Paula (38 page)

Granny began to die the day she was separated from her two grandchildren; the agony lasted three long years. Doctors blamed alcohol; they said she had destroyed her liver—she was bloated and her skin was a dirty color—but the truth was that she was dying of grief. The moment came when she lost all sense of time and place, and days lasted two hours and nights did not exist; she stayed close beside the door, waiting for the children, and she never slept because she heard their voices calling her. She lost interest in her house, closed her kitchen, and never again flooded the neighborhood with the aroma of cinnamon cookies; she stopped cleaning inside or watering her garden; the dahlias languished and worms infested the plum trees heavy with rotted, unpicked fruit. My mother's Swiss dog, now with Granny, lay down in a corner to die inch by inch, like her new mistress. My father-in-law spent that winter in bed, nursing an imaginary cold because he could not face his fear of life without his Young Lady, he thought that by ignoring the facts he could change reality. The neighbors, who thought of Granny as the community's fairy godmother, at first took turns calling on her and keeping her occupied, but eventually they began to avoid her. That gentlewoman with the celestial blue eyes, impeccable in her flowered cotton dresses, forever busy with the delicacies of a kitchen where the door was always open to the neighborhood children, rapidly turned into a balding old crone who babbled incoherently and asked anyone she saw if they had seen her grandchildren. When she could no longer find her way around her own house, and looked at her husband as if she didn't know who he was, Michael's sister had to intervene. She had gone to visit her parents and found them living in a pigsty; no one had cleaned in months and garbage and empty bottles were piled high; decay had definitively taken over the house and the soul of its inhabitants. Frightened, she realized that the situation had gone too far; it was no longer a question of mopping floors, picking up, and hiring someone to look after the old people, as she had thought, she would have to take them with her. She sold some of the furniture, stored the rest in the attic, closed up the house, and set off for Montevideo with her parents. In the confusion of the last hour, the dog sneaked away and no one ever saw her again. Before a week had gone by, Michael's sister notified us in Caracas that Granny had used up her last ounce of strength, was too weak to get out of bed, and had been taken to the hospital. Michael was at a critical stage in his work; the jungle was devouring the construction site, the rain and swollen rivers had swept away the dams, and the next day crocodiles were swimming in excavations dug for the foundations. Once again, I left the children with my parents, and flew to say my farewells to Granny.

Uruguay during that period was a country for sale. Using the pretext of eliminating the guerrillas, the military dictatorship had established the dungeon, torture, and summary execution as a style of governing. Thousands of people disappeared or were killed; almost a third of the population emigrated, escaping from the horror of the times, while the military and a handful of their cronies grew rich on the spoils. Since people leaving the country could not take much with them, they were forced to sell their belongings; signs for sales and auctions went up on every block, and property, furniture, cars, and works of art were sold at bargain prices. Collectors from the rest of the continent gathered like piranhas to snap up antiques. On a gray August dawn, the dead of winter in the Southern Cone, the taxi bore me from the airport to the hospital through silent streets where half of the houses stood empty. I left my suitcase in the porter's lodge, climbed two flights of stairs, and ran into a night-duty nurse who led me to Granny's room. I didn't recognize her; in those three years she had metamorphosed into a small lizard, but then she opened her eyes and through the clouds I glimpsed a spark of turquoise. As I fell to my knees beside the bed, she murmured, “Hello, dear, how are my children?” but before she could hear the answer, a wave of blood washed her into unconsciousness and she never waked again. I sat beside her, waiting for daylight, listening to the gurgling of the tubes suctioning her stomach and breathing air into her lungs, remembering the happy and the tragic years we had shared, and treasuring her unconditional affection. “Let go, Granny, don't fight and suffer any longer, please, go quickly,” I begged her, while I stroked her hands and kissed her feverish forehead. With the sunlight, I remembered Michael, and called to tell him to take the first plane and join his father and sister, for he should not be absent in this crisis.

Dear, sweet Granny hung on patiently until the next day, so her son could see her alive for a few minutes. We were both beside her bed when she stopped breathing. Michael went out to console his sister, and I stayed to help the nurse bathe my mother-in-law, giving back to her in death the infinite care she had lavished on my children in life, and as I sponged her body and smoothed the few remaining hairs on her skull and sprayed her with cologne and dressed her in a clean gown her daughter had brought, I told her about Paula and Nicolás, about our life in Caracas, about how much we had missed her and how much I had needed her in this hapless stage of my life when our home was being lashed by adverse winds. The next day we left Granny in an English cemetery beneath a blanket of jasmine, in the precise place she would have chosen to rest. I went with Michael's family to pay our last respects, and was amazed to see them without tears or emotion, restrained by that refined sobriety Anglo-Saxons exhibit when they bury their dead. Someone read the ritual words, but they didn't register because all I could hear was Granny's voice humming her grandmotherly songs. Each of us dropped a flower and a handful of dirt on the coffin, hugged one another in silence, and slowly walked away. Now she was alone, dreaming in a garden. And ever since, anytime I smell jasmine, Granny appears.

When we got back to the house, my father-in-law went to wash his hands while his daughter prepared afternoon tea. In a few minutes, he came to the dining room, still in his dark suit, with his hair slicked down and a rosebud in his lapel, handsome and young looking; he pushed back the chair with his elbows to avoid touching it with his fingers, and sat down.

“And where is my Young Lady?” he asked, surprised not to see his wife.

“She isn't with us any longer, Papa,” said his daughter, and we all looked at each other, alarmed.

“Tell her tea is served and we're waiting for her.”

That was our notice that time had stopped for him and that he had not absorbed the fact that his wife was dead. He lived with that delusion for the rest of his days. He had been oblivious during the funeral, as if he were attending the burial of a distant relative, and from that instant on had retreated into his memories; a curtain of senility dropped before his eyes and he never again connected with reality. The only woman he had ever loved was beside him, forever young and happy, and he forgot that he had left Chile and lost everything he owned. For the next ten years, until he died in a nursing home, shrunken to the size of a child, he was convinced he was in his house beside the golf course, that Granny was in the kitchen making plum jelly, and that at bedtime they would sleep in the same bed they had every night for forty-seven years.

The moment had come to talk with Michael about things too long unspoken, he could not continue to dwell comfortably in a fantasy the way his father did. The following day, on a rainy afternoon, bundled up in wool ponchos and mufflers, we went for a walk on the beach. I don't remember the exact moment I had finally accepted the idea that I must leave him, perhaps it had been as I watched Granny die, or when we filed out of the cemetery, leaving her beneath the jasmine, or maybe I had decided weeks before. Neither do I remember how I told Michael that I was not going back to Caracas with him, that I was going to Spain to try my luck, and taking the children with me. I told him I knew how difficult it would be for them, and that I was very sorry there was no way to prevent this new hardship, but the young have to follow their mother's destiny. I chose my words carefully, weighing them so as to inflict the least pain, bowed by my sense of guilt and by the compassion I felt for Michael: within a few hours this man had lost his mother, his father, and now his wife. He replied that I was totally out of my mind and incapable of making decisions, so he would make them for me in order to protect me and protect our children. I could go to Spain, if that was what I wanted, and this time he would not come looking for me, nor would he do anything to stop me—but he would never let me take Paula and Nicolás. In addition, I was not, he said, entitled to any of our savings, because by abandoning our home, I forfeited all my rights. He begged me to reconsider, and promised that if I gave up this insane idea, he would forgive everything, we would wipe the slate clean and begin with a fresh start. Only then did I realize that I had worked for twenty years and had nothing to show for it since the returns for my efforts had been absorbed in day-to-day expenses; Michael, on the other hand, had wisely invested his earnings and the few assets we had were in his name. Without money to support the children, I could never take them with me—even if their father allowed them to go. It was a calm discussion that lasted barely twenty minutes, without raised voices, and ended with a sincere farewell embrace.

“Don't say anything bad about me to Paula and Nicolás,” I asked.

“I will never speak ill of you. Remember that all three of us love you very much and will be waiting for you.”

“I'll come for them as soon as I get a job.”

“I will not give them to you. You may see them whenever you wish, but if you leave now you lose them forever.”

“We'll see about that. . . .”

In my heart, I was not too alarmed; I felt sure that Michael would have to cave in eventually because he hadn't the faintest idea what taking care of youngsters involved and until then had fulfilled his fatherly duties from a comfortable distance. His job was a real sticking point: he could not take the children to that half-tamed part of the country where he spent most of his time, but neither could he leave them alone in Caracas. I was sure that before a month had passed he would be desperate and begging me to take charge of them.

I left the funereal winter of Montevideo to land the next day in the boiling August of Madrid, prepared to live out my love to its ultimate consequences. From the romantic illusion I had invented in our clandestine rendezvous and hasty letters, I fell into the sordid reality of a poverty that nights and days of inexhaustible embraces could not mitigate. We rented a small, dark apartment in one of dozens of identical red brick buildings in a working-class district on the outskirts of the city. There was no touch of green, not a single tree grew there; all you could see were dirt patios, playing fields, cement, asphalt, and brick. That ugliness was like a slap in the face. “You're a spoiled bourgeois brat,” my lover laughed, smiling between kisses, but underneath the joviality his reproach was serious. In the flea market, we acquired a bed, a table, three chairs, and a few plates and saucepans that a huge, nasty-tempered man delivered in his broken-down van. On an irresistible whim, I also bought a flower vase, although there was never money to buy flowers to put in it. Every morning we went out to look for work, and every evening we returned, exhausted and empty-handed. His friends avoided us, promises dissolved like salt in water, doors were slammed in our faces, no one responded to our applications, and money seemed to melt away. I saw my daughter and son in every child playing in the street; being separated from them pained me physically, and I came to believe that the constant burning in my stomach was either an ulcer or cancer. There were times I had to choose between having bread or buying stamps for a letter to my mother, and those days I fasted. I tried to write a musical comedy with my lover, but the congenial complicity of our picnics in the park and afternoons beside the dusty piano in the Caracas theater had dissipated: our anxiety was coming between us, our differences became more and more pronounced, our defects were magnified. We never spoke of Paula and Nicolás, because any time they were mentioned the breach between us widened; I moped and he was sulky. The most superficial incidents became fuel for a fight; our reconciliations were true tourneys of passion that left us half stupefied. And so three months went by. During that time I had found neither employment nor friends; my last savings were gone, and so was my passion for a man who surely deserved better. It must have been hell to live with my anguish over my absent children, the way I raced to the mailbox, and my trips at night to the airport, where an ingenious Chilean knew how to connect cables to the telephone to make free international calls. There behind the backs of the police, all of us penniless refugees from South America—
sudacas,
they called us with scorn—gathered to talk to our families on the other side of the world. That was how I found out that Michael had gone back to his job and the children were alone, watched over by my parents from their apartment two floors above ours, that Paula had assumed the household duties and care of her brother with the iron discipline of a sergeant, and that Nicolás had broken an arm and was growing thinner by the day because he didn't want to eat. In the meantime, my love was unraveling, destroyed by poverty and nostalgia. I had soon discovered that the man I had fallen in love with became demoralized when faced with everyday problems, and fell into depressions or fits of frenetic humor. I could not imagine Paula and Nicolás with such a stepfather, and that is why when Michael finally recognized that he could not care for them and was ready to turn them over to me, I knew I had touched bottom and could not continue to deceive myself with fairy tales. I had followed the flutist in a hypnotic trance, like the mice of Hamelin, but I could not drag Paula and Nicolás into a similar fate. That night, in the bright light of reason, I examined my countless errors of recent years, from the absurd risks I had taken at the height of the dictatorship that finally forced me to leave Chile to the polite silences that separated me and Michael, and the injudicious way I had fled my house without offering an explanation or facing the basic consequences of a divorce. That night my youth ended and I entered a new phase of my life. Enough, I said. At five o'clock in the morning, I went to the airport, managed to put through a free call, and spoke with Tío Ramón, asking him to send money for my plane ticket. I told my lover goodbye, knowing I would never see him again, and eleven hours later I landed in Venezuela, defeated, without luggage, and with no plan but to put my arms around my children and never let them go again. Michael was waiting at the airport. He greeted me with a chaste kiss on the forehead and tear-filled eyes; he said emotionally that everything that had happened was his responsibility for not having taken better care of me, and asked me out of consideration for the years we had shared and my love for the family to give him another chance and begin all over again. “I need time,” I replied, defeated by his nobility and furious without knowing why. In silence, he drove up the hill toward Caracas and as we reached the house announced that he would give me all the time I desired, that he was leaving for his job in the jungle and occasions to see each other would be few.