The hacienda was by far the grandest home he had ever seen, and he secretly wished his grandparents lived there year-round. His great-grandfather Don Isadore was the only one, aside from the servants, who maintained a full-time residence there.
Don Isadore, like his son-in-law, Salomé’s father, had also been a doctor. Now ninety-two years old, he was an intimidating figure to the young children. Although he spent the majority of his day laboring over his experiments, cultivating strange, hybrid fruit trees in the garden, he did so while dressed in formal attire. Rafael had no memory of his great-grandfather in anything but a dark black suit, starched white shirt, and one of his many intricate, brocaded vests. Tall and slender as a cat’s tail, he maintained an ample head of smooth white hair and full mustache. He seldom spoke, preferring to stare and to nod, as if those gestures were words themselves, interpreted by those who knew him well enough after all these years.
His wife, Salomé’s grandmother, had died before Salomé was born. But the house, originally made of stucco and mud walls, still retained a trace of her former presence.
The entrance to the house was marked by tall iron gates, the decorating finials the shape of small, delicate birds. And inside the house, the expansive wooden floor ebbed and flowed like a large chestnut-colored river, the occasional board popping up or bowing like a small, undulating wave. Each room was designed with its own entranceway, usually an arch shaped out of white plaster. Only the room that had been Don Isadore’s wife’s remained different, for that one had a circular door.
Inside, it remained exactly as the former mistress of the house had left it, with Chinese wallpaper completely covered with images of a thousand birds. In delicate black ink, colored by hand in a palette of pastel hues, every variety of bird imaginable was rendered. Tall, elegant cranes posed on one slender foot, hummingbirds with straight, narrow beaks and rosebud breasts nestled in pale green blades of grass, and dusty brown sparrows all fluttered over washes of delicate blue sky.
The birdcages scattered over the rococo furniture, however, were now empty. The iron baskets with peaked domes and filigreed borders were but a sad reminder of the birds that had once sung to the woman the doctor had loved.
She had been called pequeña canaria—“little canary”—by those close to her, as her sitting room was an aviary completely designed by her own hand. She had waited nearly two years for the Chinese wallpaper to arrive, and at night, as she lay down to sleep in her elaborately carved four-poster bed, she would close her eyes and dream of seeing it unrolled for the first time.
She imagined each bird expertly painted. The feathers so real they seemed to rustle off the paper. She envisioned the reams of paper on their voyage across the sea, the rolls carefully packed in silk tissue, boxed in split-bamboo crates. She slept on pale lemon sheets, her hair raven against the dyed cotton. And when she slumbered, the birds from their cages serenaded her with their tiny chirpings, a melody that, until her untimely death, she associated with love.
Rafael had always been fearful of the little canary woman’s former bedchamber. He seldom went in there, although he loved to explore the hacienda’s other rooms. The heavy brown furniture was sturdy to play on, and he created fortresses in which he could spend hours in endless amusement. But his great-grandmother’s room was too foreboding. When he was four years old, his great-aunt came to spend a week at the hacienda. Never married, she reveled in her role as cranky spinster. She dressed only in black woolen clothes, even at the height of summer, her pale, lined face staring down at him from a stiff, satin collar.
At night, she would come into his room and tell him stories. Not stories like his mother or father would tell (his favorite being the one of the uncollected fortune his paternal grandfather had left in Spain). The elderly woman’s stories were far more terrifying. Worse yet, she seemed to take great delight in hearing the young Rafael squeal with fear.
She told him how her veins were filled with floating needles from the pins she had swallowed over her years of sewing. She pulled her black crepe sleeve up to her elbow and revealed a stretch of white arm, ribboned with blue veins.
“The needles float through here,” she said, pointing to the crosshatch of veins and tiny vessels. In the moonlight that streamed in through his bedroom window, her skin looked so white that it too seemed almost blue.
But her story that frightened him most was of how Don Isadore’s late wife had died.
“She was attacked by that which she loved most,” his great-aunt whispered into his ear. “Her birds.”
Rafael’s eyes were now wild with fright, his linen drawn tightly to his chin.
“Your great-grandfather was jealous of those birds, envious of how she spent her days caring for them, feeding them from her palm. One night, after she had rejected his advances of love, he decided to play a cruel joke on her. He waited until she was deep in slumber, then, stealthily as a thief, went to the porcelain container where she kept her specially milled seed and generously sprinkled it all over her hair, her body, and her sheets. Then, he went to the cages, where the birds now slept, opened their doors, and let them fly to her bed.
“Hunger came over them and they knew not whom they were feeding from. As the birds got tangled in her hair and their beaks pecked at her breasts, she awakened suddenly, screaming with fright.
“She died of a heart attack right before your great-grandfather’s eyes.”
Rafael was shaking. “Can what you say be true?” he asked, fear now beading him with sweat.
“Yes, absolutely,” she lied convincingly, her yellow teeth gleaming like a row of corn. “Your great-grandfather was a sneaky little devil. I should know. He is my brother.”
“But what did he do?” Rafael cried. “Why is he not in jail?”
“Ah…that is why he is so clever. He swept up all the remaining birdseed and closed the door. When the servants arrived the next morning, they discovered the birds nestled at the mistress’s head and fingertips. Her body cold as ice.” The old woman looked straight into Rafael’s terrified eyes. “They buried her the next day, and Don Isadore ordered the birds to be poisoned and the circular door of her bedchamber forever shut.”
Rafael was now upright in his bed. “I hate him!” he shouted. “I will never kiss him hello again!”
“Don’t hate him,” she whispered to him before standing up from her chair to bid him good night. “It’s bad for the soul.”
In the moonlight, Rafael’s eyes were shining like two round, polished shards of coal.
“And do not fear, dear one,” she whispered as she slipped out the door, “pequeña canaria has been known to visit him at night. Half woman, half bird, she hovers over his canopy and sings to him in eerie chirps, those haunting, beautiful songs of love.”
Even before hearing this ghostly tale, Rafael had been fearful of Don Isadore. Aside from his formal attire and wizened face, he was far too eccentric for the young boy to understand. He spent his days in the orchard where he cultivated strange fruits, creating hybrids the world had never even dreamt of. He tied a sapling of a cherry tree with that of an orange tree and produced fruit similar to a blood orange, the flesh a gleaming red.
He would leave for the orchard before the others had even touched their breakfast, his pocket watch dangling from an intricately patterned vest. With white hair and blue eyes, black coat and sterling-tipped cane, he walked through the fields, nodding to the servants as he went to the place where he would remain for the day completely undisturbed.
He would return at dinnertime, where his daughter, now a woman in her mid sixties, a grandmother herself, sat at the seat she had once sat in as a child, her own daughter and three grandchildren in the seats surrounding the long Gothic table. The husbands had chosen to remain in the city until August, when they would take two weeks’ leave. They too dreaded being in the company of the eerie doctor.
The strangest thing he did, however, that which neither Salomé nor her mother had an answer for, was the rit
ual Don Isadore performed after every formal meal, a ritual that, according to her and her mother, he had always performed: after every dinner, he summoned his snake.
At the sound of the patriarch’s cane hitting the wooden floor, the snake would slide from a tiny hole in the mud wall and slither to his feet. The doctor’s pale blue eyes would brighten, and his face would seem to fold into itself as he laughed.
For Rafael, there was nothing more terrifying. He would pull his knees close to his chest, his toes gripping his seat, and close his eyes tightly shut. Salomé and her mother just shook their heads, knowing there was little they could do or say.
The snake would slither around each seat eating the scraps that had fallen to the floor. Then, once it had returned to where Don Isadore sat, he would tap his cane and the snake would quietly retreat into its hole, deep into the wall of the cavernous house.
Still, Rafael loved the hacienda. He loved the animals, the pigs and the hens, the horses and the cows. He loved that there were so many rooms to play in, and that the driver would take him into town in the carriage whenever he had the whim. At the hacienda, his mother allowed him to be spoiled by his grandmother, who cherished him as if he were her own son.
In her room, Doña Olivia secretly kept her own little treasures. Sculpted marzipan, cans of whipped Chantilly cream, peppermint sticks ribboned with green and red. Her furniture was equipped with many drawers that could only be opened by the tiny keys that she kept on a long satin cord underneath her blouse. At nighttime, she would tell Rafael to come to her room, and well into the night, she would feed him sweets taken from tiny wooden compartments.
He learned to appreciate the finest confectionery, turning his nose up at the dime-store variety his classmates often carried with their lunch. He learned from his grandmother that sweets are an art form. To be both colorful and textured, whose flavor was not to be overpowered by sugar, whose packaging was almost as important as taste. The finest candy shops always wrapped their sweets in expensive wrappers, tied them with pretty satin strings, and Rafael could recognize their signature flourishes at a glance. He became his grandmother’s protégé and the child she missed the most during the times the family spent apart.
Never would either of them believe that in a few years they would be forced to separate and that Rafael would never be able to spend another summer in his beloved hacienda. Still, Doña Olivia always kept the keys under her blouse and her rosewood chest stocked with marzipan and candies, hoping that one day her daughter’s family might return.
Seventeen
SANTIAGO, CHILE
FEBRUARY 1970
Nearly four years had passed since Octavio’s film debut, and in that time he had become a household name in Chile. Now he had money, fame, a wife and three children, and having fulfilled his contract with the studio only a few months before, he had been taking some well-deserved vacation to think about his next career move. Never would he have imagined, however, that, on the one day he was relaxing in the house, his hair uncombed and his face unshaven, Pablo Neruda would arrive unannounced at his front door.
Octavio had been toiling in the garden alone when he heard the bell ring, and as the maid, Consuela, had gone out to the market to fetch the ingredients for that evening’s meal and Salomé was busy dressing one of the girls, he brushed off his trousers and went to see who it was.
He opened the large green door and his mouth fell open. Standing on the front porch of the Casa Rosa was the great poet himself, a long black cape shrouding his massive form, a fedora casting a slight shadow over his heavy-hooded eyes.
“Señor Ribeiro?” Neruda asked as he touched slightly the rim of his hat. “I hope I have not come at a time that is inconvenient for you. My name is—”
“Señor Neruda, you need no introduction,” Octavio stammered, only because he was temporarily caught off guard by the surprise nature of the bard’s visit. “I do not know what possible honor I can attribute your visit to, but please, please come in.”
Octavio extended his arm and motioned the poet to enter the family’s cluttered vestibule. “I must apologize for my manners. Our maid is out at the moment, but I should know better—can I take your cloak for you?”
Neruda bent his shoulders slightly and untied the silk cords of his cape and handed it to Octavio. The smooth black fabric draped softly in Octavio’s hands, and he felt the need to caress the edges, as if to reaffirm to himself that indeed the nation’s most beloved figure stood there before him. That his idol had called upon him quite unexpectedly, speaking to him within the very walls of his own house.
“This is quite a home you have here, Señor Ribeiro,” observed Neruda as he followed Octavio through the corridors stapled with colorful posters from his movies, past the shelves lined with Salomé’s myriad menageries. “Reminds me a little of the one I kept with Matilde when we were living off the coast of Italy.”
Octavio smiled, amused that Neruda was drawing a parallel between them. “I’m sure your home was far more orderly than ours. You must excuse the mess. Salomé and I have three small children, and the house and garden seem to run wild, much like them.”
“No, no, it’s delightful,” Neruda said, waving his hand.
Octavio was completely awestruck. He knew that Salomé would be beside herself when she discovered Neruda standing here in their home. She was a devoted fan of Neruda’s, ever since that day when Octavio had first copied one of Neruda’s poems and slipped it into one of her fallen oranges’ navels. Octavio decided it would be best to walk Neruda through the kitchen and into the garden, and to go up and tell her himself so she had time to primp. Once Neruda was in the garden, Octavio would motion for him to sit on one of the old wrought-iron chairs that had belonged to the two spinster sisters, Maria and Magda. Octavio had always imagined them sitting there together, sipping tea and admiring their roses, their backs to their treasured red house and their eyes lost in the greenery they had cultivated with their four delicate hands.
“Is this all right, Señor Neruda?” Octavio asked, as he pulled out one of the chairs. “I will tell my wife that you are here, but she will not believe me. What a surprise! I still do not know what luck has befallen me. This is too incredible for words.”
A subtle smile came over Neruda’s lips and he tipped his head slightly and lifted his palm.
“Perhaps it is better if you and I speak privately before you call the madame. As much as I would have liked this to be a purely social call, I have, sadly, come in the guise of business.” The old poet silenced himself for a moment. “Perhaps business is the wrong word. Politics is more accurate. I have come on behalf of the Social Democratic Party, on behalf of my compatriot Salvador Allende.”
“Allende?” Octavio was shocked. He pulled over a chair and sat down abruptly. “What interest would you all have in me? I’m a movie actor,” he said, revealing his own embarrassment. “I have never even voted.”
Neruda’s thin smile returned and his thick eyelids ebbed over his watery pupils. He nodded as Octavio spoke.
“I am sorry to hear that you have never voted, as you must realize that I have devoted much of my life not only to my poetry but also to fight for every Chilean’s right to partake in fair, democratic elections. But I am not here to lecture you, Señor Ribeiro. I am here to beseech your help.”
Octavio was stunned. “My help?”
“Yes, you have something of which most men would be envious. You probably are completely oblivious to it, but anyone who watches your films—and I happen to be a secret admirer, I might add—is fully captivated by you.”
“I’m not sure I am following you, Señor Neruda. Captivated?”
“You are a master of eloquence and fluidity. Your inflection is melodious. When you speak, people listen. When you gaze into the camera, neither men nor women can resist staring back at you. It is the root of your success, comrade! You are a genius on the screen.”
Octavio was in complete shock. The former literature student was
now sitting in his garden with the nation’s most revered poet, whose poems he had used to court Salomé years ago. The hero of his youth was complimenting Octavio on his craft! If people, even in passing, had told him that they had heard Neruda was a fan of his films, he would not have believed them. But, here, Neruda was not only telling him that he had seen Octavio on the screen, but also that he marveled at his talents.
“But what does Allende have to do with all of this?”
“Ah, yes, that is the root of my visit. Allende.”
“I am not sure what he would need from a man in my position,” Octavio mused, “but ask me whatever is on your mind. In many ways—my wife would be very embarrassed if I told you why—I owe you more than I can ever say. If I can help, I will.”
Neruda smiled and relaxed back into his chair. “Well, I am not sure if you are aware, Señor Ribeiro, but there will be presidential elections this year and Allende will be running for the fourth time.”
“Yes, we have heard rumors about that.”
“Well, it is no longer a rumor, but a fact. Allende will run, and hopefully, this time, he will win. I believe in the man, I always have. Honest, decent men such as he are rare in this world. In the political arena, they are even more of an endangered species. However, we all know that Allende is not a politician by formal training. He has had a distinguished career as both a doctor and a lawyer, and thus, sometimes, certain intricacies that might come naturally to a more glib, overpolished politician evade him. You see, Señor Ribeiro, Allende has always been more concerned with the future of our nation and the plight of the worker than about himself and his own image.”