Violeta, p.30
Violeta, page 30
Those bills tied up with Christmas ribbon won’t do any good tucked away. Soon, in a matter of days, Etelvina is going to give them to you to put toward your magic ration cards. You didn’t tell me about them, but there was an article in the paper and they talked about it on television, saying that even billionaires, who don’t normally give to the poor because it’s sexier to give to the symphony, are donating to your cause. According to Etelvina, they do it more out of guilt than kindness. She explained that you give out cards to families going through a rough time, so that they can buy on credit at their small neighborhood grocery stores and at the end of the month you pick up the tab. This guarantees food on the table, saves the family the humiliation of receiving charity, and keeps small shops in danger of closing in business. It’s a good idea, you do have good ideas from time to time.
Remember that everything in storage in Sacramento will go to Etelvina for her apartment, where she plans to move as soon as she’s free of me. She’ll finally be able to sleep late, have breakfast in bed, and take vacations to the farm, which already belongs to her. She’ll live in the peace and quiet she deserves. I assume everything you inherit will go directly to the poor, which is why I’m leaving you only money, minus a sum for Etelvina and the portions that correspond to Juan Martín and the foundation, as stipulated in my will. You’re going to be surprised, Camilo. You’ll have enough to open hundreds of magic accounts.
It would be pointless to ask you to spend a little on yourself, even though you need new clothes and you should really replace those boots with the holes in the soles. I guess priests’ robes have gone out of fashion, just like nuns’ habits; you always wear the same faded jeans and the vest that Etelvina knitted you a thousand years ago. Maybe Mailén will do something about it. You are truly poor. Of the three vows you took to become a priest, the vow of poverty is the easiest for you to comply with.
I might have failed Juan Martín and Nieves as a mother because I was too caught up in my passions and my work, but I’ve been a good mother to you, Camilo. You’re the greatest love of my life, and it started when you were swimming around in the amniotic fluid of Nieves’s belly. She loved you from your first spark of existence, and in order to protect you, to make sure you’d be born healthy, she gave up the drugs that had been the center of her life during all those tumultuous years. She’s never left you, she’s been with you always; I imagine you feel her presence, just as I do. My love for you was solidified the first time I held you in my arms, and from that instant it has only grown and grown, you can be sure of that. It couldn’t have been any other way. You are an exceptional man, and it’s not just my senility speaking, half the country would agree with me, and the other half doesn’t count.
My emotional lineage ends with you, although there are others who will carry on my bloodline. In the photographs Juan Martín sends me, his family appears before landscapes of pristine snow and ice, smiling with too many teeth and a suspicious excess of optimism. That’s not the case with you. Your teeth leave a lot to be desired and you’ve had a pretty hard life. That’s why I admire you and love you so much. You’re my friend and confidant, my spiritual partner, the greatest love of my long life. I only regret that you didn’t have children, but we can’t always get what we wish for in this world.
There’s a time to live and a time to die. In between there’s time to remember. That is all I’ve done for these past days, silently filling in the missing details to complete this testament—a sentimental legacy, more than a material one. I haven’t been able to write by hand for several years now, my handwriting has lost the elegance it once had, which I learned from Miss Taylor in childhood, and is now almost illegible, but my arthritis doesn’t keep me from using the computer, a useful extension of my crippled body. You laugh at me, Camilo, and say I’m the only hundred-year-old woman with one foot in the grave who’s more interested in her computer than in praying.
I was born in 1920, during the influenza pandemic, and I’m going to die in 2020, during the outbreak of coronavirus. What an elegant name for such a terrible scourge. I’ve lived a century and I have a good memory, in addition to seventy-something diaries and thousands of letters as evidence of my passage through this world. I’ve witnessed many events, I’ve amassed a lot of experience, but either because I was too distracted or too busy, I haven’t acquired much wisdom. If reincarnation is real, I’ll have to return to Earth to make up for what I’m lacking. It’s a terrifying prospect.
The world is paralyzed, and humanity is in quarantine. It is a strange symmetry that I was born in one pandemic and will die during another. I saw on television that the streets of the cities are empty, voices echo off the New York skyscrapers and butterflies congregate on the monuments in Paris. I can’t have visitors, and that allows me to say goodbye slowly and peacefully. Activity has stopped everywhere and anxiety reigns, but here at Santa Clara nothing has changed: The animals and plants don’t know about the virus, the air is pure, and the calm is so profound that from my bed I can hear the crickets beside the lake in the distance.
You and Etelvina are the only living souls who can visit me, the rest are spirits. I’d like to say goodbye to Juan Martín, tell him how much I love him and that I’m sorry I didn’t get to know his children better, but he isn’t able to come; it’s too dangerous to travel right now and many flights are canceled.
Luckily I have you here with me, Camilo. Thank you for coming, and for staying. You won’t have to wait long, I promise. I worry about you distributing aid in places where the illness is causing tremendous mortality. Take care of yourself. There are a lot of people who need you.
GOODBYE, CAMILO.
This is the end. I’m waiting, accompanied by Etelvina, my cat Frida, the stray dogs that roam the farm who come to lie at my feet from time to time, and the ghosts that surround me. Torito is the most present, because this is his house and I’m his guest. He hasn’t changed, he’s the same big, sweet man that I saw walk away for the last time with Juan Martín. He sits on the bench in the corner carving little animals out of wood, silent. I’ve asked him what happened on the mountain, but he just shrugs his shoulders in response. I also asked him what it’s like on the Other Side of life and he told me that I’ll soon find out.
I’ve been lying here for several days, remembering, dying, maybe a week now. The hemorrhage occurred all of a sudden, without warning, as I was watching the news of the virus on television; I didn’t get to prepare myself as well as I would’ve liked, and now there’s a lady, who must be death, sitting at the foot of my bed, motioning for me to follow her. I can’t distinguish clearly between night and day, and it doesn’t matter, because pain and memory aren’t measured with clocks. The morphine puts me to sleep and transports me to the dimension of dreams and visions. Etelvina had to remove the painting of the Chinese farmers that always hung across from the bed because that usually immobile couple, with their picnic basket and cone-shaped straw hats stepped right out of their frame and started walking around the room, dragging their slippered feet. Effects of the morphine, I suppose, because I’m lucid, I always have been; my body can’t take any more, but my mind is intact. The itinerant farmers walked to Camellia House, where my father was smoking in the library, waiting for them. They brought him rice of hope on a platter.
If the doctor was wrong and I’m not dying, it will be a major let-down. But that’s not going to happen. From time to time I rise up like a column of smoke and I see myself from above as I lie in this bed struggling for breath, so shrunken that my shape under the covers is barely visible. Oh! That magnificent experience of leaving the body to float in the air! Free. Dying is a tremendous effort, Camilo. I suppose that there’s no rush because I’m going to be dead for a long time, but the wait is exasperating. The only thing that makes me sad is that we won’t be together, but as long as you still remember me I’ll be with you in a way. When I asked you if you’re going to miss me, you responded that I’ll always be sitting in a rocking chair inside your heart. You can be so cheesy sometimes, Camilo. I don’t think you’ll miss me, because you’re very busy combatting poverty and you won’t have time to think about me, but I hope that you’ll miss my letters. If my absence makes you sad, Mailén will console you; I think she might be in love with you. I’m sure your agreement to remain just friends won’t last; I’ve lived too long to believe in something as ridiculous as a vow of chastity. Also, I’ve heard you say that chastity isn’t the same as celibacy. Leave it to a Jesuit.
Etelvina cries when she thinks I can’t hear her. She’s been my best friend and main support through my clumsy old age when I’ve needed help just to go to the bathroom. Soon I’ll abandon this helpless body that served me so well for an entire century but has finally given up.
“Am I dying, Etelvina?”
“Yes, señora. Are you afraid?”
“No. I feel content, and curious. What will be on the Other Side?”
“I don’t know.”
“Ask Camilo.”
“I did, señora. He says he doesn’t know either.”
“If Camilo doesn’t know, it must be because there’s nothing there.”
“Come back to haunt us, señora, and tell us what it’s like to die,” she said with that sarcasm of hers.
It’s true that I feel content and curious, but sometimes I’m also frightened. Waiting on the Other Side may be total desolation, eternal wandering of the sidereal plane calling out for help over and over. No. It won’t be like that. There will be light, a lot of light. My moments of uncertainty are very brief. Life pulls me back in and it’s hard for me to leave it behind.
Etelvina wants me to confess and take communion, since you’re already here; she’s afraid that my many sins might condemn me. I agree with you that confession shouldn’t be a habit, it is enough to confess a few times in your life, when there’s a pressing need to free the soul of guilt. Also, I haven’t had much occasion to sin in the last twenty years, and I’ve already paid for my previous mistakes. I’ve been guided by a simple rule of conduct: Treat others as I want them to treat me. Still, I’ve hurt people. I did it without cruel intentions, unless you count Fabian, whom I betrayed and abandoned because I couldn’t control myself, and Julián, because he deserved it. I don’t regret what I did, because it was the only punishment I could think of.
My feet feel colder than ever before. I don’t know if it’s day or night, sometimes the dark stretches on for so long that it mingles with the previous nights and the following ones. If I ask Etelvina what day it is, she always gives the same answer: “Whatever day you want it to be, señora, every day is the same here.” She’s wise, she’s already figured out that only the present exists. And you, Camilo? What do you think of death? The question elicits a smile; you still have your dimples and your eyes disappear when you laugh, another way you resemble your mother. You’ll soon turn fifty years old and you’ve witnessed more cruelty and suffering than most mortals, but you’ve kept your childlike innocence.
After a century, time is now slipping through my fingers. Where did those hundred years go?
I can’t confess to you, Camilo, you’re my grandson, but if you like, you can absolve me of my sins to put Etelvina at ease. Guiltless bodies float lighter on the sidereal plane and turn to stardust.
Godspeed, Camilo. Nieves has come to get me. The sky is beautiful …
Acknowledgments
Many people contributed to the writing of this story. Some helped me in my research or inspired me, others served as models for certain characters, and my editors and translator made the existence of this book possible.
I am especially grateful to:
Juan Allende, my brother, who always helps me with research and reads the first draft.
Johanna V. Castillo, my agent at Writer’s House in New York, who edited the manuscript.
Luís Miguel Palomares and Maribel Luque, from Balcells Agency, who have represented me for forty years.
Lori Barra, who directs my foundation, where I’ve learned about the strength of women in the most traumatic circumstances.
Felipe Barras del Solar, who inspired the character of Camilo Del Valle.
Berta Beltrán, who served as model for the loyal Etelvina.
Beatriz Manz for sharing with me her childhood in the countryside.
Roger Cukras for his stories about the Mafia and for his unconditional love.
Scott Michael for instructing me on the tax evasion penalties imposed by the United States.
Elizabeth Subercaseaux for her novelist’s eye and her support as a great friend.
Mikkel Aaland for the information about Norway and its people.
Jennifer and Harleigh Gordon, whose tragic lives inspired the character of Nieves.
To Google and Wikipedia, indispensable for historical documentation.
A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR
Born in Peru and raised in Chile, Isabel Allende is the author of a number of bestselling and critically acclaimed books, including A Long Petal of the Sea, The House of the Spirits, Of Love and Shadows, Eva Luna, The Stories of Eva Luna, and Paula. Her books have been translated into more than forty-two languages and have sold more than seventy-four million copies worldwide. She lives in California.
IsabelAllende.com
Facebook.com/IsabelAllende
Twitter: @isabelallende
Instagram: @allendeisabel
BLOOMSBURY PUBLISHING
Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK
29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland
BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY PUBLISHING and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
First published in Spanish in 2022 in Spain by Plaza & Janes, a member of Penguin Random House Grupo Editorial, Barcelona, Spain
First published in English in 2022 in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, USA
This electronic edition published in 2022 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Copyright © Isabel Allende, 2022
English translation © Isabel Allende, 2022
Isabel Allende has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN: HB: 978-1-5266-4834-1; TPB: 978-1-5266-4835-8; Waterstones Signed Special Edition: 978-1-5266-5147-1; eBook: 978-1-5266-4837-2; ePDF: 978-1-5266-4976-8
To find out more about our authors and their books please visit www.bloomsbury.com. Here you will find extracts, author interviews, details of forthcoming events and the option to sign up for our newsletters.
Isabel Allende, Violeta
