The Sum of Our Days (35 page)

L
ILI
, T
ONG
'
S YOUNG WIFE
, endured her mother-in-law's abuse for a year, until her submissiveness came to an end. If her husband hadn't intervened maybe Lili would have strangled that lady with her bare hands—an easy enough crime because the woman had a neck like a chicken. There must have been quite an uproar; the San Francisco Police Department sent one officer who spoke Chinese to separate the family members at that address. By then Lili had demonstrated that she had been serious when she said she hadn't come to America for the visa but to form a family. She had no intention of getting a divorce, despite the mother-in-law and the habitual unpleasantness of Tong, who still was suspicious that she would ask for a divorce as soon as the period stipulated by law had passed.

Tong realized that the submissive wife he had ordered by mail was a strapping female warrior. His mother, frightened for the first time in her seventy-plus years, said that she could not keep living with that daughter-in-law who at the first moment she dropped her guard might send her to meet her ancestors. She forced Tong to choose between his wife, that brutish woman obtained through “questionable electronic channels,” as she said, and her, his legitimate mother, whom he had lived with all his life. Lili did not give her husband long to think about it. She stood firm, and it was not she who left the house but her mother-in-law. Tong installed his mother in an apartment for seniors in the center of Chinatown, where she plays mah-jong with other ladies her age. They sold the house and bought a smaller, more modern one near where we live. Lili rolled up her sleeves and threw herself into the task of converting it into the home she had always wanted. She painted the walls, pulled the weeds in the garden, decorated with white, starched curtains, simple, well-made furniture, plants, and fresh flowers. And with her own hands she installed bamboo floors and French windows.

I learned these details little by little, through sign language, drawings, and the few English words that Lili and I shared, until summer came and my mother arrived from Chile and in less than five minutes was sitting in the living room with Lili, having tea and talking like old friends. I don't know what language they were using; Lili doesn't speak Spanish, my mother doesn't know Mandarin, and the English of both leaves something to be desired.

Two days later, my mother told me that we were invited to have dinner at Lili and Tong's house. I explained that that was impossible, she must have misunderstood. Tong had worked half a lifetime with Willie, and the only social event he had ever shared with us was Nico's wedding, and that because Lori had forced him to come. “That may be, but tonight we're having dinner with them,” my mother replied. She was so insistent that to appease her we went. I was thinking that we would ring the doorbell with some excuse and she would find she'd been mistaken, but when we got there we saw Lili sitting outdoors, waiting for us. Her house was dressed for a party with bouquets of flowers, and in the kitchen were a dozen different dishes she was putting the last touches to. Her chopsticks were flying through the air, transferring ingredients from one pot to another with magical precision, while my mother, installed in the place of honor, chatted with her in their Martian tongue. A half hour later, Willie and Tong arrived, and for the first time I had an interpreter and was able to communicate with Lili. After we had devoured the banquet, I asked her why she had left her country, her family, and her job as a surgical nurse to run the risky adventure of blindly marrying and moving to America, where she would always be a foreigner.

“It was because of the executions,” Tong translated.

I assumed there had been a linguistic error—after all, Tong's English isn't much better than mine—but Lili repeated what she'd said and then, with the help of her husband and a lot of miming, she explained why she had joined the thousands of women who leave their country to marry a stranger. She told us that every three or four months, when the prison notified them, she had to accompany the chief surgeon of the hospital to the executions. They left in his car, carrying a large box filled with ice, and traveled four hours along rural roads. At the prison they were led to a basement where half a dozen prisoners were lined up waiting, hands tied behind their backs and eyes blindfolded. The commander gave an order and the guards shot the prisoners in the temple at point-blank range. The minute the bodies fell, the surgeon, helped by Lili, hastily tore out organs for transplant: eyes to provide corneas, kidneys, livers, in short, anything that could be used. They returned from that butchery covered with blood, and with the ice chest filled with organs that then disappeared on the black market. It was a prosperous business, organized by certain physicians and the director of the prison.

Lili told that macabre story with the eloquence of a consummate actress of the silent screen: she rolled her eyes back, shot herself in the head, fell to the floor, picked up a scalpel, cut and ripped out organs, everything in such detail that my mother and I were overcome by an attack of nervous giggles, to the horror of the others, who didn't understand what the devil we found so comical. Our laughter reached the level of hysteria when Lili added that on the last trip the car turned over as they were returning from the prison and the surgeon had died instantly, leaving Lili abandoned in open country with a cadaver clutching the wheel and a load of human organs resting in ice. I have often wondered whether we truly understood Lili's tale, whether it was her idea of a joke or if in fact that enchanting woman who picks my grandchildren up from school and looks after my dog as if it were her daughter actually went through those hair-raising experiences.

“Of course it's true,” was Tabra's opinion when I told her. “In China there is a concentration camp associated with a hospital where thousands of people have disappeared. They rip out the organs while the ‘donors' are still living, then cremate the bodies. The refugees who work in my studio have equally terrifying stories. In their countries, poor people sell their kidneys to feed their children.”

“And who buys them, Tabra?”

“The wealthy, including here in America. If one of your grandchildren needed an organ to keep from dying and someone offered you one, wouldn't you buy it and not ask questions?”

That was only one of the conundrums Tabra posed during our walks in the woods. Instead of enjoying the aroma of the pines and the song of the birds, I would come home from those walks completely undone. But we didn't always talk about the atrocities committed by our fellow humans, or about politics. we also talked about Plumed Lizard, who made sporadic appearances in my friend's life only to vanish again for months. Tabra's ideal would be to have her Indian, complete with pigtails and necklaces, living in a Comanche tepee on her patio.

“That doesn't seem practical, Tabra. Who would be in charge of feeding him and washing his undershorts? He would have to use your bathroom, and then you'd have to clean up after him,” I told her, but she was impervious to this kind of mean-spirited reasoning.

T
HREE TIMES THEY IMPLANTED
in Juliette the laboratory embryos conceived from the eggs of the beautiful Brazilian donor and Nico's sperm. On all three occasions our tribe awaited the results for weeks, with souls hanging by a thread. We invoked the usual sources of magic. In Chile my friend Pía and my mother went to our national saint, Padre Hurtado, and left donations for his charitable works. The image of that revolutionary saint, which all Chileans carry in our hearts, is that of a young and energetic, black cassock-clad man with a shovel in his hand, hard at work. His smile is not in the least beatific but, rather, clearly defiant. It was he who coined your favorite phrase: Give till it hurts. Following the failure of the first two, the third embryo implant took place in the summer. Lori and Nico had for a year been planning a trip to Japan, and they decided to go anyway. If their dream of having a baby came true, it would be their last vacation for a while. They would receive the news there; if it was positive, they would celebrate, if not, they would have a couple of weeks to themselves, intimate, quiet time in which to resign themselves, far from the condolences of friends and relatives.

One of those early mornings I woke with a start. The room was palely illuminated by the subtle splendor of dawn and the night light we always leave on in the hall. No air was moving and the house was wrapped in an abnormal silence; I couldn't hear the rhythmic snoring of Willie and Olivia, or the usual murmuring of the patio palm trees dancing in the breeze. Beside my bed were two pale children, standing hand in hand, a girl about ten and a boy a little younger. They were wearing clothes from the 1900s, lace collars and patent leather high-top shoes. It seemed to me that there was sadness in their large dark eyes. We looked at each other for a second or two, but when I turned on the light they disappeared. I waited a moment, hoping in vain that they would come back, but finally, when the galloping of my heart slowed, I went on my tiptoes to call Pía. In Chile it was five hours later but my friend was still in bed, embroidering one of her patchwork bags.

“Do you think those children have anything to do with Lori and Nico?” I asked.

“No! Of course not! They're the children of the two English ladies,” she replied with calm conviction.

“What English ladies?”

“The ones who visit me. The ones who walk through the walls. Haven't I told you about them?”

On the scheduled day, Lori was to call the nurse who coordinated the treatment in the fertility clinic, a woman with the vocation of a godmother, who handles each case with delicacy; she knows how much hangs in the balance for these couples. Because of the time difference between Tokyo and California, Lori and Nico set the alarm for five in the morning. As they couldn't make international calls from the room, they hurriedly dressed and went down to the front desk of the hotel, where at that moment they found no one to help them. Fortunately, Lori knew there was a telephone booth outside. They went out to a side street that during the day was seething with activity, thanks to popular restaurants and shops for tourists, but at that hour was deserted. The antiquated booth was straight out of a '50s film, and the phone could be operated only with coins, but Lori had thought ahead and brought enough change with her to call the clinic. Blood was pounding in her temples and she was trembling as she dialed the number with a prayer on her lips. Her future was being determined in those instants. From the other side of the planet came the voice of the godmother. “It didn't take, Lori. I'm so very sorry. I don't know what happened, the embryos were the very best. . . ,” she said, but Lori heard no more. Stunned, she hung up the receiver, turned, and fell into her husband's arms. And that man, who at first was so resistant to the idea of bringing more children into the world, sobbed openly; he had been as passionate as she about the idea of their having a child together. They embraced without a word, and minutes later stumbled out onto the empty, silent street, gray in the predawn. Columns of steam rose from the grates in the sidewalks, lending a phantasmagoric air to the scene, a perfect metaphor for the desolation they felt. The rest of their time in Japan was spent convalescing. They had never been so close. In their shared sorrow they came together at a very deep level, naked, defenseless.

Something in Lori changed after that experience, as if a glass had broken inside her and the obsessive desire that had been her hope and her torment had drained away like water. She realized that she couldn't live with Nico if she were in a swamp of frustration. It wouldn't be fair to him. Nico deserved the kind of happy devotion he had tried so hard to build between them. She realized that she had come to the end of a tortuous road, and that she must root out her obsession about being a mother, if she was to go on living. After having tried every possible resource, it was obvious that a child of her own was not to be her destiny, but her husband's children, who had been with her for several years and who loved her a lot, could fill that void. That resignation didn't happen overnight; she was sick in body and soul for nearly a year. Lori had always been slim, but within a few weeks' time she lost so much weight that she was nothing but skin and bones, with large, sunken eyes. She injured a disk in her back and for months was close to being an invalid, trying to function with painkillers so strong that they made her hallucinate. At moments she despaired, but the day came when she emerged from that long grieving, her back healed, her soul at peace, transformed into a different woman. We all could see the change. She gained weight, looked younger, let her hair grow, painted her lips, resumed her yoga and long walks through the hills, but now as a sport, not an escape. We heard her laugh again, the contagious laugh that had seduced Nico, something we hadn't heard for a long, long time. At last she was ready to give herself to the children with all her heart, with joy; it was as if a fog had dissipated and she could see them clearly. They were hers. Her three children. The children the shells in Bahía and the astrologer in Colorado had predicted for her.

W
ILLIE AND
L
ORI HAD WORKED TOGETHER
in the Sausalito brothel for years, even sharing one bathroom. It's amusing to watch the relationship between those two people who could not be more different. To Willie's chaos, cursing, and rushing about, Lori opposes order, precision, calm, and gentility. At noon, as Lori tosses her macrobiotic salad with tofu, Willie perfumes the atmosphere with the garlic of spicy sausages that would perforate the intestines of a rhinoceros. After he's taken the dog for a walk, he comes into the office wearing the muddy boots of a ditch digger, and Lori amiably cleans the stairs so some client won't slip and break his neck. Willie piles mountains of papers on his desk, from legal documents to used paper napkins, and every so often Lori sweeps through and throws them into the wastebasket; he doesn't even notice, or maybe he does notice but doesn't kick about it. They share the vice of photography and travel. They consult on everything and celebrate each other with no perceptible signs of sentimentalism; she always efficient and tranquil, he always hurrying and grumbling. She takes care of the computer, and keeps the Web page up to date, and he cooks meatballs for her following her grandmother's recipe; he shares with her everything he buys wholesale, from toilet paper to papayas, and loves her more than anyone in the family, except me . . . maybe.