The Sum of Our Days (34 page)

The Chile of my loves is that of your youth, when you and your brother were small, when I was still in love with your father, was working as a journalist and we lived pressed together in a little prefabricated house with a straw roof. In that period it seemed that our destiny was well set out and that nothing bad could happen to us. The country was changing. In 1970 Salvador Allende was elected president, and that occasioned a political and cultural explosion. People poured out into the street with a feeling of power they'd never had before; the young painted socialist murals, the air was filled with songs of protest. Chile was divided and families were divided as well, which is what happened in ours. Your granny marched at the head of the protests against Allende but diverted the column so it wouldn't pass by our house and throw stones. That era was, furthermore, a time of feminism and sexual revolution that affected social behavior almost more than politics; for me it was fundamental. Then came the military coup of 1973 that unleashed a wave of violence that destroyed the little world in which we felt so safe. What would our destiny have been without that coup and the years of terror that followed? What would have happened if we'd stayed in Chile during the dictatorship? We would never have lived in Venezuela, you wouldn't have met Ernesto or Nico Celia, I might not have written books or had the opportunity to fall in love with Willie, and today I would not be in California. Such musings are futile. Life goes along without a map and there is no way to turn back.
My Invented Country
is an homage to the magical land of the heart and memories, the poor cordial country where you and Nico and I spent the happiest years of childhood.

The second volume of my trilogy for young readers was already in the hands of various translators, but I couldn't concentrate on the book about Chile because I was bothered by a recurrent dream. I dreamed that a baby was trapped in a labyrinthine cellar crisscrossed with pipes and cables, like my grandfather's cellar where I spent so many hours of my childhood in solitary games. I could get
to
the baby but couldn't bring him up to the light. I told Willie about it, and he reminded me that I dream about babies only when I'm writing; surely it was something to do with my new book. I was afraid that the dream referred to the
Kingdom of the Golden Dragon
, so I reviewed the manuscript one more time, but nothing caught my eye. The dream continued to bother me for weeks, until I received the English translation and I could read it from the distance of another language; then I could see that there was a fatal problem with the plot. I had proposed that Alexander and Nadia had certain information it was impossible for them to have. And that information determined the ending. I had to ask all my translators to send back their translations, and change one chapter. Without the baby trapped in a subterranean maze, wearing my patience thin night after night, that error would have escaped me.

T
HE THEME OF THE THIRD VOLUME
of my trilogy for young readers emerged spontaneously from a peace march we attended as a family following a meeting in a famous Methodist church in San Francisco: the Glide Memorial Church. A mixture of races, ideas, and even religions come together there; it is a favorite place for Buddhists, Catholics, Jews, Protestants, and an occasional Muslim or agnostic eager to participate in a celebration of songs and embraces more than prayers. The pastor is a formidable African-American who stirs every heart with his passionate sermons on peace, a word that at that moment had antipatriotic connotations. That day, the entire congregation, on its feet, applauded until their palms were bruised, and at the end of the service many went outside to join in protesting the Iraq War.

My tribe, including Celia, Sally, and Tabra, congregated in the midst of the huge crowd milling through the streets of San Francisco. The children had painted posters, I was holding onto to Andrea to keep from losing her in the hubbub, and Nicole was sitting on her father's shoulders. It was a sunny day, and people were in a festive mood, maybe because we were cheered to see there were so many of us dissidents. However, the fifty or a hundred thousand people in the heart of San Francisco were but a flea on the back of the empire. This country is a continent divided into parcels; it is impossible to measure the magnitude or variety of reactions because each state and each social, ethnic, or religious group is a nation within a nation, all beneath the broad umbrella of the United States, “the land of the free and the home of the brave.” The part about the brave seemed ironic at that moment when fear was so prevalent. Ernesto had to shave off his beard so he wouldn't be taken off the plane every time he tried to fly; anyone with the physical characteristics of an Arab was suspicious. It occurs to me that the al-Qaeda terrorists were the ones who were most surprised with the success of their strike. They planned to punch a hole in the towers; they never imagined those monumental buildings would collapse. I suppose that had it gone according to plan, the reaction would have been less hysterical and the government would have made a more realistic assessment of the enemy's strength. This was a matter of a small group of guerrillas in some distant caves, a primitive, fanatical, and desperate people who didn't have the resources to intimidate the United States.

Andrea's poster read “Words, not bombs.” For a girl of ten who was beginning to write her first novel, words were undoubtedly powerful. I asked her what “Words, not bombs” meant, and she told me that her teacher had asked the class to propose ways to resolve conflict without violence. She thought about her father and herself, how as a little girl she'd had fuming fits of anger and had struck out blindly. “I have a bull inside me,” she would say after her fury subsided. At those moments, Nico would gently take her arms, kneel to look into her eyes, and talk to her in a calm tone until her rage passed, a system that with some variations he always uses in critical situations. He took a course in nonviolent communication and not only does he apply what he learned to the letter of the law, he takes the refresher course every two years so he will act appropriately in an emergency. When she reached puberty, Andrea succeeded in controlling the bull, and her personality changed. “It's no fun to pester my sister anymore,” Alejandro confessed when he saw he couldn't make her lose her temper. Andrea had a point. Words could be more efficient than fists. The plot of the third book would be taming the bull of war. My grandchildren and I spread out a map on my grandmother's table of the spirits to see where we would situate Alexander Cold and Nadia Santos's last adventure. The Middle East was very visible, it was what we saw every day in the news; however, the most widespread and brutal violence was taking place in Africa, where genocide is practiced with impunity. So it would be an adventure in equatorial Africa, in an isolated village where an out-of-control military man imposes terror and enslaves Pygmies. I didn't have to rack my brains to come up with the title:
Forest of the Pygmies.
Tabra, who never fails when it's time for inspiration, lent me a book of photographs of kings of African tribes, each in his fabulous robes. Most of these rulers exercised symbolic and religious, though not political, power. In some cases the king's health and fertility represented the health and fertility of the people and the land, and for that reason he was drastically disposed of the moment he became ill or old . . . unless he had the decency to commit suicide. In one tribe, the king was allowed only seven years on the throne; then he was sent to a better life and his successor ate his liver. One of the monarchs boasted that he had engendered one hundred and seventy children, and another was photographed with his harem of young wives, all pregnant; he, decked out in a lion-skin cape, feathers, and several necklaces of solid gold; the wives stark naked. There were a couple of powerful queens in the book who had their own harem of young girls, but the text did not explain who impregnated those concubines.

I did a lot of research for that book, and the more I read the less I knew and the farther away were the horizons of that enormous continent of six hundred million persons spread across forty-five countries and five hundred ethnicities. Finally I locked myself in my study and sank into the realm of magical thought. I flew directly to a swampy jungle of equatorial Africa, where miserable Pygmies, with the aid of gorillas, elephants, and spirits, were trying to rid themselves of a psychopathic king. Writing tends to be prophetic. Months after the publication of
Forest of the Pygmies
, a colonel as savage as the one in my book took over a region north of Congo, a swampy forest where he kept the Bantu population terrorized and was exterminating the Pygmies to facilitate the traffic of diamonds, gold, and arms. There was even talk of cannibalism, something I hadn't dared include in my book out of respect for my young readers.

S
PRING OF
2003
UNLEASHED
a collective reproductive frenzy in my family. Lori and Nico, Ernesto and Giulia, Tong and Lili, all wanted to have children, but as by a bizarre coincidence none were able to achieve it by traditional methods, they had to call on the discoveries of science and technology . . . very expensive methods that became mine to finance. They had warned me in Brazil that I belonged to the goddess Yemayá, one of whose virtues is fertility, and women who want to be mothers go to her. There were so many fertility drugs, hormones, and sperm floating in the air that I was afraid that I myself might get pregnant. The year before, I had secretly consulted my astrologer because I wasn't having any dreams. I had always known from my dreams how many children and grandchildren I was going to have, even their names, but now, no matter how hard I tried, I had no nocturnal vision to give me a clue about those three couples. I don't know the astrologer personally, I only have her telephone number in Colorado, but I trust her because without ever having seen us she describes my family as if it were hers. The only person whose astral chart she hasn't done is Nico's, and that because I don't remember what hour he was born and he refuses to let me have his birth certificate. The woman told me that this son was my best friend and that we had been married in a previous incarnation. Understandably, Nico didn't want to hear of such a horrendous possibility, and that's why he hides the certificate. Your brother doesn't believe in reincarnation because it is mathematically impossible, or astrology, of course, but he thinks it reasonable to take precautions, just in case. . . . I don't believe every last bit of it, either, but there's no reason to block out such a useful tool for literature.

“How do you explain that the woman knows so much about me?” I asked Nico.

“She looked you up on the Internet, or she read
Paula.
”

“If she researched every client in order to fake them out, she would need a team of assistants and would have to charge a lot more. No one knows Willie, he's not on the Internet, but she was able to describe him physically. She said he was tall, with broad shoulders, a large neck, and handsome.”

“That's very subjective.”

“How can it be subjective, Nico! No one would say my brother Juan is tall, has broad shoulders, a thick neck, and is handsome.”

In the end, I get nowhere by discussing such subjects with my son. The fact is that the astrologer had already told me that Lori could not have children of her own but that “she would be the mother of several children.” I interpreted that to mean that she would be the mother of my grandchildren, but apparently there were other possibilities. About Ernesto and Giulia she said that they should not make the attempt until spring of the following year, when the stars were in the ideal position; any earlier would have no result. Tong and Lili, on the other hand, would have to wait a lot longer, and it was not certain that the baby would be theirs, it might be adopted. Ernesto and Giulia decided to obey the stars and wait until spring to begin the fertility treatments. Five months later, Giulia was pregnant; she swelled up like a dirigible, and soon learned she was expecting twin girls.

One day Juliette, Lori, Giulia, and I were in a restaurant, and Lori was telling how about half the young women she knew, including her hairstylist and her yoga teacher, were either pregnant or had just had a baby.

“Do you remember when I said I would have a baby for you, Isabel?” Juliette asked.

“Yes. And I told you that I would be crazy to have a child at my age.”

“That time I said I would have it only for you, but I think now that I would also do it for Lori.”

A moment of absolute silence fell over the table as Juliette's words made their way to Lori's heart, who burst into tears when she realized what her friend had just offered. I don't know what the waiter thought, but on his own he brought us chocolate cake, courtesy of the house.

Then began a complicated process that Lori, with her extraordinary perseverance and organization, directed for nearly a year. First it had to be decided whether or not Nico would be the father, because of the risk of porphyria. After talking it over between them, and with the family, they agreed that they were willing to take the chance; it was important to Lori that the baby be Nico's child. Then they had to obtain an egg. It couldn't be Juliette's because if she knew she was the biological mother she would not be capable of giving up the baby. Through the Internet they chose a young Brazilian donor who had a slight resemblance to you, Paula, a family look. She and Juliette had to undergo large doses of hormones, the former to ensure several eggs to be harvested, and the latter to prepare her womb. The eggs were fertilized in a laboratory, then the embryos were implanted in Juliette. I feared for Lori, who might suffer yet another frustration, and especially for Juliette, who now was over forty and a widow with two growing boys. If something happened to her, what would become of Aristotelis and Achilleas? As if she had read my mind, Juliette asked Willie and me to look after her children should any misfortune befall her. We had reached the boundaries of magical realism.