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:
“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, СКАЧАТЬ