Paula by Isabel Allende Read Free Book Online Page B

tried every way she could to come between us. When my mother came home from the bank in the evening, we would already be bathed, fed, and put to bed. “Don’t get the children all stirred up,” she would grumble, and to us she would say, “Don’t bother your Mama, she has a headache.” My mother clung to her children with all the force of her loneliness, and tried to compensate for her absence and the poverty of our lives with flights of imagination. All three of us slept in the same room with her, and at night, the only time we were together, she told us stories about our ancestors and fantastic tales spiced with black humor. She made up an imaginary world where we were all happy and human vices and the merciless laws of nature were forbidden. Those conversations in low voices, all in the same room, each of us in our own bed but so close we could touch, were the best part of those years. That was where my passion for stories was born, and I call upon those memories when I sit down to write.
    Pancho, the least cowed by our uncles’ “Ruffin,” was a blond little boy, sturdy and calm, but if he lost patience he could turn into a tiny beast with a savage bite. Margara adored him and called him her King; he was lost when she was out of the house. As an adolescent he left home to join a strange sect that lived in the desert region of northern Chile. We heard rumors that they tripped to other worlds on hallucinogenic mushrooms, indulged in unspeakable orgies, and brainwashed the young to make them slaves of the leaders. I never learned the truth, because no one who lived through that experience ever spoke of it—but they were marked by it. My brother renounced his family, cut all emotional ties, and hid behind a shell that nevertheless failed to protect him from pain and insecurity. Eventually, he twice married and divorced two wives, had children, and has lived nearly all his adult life outside Chile. I doubt that he will ever return. There is not much I can say about him because I don’t know him. Like my father, he is a mystery to me.
    Juan was born with the rare gift of likableness. Even now, a solemn professor in the mature years of his life, people immediately are attracted to him. When he was little, he looked like an angel, with dimpled cheeks and a helpless air capable of melting the hardest heart. Small, but prudent and astute, his many illnesses hampered his growth and condemned him to eternal poor health. We thought of him as the intellectual of the family, a true genius. At five, he could recite long poems and instantly calculate how much change we should get from a peso if we bought three caramels at eight cents apiece. He earned two master’s degrees and a doctorate from North American universities, and currently is working toward a degree in theology. He was a professor of political science, an agnostic and a Marxist, but after experiencing a spiritual crisis he decided to seek the answer to humanity’s problems in God. He abandoned his teaching position and began divinity studies. Because he is married, he can never become a Catholic priest, a choice he would have preferred because of family tradition, so he opted to become a Methodist—to the initial discomfort of my mother, who knew very little about that church and could picture the genius of the family reduced to singing hymns in a public square while accompanying himself on the guitar. Such sudden conversions are not rare among my mother’s people; I have many mystical relatives. I cannot imagine my brother preaching from a pulpit, because no one would understand his learned sermons—especially in English—but he will be an outstanding professor of theology. When he learned that you were ill, he dropped everything, caught the first plane, and came to Madrid to give me support. “We must have hope that Paula will get well,” he keeps telling me.
    Will you get well, Paula? I look at you