A Long Petal of the Sea Page 29

  Victor had spent his life fighting suffering and death. He was familiar with the volcanic emotions a patient facing the end goes through, because he had taught them at the university: denial of one’s fate, immense anger at becoming ill, bargaining with destiny and the divinity to prolong one’s existence, succumbing to despair, and finally, at best, resigning oneself to the inevitable. Roser skipped all the earlier stages and from the outset accepted her passing with astonishing calm and good humor. She refused to follow the alternative treatments that Meche and other well-intentioned female friends suggested: she didn’t want to know about homeopathy, herbs from Amazonia, healers, or exorcisms. “I’m going to die: so what? Everybody has to die.” She took advantage of the hours when she felt well to listen to music, play the piano, and read poetry with the cat Meche had given them on her lap. It looked like an Egyptian goddess but had always been half-feral, distant, and solitary. Sometimes it disappeared for days on end, and would often come back bearing the bloody remains of a rodent, which it deposited on their marital bed as an offering. Now it seemed to understand that something had changed, and overnight became gentle and affectionate, refusing to leave Roser.

  At first, Victor was obsessed with existing treatments and experimental ones. He read reports, studied every drug, and memorized statistics selectively, rejecting the most pessimistic and clinging to any shred of hope. He remembered Lazaro, the boy soldier from Estacion del Norte, who came back from death because he had such a strong desire to live. He thought that if he could inject Roser’s spirit and immune system with a similar passion for life, she could defeat cancer. There were such cases. Miracles did exist. “You’re strong, Roser, you always have been. You’ve never been ill, you’re made of iron and will get over it, this illness isn’t always fatal,” he repeated like a mantra, without managing to instill in her any of this baseless optimism that as a professional he would have discouraged in his patients. Roser went along with him as long as she was able to. Just to please him, she underwent chemotherapy and radiation, although she was convinced this only meant prolonging a process that was becoming more painful by the day. With the stoicism that was her birthright, she put up with the horror of the drugs without ever complaining. All her hair fell out, even her eyelashes, and she was so weak and thin that Victor could pick her up without effort. He carried her in his arms from bed to armchair, to the bathroom, out into the garden to see the hummingbirds in the fuchsia bush and the hares bounding past, mocking the dogs already too old to bother to chase them. She lost her appetite but made an effort to swallow at least a couple of mouthfuls of the dishes he prepared by following recipe books. Toward the end she could only keep down the Catalan custard dessert that Carme used to make for Marcel on Sundays. “When I’m gone, I want you to cry for a day or two to show respect, comfort poor Marcel, and then go back to the hospital and your teaching. But with a bit more humility, Victor, because you’ve been unbearable lately,” Roser told him on one occasion.

  Right to the end, the thatched stone house was their sanctuary. They had spent six happy years there, but it was only now, when every minute of the day and night was precious, that they fully appreciated it. When they bought it, the house was already in poor condition, but they had postponed the necessary repairs indefinitely. They should have replaced the shutters hanging off their hinges, redecorated the bathrooms with their pink tiles and rusty pipes, rehung doors that wouldn’t shut and others they couldn’t open, gotten rid of the rotting thatch on the roof where mice nested, swept away the cobwebs, moss, and moths, and beat the dusty carpets. But they saw none of this. The house wrapped itself around them like an embrace, protecting them from pointless distractions, the curiosity and pity of others.

  Marcel was their only regular visitor. He arrived every so often laden with bags of groceries from the market, food for the dogs, the cat, and the parrot, who always greeted him with an enthusiastic “Hello, handsome!” He also brought CDs of classical music for his mother, videos to entertain them, and newspapers and magazines that neither Victor nor Roser read, because they found the outside world exhausting. Marcel tried to be discreet, taking his shoes off in the doorway so as not to make noise, but he was a big man, and his looming presence and feigned cheerfulness made the house seem small. His parents missed him if he didn’t come to see them for a day, and when he was with them, he left them with their heads in a whirl. Their neighbor Meche also came to quietly leave food on the porch and ask if they needed anything. She stayed only a few moments, understanding that the most precious thing the Dalmaus had was the time they spent together, the time to say goodbye.

  The day came when, sitting side by side on the wicker chair on the porch, with the cat on her lap, dogs at their feet, and a view of the golden hills and blue sky of evening, Roser asked her husband to please let her go, because she was very weary. “Don’t take me to the hospital for any reason. I want to die in our bed, holding your hand.” Defeated at last, Victor had to accept his own powerlessness. He couldn’t save her, and he couldn’t imagine life without her. He realized in horror that the half century they had spent together had galloped by. Where had the days and years gone? The future without her was the huge empty room without doors and windows that appeared in his nightmares. He dreamed he was escaping from war, blood, and shattered bodies. He ran and ran through the night until suddenly he found himself in that sealed room where he was safe from everything but himself. The energy and enthusiasm of the previous months when he thought age could not touch him drained from his bones. The woman beside him also grew old in a few minutes. Moments earlier she was still as he had always seen her and as he remembered her in her absence: the twenty-two-year-old with a newborn babe in her arms, the woman who married him without love but loved him more than anyone else in the world, his lifelong companion. With her he had lived everything that was worth living. The proximity of death made the intensity of his love as unbearable as an acid burn. He wanted to shake her, shout at her not to go, they still had years ahead of them to love each other more than ever, to be together and not be apart a single day: Please, please, Roser, don’t leave me. And yet he said none of this to her, because he would have had to be blind not to see Death in the garden, waiting for his wife with the patience of a specter.

  There was a chill breeze, and Victor had wrapped Roser in two blankets that came up to her nostrils. Only a skeletal hand poked out of the bundle, gripping him with more strength than she seemed capable of. “I’m not afraid of dying, Victor. I’m happy: I want to know what comes next. You shouldn’t be afraid either, because I’ll always be with you in this life and in others. It’s our karma.” Victor began to weep like a baby, in despairing sobs. Roser let him cry until he ran out of tears and resigned himself to what she had accepted months earlier. “I’m not going to let you suffer anymore,” was all Victor could offer her. As she did every night, she nestled in the crook of his arm and let herself be rocked and lulled to sleep. It was dark already. Victor lifted off the cat, picked up Roser carefully so as not to wake her, and carried her to bed. She weighed almost nothing. The dogs followed him.

  CHAPTER 13

  1994

  And yet.

  Here are the roots of my dream,

  This is the harsh light we love.

  —PABLO NERUDA

  “Return”

  SAILINGS AND RETURNS

  THREE YEARS AFTER ROSER’S DEATH, Victor Dalmau was about to turn eighty in the home in the hills where they had lived ever since their return to Chile in 1983. The house was an aging, trembling, and disheveled monarch, but still noble. Solitary from childhood, Victor found being a widower more of a burden than he had anticipated. Theirs had been the happiest of marriages, as anyone meeting them would have said who didn’t know the details of their remote past.

  After Roser died he found himself unable to get used to her absence as rapidly as she herself would have wished. “When I die, remarry qu
ickly. You’re going to need someone to look after you when you’re decrepit and demented. Meche wouldn’t be a bad choice…” she ordered him toward the end, between inhaling through her oxygen mask. Despite his loneliness, Victor liked his empty house, which seemed to have grown larger somehow. He enjoyed its silence, disorder, the smell of the closed rooms, the cold and the drafts his wife had battled against much more fiercely than the rodents in the roof.

  The wind had been howling all day, the windows were covered with hoar frost, and the fire in the hearth was a ridiculous attempt to combat the winter rain and hail. After more than half a century of matrimonial sharing, it was strange being a widower: he missed Roser so much that sometimes he felt her absence as a physical pain. He didn’t want to accept being old. Advanced age is a distortion of a familiar reality, it changes the body as well as circumstances. You gradually lose control and have to depend on the kindness of others—but Victor had thought he would die before this happened. The problem was how hard it sometimes can be to die swiftly and with dignity. It seemed unlikely he would suffer a heart attack, because his heart was fine. His doctor assured him of this during his annual checkup, and this comment invariably reminded Victor forcefully of the boy soldier whose heart he had held in his hands.

  Victor didn’t share his fears for the immediate future with his son. He decided to postpone worrying about more distant days until some other time.

  “Anything could happen to you, Papa. If you have a fall or some kind of attack while I’m away, you could be lying there without help for days. What would you do?”

  “I’d simply die, Marcel, and pray that nobody came to spoil my final moments. And don’t worry about the animals. They always have food and water for several days.”

  “What if you get ill? Who’ll look after you then?”

  “That used to worry your mother. We’ll see. I’m old, but not ancient. You’ve got more wrong with you than I have.”

  This was true. At the age of fifty-five, Marcel had already had a knee replaced; he had broken several ribs and the same collarbone twice. In Victor’s view, this came from overdoing exercise: it’s fine to stay fit, but who on earth wants to run if no one’s chasing you, or to cross continents on a bike? Marcel ought to get married, then he would have less time to pedal about, and fewer ailments. Marriage suits men, although not women. When it came to marriage, though, Victor wasn’t keen on following his own advice. He wasn’t worried about his health. He had adopted the theory that to stay healthy, the best thing was to ignore any bodily or mental alarm signals and always keep busy. You have to have a purpose in life, he told himself. It was inevitable that over the years he was growing weaker: his bones must be as yellow as his teeth by now, his inner organs had to be wearing out, and his brain cells were gradually dying, and yet this drama was taking place invisibly. From the outside his appearance was still passable: who cares what the liver looks like if you have all your teeth? He tried to ignore the dark blotches that appeared spontaneously on his skin; the unavoidable fact that he found it increasingly hard to walk the dogs uphill or button his shirt; his tired eyes, deafness, and the trembling hands that had forced him to retire from practicing surgery.

  Yet he wasn’t idle. He continued seeing patients at San Juan de Dios hospital and giving classes at the university. He no longer had to prepare any of these: sixty years’ experience, including the harshest ones during the Spanish Civil War, were preparation enough. He was square-shouldered, with a firm body. He still had hair on his head, and stood ramrod straight to compensate for the limp and the fact that it was becoming gradually more difficult for him to bend his knees and waist.

  He was careful never to voice how hard he found it being a widower, so as not to upset Marcel, who worried about him like a mother hen. Victor did not see death as an irremediable separation. He imagined his wife traveling ahead through sidereal space, where perhaps the souls of the dead ended up, while he was waiting his turn to join her, more curious than concerned. He would be there with his brother, his parents, Jordi Moline, and all those friends who had died in battle. For a rationalist agnostic with scientific training like he was, this theory had fundamental weaknesses, but it comforted him. More than once Roser had warned him, only half joking, that he would never be free of her because they were destined to be together in this life and others. In the past they had not always been man and wife, she would say: most likely in other lives they were mother and son or brother and sister, which would explain the unconditional love that bound them together. Victor felt nervous at the idea of an infinite repetition with the same person, although if repetition were inevitable, better it was with Roser than anybody else. At any rate, this possibility was no more than poetic speculation, because he didn’t believe in either destiny or reincarnation. He thought the first of these was a TV soap opera gimmick, and the second scientifically impossible. According to his wife, who tended to be seduced by spiritual practices from remote regions like Tibet, science could not explain reality’s multiple dimensions, but Victor thought this was a specious argument.

  The possibility of getting married again sent a shiver down his spine; he was happy with the company of his animals. It wasn’t true that he talked to himself; he was talking to the dogs, the parrot, and the cat. The hens didn’t count, because they didn’t have their own names; they came and went as they liked, and they hid their eggs. He would arrive home at night to tell his pets all that had happened during the day. They were his audience on those rare occasions he became sentimental, and listened to him when he closed his eyes and named objects in the house or the flora and fauna in the garden. That was his way of focusing his memory and his attention, the way other old people did crossword puzzles.

  When he had time during the long evenings to reflect on his life, he would go over the short list of his loves. The first had been Elisabeth Eidenbenz, whom he had known long ago, in 1936. Whenever he thought of her, he imagined her white and sweet, like an almond cake. Back then he had promised himself that after all the battles, when the rubble and dust had settled on the earth, he would look for her; but that was not how things had turned out. When the wars were over, he was far away, married, and with a child. Much later on, he did try to find her, out of simple curiosity. He discovered Elisabeth was living in an Austrian village, watering her plants and oblivious to tales of her heroism. When he had found her address, Victor sent her a letter she never answered. Perhaps now that he was on his own it was time to write her another one. There would be no risk in it, because there was no way they would see each other again: Austria and Chile were a thousand light-years away. He preferred not to dwell on Ofelia del Solar, his second brief but passionate love. There had been few others. More than loves, they had been flashes of emotion. Yet he liked to think of them, and magnify their importance, if only to ward off unbearable memories. The only woman who counted was Roser.

  He would celebrate his eightieth birthday with his animals, sharing the meal he always made on that date in homage to the happiest moments of his childhood and youth. His mother, Carme, had always been less of a cook and more of a teacher, which kept her busy during the week. On Sundays and holidays she didn’t go into the kitchen either, because she would go to dance sardanas outside the cathedral in Barcelona’s Gothic quarter, and from there to a bar to enjoy a glass of red wine with her women friends. Victor, his brother, and his father dined each day on bread smeared with tomato, sardines, and milky coffee, but every so often his mother woke up inspired and surprised her family with the only traditional Catalan dish she knew how to prepare: arròs negre. In Victor’s mind, the memory of its fragrance was forever associated with a celebration. In honor of this sentimental legacy, the day before his birthday he would go down to the Mercado Central in search of the ingredients for the fumet, and fresh squid for the rice. Catalan through and through, Roser used to say. She herself never collaborated in the homespun creation of this festive dinner, ins
tead contributing a piano recital from the living room or sitting on a kitchen stool to read Victor verses from Neruda, often an ode with a marine flavor, such as in Chile’s tempestuous sea lives the pink conger, that giant eel with snow-white flesh. It was pointless for Victor to inform her time and again that the dish in question didn’t contain conger, the king of aristocratic dinner tables, but the humble fish heads and tails of a proletarian soup. Or while Victor fried the onion and pepper in olive oil, then added the peeled and sliced squid, cloves of garlic, a few chopped tomatoes, and the rice, ending with hot stock that was black with squid ink and the obligatory fresh bay leaf, she would share gossip with him in Catalan in order to refresh their mother tongue, grown rusty from all their wanderings.

  * * *

  —

  THE RICE COOKED SLOWLY in a big pan. He prepared three times the stated amount, even if he had to eat the same meal for the rest of the week. The legendary aroma invaded the house and his soul, while Victor waited with a small plate of Spanish anchovies and olives, available everywhere in Chile. As Marcel said to provoke him, that was one of the advantages of capitalism. Victor preferred to buy Chilean products, because it was patriotic to support national industry, but his idealism wavered when it came to such sacred items as olives and anchovies. A bottle of rosé wine was chilling in the fridge for a toast with Roser once dinner was ready. He had laid the linen tablecloth and bought half a dozen greenhouse roses and two candles to decorate the table. Ever impatient, Roser would have opened the bottle a long while earlier, but in her present state she would have to wait. There was also a Catalan custard dessert in the fridge. He wasn’t fond of sweet things, and that would end up in the dogs’ mouths. The telephone startled him.