The Sum of Our Days (40 page)

Nico caught a plane to Madrid the day after Hildita called. Abuela Hilda knew who he was immediately, even though she didn't recognize herself in the mirror. Feeling suddenly flirtatious, she asked for her lipstick, and suggested they play a game of cards, which was accomplished with their usual cheating. Nico got her to drink a warm Coca-Cola with rum, in homage to the Caribbean adventures, and in the next half hour he fed her a small bowl of soup. The visit of her proxy grandson, and the promise that if she gained weight she could come to California and smoke marijuana with Tabra, worked the miracle. Abuela Hilda began to eat again, but that lasted only a month or two more. When she again declared a hunger strike, her daughter decided with sorrow that her mother had every right to go in her own way and at her own time. Abuela Hilda, who was always a small, slim woman, in the next weeks became a minuscule, big-eared sprite so light she could be lifted up on the breeze through the window. Her last words were, “Hand me my purse; Paula came to get me and I don't want to make her wait.”

I reached Madrid a few hours later, but not in time to help her daughter take care of the details demanded by death. A few days later I returned to California with a small box containing a handful of Abuela Hilda's ashes to scatter in your forest; she wanted to be with you.

I
BEGAN THESE PAGES IN
2006. My January 8 ritual has become more complicated with the years; I no longer have the arrogant certainty of youth. To throw myself into another book is as grave as falling in love, a crazed impulse that demands fanatic dedication. With each one, as with a new love, I wonder whether I will have the strength to write it, even whether the project is worth the trouble; there are too many pointless pages, too many frustrated affairs. In the past I submersed myself in writing—and in love—with the temerity of someone who ignores the risks, but now it takes several weeks before I lose my respect for the blank screen of the computer. What kind of book will this be? Will I make it to the end? I don't ask myself those questions about love because I've been with the same lover for eighteen years and have banished any doubts; now I love Willie every day without questioning what kind of love it is or how it will end. I want to believe that it's an elegant love, and that it will not have a vulgar ending. Maybe what Willie says is true, that we will go hand in hand to the other side of death. All I want is for neither of us to lose our way in senility and cause one of the partners to care for a decrepit body. To live together, lucid, to the last day; that would be ideal.

The ritual of beginning another book is more or less the same every year. So I thoroughly cleaned my study, aired it out, changed the candles on what my grandchildren call “the ancestor altar,” and got rid of boxes filled with texts and documents used in researching last year's undertaking. I left nothing on the shelves lining the walls other than the tightly aligned first editions of my books and pictures of the living and dead who are always with me. I took out anything that might muddle inspiration or distract me from this memoir that demands clear space in which to express itself. It was the beginning of a time of solitude and silence. I always take a while to get started; at first the writing moves along in ragged spurts, like a rusty machine, and I know that several weeks must go by before the story begins to take shape. Any distraction frightens off the muse of imagination. What does imagination feed on, anyway? In my experience, on memories, the vast world, the people I know, and also the persons and voices I carry within that help me on the journey of living and writing. My grandmother used to say that space is filled with presences, of what has been, is, and will be. My characters live in that transparent atmosphere, but I can hear them only if I am silent. Toward the middle of the book, when I am no longer me—the woman—but another—the narrator—I can see them as well. They emerge from the shadows and appear before me whole, with their voices and their smell; they assault me in my
cuchitril
, invade my dreams, occupy my days, and even follow me down the street. That doesn't happen with a memoir in which the protagonists are my own living family, filled with opinions and conflicts. In this case, the plot is not an exercise of imagination but an attempt to present the truth.

There was a sense of frustration in the country that had dragged on for a long time. The future of the world looked as dark and impenetrable as tar. The escalation of violence in the Middle East was terrifying, and international condemnation of America was unanimous, but President Bush paid no attention; he wandered like a madman, detached from reality and surrounded by sycophants. He could no longer obscure the calamity of the war in Iraq, even though the press showed only aseptic images of what was happening: tanks, green lights on the horizon, soldiers running through deserted villages, and occasionally an explosion in a market where supposedly the victims were Iraqis. No blood, no dismembered children. Correspondents were embedded in units of the troops and information was filtered through a military apparatus; however, on the Internet anyone who wanted to be informed could consult the media of the rest of the world, including Arab television. Some courageous reporters—and all the comedians and cartoonists—denounced the government's incompetence. Images of the prison at Abu Ghraib flew round the world, and in Guantanamo prisoners indefinitely detained without being charged died mysteriously, committed suicide, or agonized in hunger strikes, force-fed through large stomach tubes. Things were happening that could not have been imagined a short time before in the United States, which thinks of itself as a beacon of democracy and justice: the writ of habeas corpus was suspended for prisoners, and torture was legalized. I expected the public to react with one voice, but almost no one gave those matters the importance they deserved. I come from Chile, where for sixteen years torture was institutionalized: I know the irreparable harm that leaves in the souls of victims and victimizers—indeed the entire population, which becomes an accomplice. According to Willie, the United States had not been this divided since Vietnam. Republicans controlled everything, and if the Democrats didn't win in the November elections, we'd be screwed for good. How could they
not
win? I asked myself, considering that Bush's popularity had plummeted to numbers Nixon had in his worst days.

The person who was most disturbed was Tabra. When she was young she had left the country because she could not support the war in Vietnam, and now she was prepared to do the same thing, even to renounce her U.S. citizenship. Her dream was to end her days in Costa Rica, but a lot of foreigners had had the same idea and the price of property in that country had soared beyond Tabra's resources. That was when she decided to move to Bali, where she could conduct her business dealings with the local silversmiths and artisans. She would leave a couple of sales representatives in the United States and all the rest could be done over the Internet. That was all we talked about on our walks. Tabra saw fatal signs on every side, from the television news to mercury in salmon.

“Do you think it will be different in Costa Rica or Bali?” I asked her. “Wherever you go the salmon will have mercury, Tabra.”

“At least there I won't be an accomplice to the crimes of this country. You left Chile because you didn't want to live under a dictatorship. Why can't you understand that I don't want to live here?”

“This isn't a dictatorship.”

“But it can become one, sooner than you think. What your Tío Ramón told me is true: people get the government they deserve. That's the downside of a democracy. You should leave, too, before it's too late.”

“My family is here. I've put a lot into bringing them together, Tabra, and I want to enjoy them because I know it can't last much longer. Life tends to separate us, and it takes a lot of effort to stay together. At any rate, I don't think we've reached the point where it's necessary to leave this country. We can still change things. Bush won't be around forever.”

“Well, good luck. As for me, I'm going to settle down in some peaceful place where you can come with your family when you need somewhere to go.”

I began gradually to tell Tabra good-bye as she dismantled the workshop it had cost her so many years to establish. She had help from her son, Tangi, who left his job to be with her in her last months in this country. One by one she said good-bye to the refugees she had worked with for so long, worried about them because she knew that for some it would be difficult to find another job. She got rid of her art collections, with the exception of some valuable paintings I'm keeping for her. She couldn't completely cut her ties with the United States. She would have to come back at least a couple of times a year to see her son and to supervise her business interests; her jewelry requires a much larger market than tourist beaches in an Asian paradise. I assured her that when she came to California she could always count on having a room in our home. Then she emptied her house of furniture and put it up for sale.

Those preparations and my sad walks with Tabra infected me with the delirium of my friend's uncertainty. I would go home and hug Willie, feeling blue. Maybe it wasn't such a bad idea to put our savings into gold coins; we could sew them into the hem of a skirt and be ready to flee. “What gold coins are you talking about?” Willie asked me.

A
NDREA
'
S ENTRANCE INTO ADOLESCENCE
was sudden and dramatic. One night in November she came into the kitchen, where the family was gathered, wearing contact lenses, lipstick, a long white dress, silver sandals, and drop earrings made by Tabra; she had been chosen to sing in the chorus at the school Christmas festivities. We didn't recognize that sensual, golden beauty from Ipanema with her distant, mysterious air. We were used to seeing her in scroungy blue jeans and clumsy outback boots, with a book in her hand. We'd never seen that girl who was shyly smiling at us from the doorway. When Nico, whose Zen serenity we had so often laughed at, realized who it was, he was thunderstruck. Instead of celebrating the young woman who'd just made an appearance, we had to console her father over the loss of his awkward little girl. Lori, who had taken Andrea to buy the dress and the makeup, was the only one in on the secret of the transformation. While the rest of us were recovering from our stupefaction, she took a series of photographs, some with Andrea's thick dark honey-colored hair loose on her shoulders, some with it piled on her head, in a model's poses that were all affectation and spoof.

Andrea's eyes were shining, and she was flushed, as if she'd been in the sun, though the rest of us were wearing our November pallor. She'd had a bad cough for several days. Nico wanted to have a picture with her sitting on his knees, the same pose as one when she was five and she was a plucked duck wearing an alchemist's thick eyeglasses and the pink nightgown she wore over her normal clothes. When he touched her, she was burning hot. Lori took her temperature and the small family party turned dark, because Andrea was aflame with fever. Within a few hours she was delirious. They tried to bring down her fever with cold baths, but finally they rushed her to the emergency room, where they learned she had pneumonia. Who knows how many days she had been incubating it and hadn't said a word, faithful to her stoic, introverted nature. “My chest hurts, but I thought it was because I'm developing,” was her explanation.

Celia and Sally came immediately, then the others. Andrea was in the local hospital surrounded by family, all of us watching like hawks to be sure that she wasn't given anything on the porphyria blacklist. Seeing her in that iron bed, her eyes closed, her eyelids transparent, growing paler every moment, breathing with difficulty, and connected to tubes and wires, brought back my worst memories of your illness in Madrid. Like Andrea, you checked into the hospital with a bad cold, and when you left six months later, you were no longer yourself but a lifeless doll whose only hope was for a gentle death. Nico calmly reasoned with me: this wasn't the same. You had terrible stomach pains for several days, and couldn't eat without vomiting, porphyria crisis symptoms that Andrea did not have. We decided that to avoid any possible oversight or medical error, Andrea would never be alone. We hadn't been able to do that in Madrid, where the hospital bureaucracy had taken you over with no explanation. Your husband and I stood guard for months in a corridor, never knowing what was happening on the other side of the heavy doors of the ICU.

Andrea's room in the hospital was filled. Nico and Lori, Celia and Sally, and I installed ourselves at her side. Then Juliette came, Sabrina's mothers, the other relatives, and a few friends. Fifteen cell phones kept us connected, and every day I called my parents and Pía in Chile so they would be with us, though far away. Nico handed out the list of forbidden medications and instructions for each eventuality. Your gift, Paula, was that now we were prepared; we wouldn't let anything take us by surprise. Our doctor, Cheri Forrester, asked the personnel on the floor to be forbearing because this patient came with a tribe. While the nurse was pricking Andrea, looking for a vein to place an IV, eleven people around the bed were watching. “Please, just don't chant,” said the nurse. We all laughed. “You look like the kind of people capable of chanting,” she added, preoccupied.

The day-and-night vigil began, never fewer than two or three of us in the room. Very few went to work; those who weren't taking a turn at the hospital were looking after the other children and the dogs—Poncho, Mack, and especially Olivia, who was a nervous wreck from finding herself shunted aside—keeping the houses running, and bringing food to the hospital to feed our army. For two weeks, Lori assumed the role of captain, which no one tried to usurp because she actually is the manager of this family and I don't know what we would do without her. No one has more influence or more dedication than Lori. Raised in New York, she is the only one with the intrepid character that will not be intimidated by physicians and nurses, that can fill out ten-page forms and demand explanations. In the last few years, we have moved past the obstacles of the first years; Lori is my true daughter, my confidante, my right arm in the Foundation, and I have watched how little by little she is being converted into the matriarch. Soon it will be her turn to take her place at the head of the table as the mistress of the castle.