Paula by Isabel Allende Page B

little contact with them; communications with Chile could be delayed for months, contributing to the feeling that we lived at the end of the world. Finances were extremely tight; money was laboriously stretched out in weekly accountings, and then, if anything was left over, we went to the movies or to an indoor ice-skating rink, the only luxuries we could allow ourselves. We lived decently, but on a level different from that of other members of the diplomatic corps or the social circle we frequented, for whom private clubs, winter sports, the theater, and vacations in Switzerland were the norm. My mother made herself a long silk dress for gala receptions; she transformed it in miraculous ways with a brocade train, lace sleeves, or velvet bow at the waist. I suspect that people focused on her face, however, not her clothes. She became expert in the supreme art of keeping up appearances; she prepared inexpensive dishes, disguised them with sophisticated sauces of her own invention, and served them on her famous silver trays; she made the living room and dining room elegant with paintings from my grandfather’s house and tapestries bought on credit on the docks of Beirut, but everything else was at best modest. Tío Ramón’s unbending optimism never flagged. With all the problems my mother had, I have often wondered what kept them together during that time, and the only answer that comes to me is, the tenacity of a passion born of distance, nourished with love letters, and fortified by a veritable Everest of obstacles. They are very different, and it is not unusual for them to argue to the point of exhaustion. Some of their battles were of such magnitude that they were dubbed with a name of their own and given a place in the family archive of anecdotes. I admit that I did nothing to facilitate their living together; when I realized that my stepfather had arrived in our lives to stay, I declared all-out war. Today it shames me to recall all the times I plotted horrible ways to kill him. His role was not easy; I cannot imagine how he was able to rear the three Allende children who fell into his lap. We never called him Papa, because that word brought back bad memories, but he earned his avuncular title, Tío Ramón, as a symbol of admiration and confidence. Today, at seventy-five, hundreds of persons scattered across five continents—including no few government officials and members of Chile’s diplomatic corps—call him Tío Ramón for the same reason.
    In at attempt to provide continuity to my education, I was sent to an English school for girls whose objective was to build character through trials of rigor and discipline—none of which much impressed me because it was not for nothing I had emerged unscathed from my uncles’ famous Ruffin games. The goal of that teaching was for all students to memorize the Bible. “Deuteronomy, chapter five, verse three,” Miss St. John would intone, and we had to recite it without stopping to think. In this way, I learned a little English, and also perfected to absurdity the stoic sense of life already implanted by my grandfather in the big old house with swirling currents of air. Both the English language and stoicism in the face of adversity have been beneficial; most of what other skills I possess Tío Ramón taught me by example and a methodology that modern psychology would consider brutal. He acted as consul general for several Arab countries, using Beirut as his base, a magnificent city that was considered the Paris of the Middle East: traffic was tied up by camels and sheikhs’ Cadillacs with gold bumpers, and Muslim women, draped in black with only a peephole for their eyes, shopped in the souks elbow to elbow with scantily clad foreigners. On Saturdays, some of the housewives in the North American colony liked to wash their cars wearing shorts and bare midriff tops. Those Arab men who rarely saw women without veils came from