The Sum of Our Days (29 page)

L
ILI CAME FROM
C
HINA
on a prospective bride's visa that was good for three months, at the end of which she had to marry Tong or return to her country. She was a pretty, healthy woman who looked about twenty, though she was almost thirty, and she was very little contaminated by occidental culture, just as her future husband wished. She didn't speak a single word of English; so much the better, for that would make it easier to keep her submissive, was the opinion of her future mother-in-law, who from the first applied ancient traditions in making her daughter-in-law's life impossible. We found her moon face and sparkling eyes irresistible; even my grandchildren fell in love with her. “Poor girl, it's going to be difficult for her to adapt,” Willie commented when he learned that Lili got up at dawn to do the housework and prepare the complicated dishes demanded by the old woman, who in spite of her minuscule size pushed Lili around. “Why don't you tell the old bitch to go to hell?” I asked Lili with signs, but she didn't understand. “Keep your nose out of it,” Willie recited once again, and added that I knew nothing about Chinese culture . . . but I knew more than he did, I had at least read Amy Tan. The mail-order bride was not as fainthearted as Willie had reported when he met her, of that I was sure. She had a peasant stolidity, broad shoulders, determination in her look and actions; with a flick of her wrist she could break Tong's mother's neck, and his too, if she chose. No sweet little dove there.

After three months, when Lili's visa was about to expire, Tong told us that they were getting married. Willie, as a lawyer and friend, reminded him that the girl's only reason for marrying was to stay in the United States. She would need a husband only two years; after that she could divorce and get her residence permit. Tong had thought about it; he wasn't so naive as to believe that a girl off the Internet had fallen in love with him when she saw his photograph, however much Lori had retouched it; he believed, however, that both of them had something to gain from the arrangement: he, the possibility of a son, and she, a visa. They would see which of the two came first, it was worth the risk. Willie advised him to have a prenuptial contract drawn up, otherwise she would be entitled to part of the savings he had accumulated with such sacrifice, but Lili said she would not sign a document she couldn't read. They went to a lawyer in Chinatown, who translated it. When she realized what Tong was asking of her, Lili turned the color of a beet and for the first time raised her voice. How could they accuse her of marrying for a visa! She had come to make a home with Tong! she protested, immersing the groom and the lawyer in a flood of repentance. They were married without the agreement. When Willie told me about it, sparks were shooting out of his ears; he couldn't believe that his bookkeeper was so dumb; what was making him do such a stupid thing? he was fucked for good now; couldn't Tong remember how he, Willie, had been fleeced by every woman who passed by? and on and on with a litany of gloomy prognoses. For once, I had the pleasure of getting back at him: “Keep your nose out of it.”

Lili enrolled in an intensive English class and wore headphones all day, listening to the lesson until she fell asleep, but her apprenticeship was slower and more difficult than she'd expected. She went out to look for a job, but in spite of her hard-earned education and her experience as a nurse she couldn't find anything because she didn't speak English. We asked her to clean our house and pick up the children at school because by then Ligia wasn't working for us anymore. One by one she had brought her children from Nicaragua and put them through school, and now they were all professionals. At last she could rest. If Lili was working for us, she could earn a decent salary until she found something appropriate for her skills. She gratefully accepted, as if we had done her a favor, when she was the one who was helping us.

At first, communication with Lili was amusing: I left drawings fastened to the refrigerator, but Willie's method was to shout at her in English, to which she answered “No!” with an adorable smile. Once Roberta came to visit; she is a transsexual friend who before she was a woman had been an officer in the Marines named Robert. He fought in Vietnam, was decorated for courage, was horrified at the death of innocents, and left the military service. For thirty years he lived with his wife, whom he loved and who was his companion during the process of his becoming a woman, and they stayed together until she died of breast cancer. To judge by the photographs, Roberta had been a hefty, hairy man with a broken nose and the chin of a corsair. He had gone through hormone treatments, plastic surgery, electrolysis to remove his facial hair, and finally an operation on his genitals, but I suppose the result still was not convincing, because Lili stood staring at Roberta openmouthed, and then took Willie behind a door to ask him something in Chinese. My husband deduced that it was about our friend's gender, and began to explain to Lili in a whisper that kept getting louder and louder until he ended up yelling at the top of his lungs that Roberta was a man with the soul of a woman, or something like that. I nearly died of embarrassment, but Roberta kept drinking tea and eating little pastries with her beautiful manners, ignoring the shouting behind the door.

My grandchildren and Olivia, the dog, adopted Lili. Our house had never been so clean; she disinfected it as if planning open heart surgery in the dining room. Gradually she was incorporated into our tribe. When she married, her shyness vanished; she took a deep breath, stuck out her chest, got a driver's license, and bought a car. She brightened Tong's life. He is even better looking because Lili dresses him with style and cuts his hair, though that doesn't mean there aren't sparring matches; he is a despotic husband. I tried to mime to her that the next time he raised his voice to her, she should crack him over the head with a skillet, but I don't think she understood. All that's missing is children, which don't come along because she has fertility problems and he isn't young anymore. I suggested they adopt in China, but they don't give away boys there, and “Who wants a girl?” The same words I heard in India.

W
HEN
I
FINISHED
Portrait in Sepia
, I was troubled by a promise that I could not keep postponing, which was to write three adventure novels for Alejandro, Andrea, and Nicole, one for each of them. As I had done with my children, I told my grandchildren stories from the time they were born, following a system we had refined to perfection: they would give me three words, or three subjects, and I had ten seconds to invent a story that would use all three. They plotted together to give me the most nonsensical cues possible, and bet that I wouldn't be able to weave them together, but my training—it had begun in 1963 with you, Paula—was as formidable as their innocence, and I never failed them. The problem would come when, for example, they asked me to repeat word for word the story about a restless ant that fell into an inkwell and accidentally discovered Egyptian writing. I didn't have the slightest recollection of that erudite insect and found myself in trouble when they suggested that I consult my mental computer. “The life of ants is a bore, nothing but work and serving the queen; I'd rather tell you the story of a murderous scorpion,” and I launched into that tale before they had time to react. But a day came when not even that dodge worked, and that was when I promised I would write three books on subjects they proposed, just as we had done with the improvised-in-ten-seconds bedtime stories.

My grandchildren gave me the theme for the first book, which I had already sensed in many of the stories they had asked me for: ecology. The adventure of
The City of the Beasts
evolved from the trip to the Amazon. Now I know that when my well of inspiration dries up, as happened following your death, Paula, I can refill it by taking trips. My imagination awakens when I leave my familiar surroundings and confront other ways of life, different people, languages I don't command, when I'm exposed to unforeseen vicissitudes. I can tell that the well is filling because my dreams become more active. The images and stories I accumulate on the trip are transformed into vivid dreams, sometimes into violent nightmares, that announce the arrival of the muses. In the Amazon I sank into a voracious nature, green on green, water on water; I saw caimans the size of a rowboat, pink dolphins, manta rays floating like carpets in the tea-colored waters of the Río Negro, piranhas, monkeys, unbelievable birds, and snakes of assorted varieties, including an anaconda—dead, but an anaconda nevertheless. I thought I'd never use any of that because it didn't fit into the kinds of books I write, but it all turned out to be useful when it was time to plot the first juvenile novel. Alejandro was the model for Alexander Cold, the protagonist; his friend Nadia Santos is a blend of Andrea and Nicole. In the novel, Alexander accompanies his grandmother Kate, a travel writer, to the Amazon, where he meets Nadia. The young people get lost in the jungle, live with a tribe of “invisible Indians,” and discover some prehistoric beasts that live inside a
tepuy
, the strange geological formation of the region. The idea of the beasts emerged from a conversation I overheard in a restaurant in Manaus among a group of scientists who were commenting on the find in the jungle of a gigantic fossil that had human aspects. They were wondering what animal family it corresponded to; maybe it belonged to the family of the monkeys or was a kind of tropical yeti. With those facts it was easy to imagine the beasts. Invisible Indians really do exist; they are tribes that live in the Stone Age and that in order to blend into their surroundings paint their bodies, imitating the vegetation around them, and move so stealthily that they can be ten feet away and not be seen. Many of the stories I heard in the Amazon about corruption, greed, illegal trafficking, violence, and smuggling were raw material for the plot. What was essential, however, was the jungle, which became the setting and determined the tone of the book.

A few weeks after beginning the first volume of the trilogy, I realized that I was incapable of the flights of imagination the project required. It was very difficult for me to crawl into the skin of those two teenagers who would live a wondrous adventure aided by their “spirit animals,” as is the tradition of some indigenous tribes. I recall the terrors of my own childhood, when I had no control over my life or the world around me. I was afraid of very specific things: that my father, who had disappeared so many years ago that even his name had been lost, would come to reclaim me, or that my mother would die and I would end up in some gloomy orphanage eating cabbage soup; but most of all I was frightened by the creatures that peopled my own mind. I thought that the devil appeared at night in the mirrors; that the dead came out of the cemetery during earthquakes, which in Chile are very common; that there were vampires in the attic, large evil toads in the armoires, and souls in pain in the sitting room curtains; that our neighbor was a witch and the rust in the pipes was the blood of human sacrifice. I was sure that the ghost of my grandmother sent me cryptic messages in the bread crumbs or in the shapes of clouds, but that didn't frighten me, it was one of my few calming fantasies. The memory of that ethereal and entertaining grandmother has always been a consolation, even now that I am twenty-five years older than she was when she died. Why wasn't I encircled by fairies with dragon-fly wings or sirens with bejeweled tails? Why was everything so horrible? I wouldn't know; maybe most children live with one foot in those nightmarish universes. To write my novels for youthful readers I couldn't call upon the macabre fantasies of those years, since that wasn't so much a case of evoking them as it was of feeling them in my bones, the way you do in childhood, with all their emotional charge. I needed to be again the little girl I once was, that silent girl tortured by her own imagination, who wandered like a shadow through her grandfather's house. I had to demolish my rational defenses and open my mind and heart. And to do that I decided to subject myself to the shamanic experience of
ayahuasca
, a brew the Amazon Indians prepare from the climbing plant
Banisteriopsis
to produce visions.

Willie did not want me to take that trip alone, and as on so many occasions of our shared lives, he blindly accompanied me. We drank the dark, foul-tasting tea, barely a third of a cup but so bitter and fetid it was nearly impossible to get down. It may be that I have a flawed cerebral cortex—I am always a little off the ground—because the
ayahuasca
, which gives others a push toward the world of the spirits, catapulted me so far that I didn't come back till a couple of days later. Within fifteen minutes of taking it, I lost my balance and curled up on the floor, unable to move from there. I was panicked, and called to Willie, who was able to drag himself to my side, and I clung to his hand as I would to a life buoy in the worst storm imaginable. I couldn't talk or open my eyes. I was lost in a whirlpool of geometric figures and brilliant colors, which at first were fascinating and then exhausting. I felt that I was leaving my body, that my heart was bursting, and I was filled with a terrible anguish.

Soon colors vanished and the black rock appeared that normally lay nearly forgotten in my chest, as threatening as some Bolivian mountains. I knew that I had to remove it from my path or I would die. I tried to climb over it but it was slippery; I wanted to go around it but it was too large; I began to tear pieces from it but the task was unending; and all the while my certainty was growing stronger that the rock contained all the world's evil; it was filled with demons. I can't guess how long I was there; in that state time had nothing to do with the time we're accustomed to. Suddenly I was shaken by an electric charge of energy. I gave a formidable kick and leaped atop the rock. For a moment I returned to my body, doubled over with nausea. I felt for the basin I had left within reach and vomited bile. Nausea, thirst, sand in my mouth, paralysis. I perceived, or understood, what my grandmother used to tell me, that space is filled with presences and that everything happens simultaneously. Images were superimposed on images, transparent, like those illustrations on clear pages in science texts. I wandered through gardens where threatening plants with flesh-eating leaves were growing, large mushrooms that were oozing poison, malevolent flowers. I saw a little four-year-old girl, shrinking back, terrified; I held out my hand to pull her up, and it was me. Different periods and persons passed from one illustrated page to another. I found myself with myself in different moments and in other lives. I met an old gray-haired woman, small but erect, with gleaming eyes; she, too, could have been me, a few years into the future, but I'm not sure because she was surrounded by a milling multitude.