The Japanese Lover

by Isabel Allende

  “Did you tell this Ramón you’ll be accompanied by a lawyer?” asked Nathaniel, tacitly accepting the role she had given him.

  * * *

  They left at six the next morning in the family’s black Lincoln, which was better suited to a fifteen-hour journey than Nathaniel’s sports car. Furious at being trapped in this way, Nathaniel initially kept a hostile silence, his mouth a tight line, brow furrowed, hands like talons on the wheel as he stared fixedly at the highway, but the first time Alma asked him to stop at a truck stop to go to the rest­room, he softened. She was gone for half an hour, and just as he was thinking of going to look for her, she returned to the car in a bad state. “I feel sick in the mornings, Nat, but later on it passes,” she explained. For the rest of the journey he tried to take her mind off things, and they ended up singing out of tune the most syrupy Pat Boone songs, the only ones they knew, until eventually, exhausted, she clung to him, laid her head on his shoulder, and dozed off.

  In San Diego they stopped overnight at a hotel to eat and get some sleep. The receptionist presumed they were married and gave them a room with a double bed. They lay down together holding hands, just as they had done as children. For the first time in weeks Alma slept without having nightmares, while Nathaniel stayed wide awake until dawn, breathing in the shampoo scent on his cousin’s hair, thinking of the risks they were running, feeling upset and nervous as though he were the child’s father, imagining the repercussions, regretting having agreed to this sordid adventure rather than bribing a doctor in California, where everything was possible if the price was right, just as in Tijuana. As the first light filtered through the gap in the curtains he was finally overcome with fatigue and didn’t wake up until nine in the morning, when he heard Alma retching in the bathroom. They took their time crossing the border, with the predictable delays, and drove on to keep their appointment with Ramón.

  Mexico greeted them with its well-known clichés. They had never been in Tijuana before and were expecting a sleepy little town, but instead found themselves in a city that went on forever, brimming with color and noise, people and traffic, where dilapidated buses and modern cars sped alongside carts and donkeys. In the same store you could buy Mexican artifacts and American household appliances, shoes and musical instruments, spare parts and furniture, caged birds and tortillas. The air was filled with the smell of fried food and garbage, and the din of popular music, evangelical preachers, and football commentators on the radios in bars and taco joints. They had difficulty finding their way, because many of the streets had no names or numbers, and so had to ask every three or four blocks, but didn’t understand the directions they were given in Spanish, which more often than not consisted of a vague wave of the arm and a “right here, just round the corner.” In their frustration they parked the Lincoln near a gas station and walked until they came to the agreed corner, which turned out to be at the intersection of four busy streets. They waited arm in arm, stared at shamelessly by a lone dog and a group of ragged children begging for money. The only indication they had been given, apart from the name of one of the streets at the intersection, was a store for first communion dresses and images of holy virgins and Catholic saints, bizarrely named Viva Zapata.

  After they had waited for twenty minutes, Nathaniel decided they had been tricked and ought to go back home, but Alma reminded him that punctuality was not exactly a Mexican characteristic and went into Viva Zapata. She gesticulated to use the telephone and dialed Ramón’s number. It rang nine times before a woman’s voice answered in Spanish, which she couldn’t understand. At four in the afternoon, by which time Alma had accepted they might as well give up, a pea-colored 1949 Ford with tinted rear windows just as Ramón had described it pulled up at the corner. Two men sat in the front seats: a youngster with a pockmarked face, a pompadour, and bushy sideburns was in the driver’s seat; the other one got out to let them in, because the car was two doored. He introduced himself as Ramón. He was thirtysomething, with a carefully groomed mustache, slicked-back hair, a white shirt, and pointed high-heeled boots. Both men were smoking. “The cash,” Ramón demanded as soon as they were inside the car. Nathaniel handed it over; Ramón counted it and stuffed the bills in his pocket. Neither of the men spoke during the journey, which to Alma and Nathaniel seemed endless: they were certain they were being driven around and around to get them lost—an unnecessary precaution, as neither of them knew the city. Clinging to Nathaniel the whole time, Alma was thinking how much worse the situation would have been if she had come on her own, while Nathaniel calculated that the men had already got their money and so could quite easily put a bullet in their heads and throw them down a ravine. They hadn’t told anyone where they were going, and weeks or months would go by before their family found out what had become of them.

  Finally the car came to a halt, and they were told to wait while the driver went into the house and the other man kept watch. They were outside a cheap-looking house similar to others along the street, in a neighborhood that to Nathaniel looked poor and dirty, although he could not judge it by San Francisco standards. After a couple of minutes the youngster reappeared, and the pair told Nathaniel to get out of the car. They patted him down and made as if to lead him away, but he swatted them off and confronted them, cursing in English. Taken aback, Ramón raised his hands to mollify him.

  “Slow down, man, everything’s okay.” He laughed, flashing a pair of gold teeth.

  He offered Nathaniel a cigarette, which he accepted, while the other Mexican helped Alma out of the car. They all went into the house, which was not the gangsters’ den that Nathaniel had feared, but a modest family home, with low ceilings and small windows. Inside, it was hot and dark. In the living room, two children were sprawled on the floor playing with lead toy soldiers next to a table and chairs, a plastic-covered sofa, a showy lamp with a fringed shade, and a refrigerator as noisy as an outboard motor. A smell of fried onions came from the kitchen, and they caught sight of a woman in black stirring something in a pan. She showed as little interest in the newcomers as the children had. The younger of the two men pointed Nathaniel to a chair and disappeared into the kitchen, while Ramón led Alma down a short corridor to another room with a blanket over the entrance instead of a door.

  “Wait!” shouted Nathaniel. “Who’s going to perform the operation?”

  “I am,” said Ramón, who apparently was the only one who spoke English.

  “What do you know about medicine?” asked Nathaniel, staring at the man’s hands with their long, polished nails.

  Once more came the friendly laugh and the golden smile, with fresh reassuring gestures and a couple of stilted phrases explaining that he had a lot of experience and that it would take less than fifteen minutes, no problem. Anesthetic? No, mano, we don’t have any of that here, but this helps, he said, handing Alma a bottle of tequila. When she hesitated, glancing mistrustfully at the bottle, Ramón took a lengthy swig, wiped the neck on his sleeve, and offered it to her again. Seeing the look of panic on Alma’s face, Nathaniel instantly made the most important decision in his life.

  “We’ve changed our minds, Ramón. We’re going to get married and have the baby. You can keep the money.”

  * * *

  Alma had many years ahead of her in which to carefully consider the way she had behaved in 1955. That was the year she was pitchforked into reality, and her efforts to avoid her nagging sense of shame proved useless: the disgrace at becoming pregnant, loving Ichimei less than herself, her horror of poverty, yielding to social pressure and racial prejudices, accepting Nathaniel’s sacrifice, not living up to the role of the modern Amazon she had imagined herself to be, shame at herself for being not only fearful and conventional but another half dozen adjectives as well that she punished herself with. She was aware that she had avoided the abortion more from fear of the pain and of dying from a hemorrhage or infection than out of respect for the being that was growing inside her. When she examined herself once more in her wardrobe’s
full-length mirror, she could not discover the Alma from before, the bold, sensual young girl Ichimei would see if he were there, but a cowardly, capricious, and selfish woman. There was no point making excuses; nothing could lessen her feeling that she had lost her dignity. Years later, when it had become the fashion to love someone from a different race or to have children without marrying, Alma admitted to herself that her greatest prejudice was that of social class, which she never managed to overcome. In spite of the nightmare trip to Tijuana, which destroyed the illusion of love and humiliated her to such an extent that she took refuge in a monumental pride, she never doubted her decision to keep the truth from Ichimei. To confess would have meant facing up to her own complete cowardice.

  On her return from Tijuana she arranged to meet Ichimei several hours earlier than usual in the motel they always used. She arrived with her head held high and with her lies well rehearsed, yet she was weeping inside. For once, Ichimei had arrived first, and was waiting for her in one of those filthy rooms where the roaches ruled, but which they lit with the flame of love. It had been five days since they had met, and several weeks since something obscure had been spoiling the perfection of their meetings, something that Ichimei felt was enveloping them like a thick fog but that she dismissed lightly, accusing him of being jealous and talking nonsense. Ichimei could tell there was something different about her: she was anxious, she talked too much and too quickly; her mood changed every few minutes, from amorous and affectionate to a stubborn silence or inexplicable bad temper. He had no doubt she was distancing herself emotionally, although her sudden passion and insistence on reaching an orgasm over and over again seemed to indicate the opposite. Occasionally, while they were resting in each other’s arms after making love, her cheeks were wet. “They’re tears of love,” she would say, but to Ichimei, who until now had never seen her cry, they seemed more like tears of frustration, in the same way that her sexual acrobatics were an attempt to distract him. With his ancestral discretion, he tried to discover what was going on, but she responded to his questions with mocking laughter or foul language, which, even if meant as a joke, greatly upset him. Alma slid away like a lizard. During the five days they had been apart, which she justified as a family trip to Los Angeles she could not get out of, Ichimei withdrew into himself. All that week he continued working the land and cultivating flowers in his usual selfless manner, but his movements were those of a man in a trance. His mother, who knew him better than anyone, refrained from asking him questions and took their stock to the San Francisco florists herself. As he bent over the plants with the sun on his back, silently and undemonstratively Ichimei surrendered to his forebodings, which rarely proved wrong.

  When Alma saw him by the light filtering in through the torn curtains of their motel room, she once again felt guilt tearing at her innards. For a split second she hated this man forcing her to confront her most despicable side, only to be instantly overwhelmed by the huge wave of love and desire she always felt when he was with her. Ichimei, standing by the window waiting for her, with his unshakable inner strength, his lack of vanity, his tenderness and delicacy, his serene expression; Ichi, with his body like teak, stiff hair, green fingers, affectionate eyes, his belly laugh, his way of making love as if it were always the last time. She couldn’t look him in the face and pretended she was having a coughing fit to conceal the anxiety burning her up.

  “What’s wrong, Alma?” asked Ichimei, without touching her.

  It was then that she launched into the speech she had prepared with all the care of a legal clerk, about how she loved him and would do so for the rest of her life, but that their love had no future, was impossible, how family and friends were starting to become suspicious and ask questions, how they came from very different worlds and had to fulfill their own destinies, how she had decided to continue her art studies in London, and so they would have to part.

  Ichimei received this battering with the resoluteness of someone prepared for an attack. After Alma’s declaration there was a prolonged silence, during which she imagined they could make love desperately one last time, in an ardent farewell, a final gift of the senses before they finally cut the thread of hope they had been weaving since their first fumbled caresses as children in the Sea Cliff garden. She began to unbutton her blouse, but Ichimei stopped her with a gesture.

  “I understand, Alma,” he said.

  “Forgive me, Ichimei. I’ve had a thousand mad thoughts about how we could continue to be together, to have a hideaway where we could make love rather than this disgusting motel, but I know it’s not possible. I can’t keep this secret any longer, it’s destroying me. We have to say good-bye forever.”

  “Forever is a long time, Alma. I think we’ll meet again in happier circumstances, or other lives,” said Ichimei. He tried hard to remain calm, but an icy sadness was filling his heart and strangled his voice.

  They embraced desolately, the orphans of love. Alma’s knees buckled, and she was on the verge of collapsing against her lover’s strong chest and confessing everything, even the darkest corners of her shame, begging that they get married and live in a shack, bring up mixed-race children, promising him she would be a submissive wife and would give up her silk-screening and her comfortable life at Sea Cliff and the splendid future that was her birthright, abandon this and much more just for him and the extraordinary love that bound them together. Ichimei might have had an inkling of all this, and was considerate enough to prevent her humiliating herself in this way by closing her mouth with a chaste, fleeting kiss. Still holding her close, he led her to the door and from there to her car. Kissing her on the forehead one last time, he walked to his gardening van without so much as a backward glance.

  July 11, 1969

  Our love is inevitable, Alma. I always knew it, although for years I struggled against it and tried to tear you from my mind, knowing I could not do so from my heart. When you left me without giving any reason I could not understand it. I felt cheated, but during my first trip to Japan I had time to calm down and eventually accepted I had lost you in this life. I stopped making pointless conjectures as to what had happened between us. I had no hope that destiny would reunite us. Now, after fourteen years apart, every day of which I have thought of you, I understand we will never be husband and wife, but also that we cannot renounce everything we feel so intensely. I invite you to live our love in a bubble, protected from the thorns of life and preserved intact for the rest of our lives, and beyond death. It is up to us to preserve our love forever.

  Ichi

  BEST FRIENDS

  Alma Mendel and Nathaniel Belasco were married in a private ceremony on the terrace at Sea Cliff, on a day that started out warm and sunny but that turned colder and darker, with unexpected storm clouds that reflected the bride and groom’s state of mind. Alma had purple shadows under her eyes from spending a sleepless night tossing and turning on a sea of doubts. As soon as she saw the rabbi she ran to the bathroom, stomach heaving, but Nathaniel shut himself in with her, made her splash herself with cold water, and urged her to control herself and put a brave face on it.

  “You’re not alone in this, Alma. I’m with you, and always will be,” he promised.

  The rabbi, who had at first been against the marriage because they were cousins, had to accept the situation once Isaac Belasco, the most prominent member of his congregation, explained that in view of Alma’s condition there was no choice but to marry them. Isaac told him that the young couple had loved each other since childhood, and their affection had turned to passion upon Alma’s return from Boston; that these accidents happen; that it was the way of the world, and faced with the facts all that remained was to give them their blessing.

  Martha and Sarah had the idea that they could spread a story to silence any gossip—for example, that Alma had been adopted in Poland by the Mendel family and therefore was not a blood relative—but Isaac was against it. There was no point adding such an obvious lie to a mistake already made. Deep d
own, he was happy to see the union of the two people he loved most in the world apart from his wife. He preferred a thousand times that Alma marry Nathaniel and stay closely tied to his family than for her to wed a stranger and leave him. Lillian reminded him that incestuous relations produced mentally deficient offspring, but he assured her this was nothing but a popular superstition that only had scientific grounding in enclosed communities, where the inbreeding had taken place over several generations. That was not the case for Nathaniel and Alma.

  Following the ceremony, attended only by the immediate family, the law firm’s accountant, and the household staff, a formal dinner was served for them all in the mansion’s great dining room, reserved for grand occasions. The cook, her assistant, the maids, and the chauffeur took to the table shyly with their employers; they were served by two waiters from Ernie’s, the city’s most refined restaurant, which provided the food. This idea had occurred to Isaac in order to officially establish that from this day on Alma and Nathaniel were man and wife. The domestic staff, who knew them as members of the same family, would not find it easy to become accustomed to the change; in fact, one of the maids who had been working for the Belasco family for four years still thought they were brother and sister, because no one had ever told her before that they were cousins. The meal began in a funereal silence, with everyone staring down at their plates in embarrassment, but things livened up as the wine started to flow and Isaac obliged his guests to toast the couple. Happy, talkative, filling his own and everyone else’s glasses, Isaac was like the healthy, youthful version of the old man he had turned into in recent years. Fearful he might have a heart attack, a worried Lillian kept tugging at his trousers under the table to calm him down. Finally, the bride and groom cut a marzipan and cream cake with the same silver knife Isaac had used at his own wedding many years before. They left the house in a taxi, as the family chauffeur had drunk so much he was sobbing tearfully in his seat while muttering in Gaelic, his mother tongue.