A Long Petal of the Sea

by Isabel Allende

  He called the Chilean ambassador in France, then had to wait anxiously for three days until the legation found passages for them on the last departing Chilean ship, a cargo boat full to bursting with three hundred passengers instead of the regulation fifty. In order to make room for the del Solar family, the authorities were about to disembark a Jewish family who had paid for their tickets and bribed a Chilean consul with their grandmother’s jewels to obtain visas. Already, some ships had refused to accept Jews, and liners had returned with them to their point of departure because no country would accept them. This family, like several others among the passengers, had fled Germany after suffering dreadful harassment and had been forbidden to take anything of value. For them, leaving Europe was a question of life or death.

  Ofelia heard them pleading with the captain and volunteered (without consulting her parents) to let them have her cabin, even though this meant sharing a narrow bunk with her mother. One has to adapt in times of crisis, Isidro said, but he was unhappy about being thrown together with people of different social standing, the sixty Jews, the awful food that was simply rice and more rice, the lack of enough water for a bath, and the fear of sailing without lights to be invisible to enemy planes. “I don’t know how we’re going to survive a month crammed like sardines in this rust bucket,” he would complain, while his wife prayed and his daughter kept busy entertaining the children and drawing portraits and scenes of shipboard life. Soon Ofelia, prompted by her brother Felipe’s generosity, gave some of her clothes to the Jews who had boarded with nothing more than what they were standing in. “All that money spent in shops only for that child to give away what we bought. Thank heavens her trousseau is safely in the trunks in the hold,” muttered Isidro, taken aback by this gesture from his daughter, who had always seemed to him so frivolous. It was only months later that Ofelia learned that the Second World War had saved her from the ladies’ college.

  In normal times, the voyage to Chile took twenty-seven days, but their ship took twenty-two, traveling at full speed, dodging floating mines and avoiding warships from both navies. In theory they were safe because they flew the neutral flag of Chile, but in practice there could be a tragic misunderstanding and they could be sunk by the Germans or the Allies.

  In the Panama Canal they met with extraordinary protective measures against any sabotage: nets and divers searching for any possible bombs in the locks. For Laura and Isidro del Solar the heat and mosquitoes were pure torture, the discomfort unbearable, and the tension produced by the war had their stomachs in knots. For Ofelia, on the other hand, the experience was more rewarding than the journey on the Reina del Pacifico, with its air-conditioning and orgies of chocolate.

  Felipe was waiting for them in Valparaiso with his car and a rented van to carry all their baggage, driven by the family chauffeur. He was surprised at seeing his sister again, as she had always seemed to him shallow-minded, prissy, and trivial. She seemed older and more serious; she had grown up, and her features were better defined—she was no longer the doll-faced girl who had left Chile, but an interesting young woman. If she hadn’t been his sister, he would have said she was very pretty. Matias Eyzaguirre was at the port as well, with his car and a bouquet of roses for his reluctant fiancée. Like Felipe, he was impressed when he saw Ofelia. She had always been attractive, but now she seemed to him so beautiful he was struck by the terrible thought that some other more intelligent or richer man might snatch her from him. He decided to bring his plans forward. He would tell her at once of his first diplomatic mission, and as soon as they were on their own he would offer her his great-grandmother’s diamond ring. He was sweating so nervously his shirt was soaked: who could tell how this impetuous young woman would react at the prospect of getting married and going to live in Paraguay?

  They passed a group of about twenty young people bearing swastika armbands protesting against the Jews disembarking the boat and hurling insults at all those who had come to welcome them.

  “Poor people, they’ve escaped from Germany and look what they find when they get here,” said Ofelia.

  “Don’t pay these protesters any attention. The police will disperse them,” Matias reassured her.

  During the four-hour journey up a winding dirt road to Santiago, Felipe, who was with his parents in one of the cars, had time to tell them how the Spaniards were adapting wonderfully: in less than a month the majority had found somewhere to live and jobs. Many Chilean families had taken them in: it was embarrassing that with half a dozen empty bedrooms they weren’t doing the same. “I know that you’ve got some atheist communists in your house,” said Isidro. “You’re going to regret it.”

  Felipe pointed out that they were definitely not communists, possibly anarchists, and as for being atheists, that remained to be seen. He told them about the Dalmau family and how decent and well educated they were, and about the boy, who was in love with Juana. Isidro and Laura already knew that the faithful Juana Nancucheo had betrayed them, that she went every day to see Marcel in order to supervise his meals and take him to the park to get some sun with Leonardo, because as she put it, his mother was always out on the streets and never at home, using the piano as an excuse, and her husband spent all his time in a bar. Felipe was amazed that his parents had obtained so much information in mid-ocean.

  * * *

  —

  THAT DECEMBER MATIAS EYZAGUIRRE left for Paraguay to serve an ambassador who was despotic toward his subordinates and servile toward those of a higher social rank. Matias entered into this second category. He left alone, as Ofelia had rejected his ring on the pretext that she had promised her father to stay single until she was twenty-one. Matias was well aware that if she had wanted to get married, nobody would have been able to stop her, but he resigned himself to wait, with all the risks that implied. Ofelia had her choice of admirers, but his future in-laws assured him they would keep an eye on her. “Give the girl time, she’s very immature. I’m going to pray for you both, for you to be married and very happy,” Doña Laura promised him. Matias thought he could win Ofelia over once and for all with a constant stream of correspondence, a flood of love letters: that was what the mail was for, and he could be much more eloquent when he wrote than when he spoke. Patience. He had loved Ofelia since they were children; he hadn’t the slightest doubt that they were made for each other.

  As he did every year, a few days before Christmas, Isidro del Solar had a suckling pig brought from their country property, and hired a butcher to slaughter it in the most distant yard behind the house, out of sight of Laura, Ofelia, and Baby. Juana supervised the transformation of the hapless beast into meat for the barbecue, sausages, chops, ham, and bacon. She was also in charge of the Christmas Eve dinner for the whole family, as well as of making a crib in the hearth with plaster figures brought from Italy.

  Early on Christmas Eve, when she went to take Don Isidro his coffee in the library, she paused in front of him.

  “Is something wrong, Juana?”

  “In my opinion, we ought to invite niño Felipe’s communists.”

  Isidro del Solar raised his eyes from the newspaper and stared at her in amazement.

  “I mean for little Marcel’s sake.”

  “Who?”

  “You know who I’m talking about, patron. The little brat, the communists’ child.”

  “Communists don’t give a damn about Christmas, Juana. They don’t believe in God, and couldn’t care less about the baby Jesus.”

  Juana stifled a cry. Felipe had explained to her a lot of communist nonsense about equality and the class struggle, but she had never heard of anyone who didn’t believe in God and couldn’t care less about the baby Jesus. It took her a minute to recover her voice.

  “That may be so, patron, but that’s not the brat’s fault. As I see it, they should dine here on Christmas Eve. I’ve already told niño Felipe and he agrees. So do Señora Laura and litt
le Ofelia.”

  * * *

  —

  SO IT WAS THAT the Dalmaus spent their first Christmas in Chile with the extended del Solar family. Roser wore the same dress she had worn for her wedding in Perpignan, navy blue with white flowers around the neckline. She gathered her hair up in a net with black beads and a jet clasp Carme had given her when she learned Roser was expecting a child by her son Guillem. “You’re my daughter-in-law now, there’s no need for any paperwork,” she had told Roser. Victor had on one of Felipe’s three-piece suits that was a little baggy and short in the leg.

  When they arrived at the house on Calle Mar del Plata, Juana took charge of Marcel and swept him off to play with Leonardo, while Felipe propelled the Dalmaus into the big drawing room for the obligatory presentations. He had told them that in Chile the social classes were like a mille-feuille cake, easy to reach the bottom but almost impossible to reach the top of, because money could not buy pedigree. The only exceptions were talent, as in the case of Pablo Neruda, and the beauty of certain women. That had been the case with Ofelia’s grandmother, the daughter of a modest English shopkeeper, a beauty with the bearing of a queen who came to improve the race, as her descendants, the Vizcarras, claimed. If the Dalmaus had been Chilean, they would never have been invited to the del Solars’ table, but for the moment, as exotic foreigners, they were floating in limbo. If things went well for them, they would end up in one of the numerous subdivisions of the Chilean middle class. Felipe warned them that in his parents’ house they would be observed like wild animals in a circus by people who were conservative, religious, and intolerant, but once that initial curiosity had been satisfied they would be welcomed with the obligatory Chilean hospitality.

  And so it proved. Nobody asked them about the Civil War or the reasons for their exile—partly out of ignorance (according to Felipe they only ever read the society pages of El Mercurio) but also out of kindness: they didn’t want to upset the guests. Victor suddenly relapsed into the adolescent shyness he thought he had left behind long ago, and remained standing in a corner of the French-style room between two Louis XV armchairs upholstered in moss-green silk, speaking as little as possible. Roser, on the other hand, was in her element, and didn’t need to be asked twice to play cheerful tunes on the piano, accompanied by several of the guests who had drunk one glass too many.

  It was Ofelia who was most impressed by the Dalmaus. What little she knew about them was based on Juana’s comments, and she had imagined a pair of gloomy Soviet officials, even though Matias had spoken of his pleasant experience with Spaniards, in general, when he had to stamp their visas on the Winnipeg. Roser Dalmau was a young woman who radiated confidence but without the least hint of vanity or social climbing. She explained to a gaggle of ladies, all dressed in black with pearl necklaces (the uniform of distinguished Chilean matrons), that she had been a goatherd, a baker, and a seamstress before she made a living from the piano. She said this so naturally it was celebrated as if she had done all of it on a whim. Then she sat at the piano and completely won them over.

  Ofelia felt a mixture of envy and shame when she compared her existence as an unenlightened, idle young woman to that of Roser, who Felipe had told her was only a couple of years her senior, but had lived three lives already. She had been born into poverty, had survived a war on the losing side, and suffered the desolation of exile; she was a mother and wife, had crossed the seas and reached the ends of the earth without a penny to her name, and yet she was afraid of nothing. Ofelia wished she could be worthy, strong, and brave—she wished she could be Roser.

  As if reading her thoughts, Roser came over, and the two women spent some time on their own, smoking out on the balcony to escape the heat. Roser thought that to celebrate Christmas in the middle of summer made no sense. Ofelia surprised herself by confessing to this stranger her dream of going to Paris or Buenos Aires and dedicating herself to painting, and how crazy that was because she had the misfortune of being a woman, a prisoner of her family and social convention. She added with a mocking smile that disguised her impulse to cry that the worst obstacle was being financially dependent: she would never be able to earn a living with her art. “If it’s your vocation to paint, sooner or later that’s what you’ll do, so the sooner the better. Why does it have to be Paris or Buenos Aires? Discipline is all you need. It’s like the piano, isn’t it? It only rarely brings in enough to live on, but you have to try,” argued Roser.

  That evening, more than once Ofelia felt Victor Dalmau’s ardent gaze following her around the room, but since he remained in his corner and made no attempt to approach her, she whispered to Felipe for him to make the introductions.

  “This is my friend Victor, from Barcelona. He was a militiaman in the Civil War.”

  “In fact, I was a medical auxiliary; I never had to fire a gun,” said Victor.

  “A militiaman?” queried Ofelia, who had never heard that term before.

  “That was what the Republican fighters were called before they joined the regular army,” Victor explained.

  Felipe left them on their own, and Ofelia spent some time trying to get Victor to talk, but she was unable to discover anything they had in common, and received little encouragement from him. She asked about the bar, because Juana had mentioned it, and managed to drag out of him the fact that he wanted to complete the medical studies he had begun in Spain. In the end, irritated by the lengthy pauses, she left him.

  Soon afterward, she caught him staring at her once more, and his boldness annoyed her, although she too was secretly observing him, fascinated by his ascetic face, aquiline nose, and prominent cheekbones, his veined hands with long fingers; his wiry, hard body. She would like to paint him, she thought, to do his portrait in black and white brushstrokes on a gray background, a full-length picture with him holding a rifle, and naked. The thought made her blush; she had never painted anyone naked, and had learned what little she knew of male anatomy in European museums, where most of the statues were mutilated or had parts covered by a fig leaf. Even the most daring were disappointing, like Michelangelo’s David, with his enormous hands and baby peepee. She had never seen Matias naked, but they had fondled each other enough for her to guess what was concealed beneath his trousers. She would have to see to judge. Why did the Spaniard have a limp? It could be a heroic war wound.

  Victor was just as curious as Ofelia. He concluded they came from different planets, and that this young woman was of another species, unlike any woman he had met before. War distorts everything, including memory. Possibly in the past there had been girls like Ofelia: fresh, kept from the ugliness of the world, with spotless lives like blank pages where their destinies could be written in elegant handwriting without a single crossing-out, but he couldn’t remember anyone of the sort. Her beauty intimidated him: he was used to women prematurely marked by poverty or war. She seemed tall, because everything about her was vertical, from her long neck to her slender feet, but when she came over he realized she only reached his chin. Her thick hair was various shades of wood color, tied up with a black velvet ribbon; her mouth was constantly half-open, as if she had too many teeth, and was painted ruby red. Her most striking feature was her blue eyes, set far apart and with the distant expression of somebody staring out to sea from beneath arched brows. He decided it must be because she was slightly cross-eyed.

  After dinner, the whole family, together with the children and servants, went in procession to Midnight Mass in the local church. The del Solars were surprised that the supposedly atheist Dalmaus accompanied them, and that Roser followed the rite in Latin, as the nuns had taught her. On the way, Felipe caught Ofelia by the arm and kept her back so that he could speak freely. “If I catch you flirting with Dalmau, I’ll tell Father, understood? We’ll see how he reacts to you setting your cap at a married man, an immigrant without a penny to his name.” She feigned surprise at his warning, as if the idea had never occurred to her. F
elipe did not take Victor to task in the same way because he didn’t want to humiliate him, but decided to prevent him seeing his sister again at all costs. The attraction between the two of them was so overpowering that others must have noticed it as well.

  He was right. Later on that night, when Victor went to say good night to Roser, who slept in the other bedroom with Marcel, she advised him not to fall into that temptation.

  “That girl is out of your reach. Put her out of your mind, Victor. You’ll never be part of her social circle, let alone her family.”

  “That’s the least of it. There are far greater obstacles than social class.”

  “Yes, that’s true. Apart from being poor and morally suspect in the eyes of that inward-looking clan, you’re not exactly personable.”

  “You’re forgetting the main thing: I have a wife and child.”

  “We can get divorced.”

  “In this country there is no divorce, and according to Felipe, there never will be.”

  “You mean we’re trapped forever!” Roser exclaimed in horror.

  “You could have put it more delicately. As long as we’re living here, we’ll be legally married, but when we return to Spain we’ll get divorced and that’s that.”

  “That could be a long time away. Meanwhile, we’ve got to settle here. I want Marcel to grow up as a Chilean.”