A Long Petal of the Sea Page 20
Victor was to see Neruda again thirteen months later, when, together with two friends, he had to organize the poet’s flight on horseback through Andean mountain passes and into Argentina. For months Neruda, unrecognizable with his heavy beard, had hidden in the houses of friends and party comrades, with the police hot on his heels. Just as with Neruda’s poetry, this journey to the frontier left an indelible impression on Victor. They rode through the magnificent scenery of cold forests, age-old trees, mountains, and water: water everywhere, flowing down in hidden streams among ancient trunks, cascading from the sky, sweeping everything away in turbulent rivers the travelers had to cross, their hearts racing. Many years later, Neruda recalled that crossing in his memoirs: Each one moved along, intoxicated by that boundless solitude, by that green and white silence. It was all the dazzling and secretive work of nature, and at the same time a growing threat of cold, snow, and pursuit.
Victor said goodbye to him at the border, where gauchos were waiting for him with spare horses to continue the journey. “Governments come and go, but poets remain, Don Pablo. You’ll return in glory and majesty. Remember my words,” he said, hugging him.
Neruda managed to get out of Buenos Aires using the passport of Miguel Angel Asturias, the great Guatemalan novelist with whom he shared a certain physical resemblance: they were both long-nosed, with plenty to spare in face and body. In Paris he was greeted as a brother by Pablo Picasso and feted at the World Congress of Partisans for Peace.
The Chilean government meanwhile told the press that this man was an impostor, Neruda’s double; the real one was in Chile, and the police knew where he was.
* * *
—
ON MARCEL DALMAU BRUGUERA’S tenth birthday, a letter arrived from his grandmother Carme. It had traveled halfway around the world before finally reaching its recipient. His parents had told him about her, but he had never seen a photograph, and the stories about his legendary family in Spain were so distant from his reality that he put them in the same category as the make-believe horror and fantasy novels he collected. At that age, he refused to speak Catalan, only doing so with old Jordi Moline at the Winnipeg tavern. With the rest of humanity he spoke Spanish with an exaggerated Chilean accent and vulgar expressions that often earned him resounding slaps from his mother. Apart from this oddity, he was an ideal child, taking charge of his schooling, transport, clothes, also often his food, and even making his own appointments at the dentist and barber. He was like an adult in short trousers.
Returning from school that day, Marcel picked up the mail from the box, separated his weekly magazine of aliens and the wonders of nature, and left the rest on the hall table. He was accustomed to finding the house empty. As his parents worked unpredictable hours, they had given him the house key at the age of five, and he had traveled alone on trams and buses since he was six. He was bony and tall with well-defined features, his black eyes had an absorbed expression, and his stiff straight hair was kept in place with brilliantine. Apart from his tango-singer hairstyle, he imitated Victor Dalmau’s measured gestures and his tendency to say little and avoid giving details. He knew Victor wasn’t his father but his uncle, but this information was as irrelevant as the legend of that grandmother of his who had gotten off a motorcycle in the middle of the night and became lost in the midst of a despairing throng.
First Roser arrived with a birthday cake, and then Victor. He had been on duty at the hospital for thirty hours, but hadn’t forgotten to bring Marcel the present he had been longing for over the last three years. “It’s a professional telescope, like the ones grown-ups use. It’ll last you until you get married,” Victor joked, giving him a hug. He was more demonstrably affectionate than the boy’s mother, and a much softer touch. It was impossible to get around her, but Marcel knew a dozen tricks to get his own way with Victor.
After having supper and sharing the cake, Marcel brought the mail into the kitchen. “Well! It’s from Felipe del Solar. I haven’t seen him in months,” exclaimed Victor when he saw the sender’s name. It was a large envelope with the stamp of the del Solar law firm. Inside was a note saying it was time they met for lunch one of these days, and apologizing for the delay in sending the attached letter, which had arrived at his former home after being sent one place and another until it reached him, because he now lived in an apartment opposite the golf club. A minute later, Roser and Marcel were startled to hear Victor give a loud shout: they had never heard him raise his voice before. “It’s Mother! She’s alive!” he said, breaking into sobs.
Marcel wasn’t really interested in the news. He would have preferred one of his aliens to materialize rather than his grandmother, but he changed his mind when they told him about their trip. From then on, everything was a matter of preparing to travel to meet Carme: letters that came and went without waiting for any reply; telegrams crossing in midair; freeing up Roser’s timetable of classes and concerts and Victor’s work at the hospital. Neither of them was concerned about Marcel missing months at school if need be; his resurrected grandmother was more important.
They traveled on a Peruvian airline, making five stops before they reached New York. From there they took a boat to France, a train from Paris to Toulouse, and finally arrived in the Principality of Andorra on board a bus that climbed a road that slithered like a weasel among the mountains. None of them had flown before, and the experience served to reveal the only weakness they ever discovered in Roser: her terror of heights. In her everyday life, when she had to go out onto a balcony on a top floor, for example, she disguised her vertigo with the same stoicism that she used to put up with any aches or pains or the struggle to get by. “Clench your teeth and carry on without fuss” was her motto, but in the plane her nerves and equanimity deserted her. Her husband and son had to hold her hands, comfort her, distract her attention, support her head whenever she was sick during the countless hours in the air. At each stopover they almost had to carry her, because she could hardly walk. When they reached Lima from Antofagasta on the second stage of their odyssey, Victor thought she looked so ill he decided to send her back home overland and continue on his own with Marcel. Roser confronted him with her usual determination. “I’ll fly to hell itself if necessary,” she said, and reached New York quivering with fear and still vomiting in the paper airsickness bags. In fact, she was preparing herself, as she knew she was going to have to travel by air in the future if the project of the Ancient Music Orchestra that she was planning ever came to fruition.
Carme was waiting for them at Andorra la Vella bus station, sitting ramrod-stiff on a bench, smoking as ever. She was dressed in mourning for the dead, for those lost, and for Spain, wearing an absurd hat, and with a bag on her lap out of which poked the head of a little white dog.
The three adults had no difficulty recognizing one another, because none of them had changed a great deal over the ten years they had been apart. Roser was the same as before, although she had adopted a style suited to her position; Carme found herself slightly intimidated by this confident, well-dressed woman wearing makeup. She had last seen her on a terrible night, when she was pregnant, exhausted, and shivering with cold in a motorcycle sidecar. The only one reduced to tears of emotion was Victor; the two women greeted each other with a kiss on the cheek, as though they had seen each other the day before, and as if the war and exile had been insignificant episodes in their otherwise tranquil existences.
“You must be Marcel. I’m your àvia. Are you hungry?” was the grandmother’s way of greeting her grandson. Without waiting for his reply, she handed him a sweet roll from her voluminous bag, where the dog sat beside the cakes. Fascinated, Marcel studied the complicated geography of Àvia’s wrinkles, her yellow, nicotine-stained teeth, her stiff, gray hair poking like straw from her hat, and her twisted, arthritic fingers. It seemed to him that if she had had antennae, she could have been one of his aliens.
They rode with her in a twenty-yea
r-old taxi that wheezed its way through a city nestling between mountains. According to Carme, this was the capital of spying and smuggling, practically the only two profitable enterprises in those years. She herself dabbled in the latter, because to be a spy you had to have good connections with the European powers and the Americans. More than four years had passed since World War Two ended in 1945, and the devastated cities were recuperating from hunger and ruin, but there were still hordes of refugees and displaced people searching for their place in the world. She explained that during the war Andorra had been a nest of spies, and thanks to the Cold War, it still was. In the past it had been an escape route for those fleeing the Germans, especially Jews and escaped prisoners, who were sometimes betrayed by their guides and ended up murdered or handed over to their enemy to be robbed of the money and jewels they were carrying. “There are several shepherds who became rich all of a sudden, and every year when the thaw comes, bodies appear, their wrists tied with wire,” said the taxi driver, who joined in their conversation. After the war, it was German officers and Nazi sympathizers who passed through Andorra, fleeing to possible destinations in South America. They were hoping to cross into Spain and receive help from Franco. “As for smuggling, it’s almost nothing, just a service to society,” Carme insisted. “Tobacco, alcohol, and little things like that, nothing dangerous.”
Installed in the rustic house that Carme shared with the peasant couple who had saved her life, they sat down to eat a tasty rabbit and chickpea stew with two porrones of red wine and told one another of all their adventures during the previous decade. In the Retreat, when the grandmother decided she didn’t have the strength to go on and the idea of exile was unbearable, she abandoned Roser and Aitor Ibarra to lie down and die of cold as far away from them as possible. To her great regret, she woke the next morning, stiff and ravenous but more alive than she would have wished. She remained where she was, motionless, while all around her the throng of fugitives dragged itself along, in ever decreasing numbers, until by evening she found herself alone, curled up like a snail on the frozen ground.
Carme told them she couldn’t remember what she felt, but she realized it’s hard to die, and to invite death is cowardice. Her husband was dead, and so too perhaps were her two sons, but Roser and Guillem’s child was still alive. That made her determined to go on, but she couldn’t raise herself from the ground. Then a stray puppy came by, following the trail of the refugees, and she let it snuggle up alongside her for some warmth. That animal was her salvation. An hour or two later, a peasant couple, who had sold their produce to the stragglers in the refugee column and were returning home, heard the dog whining and mistook it for a baby. When they saw Carme, they came to her aid.
She lived with them, working the land with great effort and poor results, until the family’s eldest son took them to Andorra. They spent the Second World War there, smuggling anything that came their way between Spain and France, including people, if the opportunity arose.
“Is this the same dog?” asked Marcel, who had it on his lap.
“The very same. He must be eleven years old, and he’s going to live many more. He’s called Gosset.”
“That’s not a name. It means ‘little dog’ in Catalan.”
“It’s name enough. He doesn’t need another one,” his grandmother retorted between two drags on her cigarette.
* * *
—
DURING THE MEAL, Carme told them she had found them at long last thanks to Elisabeth Eidenbenz, who had returned to Vienna, still completely devoted to her mission of helping women and children. Vienna had been ferociously bombed, and when she arrived shortly after the end of the war, its starving inhabitants were digging in the garbage for food while hundreds of lost children were living like rats among the ruins of what had once been the most beautiful of imperial cities. In the south of France in 1940, Elisabeth had carried out her plan to create a model maternity home in an abandoned mansion in Elne, close to Perpignan, where she took in pregnant women so that they could give birth in safety. At first these had been Spanish women rescued from the concentration camps, then later Jews, gypsies, and other women escaping from the Nazis. Protected by the Red Cross, the Elne maternity home was meant to stay neutral and not aid political refugees, but Elisabeth paid little attention to this, despite being closely watched. As a result, the Gestapo closed the home in 1944. By then, she had managed to save more than six hundred babies.
As chance would have it, Carme later met one of the lucky mothers in Andorra, who told her how she had her child thanks to Elisabeth. Carme made the connection between that nurse and the name of the person who was to be her family’s contact in France, if they succeeded in getting across. She wrote to the Red Cross, and from one of their offices to another, one country to another, through a persistent correspondence that overcame bureaucratic obstacles and crisscrossed Europe, she finally managed to locate Elisabeth in Vienna.
The nurse wrote to Carme that at least one of her sons, Victor, was still alive, had married Roser, who had a boy called Marcel, and the three of them were in Chile. She had no means of getting in touch with them, but Roser had written to the family that took her in when she left Argeles-sur-Mer. It was difficult to trace the Quakers, who by then were living in London. They had to search in their attic to find Roser’s envelope with the only address they had for her, that of Felipe del Solar’s house in Santiago. And so, after a delay of several years, Elisabeth Eidenbenz succeeded in reuniting the Dalmaus.
Roser, Victor, and Marcel had to return to Chile without her, as it would take a whole year before Carme Dalmau decided she was willing to emigrate and rejoin her family. As she knew nothing about Chile, that long worm at the far south of the map, she began searching in books and asking people if they knew any Chileans she could question, but none passed through Andorra in all that time. She was held back by her friendship with the peasants who had taken her in, and with whom she had lived for many years, as well as her dread at having to travel halfway round the world accompanied by an elderly dog. She was afraid she wouldn’t like Chile. “My uncle Jordi says it’s the same as Catalonia,” Marcel reassured her in one of his letters. Once her mind was made up, she said goodbye to her friends, took a deep breath, and dismissed her worries, ready and willing to enjoy the adventure. She traveled unhurriedly by land and sea for seven weeks with the mutt in a bag, allowing herself time to be a tourist and appreciate other landscapes and languages, try exotic dishes, and compare customs different from her own. Day by day she grew more distant from the past she had known and entered another dimension.
During her years as a schoolteacher she had studied and taught the world, but now she was discovering it was nothing like the descriptions in books or photographs. It was much more complex and colorful, much less frightening. She shared her thoughts with her pet, and wrote them in a school notebook together with her recollections, as a precaution, in case at some point her memory began to fail her. She embellished the facts, because she was aware that life is how we tell it, so why would she jot down trivia?
The last stage of her pilgrimage was the same voyage down the Pacific that her family had taken in 1939. Her son had sent her enough money to travel first-class, arguing that she deserved it after all the hardships she had suffered, but she preferred to travel tourist-class, where she would be more at ease. The war and her years as a smuggler had made her very discreet, but she resolved to speak to strangers, since she had discovered that people like to talk, and it only took a couple of questions to make friends and find out lots of things. Everybody had a story and wanted to tell it.
Gosset, who had been suffering from the aches and pains of old age, was gradually rejuvenated. By the time they were approaching Chile, he was a different dog, more alert and smelling less like a skunk.
Victor, Roser, and Marcel were there to receive the grandmother and her dog in the port of Valparaiso. They were accompanie
d by a stout, talkative gentleman who introduced himself as “Jordi Moline, at your service, madame.” He added in Catalan that he was ready to show her the best this beautiful country had to offer. “Do you realize you and I are almost the same age? I’m a widower too,” he said rather coquettishly.
On the train to Santiago, Carme learned about how Jordi had adapted perfectly to the role of great-uncle. By now Victor was a cardiologist in the San Juan de Dios hospital, and so no longer worked nights in the Winnipeg. Roser was busy with her music, although she still kept an eye on the accounts. Marcel went almost every day to the bar to do his homework, and so as not to be at home alone.
* * *
—
IN THE MID-1960S, Roser traveled to Caracas, invited once more by her friend Valentin Sanchez, the former Venezuelan ambassador, who by this time was retired from diplomacy and devoted himself entirely to his passion for music. In the twenty-five years that had elapsed since the arrival of the Winnipeg, Roser had become more Chilean than anyone born in that country. The same was true of the majority of the Spanish refugees, who were not only citizens, but many of whom fulfilled Pablo Neruda’s dream of rousing Chilean society from its slumbers. By now nobody remembered there had once been opposition to their arrival, and nobody could deny the magnificent contribution made by the people Neruda had invited to Chile. After years of planning, extensive correspondence, and many trips, Roser and Sanchez had succeeded in creating the Ancient Music Orchestra, the first of its kind on the continent, sponsored by oil, the inexhaustible treasure gushing out of the Venezuelan earth. While he traveled across Europe acquiring precious antique instruments and digging out unknown scores, she trained the musicians through a strict selection process from her position as vice-rector of the National Conservatory of Music. There were more than enough candidates who came from different countries in the hope of becoming part of this utopian orchestra. Chile didn’t have the means to support such an enterprise—there were other priorities in the cultural field, and on the few occasions Roser managed to awaken interest in the project, there would be another earthquake, or a change of government, and her hopes would be dashed. But in Venezuela, with the right influence and connections, any dream was possible. Valentin had plenty of both, as he had been one of the few politicians capable of navigating safely through dictatorships, military coups, attempts at democracy, as well as the compromise government then in power, with a president who was one of his personal friends. His country was struggling against a guerrilla group inspired by the Cuban revolution, like many others on the continent, apart from Chile where a revolutionary movement that was more theoretical than real was just in its infancy. However, none of this affected Venezuela’s prosperity or the love Venezuelans had for music, ancient or not. Valentin often visited Chile, where he kept an apartment in Santiago that he could use whenever he felt like it. Roser paid him visits in Caracas, and they had traveled to Europe together on orchestra business. She had learned to travel by plane thanks to tranquilizers and gin.