The Sum of Our Days by Isabel Allende Read Free Book Online

War; she chose to leave the United States and travel with her son to different countries, where she made a living teaching English. In Barcelona, she studied jewelry-making and in the evenings strolled along the Ramblas to observe the Roma, from whom she drew inspiration for her Gypsy style. In Mexico, she was employed as an apprentice in a silversmith’s workshop, and in a very short time she was designing and making her own jewelry. That, and only that, would be her calling for the rest of her life. With the defeat of the Americans in Vietnam, she returned to her country, and the era of the hippies found her, along with other penniless artists, in the colorful streets of Berkeley selling silver earrings, necklaces, and bracelets. During that period she slept in her beat-up car and used the university bathrooms, but her talent made her stand out among the other artisans and soon she could leave the street behind, rent a workshop, and hire her first helpers. A few years later, when I met her, she had a model enterprise located in a true Ali Baba cave replete with precious stones and objets d’art. More than a hundred persons were working with her, nearly all Asian refugees, some of whom had suffered the unimaginable, as was evident in their horrible scars and downcast eyes. They seemed to be very sweet people, although beneath the surface they must have hidden a volcanic desperation. Two of them, on two separate occasions, crazed by jealousy, bought a machine gun—taking advantage of the shops in this country where one can buy a personal arsenal—and killed the entire families of their wives. Then they blew out their own brains. Tabra had to attend those massive funerals and later had to “clean” the workplace with the necessary ceremonies so that bloody ghosts would not haunt the imagination of those left alive.
    The face of Che Guevara, with his irresistible charisma and his black beret pulled low on his forehead, smiled from posters lining the workshop walls. During a trip my friend made to Cuba with Tangi, she went with the ex-chief of the Black Panthers to visit Che’s monument in Santa Clara. She brought with her the ashes of a friend whom she had loved for twenty years, without confiding it to anyone, and when they reached the top of the memorial, she scattered them on the wind. In that way she fulfilled his dream of traveling to that mythic country. My friend’s ideology is considerably to the left of Fidel Castro.
    â€œYou’re stuck in the mind-set of the ’70s,” I told her once.
    â€œAnd honored to be there,” was her reply.
    My beautiful friend’s love affairs are as original as her pythoness’s clothing, her fiery hair, and her political position. Years of therapy taught Tabra to avoid men who might turn violent, as her Samoan husband had. She swore that she would never let anyone beat her again; nevertheless, it excites her to teeter on the edge of the abyss. Only machos who look vaguely dangerous or threatening attract her, and she doesn’t like men of her own race. Tangi, who had turned into a tall and very handsome young man, did not want to hear a word about his mother’s sentimental difficulties. Some years Tabra had as many as a hundred and fifty blind dates arranged through the personal ads in newspapers, but very few went further than the first cup of coffee. Following that, she chose more modern means, and now she is enrolled with several Internet agencies specializing in different types: “Single Democrats,” with whom she at least has in common a hatred of Bush; “Amigos,” which lists only Latinos, whom Tabra favors, but has the drawback that most of those men need a visa and try to convert her to Catholicism; and “Single Greens,” who love Mother Earth but think that money isn’t important and so don’t work. She receives applications from very young studs with aspirations to be kept by a mature