“I think I liked you better, Tao, when you were out-and-out Chinese. I don’t know you now. May I smell you?” she asked.
He stood very still, uneasy, while she sniffed him like a dog its quarry, at last recognizing the faint sea scent, the old, comforting odor. The haircut and severe tailoring made Tao look older; he had lost his lackadaisical air. He was thinner, and seemed taller, and his cheekbones stood out in his smooth face. Eliza observed his mouth with pleasure; she remembered perfectly his infectious smile and perfect teeth, but not how voluptuous his lips were. She caught a somber expression in his gaze but thought it must be the effect of his glasses.
“How good it is to see you, Tao!” she said as her eyes filled with tears.
“I couldn’t come any sooner, I didn’t have your address.”
“But I like you now, too. You remind me of a grave digger, but a handsome one.”
“That’s what I’m doing now,” he said, smiling, “digging graves. When I heard you were living in this place I thought you were fulfilling Azucena Placeres’s prophecy. She said that one day you would end up like her.”
“I told you in my letter that I earn my living playing the piano.”
“Incredible.”
“Why? You’ve never heard me, I’m not so bad. And if I could pass for a deaf-mute Chinese boy, I don’t know why I couldn’t be a Chilean piano player.”
To his surprise, Tao Chi’en burst out laughing. It was the first time in months he had been happy.
“Did you find your lover?”
“No. I don’t know where to look anymore.”
“Maybe he doesn’t deserve for you to find him. Come back with me to San Francisco.”
“I don’t have anything to do in San Francisco.”
“And here? Winter is coming. In a week or two the roads will be impassable and this town will be cut off.”
“It’s very boring to be your stupid little brother, Tao.”
“There is a lot to do in San Francisco, you’ll see, and you won’t have to dress as a man; there are women everywhere now.”
“What about your plans to go back to China?”
“They’re on hold. I can’t leave yet.”
Singsong Girls
In the summer of 1851 Jacob Freemont decided to interview Joaquín Murieta. Outlaws and fires were the chief subjects of conversation in California; they kept citizens terrorized and the press occupied. Crime was rampant and police corruption common knowledge; most of the force was composed of crooks more interested in protecting their partners in crime than the local populace. After one more raging fire, which destroyed a large area of San Francisco, a vigilante committee had been formed by outraged citizens, headed by the ineffable Sam Brannan, the Mormon who had spread the news of the gold. Companies of firemen pulling water carts by hand ran uphill and down, but before they reached a burning building flames would be leaping from the one beside it. The fire had begun when Australian “hounds” had splashed kerosene all through the store of a merchant who had refused to pay them protection money, and then torched it. In view of the indifference of the authorities, the committee had decided to act on its own. The newspapers clamored, “How many crimes have been committed in this city this year? And who has been hanged or jailed for them? No one! How many men have been shot or stabbed, hit over the head and beat up? And who has been convicted for that? We do not condone lynching, but who can tell what an indignant public will do to protect itself?” Lynchings were precisely the public’s solution. Vigilantes immediately threw themselves into the task and hanged the first suspect. The numbers of these self-appointed enforcers grew day by day, and they acted with such excessive enthusiasm that for the first time outlaws took care to move about only in the full light of day. In that climate of violence and revenge, the figure of Joaquín Murieta was on the way to becoming a symbol. Jacob Freemont took it upon himself to fan the flames of Murieta’s celebrity: his sensationalist articles had created a hero for Hispanics and a devil for Americans. Murieta was believed to have a large gang and the talent of a military genius; it was said that he was fighting a war of skirmishes that authorities were powerless to combat. He attacked with cunning and speed, descending upon his victims like a curse and then disappearing without a trace, only to show up a hundred miles away with another attack of unbelievable boldness that could be explained only by magic powers. Freemont suspected that there were several “Murietas,” not one, but he was careful not to write that because it would have diminished the legend. On the other hand, he had the inspired idea of labeling Murieta “the Robin Hood of California,” which immediately sparked a wildfire of racial controversy. To the Yanquis, Murieta represented what was most despicable about the greasers; and it was believed that the Mexicans hid him and provided him with weapons and supplies because he stole from the whites to help the people of his race. In the war they had lost the territories of Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah, and half of Colorado and California, and so for them any attack against the victors was an act of patriotism. The governor warned the newspaper against the rashness of making a hero of a criminal, but the name had already inflamed the public’s imagination. Freemont received dozens of letters, including one from a young girl in Washington who was ready to sail halfway around the world in order to marry that “Robin Hood” and people stopped Freemont in the street to ask him details about the famous Joaquín Murieta. Without ever having seen him, the newspaperman described Murieta as a young man of virile mien, with the features of a noble Spaniard and the courage of a bullfighter. Quite by accident, Freemont had stumbled across a gold mine more productive than many in the mother lode. He decided he must interview this Joaquín, if the fellow really existed, and write his biography, and if it were all a fable he would turn it into a novel. His work as author would consist simply of writing in a heroic tone to satisfy the common man’s tastes. California needed its myths and legends, Freemont maintained. To Americans, it had come into the union with a clean slate; they thought that the stroke of a pen could erase a long history of Indians, Mexicans, and Californians. For this land of empty spaces and solitary men, a land open to conquest and rape, what better hero than a bandit? Freemont packed his indispensables in a suitcase, stocked himself with a supply of notebooks and pencils, and set off in search of his character. The risks never entered his mind; having the dual arrogance of an Englishman and a journalist, he felt he was protected from any harm. In addition, traveling was by now effected with a certain ease; there were highways, and a regular stagecoach service connected the towns where he planned to make his investigations. It was not the way it had been when he had begun his work as a reporter, riding on mule back, forging a path through the uncertainty of hills and forests with no guide but insane maps that could lead one to wander in circles for all time. Along the way, he could see the changes in the region. Few men had made their fortune with gold but, thanks to adventurers who had come by the thousands, California was becoming civilized. Without gold fever, the conquest of the West would have been delayed by a couple of centuries, the journalist wrote in his notebook.
There was no dearth of subjects, such as the story of the young miner, a boy of eighteen, who after a year’s backbreaking effort had gotten together the ten thousand dollars he needed to go home to Oklahoma and buy a farm for his parents. He was walking back to Sacramento through the foothills of the Sierra Nevada one radiant day, with his treasure in a sack over his shoulder, when he was surprised by a band of ruthless Mexicans or Chileans, he wasn’t sure which. All he knew for sure was that they spoke Spanish, because they had the impudence to leave a sign in that language, scrawled by knifepoint on a piece of wood: “Death to Yanquis.” They were not content with beating and robbing him, they tied him naked to a tree and smeared him with honey. Two days later, when he was found by a patrol, he was raving. Mosquitoes had eaten away his skin.
Freemont put his talent for morbid journalism to the test with the tragic death of Josefa, a beautiful Mexican gi
rl who worked in a dance hall. She arrived in the town of Downieville on the Fourth of July and found herself in the midst of a celebration promoted by a candidate for senator and irrigated with a river of alcohol. A drunken miner had forced his way into Josefa’s room and she had fought him off, plunging her dagger deep into his heart. By the time Jacob Freemont arrived, the body was lying on a table, covered with an American flag, and a crowd of two thousand fanatics ignited by racial hatred was demanding the gallows for Josefa. Impassive, her white blouse stained with blood, smoking a cigarette as if the yelling had nothing to do with her, the woman was scanning the faces of the men with abysmal scorn, aware of the incendiary mixture of aggression and sexual desire she aroused in them. A doctor tried to take her part, explaining that she had acted in self-defense and that if they executed her they would also kill the baby in her womb, but the mob silenced him by threatening to hang him, too. Three terrified doctors were marched over to examine Josefa and all three declared that she was not pregnant, in view of which the impromptu tribunal condemned her in a matter of minutes. “Shooting these greasers is not the way to go,” said one member of the jury. “We have to give them a fair trial and hang them in the full majesty of the law.” Freemont had never had occasion to witness a lynching before, but this one he described in emotional sentences: how, about four in the afternoon, they had started to lead Josefa to the bridge where the ritual of execution had been prepared but she had haughtily shaken them off and walked to the gallows on her own. The beautiful woman climbed the steps without any help, bound her skirts around her ankles, placed the rope around her neck, arranged her black tresses, and bid them farewell with a courageous “Adios, señores” that left the journalist uncertain and the others ashamed. “Josefa did not die because she was guilty, but because she was Mexican. This is the first time a woman has been lynched in California. What a waste, when there are so few!” Freemont wrote in his article.
Following Joaquín Murieta’s trail, he passed through established towns, with school, library, church, and cemetery, and others whose only signs of culture were a brothel and a jail. Saloons thrived in all of them, they were the centers of social life. Jacob Freemont would install himself there, asking questions, and so began constructing—with some truths and a mountain of lies, the life—or the legend—of Joaquín Murieta. The saloonkeepers painted him as a damned spic dressed in leather and black velvet, wearing outsize silver spurs and a dagger at his waist and riding the most spirited sorrel ever seen. They said he would ride into town, unchallenged, amid a jangle of spurs and his gang of cutthroats, slap his silver dollars on the counter and order a round of drinks for everyone in the house. No one dared refuse; even the bravest of men would down their drinks in silence under the villain’s flashing gaze. For the constables, on the other hand, there was nothing splendid about him, he was nothing less than a vulgar murderer capable of the worst atrocities, who had managed to escape justice because all the greasers protected him. The Chileans thought he was one of them, born in a place called Quillota; they said he was loyal to his friends and never forgot to repay a favor, which was why it was good policy to help him, but the Mexicans swore he came from the state of Sonora and was an educated, handsome young man from an old and noble family and had turned to crime out of revenge. Gamblers considered him an expert monte player but avoided him because he had crazy luck in cards and a ready dagger that flashed into his hand at the least provocation. White prostitutes were dying with curiosity because it was rumored that this handsome and generous youth had the tireless cock of a stallion, but the Hispanic girls never expected to find out: Joaquín Murieta never used their services but often gave them tips they hadn’t earned; they claimed that he was faithful to his sweetheart. They described him as a man of medium height, with black hair and eyes like coals, adored by his men, stalwart in the face of trouble, ferocious with his enemies, and gentle with women. Other people said he had the gross features of a born criminal, with a terrible scar right across his face, and that there was nothing of kindness, breeding, or elegance about him. Jacob Freemont selected the opinions that best suited his image of the bandit, and that was how he portrayed him in his articles, always with enough ambiguity that he could print a retraction in case he should someday meet his protagonist face to face. He looked high and low during the four summer months, without finding Murieta anywhere, but from the many different versions he contrived a fanciful and heroic biography. As he did not want to admit defeat, he invented in his articles brief meetings between cock’s crow and midnight in mountain caves and forest clearings. After all, who was going to contradict him? Masked men, he wrote, led him on horseback with his eyes blindfolded; he couldn’t identify them, but they spoke Spanish. The same fervent eloquence he had used years before in Chile to describe the Patagonian Indians in Tierra del Fuego, where he had never set foot, now served to pull an imaginary outlaw from his sleeve. He was becoming enamored of the character, and in the end was convinced that he knew him, that the secret meetings in caves were real, and that the fugitive himself had commissioned him to write about his feats because he thought of himself as the avenger of oppressed Spanish peoples and someone had to assume the responsibility of according him and his cause a proper place in the developing history of California. There was little journalism involved, but more than enough fiction for the novel Jacob Freemont was planning to write that winter.
When Tao Chi’en had reached San Francisco the year before, he had devoted himself to establishing the contacts he needed to exercise his profession of zhong yi for a few months. He had some money, but he wanted to triple it in a hurry. In Sacramento the Chinese community consisted of some seven hundred men and nine or ten prostitutes, but in San Francisco there were thousands of potential clients. Also, many ships were constantly crossing the ocean, and because there was no running water in the city, some gentlemen sent their shirts to be laundered in Hawaii or China, which allowed Tao to order his herbs and remedies from Canton without any difficulty. In San Francisco he would not be as isolated as in Sacramento. Here, too, there were several Chinese practitioners with whom he could exchange patients and information. He did not plan to open his own consulting office because he was trying to save money, but he could associate with another, already established, zhong yi. Once installed in a hotel, he had taken a walk around the quarter, which had spread in all directions like an octopus. Now it was a small city with sturdy buildings, hotels, restaurants, laundries, opium parlors, brothels, markets, and factories. Where before only cheap trinkets were for sale, now stood shops of Oriental antiques, porcelains, enamels, jewels, silks, and ivories. Rich merchants came there—not just Chinese but Americans as well—to buy goods to sell in other cities. The merchandise was displayed in a motley clutter, and the best pieces, those worthy of connoisseurs and collectors, were not set out in plain sight but were shown in the back of the shop to informed clients only. Down dark streets, some buildings housed rooms where serious players met to gamble. At those exclusive tables, out of view of public curiosity and the watchfulness of authorities, extravagant sums were bet, murky deals negotiated, and power exercised. American law had no bearing among the Chinese, who lived in their own world, with their own language, customs, and ancient laws. The “celestials” were not welcome anywhere; the whites considered them the lowest among the undesirable foreigners invading California, and could not forgive them for prospering. Americans exploited them however they could, attacked them in the street, robbed them, burned their shops and homes, murdered them with impunity, but nothing quelled them. The population was divided among five tongs; on arrival, every Chinese immigrant joined one of these brotherhoods, the one guarantee of protection, of finding work, and of assuring that at death one’s body would be sent back to China. Tao Chi’en, who had avoided associating with a tong, now had to do so, and he chose the largest, the one most Cantonese affiliated with. Soon he was put in contact with other zhong yi and they explained the rules of the game to him. First of all, s
ilence and loyalty: everything that happened in the quarter stayed inside its boundaries. No going to the police, not even in the case of life or death; conflicts were resolved within their kind, that was what the tongs were for. The common enemy was always the fan wey. Tao Chi’en once again found himself a prisoner of the customs, hierarchies, and restrictions of his days in Canton. Within a couple of days everyone had heard his name and he began to receive more patients that he could attend. He did not have to look for a partner, he decided, he could open his own office and make money in less time than he had thought. He rented two rooms above a restaurant, one to live in and the other for his work; he hung a sign in the window and hired a young assistant to spread word of his services and receive his patients. For the first time, he used Dr. Ebanizer Hobbs’s system for following the history of the sick. Until then he had trusted his memory and intuition, but because of the growing number of patients, he began keeping records to note the treatment at each visit.