A Long Petal of the Sea Page 15

  “As a Chilean, if you wish, but our home will always be Catalan, and proud of it.”

  “Franco has forbidden speaking Catalan,” she reminded him.

  “For exactly that reason, Roser.”

  CHAPTER 7

  1940–1941

  I have slept with you

  the whole night long

  while the dark earth turns

  with the living and the dead.

  —PABLO NERUDA

  “Night on the Island”

  THE CAPTAIN’S VERSES

  VICTOR DALMAU ENROLLED AT THE university to complete his medical studies thanks to the fact that its president was a Vizcarra, and to the infallible system of social connections so common in Chile. Felipe del Solar introduced him to Salvador Allende, a co-founder of the Socialist Party, the president’s right-hand man, and the minister of health. Allende had followed with passionate interest the triumph of the Republic in Spain, the defeat of democracy, and Franco’s dictatorship, as though sensing an echo of his future. Allende listened to the brief account Victor Dalmau gave him about war and exile, and guessed the rest. It took him a single telephone call to get the School of Medicine to validate the courses Victor had taken in Spain and allow him to complete his studies in three years to obtain his professional diploma.

  The courses were intensive. Victor knew as much as his professors about practice, but very little about theory: it was one thing to mend broken bones, and quite another to be able to identify them by name. He went to the minister’s office to thank him, with no idea how he could repay him. Allende asked if he knew how to play chess, and challenged Victor to a game on the board he kept in his office. The minister ended up losing good-humoredly. “If you want to repay me, come and play whenever I call you,” Allende told him by way of goodbye. Chess became the basis of the friendship between the two men.

  Roser, Victor, and the boy lived with Felipe for several months, until they could afford to rent somewhere else. They refused any aid from the committee, because others needed it more. Felipe wanted them to stay on at his house, but they felt they had already been given more than enough, and it was time for them to stand on their own feet. The person worst affected by this change was Juana Nancucheo, because now she had to catch a tram to see Marcel.

  The friendship between Victor and Felipe continued, although it was hard to maintain as they belonged to different circles and were both extremely busy. Realizing how much he had to offer, Felipe tried to get Victor to join the Club of the Enraged, whose meetings were gradually losing their intellectual tone and becoming increasingly frivolous, but it was plain Victor had nothing in common with those friends of Felipe’s. On the only occasion Victor attended the group, he gave monosyllabic answers to the bombardment of questions about his hazardous life and the war in Spain. The members of the club quickly grew tired of getting only crumbs of information out of him, and proceeded to ignore him. In order to avoid him encountering Ofelia again, Felipe also didn’t take him to his parents’ house.

  Victor’s night job in the bar barely paid him enough to live on, but it helped him learn that curious trade and to study the customers. This was how he came to know Jordi Moline, a Catalan widower who had emigrated to Chile twenty years earlier and owned a shoe factory. He would often come and sit at the bar to drink and chat in his mother tongue. During one of the long nights when he sat cradling his glass of spirits, he told Victor that manufacturing shoes was boring, however profitable, and now that he was on his own and growing old, the moment had come to do as he wanted. He suggested they open a Catalan-style tavern: he would put up the money initially, and Victor would contribute his experience. Victor replied that medicine was his vocation, not running a tavern, but later that night when he told Roser about the Catalan’s bizarre proposal, she thought it was a splendid idea: better to have one’s own business than to work for other people—and if it wasn’t successful, they wouldn’t have lost much, because the shoemaker was risking the capital.

  The tavern was inspired by the Rocinante, the Barcelona inn where Victor’s father played dominoes until his final days. They set up in a hole-in-the-wall with barrels for tables, hams and strings of garlic hanging from the ceiling, and a smell of sour wine, but it was in a good spot in the center of Santiago. Roser became the bookkeeper, since she had a better head for figures and knowledge of mathematics than either of the two partners. She would arrive dragging Marcel along and install him with a toy or two in a corner behind the counter, while she did the accounts. Not so much as a single glass of beer escaped her meticulous eye. They found a cook capable of preparing Catalan sausages with diced eggplant, anchovies and squid with garlic, tuna with tomato, and other delicacies from the old country, and soon had a faithful clientele of Spanish immigrants. They named the tavern the Winnipeg.

  In the eighteen months that they had been married, Victor and Roser developed a perfect relationship as brother and sister and comrades. They shared everything apart from a bed: Roser because of the memory of Guillem, and Victor to avoid trouble. Roser had decided that love only strikes once, and that she had had her share. For his part, Victor depended on her to fight his phantoms: she was his best friend and he came to love her more and more as he grew to know her. From time to time he wished he could cross the invisible frontier between them, take her by the waist in a carefree moment, and kiss her, but that would betray his brother and could have disastrous consequences. One day they would need to have the discussion about how long mourning lasts, how long the dead are allowed to haunt us. Roser would decide when that moment arrived, as she decided almost everything: until then his thoughts strayed to Ofelia del Solar, like someone wasting their time imagining they’re going to win the lottery. He had fallen in love with her at first sight with adolescent intensity, but as he didn’t see her again, love rapidly became a myth to him. In his daydreams he would conjure up the details of her face, the way she moved, her dress, her voice. Ofelia was a flickering mirage that vanished at the slightest hesitation. He loved her theoretically, like the troubadours of olden days.

  From the outset, Victor and Roser adopted a system of trust and mutual aid. They agreed that Marcel would be the most important thing for them until he reached eighteen. Victor scarcely remembered that Marcel was not his son but his nephew, but Roser always bore it in mind, and that was why she loved Victor as much as he loved the boy. The money they earned was stored in a cigar box for their shared expenses. Roser took charge of their finances. Each month she divided the funds into four envelopes, one for each week, and they kept strictly to that amount, even if they had to eat beans and nothing but beans. Lentils were out of the question: Victor had grown tired of them in the French concentration camp. If there was anything left over, they took the child out for an ice cream.

  They were completely different, which was why they got on so well. Roser never gave in to the sentimental attitude of many exiles, refusing to look back or idealize a Spain that no longer existed. There was a reason why they had left. Her resolute sense of reality saved her from frustrated desires, pointless reproaches, deep regrets, and the vice of constantly complaining. She was oblivious to fatigue and despair: she had a tank-like determination to crush any obstacles in her way. Her plans were crystal clear. There was no way she was going to continue playing the piano for radio soap operas, where it was always the same repertoire: music that was sad, romantic, bellicose, or sinister, depending on the plot. She was thoroughly fed up with the march from Aida and Blue Danube. Her main object in life was serious music; to hell with the rest. But she had to wait. As soon as the tavern provided them with a livelihood and Victor graduated, she would enroll at the Faculty of Music. She was going to follow the path of her mentor and become a teacher and composer like Marcel Lluis Dalmau.

  Her husband, on the other hand, was often overwhelmed by sad memories and the pangs of nostalgia. Only Roser was aware of these dark moments
, because Victor continued to attend medical school and work in the tavern in the evening as usual. Yet he went around closed in on himself with the absent air of a somnambulist, not so much from the tiredness of someone who only sleeps in short bursts standing on his feet as horses do, but because he felt worn down, caught in a web of responsibilities. Whereas Roser imagined a bright future, he saw shadows all around them. “At twenty-seven I’m already an old man,” he would say, but whenever Roser heard that, she would berate him fiercely. “Why don’t you have more guts? We’ve all been through hard times. If you keep complaining you won’t be able to appreciate what we have: there’s a ghastly war on the other side of the ocean, and yet here we are living in peace with full stomachs. And I’m telling you we’re going to be here for a long time, because the Caudillo, curse him, is in very good health and evil people lead long lives.”

  And yet at night, if she heard him crying out in his sleep, Roser softened. She would go and wake him up, slip into his bed, and hug him like a mother, letting him unburden himself of his nightmares of amputated limbs and smashed chests, shrapnel, dripping bayonets, pools of blood, and graves littered with bones.

  * * *

  —

  IT WAS A YEAR and two months before Ofelia and Victor met again. During that time, Matias Eyzaguirre rented a mansion on one of Asuncion’s main streets, which was hardly appropriate to his position as second-in-command or his salary as a public servant. The ambassador regarded this as impertinent and never missed an opportunity to make a sarcastic comment. Matias filled the house with a shipment of furniture and decorations sent from Chile, and his mother made a special trip there to train the domestic staff, which proved difficult as they spoke only Guarani. His recalcitrant fiancée had finally agreed to marry him, thanks to his constant stream of letters and the efficacy of the Masses and novenas said by his future mother-in-law, Doña Laura.

  Early in December, when Ofelia turned twenty-one, Matias traveled to Santiago for the official engagement, which took place in a ceremony in the garden of the del Solars’ house with the two families’ closest relatives, about two hundred people altogether. The wedding rings were blessed by Father Vicente Urbina, Doña Laura’s nephew. He was a charismatic, scheming, and energetic priest, better suited to a colonel’s uniform than a cassock. Although not yet forty, Urbina exerted a fearsome influence on his ecclesiastical superiors as well as on his congregation in the fashionable heights of Santiago. It was a privilege having him in the family. The date for the wedding was set for September the following year, the month for elegant nuptials. Matias placed the antique diamond ring on the fourth finger of her right hand, as a sign to any possible rival that the young woman was taken; he would transfer it to the other hand on the day of their marriage, to demonstrate that she was his once and for all. He wanted to tell her in great detail about the preparations he had made to receive her like a queen in Paraguay, but she interrupted him in a rather offhand way: “What’s the hurry, Matias? Lots of things could happen between now and September.” Alarmed, he asked what things she was referring to, and she said that the Second World War might reach Chile, there could be another earthquake, or a catastrophe in Paraguay. “In other words, nothing that concerns us,” Matias concluded.

  Ofelia enjoyed this period of waiting and anticipation by laying out her trousseau in trunks, wrapped with tissue paper and sprigs of lavender, sending tablecloths, sheets, and towels to her aunt Teresa’s convent to be embroidered with her initials and those of Matias intertwined, being invited by her female friends to tea at the Hotel Crillon, repeatedly trying on her wedding dress and going-away outfit, and learning the rudiments of household management from her sisters. She showed a surprising aptitude for this, given her reputation as a lazy, disorganized young woman. There were nine months to go before the wedding, but she was already thinking up ways of lengthening this period of truce. She was afraid of taking the irrevocable step of marrying for the rest of her life, living with Matias in another country where she didn’t know a soul, far from her family and surrounded by Guarani Indians, and of having children and ending up repressed and frustrated like her mother and sisters. And yet the alternative was worse. To stay a spinster meant depending on the generosity of her father and Felipe, and becoming a social pariah. The possibility of working to earn a living was a dream as absurd as that of going to Paris to paint in a Montmartre attic.

  She was planning a whole rosary of excuses for postponing the wedding, without ever imagining that heaven would send her the only true one: Victor Dalmau. When she bumped into him two months after becoming engaged and seven before the date fixed for the wedding, she discovered the love she had read about in novels, the kind of love she had never felt for Matias despite all his stubborn faithfulness. At the end of Santiago’s hot, dry summer, when all those who could migrated en masse to the beach or countryside, Victor and Ofelia met in the street. The encounter paralyzed them both, as if they had been caught out; an eternal minute went by before she took the lead and greeted him with a smothered, barely audible “hello” that he took as a sign of encouragement. A whole year believing he was in love with her without the slightest hope, and it turned out she had been thinking of him as well, as was plain from the way she reacted like a nervous foal.

  She was prettier than he recalled, with light-colored eyes and tanned skin, a low-cut dress and curls escaping from her schoolgirl’s straw hat. He recovered sufficiently to begin an innocuous conversation, learning that the del Solar family had been spending the three summer months between their country property and their beach house in Viña del Mar; Ofelia had come to Santiago to get her hair cut and visit the dentist. He in turn told her in four sentences about Roser, the boy, the university, and the tavern. They soon ran out of things to say and stood there in silence, sweating in the scorching sun, only too aware that when they separated they would be passing up a wonderful opportunity. As she turned to go, Victor took her by the arm, dragged her into the nearest patch of shade under a pharmacy awning, and begged her breathlessly to spend the evening with him.

  “I have to get back to Viña. The chauffeur is waiting for me,” she said, without conviction.

  “Tell him to wait. We need to talk.”

  “I’m going to get married, Victor.”

  “When?”

  “What does that matter? You’re married.”

  “That’s exactly what we have to talk about. It’s not what you think. Let me explain.”

  He took her to a cheap hotel even though he couldn’t afford it, and she returned to Viña del Mar close to midnight, just as her parents were about to inform the police she was missing. Thanks to a generous bribe, the chauffeur told them a tire had burst on the way back.

  * * *

  —

  EVER SINCE HER FIFTEENTH birthday, when she had reached her full height and developed feminine curves, Ofelia had attracted men with completely unintentional powers of seduction. She wasn’t even aware of the broken hearts she sowed in her wake, except for the few occasions when the lovelorn youth became a threat and her father had to intervene. She was pampered and protected in her tranquil existence: this was a double-edged sword, because even though on the one hand the risks were reduced, on the other, so much protection prevented her from acquiring any astuteness or intuitive sense. Concealed beneath her flirtatious attitude was an astonishing naïveté.

  Over the following years as she came into womanhood, she discovered that her looks opened doors and made almost everything easy for her. This was the first, and sometimes the only, thing that others saw; she didn’t need to make any effort, as her ideas and opinions went unnoticed. In the four hundred years since the days of the rough colonial conquistador who had founded their dynasty, the Vizcarra family refined their genetic heritage with pure European blood (although Felipe del Solar maintained that everyone in Chile, however white they appeared, had some indigenous blood in them, apart from newly
arrived immigrants). Ofelia was part of a clan of pretty women, but she was the only one to inherit her English grandmother’s spectacular blue eyes. Laura del Solar was convinced the devil bestows beauty with the sole aim of leading souls to perdition, both the person so endowed and those whom it attracts. As a result, physical attributes were never mentioned in her house: that was in bad taste, pure vanity. Her husband appreciated beauty in other women, but considered it a problem in his own daughters, because he was the guardian of their virtue, especially Ofelia’s.

  For her part, Ofelia came to accept the family theory that good looks were contrary to intelligence: one could possess one or the other, but not both together. This would explain the difficulties she had at school, her laziness in pursuing her talent for painting, and her inability to keep to the path of righteousness preached by Father Urbina. Her sensuality, which she was unable to identify, was a torment to her. Urbina’s insistent query as to what she wanted to do with her life went round and round in her head without finding any answer. Her destiny of marriage and having children seemed to her as stifling as entering a convent, and yet she accepted it as inevitable: all she could do was postpone it awhile. And, as everyone constantly told her, she ought to be thankful Matias Eyzaguirre existed: such a good, noble, and handsome young man. She was to be envied.

  Matias had been in love with her from childhood. She discovered and explored desire with him as far as her strict Catholic upbringing and his natural chivalry allowed, even though she often tried to push beyond those limits: after all, what was the difference between petting and fondling until they almost fainted while keeping their clothes on, and committing a sin naked? The divine punishment would be the same. In view of her weakness, Matias assumed the responsibility for their abstinence. He respected her in the same way that he demanded others respect his sisters, and was convinced he would never betray the trust deposited in him by the del Solar family. He believed the desires of the flesh could only be satisfied in a union sanctified by the Church in order to have children. He would not have admitted even in the deepest reaches of his heart that the main reason for abstinence was not to avoid a sin, but the fear of pregnancy. Ofelia never talked of this with her mother or sisters, but was convinced this kind of transgression, however slight, could only be erased through matrimony. The sacrament of confession absolves the sin, but society does not pardon or forget; the reputation of a decent young woman is made of white silk, and any stain ruins it, as the nuns insisted. Who knew how many stains she had accumulated with Matias.