Paula WAS PUBLISHED IN SPAIN with a cover photo Willie had taken. In it you are smiling and full of life, and your dark hair is covering you like a mantle. Soon hundreds of letters began pouring in; we had to store them in boxes in the office and Celia couldn’t find enough time to sort and answer them. For years I had received letters from enthusiastic readers, although I admit that not all of them were motivated by appreciation for my books. Some were requests, like the one from the author of sixteen unpublished novels who gallantly offered to work with me and share royalties fifty-fifty, and another came from a couple of Chileans in Sweden who asked me to buy them tickets back to Chile; after all, it was my uncle Salvador Allende’s fault that they’d had to leave the country. Even so, nothing could compare with the avalanche of correspondence that flooded in with the publication of Paula. I tried to answer every one, even if with only a couple of lines scrawled across a card, because each letter had been written from the heart and sent out blind, some to my publishers, others to my agent, and many through friends and bookstores. I spent part of the night making cards with the Japanese papers Miki Shima gave me and little pieces of silver and semiprecious stones from Tabra. The letters that came were so heartfelt that years later, when the book had been translated into several languages, some European publishers decided to publish a selection of that correspondence. Sometimes parents who had lost children wrote me, but most were young people who identified with you, including girls who wanted to meet Ernesto, in love with the widower without knowing him. Tall, well built, dark, and tragic, he attracted women. I don’t think he wanted for consolation; he isn’t a saint, and celibacy isn’t his forte, as he himself has told me, and as you always knew. Ernesto always swears that if he hadn’t fallen in love with you, he would have entered seminary and become a priest, but I doubt it. He needs a woman at his side.
Occupied with the letters, I had no time for writing, and even my exchange with my mother slowed down. Instead of the daily messages that had kept us united for decades, we talked by phone or sent brief faxes, avoiding confidences that might be exposed to a stranger’s curiosity. Our correspondence during that period is very boring. Nothing like the mail, the good old snail mail with its privacy. Nothing like the pleasure of waiting for the mailman, opening the envelope, taking out the pages my mother had folded, and reading the then two-weeks-old news. If it was bad, it didn’t matter any longer, and if it was good, it was never too late to celebrate.
Among the letters came one from a young nurse who had attended you in the intensive care unit in the hospital in Madrid. Celia was the one who saw it first. She brought it to me, pale as wax, and we read it together. The nurse said that after reading the book she had felt as if it was her duty to tell me what had happened. Medical incompetence and a power failure that interrupted the oxygen had caused severe brain damage. Many people knew what had happened but tried to hide it, perhaps with the hope that you would die and they would avoid an investigation. For months, the nurses had watched me waiting all day long in the corridor of lost steps, and they had often wanted to tell me the truth but didn’t dare face the consequences. The letter left me reeling for days. “Don’t think about it, daughter, there’s nothing we can do about it now,” my mother wrote when I told her. “That was Paula’s fate. Now her spirit is free. Your daughter will never have to suffer the troubles life always visits upon us.” Right. And following that reasoning, we would all be better off dead, I thought.
That memoir brought more interest from the public and the press than all my previous books combined. I made lots of trips, gave hundreds of interviews, dozens of readings and lectures, and signed thousands of books. One woman wanted me to inscribe nine books for her, one for each of her friends who had lost a child, and one for her. Her daughter had been left a paraplegic in an automobile accident, and as soon as she could manage a wheelchair, she drove it into a swimming pool. Pain and more pain. By comparison, mine was bearable; at least I had been able to take care of you to the end.