A Long Petal of the Sea Page 30

  “Happy birthday, Papa. What are you doing?”

  “Remembering and repenting.”

  “For what?”

  “For the sins I didn’t commit.”

  “And apart from that?”

  “I’m cooking, son. Where are you?”

  “In Peru. At a conference.”

  “Another one? That’s all you ever do.”

  “Are you cooking the usual?”

  “Yes, the house smells of Barcelona.”

  “I suppose you’ve invited Meche.”

  “Mmm.”

  Meche…Meche, the enchanting neighbor his son was forcing on him, determined to resolve the problem of his widowhood with drastic measures. Victor admitted that her liveliness and happy disposition were attractive: alongside her, he felt like a pachyderm. Meche, with her open and positive mind, her exuberant sculptures of women with impressive buttocks, and her vegetable patch, would be forever young. With the tendency he had to cut himself off, he, on the other hand, was aging rapidly. Marcel had adored his mother, and Victor suspected he still shed tears for her in secret, but he was convinced that without a wife his father would turn into a tramp. To distract him, Victor had spoken of his intention to get in touch with a nurse he had known in his youth, but once he got an idea in his mind, Marcel would never let go. Meche lived three hundred meters away. Between them were two plots of land separated by rows of poplars, but Victor thought of her as his only neighbor, because he hardly said a word to the others, who accused him of being a communist for having been exiled and working in a hospital catering to the poor. As a rule, he avoided the company of others because he had sufficient contact with colleagues and patients, but he had not managed to keep Meche away. Marcel saw her as an ideal partner: she was no longer young, she was widowed, had children and grandchildren, and no obvious vices. She was eight years his junior, cheerful and creative. Last but not least, she loved animals.

  “You promised me, Papa. You owe her lots of favors.”

  “She gave me the cat because she was tired of having to come here to fetch it back. And I don’t know why you imagine any normal woman would be interested in a lame, unsociable, and badly dressed old man like me. Unless she was desperate, and in that case why would I want her?”

  “Don’t be silly.”

  This perfect woman also baked biscuits and grew tomatoes. She brought them over discreetly and left them in a basket she hung from a hook in the doorway. She wasn’t offended when he forgot to thank her. To him, her boundless enthusiasm seemed suspect. Quite often, she would turn up with strange dishes like cold zucchini soup or chicken with cinnamon and peaches. Victor saw these offerings as bribes. To him it seemed only wise to keep her at bay: he was planning to spend his old age in peace and quiet.

  “I’m sorry you’re on your own for your birthday, Papa.”

  “I have company. Your mother.”

  A lengthy silence on the line forced Victor to insist he was still in his right mind. The idea of having dinner with his dead wife was similar to going to Midnight Mass at Christmas, an annual metaphorical ritual. It had nothing to do with ghosts, it was simply a few hours enjoying her memory, and a toast to a good wife who, with a few ups and downs, had put up with him for many decades.

  “Good night, then. Make sure you go to bed early, it must be very cold down there.”

  “And you spend the night partying and go to bed with the dawn. You could do with it.”

  It was just past seven in the evening. The sky was dark, it was pouring outside, and the winter temperature had dropped several degrees. In Barcelona nobody would eat black rice before nine, and in Chile the custom was more or less the same. Having dinner at seven was for old people. Victor sat down to wait in his favorite armchair, whose battered frame was molded to the shape of his body. He breathed in the aroma of the hawthorn logs burning on the fire, anticipating the pleasure the meal would give him. He had the book he was currently reading, and a small glass of pisco just as he liked it, with no ice or any other addition. This was the only strong drink he allowed himself at the end of the day, convinced that loneliness could lead to alcoholism. The contents of the pan were tempting, but he was determined to resist them until the proper time.

  All of a sudden the dogs, who had gone out to do their business before settling down for the night, interrupted his thoughts with a chorus of fierce barking. It must be a skunk, thought Victor, but then he heard a vehicle in the garden and a shudder ran through him: damn it, it must be Meche. He didn’t have time to switch off the lights and pretend he was asleep. Usually the dogs ran to greet her in a state of ridiculous excitement, but this time they continued barking. He was surprised to hear the sound of a car horn. His neighbor never normally used hers, unless she needed help to unload some dreadful present, like a roast suckling pig or another of her works of art. Meche had won a reputation for her sculptures of fat naked women, some of them so big and heavy they in fact resembled pigs. Victor had several hidden in corners of his house, as well as one in his consulting room, which proved useful as a surprise for his patients and helped relax the tension of their first visit.

  He struggled to his feet, grumbling, and went over to the window with his hands on his kidneys, one of the most vulnerable parts of his body. His back was weakened by his limp, and this obliged him to put more weight on his right leg. The pin with four screws inserted in the base of his spine, and his unshakable decision always to maintain good posture, had alleviated the problem somewhat, but hadn’t resolved it. That was yet another reason to defend his position as a widower: the freedom to talk to himself, to curse and complain without witnesses about the private discomforts he would never admit to in public. Pride. That was what his wife and son had often accused him of, but his determination to appear hale and healthy to everyone else was not pride but vanity, a trick to defend himself against decrepitude. As well as walking erect and disguising his tiredness, he also tried to avoid other symptoms of old age: meanness, mistrust, ill temper, resentment, and bad habits such as no longer shaving every day, repeating the same stories over and over, talking about himself, his ailments, or money.

  By the yellow light of the two porch lamps he saw a van outside his front door. When the horn sounded a second time, he guessed the driver must be afraid of the dogs, so whistled for them to come to him. They obeyed reluctantly, still growling softly.

  “Who’s there?” he called out.

  “Your daughter. Please, Doctor Dalmau, control your dogs.”

  She didn’t wait for him to invite her in but hurried past him, afraid of the dogs. The two large ones sniffed at her from too close, and the small one that always seemed angry continued growling at her, fangs bared. Taken aback, Victor followed her, and unthinkingly helped her out of her coat, laying it on the bench in the hallway. Shaking herself like a wet animal, she commented on the downpour outside, and timidly extended her hand.

  “Good evening, Doctor. I’m Ingrid Schnake. May I come in?”

  “I think you already have.”

  By the dim lamps and firelight in the living room, Victor examined the intruder. She was wearing faded jeans, men’s boots, and a white woolen turtleneck sweater. No sign of jewelry or makeup. She wasn’t as young as he had thought at first: she was an adult woman with wrinkles around her eyes, and yet gave a different impression because she was slender, long-haired, and swift in her movements. She reminded him of someone.

  “Excuse me for coming here like this all of a sudden, without any warning. I live a long way off, in the south of the country, and I don’t know my way around Santiago. I didn’t think I’d arrive here so late.”

  “That’s all right. How can I help you?”

  “Mmm. What’s that delicious smell?”

  Victor Dalmau was about to forcibly eject this stranger who had the nerve to turn up at night and invade his house uninvited, bu
t curiosity overcame his irritation.

  “Rice with squid.”

  “I see you’ve already set the table. I’m interrupting, I can come back tomorrow at a more suitable time. You’re expecting guests, aren’t you?”

  “You, apparently. What did you say your name was?”

  “Ingrid Schnake. You don’t know me, but I know a lot about you. I’ve been trying to track you down for a long while.”

  “Do you like rosé wine?”

  “I like it any color. I’m afraid you’re also going to have to offer me some of your rice, I haven’t eaten a thing since breakfast. Do you have enough?”

  “There’s more than enough for us as well as the neighbors. It’s ready. Let’s sit down and you can tell me why a pretty young girl like you is trying to find me.”

  “I already told you, I’m your daughter. And I’m no young girl, I’m fifty-two well-lived years old, and—”

  “My only child is called Marcel,” Victor cut in.

  “Believe me, Doctor, I haven’t come to upset you. I just wanted to meet you.”

  “Let’s get comfortable, Ingrid. I can see we have a lot to talk about.”

  “Yes, I’ve got a lot of questions. Do you mind if we start with your life? Afterward I’ll tell you about mine, if you wish…”

  * * *

  —

  THE NEXT DAY, VICTOR’S phone call roused Marcel shortly after dawn. “Our family’s just become bigger, son,” he began. “You have a sister, a brother-in-law, a nephew, and two nieces. Your sister’s called Ingrid, and she’s going to stay with me for a couple of days. We have a lot to tell each other.”

  While he was talking with Marcel, the woman who had burst into his house the previous evening was fast asleep in her clothes on the battered living room sofa, wrapped in blankets. Victor had always suffered from insomnia, and so a night without sleep didn’t have much effect on him. In the morning he felt more wide awake than he had since Roser’s death. His visitor, however, was exhausted after spending ten hours listening to Victor’s story and telling him hers. She had revealed that her mother was Ofelia del Solar, and from what she understood, he was her father. It had taken her months to discover this, and had it not been for an old woman’s uneasy conscience, she might never have done so.

  So that was how, more than fifty years later, Victor learned that Ofelia had become pregnant during the time they had their affair. That was why she disappeared from his life, why her passion had turned to resentment, and led her to break with him without any proper explanation. “I think she felt trapped, robbed of her future through making one mistake. At least, that’s the explanation she gave me,” said Ingrid, who went on to tell him the details surrounding her birth.

  When Ofelia wouldn’t cooperate, Father Vicente Urbina took the matter of adoption into his own hands. Once she had promised never to reveal it, the only other person to participate in the plan was Laura del Solar. It was a necessary white lie, forgiven in the confessional and sanctioned by heaven. The midwife, someone by the name of Orinda Naranjo, took it upon herself to follow the priest’s instructions, and kept Ofelia in a semiconscious state before the birth, and sedated during and after it. Then, with the grandmother’s help, she whisked the baby away before anyone in the convent could ask questions. When Ofelia emerged from her stupor a few days later, they explained she had given birth to a baby boy, who died a few minutes after being born. “But it was a girl. And it was me,” Ingrid told Victor. Her mother was told it had been a boy as a precaution, to confuse her and prevent her finding her daughter if at some hypothetical future moment she came to suspect what had happened. Doña Laura, who had agreed to deceive her daughter in this way, meekly accepted the rest of the plan, including the farce of the cemetery, where they erected a cross over a tiny empty coffin. None of this was her responsibility; it was dreamed up by someone far more devious than her, a wise man of God, Father Urbina.

  Over the following years, seeing Ofelia in a good marriage, with two healthy, well-behaved children and leading a successful life, Doña Laura buried her doubts in the deepest recesses of her memory. From the outset, Father Urbina told her the baby girl had been adopted by a Catholic couple in the south of Chile. That was all he could tell her. Later on, when she plucked up courage to ask for more details, he reminded her curtly she should consider the grandchild as dead: she had never belonged to the del Solar family, even if she had their blood in her veins. God had given her to other parents. The couple who adopted the girl were descendants of Germans on both sides—big, tall, blond, and blue-eyed. They lived more than eight hundred kilometers south of Santiago in a lovely town by a river with trees and lots of rain (although the grandmother never knew this). It was when this couple had lost hope of having their own children that they took in the newborn baby offered them by the priest. A year later, the wife became pregnant. In the years that followed, they had two children as Teutonic in appearance as themselves. Compared to them, Ingrid, who was small and had dark hair and eyes, stood out like a genetic mistake. “From childhood I felt different, but my parents spoiled me terribly, and never told me I was adopted. Even now, when the whole family knows, if I mention adoption my mother starts to cry,” Ingrid explained to Victor.

  Seeing her sleeping on the sofa, Victor could study her closely. She wasn’t the same woman he had been talking to hours earlier; asleep she looked like the young Ofelia, with the same delicate features, childish dimples in her cheeks, arched eyebrows, widow’s peak, light golden skin that must become tanned in summer. The only thing missing were the blue eyes; otherwise she would have been almost identical to her mother. When she first arrived, Victor had thought he knew her from somewhere, but didn’t connect her to Ofelia. Now that she was lying there relaxed, he could see not only how similar they looked, but how different their characters were. Ingrid had none of the superficial coquettishness of the young Ofelia he had loved. She was intense, serious, and formal, a woman from the provinces, with a conservative, religious background. Her life must have been placid until she learned of her origins and set out to find her father. Victor also reflected that she didn’t seem to have inherited much from him: neither his lanky, tough body, his aquiline nose, spiky hair, stern expression, nor his introverted character. She was gentle, and he guessed she must be very maternal and loving.

  He tried to imagine what a daughter with Roser would have been like, and regretted never having had one. At first they hadn’t felt they were properly married: they were together only temporarily as the result of a convenient agreement between the two of them; and by the time they realized they were more married than anyone, twenty years had gone by and it was too late to think of children. It would take Victor an effort to get used to Ingrid, because until the previous night Marcel had been all the family he had. He thought Ofelia del Solar must be as surprised as he was; after all, she too was discovering late in life that she had an unexpected daughter. Not only that, but Ingrid had given them three grandchildren.

  Ingrid’s husband was also of German extraction, like her adoptive parents and many others in some southern provinces colonized by Germans from the nineteenth century on, thanks to a selective immigration policy. The idea had been to populate the land with true-blooded white immigrants to bring discipline and a work ethic to Chileans, who had the reputation of being lazy. In the photos Ingrid had shown him of her children, Victor saw a young man and two girls who looked like Valkyries and seemed to have inherited none of his traits. He found it hard to recognize them as his descendants.

  “Ingrid’s son is married, and his wife is pregnant. I’ll soon be a great-grandfather,” Victor told Marcel toward the end of their phone conversation.

  “And I’m an uncle to Ingrid’s children. What will I be to the one about to be born?”

  “I think you’d be something like a great-uncle.”

  “Wow! I feel really old. I can’t help thinki
ng of Àvia. Do you remember how she wanted me to give her great-grandchildren? Poor thing, she died without knowing she already had them. A granddaughter and three great-grandchildren!”

  “We’ll have to go and visit these people from a different race, Marcel. They’re all Germans. Besides, they’re right-wing and were supporters of Pinochet, so we’re going to have to bite our tongues in front of them.”

  “What’s important is that we’re family, Papa. We’re not going to fight over politics.”

  “I’ll also have to establish some regular communication with Ingrid and the grandchildren. They’ve fallen on my head like apples from a tree. All these complications: maybe I was better off before, alone and peaceful.”

  “Don’t talk nonsense, Papa. I’m dying to meet my new sibling. Well, cousin, all the same.”

  Victor calculated that if the family got together he would inevitably meet Ofelia del Solar once more. That didn’t seem such a bad thing: he had long since recovered from any nostalgia he felt for her, and yet he was curious to see her again and correct the bad impression he had of her from the Caracas Athenaeum eleven years earlier. Hopefully he would have the chance to tell her that, thanks to her, he had deep roots in Chile, deeper than any he had in Spain. It was ironic he was linked in this way to the del Solar family, who had been so against the immigration of the Spanish refugees on the Winnipeg. Ofelia had offered him an amazing gift: she had opened up the future for him. He was no longer an old man with only his animals for company. Now he had several Chilean descendants as well as Marcel, who never considered himself as anything else.

  Ofelia had been far more important in his life than he had ever thought. He had never really understood her: she was more complex, more tormented than he believed. He thought about those strange canvases of hers, and reasoned that by marrying and choosing a conventional life, the security of a marriage and her place in society, Ofelia had exiled herself from herself, renouncing an essential part of her soul, although possibly she had partly regained it in later life and in solitude. But then he recalled what she had said about her husband, Matias Eyzaguirre, and guessed that she had not renounced that part of her out of laziness or frivolity, but from a very special love.