The Sum of Our Days (17 page)

India was one of those experiences that mark you for life, memorable for many reasons, though as this is not a travelogue it isn't the place to recount them. I will relate only two relevant episodes. The first gave me the idea of a way to honor your memory, daughter, and the second changed our family forever.

S
IRINDER, OUR DRIVER
, had the expertise and the daring needed to move through the city traffic, dodging cars, buses, burros, bicycles, and more than one starving cow. No one hurried—life is long—except the motorcycles zigzagging at the speed of torpedoes and with five riding aboard. Sirinder showed signs of being a man of few words, and Tabra and I learned not to ask him questions because the only one he answered was Willie. The rural roads were narrow and curving, and he drove them at breakneck speed. When two vehicles met nose to nose, the men at the wheel looked each other in the eye and determined in a fraction of a second which was the alpha male, then the other man ceded right-of-way. The accidents we saw always involved two trucks of similar size that had smashed head-on because it wasn't clear in time which was the alpha driver. We didn't have safety belts, we had karma; no one dies before his time. We did not drive with lights at night for the same reason. Sirinder's intuition warned him that a vehicle might be coming toward us, at which time he flashed on his lights and blinded the driver.

As we drove out from the city, the landscape became sere and golden, then dusty and reddish. The villages were farther and farther apart, and the plains stretched forever, but there was always something to attract our attention. Willie carried his camera bag, tripod, and cannon-sized lens everywhere, a rather complex apparatus to set up. It is said that the only thing a good photographer remembers is the photo he didn't take. Willie will remember a thousand, like an elephant painted with yellow stripes and dressed as a trapeze artist, all by itself in that open countryside. On the other hand, he was able to immortalize a group of workers who were moving a mountain from one side of the road to the other. The men, wearing nothing but loin cloths, were piling rocks into the baskets the women carried across the road on their heads. The women were graceful, slim, dressed in threadbare saris of brilliant colors—magenta, lime, emerald—and they moved like reeds in the wind, carrying their burden of rocks. They were classified as “helpers,” and they earned half of what the men did. When it was time to eat, the men squatted in a circle, holding their tin plates, and the women waited a respectful distance away. Later they ate anything the men left.

After still more hours of driving we were tired; the sun was beginning to go down and brushstrokes the color of fire streaked the sky. In the distance, in the dry fields, stood a solitary tree, perhaps an acacia, and beneath its branches we could see some dark figures that looked like huge birds but as we went closer turned out to be a group of women and children. What were they doing there? There wasn't any village or well nearby. Willie asked Sirinder to stop so we could stretch our legs. Tabra and I walked toward the women, who started to back away, but their curiosity overcame their shyness and soon we were together beneath the acacia, surrounded by naked children. The women were wearing dusty, frayed saris. They were young, with long black hair, dry skin, and sunken eyes made up with kohl. In India, as in many parts of the world, the concept of personal space we defend so fiercely in the West doesn't exist. Lacking a common language, they greeted us with gestures, and then they examined us with bold fingers, touching our clothing, our faces, Tabra's red hair, something they may not have seen before, and our silver jewelry. We took off our bracelets and offered them to the women, who put them on with the delight of teenagers. There were enough for everyone, two or three each.

One of the women, who could have been about your age, Paula, took my face in her hands and kissed me lightly on the forehead. I felt her parted lips, her warm breath. It was such an unexpected gesture, so intimate, that I couldn't hold back the tears, the first I had shed in a long time. The other women patted me in silence, disoriented by my reaction.

From the road, a toot of the horn from Sirinder told us that it was time to leave. We bade the women good-bye and started back to the car, but they followed us. One touched my shoulder. I turned, and she held out a package. I thought she meant to give me something in exchange for the bracelets, and tried to explain with signs that it wasn't necessary, but she forced me to take it. It weighed very little, I thought it was a bundle of rags, but when I turned back the folds I saw that it held a newborn baby, tiny and dark. Its eyes were closed and it smelled like no other child I have ever held in my arms, a pungent odor of ashes, dust, and excrement. I kissed its face, murmured a blessing, and tried to return it to its mother, but instead of taking it, she turned and ran back to the others, while I stood there, rocking the baby in my arms, not understanding what was happening. A minute later Sirinder came running and shouting to put it down, I couldn't take it, it was dirty, and he snatched it from my arms and started toward the women to give it back, but they ran away, terrified by the man's wrath. And then he bent down and laid the infant on the dry earth beneath the tree.

By that time, Willie had come too, and he hustled me back to the car, nearly lifting me off the ground, followed by Tabra. Sirinder started the engine and we drove off, as I buried my head in my husband's chest.

“Why did that woman try to give us her baby?” Willie murmured.

“It was a girl. No one wants a girl,” Sirinder explained.

There are stories that have the power to heal. What happened that evening beneath the acacia loosened the knot that had been choking me, cleaned away the cobwebs of self-pity, and forced me to come back to the world and transform the loss of my daughter into action. I could not save that baby girl, or her desperate mother, or the “helpers” who were moving a mountain rock by rock, or millions of women like them and like the unforgettable woman I saw crying on Fifth Avenue that winter in New York, but I promised at that moment that I would at least attempt to ease their lot in life, as you would have done. For you, no act of compassion was impossible. “You have to earn a lot of money with your books, Mamá, so I can start a shelter for the poor and you can pay the bills,” you told me one day, entirely serious. The money I had made, and was still making, from the publication of
Paula
was sitting in a bank waiting for me to decide how to use it. At that moment, I knew. I calculated that if the capital would grow with every book I wrote in the future, something good would come of it: only a drop of water in the desert of human need, but at least I wouldn't feel helpless. “I am going to establish a foundation to help women and children,” I told Willie and Tabra that night, never imagining that with the years that seed would become a tree, like the acacia.

T
HE PALACE OF THE MAHARAJAH
, all gleaming marble, stood in a Garden of Eden where time did not exist, the climate was always gentle, and the air carried the scent of gardenias. Water from the fountains ran along sinuous canals among flowers, golden birdcages, white silk parasols, and majestic peacocks. The palace was now owned by an international hotel chain that had had the good judgment to preserve the original charm. The maharajah, ruined, but with dignity intact, occupied a wing of the building, protected from the curiosity of outsiders by a screen of palms and purple bougainvillea. In the calm of the afternoon he liked to sit in the garden and have tea with a girl who had not yet reached puberty, and who was not his great-granddaughter but his fifth wife. That interlude was assured by two guards in imperial uniforms and plumed turbans, with scimitars at the waist. In our profusely decorated suite, worthy of a king, there was not one inch where you could rest your eyes. From our balcony we had a view of the entire garden, which was separated by a high wall from the neighborhoods of the poor stretching as far as the horizon. After traveling dusty roads for weeks, we could rest in this palace, with its army of silent employees to carry our clothing to be washed, bring us tea and honey cakes on silver trays, and prepare our foaming baths. It was paradise. We dined on the delicious cuisine of India, which Willie was already immunized against, and fell into bed disposed to sleep forever.

The telephone rang at three in the morning—the time indicated by the green numbers on the travel clock glowing in the darkness—waking me from a hot, heavy sleep. I put out my hand, feeling for the phone, finding nothing, until my fingers touched a switch and I turned on the lamp. I didn't know where I was, or what the transparent veils floating above my head were, or the winged demons threatening me from the painted ceiling. I was aware of moist sheets stuck to my skin and a sweet scent I couldn't identify. The telephone kept ringing, and with every jangle my apprehension grew; it had to be something calamitous to justify the urgency of calling at that hour. Someone died, I said aloud. Be calm, be calm, I told myself. It couldn't be Nico. I had already lost a daughter and according to the law of probability I would not lose another child in my lifetime. And it wasn't my mother, she's immortal. Maybe there was news about Jennifer. Had she been found? The continued ringing guided me to the far end of the room, where I discovered an antiquated telephone sitting between two porcelain elephants. From the other side of the world, with the clarity of an omen, came the unmistakable voice of Celia. I couldn't find the strength to ask her what had happened.

“It seems that I'm bisexual,” she announced in a quavering voice.

“What is it?” Willie asked, dazed with sleep.

“Nothing. It's Celia. She says she's bisexual.”

“Oh!” My husband snorted and fell back to sleep.

I suppose that Celia called to ask me for help, but I could think of nothing magical that would help at that moment. I begged my daughter-in-law not to rush and do anything desperate, since we are all more or less bisexual and if she had waited twenty-nine years to discover that, she could wait until we returned to California. A matter as important as this should be discussed within the family. I cursed the distance that prevented me from seeing the expression on her face. I promised that we would come back as quickly as possible, although at three in the morning there wasn't much we could do to change our airline tickets, a process that even by day was complicated in India. The call had killed any chance of sleeping, and I did not go back to the veil-draped bed. Neither did I dare wake Tabra, who was in a different room on the same floor.

I went out on the balcony and waited for morning in a polychrome wood swing with topaz-colored silk cushions. A climbing jasmine and a tree with large white flowers were releasing that courtesan's fragrance I had noted in our room. Celia's news had produced a rare lucidity. It was as if I could see my family from above, floating overhead. “This daughter-in-law of ours never fails to surprise me,” I murmured. In Celia's case, the word
bisexual
could have several connotations, but none would be without pain to my people. Hmmm. Without thinking, I wrote
my.
. . . That's how I feel about all of them; they all belong to me: Willie, my son, my daughter-in-law, my grandchildren, my parents, and even my stepchildren, with whom I lived from skirmish to skirmish . . . they're all mine. It had been an effort to bring them together, and I was prepared to defend that small community against the vagaries of fate and bad luck. Celia was an uncontainable force of nature; no one had any influence over her. I didn't ask myself twice whom she had fallen for, the answer was obvious to me. “Help us, Paula, this is no joke,” I begged you, but I don't know whether you heard me.

T
HE DISASTER
—I can think of no other word to describe it—unfolded at the end of November, Thanksgiving Day. It's true, that seems ironic, but we don't get to choose the dates for such episodes. We returned to California as quickly as we could, but to find flights, change the tickets, and fly across half the planet took more than three days. The night that Celia waked me, I'd told Willie what was going on, but he was asleep; he hadn't really heard me and I had to tell him again the next morning. It made him laugh. “That Celia is a loose cannon,” he said, not considering the consequences my daughter-in-law's announcement would have for the family. Tabra had to go on to Bali, so we said good-bye without much explanation. When we got to San Francisco, Celia was waiting for us at the airport; we didn't, however, discuss anything until the two of us were alone. This was not a confidence she wanted to share in front of Willie.

“I never dreamed this was going to happen to me, Isabel. You remember what I always thought of gays,” she told me.

“I remember, Celia. How could I forget? Have you gone to bed with her?”

“With who?”

“With Sally, who else?”

“How do you know it's her?”

“Oh, Celia, no need of a crystal ball for that. Did you sleep with her?”

“That isn't important!” she exclaimed with burning eyes.

“To me it seems very important, but I may be mistaken. . . . The heat of passion passes, Celia, and it's not worth destroying a marriage for. You're confused by the novelty, that's all.”

“I am married to a marvelous man, and I have three children I will never live without. You can imagine how long I thought about this before I told you. You don't make a decision like this lightly. I don't want to hurt Nico and the kids.”

“It's strange that you make your confession to me, I'm your mother-in-law. You don't think that unconsciously. . . ?”

“Don't come at me with your fucking psychology!” she interrupted. “You and I tell each other everything.” And that was true.