Paula (43 page)

“I had to approach the prisoner, put my pistol to his temple, and press the trigger. The blood splattered my uniform. It's something I can't tear from my soul. I can't sleep, I am haunted by the memory.”

“Why are you telling me this?” I asked.

“Because it isn't enough to have told my confessor, I want to share it with someone who may be able to make use of it. Not all the military are murderers, as is being said; many of us have a conscience.” He stood, saluted me with a slight bow, put on his cap, and left.

Months later, another man, this one in civilian clothes, told me something similar. “Soldiers shoot at the legs to force the officers to fire the
coup de grace
and stain themselves with blood, too,” he said. I jotted down those memories and for nine years kept them at the bottom of a drawer, until I used them in
Of Love and Shadows
. Some critics considered the book sentimental, and too political; for me, it is filled with magic because it revealed to me the strange powers of fiction. In the slow and silent process of writing, I enter a different state of consciousness in which sometimes I can draw back a veil and see the invisible, the world of my grandmother's three-legged table. It is not necessary to mention all the premonitions and coincidences recorded in those pages, one will suffice. Although I had abundant information, there were large lacunae in the story, because many of the military trials were conducted in secret and what was published was distorted by censorship. In addition, I was far from the scene and could not go to Chile to interrogate the involved parties as I would have done under other circumstances. My years as a journalist had taught me that it is in personal interviews that one obtains the keys, motives, and emotions of a story, no research in a library can replace the firsthand information derived from a face-to-face conversation. During those warm Caracas nights, I wrote the novel from the material in my file of clippings, a few books, some tapes from Amnesty International, and the inexhaustible voices of the women of the
desaparecidos
speaking to me across distance and time. Even with all that, I had to call upon my imagination to fill in blanks. After she read the original, my mother objected to one part that to her seemed absolutely improbable: the protagonists, at night and during curfew, go by motorcycle to a mine sealed off by the military; they find a break in the fence and enter an area that is off-limits, dig into the mouth of the mine with picks and shovels, find the remains of the murdered, photograph them, return with the proof, and deliver it to the cardinal, who finally orders the tomb opened. “That's impossible,” she said. “No one would dare run such risks at the height of the dictatorship.” “I can't think of any other way to resolve the plot, just think of it as literary license,” I replied. The book was published in 1984. Four years later, the list of exiles who could not return to Chile was abolished and for the first time I felt free to go back to my country to vote in a plebiscite that finally unseated Pinochet. One night the doorbell rang in my mother's house in Santiago and a man insisted in talking with me in private. In a corner of the terrace, he told me he was a priest, that he had learned in the sanctity of the confessional about bodies buried in Lonquén, had gone there on his motorcycle during curfew, had opened a sealed mine with pick and shovel, had photographed the remains and taken the proof to the cardinal, who ordered a group of priests, newspapermen, and diplomats to open the clandestine tomb.

“No one has any knowledge of this except the cardinal and myself. If my participation in that matter had been known, I'm sure I wouldn't be here talking with you, I would be among the disappeared. How did you learn?” he asked.

“The dead told me,” I replied, but he did not believe me.

Of Love and Shadows
also brought Willie into my life, and for that I am grateful.

My first two novels were slow to cross the Atlantic, but finally they arrived in Caracas bookstores, some people read them, a couple of favorable reviews were published, and the quality of my life changed. Circles I had not had access to opened to me, I met interesting people, I was invited by various print media to collaborate, and I was called by television producers who wanted to roll out the red carpet for me, but by then I knew how uncertain promises can be and chose not to leave my secure position at the school. One day at the theater, a man with a soft voice and careful pronunciation came up to me to congratulate me on my first novel; he said it had touched him deeply: among other reasons, because he and his family had lived in Chile during the government of Salvador Allende and had witnessed the military coup. Later, I found out he had been imprisoned during those first days of indiscriminate brutality, because his neighbors, not recognizing his accent, had thought he was a Cuban agent and had informed on him. That was the beginning of my friendship with Ildemaro, the most significant of my life, a combination of good humor and rigorous lectures. I learned a lot under his tutelage; he guided my reading, revised some of my writing, and argued politics with me. When I think of him, I seem to see his finger pointed toward me as he instructs me on the work of Benedetti or clears the fog from my brain with an erudite sermon on socialism. That is not the only image, however; I also remember him weak with laughter or red with embarrassment when we punctured his solemnity with jokes. We incorporated him, his wife, his three children, and even a grandmother into our family and for the first time in many years again felt the warmth of being a tribe; we reinstated our Sunday dinners, our children thought of themselves as cousins, and we all had keys to both houses. Ildemaro, who is a physician but has a greater calling for the arts, provided us with tickets to a multitude of functions we attended because we didn't want to offend him. At first, Paula was the only one with sufficient courage to laugh at the sacred cows of art in his presence, but soon the rest of us followed her example, and we ended by organizing an informal theater troupe with the aim of parodying our friend's cultural events and intellectual disquisitions. He, however, quickly found a clever way to undercut our scheme: he became the most active member of the company. Under his direction, we mounted spectacles that transcended the limits of our long-suffering circle of friends, as, for instance, a lecture on jealousy that featured a machine of our own invention to measure “the level of the jealousy factor” in victims of that scourge. One psychiatric association—I can't remember whether Jungian or Lacanian—took us seriously; we were invited to perform a demonstration, and one night found ourselves in the headquarters of the institute with our preposterous satire. Our Jealousy Machine consisted of a black box with erratic needles indicating measurements and capriciously blinking lights connected by cables to a helmet on Paula's head, who valiantly enacted the role of guinea pig while Nicolás manipulated the controls. The psychiatrists listened, amazed, and took notes; some seemed somewhat perplexed, but in general they were satisfied, and the next day a scholarly review of the program appeared in the newspaper. Paula survived the Jealousy Machine and became so fond of Ildemaro that she made him the recipient of her most intimate confidences and to please him accepted the starring role in all the company's productions. Now Ildemaro calls me frequently about Paula; he listens to my report without interrupting and tries to give me encouragement—but not hope, because he has none himself. There was nothing back then to indicate that it would be my daughter's fate to suffer this calamity; she was a beautiful, twenty-year-old student, brilliant and happy, who had no qualms about playing the fool on stage if Ildemaro requested it. Our indefatigable Mama Hilda, who had left Chile and followed our family into exile, and who lived half her life in our house, kept a permanent sewing operation going in the dining room, where we made our costumes and sets. Michael participated with good humor, even though his health and enthusiasm tended to flag. Nicolás, who suffers from stage fright and empathetic shyness, was in charge of the technical production—light, sound, and special effects—and in that way could remain behind the curtains. Little by little, most of our friends were drawn into the troupe and there was no one left as audience, but rehearsing the works was so entertaining for actors and musicians that no one cared if we performed to an empty house. Our home was filled with people, noise, and laughter; finally we had an extended family and felt comfortable in this new country.

The same was not true of my parents, however. Tío Ramón saw himself approaching seventy and wanted to go back to Chile to die, as he announced with certain drama, eliciting belly laughs from all of us who know him to be immortal. Two months later, we watched him pack his suitcases and, shortly after, he left with my mother to return to a country where they had not set foot in many years and where the perennial general continued to govern. I felt like an orphan, and I was afraid for them; I had a foreboding that we would never live in the same city again and readied myself to resume the old routine of the daily letters. As a send-off, we gave a large party with Chilean wines and dishes and presented the last performance of the theater company. Using song and dance, actors and puppets, we narrated the torturous life and illegal loves of my mother and Tío Ramón, played by Paula and Ildemaro—outfitted with diabolical false eyebrows. This time we did have a public, because nearly all the good friends who had been so hospitable to my parents in that warm country attended. In a place of honor was Valentín Hernández, whose generous visas opened the doors to us. It was the last time we saw him, because shortly afterward he died of a sudden illness, leaving behind a grief-stricken wife and descendants. He was one of those loving and watchful patriarchs who gather all his loved ones beneath his protective cloak. It was not easy for him to die because he did not want to go while his family was exposed to the gales of these terrifying modern times and, in his heart of hearts, he may have dreamed of taking them with him. One year later, his widow convened her daughter, son-in-law, and grandchild to commemorate her husband's death in a happy way, as he would have wished, by taking them for a vacation. Their plane crashed, and few were left of that family to weep for the missing.

In September 1987, my third novel,
Eva Luna,
was published in Spain; this one was written in the full light of day on a computer in the large studio of a new house. The two preceding books had convinced my agent that I intended to take literature seriously, and me that it was reasonable to risk leaving my job to devote myself to writing, even though my husband had not emerged from bankruptcy and we still had unpaid debts. I sold my shares in the school and we bought a large house perched on a hillside—a little ramshackle, it's true, but Michael remodeled it, making it into a sunny refuge with room to spare for visitors, relatives, and friends, and for Mama Hilda to install herself comfortably in a sewing room and me in an office. In the foundations of the house, midpoint on the hill, was a bright and well-ventilated cellar, so large we planted in the middle of a tropical garden the vine that replaced the forget-me-nots of my nostalgia. The walls were lined with bookshelves, filled to overflowing, and right in the middle of the room I set a large table, the only piece of furniture. That was a period of great change. Paula and Nicolás, now independent and ambitious young adults, were attending the university; they were on their own now, and it was obvious they did not need me, but the complicity among the three of us was immutable. After her love affair with the young Sicilian, Paula became more serious about her studies in psychology and sexuality. Her chestnut hair fell to her waist; she did not use makeup and her long white cotton skirts and sandals accentuated her virginal appearance. She did volunteer work in the roughest slums, places even the police didn't venture after sunset. By then, violence and crime had skyrocketed in Caracas; our house had been broken into several times and there were horrible rumors of children kidnapped in shopping centers in order to harvest their corneas and sell them to eye banks, of women raped in parking lots, of people murdered simply to steal a watch. Paula would go off in her little car, carrying a bag of books, and I would be sick with apprehension. I begged her a thousand times not to go into those parts of the city, but she didn't listen because she felt she was protected by her good intentions and her belief that everyone knew who she was. Paula had a mature mind, but had not outgrown girlish emotions; the same woman who in the airplane memorized the map of a city she had never visited, rented a car at the airport, and drove straight to the hotel, or who in four hours could put together a course on literature that I used for university lectures, fainted when she was vaccinated and was nearly traumatized in vampire movies. She practiced her psychology tests on Nicolás and me, and confirmed that her brother has an IQ approaching genius and, in contrast, that her mother suffers severe retardation. She tested me again and again, but the results never varied, they always produced an embarrassing intellectual coefficient. Happily, she never experimented on us with the paraphernalia from the seminar on sexuality.

With
Eva Luna
, I was finally aware that my path was literary, and for the first time dared say, “I am a writer.” When I sat down to begin that book, I did not do so as I had with the two earlier ones, filled with excuses and doubts, but in full control of my will and even with a certain measure of arrogance. “I am going to write a novel,” I said aloud. Then I turned on the computer and without a second thought launched into the first sentence:
My name is Eva, which means “life”
. . .