Andrea’s poster read “Words, not bombs.” For a girl of ten who was beginning to write her first novel, words were undoubtedly powerful. I asked her what “Words, not bombs” meant, and she told me that her teacher had asked the class to propose ways to resolve conflict without violence. She thought about her father and herself, how as a little girl she’d had fuming fits of anger and had struck out blindly. “I have a bull inside me,” she would say after her fury subsided. At those moments, Nico would gently take her arms, kneel to look into her eyes, and talk to her in a calm tone until her rage passed, a system that with some variations he always uses in critical situations. He took a course in nonviolent communication and not only does he apply what he learned to the letter of the law, he takes the refresher course every two years so he will act appropriately in an emergency. When she reached puberty, Andrea succeeded in controlling the bull, and her personality changed. “It’s no fun to pester my sister anymore,” Alejandro confessed when he saw he couldn’t make her lose her temper. Andrea had a point. Words could be more efficient than fists. The plot of the third book would be taming the bull of war. My grandchildren and I spread out a map on my grandmother’s table of the spirits to see where we would situate Alexander Cold and Nadia Santos’s last adventure. The Middle East was very visible, it was what we saw every day in the news; however, the most widespread and brutal violence was taking place in Africa, where genocide is practiced with impunity. So it would be an adventure in equatorial Africa, in an isolated village where an out-of-control military man imposes terror and enslaves Pygmies. I didn’t have to rack my brains to come up with the title: Forest of the Pygmies. Tabra, who never fails when it’s time for inspiration, lent me a book of photographs of kings of African tribes, each in his fabulous robes. Most of these rulers exercised symbolic and religious, though not political, power. In some cases the king’s health and fertility represented the health and fertility of the people and the land, and for that reason he was drastically disposed of the moment he became ill or old . . . unless he had the decency to commit suicide. In one tribe, the king was allowed only seven years on the throne; then he was sent to a better life and his successor ate his liver. One of the monarchs boasted that he had engendered one hundred and seventy children, and another was photographed with his harem of young wives, all pregnant; he, decked out in a lion-skin cape, feathers, and several necklaces of solid gold; the wives stark naked. There were a couple of powerful queens in the book who had their own harem of young girls, but the text did not explain who impregnated those concubines.
I did a lot of research for that book, and the more I read the less I knew and the farther away were the horizons of that enormous continent of six hundred million persons spread across forty-five countries and five hundred ethnicities. Finally I locked myself in my study and sank into the realm of magical thought. I flew directly to a swampy jungle of equatorial Africa, where miserable Pygmies, with the aid of gorillas, elephants, and spirits, were trying to rid themselves of a psychopathic king. Writing tends to be prophetic. Months after the publication of Forest of the Pygmies, a colonel as savage as the one in my book took over a region north of Congo, a swampy forest where he kept the Bantu population terrorized and was exterminating the Pygmies to facilitate the traffic of diamonds, gold, and arms. There was even talk of cannibalism, something I hadn’t dared include in my book out of respect for my young readers.
Yemayá and Fertility
SPRING OF 2003 UNLEASHED a collective reproductive frenzy in my family. Lori and Nico, Ernesto and Giulia, Tong and Lili, all wanted to have children, but as by a bizarre coincidence none were able to achieve it by traditional methods, they had to call on the discoveries of science and technology . . . very expensive methods that became mine to finance. They had warned me in Brazil that I belonged to the goddess Yemayá, one of whose virtues is fertility, and women who want to be mothers go to her. There were so many fertility drugs, hormones, and sperm floating in the air that I was afraid that I myself might get pregnant. The year before, I had secretly consulted my astrologer because I wasn’t having any dreams. I had always known from my dreams how many children and grandchildren I was going to have, even their names, but now, no matter how hard I tried, I had no nocturnal vision to give me a clue about those three couples. I don’t know the astrologer personally, I only have her telephone number in Colorado, but I trust her because without ever having seen us she describes my family as if it were hers. The only person whose astral chart she hasn’t done is Nico’s, and that because I don’t remember what hour he was born and he refuses to let me have his birth certificate. The woman told me that this son was my best friend and that we had been married in a previous incarnation. Understandably, Nico didn’t want to hear of such a horrendous possibility, and that’s why he hides the certificate. Your brother doesn’t believe in reincarnation because it is mathematically impossible, or astrology, of course, but he thinks it reasonable to take precautions, just in case. . . . I don’t believe every last bit of it, either, but there’s no reason to block out such a useful tool for literature.
“How do you explain that the woman knows so much about me?” I asked Nico.
“She looked you up on the Internet, or she read Paula.”
“If she researched every client in order to fake them out, she would need a team of assistants and would have to charge a lot more. No one knows Willie, he’s not on the Internet, but she was able to describe him physically. She said he was tall, with broad shoulders, a large neck, and handsome.”
“That’s very subjective.”
“How can it be subjective, Nico! No one would say my brother Juan is tall, has broad shoulders, a thick neck, and is handsome.”
In the end, I get nowhere by discussing such subjects with my son. The fact is that the astrologer had already told me that Lori could not have children of her own but that “she would be the mother of several children.” I interpreted that to mean that she would be the mother of my grandchildren, but apparently there were other possibilities. About Ernesto and Giulia she said that they should not make the attempt until spring of the following year, when the stars were in the ideal position; any earlier would have no result. Tong and Lili, on the other hand, would have to wait a lot longer, and it was not certain that the baby would be theirs, it might be adopted. Ernesto and Giulia decided to obey the stars and wait until spring to begin the fertility treatments. Five months later, Giulia was pregnant; she swelled up like a dirigible, and soon learned she was expecting twin girls.
One day Juliette, Lori, Giulia, and I were in a restaurant, and Lori was telling how about half the young women she knew, including her hairstylist and her yoga teacher, were either pregnant or had just had a baby.
“Do you remember when I said I would have a baby for you, Isabel?” Juliette asked.
“Yes. And I told you that I would be crazy to have a child at my age.”
“That time I said I would have it only for you, but I think now that I would also do it for Lori.”
A moment of absolute silence fell over the table as Juliette’s words made their way to Lori’s heart, who burst into tears when she realized what her friend had just offered. I don’t know what the waiter thought, but on his own he brought us chocolate cake, courtesy of the house.
Then began a complicated process that Lori, with her extraordinary perseverance and organization, directed for nearly a year. First it had to be decided whether or not Nico would be the father, because of the risk of porphyria. After talking it over between them, and with the family, they agreed that they were willing to take the chance; it was important to Lori that the baby be Nico’s child. Then they had to obtain an egg. It couldn’t be Juliette’s because if she knew she was the biological mother she would not be capable of giving up the baby. Through the Internet they chose a young Brazilian donor who had a slight resemblance to you, Paula, a family look. She and Juliette had to undergo large doses of hormones, the former to ensure several eggs to be ha
rvested, and the latter to prepare her womb. The eggs were fertilized in a laboratory, then the embryos were implanted in Juliette. I feared for Lori, who might suffer yet another frustration, and especially for Juliette, who now was over forty and a widow with two growing boys. If something happened to her, what would become of Aristotelis and Achilleas? As if she had read my mind, Juliette asked Willie and me to look after her children should any misfortune befall her. We had reached the boundaries of magical realism.
Traffic in Organs
LILI, TONG’S YOUNG WIFE, endured her mother-in-law’s abuse for a year, until her submissiveness came to an end. If her husband hadn’t intervened maybe Lili would have strangled that lady with her bare hands—an easy enough crime because the woman had a neck like a chicken. There must have been quite an uproar; the San Francisco Police Department sent one officer who spoke Chinese to separate the family members at that address. By then Lili had demonstrated that she had been serious when she said she hadn’t come to America for the visa but to form a family. She had no intention of getting a divorce, despite the mother-in-law and the habitual unpleasantness of Tong, who still was suspicious that she would ask for a divorce as soon as the period stipulated by law had passed.
Tong realized that the submissive wife he had ordered by mail was a strapping female warrior. His mother, frightened for the first time in her seventy-plus years, said that she could not keep living with that daughter-in-law who at the first moment she dropped her guard might send her to meet her ancestors. She forced Tong to choose between his wife, that brutish woman obtained through “questionable electronic channels,” as she said, and her, his legitimate mother, whom he had lived with all his life. Lili did not give her husband long to think about it. She stood firm, and it was not she who left the house but her mother-in-law. Tong installed his mother in an apartment for seniors in the center of Chinatown, where she plays mah-jong with other ladies her age. They sold the house and bought a smaller, more modern one near where we live. Lili rolled up her sleeves and threw herself into the task of converting it into the home she had always wanted. She painted the walls, pulled the weeds in the garden, decorated with white, starched curtains, simple, well-made furniture, plants, and fresh flowers. And with her own hands she installed bamboo floors and French windows.
I learned these details little by little, through sign language, drawings, and the few English words that Lili and I shared, until summer came and my mother arrived from Chile and in less than five minutes was sitting in the living room with Lili, having tea and talking like old friends. I don’t know what language they were using; Lili doesn’t speak Spanish, my mother doesn’t know Mandarin, and the English of both leaves something to be desired.
Two days later, my mother told me that we were invited to have dinner at Lili and Tong’s house. I explained that that was impossible, she must have misunderstood. Tong had worked half a lifetime with Willie, and the only social event he had ever shared with us was Nico’s wedding, and that because Lori had forced him to come. “That may be, but tonight we’re having dinner with them,” my mother replied. She was so insistent that to appease her we went. I was thinking that we would ring the doorbell with some excuse and she would find she’d been mistaken, but when we got there we saw Lili sitting outdoors, waiting for us. Her house was dressed for a party with bouquets of flowers, and in the kitchen were a dozen different dishes she was putting the last touches to. Her chopsticks were flying through the air, transferring ingredients from one pot to another with magical precision, while my mother, installed in the place of honor, chatted with her in their Martian tongue. A half hour later, Willie and Tong arrived, and for the first time I had an interpreter and was able to communicate with Lili. After we had devoured the banquet, I asked her why she had left her country, her family, and her job as a surgical nurse to run the risky adventure of blindly marrying and moving to America, where she would always be a foreigner.
“It was because of the executions,” Tong translated.
I assumed there had been a linguistic error—after all, Tong’s English isn’t much better than mine—but Lili repeated what she’d said and then, with the help of her husband and a lot of miming, she explained why she had joined the thousands of women who leave their country to marry a stranger. She told us that every three or four months, when the prison notified them, she had to accompany the chief surgeon of the hospital to the executions. They left in his car, carrying a large box filled with ice, and traveled four hours along rural roads. At the prison they were led to a basement where half a dozen prisoners were lined up waiting, hands tied behind their backs and eyes blindfolded. The commander gave an order and the guards shot the prisoners in the temple at point-blank range. The minute the bodies fell, the surgeon, helped by Lili, hastily tore out organs for transplant: eyes to provide corneas, kidneys, livers, in short, anything that could be used. They returned from that butchery covered with blood, and with the ice chest filled with organs that then disappeared on the black market. It was a prosperous business, organized by certain physicians and the director of the prison.
Lili told that macabre story with the eloquence of a consummate actress of the silent screen: she rolled her eyes back, shot herself in the head, fell to the floor, picked up a scalpel, cut and ripped out organs, everything in such detail that my mother and I were overcome by an attack of nervous giggles, to the horror of the others, who didn’t understand what the devil we found so comical. Our laughter reached the level of hysteria when Lili added that on the last trip the car turned over as they were returning from the prison and the surgeon had died instantly, leaving Lili abandoned in open country with a cadaver clutching the wheel and a load of human organs resting in ice. I have often wondered whether we truly understood Lili’s tale, whether it was her idea of a joke or if in fact that enchanting woman who picks my grandchildren up from school and looks after my dog as if it were her daughter actually went through those hair-raising experiences.
“Of course it’s true,” was Tabra’s opinion when I told her. “In China there is a concentration camp associated with a hospital where thousands of people have disappeared. They rip out the organs while the ‘donors’ are still living, then cremate the bodies. The refugees who work in my studio have equally terrifying stories. In their countries, poor people sell their kidneys to feed their children.”
“And who buys them, Tabra?”
“The wealthy, including here in America. If one of your grandchildren needed an organ to keep from dying and someone offered you one, wouldn’t you buy it and not ask questions?”
That was only one of the conundrums Tabra posed during our walks in the woods. Instead of enjoying the aroma of the pines and the song of the birds, I would come home from those walks completely undone. But we didn’t always talk about the atrocities committed by our fellow humans, or about politics. we also talked about Plumed Lizard, who made sporadic appearances in my friend’s life only to vanish again for months. Tabra’s ideal would be to have her Indian, complete with pigtails and necklaces, living in a Comanche tepee on her patio.
“That doesn’t seem practical, Tabra. Who would be in charge of feeding him and washing his undershorts? He would have to use your bathroom, and then you’d have to clean up after him,” I told her, but she was impervious to this kind of mean-spirited reasoning.
Children that Didn’t Come
THREE TIMES THEY IMPLANTED in Juliette the laboratory embryos conceived from the eggs of the beautiful Brazilian donor and Nico’s sperm. On all three occasions our tribe awaited the results for weeks, with souls hanging by a thread. We invoked the usual sources of magic. In Chile my friend Pía and my mother went to our national saint, Padre Hurtado, and left donations for his charitable works. The image of that revolutionary saint, which all Chileans carry in our hearts, is that of a young and energetic, black cassock-clad man with a shovel in his hand, hard at work. His smile is not in the least beatific but, rather, clearly defiant. It was he who coined yo
ur favorite phrase: Give till it hurts. Following the failure of the first two, the third embryo implant took place in the summer. Lori and Nico had for a year been planning a trip to Japan, and they decided to go anyway. If their dream of having a baby came true, it would be their last vacation for a while. They would receive the news there; if it was positive, they would celebrate, if not, they would have a couple of weeks to themselves, intimate, quiet time in which to resign themselves, far from the condolences of friends and relatives.
One of those early mornings I woke with a start. The room was palely illuminated by the subtle splendor of dawn and the night light we always leave on in the hall. No air was moving and the house was wrapped in an abnormal silence; I couldn’t hear the rhythmic snoring of Willie and Olivia, or the usual murmuring of the patio palm trees dancing in the breeze. Beside my bed were two pale children, standing hand in hand, a girl about ten and a boy a little younger. They were wearing clothes from the 1900s, lace collars and patent leather high-top shoes. It seemed to me that there was sadness in their large dark eyes. We looked at each other for a second or two, but when I turned on the light they disappeared. I waited a moment, hoping in vain that they would come back, but finally, when the galloping of my heart slowed, I went on my tiptoes to call Pía. In Chile it was five hours later but my friend was still in bed, embroidering one of her patchwork bags.
The Sum of Our Days Page 27