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also came once a week, a nondescript woman, all skin and bones, with two or three little ones clinging to her skirts and a mountain of dirty clothes balanced on her head. Each piece was counted, so that nothing would be missing when it was returned clean and ironed. Every time I happened to witness the humiliating process of counting the shirts, napkins, and sheets, I ran to hide among the plush drapes of the drawing room, to be close to my grandmother. I didn’t know why I was crying. I know now; I was crying of shame. Memé’s spirit reigned in the drapes—I suppose that is why the old dog never moved from there. The servants, on the other hand, believed my grandmother roamed the cellar, the origin of mysterious sounds and faint lights, and so never went down there. I knew the source of those phenomena very well, but had my own reasons for not telling. I searched for my grandmother’s translucent face on the theatrical curtains of the drawing room; I wrote messages on scraps of paper, folded them with care, and pinned them onto the heavy cloth where she would find them and know I had not forgotten her.
    Memé left this world with great simplicity. No one took note of her preparations for her journey to the Beyond until the end, when it was too late to intervene. Aware that it requires supreme airiness to detach oneself from the earth, she lightened her load. She rid herself of earthly goods and eliminated all superfluous emotions and desires, keeping only the barest essentials. She wrote a few letters and then, as her last act, took to her bed, never to get up again. She lay dying for a week, attended by her husband, who used every medication within his power to prevent her from suffering, as her life drained away and a muted drum thudded in her chest. There was no time to inform anyone, yet her friends from the White Sisterhood received a telepathic message and came at the last instant to deliver messages for the benevolent souls that for years they had summoned to the Thursday sessions around the three-legged table. This marvelous woman left no physical trace of her presence other than a silver mirror, a prayer book with mother-of-pearl covers, and a fistful of wax orange blossoms, remnants of her bridal headdress. Neither did she leave me many memories, and those I have are surely deformed by a child’s view of that time and by the passing of years. None of that matters, though, because she has always been with me. When her asthma or anxiety made it hard for her to breathe, she hugged me close so my warmth would relieve her. That is the most vivid image I have of her: rice paper skin, gentle fingers, the wheezing, her affectionate hug, the scent of cologne, and an occasional hint of the almond lotion she rubbed on her hands. I heard people talk about her, and I hoard her few remaining relics in a tin box. All the rest I have invented, because we all need a grandmother. Not only has she played that role to perfection—despite the inconvenience of her death—but she also inspired the character I love most of all those in my books: Clara . . . clearest, clairvoyant Clara, of The House of the Spirits .
    My grandfather could not accept the loss of his wife. I believe they lived in irreconcilable worlds and at fleeting moments loved one another with a painful tenderness and secret passion. Tata had all the vitality of a practical man: he was healthy, enterprising, and loved sports. She was alien to this earth, ethereal and unreachable. Her husband had to satisfy himself with living beneath the same roof but in a different dimension, never really possessing her. Only on a few solemn occasions—such as the birth of their children, when he received them with his own hands, or when he held her in his arms as she was dying—did he have the sensation that she truly existed. He tried a thousand times to capture the airy spirit that flashed past him like a comet, leaving behind an enduring