Исабель Альенде - A Long Petal of the Sea

The day came when, sitting side by side on the wicker chair on the porch, with the cat on her lap, dogs at their feet, and a view of the golden hills and blue sky of evening, Roser asked her husband to please let her go, because she was very weary. “Don’t take me to the hospital for any reason. I want to die in our bed, holding your hand.” Defeated at last, Victor had to accept his own powerlessness. He couldn’t save her, and he couldn’t imagine life without her. He realized in horror that the half century they had spent together had galloped by. Where had the days and years gone? The future without her was the huge empty room without doors and windows that appeared in his nightmares. He dreamed he was escaping from war, blood, and shattered bodies. He ran and ran through the night until suddenly he found himself in that sealed room where he was safe from everything but himself. The energy and enthusiasm of the previous months when he thought age could not touch him drained from his bones. The woman beside him also grew old in a few minutes. Moments earlier she was still as he had always seen her and as he remembered her in her absence: the twenty-two-year-old with a newborn babe in her arms, the woman who married him without love but loved him more than anyone else in the world, his lifelong companion. With her he had lived everything that was worth living. The proximity of death made the intensity of his love as unbearable as an acid burn. He wanted to shake her, shout at her not to go, they still had years ahead of them to love each other more than ever, to be together and not be apart a single day: Please, please, Roser, don’t leave me . And yet he said none of this to her, because he would have had to be blind not to see Death in the garden, waiting for his wife with the patience of a specter.

There was a chill breeze, and Victor had wrapped Roser in two blankets that came up to her nostrils. Only a skeletal hand poked out of the bundle, gripping him with more strength than she seemed capable of. “I’m not afraid of dying, Victor. I’m happy: I want to know what comes next. You shouldn’t be afraid either, because I’ll always be with you in this life and in others. It’s our karma.” Victor began to weep like a baby, in despairing sobs. Roser let him cry until he ran out of tears and resigned himself to what she had accepted months earlier. “I’m not going to let you suffer anymore,” was all Victor could offer her. As she did every night, she nestled in the crook of his arm and let herself be rocked and lulled to sleep. It was dark already. Victor lifted off the cat, picked up Roser carefully so as not to wake her, and carried her to bed. She weighed almost nothing. The dogs followed him.

CHAPTER 13

1994

And yet.

Here are the roots of my dream,

This is the harsh light we love.

—PABLO NERUDA

“Return”

SAILINGS AND RETURNS

THREE YEARS AFTER ROSER’S DEATH, Victor Dalmau was about to turn eighty in the home in the hills where they had lived ever since their return to Chile in 1983. The house was an aging, trembling, and disheveled monarch, but still noble. Solitary from childhood, Victor found being a widower more of a burden than he had anticipated. Theirs had been the happiest of marriages, as anyone meeting them would have said who didn’t know the details of their remote past.

After Roser died he found himself unable to get used to her absence as rapidly as she herself would have wished. “When I die, remarry quickly. You’re going to need someone to look after you when you’re decrepit and demented. Meche wouldn’t be a bad choice…” she ordered him toward the end, between inhaling through her oxygen mask. Despite his loneliness, Victor liked his empty house, which seemed to have grown larger somehow. He enjoyed its silence, disorder, the smell of the closed rooms, the cold and the drafts his wife had battled against much more fiercely than the rodents in the roof.

The wind had been howling all day, the windows were covered with hoar frost, and the fire in the hearth was a ridiculous attempt to combat the winter rain and hail. After more than half a century of matrimonial sharing, it was strange being a widower: he missed Roser so much that sometimes he felt her absence as a physical pain. He didn’t want to accept being old. Advanced age is a distortion of a familiar reality, it changes the body as well as circumstances. You gradually lose control and have to depend on the kindness of others—but Victor had thought he would die before this happened. The problem was how hard it sometimes can be to die swiftly and with dignity. It seemed unlikely he would suffer a heart attack, because his heart was fine. His doctor assured him of this during his annual checkup, and this comment invariably reminded Victor forcefully of the boy soldier whose heart he had held in his hands.

Victor didn’t share his fears for the immediate future with his son. He decided to postpone worrying about more distant days until some other time.

“Anything could happen to you, Papa. If you have a fall or some kind of attack while I’m away, you could be lying there without help for days. What would you do?”

“I’d simply die, Marcel, and pray that nobody came to spoil my final moments. And don’t worry about the animals. They always have food and water for several days.”

“What if you get ill? Who’ll look after you then?”

“That used to worry your mother. We’ll see. I’m old, but not ancient. You’ve got more wrong with you than I have.”

This was true. At the age of fifty-five, Marcel had already had a knee replaced; he had broken several ribs and the same collarbone twice. In Victor’s view, this came from overdoing exercise: it’s fine to stay fit, but who on earth wants to run if no one’s chasing you, or to cross continents on a bike? Marcel ought to get married, then he would have less time to pedal about, and fewer ailments. Marriage suits men, although not women. When it came to marriage, though, Victor wasn’t keen on following his own advice. He wasn’t worried about his health. He had adopted the theory that to stay healthy, the best thing was to ignore any bodily or mental alarm signals and always keep busy. You have to have a purpose in life, he told himself. It was inevitable that over the years he was growing weaker: his bones must be as yellow as his teeth by now, his inner organs had to be wearing out, and his brain cells were gradually dying, and yet this drama was taking place invisibly. From the outside his appearance was still passable: who cares what the liver looks like if you have all your teeth? He tried to ignore the dark blotches that appeared spontaneously on his skin; the unavoidable fact that he found it increasingly hard to walk the dogs uphill or button his shirt; his tired eyes, deafness, and the trembling hands that had forced him to retire from practicing surgery.

Yet he wasn’t idle. He continued seeing patients at San Juan de Dios hospital and giving classes at the university. He no longer had to prepare any of these: sixty years’ experience, including the harshest ones during the Spanish Civil War, were preparation enough. He was square-shouldered, with a firm body. He still had hair on his head, and stood ramrod straight to compensate for the limp and the fact that it was becoming gradually more difficult for him to bend his knees and waist.

He was careful never to voice how hard he found it being a widower, so as not to upset Marcel, who worried about him like a mother hen. Victor did not see death as an irremediable separation. He imagined his wife traveling ahead through sidereal space, where perhaps the souls of the dead ended up, while he was waiting his turn to join her, more curious than concerned. He would be there with his brother, his parents, Jordi Moline, and all those friends who had died in battle. For a rationalist agnostic with scientific training like he was, this theory had fundamental weaknesses, but it comforted him. More than once Roser had warned him, only half joking, that he would never be free of her because they were destined to be together in this life and others. In the past they had not always been man and wife, she would say: most likely in other lives they were mother and son or brother and sister, which would explain the unconditional love that bound them together. Victor felt nervous at the idea of an infinite repetition with the same person, although if repetition were inevitable, better it was with Roser than anybody else. At any rate, this possibility was no more than poetic speculation, because he didn’t believe in either destiny or reincarnation. He thought the first of these was a TV soap opera gimmick, and the second scientifically impossible. According to his wife, who tended to be seduced by spiritual practices from remote regions like Tibet, science could not explain reality’s multiple dimensions, but Victor thought this was a specious argument.