Paula (22 page)

I was only five when I had my first hint of the disadvantages of my gender. My mother and I were sitting on the gallery of my grandfather's house; she was teaching me to knit, while my brothers were playing in the poplar tree in the garden. My clumsy fingers fought to loop the wool between the needles, but I dropped stitches and tangled the yarn; I was sweating with concentration when my mother said to me, “Sit up straight, now, and keep your knees together like a lady.” I threw the knitting as far as I could and at that instant decided I was going to be a man. I held firmly to that proposition until I was eleven, when my body began inexorably to change and I was betrayed by my hormones at the sight of my first love's monumental ears. Forty years had to go by before I accepted my condition and realized that, with twice the effort and half the recognition, I had achieved what some men sometimes achieve. Today, I wouldn't change places with anyone, but when I was young, daily injustices soured my life. It had nothing to do with Freudian envy—I can't think of any reason to covet that small and capricious masculine appendage, and if I had one I wouldn't know what to do with it. Delia lent me a stack of books by North American and European women writers and sent me off to read them in alphabetical order, to see whether they might sweep the romantic cobwebs from a brain poisoned by an overdose of fiction, and so, slowly, I discovered an articulate way of expressing the mute rage I had always felt. I became a formidable antagonist to Tío Ramón, who had to call upon his lowest oratorical tricks to hold his own with me; now it was I who composed statements on letterhead paper with three carbons, and he who refused to sign them.

One night Michael and I were invited to dinner in the home of a well-known Socialist politician who had made a career of fighting for justice and equality for the people. In his eyes, “the people” was composed solely of men; it had never occurred to him that women might be included. His wife held an executive position in a large corporation, and often appeared in the press as one of the few examples of the emancipated woman—I cannot fathom why she remained married to that protomacho. All the other guests were people important in politics or cultural affairs, and we, ten years younger, were very much out of place in that sophisticated gathering. At the table, someone complimented my humorous articles and asked whether I had never thought of writing something serious, and in a fit of inspiration I replied that what I really wanted to do was interview an unfaithful wife. An icy silence fell over the room; the shocked guests stared at their plates and no one said anything for several minutes. Finally, the lady of the house got up from the table and went into the kitchen to prepare coffee, and I followed, under the pretext of helping her. As we were arranging cups and saucers on a tray, she told me that if I promised to keep her secret and never, ever, reveal her identity, she would be happy to grant me that interview. The very next morning, recorder in hand, I went to her office, a sunny room in a glass and steel building in the heart of the city, where in her high executive position she reigned without female rival among a multitude of technocrats in gray suits and striped ties. She greeted me with no sign of anxiety—slim, elegant, wearing a short skirt and broad smile, and with several long gold chains accenting her Chanel suit—prepared to tell her story without the least shadow of conscience. The November issue of the magazine carried ten lines about the execution of Che Guevara, news that sent a seismic shock around the world, and four pages of my interview with the faithless wife that shattered the calm of Chilean society. In one week sales doubled, and I was signed on as a permanent member of the staff. Thousands of letters flooded the office, many from religious organizations and well-known hierarchs of the political Right unsettled by the detrimental public example of such a shameless hussy, but we also received letters from women confessing their own adventures. It is difficult today to imagine that something so banal could provoke that reaction; after all, infidelity is as old as the institution of matrimony. What no one could forgive was that the protagonist of the piece had the same motivations for adultery as a man: opportunity, boredom, dejection, flirtation, challenge, curiosity. The woman in my interview was not married to a brutal drunk or an invalid in a wheelchair; neither did she suffer the torment of impossible love. There was no tragedy in her life, she simply lacked compelling reasons to remain true to a husband who deceived her. Many people were horrified by the perfect organization of her setup: with two female friends, she rented a discreet apartment, kept it in impeccable condition, and had certain times during the week when she could take her lovers there. In that way, she was spared the danger of frequenting hotels where either of them might be recognized. It had not occurred to anyone that women could enjoy such comfort: a private apartment for affairs was the sole prerogative of males, there was even a French word for it:
garçonnière
. In my grandfather's generation, the practice was common among wealthy men, but now very few could afford that luxury and adulterers fornicated however and wherever they could, according to their means. In any case, there were more than enough rooms to rent for furtive assignations, and everyone knew their exact price and location.

Twenty years later, at some bend of my long peregrination, far from Chile in another corner of the world, I ran across the husband of the woman in the Chanel suit. He had been imprisoned and tortured during the early years of the military dictatorship and was scarred in both body and soul. He was living in exile, separated from his family, and his health was failing because he could not shake the prison cold that was devouring his bones. Even so, he had not lost his charm or his outrageous vanity. He scarcely remembered me; I stood out in his memory only because of the interview, which he had read with fascination.

“I was always crazy to know who that woman was,” he said in a confidential tone. “I discussed it with all my friends. That was all anyone was talking about in Santiago. I would have given anything to have my little visit to that apartment—even better with her two friends. Forgive my lack of modesty, Isabel, but I think those three dames deserved to know what a real man is like.”

“To tell you the truth, I think they did.”

“So much time has gone by now, won't you tell me who she was?”

“No.”

“At least tell me if I knew her!”

“Yes, you did . . . biblically.”

My job on the magazine, and later in television, was an escape valve from the madness I inherited from my ancestors; without my work, the accumulated pressure would have landed me in a psychiatric ward. The prudish and moralistic atmosphere, the small-town mentality, and the rigidity of Chilean social norms at that time were overpowering. My grandfather soon adjusted to my public life and stopped throwing my articles into the trash; he never commented on them, but from time to time he asked me what Michael thought, and reminded me that I ought to be very grateful to have such a tolerant husband. He did not like my reputation as a feminist or my long dresses and antique hats, to say nothing of my Citroën painted like a shower curtain, but he forgave my extravagances because in real life I carried out my role as mother, wife, and housekeeper. Just for the fun of shocking everyone, I would have marched through the streets with a bra impaled on a broomstick—alone, of course, no one would have accompanied me—but in private life I had internalized the formulas for eternal domestic bliss. Every morning I served my husband his breakfast in bed, every evening I was waiting in full battle dress with his martini olive between my teeth, and every night I laid out the suit and shirt he would be wearing the next day; I shined his shoes, cut his hair and fingernails, and bought his clothes to save him the bother of trying them on, just as I did with my children. That was not only stupidity on my part, it was misdirected energy and excessive love.

I cultivated the external aspects of the hippies but in my actions lived like a worker ant, laboring twelve hours a day to pay the bills. The one time I tried marijuana—offered by a real hippie—I realized it was not for me. I smoked six joints in a row, and was rewarded not with the hallucinatory euphoria I had heard so much about but a headache: my pragmatic Basque genes are immune to the facile happiness of drugs.

I returned to television, this time with a feminist humor program, and collaborated on the only children's magazine in Chile, which I ended up directing after the founder died suddenly. For years I amused myself by interviewing murderers, seers, prostitutes, necrophiliacs, jugglers, quasi-saints who performed nebulous miracles, demented psychiatrists, and beggars with false stumps who rented babies to put a dent in charitable hearts. I wrote recipes invented on a moment's inspiration, and occasionally improvised a horoscope, guided by the birthdays of friends. Our astrologist lived in Peru and the mail was often delayed, or lost in the gullies of destiny. Once I called her to say that we had received the March horoscope but were missing February's, and she told me to publish the one we had, what was the problem? the order didn't change the outcome. After that, I began fabricating them myself, and had the same percentage of successes as she. The most difficult task was the lovelorn column, which I signed with the pseudonym Francisca Román. Where I lacked personal experience, I called on the inherited intuition of Memé and the counsel of Mama Hilda, who watched all the current soap operas and was a true expert in affairs of the heart. The archive of Francisca Román's letters could provide material for volumes of short stories—I wonder where those boxes of epistolary melodramas are now? I can't imagine how I had time for the house, the children, and my husband, but somehow I found it. In my free time, I made my clothes, wrote children's stories and plays, and exchanged a steady stream of letters with my mother. Michael, meantime, was always close at hand, celebrating the serene contentment into which we had settled with the ingenuous certainty that if we played by the rules, we would live happily ever after. He seemed to be in love, and I certainly was. He was a permissive, rather uninvolved father; at any rate, punishment and rewards were left to me, after all, children were supposed to be raised by their mothers. My feminism did not include sharing household duties, in fact, the idea never entered my mind; I thought liberation had to do with going out into the world and assuming male duties, not with delegating part of my load. The result was a terrible fatigue, as witnessed today by the millions of women of my generation who question feminist movements.

The furniture in our house tended to disappear and be replaced by questionable antiques from the Persian Market, where a Syrian merchant traded men's clothing for anything old. At the rate Michael's wardrobe was reduced, the house filled up with chipped chamber pots, treadle sewing machines, cart wheels, and gas street-lights. Michael's parents, alarmed by some of the characters who drifted in and out of our home, did everything possible to protect their grandchildren from potential dangers. My face on the television and my name in the magazine were open invitations to screwball characters like the post office employee who had a correspondence with Martians, or the girl who left her infant baby on my office desk. We kept the little girl with us for a while, and had decided to adopt her, but one evening when we returned home we discovered that her legitimate grandparents had taken her away with a police order. A miner from the north, a seer by trade who had lost his sanity from having prophesied so many catastrophes, slept on our living room sofa for two weeks, until the National Health Service strike was settled. The poor man had come to Santiago to be treated at the psychiatric hospital on the very day the strike began. Out of money and not knowing anyone, but with prophetic faculties intact, he was able to locate one of the few people in that hostile city willing to give him shelter. “That man has a screw loose, he could pull a knife and murder us all,” a highly agitated Granny warned me. She collected her two grandchildren and had them sleep at her house as long as we had the seer, who, incidentally, turned out to be completely harmless and may even have saved our lives. He predicted that in a strong earthquake some of our walls would come down. Michael made a thorough inspection, reinforced certain points, and with the next minor quake only the patio wall collapsed, crushing our dahlias and the neighbor's rabbit.

Granny and Mama Hilda helped raise the children, Michael gave them stability and decency, the school instructed them, and the rest they acquired with their natural wit and talent. I merely tried to entertain them. You were a wise little girl, Paula. Even as a child, you wanted to educate people—your brother, the dogs, and your dolls all played the part of students. The time you had left from your teaching activities was divided among games with Granny, visiting residents of a neighborhood old folks' home, and sewing sessions with Mama Hilda—in spite of the exquisite embroidered batiste dresses my mother bought you in Switzerland, you always looked like an orphan in dresses you sewed for yourself. While my father-in-law spent his retirement years trying to resolve the squaring of the circle and other interminable mathematical problems, Granny was enjoying her brood in a true grandmotherly orgy; you climbed to the attic to play bandits, sneaked into the club to swim in the pool, and got decked out in my nightgowns to perform amateurish plays. In the company of that adorable woman, you, Paula, spent the summer baking cookies and the winter knitting striped mufflers for your friends in the geriatric home; later, after we left Chile, you wrote letters to each one of those great-grandparents you had adopted, until the last one died of loneliness. Those were the happiest and most secure years of our lives. Nicolás and you still treasure the happy memories that sustained you during the hard times when you begged and cried to go back to Chile. By then, though, we couldn't return. Granny was resting beneath a blanket of jasmine, her husband was lost in the labyrinths of senile dementia, our friends were dead or scattered around the world, and there was nowhere for us in our homeland. Only the house remained. It is still there, intact. Not long ago I went to visit it and was amazed by its size; it looked like a dollhouse with a moth-eaten wig for a roof.