The Sum of Our Days (26 page)

Sabrina, who was already five years old, danced the entire night, clinging to various people, while her vegetarian mothers took advantage of the occasion to try, surreptitiously, the lamb and pork chops. Alejandro, in a grave-digger suit and tie, presented the rings, accompanied by Andrea and Nicole, dressed like princesses in amber satin that contrasted with the bride's long purple gown. Lori was radiant. Nico was very full of himself in black and a Mao shirt, with his hair tied back at the nape of his neck and looking more than ever a sixteenth-century Florentine nobleman. It was an ending I will never be able to use for my novels: they got married and lived happily ever after. That's what I told Willie as he danced to the swing band and I tried to follow. The man leads, as that Scandinavian always said.

“I can die right here of a timely heart attack because my labor in this world is now complete: I have placed my son,” I told him.

“Don't even think of it; it's now that they're going to need you,” he replied.

Toward the end of the evening, when the guests were beginning to leave, I crawled under a long cloth-covered table with a dozen children drunk on sugar and revved up by the music, their clothes in tatters from all the running around. The word had spread among them that I knew all the stories there were; all they had to do was ask for one. Sabrina wanted the story to be about a mermaid. I told them about the tiny siren who fell into a whisky glass and was drunk by Willie without his realizing. The description of the voyage of the unfortunate little siren through their grandfather's organs, the vicissitudes of swimming through his digestive system, where she encountered every manner of obstacle and repugnant hazard, until she was floating in his urine and emptied into a sewer and from there into San Francisco Bay, left them speechless. The next day, Nicole, wild-eyed, came to tell me she hadn't liked the story of the little siren at all.

“Is it a true story?” she asked.

“Not everything is true, but then not everything is false either.”

“How much is false and how much is true?”

“I don't know, Nicole. The essence is true, and in my work as a storyteller that's all that matters.”

“There aren't any mermaids, so everything in your story is a lie.”

“And how do you know that the siren wasn't a bacterium, for example.”

“A mermaid is a mermaid, and a bacterium is a bacterium,” she replied, indignant.

T
ONG ACCEPTED A SOCIAL INVITATION
for the first time in the thirty years he'd worked as bookkeeper in Willie's office. We had resigned ourselves to not inviting him, since he never came, but Nico and Lori's wedding was an important event, even for a man as introverted as he. “Is obligation to go?” he asked. Lori said yes it was, something no one had dared tell him before. He came alone; finally his wife had asked for the divorce, after years and years of sleeping in the same bed without speaking. I thought that in view of the success I'd had with Nico and Lori, I could also look for a girlfriend for Tong, but he informed me that he wanted a Chinese woman, and in that community I was sadly lacking in contacts. In Tong's favor was the fact that San Francisco's Chinatown is the most heavily populated and famous Chinese enclave in the Western world, but when I suggested looking there, he explained that he wanted a woman who had not been contaminated by America. He was dreaming of a submissive wife, eyes always cast to the ground, who would cook his favorite dishes, cut his fingernails, give him a son, and in passing serve her mother-in-law like a slave. I don't know who had put that fantasy in his head, probably his mother, that tiny old lady we all feared. “Do you believe there is such a woman left in this world, Tong?” I asked, perplexed. For an answer, he led me to the computer screen and showed me an unending list of photos and descriptions of girls ready to marry a stranger in order to flee their country or their family. They were classified by race, nationality, and religion, and should the inquirer be more demanding, even the size of their bras. If I had known that this supermarket of female bargains existed, I wouldn't have agonized so over Nico. Although, thinking it over, it's better I didn't. I would never have found Lori on those lists.

The search for Tong's future bride turned out to be a long and complicated office project. At that time we had divided the old Sausalito whorehouse into Willie's law office, my office on the first floor, and Lori's on the second, where she managed the foundation. Lori's elegant touch had changed that house as well, which now was resplendent with framed posters of my books, Tibetan rugs, blue and white porcelain jardinières filled with plants, and a complete kitchen where there was always everything we needed to serve tea, as if we were at the Savoy. Tong gave himself the task of selecting the candidates, which we then criticized: this one has mean eyes, this one is evangelical, this one paints her face like a whore, and so on. We didn't allow Tong to be impressed by appearance; photographs do lie, as he knew very well seeing that Lori had computer-enhanced his portrait; she had made him taller, younger, and with whiter skin, which seems to be appreciated in China. Tong's mother installed herself in the kitchen to compare astral signs, and when finally a young Cantonese nurse emerged who seemed ideal to all of us, she went to consult an astrologer in Chinatown, who gave his approval as well. A round face smiled from the photograph, red cheeks and bright eyes that made you want to kiss her.

After a formal correspondence between Tong and the hypothetical bride, which lasted several months, Willie announced that they would go to China to meet her. I couldn't go with them, though I was dying of curiosity. I asked Tabra to stay with me because I don't like to sleep alone. My friend's business was in the black again. She wasn't living with us anymore; she had found a house, small, but with a patio that looked out toward golden hills, where she could create the illusion of the isolation that was so important to her. I'm sure that living with our tribe must have been torture for her. She needs solitude but she agreed to stay with me while Willie was gone. For a while she stopped going out on blind dates because she was working day and night to get out of debt, but she never stopped hoping for the return of her Plumed Lizard, who did appear on the horizon from time to time. Suddenly his recorded voice on the answering machine would order, “It's four thirty in the afternoon; call me before five or you will never see me again.” Tabra would get home at midnight, bone-weary, and find this charming message and be upset for weeks. Fortunately, her work forced her to travel, and she had interludes in Bali, India, and other distant places from which she sent me delicious letters filled with adventures and written with that fluid sarcasm that is her trademark.

“Sit yourself down and write a travel book, Tabra,” I begged her more than once.

“I'm an artist, I'm not an author,” she said defensively. “But if you can make necklaces, I suppose I can write a book.”

Willie took his heavy suitcase of cameras to China and returned with some very good photographs, especially portraits of people, which is what most interests him. As always, the most memorable photo is the one he didn't get to take. In a remote village in Mongolia, where he had gone by himself because he wanted to give Tong the opportunity to spend a few days with the proposed bride without him as a witness, he saw a hundred-year-old woman with bound feet, feet like girls had once suffered in that part of the world. He went up to her and tried to ask with signs if he could take a photo of her diminutive “golden lilies,” but the centenarian ran away as fast as her tiny deformed feet would take her, screaming. She had never seen anyone with blue eyes and thought that Death had come to carry her away.

The trip was nonetheless a success, according to my husband, because Tong's future bride was perfect, exactly what his bookkeeper was looking for: timid, docile, and unaware of the rights women enjoy in America. She seemed healthy and strong, and surely she would give him the desired male child. Her name was Lili and she earned her living as a surgical nurse, sixteen hours a day, six days a week, for a salary equivalent to two hundred dollars a month. “No wonder she wants to get out of here,” Willie commented, as if living with Tong and his mother would be any easier.

I
GOT READY TO ENJOY A FEW WEEKS
of solitude, which I planned to use on the book I was writing about California in the days of the gold rush. I had been putting it off for four years, though I already had a title,
Daughter of Fortune
, a mountain of historical research, and even the image for the jacket. The protagonist of the novel is a young Chilean girl, Eliza Sommers, born around 1833, who decides to follow her lover, who has left to join in the chase for gold. For a young girl of the time, a journey of that magnitude was unthinkable, but I believe that women are capable of amazing exploits for love. Eliza would never have thought of crossing half the world for the lure of gold, but she never hesitated to do it in order to find the man she'd lost. However, my plan to write it in peace did not work out because Nico wasn't well. To have a couple of wisdom teeth pulled, it had been necessary to give him a general anesthesia for a few minutes, something that tends to be dangerous for people with porphyria. He got out of the dentist's chair, walked to the reception area where Lori was waiting, and felt the world going black. His knees buckled and he fell backward, stiff as a board, striking his neck and back against the wall. He lay on the floor unconscious. It was the beginning of months of suffering for him and anguish for the rest of the family, especially for Lori, who didn't know what was happening to him, and for me, who knew all too well.

My most tragic memories swirled up in furious waves. I had thought that after going through the experience of losing you, nothing could ever move me that much again, but just the hint that possibly something similar was happening to my son, my remaining child, rocked me off my feet. I had a weight in my chest like a rock, crushing me, and making me short of breath. I felt vulnerable, raw, on the verge of tears every moment. At night, while everyone slept, I heard sounds in the walls of the house, long moans from the doorways, sighs in the unoccupied rooms. It was, I suppose, my own fear. All the sorrow that had accumulated during that long year of your dying was stalking about in the house. I have a scene forever engraved in my memory. One day I went into your room and saw your brother, his back to the door, changing your diaper as naturally and calmly as he did his children's. He was talking to you, just as if you could understand, of the times in Venezuela when the two of you were teenagers and you would cover for his pranks and save his skin if he got in a jam. Nico didn't see me; I left and softly closed the door. This son of mine has always been with me, we have shared primordial pain, dazzling failures, ephemeral successes; we left everything behind and have begun again in a new place; we have fought and we have helped each other; in other words, I believe we cannot be separated.

Weeks before the accident at the dentist's, Nico had had his annual porphyria tests and the results had not been good: his levels had doubled over the previous year. After his fall, they kept rising at an alarming rate, and the doctor, Cheri Forrester, who never took her eye off him, was worried. Added to the constant pain from the injury to his shoulder, which prevented him from lifting his arms or bending over, were the pressure of work, his relationship with Celia—which was going through a wretched stage—the ups and downs with me—I was frequently failing in my intention to leave him in peace—and an exhaustion so profound that he would fall asleep standing up. He was even speaking in a murmur, as if the effort of breathing was too much. Often crises of porphyria are accompanied by mental disturbances that alter the patient's personality. Nico, who in normal times prides himself on having the happy calm that characterizes the Dalai Lama, was often boiling with anger, but he could hide it thanks to his unusual self-control. He refused to talk about his condition, and he did not want any special consideration. Lori and I limited ourselves to watching him without asking questions, trying not to make him more annoyed than he already was, though we did suggest that at least he resign from his job; it was very far away and it didn't offer him any satisfaction or challenges. We thought that with his calm temperament, his intuition, and his mathematical ability, he could work as a day trader, but that seemed very risky to him. I told him my dream about the horses, and he told me that was very interesting, but that he wasn't the one who had dreamed it.

There was nothing Lori could do in regard to his health problems, but she stood by him and gave him moral support, never weakening, though she was suffering herself. She wanted children, and to do that she had to subject herself to the torment of fertility treatments. When she started living with Nico they had of course talked about children. She couldn't give up the idea of being a mother, she had already put it off too long waiting for a true love. From the beginning, however, Nico had said he didn't want children; in addition to possibly transmitting his porphyria, he already had three. Nico had become a father at a very young age; he hadn't experienced the freedom and adventure that filled Lori's first thirty-five years, and he intended to cherish the love that had fallen into his life, be a companion, a lover, a friend, and a husband. During the weeks the children stayed with Celia and Sally, Nico and Lori were like sweethearts, but the rest of the time they could only be parents.

Lori said that Nico couldn't understand her terrible emptiness; it seemed to her—perhaps with good reason—that no one was ready to remove a piece of the family puzzle to make room for her; she felt like a stranger. She perceived something negative in the air when she mentioned the subject of another child, and I was responsible for a lot of that; it took me more than a year to realize how important being a mother was for her. I tried not to interfere, not wanting to hurt her, but my silence was eloquent: I thought that a baby would rob Nico and her of the little freedom and intimacy they had. I was also afraid it might displace my grandchildren. The last straw for Lori came on Mother's Day; one of the girls made an affectionate card, gave it to her, and then a little later asked her to give it back so she could give it to Celia. To Lori, that was a dagger in the heart, even though Nico explained over and over that the child was too young to realize what she'd done. Lori's sense of duty seemed almost a penalty; she looked after the children and served them with a kind of desperation, as if she wanted to compensate for the fact she couldn't accept them as her own. And they weren't, they had a mother, but if they'd adopted Sally they were equally eager to love her.