The Sum of Our Days by Isabel Allende Page B

thing that quieted her for a few minutes. Ligia had left five children in her country and had come to work in the United States and support them from afar. It had been several years since she’d seen them and she had no hope of rejoining them anytime soon. For months and months those good women installed themselves and the baby in a rocker in my office, as Celia and I worked. I was afraid that from all that cradling and rocking my granddaughter’s brain might be loosened from her skull and leave her impaired. Nicole calmed down the minute they began to give her powdered milk and soup. I think the cause for her despair was pure hunger.
    In the meantime, Andrea was compulsively arranging her toys and talking to herself. When she got bored, she picked up her revolting tuto , announced that she was leaving for Venezuela, crawled into a cabinet, and closed the door after her. We had to bore a hole in that piece of furniture to provide a ray of light and breath of air, since my granddaughter could spend half a day without a word, locked in a space the size of a chicken coop. After Andrea’s operation for strabismus, she had to wear glasses and a black patch that was changed every week from one eye to the other. So she wouldn’t pull the glasses off, Nico dreamed up a contrivance made of six elastic bands and that many safety pins that crisscrossed over the top of her head. Some of the time Andrea tolerated it, but other times she flew into fits of exasperation and yanked the elastic bands until she managed to pull the whole thing down to diaper level. Incidentally, for a short while we had three children in diapers, and that is a lot of diapers. We bought them wholesale, and the most convenient system of changing the three was all at one time, whether they needed it or not. Celia or Nico would line up the opened-out diapers on the floor, lay the children on them, and wipe bottoms in a row, like an assembly line. They were able to do it with one hand while they talked on the telephone with the other, but I lacked their skill and always ended up plastered to my ears. The children were fed and bathed using the same one-two-three method. Nico got into the shower with them, soaped them, washed their hair, rinsed them off, and handed them out one by one for Celia to towel dry.
    â€œYou are a very good mother, Nico,” I told him one day with sincere admiration.
    â€œNo, Mamá, I’m a good father,” he replied, but I had never seen a father like him, and to this day I can’t explain how he learned those skills.
    At that time I was putting the final touches on my book Paula , struggling over the last pages, which were very painful for me. The memoir ended with your death, there was no other way it could end, but I was hazy on the details of that long night, it was swathed in a dense fog. I thought the room had been filled with people, and that I remembered seeing Ernesto in his Aikido whites, my parents, Granny, the grandmother who loved you so much, dead in Chile many years before, and others who could not possibly have been there.
    â€œYou were very tired, Mamá, and very sad. You can’t remember the details,” Nico excused me. “I don’t remember them myself.”
    â€œWhat do those details matter? Write with your heart,” Willie added. “You saw what we couldn’t see. Maybe it’s true that the room was filled with spirits.”
    I often opened the clay urn in which they had handed us your ashes. It is always on my writing table, the same table where my grandmother conducted her spiritist sessions. Sometimes I took out some letters and photographs of you before your illness, but I left those from your last year, when you were tied to your wheelchair, inert. I have never touched those again, Paula. Still today, so many years later, I can’t look at you in that state. I read the letters, especially that spiritual will with instructions to be followed in case