“If that beast is your lover, you’d be better off never to find him,” was Tao Chi’en’s comment when Eliza showed him the newspaper cuttings she had collected for more than a year.
“I don’t think it’s him.”
“How do you know?”
In her dreams she saw her former lover in the same worn suit and same threadbare but crisply ironed shirts of the days when they had made love in Valparaíso. He came with his tragic air, his intense eyes, his smell of soap and sweat, took her by the hands as he had then, and spoke feverishly of democracy. Sometimes they lay together on the pile of drapes in the room of the armoires, side by side, without touching, completely dressed, listening to creaking boards lashed by winds from the sea. And always, in every dream, Joaquín had a star of light on his forehead.
“And what does that signify?” Tao Chi’en wanted to know.
“No evil man has light on his forehead.”
“It’s only a dream, Eliza.”
“Not one, Tao, many dreams.”
“Then you are looking for the wrong man.”
“Maybe, but I haven’t wasted my time,” she replied without further explanation.
For the first time in four years she was again aware of her body, which had been relegated to an insignificant plane from the moment Joaquín Andieta told her good-bye in Chile on that doleful December 22 in 1848. In her obsession to find the man she had renounced everything, including her femininity. Somewhere along the way she had lost what made her a woman and turned into a strange, asexual creature. Sometimes, riding through woods and hills, exposed to the assault of the winds, she remembered the advice of Miss Rose, who bathed in milk and never allowed a ray of sun to touch her porcelain skin, but Eliza could not brood about such matters. She endured difficulties and punishment because she had no alternative. She considered her body, like her thoughts, her memory, or her sense of smell, an inseparable part of her being. She had never understood what Miss Rose was referring to when she spoke of the soul because she could not differentiate it from the whole of her person, but now she was beginning to get a glimpse of what it was. The soul was the immutable part of her being. The body, in contrast, was the fearsome beast that after years of hibernation was roaring back, filled with demands. It came to remind her of the ardor of the desire she had savored briefly in the room of the armoires. Since that time she had never felt any true urgency for love or physical pleasure, as if that part of herself was in profound, permanent slumber. She attributed that to the pain of having been abandoned by her lover, to the fear of finding herself pregnant, to her journey through the labyrinths of death on the ship, to the trauma of the miscarriage. Her body had been so mistreated that dread of finding herself in that condition again was stronger than the impulses of youth. She felt that she had paid too high a price for love, and that it would be better to avoid it altogether; but something had changed in the last two years she had been with Tao Chi’en, and suddenly love, like desire, seemed inevitable. The obligation to dress like a man was beginning to be a heavy burden. She remembered the little sewing room, where at that very moment Miss Rose must be stitching another of her exquisite dresses, and she was deluged by a wave of nostalgia for those fragile afternoons of her childhood, for five o’clock tea in cups Miss Rose had inherited from her mother, for the outings when they went to buy smuggled fripperies from the ships. And what had become of Mama Fresia? Eliza could see her, grumbling in the kitchen, fat and warm, smelling of sweet basil, always with a wooden spoon in her hand and a pot boiling on the stove, like an affable witch. She yearned for that long-lost female companionship, the sense that she was a woman again. She did not have a large mirror in her room in which to study that feminine being struggling to emerge. She wanted to see herself naked. Some days she awakened at dawn, feverish from impetuous dreams in which the image of Joaquín Andieta with a star on his forehead imposed itself upon visions from the erotic books she used to read aloud to Joe Bonecrusher’s doves. In those days she had read with remarkable indifference because the descriptions evoked nothing in her, but now they came like lewd phantoms to haunt her in dreams. Alone in her beautiful room of Chinese furniture, she used the dawn light filtering weakly through the windows to make a rapturous exploration of her body. She took off her pajamas, studied with curiosity the parts of her body she could see, and ran her hands over the rest, as she had in the days she was discovering love. She found that little had changed. She was slimmer, but she also seemed much stronger. Her hands were roughened by sun and work, but the rest of her body was as pale and smooth as she remembered. It amazed her that after being crushed so long beneath a sash that she still had small, firm breasts, with nipples like garbanzos. She let down her hair, which she hadn’t cut in four months, and fastened it at the back of her neck, then closed her eyes and shook her head, enjoying the weight and texture of the live animal of its length. She wondered at that nearly unknown woman with curved thighs and hips, small waist, and the curly, springy thatch on her pubis so different from the smooth, silky hair on her head. She lifted an arm to measure its length, appreciate its form, look at her fingernails from a distance; with the other hand she felt along her side, the ripples of her ribs, the hollow of her underarm, the contour of her arm. She paused at the most sensitive points of wrist and inner elbow, wondering whether Tao felt the same tickle at those spots. She caressed her neck, traced the outlines of her ears, the arch of her eyebrows, the line of her lips; she wet a finger in her mouth and then touched it to her nipples, which hardened with the contact of the warm saliva. She ran her hands down her hips to learn their shape, and then sensually, to feel the smoothness of her skin. She sat on her bed and stroked her legs from feet to groin, noticing for the first time the nearly imperceptible golden fuzz on her legs. She parted her thighs and found the mysterious cleft of her sex, soft and moist; she sought the bud of her clitoris, the very center of her desires and confusions, and, as she touched it, immediately came the unexpected vision of Tao Chi’en. It was not Joaquín Andieta, whose face she could barely remember, but her loyal friend who came to fuel her febrile fantasies with an irresistible blend of ardent embraces, gentle tenderness, and shared laughter. Afterward she smelled her hands, awed by the powerful aroma of salt and ripe fruit her body emitted.
Three days after the governor had put a price on the head of Joaquín Murieta, the steamship Northerner had anchored in the port of San Francisco carrying two hundred seventy-five sacks of mail and Lola Montez. She was the most famous courtesan in Europe but neither Tao Chi’en nor Eliza had ever heard her name. They were on the dock by accident, there to pick up a box of Chinese medicines brought by a sailor from Shanghai. They thought the reason for the carnival atmosphere was the mail—there had never been such a large number of sacks—but the festive fireworks made them reconsider. In that city accustomed to all manner of wonders a mob of curious men had congregated to see the incomparable Lola Montez, who had traveled across the isthmus of Panama preceded by the throbbing drums of her fame. She was carried from the dinghy in the arms of a pair of lucky sailors who set her on the ground with the reverence due a queen. And that was precisely the attitude of that celebrated Amazon as she accepted the cheers of her admirers. The hubbub caught Eliza and Tao Chi’en unaware; they had no inkling of the beauty’s history, but other spectators quickly brought them up to date. Montez was an Irishwoman, a bastard of common stock who passed herself off as a noble Spanish ballerina and actress. She danced like a goose, and had nothing of an actress except excessive vanity, but her name invoked licentious images of great seductresses, from Delilah to Cleopatra, which was why so many delirious crowds went to applaud her. They did not go because of her talent but to witness firsthand her perturbing wickedness, her legendary beauty and fiery temperament. With little craft other than impudence and audacity, she filled theaters, ran through fortunes, collected jewels and lovers, threw epic rages, declared war on Jesuits, and had been thrown out of several cities, but her crowning feat was to ha
ve broken a king’s heart. Ludwig I of Bavaria had been a good man, parsimonious and prudent, for sixty years, until Lola popped up in his life, worked him over, and left him limp as a straw doll. The monarch had lost his judgment, his health, and his honor, while she emptied the royal coffers of his small kingdom. The besotted Ludwig gave Lola everything she wanted, including the title of countess, but could not get his subjects to accept her. The woman’s low habits and outrageous whims provoked the hatred of the citizens of Munich, who finally poured out into the streets to demand that the king’s lover be exiled. Instead of quietly disappearing, Lola met the armed mob with a horsewhip and they would have chopped her to bits had her faithful servants not forcibly stuffed her into a carriage and taken her to the border. Desperate, Ludwig abdicated his throne and prepared to follow her into exile, but stripped of his crown, his power, and his bank account, the beauty found little of interest in him and left the old man flat.
“So her only virtue is her bad reputation,” said Tao Chi’en dismissively.
A group of Irishmen unhitched the horses from Lola’s carriage, harnessed themselves in place, and pulled her to the hotel through streets carpeted with flower petals. Eliza and Tao Chi’en watched her pass by in a glorious procession.
“That’s all this country of madmen needed,” sighed the Chinese without a second look at the beautiful Lola.
Eliza followed the carnival for a few blocks, half amused and half admiring, while Roman candles and pistols flashed all around. Lola Montez was carrying her hat in her hand; her black hair was parted in the middle with curls over her ears, and her eyes were a hallucinatory midnight blue; she was wearing a skirt of crimson velvet, a blouse with lace at the neck and wrists, and a bolero embroidered with bugle beads. Her attitude was mocking and defiant; she was fully aware that she embodied the men’s most primitive and secret desires and symbolized all that was most feared by defenders of morality; she was an idol of perversity and she loved the role. In the excitement of the moment, someone tossed a handful of gold dust over her and it clung to her hair and clothing like an aura. The vision of that young woman, triumphant and fearless, shook Eliza. She thought of Miss Rose, as she did more and more often, and felt a surge of compassion and tenderness for her. She remembered her armored in her corset, back straight, waist constricted, sweating under her five petticoats. “Sit with your knees together, stand up straight, never be in haste, speak in a low voice, smile, do not make faces because that causes wrinkles, be silent and feign interest, men are flattered by women who listen to them.” Miss Rose, with her scent of vanilla, always obliging. But she also remembered her in her bath, nearly naked in her wet nightdress, eyes shining with laughter, hair wild, cheeks pink, chattering happily: “A woman can do anything she wants, Eliza, as long as she does it discreetly.” Lola Montez, however, did what she wanted openly; she had lived more lives than the boldest adventurer, and had done it proudly, as a beautiful woman. That night a pensive Eliza went to her room and stealthily, like someone committing a crime, opened the suitcase with her dresses. She had left the case in Sacramento when she left to look for her lover the first time, but Tao Chi’en had kept it for her, thinking that someday she might want it. When she opened it, something fell out; surprised, she saw her pearl necklace, her payment to Tao Chi’en for smuggling her onto the ship. She stood for a long time with the pearls in her hand, deeply moved. She shook out the dresses and laid them on the bed; they were wrinkled and smelled musty. The next day she took them to the best laundry in Chinatown.
“I am going to write Miss Rose, Tao,” she announced.
“Why?”
“She is like my mother. If I love her this much, I am sure she loves me back. Four years have gone by; she must think I’m dead.”
“Would you like to see her?”
“Of course, but that isn’t possible. I’m going to write just to ease her doubts, but it would be nice if she could answer me. Do you mind if I give her this address?”
“You want your family to find you,” he said, and something cracked in his voice.
She looked at him and realized that she had never been so close to anyone in this world as she was at that moment to Tao Chi’en. She felt the man in her own blood, with such ancient and fierce certainty that she marveled at the time she had spent by his side without realizing. She missed him even though she saw him every day. She longed for the carefree days when they were good friends; everything had seemed simpler then, but neither did she want to turn back. Now there was something unfinished between them, something much more complex and fascinating than their old friendship.
Eliza’s dresses and petticoats had come back from the laundry and were laid out on her bed, wrapped in paper. She opened the suitcase and took out her white stockings and high-button shoes, but left the corset inside. She smiled at the thought that she had never dressed as a woman without help, then put on the petticoats and tried on the dresses one by one in order to choose the one most appropriate for the occasion. She felt alien in those clothes and got tangled in the ribbons, laces, and buttons; it took her several minutes to button the boots and get her balance under so many petticoats, but with each garment she put on she was overcoming her doubts and confirming her desire to be a woman again. Mama Fresia had warned her about the risks of womanhood: “Your body will change, your thoughts will be jumbled, and any man will be able to do what he wants with you,” she had said, but now Eliza did not fear those risks.
Tao Chi’en had attended the last patient of the day. He was in his shirt sleeves and had taken off the jacket and tie he always wore out of respect for his patients, following the counsel of his acupuncture master. He was perspiring, because the sun hadn’t set and it had been one of the few hot days of that July. He thought he never would get used to the caprices of the San Francisco climate, where summer wore the face of winter. It usually dawned with a radiant sun but within hours a thick fog rolled in through the Golden Gate or a chilling wind blew off the sea. He was sterilizing the needles in alcohol and arranging his medicine bottles when Eliza came in. The assistant had left and at the moment there was no singsong girl in their care; they were alone in the house.
“I have something for you, Tao,” Eliza said.
Tao Chi’en looked up; he was so startled that a bottle dropped from his hands. Eliza was wearing an elegant dark dress trimmed with white lace. He had seen her only twice in women’s clothing in Valparaíso, but he had not forgotten how she had looked.
“Do you like me this way?”
“I like you any way.” He smiled as he removed his eyeglasses to admire her from a distance.
“This is my Sunday dress. I put it on because I want to have a portrait taken. Here, this is for you,” and she handed him a pouch.
“What is this?”
“My savings . . . for you to buy another girl, Tao. I planned to look for Joaquín this summer, but I’m not going. I know now I will never find him.”
“It seems that like everyone who came to California we found something different from what we were looking for.”
“What were you looking for?”
“Knowledge, wisdom, I don’t remember. Instead I found the singsong girls, and look at the mess I’m in.”
“Why are you so unromantic, Tao? My God! Gallantry demands that you say you also found me.”
“I would have found you anyway, it was predestined.”
“Not the old story about reincarnation.”
“Of course. In every incarnation we will keep meeting until we work out our karma.”
“It sounds frightening. Whatever the case, I am not going back to Chile; but I’m not going to keep hiding, either, Tao. I want to be myself.”
“You always have been.”
“My life is here. That is, if you want me to stay and help you.”
“And Joaquín Andieta?”
“Maybe the star on his forehead means he is dead. Imagine. All this long, dreadful journey in vain.”
“Nothing
is in vain. You don’t go anywhere in life, Eliza, you just keep walking.”
“The part we’ve walked together hasn’t been bad. Come with me, I am going to have my portrait taken to send to Miss Rose.”
“Can you have one made for me?”
They walked arm in arm to Union Square, where there were several photography shops, and chose the one that looked the best. In the window was a collection of images of forty-niners: a young man with a blond beard and determined expression, holding a pick and shovel; a group of miners in shirt sleeves, eyes fixed on the camera, very serious; some Chinese on the banks of a river; Indians panning for gold with finely woven baskets; pioneer families posing beside their wagons. Daguerreotypes were in vogue; they were the link to distant friends and family, proof that they were living the gold adventure. It was said that in Eastern cities many men who had never been to California had their portraits made in mining garb. Eliza was convinced that the extraordinary invention of the photograph had dealt the death blow to painters, who rarely caught a likeness.
“Miss Rose had her portrait painted with three hands, Tao. It was by a famous artist, but I don’t remember his name.”
“Three hands?”
“Well, the painter put two, but she added another. Her brother Jeremy nearly died when he saw it.”