[she] had said on more than one occasion that if she died in Chile she wished to be buried in Spain, where her husband and son were laid to rest, but if she died in Spain she wanted to be buried in Chile, to be near the rest of her family. Why? Well just to cause trouble, she would say with a laugh. And yet it wasn’t simply a joke, it was the anguish of divided love, separation, of living and dying far from one’s loved ones. [loc. 3547]
In 1938, in Valencia, Victor Dalmau saves the life of a young soldier by reaching into his ribcage and palpating his heart. In 1994 Victor is living alone in the hills above Santiago in Chile, celebrating his eightieth birthday with only the memory of his dead wife for company, when a stranger arrives at his door.
A Long Petal of the Sea is the story of Victor and those he loves: Roser, who would have married Victor's brother if he'd survived the Civil War, and instead marries Victor to give her child a name; Carme, Victor's mother; Marcel, Roser's son; Ofelia, the Chilean aristocrat with whom he falls briefly and tragically in love. It's also the story of the Spaniards who emigrated to Chile, arriving on 3rd September 1939 -- the day war broke out in Europe -- on the Winnipeg, a ship chartered by the poet Pablo Neruda.
The initial chapters paint an uncompromising picture of the Spanish Civil War: defeat, betrayal, the rise of fascism and the desperate march across the mountains to France, where those who survived the journey were interned. Victor is fortunate to find a place on the Winnipeg, and he takes Roser with him. Their welcome in Chile is not without reservations: the usual fears of immigrants, of refugees. And within a quarter of a century, nudged by American intervention, a right-wing dictatorship takes power, and Victor is once more imprisoned.
This may sound far from cheerful, but the resilience and determination of the characters -- as well as their love for one another -- makes it more than simply a grim account of Spanish Civil War and its aftermath. It brought to life, for me, the difficulties faced after the war (any war) has ended, where those who've survived try to trace their families and friends. A memory of a Red Cross nurse's name, an unusual Basque surname ... any scrap of information might make the difference. (I felt that it would have been very satisfying if 'Lazaro' had contacted his saviour. He, after all, had a name to trace ...)
I found this a curiously compelling read. On one level it's about the horrors of war and the tensions between class, politics and friendship; on another, more comfortably, it's about how people make and preserve bonds of love and blood -- and about how those bonds persist. A good translation, in that I didn't notice any infelicities: a story of hope: and, according to the author's foreword and afterword, largely inspired by people she's known.
Read for the 'By Isabel Allende' rubric of the Reading Women Challenge 2020.
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