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:
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.
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