Portrait in Sepia (31 page)

I had grown up in the city, in the comfortable and cosmopolitan atmosphere of my grandmother's house, much more liberated than any Chilean of then or today—even though we are nearing the end of the first decade of the twentieth century, things have not been greatly modernized for girls in this part of the world. The difference in my way of life when I landed in the bosom of the Domínguez family was brutal, even though they did everything possible to make me feel at home. They treated me very well; it was easy to learn to love them. Their affection made up for the reserved and often tight-lipped character of Diego, who in public treated me like a sister and in private scarcely spoke to me. The first weeks of trying to adapt were very interesting. Don Sebastián gave me a beautiful black mare with a white star on her forehead, and Diego sent me with an overseer to ride around the estate and meet the workers and the neighbors, who were located so far away that each visit took three or four days. Then he left me on my own. My husband would go off with his brother and father to the fields or to hunt; sometimes they camped for several days. I couldn't bear the boredom of the house with its endless task of coddling Susana's children, putting up sweets and preserves, cleaning and airing, and sewing and knitting; when my chores in the school or the pantry were over, I would put on a pair of Diego's trousers and gallop off. My mother-in-law had warned me not to ride like a man, astride the horse, because it would cause "female problems," a euphemism I never entirely elucidated, but no one could ride sidesaddle in that land of hills and boulders without breaking her neck in a spill. The landscape left me breathless, surprising me at every turn of the road; I was enthralled. I rode up hill and down valley to luxuriant forests, a paradise of larch, laurel, cinnamon, mania, myrtle, and the millenary araucarias, fine timber the Domínguezes processed at their sawmill. I was intoxicated by the scent of the damp forest, that sensual aroma of red earth, sap, and roots, the peace of the dense growth guarded by those silent green giants, the mysterious murmur of growing things, the song of unseen waters, the dance of the air through the branches, the whispering of roots and insects, the cooing of gentle ring doves and raucous cries of the chimangos. The trails ended at the sawmill, and beyond that I had to pick my way through thick growth, trusting the instinct of my mare, whose hooves sank into the oil-colored mud, thick and fragrant as vegetal blood. Light filtered through the immense cupola of the trees in bright oblique rays, but there were glacial zones where pumas lay in wait, spying on me with eyes like flames. I carried a shotgun tied to my saddle, but in an emergency I wouldn't have had time to reach it, and in any case I would never have fired. I took photographs of ancient forests, lakes with black sand, tempestuous rivers of singing stones, and impetuous volcanoes that crested the horizon like sleeping dragons in towers of ash. I also took photos of workers on the estate, which I then took to them as gifts, and they received with confusion; they did not know what to do with these images of themselves they had not solicited. I was fascinated by those faces lined by weather and poverty, but they didn't like to see themselves that way, as they were, with their rags and sorrows upon them; they wanted hand-tinted photographs for which they posed wearing the one suit they owned, the one from their wedding day, all well washed and combed, and with their children's noses wiped.

On Sundays, work was suspended and there was mass—when we had a priest with us—or "missions," which the women of the family performed by visiting the peons in their homes to teach them their catechism. In that way, with little gifts and persistence, they combated the native beliefs that were all tangled up with Christian saints. I didn't participate in the religious teaching, but I used the opportunity to get to know the campesinos. Many were pure Indians who still used words in their own tongues and kept their traditions alive; others were mestizos, all of them humble and timid in normal times, but pugnacious and noisy when they drank. Alcohol was a bitter balm that for a few hours alleviated the earthly burdens of the day but over time bored into their guts like a hostile rat. Drunkenness and gunfights were punished, as were other offenses such as cutting a tree without permission or letting animals roam outside the plot allotted to each of them for their own use. The penalty for stealing or insolence to superiors was a beating, but Don Sebastián was repelled by corporal punishment. He had also eliminated the right of the
pernada,
an old tradition from the colonial epoch that allowed
patrones
to deflower the daughters of the campesinos before they were married. He himself had practiced that custom in his youth, but after Doña Elvira appeared on the estate such liberties came to an end. Neither did he approve of visits to whorehouses in nearby villages, and he insisted that his own sons marry young to avoid temptation. Eduardo and Susana had married six years before, when both were twenty, and Diego, then seventeen, had been intended for a distant cousin who drowned in the lake before the engagement could be formalized. Eduardo, the elder brother, was more jovial than Diego. He had a talent for telling jokes and singing; he knew all the legends and stories of the region, liked to talk, and knew how to listen. He was very much in love with Susana; his eyes lit up when he saw her, and he was never impatient with her capricious humors. My sister-in-law suffered headaches that put her in terrible moods. She would lock herself in her room, refuse to eat, and there were instructions never to bother her for any reason, but once the headaches passed, she emerged totally recovered, smiling and affectionate; she seemed a different woman. I learned that she slept alone and that neither her husband nor her children went into her room unless invited; the door was always closed. The family was accustomed to her headaches and depressions, but they considered her desire for privacy almost an offense, just as it amazed them that without my permission I wouldn't allow anyone to go into the little darkroom where I developed my photographs, even though I explained the harm that a ray of light could do to my negatives. At Caleufu no doors or cabinets had a key except for the wine cellars and the strongbox in the office. There was pilfering, of course, but without major consequences, since usually Don Sebastián turned a blind eye. "These people are very ignorant, they don't steal as a vice, not even out of need, it's just a bad habit," he said, although in truth the workers had greater needs than the patron admitted. The campesinos were free men, but in practice they had lived on that land for generations, and it never occurred to them that it could be any other way. They had nowhere to go. Few lived to old age. Many children died in infancy from intestinal infections, rat bites, and pneumonia, the women in childbirth and from consumption, the men from accidents, infected wounds, and alcohol intoxication. The nearest hospital belonged to the Germans, and it boasted a Bavarian doctor of great renown, but that was the last recourse; lesser illnesses were treated with secrets of nature, prayer, and the help of the
meicas
, the female Indian healers, who knew the power of the regional plants better than anyone.

At the end of May winter descended without relief, its curtain of rain washing the landscape like a patient laundress and its early darkness forcing us to gather by four in the afternoon, turning nights into an eternity. I could no longer go out on my long horseback rides or to photograph people around the estate. We were isolated; the roads were mud pits, no one visited us. I entertained myself by experimenting in the darkroom with different techniques for developing film and by photographing the family. I was discovering that everything is related, is part of a tightly woven design. What at first view seems to be a tangle of coincidences is in the precise eye of the camera revealed in all its perfect symmetry. Nothing is casual, nothing is banal. Just as in the apparent vegetal chaos of the forest there is a strict relationship of cause and effect—for each tree there are hundreds of birds, for each bird there are thousands of insects, for each insect there are millions of organic particles—so, too, the campesinos at their labors or the family sheltering from winter inside the house are indispensable parts of a vast fresco. The essential is often invisible: the eye doesn't capture it, only the heart, but the camera at times obtains glimpses of that substance. That is what maestro Ribero attempted to capture in his art, and that is what he tried to teach me: to move beyond the merely documentary and touch the core, the very soul, of reality. Those subtle connections that took shape on the photographic paper moved me profoundly and encouraged me to continue experimenting. In the confinement of winter my curiosity grew; even as my surroundings became more suffocating and constraining and I hibernated among thick adobe walls, my mind grew more restless. I began obsessively to explore the contents of the house and the secrets of its inhabitants. I examined familiar objects with new eyes, as if seeing them for the first time, without taking anything for granted. I let myself be guided by intuition, setting aside preconceived ideas. "We see only what we want to see," Don Juan Ribero always said, and added that my job should be to show what no one had seen before. At first the Domínguezes posed with forced smiles, but soon they became accustomed to my stealthy presence and in the end ignored the camera; then I could capture them off guard, just as they were. The rain carried off the flowers and leaves, the house with its heavy furniture and large empty spaces closed itself to the outdoors, and we were trapped in a strange domestic captivity. We wandered through rooms lighted with candles, avoiding icy currents of air; the furniture creaked with a widow's moans, and you could hear the furtive little footsteps of mice going about their diligent tasks. Everything smelled of mud, of wet roof tiles, of musty clothes. The servants lighted braziers and chimneys, the maids brought us hot water bottles, blankets, and cups of steaming chocolate, but there was no way to trick the long winter. It was then that I succumbed to loneliness.

•

Diego was a ghost. I try to remember now some moment we shared, but I can see him only as a mime on a stage, voiceless and separated from me by the orchestra pit. I have in my mind—and in my collection of photographs from that winter—many images of him in various activities out in the fields and inside the house, always busy with others, never with me, distant and aloof. It was impossible to be close to him; there was an abysmal silence between us, and my attempts to exchange ideas or ask about his feelings shattered against his obstinate absence. He maintained that we'd said everything there was to say. If we had married, it was because we loved each other; what need was there to delve into the obvious? At first his muteness offended me, but then I realized that that was how he behaved with everyone except his nieces and nephews. He could be happy and tender with the children; maybe he wanted to have children as much as I, but every month we were disappointed. We didn't talk about that, either; it was another of the many subjects related to the body or to love that it wasn't proper to discuss. A few times I tried to tell him how I would like to be caressed, but he immediately became defensive; in his eyes, a decent woman shouldn't feel that kind of need, much less talk about it. Soon his reticence, my embarrassment, and our mutual pride erected a Great Wall of China between us. I would have given anything to talk to someone about what happened behind our closed door, but my mother-in-law was as ethereal as an angel, I had no real friendship with Susana, Adela was barely sixteen, and Nívea was too tar away, and I didn't dare put those concerns in writing. Diego and I continued to make love—to put some kind of name to it—now and then, always like that first time. Living together did not bring us closer, but that was painful only to me; he felt very comfortable with things as they were. We didn't argue. We treated each other with strained courtesy, although I would a thousand times over have preferred open warfare to our stubborn silences. My husband fled occasions to be alone with me; at night he stayed up playing cards until I, overcome with exhaustion, went of to bed. In the mornings he leapt from bed with the cock's crow, and even on Sundays, when the rest of the family got up late, he found excuses to leave early. I, on the other hand, indulged his every mood; I hurried to serve him in a thousand details, and did everything I could to attract him and to make his life pleasant. My heart raced in my breast when I heard his steps or his voice. I never tired of gazing at him—he seemed as handsome as the heroes in storybooks. In bed, trying not to wake him, I would run my hand over his broad, strong shoulders, his thick, wavy hair, the muscles of his legs and neck. I loved the odor of his sweat, like earth and horses when he came back from the fields, like English soap after his bath. I buried my face in his clothes to breathe in his man smell, since I didn't dare do that with his body. Now, with the perspective of time and the freedom I've won in recent years, I understand how I humbled myself for love. I put everything aside, from my personality to my work, to dream of a domestic paradise that wasn't to be mine.

All during the long and idle winter, the family had to use different resources of imagination to combat the tedium. All of them had a good ear for music; they played a variety of instruments, and so the evenings went by in improvised concerts. Susana usually delighted us robed in a tunic of frayed velvet with a Turkish turban on her head and her eyes outlined with kohl, singing in a hoarse gypsy voice. Doña Elvira and Adela organized sewing classes for the women and tried to keep the little school going, but only the children of the nearest tenants could defy the weather to come to class. Every day they prayed winter rosaries that attracted young and old alike because afterward they served hot chocolate and cake. Susana had the idea of preparing a play to celebrate the end of the century; that kept us busy for weeks, writing the libretto and learning our roles, setting up a stage in one of the barns, sewing costumes, and rehearsing. The subject, naturally, was a predictable allegory on the vices and misfortunes of the past defeated by the incandescent scimitar of science, technology, and twentieth-century progress. Besides the play, we had contests of target shooting and dictionary words, championships of every kind, from chess to making puppets and constructing villages of matchsticks, but there were still hours to spare. I made Adela my assistant in the darkroom, and we exchanged books on the sly; I lent her the ones I was sent from Santiago, and she gave me her mystery novels, which I devoured with passion. I became an expert detective; usually I guessed the identity of the murderer before page eighty. Our supply was limited, and no matter how we tried to stretch out the reading, the books went fast; then Adela and I played at changing the stories or inventing complicated crimes the other had to solve. "What are you two whispering about?" Doña Adela often asked. "Nothing, Mama, we're planning a murder," Adela would reply, with her innocent little rabbit smile. Doña Elvira would laugh, unable to imagine how true her daughter's answer was.