Paula (17 page)

This experience must have left a scar somewhere, because in all my books, seductive or seduced children play a role, almost always without related evil, except in the case of the small black girl in
The Infinite Plan
whom two men capture and intend to harm. Resurrecting the memory of that young fisherman, I feel no repugnance or terror; quite the opposite, actually, I feel a vague tenderness for the little girl I was and for the man who did not rape me. For years I kept the secret so deeply hidden in a separate compartment of my mind that when I fell in love with Michael I did not relate it to the awakening of sexuality.

T
HE NEUROLOGIST AND
I
AGREED TO CUT OFF YOUR RESPIRATOR FOR
one minute, Paula, but we did not tell the rest of the family because they still haven't recovered from that fateful Monday when you were so close to leaving us. My mother cannot talk about it without bursting into tears; she wakes at night with a vision of Death leaning over your bed. I believe that, like Ernesto, she no longer prays for you to get well but for you not to suffer any longer; as yet, however, I have not lost my will to fight to keep you. The doctor is a kind man, whose eyeglasses perched at the end of his nose and wrinkled white lab coat give him a look of vulnerability, as if he had just waked from a nap. He is the only physician here who seems sensitive to the anguish of those of us who spend our days in the corridor of lost steps. The porphyria specialist is more interested in the laboratory test tubes where he analyzes your blood every day; he seldom comes by to see you. This morning we disconnected you for the first time. The neurologist checked your vital signs and read the charts from last night, while I called on my grandmother and yours—the wonderful Granny who has been gone fourteen years now—for their help. “Ready?” he asked, peering at me over his glasses, and I responded with a nod, because I couldn't speak. He flicked a switch and the liquid hiss of the oxygen in the transparent tube in your neck suddenly was stilled. I stopped breathing, too; watch in hand, I counted the seconds, begging, commanding, you to breathe, Paula . . . please. Every instant was the lash of a whip . . . thirty, forty seconds . . . nothing; five seconds more and it seemed your chest moved a fraction, but so slightly it could have been an illusion . . . fifty seconds . . . and we couldn't wait any longer, the blood had drained from your face and I myself was nearly asphyxiated. The machine began to function, and a touch of color returned to your skin. I put away the watch, trembling; I was burning hot and soaked with perspiration. The doctor handed me a square of gauze.

“Here, you have blood on your lips,” he said.

“This afternoon we'll try again, and then tomorrow, and so on, a little more each day, until she can breathe on her own,” I resolved, when I could speak.

“Paula may not be
able
to breathe on her own. . . .”

“She will, Doctor. I'm going to take her out of this place and it will be easier if she helps me.”

“I suppose mothers know better than anyone else. We will gradually lower the pressure of the respirator to force her to use those muscles. Don't worry, we'll see she gets plenty of oxygen”; he smiled, giving me an affectionate pat on the shoulder.

My eyes were blurred with tears as I left the room and rejoined my mother. I guess Memé and Granny stayed behind with you.

Willie came the moment he heard about the most recent crisis, and this time he was able to be away from his office five days—five whole days together! I needed that time badly. Long separations are dangerous; love can go astray in the shifting sands. “I'm afraid I'll lose you,” Willie says. “I feel you're farther and farther away and I don't know how to hold you. Remember you are my woman, my soul.” I haven't forgotten, but it is true that I am more distant; sorrow is a solitary road. When Willie comes he brings a blast of fresh air. Adversity has strengthened his character; nothing defeats him, he has inexhaustible stamina in the face of day-to-day struggles. He is restless and impulsive, but he is suffused with Buddhistic calm when he must endure misfortune, which makes him a stalwart companion in difficult times. He occupies every inch of our small apartment in the hotel, altering the delicate routines my mother and I have established, moving us about like two ballerinas in a rigorous choreography. Someone with the size and characteristics of Willie does not pass unnoticed; when he comes there is disorder and noise and the tiny kitchen is always busy—the entire building smells of his delicious cooking. We rent an additional room, and we take turns with my mother going to the hospital; that way I can have a few hours alone with my husband. In the mornings, Willie prepares breakfast and then calls my mother, who appears in her nightgown and wool socks and layers of shawls, with the mark of the pillow still creasing her cheek: a sweet little old grandmother from a bedtime story. She crawls into our bed and we begin the day with toast and cups of the aromatic coffee Willie has brought from San Francisco. This man never knew what a family was until he was fifty, but he quickly became accustomed to sharing his space with mine, and doesn't find it strange to start the day three to a bed. Last night we went out to eat dinner at a restaurant on the Plaza Mayor, where we let ourselves be tempted by rowdy waiters dressed up as comic opera smugglers, who danced attendance on us in a stone room with vaulted ceilings; everyone was smoking and there was no ventilation of any kind—light years behind the North American obsession with health. We poisoned ourself with lethal dishes: fried octopus and mushrooms with garlic, pork roasted in a clay cooker—golden, crackling, streaming fat, perfumed with herbs—and a jug of sangria, that heavenly wine and fruit that goes down like water but when you try to stand up hits you like a poleax at the back of the neck. I hadn't eaten like that in weeks; my mother and I often slip through the day with nothing but hot chocolate. I spent a terrible night with hair-raising visions of scalded and scraped hogs screaming over their fate and live octopuses climbing my legs, and this morning I swore to become a vegetarian like my brother Juan. No more sins of gluttony for me. These days with Willie have renewed me, I can feel life in my body again, forgotten for weeks; I touch my breasts, my ribs—which I can count under my skin—my waist, my thighs, getting to know myself again. This is me, I'm a woman, I have a name, I'm called Isabel, I'm not turning to smoke, I have not disappeared. I examine myself in my grandmother's silver mirror: this person with the disconsolate eyes is me. I have lived nearly half a century, my daughter is dying, and still I want to make love. I think of Willie's reassuring presence and feel goosebumps rise on my skin, and can only smile at the amazing power of desire that makes me shiver despite my sorrow, even push death from my mind. For a moment, I close my eyes and see clearly the first time we slept together, our first kiss, our first embrace, the astonishing discovery of a love that materialized when we least sought it, of the tenderness that took us by storm when we thought we were safely indulging in a one-night affair, of the profound intimacy we felt from the beginning, as if our entire lives had been a preparation for that meeting, of the ease, calm, and confidence with which we made love, like an old couple that has shared a thousand and one nights. And always, afterward, passions sated and love renewed, our bodies meld in sleep, not caring where one begins or the other ends, or whose hand or foot is whose, in such perfect complicity that we meet in our dreams and the next morning do not know who dreamed whom, and when one moves the other adjusts to the new angles and curves, and when one sighs the other sighs, and when one wakes the other wakes, too. “Come,” Willie calls me, and I go to the man waiting in the bed and, shivering from the cold of the hospital and the outdoors and from the unshed tears that turn to frost in my veins, I take off my nightgown and huddle against the bulk of his body, wrapped in his arms until I am warm. Little by little we become aware of the other's quickening breathing, and our caresses become slower and more intense as we surrender to pleasure. He kisses me, and once again I am surprised, as I have been for four years, at how soft and cool his lips are; I cling to his strong shoulders and neck, run my hands down his back, kiss the hollow of his ears, the horrible skull tattooed on his right arm, the line of hair down his belly, and breathe in his odor of health, that odor that always excites me, lost in love, and grateful, while a river of inevitable tears pours from my cheeks onto his chest. I cry out of sorrow for you, Paula, but I suppose I am also crying for the happiness of this late love that has come to change my life.

What was my life like before Willie? It was a good life, filled with intense emotions. I have lived the extremes; few things have been easy or smooth for me, and that may be why my first marriage lasted so long: it was a tranquil oasis, a noncombat zone in between battles. Everything else was hard work, storming the bastion with sword in hand, without an instant's truce—or boredom: great successes and smashing failures; passions and loves, but also loneliness, work, losses, desertions. Until the day of the military coup I thought that my youth would last forever; the world seemed a splendid place and people essentially good. I believed evil to be a kind of mistake, an aberration of nature. All that ended abruptly on September 11, 1973, when I awakened to the brutality of existence . . . . But I haven't reached that point in these pages yet, Paula, why confuse you by leaping around in these memories? I did not end up an old maid, as I had predicted in those dramatic statements lying in Tío Ramón's strongbox; just the opposite, I married too soon. Despite Michael's promise to his father, we decided to marry before he finished engineering school because the alternative was for me to go to Switzerland with my parents, where they had been named Chile's representatives at the United Nations. If I cut corners, my salary would be enough to rent a room and keep body and soul together, but at that time in Santiago, the idea of a girl's being independent at nineteen, with a sweetheart and no oversight, was out of the question. I debated for several weeks, until my mother seized the initiative and spoke to Michael, placing him between the sword and marriage—just as I would do twenty-six years later to my second husband. Michael and I sat down with paper and pencil and came to the conclusion that two people could subsist, barely, on my salary, and that it would be worth taking a chance. My mother immediately launched into enthusiastic activity. Her first move was to sell the large Persian rug in the dining room and then announce that a wedding was an excuse to spend money like a drunken sailor, and that mine would be splendid. Quietly, she began to store provisions in a secret room in the house, so at least we wouldn't starve. She filled trunks with linens, towels, and kitchen utensils, and found out how we could get a loan to build a house. When she set the papers before us and we saw the amount of the debt, Michael felt faint. He had no job and his father, annoyed by our precipitous decision, was not inclined to help him, but my mother's powers of persuasion are staggering, and in the end we signed. The civil service took place one fine spring day in my parents' beautiful colonial house, an intimate gathering attended only by our two families—that is, nearly a hundred people. Tío Ramón had suggested that we invite my father, who, he thought, should not be absent at such an important moment of my life, but I refused, and it was Salvador Allende who represented my father's family and signed the civil register as my witness to the wedding. Just before the judge appeared, my grandfather took me by the arm, led me aside, and repeated the words he had spoken to my mother twenty years before. “There is still time to change your mind. Don't marry him, please, think it over. Give me the sign and I will get rid of this mob. How about it?” He thought marriage was a miserable bargain for women; on the other hand, he recommended it without reservation to all his male descendants. One week later, we were married in a religious ceremony, even though Michael was Anglican and I was no longer a practicing Catholic, because the weight of the Church in the world I was born into is like a millstone around one's neck. Proudly, I walked down the aisle on the arm of Tío Ramón, who made no further suggestion regarding my father until years later, when we were called on to bury him. In photographs taken that day, the new bride and groom look like children playing dress-up: he in a tailored swallowtail coat and I swathed in clouds of the cloth acquired in the Damascus souk. In keeping with English tradition, my mother-in-law gave me a blue garter to wear for luck. The bust of my dress was stuffed with plastic foam, but with the first hug of congratulations, even before leaving the altar, my breasts were crushed concave. I lost the garter in the nave of the church, a frivolous testimony to the ceremony, and we had a flat tire on the car taking us to the reception and Michael had to take off his tailcoat and help the chauffeur change the tire, but I do not believe those were omens of bad luck.