Paula (31 page)

At the publishing house, anyone who had actively participated in the Popular Unity was immediately dismissed; I remained, but under close observation. Delia Vergara, pale but firm, announced exactly what she had three years earlier: We shall go on working as usual. This time, nevertheless, was different. Several of her collaborators had disappeared, and the best journalist of the team was running around half-crazed trying to hide her brother. Three months later, she herself had to find asylum, and finally ended up in France, where she has lived for more than twenty years. The authorities called all the representatives of the press together to communicate the rules of strict censorship under which they were to operate; not only were some subjects forbidden, there were even dangerous words, such as
compañero,
which was expunged from the vocabulary, and others that were to be used with extreme caution, such as
people, union, community, justice, worker,
and many others identified with the lexicon of the Left. The word
democracy
could be used only when accompanied by an adjective: “conditional democracy,” “authoritarian democracy,” even “totalitarian democracy.” My first direct contact with censorship came a week later, when the children's magazine I directed appeared on the stands with a cover illustration of four ferocious gorillas, accompanied by a long feature article inside. The armed forces took the cover as a direct reference to the four junta generals. We had prepared the color separations two months in advance, when the idea of a military coup was still quite remote; it was a freakish coincidence that the four gorillas appeared at just that time. The publisher, who had returned in his private plane as soon as the chaos of the first days died down a little, fired me and named another director, the same man who shortly afterward managed to convince the junta to revise all maps, reversing the continents so that the august fatherland would appear at the top of the page and not the very bottom, making south north and extending territorial seas to the shores of Africa. I lost my job as director, and soon would also lose my post on the women's magazine—as would the rest of the staff, because in the eyes of the military, feminism was as subversive as Marxism. Soldiers were cutting off women's pants legs in the street, because in their judgment only males could wear trousers; long hair on men was equated with homosexuality, and beards were shaved because it was feared a Communist might be hiding behind them. We had returned to the times of unquestionable male authority. Under the orders of a new director, the magazine made a sharp about-face and became an exact replica of dozens of other frivolous publications for women. The head of the firm returned to photographing his beautiful adolescent girls.

The military junta outlawed strikes and protests, it returned land to former landholders and mines to the North Americans, it opened the country to foreign business and capital, it sold millenary old-growth forests and fishing rights to Japanese companies, and established a system of fat commissions and corruption as the form of government. A new caste of young executives materialized, educated in the doctrines of pure capitalism, who rode around on chrome-plated motorcycles and managed the fate of the nation with merciless callousness. In the name of economic efficiency, the generals froze history; they opposed democracy as a “foreign ideology” and replaced it with a doctrine of “law and order.” Chile was not an isolated case, for soon the long night of totalitarianism would spread across all Latin America.

I
AM NO LONGER WRITING SO WHEN MY DAUGHTER
wakes up she will not feel so lost, because she is not going to wake up. These are pages Paula will never read. . . .

No! Why do I repeat what others say if I don't really believe it? Everyone has classified her case as hopeless. Brain damage, they say. . . . After looking at the most recent tests, the neurologist took me to his office and as gently as possible showed me the negatives on his view box, two large black rectangles on which the exceptional intelligence of my daughter was reduced to dark blobs. His pencil followed the convoluted paths of the brain, as he explained the terrible consequences of those shadows and lines.

“Paula has severe damage; there is nothing to be done, her mind is destroyed. We do not know when or how it happened; it could have been caused by lack of sodium, oxygen deprivation, overapplication of drugs, or it could simply be the devastating progress of the illness.”

“Do you mean she will never be normal mentally?”

“It's a very bad prognosis; in the best of cases, she might reach the level of an infant.”

“What does that mean?”

“I can't tell you at this stage, each case is different.”

“Will she be able to talk?”

“I don't think so. And it seems probable that she will never walk, either. She will always be an invalid,” he added, looking at me sadly over his eyeglasses.

“There is some mistake here. You must do the tests again!”

“I'm afraid this is the reality, Isabel.”

“You don't know what you're saying! You never saw Paula when she was healthy, you don't have the vaguest idea what she's really like! She is
brilliant
, the most intelligent person in our family, always the first in everything she does. She has an indomitable spirit. Do you think she would give in? Never!”

“I am very sorry,” he said quietly, taking my hands, but I no longer heard him. His voice was coming from very far away, as Paula's past flashed before me in rapid images. I saw her at every stage of her life: as a baby, naked and wide-eyed, looking at me with the same alert expression she had up till the last instant of her conscious life; taking her first steps with the intentness of a tiny schoolteacher; stealthily hiding her grandmother's sad bottles; at ten, dancing like a crazed marionette to music on the television; at fifteen, welcoming me with a forced hug and hard eyes when I came home after an abortive fling with a lover whose name I cannot remember; at her last high school party, with her hair to her waist, and later in her cap and gown. I saw her looking like a fairy princess in the snowy lace of her wedding dress, and in a blue cotton blouse and worn rabbit-fur slippers, bent over from pain and with her head on my knees, after she was struck by the illness. That evening, exactly four months and twenty-one days ago, we were still talking in terms of the flu, and I was discussing with Ernesto Paula's tendency to command our attention by exaggerating how she felt when she was sick. I saw her that fateful early morning when she began to die in my arms, vomiting blood. Those visions registered like jumbled snapshots superimposed on a slow and inexorably flowing time in which we all moved as sluggishly as if we were at the bottom of the sea, unable to spring like a tiger to stop the wheel of destiny whirling toward death. For nearly fifty years I have been a toreador taunting violence and pain with a red cape, secure in the protection of the good luck birthmark on my back—even though in my heart I suspected that one day I would feel the claws of misfortune raking my shoulder. But I never, ever, imagined that the blow would fall on one of my children. Again I heard the neurologist's voice: “She's not aware of anything; believe me, your daughter is not suffering.”

“Oh, she's suffering, and she's afraid. I am going to take her home to California as quickly as possible.”

“Here Paula's expenses are covered by the Spanish health care system; in the United States, the cost of medical care is sky-high. Besides, Isabel, the trip is very risky. Paula still is not retaining sodium well, her blood pressure and temperature are not stable, she has respiratory problems, it just isn't a good idea to move her at this time, she might not survive the trip. Here in Spain we have one or two institutions where she can be well looked after. She won't miss anyone. She has no sense of recognition, she doesn't even know where she is.”

“Don't you understand that I will never leave her? Help me, Doctor, I don't care what it costs, I have to take her with me. . . .”

When I look back over the long trajectory of my life, I believe that the military coup in Chile was one of the dramatic turning points. A few years from now, I will perhaps remember yesterday as the second tragedy to put its stamp on my existence. I will never again be the person I was. I have been assured, again and again, that there is no cure for Paula, but I don't believe it. I am going to take her to the United States, they can help us there. Willie has found a place for Paula in a clinic; all that remains is to convince Ernesto to let me take her; he can't look after her by himself, and we will never put her in an institution. I will find some way to travel with Paula, she isn't the first gravely ill person to be moved. I will take her with me if I have to steal an airplane to do it.

The bay of San Francisco had never looked so beautiful; a thousand brightly colored sails were unfurled to celebrate the beginning of spring, people in shorts were jogging across the Golden Gate Bridge, and the mountains were vitally green because at last it had rained, after six years of drought. It had been too long since I had seen trees so luxuriant and skies so blue; nature was dressed for a party, in welcome, and the long winter of Madrid was behind us. Before we left the hospital, I took Paula to the chapel, dark and solitary as it almost always was but glowing with candles before the Virgin's altar in honor of Mother's Day. I placed Paula's wheelchair facing the wooden statue where my mother had wept so many tears during the hundred days of her grief, and lighted a candle in celebration of life. My mother always asked the Virgin to wrap Paula in her mantle and protect her from pain and sorrow and, if she planned to take her, at least not to let her suffer any longer. I asked the Goddess to help us reach California safe and sound, and to watch over us in this new phase we were entering and give us the strength to get through it. Paula, with her head bowed and her eyes fixed on the floor, painfully rigid, began to cry; her tears fell drop by drop, like the notes of a piano exercise. What had she understood? Sometimes I think she wants to tell me something . . . I think she may want to tell me goodbye. . . .

I went with Ernesto to pack her suitcase. Again inside the small, clean, precise apartment where they had been so happy for such a short time, I was, as always, struck by the Franciscan simplicity in which they lived. In Paula's twenty-eight years in this world, she had reached a maturity others never achieve; she knew how ephemeral life is and, because she was much more concerned about the restiveness of the soul, had removed herself from nearly everything material. “We go to our grave in a winding sheet, why do you bother?” Paula asked me once in a dress shop where I wanted to buy her three blouses. She had been tossing overboard the last vestiges of vanity and had no taste for adornment, for anything unnecessary or superfluous; in her clear view, there was space and patience only for the essentials. “I look everywhere for God but I can't find him,” she told me shortly before she fell into the coma. Ernesto put some of her clothing in a bag, a few snapshots from their honeymoon in Scotland, her old rabbit-fur slippers, the silver sugar bowl she inherited from Granny, and the rag doll I had made for her when she was born, a moth-eaten relic now missing her yarn hair and one shoe-button eye, but a talisman Paula still dragged everywhere. We left in a basket the letters I had written over the years, letters that, like my mother, Paula bundled according to date. I suggested throwing them out, but Ernesto said that one day she might ask for them. The apartment was swept clean, as if by a cold wind: on December 6, Paula had left there for the hospital, and never returned. Her vigilant spirit was present as we disposed of her few belongings and intruded upon her innermost privacy. Suddenly Ernesto was on his knees with his arms around my waist, shaking with the sobs he had held back these long months. I believe that, in that moment, he fathomed the depths of his tragedy and realized that his wife would never return to this Madrid apartment; she was now in a different dimension, leaving only the memory of the beauty and grace he had fallen in love with.