WE HAVE COME TO DECEMBER and the panorama has changed for our tribe and for the country. Tabra went off to Bali; my parents, in Chile, are living on borrowed years; they are eighty-five and ninety; Nico finally turned forty—at last, as Lori says—and is a mature man; the grandchildren are full-blown teenagers and soon will be weaning themselves from the obsessive grandmother who still calls them “my babies.” Olivia has grown gray hair and thinks twice about climbing the hill when we take her out for a walk. Willie is finishing his second book, and I am still plowing the hard ground of recollections in order to write this memoir.
The Democrats won the elections and now control both House and Senate; we all hope that will put the brakes on Bush’s excesses, that the American troops will be removed from Iraq, even if gradually and with their tails between their legs, and that new wars can be prevented. As for Chile, there are changes there as well. In March, Michelle Bachelet assumed the presidency, the first woman in my country to occupy that post, and she is doing very well. She is a pediatrician, a socialist, a single mother, an agnostic, and the daughter of a general who suffered torture and death because he would not submit to the military coup in 1973. In addition, General Augusto Pinochet died tranquilly in his bed, thereby closing one of the most tragic chapters of our national history. With a great sense of timing, he died precisely on Human Rights Day.
Writing this book has been a strange experience. I have not relied exclusively on my memories and the correspondence with my mother, but have also questioned the members of my family. Since I write in Spanish, half of my family could not read it until it was translated by Margaret Sayers Peden—Petch—an adorable lady of eighty who lives in Missouri and has translated all my books except the first. With the patience of an archaeologist, Petch burrowed into the different layers of the manuscripts, reviewed each line a thousand times, and made the changes I asked. Once the manuscript was in English, the family could compare their different versions, which did not always coincide with mine. Harleigh, Willie’s younger son, decided that he would prefer not to be in the book, and I had to rewrite it. That’s a shame, really, because he is quite colorful and he’s a part of this tribe; to exclude him seems to me to be cheating somehow, but I have no right to appropriate someone’s life without his permission. In long conversations we were able to conquer our fear of expressing what we were feeling, the bad as well as the good; sometimes it is more difficult to show affection than anger. Which is the truth? As Willie says, you reach a point when you have to forget truth and concentrate on facts. As the narrator, I say that you have to forget facts and concentrate on the truth. Now that I’m coming to the end, I hope that this exercise of setting memories in order will be beneficial for everyone. Gently, the waters will settle, the mud will sink to the bottom, and there will be transparency.
Willie’s and my lives have improved since the times of the marathon therapy sessions, the magical incantations to pay the bills, and the mission of saving from themselves people who didn’t want to be saved. For the moment, the horizon is bright. Unless some cataclysm occurs, a possibility that can’t be discounted, we are free to enjoy our remaining years lolling in the sun.
“I think we’re old enough to retire,” I said to Willie one night.
“No way. I’ve just begun to write and I don’t know what we would do with you if you weren’t writing. No one could put up with you.”
“I’m serious. I’ve been working for a century. I need a sabbatical.”
“What we will do is take things more calmly,” he concluded.
Frightened by the threat of seeing me idle during a hypothetical sabbatical, Willie opted to take me on a vacation in the desert. He thought that a week in a sterile landscape with nothing to do would be enough to make me change my mind. The hotel, which according to the travel agency was four-star, turned out to be a kind of passé bordello where Toulouse-Lautrec would have felt right at home. We had reached the place by driving down an interminable expressway, a straight ribbon through naked desert dotted by improbably green golf courses baking beneath a white, incandescent sun still blazing at eight o’clock at night. There was no breeze, nor a bird in the sky. Every drop of water was transported from a great distance, and every blade of grass grew thanks to the inordinate labors of humble Latino gardeners who kept the complex machinery of this illusory paradise running and then disappeared at night like ghosts.
FORTUNATELY, WILLIE SUFFERED A NEAR LETHAL allergy attack caused by the dusty drapes in that Toulouse-Lautrec bordello, and we had to go somewhere else. That’s how we ended up at some strange hot springs we’d never heard of, where among other amenities they offered mud baths. Deep iron tubs were filled with a bubbling and boiling thick, fetid substance. A young Mexican Indian girl, short, square, with hair scorched by a cheap permanent, showed us around the installations. She wasn’t more than twenty, but we were surprised by her self-confidence.
“What does this do?” I asked in Spanish, pointing to the mud.
“I don’t know. It’s something the Americans like.”
“It looks like shit.”
“It is caca, but not human; it’s animal caca,” she told me without a trace of irony.
The girl never took her eyes off Willie, and when we were about to leave, she asked him if he was Señor Gordon, the San Francisco lawyer.
“Don’t you remember me, licenciado? I’m Magdalena Pacheco.”
“Magdalena? But how you’ve changed, niña!”
“It’s the permanent,” she said, blushing.
They hugged each other, euphoric. She was the only daughter of Jovito Pacheco, Willie’s client who had died in a construction accident years before. We went with her that night to have dinner at a Mexican restaurant where her older brother, Socorro, was king of the kitchen. He was married and already had a first son, a three-month old baby he’d named Jovito, after the child’s grandfather. The other brother was working farther north in the Napa Valley vineyards. Magdalena had a Salvadoran boyfriend, a car mechanic, and said that she would be setting the date for their wedding as soon as the family could all meet in their village in Mexico; she had promised her mother she would be married in white in the presence of all their kin. Willie said that we’d be there, too, if they invited us.
The Pachecos told us that a year or two before, their grandmother was found dead one morning and they had given her an epic funeral, with a mahogany coffin the grandchildren had brought from San Diego in a truck. Apparently crossing the border in either direction wasn’t a problem for them, even with a heavy casket. Their mother had a little store and lived with the youngest brother, the one who was blind, who by now was fourteen. On the way to the restaurant, Willie reminded me of the Pacheco case, which had dragged for years through the San Francisco court system. I hadn’t forgotten, because we often teased Willie about the high-flown phrase he’d used in his argument: “Are you going to allow this defense lawyer to toss this poor family onto the garbage dump of history?” Willie had appealed from one judge to the next, until at last he won a modest settlement for the family. He had seen small fortunes disappear; clients who had never had anything but holes in their pockets often lost their heads when they felt they were rich. They had thrown money around and attracted distant relatives and forgotten friends like flies, and a bevy of swindlers eager to relieve them of their last peso. The Pachecos’ award was a long way from being a fortune, but translated into Mexican pesos it had been a big help to the family, and had pulled them up from poverty. At Willie’s suggestion, the grandmother had invested half in a small store and had deposited the rest in the name of Jovito’s children in the United States, out of reach of bamboozlers and relatives with their hands out. It had been more than a decade since their father’s death, and during that time all the children, except the youngest, had told their mother and grandmother good-bye and left their little village to work in California. Each came carrying a piece of paper with Willie’s name and telephone number to claim the share of the money that belonged to them and would allow them to start a life under better conditions than most illegal immigrants, who came with nothing more than hunger and dreams. So Willie’s stratagem when he took them to Disneyland as children had worked.
Thanks to Socorro and Magdalena Pacheco, we were given the best cabaña at the spa, an impeccable adobe and red-tiled casita in purest Mexican style; it had a small kitchen, a rear patio, and an open-air Jacuzzi. After buying provisions for three days, we shut ourselves in. It had been a long time since Willie and I had been alone, and idle, and we spent the first hours in invented tasks. With the minimal utensils in the kitchen, barely enough to put together a breakfast, Willie decided to cook oxtail, one of those slow Old World recipes that require several pots. His stew filled the air with a powerful aroma that frightened the birds and attracted the coyotes. Since it had to stay in the refrigerator until the next day so the fat that congealed on the surface could be spooned off, we dined, as night fell, on bread and cheese, lying close together in a hammock on the patio while the pack of coyotes licked their chops on the other side of the stone wall that protected our little haven.