Portrait in Sepia

by Isabel Allende

  I wanted to know what a Chilean was doing in these parts and why he looked like a Tartar—it was easy to visualize him robed in furs and with a lance in his hand—but I was too upset to say anything. London, the clinic, the doctors, and my grandmother’s drama were more than I could manage alone. I couldn’t understand Paulina del Valle’s reticence regarding her health, or her reasons for sending Frederick Williams across the Channel just when we needed him most. Genghis Khan gave me a condescending pat on the hand and left.

  Contrary to all my pessimistic predictions, my grandmother survived the surgery, and after the first week, during which her fever rose and dropped uncontrollably, she stabilized and could begin to eat solid foods. I never left her side except to go to the hotel once a day to bathe and change my clothes, because the smell of the anesthetics, medications, and disinfectants produced a viscous mixture that clung to the skin. I slept in fits and starts, sitting in a chair beside the patient. Ignoring my grandmother’s strict injunction, I sent a telegram to Frederick Williams the day of the operation, and he arrived in London thirty hours later. I saw him lose his proverbial composure beside the bed where his wife lay stupefied by drugs, moaning with each breath, toothless, nearly hairless: a parchment-skinned old woman. He knelt beside her and placed his forehead upon the bloodless hand of Paulina del Valle, whispering her name, and when he got up his face was wet with tears. My grandmother, who maintained that youth is not a period in life but a state of mind, and that you have the health you deserve, looked totally defeated in her hospital bed. That woman, whose appetite for life was as colossal as her gluttony, had turned her face to the wall, indifferent to everything around her, immersed in herself. Her enormous strength of will, her vigor, her curiosity, her sense of adventure, even her greed, had been erased by her physical suffering.

  During that time I had many occasions to see Genghis Khan, who monitored the state of the patient and turned out to be, as one might have expected, more approachable than the famous Dr. Suffolk or the hospital’s strict matrons. He answered my grandmother’s concerns with rational explanations instead of vaguely consoling words, and he was the one who tried to ease her discomfort; the others were interested in her temperature and the condition of the incision, but ignored their patient’s moans. Did she think it wasn’t going to hurt? She should shut her mouth and be grateful they had saved her life. In contrast, the young Chilean physician did not hold back on the morphine: he believed that sustained suffering affected the sick person’s physical and moral stamina and retarded or impeded healing, as he clarified to Williams. We learned that his name was Iván Radovic, and that he came from a family of doctors. His father had emigrated from the Balkans to Chile at the end of the fifties; he had married a Chilean schoolteacher from the north, and they had three children, two of whom had followed in his footsteps as doctors. His father, Iván said, had died of typhus during the War of the Pacific, in which he served for three years as a surgeon, and his mother had had to bear the responsibility for the family alone. I was able to observe the clinic’s personnel to my heart’s desire, and I heard things that were not intended for ears like mine, because no one except Dr. Radovic gave any sign of acknowledging my existence. I was almost seventeen, but I still had my hair tied with a ribbon and wore clothes chosen by my grandmother, who had ridiculous little-girl dresses made for me to keep me a child as long as possible. The first time I wore anything suitable for my age was when Frederick Williams took me to Whiteney’s without Grandmother’s permission and put the whole store at my disposal. When we came back to the hotel, I with my hair in a bun and dressed like a young woman, she didn’t recognize me— but that was weeks later. Paulina del Valle must have had the strength of an ox; they opened her stomach, removed a tumor the size of a grapefruit, sewed her up like a shoe, and within a couple of months she was her old self. All that remained of that amazing adventure was a pirate’s scar across her belly and a voracious appetite for life and, of course, food. We left for France as soon as she was able to walk without a cane. She completely discarded the diet recommended by Dr. Suffolk; as she said, she hadn’t come to Paris from an ass-backward corner of the world to eat baby pap. Using the pretext of studying the manufacture of cheese and the culinary tradition of France, she stuffed herself with every delicacy that country could offer.

  Once we were installed in the house Williams had rented on the boulevard Haussman, we contacted the ineffable Amanda Lowell, who had lost nothing of her Viking-queen-in-exile air. In Paris she was in her element; she lived in a shabby but cozy garret with a view of pigeons on the neighboring rooftops and the matchless skies of Paris. We soon verified that her stories about bohemian life and her friendship with famous artists were strictly true; thanks to her, we visited the studios of Cézanne, Sisley, Degas, Monet, and several others. La Lowell had to teach us to appreciate their paintings because we didn’t have eyes trained for Impressionism, but before long we were totally seduced. My grandmother acquired a good collection of works that provoked gales of hilarity when she hung them in her home in Chile; no one appreciated the centrifugal skies of van Gogh or the weary showgirls of Lautrec, and it was believed that in Paris they had taken silly old Paulina del Valle for a cleaning. When Amanda Lowell noticed that I was never without my camera and spent hours closeted in the darkroom I improvised in our rented house, she offered to introduce me to the most celebrated photographers in Paris. Like my maestro, Juan Ribero, she believed that photography and painting are not competing arts but basically different: the painter interprets reality, and the camera captures it. In the former everything is fiction, while the second is the sum of the real plus the sensibility of the photographer. Ribero never allowed me sentimental or exhibitionist tricks—none of this arranging objects or models to look like paintings. He was the enemy of artificial composition; he did not let me manipulate negatives or prints, and in general he scorned effects of spots or diffuse lighting: he wanted the honest and simple image, although clear in the most minute details. “If what you want is the effect of a painting, then paint, Aurora. If what you want is truth, learn to use your camera,” he would say again and again. Amanda Lowell never treated me like a child; she took me seriously from the beginning. She too was fascinated by photography, which at that time no one called art and for many was just another bit of nonsense among the many bizarre and useless fripperies of a frivolous century. “I’m a little past the age to learn photography, Aurora, but you have young eyes, you can see the world and make others see it the way you do. A good photograph tells a story, it reveals a place, an event, a state of mind; it’s more powerful than pages and pages of writing,” she told me. My grandmother, in contrast, treated my passion for the camera as an adolescent whim and was much more interested in selecting a trousseau and readying me for marriage. She enrolled me in a school for young ladies, where I attended classes daily to learn to go up and down stairs gracefully, fold napkins for a banquet, select menus to fit the occasion, organize parlor games, and arrange flowers, talents my grandmother considered sufficient for succeeding in married life. She liked to shop, and we spent whole afternoons in boutiques choosing clothes, afternoons I could have better employed exploring Paris with my camera.

  I don’t know where the year went. When Paulina del Valle had apparently recovered from her illness and Frederick Williams had become an expert on wood for wine casks and on making cheese—from the foulest smelling to the ones with the most holes—we met Diego Domínguez at a ball in the Chilean legation celebrating Independence Day, September 18. I had spent endless hours in the hands of the hairdresser, who constructed atop my head a tower of curls and small braids adorned with pearls, a true feat when you take into account that my hair is stubborn as a horse’s mane. My dress was a frothy meringue creation spattered with beads that kept coming off all night and strewing the floor of the legation with glittering little bits like sand. “If your father could see you now!” my grandmother exclaimed, awed, when I was all dressed. She herself was ar
rayed head to toe in mauve, her favorite color, with a scandalous number of strands of pink pearls around her neck, layered hairpieces in a suspicious shade of mahogany, flawless porcelain teeth, and a cape of black velvet edged with jet from neck to floor. She entered the ball on the arm of Frederick Williams and I on that of a marine from a ship of the Chilean navy that was making a courtesy visit to France, an insipid young man whose face or name I cannot remember, who assumed on his own initiative the task of instructing me on the use of the sextant for navigational purposes. It was an enormous relief when Diego Domínguez took a stance in front of my grandmother to introduce himself with his long array of surnames and ask whether he could dance with me. That isn’t his real name—I have changed it in these pages because everything concerning him and his family should be protected. Enough to know that he existed, that his story is a true one, and that I have forgiven him. Paulina del Valle’s eyes gleamed with enthusiasm when she saw Diego Domínguez; at last we had before us a potentially acceptable suitor, the son of a well-known family, surely rich, with impeccable manners, and even good-looking. She nodded, he held out his hand to me, and we went out for a spin around the floor. After the first waltz, Señor Domínguez took my dance card and filled in every line, with the stroke of a pen eliminating the expert on sextants and other candidates. At that point I looked at him more closely and had to admit that he looked good; he radiated health and strength, had a pleasant face, blue eyes, and manly bearing. He seemed uncomfortable in his tails, but he moved with assurance and danced well, at least much better than I; I dance like a goose despite a year of intensive classes at the school for young ladies. And my embarrassment increased my clumsiness. That night I fell in love with all the passion and recklessness of first love. Diego Domínguez led me with a firm hand around the dance floor, gazing at me intently, and almost always in silence, because his attempts to establish a dialogue foundered upon my monosyllabic answers. My shyness was torture—I couldn’t meet his eyes, and didn’t know what to look at with mine; when I felt the warmth of his breath on my cheeks, I grew weak in the knees. I had to fight desperately against the temptation to run from the room and hide under some table. There’s no question that I came off very badly, and that unfortunate young man was stuck with me because in a fit of bravado he had filled my card with his name. At one point I told him that he wasn’t obliged to dance with me if he didn’t want to. He replied with a laugh, the one time he laughed that night, and asked me how old I was. I had never been held in a man’s arms, I had never felt the pressure of a male palm at my waist. One of my hands rested on his shoulder and the other in his gloved hand, but not with the dovelike lightness my dancing mistress had imparted—he was holding on with determination. In several brief pauses he offered me goblets of champagne that I drank because I didn’t dare turn them down, with the foreseeable result that I stepped on his toes even more often. When at the end of the evening the ambassador of Chile spoke to propose a toast for his distant country and for beautiful France, Diego Domínguez stood behind me, as close as the skirt of my meringue ballgown would permit, and whispered into my neck that I was “delicious,” or something of that nature.

  In the days that followed, Paulina del Valle called on all her diplomat friends to ask, without a trace of pretense, everything she could extract about the family and ancestors of Diego Domínguez before giving him permission to take me horseback riding along the Champs-Elysées, chaperoned from a prudent distance by her and Uncle Frederick in their carriage. Afterward, the four of us had ice cream beneath some umbrellas, threw bread crumbs to the ducks, and agreed to go to the opera that same week. Between outings and ice creams we arrived at October. Diego had traveled to Europe at his father’s behest on the mandatory adventure that nearly every young upper-class Chilean made once in his life as initiation into manhood. After traveling to a number of cities, visiting several museums and cathedrals out of duty, and soaking up the night life and its naughty ramifications—which supposedly would cure him forever of that vice and provide material for boasting to his pals—he was ready to return to Chile and settle down, work, marry, and start his own family. Compared to Severo del Valle, with whom I had been in love since I was a little girl, Diego Domínguez was ugly, and to Señorita Matilde Pineda, he was stupid, but I was in no state to make such comparisons; I was sure I had found the perfect man and could scarcely believe the miracle that he had noticed me. Frederick Williams believed that it wasn’t wise to jump at the first man who passed by—I was still very young, and I would have more than enough suitors to choose calmly—but my grandmother maintained that this young man was the best the matrimonial market had to offer, even though he had agricultural holdings and lived a long way from Santiago.

  “You can make the trip by ship and railroad without any problem,” she said.

  “Grandmother, don’t go so fast. Señor Domínguez has not hinted to me of any of the things you are imagining,” I clarified, blushing to my eartips.

  “He’d better do it soon, or I’ll have to pin him between the sword and the wall.”

  “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,
Matías 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 my 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.