CELIA AND WILLIE ARGUED at the top of their lungs, as passionate over trivialities as they were about serious matters.
“Put on your seat belt, Celia,” he would say to her in the car.
“You don’t have to in the back seat.”
“Yes, you do.”
“No!”
“I don’t give a shit whether you have to or not! This is my car and I’m driving. Put it on or get out!” Willie would roar, red with rage.
“Fuck you, I’m getting out!”
Celia had rebelled against masculine authority from the time she was a child, and Willie, who himself exploded at the least provocation, accused her of being an ill-mannered little brat. He was often furious with her, but everything was forgiven as soon as she took up her guitar. Nico and I tried to keep them separated, but we were not always successful. Abuela Hilda stayed out of it; the most she ever said was that Celia was not accustomed to accepting affection, but that with time she’d get the drift of it.
Tabra was operated on to remove the footballs and replace them with normal breasts, sacks of a solution less toxic than the silicone. As an aside, the doctor who put in the original ones has become one of the most famous plastic surgeons in Costa Rica, so the experience he gained with my friend was not wasted. I suppose that by now he must be a doddering old man and doesn’t even remember the young American girl who was his first experiment. Tabra this time was six hours in the operating room. They had to scrape the fossilized silicone off her ribs, and when she came out of the clinic she was in such pain that we brought her home to stay until she could get along by herself. Her lymph nodes were so inflamed she couldn’t move her arms, and she had a reaction to the anesthesia that left her nauseated for a week. She couldn’t keep anything down except watery soups and toast. By coincidence, Jason had left for New York to study and Sally had moved to an apartment she shared with a friend, but Abuela Hilda, Nico, Celia, and the three children were temporarily living with us. The Sausalito garret had become too small for Nico’s family and we were in the final stages of buying a house for them; it was a little farther away and needed work but it had a pool, a lot more room, and untouched wooded hills at the back door, perfect for bringing up the children. Our house was filled to the brim, but in spite of how bad Tabra felt, the atmosphere was usually festive, except when Celia or Willie got heated about something and then the least spark set off a fight. The day Tabra arrived, one exploded over something relatively serious that had happened in the office: Celia had accused Willie of not having been clear about some money and he went at her like a man possessed. They exchanged noisy insults and I wasn’t able to soothe their rage or get them to lower their voices and work out a solution on reasonable terms. In only a few minutes the tone had escalated to the level of a street brawl, which Nico finally stopped with the only yell any of us had heard in his lifetime and that paralyzed us with surprise. Willie exited with the slam of a door that nearly brought down the house. In one of the rooms, Tabra, still dazed from the effects of the operation and the painkillers, heard the screams and thought she was dreaming. Abuela Hilda and Sally, who was visiting, disappeared with the children—I think they hid in the cellar among the plaster skulls and the hidey-holes of the skunks.
Celia was acting in what she believed was my best interest, and I failed to jump in and go to my husband’s defense, so the suspicion she had unleashed was left floating without being resolved. I never imagined that their argument was going to have such far-reaching consequences. Willie was deeply wounded, not by Celia, but by me. When finally we could talk about it, he said that I excluded him, that I formed an impenetrable circle with my family and left him outside. I didn’t even trust him. I tried to smooth things over, but it was impossible. We had sunk pretty low. Willie and I didn’t speak for several days, and we harbored a grudge for weeks. This time I couldn’t run away because Tabra was convalescing with us, and my entire family was there in the house. Willie built a wall around himself; he was silent, furious, preoccupied. He went to the office early and returned late; he sat by himself to watch television, and stopped cooking for us. We ate rice and fried eggs every day. Not even the children could get through to him; they went around on tiptoes and got tired of inventing reasons to go to him: Grandpa had turned into an old grump. Nonetheless, we held to our agreement not to speak the word divorce, and I think that despite appearances, we both knew that we hadn’t come to the end of our rope, we still had a lot in reserve. At night we slept on our own corner of the bed, but we always woke up with our arms around each other. Over time that helped us toward a reconciliation.
I MAY HAVE GIVEN THE IMPRESSION in this account that Willie and I did nothing but argue, Paula. Of course it wasn’t like that. Except for the times I went off to sleep at Tabra’s, that is, at the most heated moments of our skirmishes, we went hand in hand. In the car, on the street, everywhere, always holding hands. It was like that from the first, but within two weeks of our meeting that custom became a necessity because of the affair of the shoes. Given my height, I have always worn high heels, but Willie insisted that I should be comfortable and not like the old-time Chinese women with their painful bound feet. He gave me a pair of athletic shoes that still today, eighteen years later, sit like new in their box. To please him, I bought a pair of sandals I saw on television. They had shown some slender models playing basketball in cocktail dresses and high heels . . . just what I needed. I threw away the shoes I’d brought from Venezuela and replaced them with those prodigious sandals. They didn’t work, I just kept walking out of them. I was so often flat on my face on the floor that for reasons of basic safety Willie has always grasped my hand tight. Besides, we’re fond of each other and that helps whatever the relationship. I like Willie a lot, and I show that in a number of ways. He has begged me not to translate into English the love words I say to him in Spanish because they sound suspicious. I always remind him that no one has ever loved him more than I do, not even his mother, and that if I die he will end his days alone in some home for old folks, so it’s worth his while to spoil me and celebrate me. Willie is not a man to squander romantic words, but if he has lived with me so many years without strangling me, it must be that he likes me a little. What is the secret of a good marriage? I can’t say, every couple is different. The two of us are bound together by our ideas, a similar way of looking at the world, camaraderie, loyalty, humor. We look after each other. We have the same schedule, we sometimes use the same toothbrush, and we like the same movies. Willie says that when we’re together our energies are multiplied, that we have the “spiritual connection” he felt when he first met me. It may be. All I know is that I like sleeping with him.
In view of our difficulties, we decided to have individual therapy, and Willie found a psychiatrist he got along with from the beginning, a huge bearded bear of a man that I perceived as my declared enemy, but one who with time would play a fundamental role in our lives. I don’t know what Willie wanted to resolve in his therapy; I suppose the most urgent thing was his relationship with his children. In mine, when I began to rake through my memory, I realized that I was carrying a very heavy burden. I had to confront old silences, admit that my father’s having abandoned me at the age of three had marked me and that the scar was still visible. It had determined my feminist posture and my relations with men from my grandfather and Tío Ramón, whom I had always rebelled against, to Nico, whom I treated as if he were a little boy—to say nothing of lovers and husbands to whom I had never completely given myself. In one session, my Buddhist therapist tried to hypnotize me. He didn’t succeed, but at least I relaxed and I could see inside my heart an enormous black granite stone. I knew then that my task would be to rid myself of it. I would have to chip away at it, piece by piece.
To free myself of that dark rock, in addition to therapy and walks in the misty forest of your ashes, I took yoga classes, and I increased the number of calming acupuncture sessions with Dr. Shima, as much for the benefit of his presence as for his science. Lying on his cot with needles all over my body, I slipped away to other dimensions.
I was looking for you, daughter. I thought about your soul, trapped in an inert body through all that long year of 1992. At times I felt a claw in my throat, I could barely breathe, or I was weighed down by the weight of a sack of sand in my chest and felt as if I were buried in a deep hole, but soon I would remember to direct my breathing to the site of the sorrow, with calm, as it is thought one should do while giving birth, and immediately the anguish would diminish. Then I would visualize a stairway that allowed me to climb out of the hole and reach daylight, the open sky. Fear is inevitable, I have to accept that, but I cannot allow it to paralyze me. Once I said—or wrote somewhere—that after your death I was no longer afraid of anything, but that isn’t true, Paula. I am afraid to lose persons I love or to see them suffer; I fear the deterioration of old age, I fear the world’s increasing poverty, violence, and the world’s corruption. In these years without you I have learned to manage sadness, making it my ally. Little by little your absence and other losses in my life are turning into a sweet nostalgia. That is what I am attempting in my stumbling spiritual practice: to rid myself of the negative feelings that prevent walking with assurance. I want to transform rage into creative energy and guilt into a mocking acceptance of my faults; I want to sweep away arrogance and vanity. I have no illusions, I will never achieve absolute detachment, authentic compassion, or the state of ecstasy known to the enlightened; it seems I do not have the bones of a saint, but I can aspire to crumbs: fewer bonds, a bit of affection for others, the joy of a clean conscience.
It’s a shame you couldn’t appreciate Miki Shima during those months of his frequent visits to give you Chinese herbs and acupuncture treatments. You would have fallen in love with him, just the way my mother and I did. He wears the suits of a duke, starched shirts, gold cuff links, silk neckties. When I met him he had black hair, but now, just a few years later, he is beginning to show threads of gray, though he still doesn’t have a single wrinkle and his skin is as pink as an infant’s, all thanks to his miraculous ointments. He told me that his parents lived together for sixty years, openly detesting each other. The husband never spoke in the house and the wife, specifically to exasperate him, never stopped, but she served him like a good Japanese wife of that time: she prepared his bath, scrubbed his back, put food into his mouth, fanned him on summer days, “So he could never say that she had failed in her duties,” and in the same manner he paid the bills and slept at home every night, “So she could never say he was heartless.” One day the woman died, even though he was much older than she and by rights he should have had lung cancer because he smoked like a locomotive. She, who was strong and untiring in her hatred, was dispatched in two minutes by a heart attack. Miki’s father had never so much as boiled water for his tea, much less washed his socks or rolled up the mat he slept on. His children expected him to waste away and die, but Miki prescribed some herbs for him and soon he began to put on weight and stand up straight, and laugh and talk for the first time in years. Now he rises at dawn, eats a ball of rice with tofu and the famous herbs, meditates, chants, does his tai chi exercises, and goes off with three packs of cigarettes in his pocket to catch trout. The walk to the river takes a couple of hours. He returns with a fish that he himself cooks, seasoned with Miki’s magical herbs, and ends his day with a hot bath and a ceremony to honor his ancestors and, in passing, affront his wife’s memory. “He is eighty-nine years old and he’s fit as a pup,” Miki told me. I decided that if those Chinese herbs had made that Japanese grandfather young again, they could dissolve the frightful rock in my heart.