Daughter of Fortune

  “The man is a devil. He will bring you nothing but trouble,” she said finally.

  “It has already begun. He left six weeks ago for California, and I haven’t had my period.”

  Mama Fresia slumped down on the floor with her legs crossed, as she did when her bones could not carry her another step, and began to rock back and forth, moaning softly.

  “Quiet, Mamacita, Miss Rose can hear us,” Eliza plead.

  “A child of the gutter! A huacho! what are we going to do, child? What are we going to do?” Mama Fresia could not stop lamenting.

  “I am going to marry him.”

  “How, if he’s gone?”

  “I will have to find him.”

  “Ay! Sweet blessed Jesus! Have you lost all your senses? I will give you something and in a few days you will be like new.”

  So Mama Fresia brewed borage tea and made up a potion of chicken shit dissolved in black beer, which she made Eliza drink three times a day; she also made her soak in sulfur baths and applied mustard compresses to her stomach. The result was that Eliza turned yellow and went around bathed in a sticky sweat that smelled like rotted gardenias, but after a week there were still no signs of a miscarriage. Mama Fresia concluded that the creature was male and obviously had a curse on it, and that was why it clung so tightly to its mother’s insides. This state of affairs was beyond her, it was the work of the devil and only the woman who had taught her, the machi, could deal with a problem of this magnitude. That same evening she asked her patrona’s permission to be gone for a while, and once again she walked the steep path to the ravine to stand dejected before the ancient blind witch woman. As a gift, she took her two jars of quince preserves and a stuffed duck flavored with rosemary.

  The machi listened to the latest developments, nodding wearily, as if she already knew what had happened.

  “I told you before that a fixation is very stubborn: it burrows into the brain and breaks the heart. There are many fixations, but love is the worst.”

  “Can you do something so my little girl can cast out the huacho?”

  “That I can do. But that won’t cure her. She will have to follow the man.”

  “He went far away to look for gold.”

  “After love, the worst fixation is gold,” the machi intoned.

  Mama Fresia understood that it would be impossible to get Eliza out of the house and take her to the machi’s ravine, let her do her work, and get the girl back home without Miss Rose finding out. The machi was a hundred years old and hadn’t left her wretched hut in fifty of them, so neither was she going to come to the Sommers’. There was no other way, she would do it herself. The machi gave her a slender coligüe twig and a dark, stinking pomade, then explained in detail how to dab the sprig in the salve and insert it in Eliza. Then she taught her the words of the incantation that would free the creature from the devil and at the same time protect the mother’s life. Mama Fresia would have to perform this ceremony on a Friday night, the one day in the week that was authorized for doing it, she warned. Mama Fresia went home very late and very tired, with the coligüe and pomade under her mantle.

  “Pray, child, because in two nights’ time I will do the cure,” she told Eliza when she took in her breakfast chocolate.

  Captain John Sommers disembarked in Valparaíso on the day set by the machi. It was the second Friday in the full summer of February. The bay was seething with activity, with fifty ships at anchor and others waiting their turn outside the port to come in. As always, Jeremy, Rose, and Eliza were at the dock to welcome this admirable Sommers, who as usual was loaded down with trinkets, stories, and gifts. Average citizens, who had appointments to visit the ships and buy contraband, blended in with seamen, travelers, stevedores, and customs employees, while a group of prostitutes, stationed at a certain distance, was studying the lay of the land. In recent months, ever since news of gold had stirred the greed of men on every shore of the world, ships had entered and left at a crazed pace, and the brothels couldn’t keep up. The most intrepid women, however, were not satisfied with the steady stream of business in Valparaíso and had calculated how much more they could earn in California, where, if what you heard was true, there were two hundred men for every woman. In the port, people jockeyed around carts, draft animals, and bundles; the air was filled with a babel of tongues, ships’ horns, and guards’ whistles, and the smell of fish baking in great baskets in the sun mixed with the stench of animal excrement and human sweat. Miss Rose, holding a vanilla-perfumed handkerchief to her nose, scrutinized the passengers in the dinghies, looking for her favorite brother as Eliza sniffed the air in quick gulps, trying to separate and identify the odors. She was the first to sight Captain Sommers. She was so relieved that she almost burst out crying. She had been waiting for him for several months, sure that he alone would understand the anguish of her frustrated love. She hadn’t said a word about Joaquín Andieta to Miss Rose, much less Jeremy Sommers, but she was sure that her seafaring uncle, whom nothing could surprise or frighten, would help her.

  The moment the captain stepped onto dry land, an exhilarated Eliza and Miss Rose threw themselves on him; he clasped them both in his formidable arms, lifted them off the ground, and whirled like a top to the gleeful shouts of Miss Rose and the protests of Eliza, who was about to throw up. Jeremy Sommers greeted his brother with a handshake, asking himself how it was possible that he hadn’t changed a hair in the last twenty years and was as rollicking as ever.

  “What’s this, my little pumpkin? You look a little peaky,” the captain said, examining Eliza.

  “I ate some green fruit, Uncle,” she said, dizzy and leaning against him to keep from falling.

  “I know you two didn’t come down here to welcome me. What you want is to buy some perfumes, I’ll wager? I’ll tell you who has the best, straight from the heart of Paris.”

  At that moment, a foreigner walking by bumped the captain with his suitcase, which he was carrying on his back. John Sommers swung around, incensed, but when he recognized the culprit jokingly shouted one of his characteristic curses, and grabbed his arm.

  “Come meet my family, Chino,” he called cordially.

  Eliza stared openly at the man because she had never seen an Asian close up and at last she had before her a citizen of China, the fabulous country that figured in so many of her uncle’s tales. This was a man of uncertain age, rather tall compared to Chileans, although beside the hearty English captain he looked like a boy.

  He walked without grace, had the smooth face and slender body of a youth, and an ancient expression in his obliquely set eyes. His doctoral restraint contrasted with a childlike laugh that burst from the bottom of his chest when Sommers spoke to him. He was wearing trousers cut off at the shin, a loose muslin smock, a sash about his waist in which had tucked a large knife, cloth slippers and a beat-up straw hat, and a long braid trailed down his back. He greeted them with several nodding bows, without setting down his suitcase or meeting anyone’s eyes. Miss Rose and Jeremy Sommers, uncomfortable at the familiarity with which their brother was treating a person of obviously inferior rank, did not know what to do, and responded with a brief nod. To Miss Rose’s horror, Eliza held out her hand, but the man pretended not to see it.

  “This is Tao Chi’en, the worst cook I’ve ever had, but he knows how to cure almost any ailment—that’s the only reason I didn’t make him walk the plank,” the captain joked.

  Tao Chi’en made a new series of little bows, laughed for no apparent reason, and then backed away. Eliza wondered if he understood English. Behind the backs of the two women, John Sommers whispered to his brother that this Chinaman could sell him the best-quality opium and powdered rhinoceros horn for impotence, in case one day he decided to break the bad habit of celibacy. Hiding behind her fan, Eliza listened, intrigued.

  That afternoon in the house, at tea time, the captain handed out the gifts he had brought: English shaving soap, a set of Toledo steel scissors, and Havana cigars for his brother, to
rtoiseshell combs and a Manila shawl for Rose, and, as always, a jewel for Eliza’s trousseau. This time it was a pearl necklace, which she thanked him for profusely and put in her jewel box along with the others he had given her. Thanks to Miss Rose’s obstinacy and her uncle’s generosity, her dowry chest was filling up with treasures.

  “This business of a trousseau seems a bit foolish, especially when there’s no bridegroom in hand,” the captain joked. “Or maybe there is one on the horizon?”

  Eliza exchanged a terrified glance with Mama Fresia, who had just at that moment brought in the tea tray. The captain said nothing, but asked himself whether his sister Rose had noticed the changes in Eliza. So what was feminine intuition good for, anyway?

  They spent the rest of the evening listening to the captain’s wondrous stories about California, even though he hadn’t been there since the discovery of gold and the only thing he could say about San Francisco was that it wasn’t much of a town but that it did sit on the most beautiful bay in the world. The brouhaha about gold was all that anyone was talking about in Europe and the United States, and the news had reached even the distant shores of Asia. His ship was crammed with passengers on their way to California, men of all ages and conditions, ignorant of the most elementary notion of mining; many had never seen a fleck of gold in their lives. There was no comfortable or quick way to get to San Francisco; a sailing ship took months, under the most precarious conditions, the captain explained, but traveling across the American continent, defying the immensity of the land and the Indian raids, took longer, and there was even less chance of getting there alive. Those who came by ship via Panama crossed the isthmus first in long boats along rivers roiling with predators and then on muleback through deep jungle. When they reached the Pacific Coast they took another ship north, having endured devilish heat, poisonous reptiles, mosquitoes, and plagues of cholera and yellow fever, to say nothing of unspeakable human wickedness. Travelers who had been spared falling off cliffs on their mounts and had survived the dangers of the swamps to reach the other ocean found themselves victims of bandits who robbed them of their belongings or mercenaries who charged a fortune to take them to San Francisco, piling them like cattle onto ships coming apart at the seams.

  “Is California very big?” Eliza asked, trying not to let her voice reveal her heart’s anxiety.

  “Bring me a map and I’ll show you. It’s much larger than Chile.”

  “And how do you get to where the gold is?”

  “They say there’s gold everywhere.”

  “But say, for example, you wanted to find someone in California. . . .”

  “That would be very difficult,” the captain answered, studying Eliza’s expression with curiosity.

  “Are you going there on your next trip, Uncle?”

  “I have a tempting offer that I think I will accept. Some Chilean investors want to establish a regular cargo and passenger service to California. They need a captain for their steamship.”

  “Then we shall see you more often, John!” Rose exclaimed.

  “You do not have any experience on steamships,” Jeremy noted.

  “Maybe not, but I know the sea better than anyone.”

  On the night of the appointed Friday, Eliza waited for the house to quiet down before going to the little shed in the farthest patio to meet Mama Fresia. She got out of bed and went downstairs barefoot, wearing only a cotton nightgown. She had no idea what nostrum she was going to be given, but she was sure it would be far from delightful. In her experience all medicines were unpleasant, but her mamacita’s were foul. “Don’t you worry, niña, I’m going to give you enough liquor that when you wake up you won’t remember any pain. One thing, though,” she had told her. “We will need a lot of rags to catch the blood.” Eliza had often made that same trip through the dark house to meet her lover, so she did not have to feel her way, but that night she went very slowly, dragging her feet, hoping for one of those Chilean earthquakes capable of flattening everything to give her a good excuse not to meet Mama Fresia. Her feet were icy and a shiver ran down her back. She didn’t know if it was cold, fear of what was going to happen, or the last nudge of her conscience. From her first suspicion that she was pregnant she had heard a voice calling her. It was the voice of the baby in her womb, crying out for its right to live, she was sure. She tried not to hear it, and not to think; she was trapped and as soon as she began to show there would be no hope or forgiveness for her. No one would be able to understand her fall; there was no way to recover her lost honor. Neither prayers nor Mama Fresia’s candles could prevent her disgrace. Her lover wasn’t going to turn around in midtrip and hurry back to marry her before you could see she was pregnant. It was already too late for that. She was terrified at the thought of ending up like Joaquín’s mother, branded with a shameful stigma, shunned by her family and living in poverty and loneliness with an illegitimate child; she couldn’t bear rejection, she would rather die once and for all. And she might die that very night at the hands of the good woman who had brought her up and loved her more than anyone in this world.

  The family started to go to bed early, but the captain and Miss Rose stayed locked up in her little sewing room, whispering for hours. Every voyage John Sommers brought books to his sister and as he left carried mysterious packets that Eliza suspected contained things Miss Rose had written. She had seen her carefully wrapping up the notebooks, the ones she spent leisurely afternoons filling with cramped writing. Out of respect, or some strange reluctance, no one mentioned them, just as no one said anything about the muted water-colors she painted. Writing and painting were treated like minor aberrations, nothing to be truly ashamed of, but nothing to boast about, either. Eliza’s culinary skills were received with the same indifference by the Sommers, who tasted the dishes in silence and changed the subject if visitors commented on them. On the other hand, they offered undeserved applause when it came to her valiant efforts at the piano, even if barely good enough to stumble along accompanying a singer. All her life Eliza had seen Miss Rose writing and had never asked about it, just as she had never heard whether Jeremy and John themselves did. She was curious to know why her uncle was so furtive when he carried Miss Rose’s notebooks away, but without anyone’s stating it she knew that this was one of the fundamental secrets upon which the family’s equilibrium depended, and to violate it would be to bring down with one puff the house of cards they lived in. For a long while now Jeremy and Rose had been asleep in their rooms, and her uncle John had gone out on horseback after his long talk with his sister. Knowing the captain’s habits, the girl could imagine him carousing with some of his flighty women friends, the ones who said hello in the street when Miss Rose wasn’t with them. She supposed that he danced and drank, but as she had barely heard whispers about prostitutes, the idea of anything more sordid never occurred to her. The possibility of doing for money or sport what she had done with Joaquín Andieta for love never entered her mind. According to her calculations, her uncle would not be home until early the next morning, which is why she nearly jumped out of her skin when, as she reached the ground floor, someone grabbed her arm in the dark. She felt the warmth of a large body against hers, a breath of liquor and tobacco in her face, and immediately identified her uncle. She tried to slip loose as she struggled to slap together some story about why she was there in her nightgown at that hour, but the captain marched her to the library dimly lit by moonbeams falling through the window. He sat her down in Jeremy’s English leather armchair while he looked for matches to light the lamp.

  “All right, Eliza, now you’re going to tell me what the hell’s going on,” he ordered in a tone he had never used with her.

  In a flash of lucidity, Eliza knew that the captain would not be her ally, as she had hoped. The tolerance he liked to boast of would not be forthcoming in this instance; if the good name of the family was in question, his loyalty would be with his brother and sister. Mute, the girl held his eyes, defying him.

  “Ros
e tells me that you’ve fallen in love with some fellow or other who is clearly on his uppers, is that right?”

  “I saw him twice, Uncle John. And that was months ago. I don’t even know his name.”

  “But you haven’t forgotten him, have you? First love is like smallpox, it leaves its scars. Were you alone with him?”

  “No.”

  “I don’t believe you. You think I’m a fool? Anyone can see how you’ve changed, Eliza.”

  “I don’t feel well, Uncle. I ate some green fruit and my stomach’s upset, that’s all. I was just on my way to the privy.”

  “You have the eyes of a bitch in heat!”

  “What a terrible thing to say, Uncle.”

  “I’m sorry, child. Don’t you see that I love you very much and I’m worried about you? I can’t allow you to ruin your life. Rose and I have worked out an excellent plan. Would you like to go to England? I can arrange for the two of you to sail within the month; that will give you time to buy what you need for the voyage.”

  “England?”

  “You will travel in first class, like queens, and once in London you will stay in a charming hotel a few blocks from Buckingham Palace.”

  Eliza understood that her uncle and aunt had arranged her future. The last thing she wanted was to go off in the opposite direction from Joaquín, putting two oceans between them.

  “Thank you, Uncle. I would love to know England,” she said with all the sweetness she could muster.

  The captain poured himself one brandy after another, lighted his pipe, and spent two solid hours telling Eliza about the advantages of life in London, where a young lady like her could mix in the best society, go to balls, attend the theater and concerts, buy beautiful dresses, and make a good marriage. She was at an age to do that. And wouldn’t she like to go to Paris and Italy, too? No one should die without seeing Venice and Florence. He would personally see that she got everything she wanted, hadn’t he always done that? The world is filled with handsome, interesting men of good standing; she would find that out for herself as soon as she got out of the godforsaken port she was buried in. Valparaíso was no place for a girl as pretty and well educated as she. It wasn’t her fault that she fell in love with the first male to cross her path; she had been locked up all her life. And about that boy, what was his name? Someone who worked for Jeremy, wasn’t he? She would soon forget him. Love, he assured her, inexorably burns itself out, or with distance is pulled up by the roots. No one could give her better advice than he could; whatever else, he was an expert on distance and love turned to ash.