The Sum of Our Days (38 page)

Zorro had been greatly exploited; there wasn't much left to tell except his youth and old age. I opted for the former, since no one likes to see his hero in a wheelchair. What was Diego de la Vega like as a boy? Why did he become Zorro? I researched the historical period, the early 1800s, an extraordinary time in the Western world. The democratic ideals of the French Revolution were transforming Europe, and from them were born the wars of independence of colonies across the Americas. The victorious armies of Napoleon invaded several countries, including Spain, where the population rebelled and waged a bloody war that finally drove the French from Spanish soil. It was the era of pirates, secret societies, slave traffic, Gypsies, and pilgrims. In California, by contrast, nothing novelistic was happening; it was a vast rural expanse with cows, Indians, bears, and a few Spanish colonists. I would have to take Diego de la Vega to Europe

My research turned up more than enough material, and the protagonist already existed. My task was to create the adventure. To that purpose, Willie and I visited New Orleans, to follow the trail of the celebrated pirate Jean Lafitte, and we were lucky to know that exuberant city before Hurricane Katrina reduced it to a national shame. In the French Quarter, night and day, we heard brass bands and banjos, the golden voices of the blues, the irresistible call of jazz. People drank and danced to the hot rhythm of the drums in the middle of the street: color, music, the smell of food, and magic. There was enough for a whole novel, but I had to limit Zorro to a brief visit. I try now to remember New Orleans as it was then, with its pagan carnival in which people of every sort blended together in dance; New Orleans, with its venerable residential streets and centuries-old trees—cypresses, elms, magnolias in bloom—the wrought-iron balconies where two hundred years ago the most beautiful women in the world sat to enjoy the cool evening air, the granddaughters of Senegalese queens and the masters of the time, sugar and cotton barons. But the most lasting images of New Orleans are those of the recent hurricane: floods of filthy water and its citizens, always the poorest, struggling against the devastation of nature and the negligence of authorities. They became refugees in their own country, abandoned to their fate while the rest of the nation, stunned by scenes that seem as remote as a monsoon in Bangladesh, wondered whether governmental indifference would have been the same had the injured parties been white.

I fell in love with Zorro. Although I could not recount his erotic feats in the book in the detail I would have liked to, I can imagine them. My favorite sexual fantasy is for that appealing hero to quietly climb to my balcony, make love to me in shadows with the wisdom and patience of Don Juan, undeterred by my cellulite and my years, and disappear at dawn. I lie drowsing between the wrinkled sheets without a hint of who the gallant was who so favored me, because he never took off his mask. No guilt assigned.

S
UMMER CAME WITH ITS USUAL
pandemonium of bees and squirrels. The garden was at its peak, as were Willie's allergies: he will never give up counting the petals of each rose. But that has never stood in the way of his monumental achievements at the grill, something Lori also participates in; she left behind her many years as a vegetarian when Dr. Miki Shima, as much a vegetarian as she, convinced her that she needed more protein. Our heated swimming pool attracted hordes of children and visitors. The days grew longer under the sun, slow, with no clock, like days in the Caribbean. Tabra was the only one who was missing; she was in Bali, where they make some of the pieces she uses in her jewelry. Lagarto-Emplumado went with her for a week, but he had to return to California because of his fear of snakes and the packs of hungry, mangy dogs. It seems that he was opening the door to his room and a little green snake slithered by, brushing his hand. It was one of the most lethal snakes there are. That same night something warm, moist, and furry dropped from the roof, landed on them, and then scurried out of the room. They couldn't turn on the light in time to see it. Tabra said that it must have been an opossum, and she punched her pillow a few times and went back to sleep, while Lagarto spent the rest of the night on guard, with all the lights on and his knife in his hand, with no idea what an opossum might be.

Juliette and her boys spent several weeks with us. Aristotelis is the most polite and considerate member of the tribe. He was born with a slight tendency toward tragedy, like any Greek worth his salt, and from the time he was a boy had taken on the role of being his mother's and his brother's protector. Contact with the other children had lightened his load, and he became a comedian. I think he will be an actor, for in addition to being dramatic and handsome, he gets all the leads in school plays. Achilleas is still a little angel, prodigal with smiles and kisses; we spoil him outrageously. He swims like an eel and can spend twelve hours in the water. We pull him out wrinkled and sunburned and make him go pee in the bathroom. I don't like to think what all must be in that water. “Don't worry, ma'am,” I was reassured by the pool maintenance man when I shared my doubts with him. “The chlorine content is so high that you could have a corpse in there and still have no problem.”

The kids changed day by day. Willie had always said that Andrea had the same features Alejandro has, but just a little askew, and that one day they would settle into place. Apparently that's what was happening, though she paid no attention because she lives in her own world, dreaming, with her nose in her books, lost in impossible adventures. Nicole has turned out to be very smart, an excellent student, as well as sociable, friendly, and a flirt, the only one in the matriarchal tribe with that quality; none of the rest of us is dying to seduce anyone. With her esthetic instinct, she can with one appraising look destroy any woman's pleasure in what she's wearing—with the exception of Andrea, who is indifferent to fashion and is always in some costume or other, her style since early childhood. For months we watched Nicole going about carrying a mysterious black case, and we prodded her so hard that finally one day she showed us what was inside. It was a violin, which she had borrowed at school because she wanted to join the orchestra. She placed it to her shoulder, took up the bow, closed her eyes, and left us awestruck with a short and impeccably performed concert of melodies we had never heard her practice. Alejandro's skeleton shot upward with a great spurt, just in time, because I was planning to have the doctor give him growth hormones, the way they do cows, so he wouldn't end up a shrimp. I was afraid that he was the only one of my descendants to inherit my undesirable genes, but that year, to our relief, he had saved himself. Although he already had the shadow of a mustache, he was still behaving like a madcap, making faces in mirrors and bothering everyone with inopportune jokes, determined to avoid at any cost the anguish of growing up and taking care of himself. He had announced that he planned to live with his parents, one foot in each house, until he was married or was kicked out. “Hurry and grow up before we lose patience,” we often warned him, tired of his clownish pranks. The twins hit the pool in two plastic floating turtles, observed from afar by Olivia, who never lost hope they would drown. Of all the fears that dog had when she came into our family, only two remain: umbrellas and the twins. All these little ones and the friends who often came with them ended the summer as tan as Africans, their hair turned green from the chemicals in the pool that are so lethal they burned the grass. Anywhere the swimmers set their wet feet, no grass would grow.

My grandchildren were at an age to discover love, all of them except Achilleas, that is, who was still at the stage of asking his mother to marry him. The kids hid in the nooks and crannies of the House of the Spirits and played in the dark. Their conversations in the pool often made their parents uneasy.

“Don't you know that you've broken my heart?” Aristotelis asked, breathing heavily through his mask.

“I don't love Eric anymore. I can come back to you, if you like,” Nicole proposed between dives.

“I don't know, I have to think about it. I can't go on suffering like this.”

“Well, think quick, otherwise I'll call Peter.”

“If you don't love me, I might as well just kill myself today!”

“Okay. But don't do it in the pool. Willie will have a fit.”

T
HAT SUMMER OF
2005 I finished writing
Inés of My Soul
and sent the manuscript off to Carmen Balcells with a big sigh of relief because it had been such a big project, and then, with Nico, Lori, and the children, we went on safari to Kenya. For several weeks we camped among the Samburu and Masai to watch the migration of the wildebeests, millions of them with the look of black cows racing terror-stricken across the Serengeti to Masai-Mara, a time of orgy for other animals that come to feast on the laggards. In one week nearly a million calves are born in this stampede. From fragile little airplanes we saw the migration like a gigantic shadow spreading across the African plains below. Lori had conceived the plan to take the children every year to some unforgettable place that would pique their curiosity and demonstrate that despite distances people are alike everywhere. The similarities that unite us are much greater than the differences that separate us. The year before we had gone to the Galapagos Islands, where the children swam with sea lions, turtles, and manta rays; Nico swam for hours out in open water behind sharks and whales as Lori and I ran from pillar to post looking for a boat we could use to rescue him from a sure death. By the time we found one, Nico was already swimming back with strong, steady strokes. We had hauled to Kenya Willie's cases of photographic equipment, his tripods, and the gigantic lens that never once captured an African beast because it was too clumsy to handle. Nicole took the best picture of the trip with a disposable camera: the eighteen-inch, blue-tongued kiss a giraffe planted on my face. Willie's heavy lens was eventually left in the tent while he used other more modest ones to immortalize the always quick smile of the Africans; their dusty markets; the five-year-old children tending the family herd in the middle of nowhere at three hours' march from the nearest village; the lion cubs and slim giraffes. In an open jeep we drove among the herds of elephants and buffalo, to muddy rivers where whole families of hippopotamuses were disporting themselves, and followed the wildebeests in their inexplicable race.

One of our guides, Lidilia, a pleasant Samburu with snow-white teeth and three long feathers crowning the bead adornment he wore on his head, became Alejandro's friend. Lidilia proposed to Alejandro that he stay there with him and be circumcised by a tribal witch doctor as the first step in his rite of passage. After that he would have to spend a month alone in the wild, hunting with a lance. If he succeeded in killing a lion, he could choose the most desirable girl in the village, and his name would be recorded along with those of other great warriors. My grandson, terrified, counted the days till he could get back to California. We called on Lidilia to translate when a warrior of some years wanted to buy Andrea as a wife. He offered us several cows for her, and since we refused, he added some sheep. Nicole telepathically communicated with the guides and the animals, and she has a notable memory for details, so she kept us informed: elephants change a complete set of teeth every ten years until they are sixty, at which time no new ones come in and they are condemned to die of hunger; a male giraffe measures nineteen and a half feet in height, his heart weighs thirteen pounds, and he eats a hundred and thirty-two pounds of leaves every day; among antelopes, the alpha male must defend his harem from his rivals and mate with the females, which leaves him very little time to eat, so he grows weak and another male bests him in combat and drives him off. The position of alpha male lasts about ten days. By then Nicole knew what it was to mate. Even though I am not made for the rustic life, and nothing horrifies me so much as not having an available mirror, I couldn't complain about the comfort of the trip. The tents were deluxe, and thanks to Lori, who arranges things to the last detail, we had hot water bottles in our beds, miner's lamps so we could read on dark nights, lotions to fend off mosquitoes, an antidote for snakebite, and every afternoon we had English tea served in a porcelain teapot as we watched a pair of crocodiles devour a forsaken gazelle.

B
ACK IN
C
ALIFORNIA
, before summer ended, Alejandro had his rite of passage, though it was somewhat different from the one the Samburu Lidilia had proposed. He signed on for a program Lori and Nico discovered on the Internet, and once the four parents were convinced that it was not a ploy of some pedophiles and sodomites, they allowed him to go. Just as Lidilia had explained, every male should go through a ceremony marking his passage from child to adult. In lieu of such a tradition, several instructors had organized a three-day retreat in the woods in which boys would reinforce the concepts of respect, honor, courage, responsibility, the obligation to protect the weak, and other basic norms that in our culture tend to be relegated to medieval chivalric novels. Alejandro was the youngest of the group. The night he left I had a terrifying dream: my grandson was sitting by a bonfire among a crew of hungry orphans shivering with cold—a scene from a Dickens tale. I implored Nico to go get his son before something awful happened in these sinister woods where he was camping with a gang of strangers, but he paid no attention to me. At the end of the three days he went to get him, and they got back in time for Sunday dinner at the family table. We'd cooked beans, using a Chilean recipe, and the house smelled of corn and sweet basil.

The whole family was waiting for the initiate, who arrived filthy and hungry. Alejandro, who for years had said that he didn't want to grow up, seemed older. I hugged him with a grandmother's frenetic love, told him my dream, and it turned out that his experience had not been exactly like that, although there were a few orphans and a bonfire. There were also some delinquents who, according to my grandson, “were good kids who had done some stupid things because they didn't have any family.” He told us that they'd sat in a circle around the fire, and each one told what caused him pain. I proposed that we do the same thing, since we were in a tribal circle, and one by one we gave our answer to the question posed to Alejandro. Willie said that he was anguished over the situation of his children: Jennifer, lost to us, and his two sons on drugs; I spoke of missing you; Lori, of her infertility . . . and all of us in turn exposed our deepest sorrow.