Paula (7 page)

The high point of the night, however, was always The Mummy, who for years filled my nights with terror. The lights in the theater would dim and we would hear a scratchy recording of a funeral march, at which point two Egyptians, profiled against lighted torches, would appear, followed by another four carrying a gaudily painted sarcophagus on a bier. The four would lower the mummy case to the floor of the ring and take one or two steps backward, all the while chanting in some dead tongue. Frozen with dread, we watched as the lid opened and a gauze-swathed humanoid figure emerged—apparently in perfect health, to judge by all the roaring and breast-beating. The Mummy did not have the mobility of the other wrestlers, but relied on formidable kicks and battering, stiff-armed blows that slammed opponents into the ropes and decked referees. Once, one of those hammer blows split Tarzan's head, and when we got home my grandfather at last could exhibit some red stains on his shirt. “This isn't blood, or anything near; it's tomato sauce,” Margara grumbled as she was soaking the shirt in chlorine. Those showmen occupied a nook in my memory, and many years later I tried to resuscitate them in a story, but the only one that had left a lasting impression was The Widower. He was a wretch of a man in the fortieth year of his miserable existence, the antithesis of a hero, who entered the ring wearing an old-fashioned bathing suit, the kind men wore at the beginning of the century: black wool jersey to his knees, with a U-neck top and suspenders. A rubber swim cap added the last touch of pathos. He was met with a storm of jeers, insults, threats, and projectiles, but by clanging the bell and blowing his whistle the referee finally restored order to the unruly mob. The Widower then raised his reed-thin voice to announce that this would be his last fight because he had serious back trouble and had been profoundly depressed since the passing of his saintly wife—might she rest in peace. When that fine woman had shuffled off this mortal coil, she had left him in sole charge of their two young children. When the boos had reached the noise level of a full-fledged battle, two little boys with sorrowful expressions climbed between the ropes and clung to The Widower's knees, begging him not to fight because he'd be killed. A sudden silence would fall over the crowd, as I whispered my favorite poem:
Hand in hand, two orphan lads / toward the graveyard slowly wend / Upon their father's tomb they kneel / and up to God sweet prayers they send
. “Quiet,” Tata would say, jabbing me with his elbow. In a voice broken with sobs, The Widower would explain that he had to support his children, and so would take on the Texas Assassin. You could hear a flea jump in that enormous hall. In one instant, a savage thirst for mayhem and blood was transformed into teary compassion, and a warmhearted shower of coins and bills rained down on the ring. The orphans quickly gathered the loot and skedaddled, as the Texas Assassin strutted toward the ring, dressed—I never knew why—as a Roman galley slave and slashing the air with a whip. Naturally, The Widower always took an unholy drubbing, but as the winner left he had to be protected by armed guards from a public ready to make mincemeat of him, while the bruised Widower and his young sons were borne off by kindly hands that, as a bonus, also bestowed sweets, money, and blessings.

“Poor devil, it's a terrible thing, being widowed,” my grandfather would comment, openly moved.

In the late sixties, when I was working as a journalist, I was assigned a feature on the “Grunt and Groan Game,” as Tata called that unique sport. At twenty-eight, I still believed in objective reporting, and had no choice but to write about the miserable lives of the pitiful combatants, to unmask the tomato-pulp blood, the glass eyes clutched in the grappling hook hands of Kuramoto as the blinded loser staggered away howling and covering his face with blood-smeared hands, or to report on the moth-eaten wig of The Angel, now so old he must surely have been the model for Gabriel García Márquez's best short story, “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings.” My grandfather read my article with clenched teeth, and it was a week before he would speak to me again.

My childhood summers were spent at the beach, where our family owned a huge, rundown old house by the sea. We left in December, before Christmas, and returned at the end of February, black from the sun and stuffed with fruit and fish. The trip, today an easy hour on the thruway, was then an odyssey that took the entire day. Preparations began a week in advance, as boxes were filled with food, sheets, and towels, bags and baskets with clothes, and the parrot—a nasty bird that would as soon as not nip off a finger if you got too close—forced into its cage. It goes without saying that Pelvina López-Pun also made the trip. The only ones to stay in town were the cook and the cats, wild creatures by now that fed on mice and pigeons. My grandfather owned a black English touring car that was as heavy as a tank, with a rack on the roof for strapping on the mountain of bundles. Pelvina rode in the open trunk with the lunch, which she never disturbed because as soon as she saw the suitcases she fell into a profound canine melancholy. Margara always brought basins, wet cloths, ammonia, and a bottle of
tisana
, a sweet, home-brewed chamomile tea to which she attributed the nebulous virtue of contracting the stomach. None of those precautions, however, could prevent carsickness. My mother, we three children, and Pelvina began to languish long before we left Santiago; as we turned onto the highway, we began to moan with agony, and by the time we reached the curving road through the hills, we entered a twilight zone. Tata, who had to stop every so often so we could get down, half swooning, to breathe and stretch our legs, fought the wheel of that old motorcar, cursing the fortune that led us to summer at the beach. We always stopped at farms along the way to buy goat cheese, melons, and jars of honey. Once he bought a live turkey to fatten; the countrywoman from whom he acquired it was large—clearly an understatement—with child, and my grandfather, with his customary chivalry, offered to catch the bird for her. Even half-sick, we were wildly entertained by the memorable spectacle of that lame old man in hot pursuit of the turkey. Finally he hooked his cane around the bird's neck and tackled it amid a whirlwind of dust and feathers. We watched him as he limped back to the car, covered with droppings but with the trophy safely beneath his arm, its feet tightly bound. How could anyone have foreseen that Pelvina would shake off her lassitude long enough to bite off the bird's head before we reached our destination? Nothing would take out the blood-stains, which remained for the life of the car as an eternal reminder of those calamitous journeys.

That summer watering place was a world of women and children. La Playa Grande was a paradise that lasted until a petroleum refinery was set up nearby that forever fouled the clear ocean water and frightened away the sirens, who were never again heard along those shores. At ten in the morning, uniformed nannies would begin to arrive with children in tow. They settled down to knit, watching their charges out of the corner of their eyes, always from the same identical spot on the beach. The oldest families, who owned the grand houses, positioned themselves beneath tents and umbrellas in the precise center; to the left were the newly rich, the tourists, and the middle class who rented the houses on the hills; and at the extreme right were the day-trip hoi polloi who came down from Santiago in rattletrap buses. In a bathing suit, everyone looks more or less equal; every person, nevertheless, immediately recognized his God-given place. In Chile, the upper class tends to have a European appearance; as you descend the social and economic scale, indigenous features become more pronounced. Class consciousness is so strong that I never saw one person violate the defining boundaries. At noon the mothers would arrive, carrying large straw hats and bottles of the carrot juice they used for rapid tanning. About two, when the sun was at its zenith, everyone retired for lunch and a siesta. Soon after, the teenagers appeared, essaying an air of boredom; ripening girls and world-weary young males who lay in the sand to smoke and rub against each other until excitement obliged them to seek relief in the sea. Every Friday night, the husbands arrived from Santiago, and Saturday and Sunday the character of the beach changed. Mothers sent their children on walks with nannies and gathered in groups in their best swimsuits and straw hats, competing for the attention of each other's spouses, a pointless endeavor, really, since the men scarcely glanced at them; they were much more interested in talking politics—the only topic in Chile—and counting the minutes before they could go back to the house to eat and drink like Cossacks. My mother, seated like an empress at the center of the center of the beach, took the sun in the mornings and in the late afternoons went to the casino, where she had discovered a system that allowed her to win enough daily to pay her expenses. To prevent our being dragged out to sea and drowning, Margara tied us to her with ropes she kept wound around her waist while she continued to knit endless sweaters for the winter. When she felt a tug, she would look up briefly to see who was in difficulty and then haul the victim back to safety. We suffered that humiliation every single day, but we forgot the other children's teasing as soon as we jumped into the water. We played until we were blue with cold; we collected conchs and other seashells; we ate sand-sprinkled cakes and half-melted lemon ices sold by a deaf-mute from a little cart filled with salted ice. Every evening, my mother took my hand and walked with me to the rocks to watch the sunset. We waited to make a wish on the last ray, which sparks green fire at the precise instant the sun sinks below the horizon. I always wished for my mother not to find a husband, and I suppose that she wished exactly the opposite. She would tell me about Ramón, whom, influenced by her description, I imagined as an enchanted prince whose principal virtue consisted of distance. Tata left us at the beach at the beginning of summer and returned almost immediately to Santiago. It was the one time he could enjoy a little peace; he liked the empty house, and playing golf and cards at the Union Club. If he appeared some weekend, it was not to indulge in relaxation but to test his strength, swimming for hours in the strong, ice-cold waves, fishing, or making badly needed repairs on a house eternally deteriorating from dampness. He sometimes took us to a place that had milk fresh from the cow, a dark, stinking shed, where a peasant with filthy fingernails squirted milk directly into tin cups. We drank the warm, creamy liquid, along with occasional flies floating in the foam. My grandfather, who did not believe in hygiene and was a proponent of immunizing children through direct contact with the source of infection, would shake with laughter when we swallowed a live fly.

The local inhabitants greeted the invasion of the summer people with a mixture of animosity and enthusiasm. They were modest folk, nearly all fishermen, or tradesmen and owners of small plots along the river where they cultivated tomatoes and lettuce. They took great pride in the fact that nothing ever happened in their peaceful little town. One winter, however, a well-known artist was found crucified on the mast of a sailboat. I heard only snatches of talk, as the subject was not considered appropriate for children, but years later I learned some of the particulars. The entire town had conspired to muddy the waters by confusing evidence and covering up proof, and the police did not make too great an effort to clear up the dark crime because everyone knew exactly who had nailed the body to the mast. This artist lived year-round in his house on the coast, devoted to his painting, his collection of classical records, and taking long walks with his dog, a purebred Afghan hound so lean people thought it must be a cross between a dog and an eagle. The handsomest among the young fishermen posed as models for the artist's paintings, and soon became his drinking companions. At night, music filled every corner of the house, and more than once the men did not return home or go to work for days at a time. Mothers and sweethearts tried in vain to reclaim their men, until, their patience exhausted, they quietly began to plot an end to the problem. I can picture them, whispering while they repaired the nets, exchanging winks from their stalls in the market, and passing along countersigns for the witches' Sabbath to come. On the night in question, they slipped like shadows along the beach, approached the large house, entered silently, without disturbing the drunken slumbers of their men, and carried out what they had to do—hammers firm in their hands. They say that the svelte Afghan suffered the same fate as its master.

I have had reason from time to time to visit the fishermen's miserable huts, with their clinging odors of charcoal and fishing gear, and I felt the same discomfort I did in the rooms of our servants. In my grandfather's house, which was as long as a railroad, the walls were so thin that our dreams intermingled at night. In the salt air, water pipes, anything metal, promptly surrendered to the pernicious leprosy of rust. Once a year the whole house had to be repainted and the mattresses ripped open to wash and sun-dry the mildewed wool. The house was built beside a hill, which Tata had had sliced off like a cake, with no thought for erosion; the happy result, however, was a gully with a continuous flow of water that fed gigantic clumps of pink and blue hydrangeas that bloomed all year round. On the top of the hill, reached by endless stairs, lived a fisherman's family. One of their children, a young man with hands calloused from the onerous task of tearing shellfish from rocks, once took me into the woods. I was eight. It was Christmas Day.

* * *

This is the moment, however, to focus on the only one of my mother's lovers to interest us; she paid very little attention to any of the others, and they simply fade from this story. Ramón had separated from his wife, who had returned to Santiago with their children, and was working in the embassy in Bolivia, saving every cent to finance an annulment, the traditional procedure in Chile where because of the absence of divorce laws one must resort to tricks, lies, and perjury. Years of deferred love had served to change his personality; he had freed himself of the guilt instilled by a despotic father, and distanced himself from the constraining straitjacket of the Church. Through passionate letters and a smattering of telephone calls, he had succeeded in routing several rivals as powerful as a dentist who was a magician in his free time and could pull a live rabbit from a pail of boiling oil; the king of pressure cookers who introduced those devices into Chile, altering forever the slow rituals of the national kitchen; and various other gallants who might have become our stepfather—including my own favorite, Dr. Benjamin Viel, tall and straight as a lance, whose contagious laughter rang through my grandfather's house. My mother assures me that the one love of her life was Ramón, and as they are both still living, I will not contradict her. Two years after we left Peru, they plotted a rendezvous in the north of Chile. For my mother, the risks of that clandestine meeting were enormous; it was a definitive step toward the forbidden, a rejection of her prudent life as a bank employee and the advantages of self-sacrificing widowhood in her father's home, but youth and the force of frustrated desire won out over scruples. She spent months planning this adventure, her only accomplice my Uncle Pablo, who did not want to know the lover's identity, or any of the details, but bought his sister the most elegant traveling outfit money could buy and filled her pocketbook with cash—in case she repented along the way and decided to come home, he said—and then, still silent as the Sphinx, drove her to the airport. She left defiantly, without any explanation to my grandfather, because she assumed he would not understand the overpowering call of love. She returned a week later, transformed by the experience of sated passion and, upon descending from the plane, found Tata, all in black and deadly serious, waiting with open arms; he clasped her to his bosom, silently forgiving her. I must suppose that during those fleeting days Ramón had fulfilled with interest the burning promises of his letters; that would explain my mother's decision that she would wait for him for years, hoping that one day he would slip free of his matrimonial bonds. Their tryst, and its consequences, seemed to dim with the passing weeks. My grandfather, who mistrusted long-distance love affairs, never broached the subject and, as my mother was similarly silent, he came to believe that the inevitable pulverization of time was grinding down their passion. He was, therefore, more than a little surprised when he learned of the lover's abrupt appearance in Santiago. As for me—nearly convinced that the enchanted prince lived in a fairy tale and was not a real person at all—I panicked; the idea that my mother might become so enamored of him that she would abandon us tied my stomach in knots. Ramón, it seems, had learned that a mysterious suitor with better prospects than his own had appeared on the horizon—I like to think it was Benjamin Viel, but have no proof—and, without a backward look, he left his post in La Paz and bought a seat on the first plane for Chile. As long as he had been out of the country, his separation from his wife had not been too noticeable, but when he returned to Santiago, and not to the conjugal abode, the situation exploded: relatives, friends, and acquaintances mobilized in a tenacious campaign to return him to his legitimate hearth. I will never forget the day that my brothers and I were walking down the street with Margara and as we passed an obviously wealthy woman she screamed, “Your mother's a slut!” In view of the stubbornness of the recalcitrant husband, his uncle the bishop came to call on my grandfather to demand his intervention. Exalted with Christian fury and enveloped in the odor of sanctity—he hadn't bathed in fifteen years—he updated the list of my mother's sins, a Bathsheba sent by the Evil One to beguile mortal men. My grandfather was not one to accept such rhetoric when it was directed toward a member of his family, nor to let himself be run over by a priest, however saintly his fame, but he realized that the scandal must be met head on, before it was too late. He arranged a meeting with Ramón in his office, to deal with the problem at its root, but found himself confronting a will as stony as his own.