The Sum of Our Days (15 page)

Alejandro was reminiscent of Nico in character, although he looked like his mother. Like his father, he had a curious mind and understood mathematical concepts before he could pronounce all the consonants in the alphabet. He was such a handsome boy that people stopped us in the street to rave about him. On one April 2, I remember the date very well, we were alone in the house and he came into the kitchen where I was making soup. He was frightened, and he threw his arms around my legs, and told me that there was “someone on the stairs.” We went to look, went all through the house without finding anyone, and when we came back from the basement to the first floor he planted himself at the bottom of the stairs and pointed.

“Up there!”

“What is it, Alejandro?” I asked. All I saw were the tiled steps.

“She has long hair,” and he hid his face in my skirts.

“It must be your aunt Paula. Don't be afraid, she's only come to say hello.”

“She's dead!”

“It's her spirit, Alejandro.”

“You told me she was in the woods! How did she get here?”

“In a taxi.”

I supposed that by then you must have vanished, because he agreed to take my hand and go upstairs. I think the legend of the ghost began when my mother—who visited us a couple of times a year and stayed for several weeks since the trip between Santiago to San Francisco is a journey worthy of Marco Polo and can't be taken on lightly—told us she heard things at night, something like furniture being dragged. We all had heard it and we had different explanations: deer had got in and were walking around the terrace; it was the pipes contracting with the cold; the dry wood in the house was creaking. My friend Celia Correas Zapata, a professor of literature who had taught my books for years at San Jose University and was writing a book about my work entitled
Life and Spirit
, once stayed overnight. She slept in your room, Paula, and was awakened at midnight by the intense scent of jasmine, even though it was the dead of winter. She, too, mentioned noises, but no one gave her report much importance until a German journalist who stayed with us while he conducted a long interview swore that he had seen the bookcase slip noiselessly about a foot and a half from the wall, without disarranging the books. There was no earthquake that night, and this time it wasn't the perceptions of Latina women but the observation of a German male, whose opinion carried atomic weight. We accepted the idea that you came to visit us, although that possibility made the woman who cleaned the house very nervous. When Nico heard what had happened with Alejandro, he concluded that surely the boy had heard us talking and the rest was childish imagination. My son always has a rational explanation that ruins my best stories.

Andrea learned to tolerate her glasses and we were able to remove the rubber bands and safety pins, but her legendary clumsiness did not go away. She was always a little off center as she made her way through the world; she couldn't handle escalators or revolving doors. At the end of a school pageant, in which she appeared dressed as a Hawaiian girl with a ukulele, she made a long deep bow, but with her bottom turned to the audience. A unanimous bellow of laughter welcomed that irreverent salute, to the fury of the family and horror of my granddaughter, who was so embarrassed she wouldn't leave the house for a week. Andrea had the strange little face of a stuffed animal, accentuated by her curly hair. She was always in costume. She wore one of my nightgowns for an entire year, pink of course, and we have a photograph of her in kindergarten in a fur stole, a gift wrap ribbon on her chest, a bride's long gloves, and two ostrich plumes in her hair. She talked to herself because she heard the people in her stories, who wouldn't leave her in peace, and she was sometime frightened by her own imagination. There was a wall mirror in our house at the end of a hallway, and she often asked me to go with her “down the mirror road.” As we neared the looking glass, her steps grew more hesitant because a dragon was crouching there, but just when the beast was ready to spring, Andrea would return from the other dimension to reality. “It's just a mirror, there's no monster there,” she would tell me, though without much conviction. An instant later she would be back in her story again, holding my hand along the imaginary road. “This child will end up either stark raving mad or writing novels,” her mother decided. I was like her at that age.

Nicole shot up as soon as she began to walk, and from being solid and square as an Inuit she went to floating about with ethereal grace. Her mind was very sharp, and she had a good memory, a sense of direction that allowed her always to know where she was, and she could have entranced Dracula with her round eyes and bunny rabbit smile. Willie did not escape his granddaughter's beguiling ways. Nicole had a mania for sitting beside him while he was watching the news on television, but after thirty seconds she would have convinced him that cartoons would be better. Willie would go to another room to watch his program, and Nicole, who hated to be alone, would follow right behind. This routine would be repeated several times during the evening. Once she saw a male elephant mounting a female.

“What are they doing, Willie?”

“Coupling, Nicole.”

“What?”

“They're making a baby.”

“No, Willie, you don't understand, they're fighting.”

“Okay, Nicole, they're fighting. Can I watch the news now?”

At that moment a shot of a newborn elephant flashed on the screen. Nicole yipped, ran closer to look, stuck her nose against the screen, then turned toward Willie with her fists on her hips.

“That's what happens when you go around fighting, Willie!”

Nicole had to go to day care when she was still in diapers because all the adults in the family were working and couldn't look after her. Just the opposite of her sister, who always dragged along a suitcase containing her most precious treasures—an infinity of trinkets, the list of which was engraved in her memory—Nicole had absolutely no sense of possession; she was as free and unbound as a cricket.

T
ABRA, THE ADVENTURER OF OUR TRIBE
, traveled several times a year to remote places, especially ones the State Department considered out of bounds to Americans, whether because of danger, as in the case of the Congo, or for being at political extremes, like Cuba. She had explored the world in various directions, almost always in primitive conditions, with the modesty of a pilgrim, and alone . . . until she met the man who was willing to accompany her. As I have lost count of my friend's suitors, and some anecdotes are hazy in my memory, all of Tabra's lovers from that time have blended in my mind into a single character. Let's call him Alfredo López Lagarto-Emplumado, or Plumed Lizard. Picture a very smart man, so handsome that he never lost an opportunity to look at himself in every mirror and plate glass window he passed. With olive skin and a slim, muscular body, he was a treat to the eyes, especially to Tabra's, who sat mute with admiration while he talked about himself. His father was a Mexican from Cholula and his mother a Comanche Indian from Texas, which guaranteed him a lifetime of thick black hair, which he usually wore in a ponytail, unless Tabra had braided it and adorned it with beads and feathers. He had always been curious about traveling but hadn't been able to do it because of his limited income.

Lagarto-Emplumado had been preparing all his life for a very noble and secret mission that, though secret, he told to anyone who would listen: it was to rescue the crown of Moctezuma displayed in a museum in Austria and return it to the Aztecs, its legitimate owners. He had a black shirt bearing the legend “Crown or Death, Viva Moctezuma!” Willie wanted to know if the Aztecs had given their approval of his project and he told us they hadn't; his plan was still very secret. The crown, made of four hundred quetzal plumes, was more than five centuries old, and it was possible that it might be a bit moth-eaten. At a family dinner, we asked how he meant to transport it and he never came to visit again; maybe he thought we were making fun. Tabra explained to us that imperialists appropriate the cultural treasures of other nations, the way the British did when they robbed Egyptian tombs. As for him, he admired the tattoo of Quetzalcoatl she had on her left ankle. It was not by chance, he said, that Tabra had a tattoo of the Mesoamerican god, the plumed serpent that had been the inspiration for his own name.

At the request of Lagarto, who like a good Comanche felt the call of the desert, they made a trip to Death Valley. I warned Tabra that it wasn't a good idea; even the name of the place was a bad omen. She drove for days, then, carrying the tent and supplies, plodded behind her hero for several miles, dehydrated and faint from heat exhaustion, as he picked up little sacred stones for his rituals. My friend kept her complaints to herself so he wouldn't throw her below-par physical conditioning and her age in her face: she was twelve years older than he. Finally Lagarto-Emplumado found the perfect place to camp. Tabra, red as a beet, her tongue swollen, set up the tent and fell onto her sleeping bag, shivering with fever. The champion of the indigenous cause shook her to get up and fix him
huevos rancheros.
“Water, water . . . ,” Tabra muttered. “Even if my mother was dying, she would have cooked my father's beans,” her peevish Lagarto replied.

Despite the experience in Death Valley, where she came close to leaving her sun-baked bones, Tabra invited her Plumed Lizard to go with her to Sumatra and New Guinea, where she hoped to find inspiration for her ethnic jewelry and a shrunken head to add to her collection of rare objects. Lagarto-Emplumado, who was extremely careful of his physical condition, took along a tote heavy with lotions and ointments, which he shared with no one, and a handbook on all the illnesses and accidents that can befall a traveler on this planet, from beriberi to a python attack. In a village in New Guinea, Tabra fell prey to a cough; she was pale and exhausted, maybe a consequence of the brutal operation on her breasts.

“Don't touch me! You may be contagious. You may have an illness that comes from eating the brains of your ancestors,” said Lagarto-Emplumado, highly alarmed, after consulting his encyclopedia of misfortunes.

“What ancestors?”

“Any ancestors. They don't have to be ours. These people eat the brains of the dead.”

“They don't eat the whole brain, Lagarto, only a little bit, as a sign of respect. But I doubt that we've eaten any at all.”

“Sometimes you can't tell what you have on your plate. Besides, we've eaten pork, and all the pigs in Bukatingi feed on what they can scavenge. Haven't you seen them rooting in the cemetery?”

Tabra's relationship with Alfredo López Lagarto-Emplumado was temporarily interrupted when he decided to return to a former lover, who had convinced him that only someone who was pure of heart could rescue Moctezuma's crown, and that as long as he was with Tabra, his was contaminated. “Why is she purer than you?” I asked my friend, who had contributed to the funds needed to carry out the epic of the crown. “Don't worry, he'll be back,” Willie consoled her. God forbid! I thought, ready to tear the memory of that ingrate to shreds, but when I saw Tabra's misty eyes I thought it better to hold my tongue. Lagarto returned as soon as he realized that the other woman, no matter how pure, was not planning to finance him. He came back with the idea that they could form a love triangle, but Tabra would never have accepted such a Mormon-inspired solution.

It was about that time that my friend's former husband died, the preacher from Samoa. He weighed 330 pounds and had high blood pressure and galloping diabetes. They'd had to remove a foot and then several months later, amputate the leg above the knee.

Tabra has told me what she suffered in her marriage; I know that it took years of therapy to overcome the trauma produced by that man's violence, who had seduced her when she was a girl, convinced her that they should run away together, beaten her brutally from the first day, kept her terrorized for years, and then after the divorce turned his back on their son. Tabra raised Tangi alone, with no help of any kind from the boy's father. However, when I asked her if she was happy he'd died, she looked at me with surprise. “Why would I be happy? Tangi is sad, and he left many other children behind.”

C
OMPARED WITH
P
LUMED
L
IZARD
, my life comrade, Willie, is a freaking wonder; he takes care of me. And compared to Tabra's expeditions to the farthest confines of the earth, my little professional trips were pitiful; even so, they left me drained. I had to board a plane day after day, where I struggled valiantly against the viruses and bacteria of the other passengers; I spent weeks away from home, and days preparing talks. I don't know how I stole time to write. I learned to speak in public without panicking, to go through airports without getting lost, to survive on what a carry-on would hold, to whistle down a taxi, and to smile at people greeting me, even though my stomach hurt and my shoes were too tight. I don't remember all the places I went, it doesn't matter. I know I traveled through Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Latin America, parts of Africa and Asia, and all the states of the union except North Dakota. On planes, I wrote my mother by hand to tell her my adventures, but when I read the letters a decade later, it's as if all that had happened to another person.

The one vivid memory that stays in my mind was of a scene in New York in midwinter that would haunt me until later, following a trip to India, I was able to exorcise it. Willie had joined me for the weekend and we had just visited Jason and a group of his university friends, young intellectuals in leather jackets. In the months he'd been away from Sally, he'd not spoken of marriage again, and we had the idea that their engagement was ended. Sally herself had hinted at that on a couple of occasions, but Jason denied it. According to him, they were going to be married as soon as he graduated, but when Ernesto had visited us in California we'd learned that he'd had a brief but intense affair with Sally, so we assumed that she and Jason no longer had ties. Jason, incidentally, didn't learn about Sally and Ernesto until many years later. By then the events that demolished his faith in our family, which he had idealized, had already been set in motion.