A Long Petal of the Sea(94)
Felipe was tempted to put this macabre story down to his mother’s dementia, or even Juana’s senile ideas, and dismiss it as absurd. He also thought that even if the tale were true it would be best to ignore it, because it would be unnecessarily cruel to tell Ofelia. However, Juana insisted she had promised Do?a Laura she would find the child so that Laura could go to heaven rather than be trapped in purgatory, and promises to the dying were sacred. At this, Felipe realized there was no way to keep Juana quiet. He would have to deal with the matter before Ofelia and the rest of the family came to hear of it. So he promised Juana he would look into it and keep her informed.
“Let’s start with the priest, ni?o Felipe. I’ll go with you.” He couldn’t shake her off. The complicity built up between them over eighty years and his certainty that she could read his intentions forced him to take action.
By now, Father Urbina had retired. He was living in a residence for old priests, looked after by nuns. It was a simple matter to find him and arrange an interview: he was lucid and remembered his former flock very well, especially the del Solar family. He greeted Felipe and Juana with an apology for not having been able to give Do?a Laura extreme unction himself. He had undergone an intestinal operation, and the recovery was taking far too long. Getting straight to the point, Felipe repeated what Juana had told him. As an experienced lawyer, he had been prepared for a difficult cross-examination to corner the bishop and force him to confess, but this proved completely unnecessary.
“I did what was best for the family. I was always very careful in my choice of adoptive parents. They were all practicing Catholics,” said Urbina.
“You mean Ofelia wasn’t the only one?”
“There were many girls like Ofelia, but none of them as stubborn. Generally, they agreed to let the baby go. What else could they do?”
“In other words, you didn’t have to lie to them to steal the baby.”
“I won’t permit you to insult me, Felipe! They were girls from good families. My duty was to protect them and avoid any scandal.”
“The scandal is that you, shielded by the Church, committed a crime—or rather, many crimes. By law, that should be paid for by a prison sentence. You’re too old now to face the consequences, but I demand you tell me who you gave Ofelia’s daughter to. I’m going to get to the bottom of this.”
Vicente Urbina hadn’t kept a register of the couples who received the babies, or of the children themselves. He took care of the transaction personally: the midwife, Orinda Naranjo, only helped with the delivery, and besides, she had died long ago. At that point Juana Nancucheo butted in to say that according to Do?a Laura the baby had been given to a German couple in the south of Chile. Father Urbina had let that slip on one occasion, and Do?a Laura had never forgotten it.
“German, you say? They must be from Valdivia,” muttered the bishop.
Their name escaped him, but he was sure the girl had a decent home and didn’t lack for anything; the family was well-off. This comment led Felipe to deduce that in these dealings money changed hands: in other words, the bishop was selling babies. At this, Felipe gave up trying to pry anything more out of him, and decided to concentrate on following the trail of donations the Catholic Church had received through Vicente Urbina around that date. It would be difficult, but not impossible, to gain access to those records; he would have to find the right person to investigate. He guessed that money always left some trace of its passage through the world, and he wasn’t mistaken.
He had to wait eight months until he finally obtained the information. He spent those months in London, pursued from afar by postcards with two-line missives from Juana Nancucheo, littered with grammatical and spelling mistakes, reminding him of his duty. The aged servant struggled to write them without help from anyone, because she had promised to keep the secret until Felipe resolved the mystery. He kept telling her she must be patient, but she couldn’t offer herself that luxury, because she was counting the days that remained to her in this world. Before she left it, she had to find the child and save Do?a Laura from purgatory. When Felipe asked her how she could be so sure of the date of her impending death, she simply said she had put a red circle around it on the kitchen calendar. She was installed in Ofelia’s house, with nothing to do for the first time in her life, apart from preparing her own funeral.
One winter day, a letter brought Felipe the details of the donations received by Father Vicente Urbina in 1942. The only one that caught his attention was from Walter and Helga Schnake, the owners of a furniture factory. According to his investigator, they had done very well, and had branches in several southern cities run by their sons and son-in-law. As Urbina had said, theirs was a wealthy family. The time had come to return to Chile and confront Ofelia.
Felipe found his sister mixing paints in her studio, a freezing shed reeking of turpentine and embroidered with cobwebs. She had grown fatter and more ragged, her hair was a dirty white mop, and she was wearing an orthopedic corset for her backache. Ensconced in a corner and wearing an overcoat, gloves, and woolen hat, Juana was the same as ever. “You don’t look as if you’re about to die,” said Felipe by way of greeting, and kissed her on the forehead. He had carefully constructed the most compassionate phrases he could use to tell his sister she had a daughter, but there was no need for any such precautions. She reacted with only vague curiosity, as if it was gossip about someone else. “I assume you want to meet her,” her brother said. She explained he would have to wait awhile, because she was busy painting a mural. Juana said in that case she would go, because she had to see the girl with her own eyes so that she could die in peace. In the end, all three of them went.