Portrait in Sepia (19 page)

In Europe I met Matias Rodríguez de Santa Cruz y del Valle. Paulina did not respect the agreement she had made with my grandmother Eliza Sommers—to tell me the truth—and instead of introducing him as my father, she said he was another uncle, one of the many every Chilean child has, since all relatives or friends of the family old enough to carry the title with a certain dignity are automatically called aunt, or uncle, which was why I always called the good Williams Uncle Frederick. I learned several years later that Matias was my father, when he came home to Chile to die, and he himself told me. The man I met made no particular impression on me; he was thin, pale, and nice-looking. Sitting, he looked young, but much older when he tried to move. He walked with a cane and always had a servant to open doors for him, help him on with his overcoat, light his cigarettes, or hand him the glass of water that was always on a table by his side, because the effort of reaching for something was too much for him. My grandmother Paulina explained that this uncle suffered from arthritis, a very painful condition that made him fragile as glass, she said, and that I was to be very careful when I went near him. She would die years later without ever learning that her eldest son suffered from syphilis, not arthritis.

The del Valle family's stupefaction when my grandmother arrived in Santiago was monumental. From Buenos Aires we had traveled across Argentina to Chile, a true safari when you take into account the volume of luggage that had come from Europe plus the eleven suitcases filled with purchases we had made in Buenos Aires. We traveled in coaches followed by our baggage strapped onto mules and accompanied by armed guards under Uncle Frederick's command because there were bandits on both sides of the border—although unfortunately they did not attack us and we reached Chile with nothing interesting to tell about crossing the Andes. Along the way we had lost the nanny, who fell in love with an Argentine and chose to stay there, and one maid who died of typhus, but my uncle Frederick arranged for us to get domestic help at each stage of our pilgrimage. Paulina had decided to settle in Santiago, the capital, because after living so many years in the United States she thought that the port of Valparaiso, where she had been born, would seem too small. Besides, she was used to being some distance from her clan, and she wasn't up to seeing her relatives every day, a trying custom in every long-suffering Chilean family. Even in Santiago, however, she was not free from family, since she had several sisters who had married among "the best people," as members of the upper class called one another, assuming, I suppose, that the rest of the world fell into the category of "the worst people." Her nephew, Severo del Valle, who also lived in the capital, came with his wife to say hello as soon as we arrived. From the first day we met, I have a much clearer memory of them than of my father in Europe, because they welcomed me with such an extreme show of affection that it frightened me. The most memorable thing about Severo was that despite his lameness and his cane he looked like the prince in illustrations of storybooks—seldom have I seen a more handsome man—and the most memorable thing about Nívea was that she was preceded by an enormous round belly. In those times, procreation was thought to be indecent, and among the bourgeoisie pregnant women were confined to their homes—but not Nívea. She had no intention of hiding her state; she exhibited it, indifferent to the disturbance she caused. In the street, people tried not to look at her, as if she had some deformity, or were naked. I had never seen anything like that, and when I asked what was the matter with that lady, my grandmother Paulina explained that the poor thing had swallowed a melon. In contrast with her handsome husband, Nívea looked like a mouse, but you only had to talk with her a couple of minutes to fall prisoner to her charm and tremendous energy.

Santiago was a beautiful city situated in a fertile valley and surrounded by tall mountains purple in summer and snow-covered in winter, a tranquil, sleepy city filled with the odors of flowering gardens and horse manure. It had the look of a French city, with its old trees, plazas, Moorish fountains, gates, and alleyways, its elegant women and exquisite shops where the finest from Europe and the Orient was sold, its parks and boulevards where the wealthy showed off their coaches and magnificent horses. The streets were crowded with packs of stray dogs and vendors hawking the humble wares in their baskets, and doves and sparrows nested on the tiled roofs. Church bells marked the passage of the hours, except during siesta time, when the streets were empty and people took their rest. It was a stately city, very different from San Francisco with its unmistakable seal of a frontier town and colorful, multiracial air. Paulina del Valle bought a mansion on Ejercito Libertador, the city's most aristocratic street, near the Alameda de las Delicias, where every spring the Napoleonic coach, plumed horses, and honor guard of the president of the republic passed on its way to the military parade and patriotic celebrations in the Parque de Matte. The house could not compare in splendor to the mansion in San Francisco, but for Santiago it had an irritating opulence. Even so, it was not the display of prosperity and lack of tact that staggered the city's society, but the pedigreed husband Paulina del Valle "had bought," as they said, as well as the gossip that circulated about her enormous gilded bed with its mythological sea creatures, in which who knows what sins that geriatric pair committed. To Williams they attributed titles of nobility and bad intentions. What reason would a British lord, so refined, so handsome, have for marrying a woman of known bad character, and a lot older than he to boot? He could only be a ruined count, a fortune hunter ready to strip Paulina of her money and then abandon her. Deep down, everyone hoped that was the case, that he would take my arrogant grandmother down a notch or two; nevertheless, no one snubbed Paulina's husband, true to the Chilean tradition of hospitality toward strangers. Besides, Frederick Williams won the respect of pagans and Christians alike with his excellent manners, his prosaic way of confronting life, and his monarchic ideas: he believed that all the ills of society were owing to lack of discipline and of respect for hierarchies. The motto for that man who had been a servant for so many years was, "Everyone in his place and a place for everyone." When he became my grandmother's husband he assumed his role as oligarch as naturally as earlier he had lived his destiny as a servant. He had never attempted then to mix with anyone above him, and now he never had contact with those beneath him: he believed that separation of the classes was indispensable if chaos and vulgarity were to be avoided. In that family of passionate barbarians, which is what the del Valles were, Williams produced stupor and admiration with his exaggerated courtesy and impassive calm, products of his years as a butler. He spoke four words of Spanish, and his compulsory silence was taken as wisdom, pride, and mystery. The one person who could have unmasked the supposed British noble was Severo del Valle, but he never did so because he liked the former servant and admired the aunt who mocked the world by strutting about like a peacock with her stylish husband. My grandmother Paulina dove into a campaign of public charity to silence the envy and slander her fortune aroused. She knew how one went about it; she had spent the first years of her life in that country, where helping indigents is the obligatory task of women of good breeding. The more one sacrificed for the poor, taking on tasks in hospitals, asylums, orphanages, and tenements, the higher one rose in general regard, which was why good works were shouted to the winds. To ignore this duty brought on so many critical glances and priestly admonishments that not even Paulina del Valle would have escaped a sense of guilt and fear of condemnation. She trained me in these compassionate labors, but I confess that I was always uncomfortable as we drove into a wretched neighborhood in our luxurious carriage loaded with foodstuffs and with two lackeys to distribute the gifts to ragged creatures who thanked us with a great show of humility but with loathing burning in their eyes.

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My grandmother had to educate me at home because I ran away from every one of the religious schools she enrolled me in. The del Valle family convinced her again and again that a boarding school was the only way to turn me into a normal child; they maintained that I needed the company of other girls to overcome my pathological shyness and the firm hand of the nuns to subjugate me. "You have spoiled Aurora too much, Paulina, you are making her into a monster," they said, and my grandmother ended up believing what was obvious. I slept with Caramelo on my bed, ate and read whatever I wanted, spent the day playing games I made up—none of it with much discipline because there was no one around who bothered to impose it. In other words, I enjoyed a rather happy childhood. I couldn't bear the boarding schools with their mustached nuns and throngs of schoolgirls; they reminded me of my frightening nightmare of children in black pajamas. Nor could I tolerate the harshness of the rules, the monotony of the daily schedule, or the cold of those colonial convents. I don't know how often the same routine was repeated: Paulina del Valle dressed me in full regalia, recited her instructions in a threatening tone, carried me off, almost literally, and deposited me with my trunks in the care of some husky novice, then escaped as fast as her pounds would permit, awash in remorse. These were schools for wealthy girls, where submission and ugliness prevailed and the end objective was to give us enough instruction that we were not totally ignorant—a veneer of culture had its value in the matrimonial market—but not so much that we would ask questions. The goal was to subdue personal will for the benefit of the collective good, to make us faithful Catholics, sacrificing mothers, and obedient wives. The nuns began by disciplining the body, the source of vanity and other sins: we were not allowed to laugh, run, or play outside. We bathed once a month, covered with long nightgowns so as not to expose our shame before God, who is in all places. The system was based on the theory that learning must be pounded in, so the rod was not spared. We were taught to fear God, the Devil, all adults, the ruler they used to rap our fingers, the pebbles on which we had to kneel while doing penance, our own thoughts and wishes: fear of fear. We were never praised, for fear of instilling pride, but there were more than enough punishments to temper our characters. Inside those thick walls my uniformed schoolmates survived, rather than lived, hair braided so tight that sometimes their scalps bled, and with chilblain rashes on their hands from the eternal cold. The contrast with their homes, where they were treated like princesses during holidays, had to be enough to madden the sanest among us. I couldn't take it. Once I talked a gardener into helping me jump over the fence and run away. I don't know how I reached Calle Ejercito Libertador on my own; I was welcomed by a hysterical Caramelo, but Paulina del Valle nearly went into cardiac arrest when she saw me with my muddy clothes and swollen eyes. I spent a few months at home until external pressures forced my grandmother to repeat the experiment. The second time I hid in the bushes on the patio all night, with the idea of perishing from cold and hunger. I imagined the faces of the nuns and of my family when they discovered my body, and wept out of pity for myself: poor child, martyred at such an early age. The next day the school notified Paulina del Valle of my disappearance, and she descended like a tornado to demand an explanation. While she and Frederick Williams were being led by a red-faced novice to the office of the mother superior, I scrambled through the bushes where I had been hiding to the carriage waiting in the patio, climbed in without the coachman's seeing me, and crouched beneath the seat. Frederick Williams, the coachman, and the mother superior had to help my grandmother into the coach; she was screaming that if I did not appear soon, they would see who Paulina del Valle was! When I crawled out of my hiding on the way home, she forgot her tears of distress, grabbed me by the nape of the neck, and gave me a shaking that lasted at least a couple of blocks, until Uncle Frederick managed to calm her. Consistency, however, was not that good lady's forte; when she learned that I hadn't eaten since the day before and had spent the night outdoors, she covered me with kisses and took me to have ice cream. At the third school where she tried to enroll me, I was rejected out of hand because in the interview with the directress I swore I had seen the devil and that he had green hooves. Finally my grandmother declared defeat. Severo del Valle convinced her there was no reason to go on torturing me, since I could easily learn what I needed at home with private tutors. A string of governesses passed through my childhood—English, French, German—who sequentially succumbed to Chile's polluted water and Paulina del Valle's rages; all those unfortunate women returned to the countries of their origin with chronic diarrhea and bad recollections. My education was rather hit-and-miss until an exceptional Chilean teacher came into my life, Señorita Matilde Pineda, who taught me nearly everything important I know—except common sense, because she didn't have any herself. She was passionate and idealistic, she wrote philosophical poetry she was never able to publish, she had an insatiable hunger for knowledge and the overly intelligent person's intransigence regarding other people's weaknesses. She could not abide laziness; in her presence, the phrase "I can't" was forbidden. My grandmother hired Señorita Pineda because she proclaimed herself an agnostic, a socialist, and a supporter of women's suffrage, three reasons that were more than enough to keep her from being employed in any educational institution. "Let's see if you can counteract a little of the conservative and patriarchal hypocrisy of this family," Paulina del Valle instructed during their first interview, backed by Frederick Williams and Severo del Valle, the only ones who glimpsed the talent of Señorita Pineda; everyone else claimed that the woman would nurture the monster I already had inside me. My aunts immediately classified her as being "above herself," and warned my grandmother against that woman of inferior station who "claimed gentility," as they put it. In contrast, Williams, the most class-conscious man I've ever known, liked her. Six days a week, without fail, my teacher came at seven in the morning to my grandmother's mansion, where I was waiting in full armor: starched white dress, clean fingernails, and freshly combed pigtails. We would eat breakfast in a small informal dining room while we talked about important stories in the newspapers; then we would have a couple of hours of regular classes and the rest of the day go to the museum or the Siglo de Oro bookstore to buy books and drink tea with the owner, Don Pedro Tey. We visited artists, took nature walks, performed chemistry experiments, read stories, wrote poetry, and put on classical plays with figures cut out of cardboard. Señorita Pineda was the one who suggested to my grandmother the idea of forming a ladies' club to channel charitable works and instead of donating used clothes or leftover food to the poor create a fund, run it as if it were a bank, and grant loans to women to start some small venture: an egg business, a seamstress shop, some tubs for taking in laundry, a cart for errands; in short, whatever it took to rise out of the absolute poverty in which they and their children were living. Nothing for the men, said Señorita Pineda, because they would use the loan to buy wine, and in any case the government was working on a plan to assist them, whereas no one took women and children into account. "People don't want handouts, they want a way to earn a living with dignity," my teacher explained, something Paulina del Valle easily understood, and she threw herself into that project with the same enthusiasm with which she embraced her most covetous plans for making money. "With one hand I rake money in and with the other I give it out; that way I kill two birds with one stone. I have a good time, and I get to heaven." And my unique grandmother would roll with laughter. She took that initiative even further and not only formed the ladies' club, which she captained with her usual efficiency—the other women were terrified of her—but also financed schools and neighborhood clinics, then organized a system for collecting unsold but still edible products from the stands in the market and the bakeries to distribute in orphanages and asylums.