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

warned us. Celia kept quietly vomiting behind our backs.

A Peculiar Daughter-in-Law
    L ET ME GO BACK FIVE YEARS and remind you how your sister-in-law appeared in our lives. In 1988 I was living with Willie in California, you were studying in Virginia, and Nico, alone in Caracas, was finishing his last year at the university. He had announced during a telephone call that he was in love with one of his classmates and wanted to bring her to meet us, his feelings for her were serious. I asked straight out whether he wanted me to ready one room or two, and he answered, rather ironically, that from the point of view of the Opus Dei sleeping with a boyfriend would be unpardonable. Celia’s parents were outraged by the sin of their traveling together without being married, even though she was twenty-five years old, and worse, that she was going to the home of a divorced Chilean atheist, Communist, and author of books banned by the church: me. That’s all we need, I thought. Two rooms, for the present. Two of Willie’s sons were living with us and my mother decided to come from Chile at just that time, so I improvised an army recruit’s sleeping bag for Nico in the kitchen. My mother and I went to the airport to pick them up. We saw your brother, looking like the same clumsy adolescent, in the company of a person striding along with strong steps and carrying a bundle on her back that from a distance looked like a weapon, but turned out to be a guitar case. I suppose it was to annoy her mother, who had been a queen in some Caribbean beauty contest, that Celia walked like John Wayne, dressed in shapeless olive drab pants, mountain climbing boots, and a baseball cap pulled down over one eye. You had to look twice to discover how pretty she was; she had fine features, expressive eyes, elegant hands, broad hips, and an intensity in her gaze that was difficult to look away from. The young woman my son had fallen for came toward us defiantly, as if saying, “If you like me, fine, and if not, well, fuck you.” She seemed so different from Nico that I was sure she was pregnant and they were planning a hasty wedding, but that turned out not to be true. It may have been that Celia just needed to get away from her surroundings for a while, and that feeling as if she were in a straitjacket, she had grabbed onto my son with the desperation of a person drowning.
    When we got to the house, your brother announced that the sleeping bag in the kitchen would not be necessary because things had changed between them, so I put them in the same room. My mother took me by one arm and dragged me into the bathroom.
    â€œIf your son chose this girl, there’s a good reason; your role is to love her and keep your mouth shut.”
    â€œBut she smokes a pipe, Mamá!”
    â€œIt would be worse if she smoked opium.”
    It was easy for me to love Celia, even though I was a little shocked by her bold frankness and brusque ways—we Chileans tiptoe around a subject as if we were walking on eggs—and in less than half an hour she had expounded her ideas on inferior races, leftists, atheists, artists, and homosexuals, all of whom were depraved. She asked me please to let her know when anyone in any of those categories was coming to visit, she would prefer not to be present. That night, however, Celia kept us laughing with off-color jokes we hadn’t heard since the easy-going days in Venezuela, where happily the concept of “politically correct” does not exist and you can make jokes on any subject you choose, and then took her guitar from its case and sang to us in an engaging voice the best songs in her repertoire. We were captivated.
    S HORTLY AFTER , Celia and Nico were married in Caracas, in a long, drawn-out ceremony during which you threw up in the bathroom—I think out of jealousy because you were losing exclusive rights to your brother—and from which my family took early leave as it seemed that