The Sum of Our Days (22 page)

N
ICO HAD BECOME VERY HANDSOME.
He was wearing his hair long, like an apostle, and his grandfather's features had become more accentuated: large sultry eyes, aristocratic nose, square chin, elegant hands. It was inexplicable to me that there weren't a dozen women milling about at his front door. Behind Willie's back—he doesn't understand these matters—Tabra and I decided to look for a girlfriend for Nico. And that's exactly what you would have done, daughter, so don't scold me.

“In India, and many other places in the world, marriages are arranged. There are fewer divorces there than in Western countries,” Tabra explained.

“That doesn't prove that they're happy, only that they have to put up with more,” I contended.

“The system works fine. Marrying for love carries a lot of problems with it, it's more successful to unite two compatible persons who with time will learn to love one another.”

“That's a little risky, but I don't have a better idea,” I admitted.

It isn't easy to make these arrangements in California, as she herself had proved for years; none of the matchmaking agencies had found a man who was worth her while. The best had been Lagarto-Emplumado, but still she had no news of him. We checked the newspapers regularly to see if Moctezuma's crown had been returned to Mexico, but found nothing. In view of the negative results obtained by Tabra, I didn't want to put ads in the papers or go to agencies; that seemed a little indiscreet in view of the fact that I hadn't as yet consulted Nico. My friends were no help; they were no longer young, and no menopausal woman would take on my three grandchildren, however gorgeous Nico was.

I devoted myself to looking for a potential sweetheart everywhere I went, and in the process my eye grew sharper. I made inquiries among people I knew, I scrutinized the young women who asked for my autograph in bookstores, I even brazenly stopped a pair of girls in the street, but that method was inefficient and very slow. At that pace Nico would be seventy and still a bachelor. I studied women, and in the end would discard them for different motives: serious or tedious, talkative or shy, smokers or macrobiotic fiends, dressed like their mothers or with a tattoo of the Virgin of Guadalupe on their backs. This was for my son; the choice could not be made frivolously. I was beginning to lose hope when Tabra introduced me to Amanda, a photographer and writer who wanted to make a trip to the Amazon with me for a travel magazine. Amanda was very interesting, and beautiful, but she was married and planned to have children very soon; she wasn't, unfortunately, a good candidate for my romantic designs. However, during one conversation, the subject of my son came up and I told her the whole drama—there was no secret about what had happened with Celia; she herself had broadcast it right and left. Amanda told me she knew the ideal girl: Lori Barra. Lori was her best friend; she had a generous heart, she had no children, she was pretty, refined, a graphic designer from New York who now lived in San Francisco. She had an obnoxious boyfriend, according to Amanda, but we'd find a way to get rid of him and leave Lori available to meet Nico. Not so fast, I said. First I need to know this girl through and through. Amanda organized a lunch, and I took Andrea with me; it seemed to me that at least the young designer ought to have a vague idea of what she would be taking on. Of the three children, Andrea was without doubt the most peculiar. My granddaughter came dressed like a beggar, with pink rags tied around different parts of her body, a straw hat with faded flowers, and her Save-the-Tuna doll. I was on the verge of dragging her somewhere to buy a more presentable outfit, but I decided it was best for Lori to know her in her natural state.

Amanda had said nothing to her friend about our plans, nor I to Nico; we didn't want to alarm them. The lunch in the Japanese restaurant was a good strategy; it didn't raise Lori's suspicion; she wanted to meet us only because she loved Tabra's jewelry and she had read a couple of my books: two points in her favor. Tabra and I were very impressed with her; she was a calm pool of simplicity and charm. Andrea observed her without saying a word, as she tried in vain to get pieces of raw fish into her mouth with chopsticks.

“You don't get to know a person in one hour,” Tabra warned me afterward.

“She's perfect! She even looks like Nico. They're both tall, slim, handsome, have noble bones, and they wear black. They look like twins.”

“Looking like twins isn't the basis of a good marriage.”

“In India they have horoscopes, and let's say that isn't very scientific either. It's all a question of luck, Tabra,” I answered.

“We need to know more about her. We have to see her in difficult circumstances.”

“You mean like in a war?”

“That would be ideal, but they're all pretty far away. What do you say we invite her to go with us to the Amazon?” was Tabra's suggestion.

And that was how Lori, who had seen us only once, over a plate of sushi, ended up flying with us to Brazil in the role of assistant to Amanda.

W
HEN WE PLANNED THE ODYSSEY
to the Amazon, I had imagined that we'd be going to a very primitive place where the character of Lori and others in the expedition would stand out clearly, but unfortunately the trip turned out to be much less dangerous than I'd expected. Amanda had seen to every last detail, and we reached Manaus without a hitch. We stopped for a few days in Bahía to meet Jorge Amado; Tabra and I had read all of his books and I wanted to know if the man was as extraordinary as the writer.

Jorge Amado and his wife, Zélia Gattai, received us in their home; he was seated in a large easy chair, amiable and hospitable. At eighty-four, half blind and not very well, he still had the sense of humor and the intelligence that characterize his novels. He was the spiritual father of Bahía. There were quotations from his books everywhere: chiseled in stone, adorning the facades of municipal buildings, in graffiti and primitive paintings on the huts of the poor. Plazas and streets proudly bore the names of his books and his characters. Amado invited us to try the culinary delights of his land in the restaurant run by Dadá, a beautiful black woman who was not the inspiration for his famous novel
Doña Flor and Her Two Husbands
—she was a child when he wrote it—but fit the description of the character: pretty, small, and agreeably plump without being fat. This replica of Doña Flor regaled us with more than twenty succulent dishes and a sampling of her desserts, which ended with little cakes of
punhetinha
, which in the local slang means “masturbation.” Needless to say, all of this was very helpful for my
Aphrodite.

The elderly writer also took us to a
terreiro
, or temple, in which he served as protective father, to witness a ceremony of Candomblé, a religion African slaves brought to Brazil several centuries ago, and that today has more than two million followers in that country, including urban middle-class whites. The divine rituals had started earlier with the sacrifice of some animals to the gods—orishas—but we didn't witness that part. The ceremony took place in a building that looked like a modest school, decorated with crepe paper and photographs of the
maes
, or “mothers,” now dead. We sat on hard wooden benches and soon musicians arrived and began to beat their drums in an irresistible rhythm. A long line of women dressed in white entered and whirled with upheld arms around a sacred pillar, summoning the orishas. One by one they fell in a trance. No foaming at the mouth or violent convulsions, no black candles or serpents, no terrifying masks or bloody rooster heads. The older women carried to another room those who had been “mounted” by the gods and then brought them back adorned with the colorful attributes of their orishas, to keep dancing till dawn, when the liturgy concluded with an abundant meal of the roasted meat of the sacrificed animals, cassava, and sweets.

It was explained to me that each person belongs to an orisha—sometimes more than one—and at any moment of life you may be claimed and have to put yourself at the service of your deity. I wanted to know who mine was. One
mae de santo
, an enormous woman dressed in a tent of ruffles and lace, wearing a turban made from several kerchiefs and a profusion of necklaces and bracelets, “cast the shells” for us; there it's called
jogo de búzios.
I pushed Lori forward to get her reading first and the shells announced a cryptic new love: “Someone she knew but hadn't yet seen.” Tabra and I had talked a lot about Nico, trying, of course, not to reveal our intention, and if by then Lori didn't know him it was because she had been on the moon. Will I have children? Lori asked. Three, the shells replied. Aha! I exclaimed, enchanted, but one look from Tabra brought me back to my senses. Then it was my turn. The
mae de santo
rubbed a handful of little shells between her palms for a long time, had me feel them in mine, and then threw them onto a black cloth. “You belong to Yemayá, the goddess of the oceans, mother of all things. Life begins with Yemayá. She is strong, a protector, she cares for her children, comforts them, and helps them in their sorrow. She can cure infertility in women. Yemayá is compassionate, but when she is angry she is terrible, like a storm on the ocean.” She added that I had gone through great suffering, and that it had paralyzed me for a time but was beginning to dissipate. Tabra, who does not believe in these things, had to admit that at least the part about being maternal fit me. “She hit that accidentally,” was her conclusion.

S
EEN FROM THE PLANE
, the Amazon is green as far as you can see. Below us is a mysterious land of water: vapor, rain, rivers wide as seas, sweat. The Amazon territory occupies sixty per cent of the surface of Brazil, an area larger than India, and it also forms part of Venezuela, Colombia, and Peru. In some regions the “law of the jungle” still rules among bandits and traffickers in drugs, gold, wood, and animals who kill each other and, if they cannot exterminate the Indians with impunity, drive them from their lands. It is a continent in itself, a mysterious and fascinating world. It seemed so incomprehensible in its immensity that I couldn't imagine how it could serve me as inspiration, but several years later I would use a lot of what I saw there in my first novel for young readers.

To summarize the trip, since the details aren't relevant to what I'm relating, I can say that it was much safer than I'd wished. We'd prepared for a dramatic adventure in the world of Tarzan, but the closest link was a flea-bitten black female monkey who latched onto me and waited at my door from the break of dawn to climb onto my shoulders, curl her tail around my neck, and comb my head for fleas with her elfin fingers. It was a delicate romance. The rest was an ecotourism stroll; mosquitoes were bearable, the piranhas did not tear out pieces of our flesh, and we did not have to dodge poisoned arrows; smugglers, soldiers, bandits, and traffickers passed by without seeing us; we did not get malaria, and worms did not burrow beneath our skin or fish like needles invade our urinary tracts. We four adventurers got away safe and sound. Nonetheless, this little adventure fully fitted our purposes: I got to know Lori.

L
ORI PASSED WITH HIGH MARKS.
She was just as Amanda had described her: a clear mind and natural goodness. Discreetly and efficiently, she lightened the load for the rest of us, resolved annoying details, and soothed inevitable frictions. She had good manners, fundamental for sane coexistence, long legs, never a negative, and a frank smile that undoubtedly would seduce Nico. She had the advantage of being a few years older than he, since experience is always helpful, but she looked very young. She was striking, with strong features, a stupendous head of dark, curly hair, and golden eyes. None of that was relevant since my son doesn't place any importance on physical appearance; he scolds me because I use makeup and does not want to believe that when my face is washed clean I look like a rifleman. I observed Lori the way a hyena observes its prey, and even set a few traps for her, but I could not catch her in any fault. That made me a little uneasy.

After a couple of weeks, exhausted, we returned to Rio de Janeiro, where we were to take a plane to California. We stayed at a hotel in Copacabana, and instead of sunning on the white sand beaches, it occurred to us to go visit a
favela
, to get an idea of how the poor live, and to look for another seer to cast the
jogo de búzios
, since Tabra kept annoying me with her skepticism about my goddess Yemayá. We went with a female Brazilian journalist and a driver, who took us up to the hills of the unimaginably poor, an area where the police never went, to say nothing of tourists. In a
terreiro
much more modest than the one in Bahía, we were greeted by a middle-aged woman wearing jeans. The priestess repeated the ritual of the shells that I'd seen in Bahía, and without hesitation said that I belonged to the goddess Yemayá. It was impossible that the two seers had reached some kind of accord. This time, Tabra had to swallow her sarcastic comments.

We left the
favela
and on the way back saw a modest café where they sold typical food by its weight. It seemed to me it would be more picturesque to have lunch there rather than eat shrimp cocktail on the hotel terrace, and I asked the driver to stop. He stayed in the van to look after the photographic equipment while the rest of us stood in line at the counter where they were dishing stew onto paper plates with a wooden spoon. I don't know why I walked outside, followed by Lori and Amanda; maybe to ask the driver if he wanted something to eat. When I looked out the door, I noticed that the street, which had been bustling with traffic and activity, had emptied; no cars were driving by, the shops all seemed to be closed, people had disappeared. Across the street, some thirty feet away, a young man wearing blue pants and a short-sleeved T-shirt, was waiting at the bus stop. At his back, a man not unlike him was advancing toward him; he, too, was young, wearing dark pants and a similar T-shirt. He had a large pistol in his hand, making no effort to hide it. He raised the weapon, aimed at the first young man's head, and fired. For an instant I didn't know what had happened; the shot wasn't explosive like those in the movies, but a muffled kind of cough. Blood gushed from the victim's head before he fell. And when he hit the ground, the murderer shot four more times. Then, calm and defiant, he walked on down the street. Like an automaton, I ran toward the man who lay bleeding on the ground. He shuddered convulsively once or twice, and lay quiet, as a pool of luminous blood grew around him. Before I could kneel to help him, my friends and the driver, who had hidden in the van during the crime, dragged me to our vehicle. In minutes the street was again filled with people. I heard screams, horns, and saw clients come running out of the restaurant.