Heritage E-Book

Miguel Bonnefoy

• Herausgeber: Pushkin Press
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 234

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

A pocket-sized family saga from the rich imagination and storytelling talents of Franco-Venezuelan author Miguel Bonnefoy.A winegrower ruined by the Great French Vine Blight takes his one surviving vine stock and boards a ship for California. But the new life he has in store is not the one he had imagined - taken ill aboard ship, he is forced to disembark at Valparaíso, where a misunderstanding at the customs post finds him rebaptized after his birthplace, Lons-le-Saunier: the Lonsonier family is born in Chile.Making the journey in reverse, his sons return to defend the motherland in 1914, and the ghosts of the war live on across the Atlantic, in a house with three lemon trees and a garden filled with birds, for years to come.From the depths of the trenches to the soaring peaks of the Andes and the shadow of dictatorship, the personal stories of the Lonsoniers collide with key moments in a century of global history, painting a vivid picture of what is both gained and lost through migration. This pocket-sized family saga confirms the rich imagination and storytelling talents of exciting young author Miguel Bonnefoy.

Leseprobe

Also by Miguel Bonnefoy:

Octavio’s Journey

Black Sugar

Heritage

Miguel Bonnefoy

Translated by Emily Boyce

Pushkin Press

A Gallic Book

First published in France as Héritage by Éditions Payot & Rivages, 2020

Copyright © Éditions Payot & Rivages, 2020

English translation copyright © Gallic Books, 2022

First published in Great Britain in 2022 by Gallic Books, 12 Eccleston Street, London, SW1W 9LT

This book is copyright under the Berne Convention

No reproduction without permission

All rights reserved

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978-1-805333-87-6

Typeset in Fournier MT Pro by Gallic Books

Printed in the UK by CPI (CR0 4TD)

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For Selva,

the only one who knows what happens next

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it

George Santayana

Lazare

Lazare Lonsonier was reading in the bath when news of the outbreak of the First World War reached Chile. In those days, he would often leaf through French newspapers at a 12,000-kilometre distance as he soaked in water infused with lemon peel. Later, when he returned from the front with half a lung, having lost two brothers to the trenches of the Marne, the scent of citrus would be forever associated in his mind with the stench of shells.

According to family legend, his father had left France with thirty francs in one pocket and a vine stock in the other. Born in Lons-le-Saunier in the foothills of the Jura, he had been the owner of a six-hectare estate when the wine blight hit, withering his vines and driving him to ruin. In the space of a few months, all that remained of four generations of winegrowing were dead roots in the apple orchards and wild plants from which he made a dismal absinthe. He left this land of chalk and cereal, morels and walnuts to board an iron ship at Le Havre bound for California. Since the Panama Canal was yet to open, he had to go the whole way round South America, travelling for forty days on a Cape Horner, aboard which two hundred men were crammed into cargo holds filled with caged birds, and the noisy fanfare was such that he didn’t get a wink of sleep until the coast of Patagonia.

One night when he was wandering like a sleepwalker between berths, he saw an old, yellow-lipped woman with bracelets all the way up her arms and star tattoos on her forehead, sitting in the darkness on a rattan chair. She beckoned him towards her.

‘Can’t you sleep?’ she asked.

She took from her bodice a small green stone pitted with tiny twinkling holes, no bigger than an agate bead.

‘It’s three francs,’ she said.

He paid, and the old woman burned the stone on a tortoiseshell which she waved under his nose. The rush of smoke went straight to his head and he thought he would faint. That night, he slept for forty-seven hours, a deep, unshakeable sleep filled with dreams of sea creatures swimming through golden vines. When he awoke, he threw up the entire contents of his stomach and he felt so heavy he could not get out of bed. He never knew if it was the old Gypsy’s fumes or the fetid reek of the birdcages, but he sank into a delirious fever as they crossed the Strait of Magellan, hallucinating amid the cathedrals of ice, watching his skin become covered in grey patches as if turning to ash. The captain, who had learned to recognise the early signs of black magic, took one look at him and saw an epidemic looming.

‘Typhoid fever,’ he declared. ‘We’ll leave him at the next port.’

This was how he found himself in Valparaíso, Chile, in the middle of the War of the Pacific, in a country he could not have placed on a map and of whose language he was utterly ignorant. On his arrival, he joined the long queue snaking from the fish warehouse to the customs post. Having realised that the immigration officer was asking each passenger the same two questions before stamping their forms, he concluded that the first must concern where the passenger had come from and the second his or her destination.

When he reached the front of the queue, the officer asked, without looking up: ‘Nombre?’

Not understanding a word of Spanish, but convinced of having guessed the question correctly, he responded without hesitation, ‘Lons-le-Saunier.’

The officer’s face was expressionless. Slowly, wearily, he noted down: Lonsonier.

‘Fecha de nacimiento?’

‘California,’ he replied.

The officer shrugged, wrote down a date and handed over the form. And so it was that this exile of the vineyards of the Jura was rechristened Lonsonier and was born a second time on 21 May, the day of his arrival in Chile. Over the course of the next century, he never did continue his journey north, discouraged as much by the Atacama Desert as by the words of witch doctors, so that he sometimes said, as he gazed towards the Andes, ‘Chile has always reminded me of California.’

Lonsonier soon became used to the reversal of the seasons, to midday siestas and his new name which, despite everything, still sounded French. He learned to feel an earthquake coming and in no time was thanking God for everything, good or bad. Within a few months he spoke as if he had been born in the region, rolling his ‘r’s like stones in a river, though a trace of an accent gave him away. As he had been taught to understand the constellations of the zodiac and to measure astronomical distances, he could decipher this new writing of the southern skies, with its fugitive star algebra, and understood that he had settled in another world of pumas and araucarias, a primeval world peopled with stone giants, willows and condors.

He was taken on as head grower at the Concha y Toro wine estate and set up several wineries called bodegas on the farms of llama and goose breeders. The venerable French vine claimed a second lease of life on the skirts of the cordillera, on the long, narrow strip of land which hung from the South American continent like a sword from a belt, a land where the sun shone blue. He soon joined a circle of French expatriates, transplanted and chilianisés, who had made smart matches and made their fortune in the foreign wine trade. Lonsonier, the humble winegrower, the simple countryman who had taken the road into the unknown, had suddenly become a shrewd businessman running several estates. From then on nothing – neither war nor blight, revolt nor dictatorship – could threaten his newfound prosperity, and as he marked the end of his first year in Santiago, Lonsonier blessed the day a Gypsy on an iron ship had burned a green stone beneath his nose.

He married Delphine Moriset, a waifish, delicate woman with straight red hair, who came from an old family of umbrella merchants from Bordeaux. Delphine would tell how her family had decided to emigrate to San Francisco after a drought in France, hoping to open a shop in California. The Morisets had crossed the Atlantic, sailed the coasts of Brazil and Argentina and passed through the Strait of Magellan before the ship called at the port of Valparaíso. It just so happened to be raining that day. Her father, the decisive Monsieur Moriset, walked onto the quay and within an hour had sold all the umbrellas he had brought on the journey in great sealed trunks. They never reboarded the ship for San Francisco and set up permanent home in this drizzly land sandwiched between mountain and ocean, where it was said that in some regions the rain could fall for half a century.

Brought together by twists of fate, the couple went to live in Santiago in an Andalusian-style house on Calle Santo Domingo, near the river Mapocho, whose waters swelled with the melting snows. The front of the house was screened by three lemon trees. The high-ceilinged rooms boasted Empire-era wicker furniture from Punta Arenas. In December, they had French specialities delivered, and the house was filled with boxes of pumpkins and veal paupiettes, cages of live quail, and plucked pheasants already displayed on silver platters, their flesh so toughened by the journey that it was hard to cut into them. The women would conduct incredible culinary experiments which seemed closer to sorcery than gastronomy. They mixed the age-old traditions of French cooking with the produce of the cordillera, filling the corridors with mysterious smells and clouds of yellow steam. They served empanadas stuffed with boudin, coq au malbec, pasteles de jaiba with morels, and reblochons so smelly the Chilean servants thought they must be made from the milk of sick cows.

Their children, who hadn’t a drop of Latin American blood in their veins, were more French than the French. Lazare Lonsonier was the first of three boys born in bedrooms with red sheets which smelled of aguardiente and snake oil. Despite growing up surrounded by old women speaking Mapuche, their mother tongue was French. Their parents had not wanted to refuse them the heritage they had clung to along their journey, a legacy saved from exile. The French language was a kind of secret refuge, a code they shared, both a relic and badge of victory from a former life. On the afternoon of Lazare’s birth, after his baptism under the lemon trees at the front of the house, they all processed into the garden and, dressed in white ponchos, celebrated by planting out the vine stock that Lonsonier senior had kept alive with a handful of soil inside a hat.

‘Now,’ he said, packing down the earth around the stem, ‘we have properly put down roots.’

From then on, despite the fact young Lazare Lonsonier had never set foot in France, it became the focus of his wildest flights of fancy, as the chroniclers of the Indies must have imagined the New World. He spent his youth in a world of magical faraway stories, sheltered from wars and political upheaval, drawn to France by a siren-like call. To his mind, the French empire had so perfected the art of refinement that no account of it could ever do it justice. Distance, time and the lifting of roots had glorified the land his parents had bitterly left behind, so that he longed for a France he had never seen.

One day, a young neighbour with a German accent asked him which region his surname was from. The blond, well-dressed boy was descended from German settlers who had arrived in Chile twenty years earlier, his family having headed south to work the hard lands of Araucania. Lazare went home with the boy’s question burning on his lips.

That same evening, his father, mindful of the fact his family had taken its name from a misunderstanding at a customs post, whispered in his ear: ‘When you go to France, you’ll meet your uncle. He’ll tell you everything.’

‘What’s his name?’

‘Michel René.’

‘Where does he live?’

‘Here,’ he replied, placing a finger over his heart.

The traditions of the old continent were so deeply engrained in the family that come August, no one was surprised when they adopted the fashion for baths. Monsieur Lonsonier came home one afternoon with opinions on domestic cleanliness and imported the latest model of enamelled cast-iron bathtub standing on four bronze lion feet, which had neither taps nor plughole, but was shaped like a pregnant woman’s belly, with space enough for two people to lie side by side in the foetal position. Madame was impressed, the children giggled at its size and their father told them it was made of elephant tusks, proof that what lay before them was surely the most captivating discovery since the steam engine or the camera.

To fill the bath, he called for Fernandito Bracamonte, el aguatero, the neighbourhood water carrier and father of Hector Bracamonte, who, some years later, was to play a decisive role in the family destiny. Fernandito was already as bent as a birch branch, with the enormous hands common to his trade. He would cross the city on a mule, carting barrels of hot water and carrying them upstairs to fill basins, his tiredness showing. He talked of being the eldest of many siblings on the Caribbean side of the continent, including the gold-digger Severo Bracamonte; a church restorer in San Pablo del Limón; a utopian from Libertalia and a maracucho journalist who answered to the name of Babel Bracamonte. Yet despite having many brothers, nobody seemed to care about him on the night the firemen found him drowned in the back of a tanker.

The tub was placed in the centre of the room and, as each Lonsonier took turns to bathe in it, they added lemons from the porch to purify the water, and a bamboo bath rack on which to rest their newspaper.

Which is why, in August 1914, when news of the outbreak of the First World War reached Chile, Lazare Lonsonier was reading in the bath. A pile of newspapers had all arrived on the same day, two months late. L’Homme Enchaîné published Wilhelm II’s telegrams to the Tsar. L’Humanité broke the news that Jaurès had been murdered. Le Petit Parisien gave information on the general state of siege. But the headline of the most recent edition of Le Petit Journal announced, in big, menacing characters, that Germany had just declared war on France.

‘Pucha,’ he muttered.

The news brought home the distance between him and the land of his fathers. He was suddenly struck by a sense of belonging to this faraway country whose borders were being attacked. He leapt from his bath and despite the small, skinny, innocuous-looking body he saw in the mirror, a body ill-equipped for combat, he felt a surge of heroism rush through him. He pumped his muscles, and a simple pride warmed his heart. He felt he could hear his ancestors whispering to him and knew right away, with a tinge of fear, that he must respond to the call of destiny which, for a generation, had pitched his family towards the ocean.

He tied a towel around his waist and went down to the living room with the newspaper in his hand. With his family assembled in front of him, amid the thick scent of citrus, he raised his fist and declared: ‘I’m off to fight for France.’

Memories of the War of the Pacific remained raw. The ongoing Tacna–Arica question, concerning provinces Chile had won from Peru, still led to flare-ups in the border regions. The Peruvian army having been trained by the French, and the Chilean army by the Germans, it was not difficult for the children of European immigrants born on the slopes of the cordillera to see parallels between the tensions in Alsace-Lorraine and those of Tacna– Arica. The three Lonsonier brothers, Lazare, Robert and Charles, unfurled a map of France on the table and began studying troop movements in meticulous detail (despite having no idea what they were looking at), convinced that their uncle Michel René was already out fighting in the Forest of Argonne. Having forbidden the playing of Wagner in their living room, they sat in the lamplight, piscos in hand, taking turns to name rivers, valleys, towns and hamlets. In the space of a few days, they had covered the map with coloured drawing pins, tacks and little paper flags. The servants watched this pantomime with dismay, respecting their orders not to lay the table while the map was out, and nobody in the household could understand how you could go and fight for a region in which you did not live.

And yet in Santiago, the call to war sounded as loudly as if it were coming from just next door, and soon people talked of little else. Out of nowhere another kind of liberty – freedom of choice, of homeland – was all around them, making its presence and its glory felt wherever you looked. Notices of conscription and fundraising efforts were pinned to the walls of the consulate and the embassy. Special newspaper editions were hastily printed and girls who spoke only Spanish were making boxes of chocolates in the shape of kepis. A French aristocrat living in Chile offered a 3,000-peso reward for the first Franco-Chilean soldier to be decorated for bravery. Lines of volunteers formed on the main roads and the boats began to fill up with recruits, the sons and grandsons of settlers heading off to join the ranks, faces brimming with confidence, bags filled with neatly folded clothes and carp-scale amulets.

It was such an alluringly cheerful sight that it was impossible for the three Lonsonier boys to resist the burning desire to sign up along with all the others, swept up in the pomp and pageantry. In October on La Alameda, the main avenue in Santiago, in front of a crowd of four thousand people, they joined the eight hundred Franco-Chileans boarding trains at Mapocho station for Valparaíso, where they were to embark on a ship bound for France. A mass was held at the church of San Vicente de Paul, between Calle 18 de Septiembre and San Ignacio, and a military band played a booming rendition of the Marseillaise before the tricolour flag. Later accounts would tell that there were so many reservists, they had had to add on extra carriages at the back of the express del norte, and that some of the young volunteers who arrived late had travelled on foot over the cordillera of the Andes – covered in snow at that time of year – to catch the boat at Buenos Aires.

The journey was long. The sea filled Lazare with both dread and amazement. While Robert spent the whole day reading in his cabin and Charles exercised on deck, Lazare smoked cigarettes and listened to the rumours swirling among the recruits. In the morning, they all joined together in rousing military songs and heroic marches, but as the sun went down, they huddled in circles telling horrifying stories of dead birds raining down from the sky at the front, of black fever spawning snails in the stomach, of Germans carving their initials into their prisoners’ skin, of the return of diseases not seen since the time of the Baron de Pointis. Once again Lazare thought of France as a dream, and after forty days, when the coast came into view, he realised that the only possibility he had never envisaged was that it really existed.

To disembark, he wore corduroy trousers, thin-soled loafers and a cable-knit jacket handed down from his father. Dressed Chilean-style, he set foot in the port with the naïvety of the adolescent he had been, not the pride of the soldier he was to become. Charles wore a sailor’s outfit, a blue-striped shirt and a cotton hat topped with a red pompom. He had styled himself a fine, perfectly symmetrical moustache to adorn his lip like his glorious Gallic ancestors, smoothing the points with a little saliva. Robert had donned a tuxedo shirt, satin trousers and a silver watch on a chain above his waist, which, on the day of his death, was discovered still to be set to Chilean time.

The first thing they noticed as they walked onto the quay was the smell, which was almost identical to that of the port of Valparaíso. But there was no time to dwell on this, for as soon as they disembarked they were lined up before their company command and handed their uniforms: red trousers, a double-breasted greatcoat, gaiters and a pair of leather boots. They boarded one of the military trucks destined for the battlefields, carrying thousands of immigrants come to tear each other to shreds at the very heart of the continent their fathers had left, never to return. Sitting face to face on benches, nobody spoke the French Lazare had read in books, with its flashes of wit and choice turns of phrase; instead, orders were barked unpoetically, insults thrown at an unseen enemy, and on their arrival that night, as Lazare queued in front of the four huge cast-iron casseroles in which the two cooks were reheating a bony stew, all he heard were Breton and Provençal dialects. For a split second, he was tempted to reboard the boat, go back home the way he had come, but he remembered the promise he had made and decided that if there was any patriotic duty that went beyond borders, it was that of fighting to defend the land of your forebears.

For the first few days, Lazare Lonsonier was so busy shoring up trenches, putting in wooden posts and metal grates and laying criss-crossed boards along the ground, that he hadn’t time to feel homesick for Chile. He and his brothers spent more than a year putting up barbed wire, sharing out food rations and transporting cases of explosives from one line to the next, coming under fire as they followed the long tracks between artillery batteries. To begin with, to keep their soldierly dignity, they washed sparingly when they found a source of clean water, using a small piece of soap which covered their arms in grey lather. They allowed their beards to grow, out of fashion rather than negligence, so that they too could have the honour of being referred to as poilus. But as the months passed, dignity came at a humiliating price. In groups of ten, they set about the degrading exercise of delousing, standing naked in a field with their clothes plunged into boiling water, polishing their rifles with a mixture of sweat and grease before stepping back into their frayed, torn, muddy uniforms, the smell of which would haunt Lazare well into the darkest days of the rise of Nazism.

A rumour went round that anyone who brought back information from the enemy front would be given thirty francs. In the worst of conditions, famished infantrymen soon began to try their luck, climbing over worm-ridden bodies. They lay in the muck like animals, peeking through cracks, peering over the chevaux-de-frise in hopes of catching a date, a time, any sign of impending attack. Far from their billets, they sneaked along German lines, trembling with fear and cold in their secret lookouts, sometimes spending entire nights huddled in shell craters. The only one to get his thirty francs was Augustin Latour, a cadet from Manosque. He said he had found a German lying at the foot of a sharp drop, his neck broken by the fall, and had searched his pockets. He had found nothing except some letters written in German, a few paper Deutschmarks and small metal coins with a square hole in the centre, but in a secret leather pouch tucked inside the soldier’s belt he spotted thirty francs in notes, carefully folded into six, which must have been stolen from the body of a Frenchman. He held them proudly aloft, repeating, ‘I’ve got France’s money back.’

It was around this time that a well was discovered halfway between the two trenches. To his dying day, Lazare Lonsonier never understood how the two enemy lines had come to agree a ceasefire to allow each side to reach it. Around midday, they would all stop firing, and a French soldier would have half an hour to get out of his trench, fill up his heavy buckets of water and carry them back. When the half-hour was up, a German soldier would take his turn to replenish his buckets. Once both fronts were adequately supplied, the guns started up again. They survived in this way in order to carry on killing one another. This black dance was repeated every day with military precision, neither side overrunning their allotted time, strictly respecting the chivalric codes of war, and when they returned from the well, the chosen soldiers said that for the first time in two years of fighting, they had heard distant birdsong, or the whirr of a mill.

Lazare Lonsonier put himself forward. Loaded with four buckets hanging from his forearms, twenty empty flasks across his shoulder and a washing-up basin in his hands, he reached the well after ten minutes of walking, all the while wondering how he would make it back once these same receptacles were filled. Built of old bricks and surrounded by a crumbling wall, the well was as sorry a sight as an aviary empty of birds. Bullet-strewn basins littered the ground around it and a soldier’s jacket had been left lying over the edge.

He tied the bucket handle to a rope and lowered it until he heard a splash. He was beginning to pull it back up when a shape suddenly loomed before him like a rock.

Lazare lifted his head. Standing covered in camouflage mud, a German soldier was pointing his gun at him. Terrified, Lazare let go of the rope, dropping the bucket. He straightened up and tried to run, but tripped over a stone and cried out, ‘Pucha!’

He waited for the shot, but none came. He slowly opened his eyes and turned towards the soldier. The soldier stepped forward; Lazare shrank back. The German must have been around the same age as him, but his uniform, boots and helmet all made him look older. He lowered his pistol and asked, ‘Eres Chileno?’

The question was whispered in perfect Spanish, a Spanish of fierce condors and arrayanes, cormorants and eucalyptus-scented rivers.

‘Si,’ replied Lazare.

The soldier looked relieved.

‘De donde eres?’ he asked.

‘De Santiago.’

The German smiled.

‘Yo también. Me llamo Helmut Drichmann.’

Lazare suddenly recognised the young neighbour from Calle Santo Domingo who had asked him, ten years earlier, where his name came from. News of the war had reached them both at the same time. Both had been drawn across the ocean to defend another country, another flag, but now, standing before this water well, for the space of an instant, they silently returned to drink at the source of their birth.

‘Escúchame,’ said the German. ‘A surprise attack is planned for Friday night. Find a way to be sick and spend the night in the infirmary. It could save your life.’

Helmut Drichmann delivered these words in one breath, unplanned and uncalculated. He said them as you would give water to another man, not because you have it, but because you know what thirst is like. The German slowly took off his helmet, and only then could Lazare see him clearly. There was a marble-like beauty to his heavy, matte face, whose patina called to mind the understated charm of old statues. Lazare thought of all the soldiers who had slept in ditches in the hopes of overhearing a conversation, learning where a platoon or machine-gun position was hidden, and the significance of the secret hit home, clear and absurd, like all the great and base events of history.

That day, he faced the first in a long series of dilemmas that would confront generations to come. Should he save himself by hiding out in the infirmary, or protect his fellow soldiers by reporting what he knew to his superiors? Unable to choose, he was in silent turmoil. When he got back to the French lines and his eyes met those of his comrades, he feared they would see him for what he was: both a liar and a traitor.

The conclusion he reached, out of love for Chile, was that he must respect the secret Helmut Drichmann had just told him. He imagined an impossible middle ground between deception and admission. He tried to find a clue, a sign to convince him he had made the right decision, but faced with his weary comrades, he remained hesitant and uncertain. Seeing Charles and Robert lying under filthy blankets on their straw mattresses, he felt such a strong sense of shame that he realised his decision no longer held. He understood that, deep down, true fraternity bound him to another choice. He didn’t fully grasp the implications immediately. He didn’t suspect for a minute that he had just endured the pain of his first injury, but an hour after his return, he discreetly informed his superior officer of the impending German attack. When he was offered his thirty-franc reward, he refused it.