Portrait in Sepia Read online

  My grandmother Paulina wanted to stay in the country until the revolution was over, but Frederick Williams convinced her that the conflict might last for years and that we should not give up the position we enjoyed in Santiago. The truth is that to him the country estate with its humble campesinos, eternal siestas, and stables knee deep in shit and horseflies seemed a much worse fate than prison.

  “Do you recall, my dear, that in the United States the Civil War persisted for four years? The same could happen here,” he said.

  “Four years? By then there wouldn’t be a single Chilean alive. My nephew Severo says that in just these few months ten thousand have already died in battle, and more than a thousand have been shot in the back.”

  Nívea wanted to return to Santiago with us, even though she was still feeling the effects of the birth of the twins, and she was so insistent that finally my grandmother gave in. At first she hadn’t spoken to Nívea because of the business of the printing press, but she forgave her completely when she saw the twins. Soon we were all en route to the capital with the same bundles we’d brought with us weeks before, plus two new babies and minus the birds, which had perished from fright along the road. We had several baskets of food and a jug with the remedy Nívea was supposed to drink to prevent anemia, a nauseating mixture of aged wine and the fresh blood of a young bull. It had been months since Nívea had news of her husband, and as she confessed in a moment of weakness, she was beginning to feel depressed. She never doubted that Severo del Valle would return to her side safe and sound from the war; she had a kind of clairvoyance in regard to her own destiny. Just as she had always known she would be his wife, even when he wrote her that he had married another woman in San Francisco, she knew they would die together in an accident. I have heard her say that many times, the words have come to be a family joke. She was reluctant to stay in the country because it would be difficult for her husband to communicate with her there; in the pandemonium of the revolution the mail tended to be lost, especially in rural areas.

  Ever since the outset of her love for Severo, when her unbridled fertility was first evident, Nívea realized that if she followed the usual norms of decorum and stayed at home with every pregnancy and each new baby, she would spend the rest of her life trapped in the house, so she decided not to make a mystery of maternity. Just as she sashayed around exhibiting her bulging womb like a shameless country woman, to the horror of “good” society, she had her babies without any fuss, limited her confinement to three days—instead of the forty the doctor recommended—and went everywhere, including her suffragettes’ meetings, with her babies and nursemaids in tow. These nannies were adolescent girls recruited in the country and destined to serve for the rest of their lives unless they married or got pregnant, neither of which was very probable. Those self-sacrificing youngsters grew up, withered, and died in someone else’s house; they slept in grimy, windowless rooms and ate food left from the main table. They adored the children it was their lot to look after, especially the boys, and when the girls in the family married, they took their nannies with them as part of their dowry, to serve a second generation of babies. In a time when everything relating to maternity was hidden, living with Nívea taught me things at age eleven that no ordinary girl in my surroundings knew. In the country, when animals were bred or dropped their young, they made us girls go in the house and closed the shutters, the basic assumption being that those functions wounded our sensitive souls and put perverse ideas in our heads. They were right; the lascivious spectacle of a magnificent stud mounting a mare, which I saw by chance on my cousin’s estate, still makes my blood run hot. Now, today, in 1910, when the twenty-year age difference between Nívea and me has evaporated and more than my aunt she is my friend, I have realized that her annual babies were never a serious obstacle for her; pregnant or not, she continued her erotic cavortings with her husband. In one of our confidential conversations I asked her why she had so many children—fifteen, of whom eleven are living—and she answered that she couldn’t help it; none of the methods recommended by knowledgeable French women had worked for her. She was saved from early decrepitude by her unassailable physical strength and a light heart that allowed her to avoid sentimental entanglements. She raised her children following the same method she used for domestic affairs: delegating. As soon as a baby was born, she bound her breasts tightly and handed the infant over to a wet nurse; in her house there were almost as many nursemaids as children. Nívea’s ease in giving birth, her good health, and her detachment from her children preserved her intimate relations with Severo. It isn’t hard to perceive the passionate affection that unites them. She has told me that the forbidden books she studied with such dedication in her uncle’s library taught her fantastic possibilities for making love, including some very undemanding ones for lovers limited in acrobatic capacity, as was the case for both of them: he because of his amputated leg, and she as the result of her ever-swollen belly. I have no idea what the favorite contortions of those two are, but I imagine that the moments of greatest delight are still those they play in the dark, without making a sound, as they did in the bedroom where a nun sat struggling between the half-sleep caused by valerian-laced hot chocolate and the lure of sin.

  News concerning the Revolution was strictly censored by the government, but everyone knew everything, even before it happened. We learned about the conspiracy because we were told by one of my older cousins, who slipped into the house in the company of a peon from the country house who acted as both servant and bodyguard. After dinner, he was closeted for a long time in the study with Frederick Williams and my grandmother while I pretended to read in a corner but was tuned into every word they were saying. My cousin was a large, blond, handsome young man with the eyes and curls of a woman, impulsive and likable. He had grown up in the country and had a real talent for breaking horses; that’s the only thing I remember about him. He explained that a few young men, of whom he was one, were planning to blow up some bridges to badger the government.

  “Which one of you got that brilliant idea? Do you have a leader?” my grandmother asked sarcastically.

  “Not yet, we’ll elect one when we meet.”

  “How many are involved in this endeavor, son?” asked Williams.

  “About a hundred, but I don’t know how many will come. Not everyone knows what we’ve called them for—we’ll tell them afterward, for security reasons. You understand that, don’t you, Aunt?”

  “Oh, I understand. Are they all proper little gentlemen like you?” my grandmother wanted to know, more and more agitated.

  “We have craftsmen, laborers, country people, and a few of my friends, too.”

  “And are you provided with weapons?” Frederick Williams asked.

  “Swords, knives, and I think there are a few carbines. We’ll have to get gunpowder, of course.”

  “That sounds like the height of idiocy!” my grandmother exploded.

  They tried to dissuade my cousin, and he listened with feigned patience, but it was obvious that he had made his decision and that this wasn’t the moment to change his view. When he left, he was carrying a leather bag containing a few firearms from the collection of Frederick Williams. Two days later we learned what happened at the site of the conspiracy, a few kilometers from Santiago. All that day, rebels showed up at a herder’s shack where they thought they were safe; they spent hours arguing, but in view of the fact that they had so few weapons and that every aspect of the plan was leaking water, they decided to postpone the action, spend the night together as good buddies, and scatter the next morning. They never suspected they had been betrayed. At four in the morning they were attacked by ninety cavalry and forty government infantry troops in a maneuver so swift and sure that the surrounded men never lifted a weapon but surrendered, convinced they were safe since they hadn’t as yet committed any crime except to hold an unauthorized meeting. The lieutenant colonel in charge of the detachment lost his head in the heat of the moment and, blind with ra
ge, dragged the first prisoner outside and had him shot and bayoneted until he looked like chopped liver, then picked eight more and shot them in the back. The beatings and slaughter continued until by dawn there were sixteen mutilated bodies. The colonel opened the wine cellars of the absent landholder and then handed the women of the campesinos over to troops drunk and emboldened by impunity. They burned the house and tortured the overseer so savagely that they had to prop him in a chair to shoot him. In the meantime, orders flew back and forth from Santiago, but the waiting did nothing to calm the soldiers, it only fired the fever of violence. The next day, after hours of hell, orders came, written in a general’s hand: “Execute them all, immediately.” And it was done. Afterward they loaded the cadavers onto five carts to haul them off to a common grave, but the outcry was so great that finally they gave the corpses to their families.

  At dusk they delivered the body of my cousin, which my grandmother had claimed by pulling strings tied to her social position and influence. He was brought in wrapped in a bloody blanket, and spirited into a room to be doctored up a little before his mother and sisters saw him. Watching from the staircase, I saw a man in a black frock coat come in carrying a small valise; he went into the room with the corpse while the maids jabbered about how he was a master embalmer who could erase the marks of gunshots with makeup, stuffing, and an upholstery needle. Frederick Williams and my grandmother had turned the gold salon into a blazing chapel with an improvised altar and yellow candles in a tall candelabra. By the time the carriages carrying family and friends began to drive up at dawn, the house was filled with flowers and my cousin, clean, well dressed, and free of any trace of his martyrdom, was laid out in a magnificent silver-studded mahogany coffin. The women, in rigorous mourning, were installed in a double row of chairs, weeping and praying. The men were planning revenge in the gold salon, the maids were serving light food as if it were a picnic, and we children, also dressed in black, were choking with laughter and playing at shooting one another dead. The wakes for my cousin and several of his companions lasted three days in their homes, while church bells tolled, uninterrupted, for the many dead. The authorities didn’t dare intervene. Despite the strict censorship, everyone in the nation knew what had occurred; the news exploded like a powder keg, and horror shook both revolutionaries and those loyal to the government. The president didn’t want to hear the details and denied all responsibility, as he had done with all the atrocities committed by the military and the feared Godoy.

  “They killed unarmed men, brutally, like animals. What would you expect, we’re a bloodthirsty country.” Nívea, much more angry than sad, proceeded to point out that up to this point in the century we’d had five wars. We Chileans, she said, seem inoffensive, and we have a reputation for being timid. We even speak with saccharine politeness—“Would you be so kind, please, as to get me a little water, if it’s no bother”—but at the first opportunity we turn into cannibals. You would have to know where we came from to understand our cruel streak, she said; our ancestors were the fiercest and cruelest Spanish conquistadors, the only ones who stuck it out as far as Chile, on foot, their armor red hot in the desert sun, conquering the worst obstacles of nature. They mixed with the Araucans, as fierce as they, the one people on the continent who were never subjugated. The Indians ate their prisoners, and their chieftains, the toquis, wore ceremonial masks fashioned from the dried skins of their oppressors, preferably those with beard and mustache because they themselves had no facial hair. That was how they avenged themselves on the whites, who in turn burned Indians alive, ran pikes up their anuses, cut off their arms, and tore out their eyes. “Enough! I forbid any more talk of such barbarity in front of my granddaughter,” my grandmother interrupted.

  The slaughter of the young conspirators was the spark that ignited the final battles of the civil war. In the days that followed, the revolutionaries put ashore an army of nine thousand men, backed by naval artillery, that advanced toward the port of Valparaíso at full tilt and in apparent disarray, like a horde of Huns, but there was a very clear plan in that chaos: within a few hours they had crushed their enemies. The government reserves lost three of every ten men. The revolutionary army occupied Valparaíso and from there moved quickly to take over Santiago and the rest of the country. In the meantime the president was directing the war from his office by telegraph and telephone, but the reports that came through to him were inaccurate and his orders were lost in the ether because most of the telephone operators belonged to the revolutionary faction. The president heard the news of the defeat at dinnertime. He finished his meal, showing no emotion, then ordered his family to take refuge in the North American embassy, picked up his muffler, his overcoat, and his hat, and, accompanied by a friend, walked to the Argentine legation only a few blocks from the presidential palace. One of the opponents of his government had been given asylum there and they nearly met at the door: one entering, defeated, and the other leaving, triumphant. The persecutor had become the persecuted.

  The revolutionaries marched on the capital amid the acclaim of the very citizenry that months before had applauded the government troops. Within a few hours the residents of Santiago had poured out into the streets with red ribbons tied to their arms, most to celebrate but some to hide, fearing the worst from the soldiers and stirred-up crowds. The new authorities put out a call to cooperate in orderly and peaceful fashion, which the mobs interpreted in their own way. They formed gangs with a leader at the head that ran around the city with lists of houses to be sacked, each identified on a map with a precise address. It was said later that the lists were drawn up with malevolence and vengeful spirit by certain ladies in high society. That may be, but it is clear to me that Paulina del Valle and Nívea were not capable of such baseness, despite their hatred for the overthrown government. Just the opposite—they hid a couple of families in their house while the popular furor cooled and the boring calm of the days before the revolution returned—something we all badly missed. The sacking of Santiago was a methodical, even entertaining action—seen from a distance, naturally. Ahead of the “commission,” a euphemism for the gangs, went the leader ringing a little bell and giving orders: “You can steal here, boys, but don’t break anything.” “Save the documents for me here, and then burn the house.” “Here you can take anything you want and then smash the rest.” The “commission” respectfully followed instructions, and if the owners were present they would greet them politely and then proceed to the sacking with boisterous abandon, like children at a party. They opened desks, removed private papers and documents, which they handed to their leader, then hacked furniture to bits, carried off what they liked, and finally sprinkled the walls with paraffin and set fire to them. From the room he occupied in the Argentine legation, the deposed president Balmaceda heard the roars from the people in the streets. After writing his political testament, and fearing that his family would pay the price for hatred toward him, he shot himself in the temple. The maid who took in his dinner that night was the last to see him alive. At eight in the morning he was found on his bed, properly dressed, his head resting on the bloody pillow. That bullet immediately converted him into a martyr, and in future years he would come to be the symbol of freedom and democracy, respected by even his most ferocious enemies. As my grandmother said, Chile is a country with a bad memory—in the few months of the revolution, more Chileans had died than during the four years of the War of the Pacific.

  Severo del Valle showed up in the midst of that chaos, bearded and caked with mud, looking for his wife, whom he hadn’t seen since January. He had a major surprise in store to find her with two more children; in the tumult of the revolution she had forgotten to tell him before he left that she was pregnant. The twins had begun to fill out, and in a couple of weeks had taken on a more or less human appearance; they were no longer the wrinkled, bluish little shrews they’d been at birth. Nívea threw her arms around her husband’s neck, and that was the first time in my life I had witnessed a long mou
th-to-mouth kiss. My grandmother, befuddled, tried to distract me, but to no avail, and I still remember the enormous impact that kiss had on me; it marked the beginning of the volcanic transformation of adolescence. Within a few months I had become a stranger; I couldn’t recognize the self-absorbed girl I was turning into. I saw myself trapped in a rebellious and demanding body that was growing and affirming itself, suffering and palpitating. It seemed to me that I was nothing but an extension of my uterus, that cavern I imagined as a bloody hollow in which humors fermented and terrible and unknown flora were developing. I couldn’t forget the hallucinatory, candlelit scene of a squatting Nívea giving birth to her babies, of her gargantuan belly studded with a protruding umbilicus, her thin arms clutching the ropes that hung from the ceiling. I would burst into tears without any apparent cause, and I suffered fits of uncontrollable anger, or woke so exhausted I couldn’t get out of bed. The dreams of the children in black pajamas returned with greater intensity and frequency; I also dreamed of a gentle man who smelled of the sea, who held me in his arms. I would wake up clinging to my pillow, wishing desperately that someone would kiss me the way Severo del Valle had kissed his wife. I was melting with heat outside and freezing inside; I couldn’t settle down enough to read or study but would run through the garden, whirling like someone possessed to keep from howling. I walked into the pond fully clothed, wading through water lilies and frightening the goldfish, my grandmother’s pride and joy. Soon I discovered the most sensitive points of my body, and would hide and fondle myself, not understanding why what was supposed to be a sin was so calming. I am going mad, I concluded, terrified, like so many girls who end up being hysterical, but I didn’t dare talk about it with my grandmother. Paulina del Valle was also changing; while my body was flowering, hers was drying up, beset by mysterious ills she didn’t discuss with anyone, not even her doctor, faithful to her theory that all that was needed to hold decrepitude at bay was to keep going and not make old lady noises. Her weight was a torment, she had varicose veins in her legs, her bones ached, she was short of breath, and her urine came in dribbles, mysteries I divined through small signs but that she held in strictest secrecy. Señorita Matilde Pineda would have helped me greatly during the trials of adolescence, but she had vanished from my life, cast out by my grandmother. Nívea had gone off with her husband, children, and nursemaids, as carefree and happy as when she had arrived, leaving a tremendous void in the house. There were too many rooms and not enough noise; without her and the children, my grandmother’s mansion turned into a mausoleum.