Isabel Allende — The Year After Paula’s Death

“My life, like my books, is made of sorrow and love,” Isabel Allende says in this P.S. section from her memoir, Paula.

The Year After Paula’s Death

During the year that my daughter was ill, I was so busy that I couldn’t think much about myself. After her death, however, I fell into the overwhelming silence of mourning. I went around in a trance the first few days, like a sleepwalker, tripping over Paula’s persistent ghost, who appeared everywhere to me.

One month later, my mother grabbed my hand and took me to the little coach house where I write. ‘Today is the 8th of January, the date you start all your books,’ she said, and I replied that I would never write again. But my mother had prepared everything and is not a woman to let herself be blinded by common sense. Refusing to listen to my protests, she lit a honey-scented candle before Paula’s photograph and placed a packet tied with yellow string into my hands. It was the 190 letters I had sent her in Chile that year, recounting each stage of the terrible test that Paula and I had passed together. She asked me to read them carefully, in the same order that they were written; that way I’d understand that death was the only liberation possible for my daughter.

‘Grief is a long, dark tunnel that you must travel alone. On the other side there’s light, but you can’t yet see it. Trust me, Isabel, nothing can save you from this suffering; not antidepressants, nor therapy, nor holidays on a tropical island, not even the love of your husband and grandchildren,’ my mother said, and asked me to walk patiently along the tunnel, trusting in the strength of life, because that was the least that Paula could expect from me.

My mother excused herself, saying she was going to buy a vest, leaving me alone with my memories and sorrow. I switched on the computer and without thinking twice I wrote the same sentence with which I’d started the first yellow exercise book in Madrid. ‘Listen, Paula. I’m going to tell you a story, so that when you wake up you will not feel so lost.’ I understood then that the only thing I could write would be this same letter addressed to my daughter. My mother came back to look for me six hours later, without a vest, and found me absorbed.

Every morning during 1993, I got out of bed with difficulty, dragged myself to my old coach house, lit a candle and sat down in front of the computer to cry. Celia, my daughter-in-law, who was expecting her third child, and who had become my shadow, my friend and my helper, says that I wrote those pages with tears and kisses. Sometimes the sadness was unbearable and I stayed staring at the screen for hours, unable to get a word out. At other times the sentences flowed as if they were dictated by Paula from the other world. Now and again I headed for the wood where we had scattered her ashes and walked for hours, calling her. But it wasn’t all crying; I often caught myself laughing at my memories, both of myself and even of Paula. A year later I glimpsed the end of the tunnel, amazed, as my mother had promised, and I realised that I no longer wanted to die, but to carry on living. I had 400 pages on my table and they were not depressing; they were, more like, a celebration of life. Like in paintings by old Flemish masters, colour sprung out of large areas of shadow; this book was chiaroscuro, made of contrasts.

I don’t know what the purpose of these pages was. I think that I wrote them as a kind of catharsis, with the vague hope that the magic of literature would defeat forgetfulness and keep Paula alive among us. I thought, too, that this meticulous record of what happened was important for Nicolás, who also has porphyria, and my grandchildren, who would have to live with that threat hanging over them. But in truth I wrote it as a form of salvation: in the process of remembering the past, my soul was healed.

My mother, the first to read the manuscript, immediately thought it could be published, but suggested making substantial changes to protect family secrets and the people involved in the story — myself above all. For a week I tried to change this memoir into a novel, but each time I made a change, however small, I felt that I was betraying Paula and the essence of the book itself. Defeated, I decided to leave it how it was. I made various copies of the original and sent them to each of the people mentioned, and all of them, without exception, allowed me to publish it as it was.

The only person that made an observation was Ernesto. ‘It seems to me that the character of Paula is incomplete,’ he said. ‘You only know her from the perspective of a mother; you don’t know that she was a passionate lover, a tender wife and a wonderful companion. I will send you something very private… If Paula knew, she’d die a second time!’  Three days later I received a box of the most unexpected treasure: the love letters that Paula and Ernesto had sent each other every day for more than a year. My daughter, who I thought of as an intellectual — the genius of the family, the only one who combined a talent for the arts with the rigour of scientific thinking — revealed herself to me as a sensual woman, uninhibited, playful and with a great need to be spoilt. In the letters she told her lover about her infancy and early childhood: I discovered that she had been very happy, that she only remembered the good things, the love and the travelling, and that she had erased the separations, exile and other uncertainties. I put paragraphs of these letters into the text; they were the only changes I made.

The book was published despite reservations from my agent and various editors, who were frightened of the topic and the fact that I had exposed myself to the public gaze without holding anything back. Until then I had only written fiction and this memoir seemed like a jump into the unknown. Nevertheless, in a few weeks letters started to arrive from readers: men and women who, after reading Paula, felt the generous impulse to communicate with me. Hundreds, then thousands of envelopes from many places — above all Italy, Spain, South America and the United States, but also from more distant shores, such as India and Australia — flooded my desk and my life. None of my earlier books, which had been in print for over thirteen years, had produced the correspondence that Paula provoked in a few months. Letters from parents who had lost children or whose deepest fear was of something happening to them; letters from youngsters who wanted an extended family; from daughters who wanted a relationship with their mothers like the one that Paula and I had — including one girl of thirteen, in the middle of an adolescent crisis, who shared the reading of the book with her mother, as an act of reconciliation after innumerable fights; from doctors who had changed their relations with their patients, and said they would no longer look at them as cases but as people with a history and a family; from terminally ill patients who had found comfort in their last days; from others who suffered from porphyria or similar conditions. I also received a letter from a nurse, who had looked after Paula in the Intensive Care Unit in the hospital in Madrid, who confirmed my worst suspicions and gave me the details of my daughter’s tragedy and the conspiracy of silence surrounding her case. This avalanche of letters proved that the decision to publish the book was the right one.

Opening myself up to my readers made me not more vulnerable, but stronger. I had to hire two helpers to open the envelopes, divide the letters by language, arrange for the ones we didn’t understand to be translated and post the replies. These weren’t letters that could be answered by a secretary with a few stock phrases, because every one of them was very personal.

Perhaps the most numerous letters were from young women who wanted to get to know Ernesto. I sent a lot of them the address of my son-in-law, of course, with the secret hope that there would be one among them capable of helping him in his grief, but I had to give up in the end, because he wouldn’t cooperate. ‘Stop sending me girlfriends, because I don’t have the energy to talk to all of them and the truth is that I’ll never be able to fall in love again,’ he told me. He had grown a beard, was sunk in sadness and appeared a lot older than his 32 years. He talked about becoming a Jesuit priest and even walked with his head slightly tilted, as if he was already in training for chastity and prayer. But in moments of lucidity it irritated me, the tragic neglect of this big man, and I often reminded him of his dedication during the months of Paula’s illness, not just with her but with the other patients in the hospital who had the good fortune to come into contact with him. I couldn’t see him in a cassock. I thought that instead of saving souls he should care for people and one day he told us that he had decided to study medicine or become a teacher.

The best news, however, is that he has finally fallen in love. Hardly had Giulia appeared in his life than he felt obliged to bring her to California, where the poor girl had to submit herself to the scrutiny of the tribe, but she passed with flying colours. I can’t stop myself from sharing a detail that would be impossible to include in a novel, because I would be accused of pushing the boundaries of magical realism: Giulia was born on the same day as Paula, her mother is called Paula and her father and I were born on the same day in the same year. Too many coincidences! I think these are obvious signs that Paula approves of Ernesto’s new love.

I never thought I’d write a memoir. The world is full of stories to relate, so why should I turn to my own? The circumstances that led to this book were dramatic; it would have been better if there hadn’t been a reason to write it, but I’m happy with the result and the response it’s had from its readers. I feel that all my previous novels were only training for the moment that Paula would write this book through me.

These pages recount the premature end of a splendid young woman who deserved a long life; they are not a lament, however, but a celebration of life. Two stories interweave within them: that of my daughter Paula and that of my own destiny. The slow death of my daughter gave me the extraordinary opportunity to revisit my past. For a year my life stopped completely; I had nothing to do but hope and remember. Compelled to remain still for the first time, I started a long introspection, a journey inside myself and my past. Until that moment I had lived in a hurry, but in those endless months next to my daughter’s bed, trying to communicate with her lost spirit, I discovered silence. This was one of the best presents that Paula gave me during that time. Now, every day, I look for the quiet peace of nature, for a few minutes of thought, of solitude, which allows me to meet Paula and my own soul.

The other precious present that Paula left me was learning unconditional love. Prostrate in that bed, silent and unmoving, with her eyes turned towards death, my daughter couldn’t give anything, only receive. She, who had before possessed a rare intelligence and a memorable grace, who had spent 28 years in the service of others, was reduced to the condition of a statue. So I had to love her as she was, without desires or hopes, without getting a reply, without even knowing if she noticed my care. And after she died, when I thought I’d lost everything, I discovered I had something that no one could take away from me: the love that I had offered to Paula. In the years that have passed since then I have tried very hard not to forget that experience of love and to repeat it as often as possible, because in reality the only thing we have is that which we give.

At the end of November, when it was obvious that she was starting to irrevocably slip away, when she had already stopped appearing to me in dreams and the subtle communication that we had seemed to disappear, I decided to open an envelope that contained a letter written by Paula long before she fell ill and marked ‘to be opened when I die’. Trembling, I broke the wax seal and took out two pages of Paula’s handwriting. It was a spiritual testament that started by saying: ‘I don’t want to remain trapped in my body. Liberated from it, I will be closer to those I love, even if they’re in the four corners of the world.’ She carries on saying to her husband and us, her family, how much she loves us and how happy she has been, and asks us not to forget her, because while we remember her she will be at our side. She tells us we should be happy because ‘spirits help, accompany and protect better those who are happy.’ Paula, who in this letter was already talking about herself as a spirit, also says that she doesn’t want a stone with her name on, she wants to remain in our hearts and for her ashes to return to the earth.We tried to follow her instructions, and her name isn’t engraved on any stone — which is why it is somewhat ironic that it’s written instead on millions of books throughout the world.

In some editions her face appears on the cover: a girl with long dark hair, thick eyebrows and big eyes, with a captivating smile. Willie took that photo shortly before she fell ill. After her death we looked for the negative in the jumbled boxes that Willie has in the basement and, almost by magic, we were able to find it. I took it to make copies but — and I don’t know how — I lost it in the street. I spent hours running up and down, despairing, until I found it, intact, in a car park, where many wheels must have passed over it. I’ve asked myself many times if Paula, who was a very private person, would have liked to pass from hand to hand… I console myself with the idea that this book has opened a space in which its readers and I share our losses and grief as much as our hopes and memories. This mission to bring people together was something that Paula had taken on since she was very small, which is why it occurs to me that she would patiently accept the publicity as a lesser evil. This book has also helped me to keep my daughter alive and always present. Each time I have to sign a copy, she smiles at me from these pages.

Sometimes I have felt clearly that she is talking to me — for example through a letter from a reader, when she replies to a question at the right moment. For my birthday, Mothers’ Day or the 8th January, greetings come from strangers who sign in Paula’s name. A couple of weeks ago, emerging from the darkness of the New York subway, I found myself in the middle of the street, blinded by the light of bright spring reflected in the skyscrapers, and when I was able to focus my gaze, Paula was looking at me. There was an enormous photograph of her in the window of a bookshop. If it’s certain that death doesn’t exist and we only die when we are forgotten, then my daughter will live for a long time.

My life, like my books, is made of sorrow and love. Sorrow makes me learn and love makes me grow. Literature, for me, is an act of alchemy, the ability to transform the banalities of existence into glimpses of wisdom. Perhaps this is what the prodigious power of the written word consists of: it allows us to preserve memory, to transform suffering into strength, to be reborn each season, like old trees who make new leaves after every winter.

From Paula. Published by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd. Copyright © 1994 Isabel Allende. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.

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