Portrait in Sepia by Isabel Allende

pride. The War of the Pacific had begun. When the news reached San Francisco, Severo went to his aunt and uncle to notify them that he was leaving to join the fight.
    "Didn't we agree that you were never going near a barracks again?" his aunt Paulina reminded him.
    "This is different—my country is in danger."
    "You're a civilian."
    "I'm a sergeant in the reserves," he corrected.
    "The war will be over before you can get to Chile. Let's see what the newspapers have to say, and what your family thinks. Don't rush into this," his aunt counseled.
    "It is my duty." Severo was thinking about his grandfather, the patriarch Agustin del Valle, who had recently died, shrunken to the size of a chimpanzee but with his bad disposition intact.
    "Your duty is here, with me. The war is good for business. This is the moment to speculate in sugar," Paulina argued.
    "Sugar?"
    "None of those three countries produces it, and in times of trouble people eat more sweets."
    "How do you know that, Aunt?"
    "Personal experience, my boy."
    Severo left to pack his suitcases, though he would not leave on the ship that sailed for the south days later, as he had planned, but at the end of October. That same night he packed his aunt told him they were expecting a strange visit and she wanted him to be present because her husband was on a trip and the matter might require the counsel of a lawyer. At seven that evening Williams, with the air of disdain he adopted when obliged to serve people of inferior social rank, showed in a tall, gray-haired Chinese man dressed in Severo black and a small woman with a youthful and inoffensive appearance, but haughty as Williams himself. Tao Chi'en and Eliza Sommers found themselves in the wild game salon, as it was called, surrounded by lions, elephants, and other African beasts staring down at them from their gilded frames. Paulina frequently saw Eliza at her pastry shop but she had never come across her anywhere else; they belonged to separate worlds. Nor did she know the Celestial who, to judge by the way he was holding Eliza's arm, must be her husband or her lover. Paulina felt ridiculous in her forty-five-room palace, dressed in black silk and dripping with diamonds, facing that modest couple who greeted her with simplicity, maintaining their distance. She noticed that her son Matias acknowledged them nervously with only a nod, without offering his hand, and took a seat apart from the group behind a jacaranda wood desk, apparently absorbed in cleaning his pipe. Severo del Valle hadn't a glimmer of doubt as to why Lynn Sommers's parents were in the house, and he wished he were a thousand leagues away. Intrigued, on her guard, Paulina did not waste time by offering them something to drink but gestured to Williams to retire and close the doors. "What can I do for you?" she asked. Then Tao Chi'en began to explain, with no change of expression, that his daughter Lynn was pregnant, that the author of that offense was Matias, and that he expected the only possible restitution. For once in her life, the del Valle matriarch lost her tongue. She sat stunned, gasping like a beached whale, and when finally she got her voice back, it was to squawk like a crow.
    "Mother, I have no connection with these people. I do not know them, and I do not know what they are talking about," said Matias from the desk, carved ivory pipe in hand.
    "Lynn has told us everything," Eliza interrupted, getting to her feet, her voice quivering but holding back the tears.
    "If it's money you want—" Matias began, but his mother cut him off with a ferocious glare.
    "You must forgive us," Paulina said, speaking to Tao Chi'en and Eliza Sommers. "My son is as surprised as I am. I'm sure we can work this out in a decent way, whatever's right."
    "Lynn wishes to marry, of course. She has told us that you two are in love," said Tao Chi'en, also standing by now, speaking to Matias, who responded with a curt laugh that sounded like a dog barking.
    "You seem like