A Long Petal of the Sea(24)

To Laura, this journey was simply another of her husband’s impositions. Where vacations were concerned, she preferred to go to their estate in the south of Chile or their beach house at Vi?a del Mar, where the days were spent in languorous leisure. Long strolls, tea in the shade of the trees, the family rosary with children and domestic staff. For her husband, this journey to Europe was an opportunity to strengthen social ties and plant the seeds of new business opportunities. He had a full agenda for each of the capitals they were to visit. Laura felt defrauded: this was not really a vacation.

Laura’s family regarded the ability to make money in commercial enterprises as suspicious, typical of the new rich, of the parvenus. They put up with this defect in Isidro because no one could doubt his solid Castilian-Basque lineage, with not a drop of Arab or Jewish blood in his veins. He came from a branch of the del Solars of irreproachable honor, the one exception being his father, who in his mature years fell in love with a modest schoolteacher and had two children with her before the affair was discovered. His numerous family and others in the same social class closed ranks around his wife and legitimate offspring, but he refused to leave his mistress. The scandal was the end of him.



Isidro had been fifteen at the time. That was the last he saw of his father, who continued to live in the same city but descended a couple of steps in the strict hierarchy of the Chilean class system and disappeared from his former entourage. The drama was never mentioned, but everyone knew about it. The abandoned wife’s brothers helped her with a minimal pension and took on Isidro, the eldest child, who was forced to leave school and start work. He turned out to be more intelligent and hardworking than all his relatives put together, and within a few years had attained an economic position appropriate to his family name. He was proud of the fact that he did not owe anyone anything.

At the age of twenty-nine he had asked for the hand of Laura Vizcarra, on the basis of his good reputation and some business ventures that were acceptable in his social milieu: a sheep farm in Patagonia, the import of antiques from Ecuador and Peru, a country estate that produced little profit but considerable prestige. The bride-to-be’s family—descended from Don Pedro de Vizcarra, an interim governor of the colony in the sixteenth century—was a Catholic, ultra-conservative, uneducated, and inward-looking clan. Its members lived, married, and died among themselves, refusing to mix with anyone else and with no intention of getting to learn the century’s new ideas. They were immune to science, art, and literature. Isidro was accepted because he won their sympathy, and because he could prove he was linked to the Vizcarras on his mother’s side.



* * *



—



ISIDRO DEL SOLAR SPENT the twenty-something days at sea cultivating his contacts and doing sports: he played ping-pong and took fencing lessons. He began the day running several laps round the track on deck, and ended it past midnight with friends and acquaintances in the bar and the smokers’ saloon, where ladies weren’t welcome. The gentlemen talked business casually, with feigned indifference: it was in bad taste to show too great an interest; political debate, however, did arouse passions. They received news thanks to the ship’s newsletter: two printed sheets taken from the telegraph that were handed out to passengers each morning. By the afternoon, the news was already out of date; everything was changing so quickly—the world they knew had been turned upside down.

Compared to Europe, Chile was a happily backward and distant paradise. It was true that at this moment it had a center-left government: the president was from the Radical Party and a freemason. He was detested by the Right, and his name was never mentioned by the “best families,” but he wasn’t going to last long. The Left, with its coarse realism and vulgarity, had no future; the owners of Chile would make sure of that.

Isidro met up with his wife to eat and for the evening entertainment. The ship offered movies, theater, music, circuses, ventriloquists, and turns by hypnotists and clairvoyants, who fascinated the ladies and were laughed at by the men. Outgoing and jovial, Isidro enjoyed everything with a cigar in one hand and a glass in the other, not permitting himself to be discouraged by the attitude of his wife, who was scandalized by this forced revelry that had more than a whiff of sin and dissipation about it.



Laura looked at herself in the mirror, fighting back the tears. The gown would look wonderful on another woman, she thought; she didn’t deserve it, just as she didn’t deserve most of what she had. She was well aware of her privileged position, of her good fortune at being born into the Vizcarra family, of marrying Isidro del Solar, and of so many other benefits obtained mysteriously, without any effort or planning on her part. She had always been protected and waited on. She had given birth to six children without ever having changed a diaper or prepared a bottle—the person who saw to all this was Juana, who supervised the wet nurses and servants. Juana had raised the children, including Felipe, who would soon be celebrating his twenty-ninth birthday. It had never occurred to Laura to ask Juana how old she was, nor how many years she had been working in the del Solars’ house; nor could Laura remember how she first arrived.

God had bestowed too much on her. Why her? What was He asking in return? She had no idea, and this debt to the Almighty tormented her. On board the Normandie, curiosity had led her to get a glimpse of life on the third-class deck, disobeying the instructions about not mixing with passengers from other classes for sanitary reasons, as the sign on the door to her suite made clear. If by any mischance there was an outbreak of tuberculosis or any other infectious disease, everyone could end up in quarantine, as the official explained when he intercepted her. Laura saw something she had observed when she accompanied the Catholic Ladies to distribute charity in the Santiago slums: poor people were a different color, with a strange smell; their skin was darker, their hair didn’t shine, their clothes were faded. Who were these people in third class? They didn’t look like beggars or delinquents, but they had the same ashen aspect. Why them and not me? Laura had wondered with a mixture of relief and shame. The question continued to echo in her mind. On board the Reina del Pacifico the class division was akin to that of the Normandie, but the contrast was less dramatic, because times had changed and this was a less luxurious boat. The passengers on the lower decks, in what was now called the tourist class, had embarked in Chile, Peru, and other ports on the Pacific coast and were civil servants, employees, students, small traders, immigrants returning to visit their families in Europe. Laura noted that they were having a much better time than the passengers in first class: the atmosphere was relaxed and festive, with singing, dancing, beer, competitions, and games. No one put on tweed jackets for lunch, silk dresses for tea, formal wear for dinner.