A Long Petal of the Sea(91)

“Excuse me for coming here like this all of a sudden, without any warning. I live a long way off, in the south of the country, and I don’t know my way around Santiago. I didn’t think I’d arrive here so late.”

“That’s all right. How can I help you?”

“Mmm. What’s that delicious smell?”

Victor Dalmau was about to forcibly eject this stranger who had the nerve to turn up at night and invade his house uninvited, but curiosity overcame his irritation.

“Rice with squid.”

“I see you’ve already set the table. I’m interrupting, I can come back tomorrow at a more suitable time. You’re expecting guests, aren’t you?”

“You, apparently. What did you say your name was?”

“Ingrid Schnake. You don’t know me, but I know a lot about you. I’ve been trying to track you down for a long while.”

“Do you like rosé wine?”

“I like it any color. I’m afraid you’re also going to have to offer me some of your rice, I haven’t eaten a thing since breakfast. Do you have enough?”

“There’s more than enough for us as well as the neighbors. It’s ready. Let’s sit down and you can tell me why a pretty young girl like you is trying to find me.”

“I already told you, I’m your daughter. And I’m no young girl, I’m fifty-two well-lived years old, and—”

“My only child is called Marcel,” Victor cut in.

“Believe me, Doctor, I haven’t come to upset you. I just wanted to meet you.”



“Let’s get comfortable, Ingrid. I can see we have a lot to talk about.”

“Yes, I’ve got a lot of questions. Do you mind if we start with your life? Afterward I’ll tell you about mine, if you wish…”



* * *



—

THE NEXT DAY, VICTOR’S phone call roused Marcel shortly after dawn. “Our family’s just become bigger, son,” he began. “You have a sister, a brother-in-law, a nephew, and two nieces. Your sister’s called Ingrid, and she’s going to stay with me for a couple of days. We have a lot to tell each other.”

While he was talking with Marcel, the woman who had burst into his house the previous evening was fast asleep in her clothes on the battered living room sofa, wrapped in blankets. Victor had always suffered from insomnia, and so a night without sleep didn’t have much effect on him. In the morning he felt more wide awake than he had since Roser’s death. His visitor, however, was exhausted after spending ten hours listening to Victor’s story and telling him hers. She had revealed that her mother was Ofelia del Solar, and from what she understood, he was her father. It had taken her months to discover this, and had it not been for an old woman’s uneasy conscience, she might never have done so.

So that was how, more than fifty years later, Victor learned that Ofelia had become pregnant during the time they had their affair. That was why she disappeared from his life, why her passion had turned to resentment, and led her to break with him without any proper explanation. “I think she felt trapped, robbed of her future through making one mistake. At least, that’s the explanation she gave me,” said Ingrid, who went on to tell him the details surrounding her birth.

When Ofelia wouldn’t cooperate, Father Vicente Urbina took the matter of adoption into his own hands. Once she had promised never to reveal it, the only other person to participate in the plan was Laura del Solar. It was a necessary white lie, forgiven in the confessional and sanctioned by heaven. The midwife, someone by the name of Orinda Naranjo, took it upon herself to follow the priest’s instructions, and kept Ofelia in a semiconscious state before the birth, and sedated during and after it. Then, with the grandmother’s help, she whisked the baby away before anyone in the convent could ask questions. When Ofelia emerged from her stupor a few days later, they explained she had given birth to a baby boy, who died a few minutes after being born. “But it was a girl. And it was me,” Ingrid told Victor. Her mother was told it had been a boy as a precaution, to confuse her and prevent her finding her daughter if at some hypothetical future moment she came to suspect what had happened. Do?a Laura, who had agreed to deceive her daughter in this way, meekly accepted the rest of the plan, including the farce of the cemetery, where they erected a cross over a tiny empty coffin. None of this was her responsibility; it was dreamed up by someone far more devious than her, a wise man of God, Father Urbina.



Over the following years, seeing Ofelia in a good marriage, with two healthy, well-behaved children and leading a successful life, Do?a Laura buried her doubts in the deepest recesses of her memory. From the outset, Father Urbina told her the baby girl had been adopted by a Catholic couple in the south of Chile. That was all he could tell her. Later on, when she plucked up courage to ask for more details, he reminded her curtly she should consider the grandchild as dead: she had never belonged to the del Solar family, even if she had their blood in her veins. God had given her to other parents. The couple who adopted the girl were descendants of Germans on both sides—big, tall, blond, and blue-eyed. They lived more than eight hundred kilometers south of Santiago in a lovely town by a river with trees and lots of rain (although the grandmother never knew this). It was when this couple had lost hope of having their own children that they took in the newborn baby offered them by the priest. A year later, the wife became pregnant. In the years that followed, they had two children as Teutonic in appearance as themselves. Compared to them, Ingrid, who was small and had dark hair and eyes, stood out like a genetic mistake. “From childhood I felt different, but my parents spoiled me terribly, and never told me I was adopted. Even now, when the whole family knows, if I mention adoption my mother starts to cry,” Ingrid explained to Victor.