The Sum of Our Days (21 page)

On one of our trips to New York, an obligatory stop on all the tours for promoting my books, we visited Ernesto and Giulia in their home in New Jersey. When they opened the door, the first thing we saw as we went in was a small altar holding a cross, Ernesto's aikido weapons, a candle, two roses in a vase, and a photograph of you. The house had the same air of whiteness and simplicity as the spaces you had decorated during your brief life, perhaps because Ernesto shared the same tastes. “She protects us,” Giulia told us, gesturing toward your photo as we passed, in a completely natural voice. I realized that this young woman had been intelligent enough to adopt you as a friend instead of competing with your memory, and in that way she had gained the admiration of Ernesto's family, who adored you, and of course ours. Right then I began to plan how I could get the couple settled in California, where they could be part of the tribe. But what tribe? There wasn't much left: Jason in New York, Celia with a new partner, Nico angry and absorbed by the kids, my three grandchildren going and coming with their little clown suitcases, my parents in Chile, and Tabra traveling the unknown corners of the world. Even Sabrina was going to preschool; she had her own life and we seldom saw her. She could now get around with a walker, and had asked for a bigger bicycle for Christmas.

“We're running out of tribe, Willie. We have to do something soon or we'll end up playing bingo in some geriatric retirement community in Florida, like so many American senior citizens who might as well be living on the moon.”

“And what is the alternative?” my husband asked, undoubtedly thinking of death.

“Be a burden to the family, but to do that, we have to add to it,” I informed him.

I was joking, of course, because the worst thing about old age isn't loneliness but being dependent. I don't want to inflict my decrepitude on my son and grandchildren, though it wouldn't be bad to spend my last years near them. I made a list of priorities for my eighties: health, financial resources, family, dog, stories. The first two would allow me to decide how and where to live, the third and fourth would keep me company, and the stories would keep me quiet and entertained and not driving anyone crazy. Willie and I are both terrified of losing our minds, in which case Nico, or even worse, strangers, would have to take charge of us. I think of you, Paula, spending months at the mercy of other people before we could bring you to California. How many times had you been mistreated by a doctor, a nurse, or an employee and I didn't know about it? How many times had you wished in the silence of that year to die soon, and in peace?

The years slip by, stealthily, on tiptoes; they whisper behind our back, making fun of us, then suddenly one day they frighten us when we look in the mirror, they drop us to our knees or drive a dagger into our backs. Old age attacks us every day, but it seems to be most evident at the end of every decade. I have a photo of me at forty-nine, at the launch for
The Infinite Plan
in Spain. It's the picture of a young woman, hands on her hips, defiant, with a red shawl thrown around her shoulders, her fingernails painted, and wearing Tabra's long earrings. It was that same moment, with Antonio Banderas at my side and a glass of champagne in my hands, that they came to tell me that you were in the hospital. I ran out of there, never imagining that your life and my youth would be coming to an end. Another of my photos, a year later, shows a mature woman, hair cut short, eyes sad, clothing dark, no adornment. My body had become a burden; I looked at myself in the mirror and didn't recognize myself. However, it was not only sorrow that suddenly aged me; when I look through the family photo albums I can see that when I turned thirty, and later forty, there was also a drastic change in my appearance. It will be that way in the future, except that instead of noticing at the end of a decade, it will be with every leap year, my mother tells me. She is twenty years ahead of me, leading the way, showing me how it will be at every stage of my life. “Take calcium and hormones so your bones don't get brittle, like mine,” she advises me. She repeatedly tells me to pamper myself, savor the hours because they go very quickly; I should never stop writing, it keeps my mind active, and I should do yoga so I can bend over and put my shoes on by myself. She adds not to work too hard trying to look young because your years show no matter what, however much you try to disguise them, and there's nothing as ridiculous as an old woman done up like Lolita. There are no magic tricks to prevent deterioration, you can only postpone it a little. “After turning fifty, vanity becomes equivalent to suffering,” says this woman with a reputation for being a beauty. But I fear the ugliness of old age, and I plan to fight it as long as I'm healthy, which is why I had cosmetic surgery, since the snake oil that will rejuvenate cells has yet to be discovered. I wasn't born with the splendid raw material of a Sophia Loren, I need all the help I can get. The operation is like detaching muscles and skin, cutting away the excess, and sewing the flesh back to the skull, snug as a ballerina's tights. For weeks I had the sensation that I was wearing a wood mask, but in the end it was worth the pain. A good surgeon can trick time. This is a subject I can't discuss with my Sisters of Disorder, or with Nico, because they believe that old age has its own beauty, including varicose veins and those warts with hairs. You agree with them. You always preferred old people to children.

O
N THE SUBJECT OF PLASTIC SURGERY
, one early Wednesday morning Tabra called, somewhat disturbed, with the news that one of her breasts had disappeared.

“Is this a joke?”

“It went flat. One side is smooth, but the other breast is like new. Nothing hurts. Do you think I should see a doctor?”

I immediately picked her up and took her to the surgeon who'd done the procedure. He assured us it wasn't his doing, the fault lay with the implant manufacturer; sometimes they are defective, they burst, and the fluid spreads through the body. It wasn't anything to worry about, he added, it's a saline solution that over time is absorbed with no danger to your health. “But she can't go around with one breast!” I intervened. That seemed reasonable to him, and a few days later he replaced the punctured implant, although it didn't occur to him to give her a discount on the price of his services. Three weeks later, the second breast deflated. Tabra came to our house wearing a poncho.

“If that bastard doesn't take responsibility for your tits, I'll sue him!” Willie bellowed. “I'll see that he replaces that one for nothing!”

“I really don't want to bother him again, Willie. He might get angry. I went to see a different doctor,” she admitted.

“And does this one know anything about breasts?” I asked.

“This is a very decent man. He goes to Nicaragua every year to operate on children who have a harelip. Free of charge.”

In fact, he did an excellent job, and Tabra will have the firm breasts of a damsel until she dies at the age of one hundred. The women in her family live very long. Within a few months the first surgeon—he of the failed implants—appeared in the news. He had operated on a patient and left her in his office overnight without a nurse, and the woman had suffered an attack and died. My grandson Alejandro figured the cost of each of his aunt Tabra's breasts and suggested that she could charge ten dollars for looking and fifteen for touching, and that way recoup her investment in about three years, one hundred and fifty days. Tabra, however, was doing fine with her jewelry and did not have to take such extreme measures.

I
N VIEW OF HER BOOMING BUSINESS
, Tabra hired a manager full of grandiose ideas. She had created her business from nothing; she had begun selling her pieces in the street, and step by step, with hard work, perseverance, and talent, she had built a model enterprise. I couldn't understand why she needed a man who had never crafted a bracelet in his life, nor worn one. He couldn't even boast of black hair. And she knew much more than he did. This business school graduate had a friend in the computer business, and he began by buying a bank of computers that equaled NASA's; none of Tabra's Asian refugees learned to use them even though several of them spoke four or five languages and were well educated. He then decided that what was needed was a group of consultants to form a board of directors. Those he selected from among his friends, to whom he paid a handsome salary. In less than a year, Tabra's business was staggering along like Willie's office; more money was going out than coming in, and she had to keep an army of employees whose functions no one understood. These expenses coincided with a time in which the economy was taking a dive, minimalist jewelry was in vogue, not Tabra's large ethnic pieces, and the company was badly administered. That was the moment this financial whiz chose to make a change, leaving Tabra drowning in debts. He was hired as a consultant in other businesses, recommended by the very people he'd hired for Tabra's board.

For months Tabra struggled with creditors and pressure from the banks, but in the end she had to resign herself and declare bankruptcy. She lost everything. She sold her idyllic property in the woods for much less than she had paid for it. Her belongings were appropriated, from her van to her factory equipment, and most of the inventory she'd acquired during a lifetime. Months before, Tabra had given me vials of beads and semiprecious stones that I kept in our cellar, waiting for the moment that she would have time to teach me how to make a few necklaces, never suspecting that later they would help her get back to work. Willie and I emptied and painted the room that had been yours and offered it to her so she would at least have a family and a roof over her head. She moved with the little bit of furniture and art she could save. We provided her with a large table, and there she began again, crafting her pieces one by one, as she had thirty years before.

We went out almost every day to walk and talk about life. I never heard her complain or curse the man who'd ruined her. “It's my fault for hiring him, and it will never happen to me again,” was all she said. In the years that I've known Tabra, which add up to a lot, my friend has been sick, disillusioned, poor, and with a thousand problems, but I have seen her despair only once: when her father died. She cried for months over that man she adored and for other losses in the past, and I could not console her. In the period of her financial travails her demeanor never changed. With humor and courage she prepared to travel from the beginning the road she'd traveled in her youth, convinced that if she had done it at twenty she could do it again at fifty. She had the advantage of having a name recognized in several countries; anyone in the ethnic jewelry trade knows who Tabra is. Owners of art galleries come to her from Japan, England, the Caribbean islands, and she has clients who collect her work obsessively; they have more than five hundred pieces and keep buying.

T
ABRA PROVED TO BE AN IDEAL GUEST.
Out of courtesy she ate whatever was on her plate, and without our daily walks she would have ended up round. She was discreet, silent, and good company, and in addition she entertained us with her opinions.

“Whales are misogynists because when the female is in rut the males surround her and rape her,” she told us.

“You can't apply the criteria of Christian morality to cetaceans,” Willie rebutted.

“Morality is morality, Willie.”

“The Yanomamo Indians in the Amazon jungle rape women of other tribes, and they're also polygamous.”

Then Tabra, who has a great respect for primitive peoples, concluded that you can't, in fact, apply the same standards of morality to Yanomamos and to whales. And that isn't even a shadow of the political discussions! Willie is very liberal, but compared to Tabra he belongs among the Taliban.

To entertain herself following another of the sudden disappearances of Alfredo López Lagarto-Emplumado—this one coinciding with her bankruptcy—Tabra returned to the vice of arranging blind dates through ads in the newspapers. One of the candidates presented himself with his shirt open to the belly button and sporting a half dozen gold crosses on his hairy chest. That, more than the fact that he was white and getting bald on the crown of his head, should have been enough to squelch my friend's interest, but he seemed intelligent and she decided to give him a chance. They met at a cafeteria, sat talking for a long while, and discovered they had interests in common, like Che Guevara and other heroic guerrillas. On the second date, the man had buttoned up his shirt, and he also brought her a beautifully wrapped gift. When she opened it, she found a penis of optimistic dimensions carved in wood. Tabra came home in a rage, and threw it into the fireplace, but Willie convinced her that it was an objet d'art, and if she collected gourds that covered male privates in New Guinea, he saw no reason for her to be offended by that present. Even with her doubts, she went out once more with her gallant. On this third date, they ran out of topics related to Latin American guerrillas and sat for some time in silence, until Tabra, to say
something
, told him that she liked tomatoes. “I like
your
tomatoes,” he replied, and grabbed the breast that had cost her so much money. And since she was paralyzed with outrage, he interpreted her stupor as authorization to take the next step, and invited her to an orgy in which the participants shed their clothes and dived headfirst into a pit of living flesh, to frolic like Romans in the times of Nero. Apparently a California custom. Tabra blamed Willie. She said that the penis had not been an artistic gift but a dishonest proposition and an assault on her decency, as she had suspected. There were other suitors. Very entertaining for us, though much less so for her.

Tabra was not the only person to furnish us with surprises. We learned about then that Sally was planning to marry Celia's brother, I suppose to provide him with a visa that would allow him to stay in the States. To convince the Immigration Service that it would be a legitimate marriage, they had a party, with a cake, and they took a photo in which Sally is wearing the famous wedding gown that had languished in my closet for years. I begged Celia to hide the picture because there was no way to explain to the children that their mother's partner was going to marry their uncle, but Celia doesn't like secrets. She says that everything comes out in the long run and there is nothing more dangerous than lies. And that was precisely why in the end the wedding never took place.