Maya's Notebook: A Novel (8 page)

My grandparents expected the newlyweds would live with us, since we had more than enough room, but my dad rented a tiny little house in the same neighborhood that could have fit inside his mother’s kitchen, because he
couldn’t afford anything better. Pilots work a lot, don’t earn very much, and are always tired; it’s not an enviable profession. Once they were settled in, my dad decided that I should live with them, and my tantrums didn’t soften him or frighten Susan, who at first glance had struck me as easy to intimidate. She was a levelheaded woman with an even temper, always ready to help, but without my Nini’s aggressive compassion, which tends to offend its beneficiaries.

Now I understand that Susan took on the thankless task of taking charge of a spoiled and fussy brat who’d been raised by old folks, who only tolerated white food—rice, popcorn, sliced bread, bananas—and spent the nights wide awake. Instead of forcing me to eat by traditional methods, she made me turkey breast with crème Chantilly, cauliflower with coconut ice cream, and other audacious combinations, until bit by bit I went from white to beige—hummus, some cereals, milky coffee—and from there to colors with more personality, like some tones of green, orange, and red, as long as it wasn’t beets. She wasn’t able to have children and tried to compensate for that lack by earning my affection, but I confronted her with the stubbornness of a mule. I left my things in my grandparents’ house and arrived at my dad’s only to sleep, with a bag in my hand, my alarm clock and whatever book I was reading. My nights were spent suffering from insomnia, trembling in fear, with my head buried under the covers. Since my dad would not have tolerated any rudeness, I opted for a haughty courtesy, inspired by butlers in British movies.

My only home was that
big flamboyantly painted house where I went every day after school to do my homework and play, praying that Susan would forget to pick me up when she finished work in San Francisco, but that never happened: my stepmother had a pathological sense of responsibility. The whole first month went like that, until she brought a dog home to live with us. She worked for the San Francisco Police Department, training dogs to sniff out bombs, a highly valued specialty from 2001 onward, when the paranoia of terrorism began, but at the time when she married my dad she was the butt of her rough colleagues’ jokes; nobody had planted a bomb in California for ages.

Each animal worked with one single human for its whole life, and the two would eventually complement each other so well, they could guess each other’s thoughts. Susan selected the liveliest puppy of the litter and the person best suited to match up with the dog, someone who’d grown up with animals. Although I had sworn to destroy my stepmother’s nerves, I gave up when I saw Alvy, a six-year-old Labrador more intelligent and nicer than the best human being. Susan taught me everything I know about animals and allowed me, violating the fundamental rules of the manual, to sleep with Alvy. That’s how she helped me to tackle my insomnia.

The quiet presence of my stepmother came to be so natural and necessary in the family that it was hard to remember how life was before her. If my dad was traveling, in other words most of the time, Susan would give me permission to sleep over at my grandparents’ magical house, where my
room remained intact. Susan loved my Popo. She went with him to see Swedish films from the 1950s, in black and white, without subtitles—you had to guess what the characters were saying—and to listen to jazz in pokey little dens thick with smoke. She treated my Nini, who is not at all docile, with the same method she used to train sniffer dogs: affection and firmness, punishment and reward. With affection she let her know she loved her and was at her beck and call; with firmness she prevented her from climbing in through the window of her house to inspect the level of cleanliness or give her granddaughter candies behind her back; she punished her by disappearing for days when my Nini overwhelmed her with gifts, unsolicited advice, and Chilean stews, and rewarded her by taking her for walks in the woods when everything was going well. She applied the same system to her husband and to me.

My good stepmother did not try to come between my grandparents and me, although the erratic way they were raising me must have shocked her. It’s true that they did spoil me, but that wasn’t the cause of my problems, as the psychologists I confronted in adolescence suspected. My Nini raised me the Chilean way, food and affection in abundance, clear rules and the occasional spanking, not many. Once I threatened to report her to the police for child abuse, and she hit me so hard with the soup ladle, she left a bump on my head. That stopped my initiative right in its tracks.

I attended a curanto, the
typical abundant and generous feast of Chiloé, a community ceremony. The preparations started early, because the ecotourism boats arrive before noon. The women chopped tomatoes, onions, garlic, and cilantro for the seasoning and, using a tedious method, made
milcao
and
chapalele
, a sort of dough of potato, flour, lard, and pork crackling—disgusting, in my opinion—while the men dug a big pit, put a whole bunch of stones at the bottom, and lit a bonfire on top of them. By the time the wood had burned down, the stones were red-hot, coinciding with the arrival of the boats. The guides showed the tourists the village and gave them opportunities to buy knits, necklaces made of shells, myrtle-berry jam,
licor de oro
, wood carvings, snail-slime cream for age spots, lavender twigs—in short, the few things there are here—and soon they were gathered around the steaming pit on the beach. The
curanto
chefs set out clay pots on the stones to collect the broth, which is an aphrodisiac, as everyone knows, and piled on layers of the
chapalele
and
milcao
, pork, lamb, fish, chicken, shellfish, vegetables, and other delicacies I didn’t write down. Then they covered it with damp white cloths, huge
nalca
leaves, a big sack, which hung over the edges of the hole like a skirt, and finally sand. The cooking took a little over an hour, and while the ingredients were transforming in the secret heat, in their intimate juices and fragrances, the visitors entertained themselves by taking photographs of the smoke, drinking pisco, and listening to Manuel Arias.

The tourists fit into several categories: Chilean senior cit
izens, Europeans on vacation, a range of Argentineans and backpackers of vague origins. Sometimes a group of Asians would arrive, or Americans with maps, guides, and books of flora and fauna they consulted terribly seriously. All of them, except the backpackers, who preferred to smoke marijuana behind the bushes, appreciated the opportunity to listen to a published author, someone able to clarify the mysteries of the archipelago in either English or Spanish. Manuel is not always annoying; in small doses, he can be entertaining on his subject. He tells the visitors about the history, legends, and customs of Chiloé and warns them that the islanders are cautious, and must be won over bit by bit, with respect, just as you have to adapt gradually and respectfully to the wilderness, the implacable winters, and the whims of the sea. Slowly. Very slowly. Chiloé is not for people in a hurry.

People travel to Chiloé with the idea of going back in time, and they can be disappointed by the cities on Isla Grande, but on our little island they find what they’re looking for. There is no intention to deceive them on our part, of course; nevertheless, on
curanto
days oxen and sheep appear by chance near the beach, there are more than the usual number of nets and boats drying on the sand, people wear their coarsest hats and ponchos, and nobody would think of using their cell phone in public.

The experts knew exactly when the culinary treasures buried in the hole were cooked and shoveled off the sand, delicately lifted the sack, the nalca leaves, and the white cloths; then a cloud of steam with the delicious aromas of the
curanto
rose up to the sky. There was an expectant silence, and then a burst of applause. The women took out
the pieces and served them on paper plates with more rounds of pisco sours, the most popular cocktail in Chile, strong enough to fell a Cossack. At the end we had to prop up several tourists on their way back to the boats.

My Popo would have liked
this life, this landscape, this abundance of seafood, this lazy pace. He’d never heard of Chiloé, or he would have included it on his list of places to visit before he died. My Popo . . . how I miss him! He was a big, strong, slow and sweet bear, warm as an oven, with the scent of tobacco and cologne, a deep voice and quaking laugh, with enormous hands to hold me. He took me to soccer games and to the opera, answered my endless questions, brushed my hair and applauded my interminable epic poems, inspired by the Kurosawa films we used to watch together. We’d go up to the tower to peer through his telescope and scrutinize the black dome of the sky, searching for his elusive planet, a green star we were never able to find. “Promise me you’ll always love yourself as much as I love you, Maya,” he told me repeatedly, and I’d promise without knowing what that strange phrase meant. He loved me unconditionally, accepted me just as I am, with my limitations, peculiarities, and defects, he applauded even when I didn’t deserve it, as opposed to my Nini, who believes you shouldn’t celebrate children’s efforts, because they get used to it and then have a terrible time with real life, when no one praises them. My Popo forgave me for everything, consoled me, laughed when I laughed, was my
best friend, my accomplice and confidant. I was his only granddaughter and the daughter he never had. “Tell me I’m the love of your life, Popo,” I’d ask him, to bug my Nini. “You’re the love of our lives, Maya,” he’d answer diplomatically, but I was his favorite, I’m sure of it; my grandma couldn’t compete with me. My Popo was incapable of choosing his own clothes—my Nini did that for him—but when I turned thirteen he took me to buy my first bra, because he noticed I was wrapped up in scarves and hunched over to hide my chest. I was too shy to talk about it to my Nini or Susan, but it seemed perfectly normal to try on bras in front of my Popo.

The house in Berkeley was my world: afternoons with my grandparents watching television, Sundays in the summertime having breakfast on the patio, the occasions when my dad arrived and we’d all have dinner together, while María Callas sang on old vinyl records, the desk, the books, the aromas in the kitchen. With this little family the first part of my existence went by without any problems worth mentioning, but at the age of sixteen the catastrophic forces of nature, as my Nini called them, agitated my blood and clouded my understanding.

I have the year my
Popo died tattooed on my left wrist: 2005. In February we found out he was ill, in August we said good-bye, in September I turned sixteen and my family crumbled away.

The unforgettable day my Popo began to die, I’d stayed
at school for the rehearsal of a play—
Waiting for Godot
no less, the drama teacher was ambitious—and then walked home to my grandparents’ house. It was dark by the time I got there. I walked in, calling them and turning on lights, surprised at the silence and the cold, because that was the house’s most welcoming time of day, when it was warm, there was music and the aromas from my Nini’s saucepans floated through the air. At that hour my Popo would be reading in the easy chair in his study and my Nini would be cooking while listening to the news on the radio, but I found none of that this evening. My grandparents were in the living room, sitting very close together on the sofa, which my Nini had upholstered following instructions from a magazine. They’d shrunk, and for the first time I noticed their age; until that moment they’d remained untouched by the rigors of time. I’d been with them day after day, year after year, without noticing the changes; my grandparents were immutable and eternal as the mountains. I don’t know if I’d only seen them through the eyes of my soul, or maybe they aged in those hours. I hadn’t noticed that my grandpa had lost weight over the last few months either; his clothes were too big for him, and my Nini didn’t look as tiny as she used to by his side.

“What’s up, folks?” and my heart leaped into empty space, because before they managed to answer me, I’d guessed. Nidia Vidal, that invincible warrior, was broken, her eyes swollen from crying. My Popo motioned me to sit down with them, hugged me, squeezing me against his chest, and told me he hadn’t been feeling well for a while, had been having stomachaches, and they’d done a number
of tests on him and the doctor had just confirmed the cause. “What’s wrong with you, Popo?” and it came out like a scream. “Something to do with my pancreas,” he said, and his wife’s visceral moan let me know it was cancer.

Susan arrived about nine for dinner, as she often did, and found us huddled together on the sofa, shivering. She turned on the furnace, ordered a pizza, phoned my dad in London to give him the bad news, and then sat down with us, holding her father-in-law’s hand, in silence.

My Nini abandoned everything to take care of her husband: the library, the stories, the protest demonstrations, and the Club of Criminals. She even let her oven, which she’d kept warm during my entire childhood, grow cold. The cancer, that sly enemy, had attacked my Popo without any alarming signs until it was very advanced. My Nini took her husband to the Georgetown University Hospital, in Washington, where the best specialists are, but nothing worked. They told him it would be futile to operate, and he refused to undergo a bombardment of chemicals just to prolong his life a few months. I studied his illness on the Internet and in books I got out of the library and learned that of the 43,000 annual cases in the United States, more or less 37,000 are terminal; only 5 percent of patients respond to treatment, and for those the best they can hope for is to live another five years; in short, only a miracle would save my grandfather.

The week my grandparents spent in Washington, my Popo deteriorated so much that we barely recognized him when I went with my dad and Susan to pick them up at the airport. He’d lost even more weight, was dragging his feet, hunched over, his eyes yellow and his skin dull and ashen.
With the hesitant steps of an invalid he walked to Susan’s van, sweating from the effort, and at home he didn’t have the energy to climb the stairs, so we made a bed up for him in his study on the first floor, where he slept until they brought in a hospital bed. My Nini got in with him, curled up at his side, like a cat.