The Rhythm of Memory (9 page)

Octavio nodded. He was nervous. His stomach was in knots. If it wasn’t for the pressure of having to prove himself to Don Fernando and Doña Olivia, he would never have gotten his nerve up to go through with it.

Luckily, Salomé had practiced with him in the days leading up to his audition. They had taken a copy of Cyrano de Bergerac out of the library and he had rehearsed the lines until they came to him.

“You’re a natural at this!” Salomé said in between her girlish giggles. “Who would have known that you had such talent! It’s a shame you wrote me those poems and didn’t recite them aloud!”

“I will recite them aloud for you anytime you wish, my darling.”

She smiled up at him, her complexion radiant from her pregnancy and her unflappable affection for him.

“When I see the camera, I will pretend it is your face,” he said poetically. “I will gaze into the lens and pretend it is your eyes I see, your mouth trembling for a kiss, and then I will never suffer from stage fright.”

He went over to her and knelt by her side. She ran her fingers through his thick black curls and whispered her unyielding love for him into his small velvet ears.

Now, nearly seven days later, Octavio stood in front of the camera. He held his script between his trembling hands and saw the monstrous camera being wheeled in his direction.

“Start from paragraph one!” the director shouted out to him.

Octavio began tentatively. Yet, somehow even before he uttered his second stanza of lines, his nervousness vanished. His limbs stopped shaking. It was as if he were in the garden alone with his beloved Salomé.

His voice became strong and his lips formed each word perfectly. His eyes were sincere, and through the camera’s lens, the planes of his face seemed to both reflect and radiate light. He appeared sensual, lithe, and full of grace. Gestures came to him without his thinking, as if he were moved by a spirit not his own. The character of the lovesick hero seemed made for him. His eyes captured the depth and despair for which the director had been searching, but had yet to find.

Octavio mesmerized the entire set. When the director yelled “Cut,” every person on the soundstage remained quiet.

The rest was history. From that moment on, Octavio Ribeiro was billed as Chile’s Cary Grant. The nation’s new leading man. Their next rising star.

The young man who had once stood alone in the orange grove waiting for his love to join him, now stood alone on a movie set with an airbrushed sunset in the background. Microphones dangled from the ceiling and a camera zoomed in on his expressive face, as Octavio recited the lines he had memorized only minutes before.

S
ANTIAGO
, C
HILE

M
ARCH
1966

Two weeks after he signed his first contract with the studio, Octavio and Salomé married in a small ceremony in the chapel of her grandfather’s hacienda. Salomé wore a high-waisted gown with a square neckline, a lace mantilla cascading down her shoulders, a garland of lemon blossoms in her dark, black hair.

Before they were wed, they exchanged gifts. He had given her a book filled with the pictures of the Fayum, the ancient Egyptians who painted their eyes with thick, black lines of kohl. He had nicknamed her “my Fayum” because of her long almond eyes, the dark brown irises, and thick black lashes. When she gazed upon him, she looked quite simply like an Egyptian princess. The night before their marriage, she had given him a book of poems by the Roman poet Catullus and promised to perfect her Latin so that she could translate the poems for him when they lay in each other’s arms.

He swore they would live a life of love, the child in her belly there to remind them of their eternal vows. They would live simply and poetically. Their union never to be broken, their eternal bond forever sealed.

He had not wanted his job to change what they already had. He did not want to change himself. But somehow he feared that the wheels of his destiny were already in motion and there was little he could do to slow it down.

The studio had signed him to a three-movie contract, and all of his roles would be the same—that of the romantic hero, driven to capture the heart of the woman he was cast to love.

With the money from his first film,
Buenos Dias Soledad
, Octavio purchased a huge house for his pregnant wife on the outskirts of Santiago that the previous owners, two spinster sisters named Maria and Magda, had painted red. On the day they finalized the sale, the elder sister, Maria, approached the young couple and begged them never to repaint the house, for the sisters had painted it vermilion as a symbol of their unrequited loves. Octavio agreed, hoping to give the two now wizened women some peace in their old age. And even though the house had faded in color over the years, so that it was more a faded pink than a vibrant red, Octavio upheld his promise and even affectionately renamed the house La Casa Rosa.

Uninterested in taming things that were meant to grow wild, Salomé was far less diligent in maintaining the sisters’ garden. The lush and intricately planned yard that the spinsters had cultivated over the years had fallen upon two owners who had no patience for weeding or planting new bulbs. While it had once bloomed different flowers each season, peonies in the summer, dahlias in the fall, the garden soon grew like an enchanted forest with untamed vines wrapping over the fence and fruit trees overloaded with unpicked bounties.

Living in such bohemian and lush surroundings, Salomé found her creative energies heightened during the last months of her pregnancy. She painted one of the upstairs bedrooms yellow, using the saffron threads she used to tint her paella as her inspiration. She crocheted white curtains with outlines of elephants and giraffes into the intricately woven pattern.

Doña Olivia brought the cradle in which she had rocked her
own daughter, and Salomé painted it with lemon leaves and lemon fruit, inspired by her own garden, which was now fragrant with the scent of verbena and rose.

At night, when Octavio returned home exhausted from the studio, his eyes dark with fatigue and his jaw tired from rehearsing his lines, he still had time to hold Salomé in his arms and stroke her full belly underneath her long, white nightgown.

He would bring her head between his two brown hands and kiss her delicately on the mouth.

“My precious Fayum,” he would whisper to her. “Tell me our love will be forever.”

“Our love will be forever, my darling,” she would whisper back to him. She would turn her brown eyes up to his, her delicate lashes fluttering in the moonlit room.

And then he would sigh. His naked chest rising and falling in small undulations. “One day this house will be filled with children and you and I will grow old together.”

“Yes,” she would say. Salomé knew these were her husband’s nightly musings. The affirmations he needed to maintain his hectic schedule of filming and rehearsing.

Octavio hated talking about his daily activities. His hours were spent meeting various publicists, managers, and impatient producers. It embarrassed him. And Salomé sensed his tension. She herself was dreading the completion of his first film, for she knew that once the studio began its promotion, she and her husband would have even less time to themselves.

They each agreed to make the most of their weekends when he was not busy with work at the studio. Octavio suggested that they scatter some vegetable seeds in the garden in the hope that they might have a small harvest to coincide with the birth of their first child. He mixed a sack of tomato and squash seeds and carried
his pregnant wife through their already blossoming backyard—encouraging her to throw the seeds into the air.

“You’re ridiculous, Octavio.” She giggled as he walked over the vines of wild strawberries and petunias. He was holding her tightly in his arms and pressing his nose into her thick mane of hair.

“You smell better than all the roses in our garden,” he said.

“Octavio.” She giggled again, as she withdrew another fistful of seeds. “Do you think they’ll grow?”

“Of course they’ll grow, my little Fayum.”

He stood still for a moment before letting Salomé down. He placed her on her feet so that she now stood in the middle of the garden. Behind her the branches of the large fig and avocado trees framed her delicate face. “This is fertile ground here,” he said as he tapped her belly with the back of his hand and smiled.

“I want to sit here and watch the sunset with you,” she whispered as she placed the burlap sack of vegetable seeds by her toes.

That evening Octavio smoothed out a large blanket in the middle of their garden. He took Salomé in his arms and brought her close to his chest. And as the sky turned pink and gold, the sun sliding into the Andes, he told her again and again how much he loved her.

They fell asleep to the sound of the crickets. And when they awakened, they were struck by the glimmer of the stars, the fireflies circling above, and the light of each other’s eyes, radiant in the night.

S
ANTIAGO
, C
HILE

J
ULY
1966

Unable to get away from the set in time, Octavio missed the birth of his first child. Doña Olivia and Don Fernando accompanied their daughter to La Clinica Santa Maria in Santiago and waited nervously in the waiting room as the hours passed and Salomé went through the pains of labor.

Before traveling by car to the clinic, Doña Olivia had telephoned her son-in-law to tell him that the baby was on the way. The studio assistant told her that Octavio was in the middle of a shoot and that he would get there as soon as the last scene was completed to the director’s satisfaction.

Octavio didn’t arrive, however, until the following morning; wearing his clothes from the previous day, unshaven and weary, he came to Salomé’s bedside, carrying a bouquet of pink and white peonies.

“I’m sorry, Fayum…I couldn’t get away.”

Salomé nodded, trying hard to fight back her tears. Unable to look at Octavio, she gazed down at their infant son, who was now nursing at her breast. “I named him Rafael,” she whispered as she nursed the tiny boy.

“God heals all,” Octavio said, acknowledging that he remembered the significance of the name’s meaning. “He’s beautiful.”

Octavio reached down to caress the child’s forehead. “Just like his mother…”

“Please, don’t…Octavio,” Salomé whispered. She knew if she spoke any more, she wouldn’t be able to restrain herself. Her eyes were still red from exhaustion and she knew if she told Octavio how truly disappointed she was, she would be unable to stop her tears.

She wanted to tell him that she couldn’t remember the last time they had held hands, that those nights they had fallen asleep in the garden, under the canopy of stars, seemed like ages ago. She wondered if he had even noticed that their garden now had patches of tomatoes and squash. They had appeared only weeks before, but she had been unable to pick them herself because of bed rest. She imagined now that the vegetables were spoiling on their vines.

She wanted to ask him where his priorities were now. She wanted to chastise him for not getting away from his silly movie and coming to her side, as he had always promised. But she had known for quite some time that their child’s birth was coinciding with the final scenes of the movie and that her husband could not control his schedule, let alone the direction of his life, at this moment.

It was just that she missed him and the way things had been only a year before. She had dreamt that when their child was born, he would be only steps outside the delivery room.

Now, as their life was changing so quickly, she was yearning for something to be constant between them.

“My love is constant,” he had told her time and time again as she voiced her concern and her desire for her poet to return.

“Can’t we at least get away for a weekend before the baby comes?” she had asked him more than once.

“This will only be for a short time, Fayum,” he had said, trying
to comfort her. “After the film wraps, we’ll get away…just the two of us.”

But she knew that those were naive words. Octavio was committed to at least two more movies after
Buenos Dias Soledad
. And she would have their baby by then. No longer would it be “just the two of us.”

“We will plant an orange grove,” he promised her as he drifted off to sleep. “I will write more poems when I have more free time,” he whispered.

She never said aloud that she knew that it would never happen. That she could already anticipate the responsibilities of motherhood and foresee how he would respond to the responsibilities of fatherhood.

Somehow the pressures of life had caught up with these two people who had always believed they were destined for an uncomplicated life grounded simply on love.

But whereas Salomé could see the decisions that Octavio was making would affect their relationship, her husband seemed to still maintain his idealism that, one day, all would return to the way things were when they had first courted. She thought him naive, but well-intentioned. She only hoped he would not wake up one day and regret he had taken a path on which there were consequences he was ill-prepared to bear.

G
ÖTEBORG
, S
WEDEN

M
ARCH
1969

Samuel Rudin hadn’t been prepared for the Scandinavian winter. He missed the Peruvian sun. He missed the mountains. He hated rising in the morning and seeing darkness. Nearly every night, as he lay in his bed, his eyes closed shut and his fists clenched to his sides, he shivered himself to sleep. In his mind, he counted down the days until midsummer.

His apartment, a modest place cloistered in the old town, along the south side of the Göta River, was lonely and sparse. And when he returned there from seeing his patients, political refugees who had come to Sweden hoping for a better life, he would boil himself a cup of hot water, stir in a spoonful of Nescafé, and slouch into his sofa. Often, he would find his mind wandering back to his few memories of Paris, the long boat ride to Peru, the deterioration of his mother’s mental health, and the depression that hung over his family like a wide bolt of mourning cloth. He saw his life like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, certain events disjointed from the main configuration. He frequently did not know what to do with the memories whose edges were not smooth and neat, the ones that didn’t fit snugly into the picture he wanted to have in his head.