Portrait in Sepia

by Isabel Allende

  Severo del Valle spent several weeks of his voyage weeping over Lynn Sommers and mulling over what the rest of his life might be. He felt responsible for the infant Aurora, and had made a will before he sailed so that the small inheritance he had received from his father, along with his savings, would go directly to her in case something happened to him. In the meantime, she would receive the monthly interest. He knew that Lynn’s parents would take better care of her than anyone else, and he expected that however strong her influence, his aunt Paulina would not try to take her by force because her husband would never allow the matter to become a public scandal.

  Sitting in the bow of the ship staring at the infinite sea, Severo concluded that he would never get over losing Lynn. He did not want to live without her. The best thing the future could hold for him would be to die in combat; die quickly and soon, that was all he asked. For months his love for Lynn and his decision to help her had occupied all his time and attention, and day after day he had delayed his return while Chileans his age were enlisting en masse to fight. On board ship were several young men with the same intention as his—to join the ranks, since wearing the uniform was a matter of honor—with whom he met frequently to analyze the war news that came over the telegraph. In the four years Severo had spent in California he had cut himself off from his country; he had responded to the call to war as a way of surrendering to his grief, but he did not feel the slightest martial fervor. Even so, as the ship sailed south he was becoming infected by the others’ excitement. He started thinking again about serving Chile, as he had wanted to do during the school years when he used to argue politics in the cafés with other students. He imagined that all his former companions would have been fighting for months, while he was wandering around San Francisco killing time before going to visit Lynn Sommers and play mah-jongg. How could he ever justify such cowardice to his friends and relatives? The image of Nívea assaulted him during these musings. His cousin would not understand his tardiness in returning to defend his country, because, he was sure, had she been a man she would have been the first to leave for the front. At least he wouldn’t have to explain, for he expected to be shot dead before he saw her again. It would require much greater courage to face Nívea, after having treated her so badly, than to go into combat against the fiercest enemy. The ship plowed on at a maddening pace; at this rate they would reach Chile after the war was over, he conjectured anxiously. He was sure that victory would be theirs despite the numerical advantage of the adversaries and the arrogant ineptitude of the high Chilean command. The commander-in-chief of the army and admiral of the navy were a pair of petty old men who could not agree on the most elementary strategy, although Chileans at least could count on greater military discipline than the Peruvians and Bolivians. “Lynn had to die before I decided to go home to Chile and do my patriotic duty. I’m a louse,” Severo groaned with shame.

  The port of Valparaíso glittered in the brilliant December light as the steamship anchored in the bay. Sailing into the territorial waters of Peru and Chile, they had sighted several ships of the navies of both countries on maneuvers, but until they anchored in Valparaíso they had seen no evidence of war. The port looked very different from how Severo remembered it. The city was militarized, and camped troops were waiting for transport. The Chilean flag fluttered on every building, and a great flurry of small boats and cranes could be noted around several ships of the fleet; in contrast, there were very few passenger ships. Severo had written his mother the date of his arrival but he didn’t expect to see her at the port; for a year or two she had been living in Santiago with her younger children, and the trip from the capital was very tedious. For that reason he didn’t trouble to scan the dock for familiar faces, as most of the passengers were doing. He picked up his suitcase, handed a couple of coins to a sailor to look after his trunks, and walked down the gangway, taking deep breaths of the salt air of the city where he had been born. As he stepped ashore he staggered like a drunk; during weeks of sailing he had grown accustomed to the motion of the waves and now he could scarcely walk on solid ground. He whistled over a porter to help him with his luggage and started to look for a carriage to drive him to the home of his grandmother Emilia, where he planned to stay a couple of nights until he was accepted into the army. At that moment he felt someone touch his arm. He turned, surprised, and found himself face to face with the last person in this world he wanted to see: his cousin Nívea. It took a couple of seconds for him to recognize her and to recover from the shock. The girl he had left four years earlier had become a stranger, still short, but much slimmer, and well formed. The one thing that hadn’t changed was the intelligent and focused expression on her face. She was wearing a summer dress of blue taffeta and a straw hat with a large white organdy bow tied beneath her chin and framing an oval, fine-featured face with shining, darting, teasing black eyes. She was alone. Severo was unable to say hello; he stood staring at her openmouthed, until he gathered his senses and managed to ask, deeply agitated, whether she had received his last letter, meaning the one in which he had reported his marriage to Lynn Sommers. Because he hadn’t written since then, he supposed that his cousin knew nothing about Lynn’s death or the birth of Aurora and couldn’t guess that he had become a widower and father without having ever been a husband.

  “We will talk about that later. For now, let me welcome you home. I have a carriage waiting,” she interrupted.

  Once the trunks had been placed in the carriage, Nívea instructed the coachman to drive slowly along the sea road, which would give them time to talk before they reached the house where the rest of the family was waiting.

  “I have behaved like a cad with you, Nívea. The only thing I can say in my favor is that I never wanted to hurt you,” Severo murmured, not daring to look at her.

  “I admit that I was furious with you, Severo, I had to bite my tongue not to curse you, but I hold no ill will. I believe that you have suffered more than I. I am truly sorry about what happened to your wife.”

  “How did you learn about that?”

  “I received a telegram with the news, signed by someone named Williams.”

  Severo del Valle’s first reaction was one of anger. How had the butler dared intrude that way in his private life? But then he could not avoid a flash of gratitude; the telegram had spared him painful explanations.

  “I don’t expect you to forgive me, only to forget me, Nívea. You, more than anyone, deserve to be happy—”

  “Who told you that I want to be happy, Severo? That’s the last adjective I would use to define the future I aspire to. I want an interesting life, adventurous, different, passionate—in short, almost anything other than happy.”

  “Oh, cousin. It is wonderful to hear how little you have changed! In any case, within a day or two I will be marching with the army toward Peru, and frankly I expect to die with my boots on, because my life has no meaning now.”

  “And your daughter?”

  “I see that Williams gave you all the details. Did he also tell you that I am not the father of the child?” Severo inquired.

  “Who is?”

  “It doesn’t matter. For legal purposes, she is my daughter. She is in the care of her grandparents, and she will not lack for money, I have left her well provided.”

  “What is her name?”

  “Aurora.”

  “Aurora del Valle, a pretty name. Try to come back from the war in one piece, Severo, because when we marry, that baby will surely become our first daughter,” Nívea said, blushing.

  “What did you say?”

  “I have waited for you all my life; I can certainly go on waiting. There’s no hurry, Severo, I have many things to do before I marry. I am working.”

  “Working? Why?” Severo exclaimed, scandalized, for no woman in his family or any other family he knew worked.

  “To learn. My uncle, josé Francisco, hired me to organize his library, and he gives me permission to read anything I want. Do you remember him?”


  “Only slightly. Isn’t he the one who married an heiress and has a palace in Viña del Mar?”

  “That’s the one, he’s kin to my mother. I don’t know any man wiser or finer than he, and he is good-looking besides—although not as good-looking as you.” She laughed.

  “Don’t make fun of me, Nívea.”

  “Was your wife pretty?” she asked.

  “Very pretty.”

  “You will have to go through your mourning period, Severo. Maybe the war will help. They say that very beautiful women are unforgettable. I hope you learn to live without her, even if you don’t forget her. I shall pray that you fall in love again, and hope it will be me,” Nívea whispered, taking his hand.

  And then Severo del Valle felt a terrible pain in his chest, as if a knife had been thrust between his ribs, and a sob escaped his lips, followed by weeping that shook his entire body as he repeated Lynn’s name, hiccuping, Lynn, Lynn . . . a thousand times. Nívea pulled him to her breast and put her slim arms around him, patting his back, consoling him as she would a child.

  The War of the Pacific began at sea and continued on land, hand-to-hand combat with fixed bayonets and curved knives in the most arid and inclement desert in the world, in the provinces that today are part of northern Chile but before the war belonged to Peru and Bolivia. The Peruvian and Bolivian armies were minimally prepared for such a conflict; they were badly armed, and their supply system failed so dismally that some battles and skirmishes were decided by lack of drinking water or because the wheels of ammunition-laden carts sank in the sand. Chile was an expansionist country with a solid economy, blessed with the best navy in South America and an army of more than seventy thousand men. It had a reputation for civility in a continent of crude caudillos, systematic corruption, and bloody revolutions. The austerity of the Chilean character and solidity of its institutions were the envy of neighboring nations, and its schools and universities attracted foreign professors and students. English, German, and Spanish immigrants had exercised a certain moderating influence on the rash Chilean temperament. The army was instructed by Prussians and had never known peace, because during the years preceding the War of the Pacific they had been in constant armed conflict in the south, fighting Indians in the area known as La Frontera. Though a civilizing influence had reached that far, beyond it lay unpredictable, indigenous lands where until very recently only Jesuit missionaries had ventured. The formidable Araucano warriors who had been fighting without letup since the time of the Conquest had never been bowed by bullets or the worst atrocities, but one by one they were being conquered by alcohol. Fighting against them, the soldiers learned about carnage and cruelty. Peruvians and Bolivians quickly came to fear the Chileans, bloodthirsty enemies capable of shooting or knifing wounded and prisoners. Chileans left such hatred and fear in their wake that they provoked a violent international reaction, followed by an interminable series of diplomatic claims and litigations that only redoubled their adversaries’ determination to fight to the death, since there was no escape in surrender. The Peruvian and Bolivian troops, composed of a handful of officers, badly equipped contingents of regular soldiers, and masses of Indians recruited at gunpoint, had very little idea of why they were fighting, and they deserted at the first opportunity. In contrast, the Chilean ranks were filled primarily with civilians, as ruthless in combat as the military, who fought out of patriotic passion and would not surrender. Often conditions were hellish. Marching across the desert, the troops dragged through a cloud of saline dust, dying of thirst, desperate, calf deep in sand, with a merciless sun reverberating over their heads, weighed down by knapsacks and ammunition and clinging to their rifles. Smallpox, typhus, and malaria decimated their numbers; in the military hospitals there were more men ill than wounded in combat. When Severo del Valle joined the army his compatriots were occupying Antofagasta—Bolivia’s only maritime province—and the Peruvian provinces of Tarapacá, Arica, and Tacna. In mid-1880 the commander-in-chief of Chile’s armed forces died of a stroke in the midst of the desert campaign, plunging the government into total disorder. Finally the president named a civilian in his place, Don José Francisco Vergara, Nívea’s uncle, that tireless traveler and voracious reader who was called to take up his sword at the age of forty-six and direct the war. He was among the first to observe that as Chile was advancing toward the conquest of the north, Argentina was silently occupying Patagonia in the south. No one, however, paid any attention; they considered that territory to be as useless as the moon. Vergara was brilliant, with refined manners and an astounding memory. Everything interested him, from botany to poetry; he was incorruptible and totally without political ambition. He planned the war strategy with the same tranquil attention to detail he devoted to his business affairs. In spite of the skepticism of the uniformed troops, and to the surprise of the whole world, he led the Chilean troops straight toward Lima. Just as his niece Nívea had said, “War is too serious a matter to hand over to the military.” The phrase made its way from the bosom of the family to become one of those lapidary statements that form the store of a nation’s anecdotes.

  By the end of the war the Chileans were preparing a final assault upon Lima. Severo del Valle had been fighting eleven months, saturated with filth, blood, and the most inconceivable barbarism. During that time, his memory of Lynn Sommers had been shredded; he no longer dreamed of her but of the destroyed bodies of the men with whom he had shared mess the day before. The war, more than anything, was forced march and patience; moments of combat were almost a relief in the tedium of mobilizing and waiting. When he could sit down to smoke a cigarette he used the time to scribble a few lines to Nívea in the same tone of camaraderie he had always used with her. He did not speak of love, but gradually he was realizing that she would be the only woman in his life and that Lynn Sommers had been nothing more than a prolonged fantasy. Nívea wrote regularly—though not all her letters reached their destination—to tell him of the family, life in the city, her rare meetings with her uncle José Francisco and the books he recommended. She also commented that she was going through an unsettling spiritual transformation, that she was distancing herself from some of the Catholic rites that to her seemed demonstrations of paganism and seeking the roots of a Christianity that was more philosophical than dogmatic. She was worried that Severo, immersed in harshness and cruelty, would lose contact with his soul and be changed into someone she didn’t know. The idea that he might have to kill was intolerable to her. She tried not to think about that, but the stories of soldiers stabbed to death, of decapitated bodies, of raped women and children impaled on bayonets were impossible to ignore. Would Severo be involved in such atrocities? Could a man who witnessed such things find peace again, become a husband and father of a family? Could she love him in spite of everything? Severo del Valle asked himself those same questions as his regiment prepared to attack a few miles from the capital of Peru. At the end of December the Chilean contingent was ready for action in a valley south of Lima. They had trained rigorously; they had a large army, mules and horses, ammunition, food and water, and several sailing vessels to transport the troops, in addition to four field hospitals with six hundred beds and two hospital ships flying the flag of the Red Cross. One of the commanders marched to the scene of battle with his brigade intact, after crossing endless swamps and mountains, and arrived looking like a mogul prince, followed by a train of fifteen hundred Chinese with wives, children, and animals. When he saw them, Severo del Valle thought he must be victim of hallucination in which all of Chinatown had deserted San Francisco to be trapped in the same war as he. The colorful commander had recruited the Chinese along the way; immigrants working in slavelike conditions and caught between two fires, without loyalty to any group, they had decided to throw in their lot with the Chileans. As the Christians were celebrating mass before entering battle, the Asians organized their own ceremony; then the military chaplains sprinkled everyone with holy water. “It’s a circus here,” Severo wrote N�
�vea that day, never suspecting it would be his last letter. Encouraging the soldiers and directing the embarkation of thousands and thousands of men, animals, cannons, and provisions, was Minister Vergara in person, on his feet beneath a blazing sun from six in the morning until well into the night.

  The Peruvians had organized two lines of defense a few kilometers from the city and in locations difficult for the attackers to access. On steep, sandy cliffs they had massed forts, ramparts, batteries of cannon, and sandbag-protected trenches for their riflemen. They had also salted the beach with hidden land mines that exploded on contact. These two lines of defense were linked with the city of Lima by railroad to guarantee transport for troops, wounded, and provisions. As Severo del Valle and his comrades-in-arms knew before initiating the attack in mid-January of 1881, the victory—if there were to be a victory—would come at the cost of many lives.