Portrait in Sepia (29 page)

"No!" I cried, horrified.

"I'm not going to let anyone play games with my granddaughter. We can't waste time. If that young man doesn't have serious intentions, he should abandon the field right now."

"But, Grandmother, what's the hurry? We've only just met—"

"Do you know how old I am, Aurora? I am getting on. Not many live as long as I have. Before I die, I want to see you well married."

"You'll live forever, Grandmother."

"No, child, it just seems that way," she replied.

I don't know whether she carried out the planned ambush on Diego Domínguez or whether he picked up the hint and made the decision himself. Now that I can look at that episode with a certain distance and humor, I understand that he was never in love with me; he simply felt flattered by my unconditional love and must have weighed in the balance the advantages of such a union. Maybe he desired me, because we were two young people and were available to each other; maybe he thought that with time he would come to love me; maybe he married me out of laziness and convenience. Diego was a good catch, but I was too: I had the income my father left me, and it was supposed that I would inherit a fortune from my grandmother. Whatever his reasons were, the fact is that he asked for my hand and placed a diamond ring on my finger. The danger signs were evident to anyone with two eyes in his head, except for my grandmother—blinded by fear of leaving me alone—and me, madly in love. Uncle Frederick argued from the beginning that Diego Domínguez was not the man for me. Since he hadn't liked anyone who came near me for the last two years, we paid no attention to him, thinking it paternal jealousy. "I find this young fellow to be rather unfeeling," he commented more than once, but my grandmother rebutted him, saying that he wasn't cold, he was respectful, as befitting a perfect Chilean gentleman.

Paulina del Valle went into a frenzy of shopping. In her haste, packages were tossed unopened into trunks, and later, when we took them out in Santiago, it turned out there were two of everything, and half didn't fit. When she learned that Diego Domínguez had to return to Chile, the two of them arranged for us all to go back on the same steamship, which would give us a few weeks to get to know each other better, they said. Frederick Williams put on a long face and tried to divert these plans, but there was no power in this world capable of facing down that lady when she got something in her head, and her current obsession was to get her granddaughter married. I recall very little of the voyage; it went by in a cloud of morning strolls, games of deck tennis and cards, and cocktails and dancing all the way to Buenos Aires, where we parted because Diego had to buy some bulls and drive them along the southern Andean trails to his estate. We had very few opportunities to be alone or to talk without witnesses. I learned the essential things about the twenty-three years of his past and his family, but almost nothing about his tastes, beliefs, and ambitions. My grandmother told him that my father, Matias Rodríguez de Santa Cruz, was dead and that my mother was an American whom we hadn't known because she died when I was born, which was not far from the truth. Diego did not evidence any curiosity to know more; neither was he interested in any passion for photography, and when I made it clear to him that I didn't intend to give it up, he said it wouldn't bother him in the least, that his sister painted watercolors, and his sister-in-law worked cross-stitch. In the long sea crossing we didn't really get to know each other, but we were getting more and more tightly entangled in the web my grandmother, with the best intentions, was weaving around us.

Since there was very little in the first-class section of the ship to photograph, except for ladies' dresses and the dining room floral arrangements, I often went down to the lower decks to shoot portraits, especially of the third-class travelers crowded together in the belly of the ship: laborers and immigrants on their way to America to try their fortune, Russians, Germans, Italians, Jews, people traveling with very little in their pockets but with hearts bursting with hope. It seemed to me that despite the discomfort and lack of services, they were doing better than the passengers in first class, where everything was formal, ceremonious, and boring. Among the emigrants there was an easy camaraderie; the men played cards and dominoes, the women formed groups to tell one another about their lives, the children improvised fishing poles and played hide-and-seek. In the evenings guitars, accordions, flutes, and violins were brought out, and there were happy sessions with singing, dancing, and beer. No one seemed to mind my presence, no one asked questions, and after a few days I was accepted as one of them, which allowed me to photograph them at will. There was no way to develop the negatives on board ship, but I sorted them carefully to do that later in Santiago. During one of those excursions through the lower decks, I ran right into the last person I expected to find there.

"Genghis Khan!" I cried when I saw him.

"I believe, señorita, you've mistaken me for—"

"Forgive me, Dr. Radovic," I apologized, feeling like an idiot.

"Do we know each other?" he asked, puzzled.

"Don't you remember me? I'm Paulina del Valle's granddaughter."

"Aurora? Surely not, I would never have recognized you. How you've changed!"

It's true I had changed. When he had met me I was dressed like a little girl, and now before his eyes he had a grown woman with a camera around her neck and an engagement ring on her finger. On that voyage began the friendship that with time would change my life. Dr. Iván Radovic, a second-class passenger, could not come up to the first-class deck without an invitation, but I could go down to visit him, which I did often. He told me about his work with as much passion as I talked to him about photography; he watched me use the camera, but I couldn't show him anything I'd done because it was at the bottom of the trunks. I did, though, promise to do so when we reached Santiago. That didn't happen, however; because here I was embarrassed to call him—it seemed pure vanity, and I didn't want to take up the time of a man occupied in saving lives. When my grandmother learned he was on board, she immediately invited him to have tea on the terrace of our suite. "With you here, Doctor, I feel safe on the high seas. If I get another grapefruit in my stomach, you will come and cut it out with a kitchen knife," she joked. The invitations to tea were repeated often, followed by card games. Iván Radovic told us he had finished his term in the Hobbs clinic and was going back to Chile to work in a hospital.

"Why don't you open a private clinic, Doctor?" queried my aunt, who had taken a fancy to him.

"I would never have the money and connections that requires, Señora del Valle."

"But I will make that investment, if you like."

"I could never allow you to—"

"I wouldn't be doing it for you, but because it's a good place to put my money, Dr. Radovic," my grandmother interrupted. "Everyone gets sick, medicine is big business."

"I believe that medicine is not a business, señora, but a right. As a physician I am obliged to serve, and I hope that some day good health will be within reach of every Chilean."

"Are you a socialist?" my grandmother asked, with a grimace of distaste; after the "betrayal" of Señorita Pineda she mistrusted socialism.

"I'm a doctor, Señora del Valle. Healing is all that interests me."

We returned to Chile at the end of December 1898, and we found a country in full moral crisis. No one, from rich landowners to schoolteachers and nitrate mine workers, was happy with his lot or with the government. Chileans seemed resigned to character flaws like drunkenness, idleness, and robbery, and to social ills like maddening bureaucracy, unemployment, an inefficient legal system, and a poverty that contrasted sharply with the brazen ostentation of the wealthy that was producing a growing, silent rage extending from north to south. We didn't remember Santiago as being so dirty, with so many wretched people, so many cockroach-infested slums, so many children dead before they could walk. The newspapers asserted that the death rate in the capital was the same as Calcutta's. Our house on Calle Ejercito Libertador had been left in the care of a pair of aunts who were poor as church mice, the kind of distant relatives every Chilean family has, and a handful of servants. The aunts had ruled those domains for more than two years and were not overjoyed to see us; Caramelo was there beside them, so old now he didn't recognize me. The garden was overgrown with weeds, the Moorish fountains were dry, the salons smelled of the tomb, the kitchens looked like a pigsty, and there were mouse droppings under the beds, but none of that fazed Paulina del Valle, who had arrived prepared to celebrate the wedding of the century and was not going to allow anything—not age, the Santiago heat, or my retiring personality—to stop her. She had the summer months, during which everyone went to the coast or the country, to get the house ready, because autumn marked the onset of intense social life, and she needed time to prepare for my marriage in September, the beginning of spring, a month of patriotic celebrations and bridal parties, exactly a year after my first meeting with Diego. Frederick Williams took charge of hiring a regiment of masons, woodworkers, gardeners, and maids who put their teeth into the task of renovating that disaster at the pace customary in Chile, which is to say, not overly fast. Summer came with its dust and heat, its scent of peaches and cries of itinerant vendors hawking the delicacies of the season. Because everyone was on vacation, the city seemed dead. Severo del Valle came to visit bringing sacks of vegetables, baskets of fruit, and good news about the vines; he was tanned, heavier, and more handsome than ever. He stared at me openmouthed, amazed that I was the same little girl he had told good-bye two years before; he made me whirl like a top so he could look at me from every angle, and his generous opinion was that I had an air that reminded him of my mother. My grandmother received that comment with a sour face; my past was never mentioned in her presence. For her my life began when I was five, when I stepped over the threshold of her palace in San Francisco; nothing existed before that. Nívea had stayed on their estate with the children because she was about to give birth again and was too big to make the trip to Santiago. The grape harvest promised to be very good that year; they planned to harvest the white grapes in March and the red ones in April, Severo del Valle reported, and added that some red grapes were mixed in with others that were more delicate, more vulnerable to diseases, and later to mature. Even though they bore excellent fruit, Severo said, he planned to uproot them to save problems. Paulina del Valle immediately cocked an ear, and I saw in her eyes the same avaricious light that usually announced a profitable idea.

"In early autumn transplant them to a separate place. Tend them carefully, and next year we will make a special wine from them," she said.

"Why should we fool with them?" Severo asked.

"If those grapes mature late, they must be finer and more concentrated. Surely the wine will be much better."

"We're already producing one of the best wines in the country, Aunt."

"Humor me, Nephew, do what I ask," my grandmother begged in that teasing tone she used before giving an order.

I wasn't able to see Nívea till the very day of my wedding, when she arrived with her newest to hastily fill me in on the basic information any bride should know before her honeymoon but no one had taken the trouble to give me. My virginity, however, did not save me from the assault of an instinctive passion I didn't know how to name. I thought of Diego day and night, and not all those thoughts were chaste. I wanted him, but I didn't know exactly for what. I wanted to be in his arms, wanted him to kiss me as he had once or twice, wanted to see him naked. I had never seen a naked man and, I confess, curiosity kept me awake at night. That was all, the rest of that road was a mystery. Nívea, with her unabashed honesty, was the one person qualified to instruct me, but it wouldn't be until several years later—given time and opportunity for our friendship to deepen—that she would tell me the secrets of her intimacy with Severo del Valle, and describe in detail, rolling with laughter, the postures she'd learned in the books of her uncle Jose Francisco Vergara. By then I had left my innocence behind, but I was very ignorant in erotic matters, as nearly all women are—and most men as well, Nívea assured me. "Without those books of my uncle's, I would have had fifteen children and never known how it happened," she told me. Her advice, which would have made my aunts' hair stand on end, stood me in very good stead for my second love, but would have been no help at all in the first.

For three long months we lived camped in four rooms of the house on Ejercito Libertador, panting with heat. I wasn't bored, because my grandmother immediately renewed her charitable works, even though all the members of the ladies' club were out of town for the summer. In her absence discipline had deteriorated, and it was up to her to take over the reins of compulsive compassion once more. Again we visited widows, the ailing and mad, delivered food, and supervised loans to poor women. This idea, which even the newspapers had made fun of because no one believed that the beneficiaries—all in the last stages of indigence—would pay back the money, had worked out so well that the government decided to copy it. The women not only scrupulously repaid the loans in monthly payments but backed one another, so that when one couldn't pay, the others paid for her. I think Paulina del Valle actually had the idea that she could charge them interest and turn the charity into a business, but I cut that off short. "There's a limit to everything, Grandmother, even greed," I scolded. My passionate correspondence with Diego Domínguez kept me waiting for the mail. I discovered that in letters I am capable of expressing what I would never dare face-to-face: the written word is profoundly liberating. I found myself reading love poems instead of the novels I had been so fond of; if a dead poet on the other side of the world could describe my feelings with such precision, I had to accept with humility that my love was not exceptional, that I had invented nothing, that everyone falls in love in more or less the same manner. I imagined my sweetheart galloping across his land like a legendary broad-shouldered hero, noble, strong, and handsome, a manly man in whose hands I would be safe; he would make me happy and would give me protection, children, and eternal love. I visualized a cottony, sugary future through which we would float, arms about each other, forever. How would the body of the man I loved smell? Of humus?—like the forests he came from? Like the sweet aroma of the bakery? Or maybe the sea? Like that fleeting tang that had come to me in dreams since my childhood. Suddenly the need to smell Diego became as imperious as thirst, and in a letter I begged him to send me one of the kerchiefs he had worn around his neck, or one of his unwashed shirts. My fiancé's answers to those impassioned letters were calm chronicles of life in the country—cows, wheat, grapes, the rainless summer sky—and sober comments about his family. Naturally, he never sent one of his kerchiefs or shirts. In the last lines he would remind me how much he loved me and how happy we would be in the cool adobe-and-tile house his father was building for us on his property, as earlier he had for his brother Eduardo when he married Susana, and as he would for his sister Adela when she married. For generations the Domínguezes had lived together: love of Christ, the bond among brothers and sister, respect for their parents, and hard work, Diego said, were the foundation of his family.