Portrait in Sepia

  My grandmother clung to Amanda Lowell with superstitious affection; she believed that as long as she was near, Matías wouldn’t die. Paulina was not on intimate terms with anyone, except me at times; she was convinced that most people are hopeless clods and said that to anyone who wanted to listen, which was not the best way to win friends. But that Scots courtesan managed to penetrate the armor my grandmother wore to protect herself. It was impossible to conceive of two women more different. La Lowell wanted nothing; she lived for the day, unfettered, free, fearless; she wasn’t afraid of poverty, loneliness, or infirmity. She accepted everything with good grace; for her, life was an entertaining voyage that inevitably led to old age and death. There was no point in accumulating wealth since in the end, she maintained, we all go to the grave in our birthday suit. She had left behind the young seductress who had stirred so many hearts in San Francisco, and long gone was the beauty who had conquered Paris. Now she was a woman in her fifties, with no affectations and no regrets. My grandmother never tired of hearing about her past, or about the famous people she had known, as they leafed through the albums of newspaper clippings and photographs—in several of which she was young and radiant, with a boa constrictor coiled about her body. “The poor creature died of seasickness on a voyage; snakes are not good travelers,” she told us. Because she was so cosmopolitan and so attractive— able without intending it to outcharm much younger and prettier women—she became the soul of my grandmother’s soirées, enlivening them with her terrible Spanish and her Scots-accented French. There was no subject she couldn’t discuss, no book she hadn’t read, no important city in Europe she didn’t know. My father, who loved her and was greatly indebted to her, said she was a dilettante, that she knew a little about everything and a lot about nothing, but she had more than enough imagination to make up for what she lacked in knowledge or experience. For Amanda Lowell there was no grander city than Paris and no more pretentious society than the French, the only place where socialism with its disastrous lack of elegance would never have a chance to triumph. In that Paulina del Valle was in complete agreement. The two women discovered that not only did they laugh at the same nonsense, including the mythological bed, they were also in agreement in nearly all fundamental matters. One day when they were having tea at a small marble table in the wrought-iron and glass gallery, they lamented not having met earlier. With or without Feliciano and Matías, they would have been great friends, they decided. Paulina did everything possible to get Amanda to stay; she rained gifts on her and introduced her to society as if she were an empress, but La Lowell was a bird that couldn’t live in a golden cage. She stayed a couple of months, but finally she confessed in private to my grandmother that she didn’t have the heart to watch Matías’s decline and that, with all frankness, Santiago seemed a very provincial city despite the luxuries and ostentation of its upper class, which were comparable to those of European nobility. She was bored; her place was in Paris, where she had spent the best part of her life. My grandmother wanted to give her a farewell ball that would make history in Santiago and that the cream of society would attend because no one would dare reject an invitation from Paulina del Valle, even after hearing the rumors circulating about the hazy past of her guest, but Amanda Lowell convinced her that Matías was too ill and that a gala under those circumstances would be in the very worst taste, and, besides, she had nothing to wear for such an occasion. Paulina offered her gowns with the best of intentions, never imagining how she offended La Lowell by insinuating they wore the same size.

  Three weeks after the departure of Amanda Lowell, the maid who looked after my father sounded the alarm. The doctor was summoned immediately, and in a thrice the house was filled with people: my grandmother’s friends, politicians from the government, family members, a quantity of monks and nuns, including the frayed fortune-grubbing priest who now was hanging around my grandmother with the hope that the sorrow of losing her son would soon dispatch her to a better life. Paulina, however, was not planning to depart this world; she had some time ago resigned herself to the tragedy of her eldest son, and I think she saw the end come with relief—witnessing that slow calvary was much worse than burying him. I was not allowed to see my father because it was supposed that a dying man was not an appropriate spectacle for a little girl and that I had suffered enough anguish with the murder of my cousin and other recent violence, but I was able to say a brief good-bye thanks to Frederick Williams, who opened the door for me at a moment when there was no one else around. He took my hand and led me to the bed where Matías Rodríguez de Santa Cruz lay, of whom nothing tangible remained, barely a handful of translucent bones buried among pillows and embroidered sheets. He was still breathing, but his soul was already traveling through other dimensions. “Good-bye, Papa,” I told him. It was the first time I had called him that. He agonized for two days more, and at the dawn of the third day he died like a baby chick.

  I was thirteen when Severo del Valle gave me a modern camera that used paper instead of old-fashioned plates, one of the first in Chile. My father had died shortly before, and the nightmares were tormenting me so that I didn’t want to go to bed and at night would wander through the house like a lost specter, followed closely by poor Caramelo, who always was a dumb, cowering dog, until my grandmother Paulina took pity and accepted us both in her huge gilded bed. Her large, warm, perfumed body took up at least half, and I would huddle on the other side, trembling with terror, with Caramelo at my feet. “What am I going to do with you two?” my grandmother would sigh, half asleep. It was a rhetorical question, because neither the dog nor I had any future. There was a general consensus in the family that I was “going to come to a bad end.” By then the first woman doctor had graduated in Chile, and others had entered the university. That gave Nívea the idea that I could do the same, if only to defy the family and society in general, but it was obvious that I didn’t have the least aptitude for studying. Then Severo del Valle appeared with the camera and set it in my lap. It was a beautiful Kodak, precious in the details of every screw, elegant, smooth, perfect, made for the hands of an artist. I still use it, it never fails. No girl my age had a toy like that. I picked it up with reverence and sat looking at it without any idea how to use it. “Let’s see if you can photograph the dark shadows in your nightmares,” Severo del Valle said as a joke, never suspecting that that would be my one objective for months, and that in the task of deciphering that nightmare I would end up in love with the world. My grandmother took me to the Plaza de Armas, to the studio of Don Juan Ribero, the best photographer in Santiago, a curt man as dry as stale bread on the outside, but generous and sentimental inside.

  “I’ve brought you my granddaughter to be your apprentice,” my grandmother said, laying a check on the artist’s desk while I clutched her skirttail with one hand and my brand-new camera in the other.

  Don Juan Ribero, who was a half head shorter than my grand-mother and half her weight, settled his eyeglasses on his nose, carefully read the amount written on the check, and then handed it back to her, looking her up and down with infinite scorn.

  “The amount isn’t a problem. You set the price,” my grandmother wavered.

  “It isn’t a question of price, but of talent, señora,” he replied, guiding Paulina del Valle toward the door.

  During that exchange I’d had time to take a quick look around. Ribero’s work covered the walls: hundreds of portraits of people of all ages. Ribero was the favorite of the upper class, the photographer of the social pages, but the people gazing at me from the walls of his studio were not bigwig conservatives or beautiful debutantes, but Indians, miners, fishermen, laundresses, poor children, old men, many women like the ones my grandmother helped with her loans from the ladies club. There I saw represented the multifaceted and tormented face of Chile. Those people in the photographs touched something deep inside me; I wanted to know the story of every one of them. I felt a pressure in my chest, like a closed fist, and an uncontainable desire to cry,
but I swallowed my emotion and followed my grandmother out with my head high. In the carriage she tried to console me: I shouldn’t worry, she said, we would get someone else to teach me to operate the camera, photographers were a dime a dozen; what did that secondrate lowborn think, anyway, talking in that arrogant tone to her, Paulina del Valle! And she grumbled on and on, but I wasn’t listening; I had decided that no one but Juan Ribero would be my teacher. The next day I left the house before my grandmother was up. I told the coachman to take me to the studio and planted myself in the street, prepared to wait forever. Don Juan Ribero showed up about eleven, found me at his door, and ordered me to go home. I was shy then—I still am—and very proud; I wasn’t used to asking for anything because from the time I was born I was coddled like a queen, but my determination must have been very strong. I didn’t move from the door. A couple of hours later, the photographer came out, threw me a furious glance, and started walking down the street. When he came back from his lunch, he found me still there with my camera clutched to my chest. “All right,” he muttered, defeated, “but I warn you, little girl, that I won’t give you any special consideration. Here you come to obey without talking back and to learn quickly, is that clear?” I nodded silently, because my voice was stuck in my throat. My grandmother, a veteran at negotiation, agreed to accept my passion for photography as long as I would devote the same number of hours to scholarly pursuits traditional in boys’ schools, including Latin and theology, because according to her it wasn’t mental ability I was lacking, just discipline.

  “Why don’t you send me to public school?” I asked, intrigued by rumors about lay education for girls, something that inspired terror among my aunts.

  “That’s for people of a different class, I would never allow that,” my grandmother said decisively.

  So once again teachers filed through the house, several of whom were priests willing to instruct me in exchange for the juicy gifts my grandmother lavished on their congregations. I was lucky; in general they indulged me, because they didn’t expect my brain to function as well as a boy’s. Don Juan Ribero, on the other hand, demanded much more from me; he held that a woman has to work a thousand times harder than a man to win intellectual or artistic respect. He taught me everything I know about photography, from the choice of a lens to the laborious process of developing; I never had any other teacher. When I left his studio two years later, we were friends. Now he is seventy-four years old, and he hasn’t worked for several years because he’s blind, but he still helps me and guides my hesitant steps. Seriousness is his motto. He is passionate about life, and blindness has not prevented him from continuing to survey the world. He has developed a kind of second sight. The way other blind people have someone to read to them, he has various helpers who observe and report to him. His students, his friends, and his children visit him every day and take turns describing what they’ve seen: a landscape, a scene, a face, an effect of light. They have to learn to observe very closely in order to endure Don Juan Ribero’s exhaustive interrogation. As a result their lives change; they can’t any longer wander through the world in their old casual way because they have to see with the maestro’s eyes. I, too, often visit him. He welcomes me in the eternal penumbra of his apartment on Calle Monjitas, sitting in his comfortable chair in front of the window with his cat on his knees, always hospitable and wise. I keep him informed about technical advances in the field of photography, describe in detail each image in the books I order from New York and Paris, consult him about my doubts. He is up-to-date on everything that happens in this profession; he becomes passionate about different tendencies and theories, and he knows the master photographers in Europe and the United States by name. He has always ferociously opposed the artificial pose, scenes arranged in the studio, the cluttered prints made with superimposed negatives so much in mode a few years ago. He believes in photography as a personal testimony, a way of seeing the world, and that way must be honest, using technology as a medium for capturing reality, not distorting it. When I went through a phase in which I photographed girls in huge glass receptacles, he asked why I did it with such scorn that I did not continue down that road, but when I described to him the portrait I took of a family of itinerant circus artists, naked and vulnerable, he was immediately interested. I had taken several photos of that family posed before a rickety covered wagon that served as transport and living quarters, when a little girl about four or five had come out, totally naked. That gave me the idea of asking all of them to take off their clothes. They did it with no ill will and posed with the same intent concentration as when dressed. It’s one of my best photographs, one of the few that has won prizes. It was soon evident that I am more attracted to people than to objects or landscapes. When I shoot a portrait there’s a relationship with the model that even if very brief is nonetheless a connection. The plate reveals not only the image but the feelings that flow between subject and photographer. Don Juan Ribero liked my portraits, very different from his. “You feel an empathy for your models, Aurora, you don’t try to dominate them, you try to understand them; that’s why you succeed in exposing their souls,” he said. He encouraged me to leave the safe walls of the studio, take my camera outside, look with my eyes wide open, overcome my shyness, lose my fear, approach people. I realized that usually I was welcomed, and that the subjects for my lens posed with all seriousness, even though I was a young girl: the camera inspired respect and confidence, people opened up, gave themselves to it. I was limited by my youth; it wasn’t until many years later that I was able to travel across the country, witness strikes, go into the mines, hospitals, the shacks of the poor, forgotten little schools, the cheap boardinghouses, the dusty plazas where retired old men sat and stared, the fields and fishing villages. “Light is the language of photography, the soul of the world. There is no light without shadow, just as there is no happiness without pain,” Don Juan Ribero told me seventeen years ago during the lesson he gave me that first day in his studio on the Plaza de Armas. I have never forgotten. But I don’t want to get ahead of myself. I intend to tell this story step by step, word by word, as it should be told.

  So while I was going along, excited about photography and disturbed by changes in my body, which was taking on unfamiliar proportions, my grandmother Paulina wasted no time contemplating her navel but began mulling over new business projects in her Phoenician merchant’s brain. That helped her recover from the loss of her son Matías, and made her feel important at an age when other women have one foot in the grave. She was rejuvenated, her gaze brighter and her step lighter; soon she took off her mourning and sent her husband to Europe on a very secret mission. The faithful Frederick Williams was gone for seven months, and returned laden with gifts for her and for me, and good tobacco for him, the only vice we ever knew him to have. In his luggage he had smuggled thousands of useless-looking little dry sticks about fifteen centimeters long, which turned out to be stock from the best vines of Bordeaux, which my grandmother planned to plant in Chilean soil to produce a decent wine. “We are going to compete with French wines,” she had explained to her husband before his voyage. It was pointless for Frederick Williams to rebut that the French had centuries of advantage over us, that conditions there are Edenic, while Chile is a country of atmospheric and political catastrophes, and that a project of such magnitude would take years of work.

  “Neither you nor I is young enough to await the results of this experiment,” he demurred with a sigh.

  “Using that criterion, we’d never get anywhere, Frederick. Do you know how many generations of craftsmen it would take to build a cathedral?”

  “Paulina, old girl, we are not speaking of cathedrals. At any moment, either of us could suffer grave cardiac distress.”

  “This wouldn’t be the century of science and technology if every inventor thought about his own mortality, now would it? I want to found a dynasty so the name del Valle will endure in the world, even if it’s on the bottom of the glass of every drunk who bu
ys my wine,” my grandmother replied.

  So the Englishman resigned himself and set off on his safari to France, while Paulina del Valle wove together the threads of the undertaking in Chile. The first Chilean vines had been planted by missionaries in the time of the colony, and they produced a local wine that was quite good—so good, in fact, that Spain banned it to avoid competition with those of the mother country. After independence, the industry expanded. Paulina wasn’t the only one who’d had the idea of producing quality wine, but while others bought land in the vicinity of Santiago, for the convenience of not having to travel more than one day, she looked for property farther away, not merely because it was cheaper but because it was better suited to growing grapes. Without telling anyone what she had in mind, she had the soil analyzed and considered the vagaries of water and constancy of the winds, beginning with the lands belonging to the del Valle family. She paid a pittance for vast abandoned properties no one valued because their only source of water was rain. The most savory grape, the one that produces the wines with best texture and aroma, the sweetest and most generous, doesn’t grow in rich soil but in stony land; the plant, with a mother’s obstinacy, overcomes obstacles to thrust its roots deep into the ground and take advantage of every drop of water. That, my grandmother explained to me, is how flavors are concentrated in the grape.