The Sum of Our Days (3 page)

The publication of the book in English came at a bad time for me; I didn't want to see anyone, and the idea of a book tour frightened me. I was still sick with grief, obsessed by what I might have done, but hadn't, to save you. Why hadn't I recognized the incompetence of the medical staff in that hospital in Madrid? Why hadn't I immediately taken you out of there and brought you back home with me to California? Why? Why? I closed myself in the room where you lived your last days, but not even in that sacred place did I find peace. Many years would go by before you became a gentle, constant friend. In those days I felt your absence as a sharp pain that at times brought me to my knees.

I was also worried about Nico because we had just learned that he, too, had porphyria. “Paula didn't die of the condition, but from medical negligence,” he insisted to calm me, but he was uneasy, not so much for himself as for his two children, and the third that was on the way; that ominous heritage might have been passed on to them, we would know that when the children were old enough to undergo the tests. Three months after your death, Celia announced that she was expecting another child, something I had already suspected because of the somnambulist's purple circles beneath her eyes and because I had dreamed it, just as I had dreamed Alejandro and Andrea before they moved in their mother's womb. Three little ones in five years was ill considered, given that she and Nico did not have steady jobs and also that their student visas were about to expire, but we celebrated nonetheless. “Don't worry. Every child comes into the world with a loaf of bread under its arm,” was my mother's comment when she heard. And so it was. That same week we started on the paperwork to obtain residency visas for Nico and his family, thanks to the fact that after five years of waiting I was finally an American citizen and could sponsor them.

Willie and I had met in 1987, three months before you met Ernesto. Someone told you that I had left your father for him, but I promise you, that wasn't how it was. Your father and I were together twenty-nine years; we met when I was fifteen and he was soon to be twenty. When we decided to get a divorce I hadn't the slightest suspicion that a few months later I would stumble upon Willie. We were brought together by literature. He had read my second novel and was curious to meet me when I sped like a comet across northern California. He was more than a little disappointed when he saw me because I am not at all the kind of woman he prefers, but he put up a good front and today he assures me that when he saw me he immediately felt a “spiritual connection.” I don't know what that would be. As for me, I had to act fast, because I was leaping from city to city on a crazed tour. I called you to ask your advice and you answered, screaming with laughter, why on earth was I asking you if I'd already made the decision to throw myself headfirst into the adventure. I told Nico, and he exclaimed with horror: “At your age, Mamá!” I was forty-five, which to him seemed the threshold of the tomb. That was my clue that I had no time to waste, I had to get down to serious business. My urgency erased Willie's justifiable caution. I won't repeat here what you already know and I have told you many times. According to Willie I have fifty versions of how our love began . . . and all of them are true. In summary, I will say only that a few days later I abandoned my former life and, uninvited, turned up at the door of that man with whom I was so infatuated. Nico says that I “abandoned my children,” but you were studying in Virginia and he was already twenty-one years old, a fine young man who was past needing to be coddled by his mother. Once Willie had recovered from his shock at seeing me on his threshold, with my suitcase, we began our lives together with enthusiasm, despite the cultural differences that separated us and the problems of his children, whom neither he nor I knew how to deal with. It seemed to me that Willie's life and family were like a bad comedy in which nothing went as it should. How many times did I call you to ask your council? I think every day. And you always gave me the same answer: “What is the most generous thing you can do in this case, Mamá?” Willie and I were married eight months later. And not at his initiative, but mine. When I realized that the passion of those first moments was turning into love, and that probably I would be staying in California, I decided to bring my children to the United States. If I wanted to be reunited with you and Nico I would have to be a citizen, so I had no choice but to swallow my pride and suggest the idea of marriage to Willie. His reaction was not the explosive joy I perhaps had dared hope for, rather more like terror; several failed love affairs had cooled the coals of romance in his heart, but in the end I twisted his arm. Well, in fact it wasn't that difficult; I gave him until noon the next day to decide and began to pack my suitcase. Fifteen minutes before the time ran out, Willie agreed to marry me, although he never understood my stubborn insistence on living near Nico and you because in the United States children abandon their family home when they finish school and return only for a visit at Christmas or Thanksgiving. Americans are shocked by the Chilean custom of living as a clan all their lives.

“Don't make me choose between my children and you!” I warned on that occasion.

“I wouldn't think of it. But are you sure that they want to live near you?” he asked.

“A mother always has the right to gather her children around her.”

We were married by a man who had obtained his license through the mail by paying twenty-five dollars because though Willie was a lawyer, he couldn't find any of his judge friends to do it. That made me apprehensive. It was the hottest day in the history of Marin County. The ceremony took place in an Italian restaurant that didn't have air-conditioning; the cake melted down to nothing, the woman who was playing the harp fainted, and the guests, streaming sweat, started taking off their clothes. The men ended up without shirts or shoes and we women with no stockings or underwear. I didn't know a soul except your brother and you, my mother, and my American editor, all of whom had come a great distance to be with me. I've always suspected that the marriage was not completely legal, and hope that some day we'll have the enterprise to be married properly.

I don't want to give the impression that I married for convenience alone, since I felt for Willie the heroic lust that tends to make women of my breed lose their heads—that's how you felt about Ernesto—but at the age I was when we met, there was no need to marry were it not for the matter of the visas. In other circumstances we would have lived without the sanction of marriage, as Willie would doubtlessly have preferred, but I had no thought of renouncing my family, no matter how much my reluctant lover resembled Paul Newman. I had left Chile with you and Nico during the military dictatorship of the '70s; together we had found refuge in Venezuela until the end of the '80s; and with the two of you in the '90s, I intended to become a United States immigrant. There was no question in my mind that your brother and you would be much better off with me in California than scattered across the world, but I had failed to take legal delays into account. Five years went by, which were like five centuries, and in the meantime you both had married, Nico to Celia in Venezuela, and you to Ernesto in Spain, but that didn't seem a serious impediment to my plan. After some time went by, I had succeeded in installing Nico and his family two blocks from where we lived, and if death had not snatched you away long before your time, you, too, would have lived nearby.

I left on a book tour, crisscrossing the United States to promote my novel and give the readings and lectures that had been postponed the year before when I was unable to leave your side. Did you feel my presence, Paula? I've asked myself that many times. What were you dreaming that long night in 1992? I'm sure you dreamed because your eyes moved behind your eyelids and at times you awoke frightened. Being in a coma must be like being trapped in the dense fog of a nightmare. According to physicians, you weren't aware of anything, but that was always hard for me to believe.

On the trip I carried a bag of pills for sleeping, pills for imagined pains, pills for drying my tears, and pills for my fear of loneliness. Willie couldn't go with me because he had to work; his office never closed, not even Sundays, and there was always an assortment of miscreants seeking miracles in his waiting room and a hundred cases on his desk. Just at that time, he was deeply involved with the tragedy of a Mexican immigrant who had died when he fell from the fifth floor of a building under construction in San Francisco. His name was Jovito Pacheco, and he was twenty-nine years old. Officially, he didn't exist. The construction company had washed its hands of him, the man's name was not on its payroll. The subcontractor had no insurance, and he, too, had “never seen” Pacheco. Actually, he had recruited him a few days before from his truck, along with twenty other illegals like him, and had driven him to the work site. Jovito Pacheco was a campesino and had never climbed a scaffold, but he had strong shoulders and a strong desire to work. No one told him that he should put on a safety harness. “I'll sue half the world if I have to, but I'm going to get some compensation for that poor family!” I heard Willie say a thousand times. Apparently it wasn't an easy case. He had a faded photograph of the Pacheco family in his office: father, mother, grandmother, three small children, and a babe in arms, all dressed in their Sunday finest and lined up in the bright sun of a dusty plaza in Mexico. The only one wearing shoes was Jovito Pacheco, a dark-skinned Indian with a proud smile and a straw hat in his hand.

On that tour I wore black from head to foot, using the pretext that black is an elegant color; I did not want to admit, even to myself, that I was wearing mourning. “You look like a Chilean widow,” Willie told me, and gave me a fire-truck-red scarf. I don't remember what cities I went to, whom I met, or what I did; none of it mattered anyway, except for my meeting in New York with Ernesto. Your husband was very moved when I told him I was writing a memoir about you. We wept together, and the sum of our grief was unleashed in the form of a hailstorm. “It often hails in winter,” Nico commented when I told him over the phone.

I spent several weeks far from my loved ones, moving as if I were hypnotized. At night I would fall into strange beds, anesthetized with sleeping pills, and in the mornings I shook off my bad dreams with black coffee. I spoke by phone with everyone in California and sent my mother letters by fax that faded with time because they were printed with an ink sensitive to light. Much of what happened during that time was lost. I'm sure it's better so. I counted the hours until I could go back home and hide from the world. I wanted to sleep next to Willie, play with my grandchildren, and console myself making necklaces in my friend Tabra's workshop.

I found that in her pregnancy Celia was losing weight instead of gaining it, that my grandson Alejandro was going to day care with a backpack like a big boy, and that Andrea needed an operation on her eyes. My granddaughter was very small, with a head of curly golden hair and eyes that were completely crossed; her left eye simply went its own way. She was very quiet and didn't romp around; she seemed always to be planning something, and as she sucked a finger she clung to a cotton diaper—her
tuto
—which she seldom let out of her hands. You never liked children, Paula. Once when you came to visit and you had to change Alejandro's diaper, you confessed to me that the more you were with the baby, the less desire you had to be a mother. You never knew Andrea, but the night you died she was sleeping, beside her brother, at the foot of your bed.

I
N
M
AY
W
ILLIE CALLED ME
in New York to tell me that, defying the predictions of science and the law of probability, Jennifer had given birth to a little girl. A double dose of narcotics had precipitated the birth, and Sabrina had been born two months before term. Someone had called an ambulance, which took Jennifer to the nearest emergency room, a private Catholic hospital where they had never seen anyone in that state of intoxication. That saved Sabrina, because had she been born in the public hospital in the poor section of Oakland where Jennifer lived, she would have been just one more of the hundreds of babies born only to die, condemned by drugs in the maternal womb. No one would have noticed her, and the tiny infant would have been lost in the cracks of the overloaded social medical system. Instead, she fell into the skilled hands of the emergency room physician who received her when she was spit out into the world, and who in the process became the first person to be seduced by Sabrina's hypnotic gaze. “This child has little chance to live,” was his diagnosis when he examined her, but he was entangled in the web of her dark eyes and that evening did not go home at the end of his shift. By then a pediatrician had arrived, and the two of them stayed part of the night, keeping watch over the incubator and attempting to figure out how to detox this newborn without harming her more than she already had been, as well as how to feed her, since she couldn't yet swallow. They had no time to worry about the mother; she had fled the hospital as soon as she could get out of the bed.

Jennifer had been struck by a pain that threatened to split her apart, and she didn't remember much of what had happened, only the terrifying shriek of the ambulance's siren, a long corridor with bright lights, and faces shouting orders. She thought she had given birth to a girl, but she couldn't stay to confirm it. They had left her resting in a room, but very soon she had felt symptoms of withdrawal and had begun to shake with nausea; she was bathed in sweat, and her nerves were live electric wires. She had dressed however she could and escaped through a service door. A couple of days later, somewhat recovered from the delivery and tranquilized by drugs, she thought of the infant she had left in the clinic and went back to look for her. But Sabrina was no longer hers. The Child Protective Services had intervened and put a monitor on Sabrina's arm that would activate an alarm if anyone tried to take her from the room.