Maya’s Notebook. Isabel Allende
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Название: Maya’s Notebook
Автор: Isabel Allende
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Современная зарубежная литература
isbn: 9780007482863
isbn:
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, СКАЧАТЬ