Portrait in Sepia

by Isabel Allende

  My grandmother had to educate me at home because I ran away from every one of the religious schools she enrolled me in. The del Valle family convinced her again and again that a boarding school was the only way to turn me into a normal child; they maintained that I needed the company of other girls to overcome my pathological shyness and the firm hand of the nuns to subjugate me. “You have spoiled Aurora too much, Paulina, you are making her into a monster,” they said, and my grandmother ended up believing what was obvious. I slept with Caramelo on my bed, ate and read whatever I wanted, spent the day playing games I made up—none of it with much discipline because there was no one around who bothered to impose it. In other words, I enjoyed a rather happy childhood. I couldn’t bear the boarding schools with their mustached nuns and throngs of schoolgirls; they reminded me of my frightening nightmare of children in black pajamas. Nor could I tolerate the harshness of the rules, the monotony of the daily schedule, or the cold of those colonial convents. I don’t know how often the same routine was repeated: Paulina del Valle dressed me in full regalia, recited her instructions in a threatening tone, carried me off, almost literally, and deposited me with my trunks in the care of some husky novice, then escaped as fast as her pounds would permit, awash in remorse. These were schools for wealthy girls, where submission and ugliness prevailed and the end objective was to give us enough instruction that we were not totally ignorant—a veneer of culture had its value in the matrimonial market—but not so much that we would ask questions. The goal was to subdue personal will for the benefit of the collective good, to make us faithful Catholics, sacrificing mothers, and obedient wives. The nuns began by disciplining the body, the source of vanity and other sins: we were not allowed to laugh, run, or play outside. We bathed once a month, covered with long nightgowns so as not to expose our shame before God, who is in all places. The system was based on the theory that learning must be pounded in, so the rod was not spared. We were taught to fear God, the Devil, all adults, the ruler they used to rap our fingers, the pebbles on which we had to kneel while doing penance, our own thoughts and wishes: fear of fear. We were never praised, for fear of instilling pride, but there were more than enough punishments to temper our characters. Inside those thick walls my uniformed schoolmates survived, rather than lived, hair braided so tight that sometimes their scalps bled, and with chilblain rashes on their hands from the eternal cold. The contrast with their homes, where they were treated like princesses during holidays, had to be enough to madden the sanest among us. I couldn’t take it. Once I talked a gardener into helping me jump over the fence and run away. I don’t know how I reached Calle Ejército Libertador on my own; I was welcomed by a hysterical Caramelo, but Paulina del Valle nearly went into cardiac arrest when she saw me with my muddy clothes and swollen eyes. I spent a few months at home until external pressures forced my grandmother to repeat the experiment. The second time I hid in the bushes on the patio all night, with the idea of perishing from cold and hunger. I imagined the faces of the nuns and of my family when they discovered my body, and wept out of pity for myself: poor child, martyred at such an early age. The next day the school notified Paulina del Valle of my disappearance, and she descended like a tornado to demand an explanation. While she and Frederick Williams were being led by a red-faced novice to the office of the mother superior, I scrambled through the bushes where I had been hiding to the carriage waiting in the patio, climbed in without the coachman’s seeing me, and crouched beneath the seat. Frederick Williams, the coachman, and the mother superior had to help my grandmother into the coach; she was screaming that if I did not appear soon, they would see who Paulina del Valle was! When I crawled out of my hiding on the way home, she forgot her tears of distress, grabbed me by the nape of the neck, and gave me a shaking that lasted at least a couple of blocks, until Uncle Frederick managed to calm her. Consistency, however, was not that good lady’s forte; when she learned that I hadn’t eaten since the day before and had spent the night outdoors, she covered me with kisses and took me to have ice cream. At the third school where she tried to enroll me, I was rejected out of hand because in the interview with the directress I swore I had seen the devil and that he had green hooves. Finally my grandmother declared defeat. Severo del Valle convinced her there was no reason to go on torturing me, since I could easily learn what I needed at home with private tutors. A string of governesses passed through my childhood—English, French, German—who sequentially succumbed to Chile’s polluted water and Paulina del Valle’s rages; all those unfortunate women returned to the countries of their origin with chronic diarrhea and bad recollections. My education was rather hit-and-miss until an exceptional Chilean teacher came into my life, Señorita Matilde Pineda, who taught me nearly everything important I know—except common sense, because she didn’t have any herself. She was passionate and idealistic, she wrote philosophical poetry she was never able to publish, she had an insatiable hunger for knowledge and the overly intelligent person’s intransigence regarding other people’s weaknesses. She could not abide laziness; in her presence, the phrase “I can’t” was forbidden. My grandmother hired Señorita Pineda because she proclaimed herself an agnostic, a socialist, and a supporter of women’s suffrage, three reasons that were more than enough to keep her from being employed in any educational institution. “Let’s see if you can counteract a little of the conservative and patriarchal hypocrisy of this family,” Paulina del Valle instructed during their first interview, backed by Frederick Williams and Severo del Valle, the only ones who glimpsed the talent of Señorita Pineda; everyone else claimed that the woman would nurture the monster I already had inside me. My aunts immediately classified her as being “above herself,” and warned my grandmother against that woman of inferior station who “claimed gentility,” as they put it. In contrast, Williams, the most class-conscious man I’ve ever known, liked her. Six days a week, without fail, my teacher came at seven in the morning to my grandmother’s mansion, where I was waiting in full armor: starched white dress, clean fingernails, and freshly combed pigtails. We would eat breakfast in a small informal dining room while we talked about important stories in the newspapers; then we would have a couple of hours of regular classes and the rest of the day go to the museum or the Siglo de Oro bookstore to buy books and drink tea with the owner, Don Pedro Tey. We visited artists, took nature walks, performed chemistry experiments, read stories, wrote poetry, and put on classical plays with figures cut out of cardboard. Señorita Pineda was the one who suggested to my grandmother the idea of forming a ladies’ club to channel charitable works and instead of donating used clothes or leftover food to the poor create a fund, run it as if it were a bank, and grant loans to women to start some small venture: an egg business, a seamstress shop, some tubs for taking in laundry, a cart for errands; in short, whatever it took to rise out of the absolute poverty in which they and their children were living. Nothing for the men, said Señorita Pineda, because they would use the loan to buy wine, and in any case the government was working on a plan to assist them, whereas no one took women and children into account. “People don’t want handouts, they want a way to earn a living with dignity,” my teacher explained, something Paulina del Valle easily understood, and she threw herself into that project with the same enthusiasm with which she embraced her most covetous plans for making money. “With one hand I rake money in and with the other I give it out; that way I kill two birds with one stone. I have a good time, and I get to heaven.” And my unique grandmother would roll with laughter. She took that initiative even further and not only formed the ladies’ club, which she captained with her usual efficiency—the other women were terrified of her—but also financed schools and neighborhood clinics, then organized a system for collecting unsold but still edible products from the stands in the market and the bakeries to distribute in orphanages and asylums.

  When Nívea came to visit, always pregnant and trailed by one or two nursemaids with children in their arms, Señorita Pineda would aband
on the blackboard, and while the nurses looked after the clutch of children we would drink tea, and those two would devote themselves to planning a more just and noble society. Even though Nívea had no surplus time or financial resources, she was the youngest and most active of the ladies in my grandmother’s club. Sometimes we would go visit her former professor, Sor María Escapulario, who now that she was no longer allowed to exercise her passion for teaching directed a home for aged nuns; her congregation had decided that her progressive ideas were not appropriate for schoolgirls and that she would do less damage caring for doddering old women than sowing rebellion in childish minds. Sor María Escapulario made do with a small cell in a crumbling building but her garden was enchanted; she always welcomed us there with gratitude because she longed for intellectual conversation, a nonexistent commodity in the nunnery. We took her the books she had asked for and we had bought for her in the dusty Siglo de Oro bookshop. We would also bring presents of biscuits or some sweet to go with tea, which she prepared over a paraffin burner and served in chipped cups. In winter we would stay inside in her cell, she sitting on the one chair, Nívea and Señorita Pineda on the cot, and I on the floor, but any time the weather allowed we would walk through her magical garden among century-old trees, climbing jasmine, roses, camellias, and a myriad of flowers in marvelous disarray whose many perfumes made my head spin. I never lost a word of those conversations, even though I understood very little; I’ve never again heard such impassioned discussions. They whispered secrets, shouted with laughter, and talked about everything except religion, out of respect for Señorita Matilde Pineda, who maintained that God was dreamed up by men to control other men and especially women. Sor María Escapulario and Nívea were Catholics, but neither seemed fanatic, unlike most of the people around me in those days. In the United States no one talked about religion, while in Chile it was the main topic of after-dinner conversations. My grandmother and Uncle Frederick took me to mass from time to time so we could be seen, because not even Paulina del Valle, with all her audacity and fortune, could give herself the luxury of not attending. Neither her family nor her society would have tolerated it.

  “Are you Catholic, Grandmother?” I asked every time I had to postpone a walk or reading a book in order to go to mass.

  “Do you think it’s possible not to be, in Chile?” she would reply.

  “Señorita Pineda doesn’t go to mass.”

  “And look at the price the poor woman’s paid. As intelligent as she is, she could be headmistress of a school if she went to mass. . . .”

  Against all logic, Frederick Williams adapted very well to the huge del Valle family, and to Chile. He must have had innards of steel, because he was the only one who didn’t get parasites from the drinking water and who could eat several empanadas without having his stomach burst into flames. No Chilean we knew, except Severo del Valle and Don José Francisco Vergara, spoke English; the second tongue of educated people was French, despite the large numbers of British in the port of Valparaíso, so that Williams had no choice but to learn Spanish. Señorita Pineda gave him lessons, and after a few months he could make himself understood in a functional but badly mangled Spanish and could read the newspapers and carry on a social life in the Club de la Unión, where he often played bridge with Patrick Egon, the North American diplomat in charge of the legation. My grandmother saw to it that he was accepted in the club, hinting of aristocratic origins in the English court, which no one took the trouble to check because titles of nobility had been abolished since independence, and, besides, you had only to look at the man to believe. By definition, the members of the Club de la Unión belonged to “well-known families,” and were “men of position”—women were not allowed past the door—and had the identity of Frederick Williams been discovered, any of those fine gentlemen would have challenged him to a duel out of shame for having been tricked by a former California butler transformed into the most refined, elegant, and cultivated club member, best bridge player, and irrefutably one of the wealthiest men in town. Williams kept up with the business world in order to counsel my grandmother Paulina, and with politics, a compulsory theme of social conversation. He declared himself an avowed conservative, like almost everyone in our family, and lamented the fact that in Chile there was no monarchy as there was in Great Britain, because to him democracy seemed vulgar and not very efficient. In the inescapable Sunday dinners in my grandmother’s home, he argued with Nívea and Severo, the only liberals in the clan. Their ideas were incompatible, but the three admired one another, and I believe that secretly they mocked the other members of the primitive del Valle tribe. On the rare occasions when we were with Don José Francisco Vergara, with whom he could have spoken English, Frederick Williams kept a respectful distance; given his intellectual superiority, Vergara was the one person who intimidated my uncle, and possibly the only one who would have immediately detected his status as a former servant. I suppose that many people wondered who I was and why Paulina had adopted me, but no one mentioned that to me. At those Sunday family dinners there were twenty or so cousins of various ages, and not one ever asked me about my parents; to accept me, it was enough to know I had the same last name.

  It was more difficult for my grandmother to adapt in Chile than for her husband, even though her name and fortune opened all doors to her. She was suffocated by the pettiness and prudery, and missed her former freedom. It was not for nothing that she had lived more than thirty years in California, but as soon as she opened the doors to her mansion she became the leader of social life in Santiago, calling on her great style and common sense, knowing all too well how the wealthy are despised in Chile, especially if they put on airs. None of the liveried lackeys she had in San Francisco, only discreet maids in black dresses and white aprons; no spending a fortune on pharaonic soirées, only modest, family-style parties, so she could not be accused of being a social climber or a nouveau riche, the worst insult possible. She did have at her disposal, of course, her opulent carriages, her enviable horses, and her private box in the Teatro Municipal, with a little buffet area where she served ices and champagne to her guests. Despite her years and her pounds, Paulina del Valle set fashions, because she had just returned from Europe and it was assumed that she was au courant with modern styles and events. In that austere and low-key society, she set herself up as the beacon of foreign influences, the one lady in her circle who spoke English, received magazines and books from New York and Paris, ordered fabrics and shoes and hats directly from London, and smoked in public the same slim Egyptian cigarettes as her son Matías. She bought art and at her table served food no one had ever seen, because even the most parvenu families still ate like the unpolished captains of the Conquest: soup, stew, roast meat, beans, and heavy colonial desserts. The first time my grandmother served foie gras and an assortment of cheeses imported from France, only the men who had been in Europe were able to eat them. When one lady smelled the camemberts and port-saluts, she was so nauseated she had to run to the bathroom and vomit. My grandmother’s house was a gathering place for artists and young writers of both sexes, who met to show off works generally within the broad frame of classicism. Unless a person was white and had a good name, he or she had to have unusual talent to be accepted; in that regard Paulina was no different from the rest of Chile’s high society. In Santiago, intellectuals gathered in cafés and clubs, and only men were included, based on the belief that women were better off stirring the soup than writing verses. My grandmother’s initiative in including female artists in her salon was a novelty that bordered on the amoral.

  My life changed in that mansion on Ejército Libertador. For the first time since the death of my grandfather Tao Chi’en, I had a sense of stability, of living somewhere that didn’t move and didn’t change, a kind of fortress with its foundations deep in solid ground. I took over the entire house; there wasn’t a cranny I hadn’t explored or a corner I hadn’t claimed, including the rooftop, where I passed hours watching the doves, and the s
ervants’ quarters, even though I was forbidden to go there. The enormous grounds stretched between two streets and had two entrances, the main one on Calle Ejército Libertador and the servants’ entrance on the street behind; there were dozens of sitting rooms, bedrooms, gardens, terraces, hiding places, attics, and staircases. One salon was red, another blue, and a third, used only on grand occasions, was gold, and there was a marvelous glassed-in gallery where the family spent a lot of time among huge Chinese flowerpots, ferns, and caged canaries. In the main dining room there were a Pompeian fresco that ran around all four walls, a number of sideboards filled with collections of china and silver, a crystal teardrop chandelier, and a large window embellished with a perpetually playing Moorish mosaic fountain.

  Once my grandmother decided not to send me to school and my classes with Señorita Pineda became routine, I was very happy. Every time I asked a question, that magnificent teacher, instead of giving the answer, showed me how to find it. She taught me to organize my thoughts, to do research, to read and listen, to seek alternatives, to resolve old problems with new solutions, to argue logically. Above all, she taught me not to believe anything blindly, to doubt, and to question even what seemed irrefutably true, such as man’s superiority over woman, or one race or social class over another. These were subversive ideas in a patriarchal country in which Indians were never mentioned and you had to descend only one rung in the hierarchy of social classes to disappear from collective memory. She was the first female intellectual I met in my life. Nívea, for all her intelligence and education, could not match my teacher. With her intuition and enormous generosity of spirit, Nívea was half a century ahead of her time, but she never posed as an intellectual, not even in my grandmother’s famous gatherings, where she stood out with her passionate speeches on suffrage and her theological doubts. In appearance, Señorita Pineda could not have been more Chilean, that mixture of Spanish and Indian that produces short, broad-hipped women with dark eyes and hair, high cheekbones, and a heavy way of walking, as if they were nailed to the ground. Her mind was unusual for her time and situation. She came from a vigorous family in the south; her father worked for the railroad, and of her eight brothers and sisters she was the only one to finish her studies. She was a disciple and friend of Don Pedro Tey, the owner of the Siglo de Oro bookstore, a Catalán gruff in behavior but softhearted, who guided her reading and lent or gave her books because she couldn’t afford them. In any exchange of opinions, however banal, Tey would take the opposite side. I heard him assure her, for example, that South Americans are macaques with a tendency toward extravagance, overindulgence, and laziness, but the minute Señorita Pineda agreed, he would immediately change over and add that at least they were better than his Spanish compatriots, who were always irritable and would fight a duel at the drop of a hat. Although it was impossible for them to agree about anything, they got along very well. Don Pedro Tey must have been at least twenty years older than my teacher, but when they began to talk, the difference in ages evaporated: he grew younger in his enthusiasm and she older in presence and maturity.