Portrait in Sepia (16 page)

In the port of Callao, Peruvian captains ordered their crews to abandon ship and light their powder, sending the entire fleet to the bottom. The explosions woke Severo del Valle, who lay on the filthy sand in one corner of the operating room beside other men who, like him, had just undergone the trauma of amputation. Someone had covered him with a blanket, and at his side was a canteen of water; he reached for it, but his hand shook so hard that he couldn't unscrew it, and so he clutched it to his chest, moaning, until a young canteen worker came to him, opened it, and helped him lift it to his parched lips. He gulped down the entire contents and then, instructed by the girl, who had fought beside the men for months and knew as much about caring for the wounded as the doctors did, he tossed a mouthful of tobacco into his mouth and chewed madly to ease the spasms of postoperative shock. "Killing is easy, soldier, surviving is the hard part. If you're not careful, death will sneak up on you when you're not looking," she warned him. "I'm afraid," Severo tried to say, and maybe she didn't hear what he muttered but sensed his terror, because she removed a small silver medal from her neck and put it in his hand. "May the Virgin look after you," she whispered and bent over and kissed him quickly on the lips before she moved on. Severo was left with the touch of those lips and the medal pressed in his fist. He was shivering, his teeth were chattering, and he was burning with fever; he slept or fainted from time to time, and when he recovered consciousness he was in a stupor from his pain. Hours later the same girl with the dark braids returned and handed him a few moistened rags so he could wipe off the sweat and dried blood; she also brought a tin plate of cornmeal gruel, a chunk of hard bread, and a cup of chicory coffee, a warm dark liquid he didn't even attempt to taste, his weakness and nausea made it seem so disgusting. He buried his head beneath the blanket, surrendering to suffering and despair, moaning and crying like a child until he went to sleep again. "You've lost a lot of blood, my son; if you don't eat you'll die." He was awakened by a chaplain who was going from man to man offering consolation to the wounded and extreme unction to the dying. Severo del Valle remembered that he had come to the war to die. That had been his intention when he lost Lynn Sommers, but now that death was here, hovering over him like a buzzard, awaiting her chance for the last slash of her claws, he was charged with an instinct to live. His desire to save himself was greater than the burning torment that radiated from his leg to every cell of his body, stronger than agony, uncertainty, and terror. He realized that far from caving in to death, he desperately wanted to stay in this world, live in whatever state or condition, however possible, lame, defeated… nothing mattered as long as he lived. Like any soldier, he knew that only one of ten amputees won the battle against blood loss and gangrene—no way to avoid it, it was a question of luck. He decided that he would be one who survived. He thought that his marvelous cousin Nívea deserved a whole man, not a cripple; he didn't want her to see him looking like a beggar, he couldn't bear her pity. Even so, when he closed his eyes, Nívea again appeared at his side; he saw her, untouched by the violence of war or sordidness of the world, bending over him with her intelligent face, her black eyes, and mischievous smile; then his pride would dissolve like salt in water. He hadn't the least doubt that she would love him as much with half a leg as she had loved him with a whole one. He took the spoon in his cramped fingers, tried to control his shaking, forced himself to open his mouth, and swallowed a mouthful of the revolting gruel, already cold and black with flies.

•

The triumphant Chilean regiments entered Lima in January 1881, and from there attempted to impose the forced peace of defeat on all Peru. Once the barbarous confusion of the first weeks had calmed, the proud victors left behind a contingent of ten thousand men to control the occupied nations, and the remaining men began their voyage to the south to collect their well-deserved laurels, olympically ignoring the thousands of conquered soldiers who had managed to escape to the sierra and who planned to continue fighting from there. The victory had been so crushing that the generals could not imagine that the Peruvians would harry them for three long years. The soul of that obstinate resistance was the legendary General Caceres, who had by a miracle escaped death and though critically wounded had fled to the mountains, reviving the stubborn seed of courage in a ragged army of ghostly soldiers and Indian conscripts, with whom he waged a cruel guerrilla war of ambushes and skirmishes. Caceres's soldiers, their uniforms in tatters, often barefoot, undernourished, and desperate, fought with knives, lances, clubs, stones, and a few antiquated rifles, but they had the advantage of knowing the terrain. They had chosen the right field of battle for engaging a disciplined and well-armed, although not always well supplied, enemy; here you had to be a condor to reach those steep hills. These guerrillas hid on snowy peaks, in caves and gullies, on windswept heights where the air was so thin and the solitude so immense that only they, men of the sierra, could survive. The Chilean troops' eardrums burst and bled, they fainted from lack of oxygen, and they froze in the icy gorges of the Andes. While they could barely climb another step higher because their hearts couldn't take the strain, the Indians of the altiplano bounded like llamas, carrying on their backs a load equal to their own weight, their only sustenance the bitter meat of eagles and the green wad of coca leaves they chewed like a cud. Those were three years of fighting with no respite and no prisoners but with thousands of dead. The Peruvian forces won a single frontal conflict in a village with no strategic value occupied by seventy-seven Chilean soldiers, several of them ill with typhus. The defenders had only a hundred bullets per man, but they fought all night with such bravery against hundreds of soldiers and Indians that in the desolate dawn, when there were but three men left shooting, the Peruvian officers begged them to surrender because it seemed ignoble to kill them. They did not surrender; they kept fighting and died with bayonets in hand, shouting the name of their country. There were three women with them, whom Indian mobs dragged to the center of the bloody plaza, raped, and cut to pieces. During the night one of them had given birth in the church while her husband fought outside; the infant was also killed. The corpses were mutilated, their bellies slit open, the entrails scooped out, and then, as it was reported in Santiago, the Indians ate the viscera roasted on sticks. That bestiality was not exceptional; both sides were equally barbaric in that war. The final surrender and signing of the peace treaty took place in October 1883, after Ciceres's troops were defeated in a last battle, a massacre by knife and bayonet that left more than a thousand dead on the field. Chile claimed three of Peru's provinces. Bolivia lost its one seaport and was forced to accept an indefinite truce, which would be prolonged for twenty years before a treaty was signed.

Severo del Valle, along with thousands of other wounded, was returned to Chile by ship. While many died of gangrene or of the typhus and dysentery rampant in the military field hospitals, he recovered, thanks to Nívea, who the minute she learned what had happened had contacted her uncle, Minister Vergara, and had hounded him until he ordered a search for Severo, rescued him from a hospital where he was but another among thousands of sick men under ominous conditions, and had him shipped home on the first available transport to Valparaiso. Vergara also issued a special permit for his niece that allowed her to enter the military area of the port, and assigned a lieutenant to help her. When Severo del Valle was brought ashore on a stretcher, she didn't recognize him; he had lost over forty pounds and was a sallow-skinned, wild-haired, and bearded corpse with the terrified, delirious eyes of a madman. Nívea, controlling her panic with the Amazon will that had sustained her in all other aspects of her life, greeted Severo with a cheerful, "Hello, Cousin, a pleasure to see you!" Severo was unable to answer. When he saw her, his relief was so great that he covered his face with his hands so she wouldn't see him cry. The lieutenant had a vehicle waiting and in accord with his orders drove the wounded man and Nívea directly to the minister's palace in Vina del Mar, where his wife had prepared a room. "My husband says that you are to stay here until you can walk, my son," she told Severo. The Vergara family physician called on all the resources of science to cure Severo, but when a month later his stump hadn't healed and he was still shaken by feverish paroxysms, Nívea realized that his soul was sickened from the horrors of war, and that the only remedy against such guilt was love. She decided to take extreme measures.

"I am going to ask my parents' permission to marry you," she announced to Severo.

"I'm dying, Nívea," he sighed.

"You always have some excuse, Severo! So when has dying been an impediment to marriage?"

"Do you want to be a widow without ever having been a wife? I don't want you to go through what happened to me with Lynn."

"I won't be a widow, because you're not going to die. Do you think you could ask me humbly to marry you, Cousin? Tell me, for example, that I am the one woman in your life, your angel, your muse, or something in that vein? Invent something, man! Tell me you can't live without me—at least that much is true, isn't it? I admit that I don't enjoy being the only romantic in this relationship."

"You are insane, Nívea. I'm not even whole, I'm a miserable invalid."

"You mean you lost something besides a little piece of your leg?" she asked, alarmed.

"You consider that little?"

"If you have everything else you're supposed to have, that doesn't seem like very much, Severo," she laughed.

"Then marry me, please," he mumbled with profound relief and a sob in his throat, too weak to embrace her.

"Don't cry, Cousin. Kiss me. You don't need your leg to do that," she replied, bending over the bed exactly as he had envisioned her so many times in his delirium.

Three days later they were married in a brief ceremony in one of the handsome salons of the minister's residence, in the presence of their two families. Given the circumstances, they had a private ceremony, but counting just the closest relatives, that came to ninety-four persons. Severo appeared in a wheelchair, pale and thin, with his hair cut à la Byron, his cheeks shaved, and in elegant attire: a shirt with a stiff collar, gold buttons, and silk necktie. There wasn't time to make a bridal gown or arrange a proper trousseau for Nívea, but her sisters and cousins filled two trunks with the linens they had been embroidering for years for their own hope chests. She wore a white satin dress and a tiara of pearls and diamonds lent to her by her uncle's wife. In the wedding photograph she is radiant, standing beside her husband's chair. That night there was a family dinner that Severo del Valle did not attend because the day's emotions had exhausted him. After the guests left, Nívea was led by her aunt to the room she had prepared for her. "I am terribly sorry that your wedding night has to be like this," the good woman stammered, blushing. "Don't worry, Aunt, I will console myself by saying the rosary," the young woman replied. She waited for the house to fall silent, and when she was sure that there was nothing moving but the sea breeze through the trees in the garden, Nívea got up in her nightgown, felt her way down the long hallways of that palace, and went into Severo's room. The nun hired to keep vigil over the patient's sleep was sprawled in a chair, deep asleep, but Severo was awake, waiting for Nívea. She placed her finger to her lips to caution silence, turned down the gas lamps, and slipped into bed.

Nívea had been educated by nuns, and she came from an old-fashioned family in which bodily functions, say nothing of those related to reproduction, were never mentioned, but she was twenty years old, and she had a passionate heart and good memory. She remembered very well the secret games she'd played in dark corners with her cousin, the shape of Severo's body, the tension of never-satisfied pleasure, the fascination of sin. In those days they had been inhibited by modesty and guilt, and both had come out of those corners trembling and weak, their skin aflame. During the years they had been apart, Nívea had had time to replay every instant shared with her cousin and to transform childhood curiosity into profound love. In addition, she had taken full advantage of her uncle Jose Francisco Vergara's library. He was a man of liberal and modern thought who accepted no boundary to his intellectual curiosity and did not abide religious censorship. As Nívea was classifying his scientific, art, and military books, she had by chance discovered a secret section of shelves where she found a not inconsiderable number of erotic texts and novels on the blacklist of the church, including an amusing collection of Japanese and Chinese drawings of inventive couples in postures that were anatomically impossible but capable of inspiring an ascetic, even more a person as imaginative as she. The most instructive texts, however, were the pornographic novels written by one Anonymous Lady, rather badly translated from English to Spanish, which the girl took with her, one by one, hidden in her handbag, read studiously, and stealthily returned to the same place—a pointless precaution since her uncle was off directing the war, and no one else in his palace ever went into the library. Guided by those books, Nívea explored her own body, learned the rudiments of humanity's most ancient art, and prepared for the day when she could apply theory to practice. She knew, of course, that she was committing a horrendous sin—pleasure always is sin—but she refrained from discussing the subject with her confessor, since it seemed to her that the pleasure she received and would give in the future was well worth the risk of hell. She prayed that death would not take her suddenly and that before she drew her last breath she could manage to confess the hours of delight those books afforded her. She never imagined that her solitary training would help her infuse life into the man she loved, much less that she would have to do it six feet away from a sleeping nun. Starting with that first night with Severo, Nívea arranged to bring a cup of warm chocolate and a few biscuits to the nurse as she went to say good night to her husband, before going to her own room. The chocolate contained a dose of valerian strong enough to speed a camel to dreamland. Severo del Valle had never imagined that his chaste cousin could be capable of such extraordinary exploits. The mending leg, which caused him shooting pains, fever, and weakness, limited him to a passive role, but what he lacked in vigor Nívea made up with initiative and knowledge. Severo had no idea that such acrobatics were possible, and he was sure they were not Christian, but that did not prevent him from enjoying them immensely. If he hadn't known Nívea from childhood, he would have thought his cousin had been trained in a Turkish seraglio, but if he was uneasy about how this maiden had learned such a variety of professional flourishes, he was intelligent enough not to ask. He followed docilely in the voyage of the senses as far as his body could go, surrendering along the way the last shred of his soul. They explored one another beneath the covers in ways described by the pornographers in the library of the honorable minister of war, and in others they invented, spurred by desire and love but limited by the bandaged stump and by the nun snoring in her armchair. Dawn would surprise them throbbing in a knot of arms, their lips joined, breathing in unison, and as soon as the first ray of light peered through the window, Nívea would slip like a shadow back to her room. Their former childish games were transformed into true marathons of lust; they caressed with voracious appetites, kissed, licked, and penetrated, all this in darkness and in the most absolute silence, swallowing their sighs and biting pillows to smother the sounds of joyous licentiousness that lifted them to glory again and again during those all-too-brief nights. The minutes flew by: no sooner had Nívea materialized like a ghost in the room and climbed into Severo's bed than it was morning. Neither of the two closed their eyes, they couldn't lose a minute of those blessed encounters. The next day Severo would sleep like a newborn babe until noon, but Nívea would get up early with the befuddled air of a sleepwalker and carry out her normal routines. In the afternoons Severo del Valle would rest in his wheelchair on the terrace, watching the sun set over the sea, while by his side his wife fell asleep over her embroidery. In front of others they behaved like brother and sister; they never touched and scarcely glanced at one another, but the atmosphere around them was charged. They passed the day counting the hours, waiting with delirious impatience for the moment to hold each other in bed. What they were doing by night would have horrified the doctor, their families, society in general—never mind the nun. Meanwhile, family and friends were going about commenting on Nívea's sacrifice, that pure, Catholic girl condemned to a platonic love, and about the moral fortitude of Severo, who had lost a leg and ruined his life defending his country. Gossipy old ladies wove a tale that a leg wasn't all Severo had lost on the battlefield—it was his male attributes as well. Poor things, they would lament among sighs, never suspecting what a romp that pair of dissolutes were having. After a week of anesthetizing the nun with hot chocolate and making love like gypsies, Severo's stump had healed and his temperature returned to normal. Before two months had passed, Severo del Valle was walking with crutches and beginning to talk about a wooden leg, while Nívea was vomiting up her insides in one of the twenty-three bathrooms in her uncle's palace.When there was nothing to do but confess that Nívea was in a family way, the surprise was so great that it was even suggested that her pregnancy was a miracle. The nun professed to be the most scandalized of all, but Severo and Nívea suspected that despite the massive doses of valerian, the blessed woman had learned a great deal; she had pretended to sleep so as not to deprive herself of the pleasure of spying on them. The one person who was able to imagine how the "miracle" had happened, and to laugh uproariously as he celebrated the couple's cleverness, was Minister Vergara. By the time Severo was able to take his first steps with his artificial leg, and Nívea's belly was not to be disguised, he helped them get settled in another house and gave Severo del Valle a job. "The nation, and the Liberal party, need men of your audacity," he said, although in truth the audacious one was Nívea.