Andrea’s eyes were shining, and she was flushed, as if she’d been in the sun, though the rest of us were wearing our November pallor. She’d had a bad cough for several days. Nico wanted to have a picture with her sitting on his knees, the same pose as one when she was five and she was a plucked duck wearing an alchemist’s thick eyeglasses and the pink nightgown she wore over her normal clothes. When he touched her, she was burning hot. Lori took her temperature and the small family party turned dark, because Andrea was aflame with fever. Within a few hours she was delirious. They tried to bring down her fever with cold baths, but finally they rushed her to the emergency room, where they learned she had pneumonia. Who knows how many days she had been incubating it and hadn’t said a word, faithful to her stoic, introverted nature. “My chest hurts, but I thought it was because I’m developing,” was her explanation.
Celia and Sally came immediately, then the others. Andrea was in the local hospital surrounded by family, all of us watching like hawks to be sure that she wasn’t given anything on the porphyria blacklist. Seeing her in that iron bed, her eyes closed, her eyelids transparent, growing paler every moment, breathing with difficulty, and connected to tubes and wires, brought back my worst memories of your illness in Madrid. Like Andrea, you checked into the hospital with a bad cold, and when you left six months later, you were no longer yourself but a lifeless doll whose only hope was for a gentle death. Nico calmly reasoned with me: this wasn’t the same. You had terrible stomach pains for several days, and couldn’t eat without vomiting, porphyria crisis symptoms that Andrea did not have. We decided that to avoid any possible oversight or medical error, Andrea would never be alone. We hadn’t been able to do that in Madrid, where the hospital bureaucracy had taken you over with no explanation. Your husband and I stood guard for months in a corridor, never knowing what was happening on the other side of the heavy doors of the ICU.
Andrea’s room in the hospital was filled. Nico and Lori, Celia and Sally, and I installed ourselves at her side. Then Juliette came, Sabrina’s mothers, the other relatives, and a few friends. Fifteen cell phones kept us connected, and every day I called my parents and Pía in Chile so they would be with us, though far away. Nico handed out the list of forbidden medications and instructions for each eventuality. Your gift, Paula, was that now we were prepared; we wouldn’t let anything take us by surprise. Our doctor, Cheri Forrester, asked the personnel on the floor to be forbearing because this patient came with a tribe. While the nurse was pricking Andrea, looking for a vein to place an IV, eleven people around the bed were watching. “Please, just don’t chant,” said the nurse. We all laughed. “You look like the kind of people capable of chanting,” she added, preoccupied.
The day-and-night vigil began, never fewer than two or three of us in the room. Very few went to work; those who weren’t taking a turn at the hospital were looking after the other children and the dogs—Poncho, Mack, and especially Olivia, who was a nervous wreck from finding herself shunted aside—keeping the houses running, and bringing food to the hospital to feed our army. For two weeks, Lori assumed the role of captain, which no one tried to usurp because she actually is the manager of this family and I don’t know what we would do without her. No one has more influence or more dedication than Lori. Raised in New York, she is the only one with the intrepid character that will not be intimidated by physicians and nurses, that can fill out ten-page forms and demand explanations. In the last few years, we have moved past the obstacles of the first years; Lori is my true daughter, my confidante, my right arm in the Foundation, and I have watched how little by little she is being converted into the matriarch. Soon it will be her turn to take her place at the head of the table as the mistress of the castle.
Andrea at first grew weaker because they couldn’t administer several of the antibiotics ordinarily used in such cases, and that prolonged the pneumonia longer than normal, but Dr. Forrester, ever vigilant, assured us there was no indication of porphyria in the blood and urine tests. Andrea would perk up for brief periods, when her brother and sister, the Greek boys, or some classmate visited, but the rest of the time she slept and coughed, holding the hand of one of her parents or her grandmother. Finally, the second Friday of her stay, her temperature was normal and she woke up with clear eyes and an appetite. We could draw a breath of relief.
For more than ten years the family had been dancing its way through the skirmishes that tend to follow divorces, a tug-of-war that leaves everyone exhausted. The relationship between the two sets of parents had its ups and downs; it was not easy to come to agreements on details of raising the children they were sharing, but as they were moving out into the world to make their own lives, there are fewer reasons for confrontation, and the day will come when there is no further need to see each other. That day is fairly close. Despite the difficulties they’ve had, they can congratulate one other because they have three happy and likable children who get good grades and are well behaved, and who up to this moment have not presented a single serious problem. During the two weeks of Andrea’s pneumonia, I lived the dream of a united family; it seemed to me that all the tensions had disappeared beside our little girl’s bed. But in real-life stories there are no perfect endings. Each person just has to do the best he or she can, that’s all.
Andrea left the hospital weighing ten pounds less, listless and the color of a cucumber, but more or less recovered. She spent another two weeks convalescing at home, and got well in time to sing in the chorus. From the audience we watched her come in singing like an angel in the long row of girls who occupied the stage. The white dress hung on her like a rag and her sandals fell off her feet, but we were all in agreement that she had never been prettier. The entire tribe was there to celebrate her, and once more I found that in an emergency you toss overboard the things that are not essential, that is, nearly everything. In the end, after a thorough lightening of loads and taking account, it turns out that the one thing that’s left is love.
A Time to Rest
WE HAVE COME TO DECEMBER and the panorama has changed for our tribe and for the country. Tabra went off to Bali; my parents, in Chile, are living on borrowed years; they are eighty-five and ninety; Nico finally turned forty—at last, as Lori says—and is a mature man; the grandchildren are full-blown teenagers and soon will be weaning themselves from the obsessive grandmother who still calls them “my babies.” Olivia has grown gray hair and thinks twice about climbing the hill when we take her out for a walk. Willie is finishing his second book, and I am still plowing the hard ground of recollections in order to write this memoir.
The Democrats won the elections and now control both House and Senate; we all hope that will put the brakes on Bush’s excesses, that the American troops will be removed from Iraq, even if gradually and with their tails between their legs, and that new wars can be prevented. As for Chile, there are changes there as well. In March, Michelle Bachelet assumed the presidency, the first woman in my country to occupy that post, and she is doing very well. She is a pediatrician, a socialist, a single mother, an agnostic, and the daughter of a general who suffered torture and death because he would not submit to the military coup in 1973. In addition, General Augusto Pinochet died tranquilly in his bed, thereby closing one of the most tragic chapters of our national history. With a great sense of timing, he died precisely on Human Rights Day.
Writing this book has been a strange experience. I have not relied exclusively on my memories and the correspondence with my mother, but have also questioned the members of my family. Since I write in Spanish, half of my family could not read it until it was translated by Margaret Sayers Peden—Petch—an adorable lady of eighty who lives in Missouri and has translated all my books except the first. With the patience of an archaeologist, Petch burrowed into the different layers of the manuscripts, reviewed each line a thousand times, and made the changes I asked. Once the manuscript was in English, the family could compare their different versions, which did not always coincide with min
e. Harleigh, Willie’s younger son, decided that he would prefer not to be in the book, and I had to rewrite it. That’s a shame, really, because he is quite colorful and he’s a part of this tribe; to exclude him seems to me to be cheating somehow, but I have no right to appropriate someone’s life without his permission. In long conversations we were able to conquer our fear of expressing what we were feeling, the bad as well as the good; sometimes it is more difficult to show affection than anger. Which is the truth? As Willie says, you reach a point when you have to forget truth and concentrate on facts. As the narrator, I say that you have to forget facts and concentrate on the truth. Now that I’m coming to the end, I hope that this exercise of setting memories in order will be beneficial for everyone. Gently, the waters will settle, the mud will sink to the bottom, and there will be transparency.
Willie’s and my lives have improved since the times of the marathon therapy sessions, the magical incantations to pay the bills, and the mission of saving from themselves people who didn’t want to be saved. For the moment, the horizon is bright. Unless some cataclysm occurs, a possibility that can’t be discounted, we are free to enjoy our remaining years lolling in the sun.
“I think we’re old enough to retire,” I said to Willie one night.
“No way. I’ve just begun to write and I don’t know what we would do with you if you weren’t writing. No one could put up with you.”
“I’m serious. I’ve been working for a century. I need a sabbatical.”
“What we will do is take things more calmly,” he concluded.
Frightened by the threat of seeing me idle during a hypothetical sabbatical, Willie opted to take me on a vacation in the desert. He thought that a week in a sterile landscape with nothing to do would be enough to make me change my mind. The hotel, which according to the travel agency was four-star, turned out to be a kind of passé bordello where Toulouse-Lautrec would have felt right at home. We had reached the place by driving down an interminable expressway, a straight ribbon through naked desert dotted by improbably green golf courses baking beneath a white, incandescent sun still blazing at eight o’clock at night. There was no breeze, nor a bird in the sky. Every drop of water was transported from a great distance, and every blade of grass grew thanks to the inordinate labors of humble Latino gardeners who kept the complex machinery of this illusory paradise running and then disappeared at night like ghosts.
FORTUNATELY, WILLIE SUFFERED A NEAR LETHAL allergy attack caused by the dusty drapes in that Toulouse-Lautrec bordello, and we had to go somewhere else. That’s how we ended up at some strange hot springs we’d never heard of, where among other amenities they offered mud baths. Deep iron tubs were filled with a bubbling and boiling thick, fetid substance. A young Mexican Indian girl, short, square, with hair scorched by a cheap permanent, showed us around the installations. She wasn’t more than twenty, but we were surprised by her self-confidence.
“What does this do?” I asked in Spanish, pointing to the mud.
“I don’t know. It’s something the Americans like.”
“It looks like shit.”
“It is caca, but not human; it’s animal caca,” she told me without a trace of irony.
The girl never took her eyes off Willie, and when we were about to leave, she asked him if he was Señor Gordon, the San Francisco lawyer.
“Don’t you remember me, licenciado? I’m Magdalena Pacheco.”
“Magdalena? But how you’ve changed, niña!”
“It’s the permanent,” she said, blushing.
They hugged each other, euphoric. She was the only daughter of Jovito Pacheco, Willie’s client who had died in a construction accident years before. We went with her that night to have dinner at a Mexican restaurant where her older brother, Socorro, was king of the kitchen. He was married and already had a first son, a three-month old baby he’d named Jovito, after the child’s grandfather. The other brother was working farther north in the Napa Valley vineyards. Magdalena had a Salvadoran boyfriend, a car mechanic, and said that she would be setting the date for their wedding as soon as the family could all meet in their village in Mexico; she had promised her mother she would be married in white in the presence of all their kin. Willie said that we’d be there, too, if they invited us.
The Pachecos told us that a year or two before, their grandmother was found dead one morning and they had given her an epic funeral, with a mahogany coffin the grandchildren had brought from San Diego in a truck. Apparently crossing the border in either direction wasn’t a problem for them, even with a heavy casket. Their mother had a little store and lived with the youngest brother, the one who was blind, who by now was fourteen. On the way to the restaurant, Willie reminded me of the Pacheco case, which had dragged for years through the San Francisco court system. I hadn’t forgotten, because we often teased Willie about the high-flown phrase he’d used in his argument: “Are you going to allow this defense lawyer to toss this poor family onto the garbage dump of history?” Willie had appealed from one judge to the next, until at last he won a modest settlement for the family. He had seen small fortunes disappear; clients who had never had anything but holes in their pockets often lost their heads when they felt they were rich. They had thrown money around and attracted distant relatives and forgotten friends like flies, and a bevy of swindlers eager to relieve them of their last peso. The Pachecos’ award was a long way from being a fortune, but translated into Mexican pesos it had been a big help to the family, and had pulled them up from poverty. At Willie’s suggestion, the grandmother had invested half in a small store and had deposited the rest in the name of Jovito’s children in the United States, out of reach of bamboozlers and relatives with their hands out. It had been more than a decade since their father’s death, and during that time all the children, except the youngest, had told their mother and grandmother good-bye and left their little village to work in California. Each came carrying a piece of paper with Willie’s name and telephone number to claim the share of the money that belonged to them and would allow them to start a life under better conditions than most illegal immigrants, who came with nothing more than hunger and dreams. So Willie’s stratagem when he took them to Disneyland as children had worked.
Thanks to Socorro and Magdalena Pacheco, we were given the best cabaña at the spa, an impeccable adobe and red-tiled casita in purest Mexican style; it had a small kitchen, a rear patio, and an open-air Jacuzzi. After buying provisions for three days, we shut ourselves in. It had been a long time since Willie and I had been alone, and idle, and we spent the first hours in invented tasks. With the minimal utensils in the kitchen, barely enough to put together a breakfast, Willie decided to cook oxtail, one of those slow Old World recipes that require several pots. His stew filled the air with a powerful aroma that frightened the birds and attracted the coyotes. Since it had to stay in the refrigerator until the next day so the fat that congealed on the surface could be spooned off, we dined, as night fell, on bread and cheese, lying close together in a hammock on the patio while the pack of coyotes licked their chops on the other side of the stone wall that protected our little haven.
A Quiet Place
NIGHT IN THE DESERT has the unfathomable mystery of the bottom of the sea. An infinite embroidery of stars filled a black, moonless sky, and as the earth cooled, it emitted dense vapors like the breath of a wild beast. We lit three thick candles that spread their ceremonial light across the water of the Jacuzzi. Little by little the silence was relieving us of stress accumulated through so many scrapes and scraps. At my side there is always an invisible and implacable overseer, whip in hand, criticizing me and giving me orders: Up, woman! Out of bed! It’s six o’clock and you have to wash your hair and walk the dog. Don’t eat that bread! Do you think you’re going to lose weight by magic? You surely remember that your father was fat. You have to write your speech over, it’s filled with clichés, and your novel is a disaster; you’ve been writing for a quarter of a century and haven’t learned a thing. An
d on and on with the same tune. You used to tell me to learn to love myself a little, Paula, that I wouldn’t treat my worst enemy the way I treat myself. “What would you do, Mamá, if someone came into your house and insulted you that way?” she would ask. I would tell him to go to hell and run him out with a broom, of course. I try to remember your advice, daughter, but it doesn’t always work for me to use that tactic with the overseer because he’s sly and he catches me off-guard. Luckily, on that occasion he had lagged behind in the little Toulouse-Lautrec hotel and wasn’t there in our cabaña to bug me.
An hour went by, maybe two, in silence. I don’t know what was going through Willie’s mind and heart, but I was imagining there in the hammock that piece by piece I was shedding my rusted helmet, my heavy iron armor, my coat of mail, my leather breastplate, my studded boots, and all the pathetic weapons I’d used to defend myself and my family from the whims of fate. Ever since your death, Paula, I have often lost myself in your forest, taking tranquil walks on which you accompany me and invite me to search into my soul. In all these years it seems to me that the sealed caves inside me have been opening, and with your help light is falling in. Sometimes in that forest I sink into nostalgia and am invaded by a dull pain, but it doesn’t last; soon I feel you walking beside me, and the rustling of the redwoods and the scent of rosemary and bay console me. I imagine how good it would be to die in this enchanted forest with Willie, old, but in full control of our lives and our deaths. Side by side, holding hands, here on this fragrant earth, we would abandon our bodies and join with the spirits. Maybe Jennifer and you will be waiting for us. If you looked for Abuela Hilda, I hope you won’t forget to do the same for me. Those walks are very good for me, and at the end I feel invincible and grateful for the overwhelming abundance of my life: love, family, work, health—a great contentment. The experience of that night in the desert was different: I didn’t feel the energy you give me in the forest but a letting go. Layers and layers of hard scales were sloughing off, and I was left with a vulnerable heart and weak bones.
The Sum of Our Days Page 32