Portrait in Sepia

by Isabel Allende

  A few weeks later Severo sailed back to Chile with his father, carrying in his memory the vastness of California and with the vision of Lynn Sommers firmly entrenched in his heart.

  Severo del Valle did not see Lynn again until several years later. He returned to California at the end of 1876 to live with his aunt Paulina, but he did not renew his acquaintance with Lynn until one winter Wednesday in 1879, and by then it was already too late for both of them. By the time of his second visit to San Francisco, the young man had reached his definitive height, but he was still bone thin, pale, ungainly, and uncomfortable in his skin, as if he had too many elbows and knees. Three years later, when he stood mute before Lynn, he was a mature man, with the noble features of his Spanish ancestors, the flexible build of an Andalusian bullfighter, and the ascetic air of a seminarian. Much had changed in his life since the first time he saw Lynn. The image of that silent little girl with the languor of a relaxed cat had accompanied him throughout the difficult years of his adolescence and the grief of his mourning. His father, whom he had adored, had died, still comparatively young, in Chile, and his mother, confounded by her immature but overly lucid and irreverent son, had sent him to finish his studies in a Catholic school in Santiago. Soon, however, he returned home with a letter explaining in no uncertain terms that one bad apple spoils all the others in the barrel, or something of that nature. Then the self-sacrificing mother made a pilgrimage on her knees to a miraculous grotto where the Virgin, always ingenious, whispered the solution to her: pack him off to the military service and let a sergeant deal with the problem. For one year Severo marched with the troops, endured the rigor and stupidity of the regiment, and emerged with the rank of reserve officer, determined never again in his lifetime to go near a barracks. He had no more than set his foot out the door when he returned to his old friendships and erratic moods. This time his uncles got into the act. They met in council in the austere dining room in the home of Severo’s grandfather Agustín, without the presence of the youth and his mother, who had no vote at the patriarchal table. In that same room thirty-five years earlier Paulina del Valle, her head shaved but crowned with a diamond tiara, had defied the males of her family to marry Feliciano Rodríguez de Santa Cruz, the man she had chosen for herself. There, that day, the charges against Severo were being presented to his grandfather: he refused to confess or take Communion; he ran around with bohemians; books on the blacklist had been discovered in his possession; in short, it was suspected that he had been recruited by the Masons or, worse yet, the liberals. Chile was going through a period of battles between irreconcilable ideologies, and the more government posts the liberals won, the greater the ire of ultraconservatives imbued with messianic fervor like the del Valles, all of whom were attempting to implant their ideas by means of excommunication and pistols, crush the Masons and anticlerics, and wipe out the liberals once and for all. The del Valles were not disposed to tolerate a dissident in the very bosom of the family and of their own blood. The idea of sending Severo to the United States came from Grandfather Agustín. “The Yankees will cure him of his hankering to run around raising hell,” he predicted. So without asking his opinion, Severo was sent off to California, dressed in mourning and carrying his deceased father’s gold watch in his jacket pocket, a meager array of luggage—including a huge Christ with a crown of thorns—and a sealed letter for his uncle Feliciano and aunt Paulina.

  Severo’s protests were merely formal, because that voyage fit right in with his own plans. His only regret was leaving Nívea, the girl whom everyone expected him to marry someday, in accord with the Chilean oligarchy’s venerable custom of marriage among cousins. Severo was suffocating in Chile. He had grown up a prisoner in a thicket of dogmas and prejudices, but contact with other students at the school in Santiago had fed his imagination and awakened his patriotic fervor. Until that time he had thought there were only two social classes: his and that of the poor, separated by a fuzzy gray area of functionaries and masses of “the common people,” as his grandfather Agustín called them. In the barracks he had come to realize that the members of his class, with their white skin and economic power, were but a handful, and that the vast majority of Chileans were poor and of mixed blood. It was in Santiago, however, that he had discovered a vigorous and growing middle class, educated and with political ambitions, that was in truth the backbone of the nation, among whom were immigrants fleeing from war and poverty, scientists, educators, philosophers, booksellers—people with modern ideas. He was awed by the oratory of his new friends, like someone in love for the first time. He wanted to change Chile, to turn it completely around, purify it. He became convinced that the conservatives—with the exception of the members of his own family, who in his eyes were acting out of error, not evil—belonged to the hordes of the devil, in the hypothetical case that the devil were something more than a colorful invention, and he was prepared to participate in politics as soon as he became independent of his family. He understood that it would be several years before that happened, which was why he considered the trip to the United States a breath of fresh air; there he could observe the enviable democracy of the North Americans and learn from it, read whatever he pleased without worrying about Catholic censorship, and become acquainted with the advances of the modern age. While in the rest of the world monarchies were being toppled, new states born, continents colonized, and marvels invented, in Chile the parliament was discussing the right of adulterers to be buried in consecrated cemeteries. In his grandfather’s presence it was forbidden to mention the theory of Darwin that was revolutionizing human knowledge; on the other hand, one could spend an afternoon arguing about the improbable miracles of saints and martyrs. Another incentive for the voyage was Severo’s memory of the girl Lynn Sommers, which with oppressive persistence kept infiltrating his affection for Nívea, although he never admitted that, not even in the most secret places of his heart.

  Severo del Valle had no idea when or how the idea of marrying Nívea had come up; it may have been that they didn’t decide it, the family did, but neither of them rebelled against their fate because they had known and loved each other from childhood. Nívea belonged to a branch of the family that had been well off when her father was alive but that at his death found itself impoverished. A wealthy uncle who was to be a prominent figure in the war, Don Francisco José Vergara, helped educate his nieces and nephews. “There is no poverty worse than that of people who have come down in the world, because they have to give the appearance of having more than they do,” Nívea had confessed to Severo in one of her characteristic moments of sudden lucidity. She was four years younger, but much more mature than he; it was she who set the tone for their childhood affection, with a firm hand leading him toward the romantic relationship they shared when Severo set sail for the United States. In the enormous houses where they lived their lives, there were more than enough corners to play at love. Groping in the shadows, and with the clumsiness of pups, the cousins discovered the secrets of their bodies. They caressed one another with curiosity, verifying their differences, not knowing why he had this and she had that, dazed by modesty and guilt, never speaking: if they didn’t put it into words, it was as if it had never happened, and was therefore less sinful. They explored one another with haste and fear, aware that they couldn’t admit these cousinly games even in the confessional, though it meant being condemned to hell. There were a thousand eyes spying on them. The old maidservants who had seen them born protected that innocent love, but spinster aunts watched them like crows: nothing escaped those scaly eyes whose only function was to register every instant of family life or those crepuscular tongues that divulged secrets and aggravated quarrels—though always within the bosom of the clan. Nothing left the walls of those houses. It was everyone’s first duty to preserve the honor and good name of the family. Nívea had developed late and at fifteen still had an innocent face and the body of a girl. Nothing in her appearance revealed her strength of character: short, plump, with large dar
k eyes that were her only memorable feature, she seemed insignificant until she opened her mouth. While her sisters were assuring their way to heaven by reading pious books, she was, on the sly, reading the articles and books her cousin Severo slipped her beneath the table, and the classics lent to her by her uncle José Francisco Vergara. When almost no one in her social setting was speaking of it, Nívea pulled out of her sleeve the idea of women’s suffrage. The first time she mentioned it at a family dinner in the home of Agustín del Valle, she sparked a conflagration. “When are women and the poor going to have the vote in this country?” Nívea had blurted out, forgetting that children were not to open their mouths in the company of adults. The aged patriarch of the del Valles thumped the table so hard that the cups danced, and ordered Nívea to go immediately to confess. Nívea quietly fulfilled the penance imposed by the priest, then wrote in her diary, with her usual passion, that she did not plan to rest until women won their basic rights, even if she were expelled from the family. She had been fortunate enough to have an exceptional teacher, Sor María Escapulario, a nun with the heart of a lioness hidden beneath her habit, who had taken note of Nívea’s intelligence. With this girl who avidly absorbed everything she was taught, who questioned what even Sor María Escapulario herself had never questioned, who challenged her with reasoning unexpected in her years, and who seemed about to explode with vitality and health inside her horrible uniform, the nun felt well rewarded as a teacher. All by herself, Nívea was worth the effort of having for years taught a multitude of rich girls with poor minds. Because of her affection for the girl, Sor María Escapulario systematically violated the rules of the school, which had been created for the specific purpose of turning students into docile creatures. With Nívea she held conversations that would have horrified the mother superior and spiritual director of the school.

  “When I was your age,” said Sor María Escapulario, “I had only two choices: marry or enter the convent.”

  “Why did you choose the second, Mother?”

  “Because it gave me more freedom. Christ is a tolerant husband. . . .”

  “Women have a raw deal, Mother. Have children and obey, and that’s all,” sighed Nívea.

  “It doesn’t have to be like that. You can change things,” the nun replied.

  “By myself?”

  “Not by yourself, no. There are other girls like you, with a clear head for thinking. I read in a newspaper that now there are women who are doctors. Imagine.”

  “Where?”

  “In England.”

  “But that’s very far away.”

  “That’s true, but if they can do it there, someday it can be done in Chile. Don’t lose heart, Nívea.”

  “My confessor says I think too much and pray too little, Mother.”

  “God gave you a brain for you to use; but I warn you that the path of rebellion is strewn with danger and sorrow; it takes a great deal of courage to travel it. It is not too much to ask divine providence to help you a little,” Sor María Escapulario counseled.

  So firm did Nívea’s determination become that she wrote in her diary that she would give up marriage in order to devote herself completely to the struggle for women’s suffrage. She was not aware that such a sacrifice would not be necessary, and that she would marry a man for love who would back her up in her political goals.

  Severo boarded the ship with a wronged air so that his relatives would not suspect how happy he was to be leaving Chile—he didn’t want them to change the plan—and how ready to get the best possible benefit from this adventure. He told his cousin Nívea good-bye with a stolen kiss, after swearing that he would send her interesting books through a friend, to elude the family’s censorship, and that he would write her every week. She had resigned herself to a separation of a year, never suspecting that he planned to stay in the United States as long as possible. He would explain that to Nívea by letter; he decided, he didn’t want to make their farewells even more difficult by announcing those intentions before he left. At any rate, both were too young to marry. He saw her standing on the dock of Valparaíso in her olive-colored dress and bonnet, surrounded by the rest of the family, waving good-bye and forcing herself to smile. “She’s not crying and not complaining; that’s why I love her and always will,” Severo said aloud to the wind, prepared to overcome the whims of his heart and the temptations of the world through pure tenacity. “Most Holy Virgin, bring him back to me safe and sound,” Nívea pleaded, biting her lips, weak with love, not remembering for a minute that she had sworn to remain celibate until she fulfilled her duty as a suffragist.

  The young del Valle fingered his grandfather Agustín’s letter all the way from Valparaíso to Panama, desperate to open it but not daring to because it had been instilled in him by blood and fire that no gentleman puts an eye on another’s letter or a hand on another’s money. Finally curiosity was stronger than honor—this was a matter of his destiny, he reasoned—and with his straight razor he cautiously broke the seal, then held the envelope over the steam from a kettle and opened it using a thousand precautions. That was how he discovered that his grandfather’s plan included sending him to a North American military school. It was a shame, his grandfather added, that Chile was not at war with some neighboring country so that his grandson could pick up his weapon and become a man, the way he was supposed to. Severo threw that letter into the ocean and wrote another in his own words, placed it in the same envelope, and dribbled sealing wax over the broken seal. In San Francisco his aunt Paulina was waiting for him on the dock, accompanied by two servants and Williams, her pompous butler. She was attired in an outrageous hat with so many veils flying in the wind that had she not been so heavy she would have blown away. She burst into gales of laughter when she saw her nephew descending the gangplank with the Christ in his arms, then clasped him to her soprano’s bosom, suffocating him in the mountain of her breasts and her gardenia perfume.

  “The first thing we do will be to get rid of that monstrosity,” she said, pointing to the Christ. “And we’ll have to buy you some clothes; no one here goes around in an outfit like that.”

  “This was my father’s suit,” Severo clarified, humiliated.

  “You can tell, you look like a grave digger,” Paulina commented, and as soon as she said it remembered that the boy had lost his father only a short time before. “Forgive me, Severo, I didn’t mean to offend you. Your father was my favorite brother, the only one in the family I could talk to.”

  “They altered several of his suits to fit me, in order not to waste them,” Severo explained, his voice quavering.

  “We got off to a bad start. Can you forgive me?”

  “It’s all right, Aunt.”

  At the first opportunity, the young man gave his aunt the purported letter from his grandfather Agustín. Paulina gave it a cursory look.

  “What did the other one say?” she asked.

  Severo’s ears turned red, and he tried to deny what he had done, but his aunt didn’t give him the opportunity to trip himself up in lies.

  “I would have done the same, nephew. I want to know what my father’s letter said so I can answer him, not to pay any attention to what he says.”

  “It said to send me to a military school, or to war, if you have any around here.”

  “You came too late, they already had it. But now they’re massacring Indians, in case you’re interested. The Indians are doing a pretty good job defending themselves; they just killed General Custer and more than two hundred soldiers of the Seventh Cavalry in Wyoming. That’s all anyone is talking about. They say that an Indian named Rain in Your Face—now there’s a poetic name for you!—had sworn vengeance against General Custer’s brother, and that during the battle he tore out his heart and ate it. Are you still interested in being a soldier?” And Paulina del Valle laughed quietly.

  “I’ve never wanted to be in the military—those are my grandfather Agustín’s ideas.”

  “In the letter you forged you s
ay you want to be a lawyer; I see that the advice I gave you years ago did not fall on barren ground. I would like that, dear boy. American laws are different from Chilean ones, but that doesn’t matter. You will be a lawyer. You will read law with the best firm in California—my influence should be good for something.”

  “I will be indebted to you for the rest of my life, Aunt,” said Severo, impressed.

  “Of course you will. I hope you don’t forget that; after all, in a long life you never know when I might need to ask you a favor.”

  “Count on me, Aunt.”

  The next day Paulina del Valle appeared with Severo in the offices of her lawyers, the same who for more than twenty-five years had been earning her enormous commissions, and without preamble announced to them that beginning the next Monday she expected to see her nephew working with them and learning the profession. They could not deny her. The aunt took the youth into her home, gave him a sunny room on the second floor, bought him a good horse, provided him an allowance, hired an English teacher for him, and proceeded to introduce him to society, because according to her there was no better capital than good connections.

  “I expect two things from you: loyalty and good humor.”

  “Don’t you also expect me to study?”