Paula (40 page)

Michael went off to the remote province where crocodiles dozed in the holes for the foundations with the aim of finishing the job and looking for work that demanded less sacrifice, and I stayed with the children, who had changed greatly in my absence; they seemed totally adjusted to their new country, and no longer talked about going back to Chile. In those three months, Paula had left childhood behind and become a beautiful young girl obsessed with learning: she got the best grades in her class, studied guitar without the least aptitude for it, and, after mastering English, began on French and Italian with the aid of records and dictionaries. Meanwhile, Nicolás had grown a span, and materialized one day with his pants' legs at midcalf, his sleeves halfway up his arms, and with the self-same bearing as his grandfather and father. He had recent stitches on his head, several scars, and the secret ambition to scale the tallest skyscraper in Caracas without ropes. He dragged around huge metal drums he used for storing human and assorted animal feces, a disagreeable task for his class in natural science. He intended to demonstrate that those fetid gases could be used as an energy source and that through a process of recycling it was feasible to use excrement as a cooking fuel instead of washing it out to sea through sewers. Paula, who had learned to drive, ferried him around to stables, henhouses, and friends' bathrooms to collect the raw material for his experiment, which he stored in the house under the always present danger that heat would cause the gases to explode and coat the entire neighborhood with shit. The camaraderie of their childhood had been transformed into a solid complicity that bound them together till Paula's last day of consciousness. That pair of slender adolescents tacitly understood my determination to bury that painful episode in our lives. I suppose that my having betrayed them left deep scars and who knows how much resentment against me, but neither of them mentioned what had happened until several years later when finally we sat down to talk about it and discovered, to our amusement, that no one remembered the details and that all of us had forgotten the name of the lover who came so close to being their stepfather.

As so often happens when one follows the road indicated in the book of destinies, a series of coincidences helped me put my plans into practice. For three years, I had not made any friends or found work in Venezuela, but the minute I focused all my energy on the task of adapting and surviving, I succeeded in less than a week. My mother's tarot cards, which previously had predicted the classic intervention of a dark-skinned man with a mustache—I took that to be a reference to the flutist—again made a revelation, this time announcing a blond woman. In fact, only a few days after my return to Caracas, Marilena, a teacher with golden hair, came into my life to offer me employment. She owned an institute that specialized in art and classes for children with learning disabilities. While her mother, an energetic Spanish lady, acted as secretary and oversaw the business side of the academy, Marilena taught ten hours a day and devoted another ten to researching the ambitious methods with which she hoped to change the education system in Venezuela and, why think small?, the world. My job consisted of helping her supervise the teachers and organize the classes, attracting students through an advertising campaign, and maintaining good relations with the parents. We became very good friends. She was a woman as bright as her hair of gold, pragmatic and direct, who forced me to accept harsh reality when I strayed into sentimental muddles or patriotic nostalgia, and who ripped out by the root any thought of self-pity on my part. With her I shared secrets, learned a new occupation, and shook off the depression that had paralyzed me for so long. She taught me the codes and subtle keys of Caracas society, which until then I had not understood because I was applying Chilean criteria, and within a couple of years I fit in so well that all I lacked was a Caribbean accent. One day in the bottom of a suitcase, I found a small plastic bag containing a handful of soil and remembered that I had brought it from Chile with the idea of planting in it the best seeds of memory, but had not done so because I hadn't meant to stay; instead, I had kept looking toward the south, hoping the dictatorship would fall and I could go home. I decided that I had waited long enough, and in a quiet, very personal, ceremony I mixed Venezuelan earth with the dirt from my old garden, filled a flowerpot, and planted a forget-me-not. The spindly plant that came up was ill-suited for that climate, and promptly died, probably of sunstroke; after a while I replaced it with a rambunctious tropical plant that grew with the voraciousness of an octopus.

My children adapted, too. Paula fell in love with a young man of Sicilian origin, a first-generation immigrant like herself, still faithful to the traditions of his homeland. His father, who had made a fortune in construction materials, was waiting for Paula to finish school—since that was what she wanted—and learn to cook before celebrating the marriage. I was dead set against it, even though in my heart I couldn't help but like that generous young man and his enchanting clan, a large, cheerful family without metaphysical or intellectual pretensions, who gathered every day to celebrate life with succulent feasts of the best of Italian cuisine. The swain was the oldest son and grandson, a tall, muscular, blond young man with the temperament of a Polynesian, who spent all his time in placid diversions involving his yacht, his beach house, his collection of automobiles, and innocent partying. My sole objection to this potential son-in-law was that he had no job and hadn't finished his education; his father provided him a generous allowance and had promised him a furnished house when he married Paula. One day he confronted me, pale and trembling but with a steady voice, to tell me that we should stop beating around the bush and call a spade a spade: he was tired of my specious questions. He explained that, in his eyes, work was a necessity, not a virtue, and if you could eat without having to get a job, only an imbecile would have difficulty choosing. He could not understand our compulsion for sacrifice and toil; he wondered why, if we were “filthy rich” as Tío Ramón was always proclaiming, we would get up every morning at dawn and labor twelve hours. Obviously, in our view, that was the only measure of integrity. I confess that he shook the stoic scale of values I inherited from my grandfather, and ever since I have confronted work with a slightly more playful spirit. The marriage was postponed, because when Paula graduated from school she announced she wasn't ready for pots and pans and intended to study psychology. Her sweetheart had to accept her plan, first, because she didn't consult him about it, and second, because it was a profession that would better prepare her for bringing up the half-dozen children he planned to have. It was, however, too much for him to digest when she enrolled in a seminar on sexuality and then—lugging a case filled with eye-opening accoutrements—she went around measuring penises and orgasms. I had to agree that this was not the best idea; after all, we weren't in Sweden and people were clearly not going to approve of that specialty, but I didn't offer an opinion because Paula would have nailed me with the very feminist arguments I had instilled in her from early childhood. I did venture that she should be discreet, because if she acquired a reputation as a sexologist no one would have the nerve to take her out—men fear comparisons—but she withered me with one professional glance and that was the end of the conversation. Toward the end of the seminar, I had to make a trip to Holland, and Paula asked me to bring back certain didactic materials difficult to obtain in Venezuela. Which was how I found myself one night in the most sordid streets of Amsterdam, poking through X-rated shops for the artifacts on her list: telescoping rubber cocks, dolls with authentic orifices, and videos featuring imaginative combinations of women and spirited paraplegics or libidinous dogs. The blush on my cheeks when I bought these treasures could not compare with how red in the face I was in the Caracas airport when the customs officials opened my suitcase and fingered those outré objects before the mocking regard of the other passengers, especially when I explained they were not for my own personal use but my daughter's. That marked the end of Paula's engagement to the Sicilian with the gentle heart. Over time, he settled down, finished school, started working in his father's firm, married, and had a child, but he never forgot his first love. Ever since he learned of Paula's illness, he has called from time to time to offer his support, as do a half-dozen other men who weep when I give them the bad news. I have no idea who these strangers are, what role they played in my daughter's life, or what deep imprint she left on their souls. Paula planted vigorous seeds as she passed through the lives of others, I have seen the fruit during these eternal months of agony. Everywhere she went, she left friends and love. Persons of all ages and conditions communicate with me to ask about her; they cannot believe that such misfortune has befallen her.

In the meantime, Nicolás was climbing the most rugged peaks in the Andes, exploring submarine caves to photograph sharks, and breaking bones with such regularity that every time the phone rang I began to tremble. If there was no real reason for me to worry, he found ways to invent them, with the same ingenuity he had employed in his experiment with natural gases. One evening I came home from the office and found the house dark and apparently empty. I could see a light at the end of the hall, and so I walked toward it, calling, absentmindedly, until suddenly in the frame of the bathroom door I saw my son with a rope around his neck. There was enough light for me to see the protruding tongue and rolled back eyes of a hanged man before I dropped to the floor like a stone. I did not lose consciousness but I could not move, I was like a block of ice. When Nicolás saw my reaction, he unbuckled the harness from which he was so skillfully suspended and rushed to comfort me, showering me with repentant kisses and swearing he would never give me such a scare again. His good intentions lasted about two weeks, until he discovered the way to submerse himself in the bathtub and breathe through a fine glass straw so I would find him drowned, and then the next time, when he appeared with one arm in a sling and a patch over one eye. According to Paula's psychology manuals, his accidents revealed a hidden suicidal tendency and his desire to torture me with heart-stopping jokes was motivated by unexpressed anger, but, for the peace of mind of all, we concluded that textbooks can be mistaken. Nicolás was a little rough as a boy but not a suicidal maniac, and his affection for me was so obvious that my mother had diagnosed an Oedipus complex. Time proved our theory. When he was seventeen, my son woke up one morning a man; he put his experimental drums, nooses, mountain-climbing gear, harpoons for killing sharks, and first-aid kit into a box at the back of the garage, and declared that he was thinking of taking up computers. Now when I see him, with his serene intellectual expression and a child in each arm, I ask myself if I didn't dream that terrifying vision of him swinging from a home-rigged gallows.

During that period, Michael completed his work in the jungle and moved back to the capital with the idea of setting up his own construction business. Slowly and cautiously, we were mending the torn fabric of our relationship, until it became so amiable and harmonious that to others we seemed very much in love. My salary supported us for a time while Michael looked for contracts in an explosively expanding Caracas where every day they were cutting down trees, leveling hills, and demolishing houses to build, seemingly overnight, new skyscrapers and highways. The status of my blonde friend's academy was so precarious that we sometimes had to draw on her mother's pension or our savings to cover expenses at the end of the month. Throngs of students flocked in just before final exams when their parents suspected they were not going to pass their courses; with special tutoring they caught up, but instead of continuing their classes to correct the source of their problem, they disappeared as soon as they passed their tests. For several months our receipts had been very erratic, and the institute was barely surviving; we were anxiously approaching January, when we would have to enroll enough children to keep our frail vessel afloat. By December, the situation was critical. Marilena's mother and I, who performed all the administrative chores, went over the accounts time and again, trying fruitlessly to make the negative numbers balance. We were engrossed in this task when the cleaning woman happened by our desk, an affectionate Colombian who often treated us to her delicious flan. When she saw us desperately juggling figures, she asked with sincere interest what the problem was, and we told her our difficulties.

“Well, in the evenings, I work at this funeral home, and when we're running short on clients we wash the place down with
Quitalapava
,” she said.

“What's that?”

“Why, a spell. You have to do a good cleaning. First, you wash the floors from the back toward the door, to get the bad luck out, and then from the door back in, to summon the spirits of light and consent.”

“And then?”

“And then the dead begin to pile in.”

“We don't need any corpses here, we need children.”

“Same thing,
Quitalapava
works for any business.”

We gave her some money, and the next day she came in with a gasoline can filled with a stinking, suspicious-looking liquid; in the bottom was a milky, yellowish sediment, then a layer of some gurgling broth, all topped with something like crankcase oil. We had to stir it up before we used it, and cover our noses with handkerchiefs because the smell was enough to knock us out. “I hope my daughter doesn't find out about this,” sighed Marilena's mother, who was nearly seventy but had lost none of the vitality and good humor that led her to leave her native Valencia thirty years before to follow an unfaithful husband to the New World, confront him for living with a concubine, demand a divorce, and immediately forget him. Captivated by that lavish country in which she felt free for the first time in her life, she and her daughter stayed on and, with tenacity and ingenuity, did very well. This remarkable woman and I scrubbed the floor on our hands and knees, murmuring the ritual words and smothering our giggles, because if we openly made fun the whole enterprise would have been shot to hell: seriousness and good faith are required if you want sorcery to work. We invested two days in that labor, and were rewarded with sprained backs and raw knees, and no matter how wide we opened the windows and doors we could not get the stink out, but it was worth it all: the first week of January there was a long line of parents at our door, with children in hand. In view of such spectacular results, I was struck with the idea of using what was left in the can to improve Michael's luck, and so one night I scrubbed his office exactly the way we had at the academy. I heard no results for several days, except comments about a strange odor. I consulted with our cleaning woman, who assured me that the
empavado
was my husband himself, and that the way to resolve that would be to take him to the Montaña Sagrada for a cleansing ceremony, advice that lay far outside the range of possibility. A man like Michael, the end product of a British education, a career in engineering, and the vice of chess, would never lower himself to magic ceremonies. I kept thinking, however, about the logic of witchcraft, and concluded that if the miraculous liquid worked for scrubbing floors, there was no reason it shouldn't be effective on a human being. The next morning when Michael was in the shower, I sneaked up behind him and doused him with the dregs from the can. He howled with surprise, and after only a few minutes turned the color of a lobster; he also lost a few clumps of hair, but exactly two weeks later he acquired a Venezuelan partner and a fabulous contract.