Señoritas
Eliza Sommers was a small, slender girl with features as delicate as a quill drawing. In 1845, when she was thirteen and beginning to show signs of breasts and a waist, she still looked like a child, although one with glimpses of the grace that would be her greatest attribute in beauty. Thanks to the implacable vigilance of Miss Rose—who made her charge sit with a metal rod strapped to her backbone through interminable hours of piano exercises and embroidery—Eliza stood straight as a spear. She did not grow much, and with the years kept the same deceptively youthful look that would save her life more than once. She was so much a little girl at heart that when she reached puberty she continued to sleep curled up in a ball in her childhood bed, surrounded by her dolls and sucking her thumb. She imitated Jeremy Sommers’ air of ennui because she thought it was a sign of internal strength. As she got older she tired of pretending to be bored, but that training helped her tame her nature. She helped in the servants’ chores: one day making bread, another grinding maize, one maybe sunning feather beds, yet another boiling the white clothes. She spent hours huddled behind the drapes in the living room, devouring the classics in Jeremy Sommers’ library one by one, along with Miss Rose’s romantic novels, out-of-date newspapers—anything that fell into her hands, however dull. She got Jacob Todd to give her one of his Bibles in Spanish, and set about deciphering it—with enormous patience, since all her schooling had been in English. She soaked up the Old Testament with a morbid fascination for the vices and passions of kings who seduced other men’s wives, prophets who dealt out punishment with terrible lightning bolts, and parents who fathered children on their own daughters. In the storeroom where they kept castoffs, she found her uncle John’s old maps, travel books, and logs, which gave her a feel for the shape of the world. Instructors hired by Miss Rose taught her French, writing, history, geography, and a little Latin, considerably more than was doled out in the best girls’ schools in the capital, where, after all was said and done, all that was learned were prayers and good manners. Eliza’s random reading, as well as Captain Sommers’ tales, gave wing to her imagination. That world-traveling uncle would appear with his load of gifts, stirring her fantasy with his extraordinary stories of black emperors on thrones of pure gold, Malaysian pirates who collected human eyeballs in little mother-of-pearl boxes, and princesses immolated on the funeral pyres of aged husbands. On each of his visits everything was set aside, from school lessons to piano lessons. The year went by in waiting for him and putting pins in the map, imagining the point on the high seas where his ship was sailing. Eliza had little contact with other girls her age; she lived in the closed world of her benefactors’ home, in the eternal illusion of being in England rather than Valparaíso. Jeremy Sommers ordered everything from a catalogue, from soap to shoes, and wore light clothing in the winter and an overcoat in the summer because he followed the calendar of the Northern Hemisphere. The little girl listened and observed attentively; she had a happy and independent temperament, she never asked for help, and she had the rare gift of making herself invisible at will, blending into the furniture, curtains, and flowered wallpaper. The day she waked to find her nightgown stained with red she went to Miss Rose to tell her she was bleeding “down there.”
“Do not discuss this with anyone, it is very private. This means you are a woman now and you must conduct yourself as such; your days as a child are over. It is time for you to attend Madame Colbert’s school for girls.” That was her adoptive mother’s complete explanation, blurted out in one breath and without meeting Eliza’s eyes, as from her armoire she produced a dozen small towels she herself had hemmed.
“You’re in for it now, child. Your body will change, your thoughts will be jumbled, and any man will be able to do what he wants with you,” Eliza was advised by Mama Fresia, from whom she could not hide her new state.
The Indian knew of plants that would stop the menstrual flow permanently, but she did not give them to Eliza for fear of her patrones. Eliza took her nana’s warning seriously and decided to be on the watch to keep those things from happening. She bound her chest tightly with a silk sash, sure that if that method had worked for centuries with the feet of Chinese women, as her uncle John had told her, there was no reason it would not do the same with her breasts. She also decided to write. For years she had seen Miss Rose writing in her notebooks and she supposed that she did it to combat the curse of jumbled ideas. As for the last part of the prophecy—that any man would be able to do what he wanted with her-—she attached less importance to that because she was incapable of imagining a case in which there would be men in her future. They were all tired and old, at least twenty; the world was void of boys of her generation and the only men she would like for a husband, Captain John Sommers and Jacob Todd, were out of bounds because the first was her uncle and the second was in love with Miss Rose, as all Valparaíso could testify.
Years later, remembering her childhood and youth, Eliza thought that Miss Rose and Mr. Todd would have made a good couple; Rose would have softened Mr. Todd’s harsh edges and he would have rescued her from boredom, but things had worked out differently. In their later years, when both were combing the gray in their hair and they had the long habit of solitude, they would meet in California under strange circumstances; then he would court her again with the same intensity and she would reject him with equal determination. But all that would come much later.
Jacob Todd lost no opportunity to be near the Sommers; there was no more faithful or punctual visitor at their musical evenings, no one more attentive to Miss Rose’s impassioned trills or more disposed to appreciate her wit, including the slightly cruel remarks she tormented him with. She was a person filled with contradictions, but was that not true of him as well? Was he not an atheist selling Bibles and deluding half the world with the story of a purported evangelizing mission? He often asked himself why such an attractive woman had never married; a single woman of her age had no future in society. Among the foreign colony there were whispers of a certain scandal in England, years ago; that would explain her presence in Chile, where she acted as chatelaine for her brother, but he never tried to learn the details, preferring mystery to the knowledge of something he might not have been able to bear. The past didn’t matter, he told himself. It took only one error in discretion or calculation to stain a woman’s reputation and prevent her from making a good marriage. He would have given years of his life to have her love, but she gave no indication of yielding to his siege, although neither did she try to discourage him; she enjoyed the game of giving him rope only to rein him back in.
“Mr. Todd is a bird of ill omen; he has bizarre ideas, teeth like a horse, and his hands perspire. I would never marry him, even if he were the last bachelor in the universe,” Miss Rose confessed to Eliza, laughing.
The girl was sorry to hear that. She was indebted to Jacob Todd, not only for having rescued her at the procession of the Cristo de Mayo, but also because he acted as if it had never happened. She was fond of her strange ally; both he and her uncle John smelled like big dogs. The good impression she had of him turned into loyal affection the day that, hidden behind heavy velvet drapes in the drawing room, she overheard a conversation between him and Jeremy Sommers.
“I must make some decision regarding Eliza, Jacob. She hasn’t the least notion of her place in society. People are beginning to ask questions and Eliza surely imagines a future that does not befit her. Nothing as perilous, you know, as the demon of fantasy embedded in every female heart.”
“Don’t exaggerate, my friend. Eliza is still a little girl, but she is intelligent and surely she will find her place.”
“Intelligence is a drawback in a woman. Rose wants to send her to Madame Colbert’s school, but I am not in favor of that much schooling for girls; it makes them unmanageable. ‘Let us always know our proper stations,’ that is my motto.”
“The world is changing, Jeremy. In the United States free men are equal before the law. Social classes hav
e been abolished.”
“We are speaking of women, old boy, not men. As for the rest, the United States is a country of merchants and pioneers, totally lacking in tradition or a sense of history. Equality does not exist anywhere, not even among animals, and much less in Chile.”
“But we are foreigners, Jeremy, we speak scarcely a word of Spanish. What do Chilean social classes matter to us? This will never be our country.”
“We must set a good example. If we British are incapable of keeping our own house in order, what can we expect of others?”
“Eliza has grown up in this family. I don’t think that Miss Rose would agree to deprive her simply because she is growing up.”
And she did not. Rose defied her brother, calling upon a full repertory of ills. First it was stomach upset and then an alarming headache that struck her blind overnight. For several days the entire house was cloaked in silence: drapes were closed, people walked on tiptoe and talked in whispers. Nothing was cooked because the smell of food exacerbated the symptoms. Jeremy Sommers ate at the club and returned home with the worried and timid attitude of someone visiting a hospital. Rose’s peculiar blindness and many ailments, added to the stubborn silence of the household servants, quickly undermined Jeremy’s resolve. As the last straw, Mama Fresia, mysteriously acquainted with the private discussions between brother and sister, became a formidable ally of her patrona. Jeremy Sommers thought of himself as a civilized and pragmatic man, invulnerable to intimidation by a superstitious witch like Mama Fresia, but when the Indian lighted black candles and fanned smoke from burning sage everywhere, under the pretext of driving off mosquitoes, he closed himself in the library, wavering between fear and fury. At night he could hear the swish of her bare feet outside his door, her low voice quietly singing psalms and curses. The Wednesday he found a dead lizard in his bottle of brandy he decided to act once and for all. For the first time ever, he knocked at his sister’s door and was admitted into that sanctuary of feminine mysteries he preferred to know nothing of, just as alien to him as the sewing room, the kitchen, the laundry, and the dark corners of the attic where the maidservants lived, to say nothing of Mama Fresia’s dark domain at the rear of the patio: he lived his world in the drawing rooms, the library with its waxed mahogany shelves and his collection of engravings of the hunt, the billiards room with its ornately carved table, his bedroom furnished in Spartan simplicity, and a small dressing room with Italian tile where someday he planned to install a modern toilet like those he had seen in catalogues from New York, because he had read that the system of chamber pots and of collecting human excrement in buckets to use as fertilizer was a breeding ground for epidemics. He had to wait for his eyes to adjust to the darkness, as he uneasily breathed in the combined scents of medicines and a persistent tone of vanilla. Rose was barely visible, wan and suffering, flat on her back in the bed, with no pillow, her arms folded across her breast as if practicing for her death. Beside her, Eliza was wringing a cloth dipped in a brew of green tea to place over Rose’s eyes.
“Leave us, child,” said Jeremy Sommers, taking a chair beside the bed.
Eliza bobbed her head and left, but she knew every last crack and chink of the house, and with her ear pressed to the thin dividing wall she could hear the conversation that later she repeated to Mama Fresia and wrote down in her diary.
“Very well, Rose. We cannot continue this warfare. Let us reach an accord. What is it you want?” asked Jeremy, conquered before he began.
“Nothing, Jeremy,” Rose sighed in a barely audible voice.
“They will never accept Eliza in Madame Colbert’s academy. Only proper girls go there, girls from well-to-do families. Everyone knows that Eliza is adopted.”
“I shall make it my business to see that she is accepted!” Rose exclaimed with a passion unexpected in a dying woman.
“Listen to me, Rose, Eliza has no need for further education. She needs to learn a skill that will enable her to earn her living. What will become of her when you and I are not here to protect her?”
“If she has an education, she will make a good marriage,” said Rose, tossing aside the compress of green tea and sitting up in the bed.
“Eliza is not exactly a beauty, Rose.”
“You haven’t truly looked, Jeremy. She is improving day by day, she will be winsome, I promise you. She will have more suitors than she can count!”
“An orphan, and without a dowry?”
“She shall have a dowry,” Miss Rose exclaimed, stumbling from her bed, hair uncombed, barefoot, and feeling her way like a blind woman.
“How so? We have never spoken of that subject.”
“Because it was not the moment, Jeremy. A marriageable girl must have jewels, a trousseau with enough clothing to last her several years, and everything she needs for her home, as well as a tidy nest egg that will help establish her and her husband in the world.”
“And may I know what the groom’s contribution is to be?”
“The house . . . and besides, he will have to support the woman for the rest of her life. In any case, it is still a number of years until Eliza is old enough to marry, and by then she will have a dowry. John and I will take charge of providing that, we shall not ask you for a penny . . . but it is pointless to waste time speaking of this now. You must think of Eliza as your daughter.”
“She is not my daughter, Rose.”
“Then treat her as if she were mine. Can you agree to do at least that?”
“Yes, I will do that,” Jeremy Sommers conceded.
The tea-soaked cloths seemed to work miracles. The ailing Miss Rose recovered completely and within forty-eight hours had regained her sight and was radiant. She devoted herself to her brother’s care with endearing solicitude: she had never been sweeter and sunnier. The house returned to its normal rhythm, and from kitchen to dining room flowed Mama Fresia’s delicious Chilean dishes and Eliza’s mouthwatering breads and fine pastries, which had contributed so greatly to the Sommers’ reputation as good hosts. From that moment, Miss Rose drastically modified her erratic tutelage of Eliza and outdid herself in a never before demonstrated maternal dedication, preparing her for school while at the same time mounting a relentless offensive aimed at Madame Colbert. Miss Rose had decided that Eliza would have learning, dowry, and fame as a beauty even if she was not one, because it was her view that beauty is a question of style. Any woman who conducts herself with the queenly assurance of a belle, she maintained, will convince everyone that she is beautiful. The first step toward emancipating Eliza would be a good marriage, seeing that the girl could not count on an older brother to shield her as her own had done. She herself could not see the advantages of marriage; a wife was the husband’s property, with fewer rights than those of a servant or a child; on the other hand, a woman alone and without a fortune was at the mercy of the worst abuses. A married woman, if she was clever, could at least manage her husband, and with a bit of luck could even be widowed young.
“I would happily give half my life to have the freedom a man has, Eliza. But we are women, and that is our cross. All we can do is try to get the best from the little we have.”
Miss Rose did not tell Eliza that the one time she had tried to fly on her own she had crashed head-on into reality; she did not want to plant any subversive ideas in the girl’s mind. She was determined that Eliza would have a better fate than her own; she would school the child in the arts of dissembling, manipulation, and cunning, which, she had no doubt, were more useful than candor. She spent three hours in the morning with Eliza and another three in the afternoon, studying schoolbooks imported from England. She entrusted the French lessons to a professor because no well-educated girl could be ignorant of that language. The rest of the time she personally supervised every stitch Eliza made for her trousseau: sheets, towels, table linens, and profusely embroidered undergarments, which Rose then wrapped in linen, perfumed with lavender, and stored in trunks. Every three months she took everything from the trunks and lai
d them in the sun to prevent the ravages of humidity and moths during the years leading up to a marriage. She bought a coffer for the jewels of Eliza’s dowry and charged her brother John with filling it with gifts from his travels. Sapphires from India were added to emeralds and amethysts from Brazil, necklaces and bracelets of Venetian gold, and even a small diamond brooch. Jeremy Sommers knew nothing of these details, and was completely innocent of how his brother and sister financed such extravagances.
The piano lessons—now with a professor newly arrived from Belgium who used a ferule to rap the clumsy fingers of his students—became a daily martyrdom for Eliza. She also attended an academy of ballroom dancing, and at the master’s suggestion Miss Rose obliged her to walk for hours balancing a book on her head, the purpose of which was to teach her to stand up straight. Eliza did all her assignments, practiced her piano lessons, and walked straight as a candle, even without a book on her head, but at night she slipped barefoot down to the servants’ patio and often the dawn found her sleeping on a pallet with her arms around Mama Fresia.