“Do they at least get some help?”
“Yes, from churches, especially the evangelical ones, from charities, and volunteers. But it’s the children I’m worried about, Roser. They grow up out of control, often go to bed hungry, attend school when they can, not always, and reach adolescence with no more prospects than gangs, drugs, or the street.”
“I know you, Victor. I know you’re happier there than anywhere else,” was Roser’s reply.
It was true. By the third day of serving in this community together with a couple of nurses and other idealistic doctors who worked shifts, Victor rediscovered his youthful enthusiastic flame. He would return home weary as a dog, heavyhearted and with many tragic stories, yet impatient to return to the consulting room the next day. His life had a meaning as clear as during the Civil War, when his role in this world had been beyond question.
“If you could only see how they organize themselves, Roser. Those who are able contribute something to the common pot cooked in giant cauldrons on braziers in the open air. The idea is to give everyone a hot meal, although sometimes there’s not enough to go around.”
“Now I know where your salary goes.”
“It’s not just food that’s needed, Roser. We also need everything in the consulting room.”
He explained that the shantytown dwellers kept order themselves to avoid raids by the police, who usually came in heavily armed. Their impossible dream was to have their own houses and plots of land to live on. In the past they had simply taken over land and stubbornly resisted being thrown off. These “takeovers” began with a few people arriving surreptitiously. Then more and more would appear, in a stealthy, uncontainable procession that advanced with their few possessions on carts and wheelbarrows, in sacks slung over their shoulders, and what little material they had for a roof, pieces of cardboard, blankets, carrying their children and followed by their dogs. By the time the authorities came to see what was going on, there were thousands of people installed, ready to defend themselves. But in the current climate, that sort of thing would have been rash to the point of suicide: the forces of law and order could come in with tanks and open fire without a second thought.
“Just suggesting a protest is all it takes for someone to disappear. If they’re seen again, it’s as a dead body that appears in the entrance to the shanty as a warning to the others. That was where they dumped the maimed body of the singer Victor Jara, with more than forty bullet wounds. Or so I’ve been told.”
In the consulting room they dealt with emergencies, cases of burns, broken bones, wounds from knife or bottle fights, domestic violence. None of this was any great challenge to Victor, but simply by being there he gave the shanty dwellers a sense of security. He dispatched the most serious cases to the nearest hospital and since there was no ambulance, often took them there himself in his car. He had been warned about robberies, and was told it was unwise to arrive there in a vehicle, because it could be dismantled and the parts sold at the Persian Market, but one of the female leaders, a still-young grandmother with the character of an amazon, warned the inhabitants, especially the wayward youngsters, that the first one who touched the doctor’s car would be in deep trouble. That was enough: Victor never had any problems.
The Dalmaus ended up living off their savings and what Roser earned, because Victor’s salary from the clinic was devoted entirely to buying essential items for the consulting room. Roser saw he was so happy she decided to accompany him. She bought instruments with money from Valentin Sanchez, who sent a substantial check and a shipment from Venezuela, and went to the shantytown on the same days as her husband, to teach music. She discovered this brought them closer together than making love, but didn’t tell him so. She gave reports and photographs to Valentin Sanchez. “In a year we’ll have a children’s choir and a youth orchestra, you’ll have to come and see it with your own eyes. But for now we need good recording equipment and loudspeakers for our open-air concerts,” she explained, knowing her friend would find a way to come up with more funds.
* * *
—
SOMEWHAT ENVIOUS OF OFELIA del Solar’s bucolic description of life in the countryside, Victor convinced Roser they should find somewhere to live on the outskirts of Santiago. The city was a nightmare of traffic and scurrying, bad-tempered pedestrians, and in the early morning was often covered by a cloud of toxic fog. They found what they were looking for: a stone and wood rustic dwelling that the architect had capriciously adorned with a thatched roof that was intended to camouflage it in the rural landscape. Three decades earlier, when it was built, access was along a snaking track that zigzagged between steep precipices, but the capital gradually had spread up the mountainsides, and by the time they bought the property, this area of small plots of lands and vegetable gardens was part of the city. There was no public transport or mail, but they could sleep in the deep silence of nature, and wake to a bird chorus. On weekdays they got up at five in the morning to go to work, and didn’t return until after dark, but the time they spent in their new house gave them the strength to take on any challenge.
The property was empty during the day, and in the first two years burglars broke in eleven times. These were such unimportant thefts there was no point getting angry or calling the police: the garden hose and hens, kitchen utensils, a transistor radio, and other insignificant items. Their first television set was also taken, as were another two replacements, so they decided to do without—there was hardly anything worth watching anyway. They were considering the possibility of always leaving the door open to avoid having their windows smashed by the thieves, when Marcel brought two big dogs rescued from the municipal dog pound that barked loudly but were gentle, and a small one that did bite. That solved the problem.
Marcel lived and worked among people Victor loosely called “privileged” for want of a more precise definition, because compared to his patients in the shantytown, that’s what they were. Marcel resented this description, which couldn’t be applied generally to all his friends, but didn’t want to get into any tangled argument with his parents. “You two are relics from the past. You’re stuck in the seventies and need to get up to date.” He called them daily and visited them every Sunday to share the obligatory barbecue Victor insisted on. He came accompanied by different women of a similar style—tall and slender, with long straight hair, laid-back and almost always vegetarian—completely different from the passionate Jamaican girl who had first taught him to love. His father could never manage to distinguish the latest of them from the previous ones, or learn their names before Marcel changed to another, almost exactly similar one. When he arrived, Marcel would whisper in Victor’s ear for him not to mention exile or his consulting room in the shantytown, because he had only just met the girl and wasn’t certain about her political tendencies, if she had any. “You only need to look at her, Marcel. She lives in a bubble, with no idea of the past, or of what’s going on now. Your generation has no ideals,” Victor would retort. They would end up arguing in the pantry while Roser tried to entertain the visitor. Later, their differences forgotten, Marcel would barbecue bloody steaks while Victor boiled spinach for the long-haired girlfriend.
They were often joined by their neighbors, Meche and Ramiro, who brought a basket of fresh vegetables from their kitchen garden and a couple of jars of homemade jam. Even though Ramiro was in good health, Roser insisted to Victor he was going to die at any moment, and in fact this is what happened. He was knocked down and killed by a drunken driver. When Victor asked his wife how on earth she had known, she told him she could see it in Ramiro’s eyes: he was marked by death. “When you become a widower, marry Meche, understand?” Roser whispered to him during the poor man’s funeral. Victor nodded, sure as he was that Roser would long outlive him.
Victor and Roser worked as volunteers for three years in the shantytown, winning the trust of the inhabitants, but then the government ordered the ev
acuation of the families to other locations on the edge of the capital, farther away from middle-class neighborhoods. Santiago was one of the most segregated cities in the world: none of the poor lived within sight of the rich on the hillsides. The police arrived, followed by soldiers, separated people at gunpoint, and took them away in army trucks escorted by motorcycles. They were distributed among identical new settlements, with unmade roads and lines of dwellings like boxes dumped on the dusty ground. Fifteen thousand people were transferred in record time without the rest of the city being aware of it. The poor became invisible. Each family was allotted a basic wooden dwelling made up of one multipurpose room, a bathroom, and kitchen. This was better than the huts they came from, but it meant that at a stroke their community was destroyed. The shantytown inhabitants were left divided, uprooted, isolated, and vulnerable: everyone had to look out for themselves. The operation was carried out so efficiently that Victor and Roser only found out the next day when they arrived to work as usual, only to find bulldozers clearing the ground where the shanties had been, in order to build apartment blocks.
It took them a week to track down some of the displaced groups, but that same evening they were warned by police agents that they were under surveillance, and any contact with the shanty dwellers would be seen as a threat to law and order. This hit Victor hard. He had no intention of retiring: he was still in charge of the most complicated cases at the clinic, but neither practicing the surgery he loved nor the money he earned could compensate for losing his shantytown patients.
Under pressure from popular protests at home, and internationally from the poor reputation it had, in 1987 the dictatorship ended the curfew and relaxed the press censorship that had been in place for fourteen years. They also authorized political parties and the return of all remaining exiles. When the opposition demanded free elections, the government responded by imposing a referendum in October 1988 to decide whether Pinochet was to remain in power for eight more years. Victor, who had never gotten involved in politics but had suffered the consequences anyway, thought the time had come to commit himself openly. He joined the opposition, which was faced with the herculean task of mobilizing the country to defeat the military government in the plebiscite. When police agents just like those who had threatened him before turned up on his doorstep, he threw them out. Instead of leading him away in handcuffs with a hood over his head, they responded with feeble threats and went their way. “They’ll be back,” said a furious Roser, but days and weeks went by without her forecast being fulfilled. This showed the couple that at last things were changing in Chile, as Marcel had suggested four years earlier. The dictatorship’s impunity was slipping away.
The referendum took place in a calm atmosphere that surprised everyone. International observers and journalists from all over the world kept a close eye on the proceedings. Nobody failed to vote: not even old people in wheelchairs, women in labor, the sick on stretchers. And at the end of the day, making a mockery of the junta’s cleverest maneuvers, the dictatorship was beaten at its own game, by its own laws. That night, faced with the incontrovertible results, Pinochet, hardened by the arrogance of absolute power and cut off from reality by many years of complete impunity, proposed another coup to keep himself on the presidential throne indefinitely. This time, however, the U.S. intelligence officials who had supported him before, and the generals he himself had handpicked, refused to back him. Unable to concede defeat until the very last moment, he finally gave in. Months later, he handed his post to a civilian to begin the transition to a restricted, cautious democracy, but he maintained tight control over the armed forces and kept the country in fear. By the time he left office in March 1990, seventeen years had gone by since the military coup.
* * *
—
WITH THE RETURN TO democracy, Victor Dalmau left the private clinic to devote himself exclusively to the San Juan de Dios hospital, which he rejoined in the same position he had held before his arrest. The new director, who had been a student of Victor’s at the university, refrained from pointing out that his former professor was more than old enough to retire and enjoy his old age. When Victor arrived one Monday in his white coat and carrying a briefcase battered by forty years’ use, he was greeted in the lobby by a crowd of some fifty people—doctors, nurses, and administrative staff—with balloons and an enormous cake smothered in meringue. They had gathered to offer him the welcome they couldn’t give before.
Goodness, I’m growing old, thought Victor when he felt tears welling in his eyes. It had been many years since he had cried. The few exiles who returned to the hospital were received with much less fanfare, because it was unwise to attract attention. This was the tacit slogan throughout the country: don’t provoke the military, so as to pretend the recent past was buried and in the process of being forgotten. Doctor Dalmau, however, had left a long-lasting impression of decency and competence among his colleagues, as well as of kindness among his juniors, who could turn to him at any moment and know they would be well received. Even his ideological opponents respected him, which meant none of them had denounced him: Victor’s years in jail and exile were simply the result of a resentful neighbor who knew of his friendship with Salvador Allende. Victor was soon invited to give classes at the School of Medicine and to occupy the post of undersecretary at the Health Ministry. He accepted the first offer, but rejected the second, because the condition was that he join one of the governing parties. He knew he wasn’t a political animal, and never would be.
He felt twenty years younger and was euphoric. After suffering punishment and ostracism in Chile and having been a foreigner for many years, overnight his luck had changed: now he was Professor Dalmau, head of cardiology, the most admired specialist in the country, capable of carrying out feats with his scalpel that others wouldn’t dare attempt, and a noted public speaker. Even his enemies turned to him, as he discovered on more than one occasion when he found himself operating on two high-ranking members of the still-powerful armed forces, and one of the most passionate strategists of repression during the dictatorship. When it was a question of saving their own lives, these men came to consult him with their tails between their legs: fear has no shame, as Roser liked to say.
This was Victor’s moment: he was at the pinnacle of his career. He felt that in some mysterious way he embodied Chile’s transformation; the shadows had been dispelled, freedom was dawning, and so he too was living a glorious dawn. He devoted himself to his work, and for the first time in his introverted life sought attention and enjoyed whatever opportunities he had to shine in public.
“Be careful, Victor, success is intoxicating you. Remember life has many peaks and troughs,” Roser warned him. She had been observing him with some concern, thinking he was growing conceited, noticing his pedantic tone, his superior air, his tendency to talk about himself—something he had never done in the past—his categorical assertions, his hasty, impatient manner, even with her. When she pointed all this out, he replied he had many responsibilities and couldn’t be treading on eggshells at home.
Roser saw him having lunch in the faculty cafeteria surrounded by young students listening to him with the veneration of disciples. She could see how Victor enjoyed this reverence, especially from the female students, who applauded his banal observations with unjustified admiration. Roser knew him inside out, every nook and cranny, and this belated vanity surprised her for being so unexpected. It made her feel sorry for her husband: she was discovering how vulnerable to flattery a conceited old man could be. It never crossed her mind that she would be the one to cause the reversal of fortune that punctured Victor’s vanity.
* * *
—
THIRTEEN MONTHS LATER, Roser began to suspect a stealthy disease was slowly eating away at her, but since her husband hadn’t noticed anything, she convinced herself these must be symptoms of age or her imagination. Victor was so caught up in his success he had neglected his rel
ationship with her, although when they were together he was still her best friend and the lover who made her feel beautiful and desired at the age of seventy-three. He also knew her inside out. If her weight loss, the yellowish tinge to her skin, and her nausea didn’t worry Victor, it must be something unimportant. It was another month before she decided to consult someone, because in addition to her previous symptoms, she was waking up shivering with fever. Out of a vague feeling of embarrassment, and to avoid giving Victor the impression she was complaining, she went to see one of his colleagues. When she was handed the results a few days later, she came home with the desperate news that she had terminal cancer. She had to say it twice for Victor to snap out of his stupor and react.
From then on, both their lives suffered a dramatic transformation. The only thing they really wanted was to prolong and enjoy the time they had left together. Victor’s vanity was well and truly pricked. He descended from Olympus to the hell of illness. He asked for indefinite leave from the hospital and gave up his classes to be with Roser. “We’re going to spend our time well for as long as we can, Victor. Maybe the war against this cancer is lost, but meanwhile we can win a few battles.” Victor took her on a honeymoon to a southern lake, an emerald-colored mirror that reflected forests, waterfalls, hills, and the snowcapped peaks of three volcanoes. They stayed in a rustic cabin in the midst of this serene landscape, far from everything and everyone. There they went back over every stage of their lives, from the days when she was a skinny young girl in love with Guillem, to the present, when for Victor she had become the most beautiful woman in the world. She insisted on swimming in the lake, as though that icy, pristine water could wash her inside and out, purify her, and restore her health. She also wanted to take walks, but wasn’t strong enough to go as far as she wished, and so they ended up strolling gently, her clinging to her husband’s arm and with a stick in her other hand. She was visibly losing weight.
A Long Petal of the Sea Page 28