A Long Petal of the Sea Page 31

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  A YEAR EARLIER, INGRID Schnake had received a letter from a stranger claiming to be her mother. It didn’t come as a complete surprise, as she had always felt different from the rest of her family. First she confronted her adoptive parents, who eventually admitted the truth. Then she prepared to receive the visit of Ofelia and Felipe del Solar, who arrived accompanied by a little old woman wearing deep mourning: Juana Nancucheo. None of them had the slightest doubt Ingrid was Ofelia’s long-lost daughter: the resemblance was only too obvious. Since then, Ofelia had seen her daughter on three occasions. Ingrid treated her with the stilted courtesy of a distant relation, because her real mother was Helga Schnake. This visitor with paint-stained hands and the bad habit of constantly complaining was a stranger to her. Aware of the similarity in their appearance, Ingrid was worried she might also have inherited her mother’s defects, and that as she grew older she would become as narcissistic as Ofelia was. She learned the story of her birth little by little, and it was only at their third meeting that she discovered her father’s name.

  Ofelia considered her past dead and buried, and avoided talking about it. She had obeyed Father Urbina’s instruction to stay silent, and she so resolutely refused to mention the dead boy buried in the rural cemetery that this youthful episode became lost in the fog of reiterated omission. She recalled it briefly when she had to bury her husband and wanted to keep the promise they made when they married that one day the baby boy would be laid to rest with them in Santiago’s Catholic cemetery. This would have been the moment to transfer the baby’s remains, but her brother Felipe persuaded her not to do so, as she would have had to explain it to her children and the rest of the family.

  By the time Laura del Solar’s health began to decline, Ofelia had been living alone for years, painting in her studio in the Chilean countryside. Her elder son was building a dam in Brazil, while her daughter was working in a museum in Buenos Aires. Doña Laura, who was about to turn a hundred, had for a long time been suffering from dementia. Two selfless caretakers looked after her day and night, under the strict supervision of Juana Nancucheo, almost as old as Laura but looking fifteen years younger. She had served the family forever and intended to continue to do so for as long as Doña Laura needed her. It was her duty to look after her until her dying breath. Her mistress was confined to bed, lying there on feather pillows and embroidered linen sheets in her silk nightdresses imported from France, surrounded by the precious objects her husband had bought her with no regard for cost. After his death, Doña Laura freed herself from the iron straitjacket of her marriage to such an overbearing man. She was able to do exactly as she pleased for a while, until old age crippled her and senility prevented her from communicating with the ghost of Leonardo, her Baby, in spiritualist séances. She gradually lost her mind, couldn’t figure out where she was in the house, and when she saw herself in the mirror asked with alarm who the ugly old woman in her bathroom was, and why she came every day to pester her. Soon, the arthritis in her legs and feet meant they couldn’t support her, and she was unable to stand up. Enclosed in her bedroom, she alternated between weeping and prolonged drowsy spells, calling out to Baby with an inexplicable anxiety and terror that her doctor tried in vain to lessen with antidepressants. During those final days of her illness, her whole family thought she was suffering from the loss of Leonardo as if it had only just happened.

  Felipe del Solar, the head of the clan since his father’s death, had flown in from London to take charge of things, settle debts, and distribute the family’s possessions. People said he must have made a pact with the devil, because, contrary to his own hypochondriac predictions, he seemed never to age. He had a thousand things wrong with him, and every week discovered a new one. Everything hurt, even his hair, but thanks to one of life’s injustices, none of this was visible. He was a distinguished gentleman straight out of an English comedy, wearing a vest, a bow tie, and a supercilious expression. He put his healthy appearance down to London fog, Scotch whisky, and his Dutch pipe tobacco. He brought with him the documents for the sale of the Calle Mar del Plata house; the land it was built on in the heart of the capital was worth a fortune. He only had to wait for his mother to die to finalize the deal.

  Reduced to little more than skin and bone, Doña Laura went on calling out to her Baby until her dying breath, unable to find peace either in her medicines or her prayers. Juana Nancucheo closed Laura’s mouth and eyes, said a Hail Mary, and dragged herself wearily away. At nine the next morning, while the funeral directors were preparing the house for the wake, the coffin in the living room festooned with floral wreaths, candles, black cloths and ribbons, Felipe gathered his sisters and brothers-in-law in the library to inform them of the forthcoming sale of the house. Afterward he called in Juana to tell her the same.

  “They’re going to knock down the house to build an apartment block, Juana. But you won’t go short of anything. Tell me how and where you’d like to live.”

  “What can I say, niño Felipe? I don’t have any family, friends, or acquaintances. I can see I get in the way. You’re going to put me into a home, aren’t you?”

  “Some old people’s homes are very good, Juana, but I won’t do anything you don’t want. Would you like to live with Ofelia or any of my other sisters?”

  “I’m going to die in a year, and I don’t care where. Dying is dying, that’s all there is to it. You finally get some rest.”

  “My poor mother didn’t think that…”

  “Doña Laura felt very guilty, that’s why she was afraid to die.”

  “For goodness’ sake, what did my mother have to feel guilty about, Juana?”

  “That’s why she cried so much.”

  “She had dementia and was obsessed with Leonardo,” Felipe said.

  “With Leonardo?”

  “Yes, Baby.”

  “No, niño Felipe, she didn’t even remember him. She was crying over little Ofelia’s baby.”

  “I don’t understand, Juana.”

  “Do you remember she became pregnant before she was married? The thing is, that baby didn’t die, as everyone said.”

  “But I’ve seen his grave!”

  “It’s empty. And it was a girl. She was taken away by that woman—I can’t recall her name—the midwife. Doña Laura told me all this, and that’s why she was weeping, because she listened to Father Urbina and stole little Ofelia’s daughter from her. She spent her whole life with that lie gnawing away inside her.”

  Felipe was tempted to put this macabre story down to his mother’s dementia, or even Juana’s senile ideas, and dismiss it as absurd. He also thought that even if the tale were true it would be best to ignore it, because it would be unnecessarily cruel to tell Ofelia. However, Juana insisted she had promised Doña Laura she would find the child so that Laura could go to heaven rather than be trapped in purgatory, and promises to the dying were sacred. At this, Felipe realized there was no way to keep Juana quiet. He would have to deal with the matter before Ofelia and the rest of the family came to hear of it. So he promised Juana he would look into it and keep her informed.

  “Let’s start with the priest, niño Felipe. I’ll go with you.” He couldn’t shake her off. The complicity built up between them over eighty years and his certainty that she could read his intentions forced him to take action.

  By now, Father Urbina had retired. He was living in a residence for old priests, looked after by nuns. It was a simple matter to find him and arrange an interview: he was lucid and remembered his former flock very well, especially the del Solar family. He greeted Felipe and Juana with an apology for not having been able to give Doña Laura extreme unction himself. He had undergone an intestinal operation, and the recovery was taking far too long. Getting straight to the point, Felipe repeated what Juana had told him. As an experienced lawyer, he had been prepared for a difficult cross-examinatio
n to corner the bishop and force him to confess, but this proved completely unnecessary.

  “I did what was best for the family. I was always very careful in my choice of adoptive parents. They were all practicing Catholics,” said Urbina.

  “You mean Ofelia wasn’t the only one?”

  “There were many girls like Ofelia, but none of them as stubborn. Generally, they agreed to let the baby go. What else could they do?”

  “In other words, you didn’t have to lie to them to steal the baby.”

  “I won’t permit you to insult me, Felipe! They were girls from good families. My duty was to protect them and avoid any scandal.”

  “The scandal is that you, shielded by the Church, committed a crime—or rather, many crimes. By law, that should be paid for by a prison sentence. You’re too old now to face the consequences, but I demand you tell me who you gave Ofelia’s daughter to. I’m going to get to the bottom of this.”

  Vicente Urbina hadn’t kept a register of the couples who received the babies, or of the children themselves. He took care of the transaction personally: the midwife, Orinda Naranjo, only helped with the delivery, and besides, she had died long ago. At that point Juana Nancucheo butted in to say that according to Doña Laura the baby had been given to a German couple in the south of Chile. Father Urbina had let that slip on one occasion, and Doña Laura had never forgotten it.

  “German, you say? They must be from Valdivia,” muttered the bishop.

  Their name escaped him, but he was sure the girl had a decent home and didn’t lack for anything; the family was well-off. This comment led Felipe to deduce that in these dealings money changed hands: in other words, the bishop was selling babies. At this, Felipe gave up trying to pry anything more out of him, and decided to concentrate on following the trail of donations the Catholic Church had received through Vicente Urbina around that date. It would be difficult, but not impossible, to gain access to those records; he would have to find the right person to investigate. He guessed that money always left some trace of its passage through the world, and he wasn’t mistaken.

  He had to wait eight months until he finally obtained the information. He spent those months in London, pursued from afar by postcards with two-line missives from Juana Nancucheo, littered with grammatical and spelling mistakes, reminding him of his duty. The aged servant struggled to write them without help from anyone, because she had promised to keep the secret until Felipe resolved the mystery. He kept telling her she must be patient, but she couldn’t offer herself that luxury, because she was counting the days that remained to her in this world. Before she left it, she had to find the child and save Doña Laura from purgatory. When Felipe asked her how she could be so sure of the date of her impending death, she simply said she had put a red circle around it on the kitchen calendar. She was installed in Ofelia’s house, with nothing to do for the first time in her life, apart from preparing her own funeral.

  One winter day, a letter brought Felipe the details of the donations received by Father Vicente Urbina in 1942. The only one that caught his attention was from Walter and Helga Schnake, the owners of a furniture factory. According to his investigator, they had done very well, and had branches in several southern cities run by their sons and son-in-law. As Urbina had said, theirs was a wealthy family. The time had come to return to Chile and confront Ofelia.

  Felipe found his sister mixing paints in her studio, a freezing shed reeking of turpentine and embroidered with cobwebs. She had grown fatter and more ragged, her hair was a dirty white mop, and she was wearing an orthopedic corset for her backache. Ensconced in a corner and wearing an overcoat, gloves, and woolen hat, Juana was the same as ever. “You don’t look as if you’re about to die,” said Felipe by way of greeting, and kissed her on the forehead. He had carefully constructed the most compassionate phrases he could use to tell his sister she had a daughter, but there was no need for any such precautions. She reacted with only vague curiosity, as if it was gossip about someone else. “I assume you want to meet her,” her brother said. She explained he would have to wait awhile, because she was busy painting a mural. Juana said in that case she would go, because she had to see the girl with her own eyes so that she could die in peace. In the end, all three of them went.

  Juana Nancucheo saw Ingrid only once. Reassured by that visit, she communicated with Doña Laura as she did every night between two prayers, and explained that her granddaughter had been found, her guilt had been atoned for, and she could arrange her transfer to heaven. Juana herself had twenty-four days left on the calendar. She lay down on her bed surrounded by her bedside saints and photographs of her loved ones—all from the del Solar family—and prepared to die of hunger. From that moment on, she neither ate nor drank, accepting only some ice to moisten her parched mouth. She left this world without fuss or pain a few days before the scheduled day. “She was in a hurry,” said a desolate, orphaned Felipe. He rejected the simple pine coffin Juana had bought and had placed standing in a corner of her bedroom. Instead, he made sure she had a High Mass and was buried in a walnut casket with bronze fittings in the del Solar mausoleum, alongside his parents.

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  ON THE THIRD DAY the storm finally abated. The sun came out, defying the winter, and that morning the poplars guarding Victor Dalmau’s property like sentinels were freshly washed. Snow covered the mountains and reflected the violet color of the clear sky. The two big dogs were able to shake off the lethargy of being in for so long, although the small one, who in dog years was as old as his master, stayed by the fireside.

  Ingrid Schnake had spent those days with Victor. She was accustomed to the rain of her southern province, and stayed not so much to ride out the bad weather as to give time to this first encounter, to allow them to get to know each other. She had carefully planned this meeting for months, and had been firm with her husband and children that they were not to accompany her. “You understand I had to do this on my own, don’t you? I found it hard, because it’s the first time I’ve traveled alone, and I didn’t know how you would receive me,” she told Victor. Unlike her experience with her mother, with whom she found it impossible to bridge the gap of more than fifty years’ absence, she and Victor became friends easily. Both of them understood he could never compete with her love for Walter Schnake, her beloved adoptive father, the only one she recognized. “He’s very old, Victor, he’s going to die on me at any moment,” she told him.

  They discovered they both played the guitar for consolation, were fans of the same soccer team, read spy novels, and could recite from memory many of Neruda’s verses. She knew the love poems; he the militant ones. That wasn’t all they had in common: they both had a tendency toward melancholy, which he kept at bay by plunging into work, and she with antidepressants and by sheltering in the unshakable haven of her family. Victor lamented the fact that his daughter had been bequeathed this trait, whereas she had inherited neither Ofelia’s artistic temperament nor her cerulean blue eyes.

  “When I’m depressed, it’s affection that helps me most,” Ingrid told him. She added that this had never been lacking: she was her parents’ favorite, was spoiled by her younger siblings, and was married to a honey-colored bear of a man who could lift her up with one arm and who gave her the quiet love of a big dog. In his turn, Victor told her that Roser’s love had always helped him keep at bay that sly melancholy that pursued him like an enemy and sometimes threatened to crush him with its weight of bad memories. With Roser gone, he was lost. His inner fire had gone out; all that was left were the ashes of a grief he had been dragging round with him for three years now. He surprised himself with his hoarse confession: he had never before spoken of that cold hollow in his chest, not even to Marcel.

  He felt as if even his soul was shriveling. He was retreating into an old man’s manias, a mineral silence, into his widower’s solitude. He had gradually given up the few friends h
e had from before; he no longer sought buddies to play chess or the guitar with; the Sunday barbecues were a thing of the past. He carried on working, because this obliged him to connect to his patients and students, but kept an insuperable distance, as if looking at them on a screen. During the years he spent in Venezuela he thought he had once and for all overcome the solemnity that had been an essential part of his nature from childhood, as though he was in mourning for all the world’s suffering, violence, and evil. Faced with so many disasters, happiness seemed to him obscene. In love with Roser in the green, warm country of Venezuela, he had vanquished the temptation to cloak himself in sadness. As she would often tell him, this was less a mantle of dignity, more a contempt for life. But his serious nature had returned agonizingly: without Roser he was withering away. He was touched only by Marcel and his animals.

  “Sadness, my enemy, is gaining ground, Ingrid. At this rate in the years I have left I’m going to turn into a hermit.”

  “That would be death in life, Victor. Do as I do. Don’t wait to defend yourself against that enemy, go out and confront it. It took me years in therapy to learn that.”

  “What reasons do you have to be sad, child?”

  “That’s what my husband asks me. I don’t know, Victor, I suppose you don’t need reasons; it’s part of your nature.”

  “It’s very difficult to change your nature. For me it’s too late, there’s nothing for it but to accept myself the way I am. I’m eighty years old: it was my birthday the day you arrived. That’s the age of memory, Ingrid. The age of making an inventory of life,” he said.