The Sum of Our Days (8 page)

Nico and Celia enrolled in an intensive English course, and the happy task of taking care of my grandson fell to me. As I wrote, Alejandro crawled around on the floor, kept captive by the dog gate we installed at the door. If he got tired, he would stick his pacifier in his mouth, drag over his pillow, and fall asleep at my feet. When it was time to eat, he tugged a few times on my skirt to pull me from the trance I tend to sink into when I write, and I would distractedly reach for his bottle and he would drink it without a sound. Once he unplugged the cable of my computer and I lost forty-eight pages of my new book, but instead of throttling him, as I would have any other mortal, I ate him up with kisses. The pages weren't good anyway.

My happiness was nearly complete; you were all that was lacking. In 1991 you had recently married Ernesto and were living in Spain, but you already had plans to move to California, where we would all be together. On December 6 of that same year, Paula, you went to the hospital with a stomachache and a cold too long ignored. You don't know what happened there. Hours later you were in intensive care in a coma, and five eternal months would go by before you were handed over to me in a vegetative state, with severe brain damage. You were breathing; that was your only sign of life. You were paralyzed and your eyes were black pools that no longer reflected light, and in the months that followed, you changed so much that it was difficult to recognize you. With the help of Ernesto, who refused to admit that in reality he was already a widower, we brought you to my home in California on a harrowing flight across the Atlantic and the continental United States. Then Ernesto had to leave you with me and go back to his job. I never imagined that the dream of having my daughter close to me would come true in such tragic fashion. Celia was near the time of giving birth to Andrea. I remember her reaction when they lowered you from the ambulance on a stretcher. She clung to Alejandro, retreated, trembling, her eyes wide with shock, as Nico paled and took a step forward; he leaned down to give you a kiss, as his tears rained down on you. For you this world ended on December 6, 1992, exactly one year after you entered the hospital in Madrid. Days later, when we scattered your ashes in a nearby forest, Celia and Nico informed me that they planned to have another child. Nicole was born ten months later.

W
ILLIE REALIZED WITH DESPERATION
that Jennifer was gradually committing suicide. An astrologer had told him that his daughter was “in the house of death.” According to Fu, there are souls who unconsciously try to achieve divine ecstasy by way of the expeditious path of drugs; maybe Jennifer needed to escape the gross reality of this world. Willie believes that he has transmitted bad genes to his children. His great-great-grandfather had arrived in Australia with shackles on his legs, covered with pustules and lice, one among a hundred and sixty thousand wretches the English sent to that land to serve out their sentences. The youngest of the convicts, sentenced for stealing bread, was nine years old, and the eldest was an old lady of eighty-two who'd been accused of stealing two pounds of cheese and who hanged herself a few days after her ship docked. Willie's ancestor, accused of who knows what rubbish, had not been hanged because he was a knife-sharpener. In those years, having a trade or knowing how to read meant that instead of being hanged you were sent to Australia. The man was among the strong ones who survived, thanks to his ability to absorb suffering and alcohol, an aptitude he passed on to nearly all his descendants. Very little is known about Willie's grandfather, but his father died of cirrhosis. Willie himself spent decades of his life without tasting a drop of alcohol because it triggers his allergies, but if he started, the amount gradually crept up. I have never seen Willie drunk. Before he reaches that point, he chokes as if he had swallowed a fistful of hair and is rendered inoperative by a ferocious headache; we both know, however, that if it weren't for those blessed allergies, he would have ended up like his father. Only now, after reaching sixty, has he learned to limit himself to a single glass of white wine and feel satisfied. It is said that we cannot duck our heritage, and his three children—all drug addicts—seem to confirm that. They do not have the same mother, but in the family lines of his first and second wives there is also addiction, handed down from their grandfathers. The only child who has never waged war against Willie is Jason, his second wife's son by another man, whom he loves as if he were his own. “Jason doesn't have my blood; that's why he's normal,” Willie tends to comment in the tone of someone reporting a natural event like the tides or the migration of wild ducks.

When I met him, Jason was a boy of eighteen, with a lot of talent for writing but lacking discipline, though I was sure that sooner or later he would acquire it. That's what it takes to deal with the rigors of life. He planned to be a writer some day, but in the meantime he was contemplating his navel. He would write two or three lines and come running to ask me if maybe there was potential there for a story, but it never went any further than that. I myself pushed him out of the house to go study at a college in southern California, where he graduated with honors, and when he returned to live with us he brought his girlfriend, Sally. Jason's biological father had a volatile temperament that tended to explode with unpredictable consequences. When Jason was only a few weeks old, there was an accident that was never clarified. His father said that the baby had fallen off the changing table, but his mother and the physicians suspected that he had been struck on the head, denting his skull. They had to operate, and by some miracle the baby came out sound—after spending a lot of time in the hospital while his parents were getting a divorce. From the hospital he was passed to the care of the state; then his mother took him to live with an aunt and uncle who according to Jason were true saints, and finally she brought him to California. When he was three, the boy went to live with his father because it seems that the building where his mother lived did not accept children. What kind of building would that be? When she married Willie, she reclaimed the boy. Later, when they were divorced, the child picked up his belongings and without hesitation went to live with Willie. In the meantime, his biological father made sporadic appearances, and on occasion again mistreated him—until Jason was old enough, and had the physical presence to defend himself. One night of heavy drinking and recriminations in his father's cabin in the mountains, where they'd gone for a few days' vacation, the man starting hitting Jason, who had promised himself he would never again allow himself to be victimized, and he responded with all the fear and rage that had accumulated for years, and used his father's face for a punching bag. Horrified, he drove several hours through a stormy night to get home; his shirt was stained with blood and he was nearly sick with guilt. Willie congratulated him; it was time to lay out the ground rules, he said. That distressing incident established an accord of respect between father and son. The violence was never repeated, and now they have a good relationship.

T
HAT YEAR OF MOURNING
, of too much work, of financial difficulties and problems with my stepchildren, was undermining the foundation of my relationship with Willie. There was too much chaos in our lives. I wasn't adapting to the United States. I felt that my heart was growing cold, that it wasn't worth the effort to keep on rowing against the current; the energy needed to keep us afloat was disproportionate. I thought about leaving, running away, taking Nico and his family to Chile, where at last, after sixteen years of military dictatorship, democracy had been restored, and where my parents lived. Get a divorce, that's what I have to do, I would mutter under my breath, but I must have said it aloud more than once because Willie cocked an ear when he heard the word
divorce.
He had gone that route twice before and was determined there would not be a third time, and he pressed me to go with him to see a counselor. For years I had made fun of Tabra's therapist, a wild-haired alcoholic whose counsel consisted of exactly the same package of platitudes I would have given without charge. In my opinion, therapy was a mania of North Americans, a very spoiled people unable to tolerate the normal difficulties of life. When I was young, my grandfather had instilled in me the stoic notion that life is hard, and when facing a problem there is nothing to do but grit our teeth and keep going. Happiness is pure kitsch; we come into the world to suffer and learn. Fortunately, the hedonism of Venezuela shook my belief in my grandfather's medieval precepts and gave me permission to enjoy myself without feeling guilty. At the time of my youth in Chile, no one visited a therapist—except for certifiable lunatics and Argentine tourists—so I strongly resisted Willie's suggestion, but he was so persistent that finally I gave in and went with him. More accurately, he took my arm and dragged me there.

The psychologist turned out to look like a monk with a shaved skull, who drank green tea and sat through most of the session with his eyes closed. In Marin County, at any time of day, you see men riding bicycles, jogging in shorts, or savoring a cappuccino at little sidewalk tables. “Don't these people work?” I once asked Willie. “They're all therapists,” he'd answered. Which may be why I felt so skeptical when we met with Bald Head, who was really very wise, as I soon found out. His office was a bare room painted a kind of pea green and decorated with a large wall hanging—a mandala, I think they're called. Willie and I sat cross-legged on cushions on the floor while the monk sipped his Japanese tea like a little bird. We began talking and soon a whole avalanche was unleashed. Willie and I each tried to get our stories in first, to tell him about what had happened with you, about the terrifying life Jennifer lived, about Sabrina's fragility and a thousand other problems, and my desire to say, The hell with it, and disappear. The tea-sipper listened without interrupting, and when only a few minutes were left to end the session, he opened his heavy lidded eyes and looked at us with an expression of genuine sorrow. “What sadness there is in your lives!” he murmured. Sadness? Actually, that hadn't occurred to either of us. All the air blew out of our rage in an instant, and deep in our bones we felt a grief as vast as the Pacific Ocean, a pain we hadn't wanted to admit out of pure and simple pride. Willie took my hand, pulled me to his cushion, and we hugged each other tight. For the first time, we admitted that our hearts were broken. It was the beginning of our reconciliation.

“I am going to suggest that you do not mention the word
divorce
for an entire week. Can you do that?” the therapist asked.

“Yes,” we answered simultaneously.

“And could you do it for two weeks?”

“Three, if you want,” I said.

That was our agreement. For three weeks we focused on solving everyday emergencies, and never spoke the forbidden word. We were living in a state of crisis, but the allotted time went by, then a month, then two, and the truth is that we never again spoke of divorce. We went back to the nightly dance that from the beginning had been so natural: sleeping so tightly embraced that if one turns the other adjusts, and if one rolls away, the other wakes. Between countless cups of green tea, the shaved-head psychologist led us by the hand over the rough terrain of those years. He counseled me to “stay in my trench” and not interfere in the problems with Willie's children, who in truth were the principal cause of our fights. So Willie gives a new car to his son, who has recently been expelled from school and is floating around in a cloud of LSD and marijuana? Not my problem. And he crashes it against a tree two weeks later? I stay in my trench. Willie buys him a second car, which he also destroys? I bite my tongue. Then his father rewards him with a van and explains to me that it is a safer, stronger vehicle. “Of course. That way when he runs over someone, at least he won't leave him wounded, he'll kill him outright,” I reply with glacial calm. I lock myself in the bathroom, take an icy shower, and recite all the curse words in my Spanish repertoire, then spend a few hours making necklaces in Tabra's workshop.

The therapy was very helpful. Thanks to it and my writing, I survived an assortment of trials, though I did not always come out the winner, and my love for Willie was saved. Fortunately, though, the family melodrama continued, because if not, what the devil would I write about?

J
ENNIFER WAS ALLOWED TO SEE
S
ABRINA
in supervised visits every two weeks, and with every one I could see how Willie's daughter's health was deteriorating. She looked worse every time I saw her, as I wrote my mother and my friend Pía. In Chile they both had made donations to Padre Hurtado's foundation; he is the only Chilean saint that even Communists venerate because he can work miracles, and they were praying for Jennifer to be cured of her addictions. In truth, only divine intervention could help her.

And here I want to pause briefly to introduce Pía, my forever friend, the woman who is like my Chilean sister, whose loyalty has never wavered, not even when we were separated by my exile. Pía comes from a very conservative Catholic family that celebrated the military coup of 1973 with champagne, but I know that on at least two occasions she hid victims of the dictatorship in her house. It is rare that we speak about politics, for we don't want anything to come between us. After I took my small family to Venezuela, we kept in touch by letter, and now we visit each other in Chile and in California, where she likes to come for vacations, and so we have kept alive a friendship that by now has a diamantine clarity. We love each other unconditionally and when we're together we create four-handed paintings and giggle like schoolgirls. Do you remember that Pía and I used to joke about how one day we would be two merry widows and would live together in a garret, gossiping and making our crafts? Well, Paula, we don't talk about that anymore because Gerardo, her husband, the kindest and most guileless man in this world, died one morning like any other when he was supervising work in one of his fields. He sighed, bowed his head, and went to the other world without a good-bye. Pía can't be consoled even though she is surrounded by her clan: four children, five grandchildren, and scores of relatives and friends with whom she is constantly in touch, as is the custom in Chile. She devotes herself to charities of every sort, takes care of her family, and works with her oils and brushes in her free time. In moments of sadness, when she can't stop crying over Gerardo, she closes her door and creates small works of art with scraps of cloth, including icons embroidered with beads and precious stones that look as if they'd come from the treasure troves of ancient Constantinople. This Pía who loved you so much had a tiny chapel built in her garden and planted a rose in your memory. There beside that luxuriant rosebush she talks with Gerardo and you, and often prays for Willie's children and for his granddaughter.