Free The Sum of Our Days by Isabel Allende Page A

his pacifier in his mouth, drag over his pillow, and fall asleep at my feet. When it was time to eat, he tugged a few times on my skirt to pull me from the trance I tend to sink into when I write, and I would distractedly reach for his bottle and he would drink it without a sound. Once he unplugged the cable of my computer and I lost forty-eight pages of my new book, but instead of throttling him, as I would have any other mortal, I ate him up with kisses. The pages weren’t good anyway.
    My happiness was nearly complete; you were all that was lacking. In 1991 you had recently married Ernesto and were living in Spain, but you already had plans to move to California, where we would all be together. On December 6 of that same year, Paula, you went to the hospital with a stomachache and a cold too long ignored. You don’t know what happened there. Hours later you were in intensive care in a coma, and five eternal months would go by before you were handed over to me in a vegetative state, with severe brain damage. You were breathing; that was your only sign of life. You were paralyzed and your eyes were black pools that no longer reflected light, and in the months that followed, you changed so much that it was difficult to recognize you. With the help of Ernesto, who refused to admit that in reality he was already a widower, we brought you to my home in California on a harrowing flight across the Atlantic and the continental United States. Then Ernesto had to leave you with me and go back to his job. I never imagined that the dream of having my daughter close to me would come true in such tragic fashion. Celia was near the time of giving birth to Andrea. I remember her reaction when they lowered you from the ambulance on a stretcher. She clung to Alejandro, retreated, trembling, her eyes wide with shock, as Nico paled and took a step forward; he leaned down to give you a kiss, as his tears rained down on you. For you this world ended on December 6, 1992, exactly one year after you entered the hospital in Madrid. Days later, when we scattered your ashes in a nearby forest, Celia and Nico informed me that they planned to have another child. Nicole was born ten months later.

Green Tea for Sadness
    W ILLIE REALIZED WITH DESPERATION that Jennifer was gradually committing suicide. An astrologer had told him that his daughter was “in the house of death.” According to Fu, there are souls who unconsciously try to achieve divine ecstasy by way of the expeditious path of drugs; maybe Jennifer needed to escape the gross reality of this world. Willie believes that he has transmitted bad genes to his children. His great-great-grandfather had arrived in Australia with shackles on his legs, covered with pustules and lice, one among a hundred and sixty thousand wretches the English sent to that land to serve out their sentences. The youngest of the convicts, sentenced for stealing bread, was nine years old, and the eldest was an old lady of eighty-two who’d been accused of stealing two pounds of cheese and who hanged herself a few days after her ship docked. Willie’s ancestor, accused of who knows what rubbish, had not been hanged because he was a knife-sharpener. In those years, having a trade or knowing how to read meant that instead of being hanged you were sent to Australia. The man was among the strong ones who survived, thanks to his ability to absorb suffering and alcohol, an aptitude he passed on to nearly all his descendants. Very little is known about Willie’s grandfather, but his father died of cirrhosis. Willie himself spent decades of his life without tasting a drop of alcohol because it triggers his allergies, but if he started, the amount gradually crept up. I have never seen Willie drunk. Before he reaches that point, he chokes as if he had swallowed a fistful of hair and is rendered inoperative by a ferocious headache; we both know, however, that if it weren’t for those blessed allergies, he