A Long Petal of the Sea Page 25

  Because of the months spent in Argeles-sur-Mer, Victor thought he was better prepared than the other prisoners to resist, but that had been years ago, when he was young. Now he was about to turn sixty, but until the moment of his arrest he had never had time to think about his age. There in the north, with burning hot days and icy nights on the saltpeter flats, he longed to die of weariness. It was impossible to escape: the camp was surrounded by the immense desert, hundreds of kilometers of dry earth, sand, rocks, and wind. He felt like an old man.

  CHAPTER 11

  1974–1983

  Now I’ll tell you:

  my land will be yours,

  I’m going to conquer it,

  not just to give it to you,

  but to everyone,

  to all my people.

  —PABLO NERUDA

  “Letter on the Way”

  THE CAPTAIN’S VERSES

  DURING THE ELEVEN MONTHS VICTOR Dalmau spent in the concentration camp, he didn’t die of weariness as he had expected. Instead, his body and mind were strengthened. He had always been thin, but there he was reduced to nothing but skin and bones. His skin was burned by the unrelenting sun, salt, and sand, his features sharpened: he was a Giacometti sculpture in cast iron. He wasn’t defeated by the absurd military exercises, pushups, races in the scorching heat, the hours lying still in the freezing night, the blows and beatings, being forced to work at pointless tasks, humiliated, ravenous. He yielded to his condition as a prisoner, abandoning all pretense that he could control anything in his existence. He was in his captors’ hands: they had absolute power and impunity, he was master only of his emotions. He repeated to himself the metaphor of the birch tree, which bends in a storm but doesn’t break. He had already endured this in other circumstances. He protected himself from the sadism and stupidity of his jailers by withdrawing into silent memories, certain only that Roser was searching for him and would one day find him. He spoke so little that the other prisoners nicknamed him “the mute.” He thought of Marcel, who had spent the first thirty years of his life saying next to nothing because he didn’t want to talk. Victor didn’t want to either, because there was nothing to say. His companions in misfortune kept their spirits up whispering out of earshot of the guards, while he thought of Roser with great nostalgia, of all they had lived through together, how much he loved her.

  To keep his mind sharp he obsessively went over the most famous games in the history of chess, as well as some of those he had played with the president. He once dreamed of carving chess pieces from the camp’s porous stones so that he could play with some of the others, but that was impossible due to the guards’ despotic surveillance. These soldiers came from the working class. Their families were poor, and perhaps most of them had been sympathetic to the socialist revolution, but they obeyed orders with great cruelty, as though the prisoners’ past actions were personal insults.

  Each week, inmates were taken to other concentration camps or were shot, their bodies blown up with dynamite in the desert, and yet many more arrived than left. Victor calculated there were more than fifteen hundred altogether. They came from across the country, were of different ages and occupations; the only thing they had in common was the fact that they were being persecuted. They were enemies of the fatherland. Like Victor, some of them had not belonged to a party or held any political position; they were there due to a vengeful denunciation or a bureaucratic mistake.

  * * *

  —

  IT WAS THE START of spring, and the prisoners were already fearing the arrival of summer, which turned the camp into a hell during the daylight hours, when an abrupt change came in Victor Dalmau’s fortunes. The camp commander suffered a heart attack just as he was giving his morning harangue to the prisoners, who were lined up in the yard barefoot and in their underwear. The commandant fell to his knees, managed to gasp for breath, then slumped to the ground before the nearest soldiers could catch him. Not a single prisoner moved; no one made a sound. To Victor it was as if everything was happening in slow motion, in silence and in another dimension, as if it were part of a nightmare. He saw two soldiers trying to lift the commandant, while others ran to call the nurse.

  With no thought for the consequences, he stepped forward through the lines of prisoners as though sleepwalking. Everybody was staring at the fallen man, and by the time they noticed Victor and ordered him to stop and throw himself facedown on the ground, he had already reached the front of the ranks. “He’s a doctor!” shouted one of the prisoners. Victor continued to trot forward, and in a few seconds reached the unconscious commandant. He kneeled down beside the commandant without anyone stopping him: the soldiers stepped back to give him room. He checked that the commandant wasn’t breathing. He signaled to one of the closest guards to loosen his clothing, while he gave him artificial respiration and pressed down hard on his chest with both hands. He knew there was a manual defibrillator in the sick bay because it was occasionally used to resuscitate torture victims.

  A few minutes later the nurse came running up, followed by an assistant with oxygen and the defibrillator. He helped Victor restart the commandant’s heart.

  “A helicopter! We have to get him to a hospital at once!” Victor insisted as soon as he realized the heart was beating once more. They carried the commandant to the sick bay, where Victor kept him alive until the helicopter on standby at the edge of the camp was ready to take off. They were thirty-five minutes from the nearest hospital. Victor was ordered to accompany the patient and was handed an army shirt, trousers, and boots.

  It was a small but well-equipped provincial hospital. In normal times it would have had sufficient resources for an emergency of this kind, but now there were only two doctors. They both knew Victor Dalmau by reputation and greeted him respectfully. Thanks to an irony typical of those days, Victor was told the chief surgeon and the cardiologist had both been arrested. Victor had no time to wonder where they could have been taken, as neither of them was among the prisoners in his camp. An operating room had been his workplace for decades, and as he always told his students, the heart is a muscular organ that contains no mysteries; those attributed to it are entirely subjective. In no time at all he gave the necessary instructions, scrubbed his hands, prepared the commandant, and then, assisted by one of the hospital doctors, proceeded to carry out the operation he had performed hundreds of times. He discovered that his hands’ memory was intact: they moved by themselves.

  Victor spent the night awake with his patient, more euphoric than exhausted. In the hospital nobody stood guard over him with a submachine gun; he was treated with deference and admiration, and given steak with mashed potatoes, a glass of red wine, and ice cream for dessert. For a few hours he became Doctor Dalmau again rather than a number. He had forgotten what life was like before his arrest. In midmorning, when his patient was still critical but stable, an army cardiologist arrived by plane from Santiago. Victor was ordered to return to the concentration camp, but he managed to ask the doctor who had assisted him in the operation to contact Roser. This was a risk, because the man was undoubtedly right-wing, but over the hours they worked together their mutual respect was plain. Victor was certain Roser had returned to Chile to look for him, because that is what he would have done for her.

  The new concentration camp commandant turned out to be as brutal as his predecessor, but Victor only had to put up with him for five days. That morning, when they had finished the roll call and separated out the prisoners to be taken away, his name was called. For the prisoners, this was the worst moment of the day, as they could be transferred to a torture center, a camp still more terrible than this one, or taken out and shot. After waiting three hours standing up, the group was led to a truck. The guard checking the names on his list stopped Victor from climbing on board with the others. “You stay here, asshole.” He had to wait another hour before he was led to the camp office, where the commandant hi
mself told him he was in luck and handed him a sheet of paper. He had been granted parole. “If it was up to me, I’d open the gate and make you walk, you communist son of a bitch. But it turns out you’re to be taken back to the hospital,” the man told him.

  Roser and a Venezuelan embassy official were waiting for him there. Victor hugged his wife with the despair of those long months of uncertainty when he had thought of her with a love he had never clearly expressed. “Oh, Roser, how much I love you, how much I’ve missed you,” he whispered, burying his nose in her hair. Both of them were weeping.

  * * *

  —

  BEING ON PAROLE MEANT going every day to a police station to sign a register. Depending on the mood of the duty officer, this could take a long while. Victor signed in twice before deciding to seek asylum in the Venezuelan embassy. It had taken him those two days to realize that having been a prisoner condemned him to being ostracized. He couldn’t go back to work at the hospital; his friends avoided him, and he ran the risk of being rearrested at any moment. The caution and fear all around him were in sharp contrast to the defiant, vengeful optimism shown by the dictatorship’s supporters. What was really going on in the shadows was never mentioned. Nobody protested; the crushed workers had lost their rights: they could be fired at any moment and were grateful for whatever wages they received, because there was a line of unemployed waiting at the door to be given an opportunity. It was the employers’ paradise. The official version was of an orderly, clean, and pacified country heading for prosperity. Victor couldn’t help thinking of those tortured or killed, the faces of the men he had met in prison and those who had disappeared. People had changed; he found it hard to recognize the country that had received him with such a fervent embrace thirty-five years earlier, and which he loved as if it were his own.

  By the second day he confessed to Roser he couldn’t bear the dictatorship. “I couldn’t do so in Spain, and I can’t here. I’m too old to live in fear, Roser; but a second exile is as unbearable as staying in Chile and facing the consequences.” She argued it would only be temporary: the military regime would soon end because, as everyone said, Chile had a solid democratic tradition, and so they could return. Her argument crumbled in the face of the fact that Franco had been in power for more than thirty years, and Pinochet could imitate him. Victor spent a sleepless night contemplating whether to leave or not, lying in the darkness with Roser curled up beside him, listening to the noises from the street.

  At three in the morning he heard a car pull up outside the house. That could only mean they were coming for him again; during curfew only military and security service vehicles were allowed on the streets. There was no way he could run or hide. He lay there in a cold sweat, his heart beating like a drum. Roser peeped out through the curtains and saw a second black automobile pull up behind the first one. “Get dressed quickly,” she ordered Victor.

  But then she saw several men get out of the cars in a leisurely way: no rushing, shouting, or pulling out weapons. They stood there for a while smoking and chatting, and eventually drove off again. Trembling, arms around each other, Victor and Roser waited at the window until it began to grow light, then five o’clock struck and the curfew ended.

  Roser arranged for the Venezuelan ambassador to collect Victor in a car with diplomatic license plates. By this time, most of the asylum-seekers in embassies had left for the countries that accepted them, and surveillance was less strict. Victor entered the embassy curled up in the trunk. A month later he was given a safe-conduct. Two Venezuelan officials accompanied him to the door of the plane, where Roser was waiting for him. He was clean, freshly shaven, and calm. On the same plane was another exile, who had his handcuffs removed once he was in his seat. He was filthy, disheveled, and shaking. Victor couldn’t help noticing him, and when they were in the air, approached him. He had difficulty striking up a conversation and convincing the man he wasn’t a secret policeman. He saw the man had no front teeth, and several of his fingers were crushed.

  “How can I be of help, comrade?” he said.

  “They’re going to make the plane turn around…They’re going to take me back to…” the man said, bursting into tears.

  “Stay calm, we’ve been in the air for almost an hour, I’m sure we’re not going back to Santiago. This is a direct flight to Caracas; you’ll be safe there, you’ll have help. I’ll get you a drink, you need it.”

  “Make it something to eat,” the other man begged him.

  * * *

  —

  ROSER HAD SPENT LONG periods in Venezuela with the Ancient Music Orchestra. She gave concerts, had made friends, and moved easily in a society whose rules of behavior were different from those of Chile. Valentin Sanchez had introduced her to everyone worth knowing, and opened the doors to the world of culture. Her love affair with Aitor Ibarra had ended years before, but they were still friends, and she visited him from time to time. His stroke had left him a semi-invalid, and he had some difficulty getting his words out, but it hadn’t affected his mind or diminished his instinct for dreaming up new businesses, which his eldest son supervised. His house was high up in Cumbres de Curumo, with a panoramic view over Caracas. He grew orchids, collected exotic birds and custom-made cars. It was a gated community with a leafy park containing several houses, protected by a barrier wall and an armed guard. Two of his married children also lived there, and several grandchildren.

  According to Aitor, his wife never suspected the lengthy relationship he had had with Roser. Roser doubted this was true, as they must have left many clues over the years. She concluded that the beauty queen had tacitly accepted that her husband was a womanizer, like many men for whom that was a proof of virility, but chose to ignore it. She was the legitimate wife, the mother of his children, the only one who counted. After Aitor was left paralyzed, she had him all to herself, and she came to love him more than before, because she discovered his great virtues, ones she hadn’t been able to appreciate in the hustle and bustle of their previous existence. They were growing old together in perfect harmony, surrounded by their children.

  “As you can see, Roser, every cloud has a silver lining, as the saying goes. In this wheelchair I’m a better husband, father, and grandfather than I would be if I were able to walk. And even though you might not believe me, I’m happy,” Aitor told Roser on one of her visits. In order not to disturb her friend’s peace of mind, she chose not to tell him how important the memory of those afternoons of kisses and white wine was to her.

  They had both promised they would never reveal this past love to their partners—why hurt them?—but Roser didn’t keep her side of the bargain. In the two days between Victor’s liberation from the camp and his asylum in the embassy, they fell in love as if they had just met. It was a luminous discovery. They had missed each other so much that when they reunited they didn’t see each other as they really were, but as they had been when they were sad youngsters pretending to make love with whispers and chaste caresses in the Winnipeg lifeboat. She fell in love with a tall, tough stranger, his features sculpted like dark wood, his eyes gentle and his clothes freshly ironed, someone who was capable of surprising her and making her laugh with silly remarks, who gave her pleasure as if he had memorized the map of her body, who cradled her all night long so that she fell asleep and woke nestled against his shoulder, who told her what she had never expected to hear, as if suffering had demolished his defenses and made him sentimental.

  Victor fell in love with the woman he had previously loved with a brother’s incestuous love. She had been his wife for thirty-five years, but it was only during those days of their re-encounter that he saw her stripped of the burdens of the past: her role as Guillem’s widow and Marcel’s mother. She was a youthful, fresh apparition. In her fifties, Roser was revealed to him as sensual, filled with enthusiasm, with an endless reserve of fearless energy. She detested the dictatorship as much as he did, but she didn
’t fear it. Victor realized that, in fact, she had never shown any sign of fearing anything, apart from traveling by plane, not even in the last days of the Spanish Civil War. She was facing exile now with the same courage as she had done then, without complaining, without looking back, her eyes fixed on the future.

  What kind of indestructible material was Roser made of? How was it that he had been so lucky to have her for so many years? And how could he have been so stupid not to love her from the start the way he loved her now? He never imagined that at his age he could fall in love like an adolescent or feel desire like wildfire. He looked at her enraptured, because still intact beneath her appearance as a mature woman was the innocent, formidable little girl Roser must have been when she looked after goats on a hillside in Catalonia. He wanted to protect and care for her, even though he knew she was stronger than he was whenever they suffered misfortune. He told her all this and much more in the days after their reunion, and he was to go on repeating them all the days that followed.

  It was during those evenings of confessions and memories—when they shared glories, wretchedness, and secrets—that she first told him about Aitor Ibarra. Listening to her, Victor felt a bullet in his chest that knocked the wind out of him. The fact that, as Roser assured him, their adventure had ended long ago only partly consoled him. He had always suspected that on her travels she had taken a lover, or perhaps even several, but the confirmation of this longstanding, serious love awoke in him retrospective jealousy that would have destroyed the happiness of the moment had Roser allowed it. With her implacable common sense, she showed him she had not robbed him of anything to give to Aitor. She had not loved him any the less, because that love was always hidden in another chamber of her heart and didn’t interfere with the rest of her life. “Back then you and I were great friends, confidants, accomplices, and spouses, but not lovers the way we are now. If I’d told you about him at the time it would have upset you a lot less, because you wouldn’t have seen it as betrayal. And anyway, you’ve been unfaithful to me as well.” This comment startled Victor, as his own infidelities had been so insignificant he could scarcely recall them, and he never imagined she knew about them. He grudgingly accepted her argument, but continued sulking for a while, until he eventually realized it was useless to stay bogged down in the past. As his mother used to say, “What’s done is done.”