Portrait in Sepia Read online

  Santiago celebrated the fall of the government with an interminable series of parades, parties, cotillions, and banquets; my grandmother, not to be left behind, again opened up the house and tried to resume her social life and soirées, but there was something in the air that the month of September, with its splendid springtime, could not affect. The thousands of deaths, the treachery and sackings, weighed on the souls of both winners and losers. We were all ashamed: the civil war had been an orgy of blood.

  That was a strange period in my life; my body changed, my soul expanded, and I began to wonder seriously who I was and where I came from. The catalyst was the arrival of Matías Rodríguez de Santa Cruz, my father—although I didn’t yet know he was my father. I welcomed him as the Uncle Matías I had met several years earlier in Europe. Even then I thought he had seemed fragile, but when I saw him again I didn’t recognize him; he was little more than a starving bird perched in his invalid’s wheelchair. He was escorted by a beautiful, mature, opulent, milky-skinned woman dressed simply in mustard-colored poplin with a faded shawl over her shoulders; her most notable feature was an untamed mat of curls, tangled and gray, held at the neck by a thin ribbon. She looked like an ancient, exiled Scandinavian queen; it took no effort to imagine her at the stern of a Viking ship sailing among icebergs.

  Paulina del Valle had received a telegram announcing that her eldest son would be landing in Valparaíso, and immediately put into action a plan to go to the port with me, Uncle Frederick, and the rest of her usual train. We went to meet him in a special car the English railroad manager had placed at our disposal. It was trimmed in varnished wood with fittings of polished brass; the seats were oxblood velvet, and we were attended by two uniformed employees who treated us as if we were royalty. We booked rooms in a hotel facing the sea, and waited for the ship, which was due the next day. When we presented ourselves at the dock, we were as elegant as if we were going to a wedding. I can say that with confidence since I have a photograph taken in the plaza a little before the boat docked. Paulina del Valle is in light-colored silk, all draped and beruffled and wearing rows of pearls; her monumental broad-brimmed hat is crowned with feathers cascading downward like a waterfall, and she is holding an open parasol to protect her from the sun. Her husband, Frederick Williams, is splendid in a black suit, top hat, and cane. I am all in white with an organdy bow in my hair; I look like a birthday present. They lowered the ship’s gangplank, and the captain personally invited us to come aboard, escorting us with great ceremony to the stateroom of Don Matías Rodríguez de Santa Cruz.

  The last thing my grandmother expected was to run smack into Amanda Lowell. The nasty shock nearly killed her; the presence of her former rival impressed her much more than the pitiful appearance of her son. Of course in those days I didn’t have enough information to interpret my grandmother’s reaction; I thought she’d been overcome by the heat. The phlegmatic Frederick Williams, on the other hand, didn’t turn a hair when he saw La Lowell; he greeted her with a brief but pleasant bow and then concentrated on getting my grandmother comfortable in a chair and getting water for her, while Matías observed the scene with evident amusement.

  “Wh-what is this woman doing here!” my grandmother stammered once she could get her breath.

  “I imagine you would like to have a family powwow, I’ll go for a stroll,” said the Viking queen, and exited with her dignity intact.

  “Miss Lowell is my friend; let’s say she is my only friend, Mother. She has accompanied me to here—without her I could not have traveled. It was she who insisted on my return to Chile, thinking it for me is better to die en famille than stretched out in some hospital in Paris,” said Matías in an obscure Spanish and with a strange French-English accent.

  Then Paulina del Valle looked at her son for the first time, and realized that he was nothing but a skeleton covered with skin like a snake’s; his glassy eyes were sunken in their sockets, his cheeks so papery you could see his teeth through the skin. He was propped up in a chair, supported by cushions, his legs covered by a shawl. He looked like a wild, sad little old man, though in fact he couldn’t have been more than forty.

  “My God, Matías, what’s happened to you?” asked my grand-mother, horrified.

  “Nothing that can be cured, Mother. You understand, n’est-ce pas, that I must have reasons very powerful for returning here.”

  “That woman—”

  “I know the whole histoire about Amanda Lowell and my father. It happened thirty years ago on the other side of the world. Can you not forget your resentment? By now we are all at an age to shed futile emotions and keep only those that help us live. Tolerance is one of them, Mother. I owe much to Miss Lowell, beaucoup! She is my companion for more than fifteen years.”

  “Companion? What does that mean?”

  “What you hear: companion. She is not my nurse, she is not my wife, and no longer she is my lover. She accompanies me in mes voyages, in my life, and now, as you can see, she accompanies me at my death.”

  “Don’t talk like that! You’re not going to die, son. We’re going to give you the proper care, and soon you’ll be good as new,” Paulina del Valle assured him, but her voice broke, and she couldn’t go on.

  It had been three decades since my grandfather Feliciano Rodriguez de Santa Cruz had his fling with Amanda Lowell, and my grandmother had seen her only once or twice, and then from afar, but she had recognized her instantly. It was not for nothing that she had slept every night in the theatrical bed she had ordered from Florence to defy her rival; that must have reminded her constantly of the rage she felt toward her husband’s scandalous lover. When an elderly, unpretentious woman materialized before her eyes who did not in any way resemble the fabulous filly who had stopped traffic when she swung her hips through the streets of San Francisco, Paulina saw her not as she was but as the dangerous rival she had once been. The anger Amanda Lowell inspired in my grandmother had lain dormant, awaiting its moment to flower, but, hearing her son’s words, she searched every corner of her heart and couldn’t find it. What Paulina encountered instead was maternal instinct, an emotion she had not been known for but one now flooding her heart with unconditional and unbearable compassion. Compassion not just for her dying son, but also for the woman who had been with him for so many years, who had loved him loyally, had cared for him through the bad times of his illness, and had now traveled across the world to bring him to his mother at the hour of his death. Paulina del Valle sat slumped in her chair, her eyes fixed on her pitiable son as tears rolled silently down her cheeks; she was suddenly diminished, aged, and fragile, and I kept patting her shoulder, understanding very little of what was going on. Frederick Williams must have known my grandmother very well, because he slipped out to find Amanda Lowell and brought her back to the stateroom.

  “Forgive me, Miss Lowell,” my grandmother murmured from her chair.

  “Please forgive me, señora,” the other woman replied, timidly coming forward until she was facing Paulina del Valle.

  They took one another’s hands, one standing, the other seated, both with tear-filled eyes, for a time that to me seemed eternal, until I noticed that my grandmother’s shoulders were shaking, and realized that she was quietly laughing. The other woman smiled, first covering her mouth, embarrassed, and then, when she saw Paulina laugh, she uttered a joyful hoot that melded with my grandmother’s, and then after a few seconds both were doubled over, infecting one another with hysterical and uncontrollable elation, sweeping away all the years of futile jealousy, shattered rancor, marital deceit, and other abominable memories.

  The house on Calle Ejército Libertador sheltered many people during the turbulent years of the revolution, but nothing was as involved and exciting for me as when my father came back to await his death. The political situation had stabilized since the civil war, which put an end to years of liberal governments. The revolutionaries won the changes for which so much blood had been spilled. Before the war, the government imposed its can
didate by means of bribery and intimidation and the support of civil and military authorities; now the bribing was done in equal measure by landowners, priests, and the two parties. The system was more fair, because the payoffs of one side compensated for the dirty tricks of the other, and corruption was no longer financed from public funds. This was called free elections. The revolutionaries also devised a parliamentary system based on Great Britain’s, though it was not to last very long. “We are the English of America,” my grandmother once said, and Nívea immediately replied that the English were the Chileans of Europe. In any case, the parliamentary experiment had no chance to survive in a land of caudillos; the ministers changed so frequently that it was impossible to keep track, and finally the Saint Vitus’ dance of politics lost its charm for everyone in our family except Nívea, who to call attention to women’s suffrage often chained herself to the gates of Congress with two or three ladies as enthusiastic as she, to the derision of passersby the fury of the police, and the chagrin of their husbands.

  “When women can vote, they will vote in a block. We will have so much leverage that we’ll be able to shift the balance of power and change this country,” she said.

  “Wrong, Nívea,” my grandmother refuted. “Women will vote for whoever their husbands or their priests say, women are much dumber than you think they are. Besides, some of us rule from behind the throne—you saw how we made short work of that last government. I don’t need suffrage to get what I want.”

  “Because you have money and an education, Aunt. How many are like you? We have to fight for the vote, that comes first.”

  “You’ve lost your head, Nívea.”

  “Not yet, Aunt, not yet—”

  My father was moved into one of the salons on the ground floor, which was converted into a bedroom because he couldn’t climb the stairs, and he was assigned a permanent maid, to be with him day and night, like his shadow. The family physician offered a poetic diagnosis— “inveterate turbulence of the blood”—he told my grandmother, because he preferred not to confront her with the truth, but I suppose that to everyone else it was obvious that my father was being consumed by a venereal disease. He was in the last stages, when there is no cataplasm, poultice, or corrosive sublimate that can help, the stage he had meant to avoid at any cost but had to suffer because he hadn’t had the courage to commit suicide before it came to that, as he had planned for years. He could barely stir because of the pain in his bones; he couldn’t walk, and his mind was failing. Some days he spent tangled in nightmares without ever really waking, murmuring incomprehensible stories, but he had moments of great lucidity, and when the morphine eased his agony he could laugh and talk about the past. Then he would call me to come sit by his side. He passed the day in a large chair by a window, looking at the garden, supported by pillows and surrounded by books, newspapers, and trays of medications. The maid would sit down to knit a short distance away, attentive to his needs, silent and gruff as an enemy, the only person he would tolerate around him because she didn’t treat him with pity. My grandmother had arranged a pleasant atmosphere for her son; she had hung chintz curtains and papered the walls in tones of yellow; she kept freshly cut flowers from the garden on all the tables and had hired a string quartet to come several times a week to play his favorite classical melodies, but nothing could disguise the smell of medicine and the certainty that in that room someone was putrefying. At first that living cadaver repelled me, but when I managed to conquer my fear and, forced by my grandmother, began to visit him, my life changed. Matías Rodríguez de Santa Cruz came to the house just when I was waking to adolescence, and he gave me what I most needed: memory. In one of his cogent periods, when he was feeling the solace of drugs, he told me he was my father, and the revelation was so casual that it didn’t even shock me.

  “Lynn Sommers, your mother, was the most beautiful woman I ever saw. How happy I am that you did not inherit her beauty,” he said.

  “Why is that, Uncle?”

  “Don’t call me Uncle, Aurora. I am ton père.Your father. Beauty tends to be a curse, because it awakens in men the worst passions. A too beautiful woman cannot escape the desire she arouses.”

  “Are you sure you’re my father.”

  “Absolument.”

  “Really! I thought my father was Uncle Severo.”

  “Severo should have been your father, he is a much better man than I. Your mother deserved a husband like him. I was always the brainless one. That’s why you find me as I am, a scarecrow. En tout cas, he can tell you much more about her than I can,” he assured me.

  “Did my mother love you?”

  “Yes, but I did not know what to do with that love, and I ran away from it. You are very young to understand these things, ma chère. It is enough to know that your mother was wonderful, and that it is sad she died so young.”

  I agreed with that—I would have liked to know my mother—but I was even more curious about other people from my early childhood who came to me in dreams or in vague memories impossible to pinpoint. Though Matías had seen him only once, it was in those conversations with my father that the silhouette of my grandfather, Tao Chi’en, began to form. All he had to do was mention his full name and tell me that he was a tall, handsome Chinese man, and my memories were released, drop by drop, like gentle rain. Once I had put a name to that invisible presence that was always with me, my grandfather ceased to be an invention of my fantasy and became a ghost as real as a flesh-and-blood person. I felt enormous relief when I found out that I hadn’t imagined that gentle man who smelled of the sea; he not only existed, he had loved me, and if he had disappeared so abruptly, it was not from any desire to abandon me.

  “I understand that Tao Chi’en died,” my father informed me.

  “How?”

  “I think of an accident, but I am not sure.”

  “And what happened to my grandmother, Eliza Sommers?”

  “She went to China. She believed that you would be better off with my family, and she was not mistaken. Ma mère always wanted a daughter, and you she raised with more affection than she ever gave my brothers and me.”

  “What does Lai Ming mean?”

  “ ’Sais pas. No idea. Why?”

  “Because sometimes it seems to me I hear that word.”

  Matías’s bones were watery from his illness, he tired quickly, and it wasn’t easy to get information from him; he tended to lose himself in ramblings that had nothing to do with what interested me, but little by little I was fitting together patches of the past, stitch by stitch, always behind my grandmother’s back, who was happy that I was visiting her sick son because she didn’t have the spirit to do it. She would go into his room a couple of times a day, give him a quick kiss on the forehead, and stumble out with her eyes filled with tears. She never asked what we talked about, and of course I never told her. Nor did I dare mention the subject to Severo and Nívea del Valle; I was afraid that the least indiscretion on my part would put an end to the talks with my father. Without having discussed it, we both knew that our conversations had to be kept secret, which united us in a strange complicity. I can’t say that I came to love my father—there wasn’t enough time for that—but in the brief months we lived in the same house he placed a treasure in my hands by giving me details of my history, especially those concerning my mother, Lynn Sommers. He repeated many times that I had the legitimate blood of the del Valles; that seemed very important to him. Later I learned that following a suggestion from Frederick Williams, who had a great influence over every person in that house, he bequeathed me, while he was living, his part of the family fortune, safe in various bank accounts and stocks, to the frustration of a priest who visited every day with the hope of snagging something for the church. This was a grumbly old man with an odor of sanctity—he hadn’t bathed or changed his cassock in years—famous for his religious intolerance and his talent for sniffing out the wealthy on their deathbeds and convincing them to leave their fortunes to works of charity. A
ffluent families would see him approach with real terror, as invariably he announced a death, but no one dared slam the door in his face. When my father realized that the end was near, he called Severo del Valle, with whom he almost never spoke, to reach an agreement about me. They brought a notary public to the house, and both signed a document in which Severo renounced his paternity and Matías Rodríguez de Santa Cruz recognized me as his daughter. In that way I was protected from Paulina’s other two sons, Matías’s younger brothers, who at my grandmother’s death, nine years later, grabbed everything they could.