Paula (11 page)

Tío Ramón had a three-sectioned wardrobe that could be taken apart when we moved, in which he locked his clothes and treasures: a collection of erotic magazines, cartons of cigarettes, boxes of chocolates, and liquor. My brother Juan discovered a way to open it with a bent wire, and we became expert sneak thieves. If we had taken only a few chocolates or cigarettes, he would have noticed, but we would sneak an entire layer of chocolates and reseal the box so perfectly it looked unopened, and we filched entire cartons of cigarettes, never a few, or a pack. Tío Ramón first became suspicious in La Paz. He called us in, one by one, and tried to get us either to confess or to inform on the guilty party. Neither gentle words nor threats were any good: we thought that to admit to the crime would be stupid and, in our moral code, betrayal among siblings was unpardonable. One Friday afternoon when we got back from school, we found Tío Ramón and a man we didn't know waiting for us in the living room.

“I have no patience with your disregard for the truth; the least I can expect is not to be robbed in my own home. This gentleman is a police detective. He will take your fingerprints, compare them with the evidence on my wardrobe, and we will know who the thief is. This is your last chance to confess the truth.”

Pale with terror, my bothers and I stared at the floor and clamped our jaws shut.

“Do you know what happens to criminals? They rot in jail,” Tío Ramón added.

The detective pulled a tin box from his pocket. When he opened it, we could see the black inkpad inside. Slowly, with great ceremony, he pressed each of our fingers to the pad, then rolled them onto a prepared cardboard.

“Have no worry, Señor Consul. Monday you will have the results of my investigation,” the man assured Tío Ramón as he left.

Saturday and Sunday were days of moral torture; hidden in the bathroom and the most private corners of the garden, we whispered about our black future. None of us was free of guilt; we would all end up in a dungeon on foul water and dry bread crusts, like the Count of Monte Cristo. The following Monday, the ineffable Tío Ramón called us into his office.

“I know exactly who the thief is,” he announced, wiggling thick, satanic eyebrows. “Nevertheless, out of consideration for your mother, who has interceded in your behalf, I shall not incarcerate anyone this time. The culprit knows I know who he or she is. It will remain between the two of us. I warn all of you that on the next occasion I shall not be so softhearted. Do I make myself clear?”

We stumbled from the room, grateful, unable to believe such magnanimity. We did not steal anything for a long time, but a few years later in Beirut I thought about it again, and was struck by the suspicion that the purported detective was actually an embassy chauffeur—Tío Ramón was quite capable of playing such a trick. Bending a wire of my own, I again opened the wardrobe. This time, in addition to the predictable treasures, I found four red leather-bound volumes of
A Thousand and One Nights
. I deduced that there must be some powerful reason these books were under lock and key, and that made them much more interesting than the bonbons, cigarettes, or erotic magazines with women in garter belts. For the next three years, every time Tío Ramón and my mother were at some cocktail party or dinner, I read snatches of the tales, curled up inside the cabinet with my faithful flashlight. Even though diplomats necessarily suffer an intense social life, there was never enough time to finish those fabulous stories. When I heard my parents coming, I had to close the wardrobe in a wink and fly to my bed and pretend to be asleep. It was impossible to leave a bookmark between the pages and I always forgot my place; worse yet, entire sections fell out as I searched for the dirty parts, with the results that innumerable new versions of the stories were created in an orgy of exotic words, eroticism, and fantasy. The contrast between the puritanism of my school, where work was exalted and neither bodily imperatives nor lightning flash of imagination allowed, and the creative idleness and enveloping sensuality of those books branded my soul. For decades I wavered between those two tendencies, torn apart inside and awash in a sea of intermingled desires and sins, until finally in the heat of Venezuela, when I was nearly forty years old, I at last freed myself from Miss St. John's rigid precepts. Just as in my childhood I hid in the basement of Tata's house to read my favorite books, so in full adolescence, just as my body and mind were awakening to the mysteries of sex, I furtively read
A Thousand and One Nights
. Deep in that dark wardrobe, I lost myself in magical tales of princes on flying carpets, genies in oil lamps, and appealing thieves who slipped into the sultan's harem disguised as old ladies to indulge in marathon love fests with forbidden women with hair black as night, pillowy hips and breasts like apples, soft women smelling of musk and eager for pleasure. On those pages, love, life, and death seemed like a gambol; the descriptions of food, landscapes, palaces, markets, smells, tastes, and textures were so rich that after them the world has never been the same to me.

I dreamed you were twelve years old, Paula. You were wearing a plaid coat; your hair was pulled back from your face with a white ribbon and the rest fell loose over your shoulders. You were standing in the center of a hollow tower, something like a grain silo filled with hundreds of fluttering doves. Memé's voice was saying,
Paula is dead
. You began to rise off the ground. I ran to catch you by the belt of your coat but you pulled me with you, and we floated like feathers, circling upward. I am going with you, take me, too, Paula, I begged. Again my grandmother's voice echoed in the tower:
No one can go with her, she has drunk the potion of death
. We kept rising and rising; I was determined to hold you back, nothing would take you from me. Overhead was a small opening through which I could see a blue sky with one perfect white cloud, like a Magritte painting, and then I understood, horrified, that you would be able to pass through but that the aperture was too narrow for me. I tried to hold you back by your clothing; I called to you, but no sound came. For a few precious instants, I could see as you drifted higher and higher, and then I began to float back down through the turbulence of the doves.

I awoke crying your name, and it was minutes before I realized I was in Madrid, and recognized the hotel room. I threw on my clothes before my mother had time to stop me, and ran toward the hospital. Along the way I found a taxi, and soon I was frantically beating on the door to intensive care. A nurse assured me that nothing had happened to you, that everything was the same, but I begged so hard, and was so visibly shaken, that she allowed me to come see you for a minute. I made sure that the machine was pumping air into your lungs, and that you weren't cold; I kissed your forehead, and went out in the corridor to wait for morning. They say that dreams don't lie. With the first light of day, my mother arrived. She brought a thermos of freshly brewed coffee and
rosquillas
still warm from the bakery.

“Don't worry, it wasn't a bad omen, it didn't have anything to do with Paula. All of the characters are you,” she explained. “You are the twelve-year-old girl, still flying free. But your innocence also ended then. The girl you were died; the potion of death was what all of us women swallow sooner or later. Have you noticed how at puberty the Amazon-like energy we are born with fades and we turn into doubt-filled creatures with clipped wings? The woman left trapped in the silo is also you, a prisoner of the restrictions of adult life. The female condition is a disgrace, Isabel, it's like having rocks tied to your ankles so you can't fly.”

“And what do the doves mean, Mama?”

“An agitated spirit, I suppose. . . .”

Every night dreams wait for me crouched beneath the bed with their bag of horrific visions—bell towers, blood, doleful wailing—but also with an ever-renewed harvest of fleeting, happy images. I have two lives, one waking, the other sleeping. In the world of my dreams, there are landscapes and people I already know; there I explore infernos and Edens; I fly through the black night of the cosmos and descend to the bottom of the sea where a green silence reigns; I meet dozens of children of all kinds, impossible animals, and the delicate ghosts of my most loved dead. Through the years I have discovered the keys to understanding these stories of the night, and I have learned to decipher their codes; now the messages are clearer and they help me illuminate the mysterious areas of everyday life and of my writing.

But back to Job. I have been thinking a lot about him these days. It occurs to me that your illness is a trial like those visited upon that poor man. It is a terrible arrogance on my part to imagine that you are lying in this bed so that we—we who wait in the corridor of lost steps—can be taught something, but the truth is that there are moments when I believe that. What do you want to teach us, Paula? I have changed a lot during these interminable weeks, all of those who have lived through this experience have changed—especially Ernesto, who seems to have aged a hundred years. How can I console him when I myself am without hope? I wonder whether I will ever laugh with pleasure again, embrace a cause, eat with gusto, write a novel. “Of course you will. Soon you will be celebrating with your daughter and this nightmare will be forgotten,” my mother promises. She is seconded by the porphyria specialist, who assures us that once the crisis is past, patients recover completely. I have a premonition, though, Paula, I can't deny it. This has gone on too long, and you are no better; in fact, it seems to me you are worse. Your grandmother does not give an inch; she keeps a normal routine, and has the energy to read the newspaper, even to go shopping. “I have only one regret in this life, and that is for the things I didn't buy,” that sinful woman tells me. We have been here a long time, and I want to go home. Madrid holds bad memories for me; I suffered through a bad love affair here, one I would prefer to forget. During this dreadful time, however, I have made my peace with this city and its inhabitants. I have learned to find my way through its broad majestic avenues and the twisted streets of its centuries-old barrios; I have come to terms with Spanish customs: their smoking, their two-fisted consumption of coffee and liquor, their staying up till dawn, the mind-numbing amount of fat they eat, and their never exercising. Even so, people here live as long as Californians—and much more happily. Once in a while we have dinner at a neighborhood restaurant, always the same one because my mother has fallen in love with the waiter. She likes ugly men, and this one could win a contest. He is burly from the waist up, with the massive hunched shoulders and long arms of an orangutan, but from the waist down he is a dwarf, with spindly little legs. My mother follows him with her seductive gaze, her mouth sometimes agape as she watches him, her spoon frozen in air. For seventy years, she has cultivated the reputation of being spoiled; all of us have protected her from stressful emotions, thinking she could not bear up, but during this crisis her true character has come to light: she is a fighting bull.

In terms of the cosmos and the long course of history, we are insignificant; after we die nothing will change, as if we had never existed. Nevertheless, by the measures of our precarious humanity, you, Paula, are more important to me than my own life, or the sum of almost all other lives. Every day several million persons die and even more are born, but, for me, you alone were born, only you can die. Your grandmother prays for you to her Christian God, and I sometimes pray to a smiling, pagan Goddess overflowing with gifts, a divinity who knows nothing of punishment, only pardon, and I speak to Her with the hope that She will hear me from the depths of time, and help you. Neither your grandmother nor I have had any response, we are encased in this abysmal silence. I think of my great-grandmother, of my clairvoyant grandmother, of my own mother, of you, and of my granddaughter who will be born in May, a strong female chain going back to the first woman, the universal mother. I must harness these nurturing forces for your salvation. I do not know how to reach you; I call but you don't hear me. That is why I am writing to you. The idea of filling these pages was not mine; it has been weeks since I took any initiative. As soon as she heard of your illness, my agent came to give me support. As a first measure, she dragged my mother and me to an inn where she tempted us with suckling pig and a bottle of Rioja wine, which settled like a stone in our stomach but also had the virtue of making us laugh again. Then she surprised us in the hotel with dozens of red roses, nougats from Alicante, and an obscene-looking sausage—the one we are still using to make lentil soup—and in my lap she deposited a ream of lined yellow paper.

“My poor Isabel. Here, take this and write. Unburden your heart; if you don't you are going to die of anguish.”

“I can't, Carmen. Something has broken inside. I may never write again.”

“Then write a letter to Paula. It will help her know what happened while she was asleep.”

And this is how I entertain myself in the empty moments of this nightmare.