Portrait in Sepia

by Isabel Allende

  The one joy during those depressing weeks was the reappearance in our lives of Señorita Matilde Pineda. She read in the newspaper that Paulina del Valle had died, and she worked up her courage and came to the house she’d been thrown out of during the days of the revolution. She arrived with a bouquet of flowers, accompanied by the bookseller Pedro Tey. She had matured during those years, and at first I didn’t recognize her; he, on the other hand, was the same small, bald man with heavy satanic eyebrows and burning pupils.

  After the cemetery, the masses, the requested novenas, and the distribution of alms and charitable bequests indicated by my deceased grandmother, the dust of the spectacular funeral settled, and Frederick Williams and I found ourselves alone in the empty house. We sat together in the glass gallery to lament my grandmother’s absence in private, because neither of us is much for tears, and to remember her in her many glories and her few imperfections.

  “What do you plan to do now, Uncle Frederick?” I wanted to know.

  “That depends on you, Aurora.”

  “On me?”

  “It has not escaped my attention, dear child, that you seem a bit off your feed,” he said, with that subtle way he had of asking a question.

  “I’ve been very sick, and losing my grandmother has made me very sad, Uncle Frederick. That’s all, I’m all right, really.”

  “I regret that you underestimate me, Aurora. I would have to be a very foolish man indeed, or have very little feeling for you, not to have been aware of your state of mind. Tell me what is happening to you, and perhaps I can be of assistance.”

  “No one can help me, Uncle.”

  “Put it to the test,” he said, “and we shall see.”

  And then I realized that I had no one else in the world in whom I could confide, and that Frederick Williams had proved to be an excellent counselor, the one person in the family with common sense. I could easily tell him my tragedy. He listened to the end, giving me all his attention, not interrupting once.

  “Life is long, Aurora. At this moment everything looks black, but time heals and erases nearly all things. This stage is like walking blindly through a tunnel; it seems to you there is no way out, but I promise there is. Keep going, child.”

  “What’s to become of me, Uncle Frederick?”

  “You will have other loves; perhaps you will be blessed with children, or be the finest photographer in the country,” he told me.

  “I feel so confused, and so alone!”

  “You are not alone, Aurora; I am with you now, and I shall be as long as you have need of me.”

  He persuaded me that I need not go back to my husband, that I could find a dozen excuses to put off my return for years, although I was sure that Diego would not encourage me to come back to Caleufú since it was to his advantage to have me as far away as possible. And as for the gentle, kind Doña Elvira, there was nothing to do but comfort her with faithful correspondence. It was a matter of winning time; my mother-in-law’s heart was weak, and according to the doctors’ prognosis she would not live much longer. Uncle Frederick assured me that he was in no hurry to leave Chile; I was his only family, and he loved me like a daughter or granddaughter.

  “Don’t you have anyone in England?” I asked him.

  “Not a soul.”

  “You know there is all kind of gossip about your background; people say you’re a ruined nobleman, and my grandmother never denied that.”

  “Nothing further from the truth, Aurora!” he exclaimed, laughing.

  “So you don’t have a family coat of arms hidden somewhere?” I laughed, too.

  “Look, dear child,” he replied.

  He took off his jacket, unbuttoned his shirt, pulled up his undershirt, and showed me his back. It was crisscrossed with horrendous scars.

  “A flogging. A hundred strokes in an Australian penal colony for stealing tobacco. I served five years before I escaped on a raft. I was picked up on the high seas by a Chinese pirate ship, and they worked me like a slave, but as soon as we got within sight of land, I escaped again. So, in one way or another, I finally reached California. My accent is the only thing about me related to British nobility, and I learned that from a true lord, my first employer in California. He also instructed me in the office of being a butler. Paulina del Valle engaged me in 1870, and I have been in her service since that date.”

  “Did my grandmother know that story, Uncle?” I asked when I got over my surprise and could speak.

  “Of course. Paulina found it very amusing that people mistook a convict for an aristocrat.”

  “Why were you sent to prison?”

  “For stealing a horse when I was fifteen. They would have hanged me, but I was fortunate; they commuted my sentence and I ended up in Australia. Have no fear, Aurora, I have never stolen a farthing since; the flogging cured me of that vice, but they could not cure me of my taste for tobacco.” He laughed.

  So the two of us stayed together. Paulina del Valle’s sons sold the mansion on Ejército Libertador, which today is a girls’ school, and auctioned off what little was left in the house. I saved the mythological bed by dismantling it before the heirs arrived and hiding it in the storeroom of Iván Radovic’s public hospital, where it stayed until the lawyers tired of digging through corners, looking for the last vestiges of my grandmother’s possessions. Frederick Williams and I bought a country house on the outskirts of the city, on a road to the mountains. We have twelve hectares of land bordered by trembling aspen, invaded with fragrant jasmine, and washed by a modest stream, where everything grows unbidden. There Williams breeds dogs and thoroughbred horses and plays croquet and other boring games the English find entertaining. And there I have my winter quarters. The house is past its prime, but it has a certain charm, and space for my darkroom and for the famous Florentine bed, which rises with its polychrome sea creatures in the middle of my room. I sleep there, guarded by the watchful spirit of my grandmother Paulina, who appears in time to take her broom after the black-pajamaed children of my nightmares. Santiago will surely grow toward Estación Central, the railway depot, and leave us in peace in this bucolic countryside of aspen and hills.

  Thanks to Uncle Lucky, who blew his good-luck breath onto me when I was born, and to the generous protection of my grandmother and my father, I can say I have a good life. I have the means and the freedom to do what I want; I can devote myself fully to traveling the length of Chile’s abrupt geography with my camera around my neck, as I have been doing for the last eight or nine years. People talk behind my back, it’s inevitable; several relatives and acquaintances cut me off, and if they see me in the street, they pretend not to know me; they cannot tolerate a woman who left her husband. Those slights do not keep me awake; I don’t have to please everyone, only those who truly matter to me, and they are not many. The dismal results of my relationship with Diego Domínguez should have immunized me forever against precipitous and fervent love affairs, but that wasn’t how it was. It’s true that I went about for several months with a wounded wing, dragging myself day after day with a feeling of absolute defeat, of having played my one card and lost everything. It is also true that I am condemned to being a married woman without a husband, which prevents me from “remaking” my life, as my aunts call it, but this strange condition gives me a lot of confidence. A year after Diego and I were separated, I fell in love again—which means that I have thick skin and heal quickly. My second love was not a gentle friendship that with time turned into a tried-and-true romance, it was simply a passionate impulse that took us both by surprise, and by chance worked out well . . . that is, it has up till now; who knows how it will be in the future? It was a winter day, one of those days of green, persistent rain, of jagged lightning and heaviness of heart. Paulina del Valle’s sons and their lawyers had come again to toss manure by the shovelful, bringing their interminable documents, each with three copies and eleven seals, which I signed without reading. Frederick Williams and I had left the house on Ejército Libertador and
were still living in a hotel because the repairs on the house where we live now weren’t finished. Uncle Frederick ran into Iván Radovic, whom we hadn’t seen in a long time, and they made a date for the three of us to go see a Spanish light opera company that was on tour through South America. When the day came, however, Uncle Frederick had taken to his bed with a cold, and I found myself waiting alone in the vestibule of the hotel, my hands freezing and my feet aching because my high-buttoned shoes were too tight. There was a waterfall running down the windowpanes, and the wind was shaking the trees like feather dusters. It was a night that did not invite venturing out, and for a moment I envied Uncle Frederick his cold, which allowed him to stay in bed with a good book and cup of hot chocolate; nevertheless, when Iván Radovic walked in, I forgot the weather. He arrived with his overcoat soaked, and when he smiled at me, I realized that he was much more handsome than I remembered. We looked into each other’s eyes, and it was as if scales had fallen from them. I think we saw each other for the first time; at least I looked him over earnestly, and I liked what I saw. There was a long silence, a pause which in other circumstances would have been awkward but at that moment seemed a form of dialogue. He helped me on with my cape, and we slowly walked to the door, hesitant, still in our mutual daze. Neither of us wanted to challenge the storm raking the heavens, but neither did we want to go separate ways. A porter ran up with a huge umbrella and offered to see us to the carriage that was waiting at the door, so we went out without a word, unsure what we wanted to do. I had no flash of romantic clairvoyance, no extraordinary presentiment that we were soul mates; I did not visualize the beginnings of a love story, nothing like that; I simply took note of the way my heart was beating, of how hard it was to breathe, of my hot and prickly skin, and of my tremendous desire to touch that man. I fear that there was nothing spiritual about my role in the encounter, only lust, although at that time I was too inexperienced and my vocabulary too limited to put the dictionary name to that excitement. The word is the least of it; what is interesting is that that visceral jolt overcame my shyness, and in the shelter of the carriage, from which there was no easy escape, I took his face in my hands and without thinking twice I kissed him on the mouth, just as years before I had seen Nívea and Severo del Valle kiss, decisively and greedily. It was a simple action, with no turning back. I won’t go into details about what followed, because it is easy to imagine, and because if Iván reads these pages, we would have a colossal fight. It must be said, our battles are as memorable as our reconciliations are passionate; this is not a quiet, saccharine love, but what can be said in its favor is that it is steadfast; obstacles do not seem to diminish it, only strengthen it. Marriage is a commonsense affair, something neither of us has much of. The fact we are not married enhances our love. That way each of us can do what we do; we have our own spaces, and when we are about to erupt, there is always the escape of living apart for a few days and then coming back together when we yearn for kisses. With Iván Radovic I have learned to speak up and show my claws. If I found he had betrayed me—may God forbid—as happened with Diego Domínguez, I would not drown myself in tears as I did then, I would kill him without a moment’s remorse.

  No, I am not going to talk about how close my lover and I are, but there is an episode I have to tell because it has to do with memory, and that, after all, is the reason I’m writing these pages. My nightmares are a blind journey through the shadowy caverns where my oldest recollections lie locked in the deep strata of consciousness. Photography and writing are a tentative way of seizing those moments before they vanish, of fixing those memories in order to give meaning to my life. Iván and I had been together several months; we had already become accustomed to the routine of seeing each other discreetly, thanks to good Uncle Frederick, who harbored our love from the beginning. Iván had to give a medical lecture in a city in the north, and I went with him under the pretext of photographing the nitrate mines, where the working conditions are very unhealthful. The English managers refused to negotiate with the workers, and there was a climate of growing violence that would explode a few years later. When that happened, in 1907, I happened by chance to be there, and my photographs are the only irrefutable documents that the slaughter at Iquique occurred, because government censorship erased from the face of history the two thousand dead that I saw in the plaza. But that is another story, and has no place in these pages. The first time I went to that city with Iván, I could not suspect the tragedy I would later witness; it was a brief honeymoon for us both. We registered separately in the hotel, and that night, after each of us finished the work of the day, he came to my room, where I was waiting with a magnificent bottle of Viña Paulina. Until then our relationship had been an adventure of the flesh, an exploration of the senses that for me was fundamental because as a result I managed to overcome the humiliation of having been rejected by Diego and to understand that I was not an incomplete woman, as I feared. In every meeting with Iván Radovic I had been gaining more confidence, conquering my shyness and repressions, but I hadn’t realized that our glorious intimacy was turning into love. That night we embraced with the languor of the good wine and the day’s fatigue, slowly, like two wise grandparents who have made love nine hundred times and can no longer surprise or deceive one another. What was special about it for me? Nothing, I suppose, except that series of happy experiences with Iván, which that night reached the critical number necessary to crumble my defenses. After an orgasm, when I came back to myself in the strong arms of my lover, I felt a sob shaking my body, and then another and another, until I was rocked by an sea swell of accumulated weeping. I cried and cried, surrendered, abandoned, more sure in those arms than I could remember ever having been. A dam burst inside me, and an ancient pain overflowed like melted snow. Iván did not ask questions or try to console me; he held me firmly against his chest, let me cry until my tears ran out, and when I tried to explain, he closed my lips with a long kiss. At that moment I had no explanation for anything, I would have had to invent it, but now I know—because it has happened several times more—that when I feel absolutely safe, sheltered and protected, the memory of those first five years of my life begins to come back, the years that my grandmother Paulina and everyone else cloaked in a mantle of mystery. First, in a flash of clarity, I saw the image of my grandfather Tao Chi’en whispering my name in Chinese: Lai Ming. It was a brief instant, but luminous as the moon. Then awake, I relived the recurrent nightmare that has tormented me forever, and I realized that there is a direct relationship between my beloved grandfather and those demons in black pajamas. The hand that lets go of mine in the dream is the hand of Tao Chi’en. The one who slowly falls is Tao Chi’en. The stain that spreads relentlessly across the paving stones of the street is the blood of Tao Chi’en.

  I had been living officially with Frederick Williams a little more than two years, but always more dedicated to my relationship with Iván Radovic, without whom I could not envision my destiny, when my maternal grandmother, Eliza Sommers, reappeared in my life. She came back whole, with the same aroma of sugar and vanilla, invulnerable to the ravages of trouble or oblivion. I recognized her at first glance, although many years had gone by since she came to leave me at the home of Paulina del Valle, and in all that time I had not seen a photograph of her and her name had been spoken only rarely in my presence. Her image was tangled in the gears of my nostalgia and she had changed so little that when she materialized in our doorway, suitcase in hand, it seemed that we had said good-bye only the day before, and that everything that has happened since was illusion. The one novelty was that she was shorter than I had remembered, but that could be the effect of my own height; the last time we were together I was a child of five, and had to look up at her. She was still as stiff-backed as an admiral, with the same young face and the same severe hairdo, though now the hair was streaked with white. She was even wearing the same pearl necklace I had always seen her wear and now know she never takes off even to sleep. She was brought by Severo
del Valle, who had been in touch with her all those years but had not told me because she wouldn’t let him. Eliza Sommers had given her word to Paulina del Valle that she would never try to contact her granddaughter, and she had kept her word religiously until Paulina’s death freed her from that promise. When Severo wrote to tell her, she packed her trunks and closed her house, as she had done many times before, and set sail for Chile. When she was widowed in 1885, in San Francisco, she undertook the pilgrimage to China with the embalmed body of her husband, to bury him in Hong Kong. Tao Chi’en had lived most of his life in California, and was one of the few Chinese immigrants to obtain American citizenship, but he had always expressed his wish that his bones end in Chinese soil; that way his soul would not be lost in the enormity of the universe, unable to find the gates to heaven. That precaution was not sufficient, though, because I am sure that the ghost of my ineffable grandfather Tao Chi’en still wanders these worlds; otherwise I can’t explain how it is that I feel him with me. It’s not just imagination; my grandmother Eliza has confirmed some clues, such as the scent of the sea that sometimes envelops me, and the voice that whispers a magical word: my name in Chinese.

  “Hello, Lai Ming,” was the greeting from that extraordinary grandmother when she saw me.

  “Oi poa!” I exclaimed.

  I hadn’t spoken those words—“maternal grandmother” in Cantonese—since the remote days when I lived with her on the upper floor of an acupuncture clinic in the Chinese quarter of San Francisco, but I hadn’t forgotten them. She put one hand on my shoulder and scrutinized me from head to foot, then nodded her approval and finally hugged me.

  “I am happy that you are not as beautiful as your mother,” she said.