Isabel Allende by Portrait in Sepia

Author:Portrait in Sepia [Sepia, Portrait in]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

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The revolution began the same day I reached puberty. I woke up with my nightgown stained with something that looked like chocolate. I hid in the bathroom, embarrassed, to wash myself off; then discovered I hadn’t soiled myself after all, I had blood between my legs. I shot off, terrified, to tell my grandmother about it and for once didn’t find her in her huge imperial bed, something unheard of in a person who never got up until noon. I ran downstairs, followed by a madly barking Caramelo, burst like a spooked horse into the library, and found myself face to face with Severo and Paulina del Valle: he dressed for a journey and she wearing the purple satin bathrobe that made her look like a bishop during Holy Week.

“I’m going to die!” I screamed, throwing myself on her.

“This is not a convenient time to do that,” my grandmother replied dryly.

For years people had been complaining about the government, and for months now we had heard that President Balmaceda was intending to declare himself dictator, in the process breaking with fifty-seven years of respect for the constitution. That constitution, drawn up by the aristocracy with the idea of governing forever, granted broad powers to the executive. When power fell into the hands of someone with whose ideas they didn’t fully agree, the upper class rebelled. Balmaceda, a brilliant man with modern ideas, had not done too badly, actually. He had advanced education more than any previous president, protected Chilean nitrates from foreign companies, and promoted hospitals and numerous public works, especially railroads, although he began more than he succeeded in finishing. Chile had military and naval power; it was a prosperous country, and its currency was the most solid in Latin America. Nevertheless, the aristocracy could not forgive him for having elevated the middle class and for trying to govern with them, and the clergy could not tolerate the separation of church and state, civil marriage, which had replaced the religious, and the law that allowed the dead of any creed to be buried in cemeteries. (It had been a terrible problem to dispose of the bodies of those who had not been Catholic in life, not to mention atheists and suicides, whose corpses often ended up in ravines or the ocean.) Because of those measures, women abandoned the president en masse. Though they had no political power, they ruled in their homes and exercised tremendous influence. The middle class, which Balmaceda had benefited, also turned its back on him, and he responded with the arrogance of one used to commanding and being obeyed, like any other large landowner of the day. His family owned enormous landholdings, an entire province with its railroad stations, towns, and hundreds of campesinos. The men of his clan had the reputation not of kindly patrones but of crude tyrants who slept with a gun under the pillow and expected blind respect from their peons. That may have been the reason Balmaceda thought he could rule the country as he did his feudal estate.

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