A Long Petal of the Sea Read online

  A Long Petal of the Sea is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination, or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2020 by Isabel Allende

  English language translation © 2020 by Isabel Allende

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  BALLANTINE and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Originally published in Spain in 2019 as Largo pétalo de mar

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  NAMES: Allende, Isabel, author. | Caistor, Nick, translator. | Hopkinson, Amanda, translator.

  Title: A long petal of the sea: a novel / Isabel Allende; translated from the Spanish by Nick Caistor and Amanda Hopkinson.

  OTHER TITLES: Largo pétalo de mar. English

  DESCRIPTION: New York: Ballantine Books, [2020] | “Originally published in Spain in 2019 as Largo pétalo de mar”—Title page verso.

  IDENTIFIERS: LCCN 2019037428 (print) | LCCN 2019037429 (ebook) | ISBN 9781984820150 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781984820167 (ebook)

  SUBJECTS: LCSH: Spain—History—Civil War, 1936-1939—Fiction. | GSAFD: Historical fiction.

  CLASSIFICATION: LCC PQ8098.1.L54 L3613 2020 (print) | LCC PQ8098.1.L54 (ebook) | DDC 863/.64—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2019037428

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2019037429

  Ebook ISBN 9781984820167

  International edition 9780593158425

  randomhousebooks.com

  Book design by Barbara M. Bachman, adapted for ebook

  Cover design: David Mann

  v5.4

  ep

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Part 1: War and Exodus

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Part 2: Exile, Loves, and Misunderstandings

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Part 3: Returns and Roots

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  By Isabel Allende

  About the Author

  Foreigners, here it is,

  This is my homeland,

  Here I was born and here live my dreams.

  —PABLO NERUDA

  “Return”

  SAILINGS AND RETURNS

  CHAPTER 1

  1938

  Get ready, lads,

  To kill again, to die once more

  And to cover the blood with flowers.

  —PABLO NERUDA

  “Bloody was all the earth of man”

  THE SEA AND THE BELLS

  THE YOUNG SOLDIER WAS PART of the “Baby Bottle Conscription,” the boys called up when there were no more men, young or old, to fight the war. Victor Dalmau received him with the other wounded taken from the supply truck and laid out like logs on mats placed over the cement and stone floor of the Estacion del Norte, where they had to wait for other vehicles to take them to the hospital centers. The boy lay motionless, with the calm look of someone who has seen the angels and now fears nothing. There was no telling how many days he had spent being shifted from one stretcher to another, one field hospital to another, one ambulance to another, before reaching Catalonia on this particular train.

  At the station, doctors, paramedics, and nurses evaluated the soldiers, immediately dispatching the most serious cases to the hospital, and classifying the others according to the part of the body where they had been wounded: Group A: arms, Group B: legs, Group C: head, and so on. They were then transferred to the corresponding center with labels around their necks. The wounded arrived by the hundreds, and each diagnosis and decision had to be made in no more than a few minutes. But the chaos and confusion were misleading, for no one was left unattended, no one was left behind. Those in need of surgery were sent to the old Sant Andreu building in Manresa; those requiring treatment were dispatched to other centers; the remainder were left where they were, since nothing could be done to save them. Volunteer women would moisten their lips, whisper to them, and comfort them as if they were their own children, in the knowledge that somewhere else, another woman might be cradling their own son or brother. Later, the stretcher-bearers would take them to the morgue.

  The little soldier had a wound in his chest, and the doctor, after a swift examination during which he could detect no pulse, decided the boy was beyond all help, and had no need of either morphine or consolation. On the battlefield they had strapped a bandage around his chest to protect the wound with an inverted tin plate, but nobody knew how many hours or days, how many trains ago that had been.

  Dalmau was there to assist the doctors. Although it was his duty to leave the boy and attend to the next case, he thought that if the youngster had survived the shock, the hemorrhaging, and the journey to reach this station platform, he must really want to live; and so it would be a shame to surrender him to death now. Carefully removing the bandages, he saw to his amazement that the wound was still open and was as clean as if it had been painted onto his chest. He couldn’t understand how the bullet had shattered the ribs and part of the sternum, and yet had left the heart intact. Having worked for nearly three years on the side of the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War, at first on the fronts at Madrid and Teruel, and then at the evacuation hospital at Manresa, Victor Dalmau thought he had seen everything, become immunized to the suffering of others, but he had never seen an actual beating heart.

  Fascinated, he watched the final, increasingly slow and sporadic pulsation until it ceased completely, and the little soldier finally passed away without a sigh. For a brief moment, Dalmau simply stood there, contemplating the red hole where the heartbeats had ceased. This was to be his most stubborn, persistent memory of the war: that fifteen- or sixteen-year-old boy, still smooth-cheeked, filthy with the dirt of battle and dried blood, laid out on a stretcher with his heart exposed to the air. Victor was never able to explain to himself why he inserted three fingers of his right hand into the gaping wound, gently grasped the organ, and squeezed it rhythmically several times, quite calmly and naturally, for how long, he couldn’t remember: perhaps thirty seconds, or perhaps an eternity. Suddenly he felt the heart coming back to life between his fingers, first with an almost imperceptible tremor, soon with a strong, regular beat.

  “If I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes, I never would have believed it,” said one of the doctors who had approached without Dalmau noticing. He called over two stretcher-bearers, ordering them to rush the wounded youth to the hospital—this was a special case.

  “Where did you learn that?” he asked Dalmau as soon as the men had lifted the little soldier onto the stretcher. The boy’s face was still ashen, but he had a pulse.

  Victor Dalmau, a man of few words, told the doctor that he had managed to complete three years of medical studies in Barcelona before leaving for the front as an
auxiliary.

  “But where did you learn that technique?” insisted the doctor.

  “Nowhere, but I thought there was nothing to lose…”

  “I see you have a limp.”

  “My left femur. I was injured at Teruel. It’s getting better.”

  “Good. From now on you’ll work with me. What’s your name?”

  “Victor Dalmau, comrade.”

  “I am not your comrade. Call me ‘Doctor.’ Understood?”

  “Understood, Doctor. The same goes for me: you can call me Señor Dalmau. But the other comrades aren’t going to like it one bit.”

  The doctor smiled to himself. The very next day, Dalmau began to learn a profession that would determine his destiny. Together with everyone else at Sant Andreu and other hospitals, he heard the story circulating that the team of surgeons had spent sixteen hours resurrecting the young soldier. Many called it a miracle. The advances of science, and the boy’s constitution of an ox, claimed those who had renounced God and his saints. Victor promised himself he would visit the boy wherever he was transferred, but in the chaos of those days he found it impossible to keep track of those present and those missing, of the living and the dead. For a long while it seemed as though he had forgotten the heart he had held in his hand.

  Yet years later, on the far side of the world, he still saw the soldier in nightmares, and from then on the boy visited him occasionally, a pale, sad ghost with his heart on a platter. Dalmau could not recall, or possibly never knew, his real name, but for obvious reasons he called him Lazaro.

  The young soldier, though, never forgot the name of his savior. As soon as he could sit up and drink water on his own, he was told about the feat performed at the Estacion del Norte by an auxiliary who had brought him back from the land of death. He was assailed with questions: everyone wanted to know whether heaven and hell really existed, or had been invented by the bishops to instill fear in people. The boy recovered before the end of the war, and two years later in Marseilles had the name of Victor Dalmau tattooed beneath the scar.

  * * *

  —

  LIKE ALMOST ALL YOUTHS his age, Victor had joined the Republican Army in 1936 and gone off with his regiment to defend Madrid, which had been partially occupied by Franco and his Nationalist forces, as the troops who rose against the government called themselves. Victor had worked recovering the wounded, because his medical studies meant he was more useful at that than shouldering a rifle in the trenches. Later on he was dispatched to other fronts.

  In December 1937, during the icy cold of the battle for Teruel, Victor Dalmau was assigned to a heroic ambulance giving first aid to the wounded, while the driver, Aitor Ibarra, an immortal Basque who was constantly singing to himself and laughing out loud to mock death, somehow managed to maneuver the vehicle along shattered roads. Dalmau trusted that the Basque’s good luck, which had allowed him to emerge unscathed from a thousand close scrapes, would be sufficient for both of them. To avoid being bombed, they often traveled at night. If there was no moon, somebody walked in front of the ambulance with a flashlight to illuminate the road, while Victor attended to the injured inside the vehicle with what limited supplies he had, by the light of another flashlight. They constantly defied the obstacle-strewn terrain and temperatures many degrees below freezing, crawling forward slowly like worms through the ice, sinking into the snow, pushing the ambulance up slopes or out of ditches and bomb craters, dodging lengths of twisted iron and frozen bodies of mules, amid strafing by Nationalist machine guns and bombs from the German Condor Legion planes swooping low above their heads. Nothing could distract Victor Dalmau from his determination to keep the men in his care alive, even if they were bleeding to death in front of his eyes. He was infected by the crazy stoicism of Aitor Ibarra, who always drove on untroubled, and had a joke for every occasion.

  From the ambulance, Dalmau was sent to the field hospital that had been set up in some caves in Teruel to protect it from the bombs. There the staff worked by candlelight, rags soaked in engine oil, and kerosene lamps. They fended off the cold with braziers pushed under the operating tables, although that didn’t stop the frozen instruments from sticking to their hands. The surgeons operated quickly on those they could patch up and send to the hospital centers, knowing full well that many would die on the way. The others, who were beyond all help, were left to await death with morphine—when there was any, since it was always in short supply; ether was rationed as well. If there was nothing else to relieve the dreadfully wounded men who cried out in pain, Victor would give them aspirin, telling them it was a powerful American drug. The bandages were washed with melted ice and snow and then reused. The most thankless task was disposing of the piles of amputated legs and arms; Victor could never get used to the smell of burning flesh.

  It was at Teruel that he ran into Elisabeth Eidenbenz for the second time. They had met during the battle for Madrid, where she had arrived as a volunteer for the Association to Aid Children in War. She was a twenty-four-year-old Swiss nurse with the face of a Renaissance virgin and the courage of a battle-hardened veteran. Victor had been half in love with her in Madrid, and would have been so entirely if only she had given him the slightest encouragement. However, nothing could divert this young woman from her mission: to lessen the suffering of children in these awful times. Over the months since he had first met her, she had lost the innocence she had arrived with. Her character had been toughened by her struggles against military bureaucracy and men’s stupidity; she kept her compassion and kindness for the women and children in her care. In a lull between two enemy attacks, Victor bumped into her next to one of the food supply trucks. “Hello there, do you remember me?” Elisabeth greeted him in a Spanish enriched by guttural German sounds. Of course he remembered her, but seeing her left him dumbstruck. She looked more mature and more beautiful than ever. They sat on a piece of concrete rubble; he began to smoke, and she drank tea from a canteen.

  “What’s become of your friend Aitor?” she asked him.

  “He’s still around in the thick of it, without a scratch.”

  “He’s not afraid of anything. Say hello to him from me.”

  “What plans do you have for when this war is over?” Victor asked.

  “To find another one. There’s always war somewhere in the world. What about you?”

  “If you like, we could get married,” he suggested, overcome with shyness.

  She laughed, and for a moment became a Renaissance maiden once more.

  “Not on your life, man. I’m not going to get married to you or anyone else. I don’t have time for love.”

  “Maybe you will change your mind. Do you think we’ll meet again?”

  “Without a doubt, if we survive. You can count on me, Victor, if there’s any way I can help you…”

  “The same goes for me. May I kiss you?”

  “No.”

  * * *

  —

  IT WAS IN THE Teruel caves that Victor acquired nerves of steel and the medical knowledge that no university could have offered him. He learned that you can get used to almost anything—to blood (so much blood!), surgery without anesthetics, the stench of gangrene, filth, the endless flood of wounded soldiers, sometimes women and children as well—while at the same time an age-old weariness sapped your will, and worst of all, you had to confront the insidious suspicion that all this sacrifice might be in vain. And it was there, as he was pulling the dead and wounded from the ruins of a bombardment, that the delayed collapse of a wall smashed his left leg.

  He was seen by an English doctor from the International Brigades. Anyone else would have opted for a rapid amputation, but the Englishman had just begun his shift and had been able to rest for a few hours. He stammered an order to the nurse and made ready to reset the broken bones. “You’re lucky, my lad. Supplies from the Red Cross arrived yesterday, so we can put you to sl
eep,” said the nurse, covering his face with the ether mask.

  Victor attributed the accident to the fact that Aitor Ibarra and his lucky star had not been with him to protect him. Aitor was the one who had taken him to the train that brought him to Valencia together with dozens of other wounded men. Victor’s leg was immobilized by lengths of wood kept in place by bandages—his flesh wounds meant it couldn’t be encased in plaster. He was wrapped in a blanket, shivering from cold and fever, and tormented by every jolt of the train, but grateful that he was in a better state than most of those lying with him on the floor of the wagon. Aitor had given him his last cigarettes, as well as a dose of morphine that he made Victor promise to use only in a dire emergency, because he wouldn’t get any more. In the hospital at Valencia, they congratulated him on the good work the English doctor had done. If there were no complications, his leg would be like new, although a little shorter than the other one, they told him.

  Once the wounds began to heal and he could stand using a crutch, they set his leg in plaster and sent him to Barcelona. He stayed at his parents’ home playing endless games of chess with his father until he could move about unaided, and then went back to work at a local hospital, where he attended civilians. To him, this was like being on vacation; compared to what he had experienced on the battlefront, it was a paradise of cleanliness and efficiency.

  He stayed there until the following spring, when he was sent to Sant Andreu in Manresa. He said goodbye to his parents, and to Roser Bruguera, the music student the Dalmau family had taken in. During the weeks of his convalescence, Victor had come to think of her as one of the family. This modest, likeable girl who spent endless hours in piano practice had provided the company that Marcel Lluis and Carme were in need of ever since their own children had left home.