Paula (23 page)

Michael had commendable patience with me. He was not disturbed by the gossip or criticism I provoked, he never interfered in my projects, no matter how outlandish, and he defended me loyally even in my mistakes; our paths, nonetheless, were growing farther and farther apart. As I gravitated more toward feminists, bohemians, artists, and intellectuals, he devoted himself to his plans, his calculations, his building sites, and his chess and bridge games. He stayed very late at the office, because among Chilean professionals it is fashionable to work from sunup to sundown and never take a vacation; anything else is considered an indication of a bureaucratic mentality and leads to certain failure in the private sector. He was a good friend and a good lover, but I do not remember much about him; he is blurred in my memory like a badly focused photograph. We were brought up in the tradition that the husband provides for the family and the wife takes charge of home and children, but in our case it was not entirely that way. I began working before he did, and carried a large part of our expenses: his salary was earmarked for paying the mortgage on the house and making investments, and mine evaporated in day-to-day expenditures. Michael remained faithful to himself; he has changed very little over his life, but I offered too many surprises. I burned with restlessness, I saw injustices everywhere, I intended to transform the world, and I embraced so many different causes that I myself lost count and my children lived in a state of constant bewilderment. Ten years later, when we were established in Venezuela and my ideals had been crippled by the fortunes of exile, I asked the children—formed in the era of hippies and socialist dreams—how they wanted to live, and they both replied, in unison and without consultation, “like wealthy bourgeois.”

Tío Ramón returned from Switzerland the same year my father died. My stepfather had slowly climbed the ladder of his diplomatic career and gained an important post in the chancellery. He took his grandchildren to the government palace, telling them it was his private residence, and seated them amid plush drapes and portraits of the Fathers of the Nation in the long ambassador's dining room, where white-gloved waiters served them orange juice. When you were seven, you had to write a composition at school on the theme of the family, and you wrote that your only interesting relative was Tío Ramón, prince and direct descendant of Jesus Christ, owner of a palace with uniformed servants and armed guards. Your teacher gave me the name of a child psychiatrist, but shortly afterward your reputation was saved. I was supposed to take you to the dentist but forgot, and you stood waiting for hours at the school door. The teacher tried unsuccessfully to locate either your father or me, and finally called Tío Ramón. “Tell Paula to stay right there, I will come get her immediately,” he replied and, in fact, a half-hour later a presidential limousine with fluttering flags and an escort of two motorcycle policemen pulled up before the school. The chauffeur got out, hat in hand, opened the door of the backseat, and your grandfather emerged wearing a chestful of decorations and the black ceremonial cape that in a burst of poetic inspiration he had stopped by his house to pick up. You have forgotten that I left you waiting, Paula, but you will always remember that imperial entourage and the face of your teacher, who was so befuddled that she made a deep bow as she greeted your Tío Ramón.

My father died of a heart attack. There was no opportunity to hear the story of his great moments or of his misery because a sudden wave of blood flooded the deepest chambers of his heart and he lay dead in the street like a common beggar. He was taken by Public Assistance to the morgue, where an autopsy determined the cause of death. In going through his pockets the attendants found his papers, connected the name, and contacted me to identify the body. When they gave me the name, I never dreamed it was my father; I hadn't thought of him for years and there was no shadow of him in my life, not even bitterness at having been abandoned by him. Instead, I thought of my brother, whose second name is Tomás and who at the time was still somewhere with the mysterious sect of the Argentine Messiah. It had been months since we heard from him and, because of the family's natural bent for the tragic, we supposed the worst. My mother had futilely exhausted her energies in trying to locate him, and was inclined to believe rumors that her son had been enlisted by Cuban revolutionaries: the idea that he was following the footsteps of the dead Che Guevara was more palatable than thinking him hypnotized by a charlatan. Before leaving for the morgue, I called Tío Ramón at his office and stammered that my brother was dead. I reached that sinister building before he did and identified myself to an impassive official who led me to an icy room where a form covered in white lay on a bare cot. They turned back the sheet and I saw a pale, naked, heavyset man with a seam stitched from chin to pubis, a man to whom I felt not the remotest connection. Moments later, Tío Ramón arrived; he glanced at the body and informed us that the man was my father. I walked over to take another look, observing his features very carefully because I would never have an opportunity to see them again.

That day I learned of the existence of an older half-brother, the son of my father and a lover, who bore a remarkable resemblance to the boy in my mathematics class I had fallen in love with at fifteen. I also learned of three younger children my father had by a third woman, offspring to whom, ironically, he had given our names. Tío Ramón took charge of the funeral and of drafting a document in which we renounced any claims in favor of that other family. Juan and I immediately signed our names, and then falsified Pancho's signature to avoid unpleasant delays. The next day we walked behind the coffin of that stranger down a path in the General Cemetery; no one else attended the modest burial, my father left very few friends in this world. I have never again had contact with my half-brothers and -sisters. When I think of my father I can only see him lying motionless in the abysmal solitude of that frigid morgue.

My father's was not the first corpse I had seen so close. From a distance, I had glimpsed bodies in the street during the chaos of the war that shook Lebanon and during an uprising in Bolivia, but they seemed more like marionettes than people. I only remember Memé alive, and of my Uncle Pablo there was nothing left to see. The one true and present death in my childhood happened when I was eight, and the circumstances make it unforgettable. That night of December 25, 1950, I had lain awake for hours, wide-eyed in a darkness filled with the familiar sounds of the beach house. My brothers and my cousins occupied other cots in the same room, and through the cardboard thin walls I heard the night breathing in the next rooms, the constant humming of the refrigerator, and the stealthy scurrying of mice. Several times I wanted to get up and go out on the patio to cool off in the salt breeze, but I was discouraged by the thought of never-ending processions of blind cockroaches. Under a sheet damp with the eternal dew of the coast, I touched my body with amazement and terror, while images of that afternoon of revelations flashed like ragged clouds across the pale reflection of the moon in the window. I could still feel the fisherman's moist lips on my throat, his voice murmuring in my ear. From far away came the muted roar of the ocean, and every once in a while a car passed in the street, briefly lighting the slits in the shutters. In my chest I felt the vibrations of a campanile, the weight of a gravestone, a powerful claw creeping toward my throat, choking me. The Devil appears at night in the mirrors. . . . There was no one in the room with me; the only thing in the whole house was a flaking rectangle in the bathroom where my mother put on her lipstick, too high for me to see. But the Evil One not only inhabits mirrors, Margara had told me, he also roams in the darkness searching for human sin, and climbs inside perverse little girls to eat their entrails. I put my hand where the fisherman had put his, and immediately drew it back, frightened, confused by the mingling of repugnance and dark pleasure. I felt again his rough, strong fingers exploring my body, the rasp of his badly shaven cheeks, his smell, his weight, his obscenities in my ear. Surely the mark of sin was emblazoned on my forehead. How was it that no one had noticed? When I got back to the house, I had not dared look my mother or my grandfather in the eye; I had hidden from Margara and, pretending to have a stomach ache, had escaped early to bed, after taking a long shower and scrubbing all over with blue laundry soap, but nothing had removed the stains. Dirty . . . I would be dirty forever. . . . Even with all that, it never entered my head to disobey the fisherman's orders; the next day I would meet him again on the road with the geraniums and, as if in a trance, follow him into the woods, even if it cost my life. “If your grandfather finds out, he'll kill me,” he had warned. My silence was sacred, his life was in my hands. The proximity of that second meeting filled me with terror, but also with fascination. What could there be beyond
sin
? The hours passed with excruciating slowness while I listened to the rhythmic breathing of my brothers and cousins and tried to calculate how long it was till dawn. With the first rays of the sun, I would be able to get out of bed and touch bare feet to the floor, because with the light the cockroaches went back to their corners. I was hungry; I thought of the jar of blancmange and cookies in the kitchen; I was cold and wrapped myself in the heavy blankets, but immediately began to rage with the heat of forbidden memories and delirium of anticipation.

Very early the next morning, while the family was still sleeping, I slipped out of bed, dressed, and went out to the patio; I circled around the house and went into the kitchen through the back door. The iron and copper pots hung on their hooks; live clams in a pail of salt water sat on the gray granite table beside a cloth sack with yesterday's bread. I couldn't open the jar of blancmange, but I cut off a chunk of cheese and a slice of quince paste and went outside to look at the sun, just rising over the hill like an incandescent orange. For no reason at all, I began walking toward the mouth of the river, the center of that small fishing village where it was still too early for any activity. I walked past the church, the post office, the general store, past the section of new houses, all exactly alike with their zinc roofs and wood terraces facing the sea, past the hotel where the young people went at night to dance to old rhythms because the new ones hadn't yet reached this backwater; I walked down the long market street where vegetables and fruit were sold, past the pharmacy, the Turk's dry goods store, the newspaper kiosk, the bar, and the billiard hall, still without seeing a soul. I came to the part of town where the fishing families lived, shanties with crude wood counters where seafood and fish were displayed, nets spread to dry like portentous spiderwebs, boots upside-down on the sand, waiting for their owners to recover sufficiently from the Christmas celebrations to go back out to sea. I heard voices, and saw people gathered near one of the farthest shacks, where the river empties into the sea. The sun was higher now and prickled hotly like ants on my shoulders. With the last bit of cheese and quince I reached the end of the street; cautiously I approached the small circle of people and tried to step through, but they pushed me back. At that moment, two policemen appeared on their bicycles; one blew his whistle and the other yelled, “Step aside, goddammit, we're the law.” The circle parted briefly, and I saw the fisherman lying face up on the dark sand of the riverbed, his arms flung open in a cross, and wearing the same black trousers, the same white shirt, and the same rubber-soled shoes he had worn the day before when he took me into the woods. One of the policemen commented that he had received a blow on the head, and then I saw the dried blood on his ear and his neck. Something exploded in my chest, and my mouth was filled with the taste of bitter grapefruit; I bent over double, rocked by violent spasms. I dropped to my knees and vomited onto the sand a mixture of cheese, quince paste, and guilt. “What's that kid doing here?” someone said; I felt a hand on my arm but I jerked free and blindly began to run. I ran and I ran, with a piercing pain in my side and that bitter taste in my mouth, not stopping until I saw the red roof of my house, and then I collapsed at the edge of the street, a tiny ball beneath the bushes. Who had seen me in the woods with him? How did Tata find out? I couldn't think, the only thing I knew for sure was that he would never again dive for sea urchins, that he lay dead on the sand, paying for our mutual crime, that I was free and would not have to meet him, and that he would never again take me to the forest. Much later, I heard familiar sounds from the house: servants preparing breakfast and the voices of my brothers and cousins. The milkman's jenny went by with rattling milk cans, and the man who delivered bread on his tricycle, and then Margara, grouching on her way to do the shopping. I sneaked into the patio with the hydrangeas, washed my face and hands in the stream from the hill, dabbed at my hair, and went into the dining room, where my grandfather sat before his newspaper and a steaming cup of
café con leche
. “Why are you looking at me like that?” he asked, smiling.

Two days later, when the coroner authorized it, the fisherman's wake was held in his modest home. All the town, including summer people, filed through to look at him; it wasn't often that anything interesting happened and no one wanted to miss the novelty of a murder, the only one anyone could remember in that resort town since the crucified artist. Margara took me even though my mother considered it a grisly spectacle, because Tata—who volunteered to pay for the burial—declared that death is a natural phenomenon and it is better to be exposed to it at a young age. At dusk, we climbed the hill to the clapboard shack decorated with paper garlands, a Chilean flag, and humble bunches of flowers from gardens along the coast. By then, the sound of tinny guitars was fading, and the mourners, foggy from cheap wine, were dozing in rattan chairs set in a circle around the coffin—a simple, unfinished pine box lighted by four candles. The black-clad mother poked at the fire in a wood stove where a sooty tea kettle was boiling, all the while muttering a stream of prayers interspersed with sobs and curses. The neighbor women brought cups to serve tea, and the victim's younger brothers, in their Sunday shoes and slicked-down hair, ran around in the patio in a flurry of hens and dogs. A black beribboned photograph of the fisherman from his days as a conscript stood on a tottering chest of drawers. All through the night, family and friends would take turns sitting with the corpse before it was lowered into the ground, strumming badly tuned guitars, eating whatever the women brought from their kitchens, and recalling the dead man in the halting language of the drunk and the sorrowing. Margara moved forward, muttering under her breath and yanking my arm because I was hanging back. When we neared the coffin, she made me go up to it and pray an Our Father of farewell, because she believed that the souls of the murdered never find rest and come in the nighttime to punish the living. Laid out on a white sheet was the man whose hands had known my body three days earlier in the forest. I looked first with visceral fear, then with curiosity, searching for a resemblance, but could find none. That face was not the face of my sin, it was a pale mask with painted lips, brilliantined hair parted in the middle, a wad of cotton in each nostril, and a handkerchief tied around its head to keep the jaw from sagging.