ONE OF THE PSYCHOLOGISTS—we had several at our disposal—recommended that Willie and I share some activities that were fun, not just obligatory. We needed more lightness and entertainment in our lives. I proposed to my husband that we should take dancing lessons because we’d seen an Australian movie on that theme, Strictly Ballroom, and I could already see us whirling in the glow of crystal chandeliers, Willie in a dinner jacket and two-tone shoes and I in my beaded dress and ostrich plumes, both of us airy, graceful, moving to the same rhythm, in perfect harmony, as we hoped some day our relationship would be. When we had met that unforgettable day in October 1987, Willie had taken me dancing at a hotel in San Francisco. That gave me the opportunity to bury my nose in his chest and sniff him, and that was why I fell in love with him. Willie smells like a healthy boy. His only memory of that occasion, however, was that I kept tugging him around. It was like trying to break a wild mare, he told me. It seems to me that he asked, “Is this going to be a problem between us?” And he assures me that I answered, in a submissive little voice, “Of course not.” That had been a number of years before.
We decided to begin with private lessons, so we wouldn’t look ridiculous in front of other more advanced dancers. More accurately, I was the one who made that decision. The truth is that Willie was a good dancer in his youth, fawned over and with a winning record in dance contests, and I, in contrast, had all the grace of a Mack truck on the dance floor. The ballroom of the academy had floor-to-ceiling mirrors on all four sides, and the teacher turned out to be a nineteen-year-old Scandinavian with legs as long as I was tall. She was wearing black stockings with seams down the back, and stiletto-heeled sandals. She announced that we would begin by dancing the salsa. She pointed me to a chair, fell into Willie’s arms, and waited for the precise beat of the music to launch herself across the floor.
“The man leads,” was her first lesson.
“Why?” I asked.
“I don’t know, but that’s how it is,” she said.
“Aha!” Willie crowed with a triumphant air.
“That doesn’t seem fair to me,” I persisted.
“What’s not fair about it?” asked the Scandinavian.
“I think we should take turns. Willie will lead once and then it will be my turn.”
“The man always leads!” the brutish woman exclaimed.
She and my husband glided around the dance floor to a Latin beat as the huge mirrors reflected their interlocked bodies to infinity, the long black-stocking-clad legs and Willie’s idiotic smile, while I sat and stewed in my chair.
After we left the class, we had a fight in the car that came close to ending in fisticuffs. According to Willie, he hadn’t even noticed the teacher’s legs or her breasts. That was all in my head. “Jeez! How stupid can you get!” he cried. The fact that I had spent an hour in that chair while he danced was logical, since the man leads, and once he learned, he could guide me around the floor with the perfection of the courting dance of the heron. He didn’t put it exactly that way, but to me it sounded as if he was mocking me. My psychologist thought that we should not give up, that ballroom dancing was an effective discipline for body and soul. What did he know, a Buddhist green tea drinker who surely had never danced in his life! But all the same, we went to a second and then a third class before I lost patience and punched the instructor. I have never felt more humiliated. The result was that what little we knew about dancing we lost, and since then Willie and I have gone dancing only once. I am recounting this episode only because it is like an allegory of our character: it captures every nuance from head to toe.
CELIA, NICO, AND THE CHILDREN moved into their new house, and Celia’s brother came to live with them. He was a tall, pleasant, although rather spoiled young man who was looking for his destiny and planned to live in the United States. I believe that like Celia he had never gotten along very well with his family.
In the meantime, the publication of Paula brought me undeserved prizes and honorary degrees. I was elected a member of assorted academies of the language, and even given the symbolic keys to a city. Caps and gowns piled up in a trunk, and Andrea used them for her costumes—my granddaughter had entered a conservationist stage, and had a doll she named Save-the-Tuna. Luckily I never lost sight of something Carmen Balcells told me. “The prize doesn’t honor the one who receives it as much as the one who gives it, so don’t get any big ideas about yourself.” That was impossible. My grandchildren made sure that I remained humble, and Willie reminded me that resting on your laurels is the best way to crush them.
It was about that time that Willie, Tabra, and I went to Chile to attend the premiere of The House of the Spirits. There were still Pinochet sympathizers in that country who were not ashamed to admit it. Today there are fewer in number because the general lost prestige among his faithful when the story of his thievery, his tax evasion, and his corruption came to light. The same people who had overlooked torture and murders could not forgive the millions he had stolen. It had been almost six years since the dictator had been defeated in a plebiscite, but the military, the press, and the judicial system still treated him with kid gloves. The right controlled the Congress, and the country was run under a constitution Pinochet himself had created; he counted on immunity from the Senate and the shelter of an amnesty law. The democracy was conditional, and there was a tacit social and political agreement not to provoke the military. A few years later, when Pinochet was arrested in England, where he had gone to collect his commissions on arms sales, have a medical checkup, and take high tea with his friend Margaret Thatcher, he was exposed in the world press and accused of crimes against humanity, and the legal edifice he had constructed to protect himself came tumbling down, and at last Chileans dared come out in the street and make fun of him.
The movie was as welcome as the plague among the extreme right, but it was enthusiastically received by most people, particularly by the young who had been raised under strict censorship and who wanted to know more about what had happened in Chile during the ’70s and ’80s. I remember that during the performance, one senator of the right jumped up and stamped out of the theater, announcing at the top of his lungs that the film was a string of lies besmirching a great patriot, our General Pinochet. Some reporters asked me what I thought about that, and I answered in good faith, since I had heard it said many times: “Everyone knows that gentleman is soft in the head.” I regret that I’ve forgotten the man’s name. . . . In spite of the few snags at the beginning, the film was very successful and now, ten years later, it is still one of the favorites on television and video.
Tabra, who though she had been to the least-known corners of the planet had never been in Chile, took away a very good impression of my country. I don’t know what she had expected but she found herself in a city that reminded her of Europe, surrounded by magnificent mountains, hospitable people, and delicious food. We had a suite in the most luxurious hotel in town, where each night we were left a chocolate sculpture modeled on some aspect of our indigenous past, such as the cacique Caupolicán armed with a lance and followed by two or three of his Mapuche warriors. Tabra worked hard to eat the last crumb, with the hope of getting rid of it once and for all, but within a few hours it would be replaced with another two pounds of chocolate: a cart with two oxen, or six of our cowboys on horseback, the celebrated huasos, carrying the Chilean flag. And since she had learned as a child never to leave anything on her plate, she would give a great sigh and attack the plate, until the night she was conquered by a replica of Aconcague, the highest peak in the cordillera of the Andes in solid chocolate, as massive as the huge dark rock that according to my psychiatrist was sitting in the middle of my chest.