Portrait in Sepia

  From her invalid’s chair, Doña Elvira observed family life without missing a detail, and she was aware of Diego’s prolonged absences and my desolation; she put two and two together and reached some conclusions. Her delicacy, and the very Chilean habit of not talking about emotions, prevented her from confronting the problem directly, but in the many hours we were alone together the closeness between us grew stronger and stronger; we came to be like mother and daughter. So, discreetly, gradually, she told me about the difficulties she had had with her husband in the beginning. She had married very young and hadn’t had her first child until five years later, after several miscarriages that left her battered in heart and soul. In those days Sebastián Domínguez was immature and had little sense of responsibility in his married life; he was impetuous, a carouser, and a fornicator—she didn’t use that word, of course, I doubt if she knew it. Doña Elvira had felt isolated, far from her family, alone and frightened, convinced that her marriage had been a terrible mistake from which her only escape was death. “But God heard my pleas; we had Eduardo, and overnight Sebastián changed completely. There is no better father or husband than he is; we have been together for more than thirty years, and every day I give thanks to heaven for the happiness we share. You must pray, daughter, that will help very much,” she counseled. I prayed, but it must not have been with the proper intensity and persistence, because nothing changed.

  My suspicions had begun months before, but I dismissed them, disgusted with myself; I couldn’t accept them without exposing something evil in my own character. I kept telling myself that such conjectures could only come from the devil, thoughts that took root and grew like lethal tumors in my brain, ideas I had to combat mercilessly, but the termite of rancor was stronger than my good intentions. First it was the photographs of the family I had showed to Ivan Radovic. What wasn’t evident to the naked eye—because of our habit of seeing only what we want to see, as my maestro Juan Ribero used to tell me—was there in black and white in the photos. The unmistakable language of body gestures, gazes, was stark in the prints. After those first suspicions, I turned more and more to the camera. Using the pretext of making an album for Doña Elvira, I was constantly photographing the family, pictures I developed in the privacy of my studio and studied with perverse attention. In that way I put together a miserable collection of vague proofs, something so subtle that only I, poisoned by wrath, could see. With the camera before my face, like a mask that made me invisible, I could focus on a scene and at the same time maintain a glacial distance. Toward the end of April, when temperatures began to drop, clouds crowned the peaks of the volcanoes, and nature began to go into seclusion in preparation for autumn, I considered that with the signs revealed in the photographs I had enough, and I began the odious task of watching Diego like any jealous woman. When finally I realized what that claw buried in my throat was, and could give it its dictionary name, I felt I was sinking in quicksand. Jealousy. The person who hasn’t felt it cannot know how much it hurts, or imagine the madness committed in its name. In my thirty years I have suffered it only once, but I was burned so brutally that I have scars that still haven’t healed, and I hope never will, as a reminder to avoid that feeling in the future. Diego wasn’t mine—no person can belong to another—and the fact that I was his wife gave me no right over him or his feelings; love is a free contract that begins with a spark and can end the same way. A thousand dangers threaten love, but if the couple defends it, it can be saved; it can grow like a tree and give shade and fruit, but that happens only when both partners participate. Diego never did; our relationship was damned from the start. I realize that today, but then I was blind, at first with pure rage and later with grief.

  Spying on him, watch in hand, I began to be aware that my husband’s absences did not coincide with his explanations. When supposedly he had gone out hunting with Eduardo, he would come back hours earlier or later than his brother; when the other men in the family were at the sawmill or at the roundup branding cattle, he would suddenly show up in the patio, and later, if I raised the subject at the table, I would find that he hadn’t been with them at any time during the day. When he went to town for supplies he would come back without anything, presumably because he hadn’t found what he was looking for, although it might be something as common as an ax or a saw. In the countless hours the family spent together, he avoided conversation at all cost; he was always the one who organized the card games or asked Susana to sing. If she came down with one of her headaches, he was quickly bored and would go off on his horse with his shotgun over his shoulder. I couldn’t follow him on horseback without his seeing me or raising suspicion in the family, but I could keep an eye on him when he was around the house. That was how I noticed that sometimes he got up in the middle of the night, and that he didn’t go to the kitchen to get something to eat, as I had always thought, but dressed, went out to the patio, disappeared for an hour or two, then quietly slipped back to bed. Following him in the darkness was easier than during the day, when a dozen eyes were watching us, it was all a matter of staying awake and avoiding wine at dinner and the bedtime opium drops. One night in mid-May I noticed when he slipped out of bed, and in the pale light of the oil lamp we always kept lit before the cross, I watched him put on his pants and boots, pick up his shirt and jacket, and leave the room. I waited a few instants, then quickly got out of bed and followed him, with my heart about to burst out of my breast. I couldn’t see him very well in the shadows of the house, but when he went out on the patio his silhouette stood out sharply in the light of the full moon, which for moments at a time shone bright in the heavens. The sky was streaked with clouds that cloaked everything in darkness when they hid the moon. I heard the dogs bark and was afraid they would come to me and betray my presence, but they didn’t; then I understood that Diego had tied them up earlier. My husband made a complete circle of the house and then walked rapidly toward one of the stables where the family’s personal mounts were kept, the ones not used in the fields; he swung the crossbar that fastened the door and went inside. I stood waiting, protected by the blackness of an elm a few yards from the barn, barefoot and wearing nothing but a thin nightgown, not daring to take another step, convinced that Diego would come out on horseback, and I wouldn’t be able to follow him. I waited for a period that seemed very long, but nothing happened. Suddenly I glimpsed a light through the slit of the open door, maybe a candle or small lantern. My teeth were chattering, and I was shivering from cold and fright. I was about to give up and go back to bed when I saw another figure approaching from the east—obviously not from the big house—and also go into the stable, closing the door behind. I let almost fifteen minutes go by before I made a decision, then forced myself to take a few steps. I was stiff from the cold and barely able to move. I crept toward the door, terrified, unable to imagine how Diego would react if he found me spying on him, but incapable of retreating. Softly I pushed the door, which opened without resistance because the bar was on the outside and it couldn’t be secured from the inside, and slipped like a thief through the narrow opening. It was dark in the stable, but a pale light flickered far at the back, and I tiptoed in that direction, almost not breathing—unnecessary precautions since the straw deadened my footsteps and several of the horses were awake; I could hear them shifting and snuffling in their stalls.

  In the faint light of a lantern hanging from a beam and swayed by the wind filtering between the wooden timbers, I saw them. They had spread blankets out in a clump of hay, like a nest, where she was lying on her back, dressed in a heavy, unbuttoned overcoat under which she was naked. Her arms and her legs were spread open, her head tilted toward her shoulder, her black hair covering her face, and her skin shining like blond wood in the delicate, orangeish glow of the lantern. Diego, wearing nothing but his shirt, was kneeling before her, licking her sex. There was such absolute abandon in Susana’s position and such contained passion in Diego’s actions that I understood in an instant how irrelevant I was to all
that. In truth, I didn’t exist, nor did Eduardo or the three children, no one else, only the two of them and the inevitability of their lovemaking. My husband had never caressed me in that way. It was easy to see that they had been like this a thousand times before, that they had loved each other for years; I understood finally that Diego had married me because he needed a screen to hide his love affair with Susana. In one instant the pieces of that painful jigsaw puzzle fell into place; I could explain his indifference to me, the absences that coincided with Susana’s headaches, Diego’s tense relationship with his brother Eduardo, the deceit in his behavior toward the rest of the family, and how he arranged always to be near her, touching her, his foot against hers, his hand on her elbow or her shoulder, and sometimes, as if coincidentally at her waist or her neck, unmistakable signs the photographs had revealed to me. I remembered how much Diego loved her children, and I speculated that maybe they weren’t his nephews but his sons, all three with blue eyes, the mark of the Domínguezes. I stood motionless, gradually turning to ice, as voluptuously they made love, savoring every stroke, every moan, unhurried, as if they had all the rest of their lives. They did not seem like a couple of lovers in a hasty clandestine meeting but like a pair of newlyweds in the second week of their honeymoon, when passion is still intact, but with added confidence and the mutual knowledge of each other’s flesh. I, nevertheless, had never experienced intimacy of that kind with my husband, nor would I have been able to invent it in my most audacious fantasies. Diego’s tongue was running over Susana’s inner thighs, from her ankles upward, pausing between her legs and then back down again, while his hands moved from her waist to her round, opulent breasts, playing with her nipples, hard and lustrous as grapes. Susana’s soft, smooth body shivered and undulated; she was a fish in the river, her head turning from side to side in the desperation of her pleasure, her hair spread across her face, her lips open in a long moan, her hands seeking Diego to guide him over the beautiful topography of her body, until his tongue made her explode in pleasure. Susana arched backward from the ecstasy that shot through her like lightning, and she uttered a hoarse cry that he choked off with his mouth upon hers. Then Diego took her in his arms, rocking her, petting her like a cat, whispering a rosary of secret words into her ear with a delicacy and tenderness I never thought possible in him. At some moment she sat up in the straw, took off her coat, and began to kiss him, first his forehead, then his eyelids, his temples, lingering on his mouth; her tongue mischievously explored Diego’s ears, swerved to his Adam’s apple, brushed across his throat, her teeth nibbling his nipples, her fingers combing the hair on his chest. Then it was his turn to abandon himself completely to her caresses; he lay facedown on the blanket and she sat astride him, biting the nape of his neck, covering his shoulders with brief playful kisses, moving down to his buttocks, exploring, smelling, savoring him, and leaving a trail of saliva as she went. Diego turned over, and her mouth enveloped his erect, pulsing penis in an interminable labor of pleasure, of give and take in the most profound intimacy conceivable, until he could not wait any longer and threw himself on her, penetrated her, and they rolled like enemies in a tangle of arms and legs and kisses and panting and sighs and expressions of love that I had never heard before. Then they dozed in a warm embrace, covered with blankets and Susana’s overcoat like a pair of innocent children. Silently I retreated and went back to the house, while the icy cold of the night spread inexorably through my soul.

  A chasm opened before me; I felt vertigo pulling me downward, a temptation to leap and annihilate myself in the depths of suffering and fear. Diego’s betrayal and my dread of the future left me floating with nothing to cling to, lost, disconsolate. The fury that had shaken me at first lasted only briefly, then I was crushed by a sensation of death, of absolute agony. I had entrusted my life to Diego, he had promised me his protection as a husband; I believed literally the ritual words of marriage: that we were joined until death us did part. There was no way out. The scene in the stable had confronted me with a reality that I had perceived for a long time but had refused to face. My first impulse was to run to the big house, to stand in the middle of the patio and howl like a madwoman, to wake the family, the servants, the dogs, and make them witnesses to adultery and incest. My timidity, however, was stronger than my desperation. Silently, feeling my way in the dark, I dragged myself back to the room I shared with Diego and sat on my bed shivering and sobbing, my tears soaking into the neck of my nightgown. In the following minutes or hours I had time to think about what I had seen and to accept my powerlessness. It wasn’t a sexual affair that joined Diego and Susana, it was a proven love; they were prepared to run every risk and sweep aside any obstacle that stood in their way, rolling onward like an uncontainable river of molten lava. Neither Eduardo nor I counted; we were disposable, barely insects in the enormity of their passion. I should tell my brother-in-law before anyone else, I decided, but when I pictured the blow such a confession would be to that good man, I knew I wouldn’t have the courage to do it. Eduardo would discover it himself some day, or with luck, he might never know. Perhaps he suspected, as I did, but didn’t want to confirm it in order to maintain the fragile equilibrium of his illusions; he had the three children, his love for Susana, and the monolithic cohesion of his clan.

  Diego came back sometime during the night, shortly before dawn. By the light of the oil lamp he saw me sitting on my bed, my face puffy from crying, unable to speak, and he thought I had woken with another of my nightmares. He sat beside me and tried to draw me to his chest, as he had on similar occasions, but instinctively I pulled away from him, and I must have worn an expression of terrible anger, because immediately he moved back to his own bed. We sat looking at each other, he surprised and I despising him, until the truth took form between the two of us, as undeniable and conclusive as a dragon.

  “What are we going to do now?” were the only words I could utter.

  He didn’t try to deny anything or justify himself; he defied me with a steely stare, ready to defend his love in any way necessary, even if he had to kill me. Then the dam of pride, good breeding, and politeness that had held me back during months of frustration collapsed, and silent reproaches were converted into a flood of recriminations that I couldn’t contain, that he listened to quietly and without emotion, attentive to every word. I accused him of everything that had gone through my mind and then begged him to reconsider; I told him that I was willing to forgive and forget, that we could go far away somewhere no one knew us, and start over. By the time my words and tears were exhausted, it was broad daylight. Diego crossed the distance that separated our beds, sat beside me, took my hands, and calmly and seriously explained that he had loved Susana for many years and that their love was the most important thing in his life, more compelling than honor, than the other members of his family, than the salvation of his very soul. To make me feel better, he said, he could promise that he would give her up, but it would be an empty promise. He added that he had tried to do that when he went to Europe, leaving her behind for six months, but it hadn’t worked. Then he had gone so far as to marry me, to see whether in that way he might break that terrible tie to his sister-in-law, but far from helping him in the decision to leave her, marriage had made it easier because it diluted the suspicions of Eduardo and the rest of the family. He was, however, happy that finally I had discovered the truth because it was painful to him to deceive me. He had nothing to say against me, he assured me. I was a good wife, and he deeply regretted that he couldn’t give me the love I deserved. He felt miserable every time he slipped away from me to be with Susana; it would be a relief not to lie to me anymore. Everything was in the open now.

  “And Eduardo doesn’t count?” I asked.

  “What happens between him and Susana is up to them. It’s the relation between you and me that we must decide now.”

  “You have already decided, Diego. I don’t have anything to do here, I will go back home,” I told him.

  “This i
s your house now, we are husband and wife, Aurora. What God has joined together you cannot put asunder.”

  “You are the one who has violated holy commandments,” I pointed out.

  “We can live together like brother and sister. You won’t want for anything, I will always respect you, you will be protected and free to devote yourself to your photographs, or whatever you want. The only thing I ask is, please not to create a scandal.”