Paula

by Isabel Allende

These gifts aroused certain misgivings, and many eligible suitors were intimidated by her, despite her charms.

That was the happiest period of her life, when she had finished raising her children, was still in love, and the world seemed secure.

My life is created as I narrate, and my memory grows stronger with writing; what I do not put in words on a page will be erased by time.

Thus was born and baptized my first novel, The House of the Spirits, and I was initiated into the ineradicable vice of telling stories. That book saved my life. Writing is a long process of introspection; it is a voyage toward the darkest caverns of consciousness, a long, slow meditation. I write feeling my way in silence, and along the way discover particles of truth, small crystals that fit in the palm

of one hand and justify my passage through this world.

Sadness is a sterile desert.

Eleven years ago I wrote a letter to my grandfather to say goodbye to him in death. On this January 8, 1992, I am writing you, Paula, to bring you back to life.

You’re like Memé, whose feet had scarcely touched solid ground before she removed the astrakhan coat and draped it over a beggar-woman’s shoulders.

suffering was more powerful than romance.

Memé had given no thought to advising her about the libidinous preoccupations of the birds and the flowers because her soul floated on different planes, more intrigued with the translucence of apparitions than the gross realities of this world.

She was so fertile that she became pregnant if a pair of men’s undershorts was waved anywhere within a radius of a half kilometer,

Calculating that there was no more fascinating woman alive, and failing to understand how her husband could have abandoned her—he

The mind selects, enhances, and betrays; happenings fade from memory; people forget one another and, in the end, all that remains is the journey of the soul, those rare moments of spiritual revelation. What actually happened isn’t what matters, only the resulting scars and distinguishing marks.

Memé left this world with great simplicity. No one took note of her preparations for her journey to the Beyond until the end, when it was too late to intervene. Aware that it requires supreme airiness to detach oneself from the earth, she lightened her load. She rid herself of earthly goods and eliminated all superfluous emotions and desires, keeping only the barest essentials. She wrote a few letters and then, as her last act, took to her bed, never to get up again.

She was alien to this earth, ethereal and unreachable.

Her husband had to satisfy himself with living beneath the same roof but in a different dimension, never really possessing her.

He tried a thousand times to capture the airy spirit that flashed past him like a comet, leaving behind an enduring trail of astral dust, but always ended with the feeling she had escaped him.

The theory that childhood must be a period of placid innocence did not exist then, this is something North Americans invented later.

I do not want to be like my mother, I will be like my grandfather—independent, healthy, strong. I will not allow anyone to order me about, and I will not be beholden to anyone.

this is what I think of. Time and time again I have tried to recapture the emotion that forest stirs in me, a feeling more intense than the most perfect orgasm, than the longest ovation.

distanced himself from the constraining straitjacket of the Church.

Even though we rarely agree on anything, I have loved her longer than anyone in my lifetime. Our relationship began the day of my conception and has already lasted a half-century; it is, furthermore, the only truly unconditional love—neither one’s children nor one’s most fervent lovers love in that way.

I suppose that it is from that feeling of loneliness the questions arise that lead one to write, and that books are conceived in the search for answers.

At the most difficult moments of my life, when it has seemed that every door was closed to me, the taste of those apricots comes back to comfort me with the notion that abundance is always within reach, if only one knows how to find it.

The smells and colors of La Paz are inscribed in my memory as an inseparable part of the slow and painful awakening of adolescence.

I have two lives, one waking, the other sleeping. In the world of my dreams, there are landscapes and people I already know; there I explore infernos and Edens; I fly through the black night of the cosmos and descend to the bottom of the sea where a green silence reigns; I meet dozens of children of all kinds, impossible animals, and the delicate ghosts of my most loved dead. Through the years I have discovered the keys to understanding these stories of the night, and I have learned to decipher their codes; now the messages are clearer and they help me illuminate the mysterious areas of everyday life and of my writing.

Every day several million persons die and even more are born, but, for me, you alone were born, only you can die.

We have been together for more than four years, and I still feel the indefinable alchemy of our first meeting, a powerful attraction that time has colored with other sentiments but is still the essence of our union.

Nothing frightens him; he thinks of you as his spiritual companion, safe from the vicissitudes of life or death; he is not alarmed by your motionless body or your absent mind; he tells us he is in contact with your soul, that you can hear him, that you have feelings and emotions, that you are not a vegetable as the machines you are connected to attest.

diaphanous soul destined to become even more pure with hard times and suffering.

the ease, calm, and confidence with which we made love, like an old couple that has shared a thousand and one nights.

And always, afterward, passions sated and love renewed, our bodies meld in sleep, not caring where one begins or the other ends, or whose hand or foot is whose, in such perfect complicity that we meet in our dreams and the next morning do not know who dreamed whom, and when one moves the other adjusts to the new angles and curves, and when one sighs the other sighs, and when one wakes the other wakes, too. “Come,”

I have spent hours in the company of this very manly man who takes a chair beside your bed to watch over you with uncommon delicacy and to divert me with his life’s adventures.

The men come and go, but the women stay put; they are trees rooted in solid ground.

Women are used to thinking of their mate as a foolish child whose every serious fault, from drunkenness to domestic violence, they forgive . . . because he’s a man.

What no one could forgive was that the protagonist of the piece had the same motivations for adultery as a man: opportunity, boredom, dejection, flirtation, challenge, curiosity.

It had not occurred to anyone that women could enjoy such comfort: a private apartment for affairs was the sole prerogative of males, there was even a French word for it: garçonnière.

but I do not remember much about him; he is blurred in my memory like a badly focused photograph.

Time moves so slowly. Or perhaps it doesn’t move at all and it is we who pass through it.

With a brutal expenditure of energy, I have been rowing upstream all my life. I am tired, I want to turn around, drop the oars, and let the current carry me gently toward the sea.

In my view, his most outstanding characteristics were integrity, intuition, courage, and charisma: he followed his hunches, which rarely failed him, he did not turn away from risk, and he had the ability to captivate both masses and individuals.

I have found out that although something is not true today, it may be true tomorrow.

I love all things, not only the grand but the infinitely small: thimble, spurs, plates, flower vases.

What is there on the other side of life? Only night silence and solitude? What remains when there are no more desires or memories or hope? What is there in death?

If I could be still, without speaking or thinking, without begging, crying, remembering, hoping, if I could submerse myself in the most absolute silence, then perhaps I could hear you, my dearest daughter.

pain is inevitable in this life, but they say that it is almost always bearable if we do not put up resistance or add fear and anguish.

Paula’s twenty-eight years in this world, she had reached a maturity others never achieve; she knew how ephemeral life is and, because she was much more concerned about the restiveness of the soul, had removed herself from nearly everything material.

And she told me that sometimes when you were with other people, half dazed by the noise of several conversations, you had only to look at each other to know how much you were in love. Time stopped, and a magical space was carved out in which just the two of you existed.

Remember that all the others are more afraid than you.

Children, like books, are voyages into one’s inner self, during which body, mind, and soul shift course and turn toward the very center of existence.