The Sum of Our Days

by Isabel Allende

  Buddhist Mothers

  FU AND GRACE HAD NOT ADOPTED SABRINA, it hadn’t seemed crucial, but then Jennifer’s old boyfriend got out of prison, where he’d been serving time, and made clear his intent to see his daughter. He had never agreed to have a blood test to prove his paternity, and in any case he had lost his rights as a father, but his voice on the telephone put them on the alert. The man wanted to have the little girl on weekends, something the mothers did not want at all because of his police record and a way of life that they had little confidence in. They decided that the moment had come to make the situation with Sabrina legal. That coincided with the death of Grace’s seventy-five-year-old father, who had smoked his entire life; his lungs were destroyed and he had ended up in a hospital connected to a respirator. He lived in Oregon, the only state in the country where no one invokes the law when a terminally ill person chooses the moment he wants to die. Grace’s father had figured that to go on living in that terrible condition would cost a fortune, and it wasn’t worth it. He called his children, who gathered from around the country, and using his laptop explained that he had summoned them to tell them good-bye.

  “Where are you going, Father?”

  “To heaven, if they’ll let me in,” he wrote on the screen.

  “And when are you planning to die?” they asked, amused.

  “What time is it?” the patient wanted to know.

  “Ten o’clock.”

  “Let’s say about noon,” he wrote. “How does that seem?”

  And at exactly noon, after saying good-bye to each of his astounded descendants and consoling them with the idea that this solution was best for all of them—especially him, because he wasn’t planning to spend years hooked up to a respirator, and besides, he had a burning curiosity to see what lay on the other side—he disconnected the respirator and died happy.

  For Sabrina’s adoption, a female judge came from San Francisco, and we appeared before her in a family group. From the door of a chamber in City Hall, we could see coming toward us down a long corridor that miraculous granddaughter walking for the first time without the help of a walker. Her small figure advanced with difficulty along that endless, tiled hallway, followed by her mothers, right behind her but not touching, ready to intervene if it were necessary. “Didn’t I tell you I was going to walk?” Sabrina said defiantly, with the touch of pride that crowns each tenacious conquest. She was wearing a party dress and pink slippers, with ribbons in her hair. She told us all hello, ignoring Willie’s emotion, posed for photos, thanked us for being there, and solemnly announced that from that moment her name was Sabrina, plus Jennifer’s surname, followed by those of her adopting mothers. Then she turned to the judge and added, “The next time we see each other, I will be a famous actress.” And we were all convinced that she would be. Sabrina, raised in the macrobiotic, spiritual Zen Center retreat, aspires to be a movie star, and her first choice in food is a bloody hamburger. I don’t know how, but she is invited every year to the Academy Awards ceremony in Hollywood. On Oscar night, we see her on television, seated in the gallery with a notebook in hand to keep count of the celebrities that parade down the red carpet. She’s in training for the time when it’s her turn to walk down that same red carpet.

  Fu and Grace are not a couple any longer, after having been together for more than a decade, but they are still united through Sabrina and a friendship of such long standing that it doesn’t make sense to separate. They rearranged the little dollhouse they have at the center; as small as it is, it is greatly coveted because there are always postulants eager to live in that calm pool of spirituality. They divided the space, left one room in the middle for Sabrina, and live at either end. You have to jump over furniture and scattered toys in those tiny rooms, which they also share with Mack, one of those big canines trained to be a service dog. They acquired him for Sabrina and she loves him very much, but she doesn’t need him; she can navigate on her own. It took a year of rigorous negotiations to obtain Mack; they had to take a course in how to communicate with him, they were sent an album containing photos of him as a pup, and they were warned that they would have surprise visits from an inspector, and if they were not caring for him properly, he would be taken from them. Finally he arrived: an off-white Labrador with eyes like grapes, sharper than most humans. One day Grace took him with her to the hospital and he followed on her rounds; she noticed that even her dying patients perked up in Mack’s presence. She had a psychotic patient who’d been sunk in his personal purgatory for a very long while; he had a deformed hand he always kept hidden in a pocket. Mack entered his room wagging his tail; gently he rested his enormous head on the man’s knees and sniffed and nosed his pocket until the man pulled out the hand he was so embarrassed about, and Mack began to lick it. Perhaps no one had ever touched him that way. The sick man’s eyes met Grace’s, and for an instant it seemed that he had come out of the dark cell in which he was trapped into the light. From then on, Mack has been kept busy at the hospital; they hang a placard labeled “Volunteer” on his chest and send him on his rounds. The patients hide the cookies from their meals to give to him, and Mack has become rather portly. Compared to that animal, my Olivia is no more than a mop of hair with the brain of a fly.

  While Grace and Mack are working at the hospital, Fu is in charge of the Zen Center, where one day she will be abbess, though she has never evidenced any interest in the post. That imposing woman with the shaved head and dark robes of a Japanese monk always produces the impact I felt the first time I saw her. But Fu is not the only notable woman in her family. She has a blind sister who has married five times, brought eleven children into the world, and been on television because at the age of sixty-three she gave birth to number twelve, a fine plump baby boy who appeared on the screen clamped onto his mother’s flaccid breast. Her latest husband is twenty-two years younger than she, and for that reason this daring woman called on science and became pregnant at an age when other women are knitting for their great-grandchildren. When reporters asked her why she had done it, she replied, “So my son will be there for my husband when I die.” To me that seemed very noble on her part; when I die, I hope Willie takes it very hard, and misses me a lot.

  The Perverted Dwarf

  WE WERE INVITED TO A COCKTAIL PARTY in San Francisco, and I went reluctantly, only because Willie asked me to. A cocktail party is a terrible trial for someone of my stature, especially in a country of tall people; it would be different in Thailand. The best idea is to avoid such events; the guests stand around, crushed together with no air, a glass in one hand and an unidentifiable hors d’oeuvre in the other. In high heels, I come up to the women’s breast bone and the men’s belly button; the waiters go by with their trays above my head. There is no advantage in being five feet tall, unless it’s that it’s easy to pick up things that fall to the floor, and in the era of the miniskirt I could make dresses from four of my first husband’s neckties. While Willie, surrounded with admiring women, devoured prawns at the buffet table and told stories of his youth—such as hitchhiking around the world and sleeping in cemeteries—I dug into a corner so no one would step on me. At these events, I can’t take a bite; the things I drop and spill, and those falling from other guests, fly straight to me. That evening a very amiable gentleman came toward me and when he looked down was able to make me out against the pattern of the carpet and from his Anglo-Saxon heights offer me a glass of wine. “Hello, I’m David, pleased to meet you.”

  “Isabel, the pleasure is mine,” I replied, looking at the glass with apprehension; you can’t get red wine stains out of white silk.

  “What do you do?” he asked in the spirit of beginning a conversation.

  That question lends itself to several responses. I could have said that right at the moment I was silently cursing my husband for having brought me to the damn party, but I opted for something less philosophical.

  “I am a novelist.”

  “Really! How interesting! When I retire I’m going t
o write a novel,” he told me.

  “Is that right! And what is your line of work now?”

  “I’m a dentist,” and he handed me his card.

  “Well, when I retire, I’m going to pull teeth,” I replied.

  Anyone could say that writing novels is like planting geraniums. I spend ten hours a day nailed to a chair, turning sentences over a thousand and one times in order to tell something in the most effective way. I suffer over the plots, I become deeply involved with the characters, I do my research, I study, correct, edit, I revise translations, and in addition travel the world promoting my books with the tenacity of a street vendor. In the car going home, driving over the superb Golden Gate Bridge, bright in the moonlight, I told Willie, laughing like a hyena, what the dentist had said, but my husband didn’t see the joke.

  “I’m not planning to wait till I retire. Very soon I’m going to begin writing my own novel,” he announced.

  “Jesus! Can you believe how arrogant some people are! And may one know what your little novel is going to be about?” I asked.

  “About an oversexed dwarf.”

  I thought at first that my husband was beginning to catch on to my Chilean sense of humor, but he actually meant it. A few months later, Willie began to write by hand on lined yellow paper. He went around with a pad under his arm, and showed what he was writing to anyone who wanted to see it, except me. He wrote in airplanes, in the kitchen, in bed, while I teased him unmercifully. A perverted dwarf! What a brilliant idea! The irrational optimism that has served Willie so well in his life once more kept him afloat, and he was able to ignore my Chilean sarcasm, which is like those tsunamis that erase everything in their path. I thought that his literary zeal would evaporate as soon as he found how hard it is to write, but nothing stopped him. He completed an abominable novel in which a frustrated love, a legal case, and the dwarf were intertwined, confusing the reader, who couldn’t determine whether he was reading a romance, a lawyer’s memoir, or a string of repressed adolescent hormonal fantasies. The women friends who read it were very frank with Willie: he should take the bloody dwarf out and maybe he could save the rest of the book, if he rewrote it with more care. Male friends counseled him to take out the romance and go into more detail about the dwarf’s depravation. Jason told him to take out the romance, the courts, and the dwarf, and write a story set in Mexico. Me? Something unexpected happened with me. The dreadful novel increased my admiration for Willie because in the process I could appreciate more than ever his basic virtues: strength and perseverance. As I have learned a few things in the years I’ve been writing—at least I’ve learned not to repeat the same errors, though I always invent new ones—I offered my husband my services as an editor. Willie accepted my comments with a humility that he doesn’t have in other aspects of life, and rewrote the manuscript; it was my opinion, however, that the second version also presented too many fundamental problems. Writing is like magic tricks; it isn’t enough to pull rabbits from a hat, you have to do it with elegance and in a convincing manner.

  Prayers

  WITH A GRANDMOTHER LIKE MINE, who quite early instilled in me the idea that the world is magic, and that all the rest is man’s delusion of greatness, given that we control almost nothing, know very little, and have only to take a quick look at history to understand the limits of the rational, it isn’t strange that all things seem possible to me. Thousands of years ago, when she was still alive and I was a frightened little girl, my grandmother and her friends invited me to their spiritist sessions, surely behind my mother’s back. They would place two cushions on a chair so I could reach the tabletop, the same lion-footed oak table I have in my house today. Although I was very young and have no memory of it, only fantasy, I see the table jumping, moved by the spirits invoked by those ladies. The table, nonetheless, has never moved in my house; it sits in place, as heavy and categorical as a dead ox, fulfilling the modest duties of ordinary tables. Mystery is not a literary device, the salt and pepper for my books, as my enemies have accused; it is a part of life itself. Profound mysteries like the one my Sister of Disorder Jean recounted about walking barefoot over red-hot coals are transforming experiences, because they have no rational or scientific explanation. “At that moment, I knew that we have incredible capacities just as we know how to be born, to give birth, and to die,” Jean said. “So, too, we know how to respond to the red-hot coals that lie in our path. After that experience, I am calm about the future. I can face the worst crises if I relax and let the spirit guide me.” And that was what Jean did when her son died in her arms: she walked over fire without being burned.

  Nico has asked me why I believe in miracles, spirits, and other dubious phenomena. His pragmatic mind requires proof more convincing than the anecdotes of a great-grandmother buried more than half a century ago, but to me the immensity of what I cannot explain inclines me toward magical thought. Miracles? It seems to me that they happen all the time, like the fact that our tribe keeps paddling along in the same boat, but according to your brother, they are a mixture of perception, opportunity, and a desire to believe. You, on the other hand, had my grandmother’s spirituality, and you sought the answer to everyday miracles in the Catholic faith, since you were brought up in it. You were harassed by many doubts. The last thing you told me before you sank into a coma was, “I’m looking for God and I can’t find him. I love you, Mamá.” I want to think that you have found him, daughter, and that perhaps you were surprised since he wasn’t what you expected.

  Here in this world you left behind, men have kidnapped God. They have created absurd religions that have survived for centuries—I can’t understand how—and continue to grow. They are implacable; they preach love, justice, and charity, and commit atrocities to impose their tenets. The illustrious gentlemen who propagate these religions judge, punish, and frown at happiness, pleasure, curiosity, and imagination. Many women of my generation have had to invent a spirituality that fits us, and if you had lived longer, maybe you would have done the same, for the patriarchal gods are definitely not suitable for us: they make us pay for the temptations and sins of men. Why are they so afraid of us? I like the idea of an inclusive and maternal divinity connected with nature, synonymous with life, an eternal process of renovation and evolution. My Goddess is an ocean and we are drops of water, but the ocean exists because of the drops of water that form it.

  My friend Miki Shima practices the ancient Shinto religion of Japan, which proclaims that we are perfect creatures created by the Goddess-Mother to live in happiness; none of that guilt, punishment, penitence, hell, sin, karma; no need for sacrifices. Life is to be celebrated. A few months ago Miki went to Osaka for a Shinto ten-day training along with a hundred Japanese and five hundred Brazilians who arrived with the exuberance of Carnival. Practice began at four in the morning with chanting. When the male and female spiritual masters told the crowd gathered in that enormous, simple wood temple that each of them was perfect, the Japanese bowed and thanked them, while the Brazilians howled and danced with elation, as they would if Brazil scored a goal in the world soccer championship. Every morning at dawn Miki goes out to the garden, bows, and with a chant greets the new day and the millions of spirits that inhabit it. Then, after sushi and herbal soup for breakfast, he goes to his office, laughing in his car. Once he was stopped by a patrol car because the officers thought he was drunk. “I’m not drunk, I am doing my spiritual practice,” Miki explained. The policemen thought he was mocking them. Happiness is suspicious.

  Only recently we went with Lori to hear an Irish Christian theologian. Despite the obstacles of his accent and my ignorance, I did take something away from his talk, which began with a brief meditation. He asked the audience to close their eyes, relax, be aware of our breathing, in short, the usual directions in these situations, and then for us to think of our favorite place—I chose a tree trunk in your forest—and of a figure that comes to us and sits facing us. We were to sink into the bottomless gaze of that being that loved us j
ust as we were, with our defects and virtues, without judging us. That, said the theologian, was the face of God. The person who came to me was a woman about sixty, a rotund African woman with firm flesh and a pure smile, mischievous eyes, skin as gleaming and smooth as polished mahogany, smelling of smoke and honey, a being so powerful that even the trees bowed in a sign of respect. She looked at me as I looked at you and Nico and my grandchildren when you were little, with total acceptance. You were perfect, from your transparent ears to your wet diaper odor. I wanted you to stay forever faithful to your essence, to protect you from all evil, take you by the hand and lead you until you learned to walk on your own. That love was pure happiness and celebration, although it contained the anguish of knowing that each instant that went by changed you a little and distanced you from me.