The Sum of Our Days (16 page)

Willie and I had said good-bye to his son with great emotion, thinking how much he had changed. When I had come to live with Willie, Jason spent his nights reading or out partying with his buddies; he got up at four in the afternoon, threw a grimy coverlet around him, and settled on the terrace to smoke, drink beer, and talk on the phone until I rapped him on the head enough times that he went to class. Now he was on the way to becoming a writer, something we'd always thought he would do because he was very talented. Willie and I were remembering that stage of the past as we walked down Fifth Avenue in the midst of the noise and crowds and traffic and cement and frost. In front of a shop window exhibiting a collection of the ancient jewels of imperial Russia, we saw a woman huddled on the ground, shivering. She was of the African race, filthy, wearing rags topped with a black garbage bag. She was sobbing. People were hurrying by without looking at her. Her weeping was so desperate that for me the world froze, as in a photograph; even the air absorbed the fathomless pain of that wretched woman. I crouched down at her side and gave her all my cash, though I was sure that a pimp would soon be by to take it from her. I tried to communicate, but she didn't speak English—or else she was beyond words. Who was she? How had she arrived at such a state of desolation? Perhaps she'd come from a Caribbean island, or from the coast of Africa, and waves had haphazardly washed her onto Fifth Avenue the way that meteorites fall to earth from another dimension. I always wonder what could have become of her. I've never forgotten her, and I carry the terrible guilt that I couldn't or wouldn't help her. We kept walking, hurrying in the cold, and a few blocks later we were inside the theater and the woman was left behind, lost in the night. I never imagined then that I could never forget her, that her tears would be an inescapable call, until a couple of years later life would give me the opportunity to respond.

If Willie could manage to get away from work, he would fly and meet me at different points of the country so we could spend one or two nights together. His office kept him tied down and gave him more disappointments than satisfaction. His clients were down-and-out folks who'd been injured on the job. As the number of immigrants from Mexico and Central America, most of them illegal, increased in California, so did the xenophobia. Willie charged a percentage of the compensation he negotiated for his clients, or obtained in a trial, but those sums were getting smaller and smaller, and the cases difficult to win. Fortunately, he didn't pay rent since his office was housed in our erstwhile brothel in Sausalito. Tong, his accountant, performed juggling acts to cover salaries, bills, taxes, insurance, and banks. This noble Chinese man looked after Willie as he would a foolish son, and he cut so many corners that his frugality had reached the level of legend. Celia swore to us that at night, after we left the office, he pulled the paper cups from the trash, washed them, and put them back in the kitchen. The truth is that without the vigilant eye and the abacus of his accountant, Willie would have gone under.

Tong was almost fifty, but he looked like a young student: slim, small, with a mop of bristly hair, he always dressed in jeans and sneakers. He hadn't spoken to his wife for twelve years, though they had lived under the same roof; they hadn't divorced because they would have had to divide their savings. They were also afraid of his mother, a tiny, ferocious old lady who had lived in California for thirty years but believed she was in the south of China. This lady did not speak a word of English; she did all her shopping with merchants in Chinatown, listened to a Cantonese radio station, and read the San Francisco newspaper in Mandarin. Tong and I had in common our affection for Willie; that was a bond despite the fact that neither of us could understand the other's accent. At the beginning, when I had just come to live with Willie, Tong felt an atavistic distrust of me, which he made obvious at the slightest opportunity.

“What does your accountant have against me?” I asked Willie one day.

“Nothing in particular. All the women in my life have been expensive, and since he pays my bills, he would like for me to live in strict celibacy,” he informed me.

“Tell him that I have supported myself since I was seventeen.”

I suppose that he did, because Tong began to look at me with something like respect. One Saturday he found me in the office scrubbing the bathrooms and vacuuming; at that point his respect was transformed into open admiration.

“You marry this one. She clean,” he counseled Willie in his rather limited English. He was the first to congratulate us when we announced we were going to be married.

This long love affair with Willie has been a gift of the mature years of my life. When I divorced your father, Paula, I prepared myself to go on alone, because I thought it would be next to impossible to find a new life companion. I'm bossy, independent, tribal, and I have unusual work habits that cause me to spend half my available time alone, not speaking, in hiding. Few men can cope with all that. But I don't want to commit the sin of false modesty, I also have a few virtues. Do you remember any, daughter? Let's see, let me think. . . . Well, for example, I'm low-maintenance, and I'm healthy and affectionate. You always said that I'm entertaining and that no one would ever get bored with me, but that was then. After I lost you, I also lost my desire to be the life of the party. I've become introverted; you wouldn't recognize me. The miracle was finding—where and when I least expected—the one man who could put up with me. Synchronicity. Luck. Destiny, my grandmother would have said. Willie maintains that we have loved each other in previous lives and will continue to do so in future ones, but you know how the idea of karma and reincarnation frightens me. I'd rather limit this amorous experiment to a single life, for that's enough. Willie still seems such a stranger to me! In the morning, when he's shaving and I see him in the mirror, I often ask myself who the devil that large, too white, North American man is, and what are we doing in the same bathroom. When we met we had very little in common; we came from very different backgrounds and we had to invent a language—Spanglish—in order to understand each other. Past, culture, and customs separated us, as well as the inevitable problems of children in a family artificially glued together, but by elbowing our way forward, we succeeded in opening the space that is indispensable for love. It's true that to make my life in the United States with Willie, I left behind nearly everything I had, and adjusted however I could to the disarray of his existence—but he had to make his own concessions and changes in order for us to be together. From the beginning, he adopted my family and respected my work; he has accompanied me in every way he could; he has backed me up and protected me even from myself; he never criticizes me; he gently laughs at my manias; he doesn't let me run over him; he doesn't compete with me, and even in the fights we've had he acts with honor. Willie defends his territory, but without aggression; he says he had traced a small chalk circle around him, and within it he is safe from me and my tribe: be careful not to invade it. A great pool of sweetness lies just beneath the surface of his tough appearance; he is as sentimental as a big dog. Without him, I wouldn't be able to write as much and as calmly as I do because he takes care of all the things that frighten me, from my contracts and our social life to the functioning of all our mysterious household machines. Even though I am still surprised to find him by my side, I have become so used to his massive presence that now I couldn't live without him. Willie fills the house, fills my life.

I
N THE SUMMER OF
1996, an unhinged racist in Oklahoma City used a truck loaded with a thousand kilos of explosives to blow up a federal building. Five hundred people were wounded and one hundred and sixty-eight were killed, several children among them. One woman was trapped under a massive block of cement and they had to amputate her leg without anesthesia to save her. Celia sobbed over that for three days; she said that it would have been better had the poor woman died, since she not only lost her leg in the tragedy, she also lost her mother and her two small children. Celia's reaction was similar to those she'd had from other tragedies she'd read about, she had few defenses against the outside world; despite our long friendship I couldn't detect what was bothering her. I thought I knew Celia better than she knew herself, but there was a part of my daughter-in-law's soul that escaped me, as I realized a few weeks later.

Willie and I decided that it was time to take a vacation. We were exhausted and I could not shake off my grief, although it had been nearly four years since you died and three since Jennifer had disappeared. I didn't know then that the sadness is never entirely gone; it lives on forever just below the skin. Without it I wouldn't be who I am, or be able to recognize myself in the mirror. Ever since I finished
Paula
, I hadn't written a word of fiction. For years I'd been playing with the idea of a novel about the mid-nineteenth-century gold rush in California, but I wasn't enthusiastic enough to tackle such a long and demanding project. I was as active as always and few people suspected my state of mind, but deep in my soul I was moaning. I developed a taste for solitude; I wanted only to be with my family; people bothered me, my friends were reduced to three or four. I was spent. I didn't want to keep making tours to promote my books, explaining what I'd already said in those pages. I needed silence, but it became more and more difficult to find. Journalists came from all over and invaded us with their cameras and lights. On one occasion, some Japanese tourists came to observe our house as if it were a monument, just as a crew from Europe had arrived hoping to photograph me inside an enormous cage with a majestic white cockatoo. That very large bird did not look at all friendly, and it had claws like a condor. It came with a trainer, and he should have controlled it, but it shit on all the furniture and when I went into the cage nearly poked out my eye. However, overall I really couldn't complain. I had an affectionate public and my books were being read everywhere. My sadness manifested itself in sleepless nights, dark clothing, the wish to live in a hermit's cave, and an absence of inspiration. I summoned the muses in vain. Even the most bedraggled muse had abandoned me.

For someone who lives to write and lives from what she does write, an internal drought is terrifying. One day I was in Book Passage, killing time with several cups of tea, when Anne Lamott came in; she is a North American writer much beloved for stories filled with humor and spirituality. I told her that I was blocked and she told me that the business of the “writer's block” is nonsense, and what happens is that sometimes the well has gone dry and has to be refilled.

The idea that my well of stories and my wish to tell them was drying up threw me into a panic, because no one was going to give me a job doing anything else, and I had to help support my family.

Nico had a job as a computer technician in a nearby city and was commuting more than two hours a day and Celia was doing the work of three people, but they couldn't meet costs for their children, we lived in one of the most expensive areas of the United States. Then I remembered that I was trained as a journalist; if I'm given a subject and time to research it, I can write about almost anything—except politics and sports. I assigned myself a “feature” as different as possible from my last book, one that had nothing to do with pain and loss, the pleasureful sins of life: gluttony and lust. As it would not be fiction, the caprices of the muse had little bearing; all I had to do was my research on food, eroticism, and the bridge that connected them: aphrodisiacs. Calmed by that plan, I accepted Willie and Tabra's suggestion that we go to India, although I had no desire to travel, and even less to India, the farthest possible point from our home before starting back around the other side of the planet. I didn't think I would be able to bear the legendary poverty of India, the devastated villages, starving children, and nine-year-old girls sold into early marriages, forced labor, or prostitution, but Willie and Tabra promised me that India was much more than that, and they were determined to take me if they had to tie me up to do it. Besides, Paula, I had promised you that one day I would visit that country because you had come back from a trip there fascinated, and you convinced me that India is the richest source of inspiration for a writer. Alfredo López Lagarto-Emplumado did not come with us, though he was again visible on Tabra's horizon; he was planning to spend a month communing with nature, accompanied by a pair of Comanches, tribal brothers. Tabra had to buy him some sacred drums that apparently were indispensable for their rituals.

Willie bought a khaki explorer's outfit with thirty-seven pockets, a backpack, an Aussie hat, and a new lens for his cameras, about the size and weight of a small cannon. Tabra and I packed our usual Gypsy skirts, ideal because wrinkles and stains wouldn't show. The three of us set off on a journey that ended a century later when we landed in New Delhi and sank into the city's sticky heat and its cacophony of voices, traffic, and blasting radios. We were surrounded by a million hands, but fortunately Willie's head emerged like a periscope above the mass of humanity, and in the distance saw a sign with his name held by a tall man with a turban and authoritative mustache. It was Sirinder, the guide we had hired through an agency in San Francisco. He opened a way with his cane, chose some bearers to carry the luggage, and took us to his ancient automobile.

We stayed in New Delhi several days. Willie was agonizing with an intestinal infection and Tabra and I were roaming around buying bagatelles. “I think your husband is pretty sick,” she told me the second day, but I wanted to go to the quarter where the craftsmen who carved stones for her jewelry had their shops. The third day Tabra pointed out to me that Willie was so weak that he wasn't even talking, but as we hadn't as yet visited the street of the tailors, where I wanted to buy a sari, I didn't take immediate action. I conjectured that what Willie needed was time; there are two kinds of illness: the ones that simply go away and the deadly ones. That night Tabra suggested that if Willie died, it might ruin our trip. Faced with the possibility of having to cremate him on the banks of the Ganges, I called the hotel desk and they soon sent up a doctor: short, oily hair, wearing a shiny brick-colored suit. When he saw my husband looking like a corpse, he did not seem in the least alarmed. He pulled from his battered doctor's bag a glass syringe like the one my grandfather used in 1945, and prepared to inject the patient with a viscous liquid; the needle was resting in a cotton ball and to every appearance was as ancient as the syringe. Tabra wanted to intervene, but I assured her that there was no need to make a fuss over a possible case of hepatitis when the future of the patient was uncertain anyway. The doctor worked the miracle of restoring Willie to good health in twenty hours, and so we were able to continue our journey.