JENNIFER WAS ALLOWED TO SEE SABRINA in supervised visits every two weeks, and with every one I could see how Willie’s daughter’s health was deteriorating. She looked worse every time I saw her, as I wrote my mother and my friend Pía. In Chile they both had made donations to Padre Hurtado’s foundation; he is the only Chilean saint that even Communists venerate because he can work miracles, and they were praying for Jennifer to be cured of her addictions. In truth, only divine intervention could help her.
And here I want to pause briefly to introduce Pía, my forever friend, the woman who is like my Chilean sister, whose loyalty has never wavered, not even when we were separated by my exile. Pía comes from a very conservative Catholic family that celebrated the military coup of 1973 with champagne, but I know that on at least two occasions she hid victims of the dictatorship in her house. It is rare that we speak about politics, for we don’t want anything to come between us. After I took my small family to Venezuela, we kept in touch by letter, and now we visit each other in Chile and in California, where she likes to come for vacations, and so we have kept alive a friendship that by now has a diamantine clarity. We love each other unconditionally and when we’re together we create four-handed paintings and giggle like schoolgirls. Do you remember that Pía and I used to joke about how one day we would be two merry widows and would live together in a garret, gossiping and making our crafts? Well, Paula, we don’t talk about that anymore because Gerardo, her husband, the kindest and most guileless man in this world, died one morning like any other when he was supervising work in one of his fields. He sighed, bowed his head, and went to the other world without a good-bye. Pía can’t be consoled even though she is surrounded by her clan: four children, five grandchildren, and scores of relatives and friends with whom she is constantly in touch, as is the custom in Chile. She devotes herself to charities of every sort, takes care of her family, and works with her oils and brushes in her free time. In moments of sadness, when she can’t stop crying over Gerardo, she closes her door and creates small works of art with scraps of cloth, including icons embroidered with beads and precious stones that look as if they’d come from the treasure troves of ancient Constantinople. This Pía who loved you so much had a tiny chapel built in her garden and planted a rose in your memory. There beside that luxuriant rosebush she talks with Gerardo and you, and often prays for Willie’s children and for his granddaughter.
Rebecca, the social worker, organized the routine for Sabrina’s visits with her mother. It wasn’t easy, since the judge had ordered that Jennifer and her companion should not meet the foster mothers or learn where they lived. Fu and Grace would meet me in the parking lot of some mall and give me the child, with diapers, toys, bottles, and the rest of the paraphernalia babies need. I would drive her, in one of the seats I kept in my car for my grandchildren, to City Hall, where I would meet Rebecca and a policewoman—always a different one, though they all had an air of professional boredom. While the uniformed woman watched the door, Rebecca and I waited in a nearby room, enchanted with Sabrina, who had become very beautiful and very alert; she did not miss a single detail. She had caramel-colored skin, the fuzz of a newborn lamb on her head, and the amazing eyes of a houri. Sometimes Jennifer would show up for the meeting, sometimes not. When she did appear, with a bad case of jitters—a fox being chased by hounds—she never stayed more than five or ten minutes. She would pick up her daughter, but then feeling her light in her arms, or hearing her cry, she seemed confounded. “I need a cigarette . . . ,” she’d say, and she would hurry out and often not come back. Rebecca and the police officer would take Sabrina and me back to my car, and I would drive to the parking lot where the two mothers were anxiously waiting. I think that for Jennifer those harried visits must have been a torment; she had lost her daughter, and not even her relief at knowing she was in good hands could console her.
These strategic appointments had been under way for about five months when Jennifer was again taken to the hospital, this time with an infection in her heart and another in her legs. She showed no signs of alarm, but simply told us that it had happened before. Nothing serious, she insisted, but the doctors were not so sanguine. Fu and Grace decided that they were tired of hiding and that Jenny had the right to know the women who were looking after her daughter. I went with them to the hospital, ignoring legal protocol. “If the social worker finds out, you all will be in a jam,” warned Willie, who thinks like a lawyer and still did not know Rebecca well.
Jennifer was a pitiable sight; you could count her teeth through the translucent skin of her cheeks, her hair was a tangled doll’s wig, and her hands were blue and the nails black. Her mother was also there, horrified to see her daughter in that state. I think she had accepted the fact that Jennifer would not live much longer, but was hoping at least to reconnect with her before the end. She thought that they would talk and make peace in the hospital—after so many years of hurting each other—but once more her daughter would run away before the medications could take effect. Our difficulties made Willie’s first wife and me very close; she had suffered with her children—both of them were addicted to drugs—and I had lost you, Paula. She had been divorced from Willie for more than twenty years, and both of them had remarried. I don’t think there was any lingering bad feeling, but if there was, the arrival of Sabrina in their lives had redeemed it. The attraction that had brought Willie and her together in their youth had turned to mutual disillusion shortly after their marriage, and had ended ten years later in divorce. Except for their children they had nothing in common.
During the years they were married, Willie was entirely dedicated to his career, determined to be successful and make money, and his wife felt abandoned and often fell into deep depressions. It was, furthermore, their fate to have lived in the turbulence of the ’60s, when customs were greatly relaxed in this part of the world. Free love was in vogue, couples swapped partners as a form of entertainment, at parties people bathed naked in Jacuzzis, and everyone drank martinis and smoked marijuana, while the children ran wild through the middle of it all. Those experiments left in their wake a multitude of easily predictable destroyed marriages. But Willie says that that wasn’t the cause of the break. “We were like oil and water; we didn’t blend together, that marriage couldn’t last.” At the beginning of my relationship with Willie, I asked him whether our arrangement was going to be “open”—a euphemism for mutual infidelity—or monogamous. I needed to have that clarified because I have neither time nor inclination to spy on a fickle lover. “Monogamous,” he replied without hesitation. “I’ve tried the other formula and it’s a disaster.” “That’s good, but if I catch you in a little peccadillo I’ll kill you, your children, and the dog. Do you hear what I’m saying?” “Perfectly.” I myself have respected our deal with more decency than might be expected of a person of my character, and I suppose he has done the same, but I wouldn’t stake my life on it.
Jennifer took her baby and held her to her squalid breast, as she thanked Fu and Grace over and over. Both of those women have the gift of investing everything they touch with humor, calm, and beauty. They breached Jennifer’s defenses—something no one had ever accomplished before—and prepared to accept her with all their compassion, which is considerable. Thus a sordid drama was transformed into a spiritual experience. Grace stroked Jennifer, smoothed her hair, kissed her forehead, and assured her that she could see Sabrina every day if she wished; she herself would bring her, and when Jennifer was released from the hospital she could visit the baby at the center. She told how intelligent and lively Sabrina was, how she was beginning to drink milk without difficulty, but did not mention any of her serious health problems.
“Don’t you think Jennifer should know the truth, Grace?” I asked as we left.
“What truth?”
“That if Sabrina keeps growing weaker at this rate . . . her white cells—”
“She’s not going to die. I can swear to that,” she interrupted with calm conviction.
That was the last time we would ever see Jennifer.
On May 25, 1994, we celebrated Sabrina’s first birthday at the Zen Center, in a circle of some fifty barefoot people, some wearing the loose robes of medieval pilgrims, some with shaved heads, and some with that expression of suspicious placidity that earmarks vegetarians. Celia, Nico, their little ones, Jason, with his girlfriend, Sally, and the rest of the family were there. The only woman wearing makeup was me, and the only man with a camera was Willie. In the center of the room, amid a riot of balloons, several children were playing around a monumental organic carrot cake. Sabrina—crowned queen of Ethiopia by Alejandro—dressed as a gnome, with metallic star stickers on her forehead and with a yellow balloon tied to her belt so she could be seen and not stepped on, was passed from arm to arm and from kiss to kiss. Compared to my granddaughter Nicole, who was as solid as a koala bear, Sabrina looked like a soft little doll, but in that one year she had defied nearly all the fatalistic prognoses of the doctors; she was now able to sit up and she was trying to crawl, and she could identify all the residents of the Zen Center. The invited guests, one by one, introduced themselves. “I am Kate. I take care of Sabrina on Tuesdays and Thursdays.” “My name is Mark and I am her physical therapist.” “I am Michael, a Zen monk for thirty years, and Sabrina is my teacher. . . .”