Paula (27 page)

When Aurelia, the epileptic poet in your ward, dances in her disheveled boas and polka-dotted dresses, she reminds me of those massive ballerinas, and also of a personal adventure. Bedizened in her theatrical garb, Aurelia in middle age dances a meaner fandango than I ever did in my youth. One day an ad appeared in the newspaper offering work in a follies theater to young, tall, pretty girls. My boss at the magazine asked me to apply for the job, get behind the scenes, and write an article on the lives of those “pitiful women” as she, in her feminist rigor, classified them. I was nowhere close to meeting the minimal requirements, but this was one of those assignments no one else wanted to try. I didn't have the nerve to go alone, so I asked a good friend to go with me. We got all dolled up in the kinds of kinky clothes we supposed showgirls wore when not performing, and stuck a rhinestone brooch in my dog's topknot, a mutt we baptized Fifi for the occasion but whose real name was Dracula. When Michael saw how we were dressed, he decided we should not step outside the house without protection, and, since we didn't have anyone to leave the children with, they came along, too. The theater was in the center of the city; it was impossible to park anywhere near, and we had to walk several blocks. My friend and I took the lead—I with Dracula in my arms—and Michael, our knight in shining armor, brought up the rear with a child's hand in each of his. It was like parading through a bull ring: men charged appreciatively, suggesting a little tossing and goring, and shouting “Olé!”, all of which we took as a good sign. There was a long line at the box office, only men, of course, most of them old, but also a few recruits on their day off, and a class of noisy adolescents in school uniform who naturally fell silent when they saw us. The porter, as decrepit as the rest of the place, led us up a rickety stairway to the second floor. Cued by the movies, we expected to see an obese gangster type with a ruby ring and chewed cigar, but instead, in the bare, empty, dust-covered loft, we were greeted by a woman in a drab overcoat, wool cap, and gloves with cut-off fingers, who might have been someone's aunt from the country. She was sitting in a pool of light, sewing on a sequined dress. A coal brazier at her feet was the only source of heat, and in another chair lay a hugely fat cat that stiffened like a porcupine when it saw Dracula. In one corner stood a full-length, triple-leaf mirror with a chipped frame, and from the ceiling hung large plastic bags containing the costumes for the extravaganza, incongruous, iridescent-feathered birds in that lugubrious barn.

“We came about the ad,” my friend said, affecting a heavy accent from the docks district.

The good woman looked us over from head to toe, with a dubious glint in her eye: we didn't exactly fit her notion of showgirls. She asked whether we had experience in the trade, and my friend reeled off her résumé: Her name was Gladys, she was a beauty operator by day and singer by night; she had a good voice but didn't know how to dance, although she was willing to learn, it couldn't be all that hard. And before I could say a word on my own, she pointed to me and added that her friend here was named Salomé and was a follies star with a string of successes in Brazil, in particular, one act in which she appeared nude on stage, then Fifi, the trained dog, brought her clothes in his mouth and a burly mulatto put them on her. The black artist hadn't come, she said, because he was in the hospital, where he had recently been operated on for appendicitis. By the time she finished her spiel, the woman had stopped sewing and was observing us openmouthed.

“Strip,” she told us. I think she suspected something.

With that total lack of modesty slim people have, my friend wiggled out of her clothes, stepped into some high-heeled gold slippers, and paraded before the woman in the moss-colored overcoat. It was unbelievably cold. “OK, no boobs, but we stuff everything here. Now for Salomé,” and aunty pointed a peremptory finger at me.

This was not a detail I had anticipated, but I didn't dare refuse. Shivering, I took off my clothes; my teeth were chattering, and I realized with horror that I was wearing woolen knickers Mama Hilda had knitted for me. Still holding the dog, who never stopped growling at the cat, I stuck my feet into the two-sizes-too-large gold shoes and began my promenade, shuffling my feet like a wounded duck. Suddenly the mirror caught my eye: in triplicate, from all angles, I saw myself in nothing but the shoes and Dracula. It was a humiliation I have not recovered from to this day.

“You're too short, but not bad otherwise. We can stick longer plumes on your head and put you in the front row and it won't be noticed. The dog and the exotic man we can do without, we have our own acts here. Come tomorrow and start rehearsing. The salary isn't great, but if you're nice to the gentlemen the tips are good.”

Euphoric, we rejoined Michael and the children outside, unable to absorb the tremendous honor of having got the job on our first try. What we didn't know was that there was an ongoing shortage of chorus girls, and that the impresarios were desperate enough to hire a chimpanzee. Only a few days later, I found myself dressed in what chorus girls really wear, that is, a spangled G-string, an emerald in my navel, glittering pasties on my nipples, and an ostrich headdress heavy as a sack of concrete. Behind, nothing. I looked at myself in the mirror and realized the audience would welcome me with a hail of tomatoes; spectators paid to see firm, professional flesh, not a mother of two who lacked the natural attributes of the office. To top everything off, a team from National Television had come to film the spectacle that night; they were installing their cameras while the choreographer was trying to teach me how to walk down a stairway between two rows of gold-painted, rippling-muscled gladiators holding lighted torches.

“Keep your head up, lower your shoulders, and smile, woman!, stop staring at the floor, and as you walk, cross one leg slightly in front of the other. Smile, I tell you! And don't flap your arms because in all those feathers you look like a broody hen. Watch out for the torches and try not to burn up the plumes, they cost a fortune! Wag the ass, suck in the belly,
breathe
. If you don't breathe, you'll pass out.”

I tried to do everything he said, but he sighed and placed a langorous hand over his eyes, while the torches burned down and the Romans stared at the ceiling with bored expressions. In a thoughtless moment, I peered through the curtain and got a glimpse of the audience, a noisy mass of males impatient at being kept waiting fifteen minutes. I could not face them; I decided that death was preferable and ran for the exit. The television camera that had filmed me from the front during the rehearsal, descending the stairway lighted by the Olympic torches of the gilded athletes, later filmed the image of a real chorus girl descending the same stairway, shot from behind after the curtain was open and the crowd howling with appreciation. They edited the film at the TV station, and I appeared with my own head and shoulders but with the perfect body of the nation's brightest follies star. The gossip filtered across the Andes to the ears of my parents in Buenos Aires. The honorable ambassador was forced to explain to the tabloid press that the cousin of President Allende had not danced naked in a pornographic extravaganza, it was merely an unfortunate coincidence of names. My father-in-law was waiting to watch his favorite evening program when he saw me in the buff, and the shock literally took his breath away. The other reporters at the women's magazine celebrated my, shall we say, exposé on the world of the chorus girl, but the head of the firm, a devout Catholic and father of five children, considered it a grave affront. Among other activities, I was the editor of the one magazine for children on the market, and in his view the scandal offered a regrettable example to the young. He called me into his office to ask whether it was true I had been brassy enough to exhibit my bare backside to all the nation, and I had to confess that, unfortunately, it was not
my
backside he'd seen but an editing trick. He looked me up and down and immediately took my word for it. The affair had no major consequences elsewhere. You and Nicolás went off to school with a chip on your shoulder, telling anyone who wanted to listen that the lady with the plumes was indeed your mother; that short-circuited any teasing and even led to my signing a few autographs. Michael shrugged his shoulders and made no comment to friends who were envious of his wife's spectacular body. More than one of them looked at me with a puzzled expression, unable to imagine how or why I hid beneath long hippie dresses the amazing physical attributes I had so generously revealed on the TV screen. I was keeping a prudent distance from Tata, until a couple of days later when he called me, choked with laughter, to say that the program had been almost as good as the wrestling matches in the Teatro Caupolicán, and wasn't it marvelous how everything looked much better on television than it did in real life? Unlike her husband, who refused to leave the house for a week or two, Granny boasted about my feat. In private, she confessed that when she saw me descending that stairway between two rows of aureate gladiators, she felt fulfilled, because that had always been her most secret fantasy. My mother-in-law had begun to change by then; she seemed agitated, and sometimes hugged her grandchildren with tears in her eyes, as if she had an intuition that a terrible shadow was threatening her precarious happiness. The tensions in the country had reached the stage of violence, and she, with the deep sensitivity of the truly innocent, could sense something momentous in the air. She was drinking cheap
pisco,
and hiding the bottles in strategic places. You, Paula, who loved her with infinite compassion, discovered the hiding places one by one and without a word carried off the empty bottles and buried them among the dahlias in the garden.

In the meantime, worn down by the pressures and work in the embassy, my mother had gone to a clinic in Romania where the renowned Dr. Aslan was working miracles with her geriatric pills. Mother spent a month in a convent cell, recovering from real and imaginary ills and reviewing in her memory old scars from the past. The room next to hers was occupied by a charming Venezuelan who was moved by her tears and one day worked up the courage to knock at her door. “What's the matter, my dear?” he asked as he introduced himself. “There is nothing that can't be cured with a little music and a drop of rum.” For the next weeks, like two elderly, hired mourners, dressed in the regulation bathrobe and slippers, they took up lawn chairs beneath the cloudy skies of Bucharest, and told the stories of their lives to one another, holding back nothing because they expected never to meet again. My mother shared her past, and he in turn confided his secrets; she showed him some of my letters and he offered photographs of his wife and his children, the one true passion of his life. At the end of the treatment, they met at the door of the hospital to say goodbye—my mother in her elegant travel outfit, rejuvenated by the prodigious art of Dr. Aslan, her green eyes washed by tears, and the Venezuelan caballero with his handsome suit and perfect smile—and very nearly did not recognize each other. Touched, he attempted to kiss the hand of that friend who had listened to his confessions, but she forestalled him by stepping closer and puting her arms around him. “I will never forget you,” she told him. “If you ever need me, you have only to call,” he replied. His name was Valentín Hernández; he was a powerful politician in his country, and a few years later when the winds of violence blew us in many directions he was essential to the future of our family.

My magazine and television reporting gave me a certain visibility; I was so often congratulated or insulted by people in the street that I came to think I was some kind of celebrity. During the winter of 1972, Pablo Neruda invited me to visit him at Isla Negra. The poet was not well; he had left his post at the embassy in Paris and returned to Chile and his coastal home to write his memoirs and his last poems facing the sea. I made meticulous preparations for that meeting; I bought a new recorder, wrote out lists of questions, I read two biographies and reread parts of his work—I even had the engine of my old Citroën checked so it would not fail me on such a delicate mission. The wind was whistling among the pines and eucalyptus, the sea was gray, and it was drizzling in that seaside town of closed houses and empty streets. The poet lived in a labyrinth of wood and stone, a capricious organism composed of added-on and revamped rooms. A ship's bell, sculptures, and timbers from shipwrecks dominated the patio, and a bank of rocks offered a broad vista of the beach and the tireless crashing of the Pacific Ocean. My gaze was lost in a limitless expanse of dark water against a leaden sky. Pure monotone of steel, gray upon gray, the landscape palpitated. Pablo Neruda, with a poncho around his shoulders and a cap crowning his great gargoyle head, welcomed me without formality. He told me he enjoyed my humorous articles and sometimes photocopied them and sent them to friends. He was weak, but he found the strength to lead me through the marvelous twists and turns of that cave crammed with his trove of modest treasures and to show me his collections of seashells, bottles, dolls, books, and paintings. He was an inexhaustible collector:
I love all things, not only the grand but the infinitely small: thimble, spurs, plates, flower vases
. . . . He also liked his food. For lunch we had baked sea bass, that white, firmfleshed fish that is king of Chile's seas, and dry white wine. He talked about the memoirs he was trying to write before death bilked him of the opportunity, about my articles—he suggested compiling them in a book—and about how he had discovered his figureheads all over the world, those enormous wood carvings with a siren's face and breasts that graced the prow of ancient ships. “These maidens were born to live among the waves,” he said, “they are miserable on dry land, that's why I rescue them and set them facing the sea.” He talked for a long time about the political situation, which caused him great agony, and his voice broke when he spoke of his country's being divided into violent extremes. Rightist newspapers were publishing six-column headlines:
CHILEANS
,
SAVE YOUR HATRED
,
YOU
'
LL NEED IT
!, inciting the military to take power and Allende either to renounce the presidency or commit suicide, as President Balmaceda had done in the past century to avoid a civil war.