A Long Petal of the Sea(42)
And so it proved. Nobody asked them about the Civil War or the reasons for their exile—partly out of ignorance (according to Felipe they only ever read the society pages of El Mercurio) but also out of kindness: they didn’t want to upset the guests. Victor suddenly relapsed into the adolescent shyness he thought he had left behind long ago, and remained standing in a corner of the French-style room between two Louis XV armchairs upholstered in moss-green silk, speaking as little as possible. Roser, on the other hand, was in her element, and didn’t need to be asked twice to play cheerful tunes on the piano, accompanied by several of the guests who had drunk one glass too many.
It was Ofelia who was most impressed by the Dalmaus. What little she knew about them was based on Juana’s comments, and she had imagined a pair of gloomy Soviet officials, even though Matias had spoken of his pleasant experience with Spaniards, in general, when he had to stamp their visas on the Winnipeg. Roser Dalmau was a young woman who radiated confidence but without the least hint of vanity or social climbing. She explained to a gaggle of ladies, all dressed in black with pearl necklaces (the uniform of distinguished Chilean matrons), that she had been a goatherd, a baker, and a seamstress before she made a living from the piano. She said this so naturally it was celebrated as if she had done all of it on a whim. Then she sat at the piano and completely won them over.
Ofelia felt a mixture of envy and shame when she compared her existence as an unenlightened, idle young woman to that of Roser, who Felipe had told her was only a couple of years her senior, but had lived three lives already. She had been born into poverty, had survived a war on the losing side, and suffered the desolation of exile; she was a mother and wife, had crossed the seas and reached the ends of the earth without a penny to her name, and yet she was afraid of nothing. Ofelia wished she could be worthy, strong, and brave—she wished she could be Roser.
As if reading her thoughts, Roser came over, and the two women spent some time on their own, smoking out on the balcony to escape the heat. Roser thought that to celebrate Christmas in the middle of summer made no sense. Ofelia surprised herself by confessing to this stranger her dream of going to Paris or Buenos Aires and dedicating herself to painting, and how crazy that was because she had the misfortune of being a woman, a prisoner of her family and social convention. She added with a mocking smile that disguised her impulse to cry that the worst obstacle was being financially dependent: she would never be able to earn a living with her art. “If it’s your vocation to paint, sooner or later that’s what you’ll do, so the sooner the better. Why does it have to be Paris or Buenos Aires? Discipline is all you need. It’s like the piano, isn’t it? It only rarely brings in enough to live on, but you have to try,” argued Roser.
That evening, more than once Ofelia felt Victor Dalmau’s ardent gaze following her around the room, but since he remained in his corner and made no attempt to approach her, she whispered to Felipe for him to make the introductions.
“This is my friend Victor, from Barcelona. He was a militiaman in the Civil War.”
“In fact, I was a medical auxiliary; I never had to fire a gun,” said Victor.
“A militiaman?” queried Ofelia, who had never heard that term before.
“That was what the Republican fighters were called before they joined the regular army,” Victor explained.
Felipe left them on their own, and Ofelia spent some time trying to get Victor to talk, but she was unable to discover anything they had in common, and received little encouragement from him. She asked about the bar, because Juana had mentioned it, and managed to drag out of him the fact that he wanted to complete the medical studies he had begun in Spain. In the end, irritated by the lengthy pauses, she left him.
Soon afterward, she caught him staring at her once more, and his boldness annoyed her, although she too was secretly observing him, fascinated by his ascetic face, aquiline nose, and prominent cheekbones, his veined hands with long fingers; his wiry, hard body. She would like to paint him, she thought, to do his portrait in black and white brushstrokes on a gray background, a full-length picture with him holding a rifle, and naked. The thought made her blush; she had never painted anyone naked, and had learned what little she knew of male anatomy in European museums, where most of the statues were mutilated or had parts covered by a fig leaf. Even the most daring were disappointing, like Michelangelo’s David, with his enormous hands and baby peepee. She had never seen Matias naked, but they had fondled each other enough for her to guess what was concealed beneath his trousers. She would have to see to judge. Why did the Spaniard have a limp? It could be a heroic war wound.
Victor was just as curious as Ofelia. He concluded they came from different planets, and that this young woman was of another species, unlike any woman he had met before. War distorts everything, including memory. Possibly in the past there had been girls like Ofelia: fresh, kept from the ugliness of the world, with spotless lives like blank pages where their destinies could be written in elegant handwriting without a single crossing-out, but he couldn’t remember anyone of the sort. Her beauty intimidated him: he was used to women prematurely marked by poverty or war. She seemed tall, because everything about her was vertical, from her long neck to her slender feet, but when she came over he realized she only reached his chin. Her thick hair was various shades of wood color, tied up with a black velvet ribbon; her mouth was constantly half-open, as if she had too many teeth, and was painted ruby red. Her most striking feature was her blue eyes, set far apart and with the distant expression of somebody staring out to sea from beneath arched brows. He decided it must be because she was slightly cross-eyed.