A mother, a daughter, a story

THIS WEEK’S WINNER

MANILA, Philippines - Nanette N. Tabuac is a CPA. She finished her MBA at DLSU Manila. She is currently connected with Miriam College. She describes herself as “a writer wannabe and a book lover, and a certified Journey and Harry Potter fan.” Her favorite authors include Marian Keyes, Jhumpa Lahiri, Frank McCourt, and John Grisham. Her ardent wish right now is to write and publish her own book.

Listen Paula. I am going to tell you a story, so that when you wake up you will not feel so lost.       — Isabel Allende

I’d had this book, Paula, for more than a year on my shelf. I do not know what took me so long to read it, but I am glad I did. Paula is the daughter of bestseller Chilean writer Isabel Allende, world-renowned for her narrative craft and gripping stories that blend the mythical and the personal. She was born in Peru in 1942 and has traveled the world. Her father was Chile’s ambassador to Peru; her uncle, Salvador Allende, was the president of Chile from 1970 to 1973.   

Written in the form of a letter to Paula, the book is a memoir of Allende’s childhood in Chile and her family. It also contains her brilliant account of Chile’s bloody coup d’état, which led to the death of then President Salvador Allende, tracks her years in exile in Venezuela and ends with Paula’s death. 

Paula had a rare genetic disease called porphyria, which runs in her father’s family; she was hospitalized in Madrid, Spain and had a crisis. According to Allende, the hospital was on strike and the doctors gave Paula the wrong medication, and as a result, she fell into coma. She had severe brain damage and was in a vegetative state. Paula stayed in the hospital in Madrid until she was brought by Allende to her home in California where she died.

Paula is a remarkable, soul-baring memoir, fusing Allende’s past and present, humor and grief. It is finely calibrated, emotionally dynamic. I laughed out loud and cried into my SM Bonus tissues reading it. I couldn’t put it down. I loved every single word of Allende’s book.  It’s one of the best memoirs I’ve read so far, along with Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes and Russell Baker’s Growing Up.

 “You have been sleeping for a month now. I don’t know how to reach you; I call and call but your name is lost in the nooks and crannies of this hospital. My soul is choking in sand. Sadness is a sterile desert.”

Reading Paula became an act of intimacy. I didn’t know that somebody could write this way. It is so open, so close to the bone, so conversational.   Allende is not just telling her story to Paula, she is telling her story to her readers as if she were talking to someone she’d always known, as if she could tell a secret publicly and it would remain a secret privately. In her book, she writes about things that people normally keep secret and do not reveal to their children: her childhood trauma of being molested, her extra-marital affairs, and her longings to make love in spite of Paula being in coma. There are a couple of women writers I know who have written about being molested or abused but turned out okay afterward: Maya Angelou, who penned her life (and her abuse) in vivid detail in her book I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and Barbara Kingsolver in her book of essays Small Wonder. 

The plain nakedness and integrity of Allende’s writing won me over. I felt her pain and sadness on every page; her love for Paula is almost tangible. The quality of her prose never falters from the spectacular start to the very end. Her every sentence is delivered with an emotional punch that left me reeling, and I had to stop reading to catch my breath and reflect. 

I read somewhere that reading enlarges our sympathy for others. Reading Paula has awakened and widened my empathies like never before. To me, Allende’s plight of losing a loved one seemed too familiar. When you lose someone you love, the loss is permanent, indelible and it becomes the central issue of existence not just for mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters, but for sons and daughters as well.

I could relate because my mother died when I was 11. 

My mother had given up teaching and opted to become a housewife. When my siblings and I were kids, our mother used to tell us stories about Jose Rizal: his life, his heroism, and his fable “The Monkey and the Turtle.” Through this fable, she taught us not to cheat and not to enrich ourselves at other people’s expense — unlike the monkey in the story. She also delighted us and sharpened our minds with her endless supply of bugtongs (riddles).

My mother taught me how to read and write, and at age six she sent me to first grade. My teachers were in awe because I was the only kid in my class who could write in longhand while the others were struggling with their ABCs. My mother was my consummate teacher. She had trained me in advance and yet when my adviser proposed that I’d be accelerated from Grade 3 to Grade 5, my mother vetoed the idea. She said she didn’t want me to be emotionally and intellectually stressed out because I’d be pitted against kids older than me and I’d be relegated to being an “average” student.

I admired (and still do) my mother’s brutal candidness. She treated me like an adult. The last time I saw her alive was in a hospital bed. Her body was connected to several tubes and apparatus. She was barely there, barely physical.

 “Nanette, mamamatay na ako,” she said without preamble, her every word punctuated with labored breaths. Nanette, I am dying.

“’Nay, huwag mong sabihin yan,” I pleaded. Mother, please don’t say that.

“Ikaw ang panganay; huwag mong pababayaan ang mga kapatid mo. Huwag kayong maghiwa-hiwalay. Mamamatay na ako,” she told me earnestly and repeatedly, as if chanting a very important prayer. You’re the eldest; take care of your little brother and sister. Keep the family together. I am dying.

I was still positively howling when a relative brought me out of the room to be pacified and comforted.

Days after my mother died, I found solace in her wardrobe. I liked to hug her clothes and pretend they smelled like my mother though they actually smelled more like naphthalene balls. I held them tightly as if clinging for my dear life because I was drowning in my unshed tears, and I prayed for reprieve from the wrenching pain of missing her so much. 

At the end of Paula, Allende has come to terms with the death of her daughter. She reveals that her sadness never went away, but she has learned to live with it. “It’s a sort of a sediment in the bottom of my heart — a very fertile soil — everything grows there.”  

Godspeed, Paula, woman.

Welcome, Paula, spirit.

I feel for Allende because losing my mother at 11 felt as if my heart, a slack muscle, had just delivered an outsized grief and it never quite snapped back. Through the years it stubbornly holds this unpleasant limpness, if not sorrow itself, then the soft shape of it. Yet, I have learned to survive with this badly broken heart that doesn’t seal back up.

Like Allende who wrote the book for her daughter, Paula, I am writing this piece for my mother, Perla.