Paula (52 page)

These pages recount the premature end of a splendid young woman who deserved a long life; they are not a lament, however, but a celebration of life. Two stories interweave within them: that of my daughter Paula and that of my own destiny. The slow death of my daughter gave me the extraordinary opportunity to revisit my past. For a year my life stopped completely; I had nothing to do but hope and remember. Compelled to remain still for the first time, I started a long introspection, a journey inside myself and my past. Until that moment I had lived in a hurry, but in those endless months next to my daughter's bed, trying to communicate with her lost spirit, I discovered silence. This was one of the best presents that Paula gave me during that time. Now, every day, I look for the quiet peace of nature, for a few minutes of thought, of solitude, which allows me to meet Paula and my own soul.

The other precious present that Paula left me was learning unconditional love. Prostrate in that bed, silent and unmoving, with her eyes turned towards death, my daughter couldn't give anything, only receive. She, who had before possessed a rare intelligence and a memorable grace, who had spent 28 years in the service of others, was reduced to the condition of a statue. So I had to love her as she was, without desires or hopes, without getting a reply, without even knowing if she noticed my care. And after she died, when I thought I'd lost everything, I discovered I had something that no one could take away from me: the love that I had offered to Paula. In the years that have passed since then I have tried very hard not to forget that experience of love and to repeat it as often as possible, because in reality the only thing we have is that which we give.

At the end of November, when it was obvious that she was starting to irrevocably slip away, when she had already stopped appearing to me in dreams and the subtle communication that we had seemed to disappear, I decided to open an envelope that contained a letter written by Paula long before she fell ill and marked “to be opened when I die.” Trembling, I broke the wax seal and took out two pages of Paula's handwriting. It was a spiritual testament that started by saying: “I don't want to remain trapped in my body. Liberated from it, I will be closer to those I love, even if they're in the four corners of the world.” She carries on saying to her husband and us, her family, how much she loves us and how happy she has been, and asks us not to forget her, because while we remember her she will be at our side. She tells us we should be happy because “spirits help, accompany and protect better those who are happy.” Paula, who in this letter was already talking about herself as a spirit, also says that she doesn't want a stone with her name on, she wants to remain in our hearts and for her ashes to return to the earth. We tried to follow her instructions, and her name isn't engraved on any stone—which is why it is somewhat ironic that it's written instead on millions of books throughout the world.

In some editions her face appears on the cover: a girl with long dark hair, thick eyebrows and big eyes, with a captivating smile. Willie took that photo shortly before she fell ill. After her death we looked for the negative in the jumbled boxes that Willie has in the basement and, almost by magic, we were able to find it. I took it to make copies but—and I don't know how—I lost it in the street. I spent hours running up and down, despairing, until I found it, intact, in a car park, where many wheels must have passed over it. I've asked myself many times if Paula, who was a very private person, would have liked to pass from hand to hand . . . I console myself with the idea that this book has opened a space in which its readers and I share our losses and grief as much as our hopes and memories. This mission to bring people together was something that Paula had taken on since she was very small, which is why it occurs to me that she would patiently accept the publicity as a lesser evil. This book has also helped me to keep my daughter alive and always present. Each time I have to sign a copy, she smiles at me from these pages.

Sometimes I have felt clearly that she is talking to me—for example through a letter from a reader, when she replies to a question at the right moment. For my birthday, Mothers' Day or the 8th January, greetings come from strangers who sign in Paula's name. A couple of weeks ago, emerging from the darkness of the New York subway, I found myself in the middle of the street, blinded by the light of bright spring reflected in the skyscrapers, and when I was able to focus my gaze, Paula was looking at me. There was an enormous photograph of her in the window of a bookshop. If it's certain that death doesn't exist and we only die when we are forgotten, then my daughter will live for a long time.

My life, like my books, is made of sorrow and love. Sorrow makes me learn and love makes me grow. Literature, for me, is an act of alchemy, the ability to transform the banalities of existence into glimpses of wisdom. Perhaps this is what the prodigious power of the written word consists of: it allows us to preserve memory, to transform suffering into strength, to be reborn each season, like old trees who make new leaves after every winter.

The following books are also available in Spanish from Rayo, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, and can be found at www.harpercollins.com
.

Abandoned and neglected by her parents, nineteen-year old Maya Vidal has grown up in a rambling old house in Berkeley with her grandparents. Her grandmother, Nidia, affectionately known as Nini, is a force of nature—willful and outspoken, unconventionally wise with a mystical streak, and fiercely protective—a woman whose formidable strength helped her build a new life after emigrating from Chile in 1973 with her young son, Maya's father. Popo, Maya's grandfather, is an African-American astronomer and professor—a gentle man whose solid, comforting presence helps calm the turbulence of Maya's adolescence.

When Popo dies of cancer, Maya goes completely off the rails. With her girlfriends—a tight circle known as the vampires—she turns to drugs, alcohol, and petty crime, a downward spiral that eventually bottoms out in Las Vegas. Lost in a dangerous underworld, she becomes caught in the crosshairs of warring forces—a gang of assassins, the police, the FBI, and Interpol. Her one chance for survival is Nini, who helps her escape to a remote island off the coast of Chile. In the care of her grandmother's old friend, Manuel Arias, Maya struggles to adapt to this insular community seemingly lost in time. Surrounded by an assortment of unusual new acquaintances, including a torture survivor and a lame dog, Maya tries to make sense of the past, unravels mysterious truths about life and her family, and embarks on her greatest adventure: the journey into her own soul.

Born a slave on the island of Saint-Domingue, Zarité—known as Tété—is the daughter of an African mother she never knew and one of the white sailors who brought her into bondage. Although her childhood is one of brutality and fear, Tété finds solace in the traditional rhythms of African drums and the voodoo loas she discovers through her fellow slaves.

When twenty-year-old Toulouse Valmorain arrives on the island in 1770, it's with powdered wigs in his trunks and dreams of financial success in his mind. But running his father's plantation, Saint Lazare, is neither glamorous nor easy. It will be eight years before he brings home a bride, the beautiful Eugenia Garcia del Solar—but marriage, too, proves more difficult than he imagined. And Valmorain remains dependent on the services of his teenaged slave.

Against the merciless backdrop of sugar cane fields, the lives of Tété and Valmorain grow ever more intertwined. When the bloody revolution of Toussaint Louverture arrives at the gates of Saint Lazare, they flee the island that will become Haiti for the decadence and opportunity of New Orleans. There, Tété finally forges a new life, but her connection to Valmorain is deeper than anyone knows and not so easily severed.

Born in southern California late in the eighteenth century, Diego de la Vega is a child of two worlds. His father is an aristocratic Spanish military man turned landowner; his mother, a Shoshone warrior. Diego learns from his maternal grandmother, White Owl, the ways of her tribe, while receiving from his father lessons in the art of fencing and in cattle branding. It is here, during Diego's childhood, filled with mischief and adventure, that he witnesses the brutal injustices dealt Native Americans by European settlers and first feels the inner conflict of his heritage.

At the age of sixteen, Diego is sent to Barcelona for a European education. In a country chafing under the corruption of Napoleonic rule, Diego follows the example of his celebrated fencing master and joins La Justicia, a secret underground resistance movement devoted to helping the powerless and the poor. With this tumultuous period as a backdrop, Diego falls in love, saves the persecuted, and confronts for the first time a great rival who emerges from the world of privilege.

Between California and Barcelona, the New World and the Old, the persona of Zorro is formed, a great hero is born, and the legend begins. After many adventures—duels at dawn, fierce battles with pirates at sea, and impossible rescues—Diego de la Vega, aka Zorro, returns to America to reclaim the hacienda on which he was raised and to seek justice for all who cannot fight for it themselves.

“Allende's discreetly subversive talent really shows. . . . You turn the pages, cheering on the masked man.”

—
Los Angeles Times Book Review