The Sum of Our Days

by Isabel Allende

  FINALLY WE COULD DO THE TESTS to learn if my grandchildren carried porphyria. The Sisters of Disorder in California, and Pía and my mother in Chile, had for years been praying for my family, and I have asked myself if the prayers had done any good. The most rigorous tests have been made with ambiguous conclusions; there is no certainty that prayer has an effect. This must be a blow for the religious people who dedicate their lives to praying for the good of humankind, but it has done little to discourage either my Sisters of Disorder, or me. We do it just in case. Lucille, Lori’s mother, had been diagnosed with breast cancer while I was on a book tour in the land of Christian extremism, the Deep South of the United States. At that same moment, Willie was flying the length of Latin America with a friend in a plane no bigger than a tin dragonfly, a demented trip from California to Chile.

  Forty million Americans define themselves as born-again Christians, and most of them live in the center and south of the country. Minutes before my lecture, a girl came up to me and offered to pray for me. I asked her if instead of doing it for me, she would pray for Lucille, who was in the hospital that day, and for Willie, my husband, who could lose his life in some crevasse in the Andes. She took my hands, closed her eyes, and began a loud litany, attracting other people, who joined the circle, invoking Jesus, filled with faith and with the names of Lucille and Willie in every sentence. After my speech I called Lori to ask how her mother was doing and she told me that there hadn’t been any operation; they examined her before taking her into the operating room and could not locate the tumor. That morning they had done eight mammograms and a sonogram. Nothing. The surgeon, who already had his gloves on, decided to postpone the intervention till the following day, and sent Lucille to another hospital where there was a scanner. They found nothing there, either. They couldn’t explain it, because only days before a biopsy had confirmed the diagnosis. This would have been a verifiable miracle of prayer if only two weeks later the tumor hadn’t reappeared. Lucille had her surgery anyway. However, that same day, when Willie was flying over Panama, there was a sharp change of pressure and the plane dropped two thousand meters in a few seconds’ time. The skill of Willie’s friend, who was piloting that big fragile insect, saved them by a hair from a spectacular death. Or was it the good thoughts of those Christians?

  In spite of the prayers of my friends, and of all I asked of you, Paula, the results of the porphyria texts for Andrea and Nicole came as bad news. The condition is more serious in women than in men, since inevitable hormonal changes can trigger a crisis. We would have to live with the fear of another tragedy in the family. Nico reminded me that porphyria is not debilitating, nor does it affect normal life; the risk is increased only by certain stimuli, which can be avoided. Your case, Paula, was a combination of circumstances and error, incredibly bad luck. “We will take precautions without overdoing it,” your brother said. “This is an inconvenience, but there is something positive about it: the girls will learn to take care of themselves, and it will be a good excuse for not letting them get too far away. The threat will bring us closer together.” He assured me that with all the advances in medicine, the girls would have good health, children, and a long life; research in genetic engineering promises to prevent porphyria from passing to the next generation. “It’s much less serious than diabetes, and other hereditary conditions,” he concluded.

  By then my relations with Nico had got past the reefs of previous years. We maintained the same close contact, but I had learned to respect him and honestly tried not to irritate him. My love for my three grandchildren was a true obsession, and it cost me many years to accept the fact that they weren’t mine, they belong to Nico and Celia. I don’t know why it took me so long to learn something obvious, something all the grandmothers in the world know without needing to be taught by a psychiatrist. Your brother and I went together to therapy for a while and even drew up written contracts establishing boundaries and rules for a peaceful coexistence, though we couldn’t be too strict. Life isn’t a photo in which we arrange things to their best advantage and then fix that image for posterity; it’s a dirty, disorderly, quick process filled with unforeseen events. The one certainty is that everything changes. Despite our contracts, problems inevitably arose, so it was futile to worry, talk things over too thoroughly, or try to control every last detail; we had to let ourselves be carried in the flow of everyday life, counting on luck and our good hearts, because neither of us would deliberately hurt the other. If I failed—and I often did—Nico reminded me of it with his characteristic gentleness, and we didn’t let it come between us. For years we’ve seen each other almost every day, but I am always amazed by that tall, muscular man with touches of gray hair and a peaceful air. If it hadn’t been for his undeniable resemblance to his paternal grandfather, I would seriously suspect that there had been a switch in the hospital when he was born, and that somewhere there was a family with a short, explosive male who carried my genes. Nico’s life improved greatly when he left the job he’d held for years. The corporation decided to outsource their work to India, where costs were much cheaper, and dismissed their employees, with the exception of Nico, who was to stay on and coordinate the programs with the office in New Delhi. He chose, however, to leave out of solidarity with his fellows. He was hired by a bank in San Francisco and also began to make transactions on the stock market, quite successfully. He has the instinct and cool head for that work, just as Lori and I had suggested some time before, but we didn’t drag that up; just the opposite; we asked him where on earth he’d got such a good idea. He scorched us with a look that would shatter glass.

  The Golden Dragon

  THE APOGEE OF RELIGIOUS FANATICISM gave me the theme for the second volume of the trilogy for young readers. The Christian evangelical right, which Republicans mobilized so successfully in winning presidential elections, had always been present in large numbers but had not determined this country’s politics, which had a solid secular base. During the presidency of George W. Bush, the evangelicals did not achieve all the matters on their agenda, but they did effect notable changes. For example, in many educational institutions there is no mention of evolution; it has been replaced by “intelligent design,” a euphemism for the biblical explanation of Creation. For them the world is ten thousand years old, and any evidence to the contrary is heresy. Guides in the Grand Canyon must be careful when they inform tourists that they can read two billion years of natural history in the geological layers. If in Norway scientists discover twenty fossils of marine animals the size of a bus and from an age prior to the dinosaurs, believers attribute that news to a conspiracy of atheists and liberals. The fundamentalists oppose abortion, in fact any form of birth control other than abstinence, but do not mobilize against war or the death penalty. Several Baptist preachers have insisted on the subjection of woman to man, erasing a century of feminist struggle. Thousands of families homeschool their children to prevent their being contaminated with secular ideas in public schools; these young people then attend Christian universities, and 70 percent of the White House interns during the Bush administration came from those universities. I hope they don’t become the political leaders of the future!

  My grandchildren live in the bubble of California, where such movements are a curiosity, like polygamy among some of the Utah Mormons, but they are learning because they listen to the adults in the family talking. My assignment for them was to think about an inclusive philosophy, a purified form of spirituality opposed to the extremist strain of any tendency. I didn’t as yet have a clear vision of the book, but I was refining it in conversations with my grandchildren and in walks with Tabra, which during those months were almost every day because she was still going through the sorrow of having lost her father. She recalled entire poems and the names of plants and flowers he had taught her when she was a child.

  “But why don’t I see him the way you see Paula?” she asked.

  “I don’t see her, I feel her inside me. I imagine that she’s always
with me.”

  “I don’t even dream about him. . . .”

  We talked about the books he’d liked and others he’d been unable to teach because of censorship in the college where he worked. Books, always books. Tabra swallowed her tears and lighted up with enthusiasm when we discussed the theme of my next novel. It had occurred to her that the model for the mythic country I wanted could be Bhutan, or the Kingdom of the Thunder Dragon as its inhabitants call it, a country she had visited in her tireless pilgrimages. We changed the name to Kingdom of the Golden Dragon, and she suggested that the dragon could be a magical statue able to predict the future. I liked the idea that each book was set in a different continent and culture, and to imagine the place I found my inspiration in one trip we had made to India and another to Nepal, fulfilling a promise I’d made you years ago, Paula. You thought that India is a psychedelic experience, and in fact it was. The same was true of Africa and the Amazon. I’d thought that what I’d seen was so alien to my reality that I could never use it in a book, but the seeds had been germinating inside me and the fruit finally appeared in the trilogy for young readers. As Willie says: you use everything sooner or later. If I’d never been to that part of the world I couldn’t have created its color, ceremonies, clothing, landscape, people, religion, or way of life. Again the help of my grandchildren was extremely valuable. We invented a religion, borrowing from Tibetan Buddhism, animism, and the books of fantasies they’d read. Andrea and Nicole go to a rather liberal Catholic school in which the search for truth, spiritual transformation, and service to others are more important than dogma. The girls landed there lacking any religious instruction. In the first week Nicole had to write a paper explaining original sin.

  “I don’t have any idea what that is,” she said.

  “I’ll give you a clue, Nicole,” Lori offered. “It comes from the story of Adam and Eve.”

  “Who are they?”

  “I think sin has something to do with an apple,” Andrea interrupted, without much conviction.

  “Don’t they say that apples are good for your health?” Nicole rejoined.

  So we dismissed original sin and sat down to talk about the soul, and in that way we outlined the spirituality of the Kingdom of the Golden Dragon. The two girls were attracted to the idea of ceremonies, rituals, and tradition, and Alejandro to the possibility of developing paranormal abilities such as telepathy and telekinesis. With those leads I began writing, and every time I lost inspiration, I remembered the ayahuasca and my own childhood, or I went back to Tabra and the children. Andrea contributed to the plot line. Alejandro imagined the obstacles that protected the statue of the dragon: labyrinth, poisons, serpents, traps, knives, and lances that drop from the ceiling. The yetis were the creation of Nicole, who had always wanted to see one of those purported giants of the eternal snows. Tabra brought in the “blue men,” a criminal sect she had heard about during a trip to the north of India.

  WITH MY OUTSTANDING TEAM of collaborators I finished the second juvenile novel in three months, and decided that in my remaining time I would put the finishing touches on a small book about Chile. The title, My Invented Country, made it clear that my narrative was not a work of cool-headed scientism but, rather, of my subjective vision. With the distance of time and geography, my memories of Chile are covered with a golden patina, like the altarpieces of colonial churches. My mother, who read the first version, was afraid that the ironic tone of the book would fall flat in Chile, where in most cases the critics skin me alive. “This is a country of solemn fools,” she warned me, but I knew it wouldn’t be like that. Literati are one thing, but Chileans who are free of intellectual puffery are another; through the centuries we have developed a perverse sense of humor in order to survive in that land of cataclysms. In my time as a journalist, I learned that nothing is as entertaining to us Chileans as making fun of ourselves, though we would never allow it from a foreigner. I was not mistaken, because my book was published a year later without any tomato tossing. Furthermore, it was pirated. Two days after its publication, stacks of the pirated edition appeared on the streets of central Santiago—sold at a quarter of the official price—next to mountains of CDs, videos, and knockoffs of designer sunglasses and handbags. From the moral and economic point of view, pirating is a disaster for publishers and authors, but in a certain way it is also an honor; it means that there are a lot of interested readers and that the poor can buy it. Chile keeps up with progress. In Asia, the Harry Potter books are pirated so brazenly that volume seven is already on the street, a book the author has not as yet envisioned. That means that in some mysterious attic there is a little Chinese person writing as J. K. Rowling, but without the glory.

  The Chile of my loves is that of your youth, when you and your brother were small, when I was still in love with your father, was working as a journalist and we lived pressed together in a little prefabricated house with a straw roof. In that period it seemed that our destiny was well set out and that nothing bad could happen to us. The country was changing. In 1970 Salvador Allende was elected president, and that occasioned a political and cultural explosion. People poured out into the street with a feeling of power they’d never had before; the young painted socialist murals, the air was filled with songs of protest. Chile was divided and families were divided as well, which is what happened in ours. Your granny marched at the head of the protests against Allende but diverted the column so it wouldn’t pass by our house and throw stones. That era was, furthermore, a time of feminism and sexual revolution that affected social behavior almost more than politics; for me it was fundamental. Then came the military coup of 1973 that unleashed a wave of violence that destroyed the little world in which we felt so safe. What would our destiny have been without that coup and the years of terror that followed? What would have happened if we’d stayed in Chile during the dictatorship? We would never have lived in Venezuela, you wouldn’t have met Ernesto or Nico Celia, I might not have written books or had the opportunity to fall in love with Willie, and today I would not be in California. Such musings are futile. Life goes along without a map and there is no way to turn back. My Invented Country is an homage to the magical land of the heart and memories, the poor cordial country where you and Nico and I spent the happiest years of childhood.

  The second volume of my trilogy for young readers was already in the hands of various translators, but I couldn’t concentrate on the book about Chile because I was bothered by a recurrent dream. I dreamed that a baby was trapped in a labyrinthine cellar crisscrossed with pipes and cables, like my grandfather’s cellar where I spent so many hours of my childhood in solitary games. I could get to the baby but couldn’t bring him up to the light. I told Willie about it, and he reminded me that I dream about babies only when I’m writing; surely it was something to do with my new book. I was afraid that the dream referred to the Kingdom of the Golden Dragon, so I reviewed the manuscript one more time, but nothing caught my eye. The dream continued to bother me for weeks, until I received the English translation and I could read it from the distance of another language; then I could see that there was a fatal problem with the plot. I had proposed that Alexander and Nadia had certain information it was impossible for them to have. And that information determined the ending. I had to ask all my translators to send back their translations, and change one chapter. Without the baby trapped in a subterranean maze, wearing my patience thin night after night, that error would have escaped me.

  Disastrous Mission

  THE THEME OF THE THIRD VOLUME of my trilogy for young readers emerged spontaneously from a peace march we attended as a family following a meeting in a famous Methodist church in San Francisco: the Glide Memorial Church. A mixture of races, ideas, and even religions come together there; it is a favorite place for Buddhists, Catholics, Jews, Protestants, and an occasional Muslim or agnostic eager to participate in a celebration of songs and embraces more than prayers. The pastor is a formidable African-American who stirs every heart with his
passionate sermons on peace, a word that at that moment had antipatriotic connotations. That day, the entire congregation, on its feet, applauded until their palms were bruised, and at the end of the service many went outside to join in protesting the Iraq War.

  My tribe, including Celia, Sally, and Tabra, congregated in the midst of the huge crowd milling through the streets of San Francisco. The children had painted posters, I was holding onto to Andrea to keep from losing her in the hubbub, and Nicole was sitting on her father’s shoulders. It was a sunny day, and people were in a festive mood, maybe because we were cheered to see there were so many of us dissidents. However, the fifty or a hundred thousand people in the heart of San Francisco were but a flea on the back of the empire. This country is a continent divided into parcels; it is impossible to measure the magnitude or variety of reactions because each state and each social, ethnic, or religious group is a nation within a nation, all beneath the broad umbrella of the United States, “the land of the free and the home of the brave.” The part about the brave seemed ironic at that moment when fear was so prevalent. Ernesto had to shave off his beard so he wouldn’t be taken off the plane every time he tried to fly; anyone with the physical characteristics of an Arab was suspicious. It occurs to me that the al-Qaeda terrorists were the ones who were most surprised with the success of their strike. They planned to punch a hole in the towers; they never imagined those monumental buildings would collapse. I suppose that had it gone according to plan, the reaction would have been less hysterical and the government would have made a more realistic assessment of the enemy’s strength. This was a matter of a small group of guerrillas in some distant caves, a primitive, fanatical, and desperate people who didn’t have the resources to intimidate the United States.