Violeta

by Isabel Allende

That fairy tale that all humans are equal before the law and in the eyes of God is a lie, Camilo. I hope you don’t buy into it. Neither the law nor God treats everyone the same.

“It’s much easier to be generous with a full belly than an empty one,” they said. I’ve never believed that, though, because I’ve seen that both kindness and cruelty exist everywhere.

Several times throughout the course of my life I’ve vowed to become a vegetarian, Camilo, but my willpower always fails me.

“Exert some independence; you’re not a little girl. You can’t let anyone else decide things for you. You have to take care of yourself in this world,”

Affection must be cultivated, Camilo; it has to be watered and tended like a plant, but we’d let ours dry up.

Teresa said that until men gave birth and put up with husbands, as women do, they should not have an opinion about—let alone decide on—abortion and divorce.

She didn’t believe that men had the right to an opinion, much less to pass laws on the female body, since they’d never know the exhaustion of gestation, the pain of labor, and the eternal bondage of motherhood.

I was scared at the prospect of having children, I knew it would be the end of my relative freedom, but I didn’t actively avoid getting pregnant, unless you count my prayers to Father Quiroga, which doesn’t technically count as birth control.

The journey of life has long and tedious stretches, step by step, day by day, without anything exciting happening, but memory is made up of the unexpected events that mark your course.

Orgasm was as dramatic a discovery as the revelation of the woman I had hidden inside me: the stranger in the mirror, shameless, defiantly unfaithful, and giddy.

“There are probably dozens of them, Auntie, but they belong to the men of the family, so nobody even keeps count,” I explained.

I was ashamed that I put up with Julián’s abuse, and more ashamed still that I always forgave him. I was shackled by our sexual passion and the belief that I’d be lost without him. How would I provide for the kids? How would I face society and my family after a second failure? How would I live down a reputation as a woman cast aside? I’d broken my marriage and defied the world to be with Julián; I couldn’t accept that the story I’d told was a lie.

I understand this is the price of motherhood. Nature is cruel to women, but it is also ruthless with men, who have to satisfy their needs.”

maybe he loved me more than I thought, or maybe he was just terrified at the prospect of being left alone with two kids.

He was terrified by the roughhousing his father thought would make a man of him;

Lust can hold us hostage for so long!

I must confess, Camilo, that more than once I prayed to heaven that Julián Bravo would crash in one of his airplanes, and I even fantasized about murder in order to free myself of him. I wouldn’t have been the first or the last woman to kill her lover because she couldn’t stand him anymore.

Our cards determine who we are: age, gender, race, family, nationality, etc., and we can’t change them, only play them to the best of our abilities. The game is marked by challenges and chances, strategizing and cheating.

Fear? Yes, there was fear, but also uncertainty, emotional dependence, force of habit, and the rule of silence that impeded me from talking about what was happening; I isolated myself.

No one will leave a child alone with a priest; three hundred clergymen in this country have been convicted as pedophiles.

You now live in a community that was no more than a trash heap before you got there. I was moved when you took me to see it, so clean and orderly, with modest but decent homes, a school, workshops for different trades, and even a library. I was moved most of all by the shack with a pressed dirt floor where you live with the dog and cat who’ve adopted you. You know what, Camilo? I felt a pang of envy, a desire to be young again and start over, to throw all the superfluous things I have out the window and keep only the essential, to share and to serve. I know that you are completely happy among those people. You’ve accepted that you can’t change the country much less the world, but you can help some individuals. You’ve been guided by the spirit of Albert Benoit. You don’t know how many times I’ve thanked heaven that you were young during the dictatorship and that, despite so much reckless behavior, you were able to escape the claws of repression. The bishop may pull on your ears, and there are people who accuse you of being a Communist because of your work with the poor; but during the dictatorship you’d have been exterminated like a cockroach.