A Long Petal of the Sea(45)
Early in December, when Ofelia turned twenty-one, Matias traveled to Santiago for the official engagement, which took place in a ceremony in the garden of the del Solars’ house with the two families’ closest relatives, about two hundred people altogether. The wedding rings were blessed by Father Vicente Urbina, Do?a Laura’s nephew. He was a charismatic, scheming, and energetic priest, better suited to a colonel’s uniform than a cassock. Although not yet forty, Urbina exerted a fearsome influence on his ecclesiastical superiors as well as on his congregation in the fashionable heights of Santiago. It was a privilege having him in the family. The date for the wedding was set for September the following year, the month for elegant nuptials. Matias placed the antique diamond ring on the fourth finger of her right hand, as a sign to any possible rival that the young woman was taken; he would transfer it to the other hand on the day of their marriage, to demonstrate that she was his once and for all. He wanted to tell her in great detail about the preparations he had made to receive her like a queen in Paraguay, but she interrupted him in a rather offhand way: “What’s the hurry, Matias? Lots of things could happen between now and September.” Alarmed, he asked what things she was referring to, and she said that the Second World War might reach Chile, there could be another earthquake, or a catastrophe in Paraguay. “In other words, nothing that concerns us,” Matias concluded.
Ofelia enjoyed this period of waiting and anticipation by laying out her trousseau in trunks, wrapped with tissue paper and sprigs of lavender, sending tablecloths, sheets, and towels to her aunt Teresa’s convent to be embroidered with her initials and those of Matias intertwined, being invited by her female friends to tea at the Hotel Crillon, repeatedly trying on her wedding dress and going-away outfit, and learning the rudiments of household management from her sisters. She showed a surprising aptitude for this, given her reputation as a lazy, disorganized young woman. There were nine months to go before the wedding, but she was already thinking up ways of lengthening this period of truce. She was afraid of taking the irrevocable step of marrying for the rest of her life, living with Matias in another country where she didn’t know a soul, far from her family and surrounded by Guarani Indians, and of having children and ending up repressed and frustrated like her mother and sisters. And yet the alternative was worse. To stay a spinster meant depending on the generosity of her father and Felipe, and becoming a social pariah. The possibility of working to earn a living was a dream as absurd as that of going to Paris to paint in a Montmartre attic.
She was planning a whole rosary of excuses for postponing the wedding, without ever imagining that heaven would send her the only true one: Victor Dalmau. When she bumped into him two months after becoming engaged and seven before the date fixed for the wedding, she discovered the love she had read about in novels, the kind of love she had never felt for Matias despite all his stubborn faithfulness. At the end of Santiago’s hot, dry summer, when all those who could migrated en masse to the beach or countryside, Victor and Ofelia met in the street. The encounter paralyzed them both, as if they had been caught out; an eternal minute went by before she took the lead and greeted him with a smothered, barely audible “hello” that he took as a sign of encouragement. A whole year believing he was in love with her without the slightest hope, and it turned out she had been thinking of him as well, as was plain from the way she reacted like a nervous foal.
She was prettier than he recalled, with light-colored eyes and tanned skin, a low-cut dress and curls escaping from her schoolgirl’s straw hat. He recovered sufficiently to begin an innocuous conversation, learning that the del Solar family had been spending the three summer months between their country property and their beach house in Vi?a del Mar; Ofelia had come to Santiago to get her hair cut and visit the dentist. He in turn told her in four sentences about Roser, the boy, the university, and the tavern. They soon ran out of things to say and stood there in silence, sweating in the scorching sun, only too aware that when they separated they would be passing up a wonderful opportunity. As she turned to go, Victor took her by the arm, dragged her into the nearest patch of shade under a pharmacy awning, and begged her breathlessly to spend the evening with him.
“I have to get back to Vi?a. The chauffeur is waiting for me,” she said, without conviction.
“Tell him to wait. We need to talk.”
“I’m going to get married, Victor.”
“When?”
“What does that matter? You’re married.”
“That’s exactly what we have to talk about. It’s not what you think. Let me explain.”
He took her to a cheap hotel even though he couldn’t afford it, and she returned to Vi?a del Mar close to midnight, just as her parents were about to inform the police she was missing. Thanks to a generous bribe, the chauffeur told them a tire had burst on the way back.
* * *
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EVER SINCE HER FIFTEENTH birthday, when she had reached her full height and developed feminine curves, Ofelia had attracted men with completely unintentional powers of seduction. She wasn’t even aware of the broken hearts she sowed in her wake, except for the few occasions when the lovelorn youth became a threat and her father had to intervene. She was pampered and protected in her tranquil existence: this was a double-edged sword, because even though on the one hand the risks were reduced, on the other, so much protection prevented her from acquiring any astuteness or intuitive sense. Concealed beneath her flirtatious attitude was an astonishing na?veté.