Portrait in Sepia

by Isabel Allende

  Diego was a ghost. I try to remember now some moment we shared, but I can see him only as a mime on a stage, voiceless and separated from me by the orchestra pit. I have in my mind—and in my collection of photographs from that winter—many images of him in various activities out in the fields and inside the house, always busy with others, never with me, distant and aloof. It was impossible to be close to him; there was an abysmal silence between us, and my attempts to exchange ideas or ask about his feelings shattered against his obstinate absence. He maintained that we’d said everything there was to say. If we had married, it was because we loved each other; what need was there to delve into the obvious? At first his muteness offended me, but then I realized that that was how he behaved with everyone except his nieces and nephews. He could be happy and tender with the children; maybe he wanted to have children as much as I, but every month we were disappointed. We didn’t talk about that, either; it was another of the many subjects related to the body or to love that it wasn’t proper to discuss. A few times I tried to tell him how I would like to be caressed, but he immediately became defensive; in his eyes, a decent woman shouldn’t feel that kind of need, much less talk about it. Soon his reticence, my embarrassment, and our mutual pride erected a Great Wall of China between us. I would have given anything to talk to someone about what happened behind our closed door, but my mother-in-law was as ethereal as an angel, I had no real friendship with Susana, Adela was barely sixteen, and Nívea was too far away, and I didn’t dare put those concerns in writing. Diego and I continued to make love—to put some kind of name to it—now and then, always like that first time. Living together did not bring us closer, but that was painful only to me; he felt very comfortable with things as they were. We didn’t argue. We treated each other with strained courtesy, although I would a thousand times over have preferred open warfare to our stubborn silences. My husband fled occasions to be alone with me; at night he stayed up playing cards until I, overcome with exhaustion, went off to bed. In the mornings he leapt from bed with the cock’s crow, and even on Sundays, when the rest of the family got up late, he found excuses to leave early. I, on the other hand, indulged his every mood; I hurried to serve him in a thousand details, and did everything I could to attract him and to make his life pleasant. My heart raced in my breast when I heard his steps or his voice. I never tired of gazing at him—he seemed as handsome as the heroes in storybooks. In bed, trying not to wake him, I would run my hand over his broad, strong shoulders, his thick, wavy hair, the muscles of his legs and neck. I loved the odor of his sweat, like earth and horses when he came back from the fields, like English soap after his bath. I buried my face in his clothes to breathe in his man smell, since I didn’t dare do that with his body. Now, with the perspective of time and the freedom I’ve won in recent years, I understand how I humbled myself for love. I put everything aside, from my personality to my work, to dream of a domestic paradise that wasn’t to be mine.

  All during the long and idle winter, the family had to use different resources of imagination to combat the tedium. All of them had a good ear for music; they played a variety of instruments, and so the evenings went by in improvised concerts. Susana usually delighted us robed in a tunic of frayed velvet with a Turkish turban on her head and her eyes outlined with kohl, singing in a hoarse gypsy voice. Doña Elvira and Adela organized sewing classes for the women and tried to keep the little school going, but only the children of the nearest tenants could defy the weather to come to class. Every day they prayed winter rosaries that attracted young and old alike because afterward they served hot chocolate and cake. Susana had the idea of preparing a play to celebrate the end of the century; that kept us busy for weeks, writing the libretto and learning our roles, setting up a stage in one of the barns, sewing costumes, and rehearsing. The subject, naturally, was a predictable allegory on the vices and misfortunes of the past defeated by the incandescent scimitar of science, technology, and twentieth-century progress. Besides the play, we had contests of target shooting and dictionary words, championships of every kind, from chess to making puppets and constructing villages of matchsticks, but there were still hours to spare. I made Adela my assistant in the darkroom, and we exchanged books on the sly; I lent her the ones I was sent from Santiago, and she gave me her mystery novels, which I devoured with passion. I became an expert detective; usually I guessed the identity of the murderer before page eighty. Our supply was limited, and no matter how we tried to stretch out the reading, the books went fast; then Adela and I played at changing the stories or inventing complicated crimes the other had to solve. “What are you two whispering about?” Doña Adela often asked. “Nothing, Mama, we’re planning a murder,” Adela would reply, with her innocent little rabbit smile. Doña Elvira would laugh, unable to imagine how true her daughter’s answer was.

  Eduardo, in his position as firstborn, was due to inherit the estate at Don Sebastián’s death, but he had formed a partnership with his brother so they could administer it jointly. I liked my brother-in-law. He was gentle and playful; he made jokes with me and brought me little presents: translucent agates from the riverbed, an inexpensive necklace from the Mapuche reservation, wildflowers, a fashion magazine he had ordered in the village, in that way trying to compensate for his brother’s indifference toward me, which was obvious to everyone in the family. He would take my hand and anxiously ask me if I was all right, if I needed anything, if I missed my grandmother, if I was bored at Caleufú. Susana, in contrast, immersed in her odalisque languor, which closely resembled laziness, ignored me most of the time and had an impertinent way of turning her back to me, leaving me with words still in my mouth. Opulent, with her golden skin and large, dark eyes, she was a beauty, but I don’t think she was aware of it. She had no one to show off to, only the family, which was why she took so little care in her personal appearance; at times she didn’t even comb her hair but lounged the whole day in her bathrobe and lambswool slippers, sleepy and melancholy. Other times, in contrast, she would be as resplendent as a Moorish princess, with her long dark hair caught up with tortoiseshell combs and with a gold necklace defining the perfect line of her throat. When she was in a good humor, she liked to pose for me; once at the table she suggested that I photograph her nude. That provocation fell like a bomb in that very conservative family; Doña Elvira nearly had another heart attack, and Diego, scandalized, jumped up so abruptly he turned over his chair. If Eduardo hadn’t made a joke, a real drama would have ensued. Adela, the least attractive of the Domínguez children, with her rabbit face and blue eyes lost in a sea of freckles, was undoubtedly the most likable. Her happiness was as reliable as the morning light; we could count on her to raise everyone’s spirits, even in the darkest winter hours when the wind howled over the roof tiles and we were sick of playing cards by candlelight. Her father, Don Sebastián, adored her. He could deny her nothing, and he used to ask her half in jest, half seriously, to grow up to be a spinster and take care of him in his old age.

  Winter came and went, leaving two children and an old man dead of pneumonia among the campesinos. The grandmother who lived in the Domínguez house also died; they had calculated that she had lived more than a century, since she had taken her first communion the year Chile declared its independence from Spain, in 1810. All were buried with little ceremony in the cemetery on Caleufú, turned into a bog by the torrential downpours. It didn’t stop raining until September, when spring began to burst out everywhere and finally we could go out on the patio to sun our clothing and mildewed mattresses. Doña Elvira had passed those months bundled in shawls, from bed to chair, weaker and weaker. Once a month, very discreetly, she asked me if I didn’t “have any news,” and since I didn’t, her prayers for Diego and me to give her more grandchildren grew more numerous. Despite the long nights of that winter, I was not any more intimate with my husband. We came together in the darkness in silence, almost like enemies, and I was always left with the same feeling of frustration and irrepressible anguish
of that first night. It seemed to me we embraced only when I took the initiative, but I could be wrong, maybe it wasn’t always like that. With the arrival of spring I again rode out alone toward the forests and volcanoes; galloping through those vast spaces somewhat dampened my hunger for love, as fatigue, and buttocks pummeled by the saddle, overrode repressed desire. I would come back home in the evening soaked from dripping forests and my sweating horse, have a warm bath prepared, and soak for hours in water perfumed with orange leaves. “Be careful, daughter; horseback riding and baths are bad for the womb, they make you sterile,” my distressed mother-in-law would admonish me. Doña Elvira was a simple woman, pure goodness and will to serve, her transparent soul reflected in the calm waters of her blue eyes, the mother I would have liked to have. I spent hours by her side, she knitting for her grandchildren and telling me again and again little stories of her life and of Caleufú, and I listening with the pain of knowing that she would not survive much longer. By then I suspected that a baby would not close the distance between Diego and me, but I wanted nothing more than to offer it to Doña Elvira as a gift. When I imagined life there without her, I felt an inconsolable sadness.

  The century ended, and Chileans were struggling to jump on the bandwagon of the industrial progress in Europe and North America, but the Domínguezes, like many conservative families, were alarmed by the loss of traditional customs and the tendency to imitate foreign ways. “Tools of the devil,” Don Sebastián would say when he read about technological advances in his out-of-date newspapers. His son Eduardo was the only one interested in the future: Diego lived in his own world, Susana always had a headache, and Adela hadn’t yet emerged from her cocoon. As remote as we were, however, ripples of progress reached us, and we could not ignore the changes in the society. Santiago was caught up in a frenzy of sports, games, and walks in the fresh air more befitting the eccentric English than the relaxed descendents of the hidalgos of Castille and León. A blizzard of art and culture from France enlivened the atmosphere, and a heavy clank of German machinery interrupted Chile’s long colonial siesta. An arriviste and educated middle class was developing that sought to live like the wealthy. The social crisis rocking the foundations of the nation with strikes, disorders, unemployment, and charges of mounted police with unsheathed swords was a distant rumble that had no effect on the rhythm of our life on Caleufú; even though on the estate we kept living like the great-grandparents who had slept in those same beds a hundred years before, the twentieth century was descending on us, too.

  My grandmother Paulina had declined badly, Frederick Williams and Nívea del Valle wrote me; she was succumbing to the many indispositions of old age and to a premonition of her death. They realized how much she had aged when Severo del Valle brought her the first bottles of wine from the grapes that matured late and that, they learned, produced a smooth, voluptuous wine with very little tannin called a carmenere, as good as the best in France, which they baptized Viña Paulina. Finally they had in hand a unique wine that would bring them fame and wealth. My grandmother tasted it delicately. “It’s a shame I can’t enjoy it—let the others drink it,” she said, and then never mentioned it again. There was no explosion of joy, no arrogant comments of the kind that usually accompanied her entrepreneurial triumphs; after a lifetime of defiance, she was becoming humble. The clearest sign of her weakness was the daily presence of the infamous priest in the stained cassock, who hovered around the dying to snatch their fortunes. I don’t know whether by her own initiative or at the suggestion of that old augurer of fatalities, my grandmother banished to the cellar her famed mythological bed, in which she had spent half her life, and replaced it with a soldier’s cot and horsehair mattress. That to me seemed a very alarming symptom, and as soon as the mud on the roads dried, I announced to my husband that I had to go to Santiago to see my grandmother. I expected some opposition but, to the contrary, in less than twenty-four hours Diego had arranged my trip by cart to the port, where I would take a boat to Valparaíso, from there to continue by train to Santiago. Adela was wild to go with me, so much so that she sat in her father’s lap, nibbled his ears, tugged at his sideburns, and pleaded, until finally Don Sebastián could not deny her that new whim, even though Doña Elvira, Eduardo, and Diego were not in agreement. They didn’t have to state their reasons; I assumed that they didn’t consider the atmosphere they had perceived in my grandmother’s house to be appropriate, and thought that I wasn’t mature enough to take care of the girl properly. But we set out for Santiago accompanied by a pair of German friends who were traveling on the same boat. We wore scapulars of the Sacred Heart of Jesus on our chests to protect us from all evil, amen; we also had money sewed into a little bag under our corsets, precise instructions not to speak with any strangers, and more luggage than needed for a trip around the world.

  The two months Adela and I spent in Santiago would have been wonderful if my grandmother hadn’t been ill. She welcomed us with feigned enthusiasm, full of plans for going on outings, to the theater, and by train to Viña del Mar to take the air on the coast, but at the last moment she sent us with Frederick Williams, and she stayed behind—as she did when we made a trip by carriage to visit Severo and Nívea del Valle at the vineyards, which by then were producing the first wines for export. My grandmother thought that Viña Paulina sounded too local and wanted to change it for something in French to sell it in the United States, where, according to her, no one understood about wine, but Severo was opposed to that kind of ruse. I found Nívea with threads of gray in her bun, surrounded by her youngest children, a little heavier but no less lively, impertinent, and mischievous. “I believe that finally I’m getting the change; now we’ll be able to make love without fear of having another baby,” she whispered in my ear, never imagining that several years later Clara, the clairvoyant, would come into the world, the strangest of the children born into the numerous and bizarre del Valle clan. Little Rosa, whose beauty evoked so many comments, was five. I regret that a photograph can’t capture her coloring; she looks like a sea creature with her yellow eyes and hair as green as old brass. She was already an angelic thing, a little slow for her age, who wafted through life like a spirit. “Where did she come from?” her mother joked. “She must be the daughter of the Holy Ghost.” That beautiful little girl had come to console Nívea for the loss of two of her younger children who had died of diphtheria, and the long illness that had ravaged the lungs of a third. I tried to talk with Nívea about that—they say there is no suffering more horrible than the loss of a child—but she changed the subject. The most I could get her to tell me was that for centuries and centuries women had suffered the pain of giving birth and of burying their children, and that she was no exception. “It would be very arrogant of me to suppose that God blessed me by sending me many children and that all of them would live longer than I,” she said.

  Paulina del Valle wasn’t a shadow of the woman she had been; she had lost interest in food and in business, she could barely walk because her knees were so bad, but she was more lucid than ever. The vials of her medications were lined up on her night table, and three nuns took turns looking after her. My grandmother intuited that we would not have many more opportunities to be together, and for the first time in our relationship was ready to answer my questions. We paged through photograph albums, as she explained them one by one; she told me about the origins of the bed commissioned in Florence, and about her rivalry with Amanda Lowell, which from the perspective of her age seemed more comic than anything, and she talked to me about my father and about Severo del Valle’s role in my childhood, but she steadfastly avoided the subject of my maternal grandparents and Chinatown. She told me that my mother had been a very beautiful American model, and that was all. Some afternoons we would sit in the glass gallery to talk with Severo and Nívea del Valle. While he talked about the years in San Francisco and his experiences in the war, she would recall details about what happened during the revolution, when I was only eleven. My grandmother
never complained, but Uncle Frederick advised me that she had severe stomach pains and that it was a tremendous effort for her to get dressed each morning. Faithful to her belief that you are the age you appear, she kept dyeing the few hairs left on her head, but she didn’t parade about like a peacock in her empress’s jewels, as she had before. “She hasn’t many left,” her husband whispered to me mysteriously. The house seemed as run-down as its mistress; missing paintings had left pale rectangles on the wallpaper, there were fewer carpets and furniture, the tropical plants in the gallery were a withered, dusty tangle, and the birds were silent in their cages. What Uncle Frederick had written about my grandmother’s sleeping on a soldier’s cot was true. She had always occupied the largest bedroom in the house, and her famous mythological bed rose in the center like a papal throne; from there she had directed her empire. Every morning found her in that bed, surrounded by the aquatic polychrome figures that a Florentine craftsman had carved forty years before, studying her account books, dictating letters, inventing new business ventures. Beneath the covers her bulk diminished, and she could create an illusion of fragility and beauty. I had taken countless photographs of her in that gilded bed, and I wanted to photograph her now in her modest viyella nightgown and grandmotherly shawl in the bed of a penitent, but she roundly refused. I noticed that the beautiful French furniture covered in quilted silk had disappeared from her room, along with the large rosewood desk with inlaid Indian mother-of-pearl, and many rugs and paintings, and that now the only adornment was a large crucifix. “She is giving her furniture and jewels to the church,” Frederick Williams explained, in view of which we decided to replace the nuns with nurses and find a way to prevent, even if by force, the visits of the apocalyptic priest, because in addition to carrying things off he was contributing to a climate of fear. Iván Radovic, the one doctor Paulina trusted, was fully in accord with these measures. It was good to see that old friend again—true friendship withstands time, distance, and silence, as he said—and to confess to him, between giggles, that in my memory he was always in the disguise of Genghis Khan. “It’s the Slavic cheekbones,” he justified with good humor. He still vaguely resembled a Tartar chieftain, but association with patients in the hospital for indigents where he worked had softened him. Besides, in Chile he didn’t look as exotic as he had in England; he could have been a taller and cleaner Araucan toqui. He was a quiet man who listened with intense attention, even to the incessant chatter of Adela, who immediately fell in love with him and, being accustomed to beguiling her father, used the same technique to cajole Iván Radovic. Unfortunately for her, the doctor saw her as an innocent and ingenuous little girl, but little girl nonetheless. The abysmal cultural ignorance of Adela and the sauciness with which she reeled off the most outlandish nonsense didn’t bother him; I think he was amused, although her naive fits of flirtatiousness could make him blush. The doctor invited confidence; I found it easy to talk to him on subjects I rarely mentioned to other people for fear of boring them—photography for instance. He was interested in that because it had been used in medicine for several years in Europe and the United States. He asked me to show him how to handle a camera; he wanted to develop an archive of operations he’d performed, and patients’ visible symptoms, to use in his lectures and classes. With that aim, we went to call on Don Juan Ribero, but we found the studio closed and posted with a FOR SALE sign. The barber next door informed us that the maestro wasn’t working anymore because he had cataracts on both eyes, but he gave us Don Juan’s address, and we went to visit him. He was living in a building on Calle Monjitas that had known better days: large, antiquated, and sighing with ghosts. A maid led us through several connecting rooms lined ceiling-to-floor with Ribero’s photographs to a sitting room with ancient mahogany furniture and chairs with worn plush upholstery. The lamps were not lit and it took several seconds for our eyes to adjust to the half-light and see the maestro sitting with a cat on his knees before a window reflecting the last rays of the afternoon sun. He stood and walked forward with great certainty to say hello; nothing in the way he moved betrayed his blindness.