The Sum of Our Days (2 page)

“What is this?” Alejandro asked.

“Your aunt Paula,” my mother told him, sobbing.

“It doesn't look like her,” he commented, confused.

I
WILL BEGIN BY TELLING YOU
what has happened since 1993, when you left us, and will limit myself to the family, which is what interests you. I'll have to omit two of Willie's sons: Lindsay, whom I barely know—I've seen him only a dozen times and we've never exchanged more than the essential courteous greetings—and Scott, because he doesn't want to appear in these pages. You were very fond of that thin, solitary boy with thick eyeglasses and disheveled hair. Now he is a man of twenty-eight; he looks like Willie and his name is Harleigh. He chose the name Scott when he was five; he liked it and used it a long time, but during his teens he reclaimed the one given him.

The first person who comes to my mind and heart is Jennifer, Willie's only daughter, who at the beginning of that year had just escaped for the third time from a hospital where she had gone to find rest for her bones because of yet another infection, among the many she had suffered in her short life. The police had not given any indication that they were going to look for her; they had too many cases like hers, and this time Willie's contacts with the law didn't help at all. The physician, a tall, discreet Filipino who by dint of perseverance had saved her when she arrived at the hospital with a raging fever, and who by now knew her because he had attended her on two previous occasions, explained to Willie that he had to find his daughter soon or she would die. With massive doses of antibiotics for several weeks, he might be able to save her, he said, but we had to prevent a relapse, for that would be fatal. We were in the emergency room—yellow walls, plastic chairs, and posters of mammograms and tests for AIDS—which was filled with patients awaiting their turn to be treated. The doctor took off his round, metal-framed glasses, cleaned them with a tissue, and guardedly answered our questions. He had no sympathy for Willie or for me; he perhaps mistook me for Jennifer's mother. In his eyes we were guilty; we had neglected her, and now when it was too late, we had showed up acting distressed. He avoided going into details—patient information was confidential—but Willie could deduce that in addition to multiple infections and bones turned to splinters, his daughter's heart was on the verge of giving out. For nine years Jennifer had persisted in jousting with death.

We had been going to see her in the hospital for several weeks. Her wrists were tied down so that in the delirium of fever she couldn't tear out the intravenous tubes. She was addicted to nearly every known drug, from tobacco to heroin. I don't know how her body had endured so much abuse. Since they couldn't find a healthy vein in which to inject medications, they had implanted a port in an artery in her chest. At the end of a week they had moved Jennifer from the intensive care unit to a three-bed room she shared with other patients, where she was no longer restrained, and where she was not watched as closely as she had been before. I started visiting every day, bringing things she had asked for: perfumes, nightgowns, music, but it all disappeared. I supposed that her buddies were coming at strange hours to furnish her drugs, which, since she had no money, she paid for with my gifts. As part of her treatment, she was given methadone to help her through withdrawal, but in addition to that she was using any drug her providers could smuggle to her—and which she injected straight into the port. Sometimes it was I who bathed her. Her ankles and feet were swollen, her body covered with bruises, marks from infected needles, and a scar worthy of a pirate on her back. “A knife,” was her laconic explanation.

Willie's daughter was a blonde with large blue eyes like her father's, but few photographs have survived from the past and no one remembered her as she had been: the best student in her class, obedient, and well groomed. She seemed ethereal. I met her in 1988, shortly after moving to California to live with Willie, a time when she was still beautiful, although she already had an evasive look and that deceptive fog that encircled her like a dark halo. My head was spinning with my newly inaugurated love affair with Willie, and I was not overly surprised when one winter Sunday he took me to a jail on the east side of San Francisco Bay. We waited a long time on an inhospitable patio, standing in line with other visitors, most of them blacks and Latinos, until the gates were opened and we were allowed to enter a gloomy building. They separated the few men from the many women and children. I don't know what Willie's experience was, but a uniformed matron confiscated my handbag, pushed me behind a curtain, and put her hands where no one had dared, more roughly than was necessary, perhaps because my accent made her suspicious. Luckily a Salvadoran peasant woman, a visitor like me, had warned me in the line not to make a fuss, because that would make things worse. Finally Willie and I met in a trailer set up for visiting the prisoners, a long narrow space divided by hen-coop wire; Jennifer sat behind that. She had been in jail, without drugs and well nourished, for two months. She looked like a schoolgirl in Sunday clothes, in contrast with the rough appearance of the other prisoners. She greeted her father with unbearable sadness. In the years that followed I came to realize that she always cried when she was with Willie, whether from shame or rancor I don't know. Willie introduced me briefly as “a friend,” although we had been living together for some time, and stood before the wire with crossed arms and eyes cast on the floor. I watched them from a short distance away, listening to bits of their dialogue through the murmurs of other voices.

“What's it for this time?”

“You already know that, why do you ask me. Get me out of here, Dad.”

“I can't.”

“But you're a lawyer, aren't you.”

“I warned you the last time that I wouldn't help you again. If you have chosen this life, you have to pay the consequences.”

Jennifer wiped away tears with her sleeve, but they kept running down her cheeks as she asked about her brother and her mother. Soon they said good-bye, and she was led out by the same uniformed woman who had taken my handbag. At that time she still had a shred of innocence, but six years later, when she escaped from the care of the Filipino doctor in the hospital, there was nothing left of the girl I had met in that prison. At twenty-six, she looked sixty.

When we left the jail it was raining and we ran, soaking wet, the two blocks to the parking garage where we had left the car. I asked Willie why he treated his daughter so coldly, why he didn't place her in a rehabilitation program instead of leaving her behind bars.

“She's safer there,” he replied.

“Can't you do anything? She has to have some treatment!”

“It's pointless, she has never wanted to accept help, and I can't force her, she's of age.”

“If she were my daughter I would move heaven and earth to save her.”

“She isn't your daughter,” he told me with a kind of mute resentment.

At the time, a young Christian was hanging around Jennifer, one of those alcoholics redeemed by the message of Jesus, who have the same fervor for religion they once had devoted to the bottle. We saw him occasionally at the prison on visiting day, always with Bible in hand and wearing the beatific smile of God's chosen. He greeted us with the compassion reserved for those who live in the darkness of error, a tone that drove Willie to frenzy but that had the desired effect on me: it made me feel guilty. It takes very little to make me feel guilty. Sometimes he took me aside to talk to me. While he was quoting the New Testament—“
Jesus said to the sinning woman, Let he who is without sin cast the first stone
”—I observed his bad teeth with fascination and tried to protect myself from his saliva spray. I have no idea how old he was, but when he wasn't talking he seemed very young—maybe because of his freckles and the way he reminded me of a cricket—but that impression disappeared the minute he began preaching, all exorbitant gestures and strident voice. At first he tried to draw Jennifer into the ranks of the just by using the logic of his faith, but she was immune; then he opted for modest gifts, which had better results. For a handful of cigarettes she would tolerate for a while his reading passages from the Gospel.

When Jennifer got out of jail, he was waiting at the gate of the prison, dressed in a clean shirt and reeking of cologne. He often called us late at night to give us news of his protégée, and to threaten Willie, telling him he must repent of his sins and accept the Lord in his heart; then he could receive the baptism of the elect and rejoin his daughter in the shelter of divine love. He did not know whom he was dealing with: Willie is the son of a bizarre preacher; he grew up in a tent where his father, with a fat, tame snake rolled about his waist, imposed on believers his invented religion, which was why when he sniffed even a hint of a sermon, he split. The evangelical was obsessed with Jennifer, drawn to her like a moth to the flame. He was torn between his mystic fervor and his carnal passion, between saving the soul of this Mary Magdalene and taking his pleasure of her somewhat battered, but still exciting, body, something he confessed to us with such candor that we could not make fun of him. “I shall not fall into the delirium of concupiscence; no, I shall wed her,” he assured us with that strange vocabulary he had, and immediately treated us to a lecture on chastity in matrimony that left us speechless. “This guy is either a complete idiot or he's gay,” was Willie's comment, but he nevertheless clung to the idea of that marriage because that good-intentioned wretch might rescue his daughter. However, when her suitor, on his knees, set forth his plan to Jennifer, her response was a burst of laughter. That preacher was killed, brutally beaten to death, in a bar in the port, where he had gone one night to look for Jennifer and to spread the gentle message of Jesus among sailors and stevedores who were not in the humor to be led to Christ. We were never again awakened at midnight to listen to his messianic sermons.

Jennifer had spent her childhood hiding in corners, invisible, while her brother Lindsay, two years older than she, monopolized the attention of his parents, who could not control him. She was a mysterious and well-behaved little girl with a sense of humor too sophisticated for her years. She laughed at herself with clear, contagious giggles. No one suspected that she was climbing out a window at night until she was arrested in one of the most sordid neighborhoods in San Francisco many miles from her house, an area where the police are afraid to venture at night. She was fifteen. Her parents had been divorced for several years; both were occupied in their own affairs and perhaps had not gauged the gravity of Jennifer's problem. Willie was hard-pressed to recognize the heavily made-up girl shivering in a cell in the police station, unable to stand up or speak a word. Hours later, safe in her bed and with her mind a little clearer, Jennifer promised her father that she was going to do better and would never do anything that foolish again. He believed her. All kids stumble and fall; he too had had problems with the law when he was a boy. That had been in Los Angeles, when he was thirteen, and his offenses were stealing ice cream and smoking marijuana with the Mexican kids in the barrio. At fourteen he had realized that if he didn't straighten up right away he would be in trouble all his life, because he had no one who could help him, so he kept his distance from gangs and made up his mind to finish school, work his way through the university, and become a lawyer.

After Jennifer fled the hospital and the efforts of the Filipino doctor, she survived because she was very strong, despite her seeming fragility, and we heard nothing of her for a while. Then one winter day we heard a vague rumor that she was pregnant, but we rejected it as being impossible. She herself had told us she couldn't have children, her body had suffered too much abuse. Three months later she came to Willie's office to ask for money, something she rarely did since she preferred to make her own way—in that case she didn't have to offer explanations. Her eyes darted around desperately, looking for something she couldn't find; her hands were trembling but her voice was strong.

“I'm pregnant,” she announced.

“That can't be!” Willie exclaimed.

“That's what I thought, but look . . .” She unbuttoned the man's shirt that covered her to the knees and showed him a protuberance the size of a grapefruit.

“It will be a girl and she will be born this summer. I will call her Sabrina. I've always liked that name.”

I
SPENT NEARLY ALL OF
1993 off to myself writing to you, Paula, crying and remembering, but I wasn't able to avoid a long book tour through several American cities promoting
The Infinite Plan
, a novel inspired by Willie's life. It had just been published in English though it had been written two years before and had already appeared in several European languages. I stole the title from Willie's father, whose wandering religion was called the Infinite Plan. Willie had ordered the book as a gift for all his friends—by my calculations he had bought out the complete first printing. He was so proud that I had to remind him that it wasn't his biography, it was fiction. “My life is a novel,” was his answer. Every life can be told as a novel; each of us is the protagonist of his own legend. At this moment, writing these pages, I have doubts. Did things really happen as I remember them and as I am telling them? Even with my mother's invaluable correspondence, which preserves a daily, and more or less truthful, version of essential as well as trivial events, these pages are subjective. Willie told me that
The Infinite Plan
was a map of his course through life, and added that it was a shame that the actor Paul Newman was a little old to play the part of the protagonist, in case it was made into a film. “You must have noticed that Paul Newman looks like me,” he pointed out with his usual modesty. I hadn't noticed, but I didn't know Willie when he was young, when surely they were as alike as two peas in a pod.