Paula (32 page)

“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 comes 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.

I, like thousands of other Chileans, have often asked myself whether I did the right thing in leaving my country during the dictatorship, whether I had the right to uproot my children and drag my husband to an uncertain future in a strange country, or whether it would have been better to stay where we were, trying to pass unnoticed—these are questions that cannot be answered. Events developed inexorably, as in Greek tragedies; disaster lay before my eyes, but I could not avoid taking the steps that led to it.

On September 23, 1973, twelve days after the military coup, Pablo Neruda died. He had been ill, and the sad events of those days ended his will to live. He lay dying in his bed at Isla Negra, staring, unseeing, at the waves crashing on the rocks beneath his window. Matilde, his wife, had erected a tight circle around Neruda to protect him from the news of what was happening, but somehow he learned of the thousands who were being arrested, tortured, and killed. “They mangled Victor Jara's hands, which was like killing a nightingale, and they say that he sang and sang, and that infuriated his torturers even more. What is happening,” Neruda murmured, his eyes wild. “Everyone has gone mad.” When he began to choke, he was taken by ambulance to a clinic in Santiago, while hundreds of telegrams from various world governments poured in offering political asylum to Chile's Nobel Laureate; some ambassadors went personally to persuade Neruda to leave, but he did not want to be away from his land in such cataclysmic times. “I cannot abandon my people, I cannot run away; promise me that you will stay, too,” he asked of his wife, and she promised she would. The last words of this poet who had sung to life were: “They're going to shoot them, they're going to shoot them.” The nurse administered a tranquilizer and he slipped into a deep sleep and never awakened. Death left upon his lips the ironic smile of his best days, when he disguised himself to entertain his friends. At that very moment, in a cell in the National Stadium, police were savagely torturing his driver to tear from him who knows what useless confession implicating the aged and peaceful poet. Neruda's wake was held in his blue house on San Cristobal Hill; it had been ransacked by troops and was in ruins: scattered everywhere were fragments of his ceramics, his bottles, his dolls, his clocks, his paintings—anything they could not take with them they broke and burned. Water and dirt streamed across the shards of glass covering the floor; as people walked over them, they made a sound like crunching bones. Matilde spent the night in the middle of the ruin, seated in a chair beside the coffin of the man who wrote her such incomparably beautiful love poems. She was accompanied by the few friends who dared defy the curfew and cross the ring the police had thrown around the house. Neruda was buried the next day in a borrowed grave, in a funeral bristling with the machine guns that bordered the streets through which the meager cortege passed. Few of his friends could be with him for his last journey, they were prisoners, or in hiding, or fearing reprisals. My coworkers from the magazine and I marched slowly behind the casket, carrying red carnations and shouting, “Pablo Neruda! Present, now and forever!” before the lines of red-eyed soldiers, all identical beneath their helmets, their faces camouflaged to conceal their identity and their weapons trembling in their hands. Halfway to the cemetery, someone shouted, “
Compañero
Salvador Allende!,” and with a single voice we answered, “Present, now and forever!” Thus the burial of the poet also honored the death of the president, whose body lay in an unmarked tomb in a cemetery in a different city. “The dead cannot rest in an anonymous grave,” an old man marching beside me said. When I got back home, I wrote my daily letter to my mother describing the funeral; she kept it with all the others, and eight years later gave it back to me and I was able to include it, almost word for word, in my first novel. I also told my grandfather, who listened, teeth clenched, to the end and then took my arms in an iron grip and shouted, Why the hell had I gone to the cemetery?, Didn't I know what was going on in Chile?, and Out of love for my children and respect for him—who couldn't take much more—to be careful. Wasn't it enough to appear on television with the name Allende? Why was I exposing myself like that? It was not incumbent on me to fight that fight.

“But evil is on the loose, Tata.”

“What evil are you talking about! It's your imagination, the world has always been like this.”

“Could it be we deny the existence of evil because we don't believe in the power of good?”

“Promise me that you'll keep your mouth shut and stay home,” was his request.