IN THE SPRING OF 1994 Rwanda was often in the newspapers. News of the genocide was so horrible that it was difficult to believe. Children were being hacked to death, pregnant women were ripped open with knives to tear the fetuses from their wombs, entire families were murdered, hundreds of starving orphans were wandering the roads, villages were burned with all their inhabitants.
“What does the rest of the world care about what’s happening in Africa? It’s only blacks that are dying,” Celia commented indignantly, with that incendiary passion she dedicated to nearly any subject.
“The killing in Rwanda is terrible, Celia, but I don’t think that’s the only reason you’re depressed. Tell me what’s really happening with you,” I prodded.
“Imagine if they were hacking my children apart!” and she burst out crying.
There was no doubt that something was brewing in the soul of my daughter-in-law. She didn’t have a moment of peace; she ran around doing a thousand tasks, she hid around corners to cry, and every day she was more emaciated. In addition, she had developed a true obsession with bad news, which she discussed with Jason, the only one in the family who read all the newspapers and who was capable of analyzing events with a journalist’s instinct. He was the first person I heard relate religion with terror, long before fundamentalism and terrorism were practically synonymous. He explained to us that the violence in Bosnia, the Middle East, and Africa, the excesses of the Taliban in Afghanistan, and other disconnected events were caused by religious as well as racial hatreds.
Jason and Sally were talking about moving as soon as they could find an apartment somewhere, but they had looked in vain to find something within range of their limited income. We offered to help them, without insisting too much, so we wouldn’t give them the impression that we were throwing them out. It was pleasant to have them with us. I was moved to see Jason in love for the first time and talking about getting married, though Willie was convinced that Sally and his son would not make a good pair. I don’t know where he got that idea, they seemed to get along very well.
Abuela Hilda stayed in California for long periods of time, and under her influence the house would become a gambling den. Even my grandchildren, innocents still sucking their pacifiers, learned to do tricks with cards. She showed them how to play with such skill that a few years later Alejandro could have earned a living with a deck of cards. Once, when he was a runny-nosed kid of ten, a little sandpiper of a boy with round eyeglasses and teeth like a beaver, he wandered into a group of ominous-looking types who had brought their trailers and motorcycles to the beach and set up camp. The general look of those men—tank tops, tattoos, cowboy boots, and the inevitable bellies of good beer drinkers—did not intimidate Alejandro because he saw that they were playing cards. He went over to them, totally self-assured, and asked if he could sit in. They answered with loud guffaws, but he insisted. “We play for money here, kid,” they warned him. Alejandro nodded, feeling rich because he had five dollars in small change. They told him to sit down, and offered him a beer, which he amiably refused, more interested in the game. After twenty minutes, my grandson had fleeced the seven tough guys and left with bills spilling out of his pockets, followed by a hailstorm of oaths and curses.
We lived as a tribe, Chilean style; we were almost always together. Abuela had such a good time with Celia and her children that she preferred her company a thousand times more over mine and spent long stretches in her home. We had explained to Abuela that Sabrina’s mothers were lesbians, Buddhists, and vegetarians, three words she was not familiar with. The vegetarianism was the only thing that seemed unacceptable to her, but she made friends with them anyway. More than once she visited them at the Zen Center, where she induced them to eat hamburgers, drink margaritas, and bet on poker. At times my mother and Tío Ramón, my ineffable stepfather, would come from Chile, and, added to them, my brother Juan, who arrived from Atlanta with the tilted head and grave expression of a bishop: he was studying theology. After he had devoted four years to the divine, Juan graduated with honors and then decided he wasn’t cut out to be a preacher and went back to his university position as professor of political science, where he is today. Willie bought food wholesale and cooked for that camp of refugees. I see him in the kitchen, bloody knives attacking a hindquarter of beef, frying bags of potatoes, and chopping tons of lettuce. In moments of inspiration he would make lethally hot Mexican tacos while listening to his ranchera CDs. The kitchen would look like the morning after a night of Carnival, and guests would lick their chops but later pay the consequences of an excess of grease and chilis.
Our house was magical; it stretched and shrank according to the need. Perched halfway up a hill, it offered a panoramic view of the bay; there were four bedrooms on the first floor and an apartment below. It was there in 1992 that we installed a hospital room where you spent several months without altering the rhythm of family life. Some nights I would wake to the murmur of my own memories and those of the characters escaped from other people’s dreams. I would get up and roam through the rooms, grateful for the quiet and warmth of that house. Nothing bad can happen here, I would think, all the evil has been expelled, and Paula’s spirit is looking after us. Sometimes the dawn would surprise me with its capricious colors of watermelon and peach. I liked to look down at the scene at the foot of the hill, with the fog rising from the lagoon and wild geese flying south.
CELIA WAS JUST RECOVERING from the battering of her three pregnancies when she had to go to Venezuela for her sister’s wedding. By then she had a residence visa that allowed her to travel abroad and return to the United States. Nico and the children temporarily moved over to our house, a solution that Abuela found ideal: “Why don’t we all live together, the way we should?” she asked. In Venezuela Celia was confronted by everything she had wanted to leave behind when she married Nico. It can’t have been pleasant because she returned with her spirits lower than low, having decided to sever all contact with most of her relatives. She clung to me, and I was prepared to defend her against anything that came along, even herself. She started losing weight again, but we had a family council and forced her to see a specialist, who prescribed therapy and anti-depressants. “I don’t believe in any of this,” she told me, but the treatment helped, and soon she was playing the guitar and making us laugh and rant with her antics. Despite the inexplicable fits of sadness, she had blossomed with maternity.
Her children were a perpetual circus, and Abuela often reminded us that we must cherish them because they soon grow up and leave home. It was the children, more than the doctors’ prescriptions, that kept Celia going during that time. Alejandro, a little shy but very smart, stuttered wise phrases with his mother’s deep voice. That year at Easter, before he went outside with his basket to hunt for Easter eggs in the garden, he whispered to me that rabbits don’t lay eggs because they’re mammals. “Then who leaves the Easter eggs?” I asked, like a fool. “You,” he answered. Ever since Nicole, the youngest, could stand, she’d had to defend herself against her brother and sister. One birthday I had the bad idea of giving Alejandro—who had begged on his knees, batting his giraffe eyelashes—a game of plastic Ninja daggers. First I got specific authorization from his parents, who did not allow him to have weapons, just as they opposed television—both impractical California New Age ideas because you can’t raise little ones in a bubble. Better for them to be contaminated while they’re young, that’s the best way to immunize them. I warned my grandson that he could not attack his sisters, but that was like handing him candy and telling him not to suck it. He had the daggers all of five minutes before he stabbed Andrea, who gave it right back to him, and then both of them turned on Nicole. Next we saw Alejandro and Andrea running for their lives, with Nicole close behind, a dagger in each hand, howling like a serial thriller Apache. She was still in diapers. Andrea was the most colorful. She always wore pink; except for a pair of lime-green plastic sandals; her golden curls peeked from among the adornments she put in her hair—tiaras, ribbons from packages, paper flowers—and she lived lost in her imaginary world. She also had her “pink power,” a magic ring with a stone of that color, a gift from Tabra, which could convert broccoli into strawberry ice cream and send a kick by long distance to the boy who had made fun of her at recess. Once Andrea’s teacher raised her voice to her, and my granddaughter confronted her squarely, pointing the finger with the powerful ring. “Don’t you dare speak to me that way. I am Andrea!” Another time she came back from school very upset, and hugged me.
“I’ve had a miserable day,” she confessed, sobbing.
“Wasn’t there even one good minute, Andrea?”
“Yes. A girl fell and broke two teeth.”
“But my God, Andrea, what’s good about that!”
“It wasn’t me.”