The Sum of Our Days (5 page)

That night, very late, my husband returned bearing ten more years on his shoulders. I had never seen him so defeated, not even when he had to rescue Jennifer from a motel where she lay dying, cover her with his jacket, and take her to that hospital where she was received by the Filipino doctor. He told me that he had spoken with the judge, with the social worker, with the doctors, even with a psychiatrist, and that every one of them agreed that the baby's health was too fragile. “We can't take her on, Isabel. We don't have the energy to care for her or the strength to bear it if she dies. I'm not able to do this,” he concluded, with his head in his hands.

W
E HAD ONE OF THOSE FIGHTS
that make history in a couple's lives and that deserve to be named—like the “Arauco war,” which was what we in the family call a contest that kept my parents in battle mode for four months—but now, now that many years have gone by and I can look back on it, I concede that Willie was right. If there are enough pages, I will tell of other epic tourneys in which we have confronted each other, but I think that none was as violent as the battle over Sabrina; that one was a collision of personalities and cultures. I didn't want to hear his arguments; I was locked in a mute rage against the legal system, the judge, the social worker, Americans in general, and Willie in particular. We both stayed away from home as much as we could: Willie worked at his office far into the night, and I packed a suitcase and went to stay with Tabra, who took me in without a fuss.

Tabra and I had known each other for several years; she was the first friend I made when I arrived in California. One day when she went to the beauty salon to have her hair tinted the beet red she was using then, the stylist commented that a week earlier a new client had come in and asked for the same color. We were the only two in her long professional career. She had added that the woman was a Chilean who wrote books, and mentioned my name. Tabra had read
The House of the Spirits
, and she asked the stylist to let her know the next time I was coming to the salon; she wanted to meet me. That happened fairly quickly because I had tired of the color sooner than I'd expected; I looked like a drowned clown. Tabra appeared with my book to be signed and was surprised to see that I was wearing earrings she had made. We were destined to hit it off, as the stylist said.

This woman who dressed in full Gypsy skirts, arms covered from wrist to elbow with silver bracelets, hair an impossible color, served as my model for the character Tamar in
The Infinite Plan.
I based Tamar on Carmen, a childhood friend of Willie's, and on Tabra, from whom I stole a personality and partial biography. Since Carmen inherited an impeccable moral rectitude from her father, she uses every opportunity to clarify that she never slept with Willie, a disclaimer that's entirely unnecessary except for people who have read my novel. Tabra's home—one story, wood, with high ceilings and large windows—was a museum for extraordinary objects from many corners of the planet, each with its own history: gourds used as penis shields from New Guinea, hairy masks from Indonesia, ferocious sculptures from Africa, dream paintings from the Australian aborigines. The property, which she shared with deer, raccoons, foxes, and the entire array of California birds, consisted of sixty acres of wild beauty. Silence, moisture, woodsy smells, a paradise obtained by dint of hard work and talent.

Tabra grew up in the bosom of southern fundamentalism. The Church of Christ was the one truth. Methodists did whatever they pleased, Baptists were damned because they had a piano in the church, Catholics didn't count—only Mexicans were Catholic and it wasn't proved that they had a soul—and the other denominations weren't worth talking about because their rites were satanic, as everyone knew. Alcohol, dancing, music, and swimming with anyone of the opposite sex were forbidden, and I think that was also true of tobacco and coffee, but I'm not sure. Tabra completed her education at Abilene Christian College, where her father taught, a sweet and open-minded professor enamored of Jewish and African-American literature, who navigated as well as he could through the censorship of the college authorities. He knew how rebellious Tabra was, but he had not expected her to elope with a secret boyfriend when she was seventeen, a Samoan student, the only person with dark skin and black eyes in that institution of whites. In those days, the youth from Samoa was still slender and handsome, at least in Tabra's eyes, and there was no doubt about his intelligence; up to that time he was the only Islander to have received a scholarship.

The couple ran away one night to another city, where the justice of the peace refused to marry them because interracial marriages were illegal, but Tabra convinced him that Polynesians are not Negroes, and furthermore, she was pregnant. Grumbling, the judge agreed. He had never heard of Samoa, and the hapless little mixed-blood creature she was carrying in her womb seemed reason enough to legitimize that disgraceful union. “I feel sorry for your parents, girl,” he said instead of giving them his blessing. That same night the brand-new husband pulled off his belt and lashed Tabra until he drew blood because she had gone to bed with a man before she was married. The indisputable fact that he was that man did not in any way minimize her status as a whore. That was the first of countless beatings and rapes, which according to the church she had to endure because God did not approve of divorce, and that was her punishment for having married someone who was not of the same race, a perversion proscribed by the Bible.

They had a handsome son named Tangi, which in Samoan means “cry,” and the husband took his small and terrified family back to his natal village. That tropical isle, where Americans maintained a military base and a detachment of missionaries, welcomed Tabra. She was the only white person in her husband's clan, and that afforded her a certain privilege, but it did not impede her husband's daily beatings. Tabra's new family consisted of some twenty dark-skinned giants, who lamented in chorus her pale, underfed appearance. Most of them, especially her father-in-law, treated her with affection and reserved for her the best bits of the communal dinner: fish heads with staring eyes, fried eggs enhanced by embryos, and a delicious pudding they prepared by chewing a fruit and spitting the pap into a wooden vessel they then set in the sun to ferment. Sometimes the women succeeded in picking up little Tangi and running to hide him from the fury of his father, but they were unable to defend his mother.

Tabra never grew accustomed to her fear. There were no rules regarding punishment; nothing she did or didn't do prevented the lashings. Finally, after one Homeric beating, her husband was sent to jail for a few days, a moment the missionaries seized to help Tabra and her son escape to Texas. The elders of her local church repudiated her. She couldn't find a decent job and the only person who helped her was her father. A divorce concluded that relationship and she didn't see her torturer again for fifteen years. By then, after many years of therapy, she was no longer afraid of him. Her former husband returned to the United States and became an evangelical preacher, a true scourge to sinners and unbelievers, but he never again dared bother Tabra.

I
N THE DECADE OF THE
'60s, Tabra could not bear the shame of the Vietnam War; she chose to leave the United States and travel with her son to different countries, where she made a living teaching English. In Barcelona, she studied jewelry-making and in the evenings strolled along the Ramblas to observe the Roma, from whom she drew inspiration for her Gypsy style. In Mexico, she was employed as an apprentice in a silversmith's workshop, and in a very short time she was designing and making her own jewelry. That, and only that, would be her calling for the rest of her life. With the defeat of the Americans in Vietnam, she returned to her country, and the era of the hippies found her, along with other penniless artists, in the colorful streets of Berkeley selling silver earrings, necklaces, and bracelets. During that period she slept in her beat-up car and used the university bathrooms, but her talent made her stand out among the other artisans and soon she could leave the street behind, rent a workshop, and hire her first helpers. A few years later, when I met her, she had a model enterprise located in a true Ali Baba cave replete with precious stones and objets d'art. More than a hundred persons were working with her, nearly all Asian refugees, some of whom had suffered the unimaginable, as was evident in their horrible scars and downcast eyes. They seemed to be very sweet people, although beneath the surface they must have hidden a volcanic desperation. Two of them, on two separate occasions, crazed by jealousy, bought a machine gun—taking advantage of the shops in this country where one can buy a personal arsenal—and killed the entire families of their wives. Then they blew out their own brains. Tabra had to attend those massive funerals and later had to “clean” the workplace with the necessary ceremonies so that bloody ghosts would not haunt the imagination of those left alive.

The face of Che Guevara, with his irresistible charisma and his black beret pulled low on his forehead, smiled from posters lining the workshop walls. During a trip my friend made to Cuba with Tangi, she went with the ex-chief of the Black Panthers to visit Che's monument in Santa Clara. She brought with her the ashes of a friend whom she had loved for twenty years, without confiding it to anyone, and when they reached the top of the memorial, she scattered them on the wind. In that way she fulfilled his dream of traveling to that mythic country. My friend's ideology is considerably to the left of Fidel Castro.

“You're stuck in the mind-set of the '70s,” I told her once.

“And honored to be there,” was her reply.

My beautiful friend's love affairs are as original as her pythoness's clothing, her fiery hair, and her political position. Years of therapy taught Tabra to avoid men who might turn violent, as her Samoan husband had. She swore that she would never let anyone beat her again; nevertheless, it excites her to teeter on the edge of the abyss. Only machos who look vaguely dangerous or threatening attract her, and she doesn't like men of her own race. Tangi, who had turned into a tall and very handsome young man, did not want to hear a word about his mother's sentimental difficulties. Some years Tabra had as many as a hundred and fifty blind dates arranged through the personal ads in newspapers, but very few went further than the first cup of coffee. Following that, she chose more modern means, and now she is enrolled with several Internet agencies specializing in different types: “Single Democrats,” with whom she at least has in common a hatred of Bush; “Amigos,” which lists only Latinos, whom Tabra favors, but has the drawback that most of those men need a visa and try to convert her to Catholicism; and “Single Greens,” who love Mother Earth but think that money isn't important and so don't work. She receives applications from very young studs with aspirations to be kept by a mature woman. Their photos speak worlds: dark, oily skin, naked torso, and the first inch or so of their fly unzipped to reveal the beginnings of pubic hair. The tone of the e-mail dialogues goes more or less like this.

BOY
: I'm more than old enough to fuck.

If someone of a more appropriate age for her shows up, he will turn out to be like the Democrat who lives with his mother and keeps his savings in silver ingots under the mattress. I'm not exaggerating: silver ingots, like the pirates of the Caribbean. It is strange that the Democrat in question would divulge on the first—and only—date information as private as where he hides his capital.

“Aren't you afraid to go out with strangers, Tabra? You might draw a criminal or a pervert,” I commented when she had introduced me to a frightening type whose only allure was that he wore the beret of a Cuban
comandante.

“It does make me think that I need a few more years of therapy,” my friend admitted on that occasion.

Once she hired a painter to freshen up her walls, a fellow with a mane of black hair, something she really likes. On the basis of the hair Tabra invited him to lounge with her in the Jacuzzi. Bad idea; the painter began treating her like a husband. She would ask him to paint the door and he would answer, “Yes, dear,” with visible irritation. One day he ran out of turpentine and announced that he needed an hour of meditation and a joint to get in contact with his inner space. By then Tabra was fed up with the black hair and told him that he had one hour to paint the interior space of the house and get the hell out of her life. He was no longer there when I arrived with my suitcase.

The first night, Tabra and I dined on fish soup, the only recipe my friend knows how to cook except for oatmeal with milk and sliced bananas. We got into the Jacuzzi, a slippery wood tub hidden among the trees; it had a sickening stench because an unfortunate skunk had fallen into it and simmered on a low flame for a week before it was discovered. There I unloaded my frustration like a bag of rocks.

“You want my opinion?” Tabra asked. “Sabrina won't ease your pain; grief takes time. You're very depressed, and you have nothing to offer that little girl.”

“I can offer more than what she'll have in a foster home for very sick children.”

“Then you'll have to do it alone, because Willie won't help you in this. I don't know how you plan to look after your son and your grandchildren, keep writing, and on top of that raise a little girl who needs two mothers.”

A
RADIANT
S
ATURDAY DAWNED
. Spring in Tabra's forest was already summer, but I didn't want to meet her and go for a walk, as we usually did on weekends. Instead, I called the five women who with me compose the circle of the Sisters of Perpetual Disorder. When I joined the group, they had already been meeting for several years to share their lives, meditate, and pray for people who were sick or in need of help. Now that I am one of them, we exchange makeup, drink champagne, stuff ourselves with bonbons, and sometimes go to the opera: spiritual practice alone is a little depressing to me. I had met them a year before, the day the physicians in California confirmed your diagnosis of no hope, Paula, exactly what I had been told in Spain. There was nothing that could be done, they said, you would never recover. I drove around keening in the car and I don't know how I ended up at Book Passage, my favorite bookstore, where I do a lot of my press interviews; they even keep a mailbox for me. There a Japanese lady almost as short as I am came over to me with an affectionate smile and invited me to have a cup of tea. She was Jean Shinoda Bolen, a psychiatrist and author of several books. I recognized her immediately because I had read her book on the goddesses that inhabit every woman, and how those archetypes influence personality. That was how I discovered that in me there was a jumble of contradictory deities that might be best not to explore. Though I had just met her, I told her what was happening with you. “We are going to pray for your daughter and for you,” she told me. A month later she invited me to her “prayer circle,” and that is how these new friends came to accompany me during your agony and death . . . and continue to comfort me today. For me it is a sisterhood sealed in heaven. Every woman in this world should have such a circle of friends. Each of us is witness to the others' lives; we keep secrets, help in difficulties, share experiences, and stay in almost daily contact by e-mail. However far I may be traveling, I always have my line to terra firma: my sisters of disorder. They are joyful, wise, and curious women. Sometimes curiosity can make one reckless, as in the instance of Jean herself, who in one spiritual ceremony felt an uncontrollable impulse, took off her shoes, and walked over red hot coals. Twice she passed through the fire, and emerged unhurt. She said it was like walking over little balls of Styrofoam; she felt the coals crunch and the rough texture of the burned wood beneath her feet.