Isabel Allende, Maya's

 This passage is adapted from Isabel Allende, Maya's 

Notebook. ©2013 by Isabel Allende. The narrator is a teenage 

girl who was raised by her grandparents, Nidia and Paul 

(whom she calls Nini and Popl).

Nidia Vidal stayed in Toronto for a couple of 

years, counting the days and the hours, until she met 

Paul Ditson II, my Popo, a professor at the 

University of California in Berkeley, who had gone to 

5 Toronto to give a series of lectures about an 

elusive planet, whose existence he was trying to prove 

by way of poetic calculations and leaps of the 

imagination. My Popo was one of the few African 

Americans in the overwhelmingly white profession 

10 of astronomy, an eminence in his field and the 

author of several books. As a young man he’d spent a 

year at Lake Turkana, in Kenya, studying the ancient 

megaliths of the region. He developed a theory, based 

on archeological discoveries, that those basalt 

15 columns were astronomical observatories and had 

been used three hundred years before the Christian 

era to determine the Borana lunar calendar, which is 

still in use among shepherds in Ethiopia and Kenya. 

In Africa he learned to observe the sky without 

20 prejudice and that’s how he began to suspect the 

existence of the invisible planet, for which he later 

searched the sky in vain with the most powerful 

telescopes.

The University of Toronto put him up in a suite 

25 for visiting academics and hired a car for him 

through an agency, which is how Nidia Vidal ended 

up escorting him during his stay. When he found out 

that his driver was Chilean, he told her he’d been at 

La Silla observatory, in Chile. He said that in the 

30 southern hemisphere you can see constellations and 

galaxies unknown in the north, like the Small 

Magellanic Cloud and the Large Magellanic Cloud. 

and that in some parts of the country, the nights are 

so clear and the climate so very dry that conditions 

35 for scrutinizing the firmament are ideal. That’s how 

they discovered that galaxies cluster together in 

designs that resemble spiderwebs.

 By one of those coincidences that normally 

happen only in novels, his visit to Chile ended on the 

40 very same day in 1974 that she left with her son for 

Canada. I often wonder if maybe they were in the 

airport at the same time waiting for their respective 

flights, but not meeting. According to them this 

would have been impossible, because he would have 

45 noticed such a beautiful woman and she would have 

seen him too--a Black man stood out in Chile back 

then, especially one as tall and handsome as my 

Popo.

 A single morning driving her passenger around 

50 Toronto was enough for Nidia to realize that he 

possessed that rare combination of a brilliant mind 

with the imagination of a dreamer, but entirely 

lacked any common sense, something she was proudto have in abundance herself. My Nini could never 

55 explain to me how she’d reached that conclusion 

from behind the steering wheel of a car while 

navigating her way through the traffic, but the fact is, 

she was absolutely right. The astronomer was living a 

life as lost as the planet he was searching the sky for; 

60 he could calculate in less than the blink of an eye how 

long it would take a space ship to arrive at the moon 

if it was traveling at 28,286 kilometers per hour, but 

he remained perplexed by an electric coffeemaker. 

She had not felt the elusive flutter of love for years, 

65 and this man, very different from all those she’d met 

in her thirty-three years, intrigued and attracted her.

 My Popo, quite frightened by his driver’s boldness 

in traffic, also felt curiosity about the woman hidden 

inside a uniform that was too big for her and wearing 

70 a bear hunter’s cap. He was not a man to give in 

easily to sentimental impulses, and if the idea of 

seducing her briefly crossed his mind, he 

immediately dismissed it as awkward. My Nini on 

the other hand, who had nothing to lose, decided to 

75 collar the astronomer before he finished his lectures. 

She liked his mahogany color and sensed that the two 

of them had a lot in common: he had astronomy and 

she astrology, which she considered to be practically 

the same thing. She thought they’d both come from a 

80 long way away to meet at this spot on earth and in 

their destinies, it was written in the stars.