THERE IS NO LACK OF DRAMA IN MY LIFE, I have more than enough three-ring-circus material for writing, but even so, I always approach the seventh of January with trembling. Last night I couldn’t sleep. We were shaken by a storm; the wind roared among the oaks and rattled the windows of the house, the culmination of the biblical deluge of recent weeks. Some neighborhoods in our area were flooded; the firemen were not equipped to cope with such a major disaster, and neighbors waded out into the streets in water up to their waists to save what they could from the torrents. Furniture sailed down the main streets, and bewildered pets awaited their owners atop drowned cars, while reporters in helicopters captured scenes of this California winter you would have thought was a Louisiana hurricane. In some places traffic was blocked for a couple of days, and when at last the skies cleared and the magnitude of the damage could be seen, crews of Latino immigrants were given the task of pumping out the water and removing debris by hand. Our house, set high on a hill, takes face-on the fury of the wind, which bends the palms and from time to time tore the proudest trees out by the roots, the ones that do not bow their heads, but we escaped the flooding. Occasionally at the height of the wind, capricious waves rise up and overflow the one access road, and at those times we were trapped, observing from above the unusual spectacle of the raging bay.
I like it that winter forces us to turn inward. I live in Marin County, to the north of San Francisco, twenty minutes from the Golden Gate Bridge, among hills golden in summer and emerald in winter, on the west shore of the enormous bay. On a clear day we can see two other bridges in the distance, the hazy outlines of the ports of Oakland and San Francisco, the slow-moving cargo ships, hundreds of sailboats, and gulls like white handkerchiefs. In May we begin to see a few intrepid adventurers hanging from multicolored comets gliding swiftly across the water, disturbing the quiet of Asian grandfathers who spend their afternoons fishing from the rocks. From the Pacific one does not see the narrow access to the bay, which greets the dawn wrapped in fog, and the sailors of yesteryear passed on by, never imagining the splendor hidden a little farther in. Now that entrance is crowned by the elegant Golden Gate Bridge, with its proud red towers. Water, sky, hills, and woods; that is my landscape.
It wasn’t the end-of-the-world windstorm or the machine-gun hail on the roof tiles that kept me awake last night, it was the anxiety of knowing that with the light of day it would be the eighth of January. For twenty-five years, I have begun a book on that date, more from superstition than discipline. I’m afraid that if I begin on any other day the book will be a failure and that if I let an eighth of January go by without writing, I’ll not be able to start for the rest of the year. January arrives after a few months without writing, months in which I’ve lived turned outward, in the uproar of the world, traveling, promoting books, giving lectures, surrounded by people, talking too much. Noise and more noise. Most of all I fear going deaf, not being able to hear the silence. Without silence, I’m done for. Last night I got up several times to wander through the house, using a variety of excuses, wrapped in Willie’s old cashmere sweater, so worn it’s become my second skin, with successive cups of hot chocolate in my hands, thinking and thinking about what I was going to write within a few hours, until the cold forced me back to bed, where Willie, bless him, lay snoring. Pressed against his naked back, I tucked my icy feet between his long, firm legs, breathing in the surprising scent of a young man that hasn’t changed in all these years. He never wakes up when I press against him, only when I move away. He is used to my body, my insomnia, and my nightmares. And the same is true with Olivia, who sleeps on a bench at the foot of our bed. She never stirs. Nothing interrupts that silly dog’s sleep, not the mice that sometimes creep out of their holes, or the funk the skunks emit as they make love, or the wandering souls murmuring in the darkness. If a madman armed with a hatchet should attack us, Olivia would be the last to know. When she came to us she was a wretched little beast the Humane Society had picked up from the dump. She had a broken leg and several broken ribs. For a month she hid among my shoes in the closet, shivering, but little by little she recovered from her previous ill treatment and emerged with her ears drooping and her tail between her legs. We knew then that she would never be a guard dog; she sleeps like a log.
By daybreak, finally, the wrath of the storm had ceased, but it was still raining. With the first light at the window, I showered and got dressed, while Willie, wrapped in his jaded sheik dressing gown, went to the kitchen. The smell of freshly ground coffee enveloped me like a caress. Aromatherapy. These everyday routines unite us more than the clamor of passion; when we’re apart it is this silent dance we miss most. We each need to feel that the other one is near, always there in that intangible space that is ours alone. A cold dawn, coffee and toast, time to write, a dog that wags her tail, and my lover. Life could be no better. Willie gave me a good-bye hug, for I was leaving on a long journey. “Good luck,” he whispered, as he does every year on this day, and I took my coat and umbrella, went down six steps, skirted the swimming pool, walked through fifty feet of garden, and reached the casita where I write, my study, my cuchitril. And here I am now.
I had barely lit a candle—one always illuminates my writing—when Carmen Balcells, my agent, called me from Santa Fe, a tiny town of crazed goats near Barcelona, where she was born. She intends to spend her mature years there in peace, but as she has energy to burn, she is buying the village house by house.
“Read me the first sentence,” demanded this larger-than-life mother figure.
I reminded her once more of the nine-hour difference in time between California and Spain. No first sentence yet. No nothing.
“Write a memoir, Isabel.”
“I already wrote one, don’t you remember?”
“That was thirteen years ago.”
“My family doesn’t like to see itself exposed, Carmen.”
“Don’t worry about anything. Send me a two- or three-hundred-page letter and I’ll take care of the rest. If it comes down to choosing between telling a story and offending relatives, any professional writer chooses the former.”
“Are you sure?”
“Absolutely.”