Paula by Isabel Allende Page A

forever, and I never saw the ears again. Tío Ramón flew directly to Paris, and from there to Lebanon, while my brothers and mother and I made the long descent by train to a port in the north of Chile; from there we took an Italian steamer to Genoa, then a bus to Rome, and from there we flew to Beirut. It was a journey of two months, and I believe it was a miracle my mother survived. We traveled in the last car of the train, in the company of an enigmatic Indian who never spoke a single word and spent the entire trip kneeling on the floor beside a small stove, chewing his coca, scratching his lice, and gripping an archaic rifle. Day and night his small, oblique eyes watched us, his expression impenetrable. We never saw him sleep. My mother was sure that at some unguarded moment he would murder us, even though she had been assured he had been hired to protect us. As the train moved slowly across the desert, inching past dunes and salt mines, my brothers often jumped down and ran alongside. To upset my mother, they would fall behind, feigning exhaustion, and then yell for help because the train was leaving them behind. On the ship, Pancho caught his fingers so often in the heavy metal hatches that finally no one would respond to his howls, and Juan caused an uproar one day by disappearing for several hours. While playing hide-and-seek, he had fallen asleep in an unoccupied stateroom; he wasn’t found until a blast from the ship’s whistle waked him, just as the captain was prepared to back down the engines and lower lifeboats to search for him; in the meantime, two brawny petty officers were forcibly restraining my mother to prevent her from diving into the Atlantic. I fell in love with all the sailors with a passion nearly as violent as that inspired by my young Bolivian, but I suspect they had eyes only for my mother. Although those slender young Italians stirred my imagination, even they could not cure me of my shameful vice of playing with dolls. Locked tight in my stateroom, I rocked them, bathed them, gave them their bottles, and sang in a low voice—in order to hear anyone coming—while my fiendish brothers threatened to take my dolls up on the deck and expose them to the crew. However, when we disembarked in Genoa, both Pancho and Juan, loyal under fire, were carrying a suspicious, towel-wrapped bundle under one arm while I hung behind, sighing, to bid the sailors of my dreams goodbye.
    We lived in Lebanon for three surreal years, which allowed me to learn some French and to travel to most of the surrounding countries—including the Holy Land and Israel, which in the decade of the fifties, as now, existed in a permanent state of war with the Arabs. Crossing the border by car, as we did more than once, was a sobering experience. We lived in a large, ugly, modern apartment. From the terrace, we could look down on a market and the Guard Headquarters that played important roles later when the violence began. Tío Ramón set aside one room for the consulate, and hung the shield and flag of Chile on the front of the building. None of my new friends had ever heard of that country; they thought I came from China. In general, in that time and in that part of the world, girls were confined to house and school until the day of their marriage—if they had the misfortune to marry—the moment at which they exchanged a paternal prison for a conjugal one. I was shy, and kept very much to myself. Elvis Presley was already fat before I ever saw him in a film. Our family life was not smooth; my mother did not adapt well to the Arab culture, the hot climate, or Tío Ramón’s authoritarianism; she suffered headaches, allergies, and sudden hallucinations. Once we packed our suitcases to return to my grandfather’s house in Santiago because she swore that an Orthodox priest in full liturgical vestments was spying on her bath through a transom. My stepfather missed his own children but had