Читать книгу Maya’s Notebook - Исабель Альенде, Isabel Allende - Страница 7

A week ago my grandmother gave me a dry-eyed hug at the San Francisco airport and told me again that if I valued my life at all, I should not get in touch with anyone I knew until we could be sure my enemies were no longer looking for me. My Nini is paranoid, as the residents of the People’s Independent Republic of Berkeley tend to be, persecuted as they are by the government and extraterrestrials, but in my case she wasn’t exaggerating: no amount of precaution could ever be enough. She handed me a hundred-page notebook so I could keep a diary, as I did from the age of eight until I was fifteen, when my life went off the rails. “You’re going to have time to get bored, Maya. Take advantage of it to write down the monumental stupidities you’ve committed, see if you can come to grips with them,” she said. Several of my diaries are still in existence, sealed with industrial-strength adhesive tape. My grandfather kept them under lock and key in his desk for years, and now my Nini has them in a shoebox under her bed. This will be notebook number nine. My Nini believes they’ll be of use to me when I get psychoanalyzed, because they contain the keys to untie the knots of my personality; but if she’d read them, she’d know they contain a huge pile of tales tall enough to outfox Freud himself. My grandmother distrusts on principle professionals who charge by the hour, since quick results are not profitable for them. However, she makes an exception for psychiatrists, because one of them saved her from depression and from the traps of magic when she took it into her head to communicate with the dead.

I put the notebook in my backpack, so I wouldn’t upset her, with no intention of using it, but it’s true that time stretches out here and writing is one way of filling up the hours. This first week of exile has been a long one for me. I’m on a tiny island so small it’s almost invisible on the map, in the middle of the Dark Ages. It’s complicated to write about my life, because I don’t know how much I actually remember and how much is a product of my imagination; the bare truth can be tedious and so, without even noticing, I change or exaggerate it, but I intend to correct this defect and lie as little as possible in the future. And that’s why now, when even the Yanomamis of the Amazonas use computers, I am writing by hand. It takes me ages and my writing must be in Cyrillic script, because I can’t even decipher it myself, but I imagine it’ll gradually straighten out page by page. Writing is like riding a bicycle: you don’t forget how, even if you go for years without doing it. I’m trying to go in chronological order, since some sort of order is required and I thought that would make it easy, but I lose my thread, I go off on tangents or I remember something important several pages later and there’s no way to fit it in. My memory goes in circles, spirals, and somersaults.

My name is Maya Vidal. I’m nineteen years old, female, single—due to a lack of opportunities rather than by choice, I’m currently without a boyfriend. Born in Berkeley, California, I’m a U.S. citizen, and temporarily taking refuge on an island at the bottom of the world. They named me Maya because my Nini has a soft spot for India and my parents hadn’t come up with any other name, even though they’d had nine months to think about it. In Hindi, maya means “charm, illusion, dream”: nothing at all to do with my personality. Attila would suit me better, because wherever I step no pasture will ever grow again. My story begins in Chile with my grandmother, my Nini, a long time before I was born, because if she hadn’t emigrated, she’d never have fallen in love with my Popo or moved to California, my father would never have met my mother and I wouldn’t be me, but rather a very different Chilean girl. What do I look like? I’m five-ten, 128 pounds when I play soccer and several more if I don’t watch out. I’ve got muscular legs, clumsy hands, blue or gray eyes, depending on the time of day, and blond hair, I think, but I’m not sure since I haven’t seen my natural hair color for quite a few years now. I didn’t inherit my grandmother’s exotic appearance, with her olive skin and those dark circles under her eyes that make her look a little depraved, or my father’s, handsome as a bullfighter and just as vain. I don’t look like my grandfather either—my magnificent Popo—because unfortunately he’s not related to me biologically, since he’s my Nini’s second husband.

I look like my mother, at least as far as size and coloring go. She wasn’t a princess of Lapland, as I used to think before I reached the age of reason, but a Danish air hostess my father, who’s a pilot, fell in love with in midair. He was too young to get married, but he got it into his head that this was the woman of his dreams and stubbornly pursued her until she eventually got tired of turning him down. Or maybe it was because she was pregnant. The fact is, they got married and regretted it within a week, but they stayed together until I was born. Days after my birth, while her husband was flying somewhere, my mother packed her bags, wrapped me up in a little blanket, and took a taxi to her in-laws’ house. My Nini was in San Francisco protesting against the Gulf War, but my Popo was home and took the bundle my mother handed him without much of an explanation, before she ran back to the taxi that was waiting for her. His granddaughter was so light he could hold her in one hand. A little while later the Danish woman sent divorce papers by mail and as a bonus a document renouncing custody of her daughter. My mother’s name is Marta Otter, and I met her the summer I was eight, when my grandparents took me to Denmark.

I’m in Chile, my grandmother Nidia Vidal’s country, where the ocean takes bites off the land and the continent of South America strings out into islands. To be more specific, I’m in Chiloé, part of the Lakes Region, between the forty-first and forty-third parallel south, an archipelago of more or less nine thousand square kilometers and two hundred thousand or so inhabitants, all of them shorter than me. In Mapudungun, the language of the region’s indigenous people, chiloé means “land of cáhuiles,” which are these screechy, black-headed seagulls, but it should be called land of wood and potatoes. Aside from the Isla Grande, where the most populous cities are, there are lots of little islands, some of them uninhabited. Some of the islands are in groups of three or four and so close to each other that at low tide you can walk from one to the next, but I didn’t have the good luck to end up on one of those: I live forty-five minutes, by motorboat, when the sea is calm, from the nearest town.

My trip from northern California to Chiloé began in my grandmother’s venerable yellow Volkswagen, which has suffered seventeen crashes since 1999, but runs like a Ferrari. I left in the middle of winter, one of those days of wind and rain when the San Francisco Bay loses its colors and the landscape looks like it was drawn with white, black, and gray brushstrokes. My grandmother was driving the way she usually does, clutching the steering wheel like a life preserver, the car making death rattles, her eyes fixed on me more than on the road, busy giving me my final instructions. She still hadn’t explained where exactly it was she was sending me; Chile, was all she’d said while concocting her plan to make me disappear. In the car she revealed the details and handed me a cheap little guidebook.

“Chiloé? What is this place?” I asked.

“You’ve got all the necessary information right there,” she said, pointing to the book.

“It seems really far away …”

“The farther the better. I have a friend in Chiloé, Manuel Arias, the only person in this world, apart from Mike O’Kelly, I’d dare ask to hide you for a year or two.”

“A year or two! You’re demented, Nini!”

“Look, kiddo, there are moments when a person has no control over their own life—things happen, that’s all. This is one of those moments,” she announced with her nose pressed against the wind-shield, trying to find her way, while we took stabs in the dark at the tangle of highways.

We were late arriving at the airport and separated without any sentimental fuss; the last image I have of her is of the Volkswagen sneezing in the rain as she drove away.

I flew to Dallas, which took several hours, squeezed between the window and a fat woman who smelled of roast peanuts, and then ten hours in another plane to Santiago, awake and hungry, remembering, thinking, and reading the book on Chiloé, which exalted the virtues of the landscape, the wooden churches, and rural living. I was terrified. Dawn broke on January 2 of this year, 2009, with an orange sky over the purple Andes, definitive, eternal, immense, as the pilot’s voice announced our descent. Soon a green valley appeared, rows of trees, pastures, crops, and in the distance Santiago, where my grandmother and my father were born and where there is a mysterious piece of my family history.

I know very little about my grandmother’s past, which she has rarely mentioned, as if her life really began when she met my Popo. In 1974, in Chile, her first husband, Felipe Vidal, died some months after the military coup that overthrew Salvador Allende’s socialist government and installed a dictatorship in the country. Finding herself a widow, she decided that she didn’t want to live under an oppressive regime and emigrated to Canada with her son Andrés, my dad. He hasn’t added much to the tale, because he doesn’t remember very much about his childhood, but he still reveres his father, of whom there are only three photographs in existence. “We’re never going back, are we?” Andrés said in the plane that took them to Canada. It wasn’t a question, it was an accusation. He was nine years old, had grown up all of a sudden over the last months, and wanted explanations, because he realized his mother was trying to protect him with half-truths and lies. He’d bravely accepted the news of his father’s unexpected heart attack and the news that he’d been buried before he could see the body and say good-bye. A short time later he found himself on a plane to Canada. “Of course we’ll come back, Andrés,” his mother assured him, but he didn’t believe her.

In Toronto they were taken in by Refugee Committee volunteers, who gave them suitable clothing and set them up in a furnished apartment, with the beds made and the fridge full. The first three days, while the provisions lasted, mother and son remained shut up indoors, trembling with solitude, but on the fourth they had a visit from a social worker who spoke good Spanish and informed them of the benefits and rights due to all Canadian residents. First of all they received intensive English classes and the boy was enrolled at school; then Nidia got a job as a driver to avoid the humiliation of receiving handouts from the state without working. It was the least appropriate job for my Nini, who is a rotten driver today, and back then was even worse.

The brief Canadian fall gave way to a polar winter, wonderful for Andrés, now called Andy, who discovered the delights of ice-skating and skiing, but unbearable for Nidia, who could never get warm or get over the sadness of having lost her husband and her country. Her mood didn’t improve with the coming of a faltering spring or with the flowers, which sprouted overnight like a mirage where before there had been hard-packed snow. She felt rootless and kept her bags packed, waiting for the chance to return to Chile as soon as the dictatorship fell, never imagining it was going to last for sixteen years.

Nidia Vidal stayed in Toronto for a couple of years, counting the days and the hours, until she met Paul Ditson II, my Popo, a professor at the University of California in Berkeley, who had gone to Toronto to give a series of lectures about an elusive planet, whose existence he was trying to prove by way of poetic calculations and leaps of the imagination. My Popo was one of the few African Americans in the overwhelmingly white profession of astronomy, an eminence in his field and the author of several books. As a young man he’d spent a year at Lake Turkana, in Kenya, studying the ancient megaliths of the region. He developed a theory, based on archaeological discoveries, that those basalt columns were astronomical observatories and had been used three hundred years before the Christian era to determine the Borana lunar calendar, which is still in use among shepherds in Ethiopia and Kenya. In Africa he learned to observe the sky without prejudice, and that’s how he began to suspect the existence of the invisible planet, for which he later searched the sky in vain with the most powerful telescopes.

The University of Toronto put him up in a suite for visiting academics and hired a car for him through an agency, which is how Nidia Vidal ended up escorting him during his stay. When he found out that his driver was Chilean, he told her he’d been at La Silla Observatory, in Chile. He said that in the southern hemisphere you can see constellations and galaxies unknown in the north, like the Small Magellanic Cloud and the Large Magellanic Cloud and that in some parts of the country, the nights are so clear and the climate so very dry that conditions for scrutinizing the firmament are ideal. That’s how they discovered that galaxies cluster together in patterns that resemble spiderwebs.

By one of those coincidences that normally happen only in novels, his visit to Chile ended on the very same day in 1974 that she left with her son for Canada. I often wonder if maybe they were in the airport at the same time waiting for their respective flights, but not meeting. According to them this would have been impossible, because he would have noticed such a beautiful woman and she would have seen him too—a black man stood out in Chile back then, especially one as tall and handsome as my Popo.

A single morning driving her passenger around Toronto was enough for Nidia to realize that he possessed that rare combination of a brilliant mind with the imagination of a dreamer, but entirely lacked any common sense, something she was proud to have in abundance herself. My Nini could never explain to me how she’d reached that conclusion from behind the steering wheel of a car while navigating her way through the traffic, but the fact is, she was absolutely right. The astronomer was living a life as lost as the planet he was searching the sky for; he could calculate in less than the blink of an eye how long it would take a spaceship to arrive at the moon if it was traveling at 28,286 kilometers per hour, but he remained perplexed by an electric coffeemaker. She had not felt the elusive flutter of love for years, and this man, very different from all those she’d met in her thirty-three years, intrigued and attracted her.

My Popo, quite frightened by his driver’s boldness in traffic, also felt curiosity about the woman hidden inside a uniform that was too big for her and wearing a bear hunter’s cap. He was not a man to give in easily to sentimental impulses, and if the idea of seducing her briefly crossed his mind, he immediately dismissed it as awkward. My Nini, on the other hand, who had nothing to lose, decided to collar the astronomer before he finished his lectures. She liked his mahogany color—she wanted to see all of him—and sensed that the two of them had a lot in common: he had astronomy and she astrology, which she considered to be practically the same thing. She thought they’d both come from a long way away to meet at this spot on earth and in their destinies; it was written in the stars. My Nini lived according to her horoscope back then, but she didn’t leave everything up to fate. Before taking the initiative of a surprise attack she made sure he was single, in a good financial situation, healthy, and only eleven years older than she, although at first glance she might have looked like his daughter if they’d been the same race. Years later my Popo would laugh and tell people that if she hadn’t knocked him out in the first round, he’d still be wandering around in love with the stars.

The second day the professor sat in the front seat to get a better look at his driver, and she took several unnecessary trips around the city to give him time to do so. That very night, after giving her son his dinner and putting him to bed, Nidia took off her uniform, took a shower, put on some lipstick, and presented herself before her prey with the pretext of returning a folder he’d left in the car and which she could just as easily have given him the following morning. She had never taken such a daring romantic step. She arrived at the building despite an icy blizzard, went up to the suite, crossed herself for courage, and knocked on the door. It was eleven thirty when she smuggled herself definitively into the life of Paul Ditson II.

My Nini had lived like a recluse in Toronto. At night she’d missed the weight of a masculine hand on her waist, but she had to survive and raise her son in a country where she’d always be a foreigner; there was no time for romantic dreams. The courage she’d armed herself with that night to get to the astronomer’s door vanished as soon as he opened it, looking sleepy and wearing pajamas. They looked at each other for half a minute, without knowing what to say—he wasn’t expecting her, and she hadn’t made a plan—until he invited her in. He was surprised how different she looked without the hat of her uniform, admiring her dark hair, her face with its uneven features, and her slightly crooked smile, which before he’d only been able to glimpse on the sly. She was surprised by the difference in size between them, less noticeable inside the car: on tiptoes her nose reached the middle of the giant’s chest. Immediately noticing the cataclysmic state of the tiny suite, she concluded that he seriously needed her.

Paul Ditson II had spent most of his life studying the mysterious behavior of celestial bodies, but he knew very little about female ones and nothing of the vagaries of love. He’d never fallen in love, and his most recent relationship had been with a faculty colleague, an attractive Jewish woman in good shape for her age, with whom he got together twice a month and who always insisted on paying half the bill in restaurants. My Nini had only loved two men, her husband and a lover she’d torn out of her head and heart ten years before. Her husband had been a scatterbrained companion, absorbed in his work and political activities, who traveled nonstop and was always too distracted to pay any attention to her needs, and her other relationship had been cut short. Nidia Vidal and Paul Ditson II were both ready for the love that would unite them to the end.

I heard my grandparents’ possibly fictionalized love story many times, and ended up memorizing it word for word, like a poem. I don’t know, of course, the details of what happened that night behind closed doors, but I can imagine them based on what I know about both of them. Did my Popo suspect, when he opened the door to this tiny Chilean woman, that he was at a crucial juncture and that the road he chose would determine his future? No, I’m sure, such tackiness would never have crossed his mind. And my Nini? I see her advancing like a somnambulist through the clothes thrown on the floor and the overflowing ashtrays, crossing the little living room, walking into the bedroom, and sitting down on the bed, because the armchair and all the other chairs were covered in papers and books. He would have knelt down beside her to embrace her, and they’d have stayed like that for a long time, trying to accommodate themselves to this sudden intimacy. Maybe she began to feel stifled in the heat, and he helped her to get out of her coat and boots; then they caressed each other hesitantly, recognizing each other, delving into their souls to make sure they weren’t mistaken. “You smell of tobacco and dessert. And you’re smooth and black like a seal,” my Nini told him. I heard that phrase many times.

The last part of the legend I don’t have to invent, because they told me. With that first embrace, my Nini concluded that she’d known the astronomer in other lives and other times, that this was just a re-encounter and that their astral signs and tarot cards were aligned. “Thank goodness you’re a man, Paul. Imagine if in this reincarnation you’d come back as my mother,” she sighed, sitting on his lap. “Since I’m not your mother, why don’t we get married?” he answered.

Two weeks later she arrived in California dragging her son, who had no desire to emigrate for a second time, with a three-month engagement visa, at the end of which she had to either get married or leave the country. They got married.

I spent my first day in Chile wandering around Santiago with a map, in a heavy, dry heat, killing time until my bus left for the south. It’s a modern city, with nothing exotic or picturesque—no Indians in traditional clothes or colonial neighborhoods with boldly colored houses, like the ones I’d seen with my grandparents in Guatemala or Mexico. I took a funicular to the top of a hill, an obligatory trip for tourists, and got an idea of the size of the capital, which looks like it goes on forever, and of the pollution that covers it like a dusty mist. At dusk I boarded an apricot-colored bus heading south, to Chiloé.

I tried and tried to sleep, lulled by the movement, the purring of the motor, and the snores of the other passengers, but it’s never been easy for me to sleep, and much less now, when I still have residues of the wild life running through my veins. When the sun came up we stopped to use the restroom and have a coffee at a posada, in a pastoral landscape of rolling green hills and cows, and then we went on for another several hours until we reached a rudimentary port, where we could stretch our legs and buy cheese and seafood empanadas from some women wearing white coats like nurses. The bus boarded a ferry to cross the Chacao Channel: half an hour sailing silently over a luminous sea. I got off the bus to look over the edge with all the rest of the numb passengers, who, like me, had spent many hours imprisoned in their seats. Defying the biting wind, we admired the flocks of swallows, like kerchiefs in the sky, and the toninas, dolphins with white bellies that danced alongside the ferry.

The bus left me in Ancud, on the Isla Grande, the second largest city of the archipelago. From there I had to take another bus to the town where Manuel Arias was expecting me, but I discovered that my wallet was missing. My Nini had warned me about Chilean pickpockets and their magician’s skill: they’ll very kindly steal your soul. Luckily they left my photo of my Popo and my passport, which I had in the other pocket of my backpack. I was alone, without a single cent, in an unknown country. If I’d learned anything from last year’s ill-fated adventures, though, it was not to get overwhelmed by minor inconveniences.

In one of the little souvenir shops in the plaza, where they sold Chiloé knits, three women sat in a circle, chatting and knitting. I assumed that if they were like my Nini, they’d help me; Chilean women fly to the rescue of anyone in distress, especially an outsider. I explained the problem in my hesitant Spanish, and they immediately dropped their knitting needles and offered me a chair and an orange soda while they discussed my case, talking over each other in their rush to give opinions. They made several calls on a cell phone and got me a lift with a cousin who was going my way; he could take me in a couple of hours and didn’t mind making a short detour to drop me off at my destination.

I took advantage of the wait to have a look around town and visit a museum of the churches of Chiloé, designed by Jesuit missionaries three hundred years earlier and raised plank by plank by the Chilotes, master boat builders who can make anything out of wood. The structures are created by an ingenious assembly system without using a single nail, and the vaulted ceilings are upside-down boats. As I came out of the museum I met a dog. He was medium in size, lame, with stiff gray fur and a lamentable tail but the dignified demeanor of a pedigree animal. I offered him the empanada I had in my backpack, and he took it gently in his big yellow teeth, put it down on the ground, and looked at me, telling me clearly that his hunger was not for food but for company. My stepmother, Susan, was a dog trainer and had taught me never to touch any animal before they approach, which they’ll do when they feel safe, but with this one we skipped the protocol and from the start we got along well. We did a little sightseeing together, and at the agreed time I went back to where the women were knitting. The dog stayed outside the shop, politely, with just one paw on the threshold.

The cousin showed up an hour later than he said he would in a van crammed to the roof with stuff, accompanied by his wife with a baby at her breast. I thanked my benefactors, who had also lent me the cell phone to get in touch with Manuel Arias, and said good-bye to the dog, but he had other plans: he sat at my feet and swept the ground with his tail, smiling like a hyena; he had done me the favor of honoring me with his attention, and now I was his lucky human. I changed tactics. “Shoo! Shoo! Fucking dog,” I shouted at him in English. He didn’t move, while the cousin observed the scene with pity. “Don’t worry, señorita, we can bring your Fahkeen,” he said at last. And in this way that ashen creature acquired his new name; maybe in his previous life he’d been called Prince. We could barely squeeze into the jam-packed vehicle. An hour later we arrived in the town where I was supposed to meet my grandmother’s friend, who’d said to wait in front of the church, facing the sea.

The town, founded by the Spanish in 1567, is one of the oldest in the archipelago and has a population of two thousand, but I don’t know where they all were—I saw more hens and sheep than humans. I waited for Manuel for a long time, sitting on the steps of a blue-and-white-painted church with Fahkeen and observed from a certain distance by four silent and serious little kids. All I knew about Manuel was that he was a friend of my grandmother’s and that they hadn’t seen each other since the 1970s but had kept in touch sporadically, first by letter, as they did in prehistoric times, and then by e-mail.

Manuel finally appeared and recognized me from the description my Nini had given him over the phone. What would she have told him? That I’m an obelisk with hair dyed four primary colors and a nose ring. He held out his hand and looked me over quickly, evaluating the remains of blue nail polish on my bitten fingernails, frayed jeans, and the commando boots, spray-painted pink, that I’d gotten at a Salvation Army store when I was on the streets.

“I’m Manuel Arias,” the man introduced himself, in English.

“Hi. I’m on the run from the FBI, Interpol, and a Las Vegas criminal gang,” I announced bluntly, to avoid any misunderstandings.

“Congratulations,” he said.

“I haven’t killed anybody, and frankly, I don’t think any of them would go to the trouble of coming to look for me all the way down here in the asshole of the world.”

“Thanks.”

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to insult your country, man. Actually it’s really pretty, lots of green and lots of water, but look how far away it is!”

“From what?”

“From California, from civilization, from the rest of the world. My Nini didn’t tell me it’d be cold.”

“It’s summer,” he informed me.

“Summer in January! Who’s ever heard of that!”

“Everyone in the southern hemisphere,” he replied dryly.

Bad news, I thought—no sense of humor. He invited me to have a cup of tea while we waited for a truck that was bringing him a refrigerator and should have been there three hours ago. We went into a house marked with a white cloth flying from a pole, like a flag of surrender, a sign that they sell fresh bread there. There were four rustic tables with oilskin tablecloths and unmatched chairs, a counter, and a stove, where a soot-blackened kettle was boiling away. A heavyset woman with a contagious laugh greeted Manuel Arias with a kiss on the cheek and looked at me a little warily before deciding to kiss me too.

“Americana?” she asked Manuel.

“Isn’t it obvious?” he said.

“But what happened to her head?” she added, pointing to my dyed hair.

“I was born this way,” I told her cheekily in Spanish.

“The gringuita speaks Christian!” she exclaimed with delight. “Sit, sit down, I’ll bring you a little tea right away.”

She took me by the arm and sat me down resolutely in one of the chairs, while Manuel explained that in Chile a gringo is any blond English-speaking person, and when the diminutive is used, as in gringuito or gringuita, it’s a term of affection.

The innkeeper brought us tea, a fragrant pyramid of bread just out of the oven, butter, and honey, then sat down with us to make sure we’d eat as much as we should. Soon we heard the sneezing of a truck that bounced along the unpaved, potholed street, a refrigerator balanced in the back. The woman leaned out the door and whistled, and a moment later several young men were helping to get the appliance off the back of the truck, carry it down to the beach, and load it onto Manuel’s motorboat using a gangway of planks.

The vessel was about twenty-five feet long, fiberglass, painted white, blue, and red, the colors of the Chilean flag—almost the same as that of Texas—that flew from the prow. The name was painted along one side: Cahuilla. They tied the refrigerator on as well as possible while keeping it upright and helped me in. The dog followed me with his pathetic little trot; one of his paws was a bit shriveled, and he walked leaning to one side.

“And this guy?” Manuel asked me.

“He’s not mine—he latched on to me in Ancud. I’ve been told that Chilean dogs are very intelligent, and this one’s a good breed.”

“He must be a cross between a German shepherd and a fox terrier. He’s got the body of a big dog with a little dog’s short legs,” was Manuel’s opinion.

“After I give him a bath, you’ll see how fine he is.”

“What’s his name?” he asked.

“Fucking dog, in Chilean.”

“What?”

“Fahkeen.”

“I hope your Fahkeen gets along with my cats. You’ll have to tie him up at night so he won’t go out and kill sheep,” he warned me.

“That won’t be necessary—he’s going to sleep with me.”

Fahkeen squashed himself into the bottom of the boat, his nose in between his front paws, and stayed absolutely still there, never taking his eyes off me. He’s not affectionate, but we understand each other in the language of flora and fauna: telepathic Esperanto.

From the horizon an avalanche of big clouds rolled toward us; an icy wind was blowing, but the sea was calm. Manuel lent me a woolen poncho and didn’t say anything more, concentrating on steering and the instruments, compass, GPS, marine wave radio, and who knows what else, while I studied him out of the corner of my eye. My Nini had told me that he was a sociologist, or something like that, but in his little boat he could pass for a sailor: medium height, thin, strong, fiber and muscle, cured by the salty wind, with wrinkles of stern character, short thick hair, eyes as gray as his hair. I don’t know how to calculate the age of old people. Manuel looks okay from a distance—he walks fast and hasn’t got that hump old men get—but up close I can tell he is older than my Nini, so he must be seventy-something. I’ve dropped into his life like a bomb. I’ll have to walk on eggshells, so he won’t regret having given me shelter.

After almost an hour on the water, passing quite a few islands that appeared uninhabited, even though they weren’t, Manuel Arias pointed to a headland that from the distance was barely a dark brushstroke but up close turned out to be a hill with a beach of blackish sand and rocks at the edge of it, where four wooden boats were drying upside down. He docked the Cahuilla at a floating wharf and threw a couple of thick ropes to a bunch of kids who’d come running down to meet us, and they tied the boat to some posts quite capably. “Welcome to our metropolis,” said Manuel, pointing to a village of wooden houses on stilts in front of the beach. A shiver ran up my spine; from here on in, this would be my whole world.

A group came down to the beach to inspect me. Manuel had told them an American girl was coming to help him with his research; if these people were expecting someone respectable, they were in for a disappointment. The Obama T-shirt I was wearing, a Christmas present from my Nini, wasn’t long enough to cover my belly button.

Unloading the refrigerator without tilting it was a job for several volunteers, who encouraged each other, laughed loudly, and hurried as it was starting to get dark. We walked up to town in a procession, the refrigerator in the lead, then Manuel and I, behind us a dozen shouting little kids, and, bringing up the rear, a ragtag bunch of dogs furiously barking at Fahkeen, without getting too close; his air of supreme disdain clearly indicated that the first to do so would suffer the consequences. Fahkeen, who seemed difficult to intimidate, wouldn’t let any of them smell his butt. We passed a cemetery, where a few goats with swollen udders were grazing among the plastic flowers and what looked like dollhouses marking the graves, some with furniture for the use of the dead.

In the village, wooden bridges connected the stilt houses. In the main street—to give it a name—I saw donkeys, bicycles, a jeep with the crossed-rifles emblem of the carabineros, the Chilean police, and three or four old cars, which in California would be collectors’ items if they were less banged up. Manuel explained that due to the uneven terrain and inevitable mud in the winter, all heavy transport is done by oxen cart, the lighter stuff by mules; people get around on horseback and on foot. A few faded signs identified some humble shops—a couple of grocery stores, a pharmacy, several bars, two restaurants, which consisted of a couple of metal tables in front of a couple of fish shops, and one Internet café, which sold batteries, soda pop, magazines, and knickknacks to the visitors who arrived once a week, carted in by ecotourism agencies, to enjoy the best curanto in Chiloé. I’ll describe curanto later on, because I haven’t tried it yet.

Some people came out to take a cautious look at me, in silence, until a short, stocky man decided to say hello. He wiped his hand on his pants before offering it to me, smiling with teeth edged in gold. This was Aurelio Ñancupel, descendant of a famous pirate and the most necessary person on the island—he sells alcohol on credit, extracts molars, and has a flat-screen TV, which his customers enjoy when there’s electricity. His place has a very appropriate name: the Tavern of the Dead. Because of its advantageous location near the cemetery, it’s the obligatory stopping point at which mourners can alleviate the sorrow of every funeral.

Ñancupel had become a Mormon, attracted by the idea of having several wives, and discovered too late that the Mormons had renounced polygamy after a new prophetic revelation, more in line with the U.S. Constitution. That’s how Manuel Arias described him to me, while the man himself doubled over with laughter, echoed by the crowd. Manuel also introduced me to other people, whose names I couldn’t remember, who seemed too old to be the parents of that gang of children; now I know they’re the grandparents; the generation in between all work far from the island.

So then this fiftyish woman with a commanding air came walking up the street. She looked tough and attractive, with hair that beige color blond turns when it goes gray, done up in a messy bun at the nape of her neck. This was Blanca Schnake, principal of the school, who people call, out of respect, Auntie Blanca. Kissing Manuel on the cheek, the way they do here, she gave me an official welcome in the name of the community, which dissolved the tension in the atmosphere and tightened the circle of nosy bystanders around me. Auntie Blanca invited me to visit the school the next day and offered me free use of the library, with its two computers and video games, which I can use till March, when the kids go back to class; after that the timetable will be more limited. She added that on Saturday they showed the same movies at the school that were playing in Santiago, but for free. She bombarded me with questions, and I summed up, in my beginner’s Spanish, my two-day trip from California and the theft of my wallet, which provoked a chorus of laughter from the kids, quickly silenced by a glacial look from Auntie Blanca. “Tomorrow I’m going to make you some machas a la parmesana, so the gringuita can start getting to know some Chiloé cuisine. I’ll expect you around nine,” she told Manuel. Afterward I found out that machas are a special kind of razor clam found only in the southern Pacific, and that the correct thing to do is to arrive an hour after the time you’re told. They have dinner very late here.

When we finished our brief tour around the town, we climbed into a cart pulled by two mules. The refrigerator was secured behind us, and off we went, very slowly, along a barely visible track through the pasture, followed by Fahkeen.

Manuel Arias lives a mile—or a kilometer and a half, as they say here—from town, right on the sea, but there’s no access to his property by boat because of the rocks. His house is a good example of the region’s architecture, he told me with a note of pride in his voice. To me it looks like all the rest of the houses in town: it rests on pillars, and it’s made of wood. But he explained that the difference is that its pillars and rafters were carved with axes; it has “round-headed” shingles, much appreciated for their decorative value; and the timber used for it is Guaitecas cypress, once abundant in the region and now very rare. The cypresses of Chiloé can live for more than three thousand years, and are among the longest-lived trees in the world, after the baobabs of Africa and the sequoias of California.

The house has a high-ceilinged living room, where everything happens around the imposing black woodstove, which is used to heat the place and for cooking. There are two bedrooms—a medium-size one, which is Manuel’s, and a smaller one, mine—as well as a bathroom with a sink and a shower. There is not a single door inside the house, but the washroom has a striped wool blanket hanging across the threshold, for privacy. In the part of the main room used as the kitchen there’s a big table, a cupboard, and a deep crate with a lid to store potatoes, which in Chiloé are eaten at every meal; bunches of herbs, braids of chilies and garlic, long, dry pork sausages, and heavy iron pots and pans for cooking over wood fires all hang from the ceiling. A ladder leads up to the attic, where Manuel keeps most of his books and files. There are no paintings, photographs, or ornaments on the walls, nothing personal, only maps of the archipelago and a beautiful ship’s clock, its bronze dial set in mahogany, that looks like it was salvaged from the Titanic. Outside Manuel has improvised a primitive jacuzzi with a huge wooden barrel. The tools, firewood, charcoal, and drums of gasoline for the motorboat and the generator are kept in the shed out back.

My room is simple, like the rest of the house; there’s one narrow bed covered with a blanket similar to the washroom curtain, a chair, a dresser with three drawers, and a few nails in the wall to hang clothes on. More than enough for my possessions, which fit easily into my backpack. I like this austere and masculine atmosphere. The only worrying thing is Manuel Arias’s obsessive tidiness; I’m more relaxed.

The men put the refrigerator in its place, hooked it up to the gas, and then settled down to share a couple of bottles of wine and a salmon that Manuel had smoked the previous week in a metal drum with apple wood. Looking out at the sea from the window, they ate and drank in silence, speaking only to give an elaborate and ceremonious series of toasts: “Salud! Good health!” “May this drink bring you good health.” “And the same I wish to you.” “May you live many more years.” “May you attend my funeral.” Manuel gave me uncomfortable sidelong glances until I took him aside to tell him to calm down, I wasn’t planning on making a grab for the bottles. My grandmother had surely warned him, and he’d been planning to hide the liquor, but that would be absurd; the problem isn’t alcohol, it’s me.

Meanwhile Fahkeen and the cats were sizing each other up cautiously, dividing up the territory. The tabby is called Dumb-Cat, because the poor animal is stupid, and the ginger one is the Literati-Cat, because his favorite spot is on top of the computer; Manuel says he knows how to read.

The men finished the salmon and the wine, said good-bye, and left. I noticed that Manuel never even hinted at paying them, as he hadn’t either with the others who’d helped move the refrigerator before, but it would have been indiscreet of me to ask him about it.

I looked over Manuel’s office, composed of two desks, a filing cabinet, bookshelves, a modern computer with a double monitor, a fax, and a printer. There was an Internet connection, but he reminded me—as if I could forget—that I’m incommunicado. He added, defensively, that he has all his work on that computer and prefers that no one touch it.

“What do you do?” I asked him.

“I’m an anthropologist.”

“Anthropophagus?”

“I study people, I don’t eat them,” he told me.

“It was a joke, man. Anthropologists don’t have any raw material anymore; even the most savage tribesman has a cell phone and a television these days.”

“I don’t specialize in savages. I’m writing a book about the mythology of Chiloé.”

“They pay you for that?”

“Barely,” he admitted.

“It looks like you must be pretty poor.”

“Yes, but I live cheaply.”

“I wouldn’t want to be a burden on you,” I told him.

“You’re going to work to cover your expenses, Maya, that’s what your grandmother and I agreed. You can help me with the book, and in March you’ll work with Blanca at the school.”

“I should warn you: I’m very ignorant. I don’t know anything about anything.”

“What do you know how to do?”

“Bake cookies and bread, swim, play soccer, and write Samurai poems. You should see my vocabulary! I’m a human dictionary, but in English. I don’t think that’ll be much use to you.”

“We’ll see. The cookies sound promising.” And I think he hid a smile.

“Have you written other books?” I asked, yawning; the tiredness of the long trip and the five-hour time difference between California and Chile was weighing on me like a ton of bricks.

“Nothing that might make me famous,” he said pointing to several books on his desk: Dream Worlds of the Australian Aborigines, Initiation Rites Among the Tribes of the Orinoco, Mapuche Cosmogony in Southern Chile.

“According to my Nini, Chiloé is magical,” I told him.

“The whole world is magical, Maya,” he answered.

Manuel Arias assured me that the soul of his house is very ancient. My Nini also believes that houses have memories and feelings, she can sense the vibrations: she knows if the air of a place is charged with bad energy because misfortunes have happened there, or if the energy is positive. Her big house in Berkeley has a good soul. When we get it back, we’ll have to fix it up—it’s falling apart from old age—and then I plan to live in it till I die. I grew up there, on the top of a hill, with a view of San Francisco Bay that would be impressive if it weren’t blocked by two thriving pine trees. My Popo never allowed them to be pruned. He said that trees suffer when they’re mutilated and all the vegetation for a thousand meters around them suffers too, because everything is connected in the subsoil. It would be a crime to kill two pines to see a puddle of water that could just as easily be appreciated from the freeway.

The first Paul Ditson bought the house in 1948, the year the racial restriction for acquiring property in Berkeley was abolished. The Ditsons were the first black family in the neighborhood, and the only one for twenty years, until others began moving in. It was built in 1885 by a tycoon who made a lot of money in oranges. When he died he left his fortune to the university and his family in the dark. It was uninhabited for a long time and then passed from hand to hand, deteriorating a bit more with each transaction, until the Ditsons bought it. They were able to repair it because it had a strong framework and good foundations. After his parents died, my Popo bought his brothers’ shares and lived alone in that six-bedroom Victorian relic, crowned with an inexplicable bell tower, where he installed his telescope.

When Nidia and Andy Vidal arrived, he was only using the kitchen, the bathroom, and two other rooms; the rest he kept closed up. My Nini burst in like a hurricane of renovation, throwing knickknacks in the garbage, cleaning, and fumigating, but her ferocity in combating the havoc was not strong enough to conquer her husband’s endemic chaos. After many fights they made a deal that she could do what she liked with the house, as long as she respected his desk and the tower of the stars.

My Nini felt right in her element in Berkeley, that gritty, radical, extravagant city, with its mix of races and human pelts, with more geniuses and Nobel Prize winners than any other city on earth, saturated with noble causes, intolerant in its sanctimoniousness. My Nini was transformed: before she’d been a prudent and responsible young widow who tried to go unnoticed, but in Berkeley her true character emerged. She no longer had to dress as a chauffeur, like in Toronto, or succumb to social hypocrisy, like in Chile; no one knew her, she could reinvent herself. She adopted the aesthetic of the hippies, who languished on Telegraph Avenue selling their handicrafts surrounded by the aromas of incense and marijuana. She wore tunics, sandals, and beads from India, but she was very far from being a hippie: she worked, took on the responsibilities of running a house and raising a granddaughter, participated in the community, and I never saw her get high or chant in Sanskrit.

Scandalizing her neighbors, almost all of them her husband’s colleagues, with their dark, ivy-covered, vaguely British residences, my Nini painted the big Ditson house in the psychedelic colors inspired by San Francisco’s Castro Street, where gay people were starting to move in and remodel the old houses. Her violet and green walls, her yellow friezes and garlands of plaster flowers, provoked gossip and a couple of citations from the municipality, until the house was photographed for an architecture magazine, became a landmark for tourists in the city, and was soon being imitated by Pakistani restaurants, shops for young people, and artists’ studios.

My Nini also put her personal stamp on the interior decoration. She added her artistic touch to the ceremonial pieces of furniture, heavy clocks and horrendous paintings in gilt frames, acquired by the first Ditson: a profusion of lamps with fringes, frayed rugs, Turkish divans, and crocheted curtains. My room, painted mango, had a canopy over the bed made of Indian cotton edged with little mirrors and a flying dragon hanging from the center, which would have killed me if it ever fell and landed on me; on the walls she’d put up photographs of malnourished African children, so I could see how these unfortunate creatures were starving to death, while I refused to eat what I was given. According to my Popo, the dragon and the Biafran children were the cause of my insomnia and lack of appetite.

My guts have begun to suffer a frontal attack from Chilean bacteria. On my second day on this island I was doubled over in bed with stomach pains, and I’m still a little shivery, spending hours in front of the window with a hot water bottle on my belly. My grandmother would say I’m giving my soul time to catch up to me in Chiloé. She thinks jet travel is not advisable because the soul travels more slowly than the body, falls behind, and sometimes gets lost along the way; that must be the reason why pilots, like my dad, are never entirely present: they’re waiting for their soul, which is up in the clouds.

You can’t rent DVDs or video games here, and the only movies are the ones they show once a week at the school. For entertainment I have only Blanca Schnake’s fevered romance novels and books about Chiloé in Spanish, very useful for learning the language, but they’re hard for me to read. Manuel gave me a battery-operated flashlight that fits over the forehead like a miner’s lamp; that’s how we read when the electricity goes off. I can’t say very much about Chiloé, because I’ve barely left this house, but I could fill several pages about Manuel Arias, the cats, and the dog, who are now my family; Auntie Blanca, who shows up all the time on the pretext of visiting me, although it’s obvious that she comes to see Manuel; and Juanito Corrales, a boy who also comes every day to read with me and to play with Fahkeen. The dog’s very selective when it comes to company, but he puts up with the kid.

Yesterday I met Juanito’s grandmother. I hadn’t seen her before, because she was at the hospital in Castro, the capital of Chiloé, with her husband, who had a leg amputated in December and isn’t healing very well. Eduvigis Corrales is the color of terra-cotta, with a cheerful face crisscrossed with wrinkles, stocky and short legged, a typical Chilota. She wears her hair in a thin braid wrapped around her head and dresses like a missionary, with a thick skirt and lumberjack boots. She looks about sixty years old, but she’s only forty-five; people age quickly here and live a long time. She arrived with an iron pot, as heavy as a cannon, that she put on the stove to heat up, while she gave me a hasty speech, something about introducing herself with the proper respect; she was Eduvigis Corrales, the gentleman’s neighbor and cleaning lady. “Hey! What a beautiful big girl, this gringuita! Watch over her, Jesus! The gentleman was waiting for you, dear, like everybody else on the island, and I hope you like the little chicken with potatoes I made for you.” It wasn’t a local dialect, which is what I thought at first, but Spanish at a gallop. I deduced that Manuel Arias was the gentleman, although Eduvigis was talking about him in the third person, as if he weren’t there.

Eduvigis speaks to me, however, in the same bossy tone as my grandmother. This good woman comes to clean the house, takes the dirty laundry away and brings it all back clean, splits firewood with an ax so heavy I couldn’t even lift it, grows crops on her land, milks her cow, shears sheep, and knows how to slaughter pigs, but doesn’t go out fishing or to collect seafood because of her arthritis, she explained. She says her husband is not such a bad sort, not as bad as people in town think, but the diabetes really got him down, and since he lost his leg, he just wants to die. Of her five living children, only one is still at home, Azucena, who’s thirteen, and she also has her grandson Juanito, who’s ten, but looks younger “cuz he was born espirituado,” as she explained to me. This being espirituado might mean mental feebleness or that the one affected possesses more spirit than matter; in Juanito’s case it must be the second, because there’s nothing stupid about him.

Eduvigis lives on the produce of her small piece of land, what Manuel pays for her help, and the money her daughter, Juanito’s mother, who works at a salmon farm in the south of the Isla Grande, sends. In Chiloé the salmon-farming industry was the second largest in the world, after Norway’s, and boosted the region’s economy, but it contaminated the seabed, put the traditional fishermen out of business, and tore families apart. Now the industry is ruined, Manuel explained, because they put too many fish in the cages and gave them so many antibiotics that when they were attacked by a virus, they couldn’t be saved; their immune systems didn’t work anymore. There are twenty thousand unemployed from the salmon farms, most of them women, but Eduvigis’s daughter still has a job.

Soon we sat down to eat. As soon as she took the lid off the pot and the fragrance reached my nostrils, I was transported back to the kitchen of my childhood, in my grandparents’ house, and my eyes misted up with nostalgia. Eduvigis’s chicken stew was my first solid food for several days. This illness has been embarrassing; it was impossible to conceal vomiting and diarrhea in a house with no doors. I asked Manuel what had happened to the doors, and he replied that he preferred open spaces. I got sick from Blanca Schnake’s clams or the myrtle-berry pie, I’m sure. At first, Manuel pretended he didn’t hear the noises coming out of the washroom, but soon he had to drop the facade, because he saw me so weak. I heard him talking on his cell phone to Blanca to ask for instructions, and then he started making rice soup, changed my sheets, and brought me a hot water bottle. He keeps watch over me out of the corner of his eye without a word, but he’s alert to my needs. At my slightest attempt to thank him, he reacts with a grunt. He also phoned Liliana Treviño, the local nurse, a short, compact, young woman, with contagious laughter and an indomitable mane of curly hair, who gave me some enormous charcoal tablets, black, scratchy, and very hard to swallow. Seeing as they had absolutely no effect, Manuel got the greengrocer’s little cart to take me in to town to see a doctor.

On Thursdays the National Health Services boat, which travels around the islands, stops here. The doctor looked like a nearsighted fourteen-year-old kid who didn’t even need to shave yet, but it just took him a single glance to diagnose my condition: “You’ve got chilenitis, what foreigners get when they come to Chile. Nothing serious,” and he gave me a few pills in a twist of paper. Eduvigis made me an infusion of herbs, because she doesn’t trust remedies from the pharmacy, says they’re a shady deal from American corporations. I’ve been taking the infusion conscientiously, and it’s making me feel better. I like Eduvigis Corrales, she talks and talks like Auntie Blanca; the rest of the people around here are taciturn.

I told Juanito Corrales that my mother was a princess of Lapland, since he was curious about my family. Manuel was at his desk and didn’t make any comments, but after the boy left he told me that the Sami people, who live in Lapland, don’t have royalty. We’d just sat down at the table, a plate of sole with butter and cilantro for him and a clear broth for me. I explained that the thing about the Laplander princess had occurred to my Nini in a moment of inspiration when I was five and started noticing the mystery surrounding my mother. I remember we were in the kitchen, the coziest room in the house, baking cookies like we did every week for Mike O’Kelly’s delinquents and drug addicts. Mike is my Nini’s best friend, who is intent on achieving the impossible task of saving young people who’ve gone astray. He’s a real Irishman, Dublin-born, with skin so white, hair so black, and eyes so blue that my Popo nicknamed him Snow White, after that gullible girl that ate the poisoned apple in that Walt Disney movie. I’m not saying that O’Kelly is gullible; quite the contrary, he’s smart as can be: he’s the only one who can shut my Nini up. There was a Laplander princess in one of my books. I had a serious library at my disposal, because my Popo believed that culture entered by osmosis and it was better to start early, but my favorite books were fairy tales. According to my Popo, children’s stories are racist—how can it be that fairies don’t exist in Botswana or Guatemala?—but he never censored my reading, he would simply give his opinion with the aim of developing my capacity for critical thought. My Nini, on the other hand, never appreciated my critical thoughts and used to discourage them with smacks on the head.

In a picture of my family that I painted in kindergarten, I put my grandparents in full color in the center of the page, and way over on one side I added a fly—my dad’s plane—and a crown on the other representing my blue-blooded mother. In case there were any doubts, the next day I took my book, where the princess appeared in an ermine cape riding a white bear. The whole class laughed at me in unison. Later, back at home, I put the book in the oven with the corn pie, which is baked at 350º. After the firefighters left and the cloud of smoke began to lift, my grandmother bombarded me with the usual shouts of “You little shit!” while my Popo tried to rescue me before she ripped my head off. Between hiccups, with snot running down my face, I told my grandparents that at school they called me “the orphan of Lapland.” My Nini, in one of her sudden mood changes, squeezed me against her papaya breasts and assured me there was nothing orphaned about me, I had a father and grandparents, and the next swine who dared to insult me was going to have to deal with the Chilean mafia. This mafia was composed of her alone, but Mike O’Kelly and I were so afraid of her that we called my Nini Don Corleone.

My grandparents pulled me out of kindergarten and for a while taught me the basics of coloring and making worms out of Play-Doh at home, until my dad returned from one of his trips and decided that I needed to socialize with people my own age, not only with O’Kelly’s drug addicts, apathetic hippies, and the implacable feminists who were drawn to my grandmother. The new school was in two old houses joined by a second-floor bridge with a roof, an architectural challenge held aloft by the effect of its curvature, like cathedral domes, according to my Popo’s explanation, although I hadn’t asked. They taught using an Italian system of experimental education in which the students did whatever the fuck we wanted. The classrooms had no blackboards or desks, we sat on the floor, the teachers didn’t wear bras or shoes, and everyone learned at their own pace. My dad might have preferred a military academy, but he didn’t interfere with my grandparents’ decision, since it would be up to them to deal with my teachers and help with my homework.

“This kid’s retarded,” decided my Nini when she saw how slowly I was learning. Her vocabulary is peppered with politically unacceptable expressions, like retard, fatso, dwarf, hunchback, faggot, butch, chinkie-rike-eat-lice, and lots more that my grandfather tried to put down to the limitations of his wife’s English. She’s the only person in Berkeley who says “black” instead of “African American.” According to my Popo, I wasn’t deficient mentally, but rather overly imaginative, which is less serious, and time proved him right, because as soon as I learned my alphabet I began to read voraciously and to fill up notebooks with pretentious poems and an invented sad and bitter story of my life. I’d realized that in writing happiness is useless—without suffering there is no story—and I secretly savored being called an orphan; the only orphans on my radar were those from classic tales, and they were all very wretched.

My mother, Marta Otter, the improbable Laplander princess, disappeared into the Scandinavian mists before I could even catch her scent. I had a dozen photographs of her and a present she sent by mail for my fourth birthday, a mermaid sitting on a rock inside a glass ball, where it looked as if it was snowing when you shook it. That ball was my most precious treasure until I was eight, when it suddenly lost its sentimental value, but that’s another story.

I’m furious because my only valuable possession has disappeared, my civilized music, my iPod. I think Juanito Corrales took it. I didn’t want to make trouble for him, poor kid, but I had to tell Manuel, who didn’t think it was a big deal; he said Juanito’ll use it for a few days and then put it back where it was. That’s the way things work in Chiloé, it seems. Last Wednesday someone brought back an ax that had been taken without permission from the woodshed more than a week before. Manuel suspected he knew who had it, but it would have been an insult to ask for it back, since borrowing is one thing and theft is something else altogether. Chilotes, descendants of dignified indigenous people and haughty Spaniards, are proud. The man who had the ax gave no explanations, but brought a sack of potatoes as a gift, which he left on the patio before settling down with Manuel to drink chicha de manzana, a rustic apple cider, and watch the flight of seagulls from the porch. Something similar happened with a relative of the Corrales, who works on Isla Grande and came here to get married before Christmas. Eduvigis gave him the key to this house so that, in Manuel’s absence, while he was in Santiago, they could take his stereo system to liven up the wedding. When he came home, Manuel found to his surprise that his stereo had vanished, but instead of informing the carabineros, he waited patiently. There are no serious thieves on the island, and those who come from elsewhere would have a hard time getting away with something so bulky. A little while later Eduvigis recovered what her relative had borrowed and returned it, along with a basket of seafood. Manuel has his stereo back, so I guess I’ll see my iPod again.

Manuel prefers to be quiet, but he’s realized that the silence of this house might be excessive for a normal person and he makes efforts to chat with me. From my room, I heard him talking to Blanca Schnake in the kitchen. “Don’t be so gruff with the gringuita, Manuel. Can’t you see how lonely she is? You have to talk to her,” she advised him. “What do you want me to say to her, Blanca? She’s like a Martian,” he muttered, but he must have thought it over, because now instead of overwhelming me with academic lectures on anthropology, like he did at first, he asks about my past and so, bit by bit, we’re starting to exchange ideas and get to know each other.

My Spanish is very faltering, but his English is fluent, though with an Australian accent and a Chilean intonation. We agreed that I should practice, so we normally try to speak in Spanish, but we soon start to mix the two languages in the same sentence and end up in Spanglish. If we’re mad at each other, he speaks to me in clearly enunciated Spanish, to make himself understood, and I shout at him in street-gang English to scare him.

Manuel doesn’t talk about himself. The little I know about him I’ve guessed or heard from Auntie Blanca. There is something strange in his life. His past must be even more turbulent than mine, because many nights I’ve heard him moan and struggle in his sleep: “Get me out of here! Let me out!” Everything can be heard through these thin walls. My first impulse is to go and wake him up, but I don’t dare enter his room; the lack of doors forces me to be prudent. His nightmares invoke evil presences, the house seems to fill with demons. Even Fahkeen gets uneasy and trembles, right up against me in bed.

My work for Manuel Arias couldn’t be easier. It consists of transcribing his recordings of interviews and typing up his notes for the book. He’s so tidy that if I move an insignificant little piece of paper on his desk, the blood drains from his face. “You should feel very honored, Maya, because you’re the first and only person I’ve ever allowed to set foot in my office. I hope you won’t make me regret it,” he had the nerve to say to me, when I threw out last year’s calendar. I dug it out of the garbage intact, except for a few spaghetti stains, and stuck it up on the computer screen with chewing gum. He didn’t speak to me for twenty-six hours.

His book on magic in Chiloé has me so hooked it keeps me from sleeping. (Only in a manner of speaking, since the slightest silliness keeps me from sleeping.) I’m not superstitious, like my Nini, but I accept that the world is a mysterious place and anything’s possible. Manuel has a whole chapter on the Mayoría, or the Recta Provincia, as the rule of the much-feared brujos—witches and sorcerers—of these lands was called. On our island the Mirandas are rumored to be a family of brujos, and people cross themselves or keep their fingers crossed when they walk past Rigoberto Miranda’s house. He’s a fisherman by trade, and related to Eduvigis Corrales. His last name is as suspicious as his good luck: fish fight to be caught in his nets, even when the sea is black, and his only cow has given birth to twins twice in three years. They say that Rigoberto Miranda has a macuñ, a bodice made from the skin of the chest of a corpse, for flying at night, but no one’s seen it. It’s advisable to slash dead people’s chests with a knife or a sharp stone so they won’t suffer the indignity of ending up turned into a waistcoat.

Brujos can fly and do all sorts of evil, kill with their minds and turn into animals, none of which I can really see Rigoberto Miranda doing. He’s a shy man who often brings Manuel crabs. But my opinion doesn’t count, I’m an ignorant gringa. Eduvigis warned me that when Rigoberto Miranda comes over, I have to cross my fingers before I let him in the house, in case he casts some spell. Those who’ve never suffered from witchcraft firsthand tend to be skeptical, but as soon as something strange happens they run to the nearest machi, an indigenous healer. Let’s say a family around here starts coughing too much; then the machi will look for a basilisk or cockatrice, an evil reptile hatched from the egg of an old rooster, staying under the house that comes up at night and sucks the air out of the people sleeping there.

The most delectable stories and anecdotes come from the really old people, on the most remote islands of the archipelago, where the same beliefs and customs have held sway for centuries. Manuel gets information not only from the elderly but also from journalists, teachers, booksellers, and shopkeepers, who make fun of brujos and magic but wouldn’t dare venture into a cemetery at night. Blanca Schnake says that her father, when he was young, saw the entrance to the mythical cave where the brujos gathered, in the peaceful village of Quicaví, but in 1960 an earthquake shifted the land and the sea, and since then no one has been able to find it.

The guardians of the cave are invunches, horrifying beings formed by the brujos from firstborn male babies, kidnapped before baptism. The method for transforming the baby into an invunche is as macabre as it is improbable: they break one of his legs, twist it, and stick it under the skin of his back, so he’ll only be able to get around on three limbs and won’t escape; then they apply an ointment that makes him grow a thick hide, like a billy goat’s; they split his tongue like a snake’s and feed him on the rotted flesh of a female corpse and the milk of an Indian woman. In comparison, a zombie can consider itself lucky. I wonder what kind of depraved mind comes up with horrific ideas like that.

Manuel’s theory is that the Recta Provincia had its origins as a political system. Beginning in the eighteenth century, the indigenous people of the region, the Huilliche, rebelled against Spanish rule and later against the Chilean authorities; they supposedly formed a clandestine government copied from the Spanish and Jesuit administrative style, divided the territory into kingdoms, and appointed presidents, scribes, judges, and so on. There were thirteen principal sorcerers, who obeyed the King of the Recta Provincia, the Above Ground King, and the Below Ground King. Since it was indispensable to keep it secret and control the population, the Mayoría created a climate of superstitious fear, and that’s how a political strategy eventually turned into a tradition of magic.

In 1880 several people were arrested on charges of witchcraft, tried in Ancud, and executed. The aim was to break the back of the Mayoría, but nobody is sure whether the objective was achieved.

“Do you believe in witches?” I asked Manuel.

“No, but it’s irrational to rule out the irrational.”

“Tell me! Yes or no?”

“It’s impossible to prove a negative, Maya, but calm down—I’ve lived here for many years, and the only witch I know is Blanca.”

Blanca doesn’t believe in any of this. She told me invunches were invented by the missionaries to convince the families of Chiloé to baptize their children, but that strikes me as going too far, even for Jesuits.

“Who is this Mike O’Kelly? I received an incomprehensible message from him,” Manuel told me.

“Oh, Snow White wrote to you! He’s a good old completely trustworthy Irish friend of the family. It must be my Nini’s idea to communicate with us through him, for safety’s sake. Can I answer him?”

“Not directly, but I can send him a message on your behalf.”

“These precautions are exaggerated, Manuel, what can I say?”

“Your grandmother must have good reason to be so cautious.”

“My grandma and Mike O’Kelly are members of the Club of Criminals, and they’d pay gold to be mixed up in a real crime, but they have to content themselves with playing at bandits.”

“What kind of club is that?” he asked me, looking worried.

I explained it starting from the beginning. The Berkeley county library hired my Nini, eleven years before my birth, to tell stories to children, as a way of keeping them busy after school until their parents finished work. A little while later she proposed to the library the idea of sessions of detective stories for adults, and it was accepted. Then she and Mike O’Kelly founded the Club of Criminals, as it’s called, although the library promotes it as the Noir Novels Club. During the children’s stories hour, I used to be just one of the kids hanging on my grandma’s every word, and sometimes, when she had no one to leave me with, she’d also take me to the library for the adults’ hour. Sitting on a cushion, with her legs crossed like a fakir, my Nini asked the children what they wanted to hear, someone suggested a theme, and she improvised something in less than ten seconds. My Nini has always been annoyed by the contrived need for a happy ending to stories for children; she believes that in life there are no endings, just thresholds, people wandering here and there, stumbling and getting lost. All that rewarding the hero and punishing the villain strikes her as a limitation, but to keep her job she had to stick to the traditional formula; the witch can’t poison the maiden with impunity and marry the prince in a white gown. My Nini prefers an adult audience, because gruesome murders don’t require a happy ending. She’s very well versed in her subject—she’s read every police case and manual of forensic medicine in existence, and claims that she and Mike O’Kelly could carry out an autopsy on the kitchen table with the greatest of ease.

The Club of Criminals consists of a group of lovers of detective novels, inoffensive people who devote their free time to planning monstrous homicides. It began discreetly in the Berkeley library and now, thanks to the Internet, it has global reach. It’s entirely financed by the members, but since they meet in a public building, indignant voices have been raised in the local press, alleging that crime is being encouraged with taxpayers’ money. “I don’t know what they’re complaining about. Isn’t it better to talk about crimes that to commit them?” my Nini argued to the mayor, when he called her to his office to discuss the problem.

My Nini’s friendship with Mike O’Kelly began in a secondhand bookstore, where both were absorbed in the detective fiction section. She had been married to my Popo for a short time, and Mike was a student at the university; he was still walking on two legs and hadn’t given a thought to becoming a social activist or to devoting his life to rescuing young delinquents from the streets and from prison. As long as I can remember, my grandma has baked cookies for O’Kelly’s kids, most of them black or Latino, the poorest people in the San Francisco Bay area. When I was old enough to interpret certain signs, I guessed that the Irishman was in love with my Nini, even though he’s twelve years younger than her, and she would never have even considered being unfaithful to my Popo. It’s a platonic love story straight out of a Victorian novel.

Mike O’Kelly became famous when they made a documentary about his life. He took two bullets in the back for protecting a gangster kid and ended up in a wheelchair, but that didn’t keep him from continuing his mission. He can take a few steps with a walker, and he drives a special car; that’s how he gets around the roughest neighborhoods saving souls, and he’s always the first to show up at any protest that gets going in the streets of Berkeley and the surrounding area. His friendship with my Nini strengthens with every wacky cause they embrace together. They both had the idea that the restaurants of Berkeley should donate leftover food to the city’s homeless, crazies, and drug addicts. She got hold of a trailer to distribute it, and he recruited the volunteers to serve it. On the television news they showed destitute people choosing between sushi, curry, duck with truffles, and vegetarian dishes from the menu. Quite a few of them complained about the quality of the coffee. Soon the lines grew long, filled with middle-class customers ready to eat without paying; there were confrontations between the original clientele and those taking advantage, and O’Kelly had to bring his boys in to sort them out before the police did. Finally the Department of Health prohibited the distribution of leftovers, after someone had an allergic reaction and almost died from the Thai peanut sauce.

The Irishman and my Nini get together often to analyze gruesome murders over tea and scones. “Do you think a chopped-up body could be dissolved in drain cleaner?” would be a typical O’Kelly question. “It would depend on the size of the pieces,” my Nini might say, and the two of them would proceed to prove it by soaking a pound of pork chops in Drano, while I would have to make notes of the results.

“It doesn’t surprise me they’ve conspired to keep me incommunicado at the bottom of the world,” I told Manuel Arias.

“From the sounds of things, they’re scarier than your supposed enemies, Maya,” he answered.

“Don’t underestimate my enemies, Manuel.”

“Did your grandfather soak chops in drain cleaner too?”

“No, he wasn’t into crimes, just stars and music. He was a third-generation jazz and classical music lover.”

I told him how my grandfather taught me to dance as soon as I could stay upright and bought me a piano when I was five, because my Nini expected me to be a child prodigy and compete on television talent shows. My grandparents put up with my thunderous keyboard exercises, until the piano teacher told them my efforts would be better spent on something that didn’t require a good ear. I immediately opted for soccer, as Americans call proper football, an activity that my Nini thinks is silly: eleven grown men in shorts chasing after a ball. My Popo knew nothing of this sport, because it’s not very popular in the United States, and although he was a baseball fanatic, he didn’t hesitate to abandon his own favorite sport in order to sit through hundreds of little girls’ soccer games. Thanks to some colleagues at the São Paulo observatory, he got me an autographed poster of Pelé, who was long-retired and living in Brazil. My Nini spent her efforts on getting me to read and write like an adult, since it was obvious I wasn’t going to be a musical prodigy. She signed me up as a library member, made me copy paragraphs of classic books, and thwacked me on the head if she caught a spelling mistake or if I got a mediocre mark in English or literature, the only subjects that interested her.

“My Nini has always been rough, Manuel, but my Popo was a sweetie, he was the light of my life. When Marta Otter left me at my grandparents’ house, he held me very carefully against his chest, because he’d never had a newborn in his arms before. He said the affection he felt for me left him dazed. That’s what he told me, and I’ve never doubted his love.”

Once I start talking about my Popo, there’s no way to shut me up. I explained to Manuel that I owe my love for books and my rather impressive vocabulary to my Nini, but everything else I owe to my grandpa. My Nini forced me to study, saying “Spare the rod and spoil the child,” or something just as barbarous, but he turned learning into a game. One of those games consisted in opening the dictionary at random, closing your eyes, pointing to a word, and then guessing what it means. We also used to play stupid questions: Why does the rain fall down, Popo? Because if it fell up, your underwear would get wet, Maya. Why is glass transparent? To confuse the flies. Why are your hands black on top and pink underneath, Popo? Because the paint ran out. And we’d go on like that until my grandma ran out of patience and started howling.

My Popo’s immense presence, with his sarcastic sense of humor, his infinite goodness, his innocence, his belly to rock me to sleep, and his tenderness, filled my childhood. He had a booming laugh that bubbled up from the bowels of the earth and shook him from head to toe. “Popo, swear to me that you’ll never ever die,” I used to demand at least once a week, and his reply never varied: “I swear I’ll always be with you.” He tried to come home early from the university to spend some time with me before going up to his desk and his big fat astronomy books and his star charts, preparing his classes, correcting proofs, researching, writing. His students and colleagues would visit and they’d shut themselves up to exchange splendid and improbable ideas until dawn, when my Nini would interrupt in her nightie with a big thermos of coffee. “Your aura’s getting dull, old man. Don’t forget you’ve got to teach at eight,” and she’d proceed to pour out coffee and push the visitors toward the door. The dominant color of my grandfather’s aura was violet, very appropriate, because it’s the color of sensibility, wisdom, intuition, psychic power, and vision of the future. These were the only times my Nini entered his office, whereas I had free access and even my own chair and a corner of the desk to do my homework on, to the rhythm of smooth jazz and the aroma of pipe tobacco.

According to my Popo, the official education system stunts intellectual growth; teachers should be respected, but you don’t need to pay them much attention. He said that Leonardo da Vinci, Galileo, Einstein, and Darwin, just to mention four geniuses of Western culture, since there were lots more, like the Arab philosophers and mathematicians Avicenna and al-Khwarizmi, questioned the knowledge of their era. If they’d accepted the stupidities their elders taught them, they wouldn’t have invented or discovered anything. “Your granddaughter is no Avicenna, and if she doesn’t study she’ll have to earn her living flipping burgers,” my Nini answered back. But I had other plans; I wanted to be a pro soccer player, they earn millions. “They’re men, silly girl. Do you know any women who earn millions?” my grandma asserted and swiftly launched into a lecture on inequality that began in the field of feminism and veered into social justice, to conclude that I’d end up with hairy legs if I kept playing soccer. Later, as an aside, my grandpa would explain that genes and hormones cause hirsutism, not sports.

For the first years of my life I slept with my grandparents, at the beginning in between the two of them and later in a sleeping bag we kept under the bed and the existence of which the three of us pretended to ignore. At night my Popo took me up to the tower to examine the infinite space strewn with lights, and I learned to distinguish between the blue approaching stars and the red ones moving away, the clusters of galaxies and the superclusters, even huger configurations, of which there are millions. He explained that the sun is a small star among the hundred million stars in the Milky Way and there were probably millions of other universes, aside from those we can only glimpse now. “So, in other words, Popo, we are less than the sigh of a louse,” was my logical conclusion. “Doesn’t it seem fantastic, Maya, that these little louse sighs can comprehend the wonder of the universe? An astronomer needs more poetic imagination than common sense, because the magnificent complexity of the universe cannot be measured or explained, but only intuited.” He talked to me about the gases and stellar dust that combine to form beautiful nebulae, true works of art, intricate brushstrokes of magnificent colors in the heavens. He told me how stars are born and die. We talked about black holes, about space and time, about how everything might have originated with the Big Bang, an indescribable explosion, and about the fundamental particles that formed the first protons and neutrons, and thus, in increasingly complex processes, the galaxies, planets, and then life were born. “We come from the stars,” he used to tell me. “That’s exactly what I always say,” my Nini added, thinking of horoscopes.

After visiting the tower with its magical telescope and giving me my glass of milk with cinnamon and honey, an astronomer’s secret to help develop intuition, my grandpa made sure I brushed my teeth and then put me to bed. Then my Nini would come and tell me a different story every night, invented as she went along, stories I always tried to make last as long as possible, but the moment inevitably arrived when I’d be left alone, then I’d start counting sheep, alert to the swaying of the winged dragon above my head, the creaking of the floor, the footsteps and discreet murmurs of the invisible inhabitants of that haunted house. My struggle to overcome my fear was mere rhetoric, because as soon as my grandparents fell asleep, I’d slip into their room, feeling my way through the darkness, drag the sleeping bag into a corner, and lie down in peace. For years my grandparents went to hotels at indecent hours to make love secretly. Only now that I’m grown up do I realize the extent of the sacrifice they made for me.

Manuel and I analyzed the cryptic message O’Kelly had sent. It was good news: the situation at home was normal, and my persecutors hadn’t shown any signs of life, although that didn’t mean they’d forgotten about me. The Irishman didn’t say that in so many words, as is logical, given the situation, but in a code similar to that used by the Japanese during World War II, which he’d taught me.

I’ve been on this island for a month now. I don’t know if I’ll ever get used to the snail’s pace of life on Chiloé, to this idleness, this permanent threat of rain, this immutable landscape of water and clouds and green pastures. Everything’s the same, everything’s calm. Chilotes have no concept of punctuality; plans depend on the weather and people’s moods, things happen when they happen, why do today what can be done tomorrow? Manuel Arias makes fun of my lists and projects, futile in this timeless culture; an hour can last as long as a week here. He still keeps regular working hours, though, and progresses with his book at the pace he’s set for himself.

Chiloé has its own voice. I never used to take my headphones off my ears—music was my oxygen—but now I walk around attentive to the twisted Spanish they speak here. Juanito Corrales left my iPod in the same pocket of my backpack he took it from, and we’ve never mentioned the matter, but during the week it took him to return it, I realized that I didn’t miss it as much as I thought I would. Without my iPod I can hear the island’s voice: birds, wind, rain, crackling wood fires, cart wheels, and sometimes the distant fiddles of the Caleuche, a ghost ship that sails in the fog and is recognized by the music and the rattling bones of its shipwrecked crew, singing and dancing on the deck. The ship is accompanied by a dolphin called Cahuilla, the name Manuel gave his boat.

Sometimes I wish I could have a shot of vodka for old times’ sake; though the old times were awful, they were at least a bit more exciting than these. It’s just a fleeting whim, not the panic of enforced abstinence I’ve experienced before. I’m determined to fulfill my promise—no alcohol, drugs, telephone, or e-mail—and the truth is, it’s been easier than I expected. Once we cleared up that point, Manuel stopped hiding the bottles of wine. I explained that he shouldn’t have to change his habits for my sake—there’s alcohol everywhere, and I’m the only one responsible for my own sobriety. He understood, and now he doesn’t get so worried if I go into the Tavern of the Dead to see some TV program or watch them play truco, an Argentinean card game, played using a Spanish deck, in which the participants improvise lines of verse in rhyme along with every bid.

I love some of the island’s customs, like truco, but there are others that bug me. If a chucao, a tiny little loudmouthed bird, chirps to the left of me, it’s bad luck, so I should take off a piece of clothing and put it back on inside out before going any farther; if I’m walking at night, I’m supposed to carry a clean knife and salt, because if I cross paths with a black dog with one ear lopped off, that’s a brujo, and in order to get away I have to trace a cross in the air with the knife and scatter salt. The diarrhea that almost did me in when I first arrived in Chiloé wasn’t dysentery, because that would have gone away with the doctor’s antibiotics, but a curse, as Eduvigis demonstrated by curing me with prayer, her infusion of myrtle, linseed, and lemon balm, and her belly rubs with silver polish.

Chiloé’s traditional dish is curanto, and our island’s is the best. The idea of offering curanto to tourists was one of Manuel’s initiatives to break the isolation of this little village, where visitors rarely venture, because the Jesuits didn’t leave one of their churches here, and we don’t have any penguins or whales, only swans, flamingos, and toninas, the white-bellied dolphins that are so common around here. First Manuel spread the rumor that La Pincoya’s cave was here, and nobody had the authority to refute it; the exact site of the grotto is up for discussion, and several islands claim it. The grotto and curanto are now our tourist attractions.

The northeast shore of the island is wild and rocky, dangerous for boats, but excellent for fishing. A submerged cavern over there, only visible at low tide, is perfect for the kingdom of La Pincoya, one of the few benevolent beings in the frightening mythology of Chiloé, because she helps fishermen and sailors in trouble. She’s a beautiful young woman with long hair draped in kelp, and if she dances facing the sea, the fishing will be abundant, but if she faces the beach as she dances, there will be scarcity and the fishermen must look for another place to cast their nets. But since almost nobody’s ever seen her, this information is useless. If La Pincoya appears, you have to close your eyes and run in the opposite direction, because she seduces the lustful and takes them to the bottom of the sea.

It’s just a twenty-minute walk along a steep uphill path from the village to the grotto, as long as you’re in decent shoes and good spirits. On the top of the hill are a few solitary monkey-puzzle trees dominating the landscape, and from up there you can appreciate the bucolic panorama of the sea, sky, and nearby uninhabited small islands. Some of these are separated by such narrow channels that at low tide you can shout from one shore to the other. From the hilltop the grotto looks like a big toothless mouth. You can scramble down the seagull-shit-covered rocks, at the risk of breaking your neck, or you can get there by kayak, skirting along the coast of the island, as long as you know the waters and the rocks. You need a bit of imagination to appreciate La Pincoya’s underwater palace, because beyond the witch’s mouth of the cave, you can’t see anything. In the past some German tourists tried to swim inside, but the carabineros have banned it because of the treacherous currents. It would be very inconvenient for us if foreigners started drowning here.

I’ve been told that January and February are dry, hot months in these latitudes, but this must be an odd summer, because it rains all the time. The days are long, and the sun’s still in no hurry to set.

I go swimming in the sea in spite of Eduvigis’s warnings about the undertows, the carnivorous salmon escaped from the cages, and the Millalobo, a mythological being, half man and half seal, with a golden pelt, who could abduct me at high tide. To that list of calamities Manuel added hypothermia; he says only a gullible gringa would think of swimming in these freezing waters without a wetsuit. I haven’t actually seen anybody go into the water by choice. Cold water is good for you, my Nini always used to insist when the water heater broke down in the big house in Berkeley—that is, two or three times a week. Last year I abused my body so much, I could have died out in the street; I’m here to recover, and there’s nothing better for that than a swim in the sea. I just hope my cystitis doesn’t come back, but so far so good.

I’ve been to some other islands and towns with Manuel to interview the really old people, and I have a general idea of the archipelago now, although I haven’t been to the south yet. Castro is the heart of the Isla Grande, with more than forty thousand people and a buoyant economy. Buoyant is a slight exaggeration, but after six weeks here, Castro is like New York. The city pokes out of the sea, with wooden houses on stilts all along the shore, painted bright colors to cheer people up during the long winters, when the sky and the water turn gray. There Manuel has his bank account, dentist, and barber; he does his grocery shopping there, orders books and picks them up at the bookstore.

If the sea is choppy and we can’t make it back home, we stay in a guesthouse run by an Austrian lady, whose formidable backside and big round chest make Manuel blush, and stuff ourselves with pork and apple strudel. There aren’t many Austrians around here, but lots of Germans. The immigration policies of this country have been very racist—no Asians, blacks, or indigenous people from elsewhere, only white Europeans. A nineteenth-century president brought Germans from the Black Forest and gave them land in the south—land that wasn’t his to give, but belonged to the Mapuche Indians—with the idea of improving the gene pool; he wanted the Germans to impart punctuality, a love of hard work, and discipline to Chileans. I don’t know if the plan worked the way he’d hoped, but in any case Germans raised up some of the southern provinces with their efforts and populated them with their blue-eyed spawn. Blanca Schnake’s family is descended from those immigrants.

We made a special trip so Manuel could introduce me to Father Luciano Lyon, an amazing old man who was in prison several times during the military dictatorship (1973–89) for defending the persecuted. The Vatican, fed up with slapping the wrists of the rebellious priest, ordered him to retire to a remote country house in Chiloé, but the old combatant wasn’t short of causes to make him indignant here either. When he turned eighty, his admirers from all the islands got together, and twenty buses filled with his parishioners arrived from Santiago. The party lasted for two days on the esplanade in front of the church, with roast lambs and chickens, empanadas, and a river of cheap wine. They had another miracle of the loaves and the fishes, because people kept arriving, and there was always more than enough food. The drunks from Santiago spent the night in the cemetery, paying no attention to the souls in torment.

The priest’s little house was guarded by a majestic rooster with iridescent plumage crowing on the roof and an imposing unshorn ram lying across the threshold as if it were dead. We had to go in through the kitchen door. The ram, appropriately named Methuselah, having escaped the stewpot for so many years, was so old he could barely move.

“What are you doing down this way, so far from your home, girl?” was Father Lyon’s greeting.

“Fleeing from the authorities,” I answered seriously, and he burst out laughing.

“I spent sixteen years doing the very same thing, and to be honest, I miss those days.”

He and Manuel Arias have been friends since 1975, when they were both banished to Chiloé. Being sentenced to banishment, or relegation, as it’s called in Chile, is very harsh, but less so than exile, because at least the convict is in his own country, he told me.

“They sent us far away from our families, to some inhospitable place where we were alone, with no money or work, harassed by the police. Manuel and I were lucky, because we got sent to Chiloé and the people here took us in. You won’t believe me, child, but Don Lionel Schnake, who hated leftists more than the devil, gave us free room and board.”

In that house Manuel met Blanca, the daughter of his kind-hearted host. Blanca was in her early twenties, engaged, and her beauty was commented on by everyone, attracting a pilgrimage of admirers, who weren’t intimidated by the fiancé.

Manuel was in Chiloé for a year, barely earning his keep as a fisherman and carpenter, while he read about the fascinating history and mythology of the archipelago without leaving Castro, where he had to present himself daily at the police station to sign in. In spite of the circumstances, he grew attached to Chiloé; he wanted to travel all over it, study it, tell its stories. That’s why, after a long journey all over the world, he came back to live out his days here. After serving his sentence, he was able to go to Australia, one of the countries that took in Chilean refugees, where his wife was waiting for him. I was surprised to hear that Manuel had a family; he’d never mentioned it. It turns out he’d been married twice, didn’t have any kids, had also been divorced twice, a long time ago; neither of the women lives in Chile.

“Why did you get banished, Manuel?” I asked.

“The military closed the Faculty of Social Sciences, where I was a professor, because they considered it a den of Communists. They arrested lots of professors and students, killed some of them.”

“Were you arrested?”

“Yes.”

“And my Nini? Do you know if they arrested her?”

“No, not her.”

How is it possible that I know so little about Chile? I don’t dare ask Manuel, as I don’t want to seem ignorant, so I started to dig around on the Internet. Thanks to the free flights my dad got us because he’s a pilot, my grandparents took me on trips for every school holiday and summer vacation. My Popo made a list of places we should see after Europe and before we died. So we visited the Galápagos Islands, the Amazon, Cappadocia, and Machu Picchu, but we never came to Chile, as might have been logical. My Nini’s lack of interest in visiting her country is inexplicable; she ferociously defends her Chilean customs and still gets emotional when she hangs the tricolor flag from her balcony in September. I think she cultivates a poetic idea of Chile and fears confronting reality—or there may well be something here she doesn’t want to remember.

My grandparents were experienced and practical travelers. In our photo albums the three of us appear in exotic places always wearing the same clothes, because we’d reduced our baggage to the bare minimum. We each kept one piece of hand luggage packed, ready to go, so we could leave within half an hour, should the opportunity or a whim arise. Once my Popo and I were reading about gorillas in National Geographic, how they’re gentle vegetarians and have strong family bonds, and my Nini, who was passing through the living room with a vase of flowers in her hands, commented offhand that we should go and see them. “Good idea,” answered my Popo, picked up the phone, called my dad, arranged the flights, and the next day we were on our way to Uganda with our battered little suitcases.

My Popo got invited to conferences and to give lectures, and whenever he could, he took us with him; my Nini feared some misfortune would befall us if we were separated. Chile is an eyelash between the mountains of the Andes and the depths of the Pacific Ocean, with hundreds of volcanoes, some with the lava still warm, that could wake up at any moment and bury the territory in the sea. This might explain why my Chilean grandmother always expects the worst. She’s always prepared for emergencies and goes through life with a healthy fatalism, supported by her favorite Catholic saints and the vague advice of her horoscope.

I used to miss a lot of classes, because I’d go traveling with my grandparents and because school got on my nerves; only my good marks and the flexibility of the Italian method kept me from getting expelled. I was extremely resourceful, and could fake appendicitis, migraine, laryngitis, and, if none of those worked, convulsions. My grandpa was easy to fool, but my Nini cured me with drastic methods, a freezing shower or a spoonful of cod-liver oil, unless it was in her interest that I miss school, for example, when she took me to protest against whatever war was on at the time, or put up posters in defense of laboratory animals, or chained us to a tree to piss off the logging companies. Her determination to inculcate me with a social conscience was always heroic.

On more than one occasion, my Popo had to go and rescue us from the police station. The police department in Berkeley is fairly indulgent, used to demonstrations in favor of all sorts of noble causes, fanatics with good intentions capable of camping for months in a public square, students determined to occupy the university in aid of Palestine or nudists’ rights, distracted geniuses who ignore traffic lights, beggars who in another life graduated summa cum laude, drug addicts looking for paradise—in short, to as many virtuous, intolerant, and combatant citizens as there are in this city of a hundred thousand inhabitants, where almost everything is permitted, as long as it’s done with good manners. My Nini and Mike O’Kelly tend to forget their good manners in the heat of battle in defense of justice, but if they do get arrested, they never end up in a cell. Instead, Sergeant Walczak personally goes and buys them cappuccinos.

I was ten when my dad remarried. He’d never introduced us to a single girlfriend and was such a champion of the advantages of independence that we never expected to see him give it up. One day he announced he was bringing a friend to dinner. My Nini, who for years had been secretly looking for girlfriends for him, prepared to try and make a good impression on this woman, while I prepared to attack her. A frenzy of activity was unleashed in the house: my Nini hired a professional cleaning service that left the air saturated with the smell of bleach and gardenias, and complicated her life with a Moroccan recipe for chicken with cinnamon that came out tasting like a dessert. My Popo recorded a selection of his favorite pieces so we’d have background music, which sounded to me like dentist’s waiting room music.

My dad, who we hadn’t seen for a couple of weeks, showed up on the appointed night with Susan, a freckle-faced and badly dressed blonde. This surprised us, because we had the idea that he liked glamorous women, like Marta Otter before she succumbed to motherhood and domestic life in Odense. Susan seduced my grandparents in just a few minutes with her easygoing nature, but not me; I was so rude to her that my Nini dragged me into the kitchen on the pretext of serving the chicken and offered me a couple of smacks if I didn’t change my attitude. After eating, my Popo committed the unthinkable crime of inviting Susan to the astronomical turret, where he never took anyone but me, and they were up there for a long time observing the sky, while my grandma and my dad scolded me for insolence.

A few months later, my dad and Susan were married in an informal ceremony on the beach. That sort of thing had gone out of fashion a decade earlier, but that’s what the bride wanted. My Popo would have preferred something a little more comfortable, but my Nini was in her element. A friend of Susan’s officiated, having obtained a mail-order license from the Universal Church. They forced me to attend, but I roundly refused to dress up as a fairy and present the rings, like my grandma wanted me to. My dad wore a white Mao suit that didn’t suit his personality or his political sympathies at all, and Susan wore a string of wildflowers in her hair and some diaphanous garment, also very passé. The guests, standing barefoot on the sand, shoes in hand, put up with half an hour of foggy weather and sugarcoated advice from the minister. Later there was a reception at the yacht club on the same beach and everybody danced and drank until after midnight, while I locked myself in my grandparents’ Volkswagen and only poked my nose out when good old O’Kelly came over in his wheelchair to bring me a piece of cake.

My grandparents expected the newlyweds would live with us, since we had more than enough room, but my dad rented a tiny little house in the same neighborhood that could have fit inside his mother’s kitchen, because he couldn’t afford anything better. Pilots work a lot, don’t earn very much, and are always tired; it’s not an enviable profession. Once they were settled in, my dad decided that I should live with them, and my tantrums didn’t soften him or frighten Susan, who at first glance had struck me as easy to intimidate. She was a levelheaded woman with an even temper, always ready to help, but without my Nini’s aggressive compassion, which tends to offend its beneficiaries.

Now I understand that Susan took on the thankless task of taking charge of a spoiled and fussy brat who’d been raised by old folks, who only tolerated white food—rice, popcorn, sliced bread, bananas—and spent the nights wide awake. Instead of forcing me to eat by traditional methods, she made me turkey breast with crème Chantilly, cauliflower with coconut ice cream, and other audacious combinations, until bit by bit I went from white to beige—hummus, some cereals, milky coffee—and from there to colors with more personality, like some tones of green, orange, and red, as long as it wasn’t beets. She wasn’t able to have children and tried to compensate for that lack by earning my affection, but I confronted her with the stubbornness of a mule. I left my things in my grandparents’ house and arrived at my dad’s only to sleep, with a bag in my hand, my alarm clock and whatever book I was reading. My nights were spent suffering from insomnia, trembling in fear, with my head buried under the covers. Since my dad would not have tolerated any rudeness, I opted for a haughty courtesy, inspired by butlers in British movies.

My only home was that big flamboyantly painted house where I went every day after school to do my homework and play, praying that Susan would forget to pick me up when she finished work in San Francisco, but that never happened: my stepmother had a pathological sense of responsibility. The whole first month went like that, until she brought a dog home to live with us. She worked for the San Francisco Police Department, training dogs to sniff out bombs, a highly valued specialty from 2001 onward, when the paranoia of terrorism began, but at the time when she married my dad she was the butt of her rough colleagues’ jokes; nobody had planted a bomb in California for ages.

Each animal worked with one single human for its whole life, and the two would eventually complement each other so well, they could guess each other’s thoughts. Susan selected the liveliest puppy of the litter and the person best suited to match up with the dog, someone who’d grown up with animals. Although I had sworn to destroy my stepmother’s nerves, I gave up when I saw Alvy, a six-year-old Labrador more intelligent and nicer than the best human being. Susan taught me everything I know about animals and allowed me, violating the fundamental rules of the manual, to sleep with Alvy. That’s how she helped me to tackle my insomnia.

The quiet presence of my stepmother came to be so natural and necessary in the family that it was hard to remember how life was before her. If my dad was traveling, in other words most of the time, Susan would give me permission to sleep over at my grandparents’ magical house, where my room remained intact. Susan loved my Popo. She went with him to see Swedish films from the 1950s, in black and white, without subtitles—you had to guess what the characters were saying—and to listen to jazz in pokey little dens thick with smoke. She treated my Nini, who is not at all docile, with the same method she used to train sniffer dogs: affection and firmness, punishment and reward. With affection she let her know she loved her and was at her beck and call; with firmness she prevented her from climbing in through the window of her house to inspect the level of cleanliness or give her granddaughter candies behind her back; she punished her by disappearing for days when my Nini overwhelmed her with gifts, unsolicited advice, and Chilean stews, and rewarded her by taking her for walks in the woods when everything was going well. She applied the same system to her husband and to me.

My good stepmother did not try to come between my grandparents and me, although the erratic way they were raising me must have shocked her. It’s true that they did spoil me, but that wasn’t the cause of my problems, as the psychologists I confronted in adolescence suspected. My Nini raised me the Chilean way, food and affection in abundance, clear rules and the occasional spanking, not many. Once I threatened to report her to the police for child abuse, and she hit me so hard with the soup ladle, she left a bump on my head. That stopped my initiative right in its tracks.

I attended a curanto, the typical abundant and generous feast of Chiloé, a community ceremony. The preparations started early, because the ecotourism boats arrive before noon. The women chopped tomatoes, onions, garlic, and cilantro for the seasoning and, using a tedious method, made milcao and chapalele, a sort of dough of potato, flour, lard, and pork crackling—disgusting, in my opinion—while the men dug a big pit, put a whole bunch of stones at the bottom, and lit a bonfire on top of them. By the time the wood had burned down, the stones were red-hot, coinciding with the arrival of the boats. The guides showed the tourists the village and gave them opportunities to buy knits, necklaces made of shells, myrtle-berry jam, licor de oro, wood carvings, snail-slime cream for age spots, lavender twigs—in short, the few things there are here—and soon they were gathered around the steaming pit on the beach. The curanto chefs set out clay pots on the stones to collect the broth, which is an aphrodisiac, as everyone knows, and piled on layers of the chapalele and milcao, pork, lamb, fish, chicken, shellfish, vegetables, and other delicacies I didn’t write down. Then they covered it with damp white cloths, huge nalca leaves, a big sack, which hung over the edges of the hole like a skirt, and finally sand. The cooking took a little over an hour, and while the ingredients were transforming in the secret heat, in their intimate juices and fragrances, the visitors entertained themselves by taking photographs of the smoke, drinking pisco, and listening to Manuel Arias.

The tourists fit into several categories: Chilean senior citizens, Europeans on vacation, a range of Argentineans and backpackers of vague origins. Sometimes a group of Asians would arrive, or Americans with maps, guides, and books of flora and fauna they consulted terribly seriously. All of them, except the backpackers, who preferred to smoke marijuana behind the bushes, appreciated the opportunity to listen to a published author, someone able to clarify the mysteries of the archipelago in either English or Spanish. Manuel is not always annoying; in small doses, he can be entertaining on his subject. He tells the visitors about the history, legends, and customs of Chiloé and warns them that the islanders are cautious, and must be won over bit by bit, with respect, just as you have to adapt gradually and respectfully to the wilderness, the implacable winters, and the whims of the sea. Slowly. Very slowly. Chiloé is not for people in a hurry.

People travel to Chiloé with the idea of going back in time, and they can be disappointed by the cities on Isla Grande, but on our little island they find what they’re looking for. There is no intention to deceive them on our part, of course; nevertheless, on curanto days oxen and sheep appear by chance near the beach, there are more than the usual number of nets and boats drying on the sand, people wear their coarsest hats and ponchos, and nobody would think of using their cell phone in public.

The experts knew exactly when the culinary treasures buried in the hole were cooked and shoveled off the sand, delicately lifted the sack, the nalca leaves, and the white cloths; then a cloud of steam with the delicious aromas of the curanto rose up to the sky. There was an expectant silence, and then a burst of applause. The women took out the pieces and served them on paper plates with more rounds of pisco sours, the most popular cocktail in Chile, strong enough to fell a Cossack. At the end we had to prop up several tourists on their way back to the boats.

My Popo would have liked this life, this landscape, this abundance of seafood, this lazy pace. He’d never heard of Chiloé, or he would have included it on his list of places to visit before he died. My Popo … how I miss him! He was a big, strong, slow and sweet bear, warm as an oven, with the scent of tobacco and cologne, a deep voice and quaking laugh, with enormous hands to hold me. He took me to soccer games and to the opera, answered my endless questions, brushed my hair and applauded my interminable epic poems, inspired by the Kurosawa films we used to watch together. We’d go up to the tower to peer through his telescope and scrutinize the black dome of the sky, searching for his elusive planet, a green star we were never able to find. “Promise me you’ll always love yourself as much as I love you, Maya,” he told me repeatedly, and I’d promise without knowing what that strange phrase meant. He loved me unconditionally, accepted me just as I am, with my limitations, peculiarities, and defects, he applauded even when I didn’t deserve it, as opposed to my Nini, who believes you shouldn’t celebrate children’s efforts, because they get used to it and then have a terrible time with real life, when no one praises them. My Popo forgave me for everything, consoled me, laughed when I laughed, was my best friend, my accomplice and confidant. I was his only granddaughter and the daughter he never had. “Tell me I’m the love of your life, Popo,” I’d ask him, to bug my Nini. “You’re the love of our lives, Maya,” he’d answer diplomatically, but I was his favorite, I’m sure of it; my grandma couldn’t compete with me. My Popo was incapable of choosing his own clothes—my Nini did that for him—but when I turned thirteen he took me to buy my first bra, because he noticed I was wrapped up in scarves and hunched over to hide my chest. I was too shy to talk about it to my Nini or Susan, but it seemed perfectly normal to try on bras in front of my Popo.

The house in Berkeley was my world: afternoons with my grandparents watching television, Sundays in the summertime having breakfast on the patio, the occasions when my dad arrived and we’d all have dinner together, while María Callas sang on old vinyl records, the desk, the books, the aromas in the kitchen. With this little family the first part of my existence went by without any problems worth mentioning, but at the age of sixteen the catastrophic forces of nature, as my Nini called them, agitated my blood and clouded my understanding.

I have the year my Popo died tattooed on my left wrist: 2005. In February we found out he was ill, in August we said good-bye, in September I turned sixteen and my family crumbled away.

The unforgettable day my Popo began to die, I’d stayed at school for the rehearsal of a play—Waiting for Godot no less, the drama teacher was ambitious—and then walked home to my grandparents’ house. It was dark by the time I got there. I walked in, calling them and turning on lights, surprised at the silence and the cold, because that was the house’s most welcoming time of day, when it was warm, there was music and the aromas from my Nini’s saucepans floated through the air. At that hour my Popo would be reading in the easy chair in his study and my Nini would be cooking while listening to the news on the radio, but I found none of that this evening. My grandparents were in the living room, sitting very close together on the sofa, which my Nini had upholstered following instructions from a magazine. They’d shrunk, and for the first time I noticed their age; until that moment they’d remained untouched by the rigors of time. I’d been with them day after day, year after year, without noticing the changes; my grandparents were immutable and eternal as the mountains. I don’t know if I’d only seen them through the eyes of my soul, or maybe they aged in those hours. I hadn’t noticed that my grandpa had lost weight over the last few months either; his clothes were too big for him, and my Nini didn’t look as tiny as she used to by his side.

“What’s up, folks?” and my heart leaped into empty space, because before they managed to answer me, I’d guessed. Nidia Vidal, that invincible warrior, was broken, her eyes swollen from crying. My Popo motioned me to sit down with them, hugged me, squeezing me against his chest, and told me he hadn’t been feeling well for a while, had been having stomachaches, and they’d done a number of tests on him and the doctor had just confirmed the cause. “What’s wrong with you, Popo?” and it came out like a scream. “Something to do with my pancreas,” he said, and his wife’s visceral moan let me know it was cancer.

Susan arrived about nine for dinner, as she often did, and found us huddled together on the sofa, shivering. She turned on the furnace, ordered a pizza, phoned my dad in London to give him the bad news, and then sat down with us, holding her father-in-law’s hand, in silence.

My Nini abandoned everything to take care of her husband: the library, the stories, the protest demonstrations, and the Club of Criminals. She even let her oven, which she’d kept warm during my entire childhood, grow cold. The cancer, that sly enemy, had attacked my Popo without any alarming signs until it was very advanced. My Nini took her husband to the Georgetown University Hospital, in Washington, where the best specialists are, but nothing worked. They told him it would be futile to operate, and he refused to undergo a bombardment of chemicals just to prolong his life a few months. I studied his illness on the Internet and in books I got out of the library and learned that of the 43,000 annual cases in the United States, more or less 37,000 are terminal; only 5 percent of patients respond to treatment, and for those the best they can hope for is to live another five years; in short, only a miracle would save my grandfather.

The week my grandparents spent in Washington, my Popo deteriorated so much that we barely recognized him when I went with my dad and Susan to pick them up at the airport. He’d lost even more weight, was dragging his feet, hunched over, his eyes yellow and his skin dull and ashen. With the hesitant steps of an invalid he walked to Susan’s van, sweating from the effort, and at home he didn’t have the energy to climb the stairs, so we made a bed up for him in his study on the first floor, where he slept until they brought in a hospital bed. My Nini got in with him, curled up at his side, like a cat.

My grandma confronted God to defend her husband with the same passion with which she embraced lost political and humanitarian causes, first with pleas, prayers, and promises, and then with curses and threats of becoming an atheist. “What good does it do us to fight against death, Nidia, when we always know who’s going to win, sooner or later?” my Popo teased her. Since traditional science could not help her husband, she resorted to alternative cures, like herbs, crystals, acupuncture, shamanism, aura massages, and even a little girl from Tijuana, with stigmata, said to work miracles. Her husband put up with these eccentricities with good humor, as he’d done ever since he met her. At first my dad and Susan tried to protect the old folks from the many charlatans who somehow got a whiff of the possibility of exploiting my Nini, but finally they accepted that these desperate measures kept her busy as the days went by.

In the final weeks I didn’t go to school. I moved into the big magic house with the intention of helping my Nini, but I was more depressed than the patient, and she had to take care of us both.

Susan was the first to dare mention a hospice. “That’s for dying people, and Paul is not going to die!” exclaimed my Nini, but little by little she had to give in. We started to get visits from Carolyn, a volunteer with a gentle manner and great expertise, to explain to us what was going to happen and how her organization could help us, at no cost, with everything from keeping the patient comfortable to providing spiritual or psychological comfort to us and dealing with the bureaucracy of the doctors and the funeral.

My Popo insisted on dying at home. The stages came and went in the order and at the pace that Carolyn predicted, but took me by surprise; just like Nini, I was expecting a divine intervention to change the course of our misfortune. Death happens to other people, not to the ones we love, and much less to my Popo, who was the center of my life, the force of gravity that anchored the world; without him I had no handle, I’d be swept away by the slightest breeze. “You swore to me you were never going to die, Popo!”

“No, Maya, I told you I would always be with you and I intend to fulfill my promise.”

The volunteers from the hospice set up the hospital bed in front of the big living room window, so at night my grandfather could imagine the stars and moon shining down on him, since he couldn’t see them through the branches of the pine trees. They inserted an IV port in his chest to administer his medicine without having to give him an injection every time and gave us instructions on how to move him, wash him, and change his sheets without getting him out of bed. Carolyn came to see him often, dealt with the doctor, the nurse, and the pharmacy; more than once she took charge of getting groceries, when no one in the family had the energy.

Mike O’Kelly visited us too. He arrived in his electric wheelchair, which he drove like a race car, often accompanied by a couple of his redeemed gang members, who he’d order to take out the garbage, vacuum, sweep the patio, and carry out other domestic tasks while he drank tea with my Nini in the kitchen. They’d been distant for a few months after fighting at a demonstration over abortion, which O’Kelly, an obedient Catholic, rejected, but my grandfather’s illness reconciled them. Although sometimes the two of them are at opposite ideological extremes, they can’t stay angry, because they love each other too much and have so much in common.

If my Popo was awake, Snow White would chat a while with him. They’d never developed a true friendship; I think they were each a bit jealous of the other. Once I heard O’Kelly talking about God to my Popo, and I felt obliged to warn him he was wasting his time, because my grandfather was an agnostic. “Are you sure, little one? Paul has spent his life observing the sky through a telescope. How could he not have caught a glimpse of God?” he answered me, but he didn’t try to save my grandfather’s soul against his will. When the doctor prescribed morphine and Carolyn let us know we’d have as much as we needed, because the patient had a right to die without pain and with dignity, O’Kelly abstained from warning us against euthanasia.

The inevitable moment arrived when my Popo ran out of strength and we had to call a halt to the procession of students and friends who kept coming to visit. He’d always been a bit of a dandy, and in spite of his weakness he worried about his appearance, although we were the only ones who saw him now. He asked us to keep him clean, shaven, and the room well ventilated; he was afraid of offending us with the miseries of his illness. His eyes were cloudy and sunken, his hands like a bird’s claws, his lips covered in sores, his skin bruised and hanging off his bones; my grandfather was the skeleton of a burned tree, but he could still listen to music and remember. “Open the window to let the joy in,” he’d ask us. Sometimes he was so far gone his voice was barely audible, but there were better moments, when we’d raise the back of the bed so he could sit up and talk with us. He wanted to pass his experiences and wisdom on to me before he left. He never lost his lucidity.

“Are you scared, Popo?” I asked him.

“No, but I’m sorry, Maya. I would have liked to live another twenty years with you two,” he answered.

“What will there be on the other side, Popo? Do you believe there’s life after death?”

“It’s a possibility, but it hasn’t been proven.”

“The existence of your planet hasn’t been proven either, and you sure believe in that,” I countered, and he laughed with satisfaction.

“You’re right, Maya. It’s absurd only to believe in what can be proven.”

“Remember when you took me to the observatory to see a comet, Popo? That night I saw God. There was no moon, the sky was black and full of diamonds, and when I looked through the telescope I clearly distinguished the comet’s tail.”

“Dry ice, ammonia, methane, iron, magnesium, and—”

“It was a bridal veil and behind it was God,” I assured him.

“What did he look like?” he asked me.

“Like a luminous spiderweb, Popo. The threads of that web connect everything that exists. I can’t explain it to you. When you die, you’re going to travel like that comet, and I’ll be right behind, attached to your tail.”

“We’ll be astral dust.”

“Ay, Popo!”

“Don’t cry, little one, because you’ll make me cry too, and then your Nini will start to cry and we’ll never be able to console each other.”

In his last days he could only swallow little spoonfuls of yogurt and sips of water. He barely spoke, but he didn’t complain either; he spent the hours floating in a half-sleep of morphine, clinging to his wife’s hand or to mine. I doubt he knew where he was, but he knew we loved him. My Nini kept telling him stories until the end, when he couldn’t understand them anymore, but the cadence of her voice soothed him. She told him about two lovers who were reincarnated in different times, had adventures, died, and met each other again in other lives, always together.

I murmured prayers I’d invented myself in the kitchen, in the bathtub, in the tower, in the garden, anywhere I could hide away, and I begged Mike O’Kelly’s God to take pity on us, but he remained remote and silent. I got covered in rashes, my hair fell out in clumps, and I bit my nails till my fingers bled; my Nini wrapped my fingertips with adhesive tape and forced me to wear gloves to bed. I couldn’t imagine life without my grandpa, but I couldn’t stand his slow agony either and ended up praying he would die soon and stop suffering. If he had asked me to, I would have given him more morphine to help him die. It would have been very easy, but he never asked.

I slept fully dressed on the living room sofa, with one eye open, watching, and so I knew before anyone else when our time had come to say good-bye. I ran to wake up my Nini, who’d taken a sleeping pill to try to get a bit of rest, and I phoned my dad and Susan, who were there ten minutes later.

My grandmother, in her nightie, climbed into her husband’s bed and laid her head on his chest, the way they’d always slept. Standing on the other side of my Popo’s bed, I leaned against his chest too, which used to be strong and wide and big enough for both of us, but now was barely moving. My Popo’s breathing had become imperceptible, and for a few very long instants it seemed to have stopped completely, but he suddenly opened his eyes, swept his gaze over my dad and Susan, who stood near the bed crying silently, lifted his big hand with effort, and laid it on my head. “When I find the planet, I’ll name it after you, Maya,” was the last thing he said.

In the three years that have passed since the death of my grandfather, I’ve very rarely talked about him. This caused me quite a few problems with the psychologists in Oregon, who tried to force me to “resolve my grief” or some similar trite platitude. There are people like that, people who think all grief is the same and that there are formulas and stages to overcoming it. My Nini’s stoic philosophy is more suitable: “Since we’re going to suffer, let’s clench our teeth,” she said. Pain like that, pain of the soul, does not go away with remedies, therapy, or vacations; you simply endure it deep down, fully, as you should. I would have done well to follow my Nini’s example, instead of denying that I was suffering and stifling the howl that was stuck in my chest. Later, in Oregon, they prescribed antidepressants, which I didn’t take, because they made me stupid. They watched me, but I was able to trick them by hiding chewing gum in my mouth, where I stuck the pill with my tongue and minutes later spit it out intact. My sadness kept me company; I didn’t want to be cured of it as if it were a cold. I didn’t want to share my memories with those well-intentioned therapists either, because anything I might tell them about my grandfather would sound banal. However, on this island in Chiloé, not a day goes by when I don’t tell Manuel Arias some anecdote about my Popo. My Popo and this man are very different, but they both have a certain giant-tree quality about them, and I feel protected by them.

I just had a rare moment of communion with Manuel, like the kind I used to have with my Popo. I found him watching the sunset from the big front window, and I asked him what he was doing.

“Breathing.”

“I’m breathing too. That’s not what I was referring to.”

“Until you interrupted me, Maya, I was breathing, nothing more. You should see how difficult it is to breathe without thinking.”

“That’s called meditation. My Nini meditates all the time, says she can feel my Popo at her side that way.”

“And do you feel him?”

“I didn’t used to, because I was frozen inside and I didn’t feel anything. But now it seems like my Popo is around here somewhere, orbiting around. …”

“What’s changed?”

“Everything, Manuel. For a start, I’m sober, and besides it’s calm here, there’s silence and space. It would do me good to meditate, like my Nini, but I can’t, I’m always thinking, my head’s always full of ideas. Do you think that’s bad?”

“Depends on the ideas. …”

“I’m no Avicenna, as my grandma likes to point out, but good ideas do occur to me.”

“Like what?”

“At this exact moment I can’t think of any, but as soon as I get a brilliant one, I’ll tell you. You think about your book too much, but you don’t spend time thinking about more important things, for example, how depressing your life was before my arrival. And what will become of you when I go? You should think about love, Manuel. Everybody needs love.”

“Aha. Where’s yours?” he asked, laughing.

“I can wait—I’m nineteen years old with my whole life ahead of me; you’re ninety, and you could die in five minutes.”

“I’m only seventy-two, but it’s true that I could die five minutes from now. That’s a good reason to avoid love; it would be impolite to leave a poor woman widowed.”

“With thinking like that, your goose is cooked, man.”

“Sit down here with me, Maya. An old man on his last legs and a pretty girl are going to breathe together. As long as you can shut up for a while, that is.”

That’s what we did as night fell. And my Popo was with us.

When my grandpa died, I was left without a compass and without family: my father lived in the air, Susan was sent to Iraq with Alvy to sniff out bombs, and my Nini sat down to mourn her husband. We didn’t even have any dogs. Susan used to bring pregnant dogs home. They stayed until the puppies were three or four months old, and then she took them away to train them; it was hard not to get attached to them. Puppies would have been a great solace when my family dispersed. Without Alvy or any puppies, I didn’t have anyone to share my sorrow.

My father was involved in other love affairs, leaving an impressive trail of clues, as if desperate for Susan to find out. At forty-one years of age he was trying to look thirty, paid a fortune for his haircut and his sports clothes, lifted weights, and went to a tanning parlor. He was better looking than ever, his graying temples giving him a distinguished air. Susan, on the other hand, tired of a life spent waiting for a husband who never entirely landed, who was always ready to take off or whispering into his cell phone with other women, had succumbed to the wear and tear of age, gained weight, dressed like a man, and wore ugly glasses she bought by the dozen at the pharmacy. She jumped at the chance to go to Iraq as an escape from that humiliating relationship. The separation was a relief to them both.

My grandparents had been truly in love. The passion that began in 1976 between that exiled Chilean woman, who kept her suitcase packed, and the American astronomer passing through Toronto stayed fresh for three decades. When my Popo died, my Nini was left inconsolable and confused, no longer herself. She was also left without means, because in a few months the illness had consumed their savings. She received her husband’s pension, but it wasn’t enough to maintain the galleon cast adrift that was her house. Without giving me even two days’ warning, she rented the house to a businessman from India, who filled it with relatives and merchandise, and went to live in a room above my dad’s garage. She got rid of most of her belongings, except for the love letters her husband had left her here and there over their years together, my drawings, poems, and diplomas, and her photographs, irrefutable proof of the happiness she’d shared with Paul Ditson II. Leaving that big house, where she’d been so fully loved, was a second mourning. For me it was a coup de grâce. I felt I’d lost everything.

My Nini was so isolated in her mourning that although we lived under the same roof, she didn’t see me. A year earlier she’d been a youthful, energetic, cheerful, and intrusive woman, with unruly hair, Birkenstocks, and long skirts, always busy, helping, inventing; now she was a middle-aged widow with a broken heart. Hugging the urn of her husband’s ashes, she told me the heart breaks like a glass, sometimes with a silent crack and other times smashing to pieces. She didn’t notice as she gradually eliminated the colors from her wardrobe and ended up wearing only black, stopped dyeing her hair, and added ten years to her appearance. She distanced herself from her friends, including Snow White, who couldn’t manage to interest her in any of the protests against the Bush government, in spite of the incentive of getting arrested, which once would have been irresistible to her. She began to dice with death.

My dad did the sums on the sleeping pills his mother was taking and the number of times she crashed her Volkswagen, left the stove on, and suffered spectacular falls, but he didn’t intervene until he discovered her spending the little money she had left on communicating with her husband. He followed her to Oakland and rescued her from a trailer painted with astrological symbols, where a psychic earned her living by connecting people with their deceased—pets as often as relatives. My Nini let him drive her to a psychiatrist, who began to treat her twice a week and stuffed her full of pills. She didn’t “resolve her grief,” and kept crying over my Popo, but she got over the paralyzing depression she’d sunk into.

Gradually, my grandma emerged from her cave over the garage and peeked out at the world, surprised to see that it hadn’t stopped spinning. In a short time the name Paul Ditson II had been erased; not even their granddaughter talked about him anymore. I had withdrawn inside a hard shell and wouldn’t let anyone get close to me. I turned myself into a defiant and sulky stranger, who didn’t answer when spoken to, burst into the place like a whirlwind, didn’t lift a finger to help around the house, and slammed doors at the slightest annoyance. The psychiatrist explained to my Nini that I was suffering from a combination of adolescence and depression and recommended that she sign me up for youth bereavement groups, but I wouldn’t hear of it. In the darkest nights, when I was most desperate, I sensed my Popo’s presence. My sadness summoned him.

My Nini had slept for thirty years with her husband’s chest as a pillow, soothed by the steady sound of his breathing. She had lived in comfort, protected by the warmth of this kind man who celebrated her extravagances of horoscopes and hippie aesthetics, her political extremism, and her foreign cooking, who put up with her mood swings, her sentimental raptures, and her sudden premonitions, which tended to alter the family’s best plans, all with good humor. When she was most in need of someone to console her, her son was rarely nearby, and her granddaughter had turned into a lunatic brat.

That’s when Mike O’Kelly reappeared, having undergone another operation on his back and spent several weeks in a physical rehabilitation center. “You didn’t come to visit me once, Nidia, and you didn’t even call,” he said instead of hello. He’d lost twenty-five pounds, grown a beard, and I almost didn’t recognize him. He looked older, no longer as if he could be my Nini’s son. “What can I do to get you to forgive me, Mike?” she begged him, leaning over his wheelchair. “Make some cookies for my boys,” he replied. My Nini had to bake them on her own, because I declared myself sick of Snow White’s repentant delinquents and other noble causes I didn’t give a shit about. My Nini raised her hand to give me a slap, which I deserved, besides, but I grabbed her wrist in midair. “Don’t you dare ever hit me again, or it’ll be the last you see of me, get it?” She got it.

That was just the shake-up my grandma needed to stand up and get moving again. She went back to her job at the library, though she was no longer able to invent anything and only repeated the stories from before. She went for long walks in the woods and began to attend the Zen Center. She is completely lacking in talent for serenity, but in the forced quietude of meditation she’d invoke my Popo and he would come, like a gentle presence, to sit beside her. I went with her just once to the Sunday ceremony at the Zendo, where I grumpily sat through a talk about the monks who swept the monastery, the significance of which entirely eluded me. Seeing my Nini in the lotus position among Buddhists with shaved heads and pumpkin-colored robes, I could imagine just how lonely she was, but my compassion lasted barely an instant. A short while later, as we shared green tea and organic rolls with the rest of the people there, I’d gone back to hating her, just as I hated the whole world.

No one saw me cry after we cremated my Popo and they handed us his ashes in a clay urn; I didn’t mention his name again, and I didn’t tell anyone that he appeared to me.

I was going to Berkeley High, the only public secondary school in the city and one of the best in the country, though too big, with 3,400 students: 30 percent white, another 30 percent black, and the rest Latinos, Asians, and mixed race. When my Popo went to Berkeley High, it was a zoo—the principals would barely last a year and then quit, exhausted—but by the time I was there the teaching was excellent; although the level of the students was very uneven, there was order and cleanliness, except in the washrooms, which by the end of the day were disgusting, and the principal had been in his post for five years. They said the principal was from another planet, because nothing got through his thick hide. We had art, music, theater, sports, science labs, languages, comparative religion, politics, social programs, workshops for lots of classes, and the best sex education, which was given to everyone, including the fundamentalist Muslims and Christians, who didn’t always appreciate it. My Nini published a letter in the Berkeley Daily Planet proposing that the LGBTU group (lesbians, gays, bisexuals, transsexuals, and undecided) should add an H to their name to include hermaphrodites. That was one of those initiatives, typical of my grandmother, that made me nervous, because they’d take wing and we’d end up protesting in the street with Mike O’Kelly. They always figured out a way to drag me into it.

Students who applied themselves flourished at Berkeley High and then went directly to the most prestigious universities, like my Popo did, with a scholarship to Harvard for his good grades and his baseball skills. Mediocre students floated along trying not to be noticed, and the weak ones got left behind or went into special programs. The most troubled, the drug addicts and gang members, ended up on the streets, expelled or dropouts. For the first two years I’d been a good student and participated in sports, but in a matter of three months I descended into the last category; my marks went down the drain, I got into fights, shoplifted, smoked marijuana, and fell asleep in class. Mr. Harper, my history teacher, was concerned and spoke to my father, who couldn’t do anything except give me a sermon, and sent me to the school health center, where they asked me a few questions and, once they’d established that I wasn’t anorexic and hadn’t tried to commit suicide, left me alone.

Berkeley High is an open campus, lodged in the middle of the city, where it was easy for me to get lost in the crowd. I started skipping classes systematically, going out for lunch and not coming back in the afternoon. We had a cafeteria where only nerds went; it wasn’t cool to be seen there. My Nini was an enemy of the local hamburger and pizza joints and insisted I go to the cafeteria, where the food was organic, tasty, and cheap, but I never listened to her. We students would hang out in the Park, a nearby square, one block from police headquarters, where the law of the jungle prevailed. Parents protested about the drug culture of kids hanging out in the Park, the press published articles, the police walked through and looked the other way, and the teachers washed their hands of it, because it was outside their jurisdiction.

In the Park we divided up into groups, separated by social class and color. The potheads and skateboarders had their sector, whites stayed in another, the Latino gang kept to the edges, defending their imaginary territory with ritual threats, and in the center the drug dealers set themselves up. In one corner were the exchange students from Yemen, who’d been in the news because they were attacked by a bunch of African American guys armed with baseball bats and penknives. In another corner was Stuart Peel, always alone, because he dared a twelve-year-old girl to run across the highway and she got run over by two or three cars; she didn’t die, but she was disabled and disfigured and the one who played the joke on her paid for it with ostracism: nobody ever spoke to him again. Mixed in with the students were the “sewer punks,” with their green hair and piercings and tattoos, the homeless with their full shopping carts and obese dogs, several alcoholics, a crazy lady who used to moon people, and other regulars.

Some kids smoked, drank alcohol out of Coke bottles, made bets, and passed around joints and pills under the cops’ noses, but the vast majority just ate their lunch and then went back to school when the forty-five-minute break was over. I wasn’t one of those. I attended just enough so I’d know what they were talking about in class.

In the afternoons we teenagers took over downtown Berkeley, spreading out in packs before the mistrustful looks of passersby and storekeepers. We walked along dragging our feet, with our cells, headphones, backpacks, chewing gum, ripped jeans, and coded language. Like all of us, I wanted more than anything to be part of a group and to be liked; there was nothing worse than being excluded, like Stuart Peel. The year I turned sixteen I felt different from the rest, tormented, rebellious, and furious at the world. It was no longer a matter of losing myself in the flock but of standing out; I didn’t want to be accepted, just feared. I distanced myself from my old friends, or they distanced themselves from me. I formed a triangular friendship with Sarah and Debbie, the girls with the worst reputations in school, which is saying a lot, because at Berkeley High there were some pathological cases. We formed an exclusive club; we were closer than sisters, telling each other everything, even our dreams. We were always together or connected by phone, talking, sharing clothes, makeup, money, food, drugs. We could not conceive of separate existences. Our friendship would last for the rest of our lives, and no one and nothing would ever come between us.

I transformed myself inside and out. I felt like I was going to explode; I had too much flesh, not enough skin and bones, my blood boiled, I couldn’t stand myself. I feared I was going to wake up in a Kafkaesque nightmare, turned into a cockroach. I examined my defects, my big teeth, muscular legs, protruding ears, straight hair, short nose, five zits, chewed fingernails, bad posture, too white, too tall and clumsy. I felt ugly, but there were moments when I could sense the power of my new feminine body, a power I didn’t know how to wield. I got irritated if men looked at me or offered me a ride in the street, if any guy in my class touched me or if a teacher took too much interest in my behavior or my grades, except for the irreproachable Mr. Harper.

The school didn’t have a girls’ soccer team. I played at a club, where the coach once had me doing extra stretches on the field until the other girls left and then followed me into the shower, where he felt me up and groped me all over and, since I didn’t react, thought I liked it. Embarrassed, I only told Sarah and Debbie, swearing them to secrecy first. I stopped playing and never set foot in the club again.

The changes in my body and personality were as sudden as slipping on ice, and I didn’t have time to notice I was going to crack my head open. I started testing danger with the determination of someone hypnotized; soon I was leading a double life, lying with astonishing aptitude, slamming doors and shouting at my grandmother, the only authority in the household since Susan was away in the war. For all practical purposes, my father had disappeared; I imagine he doubled his flying hours to avoid fights with me.

Sarah, Debbie, and I discovered Internet porn, like the rest of the kids at school, and we practiced the gestures and postures of the women on the screen, with dubious results in my case, because I felt ridiculous. My grandma began to suspect and launched a head-on campaign against the sex industry, which degraded and exploited women; nothing new there, because she and Mike O’Kelly had taken me to a demonstration against Playboy magazine when Hugh Hefner had the preposterous idea of visiting Berkeley. I was nine years old, as far as I remember.

My friends were my whole world. Only with them could I share my ideas and feelings; only they saw things from my point of view and understood me; no one else got our humor or our tastes. Berkeley High kids were snotty-nosed brats, losers. We were convinced that nobody had lives as complicated as ours. With the pretext of supposed rapes and beatings from her stepfather, Sarah was a compulsive shoplifter, while Debbie and I were always on the lookout, covering for her and protecting her. The truth is that Sarah lived with her single mom and had never had a stepfather, but that imaginary psychopath was as present in our conversations as if he’d been flesh and blood. My friend looked like a grasshopper, all elbows, knees, ribs, and other protruding bones, and she always had bags of candy, which she devoured in one go and then ran to the bathroom to stick her fingers down her throat. She was so malnourished that she fainted and smelled like death. She weighed eighty pounds, just fifteen or twenty more than my backpack full of books, and her goal was to get down to fifty and disappear completely. Debbie, who really did get beaten up at home and had been raped by one of her uncles, was a horror film fanatic and had a morbid attraction to things from beyond the grave: zombies, voodoo, Dracula, and demonic possessions. She bought a copy of The Exorcist, a really old movie, and made us watch it all the time, because it scared her to watch it alone. Sarah and I copied her goth style, always wearing only black, including nail polish, our skin deathly pale, necklaces of keys, crosses, and skulls, and the languid cynicism of Hollywood blood-suckers, which gave us our nickname: the vampires.

The three of us competed in a bad behavior contest. We’d established a system of points for offenses we got away with, consisting basically of destroying other people’s property, selling marijuana, ecstasy, LSD, and stolen prescription drugs, spray-painting the school walls, paying with forged checks, and shoplifting. We kept our scores in a notebook, counted them up at the end of the month, and whoever had the most got the prize of a bottle of the strongest and cheapest vodka on the market, KU:L, a Polish vodka that could also be used as paint thinner. My friends boasted of their promiscuity, venereal infections, and abortions, as if they were badges of honor, although in the time we spent together I didn’t see any of that. By comparison, my prudishness was embarrassing, so I hurried to lose my virginity, and did it with Rick Laredo, the dumbest dumbass on the planet.

I’ve gotten used to Manuel Arias’s habits with a flexibility and courtesy that would surprise my grandma. She still considers me a little shit, a term of reproach or affection, depending on her tone of voice, but it’s almost always the former. She doesn’t know how much I’ve changed, how I’ve turned into a real charmer. “We learn the hard way, and life’s the best teacher,” is another of her sayings, which in my case has turned out to be true.

At seven in the morning Manuel stokes up the fire in the stove to heat the water for the shower and the towels, then Eduvigis or her daughter Azucena arrives to make us a splendid breakfast of eggs laid by her hens, bread fresh out of her oven, and foamy, warm milk from her cow. The milk has a peculiar odor, which I found a bit gross at first but now love; it smells of stables, of pasture, of fresh dung. Eduvigis wants me to have breakfast in bed “like a señorita”—they still do things like that in Chile in some houses, where they have nanas, as they call domestic servants—but I only do that on Sundays, when I sleep in, because Juanito, her grandson, comes and we read in bed with Fahkeen at our feet. We’re halfway through the first Harry Potter book.

In the afternoon, once I’ve finished my work with Manuel, I jog into town; people give me strange looks and more than one has asked me where I’m going in such a hurry. I need exercise, or I’ll be a blimp, since I’m eating like I’m making up for all the meals I skipped last year. The Chilota diet has too many carbs, but you don’t see anyone obese around here, probably because of the physical effort everybody’s always expending. You really have to move here. Azucena Corrales is a little overweight for thirteen, but I haven’t managed to convince her to come running with me. She’s too embarrassed—“What will people think?” she says. She leads a very solitary life, because there aren’t many young people in the village, only a few fishermen, half a dozen idle teenagers high on marijuana, and the guy at the Internet café, where the coffee is instant and the Internet is capricious, and where I try to go as little as possible to avoid the temptation of e-mail. The only people on this island who are incommunicado are Doña Lucinda and me: in her case because she’s really old and in mine because I’m a fugitive. The rest of the villagers have cell phones and access to computers at the Internet café.

I don’t get bored. This surprises me, because I used to get bored so easily I’d even yawn during action movies. I’ve gotten used to empty hours, long days, and spare time. I amuse myself with very little—my work routine with Manuel, Auntie Blanca’s terrible novels, my neighbors on the island, and the kids, who travel in a pack, unsupervised. Juanito Corrales is my favorite. He’s like a doll, with his skinny little body, his big head and black eyes that seem to see everything. People think he’s slow because he never says more than he needs to, but he’s really smart: he realized early on that nobody cares what anyone else says, that’s why he doesn’t bother to speak. I play soccer with the boys, but I haven’t been able to interest the girls, partly because the boys refuse to play with them and partly because they’ve never seen a women’s soccer team here. Auntie Blanca and I have decided this should change; as soon as classes begin in March and we have all the kids captive, we’ll take care of that.

The people in the village have opened their doors to me, though only in a manner of speaking, since no doors are ever locked. My Spanish has improved quite a bit, so we can have sort of awkward conversations. Chilotes have a strong accent and use words and expressions you don’t find in any grammar textbooks that, according to Manuel, come from old Castilian, because Chiloé was isolated from the rest of the country for a long time. Chile gained independence from Spain in 1810, but Chiloé waited to join the republic until 1826, making it the last Spanish territory in the southern cone of the Americas.

Manuel had warned me that Chilotes are distrustful, but that hasn’t been my experience; they’ve been really nice to me. They invite me into their homes, we sit by the stove to chat and drink maté, a bitter green herbal tea served in a gourd, which they pass around, everyone sipping through the same bombilla, a silver straw with a filter on the bottom. They tell me about their illnesses and the plants’ illnesses, which might be caused by a neighbor’s envy. Several families have fallen out with each other due to gossip or suspicions of witchcraft. I don’t understand how they manage to stay enemies, since there are only about three hundred of us living here in a pretty small area, like hens in a chicken run. No secret can be kept in this community, which is like one big family, divided, resentful, and forced to live together and help each other out when necessary.

We talk about potatoes—there are a hundred varieties or “qualities,” as they call them: red potatoes, purple potatoes, black, white, and yellow ones, round potatoes, long ones, potatoes, potatoes, and more potatoes—how you have to plant them when the moon is waning and never on a Sunday, how you have to give thanks to God as you plant and harvest the first one, and how you have to sing to them while they’re sleeping under the earth. Doña Lucinda, who’s 109 years old, as far as anyone can tell, is one of the singers who entices up the crop: “Chilote, take care of your potato / care for your potato, Chilote / don’t let anyone from away come and take it, Chilote.” They complain about the salmon farms, responsible for lots of damage, and the failings of the government, which makes a lot of promises and hardly ever keeps any of them, but they all agree that Michelle Bachelet is the best president they’ve ever had, even if she is a woman. Nobody’s perfect.

Manuel is far from perfect: he’s gruff, austere, lacks a cozy belly or a poetic vision of the universe and the human heart, like my Popo, but I’ve grown fond of him, I can’t deny it. I like him as much as Fahkeen, even though Manuel never makes the slightest effort to win anyone over. His biggest fault is his obsession with order. This house looks like a military barracks; sometimes I leave my stuff lying around on the floor or dirty dishes in the sink on purpose, to teach him to relax a bit. We don’t fight, at least not literally, but we do have our run-ins. Today, for example, I didn’t have anything to wear, because I forgot to do my laundry, and I grabbed a couple of his things that were drying by the stove. I assumed that since other people can take whatever they feel like from this house, I could borrow something he’s not using.

“The next time you want to wear a pair of my underpants, please do me the favor of asking for them,” he said in a tone of voice I didn’t much like.

“You’re so fussy, Manuel! Anyone would think it’s your only pair,” I answered in a tone that he might not have liked too much either.

“I never take your things, Maya.”

“Because I don’t have anything! Here, take your fucking shorts!”—and I started undoing my pants to give them back to him, but he stopped me, in terror.

“No, no! Keep them, Maya, you can have them.”

And I, like an idiot, burst into tears. Of course I wasn’t crying about that—who knows why I was crying, maybe because I’m about to get my period or because last night I was remembering my Popo’s death and I’ve been walking around sad all day. My Popo would have hugged me, and two minutes later we’d be laughing together, but Manuel started walking around in circles and kicking the furniture, as if he’d never seen anybody cry before. Finally he had the brilliant idea of making me a Nescafé with condensed milk, which calmed me down a little so we could talk. He asked me to try to understand, that it had been twenty years since he’d lived with a woman, his habits are very deeply ingrained, order is important in a space as small as this house, and cohabitation would be easier if we respected each other’s underwear. Poor man.

“Hey, Manuel, I know a lot of psychology, because I spent more than a year among lunatics and therapists. I’ve been studying your case, and what you’ve got is fear,” I told him.

“Of what?” He smiled.

“I don’t know, but I can find out. Let me explain, this obsession with order and territory is a manifestation of neurosis. Look at the fuss you’ve made over a lousy pair of shorts, when you don’t even blink if a stranger walks in and borrows your stereo. You try to control everything, especially your emotions, in order to feel secure, but any moron can see there’s no such thing as security in this world, Manuel.”

“Ah, I see. Go on—”

“You seem serene and distant, like Siddhartha, but you don’t fool me: I know inside you’re all screwed up. You know who Siddhartha was, right? Buddha.”

“Yes, the Buddha.”

“Don’t laugh. People think you’re wise, that you’ve attained inner peace or some such nonsense. During the day you’re the height of equilibrium and tranquillity, like Siddhartha, but I hear you at night, Manuel. You shout and moan in your sleep. What terrible secret are you hiding?”

Our therapy session got that far and no further. He pulled on his jacket and hat, whistled for Fahkeen to go with him, and went off for a walk or maybe out in the boat or to complain about me to Blanca Schnake. He got back really late. I hate staying alone at night in this house full of bats!

Age, like the clouds, is imprecise and changeable. Sometimes Manuel looks as old as the years he’s lived, and sometimes, depending on the light and his mood, I can see the young man he once was still hidden under his skin. When he leans over the keyboard in the harsh blue glare of his computer he’s pretty old, but when he captains his motorboat he looks about fifty. At first I used to focus on his wrinkles, the bags under his eyes and the red edges to them, the veins on his hands, stains on his teeth, the chiseled bone structure of his face, his morning cough and throat-clearing, the tired gesture of taking off his glasses and rubbing his eyes. But now I don’t notice those details anymore, but rather his quiet virility. He’s attractive. I’m sure Blanca Schnake agrees; I’ve seen how she looks at him. I’ve just said Manuel is attractive! Oh my God, he’s older than the pyramids! The wild life I led in Las Vegas turned my brain into a cauliflower. There’s no other explanation!

According to my Nini, the sexiest parts of women are their hips, because they give an idea of reproductive capacity, and in men it’s their arms, because they indicate their capacity for work. Who knows where she dug up that theory, but I have to admit that Manuel’s arms are sexy. They’re not muscular like a young man’s, but they’re firm, with thick wrists and big hands, unexpected in a writer, a sailor’s or bricklayer’s hands, with cracked skin and nails dirty with motor oil, gasoline, firewood, earth. Those hands chop tomatoes and coriander, or skin a fish with great delicacy. I watch him while pretending not to, because he keeps me at a certain distance—I think he’s scared of me—but I’ve examined him behind his back. I’d like to touch his hair, straight and hard like a brush, and sniff that cleft he has at the nape of his neck, that we all have, I guess. What would he smell like? He doesn’t smoke or use cologne, like my Popo, whose fragrance is the first thing I sense when he comes to visit me. Manuel’s clothes smell like mine and like everything in this house: timber, cats, wool, and smoke from the woodstove.

If I try to find out about Manuel’s past or his feelings, he gets defensive, but Auntie Blanca has told me a few things, and I’ve discovered others by doing his filing. He’s a sociologist as well as an anthropologist, whatever the difference might be, and I suppose that explains his contagious passion for studying the culture of the Chilotes. I like working with him, living in his house, and visiting other islands. I enjoy his company. I’m learning a lot; when I arrived in Chiloé, my head was an empty cavern, and in such a short time it’s beginning to fill up.

Blanca Schnake is also contributing to my education. Her word is law on this island. She’s more in command than the two carabineros posted here. As a child, Blanca was sent away to a boarding school run by nuns; then she lived for some time in Europe, where she went to teacher’s college. She’s divorced and has two daughters, one in Santiago and the other, who’s married and has two children, in Florida. In the photographs she’s shown me, her daughters look like models, and her grandchildren like cherubs. She was the principal of a high school in Santiago and a few years ago requested a transfer to Chiloé, because she wanted to live in Castro, near her father, but she was assigned to the school on this insignificant little island instead. According to Eduvigis, Blanca had breast cancer and recovered thanks to the healing of a machi, but Manuel told me that that was after a double mastectomy and chemotherapy; now she’s in remission. She lives behind the school, in the nicest house in town, renovated and extended, which her father bought for her and paid for outright. On the weekends she goes to see him in Castro.

Don Lionel Schnake is considered an illustrious person in Chiloé and is much beloved for his generosity, which seems inexhaustible. “The more my dad gives away, the better he does with his investments, so I have no qualms about asking him for more,” Blanca told me. In 1971 the Allende government implemented agrarian reform and expropriated the Schnakes’ estate in Osorno and handed it over to the very same agricultural laborers who’d lived on and worked the land for decades. Schnake didn’t waste his energy cultivating hatred or sabotaging the government, like other landowners in his situation, but simply looked around in search of new horizons and opportunities. He felt young enough to start over again. He moved to Chiloé and set up a business supplying seafood to the best restaurants in Santiago. He survived the political and economic upheavals of the times and later the competition from the Japanese fishing boats and the salmon-farming industry. In 1976 the military government returned his land and he turned it over to his sons, who raised it up from the ruin it had been left in, but he stayed in Chiloé, because he’d suffered the first of several heart attacks and decided his salvation would be in adopting the Chilotes’ calm pace of life. “At eighty-five well-lived years of age, my heart works better than a Swiss watch,” Don Lionel—who I met on Sunday, when I went to visit him with Blanca—told me.

When he found out I was the gringuita who was working for Manuel Arias, Don Lionel gave me a big hug. “Tell that ungrateful Communist to come and see me! He hasn’t been here since New Year’s, and I’ve got a very fine bottle of gran reserva brandy.” He’s a colorful patriarch, an expansive bon vivant, with a big paunch, a bushy mustache, and four white tufts on top of his head. He roars with laughter at his own jokes, and his table is always set for anyone who might happen to show up. That’s how I imagine the Millalobo, that mythic being who seizes maidens to take them off to his kingdom in the sea. This Millalobo with a German surname declares himself a victim of women in general—“I can’t deny these beauties anything!”—and especially his daughter, who exploits him mercilessly. “Blanca is more of a mooch than any Chilote, always begging for something for her school. Do you know what she asked me for the other day? Condoms! That’s all this country needs: condoms for children!” he told me, laughing his head off.

Don Lionel is not the only one at Blanca’s feet. At her suggestion more than twenty volunteers got together to paint and repair the school; this is called a minga and consists of several people collaborating for free on some chore, knowing they won’t be short of help when they need it themselves. It’s the sacred law of reciprocity: you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours. That’s how potatoes are harvested, roofs are fixed, and fences are mended; that’s how Manuel’s refrigerator got here.

Rick Laredo hadn’t finished high school and was roaming the streets with other losers, selling drugs to little kids, stealing crap, and hanging around the Park at lunchtime to see his old classmates from Berkeley High and, if the opportunity arose, dealing. Although he’d never have admitted it, he wanted to get back into the school gang, after being expelled for putting the barrel of his pistol in Mr. Harper’s ear. It has to be said: the teacher behaved too well, he even intervened to prevent the expulsion; but Laredo dug his own grave when he insulted the principal and the members of the board.

Rick Laredo took a lot of care over his appearance, with his spotless brand-name white sneakers, a tank top to show off his muscles and tattoos, hair gelled up like a porcupine, and so many chains and wristbands that he could have been dragged away by a large magnet. His jeans were enormous and fell down lower than his hips, so he walked like a chimpanzee. He was such a nonentity that not even the police or Mike O’Kelly were interested in him.

When I decided to solve the problem of my virginity, I made a date with Laredo, without giving him any explanation, in the empty parking lot of a cinema, at a dead time, before the first showing. From the distance I watched him going around in circles with his provocative swagger, holding up his pants, so baggy it looked like he was wearing diapers, with one hand and a cigarette in his other hand, excited and nervous, but when I approached, he feigned the indifference required by that kind of macho guy. He looked me up and down with a mocking sneer. “Hurry up, I have to catch the bus in ten minutes,” I told him, as I took my pants off. His superior smile vanished; maybe he’d been expecting some preamble. “I’ve always liked you, Maya Vidal,” he said. At least this cretin knows my name, I thought.

Laredo flicked his cigarette away, grabbed me by the arm, and tried to kiss me, but I turned my face away: that wasn’t part of my plan, and Laredo’s breath stank. He waited till I got my pants off, and then he crushed me against the pavement and exerted himself for a minute or two, stabbing me in the chest with his chains and medallions, not even imagining he was doing it with a novice, then collapsed on top of me like a dead animal. I pushed him off me furiously, cleaned myself with my underwear, which I threw on the ground in the parking lot and left there, pulled on my jeans, grabbed my backpack, and ran away. On the bus I noticed the dark stain between my legs and tears soaking into the front of my shirt.

The next day Rick Laredo was standing in the Park with a rap CD and a little bag of marijuana for “his chick.” I felt sorry for the poor guy and couldn’t get rid of him with ridicule, as a proper vampire should. I snuck out of Sarah and Debbie’s sight, invited him for ice cream, and bought us each a three-scoop cone, pistachio, vanilla, and rum’n’raisin. While we licked our ice cream cones, I thanked him for his interest in me and for the favor he’d done me in the parking lot, and tried to explain that there’d be no second opportunity, but the message didn’t get through his primate skull. I couldn’t get rid of Rick Laredo for months, until an unexpected accident swept him out of my life.

In the mornings I would leave my house, looking like someone on her way to school, but halfway there I would meet Sarah and Debbie at a Starbucks, where the employees gave us a latte in exchange for indecent favors in the washroom. I would put on my vampire disguise and go off on a bender till it was time to return home in the afternoon, with a clean face and the look of a schoolgirl. My freedom lasted for several months, until my Nini stopped taking antidepressants, came back to the land of the living, and noticed some signs she hadn’t perceived when her gaze was directed inward: money disappeared from her purse, my hours didn’t match any known educational program, I walked around looking and acting like a slut, I’d started lying and scheming. My clothes smelled of marijuana and my breath of suspicious mint lozenges. She hadn’t yet realized that I was skipping most of my classes. Mr. Harper had spoken to my father on one occasion, with no apparent results, but it hadn’t occurred to him to call my grandmother. My Nini’s attempts to communicate with me had to compete with the noise of the thunderous music in my headphones, my computer, my cell phone, and the television.

The most convenient thing for my Nini’s well-being would have been to ignore the danger signs and just try and live in peace with me, but her desire to protect me and her long-standing habit of solving mysteries in detective novels drove her to investigate. She started with my closet and the numbers saved on my phone. She found a bag with packs of condoms and a little plastic bag with two yellow tablets with “Mitsubishi” stamped on them that she couldn’t identify. She distractedly tossed them into her mouth and fifteen minutes later discovered their effects. Her vision clouded over and so did her mind, her teeth chattered, her bones went soft, and she saw her sorrows disappear. She put on a record of music from back in her day and started dancing frenetically. Then she went outside for a breath of fresh air, where she kept dancing, while taking off her clothes. A couple of neighbors, who saw her fall to the ground, rushed over to cover her with a towel. They were just getting ready to call 911 at the moment I showed up, recognized the symptoms, and managed to convince them to help me carry her inside.

We couldn’t lift her—she’d turned to stone—and we had to drag her to the sofa in the living room. I explained to these good Samaritans that it was nothing serious, my grandmother had attacks like this quite regularly and they went away by themselves. I gently pushed them toward the door, then ran to reheat the coffee left over from breakfast and look for a blanket, because my Nini’s teeth sounded like a machine gun. A couple of minutes later she was burning up. For the next three hours I was alternating the blanket with cold compresses until my Nini’s temperature got back under control.