Portrait in Sepia

by Isabel Allende

  When Diego awoke the next morning, I had been dressed for a long while and had made up my mind to go back home and find refuge in the familiar arms of my grandmother, but the fresh air and a stroll through the streets of the city center, almost empty at that hour of Sunday morning, calmed me. My vagina was burning where I could still feel the aftermath of Diego’s roughness, but step by step my rage was dissipating, and I was prepared to face the future like a woman and not like a runny-nosed, spoiled brat. I was aware of how pampered I had been for the nineteen years of my life, but that stage was over; the night before I had been initiated into my status as a married woman, and I should act and think maturely, I concluded, swallowing my tears. The responsibility for being content was exclusively mine. My husband would not hand me eternal happiness like a present wrapped in tissue paper, I would have to cultivate it day by day with intelligence and effort. Luckily, I loved that man, and I believed, just as he had assured me, that with time and practice things would go much better between us. Poor Diego, I thought, he must be as disillusioned as I. I returned to the hotel in time to close our suitcases and set off on our honeymoon.

  Caleufú, the estate set in the most beautiful area of Chile, a wild paradise of cold forest, volcanoes, lakes, and rivers, had belonged to the Domínguez family since colonial times, when land had been divided among the distinguished noblemen of the Conquest. The family had added to its wealth by buying more Indian lands for the price of a few bottles of liquor, until they had one of the most prosperous land-holdings in the region. That property had never been divided; by tradition it was passed intact to the eldest son, who had the obligation to give work to or to help his brothers, to support and provide a dowry for his sisters, and to care for the campesinos. My father-in-law, Don Sebastián Domínguez, was one of those people who met every expectation; he was growing old with his conscience at peace and grateful for the rewards life had given him, most of all, the affection of his wife, Doña Elvira. In his youth, as he himself admitted, laughing, he had been a rake, and the proof was several campesinos on his land who had blue eyes, but the gentle, firm hand of doña Elvira had gradually tamed him without his noticing. As patriarch, he was good and kind; the workers on his estate brought their problems to him before anyone else, because his two sons, Eduardo and Diego, were stricter than he, and Doña Elvira never opened her mouth outside the walls of the house. The patience Don Sebastián showed with the people on his lands, whom he treated like slightly retarded children, turned to sternness when dealing with his male offspring. “We are very privileged, which is why we have responsibilities,” he would say. “For us there are no excuses or pretexts, our duty is to do God’s will and help our people; we will have to answer for that in heaven.” He must have been about fifty years old, but he looked younger because he lived a very healthy life. He spent the day on horseback, riding over his property; he was the first up in the morning, and the last to go to bed, he was present at the time for threshing, for breaking new colts, for the roundups, and he helped brand and castrate the cattle. He began his day with a cup of strong black coffee with six spoons of sugar and a slug of brandy; that gave him strength to see to the work in the fields until two in the afternoon, when in the company of his family he ate four full plates and three desserts washed down with abundant wine. There were not very many of us in that enormous house; my in-laws’ greatest sorrow was having had only three children. It was God’s will, they said. At dinner all of us gathered who during the day had been scattered in different occupations—no one could be absent. Eduardo and Susana lived with their children in a different house two hundred yards from the big house, but the only meal they prepared was breakfast; the others they took at my in-laws’ table. Because our wedding date had been set forward, the house intended for Diego and me wasn’t ready, and we were living in a wing of his parents’ house. Don Sebastián sat at the head of the table in the tallest and most ornate chair; at the other end was Doña Elvira, and on either side were distributed the sons and their wives, two widowed aunts, some cousins or distant relatives, a grandmother so ancient she had to be fed from a baby bottle, and guests—and there were always several. Extra places were set for visitors who dropped in unannounced and sometimes stayed for weeks. They were eagerly welcomed, because in the isolation of the country visits were the major entertainment. Farther to the south lived a few Chilean families deep in Indian territory, also some German colonists without whom the region would have remained semi-savage. It took several days on horseback to travel across the Domínguez holdings, which reached to the border with Argentina. At night there were prayers, and the year’s calendar was ruled by religious dates, which were observed with rigor and rejoicing. My in-laws realized that I had been brought up with very little Catholic instruction, but we had no problems in that area because I was very respectful of their beliefs, and they did not try to impose theirs on me. Doña Elvira explained to me that faith is a divine gift: “God calls your name, he chooses you,” she said. That freed me from guilt in her eyes; God hadn’t as yet called my name, but if He had placed me in that very Christian family it was because He soon would. My enthusiasm for helping her in her charitable works among the tenants compensated for my limited religious fervor. She believed it was owing to my compassionate spirit, a sign of my good character; she didn’t know that it was my training in my grandmother’s ladies’ club and a pedestrian interest in meeting the field laborers so I could photograph them. Outside of Don Sebastián, Eduardo, and Diego, all of whom had gone to a good boarding school and made the obligatory voyage to Europe, no one suspected there was a big world out there. No novels were allowed in that home. I believe that Don Sebastián lacked the heart to censor them, so to prevent anyone’s reading a novel on the church’s blacklist, he preferred to take the easy way out and forbid them all. Newspapers arrived so long out-of-date that they brought no news, only history. Doña Elvira read her books of prayers and Adela, Diego’s young sister, had a few volumes of poetry and some biographies of historic figures and travel journals, which she read over and over. Later I discovered that she somehow obtained mystery novels, tore off the covers, and replaced them with covers from books authorized by her father. When my trunks and boxes came from Santiago and hundreds of books appeared, Doña Elvira asked me with her habitual sweetness not to show them to the rest of the family. Every week my grandmother or Nívea sent me reading matter, which I kept in my room. My in-laws said nothing, confident, I suppose, that this bad habit would pass once I had children and didn’t have so many hours of leisure, which was the case with my sister-in-law Susana, who had three darling, and very badly behaved, children. They did not, however, oppose my photography; perhaps they guessed that it would be very difficult to bend my will on that point, and although they never showed any curiosity to see my work, they gave me a room at the back of the house where I could set up my darkroom.

  I had grown up in the city, in the comfortable and cosmopolitan atmosphere of my grandmother’s house, much more liberated than any Chilean of then or today—even though we are nearing the end of the first decade of the twentieth century, things have not been greatly modernized for girls in this part of the world. The difference in my way of life when I landed in the bosom of the Domínguez family was brutal, even though they did everything possible to make me feel at home. They treated me very well; it was easy to learn to love them. Their affection made up for the reserved and often tight-lipped character of Diego, who in public treated me like a sister and in private scarcely spoke to me. The first weeks of trying to adapt were very interesting. Don Sebastián gave me a beautiful black mare with a white star on her forehead, and Diego sent me with an overseer to ride around the estate and meet the workers and the neighbors, who were located so far away that each visit took three or four days. Then he left me on my own. My husband would go off with his brother and father to the fields or to hunt; sometimes they camped for several days. I couldn’t bear the boredom of the house with its endless task of coddli
ng Susana’s children, putting up sweets and preserves, cleaning and airing, and sewing and knitting; when my chores in the school or the pantry were over, I would put on a pair of Diego’s trousers and gallop off. My mother-in-law had warned me not to ride like a man, astride the horse, because it would cause “female problems,” a euphemism I never entirely elucidated, but no one could ride sidesaddle in that land of hills and boulders without breaking her neck in a spill. The landscape left me breathless, surprising me at every turn of the road; I was enthralled. I rode up hill and down valley to luxuriant forests, a paradise of larch, laurel, cinnamon, maniu, myrtle, and the millenary araucarias, fine timber the Domínguezes processed at their sawmill. I was intoxicated by the scent of the damp forest, that sensual aroma of red earth, sap, and roots, the peace of the dense growth guarded by those silent green giants, the mysterious murmur of growing things, the song of unseen waters, the dance of the air through the branches, the whispering of roots and insects, the cooing of gentle ring doves and raucous cries of the chimangos. The trails ended at the sawmill, and beyond that I had to pick my way through thick growth, trusting the instinct of my mare, whose hooves sank into the oil-colored mud, thick and fragrant as vegetal blood. Light filtered through the immense cupola of the trees in bright oblique rays, but there were glacial zones where pumas lay in wait, spying on me with eyes like flames. I carried a shotgun tied to my saddle, but in an emergency I wouldn’t have had time to reach it, and in any case I would never have fired. I took photographs of ancient forests, lakes with black sand, tempestuous rivers of singing stones, and impetuous volcanoes that crested the horizon like sleeping dragons in towers of ash. I also took photos of workers on the estate, which I then took to them as gifts, and they received with confusion; they did not know what to do with these images of themselves they had not solicited. I was fascinated by those faces lined by weather and poverty, but they didn’t like to see themselves that way, as they were, with their rags and sorrows upon them; they wanted hand-tinted photographs for which they posed wearing the one suit they owned, the one from their wedding day, all well washed and combed, and with their children’s noses wiped.

  On Sundays, work was suspended and there was mass—when we had a priest with us—or “missions,” which the women of the family performed by visiting the peons in their homes to teach them their catechism. In that way, with little gifts and persistence, they combated the native beliefs that were all tangled up with Christian saints. I didn’t participate in the religious teaching, but I used the opportunity to get to know the campesinos. Many were pure Indians who still used words in their own tongues and kept their traditions alive; others were mestizos, all of them humble and timid in normal times, but pugnacious and noisy when they drank. Alcohol was a bitter balm that for a few hours alleviated the earthly burdens of the day but over time bored into their guts like a hostile rat. Drunkenness and gunfights were punished, as were other offenses such as cutting a tree without permission or letting animals roam outside the plot allotted to each of them for their own use. The penalty for stealing or insolence to superiors was a beating, but Don Sebastián was repelled by corporal punishment. He had also eliminated the right of the pernada, an old tradition from the colonial epoch that allowed patrones to deflower the daughters of the campesinos before they were married. He himself had practiced that custom in his youth, but after Doña Elvira appeared on the estate such liberties came to an end. Neither did he approve of visits to whorehouses in nearby villages, and he insisted that his own sons marry young to avoid temptation. Eduardo and Susana had married six years before, when both were twenty, and Diego, then seventeen, had been intended for a distant cousin who drowned in the lake before the engagement could be formalized. Eduardo, the elder brother, was more jovial than Diego. He had a talent for telling jokes and singing; he knew all the legends and stories of the region, liked to talk, and knew how to listen. He was very much in love with Susana; his eyes lit up when he saw her, and he was never impatient with her capricious humors. My sister-in-law suffered headaches that put her in terrible moods. She would lock herself in her room, refuse to eat, and there were instructions never to bother her for any reason, but once the headaches passed, she emerged totally recovered, smiling and affectionate; she seemed a different woman. I learned that she slept alone and that neither her husband nor her children went into her room unless invited; the door was always closed. The family was accustomed to her headaches and depressions, but they considered her desire for privacy almost an offense, just as it amazed them that without my permission I wouldn’t allow anyone to go into the little darkroom where I developed my photographs, even though I explained the harm that a ray of light could do to my negatives. At Caleufú no doors or cabinets had a key except for the wine cellars and the strongbox in the office. There was pilfering, of course, but without major consequences, since usually Don Sebastián turned a blind eye. “These people are very ignorant, they don’t steal as a vice, not even out of need, it’s just a bad habit,” he said, although in truth the workers had greater needs than the patrón admitted. The campesinos were free men, but in practice they had lived on that land for generations, and it never occurred to them that it could be any other way. They had nowhere to go. Few lived to old age. Many children died in infancy from intestinal infections, rat bites, and pneumonia, the women in childbirth and from consumption, the men from accidents, infected wounds, and alcohol intoxication. The nearest hospital belonged to the Germans, and it boasted a Bavarian doctor of great renown, but that was the last recourse; lesser illnesses were treated with secrets of nature, prayer, and the help of the meicas, the female Indian healers, who knew the power of the regional plants better than anyone.

  At the end of May winter descended without relief, its curtain of rain washing the landscape like a patient laundress and its early darkness forcing us to gather by four in the afternoon, turning nights into an eternity. I could no longer go out on my long horseback rides or to photograph people around the estate. We were isolated; the roads were mud pits, no one visited us. I entertained myself by experimenting in the darkroom with different techniques for developing film and by photographing the family. I was discovering that everything is related, is part of a tightly woven design. What at first view seems to be a tangle of coincidences is in the precise eye of the camera revealed in all its perfect symmetry. Nothing is casual, nothing is banal. Just as in the apparent vegetal chaos of the forest there is a strict relationship of cause and effect—for each tree there are hundreds of birds, for each bird there are thousands of insects, for each insect there are millions of organic particles—so, too, the campesinos at their labors or the family sheltering from winter inside the house are indispensable parts of a vast fresco. The essential is often invisible: the eye doesn’t capture it, only the heart, but the camera at times obtains glimpses of that substance. That is what maestro Ribero attempted to capture in his art, and that is what he tried to teach me: to move beyond the merely documentary and touch the core, the very soul, of reality. Those subtle connections that took shape on the photographic paper moved me profoundly and encouraged me to continue experimenting. In the confinement of winter my curiosity grew; even as my surroundings became more suffocating and constraining and I hibernated among thick adobe walls, my mind grew more restless. I began obsessively to explore the contents of the house and the secrets of its inhabitants. I examined familiar objects with new eyes, as if seeing them for the first time, without taking anything for granted. I let myself be guided by intuition, setting aside preconceived ideas. “We see only what we want to see,” Don Juan Ribero always said, and added that my job should be to show what no one had seen before. At first the Domínguezes posed with forced smiles, but soon they became accustomed to my stealthy presence and in the end ignored the camera; then I could capture them off guard, just as they were. The rain carried off the flowers and leaves, the house with its heavy furniture and large empty spaces closed itself to the outdoors, and we were trapped i
n a strange domestic captivity. We wandered through rooms lighted with candles, avoiding icy currents of air; the furniture creaked with a widow’s moans, and you could hear the furtive little footsteps of mice going about their diligent tasks. Everything smelled of mud, of wet roof tiles, of musty clothes. The servants lighted braziers and chimneys, the maids brought us hot water bottles, blankets, and cups of steaming chocolate, but there was no way to trick the long winter. It was then that I succumbed to loneliness.