Paula (39 page)

Today is my birthday, I have lived half a century. Maybe this evening friends will come by to visit; here, people drop in without prior warning, ours is an open house where the living and the dead go hand in hand. We bought it several years ago, when Willie and I realized that our love at first sight was not giving any signs of diminishing and we needed a place larger than his own. When we first saw it, it seemed it had been waiting for us—more accurately, had been calling to us. It had a weary air: the paint was peeling from the wood, it needed many repairs, and it was dark inside, but it had a spectacular view of the Bay and a benevolent soul. We were told that the former owner had died here a few months before, and we thought she must have been happy within these walls because her memory still lingered in the rooms. We signed within half an hour, without bargaining, and in recent years it has become a sanctuary for an Anglo-Latin tribe where words in Spanish and English echo back and forth, something spicy is always simmering on the stove, and at mealtimes we have many guests around the table. The rooms stretch and multiply to accommodate new arrivals: grandparents, grandchildren, Willie's children, and now Paula, this girl who is slowly turning into an angel. A colony of skunks dwells in the foundations, and every evening the mysterious tortoiseshell cat appears—apparently it has adopted us. Several days ago, she deposited on my daughter's bed a newly killed, still bleeding, bird with blue wings; I suspect that is her way of repaying our kindnesses. In the last four years, the house has been transformed with large skylights to let in the sun and the stars, white rugs and walls, Mexican floor tiles, and a small garden. We contracted with a crew of Chinese workmen to build a storage space, but they didn't understand English, confused our instructions and, by the time we realized it, had added to the ground floor two rooms, a bath, and a strange area that ended up as Willie's workshop. In the basement I have hidden sinister surprises for the grandchildren: a plaster skeleton, treasure maps, and trunks filled with pirate disguises and fake jewels. I have the hope that a scary cellar will act as a stimulus to their imaginations, as my grandfather's did for mine. At night, the house shudders, moans, and yawns, and I have the feeling that memories of people who have lived here, the characters that escape from books and dreams, the gentle ghost of the former owner, and Paula's soul, which at times is freed from the painful bonds of its body, all roam through the rooms. Houses need births and deaths to become homes. Today is a day of celebration; we will have a birthday cake and Willie will come home from the office laden with shopping bags and ready to devote the afternoon to planting his rosebushes in terra firma. That is his gift to me. Those poor plants in wine barrels symbolized the nomadic life of their owner, who always left one door open to escape should life turn a drab ant-brown. That was how it was with all his previous relationships, they reached a point at which he packed his clothes and left, wheeling his barrels to a different destination. “I think we will be here for a long while, it's time now to plant my roses in the garden,” he told me yesterday. I like this man from a different race who walks with long strides, laughs explosively, speaks with a booming voice, annihilates his chicken at dinner with a few slashes of his knife, and cooks without any fuss—so different from other men I have loved. I celebrate his bursts of masculine energy because he compensates for them with a boundless reserve of gentleness, which he can summon at any moment. He has survived great misfortune without being tainted with cynicism and can today give himself without qualification to our late-blooming love and to this Latin tribe in which he now occupies a central position. Later, the rest of the family will gather; Celia and Nicolás will settle in to watch television while Paula drowses in her chair. We will fill the plastic pool on the terrace for Alejandro, who now feels at ease with his silent aunt, and he can splash around. I think today will be another peaceful Sunday.

I am fifty years old, I have entered the last half of my life but I feel as strong as when I was twenty, my body has not failed me yet.
Vieja
, old lady . . . , that's what Paula affectionately called me. Now the word frightens me a little, it suggests someone with warts and varicose veins. In other cultures, elderly women dress in black, tie a kerchief around their heads, grow a mustache, and retire from worldly strife to devote themselves to piety, lamenting their dead, and tending their grandchildren, but here in the United States women go to grotesque lengths to look eternally healthy and happy. I have a fan of fine wrinkles at the corners of my eyes, like tiny scars of past laughter and tears; I look like the photograph of my clairvoyant grandmother, the same expression of intensity tinged with sadness. I am losing hair at my temples. A week after Paula fell ill I found bare spots round as coins; they say they are caused by grief and will grow back, but I honestly don't care. I had to cut Paula's long hair and now she has the head of a boy; she looks much younger, a child again. I wonder how much longer I will live, and why. Time and circumstances have placed me beside this wheelchair to watch over my daughter. I am her guardian, and my family's. . . . I am quickly learning the advantages of disengagement. Will I write again? Every stage of the road is different, and maybe the one having to do with literature is behind me. I will know in a few months, next January 8, when I sit down at my typewriter to begin another novel and test the presence or the silence of the spirits. Recently, I have been empty, my inspiration has dried up, but it is also possible that stories are creatures with their own lives and that they exist in the shadows of some mysterious dimension; in that case, it will be a question of opening so they may enter, sink into me, and grow until they are ready to emerge transformed into language. They do not belong to me, they are not my creations, but, if I succeed in breaking down the wall of anguish in which I am enclosed, I can again serve them as medium. If that doesn't happen, I will have to find a new calling. Ever since Paula became ill, a dark curtain has separated me from the fantasy world in which I used to move so freely; reality has become intractable. Today's experiences are tomorrow's recollections; I have never before lacked for dramatic events to feed my memories, and it was from them all my stories were born. Eva Luna says at the end of my third book:
I also try to live my life as I would like it . . . like a novel
. I don't know whether my road has been extraordinary or whether I have written these books out of a banal existence, but only adventures, love, happiness, and suffering are stored in my memory; the petty happenings of everyday life have disappeared. When I look back, it seems to me that I was the protagonist of a melodrama; now, in contrast, everything is suspended, I have nothing to tell, the present has the brutal certainty of tragedy. I close my eyes and before me rises the painful image of my daughter in her wheelchair, her eyes staring toward the sea, her gaze focused beyond the horizon where death begins.

What will happen with this great empty space that I am today? What will fill me now that not a whiff of ambition remains, no project, nothing of myself? The force of the suction will reduce me to a black hole, and I will disappear. To die. . . . The idea of leaving the body is fascinating. I do not want to go on living and die inside; if I am to continue in this world I must plan the years I have left. Perhaps old age is a new beginning, maybe we can return to the magic time of infancy, to that time before linear thought and prejudices when we perceived the universe with the exalted senses of the mad and were free to believe the unbelievable and to explore worlds that later, in the age of reason, vanished. I have very little to lose now, nothing to defend; could this be freedom at last? I have the idea that we grandmothers are meant to play the part of protective witches; we must watch over younger women, children, community, and also, why not?, this mistreated planet, the victim of such unrelenting desecration. I would like to fly on a broomstick and dance in the moonlight with other pagan witches in the forest, invoking earth forces and howling demons; I want to become a wise old crone, to learn ancient spells and healers' secrets. It is no small thing, this design of mine. Witches, like saints, are solitary stars that shine with a light of their own; they depend on nothing and no one, which is why they have no fear and can plunge blindly into the abyss with the assurance that instead of crashing to earth, they will fly back out. They can change into birds and see the world from above, or worms to see it from within, they can inhabit other dimensions and travel to other galaxies, they are navigators on an infinite ocean of consciousness and cognition.

W
HEN
I
DEFINITIVELY RENOUNCED MY CARNAL PASSION FOR THE
indecisive Argentine musician, there lay before my eyes a boundless desert of boredom and loneliness. I was thirty-seven years old, and, confusing love in general with a lover in particular, I had decided to cure myself forever of the vice of infatuation, which had, after all, brought me nothing but complications. Fortunately, I did not entirely succeed; the inclination lay dormant, like a seed crushed beneath two meters of polar ice that stubbornly bursts through with the first warm breeze. After I returned to Caracas to be with my husband, my lover persisted for some time, more as a duty than out of any other reason, I think. The telephone would ring, I would hear the characteristic click of international calls and hang up without answering. With the same determination, I tore up his letters without opening them, until finally the flutist's attempts at communication ended. Fifteen years have gone by, and if you had told me then that the day would come when I would forget him, I would not have believed it; I was sure I had shared one of those rare heroic love affairs that because of its tragic ending constitutes the stuff of opera. Now I have a more modest vision, and hope simply that if at one of the turns of the road I meet him again, I will at least recognize him. That thwarted relationship was an open wound for more than two years; I was literally sick from love, but no one knew it—not even my mother, who watched me closely. Some mornings, crushed by frustration, I could not find the strength to get out of bed, and some nights I was wrung out by memories and raging desires that—like my grandfather—I battled with icy showers. In a fever to sweep away the past, I tore up the scores of the pied piper's songs and my play, an act that has occasioned regret, because they may have had some merit. I cured myself with the thickheaded remedy Michael had suggested: I buried love in the quicksand of silence. I did not mention what had happened for several years, until it had stopped paining me, and my resolve to eliminate the memory of even the good caresses was so extreme that I went too far, and have an alarming hiatus in my memory that has swallowed not only the misery of that time but also a large part of the happiness.

That adventure brought back to me the first lesson of my childhood, one I can't believe I forgot—that there is no freedom without financial independence. During the years of my marriage, I had unknowingly placed myself in the same vulnerable position my mother had been in when she was dependent on my grandfather's charity. As a child, I had promised myself that would never happen to me, I was determined to be strong and productive like the patriarch of the family, so I would not have to ask anything of anyone, and I had achieved the first part but, instead of managing the money I earned, I had, out of laziness, entrusted it to the care of a husband whose saintly reputation seemed to me a sufficient guarantee. That sensible and practical man, who had perfect control over his emotions and was apparently incapable of committing an unfair or dishonorable act, seemed more qualified than I to look after my interests. I can't imagine where I got such an idea. In the turbulence of the life we shared, and because of my own talent for extravagance, I lost everything. When I went back to my husband, I decided that my first step in this new phase would be to find a steady job, save everything I could, and change the rules of our domestic finances so that his income was earmarked for household expenses and mine went into savings. It was not my plan to accumulate money for a divorce; there was no need, in fact, for cynical stratagems, because once the troubador had disappeared into the sunset, the husband's wrath subsided, and he would undoubtedly have negotiated a separation on fairer terms than those he had laid down on the wintry beach in Montevideo. I stayed with Michael for nine years, acting with absolute good faith, believing that with luck and dedication we could fulfill the promise of forever-after we had made at the altar. Notwithstanding, the very fiber of our alliance was rent, for reasons that had little to do with my infidelity and much more with old accounts, as I discovered later. In our reconciliations, the two children tipped the scale, as well as half a lifetime invested in our relationship and the calm affection and common interests that united us. I did not take into account my passions, which finally were stronger than those prudent objectives. For a very long time, I felt sincere affection for my husband; I am sorry that the quality of the last years eroded the good memories of our youthful days.