Portrait in Sepia

by Isabel Allende

  “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 Ejército 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 José 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 Ejército 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 t
he 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.

  However long I was occupied in writing and sighing as I read poems, I had time left over, so I went back to the studio of Don Juan Ribero. I went around the city taking photographs and at night worked in the darkroom I had set up at home. I was experimenting with platinum prints, a new technique that produced very beautiful images. The procedure is simple, and costly, but my grandmother bore the expenses. You brush a platinum solution on photographic paper, and that produces images in subtle gradations of tone—luminous and clear, and with great depth—that are not changed by time. Ten years have passed, and those are the most extraordinary photographs in my collection. When I look at them, many memories rise before me with the same impeccable clarity of those platinum prints. I can see my grandmother Paulina, Severo, Nívea, friends, and relatives; in some self-portraits I can also see myself as I was then, just before the events that were to change my life.

  When the second Tuesday in March arrived, the house was royally outfitted with a modern gas installation, a telephone, an elevator for my grandmother, wallpaper shipped from New York, brand-new upholstery on the furniture, recently waxed parquet floors, polished brass, washed windows, and the collection of Impressionist paintings in the salons. There was a new contingent of uniformed servants under the command of an Argentine butler Paulina del Valle had stolen from the Hotel Crillón by paying him twice his salary.

  “People are going to talk, Grandmother. No one has a butler, it’s vulgar,” I warned her.

  “I don’t care. I don’t want to have to do battle with Mapuche Indians in house slippers who put hairs in the soup and throw plates down on the table,” she replied, determined to impress Santiago society in general and the family of Diego Domínguez in particular.

  So the new employees were added to the maids who had been in the house for years and could not, of course, be fired. There were so many people working for us that they had nothing to do but trip over each other, and there was so much gossip and pilfering that finally Frederick Williams had to intervene to establish order, since the Argentine couldn’t decide where to begin. That caused a real ruckus, since no one had ever seen the master of the house lower himself to the level of domestic affairs, but he did it to perfection; his long experience in that employ had not been for naught. I don’t think that Diego Domínguez and his family, our first visitors, appreciated the elegance of the service; to the contrary, they seemed intimidated by such splendor. They belonged to a very old dynasty of landholders from the south, but unlike most agriculturists in Chile who spend a couple of months on their lands and the rest of the time living off their income in Santiago or in Europe, the Domínguezes were born, raised, and buried in the country. People with a solid family tradition, deeply Catholic, simple, they boasted none of the refinements flaunted by my grandmother, which surely to them seemed slightly decadent and not at all Christian. I was struck by the fact that they all had blue eyes, except for Susana, Diego’s sister-in-law, a dark beauty with a languid air, like a Spanish painting. At the table they were confused by the number of knives, forks, and spoons, and the six wine goblets; none of them tasted the duck à l’orange, and they were startled when the baked Alaska was served. When she saw the line of uniformed servants, Diego’s mother, Doña Elvira, asked why there were so many military people in our house. They were stunned by the Impressionist paintings, convinced that I had painted those pigs’ tracks and my grandmother had the gall to hang them, but they appreciated the brief harp and piano concert we offered in the music salon. The conversation died after the second sentence, until the bulls furnished an opening for talking about cattle breeding—which was of enormous interest to Paulina del Valle, who in view of the numbers of cattle the Domínguezes owned was doubtlessly thinking of starting a cheese business with them. If I had had any doubts about my future life in the country with my fiancé’s clan, that visit dissipated them. I fell in love with these people from a long line of country gentry, good-hearted and unpretentious: the sanguine, laughing father, the innocent mother, the amiable and virile older brother, the mysterious sister-in-law, and the young sister, happy as a canary, all of whom had traveled for several days in order to meet me. They accepted me with all naturalness, and I am sure that though they were disconcerted by our way of life, they didn’t criticize us; they seemed incapable of a bad thought. Because Diego had chosen me, they considered me part of their family; that was enough. Their simplicity allowed me to relax, something that rarely happens with strangers, and after a while I was talking with each of them, telling about our trip to Europe and my love of photography. “Show me your photographs, Aurora,” Doña Elvira asked, and when I did, she couldn’t hide her disillusion. I think she was expecting something more comforting than throngs of workers on strike, slums, ragged children playing in irrigation ditches, violent uprisings, patient emigrants sitting on their bundles in the hold of a ship. “But, child, why don’t you take pretty pictures? Why go into those places? There are so many nice landscapes in Chile,” the sainted lady murmured. I was going to explain that I was interested in those faces lined by hard work and suffering, not “pretty” things, but I realized this was not the proper moment. There would be time ahead for my future mother-in-law and the rest of the family to get to know me.

  “Why did you show them those photographs, Aurora? The Domínguezes are mired in the old ways, you shouldn’t have frightened them with your modern ideas,” Paulina del Valle scolded when they left.

  “But, Grandmother, they were already frightened by the luxury of this house and the Impressionist paint
ings, don’t you think? Besides, Diego and his family need to know what kind of woman I am,” I replied.

  “You’re not a woman yet, you’re a child. You will change, you will have children, you will have to adjust to your husband’s surroundings.”

  “I will always be the same person, and I don’t want to give up my photography. It isn’t the same as Diego’s sister’s watercolors, or his sister-in-law’s embroidery. Photography is fundamental to my life.”

  “Well then, marry first and later do whatever you like,” my grandmother concluded.

  We didn’t wait until September, as planned; we had to get married in mid-April because Doña Elvira Domínguez had a slight heart attack, and a week later, when she was well enough to take a few steps on her own, she made clear her wish to see me become her son Diego’s wife before she departed this mortal coil. The rest of the family agreed, because if she died they would have to postpone the wedding at least a year to observe the obligatory mourning period. My grandmother resigned herself to speeding up things and to sacrificing the princely ceremony she’d planned. I drew a deep breath of relief; I had been very nervous at the thought of exposing myself to the eyes of half Santiago as I entered the cathedral on the arm of Frederick Williams or Severo del Valle, floating in a cloud of white organdy as my grandmother had intended.

  What can I tell you about my first night of love with Diego Domínguez? Very little, because memory prints in stark black and white; the grays get lost along the way. Perhaps it wasn’t as wretched as I recall, but I’ve forgotten the shadings—all I have left is a general sensation of frustration and rage. After the private wedding in our house on Ejército Libertador, we went to a hotel to spend the night before leaving for a two-week honeymoon in Buenos Aires; Doña Elvira’s precarious health did not allow us to go any farther. When I said good-bye to my grandmother, I felt that a portion of my life was coming to a close. When I hugged her, I knew how much I loved her, and how much she had shrunk; her clothes hung from her and I was a half-head taller than she. I had the presentiment that she didn’t have much time left; she looked small and vulnerable, a little old lady with a trembling voice and knees weak as cotton wool. Not much remained of the formidable matriarch who for more than seventy years had lived life on her own terms and managed the destinies of her family as she pleased. Beside her, Frederick Williams looked like her son. The years hadn’t touched him; it was as if he were immune to the decline of ordinary mortals. Up until the day before the wedding, my good uncle Frederick had begged me, behind my grandmother’s back, not to marry if I wasn’t sure, and each time I replied that I had never been more sure of anything. I had no doubts about my love for Diego Domínguez. As the moment for the wedding grew closer, my impatience increased. I would study myself in the mirror, naked, or barely clothed in the delicate lace nightgowns my grandmother had bought in France, and ask myself anxiously whether he would find me pretty. A mole on my neck, my dark nipples, seemed terrible defects. Would he want me as much as I wanted him? I found out that first night in the hotel. We were tired. We had eaten a lot, he’d had more to drink than normal, and I was feeling the effects of three goblets of champagne. As we walked into the hotel, we feigned indifference, but the trail of rice we were leaving behind on the floor betrayed our state as newlyweds. So great was my embarrassment at being alone with Diego and imagining that outside our door someone was picturing us making love that I felt nauseated, and I locked myself in the bathroom so long that after a while my new husband tapped gently on the door to ask if I was still alive. He led me by the hand into the bedroom, helped me remove my elaborate hat, took the hairpins from my bun, freed me from my short, fitted suede jacket, unbuttoned the thousand pearl buttons of my blouse, slipped off my heavy skirt and petticoats, until I was dressed only in the fine batiste chemise I wore under my corset. As he was taking off my clothes, I felt myself evaporate like water, I was vanishing, he was reducing me to nothing but bones and air. Diego kissed me on the lips, not as I had imagined so many times during the previous months, but with force and urgency. The kiss became more demanding, and his hands tore at my chemise as I struggled to hold it together because I was horrified by the prospect of his seeing me naked. His hasty caresses and the revelation of his body against mine put me on the defensive; I was so tense that I shook as if I were cold. He asked me, annoyed, what was the matter and ordered me to try to relax, but when he saw that this method was making things worse, he changed his tone, added that I shouldn’t be afraid, and promised to be careful. He blew out the lamp and somehow managed to lead me to the bed. The rest happened quickly. I did nothing to help him. I lay as motionless as a hypnotized hen, trying futilely to remember Nívea’s counsel. At some moment I was pierced by his sword; I managed to hold back a scream and was aware of the taste of blood in my mouth. My clearest memory of that night was one of disenchantment. Was this the passion that poets wasted so much ink on? Diego consoled me, saying that it was always like that the first time, that we would learn to know each other and everything would go better, then he gave me a chaste kiss on the forehead, turned his back to me without another word, and slept like a baby, while I lay awake in the dark with a cloth between my legs and a searing pain in my vagina and my heart. I was too ignorant to guess the source of my frustration—I didn’t even know the word orgasm—but I had explored my body and I knew that hiding somewhere was that seismic pleasure capable of turning life upside down. Diego had felt it inside me, that was evident, but I had experienced only anguish. I felt I was the victim of a terrible biological injustice: sex was easy for the man—he could get it even by force—while for us it was without pleasure and with grave consequences. Would I have to add to the divine curse of giving birth with pain that of loving without pleasure?