Read Online Paula by Isabel Allende - Free Book Online Page B

were never again heard along those shores. At ten in the morning, uniformed nannies would begin to arrive with children in tow. They settled down to knit, watching their charges out of the corner of their eyes, always from the same identical spot on the beach. The oldest families, who owned the grand houses, positioned themselves beneath tents and umbrellas in the precise center; to the left were the newly rich, the tourists, and the middle class who rented the houses on the hills; and at the extreme right were the day-trip hoi polloi who came down from Santiago in rattletrap buses. In a bathing suit, everyone looks more or less equal; every person, nevertheless, immediately recognized his God-given place. In Chile, the upper class tends to have a European appearance; as you descend the social and economic scale, indigenous features become more pronounced. Class consciousness is so strong that I never saw one person violate the defining boundaries. At noon the mothers would arrive, carrying large straw hats and bottles of the carrot juice they used for rapid tanning. About two, when the sun was at its zenith, everyone retired for lunch and a siesta. Soon after, the teenagers appeared, essaying an air of boredom; ripening girls and world-weary young males who lay in the sand to smoke and rub against each other until excitement obliged them to seek relief in the sea. Every Friday night, the husbands arrived from Santiago, and Saturday and Sunday the character of the beach changed. Mothers sent their children on walks with nannies and gathered in groups in their best swimsuits and straw hats, competing for the attention of each other’s spouses, a pointless endeavor, really, since the men scarcely glanced at them; they were much more interested in talking politics—the only topic in Chile—and counting the minutes before they could go back to the house to eat and drink like Cossacks. My mother, seated like an empress at the center of the center of the beach, took the sun in the mornings and in the late afternoons went to the casino, where she had discovered a system that allowed her to win enough daily to pay her expenses. To prevent our being dragged out to sea and drowning, Margara tied us to her with ropes she kept wound around her waist while she continued to knit endless sweaters for the winter. When she felt a tug, she would look up briefly to see who was in difficulty and then haul the victim back to safety. We suffered that humiliation every single day, but we forgot the other children’s teasing as soon as we jumped into the water. We played until we were blue with cold; we collected conchs and other seashells; we ate sand-sprinkled cakes and half-melted lemon ices sold by a deaf-mute from a little cart filled with salted ice. Every evening, my mother took my hand and walked with me to the rocks to watch the sunset. We waited to make a wish on the last ray, which sparks green fire at the precise instant the sun sinks below the horizon. I always wished for my mother not to find a husband, and I suppose that she wished exactly the opposite. She would tell me about Ramón, whom, influenced by her description, I imagined as an enchanted prince whose principal virtue consisted of distance. Tata left us at the beach at the beginning of summer and returned almost immediately to Santiago. It was the one time he could enjoy a little peace; he liked the empty house, and playing golf and cards at the Union Club. If he appeared some weekend, it was not to indulge in relaxation but to test his strength, swimming for hours in the strong, ice-cold waves, fishing, or making badly needed repairs on a house eternally deteriorating from dampness. He sometimes took us to a place that had milk fresh from the cow, a dark, stinking shed, where a peasant with filthy fingernails squirted milk directly into tin cups. We drank the warm, creamy liquid, along with occasional flies floating in the foam. My grandfather, who did not