I GOT READY TO ENJOY A FEW WEEKS of solitude, which I planned to use on the book I was writing about California in the days of the gold rush. I had been putting it off for four years, though I already had a title, Daughter of Fortune, a mountain of historical research, and even the image for the jacket. The protagonist of the novel is a young Chilean girl, Eliza Sommers, born around 1833, who decides to follow her lover, who has left to join in the chase for gold. For a young girl of the time, a journey of that magnitude was unthinkable, but I believe that women are capable of amazing exploits for love. Eliza would never have thought of crossing half the world for the lure of gold, but she never hesitated to do it in order to find the man she’d lost. However, my plan to write it in peace did not work out because Nico wasn’t well. To have a couple of wisdom teeth pulled, it had been necessary to give him a general anesthesia for a few minutes, something that tends to be dangerous for people with porphyria. He got out of the dentist’s chair, walked to the reception area where Lori was waiting, and felt the world going black. His knees buckled and he fell backward, stiff as a board, striking his neck and back against the wall. He lay on the floor unconscious. It was the beginning of months of suffering for him and anguish for the rest of the family, especially for Lori, who didn’t know what was happening to him, and for me, who knew all too well.
My most tragic memories swirled up in furious waves. I had thought that after going through the experience of losing you, nothing could ever move me that much again, but just the hint that possibly something similar was happening to my son, my remaining child, rocked me off my feet. I had a weight in my chest like a rock, crushing me, and making me short of breath. I felt vulnerable, raw, on the verge of tears every moment. At night, while everyone slept, I heard sounds in the walls of the house, long moans from the doorways, sighs in the unoccupied rooms. It was, I suppose, my own fear. All the sorrow that had accumulated during that long year of your dying was stalking about in the house. I have a scene forever engraved in my memory. One day I went into your room and saw your brother, his back to the door, changing your diaper as naturally and calmly as he did his children’s. He was talking to you, just as if you could understand, of the times in Venezuela when the two of you were teenagers and you would cover for his pranks and save his skin if he got in a jam. Nico didn’t see me; I left and softly closed the door. This son of mine has always been with me, we have shared primordial pain, dazzling failures, ephemeral successes; we left everything behind and have begun again in a new place; we have fought and we have helped each other; in other words, I believe we cannot be separated.
Weeks before the accident at the dentist’s, Nico had had his annual porphyria tests and the results had not been good: his levels had doubled over the previous year. After his fall, they kept rising at an alarming rate, and the doctor, Cheri Forrester, who never took her eye off him, was worried. Added to the constant pain from the injury to his shoulder, which prevented him from lifting his arms or bending over, were the pressure of work, his relationship with Celia—which was going through a wretched stage—the ups and downs with me—I was frequently failing in my intention to leave him in peace—and an exhaustion so profound that he would fall asleep standing up. He was even speaking in a murmur, as if the effort of breathing was too much. Often crises of porphyria are accompanied by mental disturbances that alter the patient’s personality. Nico, who in normal times prides himself on having the happy calm that characterizes the Dalai Lama, was often boiling with anger, but he could hide it thanks to his unusual self-control. He refused to talk about his condition, and he did not want any special consideration. Lori and I limited ourselves to watching him without asking questions, trying not to make him more annoyed than he already was, though we did suggest that at least he resign from his job; it was very far away and it didn’t offer him any satisfaction or challenges. We thought that with his calm temperament, his intuition, and his mathematical ability, he could work as a day trader, but that seemed very risky to him. I told him my dream about the horses, and he told me that was very interesting, but that he wasn’t the one who had dreamed it.
There was nothing Lori could do in regard to his health problems, but she stood by him and gave him moral support, never weakening, though she was suffering herself. She wanted children, and to do that she had to subject herself to the torment of fertility treatments. When she started living with Nico they had of course talked about children. She couldn’t give up the idea of being a mother, she had already put it off too long waiting for a true love. From the beginning, however, Nico had said he didn’t want children; in addition to possibly transmitting his porphyria, he already had three. Nico had become a father at a very young age; he hadn’t experienced the freedom and adventure that filled Lori’s first thirty-five years, and he intended to cherish the love that had fallen into his life, be a companion, a lover, a friend, and a husband. During the weeks the children stayed with Celia and Sally, Nico and Lori were like sweethearts, but the rest of the time they could only be parents.
Lori said that Nico couldn’t understand her terrible emptiness; it seemed to her—perhaps with good reason—that no one was ready to remove a piece of the family puzzle to make room for her; she felt like a stranger. She perceived something negative in the air when she mentioned the subject of another child, and I was responsible for a lot of that; it took me more than a year to realize how important being a mother was for her. I tried not to interfere, not wanting to hurt her, but my silence was eloquent: I thought that a baby would rob Nico and her of the little freedom and intimacy they had. I was also afraid it might displace my grandchildren. The last straw for Lori came on Mother’s Day; one of the girls made an affectionate card, gave it to her, and then a little later asked her to give it back so she could give it to Celia. To Lori, that was a dagger in the heart, even though Nico explained over and over that the child was too young to realize what she’d done. Lori’s sense of duty seemed almost a penalty; she looked after the children and served them with a kind of desperation, as if she wanted to compensate for the fact she couldn’t accept them as her own. And they weren’t, they had a mother, but if they’d adopted Sally they were equally eager to love her.
During this period several of Lori’s friends got pregnant; she was surrounded by half a dozen women priding themselves on their bellies. They spoke of nothing else; the very air smelled of infants, and the pressure grew for Lori because her chances of being a mother were decreasing month by month, something her specialist made clear. Lori was never jealous of her friends; just the opposite; she spent a lot of time and energy taking their portraits, and she put together a collection of extraordinary images on the subject of pregnancy that I hope one day will become a book.
Nico and Lori were going to a therapist, where I suppose they discussed this subject to the point of nausea, but on an impulse Nico called Tío Ramón in Chile, whose judgment he trusted blindly. “How do you expect Lori to be mother to your children if you don’t want to be father to hers?” was his answer. It was an argument of pristine fairness, and Nico not only yielded, he was enthusiastic about the idea; the weight of that decision, nonetheless, fell on Lori. She submitted, silent and alone, to the fertility treatments that took their toll on her body and spirit. She, who had always been so careful to eat well, to exercise, and live a healthful life, felt poisoned by that bombardment of drugs and hormones. Her attempts failed again and again. “If science doesn’t do it, you have to put it in God’s hands,” my loyal friend Pía contributed from Chile. But neither her prayers, nor those of my Sisters of Disorder, nor the supplications to you, Paula, produced results, and so an entire year went by.