Isabel Allende - Mayas Notebook: A Novel

The House of the Spirits

Of Love and Shadows

Eva Luna

The Stories of Eva Luna

The Infinite Plan

Paula

Aphrodite: A Memoir of the Senses

Daughter of Fortune

Portrait in Sepia

My Invented Country

Zorro

Ines of My Soul

The Sum of Our Days

Island Beneath the Sea

THE JAGUAR AND EAGLE TRILOGY

City of the Beasts

Kingdom of the Golden Dragon

Forest of the Pygmies

MAYAS NOTEBOOK. Copyright 2013 by Isabel Allende. English-language translation copyright 2013 Isabel Allende. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

Originally published in Spanish as El Cuaderno de Maya in Spain in 2011 by Random House Mondadori.

FIRST EDITION

ISBN: 978-0-06-210562-2 (Hardcover)

EPub Edition MAY 2013 ISBN 9780062105646

13 14 15 16 17 OV/RRD 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For the teenagers of my tribe:

Alejandro, Andrea, Nicole, Sabrina, Aristotelis, and Achilleas

Tell me, what else should I have done?

Doesnt everything die at last, and too soon?

Tell me, what is it you plan to do

with your one wild and precious life?

M ARY O LIVER , The Summer Day

Cover design by Richard Ljoenes

Front cover photograph Rekha Garton/Getty Images

January, February, March

A week ago my grandmother gave me a dry-eyed hug at the San Francisco airport and told me again that if I valued my life at all, I should not get in touch with anyone I knew until we could be sure my enemies were no longer looking for me. My Nini is paranoid, as the residents of the Peoples Independent Republic of Berkeley tend to be, persecuted as they are by the government and extraterrestrials, but in my case she wasnt exaggerating: no amount of precaution could ever be enough. She handed me a hundred-page notebook so I could keep a diary, as I did from the age of eight until I was fifteen, when my life went off the rails. Youre going to have time to get bored, Maya. Take advantage of it to write down the monumental stupidities youve committed, see if you can come to grips with them, she said. Several of my diaries are still in existence, sealed with industrial-strength adhesive tape. My grandfather kept them under lock and key in his desk for years, and now my Nini has them in a shoebox under her bed. This will be notebook number nine. My Nini believes theyll be of use to me when I get psychoanalyzed, because they contain the keys to untie the knots of my personality; but if shed read them, shed know they contain a huge pile of tales tall enough to outfox Freud himself. My grandmother distrusts on principle professionals who charge by the hour, since quick results are not profitable for them. However, she makes an exception for psychiatrists, because one of them saved her from depression and from the traps of magic when she took it into her head to communicate with the dead.

I put the notebook in my backpack, so I wouldnt upset her, with no intention of using it, but its true that time stretches out here and writing is one way of filling up the hours. This first week of exile has been a long one for me. Im on a tiny island so small its almost invisible on the map, in the middle of the Dark Ages. Its complicated to write about my life, because I dont know how much I actually remember and how much is a product of my imagination; the bare truth can be tedious and so, without even noticing, I change or exaggerate it, but I intend to correct this defect and lie as little as possible in the future. And thats why now, when even the Yanomamis of the Amazonas use computers, I am writing by hand. It takes me ages and my writing must be in Cyrillic script, because I cant even decipher it myself, but I imagine itll gradually straighten out page by page. Writing is like riding a bicycle: you dont forget how, even if you go for years without doing it. Im trying to go in chronological order, since some sort of order is required and I thought that would make it easy, but I lose my thread, I go off on tangents or I remember something important several pages later and theres no way to fit it in. My memory goes in circles, spirals, and somersaults.

My name is Maya Vidal. Im nineteen years old, female, singledue to a lack of opportunities rather than by choice, Im currently without a boyfriend. Born in Berkeley, California, Im a U.S. citizen, and temporarily taking refuge on an island at the bottom of the world. They named me Maya because my Nini has a soft spot for India and my parents hadnt come up with any other name, even though theyd had nine months to think about it. In Hindi, maya means charm, illusion, dream: nothing at all to do with my personality. Attila would suit me better, because wherever I step no pasture will ever grow again. My story begins in Chile with my grandmother, my Nini, a long time before I was born, because if she hadnt emigrated, shed never have fallen in love with my Popo or moved to California, my father would never have met my mother and I wouldnt be me, but rather a very different Chilean girl. What do I look like? Im five-ten, 128 pounds when I play soccer and several more if I dont watch out. Ive got muscular legs, clumsy hands, blue or gray eyes, depending on the time of day, and blond hair, I think, but Im not sure since I havent seen my natural hair color for quite a few years now. I didnt inherit my grandmothers exotic appearance, with her olive skin and those dark circles under her eyes that make her look a little depraved, or my fathers, handsome as a bullfighter and just as vain. I dont look like my grandfather eithermy magnificent Popobecause unfortunately hes not related to me biologically, since hes my Ninis second husband.

I look like my mother, at least as far as size and coloring go. She wasnt a princess of Lapland, as I used to think before I reached the age of reason, but a Danish air hostess my father, whos a pilot, fell in love with in midair. He was too young to get married, but he got it into his head that this was the woman of his dreams and stubbornly pursued her until she eventually got tired of turning him down. Or maybe it was because she was pregnant. The fact is, they got married and regretted it within a week, but they stayed together until I was born. Days after my birth, while her husband was flying somewhere, my mother packed her bags, wrapped me up in a little blanket, and took a taxi to her in-laws house. My Nini was in San Francisco protesting against the Gulf War, but my Popo was home and took the bundle my mother handed him without much of an explanation, before she ran back to the taxi that was waiting for her. His granddaughter was so light he could hold her in one hand. A little while later the Danish woman sent divorce papers by mail and as a bonus a document renouncing custody of her daughter. My mothers name is Marta Otter, and I met her the summer I was eight, when my grandparents took me to Denmark.

Im in Chile, my grandmother Nidia Vidals country, where the ocean takes bites off the land and the continent of South America strings out into islands. To be more specific, Im in Chilo, part of the Lakes Region, between the forty-first and forty-third parallel south, an archipelago of more or less nine thousand square kilometers and two hundred thousand or so inhabitants, all of them shorter than me. In Mapudungun, the language of the regions indigenous people,