A Long Petal of the Sea(76)
At three in the morning he heard a car pull up outside the house. That could only mean they were coming for him again; during curfew only military and security service vehicles were allowed on the streets. There was no way he could run or hide. He lay there in a cold sweat, his heart beating like a drum. Roser peeped out through the curtains and saw a second black automobile pull up behind the first one. “Get dressed quickly,” she ordered Victor.
But then she saw several men get out of the cars in a leisurely way: no rushing, shouting, or pulling out weapons. They stood there for a while smoking and chatting, and eventually drove off again. Trembling, arms around each other, Victor and Roser waited at the window until it began to grow light, then five o’clock struck and the curfew ended.
Roser arranged for the Venezuelan ambassador to collect Victor in a car with diplomatic license plates. By this time, most of the asylum-seekers in embassies had left for the countries that accepted them, and surveillance was less strict. Victor entered the embassy curled up in the trunk. A month later he was given a safe-conduct. Two Venezuelan officials accompanied him to the door of the plane, where Roser was waiting for him. He was clean, freshly shaven, and calm. On the same plane was another exile, who had his handcuffs removed once he was in his seat. He was filthy, disheveled, and shaking. Victor couldn’t help noticing him, and when they were in the air, approached him. He had difficulty striking up a conversation and convincing the man he wasn’t a secret policeman. He saw the man had no front teeth, and several of his fingers were crushed.
“How can I be of help, comrade?” he said.
“They’re going to make the plane turn around…They’re going to take me back to…” the man said, bursting into tears.
“Stay calm, we’ve been in the air for almost an hour, I’m sure we’re not going back to Santiago. This is a direct flight to Caracas; you’ll be safe there, you’ll have help. I’ll get you a drink, you need it.”
“Make it something to eat,” the other man begged him.
* * *
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ROSER HAD SPENT LONG periods in Venezuela with the Ancient Music Orchestra. She gave concerts, had made friends, and moved easily in a society whose rules of behavior were different from those of Chile. Valentin Sanchez had introduced her to everyone worth knowing, and opened the doors to the world of culture. Her love affair with Aitor Ibarra had ended years before, but they were still friends, and she visited him from time to time. His stroke had left him a semi-invalid, and he had some difficulty getting his words out, but it hadn’t affected his mind or diminished his instinct for dreaming up new businesses, which his eldest son supervised. His house was high up in Cumbres de Curumo, with a panoramic view over Caracas. He grew orchids, collected exotic birds and custom-made cars. It was a gated community with a leafy park containing several houses, protected by a barrier wall and an armed guard. Two of his married children also lived there, and several grandchildren.
According to Aitor, his wife never suspected the lengthy relationship he had had with Roser. Roser doubted this was true, as they must have left many clues over the years. She concluded that the beauty queen had tacitly accepted that her husband was a womanizer, like many men for whom that was a proof of virility, but chose to ignore it. She was the legitimate wife, the mother of his children, the only one who counted. After Aitor was left paralyzed, she had him all to herself, and she came to love him more than before, because she discovered his great virtues, ones she hadn’t been able to appreciate in the hustle and bustle of their previous existence. They were growing old together in perfect harmony, surrounded by their children.
“As you can see, Roser, every cloud has a silver lining, as the saying goes. In this wheelchair I’m a better husband, father, and grandfather than I would be if I were able to walk. And even though you might not believe me, I’m happy,” Aitor told Roser on one of her visits. In order not to disturb her friend’s peace of mind, she chose not to tell him how important the memory of those afternoons of kisses and white wine was to her.
They had both promised they would never reveal this past love to their partners—why hurt them?—but Roser didn’t keep her side of the bargain. In the two days between Victor’s liberation from the camp and his asylum in the embassy, they fell in love as if they had just met. It was a luminous discovery. They had missed each other so much that when they reunited they didn’t see each other as they really were, but as they had been when they were sad youngsters pretending to make love with whispers and chaste caresses in the Winnipeg lifeboat. She fell in love with a tall, tough stranger, his features sculpted like dark wood, his eyes gentle and his clothes freshly ironed, someone who was capable of surprising her and making her laugh with silly remarks, who gave her pleasure as if he had memorized the map of her body, who cradled her all night long so that she fell asleep and woke nestled against his shoulder, who told her what she had never expected to hear, as if suffering had demolished his defenses and made him sentimental.
Victor fell in love with the woman he had previously loved with a brother’s incestuous love. She had been his wife for thirty-five years, but it was only during those days of their re-encounter that he saw her stripped of the burdens of the past: her role as Guillem’s widow and Marcel’s mother. She was a youthful, fresh apparition. In her fifties, Roser was revealed to him as sensual, filled with enthusiasm, with an endless reserve of fearless energy. She detested the dictatorship as much as he did, but she didn’t fear it. Victor realized that, in fact, she had never shown any sign of fearing anything, apart from traveling by plane, not even in the last days of the Spanish Civil War. She was facing exile now with the same courage as she had done then, without complaining, without looking back, her eyes fixed on the future.