More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Get ready, lads, To kill again, to die once more And to cover the blood with flowers. —Pablo Neruda “Bloody was all the earth of man” The Sea and the Bells
but remember that not everything is politics. Without science, industry, and technology, no progress is possible, and without music and art, there’s no soul,” he would maintain.
hoydens
Nothing, not even victory, Can wipe away the terrible hole of blood. —Pablo Neruda “Hymn to the Glory of the People at War” Offended Lands
To judge by the way his parents took care of her, Roser must be a virgin, one of the few remaining in Republican Spain.
Many people grew vegetables in their bathtubs or on their balconies. Family heirlooms and jewels were traded for potatoes and rice.
the incendiary speeches of La Pasionaria: better to die on one’s feet than to live on one’s knees.
Her virginity, so prized at the nuns’ school, now weighed on her at twenty like a blemish. Nothing was certain; the future did not exist; all they had was this moment to savor before the war snatched it from them.
thirty thousand dead. Among them would be Guillem Dalmau.
And the number of the executed was in the tens of thousands. So much blood ran that the following year the peasants swore that when they pulled up their onions they were red, and that they found human teeth in their potatoes.
Hundreds of thousands of terrified refugees were escaping to France, where a campaign of fear and hatred awaited them. Nobody wanted these foreigners—Reds, filthy fugitives, deserters, delinquents, as the French press labeled them. Repugnant beings who were going to spread epidemics, commit robberies and rape, and stir up a communist revolution.
France’s first reaction was to close the ports of entry while the authorities reached an agreement as to how to deal with the problem.
All that mattered was for Roser to reach France safe and sound, for her to give birth there and be reunited with Guillem and Victor.
Nearly two years earlier, they had escaped alive from Guernica when it was bombed by the much-feared Condor Legion planes that razed the historic Basque town and sowed death and destruction in their wake.
The whole country was overwhelmed by this massive influx of undesirables, as they were officially called.
tramontana, the icy wind that whipped up the sand.
almost fifteen thousand people died in those French camps, from hunger, starvation, mistreatment, and illnesses. Nine out of every ten children perished.
I celebrate the virtues and vices Of the suburban middle classes. —Pablo Neruda “Suburbs” The Yellow Heart
The previous fall, the European powers had signed the Munich peace treaty, which Hitler had no intention of respecting.
Isidro was omnipresent: the universe revolved around him, his wishes and demands.
cordillera
“Goodness me, you’re part of the family, why would we pay you?” was their answer.
When Leonardo was born, and it was obvious from his sweet moon face that he was different,
Poetry is what stays in your head and isn’t forgotten.” “Of course, and music is what you can whistle, isn’t it?”
None of them knew anything about Chile. Years later, Neruda was to define it as a long petal of sea and wine and snow…with a belt of black and white foam, but that would not have left the migrants any the wiser. On the map, it looked slender and remote.
Fifty years later, when Victor Dalmau was interviewed on television about the odyssey of his exile, he said that the Winnipeg had been the ship of hope. —
there were no exuberant jungles or luminous, palm tree–lined beaches—it looked more like the Sahara Desert.
was the driest inhabited region on earth.
they were completely opposed to the policy of accepting the refugees into Chile. They considered them to be a mob of Reds, atheists, and possibly criminals, who were coming to take jobs from Chileans just at a moment when there was terrible unemployment and the country hadn’t yet recovered from the Great Depression or the recent earthquake—but
He was against immigration, but like Captain Pupin, when he came face-to-face with the individual refugees—men, women, and children—his views changed.
Thousands of twinkling lights in the port and dwellings on the hills of Valparaiso competed with the stars: it was impossible to tell where the promised land ended and the sky began.
From the ship it shone like a mythical, diamond-studded city.
September 3, 1939, the day of the Spanish exiles’ splendid arrival in Chile, the Second World War broke out in Europe.
Also present was a doctor from Valparaiso, Salvador Allende, a Socialist Party
leader who a few days later would be named health minister.
The conflict had been looming for months, but Isidro had managed to put the collective apprehension out of his mind, lest it interfere with his vacation.
Catalan sausages with diced eggplant, anchovies and squid with garlic, tuna with tomato, and
Lentils were out of the question: Victor had grown tired of them in the French concentration camp.
somnambulist,
The possibility of working to earn a living was a dream as absurd as that of going to Paris to paint in a Montmartre attic.
Her destiny of marriage and having children seemed to her as stifling as entering a convent, and
Rumors have wings, as Isidro rightly said;
It was only natural that the boys in the family took advantage of the maids occasionally, but he couldn’t imagine his daughter doing the same with his pockmarked servant.
It had never occurred to her to ask Victor what they should do to avoid a pregnancy, because she assumed he had it under control and that, anyway, they met so infrequently it wouldn’t happen. Magical thinking. Since he was older and more experienced, Victor was to blame for this unforgivable accident; and yet as the victim, she had to pay for both of them. That was a monumental injustice.
She was the one who had to make all the decisions concerning her pregnancy; no one else had any right to give their opinion, least of all that man who had already caused her enough harm.
She didn’t dare ask for the miracle of a miscarriage, which would have solved the family’s problem,
Remember that many women render up their souls to God in the act of giving birth.”
wide corridors where footsteps resounded like castanets,
“You gave birth to a little boy,” the priest informed her in the most compassionate tone he could muster, “but God in his wisdom took him a few minutes after he was born.”
As she often told Felipe when he scolded her for listening behind doors, her position in the family meant she had to stay well informed.
