Исабель Альенде - A Long Petal of the Sea

With no thought for the consequences, he stepped forward through the lines of prisoners as though sleepwalking. Everybody was staring at the fallen man, and by the time they noticed Victor and ordered him to stop and throw himself facedown on the ground, he had already reached the front of the ranks. “He’s a doctor!” shouted one of the prisoners. Victor continued to trot forward, and in a few seconds reached the unconscious commandant. He kneeled down beside the commandant without anyone stopping him: the soldiers stepped back to give him room. He checked that the commandant wasn’t breathing. He signaled to one of the closest guards to loosen his clothing, while he gave him artificial respiration and pressed down hard on his chest with both hands. He knew there was a manual defibrillator in the sick bay because it was occasionally used to resuscitate torture victims.

A few minutes later the nurse came running up, followed by an assistant with oxygen and the defibrillator. He helped Victor restart the commandant’s heart.

“A helicopter! We have to get him to a hospital at once!” Victor insisted as soon as he realized the heart was beating once more. They carried the commandant to the sick bay, where Victor kept him alive until the helicopter on standby at the edge of the camp was ready to take off. They were thirty-five minutes from the nearest hospital. Victor was ordered to accompany the patient and was handed an army shirt, trousers, and boots.

It was a small but well-equipped provincial hospital. In normal times it would have had sufficient resources for an emergency of this kind, but now there were only two doctors. They both knew Victor Dalmau by reputation and greeted him respectfully. Thanks to an irony typical of those days, Victor was told the chief surgeon and the cardiologist had both been arrested. Victor had no time to wonder where they could have been taken, as neither of them was among the prisoners in his camp. An operating room had been his workplace for decades, and as he always told his students, the heart is a muscular organ that contains no mysteries; those attributed to it are entirely subjective. In no time at all he gave the necessary instructions, scrubbed his hands, prepared the commandant, and then, assisted by one of the hospital doctors, proceeded to carry out the operation he had performed hundreds of times. He discovered that his hands’ memory was intact: they moved by themselves.

Victor spent the night awake with his patient, more euphoric than exhausted. In the hospital nobody stood guard over him with a submachine gun; he was treated with deference and admiration, and given steak with mashed potatoes, a glass of red wine, and ice cream for dessert. For a few hours he became Doctor Dalmau again rather than a number. He had forgotten what life was like before his arrest. In midmorning, when his patient was still critical but stable, an army cardiologist arrived by plane from Santiago. Victor was ordered to return to the concentration camp, but he managed to ask the doctor who had assisted him in the operation to contact Roser. This was a risk, because the man was undoubtedly right-wing, but over the hours they worked together their mutual respect was plain. Victor was certain Roser had returned to Chile to look for him, because that is what he would have done for her.

The new concentration camp commandant turned out to be as brutal as his predecessor, but Victor only had to put up with him for five days. That morning, when they had finished the roll call and separated out the prisoners to be taken away, his name was called. For the prisoners, this was the worst moment of the day, as they could be transferred to a torture center, a camp still more terrible than this one, or taken out and shot. After waiting three hours standing up, the group was led to a truck. The guard checking the names on his list stopped Victor from climbing on board with the others. “You stay here, asshole.” He had to wait another hour before he was led to the camp office, where the commandant himself told him he was in luck and handed him a sheet of paper. He had been granted parole. “If it was up to me, I’d open the gate and make you walk, you communist son of a bitch. But it turns out you’re to be taken back to the hospital,” the man told him.

Roser and a Venezuelan embassy official were waiting for him there. Victor hugged his wife with the despair of those long months of uncertainty when he had thought of her with a love he had never clearly expressed. “Oh, Roser, how much I love you, how much I’ve missed you,” he whispered, burying his nose in her hair. Both of them were weeping.

—

BEING ON PAROLE MEANT going every day to a police station to sign a register. Depending on the mood of the duty officer, this could take a long while. Victor signed in twice before deciding to seek asylum in the Venezuelan embassy. It had taken him those two days to realize that having been a prisoner condemned him to being ostracized. He couldn’t go back to work at the hospital; his friends avoided him, and he ran the risk of being rearrested at any moment. The caution and fear all around him were in sharp contrast to the defiant, vengeful optimism shown by the dictatorship’s supporters. What was really going on in the shadows was never mentioned. Nobody protested; the crushed workers had lost their rights: they could be fired at any moment and were grateful for whatever wages they received, because there was a line of unemployed waiting at the door to be given an opportunity. It was the employers’ paradise. The official version was of an orderly, clean, and pacified country heading for prosperity. Victor couldn’t help thinking of those tortured or killed, the faces of the men he had met in prison and those who had disappeared. People had changed; he found it hard to recognize the country that had received him with such a fervent embrace thirty-five years earlier, and which he loved as if it were his own.

By the second day he confessed to Roser he couldn’t bear the dictatorship. “I couldn’t do so in Spain, and I can’t here. I’m too old to live in fear, Roser; but a second exile is as unbearable as staying in Chile and facing the consequences.” She argued it would only be temporary: the military regime would soon end because, as everyone said, Chile had a solid democratic tradition, and so they could return. Her argument crumbled in the face of the fact that Franco had been in power for more than thirty years, and Pinochet could imitate him. Victor spent a sleepless night contemplating whether to leave or not, lying in the darkness with Roser curled up beside him, listening to the noises from the street.

At three in the morning he heard a car pull up outside the house. That could only mean they were coming for him again; during curfew only military and security service vehicles were allowed on the streets. There was no way he could run or hide. He lay there in a cold sweat, his heart beating like a drum. Roser peeped out through the curtains and saw a second black automobile pull up behind the first one. “Get dressed quickly,” she ordered Victor.

But then she saw several men get out of the cars in a leisurely way: no rushing, shouting, or pulling out weapons. They stood there for a while smoking and chatting, and eventually drove off again. Trembling, arms around each other, Victor and Roser waited at the window until it began to grow light, then five o’clock struck and the curfew ended.

Roser arranged for the Venezuelan ambassador to collect Victor in a car with diplomatic license plates. By this time, most of the asylum-seekers in embassies had left for the countries that accepted them, and surveillance was less strict. Victor entered the embassy curled up in the trunk. A month later he was given a safe-conduct. Two Venezuelan officials accompanied him to the door of the plane, where Roser was waiting for him. He was clean, freshly shaven, and calm. On the same plane was another exile, who had his handcuffs removed once he was in his seat. He was filthy, disheveled, and shaking. Victor couldn’t help noticing him, and when they were in the air, approached him. He had difficulty striking up a conversation and convincing the man he wasn’t a secret policeman. He saw the man had no front teeth, and several of his fingers were crushed.