Portrait in Sepia Read Free Page A

lack of desire, as she confessed to me forty years later, but out of pride. It revolted her to look at herself in the mirror, and she assumed that any man would feel the same if he saw her naked. She remembered the exact moment she became aware that her body was becoming her enemy. A few years before, when Feliciano returned from a long business trip to Chile, he had caught her by the waist and with his usual hearty good humor tried to sweep her off her feet and carry her to bed, but was unable to budge her.
    "Shit, Paulina! Do you have rocks in your underdrawers?" He laughed.
    "It's fat," she sighed sadly.
    "I want to see it!"
    "Absolutely not. From now on, you can come to my room only at night and with the lamp out."
    For a while those two, who had frolicked without restraint, made love in the dark. Paulina stood firm, impervious to the pleas and rages of her husband, who never got used to finding her beneath a pile of covers in the blackness of her room, or to embracing her with missionary haste while she held his hands to keep him from filling them with her flesh. That tug of war left them exhausted and with nerves screaming. Finally, using the pretext of the move to the new mansion on Nob Hill, Paulina installed her husband at the other end of the house and shot the bolt on the door to her bedroom. Disgust for her own body outweighed the desire she felt for her husband. Her neck disappeared behind her double chin, her breasts and belly were a single episcopal promontory, her feet could not bear her weight for more than a few minutes, she could not dress herself alone or fasten her shoes, but in her silk dresses and splendid jewels, which were what she nearly always wore, she presented a prodigious spectacle. Her greatest worry was sweat in the folds of her fat, and she used to ask me in whispers if she smelled bad, although I never perceived any aroma but eau de gardenia and talcum. Despite the widely held belief that water and soap were bad for the bronchial tubes, Paulina spent hours floating in her tub of enameled iron, where she felt as light as in her youth. At eighteen she had fallen in love with Feliciano when he was a handsome and ambitious young man, the owner of silver mines in the north of Chile. For the sake of his love, she defied her father, Agustin del Valle, who figures in the history books of Chile as the founder of a small and miserly, ultraconservative political party that disappeared more than two decades ago but every so often revives like a bald, pathetic phoenix. That same love for Feliciano sustained her when she decided to forbid him entry to her bedroom at an age when her nature called more than ever for his embrace. Unlike her, he matured gracefully. His hair had turned gray, but he was still the same happy, passionate, free-spending, and lusty man. Paulina liked his common side; the idea that this gentleman with the resonant family names came from a line of Sephardic Jews, and that beneath the silk shirts with embroidered initials was a devil-may-care tattoo acquired in a port during a binge. She longed to hear again the dirty words he'd whispered in the days they were still paddling about the bed with all the lights on and would have given anything to sleep once more with her head resting on the indelible blue ink dragon on her husband's shoulder. She could never believe that he wanted the same. To Feliciano, Paulina was always the daring young sweetheart he had run away with in his youth, the only woman he admired and feared. It occurs to me that those two never stopped loving each other, despite the cyclonic force of their fights, which left everyone in the house trembling. The embraces that once made them so happy turned into battles that culminated in long periods of truce and such memorable revenge as the Florentine bed, but nothing ever destroyed their relationship, and until the end, when Feliciano was fatally felled by a stroke, they were joined by the enviable complicity of true