A Long Petal of the Sea(95)

Juana Nancucheo saw Ingrid only once. Reassured by that visit, she communicated with Do?a Laura as she did every night between two prayers, and explained that her granddaughter had been found, her guilt had been atoned for, and she could arrange her transfer to heaven. Juana herself had twenty-four days left on the calendar. She lay down on her bed surrounded by her bedside saints and photographs of her loved ones—all from the del Solar family—and prepared to die of hunger. From that moment on, she neither ate nor drank, accepting only some ice to moisten her parched mouth. She left this world without fuss or pain a few days before the scheduled day. “She was in a hurry,” said a desolate, orphaned Felipe. He rejected the simple pine coffin Juana had bought and had placed standing in a corner of her bedroom. Instead, he made sure she had a High Mass and was buried in a walnut casket with bronze fittings in the del Solar mausoleum, alongside his parents.



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ON THE THIRD DAY the storm finally abated. The sun came out, defying the winter, and that morning the poplars guarding Victor Dalmau’s property like sentinels were freshly washed. Snow covered the mountains and reflected the violet color of the clear sky. The two big dogs were able to shake off the lethargy of being in for so long, although the small one, who in dog years was as old as his master, stayed by the fireside.



Ingrid Schnake had spent those days with Victor. She was accustomed to the rain of her southern province, and stayed not so much to ride out the bad weather as to give time to this first encounter, to allow them to get to know each other. She had carefully planned this meeting for months, and had been firm with her husband and children that they were not to accompany her. “You understand I had to do this on my own, don’t you? I found it hard, because it’s the first time I’ve traveled alone, and I didn’t know how you would receive me,” she told Victor. Unlike her experience with her mother, with whom she found it impossible to bridge the gap of more than fifty years’ absence, she and Victor became friends easily. Both of them understood he could never compete with her love for Walter Schnake, her beloved adoptive father, the only one she recognized. “He’s very old, Victor, he’s going to die on me at any moment,” she told him.

They discovered they both played the guitar for consolation, were fans of the same soccer team, read spy novels, and could recite from memory many of Neruda’s verses. She knew the love poems; he the militant ones. That wasn’t all they had in common: they both had a tendency toward melancholy, which he kept at bay by plunging into work, and she with antidepressants and by sheltering in the unshakable haven of her family. Victor lamented the fact that his daughter had been bequeathed this trait, whereas she had inherited neither Ofelia’s artistic temperament nor her cerulean blue eyes.

“When I’m depressed, it’s affection that helps me most,” Ingrid told him. She added that this had never been lacking: she was her parents’ favorite, was spoiled by her younger siblings, and was married to a honey-colored bear of a man who could lift her up with one arm and who gave her the quiet love of a big dog. In his turn, Victor told her that Roser’s love had always helped him keep at bay that sly melancholy that pursued him like an enemy and sometimes threatened to crush him with its weight of bad memories. With Roser gone, he was lost. His inner fire had gone out; all that was left were the ashes of a grief he had been dragging round with him for three years now. He surprised himself with his hoarse confession: he had never before spoken of that cold hollow in his chest, not even to Marcel.



He felt as if even his soul was shriveling. He was retreating into an old man’s manias, a mineral silence, into his widower’s solitude. He had gradually given up the few friends he had from before; he no longer sought buddies to play chess or the guitar with; the Sunday barbecues were a thing of the past. He carried on working, because this obliged him to connect to his patients and students, but kept an insuperable distance, as if looking at them on a screen. During the years he spent in Venezuela he thought he had once and for all overcome the solemnity that had been an essential part of his nature from childhood, as though he was in mourning for all the world’s suffering, violence, and evil. Faced with so many disasters, happiness seemed to him obscene. In love with Roser in the green, warm country of Venezuela, he had vanquished the temptation to cloak himself in sadness. As she would often tell him, this was less a mantle of dignity, more a contempt for life. But his serious nature had returned agonizingly: without Roser he was withering away. He was touched only by Marcel and his animals.

“Sadness, my enemy, is gaining ground, Ingrid. At this rate in the years I have left I’m going to turn into a hermit.”

“That would be death in life, Victor. Do as I do. Don’t wait to defend yourself against that enemy, go out and confront it. It took me years in therapy to learn that.”

“What reasons do you have to be sad, child?”

“That’s what my husband asks me. I don’t know, Victor, I suppose you don’t need reasons; it’s part of your nature.”

“It’s very difficult to change your nature. For me it’s too late, there’s nothing for it but to accept myself the way I am. I’m eighty years old: it was my birthday the day you arrived. That’s the age of memory, Ingrid. The age of making an inventory of life,” he said.