Paula (21 page)

Thanks to that diet, however, and other economies, we were able to travel from Andalusia to Oslo in a broken-down Volkswagen-cum-Gypsywagen that sneezed along the highway with all our goods and chattel strapped to the roof. It served us with the loyalty of a camel to the end of the trip, but when the moment came to leave it behind, it was in such bad shape that we had to pay someone to haul it to the junkyard. For months we lived in a tent; you didn't know there was any other way to live, Paula, and when we went into a solid structure, you asked with amazement how they folded the walls to load them onto a car. We poked through countless castles, cathedrals, and museums, carrying you in a backpack and feeding you Coca-Cola and bananas. You had no toys, but you entertained yourself imitating the tourist guides: at three you knew the difference between Roman and Renaissance frescoes. In my memory, the ruins, plazas, and palaces of all those cities blend together; I'm not really sure whether I was in Florence or whether I saw it on a postcard, whether we went to a bullfight or a horse race. I cannot distinguish between the Côte d'Azur and the Costa Brava and, in the stupefaction of exile from Chile, I lost the photographs that prove I was ever in those places, and that piece of my past may simply be a dream like so many that distort my reality. Part of the confusion can be explained by my second pregnancy; it happened at a most inopportune time, because with the bucking of the old VW and the effort of setting up the tent and squatting to cook by a campfire I was truly ill. Nicolás was conceived in a sleeping bag during the first glimmers of a cold spring, possibly in the Bois de Boulogne, some thirty meters from homosexuals dressed as adolescent girls who sold themselves for ten dollars, and only a few steps from a nearby tent that was the source of marijuana smoke and raucous jazz. With such antecedents, Nicolás should have been a wild adventurer, but he turned out to be one of those calm souls who inspire confidence at first sight. In the womb, he adjusted to circumstances as unobtrusively as one of the cells of my own body—just as in a certain way he still is. Even in the best of cases, however, a pregnancy is a major invasion, an amoeba growing in one's innards and passing through multiple stages of evolution—fish, cockroach, dinosaur, monkey—until it reaches human form. All during that heroic tour through Europe, Nicolás journeyed quietly inside me, but his presence inevitably created havoc with my thoughts. I lost interest in the ruins of past civilizations, I was bored in museums, I was carsick, and I lost my appetite. I suppose that explains why I can't remember the details of the trip.

We returned to Chile in the midst of the euphoria of the Christian Democrats, a party that promised reforms without drastic changes and had been elected with the support of the Right in order to prevent a possible triumph by Salvador Allende, whom many held to be Satan. The elections were tainted from the beginning by the campaign of terror the Right had been waging since the early years of the decade, when the Cuban Revolution had sent a surge of hope through all Latin America. Huge posters showed pregnant mothers defending their children against the menace of Russian soldiers. Nothing new under the sun: the same tactics had been used thirty years earlier during the time of the Popular Front, and soon would be employed against Allende in the elections of 1970. The Christian Democrats' politics of conciliation, backed by the North American copper companies, was destined to failure because it satisfied neither Left nor Right. Their agrarian project, which people called the “Flowerpot Reform,” apportioned a few abandoned or poorly developed plots of land, but large holdings remained in the same old hands. Discontent spread, and within two years a large part of the population began to veer toward the Left; political parties that proposed true reforms joined together in a coalition and, to the surprise of the world in general, and to the United States in particular, Salvador Allende became the first Marxist president in history elected by popular vote. But I don't want to get ahead of myself. In 1966, the Christian Democrats were still celebrating their triumph in the parliamentary elections of the previous year, and there was talk that their party would govern the country for the next fifty years, that the Left had suffered an irreparable defeat, and that politically Allende was a dead duck. This was also the era of women who looked like undernourished orphans and wore dresses so short they barely covered their bottoms. There were a smattering of hippies in the most sophisticated neighborhoods of Santiago, in their Indian prints, necklaces, flowers, and long hair, but for anyone who had been in London and seen the druggies dancing half-naked in Trafalgar Square, Chilean hippies seemed rather pathetic. My life then was characterized by work and responsibilities; nothing was farther from my temperament than the bucolic indolence of the Flower Children. I did, however, immediately accept many of the external signs of that culture because I looked much better in long dresses, especially in the last months of pregnancy when I was absolutely round. I not only adopted flowers in my clothing, I painted them on the walls of our house and on our car—enormous yellow sunflowers and bright dahlias that scandalized my in-laws and our neighbors. Fortunately, Michael seemed not to notice; he was preoccupied with a new construction project and his long games of chess.

Nicolás made a difficult entry into the world; I was in labor for two days that are much more deeply engraved in my memory than all the year we traveled in Europe. I had the feeling I was falling off a precipice, gaining speed with every second, until a final tumultuous conclusion during which even my bones burst open as an uncontrollable earth force pushed the baby from my body. I had experienced nothing like that when you were born, Paula, because yours was a straightforward cesarean. There was nothing romantic about your brother's birth, only sweat and pain and loneliness. I had never heard that the father might participate in the process, and besides, Michael was not the ideal man for such events—he faints at the sight of a needle or blood. So I thought birth was a strictly individual affair, like death. I hadn't a clue that while I was suffering alone in my hospital room, other women of my generation were having their babies at home, accompanied by a midwife, their husband, friends, even a photographer, all smoking marijuana and listening to the Beatles.

Nicolás was born without a hair on his body but with a horn on his forehead and a purple arm. I was afraid that from having read so much science fiction I had brought to earth a creature from another planet, but the doctor assured me that your brother was indeed human. The unicorn effect was produced by the forceps they used to wrest him from me, and before long the purple faded from his arm. I remember him as a bald baby, but at some moment his papillary cells must have begun to function, because today he has thick eyebrows and a heavy head of wavy black hair. If you were jealous of your brother you never showed it, you were a second mother to him. The two of you shared a little room with storybook characters painted on the walls and a window where at night a sinister, shadowy dragon waved its terrifying claws at you. You came to my bed dragging the baby; you couldn't actually lift him but neither could you leave Nicolás alone at the mercy of the monster in the garden. Later, when he learned the fundamentals of fear, he slept with a hammer beneath his pillow to defend his sister. During the day, the dragon turned back into a sturdy cherry tree; its branches held swings and sheltered tree houses, and in the summer you and your brother always got stomach aches from the green fruit you fought the birds for. That tiny garden was a secure and enchanted world where you could set up a tent and sleep outside and play Indian, bury treasures, and raise worms. In an absurd pool at the back of the patio, you and Nicolás splashed with the neighborhood children and dogs. A wild grapevine grew on the roof, and you pressed the grapes and produced a wine no one could swallow. At Michael's parents' home a block away, you had an attic crammed with surprises, fruit trees, rolls freshly baked by a perfect grandmother, and a hole in the fence you could crawl through to run to your heart's content on the adjoining golf course. Nicolás and you grew up listening to Granny's English songs and my stories. Every night as I put you to bed, you gave me a subject or a first sentence, and in three seconds I would create a made-to-order story. Since then I have lost the knack of instant inspiration, but I hope it isn't dead and that in the future my grandchildren will revive it.

I
HAVE HEARD IT SAID SO OFTEN THAT WE LIVE IN A MATRIARCHY IN
Chile that I almost believe it. Even my grandfather and my stepfather, authoritarian gentlemen of the feudal school, have stated that without blushing. I don't know who invented the myth of the matriarchy nor how it has been perpetuated for more than a hundred years; perhaps some visitor from the past, one of those Danish geographers or merchants from Liverpool visiting our shores, noticed that Chilean women are stronger and more organized than the majority of men and frivolously concluded that they are in command, and from years of being repeated, the fallacy became dogma. If women have influence, it is only—and then only sometimes—within their home. Men control all the political and economic power, the culture and customs; they proclaim the laws and apply them as they wish, and when social pressures and the legal apparatus are not sufficient to subdue the most rebellious women, the Church steps in with its incontestable patriarchal seal. What is unforgivable, though, is that it is women who perpetuate and reinforce the system, continuing to raise arrogant sons and servile daughters. If they would agree to revise the standards, they could end machismo in one generation. For centuries, poverty has forced men to travel up and down the narrow length of Chile in search of a living; it is not rare that the same man who in winter scrabbles in the bowels of the mines in the north will, in summer, find himself picking fruit in the central valley or on a fishing boat in the south. The men come and go, but the women stay put; they are trees rooted in solid ground. Around them revolve their own children and others they have taken in; they care for the aged, the ill, the unfortunate—they are the axis of the community. In all social classes except the most privileged, abnegation and hard work are considered the supreme female virtues; a spirit of sacrifice is a question of honor: the more one suffers for family, the prouder one feels. Women are used to thinking of their mate as a foolish child whose every serious fault, from drunkenness to domestic violence, they forgive . . .
because he's a man
. In the sixties, a small group of young women who had had the good fortune to see the world beyond the Andes dared propose a challenge. As long as they dealt with vague complaints, no one paid any attention, but in 1967 the first feminist publication appeared, blasting the provincial stupor in which we were vegetating. The magazine was born as yet another whim of the owner of the most powerful publishing house in the nation, a millionaire whose intention was probably not to raise anyone's consciousness, nor anything mildly related to that, but to photograph androgynous adolescents for the fashion pages. He reserved for himself all dealings with the beautiful models, then looked within his social world for someone to do the rest of the work, and the choice fell to Delia Vergara, a recently graduated journalist whose aristocratic facade concealed a will of steel and a subversive intellect. This woman produced an elegant magazine with the same glamorous look and mindless trivia of so many other publications of that day—and today—but she allotted a portion of it for the promotion of her feminist ideals. She enlisted a pair of audacious women colleagues and created a style and a language that had never been seen in print in Chile. From the first issue, the magazine provoked heated polemics: the young welcomed it enthusiastically, while the most conservative segments of society rose up in defense of the morality, country, and tradition that surely would be endangered by equality between the sexes. By one of those strange twists of fate, Delia had been in Geneva and my mother had shown her one of my letters, which was how she knew of my existence. The tone of one or two of the paragraphs had intrigued her, and when she returned to Chile she looked me up and asked me to be a part of her enterprise. When we met, I had no job, I was about to give birth to Nicolás, and my lack of credentials was embarrassing: I had not attended the University, I had a head filled with fantasies, and, as a result of my nomadic school days, my writing was peppered with grammatic horrors. In spite of all that, Delia offered me a feature page with no conditions other than it be ironic, because in the midst of so many argumentative articles, she wanted something light. I accepted, without any idea of how difficult it is to be funny on demand. In private, we Chileans laugh easily and like to joke, but in public we are a people of serious simpletons paralyzed by fear of looking ridiculous. That worked in my favor because I had almost no competition. In my column, I treated males as troglodytes; I suppose that if any man had dared write with such insolence about the opposite sex he would have been lynched in a public plaza by a crowd of rampaging women, but no one took me seriously. When the first issues of the magazine were published with articles on contraceptives, divorce, abortion, suicide, and other unutterable subjects, the scandal was intense. The names of those of us who worked on the magazine traveled from mouth to mouth—sometimes with admiration, but usually with contempt. We put up with a lot of aggression and within a few years everyone except me—already married to a hybrid Englishman—ended up separated from Chilean husbands unable to bear their wives' assertiveness and celebrity.