Portrait in Sepia (23 page)

An hour later, while the maids were collecting and preparing to burn the stained rags and other items used during the birth—it was thought that this prevented hemorrhaging—and the
meica
wrapped up the placenta and umbilical cord to be buried under a fig tree, the custom in those parts, the rest of the family gathered in the sitting room around Father Teodoro Riesco to give thanks to God for the birth of a pair of twins, two fine boys who, the priest said, would carry on the del Valle name with honor. Two of the aunts held the infants in their arms, warmly wrapped in little wool blankets and with knit caps on their heads, as each member of the family came up to kiss them on the forehead and say, "God be with you," to ward off any gratuitous evil eye. I couldn't do it. I couldn't welcome my cousins as the others had done because to me they looked like two hideous little worms, and the vision of Nívea's bluish belly expelling them like a bloody mass would haunt me forever.

•

The second week of August, Frederick Williams came to look for us, elegant, as always, and totally calm, as if the risk of falling into the hands of the political police had been nothing but a collective hallucination. My grandmother welcomed her husband like a bride, with shining eyes and cheeks rosy with emotion; she held her hands out to him, and he kissed them with something more than respect. I realized for the first time that this strange pair were united by ties that very closely resembled affection. By then Paulina was nearly sixty-five, an age at which other women were ground down by the imposed sorrows and calamities of life, but Paulina del Valle seemed invincible. She dyed her hair, a coquettish indulgence no lady of her class allowed herself, and she enhanced it with switches; she dressed with the vanity she had always displayed despite her weight, and she used makeup with such subtlety that no one was suspicious of the blush in her cheeks or the blackness of her eyelashes. Frederick Williams was noticeably younger, and it seems that women found him very attractive, because they were always fluttering their fans and dropping handkerchiefs when he was around. I never saw him respond to any of those overtures; in fact he seemed absolutely devoted to his wife. I have often asked myself whether the relationship between Frederick Williams and Paulina del Valle was more than a marriage of convenience, whether it was as platonic as we all supposed or whether there was an attraction between them. Did they ever make love? No one could know, because he never broached the subject, and my grandmother, who in her last years was able to tell me the most personal things, carried the answer to the other world.

We learned through Uncle Frederick that thanks to the personal intervention of the president, Don Pedro Tey had been set free before Godoy could extract a confession from him, which meant that since our family's name had never been entered on the police rolls, we could go back to our house in Santiago. Nine years later, when my grandmother Paulina died and I saw Señorita Matilde Pineda and Don Pedro Tey again, I learned the details of what really happened, information the good Frederick Williams had wanted to spare us. After raiding the bookstore, beating the employees, and throwing hundreds of books onto piles and burning them, they had taken the Catalan bookseller to their sinister barracks, where they applied the usual treatment. At the end of the session, Tey had lost consciousness without having said a single word, so they emptied a bucket of excrement over him, tied him to a chair, and left him there the rest of the night. The following day, as he was being taken back to his torturers, the North American ambassador, Patrick Egon, had come with an aide-de-camp to the president, demanding the prisoner be set free. They had let him go after warning him that if he told a single word of what had happened they would stand him up before a firing squad. He was led, dripping blood and excrement, to the ambassador's carriage, where Frederick Williams and a doctor were waiting, and driven to the legation of the United States to be given asylum. One month later the government fell, and Don Pedro Tey left the legation, making room for the family of the deposed president, which found refuge under the same flag. The bookseller had spent several frustrating months while his wounds from the beating and the bones in his shoulders healed and he could get his book business back on track. The atrocities he had suffered did not deter him; the idea of going back to Catalonia never entered his mind, and he continued working for the opposition—whatever government was in power. When many years later I thanked him for the terrible torture he endured to protect my family, he told me that he hadn't done it for us but for Señorita Matilde Pineda.

My grandmother Paulina wanted to stay in the country until the revolution was over, but Frederick Williams convinced her that the conflict might last for years and that we should not give up the position we enjoyed in Santiago. The truth is that to him the country estate with its humble campesinos, eternal siestas, and stables knee deep in shit and horseflies seemed a much worse fate than prison.

"Do you recall, my dear, that in the United States the Civil War persisted for four years? The same could happen here," he said.

"Four years? By then there wouldn't be a single Chilean alive. My nephew Severo says that in just these few months ten thousand have already died in battle, and more than a thousand have been shot in the back."

Nívea wanted to return to Santiago with us, even though she was still feeling the effects of the birth of the twins, and she was so insistent that finally my grandmother gave in. At first she hadn't spoken to Nívea because of the business of the printing press, but she forgave her completely when she saw the twins. Soon we were all en route to the capital with the same bundles we'd brought with us weeks before, plus two new babies and minus the birds, which had perished from fright along the road. We had several baskets of food and a jug with the remedy Nívea was supposed to drink to prevent anemia, a nauseating mixture of aged wine and the fresh blood of a young bull. It had been months since Nívea had news of her husband, and as she confessed in a moment of weakness, she was beginning to feel depressed. She never doubted that Severo del Valle would return to her side safe and sound from the war; she had a kind of clairvoyance in regard to her own destiny. Just as she had always known she would be his wife, even when he wrote her that he had married another woman in San Francisco, she knew they would die together in an accident. I have heard her say that many times, the words have come to be a family joke. She was reluctant to stay in the country because it would be difficult for her husband to communicate with her there; in the pandemonium of the revolution the mail tended to be lost, especially in rural areas.

Ever since the outset of her love for Severo, when her unbridled fertility was first evident, Nívea realized that if she followed the usual norms of decorum and stayed at home with every pregnancy and each new baby, she would spend the rest of her life trapped in the house, so she decided not to make a mystery of maternity. Just as she sashayed around exhibiting her bulging womb like a shameless country woman, to the horror of "good" society, she had her babies without any fuss, limited her confinement to three days—instead of the forty the doctor recommended—and went everywhere, including her suffragettes' meetings, with her babies and nursemaids in tow. These nannies were adolescent girls recruited in the country and destined to serve for the rest of their lives unless they married or got pregnant, neither of which was very probable. Those self-sacrificing youngsters grew up, withered, and died in someone else's house; they slept in grimy, windowless rooms and ate food left from the main table. They adored the children it was their lot to look after, especially the boys, and when the girls in the family married, they took their nannies with them as part of their dowry, to serve a second generation of babies. In a time when everything relating to maternity was hidden, living with Nívea taught me things at age eleven that no ordinary girl in my surroundings knew. In the country, when animals were bred or dropped their young, they made us girls go in the house and closed the shutters, the basic assumption being that those functions wounded our sensitive souls and put perverse ideas in our heads. They were right; the lascivious spectacle of a magnificent stud mounting a mare, which I saw by chance on my cousin's estate, still makes my blood run hot. Now, today, in 1910, when the twenty-year age difference between Nívea and me has evaporated and more than my aunt she is my friend, I have realized that her annual babies were never a serious obstacle for her; pregnant or not, she continued her erotic cavortings with her husband. In one of our confidential conversations I asked her why she had so many children—fifteen, of whom eleven are living—and she answered that she couldn't help it; none of the methods recommended by knowledgeable French women had worked for her. She was saved from early decrepitude by her unassailable physical strength and a light heart that allowed her to avoid sentimental entanglements. She raised her children following the same method she used for domestic affairs: delegating. As soon as a baby was born, she bound her breasts tightly and handed the infant over to a wet nurse; in her house there were almost as many nursemaids as children. Nívea's ease in giving birth, her good health, and her detachment from her children preserved her intimate relations with Severo. It isn't hard to perceive the passionate affection that unites them. She has told me that the forbidden books she studied with such dedication in her uncle's library taught her fantastic possibilities for making love, including some very undemanding ones for lovers limited in acrobatic capacity, as was the case for both of them: he because of his amputated leg, and she as the result of her ever-swollen belly. I have no idea what the favorite contortions of those two are, but I imagine that the moments of greatest delight are still those they play in the dark, without making a sound, as they did in the bedroom where a nun sat struggling between the half-sleep caused by valerian-laced hot chocolate and the lure of sin.

•

News concerning the Revolution was strictly censored by the government, but everyone knew everything, even before it happened. We learned about the conspiracy because we were told by one of my older cousins, who slipped into the house in the company of a peon from the country house who acted as both servant and bodyguard. After dinner, he was closeted for a long time in the study with Frederick Williams and my grandmother while I pretended to read in a corner but was tuned into every word they were saying. My cousin was a large, blond, handsome young man with the eyes and curls of a woman, impulsive and likable. He had grown up in the country and had a real talent for breaking horses; that's the only thing I remember about him. He explained that a few young men, of whom he was one, were planning to blow up some bridges to badger the government.

"Which one of you got that brilliant idea? Do you have a leader?" my grandmother asked sarcastically.

"Not yet, we'll elect one when we meet."

"How many are involved in this endeavor, son?" asked Williams.

"About a hundred, but I don't know how many will come. Not everyone knows what we've called them for—we'll tell them afterward, for security reasons. You understand that, don't you, Aunt?"

"Oh, I understand. Are they all proper little gentlemen like you?" grandmother wanted to know, more and more agitated.

"We have craftsmen, laborers, country people, and a few of my friends, too."

"And are you provided with weapons?" Frederick Williams asked.

"Swords, knives, and I think there are a few carbines. We'll have to get gunpowder, of course."

"That sounds like the height of idiocy!" my grandmother exploded.

They tried to dissuade my cousin, and he listened with feigned patience, but it was obvious that he had made his decision and that this wasn't the moment to change his view. When he left, he was carrying a leather bag containing a few firearms from the collection of Frederick Williams. Two days later we learned what happened at the site of the conspiracy, a few kilometers from Santiago. All that day, rebels showed up at a herder's shack where they thought they were safe; they spent hours arguing, but in view of the fact that they had so few weapons and that every aspect of the plan was leaking water, they decided to postpone the action, spend the night together as good buddies, and scatter the next morning. They never suspected they had been betrayed. At four in the morning they were attacked by ninety cavalry and forty government infantry troops in a maneuver so swift and sure that the surrounded men never lifted a weapon but surrendered, convinced they were safe since they hadn't as yet committed any crime except to hold an unauthorized meeting. The lieutenant colonel in charge of the detachment lost his head in the heat of the moment and, blind with rage, dragged the first prisoner outside and had him shot and bayoneted until he looked like chopped liver, then picked eight more and shot them in the back. The beatings and slaughter continued until by dawn there were sixteen mutilated bodies. The colonel opened the wine cellars of the absent landholder and then handed the women of the campesinos over to troops drunk and emboldened by impunity. They burned the house and tortured the overseer so savagely that they had to prop him in a chair to shoot him. In the meantime, orders flew back and forth from Santiago, but the waiting did nothing to calm the soldiers, it only fired the fever of violence. The next day, after hours of hell, orders came, written in a general's hand: "Execute them all, immediately." And it was done. Afterward they loaded the cadavers onto five carts to haul them off to a common grave, but the outcry was so great that finally they gave the corpses to their families.

At dusk they delivered the body of my cousin, which my grandmother had claimed by pulling strings tied to her social position and influence. He was brought in wrapped in a bloody blanket, and spirited into a room to be doctored up a little before his mother and sisters saw him. Watching from the staircase, I saw a man in a black frock coat come in carrying a small valise; he went into the room with the corpse while the maids jabbered about how he was a master embalmer who could erase the marks of gunshots with makeup, stuffing, and an upholstery needle. Frederick Williams and my grandmother had turned the gold salon into a blazing chapel with an improvised altar and yellow candles in a tall candelabra. By the time the carriages carrying family and friends began to drive up at dawn, the house was filled with flowers and my cousin, clean, well dressed, and free of any trace of his martyrdom, was laid out in a magnificent silver-studded mahogany coffin. The women, in rigorous mourning, were installed in a double row of chairs, weeping and praying. The men were planning revenge in the gold salon, the maids were serving light food as if it were a picnic, and we children, also dressed in black, were choking with laughter and playing at shooting one another dead. The wakes for my cousin and several of his companions lasted three days in their homes, while church bells tolled, uninterrupted, for the many dead. The authorities didn't dare intervene. Despite the strict censorship, everyone in the nation knew what had occurred; the news exploded like a powder keg, and horror shook both revolutionaries and those loyal to the government. The president didn't want to hear the details and denied all responsibility, as he had done with all the atrocities committed by the military and the feared Godoy.