Isabel Allende: “If you live long enough, all the circles close”

There Spanish Civil War opponents forced to Franco exile in France. Entire families crossed the border on foot, sacrificing everything. The writer Isabelle Allende tells it wonderfully in long sea petal with the Dalmau family (Roser Bruguera and her baby) and the Del Solar family as protagonists, united by the master pass of the poet Pablo Neruda. Perhaps this heroic act of having organized the rescue and then the asylum in Valparaíso of more than 2,300 Spaniards fleeing the civil war was the best poem of the Nobel Prize in literature Chilean.

“That summer day, August 4, 1939, in Bordeaux, will forever be remembered by Víctor Dalmau, Roser Bruguera and two thousand other Spaniards who left for this lanky country of South America, clinging to the mountains. so as not to fall into the sea, of which they knew nothing. Neruda would have defined it as “a long petal of sea and wine and snow, with a sliver of black and white foam, but that would not have made clear their fate to the exiles. (…) From the dock, Pablo Neruda says goodbye to them waving a handkerchief (…) This day too will be unforgettable and years later he will write: Let the critics erase all my poetry, if you want . But this poem that I remember today, no one can erase it.

But this swimming pool – from the Atlantic to the Pacific – of Víctor and Roser, was not at all idyllic. And that would only be the beginning of the twists that would come later. Víctor, a quasi-doctor who served at the front and Roser, a goatherd adopted by the Dalmaus, in love with Víctor’s brother. For reasons beyond their control and due to the Spanish Civil War, they escape from Barcelona.

In Bordeaux, they embark on the boat which will take them to Chile but, first, they get married without getting engaged and, in addition, she is expecting a baby which is not Victor’s. Either way, all you have to do is set foot on Chilean soil, and a tidal wave of things begins that neither they nor we will understand. Or yes?

Until the day when, as if it were written, the sky turns black again and exile again“Venezuela received Víctor with the same carefree generosity with which it welcomed thousands of immigrants from all over the world and more recently from the Chilean dictatorship and the dirty war in Argentina and Uruguay.”

But where did these two end up in the end? And the baby, whose was it? I would not want -and right in the middle of the novel- to apply a warning of divulge and spoil the stew. This never. But I am giving you information to move forward in some of the possible answers (there are still thousands of questions, I warn you). “They had been waiting for it for 9 years and when it happened they could not rejoice because it meant giving up what they had (…) and returning to the country they had left. That night, when she talked about it with Víctor, he told her that if they didn’t come back soon, they never would. We’ve started from scratch many times, Roser. We can do it one more time.”.

long sea petal and its amalgamation of love, heartbreak, betrayal and loyalty, encounters and disagreements, as well as the historical epic that filters through every page, is one of the Chilean author’s most successful tales. . A perfect marriage between fiction and reality. One and thousands of lives amid tragedy and horror, uprooting and uncertainty, and many other crazy circumstances that drag the characters to the abyss from which they always return (I do not know how). A plot that knows how to take the reader to this unexpected place then free him to surprise him again a few lines later and not let go.

And, as the author wrote when the protagonist says goodbye to an old love to return to the possibility of another and, as if to understand that nothing is much, even if life falls apart: ” If you live long enough, all circles are closed”. You just have to know how to wait.

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