Violeta by Isabel Allende EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Authors: Isabel Allende
- Publish Date: January 25, 2022
- Language: English
- Genre: Hispanic American Literature & Fiction
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 2 MB
- Pages: 318
- Price: Free
I came into the world one stormy Friday in 1920, the year of
the scourge. The evening of my birth the electricity went out,
something that often happened during storms, so they lit
candles and kerosene lamps, which were always kept on hand
for these types of emergencies. María Gracia, my mother,
began to feel the contractions—a sensation she knew well
since she’d already birthed five sons—and she surrendered to
the pain, resigned to bringing another male into the world with
the help of her sisters, who had assisted her through the
difficult process several times. The family doctor had been
working tirelessly for weeks in one of the field hospitals and
she felt it imprudent to call him for something as prosaic as
childbirth.
On previous occasions they had used a midwife,
always the same one, but the woman had been among the first
to fall victim to the flu and they didn’t know of anyone else.
To my mother it seemed she’d spent the entirety of her adult
life either pregnant, recovering from childbirth, or
convalescing after a miscarriage. Her oldest son, José Antonio,
had turned seventeen, she was sure of that, because he had
been born the same year as one of our worst earthquakes,
which knocked half the country to the ground and left
thousands of deaths in its wake. But she could never precisely
recall the ages of her other sons nor how many pregnancies
she’d failed to carry to term.
Each miscarriage had left her
incapacitated for months and after each birth she’d felt
exhausted and melancholic for a long while. Before getting
married she had been the most beautiful debutante in the
capital—slender, with an unforgettable face, green eyes, and
translucent skin—but the extremes of motherhood had
distorted her body and drained her spirit.
She loved her sons, in theory, but in practice she preferred
to keep them at a comfortable distance. The exuberant band of
boys was as disruptive as a battle in her peaceful feminine
realm. She’d once admitted during confession that she felt
doomed to bear only sons, like a curse from the Devil. In
penitence she was ordered to recite a rosary every day for two
years straight and to make a sizable donation to the church
renovation fund. Her husband forbade her from returning to
confession.
Under my aunt Pilar’s direction, Torito, the boy we
employed for a wide range of chores, climbed a ladder to hang
a labor sling from two steel hooks that he himself had installed
in the ceiling. My mother, kneeling in her nightdress, each
hand pulling at a strap, pushed for what felt like an eternity,
cursing like a pirate, using words she’d never utter under
normal circumstances. My aunt Pía, crouched between her
legs, waited to receive the newborn baby before he could fall
to the floor.
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