A Long Petal of the Sea(61)

As chance would have it, Carme later met one of the lucky mothers in Andorra, who told her how she had her child thanks to Elisabeth. Carme made the connection between that nurse and the name of the person who was to be her family’s contact in France, if they succeeded in getting across. She wrote to the Red Cross, and from one of their offices to another, one country to another, through a persistent correspondence that overcame bureaucratic obstacles and crisscrossed Europe, she finally managed to locate Elisabeth in Vienna.



The nurse wrote to Carme that at least one of her sons, Victor, was still alive, had married Roser, who had a boy called Marcel, and the three of them were in Chile. She had no means of getting in touch with them, but Roser had written to the family that took her in when she left Argeles-sur-Mer. It was difficult to trace the Quakers, who by then were living in London. They had to search in their attic to find Roser’s envelope with the only address they had for her, that of Felipe del Solar’s house in Santiago. And so, after a delay of several years, Elisabeth Eidenbenz succeeded in reuniting the Dalmaus.

Roser, Victor, and Marcel had to return to Chile without her, as it would take a whole year before Carme Dalmau decided she was willing to emigrate and rejoin her family. As she knew nothing about Chile, that long worm at the far south of the map, she began searching in books and asking people if they knew any Chileans she could question, but none passed through Andorra in all that time. She was held back by her friendship with the peasants who had taken her in, and with whom she had lived for many years, as well as her dread at having to travel halfway round the world accompanied by an elderly dog. She was afraid she wouldn’t like Chile. “My uncle Jordi says it’s the same as Catalonia,” Marcel reassured her in one of his letters. Once her mind was made up, she said goodbye to her friends, took a deep breath, and dismissed her worries, ready and willing to enjoy the adventure. She traveled unhurriedly by land and sea for seven weeks with the mutt in a bag, allowing herself time to be a tourist and appreciate other landscapes and languages, try exotic dishes, and compare customs different from her own. Day by day she grew more distant from the past she had known and entered another dimension.



During her years as a schoolteacher she had studied and taught the world, but now she was discovering it was nothing like the descriptions in books or photographs. It was much more complex and colorful, much less frightening. She shared her thoughts with her pet, and wrote them in a school notebook together with her recollections, as a precaution, in case at some point her memory began to fail her. She embellished the facts, because she was aware that life is how we tell it, so why would she jot down trivia?

The last stage of her pilgrimage was the same voyage down the Pacific that her family had taken in 1939. Her son had sent her enough money to travel first-class, arguing that she deserved it after all the hardships she had suffered, but she preferred to travel tourist-class, where she would be more at ease. The war and her years as a smuggler had made her very discreet, but she resolved to speak to strangers, since she had discovered that people like to talk, and it only took a couple of questions to make friends and find out lots of things. Everybody had a story and wanted to tell it.

Gosset, who had been suffering from the aches and pains of old age, was gradually rejuvenated. By the time they were approaching Chile, he was a different dog, more alert and smelling less like a skunk.

Victor, Roser, and Marcel were there to receive the grandmother and her dog in the port of Valparaiso. They were accompanied by a stout, talkative gentleman who introduced himself as “Jordi Moline, at your service, madame.” He added in Catalan that he was ready to show her the best this beautiful country had to offer. “Do you realize you and I are almost the same age? I’m a widower too,” he said rather coquettishly.

On the train to Santiago, Carme learned about how Jordi had adapted perfectly to the role of great-uncle. By now Victor was a cardiologist in the San Juan de Dios hospital, and so no longer worked nights in the Winnipeg. Roser was busy with her music, although she still kept an eye on the accounts. Marcel went almost every day to the bar to do his homework, and so as not to be at home alone.



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IN THE MID-1960S, Roser traveled to Caracas, invited once more by her friend Valentin Sanchez, the former Venezuelan ambassador, who by this time was retired from diplomacy and devoted himself entirely to his passion for music. In the twenty-five years that had elapsed since the arrival of the Winnipeg, Roser had become more Chilean than anyone born in that country. The same was true of the majority of the Spanish refugees, who were not only citizens, but many of whom fulfilled Pablo Neruda’s dream of rousing Chilean society from its slumbers. By now nobody remembered there had once been opposition to their arrival, and nobody could deny the magnificent contribution made by the people Neruda had invited to Chile. After years of planning, extensive correspondence, and many trips, Roser and Sanchez had succeeded in creating the Ancient Music Orchestra, the first of its kind on the continent, sponsored by oil, the inexhaustible treasure gushing out of the Venezuelan earth. While he traveled across Europe acquiring precious antique instruments and digging out unknown scores, she trained the musicians through a strict selection process from her position as vice-rector of the National Conservatory of Music. There were more than enough candidates who came from different countries in the hope of becoming part of this utopian orchestra. Chile didn’t have the means to support such an enterprise—there were other priorities in the cultural field, and on the few occasions Roser managed to awaken interest in the project, there would be another earthquake, or a change of government, and her hopes would be dashed. But in Venezuela, with the right influence and connections, any dream was possible. Valentin had plenty of both, as he had been one of the few politicians capable of navigating safely through dictatorships, military coups, attempts at democracy, as well as the compromise government then in power, with a president who was one of his personal friends. His country was struggling against a guerrilla group inspired by the Cuban revolution, like many others on the continent, apart from Chile where a revolutionary movement that was more theoretical than real was just in its infancy. However, none of this affected Venezuela’s prosperity or the love Venezuelans had for music, ancient or not. Valentin often visited Chile, where he kept an apartment in Santiago that he could use whenever he felt like it. Roser paid him visits in Caracas, and they had traveled to Europe together on orchestra business. She had learned to travel by plane thanks to tranquilizers and gin.