“Jesús, María, y José!” Azucena yelled, crossing herself in terror when she saw Eliza.
“Ask her to help us,” Tao Chi’en told Eliza in English, shaking her awake.
It took Eliza a good quarter of an hour to stammer out the simple instructions from Tao Chi’en, who had taken the turquoise brooch from Eliza’s bag of jewels and was brandishing it before the eyes of the trembling Azucena. The deal, he told her, as Eliza translated, was to come down twice a day to bathe and feed Eliza, without anyone’s knowing. If she did that, he would give her the brooch in San Francisco, but if she said a single word to anyone, he would slit her throat. He had taken the knife from his sash and was waving it under her nose; in the other hand he held the brooch so the message would be very clear.
“You understand?”
“Tell this crazy Chinaman I understand and to put that knife away, because he could kill me, mean to or not.”
For a time that seemed endless, Eliza fought her way through delirium, tended by Tao Chi’en at night and Azucena Placeres by day. Early in the morning and at siesta time, when most of the passengers were drowsing, Azucena would slip down to the kitchen and get the key from Tao Chi’en. At first she was shaking with fear when she went down to the hold, but soon her natural good nature, and the brooch, overcame her fright. She would begin by rubbing Eliza with a soapy rag until she had removed the sweat of her agony, then force her to eat some oatmeal and chicken broth fortified with the tangkuei Tao Chi’en prepared. She gave Eliza herbs, according to his directions, and on her own initiative brewed her a daily cup of borage tea. She blindly trusted in that remedy to flush a pregnancy from a womb: borage and an image of the Virgin of Carmen were the first things she and her companions-in-adventure had tucked into their travel trunks, because without those protections the roads of California could be very hard to travel. Eliza was lost in the land of death until the morning they anchored in the port of Guayaquil, not much more than a small community overrun by exuberant Ecuadorian vegetation; few ships anchored there except to negotiate for tropical fruit or coffee, but Captain Katz had promised to deliver some letters to a family of Dutch missionaries. He had had that correspondence with him for six months and he was not a man to fail on a promise. The previous night, in heat like a bonfire, Eliza had sweated out the last drop of temperature and dreamt that she was climbing barefoot up the side of an erupting volcano; she awakened sopping wet but lucid and with a clear brow. All the passengers, including the women and a good part of the crew, disembarked for a few hours to stretch their legs, bathe in the river, and stuff themselves with fresh fruit, but Tao Chi’en stayed onboard to teach Eliza to light and smoke the pipe he had in his trunk. He had doubts about the girl’s treatment; that was one time he would have given anything to have the counsel of his wise master. He understood the need to keep her calm and help pass the time in the prison of the hold, but she had lost a lot of blood and he was afraid the drug would thin what little she had left. He made his decision hesitantly, after entreating Lin to watch over Eliza’s sleep.
“Opium. It will put you to sleep, and so time will pass quickly.”
“Opium! That brings madness!”
“You’re mad anyway, so you have little to lose,” Tao said, smiling.
“You want to kill me, don’t you?”
“Of course. I wasn’t able to kill you when you were bleeding to death so I will now with opium.”
“Tao, I am afraid of it.”
“Much opium is bad. A little is comfort and I will give you only a little.”
Eliza didn’t know how much “little” or “much” was. Tao Chi’en had her drink his potions—dragon bone and oyster shell—and rationed the opium to give her a few hours of merciful half sleep but not allow her to lose herself forever in a paradise of no return. She spent the next weeks flying through other galaxies, far from the unhealthy burrow where she lay prostrate and awakened only when Tao or Azucena came to feed her, bathe her, and make her walk a little in the narrow labyrinths of the hold. She did not feel the torment of fleas and lice or smell the nauseating stench she had at first been unable to bear, because the drugs deadened her prodigious sense of smell. She floated in and out of her dreams without control, nor could she remember them, but Tao Chi’en was right: time passed quickly. Azucena Placeres did not understand why Eliza was traveling under such conditions. None of her group had paid for a passage, they had a contract with the captain, who would get his pay when they reached San Francisco.
“If the stories are true, in a single day you can make hundreds of dollars. The miners pay with pure gold. They go for months without seeing a woman, they’re desperate. Talk with the captain and pay him when you get there,” she would insist to Eliza in the brief times she was up.
“I am not one of you,” Eliza replied, groggy in the sweet fog of the drugs.
Finally, in a moment of lucidity, Azucena Placeres got Eliza to confess part of her story. Immediately, the idea of helping a fugitive of love captured the woman’s imagination, and from then on she cared for the invalid with even greater attention. Now she not only fed her and bathed her, she stayed with her for the pleasure of watching her sleep. If Eliza was awake, Azucena told her about her own life and taught her to pray the rosary that, according to her, was the best way to pass hours without thinking and at the same time get to heaven without too much effort. Nothing better for a person in her profession, she explained. She saved part of the money she took in to buy indulgences from the Church, thus reducing the days she would have to spend in purgatory in the next life, although, according to her calculations, she would never have enough to cover all her sins. Weeks went by when Eliza didn’t know whether it was night or day. She had a vague sensation of sometimes relying on a female presence at her side, but then she would sleep and wake confused, not knowing if she had dreamed Azucena Placeres or whether in fact a small woman existed who had black hair, a flat nose, and high cheekbones, and looked like a young version of Mama Fresia.
The climate grew a little cooler as they left Panama behind, where the captain had forbidden anyone to go ashore because of fear of yellow fever; he sent two sailors in a dinghy to scout for freshwater, since what little they had left was like swamp water. They sailed past Mexico, and once the Emilia was plowing the waters of northern California they encountered winter. The suffocating heat of the first part of the voyage was replaced with cold and wet; out of suitcases came fur hats, boots, gloves, and woolen petticoats. From time to time the brigantine met other ships and saluted from a distance, without slowing. At each religious service the captain gave thanks for their progress, because he knew of ships that had sailed as far as the shores of Hawaii or beyond before finding favorable winds. Besides playful dolphins, large, solemn whales accompanied them for long stretches. At dusk, when the water turned red with reflections from the setting sun, the enormous cetaceans made love in a froth of golden foam, calling to one another with deep, submarine bawling. And sometimes, in the silence of the night, they came so close to the ship that the heavy, mysterious whisper of their presence was easily heard. All fresh provisions had been exhausted and rations were spare; except for playing cards and fishing there was no entertainment of any kind. The voyagers spent hours discussing the details of the associations created for the adventure, some with strictly military rules, even uniforms, others more informal. All of them, basically, had been formed to finance travel and equipment, work the mines, transport the gold, and then share the profits. No one knew anything about the terrain, or the distances. One of the associations stipulated that the members would return every night to the ship, where they were intended to live for several months, and deposit the day’s gold in a strongbox. Captain Katz explained to them that the Emilia could not be rented like a hotel because he planned to return to Europe as soon as possible, and that the mines were hundreds of miles from the port, but he was ignored. They had been sailing fifty-two days. The monotony of the infinite waves was affecting nerves and q
uarrels erupted over the least pretext. When a Chilean passenger was just at the point of firing his blunderbuss at a Yankee sailor with whom Azucena Placeres was flirting too openly, Captain Vincent Katz confiscated all weapons, including straight razors, with the promise that he would return them as soon as they sighted San Francisco. The one person authorized to handle knives was the cook, who had the thankless task of slaughtering the domestic animals one by one. Once the last cow ended up in the stewpots, Tao Chi’en improvised an elaborate ceremony to obtain the pardon of the sacrificed animals and cleanse himself of their spilled blood, then disinfected his knife by passing it several times through the flame of a torch.
As soon as the ship had sailed into California waters, Tao Chi’en began gradually cutting back on Eliza’s tranquilizing herbs and opium. He gave his attention to feeding her, and made her exercise so she would be able to walk out of her confinement on her own two feet. Azucena Placeres patiently washed Eliza with a soapy cloth and even improvised a way to wash her hair in a few cupfuls of water as she told Eliza sad tales about her life as a whore and of her fantasy of getting rich in California and returning to Chile as a lady, with six trunks of clothes fit for a queen and one gold tooth. Tao Chi’en was wondering how he was going to get Eliza off the ship, but he had brought her aboard in a seabag and surely he could use the same method to smuggle her ashore. And once on land, the girl was no longer his responsibility. The idea of a definitive parting produced a mixture of tremendous relief and inexplicable anxiety.
The Emilia was now only a few leagues from its destination, hugging the coast of northern California. According to Azucena Placeres, it looked so much like Chile that she was sure they had been traveling in circles, like a crab, and were back in Valparaíso. Thousands of sea lions and seals scrambled from the rocks and fell heavily into the water, setting off the loud screeching of gulls and pelicans. There was no sign of a human being along the coast, not a trace of a town or a shadow of the Indians who for centuries, they’d been told, had inhabited those enchanted lands. Finally they were approaching the rocky islands that announced the proximity of the famous Golden Gate, the threshold of the bay of San Francisco. A thick fog enveloped the ship like a blanket, and visibility was reduced to half a meter; the captain ordered a halt and dropped anchor, fearing a collision. They were so close now that the passengers’ impatience was turning to a near riot. Everyone was talking at once, eager to get onto dry land and race off to the placers in search of treasure. Most of the companies formed to explore the mines had broken up in the last days; the tedium of the sailing had made enemies of former partners and each man was thinking only of himself, sunk in reveries of enormous wealth. Some had declared their love for the prostitutes, wanting the captain to marry them before debarking because they had heard that the scarcest commodity in those barbarous lands was women. One of the Peruvian whores accepted the proposal of a Frenchman who had been onboard so long he no longer remembered his own name, but Captain Vincent Katz refused to celebrate the marriage when he learned the man already had a wife and four children in Avignon. The other women rejected their suitors outright, because, they said, they had made this tedious voyage in order to be free and rich, not to become an unpaid servant to the first beggar who asked them to marry.
Trapped in the milky unreality of the fog in forced immobility, the men’s enthusiasm dimmed with every hour. Finally, on the second day, the skies abruptly cleared. They weighed anchor and set off under full canvas on the last stage of the long voyage. Passengers and crew came out on deck to admire the narrow opening of the Golden Gate, then sailed six more miles under a diaphanous sky, pushed by the April winds. On either side rose densely wooded hills gashed with wounds inflicted by restless waves. The Pacific lay behind them, and before them, like a lake of silver, stretched the splendid bay. A salvo of hurrahs greeted the end of the arduous journey and the beginning of the gold adventure for those men and women—and the twenty crewmen as well, who had at that very instant decided to abandon the ship to its fate and test their luck with the others in the mines. The only persons left unfazed were the Dutch captain, Vincent Katz, who stood at his post beside the wheel without a trace of emotion—he was not moved by the gold, his only desire was to return to Amsterdam in time for Christmas with his family—and Eliza Sommers who, in the belly of the ship, did not know until many hours later that they had arrived at their destination.
The first thing to strike Tao Chi’en when they entered the bay was the forest of masts to his right. It was impossible to count them, but he estimated more than a hundred ships abandoned as if in the heat of battle. On shore, any peon earned more in a day than a sailor in a month of sailing; men deserted not only for gold, but also for the enticement of making money as porters, bakers, and blacksmiths. Some of the empty ships had been rented as storehouses or temporary hotels; others had been left to rot, covered with algae and gulls’ nests. The second thing Tao Chi’en saw was a community opening like a fan on the hillsides, a jumble of campaign tents, wood and cardboard shacks, and a few simple, but well constructed, buildings, the first in that mushrooming town. As soon as they dropped anchor a boat came alongside, not the harbormaster’s, as they had expected, but one belonging to a Chilean eager to welcome his compatriots and pick up the mail. He was Feliciano Rodríguez de Santa Cruz, who had changed his sonorous name to Felix Cross so the Yanquis could pronounce it. Even though several of the passengers were his personal friends, no one recognized him: every trace of the affected fop in a frock coat and waxed mustache they had last seen in Valparaíso had vanished. Before them stood a hirsute caveman with the weathered skin of an Indian clad in a mountain man’s gear: boots to midthigh, and two pistols at his waist. He was accompanied by a black with an equally savage look, he, too, armed like a highwayman. He was a fugitive slave who, as he stepped onto California soil, had become a free man, but as he was unwilling to suffer the misery of the mines he had chosen to earn his living as a hired gun. When Feliciano identified himself, he was greeted with cries of enthusiasm and practically carried on his friends’ shoulders to the nearest stateroom, where he was bombarded with questions about the latest news. Of prime interest was whether gold was as abundant as everyone said, to which Cross replied, “More,” and produced from his pouch a yellow substance that looked like squashed shit; he explained that this was a half-kilo nugget and that he was prepared to trade it for whatever liquor they had onboard; no deal was made, however, because there were only three bottles left, the rest having been consumed on the voyage. The nugget had been found, Feliciano told them, by valiant miners from Chile now working for him along the banks of the American River. Once they had drunk a toast with the last of the liquor and the Chilean had picked up the letters from his wife, he left them with a few words on how to survive in that land.
“Until a few months ago we had a code of honor, and even the worst ruffians behaved with decency. You could leave your gold in a tent with no guard and no one would touch it, but now all that has changed. The law of the jungle rules, the only ideology is greed. Don’t let yourself be parted from your weapons, and always travel in pairs or groups, because this is a land of thieves.”
Several dinghies had by then surrounded the ship, crewed by men shouting out all kinds of deals, eager to buy anything the passengers had because it could be sold on shore for five times its value. Unwary travelers quickly discovered the art of speculation. The harbormaster showed up in the afternoon, accompanied by a customs agent and trailing two boats filled with several Mexicans and two Chinese who offered to ferry the ship’s cargo to the dock. They charged a fortune, but there was no alternative. The harbormaster showed no inclination to check passports or verify the passengers’ identities.
“Documents? None of that! You have come to the paradise of freedom. There are no stamped papers here,” he cried.
He was, on the other hand, intensely interested in the women. He prided himself on being the first to try out each and every female who got off a
ship in San Francisco, although there weren’t as many as he would have wished. He told them how the first women to appear in the city, several months ago, were welcomed by a throng of euphoric males who stood in line for hours to take their turn, paying in gold dust, nuggets, coins, even bars. Those first two had been brave Yankee girls who had made the trip from Boston, crossing to the Pacific by way of the isthmus of Panama. They auctioned their services to the highest bidders, earning in one day their normal income for a year. Since then, more than five hundred whores had arrived, nearly all of them Mexicans, Chileans, and Peruvians, except for a few North American and French women, although their total number was insignificant compared to the growing invasion of young single men.