Read Online The Sum of Our Days by Isabel Allende - Free Book Online

of your death, which you had written on your honeymoon. You were only twenty-seven years old at the time. Why were you already thinking of death? I wrote that memoir with many, many tears.
    â€œWhat’s the matter?” Andrea asked sympathetically in her quasi-language, scrutinizing me with her cyclopean eye.
    â€œNothing, I just miss Paula.”
    â€œAnd why is Nicole crying?” she persisted.
    â€œOh, because she doesn’t know any better,” was the only answer I could think of.
    Just as Alejandro had done before her, Andrea got it into her head that Paula was the only valid reason for crying. Since she could use only one eye at a time, she had no depth perception, everything was flat, and she gave herself some fearful bumps and bangs. She would get up off the floor streaming blood from her nose, with her eyeglasses all askew, and explain between sobs that she “missed” her Aunt Paula.
    W HEN I FINISHED WRITING Paula , I realized that I had traveled a tortuous road and reached the end cleansed and naked. Those pages contained your luminous life and the trajectory of our family. The terrible confusion of that year of torment had dissipated. It had become clear that my loss was not exceptional but that of millions of mothers: the most ancient and most common suffering of humankind. I sent off the manuscript to people I’d mentioned in it; I felt that they should have the right to revise what I’d written about them. There weren’t many because I’d left out several people who were close to you but that weren’t essential to the main story. After they’d read it, everyone wrote me immediately, moved and enthusiastic, except for my best friend in Venezuela, Ildemaro, who adored you and thought that you would not enjoy seeing yourself exposed in that way. I’d had that same doubt, because it is one thing to write as catharsis, to honor a daughter you have lost, but quite a different thing to share your grief publicly. “You may be called an exhibitionist, or accused of using your tragedy to make money, you know how unkind people can be,” my mother warned me; she was worried although she was convinced that the book should be published. To avoid any suspicion of the kind, I decided I would not touch a penny of the income from the book, if there was any; I would find an altruistic use for it, something that you would have approved of.
    Ernesto was living in New Jersey, where he was working in the same multinational company that had employed him in Spain. When we brought you to our home, he asked for a transfer in order to be near you, but there was no position available in California and he had to accept the one he was offered in New Jersey—at least it was closer than Madrid. When he received the manuscript of the book, he called me, crying. It had been a full year since he’d been widowed but he still couldn’t mention your name without breaking up. He encouraged me, using the charitable argument that you would like for the memoir to be published since it could console others who had losses and sorrow, but he added that he nearly hadn’t recognized you in those pages. I had narrated the story from my narrow point of view. As your mother, there were areas of your personality and life that I knew nothing about. Where was Paula the impulsive lover, the finicky and bossy wife, the unconditional friend, the caustic critic? “I’m going to do something that Paula would kill me for if she knew,” he told me, and three days later the mail brought me a large box containing the passionate love letters you two had exchanged for more than a year before you were married. It was an extraordinary gift that allowed me to know you better. With Ernesto’s permission, I was able to include in the book actual lines you had written.
    While I was polishing the final version of the book, Celia took complete charge of the office, wearing her blouse half