The Sum of Our Days (12 page)

“I've had a miserable day,” she confessed, sobbing.

“Wasn't there even one good minute, Andrea?”

“Yes. A girl fell and broke two teeth.”

“But my God, Andrea, what's good about that!”

“It wasn't me.”

P
aula
WAS PUBLISHED IN
S
PAIN
with a cover photo Willie had taken. In it you are smiling and full of life, and your dark hair is covering you like a mantle. Soon hundreds of letters began pouring in; we had to store them in boxes in the office and Celia couldn't find enough time to sort and answer them. For years I had received letters from enthusiastic readers, although I admit that not all of them were motivated by appreciation for my books. Some were requests, like the one from the author of sixteen unpublished novels who gallantly offered to work with me and share royalties fifty-fifty, and another came from a couple of Chileans in Sweden who asked me to buy them tickets back to Chile; after all, it was my uncle Salvador Allende's fault that they'd had to leave the country. Even so, nothing could compare with the avalanche of correspondence that flooded in with the publication of
Paula.
I tried to answer every one, even if with only a couple of lines scrawled across a card, because each letter had been written from the heart and sent out blind, some to my publishers, others to my agent, and many through friends and bookstores. I spent part of the night making cards with the Japanese papers Miki Shima gave me and little pieces of silver and semiprecious stones from Tabra. The letters that came were so heartfelt that years later, when the book had been translated into several languages, some European publishers decided to publish a selection of that correspondence. Sometimes parents who had lost children wrote me, but most were young people who identified with you, including girls who wanted to meet Ernesto, in love with the widower without knowing him. Tall, well built, dark, and tragic, he attracted women. I don't think he wanted for consolation; he isn't a saint, and celibacy isn't his forte, as he himself has told me, and as you always knew. Ernesto always swears that if he hadn't fallen in love with you, he would have entered seminary and become a priest, but I doubt it. He needs a woman at his side.

Occupied with the letters, I had no time for writing, and even my exchange with my mother slowed down. Instead of the daily messages that had kept us united for decades, we talked by phone or sent brief faxes, avoiding confidences that might be exposed to a stranger's curiosity. Our correspondence during that period is very boring. Nothing like the mail, the good old snail mail with its privacy. Nothing like the pleasure of waiting for the mailman, opening the envelope, taking out the pages my mother had folded, and reading the then two-weeks-old news. If it was bad, it didn't matter any longer, and if it was good, it was never too late to celebrate.

Among the letters came one from a young nurse who had attended you in the intensive care unit in the hospital in Madrid. Celia was the one who saw it first. She brought it to me, pale as wax, and we read it together. The nurse said that after reading the book she had felt as if it was her duty to tell me what had happened. Medical incompetence and a power failure that interrupted the oxygen had caused severe brain damage. Many people knew what had happened but tried to hide it, perhaps with the hope that you would die and they would avoid an investigation. For months, the nurses had watched me waiting all day long in the corridor of lost steps, and they had often wanted to tell me the truth but didn't dare face the consequences. The letter left me reeling for days. “Don't think about it, daughter, there's nothing we can do about it now,” my mother wrote when I told her. “That was Paula's fate. Now her spirit is free. Your daughter will never have to suffer the troubles life always visits upon us.” Right. And following that reasoning, we would all be better off dead, I thought.

That memoir brought more interest from the public and the press than all my previous books combined. I made lots of trips, gave hundreds of interviews, dozens of readings and lectures, and signed thousands of books. One woman wanted me to inscribe nine books for her, one for each of her friends who had lost a child, and one for her. Her daughter had been left a paraplegic in an automobile accident, and as soon as she could manage a wheelchair, she drove it into a swimming pool. Pain and more pain. By comparison, mine was bearable; at least I had been able to take care of you to the end.

T
HE MOVIE BASED ON MY FIRST NOVEL
,
The House of the Spirits
, was announced with great fanfare because it had a formidable cast of the great stars of the day: Meryl Streep, Jeremy Irons, Glenn Close, Vanessa Redgrave, Winona Ryder, and, my favorite, Antonio Banderas. Now, several years later, when I think of them, those actors seem as far away in time as the stars of the silent screen. Time is implacable. When my first novel was published, several members of my mother's family were upset with me, some because our political ideas are diametrically opposed, and some who believed I had betrayed family secrets. “Dirty linen is washed at home” is Chile's watchword. To write that book I had used my grandparents, some uncles, and other bizarre characters in my large Chilean tribe as models, as well as political happenings of the time and anecdotes I'd listened to my grandfather tell for years, but I'd never imagined that some people would take it literally. Mine is a twisted and exaggerated version of events. My grandmother could never move a billiard table with the power of her mind, like Clara del Valle, nor was my grandfather a rapist and murderer, like Esteban Trueba in the novel. For many years those relatives didn't speak to me, or at best avoided me. I thought that the film would be like throwing salt in the wound, but it was just the opposite. The power of film is so enormous that the movie became the official history of my family, and I have found that now photographs of Meryl Streep and Jeremy Irons have replaced those of my grandparents. It was rumored that the film would sweep the Academy Awards in Hollywood, but before it was even shown negative articles began to appear recounting how Hispanic actors had not been given the chance to work in a film with a Latin American theme. In the early days, they wrote, when a black actor was needed on the screen they painted a white with shoe polish, and now that a Latino was required, they pasted a mustache on a white man. The movie was filmed in Europe by a Danish director, with German money, Anglo-Saxon actors, and an English sound track. There was little about it that was Chilean, but to me it seemed better than the book and I was sorry that bad will was building in advance. Months earlier, the director, Bille August, had invited Willie and me to the filming in Copenhagen. The exteriors were done on an estate in Portugal, which later became a tourist attraction, and the interiors in a house built on a studio set in Denmark. The furniture and decor were rented from antique stores in London. I recall that there was a little enamel box I wanted to slip into in my pocket as a souvenir, but each object had a coded number, and someone was charged with keeping track of them. Then I asked for the head of Vanessa Redgrave, but they didn't give it to me. I'm referring to a wax model that was supposed to appear in a scene in a hat shop but was omitted for fear of causing hilarity in the audience rather than the desired fright. I wonder what ever became of that head? Perhaps Vanessa has it on her night table, to remind her of just how tenuous life is. I would have used it for years to break the ice in conversations, and to scare my grandchildren. In the cellar I kept hidden skulls, pirate maps, and treasure trunks; nothing better than a childhood of terror to stimulate the imagination.

For a week, Willie and I rubbed elbows with celebrities, and lived as important people in this world live. Each star had a court of assistants, makeup artists, hairdressers, masseuses, and cooks. Meryl Streep, beautiful and remote, came and went with her children and their respective nannies and tutors. One of her young daughters with the same talent and ethereal appearance as her mother acted in the film. Glenn Close had several dogs, and assistants to look after the dogs. She had read my book very carefully to prepare for the part of Férula, the spinster, and we spent pleasant hours chatting. She asked me whether the relationship between Férula and Clara was lesbian, and I didn't know what to answer as I was surprised by that reading. I think that in the early years of the twentieth century in Chile, a time in which part of the novel is set, there were loving relations among women that never reached a sexual level because of the societal and religious impediments of the time. In real life Jeremy Irons was not precisely the frosty English aristocrat we admire on the screen; he could have been a likable taxi driver in the suburbs of London. He had a dark sense of humor, fingers stained with nicotine, and was proud of his inexhaustible repertoire of wild stories, such as one in which he loses his dog in the London Underground, and for one entire morning dog and master cross paths going in opposite directions, leaping out of trains every time they catch sight of each other in some station. I don't know why, but for the film they put something like a bit in his mouth that distorted his face and his voice. Vanessa Redgrave, tall, patrician, luminous, with eyes of cobalt blue, showed up sans makeup and with a babushka around her head, none of which diminished one whit the formidable impact of her presence. Winona Ryder I met later; she was a kind of pretty little boy whose mother had whacked his hair with her scissors; to me she seemed enchanting, but among the technical crew she had a reputation for being spoiled and capricious. I've heard that later that damaged a career that could have been brilliant. As for Antonio Banderas, I had seen him once or twice before and was already in love with him, one of those shy, ridiculous schoolgirl crushes adolescents have on screen stars—no matter that if you stretched the years a little he could be my son. There was always a line of half-frozen fans at the main door of the hotel, feet buried in the snow, hoping some star would come by and they could ask for an autograph, but the actors all used a service door, and fans had to be content with my signature. “Who's she?” I heard one ask in English, pointing to me. “Can't you see? She's Meryl Streep,” another answered.

Just when we'd become accustomed to living like royalty, our vacation ended. We went home and immediately we passed into absolute anonymity; if we called any of our famous “friends,” we had to spell our names. The world premiere wasn't held in Hollywood but in Munich—the producers were German—where we were greeted by a throng of tall people and a crushing bombardment of cameras and lights. Everyone was wearing black, and I, in the same color but only half their height, disappeared below belt-buckle level. I appear in only one press photo, and I look like a terrified mouse, black on black, with Willie's amputated hand on one shoulder.

I
AM GOING TO TELL YOU SOMETHING NOW
that happened a long time after the movie version of
The House of the Spirits
came out, or I'll never tell it at all; it is in reference to fame and that's something that never interested you, Paula. I was asked to carry the Olympic flag in the Winter Games in Italy, in February of 2006. It took only four minutes for me to be catapulted into fame. Now people recognize me in the street, and at last my grandchildren boast of having me for a grandmother.

One day Nicoletta Pavarotti called me; she is the wife of the tenor, a charming woman thirty-four years younger than her famous husband, and she told me that I had been selected as one of the eight persons who would carry a flag in the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games. I replied that there was surely some error because I am the opposite of an athlete, and in truth, I wasn't sure I could make it around the stadium without a walker. She explained that it was a great honor; the candidates had been rigorously screened, and their lives, their ideas, and their work had been thoroughly investigated. In addition, it would be the first time that only women would carry the flag: three female gold medalists and five women representing continents. I represented Latin America. My first question, naturally, was what I would wear. She replied that we would all be dressed in a uniform, and she asked for my measurements, which sent me into a panic: I could see myself in a quilted outfit in some repulsive pastel color, fat as an ad for Michelin tires.

“May I wear high heels?” I asked, and heard a sigh from the other end of the line.

In mid-February Willie and I, with the rest of the family, arrived in Turin, a beautiful city on an international scale, but not to Italians, who are not impressed even by Venice or Florence. Enthusiastic crowds cheered as the Olympic torch was carried through the streets, or as any of eighty competing teams passed by, each in their national colors. Those young people were the best athletes in the world; they had trained since they were three or four years old and had sacrificed everything to participate in the Olympiad. They all deserved to win, but there is an unpredictable element of luck involved: one flake of snow, one centimeter of ice or the wind speed can determine the result of a race. Nonetheless, what weighs heaviest, more than training or luck, is heart: only the most valiant and determined heart will take home the gold medal. Passion, that is the winner's secret. The streets of Turin were covered with posters proclaiming the motto of the Olympiad: “Passion Lives Here.” And that is my greatest wish, to live passionately to the very end.

In the stadium, I met the other flag bearers: three athletes and the actresses Susan Sarandon and Sophia Loren, as well as two activists, the Nobel Peace laureate Wangari Maathai from Kenya and Somaly Mam, who campaigns against the sexual traffic of children in Cambodia. I was also given my uniform. It wasn't the style of clothing I normally wear but it wasn't as horrible as I had imagined: sweater, skirt, and coat of winter white wool, boots and gloves of the same color, all bearing an expensive designer's logo. Not that bad, to tell the truth. I looked like a refrigerator, but the others did, too, except for Sophia Loren, tall, imposing, full-breasted, and sensual, and splendid in all her seventy-some years. I don't know how she keeps herself slim, because during the long hours we were waiting in the wings, she never stopped snacking on carbohydrates: cookies, nuts, bananas, chocolates. And I don't know how she can be so tanned and not have wrinkles. Sophia is from another era, very different from today's models and actresses, who look like skeletons with false breasts. Her beauty is legendary, and apparently indestructible. Earlier I had heard her say during a television program that the secret for beauty was to maintain good posture and not “make old woman noises,” no moaning, grunting, coughing, puffing, talking to yourself, or breaking wind, though you have nothing to worry about, daughter, you will always be twenty-eight years old. On the other hand I, who am hopelessly vain, have tried to follow that advice in every detail, since I cannot imitate Sophia in any other way.