Paula (51 page)

Seed funding for the foundation came from the income I received from Paula, a memoir I wrote after her death. To this day, I get innumerable letters from people touched by Paula's spirit.

Since 1996, I have contributed to the foundation annually with income from my other books.

It is a wonderful truth that things we want most in life—a sense of purpose, happiness, and hope—are most easily attained by giving them to others.

M
Y FOUNDATION
is guided by a vision of a world in which women have achieved social and economic justice. This vision includes empowerment of women and girls and protection of women and children.

The foundation is small, only a drop of water in the vast desert of human need, so I cannot spread my support too thin. I have found that it is more efficient to concentrate on specific issues and in limited areas. I therefore support select nonprofits in the San Francisco Bay Area and Chile whose missions are to provide women and girls with:

Reproductive self-determination

Healthcare

Education

Protection from violence, exploitation and/or discrimination

Over the past decade, the Isabel Allende Foundation has made grants and scholarships through the following three programs:

Esperanza Grants

Paula Scholarships

Espíritu Awards

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“My mother placed a packet tied with yellow string into my hands. It was the 190 letters I had sent her in Chile that year, recounting each stage of the terrible test that Paula and I had passed together.”

D
URING THE YEAR
that my daughter was ill, I was so busy that I couldn't think much about myself. After her death, however, I fell into the overwhelming silence of mourning. I went around in a trance the first few days, like a sleepwalker, tripping over Paula's persistent ghost, who appeared everywhere to me.

One month later, my mother grabbed my hand and took me to the little coach house where I write. “Today is the 8th of January, the date you start all your books,” she said, and I replied that I would never write again. But my mother had prepared everything and is not a woman to let herself be blinded by common sense. Refusing to listen to my protests, she lit a honey-scented candle before Paula's photograph and placed a packet tied with yellow string into my hands. It was the 190 letters I had sent her in Chile that year, recounting each stage of the terrible test that Paula and I had passed together. She asked me to read them carefully, in the same order that they were written; that way I'd understand that death was the only liberation possible for my daughter.

“Grief is a long, dark tunnel that you must travel alone. On the other side there's light, but you can't yet see it. Trust me, Isabel, nothing can save you from this suffering; not antidepressants, nor therapy, nor holidays on a tropical island, not even the love of your husband and grandchildren,” my mother said, and asked me to walk patiently along the tunnel, trusting in the strength of life, because that was the least that Paula could expect from me.

My mother excused herself, saying she was going to buy a vest, leaving me alone with my memories and sorrow. I switched on the computer and without thinking twice I wrote the same sentence with which I'd started the first yellow exercise book in Madrid. “Listen, Paula. I'm going to tell you a story, so that when you wake up you will not feel so lost.” I understood then that the only thing I could write would be this same letter addressed to my daughter. My mother came back to look for me six hours later, without a vest, and found me absorbed.

Every morning during 1993, I got out of bed with difficulty, dragged myself to my old coach house, lit a candle and sat down in front of the computer to cry. Celia, my daughter-in-law, who was expecting her third child, and who had become my shadow, my friend and my helper, says that I wrote those pages with tears and kisses. Sometimes the sadness was unbearable and I stayed staring at the screen for hours, unable to get a word out. At other times the sentences flowed as if they were dictated by Paula from the other world. Now and again I headed for the wood where we had scattered her ashes and walked for hours, calling her. But it wasn't all crying; I often caught myself laughing at my memories, both of myself and even of Paula. A year later I glimpsed the end of the tunnel, amazed, as my mother had promised, and I realized that I no longer wanted to die, but to carry on living. I had 400 pages on my table and they were not depressing; they were, more like, a celebration of life. Like in paintings by old Flemish masters, color sprung out of large areas of shadow; this book was
chiaroscuro
, made of contrasts.

“Every morning during 1993, I got out of bed with difficulty, dragged myself to my coach house, lit a candle and sat down in front of the computer to cry.”

I don't know what the purpose of these pages was. I think that I wrote them as a kind of catharsis, with the vague hope that the magic of literature would defeat forgetfulness and keep Paula alive among us. I thought, too, that this meticulous record of what happened was important for Nicolás, who also has porphyria, and my grandchildren, who would have to live with that threat hanging over them. But in truth I wrote it as a form of salvation: in the process of remembering the past, my soul was healed.

My mother, the first to read the manuscript, immediately thought it could be published, but suggested making substantial changes to protect family secrets and the people involved in the story—myself above all. For a week I tried to change this memoir into a novel, but each time I made a change, however small, I felt that I was betraying Paula and the essence of the book itself. Defeated, I decided to leave it how it was. I made various copies of the original and sent them to each of the people mentioned, and all of them, without exception, allowed me to publish it as it was.

The only person that made an observation was Ernesto. “It seems to me that the character of Paula is incomplete,” he said. “You only know her from the perspective of a mother; you don't know that she was a passionate lover, a tender wife and a wonderful companion. I will send you something very private . . . If Paula knew, she'd die a second time!” Three days later I received a box of the most unexpected treasure: the love letters that Paula and Ernesto had sent each other every day for more than a year. My daughter, who I thought of as an intellectual—the genius of the family, the only one who combined a talent for the arts with the rigor of scientific thinking—revealed herself to me as a sensual woman, uninhibited, playful and with a great need to be spoiled. In the letters she told her lover about her infancy and early childhood: I discovered that she had been very happy, that she only remembered the good things, the love and the traveling, and that she had erased the separations, exile and other uncertainties. I put paragraphs of these letters into the text; they were the only changes I made.

The book was published despite reservations from my agent and various editors, who were frightened of the topic and the fact that I had exposed myself to the public gaze without holding anything back. Until then I had only written fiction and this memoir seemed like a jump into the unknown. Nevertheless, in a few weeks letters started to arrive from readers: men and women who, after reading
Paula
, felt the generous impulse to communicate with me. Hundreds, then thousands of envelopes from many places—above all Italy, Spain, South America and the United States, but also from more distant shores, such as India and Australia—flooded my desk and my life. None of my earlier books, which had been in print for over thirteen years, had produced the correspondence that
Paula
provoked in a few months. Letters from parents who had lost children or whose deepest fear was of something happening to them; letters from youngsters who wanted an extended family; from daughters who wanted a relationship with their mothers like the one that Paula and I had—including one girl of thirteen, in the middle of an adolescent crisis, who shared the reading of the book with her mother, as an act of reconciliation after innumerable fights; from doctors who had changed their relations with their patients, and said they would no longer look at them as cases but as people with a history and a family; from terminally ill patients who had found comfort in their last days; from others who suffered from porphyria or similar conditions. I also received a letter from a nurse, who had looked after Paula in the Intensive Care Unit in the hospital in Madrid, who confirmed my worst suspicions and gave me the details of my daughter's tragedy and the conspiracy of silence surrounding her case. This avalanche of letters proved that the decision to publish the book was the right one.

Opening myself up to my readers made me not more vulnerable, but stronger. I had to hire two helpers to open the envelopes, divide the letters by language, arrange for the ones we didn't understand to be translated and post the replies. These weren't letters that could be answered by a secretary with a few stock phrases, because every one of them was very personal.

Perhaps the most numerous letters were from young women who wanted to get to know Ernesto. I sent a lot of them the address of my son-in-law, of course, with the secret hope that there would be one among them capable of helping him in his grief, but I had to give up in the end, because he wouldn't cooperate. “Stop sending me girlfriends, because I don't have the energy to talk to all of them and the truth is that I'll never be able to fall in love again,” he told me. He had grown a beard, was sunk in sadness and appeared a lot older than his 32 years. He talked about becoming a Jesuit priest and even walked with his head slightly tilted, as if he was already in training for chastity and prayer. But in moments of lucidity it irritated me, the tragic neglect of this big man, and I often reminded him of his dedication during the months of Paula's illness, not just with her but with the other patients in the hospital who had the good fortune to come into contact with him. I couldn't see him in a cassock. I thought that instead of saving souls he should care for people and one day he told us that he had decided to study medicine or become a teacher.

The best news, however, is that he has finally fallen in love. Hardly had Giulia appeared in his life than he felt obliged to bring her to California, where the poor girl had to submit herself to the scrutiny of the tribe, but she passed with flying colors. I can't stop myself from sharing a detail that would be impossible to include in a novel, because I would be accused of pushing the boundaries of magical realism: Giulia was born on the same day as Paula, her mother is called Paula and her father and I were born on the same day in the same year. Too many coincidences! I think these are obvious signs that Paula approves of Ernesto's new love.

I never thought I'd write a memoir. The world is full of stories to relate, so why should I turn to my own? The circumstances that led to this book were dramatic; it would have been better if there hadn't been a reason to write it, but I'm happy with the result and the response it's had from its readers. I feel that all my previous novels were only training for the moment that Paula would write this book through me.