TWO YEARS AFTER THE FIRST NIGHT they spent together, in January of 1999, Nico and Lori were married. Up till then she had resisted because she couldn’t see why it was necessary; he, however, thought that the children had been through a lot and would feel more secure if he and Lori were husband and wife. The children had seen Celia and Sally always together and didn’t question their love, but I think they were afraid that if we were careless Lori would get away. Nico was right; the children were happier about the decision than anyone. “Now Lori will be with us more,” said Andrea. They say that it takes eight years to adapt to the role of stepmother, and that the most difficult of all is the task of the childless woman who comes into the life of a man who is a father. It wasn’t easy for Lori to change her life and accept the children; she felt invaded. Nevertheless, she took over all the thankless tasks, from washing clothes to buying shoes for Andrea, who wore only green plastic sandals—and not just any sandals, they had to be from Taiwan. Lori killed herself working to be the perfect mother, never overlooking a single detail, but she really didn’t need to take such pains, since the children loved her for the same reasons the rest of us did: her laugh, her unconditional affection, her friendly jokes, her tempestuous hair, her boundless goodness, her way of being there in good and bad times.
The wedding was a joyful ceremony in San Francisco, which culminated with a group class in swing, the first time Willie and I had danced together since the humiliating experience with the Scandinavian instructor. Willie, in his dinner jacket, looked like Paul Newman in one of his films, though I don’t remember which one. Ernesto and Giulia came from New Jersey, Abuela Hilda and my parents from Chile, but Jason couldn’t get away from work. He was still single, though he was not wanting for women to keep him company for one night. According to him, he was looking for someone as reliable as Willie.
We met Lori’s friends, who came from the four points of the compass. Over time, several of them became Willie’s and my best friends, despite the difference in ages. Later, when we received our photos of the party, I realized that they all looked like magazine models; I have never seen a group of such beautiful people. Most were talented, unpretentious artists: designers, graphic artists, caricaturists, photographers, filmmakers. Willie and I immediately were friends with Lori’s parents, who did not see in me any incarnation of Satan, as Celia’s parents had, even though in my brief words at the reception I made the bad mistake of alluding to carnal love among our children. Nico still hasn’t forgiven me. The Barras, uncomplicated, loving people, are of Italian origin and have lived for more than fifty years in the same house in Brooklyn where they brought up four children a block away from the old mansions of the mafiosi, which can be distinguished from others in the neighborhood by the marble fountains, Greek columns, and statues of angels. Lori’s mother, Lucille, is slowly losing her eyesight, but she makes light of it, not so much because of pride as not to be a bother. In her house, which she knows by memory, she moves with assurance, and in her kitchen she is invincible; she continues to prepare by touch the complicated recipes handed down from generation to generation. Her husband, Tom, a storybook grandfather, embraced me with genuine affection.
“I’ve prayed a long time that Lori and Nico would get married,” he confessed.
“So they wouldn’t go on living in mortal sin?” I asked as a joke, knowing that he is a practicing Catholic.
“Yes, but more than anything because of the children,” he answered, absolutely serious.
Tom had owned a neighborhood pharmacy before he retired. That had prepared him for stress and fright, since he’d been assaulted on several occasions. Although he’s no longer young, he still shovels snow in the winter and climbs a folding ladder to paint ceilings in the summertime. He has steadfastly battled the rather peculiar renters who through the years have occupied a small apartment on the first floor of their house, such as the weightlifter who threatened him with a hammer, the paranoid man who stacked newspapers from floor to ceiling and left barely an ant corridor from the door to the bathroom and from there to the bed, or the third renter who exploded—I can’t think of another word to describe what happened—and left the walls covered with excrement, blood, and organs, which Tom, of course, had to clean up. No one could explain what had happened because no trace of explosives was found; my theory is that it must have been something like the phenomenon of spontaneous combustion. Despite these and other macabre experiences, Lucille and Tom have maintained their trust in humanity.
Sabrina, who was already five years old, danced the entire night, clinging to various people, while her vegetarian mothers took advantage of the occasion to try, surreptitiously, the lamb and pork chops. Alejandro, in a grave-digger suit and tie, presented the rings, accompanied by Andrea and Nicole, dressed like princesses in amber satin that contrasted with the bride’s long purple gown. Lori was radiant. Nico was very full of himself in black and a Mao shirt, with his hair tied back at the nape of his neck and looking more than ever a sixteenth-century Florentine nobleman. It was an ending I will never be able to use for my novels: they got married and lived happily ever after. That’s what I told Willie as he danced to the swing band and I tried to follow. The man leads, as that Scandinavian always said.
“I can die right here of a timely heart attack because my labor in this world is now complete: I have placed my son,” I told him.
“Don’t even think of it; it’s now that they’re going to need you,” he replied.
Toward the end of the evening, when the guests were beginning to leave, I crawled under a long cloth-covered table with a dozen children drunk on sugar and revved up by the music, their clothes in tatters from all the running around. The word had spread among them that I knew all the stories there were; all they had to do was ask for one. Sabrina wanted the story to be about a mermaid. I told them about the tiny siren who fell into a whisky glass and was drunk by Willie without his realizing. The description of the voyage of the unfortunate little siren through their grandfather’s organs, the vicissitudes of swimming through his digestive system, where she encountered every manner of obstacle and repugnant hazard, until she was floating in his urine and emptied into a sewer and from there into San Francisco Bay, left them speechless. The next day, Nicole, wild-eyed, came to tell me she hadn’t liked the story of the little siren at all.
“Is it a true story?” she asked.
“Not everything is true, but then not everything is false either.”
“How much is false and how much is true?”
“I don’t know, Nicole. The essence is true, and in my work as a storyteller that’s all that matters.”
“There aren’t any mermaids, so everything in your story is a lie.”
“And how do you know that the siren wasn’t a bacterium, for example.”
“A mermaid is a mermaid, and a bacterium is a bacterium,” she replied, indignant.