The military junta outlawed strikes and protests, it returned land to former landholders and mines to the North Americans, it opened the country to foreign business and capital, it sold millenary old-growth forests and fishing rights to Japanese companies, and established a system of fat commissions and corruption as the form of government. A new caste of young executives materialized, educated in the doctrines of pure capitalism, who rode around on chrome-plated motorcycles and managed the fate of the nation with merciless callousness. In the name of economic efficiency, the generals froze history; they opposed democracy as a “foreign ideology” and replaced it with a doctrine of “law and order.” Chile was not an isolated case, for soon the long night of totalitarianism would spread across all Latin America.
PART TWO
May to December 1992
I AM NO LONGER WRITING SO WHEN MY DAUGHTER wakes up she will not feel so lost, because she is not going to wake up. These are pages Paula will never read. . . .
No! Why do I repeat what others say if I don’t really believe it? Everyone has classified her case as hopeless. Brain damage, they say. . . . After looking at the most recent tests, the neurologist took me to his office and as gently as possible showed me the negatives on his view box, two large black rectangles on which the exceptional intelligence of my daughter was reduced to dark blobs. His pencil followed the convoluted paths of the brain, as he explained the terrible consequences of those shadows and lines.
“Paula has severe damage; there is nothing to be done, her mind is destroyed. We do not know when or how it happened; it could have been caused by lack of sodium, oxygen deprivation, overapplication of drugs, or it could simply be the devastating progress of the illness.”
“Do you mean she will never be normal mentally?”
“It’s a very bad prognosis; in the best of cases, she might reach the level of an infant.”
“What does that mean?”
“I can’t tell you at this stage, each case is different.”
“Will she be able to talk?”
“I don’t think so. And it seems probable that she will never walk, either. She will always be an invalid,” he added, looking at me sadly over his eyeglasses.
“There is some mistake here. You must do the tests again!”
“I’m afraid this is the reality, Isabel.”
“You don’t know what you’re saying! You never saw Paula when she was healthy, you don’t have the vaguest idea what she’s really like! She is brilliant, the most intelligent person in our family, always the first in everything she does. She has an indomitable spirit. Do you think she would give in? Never!”
“I am very sorry,” he said quietly, taking my hands, but I no longer heard him. His voice was coming from very far away, as Paula’s past flashed before me in rapid images. I saw her at every stage of her life: as a baby, naked and wide-eyed, looking at me with the same alert expression she had up till the last instant of her conscious life; taking her first steps with the intentness of a tiny schoolteacher; stealthily hiding her grandmother’s sad bottles; at ten, dancing like a crazed marionette to music on the television; at fifteen, welcoming me with a forced hug and hard eyes when I came home after an abortive fling with a lover whose name I cannot remember; at her last high school party, with her hair to her waist, and later in her cap and gown. I saw her looking like a fairy princess in the snowy lace of her wedding dress, and in a blue cotton blouse and worn rabbit-fur slippers, bent over from pain and with her head on my knees, after she was struck by the illness. That evening, exactly four months and twenty-one days ago, we were still talking in terms of the flu, and I was discussing with Ernesto Paula’s tendency to command our attention by exaggerating how she felt when she was sick. I saw her that fateful early morning when she began to die in my arms, vomiting blood. Those visions registered like jumbled snapshots superimposed on a slow and inexorably flowing time in which we all moved as sluggishly as if we were at the bottom of the sea, unable to spring like a tiger to stop the wheel of destiny whirling toward death. For nearly fifty years I have been a toreador taunting violence and pain with a red cape, secure in the protection of the good luck birthmark on my back—even though in my heart I suspected that one day I would feel the claws of misfortune raking my shoulder. But I never, ever, imagined that the blow would fall on one of my children. Again I heard the neurologist’s voice: “She’s not aware of anything; believe me, your daughter is not suffering.”
“Oh, she’s suffering, and she’s afraid. I am going to take her home to California as quickly as possible.”
“Here Paula’s expenses are covered by the Spanish health care system; in the United States, the cost of medical care is sky-high. Besides, Isabel, the trip is very risky. Paula still is not retaining sodium well, her blood pressure and temperature are not stable, she has respiratory problems, it just isn’t a good idea to move her at this time, she might not survive the trip. Here in Spain we have one or two institutions where she can be well looked after. She won’t miss anyone. She has no sense of recognition, she doesn’t even know where she is.”
“Don’t you understand that I will never leave her? Help me, Doctor, I don’t care what it costs, I have to take her with me. . . .”
When I look back over the long trajectory of my life, I believe that the military coup in Chile was one of the dramatic turning points. A few years from now, I will perhaps remember yesterday as the second tragedy to put its stamp on my existence. I will never again be the person I was. I have been assured, again and again, that there is no cure for Paula, but I don’t believe it. I am going to take her to the United States, they can help us there. Willie has found a place for Paula in a clinic; all that remains is to convince Ernesto to let me take her; he can’t look after her by himself, and we will never put her in an institution. I will find some way to travel with Paula, she isn’t the first gravely ill person to be moved. I will take her with me if I have to steal an airplane to do it.
The bay of San Francisco had never looked so beautiful; a thousand brightly colored sails were unfurled to celebrate the beginning of spring, people in shorts were jogging across the Golden Gate Bridge, and the mountains were vitally green because at last it had rained, after six years of drought. It had been too long since I had seen trees so luxuriant and skies so blue; nature was dressed for a party, in welcome, and the long winter of Madrid was behind us. Before we left the hospital, I took Paula to the chapel, dark and solitary as it almost always was but glowing with candles before the Virgin’s altar in honor of Mother’s Day. I placed Paula’s wheelchair facing the wooden statue where my mother had wept so many tears during the hundred days of her grief, and lighted a candle in celebration of life. My mother always asked the Virgin to wrap Paula in her mantle and protect her from pain and sorrow and, if she planned to take her, at least not to let her suffer any longer. I asked the Goddess to help us reach California safe and sound, and to watch over us in this new phase we were entering and give us the strength to get through it. Paula, with her head bowed and her eyes fixed on the floor, painfully rigid, began to cry; her tears fell drop by drop, like the notes of a piano exercise. What had she understood? Sometimes I think she wants to tell me something . . . I think she may want to tell me goodbye. . . .
I went with Ernesto to pack her suitcase. Again inside the small, clean, precise apartment where they had been so happy for such a short time, I was, as always, struck by the Franciscan simplicity in which they lived. In Paula’s twenty-eight years in this world, she had reached a maturity others never achieve; she knew how ephemeral life is and, because she was much more concerned about the restiveness of the soul, had removed herself from nearly everything material. “We go to our grave in a winding sheet, why do you bother?” Paula asked me once in a dress shop where I wanted to buy her three blouses. She had been tossing overboard the last vestiges of vanity and had no taste for adornment, for anything unnecessary or superfluous; in her clear view, there was space and patience only for
the essentials. “I look everywhere for God but I can’t find him,” she told me shortly before she fell into the coma. Ernesto put some of her clothing in a bag, a few snapshots from their honeymoon in Scotland, her old rabbit-fur slippers, the silver sugar bowl she inherited from Granny, and the rag doll I had made for her when she was born, a moth-eaten relic now missing her yarn hair and one shoe-button eye, but a talisman Paula still dragged everywhere. We left in a basket the letters I had written over the years, letters that, like my mother, Paula bundled according to date. I suggested throwing them out, but Ernesto said that one day she might ask for them. The apartment was swept clean, as if by a cold wind: on December 6, Paula had left there for the hospital, and never returned. Her vigilant spirit was present as we disposed of her few belongings and intruded upon her innermost privacy. Suddenly Ernesto was on his knees with his arms around my waist, shaking with the sobs he had held back these long months. I believe that, in that moment, he fathomed the depths of his tragedy and realized that his wife would never return to this Madrid apartment; she was now in a different dimension, leaving only the memory of the beauty and grace he had fallen in love with.
“Is it because we loved each other too much? Did Paula and I squander all the happiness we had a right to? Were we swallowed up by life? My love for her is unconditional, but it seems she doesn’t need it anymore,” he said.
“She needs it more than ever, Ernesto, but at this moment she needs me more because someone must take care of her.”
“It isn’t fair for you to bear that terrible responsibility alone. She’s my wife. . . .”
“I won’t be alone, I have the family. Besides, you can be there, too, you are always welcome in our house.”
“But what will happen if I can’t get a job in California? I can’t live on your charity. But I can’t be separated from her, either. . . .”
“Once Paula wrote me that when you came into her life everything changed, she felt complete. And she told me that sometimes when you were with other people, half dazed by the noise of several conversations, you had only to look at each other to know how much you were in love. Time stopped, and a magical space was carved out in which just the two of you existed. Maybe that’s how it will be from now on: in spite of distance, the love you two share will be intact, in a separate compartment, beyond life and death.”
At the last moment, before the door closed forever behind us, Ernesto gave me a wax-sealed envelope. It was in my daughter’s unmistakable hand and it read, To be opened after I die.
“Months ago, in the middle of our honeymoon, Paula woke up screaming,” Ernesto told me. “I don’t know what it was she dreamed, but it must have been very disturbing because she couldn’t get back to sleep. She wrote this letter and gave it to me. Do you think we should open it?”
“Paula isn’t dead, Ernesto. . . .”
“Then you keep it. Every time I see the envelope, I feel a sharp pain here in my chest.”
Goodbye to Madrid. . . . The corridor of lost steps, where I walked several times the distance around the globe, the hotel room, the pots of lentil soup, all left behind. For the last time, I hugged Elvira, Aurelia, and my other hospital friends, who cried as we left, the nuns, who gave me a rosary blessed by the pope, the healers, who came for the last time to apply the powers of their Tibetan bells, and the neurologist, the only doctor who stayed with me to the end, preparing Paula and obtaining signatures and permits so the airline would agree to transport her. I bought several first-class tickets, installed a stretcher, oxygen and other equipment, engaged a registered nurse, and took my daughter to the airport in an ambulance, where someone was waiting to drive us directly to the plane. Paula was sleeping, thanks to drops the doctor had given me at the last instant. I had combed her hair into the half ponytail she liked, tied with a scarf, and Ernesto and I had dressed her for the first time in long months; we chose one of my skirts and one of his jackets because when we looked in her closet there were only a couple of pairs of blue jeans, a blouse or two, and an overcoat, clothes too difficult to pull over her rigid body.
The trip between Madrid and San Francisco was a safari of more than twenty hours of nourishing an unconscious patient drop by drop, controlling her vital signs, and, when she grew restless, easing her into a merciful sopor with the miraculous drops. This all happened less than a week ago, but I have already forgotten the details. I barely remember that we were in Washington two hours, where an official from the Chilean embassy was waiting to facilitate our entry into the United States. The nurse and Ernesto tended Paula while I ran through the airport with the luggage and passports and permits, which the officials stamped without question after one glance at the pale and lifeless girl on the stretcher. In San Francisco, Willie was at the airport with another ambulance, and an hour later we were at the rehabilitation clinic where a team of doctors immediately evaluated Paula, who had arrived bathed in cold sweat and with dangerously low blood pressure. Celia, Nicolás, and my grandson were waiting at the clinic door. Alejandro trotted toward me on his clumsy little legs with his arms out to me, but he must have felt the awful tension in the air because he stopped abruptly and backed away, frightened. Day after day, by telephone, Nicolás had been kept up to date on the details of Paula’s illness, but he was not prepared for what he saw. He leaned over his sister and kissed her forehead; she opened her eyes and for a moment seemed to focus on who he was. “Paula, Paula!” he murmured, as tears ran down his cheeks. Celia, mute and terrified, protecting the baby in her womb with crossed arms, disappeared behind a column in the darkest corner of the room.
That night Ernesto stayed in the clinic, and I went home with Willie. I had not been there for months and I felt as if I were a stranger, as if I had never crossed that threshold before or seen that furniture or any of the things I had bought with such excitement. Everything was impeccable, and my husband had cut his best roses to fill the flower vases. I looked at our bed with the white batiste canopy and large embroidered pillows, the paintings I had taken everywhere with me for years, my clothes arranged by color in the closet, and it seemed very pretty but totally alien; my home was still the waiting room of the hospital, the hotel room, Paula’s bare little apartment. I felt I had never been in this house and that my soul had been left behind in the corridor of lost steps and it would be a long time before I could find it. But then Willie put his arms around me, tight, and I sensed his warmth and his scent through the cloth of his shirt; I was wrapped in the unmistakable strength of his loyalty and I had a presentiment that the worst was over. From now on I would not be alone; beside him I would have the courage to meet all that fate had to offer.
Ernesto could stay in California only four days before he had to fly back to Spain to his job. He is negotiating a transfer to the United States so he can be close to Paula.
“Wait for me, my love. I will soon be back and then we’ll never be apart again, I promise you. Be strong, don’t give up,” he said, as he kissed her goodbye.
Every morning, Paula is exercised and subjected to complicated tests, but in the afternoons there is free time for us to be with her. The doctors seem surprised by the excellent condition of her body; her skin is healthy, her body isn’t deformed, and she hasn’t lost the flexibility of her joints, despite the paralysis. The movements I had improvised are the same they employ, my braces contrived from books and elastic bandages are similar to those they build to order here, my thumping Paula’s back to help her cough and the drops of water to moisten the tracheotomy serve the same purpose as their sophisticated respiratory machines. Paula has a bright private room with a window overlooking a patio filled with geraniums; we have hung family photographs on the walls and play soft music, and she has a television set with tapes of placid images of water and woods. Some of my friends brought Paula aromatic lotions, and in the morning we rub her with oil of rosemary to stimulate her, in the evening, lavender to make her drowsy, and, to refresh her, rose and chamomile. A man with large, magician’s hands com
es every day to give her Japanese massages, and she is tended by a team of six therapists; some work with her in the rehab room and others try to communicate by showing her boards with letters and drawings, playing different instruments, and even placing lemon or honey on her tongue to see if she reacts to the flavors. A porphyria specialist attends her, one of the few in existence, since no one is interested in this rare affliction. Some people know about it in passing because there was an English king who was thought to be mad but in fact suffered from porphyria. The doctor read the reports from the hospital in Spain, examined Paula, and determined that the brain damage is not a result of her illness but possibly an accident or error in her treatment.
Today we put Paula in a wheelchair, with cushions at her back, and took her outside to the clinic gardens. There a path winds through clumps of wild jasmine whose fragrance is as penetrating as Paula’s lotions. Those flowers always remind me of Granny, and it’s a strange coincidence that Paula is surrounded by them. We put a wide-brimmed straw hat and dark glasses on her to protect her from the sun, and dressed like that she looks nearly normal. Nicolás was pushing the chair, while Celia, who is very large now, and I, holding Alejandro, watched from a distance. Nicolás had cut some of the jasmine blossoms and placed them in his sister’s hand, and was talking to her as if she could answer. I wonder what he was saying? I talk to her all the time myself, in case she has instants of lucidity and in one of those flashes we might succeed in reaching her. Early every morning, I repeat that this is summertime in California and she is with her family, and I tell her the date so she won’t drift outside of time and space. At night I tell her that another day has passed, that it is time to dream, and I whisper into her ear one of those sweet English prayers Granny raised her on. I explain what has happened to her and that I am her mother and not to be afraid because she will come out of this stronger than ever, and that in the darkest moments, when all doors close to us and we feel trapped with no way out, there is always some unexpected opening toward escape. I remind her of the period of the terror in Chile and of the lonely years of exile, times that were also the most important in our lives because they gave us purpose and strength.
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