A Long Petal of the Sea(69)

“It was about time,” Marcel Dalmau told his grandmother. “Copper is Chile’s paycheck, it’s what sustains the economy.”

“If copper is Chilean, I don’t see why it has to be nationalized.”

“It’s always been in the hands of North American companies, àvia. The government took it back and refused to indemnify the Americans, because they owe the country billions of dollars in excessive profits and tax evasion.”

“The Americans aren’t going to like that. Take heed of what I’m saying, Marcel, there’s going to be trouble,” Carme told him.

“When the Americans leave the mining industry, we’re going to need more Chilean engineers and geologists. I’m going to be in demand, àvia.”

“I’m glad. Will they pay you more?”

“I don’t know. Why?”

“So that you can get married, Marcel. If you don’t hurry up, I’m not going to get to know my great-grandchildren. You’re thirty-one, it’s time for you to settle down.”

“I am settled.”

“I can’t see any women in your life. That’s not normal. Have you never been in love? Or are you one of those who…? Well, you know what I mean.”

“How nosy you are, àvia!”

“This comes from the vice of riding a bicycle. It crushes the testicles and causes impotence and sterility.”

“Aha.”

“I read it in a magazine at the hairdresser’s. And it’s not that you’re bad-looking, Marcel. If you got rid of that beard and cut that mop of hair of yours, you’d look just like Dominguin.”

“Who?”



“The bullfighter, of course. And you’re not stupid either. Wake up a bit. You’re like a Trappist monk.”

Carme hadn’t anticipated that one consequence of the nationalization would be that the copper corporation gave her grandson a grant to go to the United States. She got it into her head she would never see him again. Marcel left for Colorado, to a city at the foot of the Rocky Mountains founded during the gold rush, to study geology. He took his dismantled bike with him because it was specially made for him, together with his Victor Jara records. “I’ll write to you,” was the last thing àvia told him in the airport.

Marcel had studied English with the same quiet obstinacy that made him refuse to speak Catalan, and was able to adapt after only a few weeks in Colorado. He arrived at the start of a golden fall, and a couple of months later was shoveling snow. He joined bike enthusiasts training to cross the United States from the Pacific to the Atlantic, and another group that climbed mountains. Victor was never able to go and see him; with all the disturbances, demonstrations, shutdowns, strikes, and overwork, he couldn’t find time to travel. But Roser visited him a couple of times and was able to inform the rest of the family that her son had possibly said more in English in Colorado than he had in Spanish in all his previous life. He had shaved off his beard and wore a short ponytail. àvia was right, he did look like Dominguin.

Far from his family’s scrutiny, free from the conflicts and injustices taking place in Chile, and in the intellectual oasis of the university, where he spent his time deciphering the secret nature of rocks, for the first time he felt comfortable in his own skin. In Colorado he wasn’t the son of refugees, nobody had heard of the Spanish Civil War, and only a few people could place Chile on a map, much less Catalonia. In this foreign reality and in a different language he made friends, and within a few months was living in a tiny apartment with his first love, a young Jamaican woman who studied literature and wrote for newspapers. On Roser’s second visit, she met the girlfriend and returned to Chile commenting that as well as being beautiful, she was as bubbly and talkative as Marcel was introverted. “Don’t worry, Do?a Carme, your grandson is finally wising up. The Jamaican girl is teaching him to dance to her country’s rhythms. If you saw him writhing around to the sound of drums and maracas, you wouldn’t believe it.”



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AS SHE FEARED, àvia never embraced her grandson again, nor did she meet the Jamaican girl or any of his other girlfriends, or the great-grandchildren who would have prolonged the Dalmau lineage. She died in her bed on the morning of her eighty-seventh birthday, when the tent and tables for the party had already been set up behind the house. She had gone to bed with her smoker’s cough as always, but in good health and looking forward to the celebration. Jordi Moline woke to the daylight filtering in through the slats in the shutters. He lay around in bed, waiting for the smell of toast to tell him it was time to get up, put his slippers on, and have breakfast. It took him several minutes to realize that Carme was still alongside him, motionless and cold as marble. Taking her by the hand, he lay there quietly, sobbing gently as he took in the terrible betrayal of her going first and leaving him all alone.

Roser discovered Carme around one o’clock that afternoon, when she appeared at the house with the birthday cake and a car full of balloons to set the tables before the caterer and his assistants arrived. She was surprised by the silence and darkness in the house, the closed shutters and stale air. She called out to her mother-in-law and Jordi from the living room before going to look for them in the kitchen and then venturing into the bedroom. Afterward, as soon as she could react, she picked up the telephone and first dialed Victor’s number at the hospital and then Marcel’s at his hotel in Buenos Aires, where by chance he had been visiting with a group of students. She told them àvia had died, and Jordi had disappeared.