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were necessary, because if they put Sabrina in a hospice for babies she would die no matter what. Willie got into gear and I went home to tremble and await results.
    That night, very late, my husband returned bearing ten more years on his shoulders. I had never seen him so defeated, not even when he had to rescue Jennifer from a motel where she lay dying, cover her with his jacket, and take her to that hospital where she was received by the Filipino doctor. He told me that he had spoken with the judge, with the social worker, with the doctors, even with a psychiatrist, and that every one of them agreed that the baby’s health was too fragile. “We can’t take her on, Isabel. We don’t have the energy to care for her or the strength to bear it if she dies. I’m not able to do this,” he concluded, with his head in his hands.

A Gypsy at Heart
    W E HAD ONE OF THOSE FIGHTS that make history in a couple’s lives and that deserve to be named—like the “Arauco war,” which was what we in the family call a contest that kept my parents in battle mode for four months—but now, now that many years have gone by and I can look back on it, I concede that Willie was right. If there are enough pages, I will tell of other epic tourneys in which we have confronted each other, but I think that none was as violent as the battle over Sabrina; that one was a collision of personalities and cultures. I didn’t want to hear his arguments; I was locked in a mute rage against the legal system, the judge, the social worker, Americans in general, and Willie in particular. We both stayed away from home as much as we could: Willie worked at his office far into the night, and I packed a suitcase and went to stay with Tabra, who took me in without a fuss.
    Tabra and I had known each other for several years; she was the first friend I made when I arrived in California. One day when she went to the beauty salon to have her hair tinted the beet red she was using then, the stylist commented that a week earlier a new client had come in and asked for the same color. We were the only two in her long professional career. She had added that the woman was a Chilean who wrote books, and mentioned my name. Tabra had read The House of the Spirits , and she asked the stylist to let her know the next time I was coming to the salon; she wanted to meet me. That happened fairly quickly because I had tired of the color sooner than I’d expected; I looked like a drowned clown. Tabra appeared with my book to be signed and was surprised to see that I was wearing earrings she had made. We were destined to hit it off, as the stylist said.
    This woman who dressed in full Gypsy skirts, arms covered from wrist to elbow with silver bracelets, hair an impossible color, served as my model for the character Tamar in The Infinite Plan. I based Tamar on Carmen, a childhood friend of Willie’s, and on Tabra, from whom I stole a personality and partial biography. Since Carmen inherited an impeccable moral rectitude from her father, she uses every opportunity to clarify that she never slept with Willie, a disclaimer that’s entirely unnecessary except for people who have read my novel. Tabra’s home—one story, wood, with high ceilings and large windows—was a museum for extraordinary objects from many corners of the planet, each with its own history: gourds used as penis shields from New Guinea, hairy masks from Indonesia, ferocious sculptures from Africa, dream paintings from the Australian aborigines. The property, which she shared with deer, raccoons, foxes, and the entire array of California birds, consisted of sixty acres of wild beauty. Silence, moisture, woodsy smells, a paradise obtained by dint of hard work and talent.
    Tabra grew up in the bosom of southern fundamentalism. The Church of Christ was the one truth. Methodists did whatever they pleased, Baptists were damned because they had a piano in the church,