Portrait in Sepia Read online

  “You can’t ask anything of me, Diego.”

  “I’m not asking for myself. I have thick skin, and I can face it like a man. I’m asking for my mother’s sake. She couldn’t bear it.”

  So for Doña Elvira’s sake, I stayed. I don’t know how I was able to get dressed, splash water on my face, comb my hair, have a cup of coffee, and leave the house for my daily chores. I don’t know how I faced Susana at lunch, or what explanation I gave my in-laws for my swollen eyes. That day was the worst; I felt beaten, dazed, on the verge of tears at the first word from anyone. That night I had a fever, and my bones ached, but the next day I was calmer. I saddled my horse and raced off toward the hills. Soon it began to rain, but I kept galloping on until my poor mare couldn’t go any farther; then I got off and pushed my way on foot through the undergrowth and mud beneath the trees, slipping, and falling, and getting back up, screaming at the top of my lungs as the rain poured down. My soaked poncho weighed so much that I threw it off and went on, shivering from the cold but burning inside. I rode back at sunset; I had lost my voice and had a fever. I drank a cup of hot tea and got into bed. I remember very little of the rest, because in the following weeks I was busy fending off death and hadn’t the time or spirit to think about the tragedy of my marriage. The night I had spent barefoot and half naked in the stable, and the gallop through the rain, had brought on a pneumonia that nearly killed me. They took me by cart to the German hospital, where I was placed in the hands of a Teutonic nurse with blond braids whose tenacity saved my life. That noble Valkyrie could lift me like a baby in her strong woodcutter’s arms, and just as ably spoon chicken broth into me with the patience of a wet nurse.

  At the beginning of July, when winter had definitively set in and all you could see was water—torrential rivers, floods, bogs, rain and more rain—Diego and two of the campesinos came to the hospital to get me and take me back to Caleufú wrapped in blankets and furs like a package. They had improvised a roof of waxed canvas over the cart, installed a bed, and there was even a lighted brazier to combat the dampness. Sweating in my cocoon of covers I made the slow journey home, Diego riding alongside on horseback. At times the wheels became mired; the oxen weren’t strong enough to pull the cart out, and the men had to lay planks over the mud and push. Diego and I did not exchange a single word during that long day’s journey. At Caleufú, Doña Elvira came out to welcome me, weeping with joy, nervous, bestirring the maids to get the braziers, the hot water bottles, the soup with calf’s blood to bring back my color and my wish to live. She had prayed so much for me, she said, that God had taken pity. Using the excuse that I still felt very vulnerable, I asked her to let me sleep in the big house, and she put me in a room near hers. For the first time in my life I had a mother’s care. My grandmother Paulina del Valle, who loved me so dearly and had done so much for me, was not given to shows of affection, although at heart she was very sentimental. She said that tenderness, that honeyed mixture of love and compassion so frequently represented on calendars by enraptured mothers beside their babies’ cradles, was tolerable when applied to defenseless creatures like kittens, for example, but supreme foolishness when it came to human beings. There had always been an ironic and brassy note in our relationship; we scarcely ever touched, except when I slept with her as a child, and in general we treated each other with a certain brusqueness that was very comfortable to us both. I would fall back on a mocking tenderness when I wanted to get my way, and I always won, because my prodigious grandmother was easy to soften up—more to escape demonstrations of emotion than for any weakness of character. Doña Elvira, on the other hand, was a simple being to whom the sarcasm my grandmother and I used would have been offensive. She was naturally affectionate. She would take my hand and hold it in hers, and kiss and hug me; she liked to brush my hair, she personally gave me my marrow bone and codfish tonics, applied camphor plasters for my cough, and made me sweat out my fever by rubbing me with eucalyptus oil and wrapping me in warm blankets. She worried over me, seeing that I ate well and got enough rest, and at night she gave me the opium drops and stayed at my side praying until I fell asleep. Every morning she asked if I’d had nightmares, and asked me to describe them in detail, “because by talking about those things you lose your fear.” Her health wasn’t good, but she found strength from God knows where to nurse me and stay with me, while I pretended to be more fragile than I truly was in order to prolong that idyll with my mother-in-law. “Get better soon, child, your husband needs you at his side,” she would say, concerned, although Diego kept saying I should spend the rest of the winter in the big house. Those weeks beneath her roof recovering from pneumonia were a strange experience. My mother-in-law gave me the care and warmth I would never have from Diego. That gentle and unconditional love acted like a balm, and little by little I was getting over wanting to die and feeling such animosity toward my husband. I had come to understand Diego and Susana’s feelings and the inexorable fatalism of what had happened. Their passion had to be a force of nature, an earthquake that tossed them about at will. I imagined how they had fought against that attraction before succumbing to it, how many taboos they had to overcome in order to be together, how terrible the torment of each day must be, pretending a brother-and-sister relationship to the world while they were burning with desire inside. I stopped asking myself how it was possible that they could not conquer the lust and selfishness that kept them from seeing the disaster they could cause among those closest to them because I intuited how tortured they must be. I had loved Diego desperately, I could understand what Susana felt for him. Would I have done the same as she in the same circumstances? I didn’t think so, but that was impossible to know. Although my sense of failure was as strong as ever, I was able to let go of my hatred, to stand back and put myself in the skin of the other protagonists in that misery. I had more compassion for Eduardo than sorrow for myself. He had three children, and he loved his wife; the drama of that incestuous infidelity would be worse for him than for me. For my brother-in-law’s sake, too, I had to hold my tongue, but the secret wasn’t weighing now like a millstone around my neck because the horror of what Diego had done had been mitigated, washed by the hands of Doña Elvira. My gratitude to that woman was added to the respect and affection I had felt from the beginning. I clung to her like a lapdog; I needed her presence, her voice, her lips on my forehead. I felt obliged to protect her from the cataclysm brewing in the bosom of her family. I was willing to stay at Caleufú, hiding my humiliation as a rejected wife, because if I left and she discovered the truth she would die of grief and shame. Her life turned around that family, around the needs of each of the persons who lived within the walls of their compound: that was her entire universe. My agreement with Diego was that I would play my part as long as Doña Elvira lived, and after that I would be free; he would let me leave and would never contact me again. I would have to live with the stigma—calamitous for many—of being “separated,” and would not be able to marry again, but at least I wouldn’t have to live with a man who didn’t love me.

  In mid-September, when I was running out of excuses to stay in my in-laws’ house and the moment had come to move back to live with Diego, Iván Radovic’s telegram arrived. In a couple of lines he informed me that I should return to Santiago because my grandmother was nearing the end. I had expected that news for months, but when the telegram came I felt as if I’d been clubbed; I was stupefied with sorrow and surprise. My grandmother was immortal. I couldn’t visualize her as the tiny, bald, fragile old woman she truly was, only as she had been: an astute, bewigged Amazon with a gluttonous appetite. Doña Elvira took me in her arms and told me that I mustn’t feel alone, that I had another family now, that I belonged at Caleufú and she would try to look after me and protect me as Paulina del Valle had done before. She helped me pack my two suitcases, again hung the scapular of the Sacred Heart of Jesus around my neck, and swamped me with advice. To her, Santiago was a den of iniquity and the trip a perilous adventure. It was the
time they started up the sawmill again after the paralysis of winter, which afforded Diego a good excuse not to come with me to Santiago, even though his mother insisted he should. Eduardo took me to the boat. The whole family stood waving good-bye at the door of the big house at Caleufú: Diego, my in-laws, Adela, Susana, the children, and various servants. I didn’t know that I would not see them again.

  Before I left I went through my darkroom, which I hadn’t been in since that fateful night in the stable, and found that someone had removed the photographs of Diego and Susana, but since that person knew nothing about the developing process, the negatives hadn’t been touched. Those pathetic vestiges of evidence had no purpose now, so I destroyed them. I put the negatives of the Indians, the people around Caleufú, and the other members of the family into my suitcases, because I didn’t know how long I would be away and I didn’t want them to be damaged. I made the trip with Eduardo on horseback, with my luggage strapped onto a mule, stopping at small settlements to eat and rest. My brother-in-law, that large bearlike man, had the same gentle nature as his mother, the same nearly childish naïveté. Along the way we had time to talk as we never had before. He confessed that from the time he was a child he had written poetry. “How can you not when you live in the midst of such beauty?” he added, indicating the landscape of woods and water around us. He told me there was nothing he wanted; unlike Diego, he had no curiosity about other places in the world, Caleufú was enough for him. When he’d traveled to Europe in his youth, he had felt lost and deeply unhappy; he couldn’t live away from that land he loved. God had been very generous with him, he said, setting him down in the middle of an earthly paradise. We said good-bye in the port with a quick hug. “May God protect you, Eduardo,” I whispered in his ear. He seemed a little taken aback by that solemn farewell.

  Frederick Williams was waiting for me at the station, and he took me by carriage to the house on Ejército Libertador. He was surprised to see me so thin, and my explanation that I had been very sick did not satisfy him. He kept looking at me out of the corner of his eye, insistently asking about Diego, whether I was happy, what the family of my in-laws was like, if I had adapted to life in the country. From being the most splendid in that neighborhood of small palaces, my grandmother’s mansion had become as decrepit as its mistress. Shutters were swinging from their hinges, and the walls looked faded. The garden was so abandoned that spring hadn’t touched it, it was still caught in wintry sadness. Inside the desolation was worse; the once beautiful salons were nearly empty; furniture, carpets, and art had disappeared, and nothing remained of the famous Impressionist paintings that had caused such a scandal several years before. Uncle Frederick explained that in preparing for death, my grandmother had given nearly everything to the church. “But I believe that her monetary resources are intact, Aurora, because she still keeps count of every penny, and her account books are under the bed,” he added with a mischievous wink. She, who had gone to church only to be seen, who detested the swarms of obsequious nuns and priests with their hands out who were always buzzing around the rest of the family, had in her will set aside a considerable sum for the Catholic church. Always sharp in business dealings, she was prepared to buy at her death what she’d had little need of in life. Williams knew my grandmother better than anyone, and I think he loved her almost as much as I; against all the predictions of the envious, he did not steal her fortune and abandon her in her old age but looked after the interests of the family for years. He was a husband worthy of her, willing to stay to her last breath, and he would be of great help to me, as he later demonstrated. Paulina was not very lucid; the drugs she had to take to ease her pain kept her in a limbo without memory or desires. In those months she had been reduced to pure skin because she couldn’t swallow and was being fed milk through a rubber tube introduced through a nostril. She had almost no hair on her head, and her large dark eyes had narrowed to two little dots in a map of wrinkles. I bent down to kiss her, but she didn’t know me and turned her face away; at the same time, however, her hand felt in the air for her husband’s, and when he took it an expression of peace lighted her face.

  “We are not allowing her to suffer, Aurora, we are giving her a goodly amount of morphine,” Uncle Frederick informed me.

  “Have you notified her sons?”

  “Yes, I sent them a wireless two months ago, but we have received no answer, and I doubt that their arrival will be opportune. Paulina’s time is growing short.”

  And that was true. Paulina del Valle died silently the next day. Her husband, Dr. Radovic, Severo, Nívea, and I were at her side; her sons appeared much later with their lawyers to fight for the inheritance that no one was disputing. The doctor had removed my grandmother’s feeding tube, and Williams put gloves on her because her hands were icy. Her lips turned blue, and she was very pale; her breathing was less and less perceptible, with no sign of distress, and at one point it simply stopped. Radovic took her pulse; a minute passed, maybe two, then he announced that she was gone. There was a gentle quiet in the room; something mysterious was happening. Maybe my grandmother’s spirit had left her body and was circling like a confused bird above her body, telling us good-bye. I felt desolate at her parting, an old, old feeling I knew well but could not name or explain until a couple of years later when the mystery of my past finally was clarified and I realized that the death of my grandfather Tao Chi’en, many years before, had plunged me into similar anguish. The wound had been there beneath the surface and now had opened with the same searing pain. The sense of being absolutely alone, an orphan, that I experienced at my grandmother’s death was identical to what had gripped me when I was five years old, when Tao Chi’en vanished from my life. I suppose that the old sorrows of my childhood—loss after loss—buried for years in the deepest layers of my memory rose up with their menacing Medusa heads to devour me: my mother dead at my birth, my father unaware of my existence, my maternal grandmother’s depositing me in the hands of Paulina del Valle without explanation, and especially, the sudden loss of the person I loved most in the world, my grandfather Tao Chi’en.

  Nine years have gone by since that September day when Paulina del Valle died; that and other misfortunes are behind me, and now I can remember my magnificent grandmother with a peaceful heart. She did not disappear into the boundless blackness of absolute death, as it first seemed; part of her stayed behind and is always near me, along with Tao Chi’en, the two very different spirits that accompany me and give me counsel—the first in practical matters, and the second in resolving emotional questions—but when my grandmother stopped breathing on that army cot where she spent her last months, I had no way to know that she would return, and I was overcome with grief. If I were capable of exteriorizing my emotions, I might suffer less, but they get locked inside me, like a huge block of ice, and years can pass before that ice begins to melt. I didn’t weep when she died. The silence in the room seemed an error of protocol, because a woman who had lived like Paulina del Valle ought to die operatically singing, accompanied by an orchestra; instead her farewell was silent, the one discreet thing she did in all her life. The men left the room, and Nívea and I carefully dressed her for her last voyage in the Carmelite habit she had kept hanging in her closet for more than a year, but we couldn’t resist the temptation to clothe her first in her best French mauve silk lingerie. When we lifted her body, I realized how slight she had become; all that was left was a brittle skeleton and some loose skin. In silence I thanked her for everything she had done for me; I spoke the words of affection I would never have dared voice if she could hear me. I kissed her beautiful hands, her reptilian eyelids, her noble forehead, and I asked her forgiveness for the tantrums I threw as a child, for having come too late to say good-bye, for the dried lizard I’d spit out in a false attack of coughing, and other heavy-handed jokes she’d had to put up with, while Nívea seized the excuse offered by Paulina del Valle’s departure to weep noiselessly for her dead children. After we dressed my grandmother, we
sprinkled her with eau de gardenia and opened the drapes and windows to let spring blow in, as she would have liked. No mourning gallery, no black clothes, no covering the mirrors; Paulina del Valle had lived like an eccentric empress, and she deserved to be celebrated in September light. Which was what Williams thought, too; he went personally to the market and filled the carriage with fresh flowers to decorate the house.

  When relatives and friends arrived—dressed in mourning and with handkerchief in hand—they were scandalized, for they had never seen a wake with bright sunlight, wedding flowers, and no tears. They went off mumbling darkly about plots, and years later there are still people who point me out, convinced that I rejoiced when Paulina del Valle died because I thought I could clamp onto her fortune. I inherited nothing—because her sons quickly sewed that up through their lawyers—but after all, I didn’t have to, since my father left me enough to live decently, and I can earn the rest with my work. Despite my grandmother’s endless advice and teaching, I never developed her nose for profitable business dealings; I will never be rich, and I’m happy about that. Frederick Williams did not have to fight the lawyers, either, because he was much less interested in money than evil tongues had been whispering for years. Besides, his wife had given him a lot in her lifetime, and he, a cautious man, had put it in a safe place. Paulina’s sons could not prove that their mother’s marriage to the former butler was illegal, and they had to resign themselves to leaving Uncle Frederick in peace. Neither could they appropriate the vineyards because they were in Severo del Valle’s name, in view of which the would-be heirs set their lawyers onto the priests, to see if they could recover the wealth they’d obtained by frightening the sick woman with the cauldrons of hell, but up till now no one has won a case against the Catholic Church, which has God on its side, as everyone knows. In any case there was money to spare, and the sons, various relatives, and even the lawyers have lived on it to the present day.