The Beacon of Valparaíso

The lamp had a sound of its own in Catalina’s memory: a slow, patient breathing that rose from the bowl of oil and the wick, a quiet rhythm that marked the night as certainly as the tide. She kept that sound with the care of someone who thought of time and safety as appliances of her hands — a measured trimming of the wick, the scraping of soot from the copper reflector, the tightening of the chains on the glass lantern so wind would not rattle it into shards. The beacon stood on a crag of basalt above Valparaíso’s harbor, part sentinel and part household: a narrow tower, a low room that smelled of brine and whale oil, a ledger in which Catalina recorded each barrel and each lantern-change as if chronicling a litany.

Her father had taught her all of it between the shouts of fishermen and the slow, insistent work of maintenance. He had shown her the small things that made light reliable — the way a wick must be rolled, the angle of a polished tin reflector, the right moment to top a lamp with heavy oil when fog would come rolling in off the Pacific. After his hands stopped finding the ropes and the keys, she kept the ritual without ceremony. She was twenty-two and the work had grown into the same simple steadiness she had always sought: oil, fire, pull of tide, sweep of horizon. In the daylight the town’s colors climbed the hills in flurries of laundry and painted wood; at night the harbor was a swath of black and lanterns. Catalina valued the plainness of her watch. It asked of her nothing but attention.

Valparaíso had changed in the past years as ships arrived with new flags and new phrases. Word came now with a briskness she could not still: talk of armies inland, of assemblies in Santiago, of a distant struggle that sometimes arrived in small, tangible ways — the requisition of a barrel here, the questioning of a sailor there. Spanish officers had begun to make routine rounds along the headlands. Their uniforms were crisp and their manners careful, but their eyes lingered long on any who kept to the edges of the port. Don Esteban’s men, the town said, had taken to asking about strangers and rummaging through fishermen’s logs. For the moment the beacon’s work remained simple; its ethics, to Catalina, were absolute: keep the lantern for the safety of any who sailed, whether they flew the red cross or another flag.