Free Paula by Isabel Allende Page A

as powerful as a dentist who was a magician in his free time and could pull a live rabbit from a pail of boiling oil; the king of pressure cookers who introduced those devices into Chile, altering forever the slow rituals of the national kitchen; and various other gallants who might have become our stepfather—including my own favorite, Dr. Benjamin Viel, tall and straight as a lance, whose contagious laughter rang through my grandfather’s house. My mother assures me that the one love of her life was Ramón, and as they are both still living, I will not contradict her. Two years after we left Peru, they plotted a rendezvous in the north of Chile. For my mother, the risks of that clandestine meeting were enormous; it was a definitive step toward the forbidden, a rejection of her prudent life as a bank employee and the advantages of self-sacrificing widowhood in her father’s home, but youth and the force of frustrated desire won out over scruples. She spent months planning this adventure, her only accomplice my Uncle Pablo, who did not want to know the lover’s identity, or any of the details, but bought his sister the most elegant traveling outfit money could buy and filled her pocketbook with cash—in case she repented along the way and decided to come home, he said—and then, still silent as the Sphinx, drove her to the airport. She left defiantly, without any explanation to my grandfather, because she assumed he would not understand the overpowering call of love. She returned a week later, transformed by the experience of sated passion and, upon descending from the plane, found Tata, all in black and deadly serious, waiting with open arms; he clasped her to his bosom, silently forgiving her. I must suppose that during those fleeting days Ramón had fulfilled with interest the burning promises of his letters; that would explain my mother’s decision that she would wait for him for years, hoping that one day he would slip free of his matrimonial bonds. Their tryst, and its consequences, seemed to dim with the passing weeks. My grandfather, who mistrusted long-distance love affairs, never broached the subject and, as my mother was similarly silent, he came to believe that the inevitable pulverization of time was grinding down their passion. He was, therefore, more than a little surprised when he learned of the lover’s abrupt appearance in Santiago. As for me—nearly convinced that the enchanted prince lived in a fairy tale and was not a real person at all—I panicked; the idea that my mother might become so enamored of him that she would abandon us tied my stomach in knots. Ramón, it seems, had learned that a mysterious suitor with better prospects than his own had appeared on the horizon—I like to think it was Benjamin Viel, but have no proof—and, without a backward look, he left his post in La Paz and bought a seat on the first plane for Chile. As long as he had been out of the country, his separation from his wife had not been too noticeable, but when he returned to Santiago, and not to the conjugal abode, the situation exploded: relatives, friends, and acquaintances mobilized in a tenacious campaign to return him to his legitimate hearth. I will never forget the day that my brothers and I were walking down the street with Margara and as we passed an obviously wealthy woman she screamed, “Your mother’s a slut!” In view of the stubbornness of the recalcitrant husband, his uncle the bishop came to call on my grandfather to demand his intervention. Exalted with Christian fury and enveloped in the odor of sanctity—he hadn’t bathed in fifteen years—he updated the list of my mother’s sins, a Bathsheba sent by the Evil One to beguile mortal men. My grandfather was not one to accept such rhetoric when it was directed toward a member of his family, nor to let himself be run over by a priest, however saintly his fame, but he realized that