Maya's Notebook: A Novel (23 page)

The closest person to Manuel
is Blanca Schnake—not that this means very much, as he doesn’t need anybody, not even Blanca, and could spend the rest of his life without speaking. All the effort of keeping the friendship going comes from her. She’s the one who invites him over for meals or arrives out of the blue with a stew and a bottle of wine. She’s the one who forces him to go to Castro to see her father, the Millalobo, who gets offended if he doesn’t get regular visits. She’s the one who worries about Manuel’s clothes, health, and domestic well-being, like a housekeeper. I’m an intruder who has come to ruin their
privacy; before my arrival they could be alone, but now they’ve always got me stuck in the middle. They’re tolerant, these Chileans; neither of them have shown any signs of resenting my presence.

A few days ago we had dinner at Blanca’s house, as we often do, because it’s much cozier than ours. Blanca had set the table with her best tablecloth, starched linen napkins, candles, and a basket of rosemary bread that I’d brought; a simple and refined table, like everything of hers. Manuel is incapable of appreciating such details, which leave me awestruck; before meeting this woman, I thought interior decoration was only for hotels and magazines. My grandparents’ house resembled a flea market, overstuffed with furniture and horrendous objects piled up with no other criteria than utility or laziness about throwing them away. With Blanca, who can create a work of art with three blue stems of hydrangea in a glass jar full of lemons, my taste is becoming more polished. While they were cooking a seafood soup, I went out to the garden to pick some lettuce and basil, while there was still light, as it’s starting to get dark earlier now. In a few square yards, Blanca has planted fruit trees and a variety of vegetables, which she looks after herself; she’s always working in her garden in a straw hat and gloves. When spring comes, I’m going to ask her to help me plant some things on Manuel’s land, where there’s nothing but weeds and stones.

Over dessert we talked about magic—Manuel’s book has got me obsessed—and supernatural phenomena, on which I’d be an authority if I’d paid more attention to my grandmother. I told them I’d grown up with my grandpa, an agnostic and rationalist astronomer, and my grandma, an en
thusiast for tarot cards, an aspiring astrologer, aura and energy reader, interpreter of dreams, amulet, crystal and sacred stone collector, not to mention friend of the spirits that surround her.

“My Nini never gets bored—she keeps busy protesting against the government and talking to her dead,” I told them.

“What dead?” Manuel asked me.

“My Popo and some other ones, like Anthony of Padua, a saint who finds lost things and boyfriends for old maids.”

“Sounds like your grandma needs a boyfriend,” he said.

“What a thing to say, man! She’s almost as old as you are.”

“Didn’t you tell me I need a love affair? If you think I’m the right age to fall in love, then Nidia definitely is, since she’s several years younger than me.”

“You’re interested in my Nini!” I exclaimed, thinking the three of us could live together; for an instant I forgot that his ideal girlfriend would be Blanca.

“That’s a hasty conclusion, Maya.”

“You’d have to win her away from Mike O’Kelly,” I informed him. “He’s an invalid and Irish, but quite good-looking and famous.”

“Then he has more to offer her than I do.” And he laughed.

“And you, Auntie Blanca, do you believe in things like that?” I asked.

“I’m very practical, Maya. If I need a wart cured, I’ll go to the dermatologist and also, just in case, tie a hair around my baby finger and pee behind an oak.”

“Manuel told me you’re a witch.”

“True. I get together with other witches on the nights of the full moon. Do you want to come? We’ll be meeting next Wednesday. We could go to Castro together to spend a couple of days with my dad, and I’ll take you to our coven.”

“A coven? I don’t have a broom,” I said.

“If I were you, I’d accept, Maya,” Manuel interrupted. “An opportunity like that won’t come twice. Blanca’s never invited me.”

“It’s a feminine circle, Manuel. You’d drown in estrogen.”

“You’re both pulling my leg,” I said.

“I’m serious,
gringuita
. But it’s not what you might imagine, nothing like the witchcraft in Manuel’s book, no vests made of corpses’ skin or any
invunches
either. Our group is very closed, as it must be so we can feel completely confident. We don’t accept guests, but we could make an exception for you.”

“Why?”

“I think you’re quite lonely and you could use some friends.”

A few days later I went to Castro with Blanca. We arrived at the Millalobo’s house at teatime, a sacred ritual, which the Chileans copied from the English. Blanca and her father have an invariable routine, a scene from a comedy. First they greet each other effusively, as if they haven’t just seen each other the previous week and haven’t spoken on the phone every day since. Then she immediately starts scolding him because he’s “getting fatter every day and how long do you plan to keep smoking and drinking, Dad, you’re going to kick the bucket any moment now.” He
comes back with comments about women who don’t cover up their gray hairs and walk around dressed like Rumanian peasants. Then they bring each other up to date with the gossip and rumors going around. She then asks him for another loan, and he screams blue murder, that he’s being ruined, that he’s going to end up losing his shirt and having to declare bankruptcy, which gives way to five minutes of negotiations, and finally they seal an agreement with more kisses. By then I’ll be on my fourth cup of tea.

At dusk, the Millalobo lent
us his car, and Blanca took me to the meeting. We drove past the cathedral, with its two steeples covered in metal tiles, and the plaza, with all its benches occupied by couples, left behind the old part of the city and then the new part, with its ugly concrete houses, and turned up a curvy solitary track. A short while later Blanca stopped in a yard where other cars were already parked, and we walked toward the house along a barely visible path, making our way with her flashlight. Inside there was a group of ten young women, dressed in the new-age hippie style like my Nini—tunics, long skirts or wide-legged cotton slacks, and ponchos, because it was cold. They were expecting me and welcomed me with spontaneous Chilean affection, which initially, when I first arrived in this country, shocked me and I’ve now come to expect. The house was furnished unpretentiously. There was an old dog lying on the sofa and toys strewn across the floor. The hostess explained that when there was a full moon her chil
dren went to sleep over at their grandmother’s house, and her husband took the opportunity to play poker with his friends.

We went outside through the kitchen into a big backyard, lit with paraffin lamps, where there was a garden with vegetables planted in crates, a chicken run, two swings, a big tent, and something that at first glance looked like a mound of earth covered with a tarp, but a thin column of smoke was coming out of the center. “This is the
ruca
,” the owner of the house told me. It was round like an igloo or a kiva, and only the roof stuck up above the surface; the rest of it was underground. It had been built by the husbands and boyfriends of these women, who sometimes participated in the meetings, but on those occasions they met in the tent, because the
ruca
was a feminine sanctuary. Following their lead, I took off my clothes; some were completely naked, others left their underwear on. Blanca lit a handful of sage leaves to “cleanse us” with the fragrant smoke as we crawled through a narrow tunnel on hands and knees.

Inside, the
ruca
was a round dome about twelve feet across and five and a half feet high at its tallest part. At the center a wood fire burned in a stone circle; the smoke was drawn up and out through the only aperture in the roof, above the bonfire, and all around the wall was a little platform covered with woolen blankets, where we sat in a circle. The heat was intense, but bearable, the air smelled of something organic—mushrooms or yeast—and what little light there was came from the fire. There was a bit of dried fruit—apricots, almonds, figs—and two jugs of iced tea.

That group of women was a vision from
The Thousand and One Nights
, a harem of odalisques. In the half-light of
the
ruca
they looked beautiful, like Renaissance Madonnas with their thick hair, comfortable in their bodies, languid, unself-conscious. In Chile people are divided by social class, like the caste system in India or race in the United States, and I don’t have a trained eye to distinguish them, but these European-looking women must be from a different class from the Chilotas I’ve met, who in general are heavyset, short, with indigenous features, worn down by work and worry. One of these is seven or eight months pregnant, to judge by the size of her belly, and another had given birth not long ago; she had swollen breasts and purple aureoles around her nipples. Blanca had undone her bun, and her hair, curly and unruly like foam, reached her shoulders. She showed her mature body off with the naturalness of someone who’s always been beautiful, even though she didn’t have breasts and a pirate’s scar ran across her chest.

Blanca rang a little bell; there were a couple of minutes of silence to focus our concentration, and then one of them invoked Pachamama, Mother Earth, in whose womb we were gathered. The next four hours went by without my noticing, slowly, passing the big conch shell from hand to hand to take turns speaking, drinking tea, nibbling on fruit, telling each other what was happening at that moment in our lives and the sorrows carried over from the past, listening with respect, without questioning or offering opinions. The majority came from other cities in Chile, some for their work, others accompanying their husbands. Two of the women were “healers,” dedicated to curing through different methods—herbs, aromatic essences, reflexology, magnets, light, homeopathy, movement of energy, and other
forms of alternative medicine—that are very popular in Chile. Here people only resort to drugstore remedies when everything else fails. They shared their stories without embarrassment: one was shattered, because she’d walked in on her husband and her best friend; another couldn’t bring herself to leave an abusive man who mistreated her emotionally and physically. They talked of their dreams, illnesses, fears, and hopes; they laughed, some cried, and all applauded Blanca, because her recent test results confirmed that her cancer was still in remission. A young woman, whose mother had just died, asked if they could sing for her soul, and another, with a silvery voice, began a song, with everyone else joining in for the chorus.

Just after midnight, Blanca suggested we conclude the meeting by honoring our ancestors, then each of us named someone—the recently deceased mother, a grandmother, a godmother—and described the legacy that person had left them. For one it was artistic talent, for another a natural medicine recipe book, for the third a love of science, and around it went until everyone told theirs. I was the last and when my turn came, I named my Popo, but my voice wouldn’t cooperate to tell these women who he was. Afterward there was a silent meditation, with eyes closed, to think about the ancestor we’d invoked, thank them for their gifts, and say good-bye. That’s what we were doing when I remembered the phrase my Popo had repeated to me for years: “Promise me that you’ll always love yourself as much as I love you.” The message was as clear as if he’d said it to me out loud. I began to cry and kept crying, the ocean of tears that hadn’t flowed when he died.

At the end they circulated a wooden bowl, and each of
them had the opportunity to place a small stone inside. Blanca counted them, and there were as many stones as women in the
ruca
; it was a vote and I had been approved unanimously, the only way to belong to the group. They congratulated me, and we drank a toast with tea.

I returned to our island proudly to inform Manuel Arias that from now on he should not count on my presence on nights when the moon is full.

The night with the good
witches in Castro made me think of my experiences over the past year. My life is very different from those women’s, and I don’t know whether or not in the intimacy of the
ruca
I might be able to tell them one day about all that has happened to me, tell them of the rage that used to consume me, of how it felt to have an urgent need for alcohol and drugs, of how I couldn’t stay still and quiet. In the academy in Oregon I was diagnosed with “attention deficit disorder,” one of those classifications that seem like a perpetual prison sentence, but that condition was never manifest while my Popo was alive, and I don’t have it now either. I can describe the symptoms of addiction, but I can’t evoke their brutal intensity. Where was my soul then? In Las Vegas there were trees, sunshine, parks, the laughter of Freddy the king of rap, ice cream, comedy shows on TV, bronzed young men and lemonade by the pool at the gym, music and lights on the eternal night of the Strip. There were good times, including a wedding of some friends of Leeman’s and a birthday cake for Freddy, but I
only remember the ephemeral happiness of shooting up and the long hell of looking for the next hit. The world back then is beginning to turn into a blot on my memory, although only a few months have gone by.

The ceremony of women in the womb of Pachamama connected me definitively with this fantastical Chiloé and, in some strange way, with my own body. Last year I led an undermined existence, thinking my life was over and my body irremediably stained. Now I’m whole, and I feel a respect for my body that I never had before, when I used to spend my time examining myself in the mirror to count up all my defects. I like myself as I am and don’t want to change anything. On this blessed island nothing feeds my bad memories, but I make an effort to write them down in this notebook so I won’t have to go through what happens to Manuel. He keeps his memories buried in a cave, and if he’s not careful, they attack him at night like rabid dogs.

Today I put five flowers—last of the season—from Blanca Schnake’s garden on Manuel’s desk, which he won’t appreciate, but it’s given me a tranquil happiness. It’s natural to be entranced by color when one emerges from grayness. Last year was a gray year for me. This tiny bouquet is perfect: a glass, five flowers, an insect, the light from the window. Nothing more. Naturally it’s hard for me to remember the darkness that came before. My adolescence was so long! A voyage to the underworld.