Portrait in Sepia Read online

  “Vines are like people, Aurora; the more difficult the circumstances, the better the fruit. It’s a shame that I discovered this truth so late, because if I’d known earlier, I would have ridden you and my sons a lot harder.”

  “You tried with me, Grandmother.”

  “I’ve been soft as mush with you. I should have left you with the nuns.”

  “To learn to embroider and pray? Señorita Pineda—”

  “I forbid you to mention that woman’s name in this house!”

  “All right, Grandmother, but at least I’m learning photography. With that I can earn a living.”

  “Where did you get such a harebrained idea!” cried Paulina del Valle. “No granddaughter of mine will ever have to earn a living. What Ribero is teaching you is entertainment—that’s no future for a del Valle woman. It isn’t your destiny to be a photographer taking pictures down on the plaza. You are going to marry someone of your own class and bring healthy children into the world.”

  “You’ve done more than that, Grandmother.”

  “I married Feliciano, I had three sons and a granddaughter. All the rest was just trimming.”

  “Well, frankly, it doesn’t seem like it.”

  In France, Frederick Williams had hired an expert who came shortly after to assess the technical aspects of the program. He was a hypochondriac, a little man who pedaled over my grandmother’s lands on his bicycle with a handkerchief tied around his nose and mouth because he thought that cow dung and Chilean dust would give him cancer of the lungs; he left no doubt, however, in regard to his profound knowledge of viticulture. The campesinos watched with awe as that gentleman in city clothes threaded his velocipede among the sharp rocks, stopping from time to time to sniff the soil like a dog on the scent. Since they couldn’t understand a word of his long diatribes in the tongue of Molière, my grandmother, in person, in her galoshes and carrying a parasol, had to follow the Frenchman’s bicycle for weeks to translate. The first thing Paulina noticed was that not all the plants were alike; there were at least three different kinds, mixed together. The Frenchman explained that some matured faster than others, so that if the climate destroyed the most delicate ones, they would get a crop from the others. He also confirmed that the enterprise would take years, because it wasn’t simply a question of harvesting better grapes, but of producing a fine wine and marketing it abroad, where it would have to compete with the centuries-old reputations of the wines of France, Italy, and Spain. Paulina learned everything the expert could teach her, and when she felt confident she sent him back home. By then she was exhausted, and she had learned that her plan would require someone younger and lighter on his feet than she, someone like Severo del Valle, her favorite nephew, whom she could trust. “If you keep producing all those babies, you’re going to need a lot of money to support them. You’re not going to do that lawyering, unless you steal twice as much as the others do, but the wine will make you rich,” she tempted him. Just that year, Severo and Nívea del Valle had given birth to an angel—that’s what people called her—an infant as beautiful as a tiny fairy, whom they named Rosa. It was Nívea’s opinion they had just been practicing with all their previous children in order finally to produce that perfect creature. Maybe God would be satisfied and not send them any more children, because they had a flock of them now. Severo thought the business of the French vines was preposterous, but he had learned to respect his aunt’s nose for commercial success and thought that it was worth taking a chance; he didn’t know that within a few months the vineyards would change his life. As soon as my grandmother found that Severo del Valle was as obsessed with the vines as she, she decided to make him a partner, leave the vineyards in his care, and take Williams and me to Europe, because, as she said, I was sixteen years old, and it was high time for me to acquire a veneer of cosmopolitanism and a wedding trousseau.

  “I’m not planning to marry, Grandmother.”

  “Not yet, but you’ll have to do that before you’re twenty, or you’ll end up an old maid dressing saints,” she concluded categorically.

  She didn’t tell anyone the real reason for the voyage. She was ill, and she thought that she could be operated on in England. Surgery there had developed apace since the discovery of anesthesia and asepsis. In recent months my grandmother had lost her appetite, and for the first time in her life she was suffering nausea and stomach upsets after a heavy meal. She wasn’t eating meat anymore, preferring soft food, sugary puddings, soups, and her pastries, which she couldn’t give up even though they fell like stones in her belly. She had heard about the famous clinic founded by a Dr. Ebanizer Hobbs, dead now for more than a decade, where the best physicians in Europe practiced. As soon as winter was over and the trail across the cordillera of the Andes was passable, we undertook the journey to Buenos Aires, where we were to board a transatlantic steamer to London. As usual, we took with us a cortège of servants, a ton of luggage, and several armed guards to protect us from the bandits that lurked in those lonely places, but this time my dog Caramelo couldn’t come with us because his legs were giving out. Crossing the mountains by carriage, then horseback, and finally on mules between precipitous cliffs that yawned on both sides like abysmal maws ready to devour us was unforgettable. The path looked like an endless narrow snake slithering through those overwhelming mountains, the backbone of America. Among the rocks grew bushes battered by raw weather and fed by narrow threads of water. Water was everywhere; waterfalls, streams, melting snow. The only sound was of water and the hooves of the beasts on the hard crust of the Andes. When we paused, an abysmal silence fell over us like a heavy mantle; we were intruders violating the perfect solitude of those heights. My grandmother, battling vertigo and the fainting spells that assaulted her almost as soon as we began the upward climb, was sustained by her iron will and the solicitude of Frederick Williams, who did everything in his power to help her. She was wearing a heavy traveling coat, leather gloves, and a pith helmet with heavy veils, as no ray of sunshine, however feeble, had ever touched her skin—thanks to which she planned to go to her grave without a wrinkle. I was dazzled. We had made this trip before, crossing toward Chile, but then I had been too young to appreciate the majesty of this nature. The animals moved forward step by step, picking their way along sheer precipices and high walls of pure rock raked by wind and polished by time. The air was as thin as a transparent veil and the sky a turquoise sea furrowed from time to time by a condor soaring on magnificent wings, absolute lord of those domains. As soon as the sun went down, the landscape was completely transformed; the blue peace of that abrupt and solemn nature disappeared to give way to a universe of geometric shadows that moved menacingly about us, closing us in, enveloping us. One false step and the mules would have tumbled, with us on their backs, into the depths of those ravines, but the guide had calculated the distance well and night found us at a squalid little woodplank hut, a refuge for travelers. They unloaded the animals and made seats for us on the sheepskin saddles and blankets, lighted by torches dipped in pitch, although lights were almost unnecessary, for an incandescent moon reigned in the giant dome of the skies like a sidereal beacon above the high rock. We had brought firewood with us, which they used to build a fire for warmth and to boil water for maté tea. Soon that brew of green, bitter herbs was being passed from hand to hand, everyone sipping from the same silver straw; that restored us and brought color back to the cheeks of my poor grandmother, who asked for her baskets and settled in like a flower vendor in the market to hand around food to dull our hunger. Out came bottles of liquor and champagne, aromatic country cheeses, delicate slices of roast pork, and breads and cakes wrapped in white linen napkins, but I noticed that my grandmother ate very little and did not touch the alcohol. In the meantime the men, skillful with their knives, killed a couple of kids they’d led behind the mules, skinned them, and strung them, crucified, on a pole they hung between two forked sticks. I don’t know how the night went—I fell into a deathlike sleep and didn’t wake until
dawn, when the task began of stirring the coals to make coffee and to dispose of the remains of the kids. Before we started off, we left firewood, a sack of beans, and a few bottles of liquor for the next travelers.

  PART THREE

  1896–1910

  The Hobbs clinic was founded by the celebrated surgeon Ebanizer Hobbs in his own home; it was a large, solid, and elegant residence right in the heart of Kensington, yet they kept tearing down walls, blocking windows, and adding tiles until it became a true horror. Its presence on that elegant street so upset the neighbors that Hobbs’s successors had no difficulty buying the adjacent homes to enlarge the clinic, but they kept the Edwardian façades so that from the outside it looked no different from the rows of houses on the block, all identical. Inside it was a labyrinth of rooms, staircases, corridors, and interior windows that didn’t look onto anything. It didn’t have the typical bullring-style operating room of the old city hospitals—a central circle covered with sawdust or sand and surrounded by galleries for spectators—but small surgery rooms with walls, ceiling, and floors faced with floor tiles and metal plates that were scrubbed with soap and lye once a day because the deceased Dr. Hobbs had been among the first to accept Robert Koch’s theory of the propagation of infection and to adopt Joseph Lister’s methods for asepsis, which most physicians still rejected out of pride or laziness. It was not easy to change old habits; hygiene was tedious and complicated, and it interfered with the swiftness of operations, which was considered the mark of a good surgeon since it diminished the risk of shock and blood loss. Unlike many of his contemporaries, who believed that infections were produced spontaneously in the body of the patient, Ebanizer Hobbs understood immediately that the germs were outside, on hands, floors, and instruments and in the atmosphere, which is why they sprayed everything from wounds to the air of the operating room itself with phenol. The poor man breathed so much phenol that he died before his time from a renal affection, his skin badly ulcerated, which gave his detractors an opportunity to cling to their own antiquated ideas. Hobbs’s disciples, nevertheless, analyzed the air and discovered that germs do not float like invisible birds of prey primed for a sneak attack but are concentrated on dirty surfaces; infection was produced by direct contact, so it was fundamental to clean the instruments thoroughly, use sterilized bandages, and see that surgeons not only zealously washed their hands but when possible wore rubber gloves. These were not the clumsy gloves used by anatomists to dissect cadavers or by some workers to handle chemicals, but a delicate product soft as human skin, made in the United States. They had a romantic origin: a physician, in love with a nurse, wanted to protect her from the eczema caused by disinfectants and had the first rubber gloves made for her; later they were adopted by surgeons for operations. Paulina del Valle had read all this with great interest in the scientific journals lent to her by her relative Don José Francisco Vergara, who, though still the scholar of old, by then had heart trouble and had retired to his palace in Viña del Mar. My grandmother not only carefully chose the doctor she wanted to operate on her, and contacted him from Chile months in advance; she also wrote to Baltimore, ordered several pairs of the famous rubber gloves, and carried them with her, carefully wrapped, in the trunk with her lingerie.

  Paulina del Valle sent Frederick Williams to France to check on the wood used in the barrels for fermenting wine, and to explore the cheese industry, because she didn’t see any reason why Chilean cows couldn’t produce cheeses as tasty as those from French cows, which undoubtedly were equally stupid. During that crossing of the cordillera of the Andes, and later on the ocean liner, I was able to observe my grandmother closely, and I became aware that something basic was beginning to weaken in her, something that wasn’t her will, her mind, or her greed, something more like her ferocity. She became gentle, bland, and so absentminded that she used to stroll on the deck of the ship dressed in fine muslin and pearls, but without her false teeth. It was obvious that she had bad nights; she had deep circles beneath her eyes and was always sleepy. She had lost a lot of weight, and her skin hung loose when she removed her corset. She wanted me to stay very close, “So you don’t flirt with the sailors,” she said, a cruel joke, since at that age my shyness was so absolute that one innocent look in my direction from a man and I would blush like a boiled lobster. The real reason was that Paulina del Valle felt fragile, and she needed me at her side to distract her from death. She didn’t mention her health; to the contrary, she talked about spending a few days in London and then going on to France to see about the barrels and cheese, but I guessed from the beginning that she had other plans. That became apparent as soon as we arrived in England and she began her diplomatic labor of convincing Frederick Williams to go on alone; we would stay to shop a while and then join him later. I don’t know whether Williams went ahead without suspecting that his wife was ill, or whether he guessed the truth, and understanding her modesty, left her in peace. The fact is that he checked us into the Hotel Savoy, and once he was sure we didn’t lack for anything, he took the next ferry across the Channel, but without any enthusiasm.

  My grandmother did not want witnesses to her decline, and she was especially reserved in front of Williams. That was part of the coquettishness she acquired once they were married; she’d shown none of that when he was her butler. She’d had no reluctance then to expose to him the worst side of her character, and he saw her dressed any which way, but from the day of their marriage she’d tried to impress him with her best plumage. That autumnal relationship was very important to her, and she didn’t want bad health to damage the solid edifice of her vanity, which was why she tried to keep her husband at a distance, and if I hadn’t planted my feet she would have shut me out too. It was a battle to be allowed to go with her on those medical visits, but finally she yielded, given my stubbornness and her weakness. She was in pain, and almost couldn’t swallow, but she didn’t seem frightened, although she sometimes made jokes about the drawbacks of hell and boredom of heaven. The Hobbs clinic inspired confidence from the moment you stepped inside, with its hall filled with bookshelves and oil portraits of the surgeons who had practiced within those walls. We were received by an impeccable matron and led to the doctor’s office, a cozy room with elegant brown leather furniture and a fireplace where large logs were crackling. Dr. Gerald Suffolk’s appearance was as impressive as his fame. He was a Teutonic type, large and ruddy, with a thick scar on his cheek that instead of making him ugly made him unforgettable. On his desk were the letters he had exchanged with my grandmother, the records of the Chilean specialists she had consulted, and the package with the rubber gloves, which she had sent ahead that morning by messenger. Later we learned that was an unnecessary precaution, since they had been used in the Hobbs clinic for three years. Suffolk welcomed us as if we were on a social call, offering us Turkish coffee scented with cardamom seeds. He led my grandmother to an adjoining room and after examining her returned to the office and leafed through a weighty book while she dressed. The patient soon returned, and the surgeon confirmed the earlier diagnosis of her Chilean doctors: my grandmother had a gastrointestinal tumor. He added that the operation would be risky for someone of her age, and also because it was in the experimental stage, but he had developed a perfect technique for such cases and physicians came from all over the world to learn from him. He expressed himself with such a sense of superiority that one of Don Juan Ribero’s maxims came to mind: Conceit is a privilege of the ignorant; the wise man is humble because he knows how little he knows. My grandmother surprised Dr. Suffolk when she demanded that he explain in detail what he intended to do to her; he was accustomed to having patients deliver themselves unto the unquestioned authority of his hands with the passivity of hens, but he seized the occasion to display his erudition with a lecture, more concerned with impressing us with the virtuosity of his scalpel than with the well-being of his unfortunate patient. He drew a sketch of intestines and organs that resembled a demented machine, and pointed out to us where the tumo
r was located and how he planned to excise it, right down to the type of suture, information that Paulina del Valle listened to imperturbably but so undid me I had to leave the office. I sat in the hall of the portraits to pray quietly. In truth I was more afraid for myself than for her; the idea of being left alone in the world terrified me. It was at that moment, pondering my possible orphanhood, that a man passed by; I must have looked very pale because he stopped. “Is something wrong, niña?” he asked in a Chilean-accented Spanish. I shook my head, surprised, not daring to look directly at him, but I must have peeked out of the corner of my eye because I could see he was young, clean shaven, and had high cheekbones, a strong chin, and oblique eyes; he looked like the illustration of Genghis Khan in my history book, though less ferocious. He was the color of honey all over—hair, eyes, skin—but there was nothing honeyed in his tone when he explained that he was as Chilean as we were, and he would assist Dr. Suffolk in the operation.

  “Señora del Valle is in good hands,” he said, without a shred of modesty.

  “What happens if they d-d-don’t operate?” I asked, stammering, as I always do when I’m nervous.

  “The tumor will keep growing. But don’t worry, niña, surgery has advanced by leaps and bounds, your grandmother did well to come here,” he concluded.