Paula Read Online Free PDF

father in Chile?” I asked. “It will take him more than twenty hours to get here.”
    â€œYes.”
    People began to come by: Ernesto’s relatives, and friends and nuns from your school. Someone notified the members of the family scattered through Chile, Venezuela, and the United States. Shortly afterward, your husband arrived, calm and gentle, more concerned about others’ feelings than his own, but he looked very fatigued. They allowed him to see you for a few minutes, and when he came back he informed us that you were hooked up to a respirator and being given a blood transfusion. “It isn’t as bad as they say,” he told us. “I feel Paula’s strong heart beating close to mine,” a phrase that at the moment seemed to have little meaning but now that I know him I can better understand. We spent that day and the next night in the waiting room. At times I drifted into an exhausted sleep, but when I opened my eyes I found Ernesto always in the same position, unmoving, waiting.
    â€œI’m terrified, Ernesto,” I admitted toward dawn.
    â€œThere’s nothing we can do. Paula is in God’s hands.”
    â€œYou find that easier to accept than I do, because at least you have your faith.”
    â€œIt’s as painful to me as to you, but I have less fear of death and more hope for life,” he replied, putting his arms around me. I buried my face in his jacket, breathing his young male scent, racked by an atavistic fear.
    As it grew light, my mother and Michael arrived from Chile, along with Willie, from California. Your father was very pale. He had boarded the airplane in Santiago convinced that he would find you dead. The flight must have seemed an eternity. Devastated, I hugged my mother, and realized that although she may have shrunken with the years, she still radiates an aura of protection. Beside her, Willie is a giant, yet when I wanted a chest to lay my head upon, my mother’s seemed more ample and comforting than his. We went into the intensive care room and found you conscious, and improved over the previous day. The doctors had begun to replace the sodium in your body—which you were losing in alarming amounts—and the transfusion had revived you. That illusion, however, lasted only a few hours; soon afterward, you became very agitated, and with the massive dose of sedatives they used to treat it you descended into the deep coma from which you have not awakened to this day.
    â€œYour poor daughter, she doesn’t deserve this. I’m old, why can’t I die in her place?” don Manuel wonders from time to time, his voice barely audible.
    It is so difficult to write these pages, Paula, to retrace the steps of this painful journey, verify details, imagine how things might have been if you had fallen into more capable hands, if they had not immobilized you with drugs, if . . . , if . . . . How can I shake this guilt? When you mentioned the porphyria I thought you were exaggerating and, instead of seeking further help, I trusted those people in white; I handed over my daughter without hesitation. It isn’t possible to go back in time. I must not keep looking back, yet I can’t stop doing it, it’s an obsession. Nothing exists but the unremitting certainty of this hospital; the rest of my life is veiled in heavy mist.
    Willie, who after a few days had to return to his work in California, calls every morning and every night to offer support, to remind me that we love each other and have a happy life on the other side of the ocean. His voice comes to me from very far away, as if I had dreamed him and there was no wood house high above San Francisco Bay, no ardent lover now a distant husband. It also seems I have dreamed my son Nicolás, my daughter-in-law Celia, and little Alejandro with his giraffe eyelashes. Carmen, my agent, comes from time to time with sympathies from my editors or news about my books, but