WILLIE REALIZED WITH DESPERATION that Jennifer was gradually committing suicide. An astrologer had told him that his daughter was “in the house of death.” According to Fu, there are souls who unconsciously try to achieve divine ecstasy by way of the expeditious path of drugs; maybe Jennifer needed to escape the gross reality of this world. Willie believes that he has transmitted bad genes to his children. His great-great-grandfather had arrived in Australia with shackles on his legs, covered with pustules and lice, one among a hundred and sixty thousand wretches the English sent to that land to serve out their sentences. The youngest of the convicts, sentenced for stealing bread, was nine years old, and the eldest was an old lady of eighty-two who’d been accused of stealing two pounds of cheese and who hanged herself a few days after her ship docked. Willie’s ancestor, accused of who knows what rubbish, had not been hanged because he was a knife-sharpener. In those years, having a trade or knowing how to read meant that instead of being hanged you were sent to Australia. The man was among the strong ones who survived, thanks to his ability to absorb suffering and alcohol, an aptitude he passed on to nearly all his descendants. Very little is known about Willie’s grandfather, but his father died of cirrhosis. Willie himself spent decades of his life without tasting a drop of alcohol because it triggers his allergies, but if he started, the amount gradually crept up. I have never seen Willie drunk. Before he reaches that point, he chokes as if he had swallowed a fistful of hair and is rendered inoperative by a ferocious headache; we both know, however, that if it weren’t for those blessed allergies, he would have ended up like his father. Only now, after reaching sixty, has he learned to limit himself to a single glass of white wine and feel satisfied. It is said that we cannot duck our heritage, and his three children—all drug addicts—seem to confirm that. They do not have the same mother, but in the family lines of his first and second wives there is also addiction, handed down from their grandfathers. The only child who has never waged war against Willie is Jason, his second wife’s son by another man, whom he loves as if he were his own. “Jason doesn’t have my blood; that’s why he’s normal,” Willie tends to comment in the tone of someone reporting a natural event like the tides or the migration of wild ducks.
When I met him, Jason was a boy of eighteen, with a lot of talent for writing but lacking discipline, though I was sure that sooner or later he would acquire it. That’s what it takes to deal with the rigors of life. He planned to be a writer some day, but in the meantime he was contemplating his navel. He would write two or three lines and come running to ask me if maybe there was potential there for a story, but it never went any further than that. I myself pushed him out of the house to go study at a college in southern California, where he graduated with honors, and when he returned to live with us he brought his girlfriend, Sally. Jason’s biological father had a volatile temperament that tended to explode with unpredictable consequences. When Jason was only a few weeks old, there was an accident that was never clarified. His father said that the baby had fallen off the changing table, but his mother and the physicians suspected that he had been struck on the head, denting his skull. They had to operate, and by some miracle the baby came out sound—after spending a lot of time in the hospital while his parents were getting a divorce. From the hospital he was passed to the care of the state; then his mother took him to live with an aunt and uncle who according to Jason were true saints, and finally she brought him to California. When he was three, the boy went to live with his father because it seems that the building where his mother lived did not accept children. What kind of building would that be? When she married Willie, she reclaimed the boy. Later, when they were divorced, the child picked up his belongings and without hesitation went to live with Willie. In the meantime, his biological father made sporadic appearances, and on occasion again mistreated him—until Jason was old enough, and had the physical presence to defend himself. One night of heavy drinking and recriminations in his father’s cabin in the mountains, where they’d gone for a few days’ vacation, the man starting hitting Jason, who had promised himself he would never again allow himself to be victimized, and he responded with all the fear and rage that had accumulated for years, and used his father’s face for a punching bag. Horrified, he drove several hours through a stormy night to get home; his shirt was stained with blood and he was nearly sick with guilt. Willie congratulated him; it was time to lay out the ground rules, he said. That distressing incident established an accord of respect between father and son. The violence was never repeated, and now they have a good relationship.
THAT YEAR OF MOURNING, of too much work, of financial difficulties and problems with my stepchildren, was undermining the foundation of my relationship with Willie. There was too much chaos in our lives. I wasn’t adapting to the United States. I felt that my heart was growing cold, that it wasn’t worth the effort to keep on rowing against the current; the energy needed to keep us afloat was disproportionate. I thought about leaving, running away, taking Nico and his family to Chile, where at last, after sixteen years of military dictatorship, democracy had been restored, and where my parents lived. Get a divorce, that’s what I have to do, I would mutter under my breath, but I must have said it aloud more than once because Willie cocked an ear when he heard the word divorce. He had gone that route twice before and was determined there would not be a third time, and he pressed me to go with him to see a counselor. For years I had made fun of Tabra’s therapist, a wild-haired alcoholic whose counsel consisted of exactly the same package of platitudes I would have given without charge. In my opinion, therapy was a mania of North Americans, a very spoiled people unable to tolerate the normal difficulties of life. When I was young, my grandfather had instilled in me the stoic notion that life is hard, and when facing a problem there is nothing to do but grit our teeth and keep going. Happiness is pure kitsch; we come into the world to suffer and learn. Fortunately, the hedonism of Venezuela shook my belief in my grandfather’s medieval precepts and gave me permission to enjoy myself without feeling guilty. At the time of my youth in Chile, no one visited a therapist—except for certifiable lunatics and Argentine tourists—so I strongly resisted Willie’s suggestion, but he was so persistent that finally I gave in and went with him. More accurately, he took my arm and dragged me there.
The psychologist turned out to look like a monk with a shaved skull, who drank green tea and sat through most of the session with his eyes closed. In Marin County, at any time of day, you see men riding bicycles, jogging in shorts, or savoring a cappuccino at little sidewalk tables. “Don’t these people work?” I once asked Willie. “They’re all therapists,” he’d answered. Which may be why I felt so skeptical when we met with Bald Head, who was really very wise, as I soon found out. His office was a bare room painted a kind of pea green and decorated with a large wall hanging—a mandala, I think they’re called. Willie and I sat cross-legged on cushions on the floor while the monk sipped his Japanese tea like a little bird. We began talking and soon a whole avalanche was unleashed. Willie and I each tried to get our stories in first, to tell him about what had happened with you, about the terrifying life Jennifer lived, about Sabrina’s fragility and a thousand other problems, and my desire to say, The hell with it, and disappear. The tea-sipper listened without interrupting, and when only a few minutes were left to end the session, he opened his heavy lidded eyes and looked at us with an expression of genuine sorrow. “What sadness there is in your lives!” he murmured. Sadness? Actually, that hadn’t occurred to either of us. All the air blew out of our rage in an instant, and deep in our bones we felt a grief as vast as the Pacific Ocean, a pain we hadn’t wanted to admit out of pure and simple pride. Willie took my hand, pulled me to his cushion, and we hugged each other tight. For the first time, we admitted that our hearts were broken. It was the beginning of our reconciliation.
“I am going to suggest that you do not mention the word divorce for an entire week. Can you do that?” the therapist asked.
“Yes,” we answered simultaneously.
“And could you do it for two weeks?”
“Three, if you want,” I said.
That was our agreement. For three weeks we focused on solving everyday emergencies, and never spoke the forbidden word. We were living in a state of crisis, but the allotted time went by, then a month, then two, and the truth is that we never again spoke of divorce. We went back to the nightly dance that from the beginning had been so natural: sleeping so tightly embraced that if one turns the other adjusts, and if one rolls away, the other wakes. Between countless cups of green tea, the shaved-head psychologist led us by the hand over the rough terrain of those years. He counseled me to “stay in my trench” and not interfere in the problems with Willie’s children, who in truth were the principal cause of our fights. So Willie gives a new car to his son, who has recently been expelled from school and is floating around in a cloud of LSD and marijuana? Not my problem. And he crashes it against a tree two weeks later? I stay in my trench. Willie buys him a second car, which he also destroys? I bite my tongue. Then his father rewards him with a van and explains to me that it is a safer, stronger vehicle. “Of course. That way when he runs over someone, at least he won’t leave him wounded, he’ll kill him outright,” I reply with glacial calm. I lock myself in the bathroom, take an icy shower, and recite all the curse words in my Spanish repertoire, then spend a few hours making necklaces in Tabra’s workshop.
The therapy was very helpful. Thanks to it and my writing, I survived an assortment of trials, though I did not always come out the winner, and my love for Willie was saved. Fortunately, though, the family melodrama continued, because if not, what the devil would I write about?