WE WERE INVITED TO A COCKTAIL PARTY in San Francisco, and I went reluctantly, only because Willie asked me to. A cocktail party is a terrible trial for someone of my stature, especially in a country of tall people; it would be different in Thailand. The best idea is to avoid such events; the guests stand around, crushed together with no air, a glass in one hand and an unidentifiable hors d’oeuvre in the other. In high heels, I come up to the women’s breast bone and the men’s belly button; the waiters go by with their trays above my head. There is no advantage in being five feet tall, unless it’s that it’s easy to pick up things that fall to the floor, and in the era of the miniskirt I could make dresses from four of my first husband’s neckties. While Willie, surrounded with admiring women, devoured prawns at the buffet table and told stories of his youth—such as hitchhiking around the world and sleeping in cemeteries—I dug into a corner so no one would step on me. At these events, I can’t take a bite; the things I drop and spill, and those falling from other guests, fly straight to me. That evening a very amiable gentleman came toward me and when he looked down was able to make me out against the pattern of the carpet and from his Anglo-Saxon heights offer me a glass of wine. “Hello, I’m David, pleased to meet you.”
“Isabel, the pleasure is mine,” I replied, looking at the glass with apprehension; you can’t get red wine stains out of white silk.
“What do you do?” he asked in the spirit of beginning a conversation.
That question lends itself to several responses. I could have said that right at the moment I was silently cursing my husband for having brought me to the damn party, but I opted for something less philosophical.
“I am a novelist.”
“Really! How interesting! When I retire I’m going to write a novel,” he told me.
“Is that right! And what is your line of work now?”
“I’m a dentist,” and he handed me his card.
“Well, when I retire, I’m going to pull teeth,” I replied.
Anyone could say that writing novels is like planting geraniums. I spend ten hours a day nailed to a chair, turning sentences over a thousand and one times in order to tell something in the most effective way. I suffer over the plots, I become deeply involved with the characters, I do my research, I study, correct, edit, I revise translations, and in addition travel the world promoting my books with the tenacity of a street vendor. In the car going home, driving over the superb Golden Gate Bridge, bright in the moonlight, I told Willie, laughing like a hyena, what the dentist had said, but my husband didn’t see the joke.
“I’m not planning to wait till I retire. Very soon I’m going to begin writing my own novel,” he announced.
“Jesus! Can you believe how arrogant some people are! And may one know what your little novel is going to be about?” I asked.
“About an oversexed dwarf.”
I thought at first that my husband was beginning to catch on to my Chilean sense of humor, but he actually meant it. A few months later, Willie began to write by hand on lined yellow paper. He went around with a pad under his arm, and showed what he was writing to anyone who wanted to see it, except me. He wrote in airplanes, in the kitchen, in bed, while I teased him unmercifully. A perverted dwarf! What a brilliant idea! The irrational optimism that has served Willie so well in his life once more kept him afloat, and he was able to ignore my Chilean sarcasm, which is like those tsunamis that erase everything in their path. I thought that his literary zeal would evaporate as soon as he found how hard it is to write, but nothing stopped him. He completed an abominable novel in which a frustrated love, a legal case, and the dwarf were intertwined, confusing the reader, who couldn’t determine whether he was reading a romance, a lawyer’s memoir, or a string of repressed adolescent hormonal fantasies. The women friends who read it were very frank with Willie: he should take the bloody dwarf out and maybe he could save the rest of the book, if he rewrote it with more care. Male friends counseled him to take out the romance and go into more detail about the dwarf’s depravation. Jason told him to take out the romance, the courts, and the dwarf, and write a story set in Mexico. Me? Something unexpected happened with me. The dreadful novel increased my admiration for Willie because in the process I could appreciate more than ever his basic virtues: strength and perseverance. As I have learned a few things in the years I’ve been writing—at least I’ve learned not to repeat the same errors, though I always invent new ones—I offered my husband my services as an editor. Willie accepted my comments with a humility that he doesn’t have in other aspects of life, and rewrote the manuscript; it was my opinion, however, that the second version also presented too many fundamental problems. Writing is like magic tricks; it isn’t enough to pull rabbits from a hat, you have to do it with elegance and in a convincing manner.