Maya’s Notebook. Isabel AllendeЧитать онлайн книгу.
more than once she took charge of getting groceries, when no one in the family had the energy.
Mike O’Kelly visited us too. He arrived in his electric wheelchair, which he drove like a race car, often accompanied by a couple of his redeemed gang members, who he’d order to take out the garbage, vacuum, sweep the patio, and carry out other domestic tasks while he drank tea with my Nini in the kitchen. They’d been distant for a few months after fighting at a demonstration over abortion, which O’Kelly, an obedient Catholic, rejected, but my grandfather’s illness reconciled them. Although sometimes the two of them are at opposite ideological extremes, they can’t stay angry, because they love each other too much and have so much in common.
If my Popo was awake, Snow White would chat a while with him. They’d never developed a true friendship; I think they were each a bit jealous of the other. Once I heard O’Kelly talking about God to my Popo, and I felt obliged to warn him he was wasting his time, because my grandfather was an agnostic. “Are you sure, little one? Paul has spent his life observing the sky through a telescope. How could he not have caught a glimpse of God?” he answered me, but he didn’t try to save my grandfather’s soul against his will. When the doctor prescribed morphine and Carolyn let us know we’d have as much as we needed, because the patient had a right to die without pain and with dignity, O’Kelly abstained from warning us against euthanasia.
The inevitable moment arrived when my Popo ran out of strength and we had to call a halt to the procession of students and friends who kept coming to visit. He’d always been a bit of a dandy, and in spite of his weakness he worried about his appearance, although we were the only ones who saw him now. He asked us to keep him clean, shaven, and the room well ventilated; he was afraid of offending us with the miseries of his illness. His eyes were cloudy and sunken, his hands like a bird’s claws, his lips covered in sores, his skin bruised and hanging off his bones; my grandfather was the skeleton of a burned tree, but he could still listen to music and remember. “Open the window to let the joy in,” he’d ask us. Sometimes he was so far gone his voice was barely audible, but there were better moments, when we’d raise the back of the bed so he could sit up and talk with us. He wanted to pass his experiences and wisdom on to me before he left. He never lost his lucidity.
“Are you scared, Popo?” I asked him.
“No, but I’m sorry, Maya. I would have liked to live another twenty years with you two,” he answered.
“What will there be on the other side, Popo? Do you believe there’s life after death?”
“It’s a possibility, but it hasn’t been proven.”
“The existence of your planet hasn’t been proven either, and you sure believe in that,” I countered, and he laughed with satisfaction.
“You’re right, Maya. It’s absurd only to believe in what can be proven.”
“Remember when you took me to the observatory to see a comet, Popo? That night I saw God. There was no moon, the sky was black and full of diamonds, and when I looked through the telescope I clearly distinguished the comet’s tail.”
“Dry ice, ammonia, methane, iron, magnesium, and—”
“It was a bridal veil and behind it was God,” I assured him.
“What did he look like?” he asked me.
“Like a luminous spiderweb, Popo. The threads of that web connect everything that exists. I can’t explain it to you. When you die, you’re going to travel like that comet, and I’ll be right behind, attached to your tail.”
“We’ll be astral dust.”
“Ay, Popo!”
“Don’t cry, little one, because you’ll make me cry too, and then your Nini will start to cry and we’ll never be able to console each other.”
In his last days he could only swallow little spoonfuls of yogurt and sips of water. He barely spoke, but he didn’t complain either; he spent the hours floating in a half-sleep of morphine, clinging to his wife’s hand or to mine. I doubt he knew where he was, but he knew we loved him. My Nini kept telling him stories until the end, when he couldn’t understand them anymore, but the cadence of her voice soothed him. She told him about two lovers who were reincarnated in different times, had adventures, died, and met each other again in other lives, always together.
I murmured prayers I’d invented myself in the kitchen, in the bathtub, in the tower, in the garden, anywhere I could hide away, and I begged Mike O’Kelly’s God to take pity on us, but he remained remote and silent. I got covered in rashes, my hair fell out in clumps, and I bit my nails till my fingers bled; my Nini wrapped my fingertips with adhesive tape and forced me to wear gloves to bed. I couldn’t imagine life without my grandpa, but I couldn’t stand his slow agony either and ended up praying he would die soon and stop suffering. If he had asked me to, I would have given him more morphine to help him die. It would have been very easy, but he never asked.
I slept fully dressed on the living room sofa, with one eye open, watching, and so I knew before anyone else when our time had come to say good-bye. I ran to wake up my Nini, who’d taken a sleeping pill to try to get a bit of rest, and I phoned my dad and Susan, who were there ten minutes later.
My grandmother, in her nightie, climbed into her husband’s bed and laid her head on his chest, the way they’d always slept. Standing on the other side of my Popo’s bed, I leaned against his chest too, which used to be strong and wide and big enough for both of us, but now was barely moving. My Popo’s breathing had become imperceptible, and for a few very long instants it seemed to have stopped completely, but he suddenly opened his eyes, swept his gaze over my dad and Susan, who stood near the bed crying silently, lifted his big hand with effort, and laid it on my head. “When I find the planet, I’ll name it after you, Maya,” was the last thing he said.
In the three years that have passed since the death of my grandfather, I’ve very rarely talked about him. This caused me quite a few problems with the psychologists in Oregon, who tried to force me to “resolve my grief” or some similar trite platitude. There are people like that, people who think all grief is the same and that there are formulas and stages to overcoming it. My Nini’s stoic philosophy is more suitable: “Since we’re going to suffer, let’s clench our teeth,” she said. Pain like that, pain of the soul, does not go away with remedies, therapy, or vacations; you simply endure it deep down, fully, as you should. I would have done well to follow my Nini’s example, instead of denying that I was suffering and stifling the howl that was stuck in my chest. Later, in Oregon, they prescribed antidepressants, which I didn’t take, because they made me stupid. They watched me, but I was able to trick them by hiding chewing gum in my mouth, where I stuck the pill with my tongue and minutes later spit it out intact. My sadness kept me company; I didn’t want to be cured of it as if it were a cold. I didn’t want to share my memories with those well-intentioned therapists either, because anything I might tell them about my grandfather would sound banal. However, on this island in Chiloé, not a day goes by when I don’t tell Manuel Arias some anecdote about my Popo. My Popo and this man are very different, but they both have a certain giant-tree quality about them, and I feel protected by them.
I just had a rare moment of communion with Manuel, like the kind I used to have with my Popo. I found him watching the sunset from the big front window, and I asked him what he was doing.
“Breathing.”
“I’m breathing too. That’s not what I was referring to.”
“Until you interrupted me, Maya, I was breathing, nothing more. You should see how difficult it is to breathe without thinking.”
“That’s called meditation. My Nini meditates all the time, says she can feel my Popo at her side that way.”
“And do you feel