Daughter of Fortune
by
Isabel Allende

"You have English blood, like us," Miss Rose assured Eliza when she was
old enough to understand.

"Only someone from the British colony would have thought to leave you
in a basket on the doorstep of the British Import and Export Company,
Limited.  I am sure they knew how good-hearted my brother Jeremy is,
and felt sure he would take you in. In those days I was longing to have
a child, and you fell into my arms, sent by God to be brought up in the
solid principles of the Protestant faith and the English language."

The family servant, Mama Fresia, has a different point of view,
however:

"You, English?  Don't get any ideas, child.  You have Indian hair, like
mine."  And certainly Eliza's almost mystical ability to recall all the
events of her life would seem to stem more from the Indian than the
Protestant side.

As Eliza grows up, she becomes less tractable, and when she falls in
love with Joachin Andieta, a clerk in Jeremy's firm, her adoptive
family is horrified.  They are even more so when a now-pregnant Eliza
follows her lover to California where he has gone to make his fortune
in the 1849 gold rush.  Along the way Eliza meets Tao Chi'en, a Chinese
doctor who saves her life and becomes her closest friend.  What starts
out as a search for a lost love becomes, over time, the discovery of
self; and by the time Eliza finally catches up with the elusive
Joachin, she is no longer sure she still wants what she once wished
for.  Allende peoples her novel with a host of colorful secondary
characters.  She even takes the narrative as far afield as China,
providing an intimate portrait of Tao Chien's past before returning to
19th-century San Francisco, where he and Eliza eventually fetch up.
Readers with a taste for the epic, the picaresque, and romance that is
satisfyingly complex will find them all in Daughter of Fortune.


The House of the Spirits Of Love and Shadows Eva Luna The Stories of
Eva Luna The Infnite Plan Paula Aphrodite: A Memoir of the Senses
Daughter of Fortune

ISABEL ALLENDE

Daughter of Fortune

A NOVEL

Translated from the Spanish by Margaret Sayers Peden

HarperCollins Publish Contents k ;

PART ONE

43-1848

Eliza 3

DAUGHTER OF FORTUNE.  Copyright (C) 1999 by Isabel Allende.

English translation copyright (C) 1999 by HarperCollins Publishers,
Inc.  All rights reserved.  Printed in the United States of America.

No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever
without written permission except in the case of brief quotations
embodied in critical articles and reviews.  For information address
HarperCollins Publishers, Inc."  lo East 53rd Street, New York, NY
10022.

HarperCollins books may be purchased for educational, business, or
sales promotional use.  For information please write: Special Markets
Department, HarperCollins Publishers, Inc."  lo East 53rd Street, New
York, NY 10022.

FIRST EDITION

Designed by Barbara DuPree Knouoles, BDK Books Map copyright t 1999 by
Anna Karl &Jxm Kemp

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publicanon Data Allende, Isabel.

[Hija de la fortuna.  English]

Daughter of Fortune: a novel / Isabel Allende p. em.

ISBN o-06-olg4gI-X 1. Title.

PQ8098.  l .Ls4Hs 5 l 3 1999 863--dc21

_ _ _ _ _

oo Ol 02 o3 /HC IO 9 8 7 6

99-2602 I

The English 22 Senoritas 43

A Ruined Reputation S8 Suitors 7 1 Miss Rose 85

Love 100

PART TWO

1848-1849

The News 119 The Farewell I39 Fourth Son I53 Tao Chi'en I70 The Voyage
I99 The Argonauts 222 The Secret 247

vii -Ma Contents 0

PART THREE

1850-1853

El Dorado 269 Business Dealings 287 Soiled Doves 300 Disillusion 3S5
Singsong Girls 337 Joaquin 3 5 5 An Unusual Pair 367

vltl

A Ct)f I G

(S CE

W)D""/

< 3vZLg if /

PART ONE

1843-1848

i w. M. Eliza

- n very one is born with some special talent, and < Eliza Sommers
discovered early on that she had l J two: a good sense of smell and a
good memory.

She used the first to earn a living and the second to recall her
life-if not in precise detail, at least with an astrologer's poetic
vagueness.

The things we forget may as well never have happened, but she had many
memories, both real and illusory, and that was like living twice.  She
used to tell her faithful friend, the sage Tao Chi'en, that her memory
was like the hold of the ship where they had come to know one another:
vast and somber, bursting with boxes, barrels, and sacks in which all
the events of her life were jammed.  Awake it was difficult to find
anything in that chaotic clutter, but asleep she could, just as Mama
Fresia had taught her in the gentle nights of her childhood, when the
contours of reality were as faint as a tracery of pale ink.  She
entered the place of her dreams along a much traveled path and returned
treading very carefully in order not to shatter the tenuous visions
against the harsh light of consciousness.

She put as much store in that process as others put in numbers, and she
so refined the art of remembering that she could see Miss Rose bent
over the crate of Marseilles soap that was her first cradle.

"You cannot possibly remember that, Eliza.  Newborns are like cats,
they have no emotions and no memory," Miss Rose insisted the few times
the subject arose.

Possible or not, that woman peering down at her, her topaz colored
dress, the loose strands from her bun stirring in the breeze were
engraved in Eliza's mind, and she could never accept the other
explanation of her origins.

"You have English blood, like us," Miss Rose assured Eliza when she was
old enough to understand.  "Only someone from the British colony would
have thought to leave you in a basket on the doorstep of the British
Import and Export Company, Limited.  I am sure they knew how
good-hearted my brother Jeremy is, and felt sure he would take you in.
In those days I was longing to have a child, and you fell into my arms,
sent by God to be brought up in the solid principles of the Protestant
faith and the English language."

"You, English?  Don't get any ideas, child.  You have Indian hair, like
mine," Mama Fresia rebutted behind her pa trona back.

But Eliza's birth was a forbidden subject in that house, and the child
grew accustomed to the mystery.  It, along with other delicate matters,
was never mentioned between Rose and Jeremy Sommers, but it was aired
in whispers in the kitchen with Mama Fresia, who never wavered in her
description of the soap crate, while Miss Rose's version was, with the
years, embroidered into a fairy tale.

According to her, the basket they had found at the office door was
woven of the finest wicker and lined in batiste; Eliza's nightgown was
worked with French knots and the sheets edged with Brussels lace, and
topping everything was a mink coverlet, an extravagance never seen in
Chile.

Over time, other details were added: six gold coins tied up in a silk
handkerchief and a note in English explaining that the baby, though
illegitimate, was of good stock--although Eliza never set eyes on any
of that.  The mink, the coins, and the note conveniently disappeared,
erasing any trace of her birth.  Closer to Eliza's memories was Mama
Fresia's explanation: when she opened the door one morning at the end
of summer, she had found a naked baby girl in a crate.

> ElizaA

"No mink coverlet, no gold coins.  I was there and I remember very
well.  You were shivering and bundled up in a man's sweater.

They hadn't even put a diaper on you, and you were covered with your
own caca.Your nose was running and you were red as a boiled lobster,
with a head full of fuzz like corn silk.  That's how it was.

Don't get any ideas," she repeated stoutly.  "You weren't born to be
princess and if your hair had been as black as it is now, Miss Rose and
her brother would have tossed the crate in the trash."

At least everyone agreed that the baby came into their lives on March
I5, I832, a year and a half after the Sommers arrived in Chile, and
they adopted that date as her birthday.  Everything else was always a
tangle of contradictions, and Eliza decided finally that it wasn't
worth the effort to keep going over it, because whatever the truth was,
she could do nothing to change it.  What matters is what you do in this
world, not how you come into it, she used to say to Tao Chien during
the many years of their splendid friendship; he, however, did not
agree.  It was impossible for him to imagine his own life apart from
the long chain of his ancestors, who not only had given him his
physical and mental characteristics but bequeathed him his karma.  His
fate, he believed, had been determined by the acts of his family before
him, which was why he had to honor them with daily prayers and fear
them when they appeared in their spectral robes to claim their due.

Tao Chi'en could recite the names of all his ancestors, back to the
most remote and venerable great-great-grandparents dead now for more
than a century.  His primary concern during the gold madness was to go
home in time to die in his village in China and be buried beside his
ancestors; if not, his soul would forever wander aimlessly in a foreign
land.  Eliza, naturally, was drawn to the story of the exquisite
basket--no one in her right mind would want to have begun life in
common soap cratc but out of respect for the truth, she could not
accept it.  Her bloodhound nose remembered very well the first scents
of her life, which were not clean batiste sheets but wool, male sweat,
and tobacco.  The next smell she remembered was the monumental stench
of a goat.

Eliza grew up watching the Pacific Ocean from the balcony of her
adoptive parents' home.  Perched on the slopes of a hill overlooking
the port of Valparaiso, the house was meant to imitate a style then in
vogue in London, but the exigencies of landscape, climate, and life in
Chile had forced substantial changes and the result was an unfortunate
hodgepodge.  At the rear of the patio, springing up like organic
tumors, were various windowless rooms with dungeon like doors where
Jeremy Sommers stored his company's most precious cargo, which tended
to disappear from the warehouses in the port.

"This is a land of thieves.  Nowhere else in the world does the company
spend so much on safeguarding the merchandise as here.

Everything gets stolen, and everything we save from the rabble is
soaked by winter floods, scorched in summer, or smashed during one of
their ungodly earthquakes," he said every time the mules brought new
bundles to be unloaded in the patio of his home.

From sitting so long at the window overlooking the sea to count the
ships and the whales on the horizon, Eliza convinced herself that she
was the child of a shipwreck and not of an unnatural mother capable of
abandoning her and leaving her exposed to the uncertainty of a March
day.  She wrote in her diary that a fisherman had found her on the
beach amid the debris of a beached ship, wrapped her in his sweater,
and left her at the finest house in the English colony.  As time passed
she concluded that this story wasn't bad at all: there is a certain
poetry and mystery about what the sea washes up.  If the ocean should
draw back, the exposed sand would be a vast, damp desert strewn with
sirens and dying fish' John Sommers used to say.  He was the brother of
Jeremy and Rose and had sailed all the seas of the world, and he would
vividly describe how the water gathered itself in sepulchral silence
and roared back in single monstrous wave, sweeping away everything
before it.  Horrible, he maintained, although at least that gave you
time to run toward the hills, while with earthquakes the church bells
clanged, announcing the catastrophe as everyone was scrambling through
the rubble.

At the time the baby appeared' Jeremy Sommers was thirty years old and
was beginning to forge a brilliant future with the British Import and
Export Company, Ltd.  In commercial and banking circles he was known as
an honorable man: his word and a handshake were as good as a signed
contract, an indispensable virtue in a transaction, since letters of
credit took months to cross the ocean.  For Jeremy Sommers, lacking a
fortune, his good name was more important than life itself.  With
sacrifice, he had achieved a solid position in the remote port of
Valparaiso, and the last thing he wanted in his well-organized life was
a tiny baby to disturb his routine, but when Eliza turned up on their
doorstep he had to take her in because his resolve crumbled when he saw
his sister, Rose, clinging to the babe as if its mother.

Rose was only twenty, but she was already a woman with a past, and her
chances for making a good marriage were minimal.  In addition, she had
totted up her possibilities and had decided that marriage, even in the
best of cases, was a dreary business.  With her brother Jeremy she
enjoyed the independence she would never have with a husband.  She had
her life in order and she was not daunted by the stigma attached to
spinsterhood; just the opposite, she was determined to be the envy of
all wives despite the current theory that when women deviated from
their role as mothers and wives they grew a mustache, like the
suffragettes; but she had no children and that was the one afiliction
she could not transform into a triumph through the disciplined exercise
of imagination Sometimes she dreamed that the walls of her room were
covered

/

with blood, that blood soaked the carpet, spattered the walls up to the
ceiling, and that she was sprawled in the center, naked and as
wild-haired as a madwoman, giving birth to a salamander.  She would
awake screaming and spend the rest of the day disoriented, unable to
rid herself of the nightmare.  Jeremy watched her, worrying about her
nerves and feeling guilty for having dragged her so far from England,
although he could not avoid a certain smug satisfaction with their
mutual arrangement.  As the idea of matrimony had never passed through
his heart, Rose's presence solved all his domestic and social problems,
two important aspects of his career.

His sister compensated for his introverted and solitary nature, and
that was why he bore her shifts of mood and unnecessary expenditures
with good humor.  When Eliza appeared and Rose insisted on keeping her,
Jeremy did not dare oppose her or express niggardly doubts, and he
gallantly lost all his battles to keep the baby at arm's length,
beginning with the first: giving her a name.

"We will call her Eliza, after our mother, and she will have our family
name," Rose decided almost as soon as she had fed, bathed, then wrapped
the baby in her own little blanket.

"We will do no such thing, Rose!  Whatever would people say?"

"I'll take responsibility for that.  People will say you are a saint
for taking in a poor little orphan, Jeremy.  There is no worse fate
than not having a family.  Where should I be without a brother like
you?"  she replied, conscious of her brother's horror of the least hint
of sentimentality.

Gossip was inevitable, but Jeremy Sommers had to resign himself even to
that, just as he accepted that the baby would have his mother's name,
sleep all her early years in his sister's bedroom, and create an uproar
in the house.  Rose spread the implausible story of the lavish basket
left anonymously at the office of the British Import and Export
Company, Ltd."  and no one swallowed it, but since they could not
Eliza^

accuse her of a misstep--they saw her every Sunday of her life singing
in the Anglican service and her tiny waist was a challenge to the laws
of anatomy--they said that the baby was the product of Jeremy's
relation with some loose woman and that was why they were bringing
Eliza up as one of the family.  Jeremy made no effort to defend himself
against the malicious rumors.  Children's irrationality in general
upset him, but Eliza managed to enchant him.  Although he would not
admit it, he liked watching her play at his feet in the evenings when
he sat down in his easy chair to read the newspaper.  There were no
demonstrations of affection between them; Jeremy went stiff just
shaking a human hand, and the thought of more intimate contact sent him
into a panic.

When the tiny newborn appeared at the Sommers' home that March
fifteenth, Mama Fresia, who served them as cook and housekeeper, argued
against keeping her.

"If her own mother abandoned her, it's because she is cursed, better
not to touch her," she said, but she could do nothing to dent her pa
trona determination.

The minute Miss Rose picked up the baby, Eliza started screeching at
the top of her lungs, shaking the house and grating on the nerves of
everyone in it.  Unable to get the infant to stop crying, Miss Rose
improvised a cradle in a dresser drawer and pulled a cover over her
while she rushed out to look for a wet nurse.  She soon returned with a
woman she had found in the market.  It had never occurred to Miss Rose
to examine her find close up; all she had needed to engage the woman on
the spot was one glimpse of huge breasts straining to escape a
billowing blouse.  She turned out to be a rather dull-witted campesina
who brought her baby with her, a poor creature as begrimed as she was.
They had to soak that child a long time in warm water to loosen the
filth on his bottom and dip the woman's head in a bucket of water with
lye to get rid of her lice.  The two babies, and the wet nurse's, came
down with colic and a bilious diarrhea that rendered the family's
physician and the German pharmacist helpless.

Done in by the babies' howling, which was pain and misery added to
hunger, Miss Rose wept, too.  Finally, on the third day, Mama Fresia
reluctantly intervened.

"Can't you see that woman has sour breasts?"  she grumbled.

"Buy a she-goat to feed your baby and dose her with cinnamon tea,
because if you don't she'll be gone before Friday."

At that time Miss Rose barely stumbled through a little Spanish, but
she understood the word "she-goat"; she sent the coachman to fetch one
and dismissed the wet nurse.  The minute the coachman brought the goat,
Mama Fresia lay Eliza directly beneath its swollen udders--to the
horror of Miss Rose, who had never seen such a revolting spectacle. The
warm milk and cinnamon infusions promptly addressed the situation,
however; the baby stopped crying, slept seven hours in a row, and awoke
making frantic sucking sounds.  After a few days she had the placid
expression of a healthy infant and it was evident that she was gaining
weight.  Miss Rose bought a baby bottle when she realized that when the
she-goat bleated in the patio, Eliza began sniffing, looking for the
teat.  Rose did not want to see the child grow up with the bizarre
notion that the animal was her mother.  That colic was one of the few
upsets Eliza suffered in her infancy; the others were headed off at the
first symptoms by Mama Fresia's herbs and incantations, including the
fierce epidemic of African measles carried toValparaiso by a Greek
sailor.  As long as that danger lasted, Mama Fresia placed a piece of
raw meat on Eliza's navel every night and bound it with a strip of red
flannel, nature's secret for preventing contagion.

In the following years, Miss Rose made Eliza her play toy.  She spent
happy hours teaching her to sing and dance, reciting verses her

1,0

charge memorized with no effort, braiding her hair and dressing her up,
but the minute she found another diversion or was felled by a headache,
she sent the child to the kitchen with Mama Fresia.  Eliza grew up
between Miss Rose's sewing room and the back patios, speaking English
in one part of the house and a mixture of Spanish and Mapuche, her
nana's native tongue, in the other, one day dressed and shod like a
duchess and the next playing with hens and dogs, barefoot and barely
covered by an orphan's smock.  Miss Rose presented her at her musical
evenings, and took her out in the coach to go shopping, or to visit the
ships at the dock, or to stop at the finest pastry shop for hot
chocolate, but she could just as easily spend days at a time writing in
her mysterious notebooks or reading a novel without a thought for her
protegee.  When she did remember her, she would run repentently to look
for her, cover her with kisses, shower her with treats, and dress her
up like a doll and take her out for a ride.

She devoted herself to giving Eliza the broadest possible education,
not overlooking the skills appropriate for a young lady.  The day threw
a tantrum because she didn't want to practice the piano, Miss Rose
grabbed her by an arm and without waiting for the coachman dragged
Eliza twelve blocks downhill to a convent.  On the adobe wall, above a
heavy oak door with iron studs, you could read in letters faded by the
salt air: "Foundling Home."

"Be thankful that my brother and I took you under our wing.

This is where little bastards and abandoned children end up.  Is this
what you want?"

Speechless, the girl shook her head.

"Then you would do well to learn to play the piano like a little lady.
Do you understand me?"

Eliza learned to play without either talent or grace, but through dint
of strict discipline could by the time she was twelve accompany Miss
Rose at her musical evenings.  She never lost that skill,

despite long periods without playing, and several years later she was
able to earn her daily bread in a traveling brothel, an application
that had never crossed Miss Rose's mind when she had insisted on
teaching her ward the sublime art of music.

Many years later, on a tranquil evening as she drank tea and chatted
with her friend Tao Chi'en in the delicate garden they both tended,
Eliza concluded that the erratic Englishwoman had been a very good
mother and that she was grateful to her for the large spaces of
internal freedom she had given her.  Mama Fresia was the second pillar
of Eliza's childhood.  She clung to her full black skirts, followed her
around while she did her chores, and in the meantime drove her crazy
with questions.  That was how Eliza learned Indian legends and myths,
how to read signs of the animals and the sea, how to recognize the
habits of the spirits, and the messages in dreams, and also how to
cook.  With her prodigious nose, she was able to identify herbs,
spices, and other ingredients with her eyes closed, and just the way
she memorized poems, she remembered how to combine them.  Soon Mama
Fresia's complicated Chilean dishes and Miss Rose's delicate pastries
lost all their mysteries for her.  She had a rare culinary gift; at
seven, without turning a hair, she could skin a beef tongue, dress a
hen, make twenty empanadas without drawing a breath, and spend hours on
end shelling beans while she listened openmouthed to Mama Fresia's
cruel Indian legends and her colorful versions of the lives of the
saints.

Rose and her brother John had been inseparable since they were
children.  In the wintertime she entertained herself by knitting
sweaters and socks for the captain and he took great pains every voyage
to bring her suitcases filled with gifts and huge boxes of books,
several of which ended up under lock and key in Rose's armoire.

Jeremy, as master of the house and head of the family, had the right to
open his sister's correspondence, read her private diary, and demand a
copy of the keys to her furniture, but he never showed any
inclination

^: Eliza t to do it.  Jeremy and Rose had a no-nonsense domestic
relationship but had little in common except the mutual dependence that
sometimes seemed closer to a hidden form of hatred.  Jeremy paid for
Rose's necessities, but he financed none of her whims and never asked
where she got the money for things she wanted, simply assuming that
John gave it to her.  In exchange, she managed the house efficiently
and with style, kept impeccable accounts, and never bothered him with
minutiae.  She had good taste and effortless grace, she put a polish on
both their lives, and her presence was a check to the belief, widely
held on these shores, that a man without a family was a potential
malefactor.

"It is man's nature to be savage; it is woman's destiny to preserve
moral values and good conduct, "Jeremy Sommers pontificated.

"Really, brother.  You and I both know that my nature is more savage
than yours," Rose would joke.

Jacob Todd, a charismatic redhead with the most beautiful preacher's
voice ever heard on those shores, disembarked inValparaiso in I843 with
three hundred copies of the Bible in Spanish.

No one was surprised to see him: he was just one more missionary among
the many wandering all over preaching the Protestant faith.

In his case, however, the voyage was not the result of religious fervor
but an adventurer's curiosity.  With the braggadocio of a high-living
man with too much beer in his belly, he had bet at a gaming table in
his London club that he could sell Bibles anywhere on the planet.

Todd's friends had blindfolded him, spun a globe, and his finger had
landed on a colony of the king of Spain lost at the bottom of the world
where none of his merry cronies had suspected there was life.

He soon found that the map was out-of-date; the colony had gained its
independence more than thirty years before and was now the proud
Republic of Chile, a Catholic country where Protestant ideas had little
foothold, but the bet had been made and he was not disposed to turn
back.  He was a bachelor with no emotional or professional ties and the
outlandishness of such a voyage attracted him immediately.  Considering
the three months over and another three back, sailing across two
oceans, the project turned out to be a protracted one.  Cheered by his
friends, who predicted a tragic end at the hands of Papists in that
unknown and barbarous country, and with the financial aid of the
British and Foreign Bible Society, which provided him with the books
and arranged his passage, he began the long crossing on a ship bound
for the port of Valparaiso.  The challenge was to sell the Bibles and
return within a year's time with signed receipt for each sale.  In the
archives of the British Museum he read the letters of illustrious men,
sailors and merchants, who had been in Chile.  They described a mestizo
people of a little more than a million souls and a wild geography of
imposing mountains, cliff lined coasts, fertile valleys, ancient
forests, and eternal ice.

Chile, he was assured by those who had visited it, had a reputation for
being the most intolerant country in religious matters of any on the
American continent.  Despite that hindrance, virtuous missionaries were
determined to broadcast their Protestant faith, and without speaking a
word of Spanish or a syllable of the Indians' tongue, they traveled
south to where terra firma broke up into islands like a string of
beads.  Several died of hunger, cold, or, it was suspected, were
devoured by their own flock.  They had no better luck in the cities.

The Chileans' sacred sense of hospitality was stronger than their
religious intolerance and out of courtesy they allowed the missionaries
to preach, but gave them little consideration.  When they attended the
meetings of the occasional Protestant pastor, it was with the demeanor
of someone witnessing a spectacle, amused by the peculiar notion that
they were thought of as heretics.  None of this, how 1S- Eliza ever,
disheartened Jacob Todd, because he had come as a Bible salesman, not a
missionary.

In those same library archives he discovered that since its
independence in I8IO Chile had opened its doors to immigrants, who had
come by the hundreds and settled in that long and narrow land bathed
top to tail by the Pacific Ocean.  The English quickly made fortunes as
merchants and ships' outfitters; many brought their families and stayed
to live.  They formed a small nation within the country, with their own
customs, cults, newspapers, clubs, schools, and hospitals, but they did
it with such refined manners that, far from arousing suspicion, they
were considered an example of civility.  The British harbored their
fleet inValparaiso to control the Pacific maritime traffic, and thus
from a rude hamlet with no future at the beginnings of the republic
Valparaiso had in less than twenty years become an important port where
the ships that sailed across the Atlantic and around Cape Horn, and
later those that steamed through the Straits of Magellan, came to
anchor.

Valparaiso was a surprise to the weary voyager.  There before his eyes
was a port with a hundred ships Slying the flags of half the world.

The snow-capped mountains seemed so close they gave the impression of
emerging directly from the sea, and from the inky-blue water rose the
impossible fragrance of sirens.  Jacob Todd never knew that beneath
that peaceful-looking surface lay an entire city of sunken Spanish
sailing ships and skeletons of patriots with quarry stones tied to
their ankles, consigned to the deep by the soldiers of the captain
general.  The ship dropped anchor in the bay amid the thousands of
gulls shattering the air with their tremendous wings and ravenous
screeches.  Countless small boats bobbed on the waves, some filled with
huge live conger eels and sea bass flopping desperately for
oxygen.Valparaiso'Todd was told, was the commercial emporium of the
Pacific; in its warehouses were stored metals, sheep and alpaca wool,

grains, and hides for the world's markets.  Several landing boats
ferried the passengers and cargo from the sailing ship to dry land.
Todd stepped onto the dock amid sailors, stevedores, passengers,
visitors, burros, and carts and found himself in a city boxed into an
amphitheater ringed by steep hills, a city as populous and filthy as
many famous in Europe, an architectural blunder with narrow streets of
adobe and wood houses that fire could turn to ashes in a few hours'
time.  A coach drawn by two badly abused horses carried him and his
trunks and boxes to the Hotel Ingles.They passed sturdy buildings set
around plaza, several rather unfinished-looking churches, and one-story
residences surrounded by large gardens and orchards.  He at first
estimated an area of about a hundred blocks, but soon learned that the
city was deceptive; it was a labyrinth of alleys and passageways.  In
the distance he glimpsed a fishing community where shacks were exposed
to the wind off the ocean and nets stretched like enormous spiderwebs,
and beyond them, fertile fields planted with vegetables and fruit
trees.  He saw coaches as modern as any in London, barouches, fiacres,
and ca lashes but also teams of mules driven by ragged children and
carts drawn by oxen in the very center of the city.  On street corners,
priests and nuns begged for charity for the poorX surrounded by a sea
of stray dogs and befuddled chickens.  He saw women carrying bundles
and baskets, children clinging to their skirt tails, barefoot but with
black mantles over their heads, and quantities of idle men in
cone-shaped hats sitting in doorways or talking in groups.

An hour after getting off the ship' Jacob Todd was sitting in the
elegant salon of the Hotel Ingles, smoking black cigarettes imported
from Cairo and thumbing through a British magazine long out of date. 
He sighed with pleasure.  It seemed he would have no problems in
adapting, and if he managed his funds carefully he could live here
almost as comfortably as he did in London.  As he was waiting for
someone to come serve him--apparently no one hurried in this

W Eliza "M country--he was approached by John Sommers, the captain of
the ship he had sailed on.  Sommers was a large man with dark hair and
skin tanned like shoe leather who took pride in his reputation as hard
drinker, woman chaser, and inexhaustible devotee of cards and dice.
They had struck up a good friendship, and playing cards had entertained
them through endless nights on the high seas and stormy, icy days
rounding Cape Horn at the southern tip of the world.  John Sommers was
accompanied by a pale man dressed in black from head to toe and
sporting a newly trimmed beard; although the captain introduced the man
as his brother' Jeremy it would be difficult to find two more different
human beings.  John was the image of good health and strength, open,
loud, and likable, while his brother had the air of a ghost trapped in
eternal winter.  He was one of those persons who never seems to be
entirely there, thought Jacob Todd, the kind it is difficult to
remember because they have no outstanding features.  Without waiting
for an invitation, the two men joined him at his table with that
familiarity of compatriots in a foreign land.  Finally a waitress
showed up and Captain John Sommers ordered a bottle of whiskey, while
his brother asked for tea in the lingo invented by Britons to
communicate with servants.

"How are things Back Home?  "Jeremy inquired.  He spoke in low voice,
almost a murmur, barely moving his lips, his accent rather affected.

"Nothing has happened in England for the last three hundred years," the
captain answered.

"Forgive my curiosity, Mr.  Todd, but I saw you arrive at the hotel and
could not help but notice your luggage.  I thought I saw you had
several boxes labeled' Bibles  "Was I in error?"  asked Jeremy
Sommers.

"No, they are Bibles."

"No one advised us they were sending another pastor--"

w.,

"We were three months together in that nutshell and I never made you
out to be a pastor, Mr.  Todd," the captain exclaimed.

"I confess I am not, "Todd replied, hiding his discomfort behind a
mouthful of cigarette smoke.

"A missionary, then.  I suppose you are planning to go down to Tierra
del Fuego.The Indians of Patagonia are ripe to be evangelized.

Forget the Araucans, old boy, the Catholics have already reeled them
in, "Jeremy Sommers commented.

"There are probably no more than a dozen Araucans left," his brother
added.  "Those people have a mania for letting themselves be
massacred."

"They were the most savage Indians in America, Mr.  Todd.

Most of them died fighting the Spanish.  They were cannibals."

"They hacked pieces of flesh off living prisoners," the captain
elaborated, "they preferred their meat fresh.  But then, you and I
would do no less if someone slaughtered our family, burned our village,
and stole our land."

"Excellent, John!  Now you are defending cannibalism," his brother
replied, annoyed.

"In any case, Mr.  Todd, I must warn you not to tread on the toes of
our Catholic friends.  We must not provoke the natives.  These people
are extremely superstitious."

"Interesting that the beliefs of others are labeled mere superstitions,
Mr.  Todd  Ours we call religion.  Did you know that the Indians of
Tierra del Fuego, the Patagonians, are very different from the
Araucans?"

"Equally savage, John.  Why, they go about stark naked in an
insupportable climate," said Jeremy.

"Take them your religion, Mr.  Todd  Let's see if at least you can
teach them to wear britches.  "The captain laughed.

Todd had not heard the bad reports about those Indians, and the last
thing he wanted to do was to preach something he himself did not
believe in, but he didn't dare confess that his voyage was the
consequence of a drunken bet.  He replied vaguely that he was thinking
of forming a missionary expedition but that he still hadn't decided how
to finance it.

"Had I known, Mr.  Todd, that you were coming to preach the designs of
a tyrannical god among those good people, I would have thrown you
overboard in the middle of the Atlantic."

The waitress interrupted them, bringing their whiskey and tea.

She was a young girl who deliciously filled out the black uniform with
its starched coif and apron.  When she bent down with the tray, she
left a perturbing scent of crushed flowers and hot flat iron on the
air.  It had been weeks since Jacob Todd had seen a woman, and he sat
staring at her with a stab of loneliness.  John Sommers waited until
the girl had left.

"Careful, my friend, Chilean women are fatal," he said.

"They do not seem so to me.  They are short, broad through the
posterior, and they have most unpleasant voices," said Jeremy Sommers,
balancing his cup of tea.

"Sailors desert their ships for them!"  the captain exclaimed.

"I admit I am no authority when it comes to women.  I do not have time
for that sort of thing.  I must look after my business and our sister,
or had you forgotten?"

"Not for a minute; you always remind me.  You see, Mr.  Todd am the
black sheep of the family, a waster.  If it were not for our good
Jeremy here--"

"That girl looks Spanish," interrupted Jacob Todd, his eyes still on
the waitress, who was now at another table.

"I lived two months in Madrid, and I saw many like her."

"Here everyone has a touch of Indian blood, even those of the upper
classes.  They do not admit it, of course.  Indian blood is hidden like
the plague.  I cannot say I blame them.  Indians have a reputation for
being filthy, drunken, and lazy.  The government is trying to improve
the race by importing European immigrants.  Did you know, Mr.  Todd
that in the south they are giving away land to colonists?"

"The favorite sport is killing Indians to take away their lands."

"You exaggerate' John

"You don't always have to shoot them, giving them alcohol will do it.
But killing them is much more entertaining, of course.  In any case, we
English do not indulge in that pastime, Mr.  Todd.  We are not
interested in land.  Why plant potatoes if we can make a fortune
without taking off our gloves?"

"There is no dearth of opportunities here for an enterprising man.
There is much to be done in this country.  If you want to prosper, dear
fellow, head north.  There you find silver, copper, nitrates,
guano--"

"Guano?"

"Bird shit, Mr.  Todd laughed the captain.

"I know nothing about that, Mr.  Sommers."

"Mr.  Todd is not interested in making a fortune, Jeremy.

His interest is the Christian faith, right?"

"The Protestant colony here is large, and prosperous;

they will help you.  Come to my home tomorrow.  On Wednesdays my sister
Rose organizes a little musicale; it will be a good opportunity for you
to meet the right people.  I shall send my coach to pick you up at five
in the evening.  You will enjoy it," said Jeremy Sommers, excusing
himself.

The next day, refreshed by a night free of dreams and a long bath that
removed the coating of salt clinging to his soul but not the weaving
step of the ocean traveler' Jacob Todd went out to stroll through the
port.  He walked slowly along the main street, which was parallel to
the ocean and so close to the shore that it was splashed by the waves,
had a few drinks in a cafe, and ate in a tavern in the market.  He r
Eliza -i had left England in the middle of an icy February winter and,
after crossing an endless desert of water and stars in which he was
embroiled even in the count of his lost loves, had reached the Southern
Hemisphere at the beginning of June and another merciless winter.
Before he left it had not occurred to him to inquire about the climate.
He imagined a Chile as warm and humid as India, because that was what
one expected of poor countries; instead he found himself at the mercy
of an icy wind that blasted his bones and lifted whirlwinds of sand and
trash.  He got lost more than once in twisting streets, and made turn
after turn to get back to where he had begun.  He climbed infinite
stairs up tortuous alleyways bordered with houses absurdly suspended in
midair, trying politely not to stare through windows and invade the
privacy of others.  He stumbled upon romantic plazas reminiscent of
Europe, with bandstands where military ensembles were playing music for
lovers, and walked through modest gardens trampled by burros.  Lordly
trees grew at the edge of the principal streets, nourished by fetid
waters that poured down from the hills in open ditches.  In the
commercial zone the presence of the British was so evident that one
breathed an illusory air of other latitudes.  Signs on several shops
were in English and he passed compatriots dressed in the mode of London
fashion, even to the same black undertakers' umbrellas.  The moment he
was out of the center, poverty met him like a slap in the face; people
looked undernourished, sleepy; he saw soldiers in threadbare uniforms
and beggars in the doorways of the churches.  At noon all the church
bells began to chime in unison and instantly the tumult quieted; people
in the street stopped; men removed their hats, the few women about
knelt, and everyone crossed himself.  This vision lasted as the bells
tolled twelve times, then the activity was renewed as if nothing had
happened.

-8-1 The English -t=

The English he fiacre sent by Sommers arrived at the hotel a half hour
late.  The coachman had more than a bit l of alcohol under his belt,
but Jacob Todd was in no position to be choosy.  The driver started off
toward the south.

It had rained for a couple of hours, and in some sections mud puddles
masked fatal traps that could swallow a distracted horse.  Children
waited on either side of the street with teams of oxen, ready to rescue
bogged-down coaches in exchange for a coin, but even in his cups the
driver somehow avoided most of the potholes and they soon began
climbing uphill .  As soon as they reached Cerro Alegre, where most of
the foreign colony lived, the look of the city changed abruptly;

the shacks and crowded dwellings he'd seen below disappeared.  The
coach stopped before an estate of generous proportions but tortuous
design, a mishmash of pretentious towers and useless stairways
straddling various ground levels and lighted with so many torches that
night was in full retreat.  An Indian servant came to the door, wearing
livery that was much too large for him.  He took Todd's overcoat and
hat and led him to a spacious drawing room furnished with good
furniture and somewhat theatrical green velvet drapes; the room was
crammed with knickknacks and there was not an inch of wall space on
which to rest the eyes.  He assumed that in Chile, as in Europe, bare
wall was considered a sign of poverty; it was only later, when he
visited the somber homes of the Chileans, that he learned better.

Paintings leaned outward from the wall so they might be better
appreciated, and much of the room was lost in the shadow of the high
ceilings.  Huge logs were blazing in the fireplace and several charcoal
braziers dispensed an uneven warmth that left his feet icy and his head
feverish.  Over a dozen people dressed in the European mode were
standing around as uniformed maids passed trays.  Jeremy and John
Sommers came forward to meet him.

"I want you to meet my sister, Rose," said Jeremy, leading him to the
back of the drawing room.

At that moment, sitting to the right of the fireplace, Jacob Todd saw
the woman who would destroy his peace of heart.  Rose Sommers dazzled
him instantly, not so much for her beauty as for her self-assurance and
good cheer.  She had none of the captain's gross exuberance nor the
fastidious solemnity of her brother Jeremy; she was a woman with a
sparkling expression who seemed always about to break into flirtatious
laughter.  When she did, a network of fine lines crinkled around her
eyes, and for some reason that was what most attracted Jacob Todd.  He
could not judge her ago he thought somewhere between twenty and
thirty--but he imagined that in ten years she would look the same
because she had good bones and a queenly bearing.  She was wearing a
peach-colored taffeta dress and no adornment but a simple pair of coral
earrings.  The most elementary courtesy demanded that he do no more
than simulate the gesture of kissing her hand, not actually touching it
with his lips, but he was so overcome that unintentionally he planted a
full kiss on her hand.  That greeting was so inappropriate that for an
eternal moment they both stood frozen in uncertainty, he clutching her
hand the way you grip a sword, and she regarding the trace of his
saliva, not daring to wipe it off for fear of embarrassing the visitor,
until they were interrupted by a little girl dressed like a princess.
Todd shook off his anguish, and as he straightened up intercepted a
slightly mocking glance exchanged between the Sommers.Trying to smooth
over his gaffe, he turned to the child with exaggerated attention,
determined to win her over.

"This is Eliza, our protegee," said Jeremy Sommers.

Jacob Todd committed his second blunder.

"Protegee?  I'm not sure I follow you."  he said.

"It means that I do not belong to this family," Eliza explained
patiently, in the tone of someone speaking to an idiot.

"No?"

"If I do not behave, they will send me off to the Papist nuns."

"What are you saying, Eliza!  Pay no attention to her, Mr.  Todd

Children get strange ideas.  Of course Eliza belongs to our family,"
Miss Rose burst out, rising to her feet.

Eliza had spent the day with Mama Fresia, preparing dinner.  The
kitchen was at the back of the patio, but Miss Rose had had it joined
to the house with a walkway to avoid being embarrassed by serving
dishes that were either cold or splattered with dove droppings.

That room blackened by grease and soot was the indisputable kingdom of
Mama Fresia.  Cats, dogs, geese, and hens wandered at will across the
floor of rough unwaxed bricks.  There the goat that had nursed Eliza
ruminated through the winter; by now it was very ancient, but no one
would think of sacrificing it, for that would be like murdering one's
mother.  The child loved the aroma of the dough in the pans as the
yeast sighed and worked the mysterious process of leavening; the smell
of caramel beaten to frost cakes; the fragrance of mounds of chocolate
melting in milk.  On Miss Rose's musical Wednesdays the serving
girls--two Indian adolescents who lived in the house and worked in
exchange for food--polished silver, ironed tablecloths, and made the
crystal sparkle.  At noon they sent the coachman to the pastry shop to
buy sweets prepared with recipes jealously guarded since the times of
the colonies.  Mama Fresia always used the occasion to hang a leather
bag of fresh milk to the horses' harness, and on the trip back and
forth it was churned into butter.

At three in the afternoon, Miss Rose called Eliza to her bedroom, where
the coachman and the valet installed a lion's paw-footed bronze bathtub
that the chambermaids then lined with a sheet and filled with hot water
perfumed with mint leaves and rosemary.  Rose and Eliza splashed around
in the tub like children until the water grew cool and the maidservants
returned with armfuls of clothes and helped them into stockings and
boots, under drawers to the knees, batiste camisoles, contrivances with
padding over the hips to accentuate a slim waist, then three starched
petticoats and finally a dress, which covered the body completely,
leaving only head and hands exposed.  Miss Rose also wore a corset
stiffened with whalebone and so tight that she could not take a deep
breath or lift her arms higher than her shoulders.  Neither could she
get dressed without help nor bend from the waist because the whalebone
would break and poke into her body like a knitting needle.  That was
the one bath of the week, a ceremony comparable only to Saturday's hair
washing, which could be canceled on the least pretext since it was
considered dangerous for the health.  During the week, Miss Rose used
soap with caution; she preferred to scrub herself with a sponge
dampened in milk and to freshen up with a vanilla-scented eau de
toilette that she was informed had been in fashion in France since the
time of Madame Pompadour.  With eyes closed, Eliza could pick Miss Rose
out in a crowd by her peculiar fragrance of vanilla pudding.  Although
over thirty, she had not lost that transparent, delicate skin some
Englishwomen have before the glare of the world and their own arrogance
turns it to parchment.  She cared for her looks, using rose and lemon
water to blanch her skin, witch hazel blossom honey to keep it soft,
chamomile to bring out the shine in her hair, and a collection of
exotic balms and lotions her brother John brought her from the Far
East, where, he said, the women were more beautiful than anywhere else
in the universe.  She designed dresses inspired by her magazines from
London and stitched them herself in the sewing room; calling on
intuition and cleverness she modified her wardrobe with the same
ribbons, flowers, and feathers she had worn for years and yet never
looked bedraggled.  She did not, like Chilean women, wear a black
mantle over her head when she went out, a custom she considered an
aberration; she preferred short capes and assorted bonnets, even though
people stared at her in the street as if she were a courtesan.

Enchanted to see a new face at the weekly gathering, Miss Rose forgave
Jacob Todd his impertinent kiss and, taking his arm, led him to a round
table in a far corner of the room.  She invited him to choose among
various liqueurs, insisting that he try her mistela, a strange beverage
of cinnamon, alcohol, and sugar that he could not get past his lips and
later surreptitiously poured into flowerpot.  Then she introduced him
to the other guests: Mr.Appelgreen, a furniture manufacturer who was
accompanied by his daughter, a pallid, timid girl; Madame Colbert,
headmistress of an English school for girls; Mr.  Ebeling, proprietor
of the best gentlemen's haberdashery in town, and his wife, who latched
on to Todd, pressing him for news of the English royal family as if
they were her relatives.  He also met two surgeons: Page and Poett.

"These gentlemen use chloroform in their operations," Miss Rose
announced with admiration.

"It is still a novelty here, but in Europe it has revolutionized the
practice of medicine," one of the surgeons clarified.

"I understand that in England it is sometimes employed in obstetric
practice.  Did not Queen Victoria use it?"  Todd added, merely to have
something to say, since he knew nothing about the subject.

"Here we encounter major opposition on the part of the Catholics.  The
biblical curse on women is that they bring forth children with pain,
Mr.  Todd

"Does that not seem unjust, gentlemen?  Man's curse is to toil with the
sweat of his brow, but the men in this room--without having to go any
farther--earn their living from the sweat of others' brows," Miss Rose
rejoined, turning red as a beet.

The surgeons smiled with discomfort, but Todd was captivated.

He would have stayed by her side the entire evening, even though, as he
remembered, correct behavior at a London soiree dictated a stay of no
more than half an hour.  He noted, however, that in this garhering
people seemed disposed to stay, and he imagined that social life must
be quite limited and that perhaps the only occasion of the week was
this one hosted by the Sommers.  He was mulling this over when Miss
Rose announced the musical entertainment.

The maids brought more candelabras, making the room bright as day, and
arranged chairs around a piano, a guitar, and a harp.  The women were
seated in a semicircle, and the men remained standing behind their
chairs.  A chubby-cheeked gentleman took his place at the piano and
from his butcher's fingers flowed a delightful melody as the furniture
manufacturer's daughter interpreted an old Scots ballad in a voice so
sweet that Todd quite forgot she had a face like a frightened mouse.
The headmistress of the school for girls recited a heroic poem,
unnecessarily long; Rose sang a couple of raffish songs in a duet with
her brother John, despite Jeremy Sommers' evident disapproval; and then
Rose demanded that Jacob Todd give them the pleasure of a number from
his repertoire, which allowed the visitor the opportunity to show off
his fine voice.

"You are a true find, Mr.  Todd  We shall not let you escape.  You are
sentenced to come here every Wednesday!"  Rose exclaimed when the
applause died down, ignoring the bewitched expression on her visitor's
face.

Todd felt as if his teeth were sugarcoated, and his head was whiding,
whether from his admiration for Rose Sommers or the liqueurs he had
imbibed and the potent Cuban cigar he had smoked in the company of
Captain Sommers, he didn't know.  In that house no one could refuse a
dish or a refreshment without causing offense;

soon he would discover that this was a national characteristic in
Chile, where hospitality was manifested by forcing one's guests to
drink and eat beyond the bounds of human endurance.  At nine, dinner
was announced, and everyone paraded into the dining room where a new
series of overly generous entrees and desserts awaited.  It was near
midnight when the women got up and continued their conversation in the
drawing room while the men drank brandy and smoked in the dining room.
Finally, when Todd felt he was on the verge of passing out, the guests
began to ask for their overcoats and their coaches.  The Ebelings,
vitally interested in Todd's purported evangelizing mission in Tierra
del Fuego, offered to take him back to his hotel and he immediately
accepted, terrified at the idea of being driven through nightmarish
streets in the black of night by the Sommers' drunken coachman.  He
thought the ride to the hotel would never end; he felt incapable of
concentrating on the conversation, he was dizzy and his stomach was
churning.

"My wife was born in Africa; she is the daughter of missionaries who
preached the true faith in those lands; we know the sacrifices that
entails, Mr.  Todd.  We do hope that you will allow us the privilege of
assisting you in your noble endeavors among the natives," Mr.  Ebeling
said with great solemnity as they bid one another good evening.

That night Jacob Todd could not sleep.  The vision of Rose Sommers
assailed him repeatedly, and before day dawned he had made the decision
to court her in earnest.  He knew nothing about her, but he didn't
care; perhaps it was his destiny to lose a bet and travel to Chile in
order to meet his future wife.  He would have

As^ The English begun his courtship the very next day but he was unable
to crawl out of bed, having been felled by a violent griping of the
bowels.

He lay there a day and a night, at some moments unconscious and at
others thinking he was dying, until he could summon enough strength to
put his head out the door and call for help.  At his request, the hotel
manager advised the Sommers, his only acquaintances in the city, and
called a boy to clean up the room, which stank like a dung heap. 
Jeremy Sommers arrived at the hotel at midday, accompanied by the best
blood letter inValparaiso, who fortunately had a smattering of English
and who, after bleeding Jacob Todd's legs and arms until he was nearly
lifeless, explained to him that all newcomers fell ill when first they
visited Chile.

"There's no reason to be alarmed, that I know of; very few die," he
said to reassure Todd.

He left small rice-paper packets of quinine, but the suffering
Englishman, doubled over with stomach cramps, could not get them down.
He had been in India and he recognized the symptoms of malaria and
other tropical illnesses treated with quinine, but his sickness did not
resemble them even remotely.  As soon as the phlebotomist left, the boy
returned to take away the rags and wash down the room again.  Jeremy
Sommers had left the address of the doctors Page and Poett, but Todd
did not get around to calling them because two hours later a formidable
woman appeared at the hotel and demanded to see the sick man.  She had
by the hand a little girl dressed in blue velvet, white high-button
shoes, and a bonnet embroidered with flowers, like a picture in a
storybook.  They were Mama Fresia and Eliza, whom Rose Sommers had sent
because she had very little faith in bloodletting.  They marched into
Todd's room with such assurance that the weakened man did not dare
protest.  The woman had come in the guise of healer, and the little
girl as translator.

"My mamita says that she is going to take off your pajamas.  I will not
look," the child explained, and turned her face to the wall while the
Indian woman stripped off his clothes in a thrice and proceeded to
scrub his entire body with strong liquor.

She placed hot bricks in Todd bed, wrapped him in blankets, and fed him
teaspoons of a honey-sweetened bitter herb tea to ease his stomach
pain.

"Now my mamita is going to romance your sickness," the girl said.

"What is that?"

"Don't worry, it doesn't hurt."

Mama Fresia closed her eyes and began to pass her hands over Jacob
Todd's torso and stomach as she whispered incantations in her Mapuche
tongue.  He felt a delicious drowsiness creep over him; even before the
woman finished, he was sound asleep, unaware of when his two nurses
left.  He slept eighteen hours and awakened bathed in sweat.  The next
morning Mama Fresia and Eliza returned to administer another vigorous
rubdown and feed him a bowl of chicken soup.

"My mamita says not to drink any more water.  Take steaming hot tea,
and don't eat fruit, or else you will feel like you want to die again,"
the girl translated.

Within a week, when he could stand and look at himself in the mirror,
Jacob Todd realized that he could not show himself before Miss Rose
looking the way he did: he had lost several pounds and was so weak he
could not take two steps without falling panting into a chair.  When he
was up to sending a note to thank Rose for saving his life, along with
chocolates for Mama Fresia and Eliza, he learned that she had left with
a friend and her chambermaid for Santiago, a perilous journey given the
bad conditions of the road and the weather.

Miss Sommers made the thirty-four-league trip once a year, usually at
the beginning of autumn or in mid-spring, for the purpose of attending
the theater, hearing good music, and making her yearly purchases

The English Y

in the Gran Almacen Japones, an emporium perfumed with jasmine and
lighted by gas lamps with rose-colored glass shades, where she
purchased the bagatelles difficult to come by in the port.  This year,
however, there was good reason for going during the winter: she was to
sit for a portrait.  A famous French painter named Monvoisin had
arrived in Chile, invited by the government to establish a school among
the nation's artists.  The maestro painted only the head, the rest was
done by his assistants, and to save time lace might be applied directly
onto the canvas.  Despite such ignoble devices, however, nothing was as
prestigious as a portrait signed by the French master.  Jeremy Sommers
insisted on having one of his sister to preside over the drawing room.
The painting cost six ounces of gold, plus an additional ounce for each
hand, but this was no time to try to save money.  The opportunity to
have an authentic work by the great Monvoisin did not present itself
twice in the same lifetime, as his clients were wont to say.

"If expense is no problem, I want him to paint me with three hands.  It
will be his most famous painting, and someday will end up in a museum
rather than over our fireplace," was Miss Rose's comment.

That was the year of the floods, which were immortalized in
schoolchildren's textbooks and in their grandparents' memories.

The deluge swept away hundreds of dwellings, and when finally the storm
abated and the waters began to recede, a series of minor temblors,
which came like God's wrath, finished destroying everything that had
been softened by the pouring rain.  Ruffians scrabbled through the
rubble, taking advantage of the confusion to pillage ruined houses, and
soldiers were issued orders to summarily execute anyone they surprised
in such barbaric acts.  Overly zealous in their duties, however, these
same protectors began swinging away for the pleasure of hearing their
victims yell and the order was revoked before they began slaughtering
innocents.  Jacob Todd, tucked in his hotel nursing a cold and still
weak from his illness, spent hours despairing of the incessant tolling
of church bells calling for repentance, reading old newspapers, and
looking for a partner at cards.  He made one trip to a pharmacy,
looking for a tonic to settle his stomach, but the shop was a jumble of
dusty blue and green glass bottles where a Teutonic clerk tried to sell
him scorpion oil and pinworm liqueur.  For the first time' Todd
lamented being so far from London.

At night he was scarcely able to sleep because of drunken parties and
quarrels, and because of the daily burials, which took place between
twelve midnight and three in the morning.  The new cemetery was high on
a hill overlooking the city.  The storm washed open graves and coffins
rolled down the slopes in a muddle of bones that equalized all the dead
in the same indignity.  Many commented that the dead were better off
ten years ago, when decent people were buried in the churchyard, the
poor in the ravines, and foreigners on the beach.  This is a truly
eccentric country, concluded Todd who kept a handkerchief tied around
his face because of the sickening wind borne stench of misfortune,
which the authorities fought with great bonfires of eucalyptus
branches.  As soon as he felt a little better, he went out to watch the
processions.  Ordinarily they did not draw a crowd, since they were
repeated every year during the seven days of Holy Week and on other
religious holidays, but on this occasion they had become massive
rallies imploring heaven to bring an end to the storms.  Long lines of
the faithful poured out of the churches, led by the associations of
black-clad caballeros, each group carrying a platform bearing the
statue of a saint in magnificent robes embroidered with gold thread and
precious stones.  One column bore a crucified

Christ whose crown of thorns lay around his neck.  Someone explained to
Todd that this was the Cristo de Mayo, the May Christ, which had been
brought from Santiago especially for the procession because it was the
most miraculous image in the world, the only one capable of changing
the weather.  Two hundred years before, a devastating earthquake had
leveled the capital, completely destroying the church of San Agustin
except for the altar that held this Christ.

His crown had slipped from his head to around his neck, where it
stayed, because every time they tried to put it back where it belonged
the earth began to tremble.  The festivities brought together hundreds
of monks and nuns, pious women faint from fasting, humble people
praying and singing at the top of their lungs, penitents in coarse
robes, and flagellants flaying their naked backs with scourges of
leather strips tipped with sharp metal rosettes.  Some swooned and were
attended by women who cleaned their open wounds and gave them cooling
drinks, but as soon as they recovered they pushed their way back into
the procession.  Lines of Indians filed by, punishing themselves with
demented fervor, followed by bands of musicians playing religious
hymns.  Mourners' prayers roared like a rushing stream, and the humid
air was heavy with incense and sweat.  There were processions of
aristocrats, richly clad but all in black and stripped of jewelry, and
others of the ragged, barefoot, down-and-out, all of whom crisscrossed
the plaza without touching or mixing.  The more who crowded in, the
greater the uproar and the more intense the displays of piety: the
faithful lifted their voices begging forgiveness for their sins,
convinced that the bad weather was divine punishment for their
failings.  The repentant came in swarms, overflowing the churches, and
rows of priests were installed beneath tents and umbrellas to hear
confessions.  The Englishman found the spectacle fascinating; he had
seen nothing in any of his voyages to compare to such exoticism and
gloom.  Accustomed to Protestant sobriety, he felt he had awakened in
the Middle Ages; his friends in London would never believe him.  Even
at a prudent distance he could sense the primitive shiver of animal
suffering that swept in waves through the masses of humanity.  With no
little effort, he climbed upon the base of a monument in the church
plaza facing the Iglesia de la Matriz, where he could enjoy a panoramic
view.  Suddenly he felt someone tugging at his pants leg; he looked
down and saw a frightened little girl with a black mantle over her
head, her face streaked with blood and tears.  He jerked his leg away,
but too late; his trousers were already stained.  He swore and tried to
shoo her away with gestures, since he could not remember the words to
do it in Spanish.  He was astounded when the child replied in perfect
English that she was lost and that maybe he could take her home.  He
took a better look.

"I am Eliza Sommers.  Do you remember me?"  the child murmured.

Knowing that Miss Rose was in Santiago posing for her portrait and that
Jeremy Sommers had scarcely been home because his warehouse was
flooded, Eliza had seized the moment and nagged Mama Fresia to take her
to the procession until the woman finally gave in.

Her patrones had forbidden her to mention any Catholic or Indian
rituals in front of the girl, much less expose her to them, but she
herself was dying to see the Cristo de Mayo at least once in her life.
The Sommers would never find out, she concluded.  So the two stole out
of the house, waLked down the hill, and climbed onto a cart that took
them close to the plaza, where they joined a column of Indian
penitents.  Everything would have worked out fine if in the tumult and
fervor of the day Eliza had not let loose of Mama Fresia's hand, Mama
Fresia being so caught up in the collective hysteria that she failed to
notice.  Eliza shouted to her, but her voice was lost in the clamor of
the prayers and the mournful drums of the brotherhoods.  She began
running around, calling for her nana, but all the women looked the
same

The English S

beneath their dark mantles, and she kept slipping on cobbles slick with
mud, candle wax, and blood.  Eventually the many columns blended
together into a single mass that dragged along like a wounded animal as
bells pealed madly and the horns of the ships in the port blared. 
Eliza had no way of knowing how long she was paralyzed with terror
until gradually she began to think clearly.  In the meantime, the
procession itself had grown quiet, everyone was kneeling, and on a
platform in front of the church the bishop, in person, was celebrating
mass.  Eliza thought of just starting off toward Cerro Alegre, but she
was afraid that she would be overtaken by darkness before she found her
house; she had never been out alone and did not know which way to go. 
She decided not to move until the crowd thinned out; maybe then Mama
Fresia would find her.  That was when she spied the tall red-haired man
clinging to the monument in the plaza and recognized the sick man she
had helped her nana take care of.  Without a moment's hesitation, she
made a beeline straight for him.

"What are you doing here!  Are you hurt?"  he exclaimed.

"I'm lost.  Can you take me to my house?"

Jacob Todd wiped Eliza's face with his handkerchief and checked her
over quickly, satisfying himself that there was no visible harm.  He
concluded that the blood must have come from one of the flagellants.

"I will take you to Mr.  Sommers' office."

She begged him not to do that, because if her guardian found out she
had come to see the procession he would send Mama Fresia away.  Todd
set out to find a carriage for hire, not an easy task at that moment,
while the girl trotted along, saying nothing but also not letting go of
his hand.  For the first time in his life, the man felt a quiver of
tenderness as he felt that tiny warm hand grasping his.  Occasionally
he glanced at her out of the corner of his eye, moved by the childish
face with its almond-shaped black eyes.

Finally they came upon a small cart pulled by two mules and the driver
agreed to carry them up the hill for double the usual fare.

They made the journey in silence, and an hour later Todd dropped Eliza
in front of her house.  She thanked him as.  she said good-bye but did
not invite him in.  He watched her walk away, small and unbearably
fragile, covered from head to toe in her black mantle.

Suddenly she turned, ran back to him, threw her arms around his neck,
and planted a kiss on his cheek.  "Thank you," she said again.

Jacob Todd returned to his hotel in the same cart.  Occasionally he
touched his cheek, surprised by the sweet yet sad feelings the child
had aroused in him.

The processions had the effect of heightening collective repentance,
but also, as Jacob Todd himself had witnessed, of ending the rains,
justifying once again the splendid reputation of the Cristo de Mayo. 
In less than forty-eight hours the skies cleared and a timid sun peeked
out, playing an optimistic note in the concert of current catastrophes.
Owing to the storms and epidemics, nine whole weeks passed before the
Wednesday gatherings in the Sommers' home were resumed, and several
more before Jacob Todd dared hint to Miss Rose of his romantic
feelings.  When finally he did so, she pretended not to hear him, but
when he persisted she came out with a crushing response.

"The only good thing about marriage is becoming a widow," she said.

"A husband, no matter how stupid, always makes a woman look good," he
replied without losing his good humor.

"Not me.  A husband would be an impediment, and he could not give me
anything I do not already have."

"What about children?"

aA The English

"But how old do you think I am, Mr.  Todd

"No more than seventeen!"

"Do not tease me.  It is my good fortune that I have Eliza."

"I am stubborn, Miss Rose, I will never give up."

"I am grateful to you, Mr.  Todd.  However, it isn't a husband who
makes a woman look good, but many suitors."

In any case, Rose was the reason why Jacob Todd remained in Chile much
longer than the three months designated for selling his Bibles.  The
Sommers were the perfect social contact; thanks to them, the doors of
the prosperous foreign colony were thrown wide open to him, and all the
English were ready to help him in his proposed religious mission in
Tierra del Fuego.  He set himself the task of learning something about
the Patagonian Indians, but after a few halfhearted sweeps through some
heavy tomes in the library, he understood that it made little matter
what he knew or didn't know, since ignorance on the subject was
universal.  All he had to do was say what people wanted to hear, and
for that he could rely on his golden tongue.  To unload his Bibles
among Chilean clients, however, he would have to improve his
rudimentary Spanish.  With the two months he had lived in Spain, and
his good ear, he learned more quickly, certainly, and also more
comprehensively than many of the British who had come to the country
twenty years before him.  At first, he concealed his too liberal
political ideas, but soon he noticed that in every social gathering he
was besieged with questions and always surrounded by a group of
astonished listeners.  His abolitionist, egalitarian, and democratic
discourses shook those good people from their fog; they were the source
of endless discussion among the men and horrified exclamations among
the mature ladies, though inevitably they attracted the younger ones.
He was catalogued in general opinion as a kind of harmless lunatic, and
his incendiary ideas were considered entertaining; on the other hand,
his mockery of the British royal family was badly received among
members of the English colony for whom Queen Victoria like God and
Empire, was untouchable.  His incomc modest, though not to be sneezed
at--allowed him to live with a certain ease without ever really having
to work for a living, and that classified him as a gentleman.  As soon
as it was established that he was unattached there was no shortage of
marriageable girls intent on capturing him, but after he met Rose
Sommers he had no eyes for other women.  He asked himself a thousand
times why she had never married and all that occurred to that
rationalist agnostic was that heaven intended her for him.

"How long are you going to go on tormenting me, Miss Rose?

Aren't you afraid I may get tired of chasing you?"  he teased her.

"You won't tire, Mr.  Todd.  Pursuing the cat is much more entertaining
than catching it," she replied.

The bogus missionary's eloquence was a novelty in those surroundings,
and as soon as it was learned that he had conscientiously studied Holy
Scripture, he was invited to speak.  There was a small Anglican church,
frowned upon by the Catholic powers-that-be, but the Protestant
community also met in private homes.  "Whoever heard of a church
without virgins and devils?  Those English folks are all heretics; they
don't believe in the Pope, they don't know how to pray, they spend most
of their time singing, and they don't even take communion," a
scandalized Mama Fresia would grumble when it was the Sommers' turn to
hold Sunday service in their home.  Todd planned to read briefly about
the exodus of the Jews from Egypt and then refer to the situation of
immigrants who, like the biblical Jews, had to adapt to a strange land,
but Jeremy Sommers introduced him to the congregation as a missionary
and asked him to speak about the Indians inTierra del Fuego.JacobEodd
could not have foundTierra del Fuego on the map, or told why it had the
intriguing name Land of Fire, but he succeeded in moving his audience
to tears with the

_ s w..

story of three savages captured by a British captain and taken to land.
In less than three years those unfortunate individuals, who lived naked
in glacial cold and from time to time practiced cannibalism, he said,
went about properly dressed, had become good Christians and learned
civilized customs, including a tolerance for English food.

He failed to mention, however, that as soon as they were repatriated
they had returned to their old ways, as if they had never been touched
by England or the word of Jesus.  At Jeremy Sommers' suggestion, a
collection was taken up right there for Todd's plan to spread the
faith, with such fine results that the following day Jacob Todd opened
an account in theValparaiso branch of the Bank of London.  The account
was nourished weekly with contributions from the Protestants and grew
despite the frequent drafts Todd drew to finance personal expenses when
his income did not stretch to cover them.  The more money that came in,
the more the obstacles and pretexts for postponing the evangelical
mission multiplied.  And in that manner two years went by.

Jacob Todd came to feel as comfortable inValparaiso as if he had been
born there.  Chileans and English shared a number of character traits:
they resolved everything with solicitors and barristers;

they had an absurd fondness for tradition, patriotic symbols, and
routine;

they prided themselves on being individualists and enemies of
ostentation, which they scorned as a sin of social climbing; they
seemed amiable and self-controlled but were capable of great cruelty.
However, unlike the English, Chileans were horrified by eccentricity
and feared nothing so much as ridicule.  If only I spoke Spanish well,
thought Jacob Todd, I would feel entirely at home.  He had moved into
the boardinghouse of an English widow woman who took in stray cats and
baked the most famous pastries in the port.  He slept with four felines
on his bed, better company than he had ever had, and breakfasted daily
on his hostess's tempting tarts.  He connected with Chileans of every
class, from the most humble, whom he met in his wanderings through the
poor neighborhoods of the port, to the high-and-mightiest.  Jeremy
Sommers introduced him into the Club de la Union, where he was accepted
as an invited member.  Only foreigners of recognized social status
could boast of such privilege, since the club was an enclave of
landowners and political conservatives whose members' worth was
determined by family name.  Doors opened to him because of his skill
with cards and dice; he lost with such grace that very few realized how
much he won.  It was there that he became a friend of Agustin delValle,
the owner of agricultural holdings in that area and flocks of sheep in
the south, where delValle had never thought of going since that was
precisely why he had imported stewards from Scotland.  That new
friendship gave Todd occasion to visit the austere mansions of
aristocratic Chilean families, dark, square edifices with huge, nearly
empty rooms decorated with little refinement: heavy furniture, funereal
candelabra, and a court of bloody, crucified Christs, plaster virgins,
and saints dressed in the mode of ancient Spanish noblemen.

These were houses that turned inward, closed to the street by tall iron
railings, graceless and uncomfortable but relieved by cool colonnades
and interior patios filled with jasmine, orange trees, and roses.

With the first signs of spring'Agustin delValle invited the Sommers and
Jacob Todd to one of his country estates.  The road was a nightmare: a
lone horseman could make it in four or five hours, but the caravan of
family and guests started at dawn and did not arrive until late at
night.  The del Vanes traveled in ox carts laden with tables and plush
sofas.  Behind them came a mule team with the luggage, along with
peasants on horseback armed with primitive blunderbusses to defend
against the highwaymen who all too often awaited around the curve of
the hill.  Added to the maddening pace of the animals were the
washed-out track where carts sank to their axles and the frequent rest
stops during which the servants served refreshments amid clouds of
flies.  Todd knew nothing about agriculture, but he needed only a look
to realize how abundantly things grew in that fertile soil: fruit fell
from the trees and rotted on the ground because no one made the effort
to gather it.  At the hacienda he encountered the same style of life he
had observed years before in Spain: a large family united by intricate
bloodlines and an inflexible code of honor.  His host was a powerful
and feudal patriarch who held the destinies of his descendants in his
iron fist and made much of a family tree he could trace back to the
first Spanish conquistadors.  My ancestors, he would say, walked more
than a thousand kilometers weighed down in heavy iron armor;

they crossed mountains, rivers, and the world's most arid desert to
found the city of Santiago.  Among his peers delValle was a symbol of
authority and decency, but outside his class he was known as a rake. 
He had untold bastards and a reputation for having killed more than one
of his tenants in a legendary fit of temper, but those deaths, along
with many other sins, were never mentioned.  His wife was in her
forties but she looked like an old woman, tremulous and hangdog, always
dressed in mourning for the children who died in infancy and squeezed
breathless by the pressure of her corset, her religion, and the husband
fate had dealt her.  Male offspring idled away the days in masses,
outings, siestas, gambling, and carousing, while the girls floated like
mysterious nymphs through the house and gardens in whispering
petticoats, always beneath the vigilant eye of their chaperones.  They
had been trained since early childhood for a life of virtue, faith, and
abnegation; their fate was a marriage of convenience and motherhood.

In the country, the party attended a bullfight that did not even
remotely resemble the brilliant Spanish spectacle of courage and death:
no suit of lights, no fanfare, no passion or glory, only a handful of
reckless drunks tormenting an animal with spears and insults, then
tossed into the dust to the tune of curses and guffaws.  The most
dangerous part of the fight was getting the enraged and ill-treated,
but still unharmed, beast from the ring.  Todd was grateful that they
spared it the ultimate indignity of public execution, for in his good
English heart he would rather have seen the bullfighter die than the
bull.

In the afternoons the men played ombre and rocambor, waited on like
princes by a true army of humble, dark-skinned servants who never
lifted their eyes from the ground or their voices above a murmur.

They weren't slaves but may as well have been.  They worked in exchange
for protection, a roof over their heads, and a portion of the harvest;
in theory they were free but they stayed with the patron, however
despotic he might be or however harsh their conditions, since they had
nowhere else to go.  Slavery had been quietly abolished ten years
before.  The African slave trade had never been profitable in these
lands because there were no large plantations--although no one
mentioned the fate of the Indians who had been deprived of their lands
and reduced to penury, or the tenants in the fields who were sold or
inherited with the property, like the animals.  Neither was there any
reference to the shiploads of Chinese and Polynesian slaves destined
for the guano deposits of the Chincha Islands.  As long as they didn't
leave the ship there was no problem: the law prohibited slavery on dry
land but said nothing about the sea.  While the men played cards, Miss
Rose grew discreetly bored in the company of Senora del Vane and her
many daughters.  Eliza, in contrast, raced through the open fields with
Paulina, the one daughter of Agustin delValle who had escaped the
languid pattern of the women of that family.  She was several years
older than Eliza, but that day she romped and played as if they were
the same age, faces bare to the sun, their hair blowing loose in the
wind as they whipped their horses on.

liza Sommers was a small, slender girl with features as delicate as a
quill drawing.  In I 845, _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 thanValparaiso.  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."

Senoritas

"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 allValparaiso 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 chat elaine 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
laughing.

-H Senoritas f

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 have 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

Senoritas -;

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 tute 5o

1 Senoritas 0 !

lage 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, 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 trunk vs and laid 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.

Two years after the floods things took a turn for the better and the
country basked in good weather, political tranquility, and an economic
boom.  Chileans treaded warily; they were accustomed to natural
disasters and such a bonanza could be the preparation for major
cataclysm.  To top it off, rich veins of silver and gold were
discovered in the north.  During the Conquest, when the Spaniards
wandered America seeking those ores and bearing off everything they
found, Chile had been considered the backside of the world because,
compared with the riches of the rest of the continent, it had very
little to offer.  The forced march across its towering mountains and
the lunar desert of the north dried up the greed in the hearts of those
conquistadors, and if any remained, unconquerable Indians made them rue
it.  The captains, exhausted and impoverished, cursed the land that
gave them no choice but to plant their flags and lie down to die
because to return without glory was worse.  Three hundred years later
those mines, hidden from the eyes of the ambitious soldiers of Spain
and now suddenly, magically, exposed, were an unexpected prize for
their descendants.  New fortunes were formed, augmented by others from
industry and commerce.  The ancient landed aristocracy, which had
always had the upper hand in the country, felt its privileges
threatened, and new wealth became a social stigma.

One of those filthy-rich upstarts fell in love with Paulina del Vane.
His name was Feliciano Rodriguez de Santa Cruz, and in a few years'
time he had made a fortune in a gold mine he had developed with his
brother.  Little was known of their origins, except that it was
suspected that their ancestors were converted Jews and had adopted that
sonorous Christian family name to save their skins during the
Inquisition, more than enough reason to be flatly rejected by the proud
delValles.  Of Agustin's five daughters' Jacob Todd liked Paulina best
because her dashing, happy nature reminded him of Miss Rose.  The girl
had an open way of laughing that contrasted with her sisters' simpers
hidden behind fans and mantillas.  When Jacob Todd learned of her
father's plan to banish Paulina to a convent to foil her love affair,
he decided, against his better judgment, to help her.  Before she was
taken away, he managed to steal a few words with her in a moment when
her chaperone's attention was wandering.  Aware that there was no time
for explanations, Paulina pulled from her bodice a letter so folded and
wadded up it looked like a weathered rock and begged Todd to take it to
her beloved.  The next day the girl, closely guarded by her father, was
taken on a journey of several days over nearly impassable roads to
Concepcion, a city in the south near Indian reservations, where nuns
would undertake the chore of bringing her to her senses with prayers
and fasting.  To rid her of the foolhardy -notion that she might rebel
or escape, delValle had ordered her head to be shaved.  Her mother
collected Paulina's cut-of flocks wrapped them in an embroidered
batiste cloth, and took them as a gift to the charitable women of the
Iglesia de la Matriz to make wigs for the saints.  Meanwhile, Todd not
only succeeded in delivering Paulina's missive, he also learned the
exact location of the convent from her brothers and passed on that
information to a greatly distressed Feliciano Rodriguez de Santa Cruz.
In gratitude, the suitor took out his pocket watch and pure-gold chain
and insisted on giving them to his love's sainted spy, who refused
them, offended.

"I have no way to repay you for what you have done," Feliciano
murmured, nonplussed.

"You have no reason to do so."

For some time Jacob Todd heard nothing about the beleaguered pair, but
after a couple of months the delicious tale of the girl's flight was
the tidbit of every social gathering and there was nothing the haughty
Agustin delValle could do to prevent the addition of colorful details
that made him the butt of ridicule.  The version Paulina told Jacob
Todd months later was that one June evening, one of those wintry
twilights with a fine rain and early nightfall, she had managed to
escape her keepers' vigilance and flee the convent dressed in a
novice's habit, taking with her two silver candelabra from the main
altar.

Thanks to Jacob Todd's information, Feliciano Rodriguez de Santa Cruz
had journeyed south, where he had been in secret contact with Paulina
from the beginning, prepared to meet her at the first opportunity. That
evening he was waiting a short distance from the convent, although when
he saw her it was several seconds before he recognized

0 Senoritas i;

the half-bald novice who melted into his arms, still clutching the
candelabras.

"Don't look at me like that, Feliciano, hair grows," she said, kissing
him smack on the lips.

Feliciano took Paulina back to Valparaiso in a closed carriage and
temporarily installed her in his widowed mother's home, the most
respectable hiding place he could think of, doing his best to protect
her honor although aware that there was no way to keep her reputation
from being tarred by the scandal.  Agustin's first thought was to
challenge his daughter's seducer to a duel, but when he acted on that
impulse he learned that Feliciano was on a business trip in Santiago.
He turned his attention instead to finding Paulina, assisted by armed
sons and nephews preoccupied with avenging the honor of the family,
while the mother and a chorus of sisters prayed a rosary for their
misguided Paulina.The ecclesiastical uncle who had recommended sending
Paulina to the nuns tried to instill a little sanity in the male
delValles, but those chauvinists were in no mood for that good
Christian's sermonizing.  Feliciano's trip was part of the strategy he
had planned with his brother and Jacob Todd.  He left without fanfare
for the capital while the other two men set into action theValparaiso
portion of the plan, publishing in a liberal newspaper news of the
disappearance of Senorita Paulina delValle, word that the family had
tried very hard to suppress.  That saved the lovers' lives.

Finally Agustin del Vane accepted the fact that this was not the time
to defy the law and that a public wedding would go farther than a
double murder to cleanse the family honor.  They set the guidelines for
a negotiated peace and a week later, when everything was ready,
Feliciano returned.  The fugitives presented themselves at the del
Vanes' home, accompanied by the groom's brother, a lawyer, and the
bishop.  Jacob Todd was discreetly absent.  Paulina wore a very simple
=

dress, but when she took off her mantle she defiantly displayed a
queen's diadem.  She entered on the arm of her future mother-in-law,
who was prepared to speak for her virtue but was not given the
opportunity.  The last thing the family wanted was a second story in
the newspaper, so Agustin delValle had no choice but to receive his
rebellious daughter and her undesirable suitor.  He did so surrounded
by his sons and nephews in the dining room, which had been converted
into a tribunal for the occasion, while the women of the family,
secluded at the opposite end of the house, learned the details from the
maidservants, who listened behind doors and then ran to them with every
word.  They reported that the girl had shown up with diamonds
glittering in her bristly new hair and had faced her father without a
trace of shyness or fear, announcing that she still had the
candelabras, and, in fact, had taken them only to gall the nuns.Agustin
del Vane raised his riding crop but Feliciano stepped forward to
receive the punishment.  Then the bishop, very weary but with the
weight of his authority intact, intervened with the irrefutable
argument that there could be no public marriage to still the gossip if
the bride and groom showed up with bruised faces.

"Ask them to bring us hot chocolate, Agustin, and let us sit down and
converse like decent people," this officer of the Church proposed.

And so they did.  They ordered Paulina and the widow Rodriguez de Santa
Cruz to wait outside the room because this was a man's affair, and
after consuming several pots of foaming chocolate they reached an
agreement.  They dictated a document in which the economic terms were
set out clearly and the honor of both parties saved, signed it before a
notary, and proceeded to plan the details of the wedding.

One month later Jacob Todd attended an unforgettable ball in which the
prodigal hospitality of the delValle family reached new heights:

>0 Senoritas <

the dancing, singing, and feasting lasted into the following morning
and the guests all commented on the beauty of the bride, the happiness
of the groom, and the good fortune of the delValles, who had wed their
daughter to a solid, if brand-new, fortune.  The couple immediately
left for the north.

> ARuined Reputation

A Ruined Reputation

T acob Todd was sorry to see Feliciano and Paulina | go; he had become
good friends with the mining J millionaire and his spunky wife.  He
felt as much at ease with the young impresarios as he began to feel ill
at ease among the members of the Club de la Union.  Like him, the new
industrialists were imbued with European ideas, they were modern and
liberal, unlike the old Chilean oligarchy which at mid century was
decades behind the times.  He still had one hundred and seventy Bibles
stacked beneath his bed, which by now he had forgotten because he had
long ago lost his bet.  He had enough command of Spanish to manage on
his own and, though it was not returned, he had never stopped loving
Rose Sommers: two good reasons for staying in Chile.  Her unfailing
rebuffs had become a pleasant habit and no longer humiliated him.  He
learned to deflect them with irony and return them without malice, like
a game of catch whose mysterious rules only they knew.  He was
acquainted with a few intellectuals and spent entire nights discussing
French and German philosophers, along with scientific discoveries that
were opening new horizons on human knowledge.  He had long hours in
which to think, read, and debate.  He distilled ideas that he noted
down in a thick notebook worn with use and spent a major part of his
pension on books ordered from London and others he bought in the Santos
Tornero bookstore in El Almendral, the district where the French lived
and where all the best brothels in Valparaiso were located.  The
bookshop was a meeting place for intellectuals and aspiring writers.
Todd sometimes spent whole days reading; later he passed his books on
to his comrades, who translated them and published them in small,
inexpensive pamphlets circulated from hand to hand.

Among the group of intellectuals, the youngest was one Joaquin Andieta,
who was barely eighteen but who made up for lack of experience with the
qualities of a natural lead eL His electrifying personality was even
more notable given his youth and poverty.  This Joaquin was not a man
of many words, but of action, one of the few with enough clear
mindedness and courage to transform ideas from books into revolutionary
impulses; the others would rather argue forever around a bottle in the
back room of the bookstore.  Todd had picked Andieta out from the
beginning; there was something disquieting and pathetic about him that
drew him like an abyss.  Todd had noticed Andieta's scuffed satchel and
threadbare suit, transparent and brittle as onion skin.  To hide the
holes in the soles of his boots'Andieta never crossed his legs, and
Todd suspected that he did not remove his jacket because his shirt was
mended and patched.  He didn't own a decent overcoat, but in winter he
was the first to get up early to hand out pamphlets and paste up
posters calling workers to rebel against employers' abuses, or sailors
against captains and ship companies, an often futile labor since most
of those to whom the notices were directed were illiterate.  His calls
for justice were lost at the mercy of the wind and human
indifference.

Through discreet inquiries Jacob Todd discovered that his friend was
employed by the British Import and Export Company, Ltd.  In return for
a miserly salary and exhausting work schedule he kept an accounting of
the goods that passed through the port office.  He was also expected to
wear a starched collar and shined shoes.  He spent his days in a badly
lit, badly ventilated room in which the desks were lined up one after
the other to infinity and piled with dusty files and ledgers that no
one had looked at in years.  Todd asked Jeremy Sommers about the boy
but he could not place him.  He must see him every day, he said, but he
had no personal interchange with his subordinates and could barely
recognize their names.  Through other sources, Todd learned that
Andieta lived with his mother, but could find out nothing about his
father.  He imagined that he had been a sailor passing through the port
and the mother one of those luckless women who did not fit into any
social category, perhaps illegitimate or renounced by her
family.Joaquin Andieta had Andalusian features and the virile grace of
a young toreador; everything about him suggested firmness, athleticism,
control; his movements were precise, his gaze intense, his pride
touching.  To Todd's Utopian idealism he posed a rock-hard realism.
Todd preached the creation of a communal society without priests or
police, governed democratically under a unique and flexible moral
law.

"You live in the clouds, Mr.  Todd.  We have much to do, we can't waste
time discussing fantasies," interrupted Joaquin Andieta.

"But if we don't begin by imagining the perfect society, how shall we
create one?  "Todd responded, waving his constantly growing notebook,
to which he had added plans of ideal cities in which each citizen
cultivated his food and children grew up healthy and happy, cared for
by the community, for since there was no private property neither could
one claim possession of children.

"We must improve the disaster of the here and now.  The first thing is
to organize the workers, the poor, and the Indians, give land to the
campesinos and seize power from the priests.  We must change the
constitution, Mr.  Todd.  Here only property owners vote, which means
the rich govern.  The poor don't count."

At first' Jacob Todd sought ways to help his friend, but soon he had to
give that up because his attempts were taken as offense by v 0 A Ruined
Reputation -il him.  He assigned Andieta little jobs in order to have
an excuse to give him money, but Andieta completed them scrupulously
and then refused payment.  If Todd offered him tobacco, a glass of
brandy, or his umbrella on a stormy night'Andieta reacted with icy
pride, leaving Todd upset and sometimes insulted.  The young man never
mentioned his private affairs or his past; he seemed briefly to come to
life in order to share a few hours of revolutionary conversation or
feverish reading in the bookshop before vanishing like smoke at the end
of those evenings.  He did not have money to accompany the others to
the tavern and would not accept an invitation he couldn't repay.

One night Todd could not bear the uncertainty any longer and followed
Andieta through the labyrinth of the port streets, hiding in the
shadows of colonnades and around the bends of the absurd alleyways that
people told him twisted purposely to keep the devil from entering them.
He watched Joaquin Andieta turn up his pants legs, take off his shoes,
wrap them in a sheet of newspaper, and carefully put them in his worn
satchel, from which he took a pair of peasant sandals to wear.  At that
late hour there were only a few lost souls about and stray cats pawing
through garbage.  Feeling like a thief, Todd slunk through the
darkness, close upon his friend's heels; he could hear Andieta's
agitated breathing and the chafing of skin as he rubbed his hands to
combat the needles of icy wind.  His steps led to a wretched house on
one of those narrow alleys so typical of the city.  The stench of urine
and excrement struck Todd in the face; the crew that policed the
neighborhoods with long hooks to clear the drains rarely came here.  He
now understood Andieta's precaution in taking off his only pair of
shoes: Todd had no idea what he was walking through, only that his feet
were sinking into pestilential broth.  In the moonless night a faint
light filtered through the battered shutters at the windows, many
without windowpanes but closed with boards or pasteboard.  Through the
cracks he glimpsed a miserable candlelit room.  The gentle mist gave
the scene an air of unreality.  He watched Joaquin Andieta light a
match, protecting it from the wind with his body, take out a key, and
open a door in the tremulous light of the flame.

"Is that you, son?"  Todd heard a woman's voice, younger than he had
expected.  The door immediately closed.  He stood a long while in the
darkness, staring at the shabby house, fighting a powerful urge to
knock at the door, a desire born not of mere curiosity but from an
overwhelming affection for his friend.  "I'm a bloody idiot," he
muttered finally.

He turned and started back to the Club de la Union to have a drink and
read the newspapers, but before he got there he went home, unable to
face the contrast between the poverty he had just left and those rooms
with their leather furniture and crystal chandeliers.  He went back to
his lodgings, burning with a fire of compassion not unlike the fever
that had so nearly done him in during his first week in Chile.

And that was the state of things at the end of I845 when the commercial
maritime fleet of Great Britain assigned a chaplain in Valparaiso to
attend to the spiritual needs of the Protestants.  He arrived eager to
challenge the Catholics, build a solid Anglican temple, and put new
life in his congregation.  He announced that his first official act
would be to examine the accounts of the missionary project in Tierra
del Fuego, the results of which were nowhere in evidence.

Jacob Todd had Agustin delValle invite him to the country, with the
idea of giving the new pastor time to cool down, but when he returned
two weeks later he found that the chaplain had not forgotten the
matter.  For a while Todd invented new excuses to forestall the
inevitable, but finally he had to face an auditor and then a
commission

<w A Ruined Reputation 1;

of the Anglican Church.  He became entangled in explanations that
became more and more fantastic the more clearly the numbers exposed the
deficit to the bright light of day.  He turned over what money was left
in the account but his reputation suffered irreparable
damage.TheWednesday musicales in the home of the Sommers were ended for
him, and no one in the foreign colony invited him anywhere again;
friends avoided him in the street and everyone who had business with
him considered it terminated.  News of the deception filtered through
to his Chilean friends, who discreetly but firmly suggested that he not
show his face again in the Club de la Union if he wanted to avoid the
embarrassment of being ejected.  He was not welcome at the cricket
matches or in the bar of the Hotel Ingles.  Soon he was isolated and
even his liberal friends turned their backs on him.

The delValle family, as a block, stopped speaking to him, except for
Paulina, with whom he maintained a sporadic correspondence.

Still in the north, Paulina had given birth to her first son and
revealed in her letters her satisfaction with married life.

Feliciano Rodriguez de Santa Cruz, richer by the day if what people
said was true, had turned out to be a very unusual husband.  He was
convinced that the boldness Paulina had shown in running away from the
convent and defying her family to marry him should not be diluted in
domestic chores but should be used to their mutual benefit.  His wife,
educated as a lady, scarcely knew how to read or add but she had
developed a true passion for business.  At first was amazed at her
interest in learning details about the process of mining and
transporting minerals, as well as the ups and downs of the stock
exchange, but he had soon learned to respect his wife's uncommon
intuition.  Following her advice, only seven months after they were
married he earned huge profits from speculations in sugar.  Grateful,
he gave her an ornate tea service of Peruvian silver that weighed
nineteen kilos.  Paulina, who was nearly immobilized by the bulk of
their first child, waved off the gift without looking up from the
booties she was knitting.

"I would rather you opened an account in my name in the Bank of London,
and from now on deposit twenty percent of the profits I earn for
you."

"Why?  Don't I give you everything you want, and more?"

asked Feliciano, offended.

"Life is long and filled with unpleasant surprises.  I do not ever want
to be a penniless widow, especially not with children," she explained,
rubbing her belly.

Feliciano slammed the door as he left, but his innate sense of fairness
was stronger than his aggrieved husband's bad humor.  Besides, he
decided, that twenty percent would be a powerful incentive for Paulina.
He did as she asked even though he had never heard of a married woman
with money of her own.  If a wife could not travel, sign legal
documents, go to court, sell or buy anything without her husband's
authorization, certainly it didn't make sense for her to have a bank
account to use however she wished.  It would be difficult to explain to
the bank and to his associates.

"Come back north with us, the future is in the mines and there you can
begin all over again," Paulina suggested to Jacob Todd when in one of
her brief visits to Valparaiso she learned that he had fallen into
disgrace.

"What would I do there, my friend," he murmured.

"Sell your Bibles," Paulina joked, but moved immediately by the other's
inconsolable sadness offered him her house, her friendship, and a job
in her husband's various enterprises.

Todd, however, was so dejected by his bad luck and public shame that he
could not find the strength to begin another adventure in the north.
The curiosity and restlessness that had once driven him had been
replaced by an obsession to regain the good name he had lost.

^ - A Ruined Reputation

"I am ruined, senora, can't you see it?  A man without honor is a dead
man."

"Times have changed," Paulina consoled him.  "Once a stain on a woman's
honor could be washed away only with blood.  But you see, Mr.  Todd, in
my case it was cleansed with a pitcher of hot chocolate.  And men's
honor is much more resilient than ours.  Do not despair."

Feliciano Rodriguez de Santa Cruz, who had not forgotten Todd's role in
the period of his and Paulina's frustrated love, wanted to lend him
enough money to return every last penny for the missions, but Todd
decided that between owing money to a friend and owing a Protestant
chaplain he preferred the latter, since his reputation was destroyed
anyway.  Soon thereafter he had to tell the cats and the tarts good-bye
because the English widow who ran his boardinghouse asked him to leave,
all the while shouting an unending stream of reproaches.  The good
woman had doubled her efforts in the kitchen to help spread her faith
in those regions of immutable winter where spectral winds howled day
and night--as Jacob Todd had described them, drunk with eloquence. When
she learned the fate of her savings at the hand of the false
missionary, she fell into a righteous rage and threw him out of her
home.  With the help of Joaquin Andieta, who had found other lodgings
for him' Todd moved to a room--small but with a view of the sea--in one
of the modest neighborhoods of the port.  The house belonged to a
Chilean family and did not have the European pretensions of his former
chambers; it was built according to tradition: whitewashed adobe and
red tile roof, entry hall, one large room nearly bare of furniture that
served as living room, dining room, and bedroom for the parents, a
smaller, windowless room where all the children slept, and the room at
the rear that he rented.  The owner worked as a schoolmaster, and his
wife contributed to their income by making candles in the kitchen.  The
scent of wax permeated the house.  Todd smelled that sweetish aroma in
his books, his clothing, his hair, even his soul; it was so deep in his
pores that many years later, on the other side of the world, he could
still smell candles.  He kept-to the poor sections of the port where no
one cared about the reputation, good or bad, of a red-haired
Englishman.  He ate in taverns that catered to the poor and spent
entire days among the fishermen, working on their nets and boats.  The
physical exercise did him good and for a few hours he could forget his
injured pride.  Only Joaquin Andieta continued to visit him.  They
would lock themselves in Todd's room to argue politics and exchange
texts of French philosophers while on the other side of the door the
schoolmaster's children ran around and the wax of the candles flowed
like a thread of molten gold.JoaquinAndieta never referred to the money
for the missions, although considering that the scandal was a lively
topic of discussion for weeks, he had to have known.WhenTodd tried to
explain that it had never been his intention to steal and that
everything was the result of his bad head for figures, his proverbial
disarray, and his abominable luck'Joaquin Andieta put a finger to his
lips in the universal gesture for silence.

In an impulse of shame and affection, Jacob Todd clumsily threw his
arms around Andieta and his friend embraced him for an instant but then
abruptly dropped his arms, flushed to his ear tips.  Both stepped back
simultaneously, unable to comprehend how they could have violated the
elementary rule of conduct that forbade physical contact between men,
except in battle or brutal sports.  In the following months the
Englishman began to wander off course he was careless in his appearance
and tended to go about unshaven, smelling of candle wax and alcohol.
When he overdid the gin, he ranted like a maniac, without pausing or
taking a breath, against governments, the English royal family, the
military and the police, the system of class privilege, which he
compared to the caste system in India, religion in general, and
Christianity in particular.

- ^$ A Ruined Reputation

"You need to get out of here, Mr.  Todd, you're losing touch," Joaquin
Andieta found the courage to tell his friend the day he rescued him
just as he was about to be led from the plaza by the civil police.

It was exactly like that, railing like a lunatic on a street corner,
that Todd was found by Captain John Sommers, who had debarked from his
sailing ship in the port several weeks before.  His vessel had taken
such a beating in the trip around Cape Horn that it had to be put in
dry dock for major repairs.  John Sommers had spent an entire month in
the home of his brother and sister, Jeremy and Rose.  That had decided
him; as soon as he returned to England he would look for a place on one
of the modern steamships; he was not eager to repeat the experience of
being cooped up with his family.  He loved Jeremy and Rose, but
preferred them at a distance.  He had resisted the idea of steam until
then because he could not conceive of the adventure of the sea without
the challenges of sails and weather, challenges that tested the stuff
the captain was made of, but he had to admit finally that the future
lay in the new ships, larger, surer, and quicker.  When he noticed that
he was losing his hair, he naturally blamed it on a sedentary life.
Soon boredom began to weigh on him like a suit of armor, and he escaped
from the house to walk through the port with the restlessness of a
caged animal.  When Jacob Todd recognized the captain, he turned down
the brim of his hat to save himself the humiliation of another rebuff
and pretended not to see him, but the sailor stopped short and greeted
him with affectionate claps on the back.

"Let's go drown our sorrows, old friend!"  he said, and dragged Todd to
a nearby bar.

It happened to be one of those places known among its clients for an
honest drink, and they also served a unique dish of well deserved fame:
fried conger eel with potatoes and raw-onion salad.  Todd who tended
those days to forget about eating, and was always short of money,
thought he might faint when he smelled the delicious aroma of the food.
A wave of gratitude and pleasure brought tears to his eyes.  Out of
courtesy' John Sommers looked away as his friend devoured every last
crumb on his plate.

"I never did think that business of missions among the Indians was a
good idea," he said, just as Todd was beginning to wonder if the
captain had heard about his financial disgrace.  "Those poor people
don't deserve the misery of being evangelized.  What do you plan to do
now?"

"I returned what I had left in the account, but I still owe a large
sum."

"And no way to pay it, right?"

"Not at the moment, no, but--"

"But nothing, my good fellow.  You gave those good Christians an excuse
to feel virtuous and now you've given them a scandal to chew on for a
while.  Entertainment cheap at the price.  When I asked you what you
plan to do I was referring to the future, not your debts."

"I have no plans."

"Come back to England with me.  There no place here for you.

How many foreigners are there in this port?  Four derelicts, and they
all know each other.  Believe me, they will never leave you in peace.
In England, on the other hand, you can get lost in the crowd."

Jacob Todd sat staring into the bottom of his glass with such a
hopeless expression that the captain ripped loose with one of his
hearty laughs.

"Don't tell me you're staying here on account of my sister, Rose!  "

It was true.  Todd would have found the general rejection a little
easier to bear had Miss Rose demonstrated a whit of loyalty or
understanding, but she had refused to receive him and had returned
unopened the letters he had sent her hoping to clear his name.  He

A Ruined Reputation 0:

never knew that his missives did not reach the hands of the person they
were addressed to because Jeremy Sommers, violating the accord of
mutual respect between him and his sister, had decided to protect her
from her own soft heart and prevent her from committing some new and
irreparable foolishness.  The captain did not know that either, but he
guessed the precautions Jeremy had taken and concluded that he himself
would have done the same given the circumstances.  The idea of the
pathetic Bible salesman as an aspirant for his sister Rose's hand
seemed unthinkable: for once he was in total agreement with Jeremy

"Are my feelings about Miss Rose that obvious?"  asked Jacob Todd,
perturbed.

"Let us say they're no mystery, my friend."

"I fear that I cannot have the least hope that some day she will accept
me .. ."

"I fear the same."

"Would you do me the enormous favor of interceding on my behalf,
Captain?  If Miss Rose would see me just once, I could explain to
her--"

"Don't count on me to act as your go-between' Todd  If Rose returned
your affection, you would know it by now.  My sister is not at all
timid, I assure you.  I repeat, dear fellow, that the only thing left
is for you to get out of this damned port; you'll be reduced to beggary
if you stay here.  My ship leaves in three days for Hong Kong, and from
there to England.  It will be a long trip but you are not in any hurry.
Fresh air and hard work are infallible remedies for the stupidity of
love.  I should know that; I fall in love in every port and am cured as
soon as I am back at sea."

"I don't have money for the passage."

"Then you will simply have to work as a sailor and play cards with me
every evening.  If you haven't forgotten those gambler's tricks you
knew when I brought you to Chile three years ago, I expect you will
strip me clean on the voyage."

A few days after that conversation' Jacob Todd boarded the ship much
poorer than he had arrived.  The one person who came to see him off was
Joaquin Andieta.  The somber youth had asked permission at work to be
gone for an hour.  He bid Jacob Todd good-bye with a firm handshake.

"We will see each other again, my friend," the Englishman said.

"I don't think so," replied the Chilean, who had a much clearer
intuition of destiny.

7o

Suitors

S t > he definitive metamorphosis of Eliza took place t two years after
Jacob Todd's departure.  From the L angular little bug she had been in
childhood she was transformed into a girl with soft curves and a
delicate face.

Under the tutelage of Miss Rose, she spent the unpleasant years of her
puberty balancing a book on her head and studying piano, at the same
time growing native herbs in Mama Fresia's garden and learning age-old
recipes for curing known maladies and others yet to be learned,
including mustard for an indifference to everyday life, hydrangea
leaves for ripening tumors and restoring laughter, violets for enduring
loneliness, and verbena, which she put in Miss Rose's soup because this
noble plant cures the vagaries of bad humor.  Miss Rose was unable to
squelch her protegee's interest in cooking and finally resigned herself
to watching her waste precious hours amid Mama Fresia's black cooking
pots.  Miss Rose considered culinary lore as an adornment to a young
lady's education in that it prepared her for giving orders to the
servants, as she herself did, but that was a far cry from plunging up
to one's elbows in pans and skillets.  A lady could not smell of garlic
and onion, but Eliza preferred practice to theory and went to all their
friends looking for recipes she copied in a notebook and then improved
in their kitchen.  She could spend entire days grinding spices and nuts
for tortes or maize for Chilean cakes, dressing turtledoves for
pickling and chopping fruit for preserves.  By the time she was
fourteen, she had surpassed Miss Rose's timid pastry skills and had
learned all of Mama Fresia's repertory; at fifteen she was in charge of
refreshments for the Wednesday musical evenings, and when local dishes
were no longer a challenge she turned to the refined cuisine of the
French, which Madame Colbert imparted, and the exotic spices of India,
which her uncle John used to bring her and which she identified by
smell although she didn't know their names.  When the coachman took a
message to one of the Sommers' friends, he delivered the envelope along
with a treat fresh from the hands of Eliza, who had elevated the local
custom of exchanging main dishes and desserts to the category of an
art.  So great was her dedication that Jeremy Sommers began to imagine
her as the owner of her own tearoom, a project which, like all the
others her brother had for the girl, Miss Rose discarded without a
moment's consideration.  A woman who earns her own living, however
respectable the enterprise, descends on the social scale, she lectured.
Her goal for was a good husband, and she had set a two-year limit for
finding one in Chile; after that she would take Eliza to England, she
could not run the risk of having her turn twenty without a fiance and
end up a spinster.  The candidate would have to be someone willing to
overlook her hazy origins and focus on her virtues.  Among the
Chileans, not a chance; the aristocracy married their cousins and she
wasn't interested in the middle class, she did not want to see Eliza
mired in penury.  From time to time Rose had contact with impresarios
in commerce or the mines who had business with her brother Jeremy, but
those men were after the family names and coats of arms of the
oligarchy.  It was not likely they would be taken with Eliza because
there was little in her physical appearance to spark passion: she was
small and slender and did not have the milky-white skin or the opulent
bust and hips so much in vogue.  It was only when you looked at her a
second time that you discovered her quiet beauty, her grace, and the
intensity in her eyes;

she looked like one of the porcelain dolls Captain John Sommers brought
from China.  Miss Rose was looking for a suitor able to appreciate her
protegee's discernment, her strength of character, and her ability to
turn situations in her favor, what Mama Fresia called luck and Rose
preferred to call intelligence.  She was looking for a man with
economic solvency and good character who would offer Eliza security and
respect, but one her adopted daughter could manage without any fuss.
She planned in due time to teach her the subtle discipline of the
everyday attentions that nourish the habit of domestic life in a man,
the system of daring caresses that reward him and stubborn silences
that punish him, secrets for melting his will that she herself had
never had occasion to practice, and, of course, the millennial art of
physical love.  She had never dared speak of that to Eliza but she had
several books under double lock and key in her armoire that she would
lend her when the moment came.  Everything can be said in writing, that
was her theory, and in matters of theory no one was wiser than she.
Miss Rose, though an old maid, could have taught a graduate course on
all the possible and impossible ways to make love.

"You should adopt Eliza legally so that she can claim our name," she
told her brother Jeremy.

"She has used it for years, Rose, what more do you want?"

"I want her to be able to marry with her head held high."

"Marry whom?"

Miss Rose did not tell him at that moment but she already had someone
in mind.  It was Michael Steward, twenty-eight years old, an officer in
the English fleet anchored in the port of Valparaiso.

She had found out through her brother John that the sailor came from an
old family.  They would not look fondly on the marriage of their oldest
son and only heir to a girl who had no name and no fortune and
furthermore lived in some godforsaken country they had never heard
of.

It was indispensable for Eliza to be provided with an appealing dowry
and for Jeremy to adopt her, that way at least the question of her
origins would not stand in the way.

Michael Steward had an athletic bearing, an innocent, blue-eyed gaze,
blond sideburns and mustache, good teeth, and an aristocratic nose. The
weak chin robbed him of perfection and Miss Rose hoped to speak to him
in private and suggest that he disguise it by letting his beard grow. 
According to Captain Sommers, the youth was a model of morality and his
impeccable service record guaranteed him a brilliant career in the
navy.  In Miss Rose's eyes, the fact that he spent so much time at sea
would be a great plus for whoever married him.  The more she thought
about it, the more she was convinced she had found the ideal man, but
she knew that given Eliza's nature, she would not accept him for the
sake of convenience, she would have to love him.

There was hope: the man looked handsome in his uniform, and no one had
yet seen him without it.

"Steward is a dunce who happens to have good manners.

would die of boredom married to him," Captain John Sommers protested
when Rose told him of her plans.

"All husbands are boring, John.  No woman with an ounce of sense gets
married to be entertained, she marries to be maintained."

Eliza still looked like a little girl, but her education was complete
and soon she would be ready to marry.  There was some time left, Miss
Rose concluded, but she must act decisively so that a more quick-witted
girl did not snatch away the candidate.  Once her mind was made up, she
concentrated on the task of attracting the officer, using every tactic
she could imagine.  She scheduled her musical

Suitors A gatherings to coincide with the dates of Michael Steward's
shore leaves, with no consideration for her other guests, who for years
had saved Wednesday for that sacred engagement.  Annoyed, some stopped
coming.  Which was precisely what Rose had hoped; she was able to
transform the placid musicales into lively dancing and replenish the
guest list to include young bachelors and marriageable girls from the
foreign colony, replacing the tedious Ebelings, Scotts, and Appelgreens
who were turning into fossils.  The poetry and voice recitals gave way
to parlor games, informal balls, contests of wit, and charades.  She
organized complex picnics and beach outings.  They would set off in
coaches, preceded at dawn by heavy carts with leather floors and straw
canopies and carrying servants charged with setting out countless
luncheon baskets beneath tents and parasols.  Stretching before them
were fertile valleys planted with fruit trees and grapes, wheat and
corn fields, the steep coastline where the Pacific Ocean exploded into
clouds of foam and, in the distance, the snowy cordillera profiled
starkly against the sky.  Somehow Miss Rose would arrange things so
Eliza and Steward traveled in the same carriage, sat together, and were
partners in the ball games and pantomimes, but in cards and dominos she
separated them because Eliza stoutly refused to let anyone beat her.

"You must allow the man to feel superior, child," Miss Rose patiently
explained.

"That is very difficult," Eliza, unmoved, responded.

Jeremy Sommers could do nothing to stop his sister's sea swell of
expenses.  She bought fabrics wholesale and kept two of the maids
sewing all day, copying the latest dresses from magazines.  She spent
far more than was reasonable with the sailors who smuggled contraband,
so they would never lack perfumes, Turkish rouge, belladonna and kohl
for the mystery of the eyes, and cream made from crushed pearls for
blanching the skin.  For the first time she could not find time to
write, turning all her attention to treats for the English officer,
including biscuits and preserves for him to take to sea, everything
made in their home and presented in beautiful jars.

"Eliza prepared this for you, but she is too shy to give it to you
personally," she would tell Steward, not adding that Eliza cooked
anything she was asked to, never questioning whom it was for, and was
inevitably surprised when he thanked her.

Michael Steward was not oblivious to the campaign of seduction.

Sparing with words, he expressed his thanks in brief, formal letters on
navy stationery, and showed up with bouquets when on shore.  He had
studied the language of flowers, but that refinement fell on barren
ground because neither Miss Rose nor anyone inValparaiso, at that
distance from England, had heard of the difference betsveen a rose and
a carnation, much less suspected the significance of the color of the
ribbon.  Steward's efforts to find flowers that gradually grew more
intense in color, from pale rose through all shades of pink to the
deepest crimson to indicate his growing passion, were entirely
wasted.

With time, the officer learned to overcome his timidity, and from the
painful silence that characterized him in the beginning he passed to a
chattiness that made his listeners squirm.  Euphorically, he expounded
his moral opinions on insignificant topics and often lost himself in
pointless comments on the subject of ocean currents and navigation
charts.  Where he truly shone was in rough sports, which showed off his
daring and his muscular build.  Miss Rose encouraged him to perform
acrobatics, hanging from a tree branch in the garden, and even, after a
certain insistence, to delight them with the heel taps, knee bends, and
somersaults of a Ukrainian dance he had learned from another sailor.
Miss Rose applauded it all with exaggerated enthusiasm, while Eliza
watched, silent and serious, without offering her opinion.  Weeks went
by while Michael Steward weighed and measured the consequences of the
step he wanted to take and communicated by letter with his father to
discuss his plans.  The inevitable delays of the post prolonged his
uncertainty for several months.  This was, after all, the most serious
decision of his life, and it took more courage to face it than fighting
any and all potential enemies of the British empire throughout the
Pacific.  Finally, during one of the musical soirees, after a hundred
rehearsals before his mirror, he succeeded in gathering the courage
that had been rapidly melting away and steadying a voice that fluted
with fear to corner Miss Rose in a corridor.

"I must speak with you in private," he whispered.

Miss Rose led him into her sewing room.  She suspected what she was
going to hear and was surprised at her own emotions; her cheeks were
burning and her heart was racing.  She tucked back a strand of hair
that had escaped her bun and discreetly wiped the perspiration from her
brow.  Michael Steward thought he had never seen her so beautiful.

"I believe you have already divined what I want to tell you, Miss
Rose."

"Divining is dangerous, Mr.  Steward.  I am listening .  "

"It regards my sentiments.  I am sure you know what I am referring to.
I wish to prove to you that my intentions are of the most honorable and
irreproachable seriousness."

"I expect no less from a person like yourself.  Do you believe that
your feelings are reciprocated?"

"That is s-s-s-something only you can answer," the young officer
stuttered.

They stood looking at one another, she with her eyebrows raised
expectantly and he fearing the roof would crash down on his head.

Determined to act before the magic of the moment turned to ash, the
gallant took Miss Rose by the shoulders and bent down to kiss her.

Frozen with surprise, Miss Rose could not move.  She felt the officer
moist lips and soft mustache on her mouth, unable to imagine how the
devil things had gone so wrong, and when finally she could react, she
pushed him away violently.

"What are you doing!"  she exclaimed, wiping her mouth with the back of
her hand.

"Can't you see that I am.  much, much older than you!"

"What does age m-matter?"  the officer stammered, confounded, because
in truth he had thought that Miss Rose was no more than twenty-seven.

"How dare you!  Have you lost your senses?"

"But you .. . you led me to believe .. . I cannot be so mistaken!"  the
poor man mumbled, stupefied with embarrassment.

"I want you for Eliza, not myself," Miss Rose sputtered with fright,
and bolted out the door to run and lock herself in her room, while the
hapless suitor asked for his cape and cap and left without a word to
anyone, never to return to that house.

From a corner of the hallway, Eliza had heard everything through the
half-open door of the sewing room.  She, too, had been confused by the
attentions to the officer.  Miss Rose had always shown such
indifference to potential suitors that she was used to thinking of her
as an old woman.  Only in recent months, as she watched her devote body
and soul to games of seduction, had she become aware of her protector's
magnificent bearing and luminous skin.  She had thought Miss Rose was
head over heels in love with Michael Steward and it had never crossed
her mind that the bucolic picnics beneath the Japanese parasols and the
butter biscuits to ease the discomforts of life at sea had been her
protector's stratagem for snagging the officer and delivering him to
her on a platter.  The idea struck like a dagger to her heart--it took
her breath away--because the last thing in this world she wanted was a
marriage arranged behind her back.  She had just been caught up in the
whirlwind of her first love and had sworn, with irrevocable fervor,
that she would never marry another.

,

i Suitors f

Eliza Sommers saw Joaquin Andieta for the first time one Friday in the
May of I848 when he came to the house overseeing a cart pulled by
several mules and loaded to the top with crates belonging to the
British Import and Export Company, Ltd.  Packed inside were Persian
carpets, crystal chandeliers, and a collection of ivory figurines
Feliciano Rodriguez de Santa Cruz had ordered to decorate the mansion
he had built in the north, precious cargo that was at risk in the port
and safer stored in the Sommers' home until time to forward it to its
destination.  If the rest of the trip was overland, Jeremy hired men to
guard the treasures, but in this case he would route them by way of a
Chilean schooner scheduled to sail in a week's time.  Andieta was
wearing his one suit, out of style, dark, and threadbare, and he had no
hat or umbrella.  His funereal pallor contrasted with his flashing eyes
and his black hair gleamed with moisture from an early autumn mist.
Miss Rose went out to meet him, and Mama Fresia, who always carried the
keys to the house on a large ring at her waist, led him to the
storeroom in the back patio.  The youth organized the peons in a long
line and they transported the crates from man to man down rugged
terrain, up twisting stairs, across superfluous terraces, and through
unvisited bowers.  As Andieta counted, marked, and recorded in his
notebook, Eliza made use of her ability to make herself invisible and
watched him at her leisure.  Two months before, she had turned sixteen
and she was ready for love.  As she watched Joaquin Andieta's long ink
stained fingers and heard his voice--deep, but at the same time clear
and cool as a flowing brook--issuing brusque orders to the peons, she
was shaken to her bones and an overpowering urge to be close enough to
smell him forced her from her hiding place behind the potted palms.
Mama Fresia, grumbling because the mules had fouled the front entry,
and busy with her keys, didn't notice, but out of the corner of her eye
Miss Rose caught a glimpse of the girl's flushed face.  She didn't
think much about it; in her eyes her brother's employee was a cipher,
barely a shadow among the many shadows of that cloudy day.  Eliza
disappeared into the kitchen and after a few minutes returned with
glasses and a pitcher of honey-sweetened orange juice.  For the first
time in her life, this girl who had spent years balancing a book on her
head without giving it a thought was conscious of how she walked, the
swaying of her hips, the undulation of her body, the angle of her arms,
the distance between her shoulders and chin.  She wanted to be as
beautiful as Miss Rose when she had been the splendid young woman who'd
rescued her from her improvised cradle in a Marseilles soap crate; she
wanted to sing with the nightingale-sweet voice of Miss Appelgreen when
she warbled her Scots ballads; she wanted to dance with the impossible
lightness of her dance instructor; and she wanted to die right there,
pierced by the sensation, sharp and no more to be denied than a sword,
that was filling her mouth with warm blood and, even before she could
identify it, crushing her with the terrible weight of idealized love.
Many years later, standing before a human head preserved in a jar of
gin, would remember that first meeting with Joaquin Andieta and again
experience the same unbearable anguish.  She would ask herself a
thousand times along the way whether she had had a chance to flee from
the devastating passion that would warp her life, whether maybe in
those brief instants she could have turned away and saved herself, but
every time she formulated the question she concluded that her fate had
been determined since the beginning of time.  And when the sage Tao
Chi'en introduced her to the poetic possibility of reincarnation, she
convinced herself that the same drama was repeated in each of her
lives; if she had been born a thousand times before and had to be born
a thousand times again in the future, she

=

v Suitors f would always come into the world with the mission of loving
that same man in the same way.  There was no escape for her.  But then
Tao Chi'en taught her the magical formulas for untangling the knots of
karma and freeing herself from forever repeating the same harrowing
uncertainty of love in every incarnation.

That day in May, Eliza placed the tray on a bench and offered the
cooling drink first to the laborers--in order to gain time while she
controlled her shaking knees and won the battle that was mulishly
paralyzing her chest and blocking her breathing--and only then to
Joaquin Andieta who, absorbed in his task, barely looked up when she
handed him the glass.  When he did, Eliza moved as close to him as she
could, calculating the direction of breeze so it would carry the scent
of this man who, she was sure, was hers.  With her eyes half closed,
she inhaled the aroma of damp clothing, common soap, and fresh sweat.A
river of flowing lava swept through her, melting her bones; and in an
instant of panic she believed that she was actually dying.  Those
seconds were so intense that Joaquin Andieta's notebook dropped from
his hands, as if some irresistible force had seized it from him, as
that same glowing heat washed over him, searing him in its
reflection.

He looked at Eliza without seeing her; the girl's face was a pale
mirror in which he thought he glimpsed his own image.  He had only a
vague idea of her size and of a dark aureole of hair, but it would not
be until their second meeting a few days later that he would sink into
the perdition of her black eyes and the watery grace of her gestures.

Both stooped down at the same time to pick up the notebook; their
shoulders bumped and the contents of the glass splashed onto her
dress.

"Watch what you're doing, Eliza!"  Miss Rose exclaimed, alarmed,
because the force of that instantaneous love had struck her as well.

"Go and change your dress and rinse that one in cold water to see if
you can get the stain out," she added sharply.

Eliza, however, did not move, locked to Joaquin Andieta's eyes,

trembling, nostrils dilated, unabashedly sniffing, until Miss Rose took
her by one arm and led her inside.

"I told you, child; any man, as miserable a man as he may be, can do
whatever he wants with you," the Indian reminded her that night.

"I don't know what you're talking about, Mama Fresia," replied.

That autumn morning when she saw Joaquin Andieta in the patio of her
home, Eliza thought she had met her destiny: she would be his slave
forever.  Although she hadn't lived enough to understand what had
happened to her, to express in words the tumult that was drowning her,
or to work out a plan, her intuition of the inevitable was fully
functional.  In some vague but painful way she realized she was
trapped, and suffered a physical reaction not unlike the epizootic. 
For a week, until she saw Andieta again, she tried to fight off
convulsive upsets that would not yield to Mama Fresia's miraculous
herbs or to the German pharmacist's arsenic powders in cherry liqueur. 
She lost weight and her bones became as light as a turtledove's, to the
terror of Mama Fresia, who went around closing windows to prevent the
ocean wind from lifting her up and sweeping her away toward the
horizon.  The Indian administered various remedies and spells from her
vast repertoire, but when she realized that nothing was taking effect
she turned to Catholic saintdom.  She collected some of her pitiful
savings from the bottom of her trunk, bought a dozen candles, and set
off to negotiate with the priest.  After having the candles blessed
during Sunday high mass, she lighted one before each of the saints in
the side altars of the church, eight in all, and placed three before
the image of Saint Anthony, patron of hopeless, unwed girls, unhappy tV
| r t i t ll

AQ

l,1.

f; Suitors S

wives, and other lost causes.  The remaining candle she took with her,
along with a lock of Eliza's hair and one of her night dresses to the
most celebrated ma chi in the area, an ancient Mapuche Indian, blind
from birth, a white-magic witch famous for her etched-in stone
predictions and her common sense in curing bodily ills and anxieties of
the soul.  Mama Fresia had spent her adolescent years serving this
woman as her apprentice and servant, but she had not, as she had
wished, been able to follow in her footsteps because she did not have
the gift.  Nothing to do for it: you are born with it or you're not.
Once she had tried to explain to Eliza what the gift was and the only
thing that came to her was that it was the ability to see what lies
behind mirrors.  Lacking that mysterious talent, Mama Fresia had to
renounce her aspiration to be a healer and take a place in the service
of the Sommers family.

The ma chi lived alone at the bottom of a ravine in a straw-roofed
adobe hovel that looked about to cave in.  Around the dwelling was
wasteland of rocks, firewood, plants in chamber pots, skin-and-bones
dogs, and huge black birds futilely scratching the dirt for something
to eat.  Along the path to her hut was a small forest of offerings and
amulets left there by satisfied clients to indicate the favors they had
received.  The ma chi smelled of the sum of all the concoctions she had
prepared during her lifetime; her mantle was the color of the dry earth
of the landscape; she was barefoot and filthy, but she was laden with a
profusion of cheap silver necklaces.  Her face was a dark mask of
wrinkles; she had only two teeth in her head and her eyes were dead.
She received her former disciple without any sign of recognition,
accepted the gifts of food and the bottle of anise liquor, signaled
Mama Fresia to sit before her, and sat in silence, waiting.  A few
sticks flickered reluctantly in the center of the hut, the smoke
escaping through a hole in the roof.  The soot-blackened walls were
studded with clay and tin trifles, plants, and a collection of
desiccated reptiles.

The heavy fragrance of dried herbs and medicinal barks blended with the
stink of dead animals.  The two women spoke in Mapudungo, the language
of the Mapuches.  For a long time, the witch woman listened to the
story of Eliza, from the moment of her arrival in the Marseilles soap
crate to the recent crisis; then she took the candle, the hair, and the
nightdress, and sent her visitor away with instructions to come back
after she had completed her spells and rituals of divination.

"Everyone knows there's no cure for this," she pronounced as soon as
Mama Fresia stepped across her threshold two days later.

"Is my baby going to die, then?"

"That I cannot say, but she will suffer, oh that I do not doubt."

"What is it she has?

"She has a fixation on love.  Strong trouble.  That girl left her
window open one clear night and it crawled into her body while she was
asleep.  There no spell can cure it."

Resigned, Mama Fresia went back home.  If the art of that all wise ma
chi could not change Eliza's fate, then the little she knew, and all
her saints' candles, were not going to help.

Miss Rose l X iss Rose kept an eye on Eliza with more > curiosity than
compassion; she knew the v symptoms well and, in her experience, time
and obstacles extinguish even the most stubborn fires of love.  She had
been barely sixteen when she'd fallen head over heels in love with
aViennese tenor.  She was living in England at that time, and dreamed
of being a diva despite the stubborn opposition of her mother and her
brother Jeremy, who had been head of the family since their father's
death.  Neither of them considered the opera to be a desirable
occupation for a lady, principally because it was performed in
theaters, at night, and wearing low-cut gowns.  Nor could she count on
the support of her brother John, who had joined the navy and showed up
at home barely a couple of times a year, always in a rush.  Exuberant
and tanned by the sun of far-off lands and exhibiting some new tattoo
or scar, he would always manage to disrupt the routines of the small
family.  He handed out gifts, dazzled them with his exotic tales, and
immediately disappeared into the red-light district, where he stayed
until the moment to ship out again.  The Sommers were country gentry
without any great ambitions.  They had owned land for several
generations, but the father, bored with dumb sheep and poor harvests,
had wanted to try his fortunes in London.  He loved books so much that
he was quite capable of depriving his family of food and going into
debt to acquire first editions signed by his favorite authors, but he
lacked the greed of dyed-in-the-wool collectors.  After fruitless
ventures into commerce, he decided to give rein to his true vocation,
and ended by opening a shop for antiquarian books and others he
published himself.  In the back of the bookstore he set up a small
press, which he operated with the help of two assistants, and in an
upstairs room of the same shop his trade in rare books grew at a
snail's pace.  Of his three children, only Rose shared his interests;
she grew up with a passion for music and reading, and when she was not
sitting at the piano or doing her voice exercises they could find her
in a corner reading.  Her father lamented that Rose was the one who
loved books and not Jeremy or John, who could have inherited his
business.  At his death, the male heirs liquidated the press and
bookshop.  John went off to sea and Jeremy took over the care of his
widowed mother and his sister.  He earned a modest salary as an
employee of the British Import and Export Company, Ltd."  and had a
small income from his father, in addition to his brother John sporadic
contributions, which often arrived in the form of contraband instead of
negotiable currency.  Jeremy, scandalized, would store those accursed
boxes in the garret, unopened, until the next visit of his brother, who
then took responsibility for selling the contents.  The family moved to
modest chambers that were expensive for their means but well situated
in the heart of London.  Jeremy considered it a good investment; they
must marry Rose well.

At sixteen, the girl's beauty began to flower and there were suitors to
spare, well placed and prepared to die of love, but while her fiends
busied themselves looking for husbands, Rose was looking for a singing
master.  Which was how she met Karl Bretzner, aViennese tenor who had
come to London to perform in several Mozart works, which were to
culminate one stellar night in The Marriage of Figaro with the royal
family in attendance.  Bretzner's appearance revealed nothing of his
enormous talent: he looked like a butcher.  His

Miss Rose ^-:

physique--barrel-chested but thin in the pins--lacked elegance, and his
ruddy face, topped with a mass of salt-and-pepper curls, added up to a
rather vulgar whole, but when he opened his mouth to delight the world
with the torrent of his voice he was transformed into a different
creature: he grew taller, his potbelly was sucked up into the cavern of
his chest, and his Teutonic, apoplectic face was filled with Olympic
light.  At least that was how he was seen by Rose Sommers, who was able
to get tickets for every performance.  She would come to the theater
long before it opened and, defying the scandalized glances of passersby
little accustomed to seeing a girl of her class unaccompanied, wait at
the actor's entrance for hours to catch a glimpse of the maestro
getting out of his carriage.  On Sunday night, the man noticed the
beauty stationed in the street, and went over to speak to her.
Trembling she answered his questions and confessed her admiration for
him and her wishes to follow in his footsteps in the arduous but divine
path of bel canto--to use her words.

"Come to my dressing room after the performance and we shall see what I
can do for you," he said in his precious, strongly Austrianaccented
voice.

And that she did, walking on air.  When the standing ovation faded, an
usher sent by Karl Bretzner led Rose behind the wings.

She had never seen the inner workings of a theater but she wasted no
time admiring the ingenious machines for making storms or the painted
landscapes on the drops; her only goal was to meet her idol.  She found
him enveloped in a gold-trimmed, royal-blue dressing gown, still
wearing his makeup and an elaborate wig of white curls.  The usher
closed the door and left them alone.  The room, crammed with mirrors,
furniture, and draperies, smelled of tobacco, stage makeup, and mold.
In one corner stood a screen painted with scenes of rosy fleshed women
in a Turkish harem and costumes on clothes racks lined the walls.
Seeing her idol so near, Rose's enthusiasm flagged for a few moments,
but he soon regained the lost ground.  He took her hands in his, lifted
them to his lips, and kissed them slowly, then from deep in his chest
voiced a do that rattled the screen of the odalisques.

Rose's last hesitations crumbled, like the walls of Jericho, in the
cloud of powder that rose from the wig as the artist peeled it from his
head with a passionate, virile gesture and tossed it upon a chair where
it lay as inert as a dead rabbit.  His hair was crushed beneath a
tightly knit hair net that, added to the makeup, lent him the air of an
aged courtesan

Upon the same chaise longue where the wig had landed, Rose would offer
Bretzner her virginity a couple of days afterward, at exactly
three-fifteen in the afternoon.TheViennese tenor had made date with
her, using the pretext of showing her the theater that Tuesday when
there was no performance.  They met secretly in a tearoom, where he
delicately savored five cream eclairs and two cups of chocolate while
she stirred her tea, so frightened and excited she couldn't swallow.
From there they went straight to the theater.  At that hour there was
no one around but two women cleaning the foyer and a man readying the
oil lamps, torches, and candles for the following day.

Karl Bretzner, skilled in the perils of love, produced a bottle of
champagne with a magician's dexterity and poured each of them a glass,
which they drank down in a toast to Mozart and Rossini.  He then
installed Rose in the imperial plush box where only the king sat, every
inch of which was adorned with chubby cupids and overblown roses, then
went down to the stage.  Standing on a segment of painted plaster
column, lighted by the foot lamps, he sang for her alone an aria from
The Barber of Seville, displaying all his vocal agility and the soft
delirium of his voice with endless embellishments.  As the last note of
his homage faded he heard the distant sobs of Rose Sommers; with
unexpected agility he ran toward her; crossing the hall, he gained the
box in two bounds and fell to his knees at her feet.  Breathless, he
laid

i_.

-; Miss Rose ^^ I his large head upon the girl's skirt, burying his
face in folds of moss colored silk.  He wept with her because, without
intending it, he, too, had fallen in love; what had begun as yet
another fleeting conquest had in a few hours been transformed into
incandescent passion.

Rose and Karl got to their feet, supporting one another, stumbling,
terrified before the inevitable, and with no idea how, they walked down
a long corridor in darkness, climbed a short staircase, and reached the
area of the dressing rooms.  The cursive letters of the tenor's name
marked one of the doors.  They went into the room cluttered with
furniture and dusty, sweaty costumes where they had been alone for the
first time only two days before.  The room had no windows and for a
moment they sank into the refuge of darkness, recovering breath lost in
sobs and sighs while he lighted first a match and then the five candles
of a candelabrum.  In the trembling yellow light of the flames they
admired one another, confused and clumsy, filled with a torrent of
emotions but unable to articulate a single word.

Rose could not withstand the eyes stripping her bare and hid her face
in her hands, but he pulled them away with the same delicacy he had
earlier used to demolish the cream pastries.  They began with tiny,
tear-wet kisses, dove pecks, which developed naturally into serious
kisses.  Rose had experienced tender, but very hesitant and hasty,
encounters with some of her suitors, and one or two of them had managed
to brush her cheek with his lips, but she had never imagined it
possible to reach such a degree of intimacy that another's tongue could
wind around hers like a lewd snake or that she could be slathered with
someone else's saliva externally and invaded internally, but her
initial repugnance was soon conquered by the stimulus of youth and her
enthusiasm for the lyrical.  Not only did she return Bretzner's
caresses with equal intensity, she took the initiative by removing her
hat and the short gray karakul cape around her shoulders.  From there
to allowing him to unbutton her jacket, and then her blouse, was but a
few capitulations.  She was able to follow the mating dance step by
step, guided by instinct as well as the forbidden books she had
furtively pulled from her father's shelves.  That was the most
memorable day of her life, and she would remember it--adorned and
exaggerated--in the most minute detail in the years to come.  That was
to be her source of experience and knowledge, the fount of inspiration
for nourishing her fantasies and, years later, for creating the art
that would make her famous in certain very secret circles.  That
marvelous day she could compare in intensity with only one other, two
years later inValparaiso, in March, when the newborn Eliza fell into
her arms as consolation for the children she would never have, for the
men she would never love, and for the hearth she would never call
hers.

The Viennese tenor turned out to be a very refined lover.

He loved and knew women to their marrow, but he was able to erase from
his memory the relics of past loves, the frustrations of multiple
farewells, the jealousies, disasters, and deceptions of other
relationships and give himself with complete innocence to his brief
passion for Rose Sommers.  His experience had not come from pathetic
embraces with squalid whores; Bretzner prided himself on never having
had to pay for pleasure because women of varied station, from humble
chambermaids to arrogant countesses, gave themselves to him
unconditionally after they heard him sing.  He learned the arts of love
at the same time he learned those of singing.  He was ten when he fell
in love with the person who was to be his mentor, a Frenchwoman, old
enough to be his mother, with the eyes of a tigress and breasts of pure
alabaster.  She, in turn, had been initiated at the age of thirteen, in
France, by Donatien-AlphonseFrancois de Sade.  Daughter of a gaoler in
the Bastille, she had met

- - Miss Rose 9

the famous marquis in the filthy cell in which he wrote his perverse
stories by the light of a candle.  She used to watch him through the
bars with a child's simple curiosity, unaware that her father had sold
her to the prisoner in exchange for a gold watch, the impoverished
noble's last possession.  One morning when she was peering through the
peephole in the cell door, her father took the large ring of keys from
his waist, opened the door, and, as one feeds a lion his prey, with a
push thrust the girl into the cell.  What happened there she could not
remember; it was enough to know that she stayed with de Sade, following
him from gaol to the worse poverty of freedom, learning everything he
had to teach her.  When in I802 the marquis was locked up in the
madhouse of Charenton, she was left on her own without a centime but
with a vast storehouse of amatory wisdom that helped her win a husband
fifty-two years older than she, and very wealthy.  He died not long
after, exhausted by the excesses of his young wife, and she finally was
free and with money to do whatever she wished.  She was thirty-four
years old; she had survived her brutal apprenticeship at the side of
the marquis, the poverty of bread crusts in her childhood, the turmoil
of the French Revolution, the terror of the Napoleonic wars, and now
she had to put up with the dictatorial repression of the empire.  She
had had enough, her spirit yearned for a truce.  She decided to look
for a safe place to spend the rest of her days in peace, and chose
Vienna.  It was during this period in her life that she met Karl
Bretzner, her neighbors' son; he was barely ten, but even by then he
was singing like a nightingale in the cathedral choir.  Thanks to her,
now the friend and confidante of the Bretzners, the boy was not, as the
choir director had recommended, castrated that year to preserve his
cherubic voice.

"Do not touch him, and before you know it he will be the best-paid
tenor in Europe," she predicted.  She was not mistaken.

Despite the enormous discrepancy in age, an unusual relationship
developed between the woman and the young Karl.  She admired the boy's
purity of sentiment and his dedication to music;

in her he found the muse who not only saved his manhood but also taught
him to use it.  By the time his voice had changed and he had begun to
shave, he had mastered the eunuch's proverbial talent in pleasing a
woman in ways not foreseen by nature and custom, but with Rose Sommers
he took no risks.  No fierce assault in a flurry of overly daring
caresses, for this was not a time to shock with tricks of the seraglio,
he decided, never suspecting that in less than three practical lessons
his student would surpass him in inventiveness.  He was a man who was
careful about details and he knew the hallucinatory power of le mot
juste in the hour of love.  With his left hand he undid one by one the
small mother-of-pearl buttons down Rose's back while with the right he
took the pins from her hair, never losing the rhythm of kisses
interspersed with a stream of compliments.  He spoke of the smallness
of her waist, the pristine whiteness of her skin, the classic roundness
of her throat and shoulders, all of which, he said, kindled a fire in
him, an uncontrollable madness.

"I am deranged.  I do not know what is happening to me, never have I,
never shall I, love anyone as I do you.  This is the miraculous meeting
of two souls destined never to part," he murmured again and again.

He recited his entire repertoire, but without hypocrisy, deeply
convinced of his own honesty and dazzled by Rose.  He untied the
strings of her corset and removed petticoats until she was wearing only
her long batiste under drawers and a sheer camisole that revealed the
strawberries of her nipples.  He did not remove her high-laced kid
shoes with the curved heels or the white stockings fastened at her
knees with embroidered garters.  At that point he stopped, panting,
with a planetary clamor in his breast, convinced that Rose Sommers

I.1

Miss Rose was the most beautiful woman in the universe, an angel, and
that his heart was going to explode and scatter him in pieces if he did
not calm himself.  He picked her up effortlessly, crossed the room, and
stood her before a large mirror with a golden frame.  The winking light
of the candles and the theatrical wardrobe on the walls, a confusion of
brocades, feathers, velvets, and faded laces, gave the scene an air of
unreality.

Disarmed, drunk with emotion, Rose looked at herself in the mirror and
did not recognize that woman in her undergarments, her hair wild and
cheeks aflame, whom some man, also unrecognizable, was kissing on the
neck as he greedily fondled her breasts.  That avid interlude gave the
tenor time to catch his breath and some of the lucidity he had lost
during their preliminary skirmishes.  He began taking off his clothes,
facing the mirror, uninhibited, and--it must be said--looking much
better out of his clothes than in them.  He needs a good tailor, Rose
thought.  She had never seen a naked man, not even her brothers as
children, and her information was based on overblown descriptions in
the racy books and Japanese postcards she had discovered in her uncle
John's luggage, in which the male organs were depicted in f ankly
optimistic proportions.  The rosy, perky gherkin revealed before her
eyes did not frighten her, as Karl Bretzner had feared, but instead
provoked irrepressible and joyful giggles.

And that set the tone for what followed.  Instead of the solemn, rather
doleful ceremony a deflowering can be, they pleasured themselves in
playful caperings, chasing one another around the room, hopping over
furniture like children; they drank the rest of the champagne and
opened another bottle to spray one another with bubbling foam;

risque phrases rolled out with laughter, whispers brought oaths of
love, as they bit and licked and frolicked in the bottomless tidal pool
of newly discovered love, all through the afternoon and well into the
night, without a thought for the time or for the rest of the
universe.

Only they existed.TheViennese tenor led Rose to epic heights, and she,
a diligent student, followed without hesitation and, once at the
summit, took wing on her own with surprising natural talent, guided by
signs and asking what she could not guess, dazzling her maestro and
finally be sting him with her improvised skills and the annihilating
gift of her love.  When they could bear to pull themselves apart and
return to reality, the clock showed ten o'clock.The theater was empty,
darkness ruled outside, and, to top everything off, a fog thick as
meringue had settled in.

A frenetic exchange began between the lovers--notes, flowers, bonbons,
copied verses, and small sentimental trinkets--that lasted as long as
the season in London.  They met where they could; passion caused them
to lose all prudence.  To gain time they looked for hotel rooms near
the theater, indifferent to the possibility of being recognized.  Rose
escaped the house with ridiculous excuses, but her terrified mother
said nothing to Jeremy of her suspicions, praying that her daughter's
madness was temporary and would disappear without leaving a mark.  Karl
Bretzner came late to rehearsals, and from whipping off his clothes at
any hour he caught a cold and missed two performances.  Far from being
sorry, he used the time for lovemaking enhanced by feverish chills.  He
would come to the rented room with flowers for Rose, champagne to drink
and to bathe in, cream pastries, poems written on the fly to read in
bed, aromatic oils to rub into places until then sealed, erotic books
they paged through seeking the most inspiring scenes, ostrich feathers
for tickling, and countless other props for their games.  The girl felt
that she was opening like a carnivorous flower, emitting demonic
perfumes to attract her man like a Venus's-flytrap, crushing him,
swallowing him, digesting him, and finally spitting out the splinters
of his bones.  She was suffused with unbearable energy, she was
drowning, she could not sit quiet an instant, devoured with impa Miss
tience.  In the meantime, Karl Bretzner was floundering in confusion,
at times uplifted to the point of frenzy, at others drained, trying to
meet his musical obligations, but he was deteriorating in full view and
the critics, implacable, said that Mozart whirled in his grave when he
heard the Viennese tenor executc literally--his compositions.

With panic the lovers watched the moment of parting draw near, and
entered the phase of love obstructed.  They discussed running away to
Brazil or committing suicide together, but the possibility of marriage
was never mentioned.  In the end, the appetite for life was stronger
than the temptation of tragedy, and after Bretzner's last performance
they hired a carriage and traveled to a seaside hotel in the north of
England.  They had decided to enjoy a few days in anonymity before Karl
Bretzner went ahead to Italy to honor his contracts.  Rose would meet
him in Vienna once he found appropriate lodgings, got settled, and sent
money for the journey.

They were breakfasting beneath an awning on the terrace of their small
hotel, legs covered with a wool blanket because of the sharp, cold air
of the coast, when they were interrupted by Jeremy Sommers, indignant
and solemn as a prophet.  Rose had left such a clear trail that it had
been easy for her older brother to follow and find her in this
out-of-the-way resort.  When she saw him, her cry was more one of
surprise than fear, emboldened as she was by the tumult of her love. 
At that instant, she felt for the first time a sense of what she had
done, and the weight of the consequences was revealed in all its
magnitude. She rose to her feet, resolved to defend her right to live
her life however she pleased, but her brother cut her off before she
could speak, directing his remarks to the tenor.

"You owe my sister an explanation.  I suppose you have not told her
that you are married and that you have two children," he sputtered to
the seducer.

That was the one thing Karl Bretzner had failed to tell Rose.  They had
talked themselves out; he had confessed even the most intimate details
of previous love affairs, not overlooking the excesses of the Marquis
de Sade that his mentor, the French woman with the eyes of a tiger, had
described to him, because Rose had demonstrated a morbid curiosity to
know when, with whom, and especially how he had made love, from the
time he was ten until the day before he met her.

And once he learned how much she liked listening to him and how she
incorporated the information into her own theory and practice, he told
her everything, without reservation.  But of his wife and children he
had said nothing, out of compassion for this beautiful virgin who had
given herself to him unconditionally.  He hadn't wanted to destroy the
magic of that coming together: Rose Sommers deserved to enjoy her first
love to the fullest.

"You owe me satisfaction, "Jeremy Sommers challenged, slapping Bretzner
across the face with his glove.

Karl Bretzner was a man of the world, and he had no intention of doing
anything as barbaric as fight a duel.  He understood that the moment
had come for him to retreat, and he regretted not having a few moments
in private to try to explain things to Rose.  He did not want to leave
her with a broken heart or with the idea that he had seduced her in bad
conscience only to abandon her.  He needed to tell her once more how
much he truly loved her and that he was sorry he was not free to live
out their dreams, but he saw on Jeremy Sommers' face that he would not
allow that.  Jeremy took the arm of his sister, who seemed stupefied,
and led her firmly to the carriage, denying her the opportunity to say
good-bye to her lover or to collect her few belongings.  He drove her
to the home of ll iL

-M.  Miss Rose;:

an aunt in Scotland, where she was to stay until her condition could be
determined.  If the worst happened, which was how Jeremy referred to a
possible pregnancy, her life and the honor of the family would be
forever besmirched.

"Not a word of this to anyone, not even to Mama or John you
understand?"  were the only words he spoke during the journey.

Rose lived a few weeks of uncertainty, until she knew she was not
pregnant.  That brought a sigh of enormous relief, as if the heavens
had absolved her.  As atonement, she spent three months knitting for
the poor, reading, and writing on the sly without shedding a single
tear.  During that time, she reflected on her fate and something
shifted inside, because when she left her aunt's home she was a
different person.  Only Rose was aware of the change.  She reappeared
in London exactly as she had left, smiling, tranquil, interested in
opera and literature, without a word of bitterness to Jeremy for having
dragged her from the arms of her lover or of nostalgia for the man who
had deceived her, Olympian in her posture of ignoring gossip and the
mournful faces of her family.  On the surface she seemed the same girl
she had always been; not even her mother could find the chink in her
perfect composure that would allow her a reproach or counsel.  On the
other hand, the widow was not in a situation to help or protect her
daughter, a cancer was rapidly devouring her.  The one modification in
Rose's behavior was her fancy for spending hours closed in her room,
writing.  In her tiny hand she filled dozens of notebooks, which she
kept under lock and key.  As she never tried to post a letter' Jeremy
Sommers, who feared nothing so much as ridicule, stopped worrying about
the vice of writing and assumed that his sister had had the good
judgment to forget the ill-omened Viennese tenor.  Not only had she not
forgotten him, however, she remembered with noonday clarity every
detail of what had happened and each word he had spoken or whispered.
The only thing she erased from her mind was the disenchantment of
having been deceived.  Karl Bretzner's wife and children simply
disappeared, because they had never been given a place in the vast
fresco of her memories of love.

Rose's retreat to her aunt's home in Scotland had not eliminated
gossip, but as the rumors could not be confirmed, no one dared openly
snub the family.  One by one, the many suitors who had besieged Rose
returned, but she sent them away, using the excuse of her mother's
illness.  Things kept quiet simply never happened' Jeremy Sommers
maintained, eager to snuff out every vestige of that episode with
silence.  Rose's shameful escapade lived on in the limbo of things not
given words, although at times the brother and sister made oblique
references that kept their rancor alive but also united them in the
shared secret.  Years later, when it no longer mattered to anyone, Rose
dared tell her brother John, with whom she had always played the role
of the spoiled and innocent little girl.  Shortly after the death of
their mother' Jeremy Sommers was offered the directorship of the
British Import and Export Company, Ltd.  in Chile.  He left with his
sister, Rose, carrying the secret with them, intact, to the other side
of the world.

They arrived inValparaiso at the end of the winter of I830, when that
city was still a hamlet even though there were already European
companies and families there.  For Rose their destination was a
punishment, and she assumed it stoically, resigned to pay for her
misstep with that inescapable exile, though not allowing anyone, most
of all her brother Jeremy, to suspect her desperation.  Her discipline
in not complaining and not talking, even in dreams, about her lost
lover sustained her when she was beset with difficulties.  They moved
into the best available hotel, wanting to guard against winds and
humidity because of an epidemic of diphtheria, which the local barbers
combated with cruel and futile surgical interventions they performed

Miss Rose =h with their razors.  Spring, and then summer, somewhat
improved Rose's bad impression of Chile.  She determined to forget
about London and make the best of her new surroundings, despite the
provincial atmosphere and the sea winds that pierced one's bones on
even the sunniest days.  She convinced her brother, and he his office,
of the need to acquire a decent house in the firm's name and to ship
furniture from England.  She presented it as a matter of authority and
prestige: it was unthinkable that the representative of such an
important office should be lodging in a rundown hotel.  Eighteen months
later, when baby Eliza came into their lives, brother and sister were
living in a large house on Cerro Alegre.  Miss Rose had relegated her
former lover to a sealed compartment of her memory and was wholly
dedicated to winning a prominent position in local society.  In the
following years'Valparaiso grew in size and was modernized at the same
pace that Rose left her past behind to become the exuberant, happy
appearing woman who eleven years later would enslave Jacob Todd.

The false missionary was not the first to be rejected, but Miss Rose
had no interest in marrying.  She had discovered an extraordinary
formula for never emerging from her idyllic romance with Karl Bretzner,
reliving each and every moment of their incendiary passion, along with
fantasies she invented in the silence of her spinster nights.

;

i Love CX

Love

GX \ T one better than Miss Rose could know wHZ x .. .. .

what was .  happening to Elizas lovesick 5 SOUL.  n She immediately
guessed the man's identity, because only a blind man could have missed
the connection between the girl's bizarre behavior and the delivery by
her brother's employee of the crates of treasures for Feliciano
Rodriguez de Santa Cruz.  Her first impulse had been to write off the
young man as a nonentity, too poor to be significant, but she quickly
realized that she herself had sensed his dangerous attraction and had
not stopped thinking about him.  Naturally, she had first focused on
his mended clothing and mournful pallor, but a second look had been
enough to appreciate his aura: the tragic, damned poet.  Furiously
embroidering in her sewing room, she kept mulling over the reversal of
fate that was affecting her plans to find Eliza a congenial and wealthy
husband.  In her thoughts she wove a web of plots to nip that love in
the bud before it began, from sending Eliza to a boarding school for
girls in England or to her own ancient aunt in Scotland to pouring out
the truth to her brother so he would fire his employee.  In the depths
of her heart, however, quite despite herself, was germinating the
secret hope that Eliza could live out her passion to the end, to
compensate for the fathomless void the tenor had left in her own life
eighteen years before.

In the meantime, for Eliza the hours passed with paralyzing slowness in
a whirl of confused emotions.  She didn't know whether it was day or
night, Tuesday or Friday, whether it had been a few hours or several
years since she'd met that young man.  She felt that her blood had
turned to froth, and she broke out in hives that faded as suddenly and
inexplicably as they had appeared.  She saw her beloved everywhere: in
the shadows of the corners, in the shapes of the clouds, in her teacup,
and most of all in her dreams.  She did not know his name but did not
dare ask Jeremy Sommers because that would unleash a wave of
suspicions, but she entertained herself for hours imagining an
appropriate name for him.  She needed desperately to talk with someone
about her love, to analyze every detail of his brief visit, to
speculate on what they should have said to each other and what they had
communicated with glances, blushes, and designs, but she had no one in
whom to confide.  She longed for a visit from Captain John Sommers,
that uncle with the heart of a buccaneer who had been the most
fascinating character in her childhood, the only one capable of
understanding and helping in such a difficult time.  She had no doubt
at all that if Jeremy Sommers got wind of her feelings he would declare
all-out war on his firm's humble employee, and she could not predict
Miss Rose's reaction.  She decided that the less that was known in her
home the more she and her future sweetheart would be free to act.  She
never imagined a scenario in which her love was not returned with the
same depth of feeling, for to her it was impossible to believe that
love of such magnitude could have stunned only her.  The most
elementary logic and justice indicated that somewhere in the city he
was suffering the same delicious torment.

Eliza hid to touch her body in secret places she had never explored
before.  She closed her eyes, and then it was his hand that caressed
her with the delicacy of a bird, his lips she kissed in the mirror, his
waist she embraced around the pillow, his the murmurs of love carried
to her on the wind.  Not even her dreams escaped the power of Joaquin
Andieta.  She would see him appear like a huge shadow looming over her
and devouring her in a thousand outlandish and disturbing ways.
Moon-calf, devil, archangel--she didn't know.  She did not want to
wake, and with fanatic determination she practiced the skill learned
from Mama Fresia for entering and leaving dreams at will.  She came to
have such mastery of this art that her illusory lover appeared in
bodily form; she could touch him, smell him, and hear his voice,
perfectly clear and close by.  If only she could always be asleep she
would need nothing more, she thought: she could go on loving him from
her bed through eternity.  She would have perished in the delirium of
that passion if Joaquin Andieta hadn't come to the house a week later
to pick up the boxes of treasures being sent to their client in the
north.

She learned the night before that he was coming, not through instinct
or premonition, as she would imply years later when she told Tao Chi'en
the story, but because at dinner she heard Jeremy Sommers giving
instructions to his sister and Mama Fresia.

"The same employee who brought the load will come to get it," he added
in passing, never suspecting the hurricane of emotions his words--for
different reasons--unleashed among the three women.

The girl spent the morning on the terrace, her eyes glued to the road
rising up the hill toward the house.  About midday she saw the cart
pulled by six mules and followed by armed peons on horseback.

She felt an icy peace, as if she had died, unaware that Miss Rose and
Mama Fresia were watching her from the house.

"All that I have invested in educating her and she falls in love with
the first good-for-nothing who crosses her path," muttered Miss

Rose.

She had decided to do whatever she could to forestall disaster, but
without much conviction, because she knew too well the obstinate temper
of first love.

_.

-S- Love;

"I will take him to the cargo.  Tell Eliza to go in the house and don't
let her come out for any reason," she ordered.

"And how do you want me to do that?"  Mama Fresia asked, grumbling.

"Lock her up if you have to."

" You lock her up, if you can.  Don't get me into it," she replied, and
left, bedroom slippers slapping.

There was no way to keep the girl from going up to Andieta and handing
him a letter.  She did it openly, looking him in the eye, and with such
fierce determination that Miss Rose did not have the gall to intercept
her or Mama Fresia to stand in her way.

Then the women understood that the sorcery was much stronger than they
had imagined and that no locked door or blessed candles were enough to
break the spell.  The young man also had spent that week obsessed with
the memory of the girl who he believed was the daughter of his
employer' Jeremy Sommers, and therefore far beyond his reach.  He had
no inkling of the impression he had made, and it never crossed his mind
that by offering him that memorable glass of juice on his first visit
she was declaring her love; as a result, he was wildly surprised when
she handed him a sealed envelope.  Disconcerted, he slipped the
envelope into his pocket and continued to supervise the task of loading
the boxes into the cart, as his ears burned, his clothes grew damp with
sweat, and a fever of shivers ran down his spine.  Motionless and
silent, Eliza watched closely from a few steps away, ignoring Miss
Rose's furious and Mama Fresia's remorseful expressions.  When the last
crate was tied onto the cart and the mules turned to head down the
hill'Joaquin apologized to Miss Rose for the nuisance, greeted Eliza
with a brief nod of his head, and left as quickly as he could.

Eliza's note contained only two lines, telling him where and how to
meet her.  The strategy was of such simplicity and boldness that she
might have been taken as an expert in duplicity: Joaquin was to present
himself three days thence on Cerro Alegre at goo RM.  in the shrine of
theVirgen del Perpetuo Succor, a chapel built a short distance from the
Sommers' home as a haven for travelers on foot.  Eliza had chosen that
place because it was nearby and the date because it was Wednesday. 
Miss Rose, Mama Fresia, and the servants would be busy with dinner and
no one would notice if she slipped out for a while.  After the
departure of the crestfallen Michael Steward there had been no reason
for dances and the premature winter was not conducive to them, but Miss
Rose maintained the custom in order to deflate the gossip circulating
about her and the navy officer.  To have suspended the musical evenings
in Steward's absence would have been equivalent to confessing that he
was the only reason for holding them.

By seven, Joaquin Andieta was already waiting impatiently.  In the
distance he saw the glow of bright lights from the house, the parade of
carriages bringing guests, and the torches of the coachmen waiting
along the road.  Once or twice he had to hide as watchmen came by to
check the lamps on top of the shrine, which the wind kept blowing out.
The building was a small adobe rectangle only slightly larger than a
confessional, topped with a painted wood cross and housing a plaster
image of the Virgin.  A tray held rows of burned-down votive candles
and a vase containing withered flowers.  There was a full moon, but the
sky was striped with clouds that from time to time completely blacked
out the moonlight.  At nine exactly he felt the girl's presence and saw
her silhouette, cloaked from head to foot in a dark mantle.

"I have been waiting for you, senorita," was all he could think to
stammer, feeling like an idiot.

< Love : <

"I have been waiting for you forever," she replied without the least
hesitation.

She threw back her mantle andJoaquin saw she was dressed for a party,
though her skirt was tucked up and she was wearing rough sandals.  She
was carrying her white stockings and chamois dancing slippers to keep
from muddying them on the road.  Her black hair, parted in the center,
was caught back on both sides of her head into braids decorated with
satin ribbons.  They sat at the back of the shrine on the mantle that
she lay on the floor, hidden behind the statue, unspeaking, very close
but not touching.  For a long time, they lacked the courage to look at
one another in the soft shadows, stupefied by their closeness,
breathing the same air and aflame despite the cold wind that threatened
to leave them in blackness.

"My name is Eliza Sommers," she said finally.

"And I am Joaquin Andieta," he replied.

"I thought maybe your name was Sebastian."

"Why?"

"Because you look like Saint Sebastian the martyr.  I don't go to the
Papist church, I am a Protestant, but Mama Fresia has sometimes taken
me when she goes to make promises to her saints."

The conversation ended there because they didn't know what else to say;
they stole glances out of the corners of their eyes and then blushed in
unison.  Eliza could smell his scent of soap and sweat but didn't dare
move closer to sniff him as she wanted to.  The only sounds in the
shrine were the whispering wind and their agitated breathing.

After a few minutes, Eliza announced that she had to go back to the
house before she was missed, and they said good-bye, brushing hands.

They met the next few Wednesdays always at a different time and for
only brief intervals.  In each of those tumultuous meetings they moved
forward with giant steps through the delirium and torment of love.

Hurriedly, they told each other what was indispensable to tell, because
words seemed a waste of time; soon they held hands and kept on talking,
their bodies closer and closer as their souls moved toward each other,
until on the night of the fifth Wednesday they kissed on the lips,
first tentatively, then exploring, and finally, losing themselves in
pleasure until the fever consuming them was totally unleashed.  By then
they had exchanged abbreviated summaries of Eliza's sixteen years
andJoaquin's twenty-one.  They discussed the improbable basket with
batiste sheets and mink coverlet in contrast to the Marseilles soap
crate, and it came as a relief to Andieta that Eliza was not the
daughter of either Sommers but was, like him, born of obscure origins,
although they were still separated by a social and economic abyss.

Eliza learned that Joaquin was the fruit of a passing ravishment;

his father had vanished as quickly as he had sown his seed, and the boy
had grown up not knowing his father's name, carrying his mother's, and,
marked as a bastard, limited at every turn of the road.  The family
drove their dishonored daughter from their bosom and disregarded her
illegitimate son.  His grandparents and his uncles, merchants and minor
civil servants in a middle class mired in prejudice, lived in the same
city, only a few blocks away, but their paths never crossed.

On Sundays they went to the same church, but at different hours,
because the poor never went to noon mass.  Branded by the
stigma'Joaquin never played in the same parks or went to the schools
his cousins attended, although he wore their old clothes and played
with their discarded toys, which a kindhearted aunt sent to her
banished sister through convoluted means.  Joaquin Andieta's mother had
been less fortunate than Miss Rose, and had paid more dearly for her
weakness.

The women were about the same age, but while the English lady looked
young, the other was worn down by poverty, consumption, and the dismal
task of embroidering bridal gowns by candlelight.

Bad luck had not diminished her dignity and she had brought up her son
with inviolable principles of honor.  Joaquin had learned at a very ll
early age to hold his head high, defying any glimmer of mockery or
pity.

"One day I will take my mother out of that shack she lives in," Joaquin
vowed during their whispered conversations in the shrine.

"I will give her a decent life, like the one she had before she lost
everything."

"She didn't lose everything.  She has a son," Eliza replied.

"I was her misfortune."

"Her misfortune was to fall in love with a bad man.  You are her
redemption," she declared.

The meetings between the two young people were very brief and never at
the same hour, and Miss Rose could not watch Eliza day and night.  She
knew something was happening behind her back, but she could not go so
far as to lock Eliza in her room or send her to the country, as duty
prescribed, and she refrained from mentioning her suspicions to her
brother Jeremy.  She was sure that Eliza and her beloved were
exchanging letters but was never able to intercept one, though she
alerted all the servants.  The letters did exist and were of such
intensity that had Miss Rose seen them she would have been appalled.
Joaquin never sent them, he handed them to Eliza at each of their
meetings.  In the most feverish language he told her what he did not
dare in person, out of pride and propriety.  She hid the letters in a
box buried thirty centimeters deep in the small kitchen garden by the
house, where every day she pretended to be diligently weeding Mama
Fresia's vegetables and medicinal herbs.  Those pages, reread a
thousand times in stolen moments, were the principal sustenance of her
passion, because they revealed an aspect of Joaquin Andieta that did
not emerge when they were together.  They seemed written by a different
person.  That haughty young man, always on the defensive, somber and
tormented, who embraced her madly and then pushed her away as if burned
by the contact, in writing opened the floodgates of his soul and
described his emotions like a poet.  Later, when for years Eliza would
follow Joaquin Andieta's faint trail, those letters would be her only
grasp on the truth, irrefutable proof that their delirious love was not
an invention of her adolescent imagination but that it was real, a
brief blessing and an extended torment.

After the first Wednesday in the shrine, Eliza's attacks of indigestion
vanished without a trace, and nothing in her behavior or her appearance
revealed her secret except the demented gleam in her eyes and a more f
equent use of her talent for making herself invisible.

At times she gave the impression of being in several places at once,
confusing everyone, or it might be that no one could remember where or
when they had last seen her and just as they started to call her she
would materialize with the air of someone who doesn't know anyone was
looking for her.  She spent time with Miss Rose in her sewing room or
cooking with Mama Fresia, but she had become so quiet and transparent
that neither woman felt she was seeing her.  Her presence was subtle,
nearly imperceptible, and when she went away no one realized it until
hours later.

"You're like a ghost!  I'm tired of looking for you.  I don't want you
to leave the house, not even leave my sight," Miss Rose ordered again
and again.

"I've been here all afternoon," Eliza would reply, undaunted, quietly
appearing in a corner with a book or embroidery in her hand.

"Make some noise, child, por Dios!  How can I see you when you're
quieter than a rabbit?"  Mama Fresia would ask in turn.

Eliza said all right, and then did just as she wanted, but she took
pains to seem obedient and stay in good favor.  After a few days she
had i_.

acquired an astonishing skill for clouding reality, as if she had
practiced the magician's art all her life.  Faced with the
impossibility of catching her in a lie she could prove, Miss Rose chose
to worm her way into Eliza's confidence by constantly bringing up the
subject of love.  There were more than enough excuses: gossip about her
friends, romantic books they had shared or librettos of new Italian
operas, which they learned by memory, but Eliza never said a word to
betray her feelings.

Miss Rose watched--vainly--for telltale signs: she went through the
girl's clothes and searched her room, she turned her doll and music box
collections, her books, her notebooks upside down, but could not find
Eliza's diary.  Had she found it she would have been disappointed,
because there was no mention of Joaquin Andieta in those pages.

wrote only to remember.  She put down everything in her diary, from
recurring dreams to an ever growing list of recipes and domestic lore,
such as the way to fatten a hen or remove a grease stain.  There were
also speculations about her birth, the expensive basket and soap crate,
but not a word about Joaqum Andieta.  She did not need diary to
remember him.  It would be several years before she began to record her
Wednesday rendezvous in those pages.

Finally came the night the lovers did not meet at the shrine but in the
Sommers' home.  To reach that moment, Eliza had suffered the torments
of an infinity of doubts; she realized this was a decisive step.

Just for meeting in secret, unchaperoned, a girl sacrificed her honor,
her most precious treasure, without which she had no future.  "A woman
without virtue is nothing, she can never become a wife and mother,
better she tie a stone around her neck and jump into the sea," had been
drummed into her time and time again.  She believed there was no
extenuating excuse for the sin she was about to commit; she did it with
premeditation and conscious intent.  At two in the morning, when no one
was awake in the city and only night watchmen were making their rounds,
peering into darkness, Joaquin Andieta managed to sneak like a thief
onto the terrace of the library, where Eliza was waiting for him in her
nightgown, barefoot, shivering with cold and anxiety.  She took his
hand and led him blindly through the house to a back room where the
family's clothing was kept in huge armoires, along with boxes of
trimmings for dresses and hats that Miss Rose used and reused through
the years.  Flat on the floor, wrapped in lengths of linen, were the
drawing room and dining room drapes, awaiting the turn of seasons.  It
had seemed the safest place to Eliza, far from the other rooms.  At any
rate, as a precaution she had put valerian in the small glass of
anisette Miss Rose drank before going to bed, and into the brandy
Jeremy sipped as he smoked his Cuban cigarette after dinner.  Eliza
knew every centimeter of the house; and since she knew exactly where
the floor creaked and how to open doors so they wouldn't squeak, she
could guide Joaquin in the darkness with no light but her memory, and
he followed, docile and pale with fear, shutting out the voice of his
own conscience blending with that of his mother relentlessly reminding
him of a decent man's code of honor.

will never do to Eliza what my father did to my mother, he vowed as he
groped his way along, holding the girl's hand, knowing that any such
pledge was pointless, for he had already lost the battle with the
pulsing desire that had bedeviled him since the first time he'd seen
her.  In the meantime, Eliza was torn between the warning voices
echoing through her head and the force of instinct, with all its
awesome devices.  She had no clear idea of what was going to happen in
the room with the armoires, but she had already given in.

The Sommers' home, suspended in the air like a spiderweb at the mercy
of the wind, was impossible to keep warm despite the charcoal braziers
the servants kept burning during seven months of the year.

The sheets were always damp from the persistent breath of the sea and
one slept with a hot-water bottle at one's feet.  The only place that
was always warm was the kitchen, where the woodstove, an enormous i_.

affair with many uses, was never allowed to go out.  During the winter,
wood creaked, boards popped loose, and the framework of the house
threatened to launch itself like an ancient frigate.  Miss Rose never
grew accustomed to the Pacific storms, just as she never got used to
the temblors.True earthquakes, the ones that flattened everything,
happened more or less every six years, and in each of those she showed
surprising self-composure, but the daily vibrations that shook their
lives left her in a foul mood.  She did not like to put her china and
glassware on shelves at ground level, as Chileans did, and when the
dining room furniture shook and plates shattered, she cursed the
country at the top of her lungs.

The storeroom where Eliza and Joaquin made love on the huge bundle of
flowered cretonne draperies that in summer replaced the green velvet
parlor drapes was on the ground floor.  They loved one another
surrounded by solemn armoires, hatboxes, and Miss Rose's cloth-wrapped
spring dresses.  Neither the cold nor the smell of mothballs bothered
them, because they were beyond practical concerns, beyond fear of the
consequences, and beyond their own puppy like clumsiness.  They did not
know what to do, but they made it up as they went, befuddled and
confounded, in total silence, guiding one another with little skill. 
At twenty-one, he was as much a virgin as she.

At fourteen he had decided to become a priest to please his mother, but
at sixteen he had fallen into reading liberal books and declared
himself an enemy of the clergy, though not of religion, and had decided
to remain chaste until he accomplished his plan to move his mother from
her wretched home.  It seemed a small repayment for her countless
sacrifices.  Despite their virginity and their terrible fear of being
surprised, they were able to find in the darkness what they sought.
They unfastened buttons and ties, shed their modesty and found
themselves naked, sucking in each other's breath and saliva.

They inhaled feral scents, feverishly put this here and that there with
an honest desire to decipher enigmas, plumb the other's depths, and
lose themselves in the same soul.  They left summer drapes stained with
warm sweat, virginal blood, and semen, but neither of them noticed
those signs of love.  In the darkness they could barely make out each
other's outlines and gauge how much room they had to keep from knocking
down stacks of boxes and clothes racks in the furor of their embraces.
They blessed the wind and the rain on the roof tiles because those
sounds masked the creaking of the floor, but the thundering of their
hearts and the rage of their panting and sighs of love were so
deafening that they couldn't understand why they didn't wake the whole
house.

Before dawn, Joaquin Andieta left by the same library window and Eliza
went back to bed, drained.  While she slept, wrapped in several
blankets, he had a two hours' walk downhill through the storm.

Silently he slipped through the town without attracting the attention
of the watchman, and reached his house just as the church bells were
ringing for early mass.  He had planned to go in quietly, wash, change
the collar of his shirt, and go off to work in his wet suit, since he
had no other, but his mother was awake, waiting for him with toasted
stale bread and hot water for mate, as she did every morning.

"Where have you been, son?"  she asked, so sadly that he could not
deceive her.

"Discovering love, Mama," he answered, throwing his arms around her,
his face radiant.

Joaquin Andieta lived the torment of a political romanticism that had
no echo in that country of practical and prudent people.  He had become
a fan of the theories of Lamennais, which he read in mediocre and
confusing translations from the French in the same way he read the
Encyclopedists.  Like his mentor, he professed a Catholic

w Love-jQ

liberalism in politics and the separation of church and state.  He
declared himself a fundamental Christian, like the apostles and
martyrs, but an enemy of priests, who, he said, had betrayed Jesus and
his true doctrine, comparing them to bloodsuckers feeding on the
credulity of the faithful.  He was very careful, nonetheless, not to
expound such ideas before his mother, who would have died of
mortification.  He also considered himself an enemy of the useless and
decadent oligarchy, and of the government because it did not represent
the interests of the people, only the rich, as his colleagues proved
with many examples in their meetings at the Santos Tornero bookshop and
as he patiently explained to Eliza, although she seemed scarcely to
hear him, more interested in smelling him than in listening to his
speeches.  He was prepared to give his life for the pointless glory of
a burst of heroism, but he had a visceral fear of looking in the eyes
and talking of his sentiments.  They established the routine of making
love at least once a week in that same room with the armoires, now
their nest.  They had counted on so few precious moments together that
it seemed senseless to her to waste them philosophizing; if they were
going to talk, she would rather hear about his tastes, his past, his
mother, and his plans to marry her someday.

She would have given anything to have him say in person the magnificent
phrases he wrote to her in his letters.  To tell her, for example, that
it would be easier to measure the intentions of the wind or the
patience of the waves on the shore than the intensity of his love; that
there was no winter night cold enough to damp the ever burning fires of
his passion; that he spent the days dreaming and nights awake, assailed
by the madness of memories and counting, with the anguish of a
condemned man, the hours until he would hold her again.  "You are my
angel and my damnation; in your presence I reach divine ecstasy and in
your absence I descend to hell.  What is this hold you have over me,
Eliza?  Do not speak to me of tomorrow or yesterday, I live only for
the instant, for the today, when I can again sink into the infinite
night of your dark eyes."  Nourished by Miss Rose's novels and the
romantic poets, whose verses she knew by heart, the girl lost herself
in the intoxicating delight of feeling adored like a goddess, failing
to see the discrepancy between those inJlamed declarations and the real
person of Joaquin Andieta.  In his letters he was transformed into the
perfect lover, able to describe his passion with such angelic spirit
that guilt and fear disappeared to give rise to the absolute exaltation
of his emotions.  No one had loved like that before; they had been
chosen among mortals for a passion like no other'Joaquin told her in
his letters, and she believed him.  Nevertheless, he made love
hurriedly, like a starving man, without savoring it, like someone
succumbing to a vice, tormented by guilt.  He did not take the time to
know her body or reveal his to her; he was overcome by the urgency of
desire, and their secret.

He always felt as if they never had enough time, though Eliza calmed
him, explaining that no one came to that room at night, that the mers
were both drugged, that Mama Fresia was asleep in her hut at the back
of the patio, and that the rest of the servants' rooms were in the
attic.  Instinct provoked the girl's boldness, driving her to discover
the multiple possibilities of pleasure, but soon she learned to hold
back.  Her initiatives in the game of love put Joaquin on the
defensive; he felt criticized, wounded, his virility threatened.  He
was tormented by the worst suspicions, because he could not imagine
such natural sensuality in a sixteen-year-old girl whose horizons were
the walls of her home.  Fear of pregnancy made things worse, because
neither of them knew how to avoid it.Joaquin vaguely understood the
mechanics of fertilization and assumed that if he withdrew in time they
were safe, but he did not always achieve that.  He was aware of Eliza's
frustration, but did not know how to comfort her, and instead of
trying, he took immediate refuge in his role as her intellectual
mentor, where he felt secure.  When she longed to be stroked, or at
least to rest her head on

gLove V

j_..

her lover's shoulder, he pulled away, quickly dressed, and wasted the
precious time they had left laying out new arguments for the same
political theories he had repeated a hundred times.  Eliza felt
restless after those embraces, but she did not dare admit it, not even
in the deepest part of her being, because that would be questioning the
quality of their love.  Then she fell into the trap of feeling sorry
for her lover, making excuses for him, thinking that if they had more
time, safe place, everything would be fine.  Much better than their
rolling about were the hours afterward inventing things that hadn't
happened and the nights dreaming of what might happen the next time in
the room with the armoires.

With the same gravity she invested in all her acts, Eliza gave herself
to the task of idealizing her lover until he became an obsession.

All she wanted was to serve him wholeheartedly for the rest of her
life, to sacrifice herself and suffer to prove her selflessness, to die
for him if necessary.  She was so befogged by the witchery of that
first passion that she did not see that her love was not returned with
equal intensity.  Her lover was never completely present.  Even in the
most rousing embraces on the pile of drapes, his mind was somewhere
else, ready to leave or already absent.  He revealed himself only
partly, fleetingly, in an exasperating game of Chinese shadow plays,
but when he left, when she was so starved for love that she was at the
point of bursting into tears, he would hand her another of his
marvelous letters.  Then the entire universe would turn into a prism
whose one purpose was to reflect her emotions.  Captive to the
demanding task of besotted love, she never doubted her capacity to give
without reserve, and therefore did not recognize Joaquin's ambiguity.
She had invented a perfect lover, and she obstinately nurtured that
illusion.

Her imagination compensated for the unrewarding embraces with her lover
that left her in the dark limbo of unsatisfied desire.

PART TWO

1848-1849

The News

{_eptember twenty-first, the first day of spring > according to Miss
Rose's calendar, they aired _ the rooms, hung the feather beds and
bedding in the sun, waxed the wood furniture, and changed the curtains
in the drawing room.  Mama Fresia washed the flowered cretonne without
comment, convinced that the dried stains were mouse urine.  In the
patio, she prepared great pots of hot, strained, quillay bark, soaked
the curtains one whole day, starched them with rice water, and dried
them in the sun; then two women ironed them, and when they were good as
new she hung them at the windows of the drawing room to welcome the new
season.  In the meantime, Eliza and Joaquin, indifferent to Miss Rose's
springtime pandemonium, indulged their love on the green velvet drapes,
more cushiony than the cretonne.  It wasn't cold anymore, and the
nights were bright.  They had been lovers for three months, and Joaquin
Andieta's letters, sprinkled with poetic figures and torrid
declarations, were noticeably fewer and farther between.  Eliza sensed
that her lover was somewhere else, that at times she embraced a
ghost.

Despite the anguish of unsatisfied love and the heavy load of so many
secrets, the girl had regained a superficial calm.  She spent the hours
of the day in her usual occupations, absorbed in her books and her
piano exercises, or busy about the kitchen and sewing room, not showing
the slightest interest in leaving the house, although if Miss Rose
asked her to, she went along with the willingness of someone who has
nothing better to do.  She got up early and went to bed early, as
always; she had a good appetite and looked healthy, although these
symptoms of perfect normality raised terrifying suspicions in the minds
of Miss Rose and Mama Fresia.They never let her out of their sight.
They doubted that the intoxication of love had dissipated so suddenly,
but as the weeks went by and Eliza showed no signs of distress they
slowly relaxed their vigilance.

Maybe the candles to Saint Anthony did help, the Indian speculated;
maybe it wasn't love after all, Miss Rose thought without much
conviction.

The news of the gold discovered in California reached Chile in August.
First it was a wild rumor from the mouths of drunken sailors in the
brothels of El Almendral, but a few days later the captain of the
schooner Adelaida announced that half his crew had deserted in San
Francisco.

"There's gold everywhere, you can shovel it up, they say there are
nuggets the size of oranges!  Anyone with a lick of gumption can be a
millionaire!"  he reported, choked with excitement.

In January of that year, near the mill of a Swiss farmer on the banks
of the American River, a man by the name of Marshall had found a scale
of gold in the water.  The yellow pellet that unleashed the madness was
found nine days after the war between Mexico and the United States had
ended with the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.  By the time
the news spread, California no longer belonged to Mexico.  That
territory had been largely ignored before it was known that it was
sitting on a never-ending treasure.  North Americans had thought of it
as Indian hunting grounds, and the pioneers had preferred Oregon, which
they'd found better suited for agriculture.  Mexico had considered it a
wasteland bristling with thieves and hadn't bothered to send troops to
defend it during the war.  But a little later, Sam Brannan, a newspaper
editor and Mormon preacher sent iLi to spread the faith, went up and
down the streets of San Francisco broadcasting the news.  He might not
have been believed, considering he had a slightly murky reputation--it
was rumored that he had misappropriated God's money and when the Mormon
church asked him to return it he had said he would .. . if he got a
receipt signed by God--but he backed up his words with a small pouch
filled with gold dust, which passed from hand to hand inflaming his
audience.  At the cry of' Gold  Gold!"  three out of four men dropped
everything and set out for the placers.  They had to close the only
school because there weren't any children left.  In Chile the news had
the same impact.  The average salary was twenty cents per day, and the
newspapers wrote that the long-lost El Dorado had been found, the city
the conquistadors had dreamed of, where the streets were paved with
pure gold.

"The riches of the mines recall the stories of Sinbad and Aladdin's
lamp; without fear of exaggeration, the day's take averages an ounce of
pure gold," proclaimed the newspapers, and they added that there was
enough to make thousands rich for decades.  The wildfire of greed
flared immediately among Chileans, who had the souls of miners, and the
rush to California began the next month.  They were already halfway
there compared to any adventurer crossing the Atlantic.  The trip from
Europe toValparaiso took three months, and then two more to reach
California.  The distance betweenValparaiso and San Francisco was less
than seven thousand miles, while from the east coast of North America,
passing around Cape Horn, it was nearly twenty thousand.  That as
Joaquin Andieta calculated, represented a considerable head start for
the Chileans, and the first to get there would stake the best claims.

Feliciano Rodriguez de Santa Cruz came to the same conclusion, and he
decided to leave immediately with five of his best and most loyal
miners, promising them a reward as incentive to get them to leave their
families and jump into such a risky enterprise.  He spent three weeks
organizing supplies for a stay of several months in that land to the
north, which he imagined as desolate and savage.  He was miles ahead of
most of the reckless who set out blindly, destitute, spurred by the
temptation of an easy fortune but with no hint of the dangers and
exertion involved.  He was not about to break his back slaving like a
common laborer, which was why he was going to be well supplied and take
workmen he trusted, he explained to his wife, who was expecting their
second child but insisted she wanted to go with him.  Paulina planned
to make the voyage with two nursemaids, their cook, and a cow and
several chickens to provide milk and eggs for the babies during the
trip, but for once her husband stood firm in his refusal.  The idea of
setting off on such an odyssey with a family on his back was clearly on
the level of idiocy.  His wife had lost her mind.

"What was that captain's name?  Mr.  Todd friend?"  Paulina interrupted
in the middle of his harangue, balancing a cup of chocolate on her
enormous belly as she nibbled a cream-filled flaky pastry, a recipe of
the Clarisa nuns.

"You mean John Sommers?"

"I mean that man who was fed up with navigating under sail and was
talking about steamships."

"That's the one."

Paulina sat thinking awhile, stuffing her mouth with pastries and
totally ignoring the list of dangers her husband was invoking.

By now she was Rubenesque, and little remained of the slender girl with
the shaved head who had run off from the convent.

"How much do I have in my account in London?"  she asked finally.

"Fifty thousand pounds.  You are a very wealthy woman."

"Not enough.  Can you lend me twice that amount with ten percent
interest payable in three years?"

"Where do you get such harebrained ideas, woman?  For

11E

X The News

God's sake!  What the devil do you want with that much money?"

"I want to buy a steamship.  The real money isn't in gold, Feliciano;
when all's said and done, it's just yellow crap.  The real money is in
the miners.  They are going to need everything when they get to
California, and they will have ready cash.  They say that the
steamships plow right ahead; they are not at the mercy of the wind, and
are bigger and faster.  Sailing ships are a thing of the past."

Feliciano went ahead with his plans, but experience had taught him not
to disdain his wife's financial premonitions.  For several nights he
couldn't sleep.  Wide-eyed, he paced through the ostentatious rooms of
his mansion, stepping carefully among sacks of provisions, boxes of
tools, barrels of gunpowder, and piles of weapons for the voyage,
measuring and pondering Paulina's words.  The longer he thought about
it, the sounder it seemed to invest in transport, but before making a
decision he consulted his brother, who was his partner in all his
business negotiations.  His brother listened open-mouthed, and when
Feliciano had set out the plan, he clapped his hand to his head.

"Caramba, brother!  Why didn't we think of that?"

In the meantime, Joaquin Andieta was, like thousands of other Chileans
his age, no matter their situation, dreaming of bags of gold dust and
nuggets scattered across the ground.  Several of his acquaintances had
already left, including one of his comrades at the Santos Tornero
bookshop, a young liberal who ranted against the rich and was the first
to denounce the evils of money, but who could not resist the siren call
of gold and had taken off without a good-bye to anyone.

For Joaquin, California represented his one way out of poverty, his
only chance to take his mother out of the slums and seek a cure for her
lungs, to stand before Jeremy Sommers with his head high and his
pockets filled to ask for Eliza's hand.  Gold .. . gold within his
reach.... He could see pouches bulging with gold dust, baskets of huge
nuggets, greenbacks in his pockets, the palace he would build, more
solid and with more marble than the Club de la Union, to shut the
mouths of the relatives who had humiliated his mother.  He also saw
himself leaving the Iglesia de La Matriz with Eliza Sommers on his arm,
the happiest bride and groom on the planet.  It was just a question of
daring.  What future did Chile offer?  In the best of cases, growing
old counting the products that passed over the desk of the British
Import and Export Company, Ltd.What could he lose, since he had nothing
to his name to begin with?  He was ill with gold fever;

he lost his appetite and couldn't sleep, he went around in a high heat,
staring at the sea with the eyes of a madman.  His bookseller friend
lent him maps and books about California, and a pamphlet on how to pan
for treasure, which he read avidly as he thought up desperate schemes
to finance the adventure.  Reports in the newspapers could not be more
tempting: "In one kind of mine called dry diggings, the only tool
needed to pry gold from the rocks is a common pocketknife.  In other
places the gold is already loose and to wash it up one uses a simple
machine called a sluice, or rocker, an ordinary round bottomed trough
some ten feet long and two wide across the top.  No capital is
necessary, so the competition is fierce, but men who were barely able
to make ends meet for a month now have thousands of dollars of precious
metal."

When Andieta mentioned the possibility of sailing north, his mother
protested as loudly as Eliza had.  Without ever having seen each other,
the two women said exactly the same thing: If you go, Joaquin, I will
die.  Both tried to make him see the countless dangers of such an
endeavor, and swore to him that they would a thousand times rather live
with him in inescapable poverty than have him pursue an illusory
fortune and risk losing him forever.  His mother told him that she
wouldn't leave the hovel where she lived even if she were very wealthy,
because all her friends were there and she had nowhere else in this
world to go.  And as for her lungs, nothing could be done for them, she
said, except wait for them to give out.  Eliza, for her part, offered
to run away with him if her family wouldn't let them marry.

Joaquin didn't listen, however, rapt in his nightmare of gold,
convinced he would never have another chance like this and that if he
let it go by it would be unpardonable cowardice.  He put into his new
mania the same intensity he had once devoted to espousing liberal
ideals, but he lacked the means to realize his plans.  He couldn't live
out his destiny unless he could raise the sum for the passage and
outfit himself with the bare necessities.  He went to the bank to ask
for a small loan, but he had no collateral and with one look they saw
he was as poor as a church mouse; he was icily rejected.  For the first
time he considered going to his mother's family, whom he had never
spoken to in his life, but he was too proud.  He was haunted by the
vision of a dazzling future; it was all he could do to go on with his
work; the long hours at his desk became a martyrdom.  He would sit
holding his pen in the air, staring blindly at the blank page as he
repeated by heart the names of the ships that could take him north.
Nights drained away in tumultuous dreams and nervous insomnia; he
awakened exhausted, his imagination boiling over.  He made childish
errors, while all around him the exaltation of gold reached the level
of hysteria.

Everyone wanted to go, and those who couldn't go in person set up
corporations, invested in hastily formed companies, or sent a trusted
representative in their stead with an agreement to share the profits.

Bachelors were the first to set sail; soon married men were leaving
their children and starting off without a backward look, despite
harrowing stories of obscure illnesses, disastrous accidents, and
brutal crimes.  The most peaceful men were ready to confront the
dangers of pistols and knives, the most prudent abandoned the security
won with years of daily struggle and threw themselves into the
adventure with their carpetbags of illusions.  Some spent their life's
savings on a passage, others paid for the voyage by hiring on as
sailors or signing indentures, but there were so many candidates that
Joaquin Andieta could not find a berth on a single ship, even after
days of haunting the docks.

By December he couldn't take any more.  As he was copying the
particulars of a cargo that had arrived in the port, as he did
meticulously every day, he altered the figures in the registry, then
destroyed the original documents of o loading.  Through the art of
bookkeeping sleight of hand, he caused several boxes of revolvers and
bullets originating in New York to disappear.  For the next three
nights he avoided the night watch, jimmied the locks, and sneaked into
the warehouse of the British Import and Export Company, Ltd.  to steal
the contents of those boxes.  He had to make several trips because the
booty was heavy.  First he filled his pockets with guns, and strapped
others to his arms and legs beneath his clothing; then he carried out
sacks of bullets.  Several times he was nearly caught by the night
guards, but luck was with him and each time he slipped away in time.

He knew he had a couple of weeks before anyone would claim the boxes
and discover the theft; he supposed, too, that it would be all too easy
to follow the trail of the missing documents and altered figures to the
guilty person, but by then he would be on the high seas.  And when he
had made his own fortune he would return every last cent, with
interest, since the only reason for committing such a deed, he repeated
a thousand times, was his desperation.  This was a matter of life and
death.  Life as he understood it lay in California; to stay trapped in
Chile was to condemn himself to a slow death.  He sold part of his loot
at a ridiculous price in dives in the port and the rest among his
friends in the SantosTornero bookshop after making them swear they
would guard his secret.  Those hotheaded idealists had never held a
weapon in their hands but they had spent years preparing verbally for a
Utopian revolt against the conservative government.  It would have

> The News tW

"I

been a betrayal of their propositions not to buy the black-market
revolvers, especially at such bargain prices.Joaquin Andieta kept two
revolvers for himself, determined to use them to shoot his way out if
he had to, but he said nothing to his closest friends about his plans
to leave.  That night in the back room of the bookshop, he, too, placed
his right hand over his heart and swore, in the name of the republic,
that he would give his life for democracy and justice.  The next
morning he bought a third-class passage on the first schooner scheduled
to sail north, along with a few sacks of toasted flour beans, rice,
sugar, jerked horse meat, and bacon, which if doled out with parsimony
could get him through the journey.  He bound his few remaining re ales
around his waist with a tight sash.

On the night of December twenty-second, he kissed Eliza and his mother
good-bye, and the next morning set off for California.

Mama Fresia discovered the love letters by chance when she was digging
onions in her narrow garden in the patio and the pitchfork hit a tin
box.  She didn't know how to read, but she only had to glance at them
to know what she had found.  She was tempted to take them to Miss Rose,
because just holding them in her hand she could sense the threat; she
would have sworn that the red ribbon-tied packet throbbed like a living
heart, but her affection for Eliza was stronger than prudence and
instead of going to her pa trona she put the letters back in the
biscuit tin, hid it beneath her full black skirts, and with a heavy
sigh went to the girl's room.

She found Eliza sitting in a chair, her back straight and her hands
clasped in her lap as if she were at mass, staring out her window at
the sea, so filled with anguish that the air around her felt dense and
heavy with premonitions.  Mama Fresia set the box on Eliza's knees and
stood waiting for an explanation--in vain.

"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 ma chi could deal with
a problem of this magnitude.  That same evening she asked her pa trona
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 ma chi 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 ma chi intoned.

Mama Fresia understood that it would be impossible to get out of the
house and take her to the ma chi ravine, let her do her work, and get
the girl back home without Miss Rose finding out.  The ma chi 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 ma chi gave her a slender coligue 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 coligue 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 inValparaiso on the day set by the ma
chi  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 inValparaiso 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 Joaquin 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 ll 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 pea ky 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 of fat 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, tortoiseshell 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
News 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 mule back
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, nina, 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 w.

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 mid trip 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 Joaquin'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 watercolors 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 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
Joaquin 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 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.

"Rose 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, UncleJohn.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
Joaquin, 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.Valparaiso 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.

"I do not know what you are talking about, Uncle.  Based on one glass
of orange juice, Miss Rose has invented a novel about my being in love.
This person came to deliver some crates, I offered him some juice, he
took it, and then he left.  That all.  Nothing happened, and I have
never seen him again."

"If it is as you say, you are fortunate.  That's one fantasy you won't
have to eradicate."

John Sommers continued drinking and talking till early dawn, while
Eliza, curled up in the English leather chair, fell asleep thinking
that her prayers had been heard in heaven after all.  It wasn't a
timely earthquake that had saved her from Mama Fresia's terrible
ministrations but her uncle.  In the hut in the patio, the Indian
waited the whole night long.

=.

The Farewell

{_ aturday afternoon John Sommers invited his sister > Rose to visit
the ship owned by the Rodriguez de VJ Santa Cruz brothers.  If
everything worked out in the current negotiations, he would be
captaining it, at last fulfilling his dream of sailing with steam.
Later Paulina received them in the salon of the Hotel Ingles, where she
was staying.  She had traveled from the north to set the ball rolling
on her project, seeing that her husband had been in California for
several months.  They took advantage of the constant stream of ships
coming and going to communicate via a vigorous correspondence in which
declarations of love were interwoven with business plans.  Paulina had
incorporated John Sommers into their enterprise solely on intuition.
She remembered vaguely that he was the brother of Jeremy and Rose
Sommers, some people from the English colony her father had invited to
the hacienda once or twice, but she had seen him only once and hadnt
exchanged more than a few courteous words with him.  Their one
connection was their shared friendship with Jacob Todd, but in recent
weeks she had made inquiries and was very satisfied with what she had
heard.  The captain had a solid reputation among seafaring men and in
commercial accounting offices.  He was a man whose experience and word
could be trusted, which was more than you could say for many in these
mad times when anyone could rent a ship, form a company of adventurers,
and set sail.  In general they were flimflam men and their ships were
lucky to stay afloat, but that mattered little or not at all since as
soon as they reached California the associations evaporated, the ships
were abandoned, and everyone shot off in search of gold.  Paulina,
however, had a long-term vision.  To begin with, she was not obliged to
respect the whims of strangers, because her only partners were her
husband and her brother-in-law, and besides, the major part of the
capital was hers, so she was free to make her own decisions.  Her
ship--which she christened the Fortuneeven though rather small and a
veteran of seven years at sea, was in impeccable condition.  Paulina
was prepared to pay the crew well to keep them from deserting to the
gold frenzy, but she also assumed that without the iron hand of a good
captain no salary was big enough to maintain discipline on board.  It
was her husband and brother-in-law's plan to export mining tools,
lumber, work clothing, domestic utensils, dried beef, grains, beans,
and other nonperishable produce, but as soon as she set foot
inValparaiso she realized that this plan had occurred to a number of
others and the competition would be ferocious.  She took a good look
around and saw the riot of vegetables and fruits of that generous
summer.  There was more than could be sold.  Vegetables were growing in
every patio and trees were bowed beneath the weight of their fruit; few
people were inclined to pay for what they could have for free.  She
thought about her father's estate, where summer's bounty rotted on the
ground because no one had enough interest to pick it up.  If they could
get it to California it would be more valuable than gold itself, she
thought.

Fresh produce, Chilean wine, medicines, eggs, good clothing, musical
instruments, and--why not--theater extravaganzas, operettas, music hall
performances.  Hundreds of immigrants were streaming into San Francisco
every day.  For the moment they were mainly adventurers and outlaws,
but soon settlers would be coming from the other side of the United
States: honest farmers, lawyers, doctors, teachers, all kinds

> The Farewell of decent people ready to build a life with their
families.  Where there are women, there is civilization, and when that
time comes in San Francisco my ship will be there with all the
necessities, she decided.

Paulina received Captain John Sommers and his sister, Rose, at tea
time, when the heat of midday was waning and a fresh breeze was blowing
from the sea.  She was overdressed in comparison with the sober port
society, head to toe butter-colored mousseline and lace, with a cluster
of curls over each ear and more jewelry than was acceptable at that
hour of the day.  Her two-year-old son was kicking in the arms of a
uniformed nursemaid and a woolly little dog at her feet gobbled the
bits of cake she placed in its mouth.  The first half hour was taken up
with introductions, drinking tea, and remembering Jacob Todd.

"What has become of our good friend?"  inquired Paulina, who would
never forget the eccentric Englishman's intervention in her love affair
with Feliciano.

"I haven't heard anything from him in some time," the captain informed
her.

"He went to England with me a couple of years ago.

He was terribly depressed, but the sea air did him good and by the time
he got off the ship he had recovered his good humor.  The last I knew,
he was thinking of forming a Utopian colony."

"A what?"  Paulina and Miss Rose exclaimed in unison.

"A group to live outside society, with their own laws and government
guided by principles of equality, free love, and communal labor, as I
remember.  At least that was how he explained it a thousand times
during the voyage."

"He is even madder than we thought," Miss Rose concluded, feeling a
touch of sadness for her loyal suitor.

"People with original ideas always end up being considered mad,"
Paulina noted.  "Now, to come to the point.  I have an idea I

would like to discuss with you, Captain Sommers.You know the Fortuna.
How long would it take to steam betweenValparaiso and the Golfo de
Penas?"

"Golfo de Penas?  But that's to the south!  And it's not called the
Gulf of Sorrows for nothing."

"Yes, it's farther south than Puerto Aysen."

"And what will I do there?  There's nothing but islands, forest, and
rain, senora."

"Do you know those waters?"

"Yes, but I thought we were talking about going to San cisco."

"Try these little pastries, they are delicious," she offered, petting
the dog.

While John and Rose Sommers were talking with Paulina in the salon of
the Hotel Ingles, Eliza was roaming through El Almendral with Mama
Fresia.  It was near the time when students and guests were beginning
to gather for the Academy dancing class, and, most untypically, Miss
Rose had let Eliza go for a couple of hours with her nana as chaperone.
Usually she did not let her protegee go near the Academy without her,
but the dancing master did not serve alcoholic beverages until after
sunset, which kept the more troublesome youths away during the early
evening.  Eliza decided to seize the unique opportunity of getting out
of the house without Miss Rose, and convinced Mama Fresia to help her
in her plans.

"Give me your blessing, Mamita," she asked.  "I have to go to

California to look forJoaquin."

"How can you do that, alone and pregnant!"  Mama Fresia exclaimed with
horror.

"If you don't help me, I'll do it alone."

^g^The Farewell wA

"I am going to tell Miss Rose everything!"

"If you do, I'll kill myself.  And then I will come and haunt you for
the rest of your days.  I swear I will," the girl returned with fierce
determination.

The day before, she had seen a group of women in the port negotiating
for a ticket.  Because they looked so different from the women she
normally saw in the street, heads covered winter or summer beneath
their black mantles, she assumed these were the girls her Uncle John
partied with.

"They are worse than dogs, nina; they go to bed for money and have
their big toes in hell," Mama Fresia had told her once.  Eliza had
overheard some things the captain told Jeremy Sommers about the Chilean
and Peruvian women on their way to California with plans to relieve the
miners of their gold, but she couldn't imagine how they were going to
do that.  If those women could make the voyage alone, and survive
without help, she could do it, too, she resolved.  She walked quickly,
her heart thudding and her face half hidden behind her fan, sweating in
the December heat.  She had brought her little velvet bag with the
jewels of her trousseau.

Her new ankle boots were acute torture and her corset squeezed her
waist; the stench of the open sewers that drained all the city's waste
increased her nausea, but she walked erect as she had learned in years
of balancing a book on her head and of playing the piano with a metal
rod strapped to her back.  Mama Fresia, moaning and muttering prayers
in her tongue and slowed by varicose veins, and her pounds, could
barely keep up with her.  Where are we going, child?  Por Dios.... But
Eliza couldn't answer because she didn't know.  She was sure of one
thing: there was no question of pawning her jewels and buying a ticket
to California, because there was no way to do it without her uncle John
learning.  Even though dozens of ships came and went every
day'Valparaiso was a small city, and everyone in the port knew Captain
John Sommers.  She had no identification papers, and no chance at all
of obtaining a passport, because the United States legation in Chile
had been closed due to a frustrated love affair between some North
American diplomat and a Chilean lady.  Eliza concluded that the only
way she could followJoaquinAndieta to California would be to stow away.
Her uncle John had told her that sometimes voyagers were sneaked onto a
ship with the help of a crew member.  Sometimes they managed to stay
hidden the whole trip, other times they died and their bodies went into
the sea without anyone's ever knowing, but if they were discovered both
the stowaway and the ones who had helped him were punished.  That was
one of the times, he said, when he exercised his unquestionable
authority as captain with the greatest rigor: on the high seas there
was no law or justice but his.

Most of the illegal transactions in the port, according to her uncle,
were carried out in the bars.  Eliza had never been inside such a
place, but when she saw a female figure heading for a nearby doorway
she recognized her as one of the women who had been on the dock the day
before looking for a way to get on one of the ships.  She looked very
young; she was short, broad-hipped, full-busted, had two black braids
down her back, and was wearing a cotton skirt, embroidered blouse, and
a shawl around her shoulders.  Without a second thought, Eliza followed
her, while Mama Fresia stood in the street voicing her warnings.  "No
one goes in there but bad women, nina, it's a mortal sin!"  Eliza
pushed the door open and took several seconds to adjust to the darkness
and the blast of tobacco and rancid beer that struck her in the face.
The place was crowded with men, and all eyes turned to look at the two
women.  For an instant, there was an expectant silence, followed
immediately by a chorus of whistles and vulgarities.  The other woman,
a veteran of these scenes, marched toward a table at the rear of the
room, slapping away right and left at hands trying to touch her, but
Eliza stepped back blindly, horrified, not really understanding what
was happening or why those men were shouting at her.  As she backed
toward the door she crashed into a customer coming in.  This individual
grunted something in another language and caught her when she slipped.
He was shocked when he saw who it was.  Eliza, all virginal dress and
fan, was completely out of place.  She in turn immediately recognized
the Chinese cook her uncle had spoken to the day before.

"Tao Chi'en?"  she asked, grateful for her good memory.

The man greeted her by joining his hands before his face and bowing
over and over as the whistling continued from the bar.  Two sailors got
to their feet and stumbled toward them.  Tao Chi'en pointed toward the
door and they both left.

"Miss Sommers?"  he asked once they were outside.

She nodded, but had no opportunity to say more because they were
interrupted by the two sailors from the bar, who loomed in the doorway,
pretty clearly drunk and looking for trouble.

"You dare to bother this pretty little lady, you stinking Chink?"

they threatened.

Tao Chi'en ducked his head, half-turned, and made a move to leave, but
one of the men stopped him short by grabbing his braid and tugging on
it while his buddy exhaled his winey breath in Eliza's face, mumbling
propositions.  Tao Chi'en turned with the reflexes of a cat and faced
the aggressor.  His outsized knife was in his hand, the blade gleaming
like a mirror in the summer sun.  Mama Fresia grunted and without even
thinking shouldered the nearer sailor like a plow horse, grabbed
Eliza's arm, and raced off down the street with an agility unsuspected
in anyone of her pounds.  The two women ran several blocks, putting
distance between them and the red-light district, not stopping until
they reached San Agustin plaza, where Mama Fresia collapsed, trembling,
onto the first bench in sight.

"Ay, nina!  If my pa trona ever finds out, she will kill me.  Let's go
straight home."

"I haven't done what I came to do, Mamita.  I have to go back to that
bar."

Mama Fresia crossed her arms, stoutly refusing to budge, while Eliza
strode back and forth trying to organize a plan in the midst of her
confusion.  There wasn't much time.  Miss Rose's instructions had been
very clear: at exactly six o'clock the coach would be in front of the
dance academy to take them back home.  She had to act quickly, she knew
she would not have a second chance.  This was their standoff when Eliza
saw Tao Chi'en walking serenely in their direction with his hesitant
step and imperturbable smile.  He repeated the usual ritual of his
greeting and then spoke to Eliza in good English to ask whether the
honorable daughter of Captain John Sommers needed assistance.  Eliza
clarified that she was Sommers' niece, not his daughter, and with a
rush of sudden confidence, or desperation, confessed that in fact she
did need his help, but that it was an extremely private matter.

"Something the captain cannot know?"

"No one can know."

Tao Chi'en begged her pardon.  The captain was a good man, he said; it
was true that his employer had been underhanded when he shanghaied him
for his crew, but he had treated him well and Tao could not think of
betraying him.  Crushed, Eliza sank down on the bench with her face in
her hands, while Mama Fresia watched them, not understanding a word of
their English but guessing the drift.

Finally, she leaned over to Eliza and tugged a few times on the velvet
pouch that held the jewels.

"Do you think that anyone does anything for free in this world, nina?"
she asked.

Eliza got the point.  She dried her tears and, indicating a place
beside her on the bench, invited the man to sit down.  She dug into the
pouch and pulled out the pearl necklace her uncle John

I i

C;The Farewell Aa had given her the day before and laid it on Tao
Chien's knees.

"Can you hide me in a ship?  I have to go to California," she
explained.

"Why?  That's no place for women, only bandits."

"I'm looking for something."

"Gold?"

"Something more valuable than gold."

The man stared, openmouthed, because he had never seen a woman capable
of such extremes in real life, only in classic novels in which the
heroines always died at the end.

"With this necklace you can buy your passage.  You don't have to hide,"
said Tao Chi'en, who was not inclined to complicate his life by
breaking the law.

"No captain will take me without notifying my family."

Tao Chien's initial surprise turned into frank amazement.  This woman
was actually planning to dishonor her family and was expecting him to
help her!  A devil had gotten into her body, no doubt of it.

Again Eliza reached into the pouch; she took out a gold brooch set with
turquoises and set it beside the necklace.

"Have you ever loved anyone more than life itself, senor?"  she
asked.

Tao Chi'en looked into the girl's eyes for the first time since they
had met, and he must have seen something in them because he picked up
the necklace and hid it beneath his shirt, then handed the brooch back
to Eliza.  He stood up, adjusted his cotton pants and the butcher knife
in his sash, and again bowed ceremoniously.

"I no longer work for Captain Sommers.  Tomorrow the brigantine Emilia
sails for California.  Come tonight at ten and I will get you on
board."

"How?"

"I do not know.  We shall see."

Tao Chi'en proffered another courteous farewell and walked away so
silently and quickly that he seemed to have vanished like smoke.  Eliza
and Mama Fresia arrived at the dance academy just in time to meet the
coachman, who had killed a half-hour wait while drinking from his
flask.

The Emilia was a ship of French registry, once svelte and swift, but
she had plowed through many seas, and centuries before had lost the
impetus of youth.  She was crisscrossed with ancient marine scars, she
carried a crust of mollusks on her matronly hips, her exhausted joints
moaned in the pounding seas, and her stained and repatched sail looked
like a petticoat ready for the ragbag.  She sailed fromValparaiso on
the radiant morning of February I8, I849, carrying eighty-seven
passengers of the male sex, five women, six cows, eight hogs, three
cats, eighteen sailors, a Dutch captain, a Chilean pilot, and a Chinese
cook.  Eliza was also aboard, but the only person who knew of her
existence was Tao Chi'en.

The first-class passengers were crowded into staterooms on the forward
deck, without much privacy but considerably more comfortable than those
in tiny cabins with four bunks each, or out on the open deck after
casting lots to see where to stow their bundles.

One cabin below the waterline was assigned to the five Chilean women
who were off to test their luck in California.  In the port of Callao,
two Peruvians came aboard and were unceremoniously shoved in with them,
two to a bunk.  Captain Vincent Katz instructed his crew, as well as
the passengers, that they were not to have the least social contact
with the females, for he was not about to allow indecent congress on
his ship, and in his eyes it was obvious that those women were not the
most virtuous--although, inevitably, his orders were violated over and
over during the voyage.  The men greatly missed female companion =SR
The Farewell ^ w ship, and the humble bawds off on an adventure hadn't
a peso in their pockets.  The cows and hogs, well secured in small pens
on the second deck, were to provide fresh milk and meat for the
passengers, whose diet would consist primarily of beans, hardtack,
salted meat, and whatever fish they could catch.  To compensate for
such monotony, the more afRuent passengers brought some of their own
provisions, especially wine and cigars, but most on board endured their
hunger.  Two of the cats were set loose to hold down the rats, which
otherwise would have reproduced uncontrollably during the two months of
the voyage.  The third traveled with Eliza.

The belly of the Emilia held the assorted luggage of the passengers and
cargo destined for the California trade, organized in such way as to
obtain maximum usage of the limited space.  Nothing would be touched
until the final destination, and no one went there except the cook, the
one person with authorized access to the strictly rationed dried
staples.  Tao Chi'en kept the keys at his waist, and personally
answered to the captain for the contents of the storerooms.

There, in the darkest, deepest pit of the ship, in a two-by-two-meter
hole, went Eliza.  The walls and ceiling of her cavern were trunks and
cases of merchandise; her bed was a sack, and the only light came from
a candle stub.  She had a soup bowl for food, a jug for water, and
bucket for her physical needs.  She could take a couple of steps and
stretch among the bales and crates, and could cry and scream as much as
she wished, because the sloshing of the waves against the ship
swallowed her voice.  Her one contact with the outside world was Tao
Chi'en, who invented a variety of pretexts to come down to feed her and
empty her bucket.  Her only company was the cat, closed in the hold to
control the rats, but during the terrible weeks of the sailing the
unfortunate animal slowly went crazy, and finally, sadly, Tao Chi'en
cut its throat with his knife.

Eliza was taken aboard in a sack over the back of a stevedore, one of
many loading cargo and luggage inValparaiso.  She never learned how Tao
Chi'en had managed to win the man's complicity and evade the vigilance
of the captain and the pilot, who entered in a log everything that came
onto the ship.  She had escaped a few hours earlier thanks to a
complicated scheme that involved a fake written invitation from the del
Vane family to come visit for a few days at their hacienda.  It was not
an outlandish subterfuge.  On previous occasions the daughters of
Agustin delValle had invited her to the country and Miss Rose had
allowed her to go, always accompanied by Mama Fresia.  She said
good-bye to Jeremy, Miss Rose, and her uncle John with false
lightheartedness, feeling a weight like a stone in her chest.

She saw them sitting at the breakfast table reading English newspapers,
completely innocent of her plans, and an overwhelming indecision nearly
caused her to stay.  They represented security and well-being;

they were her only family, but she had crossed the line of decency;

there was no turning back.  The Sommers had brought her up within the
strict norms of good behavior and such a serious slip sullied their
good name.  If she fled, the family reputation would be stained but at
least they would have the benefit of the doubt: they could always say
she had died.  Whatever story the Sommers offered the world, she
wouldn't have to watch them suffer the shame.  The odyssey of going to
find her lover seemed to be her one possible course, but in that moment
of silent farewell she was assaulted by such sadness that she came
close to bursting into tears and confessing everything.  Then the last
image of Joaquin Andieta the night he had left materialized with
startling precision to remind her of her debt to their love.  She
caught up some loose strands of hair, set her Italian straw bonnet on
her head, and left waving good-bye.

She took with her the suitcase Miss Rose had packed with her best
summer dresses, a little money she had taken from Jeremy Sommers' room,
and the jewels of her trousseau.  She had been ll tempted to take Miss
Rose's as well, but at the last moment was stayed by her respect for
the woman who had been a mother to her.  In her own room, in the empty
coffer, she left a brief letter thanking them for all they had done for
her and reiterating how much she loved them.  She added a confession
about the things she had taken, to protect the servants from being
accused.  Mama Fresia had put her stoutest boots in the suitcase, along
with her notebooks and the bundle of Joaquin Andieta's love letters.
She also took a heavy Castile woolen mantle, a gift from her uncle
John.  They left without arousing the least suspicion.  The coachman
left them in the street of the del Vane home and drove out of view
without waiting for the gate to be opened.  Mama Fresia and Eliza set
off toward the port to meet Tao Chi'en at the place and the time they
had agreed upon.

He was waiting for them.  He took the suitcase from Mama Fresia's
hands, and motioned to Eliza to follow him.  The girl and her nana
embraced for a long time.  They knew they would never see each other
again, but neither shed tears.

"What are you going to tell Miss Rose, Mamacita?"

"Nothing.  I am leaving right now to go to my people in the south; no
one will ever find me."

"Thank you, Mamita.  I will never forget you."

"And I am going to pray that everything goes well with you, nina," were
the last words Eliza heard from Mama Fresia's lips before she followed
the Chinese cook into a fisherman's hut.

In the dark, windowless wood shack reeking of fish, its only
ventilation the door' Tao Chi'en handed Eliza a pair of baggy trousers
and a worn smock, indicating that she should put them on.  He made no
move to go outside or discreetly turn away.  Eliza hesitated; she had
never removed her clothes before a man, except Joaquin Andieta, but Tao
Chi'en, who lacked a sense of privacy, failed to perceive her
confusion; the body and its functions were natural to him, and he
considered modesty more inconvenient than virtuous.  Eliza realized
that this was not the time for scruples; the ship was leaving that
morning and the last dinghies were loading on the stragglers' luggage.
She removed her straw bonnet, undid the buttons on her kidskin boots
and her dress, untied the ribbons of her petticoats and, nearly
swooning with shame, gestured to Tao Chi'en to help her undo her
corset.  As the articles of a young English lady's clothing piled up on
the floor one by one, she was losing contact with known reality and
irreversibly entering the strange illusion that would be her life in
the months to come.

She had the clear sensation of beginning a new story in which she was
both protagonist and narrator.

Fourth Son

Tao Chi'en had not always had that name.  In fact, he had no name until
he was eleven; his parents were too poor to worry about details,

he was simply called Fourth Son.  He was born nine years before Eliza
in a village in the province of Kwangtung, a day and a half's walk from
the city of Canton.  He came from a family of healers.

For countless generations the men of his blood had passed from father
to son their knowledge of medicinal plants, the art of drawing off bad
humors, magic for frightening away demons, and skills for regulating
energy: The year Fourth Son was born, the family found itself in worse
poverty than ever, and for some time they had been losing their land to
moneylenders and gamblers.  The officials of the empire collected
taxes, kept the money, then imposed new tributes to cover up what they
had stolen, and for good measure demanded illegal commissions and
bribes.  Fourth Son's family, like most of the peasants, could not pay.
If they managed to save a few coins of their meager income from the
mandarins, they immediately lost them gambling, one of the few
diversions available to the poor.  They could bet on frog and
grasshopper races, cockroach fights, or fan-tan, along with many other
popular games.

Fourth Son was a happy child who laughed over nothing, but he also had
an unusual ability to concentrate and a keen curiosity for learning. 
By the time he was seven he knew that the talent of a good healer
consists of maintaining the balance between yin and yang.  At nine he
knew the properties of the regional plants and could help his father
and older brothers in the tiresome preparation of the plasters, salves,
tonics, balms, syrups, powders, and pills of the peasant pharmacopoeia.
First Son and his father traveled by foot from village to village
offering treatments and remedies while Second Son and Third Son
cultivated the wretched piece of land that was the family's only
capital.  Fourth Son had the mission of collecting plants, and he liked
doing that because it allowed him to wander outside the village
unsupervised, inventing games and imitating the songbirds.  Sometimes,
if she had enough strength after her endless household chores, his
mother went with him. Because she was a woman, she could not work the
land without drawing the derision of the neighbors.  The family
scratched to make ends meet, falling deeper and deeper into debt, until
the fateful year of I834 when their worst demons descended with full
fury.  First a pot of boiling water overturned on the youngest sister,
barely two, scalding her from head to foot.  They applied egg white to
the burns and treated her with the herbs indicated in such injuries,
but in less than three days the child died, exhausted from suffering. 
The mother never recovered.  She had lost other sons and daughters in
infancy; each had left a bleeding wound, and the little girl's accident
was like the grain of rice that makes the bowl overflow.  She began to
decline before their eyes, thinner every day, her skin greenish, her
bones brittle, and all her husband's brews could not stay the
implacable advance of her mysterious illness until the morning they
found her rigid, a smile of relief on her lips and her eyes at peace
because at last she was going to meet the children she had lost.  The
funeral rites were very simple, because she was a woman and because
they could not pay a monk.  Neither did they have rice to offer
relatives and neighbors during the ceremony; but at least they made
sure that her spirit did not take refuge in the roof, the well, or the
rats' nests, and later come out to haunt them.  Without the one ll ll
whose strength and patience had kept the family together through every
trial, it was impossible to fend off calamity.  It was a year of
typhoons, bad harvests, and famine; the vast land of China was overrun
with beggars and bandits.  The one girl child left in the family, who
was seven, was sold to an agent and never heard from again.  First 2
Son, destined to take his father's place in the calling of itinerant
healer, was bitten by a rabid dog and died soon after, foaming at the
mouth, his back arched like a bow.  Second Son and Third Son were of an
age to work, and to them fell the task of looking after their father in
life, along with the future responsibilities of carrying out the
funeral rites at his death and honoring his memory and that of their
male ancestors for five generations.  Fourth Son was of no particular
value and was another mouth to feed, so his father sold him into ten
years of servitude to merchants whose caravan passed near the village. 
The boy was eleven years old.

Thanks to one of those happy events that often changes the course of a
life, that period of slavery, which could have been a hell for the boy,
would turn out to be much better than the years he had spent under the
paternal roof.  Two mules pulled the cart loaded with the heavy goods
of the caravan.  A nerve-racking squeal accompanied every turn of the
wheels, purposely left un oiled in order to frighten away demons.
Fourth Son was tied with a rope to one of the animals to keep him from
running away.  Barefoot and thirsty, with his meager bundle of
belongings on his back, he saw the roofs of his village and all the
familiar landscape fade away behind him.  He wept bitterly from the
moment he left his father and brothers.  Life in their little hut was
the only life he had known, and it had not been unhappy;

his parents had treated him gently, his mother had told him stories,
and any excuse was cause to laugh and celebrate, even in times of the
worst poverty.  He trotted along behind the mule, convinced that every
step was taking him deeper and deeper into the territory of evil
spirits, and

WA Fourth Son ca fearing that the squealing of the wheels, and the
little bells hanging from the cart, would not be enough to protect him.
He could barely understand the merchants' dialect, but the few words he
could capture struck fear into his bones.  They were talking about the
many unhappy spirits roaming the region, lost souls of the dead who had
not received a proper funeral.  Famine, typhus, and cholera had strewn
the landscape with corpses and there were not enough living left to
honor so many dead.  Fortunately, ghosts and demons had a reputation
for being a little slow; they didn't know how to turn a corner and were
easily distracted with offerings of food or paper gifts.  Sometimes,
however, nothing could keep them away and they might suddenly reappear,
eager to earn their freedom by murdering strangers and inhabiting their
bodies to make them carry out unthinkable deeds.  The caravan had
traveled for hours; the summer heat and the thirst were intense;

the little boy tripped every two steps, and his impatient new masters
urged him on by flicking his legs with a willow switch, though with no
real malice.  As the sun set, they decided to stop and make camp.

They relieved the animals of their load, built a fire, brewed tea, and
split into small groups to play fan-tan and mahjongg.  Finally they
remembered Fourth Son and handed him a bowl of rice and a glass of tea,
which he attacked with the voraciousness of months of hunger.  As they
were eating, they were surprised by deafening yells and found
themselves engulfed in a cloud of dust.  The travelers' howls were
added to those of the attackers, and the terrorized boy dragged himself
beneath the cart as far as the rope he was tied by would allow.  This
was no legion from hell, he quickly realized, but a band of robbers,
one of many that, flaunting defiance of bumbling imperial soldiers,
afflicted the highways and byways in those hopeless times.  As soon as
the merchants recovered from their first shock, they seized their
weapons and confronted the attackers amid a tumult of yells, threats,
and shots that lasted but a few minutes.  When the dust settled, one
of

^;/ Fourth Son ;s the bandits had escaped and two others were lying on
the ground, gravely wounded.  The merchants tore the cloth masks from
their faces and revealed two ragged adolescents armed v.ith clubs and
crude spears.  The brigands were decapitated with dispatch so that they
would suffer the humiliation of leaving this world in pieces, not whole
as they had come into it, and their heads were impaled on stakes on
either side of the road.  As the merchants were catching their breath,
they found one member of the caravan writhing on the ground with a
serious spear wound in the thigh.  Fourth Son, who had been paralyzed
with fear beneath the cart, came wriggling out of his hiding place and
respectfully asked the honorable merchants if he could attend the
wounded man; since there was no alternative, they gave Fourth Son
permission to proceed.  He asked for tea to wash away the blood, then
opened his pack and pulled out a bottle containing bai yao.  He rubbed
the white salve on the wound, wrapped the leg tightly, and proclaimed
without hesitation that in fewer than three days the wound would have
healed.  And so it did.  That incident saved Tao Chi'en from spending
the next ten years working like a slave and being treated worse than a
dog: the merchants took notice of his skills and sold him in Canton to
a famous traditional physician and acupuncture master--a zhong yi--who
needed an apprentice.  With that wise man, Fourth Son acquired
knowledge he would never have obtained from his rustic father.

His aged master was a placid man, slow to speak, with a face as round
as the moon, and bony, sensitive hands, his best instruments.

The first thing he did with his servant was give him a name.  He
consulted astrological and seers' books to find the name that
corresponded to the boy'Tao.The word had several meanings, among them
"way,""direction,""sense," and "harmony," but especially it represented
the journey of life.  The master gave Tao his own family name.

"You will be callediao Chi'en.That name will start you on the road of
medicine.  Your destiny will be to ease pain and achieve wisdom.  You
will be a zhong yi, like me."

Tao Chi'en....The young apprentice received his name gratefully.  He
kissed his master's hands and smiled for the first time since he had
left his home.  The impulse of joy that once made him dance with
happiness for no reason at all beat again in his chest, and his smile
did not fade for weeks.  He skipped around the house, savoring his name
like a sweet in his mouth, repeating it aloud and dreaming of it, until
he was fully identified with it.  His master, follower of Confucius in
practical matters and of Buddha in ideology, taught him with a firm
hand but with great gentleness the discipline that led to making him a
good physician.

"If I succeed in teaching you everything I mean to, someday you will be
an enlightened man," he told him.

He maintained that rites and ceremonies were as necessary as the norms
of good behavior and respect for hierarchies.  He said that knowledge
was of little use without wisdom, and that there was no wisdom without
spirituality, and that true spirituality always included service to
others.  As he explained many times, the essence of a good physician
consisted of a capacity for compassion and a sense of the ethical,
without which qualities the sacred art of healing degenerated into
simple charlatanism.  He liked the ready smile of his apprentice.

"You have already traveled a good distance along the path of
wisdom'Tao.The wise man is always joyful," he maintained.

Throughout the year' Tao Chi'en got out of bed at dawn, like any
student, to do his hour of meditation, chants, and prayers.  He had one
day of rest on which to celebrate the New Year working and studying
were his only occupations.  Before anything else, he had to learn

Fourth Son 0

Chinese script to perfection, it was the official medium of
communication in that enormous land of hundreds of peoples and
languages.

His master was inflexible in regard to the beau tv and precision of
calligraphy, which distinguishes the refined man from the scoundrel.

He also insisted on developing in Tao Chi'en the artistic sensitivity
which, according to him, characterized the superior being.  Like all
civilized Chinese, he had an immeasurable aversion to war and was, in
contrast, inclined toward the arts of music, painting, and literature.
By his side' Tao Chi'en learned to appreciate the delicate lace of a
spiderweb pear led with dewdrops in the light of dawn and to express
his pleasure in inspired poems written in elegant calligraphy.  In the
opinion of the master, the only thing worse than not writing poetry was
writing it badly.  In his master's house the boy attended the frequent
reunions in which the guests admired the garden and created verses in
the impulse of the instant, while he served tea and listened,
enthralled.

One could win immortality by writing a book, especially a book of
poems, said the master, who had written several.  To the homespun
practical knowledge he had acquired by watching his father at work Tao
Chi'en added the impressive theoretical volume of ancestral nese
medicine.  The youth learned that the human body is composed of five
elements: wood, fire, earth, metal, and water, and that those elements
are associated with five planets, five atmospheric conditions, five
colors, and five notes.  Through the proper use of medicinal plants,
acupuncture, and cupping glasses, a good physician could prevent and
cure various maladies and control masculine energy--active and
light--and feminine energy--passive and dark: yin and yang.  The goal
of this art, however, was not so much to eliminate illness as to
maintain harmony.  "You must choose your food, orient your bed, and
conduct your meditation according to the season of the year and the
direction of the wind.  In that way you will always resonate with the
universe," the master counseled.

The zhong yi was content with his fate, although the lack of
descendants weighed like a shadow over his serenity of spirit.  He had
never had sons, despite the miraculous herbs regularly ingested during
an entire lifetime to cleanse his blood and fortify his member, and the
remedies and spells applied to two wives, both dead in their youth, as
well as the many concubines who followed.  He had to accept with
humility that it had not been the fault of those self-denying women but
the apathy of his virile liquors.  None of the remedies for fertility
he had used to help others aided him, and finally he became resigned to
the irrefutable fact that his loins were barren.  He stopped punishing
his wives with fruitless demands and enjoyed them to the full, in
accord with the precepts of the beautiful pillow books in his
collection.  However, the aged physician, far more interested in
acquiring new knowledge and exploring the narrow path of wisdom, had
long ago, one by one, shed the concubines whose presence distracted him
from his intellectual pursuits.  He did not have to have a young woman
before his eyes in order to describe her in elegant poems; memory was
sufficient.  He had also surrendered hope for sons of his own, but he
needed to prepare for the future.  Who would help him in the last stage
of his life and at the hour of his death?  Who would clean his tomb and
venerate his memory?  He had trained apprentices before, and with each
had nourished the secret ambition of adopting him, but none was worthy
of the honor.  Tao Chi'en was no more intelligent or intuitive than the
others, but he carried within him an obsession for learning that the
master immediately recognized because it was identical to his own.  He
was, besides, a sweet and entertaining lad; it was easy to become fond
of him.  In the years they lived together, he gained such an
appreciation of Tao that often he asked himself how it was possible
that he was not a child of his blood.  Nevertheless, esteem for his
apprentice did not blind him; in his experience the changes of
adolescence may be very profound, and he could not predict what kind

Fourth Son F of man Tao would make.  As the Chinese proverb says,
"Brilliance in youth does not guarantee worth in maturity."  He feared
he would be mistaken, as he had been before, and he preferred to wait
patiently for the true nature of the boy to be revealed.  In the
meanwhile, he guided him, as he did the young trees in his garden, to
help him grow straight.

At least this one learns quickly, the aged physician thought,
calculating how many years he had left to live; according to the astral
signs and careful observation of his body, he would not have time to
train a new apprentice.

Soon Tao Chi'en learned to select their supplies in the market and herb
shops.  Watching the physician as he worked, he came to know the
intricate mechanisms of the human body, procedures for cooling fevers
and fiery temperaments, for giving warmth to those who suffered the
cold of approaching death, for stirring the juices in sterile men, and
for stopping the flux of watery bowels.  He made long trips through the
fields to look for the best plants at the precise point of maximum
efficacy, then wrapped them in damp rags to keep them fresh on his way
back to the city.  When he turned fourteen, his master considered him
ready to practice and regularly sent him to attend prostitutes, with
the stringent order to abstain from any commerce with them because, as
he himself would see when he examined them, death rode on their
shoulders.

"Diseases of the brothels kill more people than opium and typhus.  But
if you carry out your obligations and learn at a good pace, in due time
I will buy you a young virgin," his master promised.

Tao Chi'en had suffered hunger as a boy, but his body stretched until
he became taller than any other member of his family.  At fourteen, he
felt no attraction toward those girls for hire, merely scientific
curiosity.  They were too different from him; they lived in a world
that was so remote and secret that he could not consider them truly
human.  Later, when the sudden onslaught of nature unhinged him and he
was staggering around like a drunk tripping over his shadow, his
teacher regretted having let his concubines go.

Nothing so distracted a good student from his responsibilities as the
explosion of virility.  A woman would calm him, and in passing be
useful in giving him practical knowledge, but the idea of buying one
was bothersome the master was comfortable in his solely masculine
universe and he gave Tao herbal teas to calm his ardor.

The zhong yi did not remember the hurricane of carnal passions, and
with the best intention gave his student the pillow books from his
library to read as part of his education, not thinking to measure the
debilitating effect they would have on his wretched pupil.  He made Tao
memorize each of the two hundred twenty-two positions of love, along
with their poetic names, until he could identify them unhesitatingly in
the exquisite illustrations of the books, all of which added
immeasurably to the young man's distraction.

Tao Chi'en became as familiar with Canton as once he had been with his
small village.  He liked that ancient, chaotic, walled city of twisting
streets and canals, where palaces and huts were jumbled together
indiscriminately and there were people who lived and died on boats on
the river without ever stepping onto dry land.  He grew used to the
humid, hot climate of a long summer lashed with typhoons but pleasant
in the winter months of October to March.

Canton was sealed to foreigners, although from time to time pirates
flying flags of other nations made a surprise raid.  There were a few
locations where from November to May foreigners could trade their
merchandise, but there were so many taxes, regulations, and obstacles
that most international merchants chose to set up business in Macao.

Early in the morning, when Tao Chi'en was on his way to the market, it
was not unusual to find newborn baby girls thrown like garbage into the
street or floating in the canals, often chewed on by dogs or rats.  No
one wanted them, they were disposable.  Why feed a daughter

: Fourth Son who had no value and was going to end up as a servant in
the home of her future husband?

"Better a deformed son than a dozen girls as wise as Buddha," was the
popular saying.  There were too many children anyway.  Brothels and
opium dens proliferated on all sides.

Canton was a populous city, rich and lighthearted, filled with temples,
restaurants, and gaming houses, where all the festivals of the calendar
were noisily observed.  Even punishments and executions became a cause
for a celebration.  Great crowds gathered to cheer on the executioners
with their bloody aprons and collections of sharp knives that could lop
off a head with a single sure-handed blow.  Justice was meted out
promptly and simply, with no appeal or unnecessary cruelty except in
the case of betrayal of the emperor, the worst possible crime, which
was paid for with slow death and the banishment of all relatives,
thereby reduced to slavery.  Minor crimes were punished by lashing or
by placing the guilty party's head in a wood stock for several days so
that he could not rest or reach his head with his hands to eat or
scratch.  Squares and markets were home to the popular storytellers
who, like mendicant monks, traveled about the country preserving a
centuries-old oral tradition.  Jugglers acrobats, snake charmers,
transvestites, traveling musicians, magicians, and contortionists
performed in the streets, while all around them seethed a commerce in
silk, tea, jade, spices, gold, tortoiseshell, porcelain, ivory, and
precious stones.

Vegetables, fruits, and meats were offered in colorful profusion:

cabbages and tender bamboo shoots were displayed beside cages of the
cats, dogs, and raccoons that at a client's request the butcher killed
and skinned in one maneuver.  There were long alleys where only birds
were sold--for no one was ever without birds--and their cages, from the
simplest to those made of the finest woods inlaid with silver and
mother-of-pearl.  Other passageways in the market were devoted to
exotic fish, which were known to attract good fortune.  Tao Chi'en,
always curious, would entertain himself looking at everything and
making friends, and then he would run to complete his errands in the
sector where the supplies for his vocation were sold.  He could
identify it blindfolded from the penetrating scent of spices, plants,
and medicinal barks.  Dried serpents were rolled up and set in heaps
like dusty coils of rope; toads, salamanders, and strange marine
creatures were strung on cords like beads; crickets and large beetles
with hard phosphorescent shells languished in boxes; monkeys of all
kinds awaited their turn to die; bear and orangutan paws, antelope and
rhinoceros horns, tiger eyes, shark fins, and claws of mysterious
nocturnal birds were sold by weight.

Tao Chien's first years in Canton were spent in study, work, and
service to his aged mentor, whom he came to respect like a grandfather.
Those were happy years.  The memory of his own family faded and he
forgot the faces of his father and his brothers, but not his mother's,
because she appeared to him frequently.  Study soon ceased to be a task
and became a passion.  Every time he learned something new, he flew to
his master to blurt it out to him.  "The more you learn, the sooner you
will know how little you know," the ancient would say, laughing.  On
his own initiative' Tao Chi'en decided to learn Mandarin and Cantonese,
because the dialect of his village seemed very limited.  He absorbed
the knowledge of his master so swiftly that the old man jokingly
accused him of stealing even his dreams, but his passion for teaching
made him generous.  He shared with the boy everything he wanted to
investigate, not only in matters of medicine but other aspects of his
vast reserve of knowledge and refined culture.

Magnanimous by nature, he was nonetheless severe in his criticism and
demanding of effort, because, as he said,"I do not have much time left
and I cannot take all I know to the other world, someone must use it
upon my death."  However, he also warned his pupil against greed for
learning, for that could fetter a man as surely as gluttony or lust.

"The wise man desires nothing; he does not judge, he makes no plans,

;

Fourth Son he keeps his mind open and his heart at peace," he
maintained.  He reprimandedWao Chi'en with such sadness when the youth
failed that he would have preferred a lashing, but that practice went
against the nature of the zhong yi, who never allowed anger to
determine his actions.  The only occasions on which he ceremoniously
punishediao Chi'en with a willow switch, without anger but with firm
didactic purpose, was when he could prove beyond a shadow of a doubt
that his apprentice had yielded to the temptation of gambling or had
paid for a woman.  Tao Chi'en used to juggle the market bills in order
to make bets in the gaming houses, whose attraction he could not
resist, or for a brief, student-rate consolation in the arms of one of
his patients in the brothels.  It never took the master long to
discover these offenses, because if Tao lost in gambling he could not
explain what had happened to the change, and if he won he was incapable
of hiding his euphoria.  As for women, his master could smell them on
his skin.

"Take off your shirt, I will have to apply the bamboo and see if
finally you understand, my son.  How many times have I told you that
the worst evils in China are gambling and brothels?  In the former, men
lose the product of their labors, and in the latter they lose their
health and life.  You will never be a good physician or a good poet if
you have those vices."

In I839, when the Opium War between China and Great Britain broke out'
Tao Chi'en was sixteen years old.  At that point the country was
overrun with beggars.  Masses of humanity poured from the countryside
and appeared with their tatters and pustules in the cities, where they
were driven back, forced to wander the highways of the empire like
packs of starving dogs.  Bands of robbers and rebels fought an endless
war of ambushes against the government troops.  It was a

!

period of destruction and pillage.  The weakened imperial armies, under
the command of corrupt officers receiving contradictory orders from
Peking, could do nothing against the power fill and well disciplined
English fleet.  They could not draw upon popular support because the
peasants were so weary of seeing their paddies destroyed, their
villages in flames, and their daughters raped by soldiers.  At the end
of almost four years of struggle, China had to accept a humiliating
defeat and pay the equivalent of twenty-one million dollars to their
British conquerors, yield Hong Kong to them, and grant them the right
to establish "concessions," residential enclaves protected by
extraterritorial laws.  There the foreigners lived with their own
police, services, and government and laws, guarded by their own troops.
The "concessions" were true foreign nations inside Chinese territory,
from which the Europeans controlled trade, principally opium.  They did
not enter Canton until five years later, but after the acupuncture
master witnessed the degrading defeat of his venerated emperor and saw
the economy and morale of his nation sag, he decided there was no
reason to go on living.

During the war years the aged zhong yi's spirit visibly deteriorated
and he lost the serenity so arduously won over the course of his
lifetime.  His withdrawal and inattention to material matters reached
such a point that after his master had eaten nothing for days' Tao
Chi'en had to spoon food into his mouth.  The accounts became
hopelessly entangled and creditors began to beat at the door, but his
master dismissed them, for anything having to do with money seemed a
repugnant burden from which sages were naturally immune.  In the senile
confusion of his last years' Tao teacher forgot his good intentions in
regard to adopting his apprentice and providing him with a wife; in
truth, his mind was so cloudy that he often sat staring at Tao Chi'en
with a perplexed expression, unable to remember his name or to place
him in the labyrinth of faces and events that assailed him without

Fourth Son S

order or harmony.  But he had enough spirit still to direct the details
of his burial, because for enlightened Chinese the most important event
in life was one's funeral.  The idea of putting an end to his
depressing life by means of an elegant death had been with him for some
time, but he awaited the outcome of the war with the secret and
irrational hope of seeing the triumph of the armies of the celestial
empire.  The foreigners' arrogance was intolerable; he felt a great
scorn for those brutal fan wey, white ghosts who seldom washed, who
drank milk and alcohol, and who were ignorant of the elementary norms
of good behavior and incapable of honoring their ancestors as custom
demanded.  To him, the commercial accords seemed a favor the emperor
had granted the ingrate barbarians who, instead of bowing before him
with praise and gratitude, kept demanding more.  When the treaty of
Nanking was signed, it was the final blow for the zhong yi.The emperor,
and every citizen of China down to the most humble, was dishonored. 
How could one recover his dignity following such an affront?

The ancient sage poisoned himself by swallowing gold.  When his
disciple returned from one of his excursions into the country to gather
plants, he found the zhong yi in the garden, lying on silk cushions and
dressed in white as a sign of mourning for himself.  By his side, his
tea was still warm and the ink from his brush still fresh.  On his
small desk was an unfinished poem, and a dragonfly cast a shadow upon
the smooth parchment.  Tao Chi'en kissed the hands of this man who had
given him so much, then paused in the crepuscular light for an instant
to appreciate the tracery of the dragonfly's transparent wings, just as
his master would have wished him to do.

An enormous crowd attended the sage's funeral, because during his long
life he had helped thousands of persons live in good health and die
without agony.  Government officials and dignitaries filed by with the
greatest solemnity, literati recited their best poems, and courtesans
showed up in their finest silks.  A seer determined the most favorable
day for the burial and an artist who crafted funeral offerings visited
the house of the deceased to copy his possessions.  He went around the
property slowly, without taking measurements or notes, although beneath
his voluminous sleeves he was making marks in a wax tablet with his
fingernail.  Later he constructed paper miniatures of the rooms and
furnishings of the house, including the dead man's favorite objects, to
be burned with bundles of paper money.  He must not in the other world
be deprived of the things he had enjoyed in this one.  The coffin,
which was huge and decorated like an imperial carriage, passed through
the streets of the city between two rows of soldiers in dress uniform
preceded by horsemen attired in brilliant colors and a band of
musicians playing cymbals, drums, flutes, bells, triangles, and a
variety of stringed instruments.  The noise was unbearable, befitting
the importance of the deceased.  Flowers, clothing, and food were
heaped upon his grave; candles and incense were lighted;

and, finally, the money and quantities of paper objects were burned.

The ancestral gold-sheathed tablet engraved with the master's name was
placed upon the grave to receive his spirit, while the body returned to
the earth.  It was the role of the eldest son to accept the tablet and
install it in a place of honor in his home beside those of other male
ancestors, but the physician had no one to carry out that duty.  Tao
Chi'en was only a servant and it would have been an unforgivable breach
of etiquette for him to offer.  He was genuinely moved;

among the throng he was surely the only one whose tears and wailing
represented true grief, but the ancestral tablet ended up in the hands
of a distant nephew whose moral obligation it would be to bring
offerings and pray before it every two weeks and on each anniversary.

Once these solemn funeral rites were realized, the creditors fell like
jackals upon the master's possessions.  They ravaged the sacred texts
and the laboratory, pawed through the herbs, spoiled the medic

Fourth Son i-XC

inal preparations, destroyed his carefully crafted poems, carried off
his furniture and art objects, trampled the beautiful garden, and
auctioned off the ancient mansion.  Only shortly before, Tao Chi'en had
safely hidden the gold acupuncture needles, a case containing medical
instruments and a few essential remedies, and a small amount of money
he had been filching for the last three years, ever since his master
had begun to lose his way in the barren landscape of senile dementia.
It was not his intention to steal from the venerable zhong yi, whom he
revered like a grandfather, but to use the money to feed him, because
he saw the debts piling up and feared the future.  The suicide had
precipitated events, however, and Tao Chi'en found himself in
possession of an unexpected bonanza.  Taking those funds could cost him
his head, for his would be a crime of inferior against superior, but he
was sure that no one would know except the spirit of the deceased, who
undoubtedly would have approved his action.  Would he not prefer
rewarding his faithful servant and disciple to paying one of the many
debts he owed to ravenous creditors?  With this modest treasure and a
change of clean clothing' Tao Chi'en fled the city.  It occurred to
him, fleetingly, to return to the village of his birth, but he
immediately discarded that plan.  To his family, he would always be
Fourth Son, he would owe submission and obedience to his older
brothers.  He would have to work for them, accept the wife they chose
for him, and resign himself to lifelong poverty.  Nothing called him in
that direction, not even filial obligations to his father and his
ancestors, which fell to his older brothers anyway.  What he needed was
to go somewhere far away, somewhere the long arm of Chinese justice
could not reach.  He was twenty years old, and he had one year left
before he would have fulfilled the ten years of his servitude, and any
one of the creditors could claim the right to use him as a slave for
that time.

 n

Tao Chi'en tao Chi'en took a sampan to Hong Kong with the | intention
of beginning a new life.  Now he was a l zhong yi, trained in
traditional Chinese medicine by the finest master in Canton.  He owed
eternal gratitude to the spirits of his venerable ancestors, who had
worked out his karma in such a glorious manner.  The first thing he
must do, he decided, was take wife, for he was of an age, and more, to
marry, and celibacy was too heavy a load.  The absence of a wife was a
sign of poverty that could not be hidden.  He cherished the prospect of
acquiring a delicate young woman with beautiful feet.  Her'golden
lilies" should not be more than three or four inches long, and should
be plump and soft to the touch, like the feet of an infant of a few
months.  He was fascinated by the way a young girl walked on those
minuscule feet, with short, very hesitant steps, as if she were always
about to fall, hips thrown back and swaying like the reeds at the edge
of the pond in his master's garden.  He detested large, muscular, and
cold feet like those of a peasant woman.  In his village, from afar, he
had seen girls with bound feet, the pride of their families, who
undoubtedly would marry them well, but only when he visited the
prostitutes in Canton had he held two of those golden lilies in his
hands and swooned in ecstasy over the tiny embroidered slippers that
always covered them--necessarily, because for years and years the
destroyed bones seeped a foul-smelling substance.  After he touched
such feet, he realized that their elegance was the fruit of constant
pain, and that made them even more valuable.

aL

Then he properly appreciated the books in his master's collection that
were devoted to women's feet, describing the five classes and eighteen
different styles of golden lilies.  His wife must also be very young,
for beauty lasted but a brief time: it began sometime around the
twelfth year and ended shortly after the woman reached twenty.  These
things his master had explained to him.  It was not for nothing that
the most celebrated heroines of Chinese literature always died at the
precise moment of their greatest charm.  Fortunate were those who
departed this world before they were ruined by age and could still be
remembered in the fullness of their fresh beauty.  There were also
practical reasons to prefer a nubile girl: she would give him male
children and it would be easy to tame her nature and make her truly
submissive.

Nothing as disagreeable as a shrieking woman; he had seen some who spit
at their husbands and children and slapped them about, even in the
street in front of the neighbors.  Such humiliation at the hands of a
woman was the worst shame for a man.  In the sampan that slowly carried
him the ninety miles between Canton and Hong Kong, leaving his past
life farther behind by the minute' Tao Chi'en dreamed of that girl, of
the pleasure and the sons she would give him.  Again and again he
counted the money in his pocket, as if with abstract calculations he
could make it grow, but it was clear that it would not stretch far
enough for a wife of the quality he desired.  Nevertheless, he was not
content, however great his urgency, to settle for less and live the
rest of his days with a wife who had large feet and a strong
character.

The island of Hong Kong appeared suddenly before his eyes, with its
profile of mountains and green vegetation, emerging like a siren from
the indigo waters of the China Sea.  As soon as his light boat docked
in the port, Tao Chi'en noted the presence of the despised foreigners.
He had seen a few of them before, but at a distance;

now he saw them so near that had he dared he could have touched them to
test whether those huge, graceless creatures were truly human.

With amazement, he discovered that many of the fan wey had red or
yellow hair, pale eyes, and skin the color of boiled lobsters.  He
thought the women very ugly; they were wearing hats bedecked with
feathers and flowers, perhaps trying to cover that diabolical hair.
They were dressed in an extraordinary fashion, in stiff clothing that
bound their bodies tightly.  He supposed that was why they moved like
automatons and did not greet each other with friendly bows; they passed
by stiff as poles, not looking at anyone, suffering the summer heat in
their uncomfortable clothing.  There were a dozen European ships in the
port, surrounded by thousands of Asian boats of all sizes and colors.
In the streets he saw a few carriages driven by uniformed men, lost
among the many vehicles propelled by humans: litters, palanquins,
handbarrows, and porters simply carrying their fare on their backs. The
smell of fish came like a slap, reminding him that he was hungry. First
he must locate a place to eat, which he would know by its long strips
of yellow silk.

Tao Chi'en ate like a prince in a restaurant crowded with people
talking and laughing at the tops of their voices, an unmistakable sign
of contentment and good digestion, where he savored the delicate dishes
that had long been forgotten in the house of his master.

The zhong yi had been a great gourmet during his lifetime and had
prided himself on having had the best cooks in Canton in his service,
but during his latter years he had lived on green tea and rice with a
few shreds of vegetables.  At the time Tao Chi'en had escaped his
servitude, he was as thin as any of the countless people in Hong Kong
who suffered from tuberculosis.  This was his first decent meal in a
very long time, and the onslaught of tastes, aromas, and textures was
ecstasy.  He ended the feast with the pleasure of a pipe.  He went
outside floating and laughing aloud, like a madman: he had never felt
so filled with enthusiasm and good luck.  He breathed in the air about
him, so reminiscent of Canton, and decided that it would be

easy to conquer that city just as nine years earlier he had conquered
the other one.  First he would look for the market and the district of
the healers and herbalists, where he would find a place to live and
offer his professional services.  Then he would consider the matter of
the woman with the tiny feet.

That very afternoon' Tao Chi'en found lodging in the attic of a large
house divided into compartments that housed one family per room, a
veritable anthill.  His room, a dark tunnel a meter wide by three
meters long, windowless, dark, and hot, trapped the fumes from the
cooking and chamber pots of the other renters, mixed with the
unmistakable stench of general filth.  Compared to his master's refined
home it was like living in a rat hole, but he remembered that his
parents' home had been even poorer.  As an unmarried man he did not
need more space or luxury, he decided, only a corner where he could put
his pallet and few belongings.  Later, when he married, he would look
for an appropriate dwelling where he could prepare his medicines,
attend his patients, and be served by his wife as was fitting.  For the
moment, while he established contacts indispensable to his work, this
space at least gave him a roof and a bit of privacy.  He left his
things and went to bathe, shave the front of his skull, and rebraid his
queue.  As soon as he was presentable, he left to look for a gaming
house, determined to double his capital in the least possible time and
get started along the path of success.

In less than two hours at on-tan' Tao Chi'en lost all his money; he did
not lose his medical instruments only because he had not thought to
bring them.  The shouting in the gaming hall was so thunderous that
bets were made by signaling through the dense tobacco smoke.

Fan-tan was a simple game: it consisted of a handful of counters
underneath a cup.  Bets were taken, the chips counted out four at a
time, and the person who guessed how many were left--one, two, three,
or none--won.  Tao Chi'en could scarcely follow the hands of the man
who threw the chips and counted them.  It seemed to him that he had
been cheated, but to accuse the banker in public would have been an
offense so grave that were he in error he would have paid with his
life.  Every day in Canton, the bodies of insolent losers were picked
up in the area of the gaming houses; it would be no different in Hong
Kong.  Tao returned to his tunnel in the attic and threw himself down
on his mat and wept like a baby, thinking of the switchings he had
received at the hands of his former acupuncture master.  His despair
lasted until the following morning, when he recognized his impatience
and his arrogance with abysmal clarity.  Then he burst out laughing,
grateful for the lesson, convinced that the mischievous spirit of his
master had presented it to teach him something more.  He had been
awakened in total darkness by the noise of the house and the street. It
was late morning, but no natural light reached his hole.  Groping in
the dark, he put on his only change of clean clothing.  He was still
laughing as he took his medical kit and set out for the market.  In the
tattoo artists' shops, covered from top to bottom with pieces of cloth
and paper exhibiting their patterns, one could choose from among
thousands of designs, from discreet flowers in indigo-blue ink to
fantastic five-color dragons whose unfolded wings and fiery breath
could decorate the entire back of a husky man.  He spent half an hour
bargaining and finally made a deal with an artist willing to trade a
modest tattoo for a tonic to flush the liver.  In less than ten
minutes, he had tattooed on the back of his right hand, the hand he
used for making bets, the word "No" in simple and elegant characters.

"If you like the tonic, recommend my services to your friends," Tao
Chi'en requested.

"If you like my tattoo, do the same," the artist replied.

Tao Chi'en always claimed that that tattoo brought him luck.

He went from the shop into the hurly-burly of the market, pushing and
elbowing his way through the narrow alleyways seething with humanity.
He did not see a single foreigner, and the market looked exactly like
the one in Canton.  The noise was like a roaring waterfall: vendors
crying the merits of their merchandise and clients bargaining at the
top of their lungs in the midst of a deafening riot of caged birds and
whimpering animals awaiting their turn for the blade.  The pestilence
of sweat, live and dead animals, excrement and garbage, spices, opium,
street kitchens--all the products and creatures of earth, air, and
sea--was so thick you could rub it between your fingers.  He saw a
woman selling crabs.  She took them live from a sack, boiled them a few
minutes in a pot of water the murky consistency of the bottom of the
sea, dipped them out with a slotted spoon, doused them with soy sauce,
and served them to passing customers on a piece of paper.  The woman's
hands were covered with warts.  Tao Chi'en negotiated a month's lunches
in exchange for treating her skin.

"Ah.  I see you like crabs very much," she said.

"I detest them, but I will eat them as a penitence so I never forget a
lesson I must remember forever."

"And if at the end of a month I am not cured, who will give me back the
crabs you have eaten?"

"If at the end of the month you have your warts, my reputation is
ruined.  Who will buy my medicines then?  "Tao smiled.

"Very well."

And so began Tao's new life in Hong Kong as a free man.

In two or three days the inflammation faded and the tattoo appeared as
a clean design of blue veins.  All that month, as he went from stand to
stand in the market offering his professional services, he ate only
once a day, always boiled crabs, and lost so much weight he could stick
coin between his ribs.  Every creature he put into his mouth,
conquering his revulsion, made him smile, thinking of his master, who
liked crabs as little as he.  The woman's warts disappeared in
twenty-six days and she gratefully spread the good news around the
neighborhood.  She offered Tao a second month of crabs if he would cure
her cataracts, but he believed he had suffered enough punishment and
could grant himself the luxury of never tasting a crab again for the
rest of his life.  At night he dragged back to his hole, exhausted,
counted his money by candlelight, hid it under a floorboard, and then
warmed water on the charcoal brazier to endure his hunger with tea.
From time to time, if he began to feel weak in the knees or in his
resolve, he bought a scoop of rice, a bit of sugar, or a pipe of opium,
which he savored slowly, grateful that there were gifts in the world as
dazzling as the consolation of rice, the sweetness of sugar, and the
perfect dreams of opium.  He spent money on nothing but rent, English
classes, shaving his fore skull and having his change of clothes
laundered because he did not want to go about like a beggar.  His
teacher had always dressed like a mandarin.

"Good appearance is a sign of civility, a zhong yi is not the same as a
country healer.  The poorer the patient, the richer your clothing
should be, out of respect," he had taught his pupil.  Gradually Tao's
reputation spread, first among the people in the market and their
families, then through the port, where he treated sailors for injuries
from brawls, scurvy, venereal chancres, and delirium tremens.

After six months, Tao Chi'en had a faithful clientele and had begun to
prosper.  He moved to a room with a window, furnished it with a large
bed, which he would use when he married, a chair, and an English desk.
He also bought a few items of clothing; for years he had wanted to
dress well.  He had made up his mind to learn English because it hadn't
taken long to learn where the power

Tao Chi en G

lay.  A handful of British controlled Hong Kong, made the laws and
administered them, and commanded the course of commerce and
politics.Thejan wey lived in exclusive neighborhoods and had dealings
with wealthy Chinese only to do business, always in English.

The remaining masses shared the same space and time, but it was as if
they did not exist.  China's most refined products flowed through Hong
Kong directly to the drawing rooms of a Europe fascinated with that
centuries-old, remote culture.  Chinoiserie was the rage.

Silk caused a furor in the fashion world; one could not be without
graceful bridges with little lanterns and weeping willows imitating the
marvelous secret gardens of Peking; pagoda rooftops ornamented summer
houses; and dragon and cherry blossom motifs were repeated ad nauseum
in decor.  There was no English mansion without an Oriental drawing
room with its Coromandel screen, its collection of porcelains and
ivories, its fans embroidered by childish hands in the forbidden
stitch, its imperial canaries in carved cages.

The ships that carried those treasures to Europe did not return empty;
they brought opium from India to sell as contraband, and trinkets that
devastated small local industries.  The Chinese had to compete with the
English, Dutch, French, and North Americans to do business in their own
country.  But the greatest disaster was opium.  It had been used in
China for centuries as a diversion and for medicinal purposes, but when
the English flooded the market it became an uncontrollable evil.  It
attacked all sectors of the society, weakening it, causing it to
crumble like stale bread.

At first the Chinese looked on the foreigners with scorn and disgust,
with the great superiority of those who feel they are the only truly
civilized beings in the universe, but in the space of a few years they
learned to respect and fear them.  As for the Europeans, they were
imbued with the same concept of racial superiority, sure of their role
as heralds of civilization in a land of dirty, ugly, weak,

noisy, corrupt, and savage people who ate cats and snakes and killed
their own children at birth.  Few were aware that the Chinese had known
writing a thousand years before they had.  While businessmen were
imposing a culture of drugs and violence, missionaries were
evangelizing.  Christianity must be propagated at any cost; it was the
one true faith, and the fact that Confucius had lived fifteen hundred
years before Christ was insignificant.  The British considered the
Chinese barely human, but they intended to save their souls and
rewarded conversions with rice.  The new Christians would consume their
ration of divine bribery and move on to the next church to be converted
all over again, amused by the mania of the fan wey for preaching their
beliefs as if they were unique.  For the practical and tolerant
Chinese, spirituality was closer to philosophy than to religion; it was
a question of ethics, never dogma.

Tao Chi'en took lessons from a compatriot who spoke a soupy English
devoid of consonants but wrote it with absolute correctness.

Compared to Chinese characters, the European alphabet had an enchanting
simplicity, and after five weeks Tao Chi'en could read the British
newspapers without stumbling over the letters, although every fifth
word he had to look up in the dictionary.  He spent hours every night
studying.  He missed his venerable master, who had marked him forever
with a thirst for knowledge as persistent as the drunk's thirst for
alcohol or the ambitious man's thirst for power.  He no longer had his
mentor's library or his inexhaustible fount of experience; he could not
run to him to ask for advice or to discuss a patient's symptoms; he
lacked a guide, he felt like an orphan.  Since his mentor's death he
had not written or read poetry, had not taken the time to admire
nature, to meditate, or to observe the daily rites and ceremonies that
had previously enriched his life.  He felt filled with noise inside; he
longed for the void of silence and solitude his master had taught him
to cultivate as life's most precious gift.  In the practice of his
office he was learning

; ^ Tao Chien U

about the complex nature of humankind, the emotional differences
between men and women, the illnesses treatable with remedies and those
that also required the magic of the right words, but he had no one to
share those experiences with.  The dream of buying a wife and having a
family was always in his mind, but misty and tenuous, like beautiful
landscape painted on silk; in contrast, his wish to acquire books, to
study and find other masters willing to help him along the road of
knowledge was turning into an obsession.

This was the state of affairs when Tao Chi'en met Dr.

Ebanizer Hobbs, an English aristocrat who had none of their usual
arrogance and who, unlike other Europeans, was interested in the local
color of the city.  Tao Chi'en saw him first in the market picking
through the herbs and potions in a healer's shop.  Hobbs knew only ten
words of Mandarin, but he spoke them in such a booming voice and with
such conviction that a small crowd--half mocking, half frightened--had
gathered around him.  He was easy to see from a distance because his
head rose far above the Chinese.  Tao Chi'en had never seen a foreigner
in this part of the city, so far from the sectors they normally
frequented, and he moved closer to observe him better.  Hobbs was a
young man still, tall and slender, with noble features and large blue
eyes.  Tao Chi'en found to his delight that he could translate the jan
wey's ten words, that he knew at least that many more in English, and
that it might be possible to communicate.  He greeted the Englishman
with a cordial bow and the foreigner answered by clumsily imitating his
gesture.  Both smiled, and then broke out laughing, chorused by the
friendly chortles of the spectators.  They began an eager dialogue of
twenty words badly pronounced on both sides and a comic pantomime
performed to the growing hilarity of the curious.  Soon there was a
group sizable enough to block traffic, all weak with laughter, which
attracted a British mounted policeman who ordered the throng to
disperse immediately.  That was the birth of a solid alliance between
the two men.

Ebanizer Hobbs was as aware of the limitations of his calling as Tao
Chi'en was of his.  The former wanted to learn the secrets of the
Eastern medicine he had seen flashes of during his travels through
Asia, especially the control of pain through needles inserted at nerve
terminals and the use of combinations of plants and herbs to treat
number of illnesses that in Europe were considered fatal.  Tao Chi'en
was fascinated by Western medicine and its aggressive methods of
treatment; his was a subtle art of balance and harmony, a slow process
of rerouting misdirected energy, preventing illness, and seeking the
causes of symptoms.  Tao Chi'en had never practiced surgery, and his
knowledge of anatomy, extremely precise in regard to the different
pulses and acupuncture points, was limited to what he could see and
touch.  He knew from memory the anatomical drawings in the library of
his former master, but it had never occurred to him to dissect cadaver.
That custom was not accepted in Chinese medicine: his wise master, who
had practiced the art of healing for a lifetime, had rarely seen an
internal organ and was incapable of a diagnosis if he encountered
symptoms that did not fit within the repertory of known ills.

Ebanizer Hobbs, on the other hand, dissected cadavers and looked for
the cause; that was how one learned.  Tao Chi'en did that for the first
time in the basement of the English hospital, on a night of typhoons,
as assistant to Dr.  Hobbs, who that same morning had placed his first
acupuncture needles to relieve a migraine in the consulting office
where Tao Chi'en attended his patients.  In Hong Kong there were a few
missionaries interested in curing the body as well as converting the
souls of their congregation, with whom Dr.  Hobbs maintained excellent
relations.  These evangelists were much closer to the local population
than the British physicians of the colony, and they admired the methods
of Eastern medicine.  They opened the doors of their

> Tao Chi'en IL

small hospitals to the zhong yi.  The enthusiasm of Tao Chi'en and
Ebanizer Hobbs for study and experimentation inevitably led to
friendship.  They met almost in secret, because had their mutual
respect and admiration been common knowledge, they would have risked
their reputations.  Neither European nor Chinese patients admitted that
the other race had anything to teach them.

As Tao Chi'en became more comfortable financially, the wish to buy a
wife began to occupy his dreams again.  On his twenty second birthday,
he once again added up his savings, as he often did, and was elated to
find that he had enough for a woman with tiny feet and a sweet nature.
As he did not have parents to assist him in making his choice, as
custom demanded, he had to consult an agent; there he was shown
portraits of various candidates, but they all looked alike; he found it
impossible to deduce a girl's looks-much less her personality--from
those modest ink sketches.  It was forbidden for him to see the
prospective wife with his own eyes, or hear her voice, as he would have
liked; neither did he have a female family member to do it for him. 
One thing was allowed: he could view a girl's feet as she stood behind
a curtain, but he had been told that not even that was reliable because
the agents often cheated and substituted the golden lilies of a
different woman.  He had to trust in fate.  He came close to leaving
the decision to the dice but the tattoo on his right hand reminded him
of past misadventures in games of chance, and he chose to commend the
task to the spirits of his mother and his acupuncture master.  After
going to five temples to make offerings, he cast the I Ching sticks,
where he read that it was the propitious moment, and so chose his
bride.  The method did not fail him.  When he lifted the red silk
kerchief from the face of his new wife following minimal ceremonies,
since he did not have money for a more splendid wedding--he saw a
harmonious face with eyes cast obstinately to the ground.  He repeated
her name three times before she dared look at him with tear-filled
eyes, trembling with fright.

"I will be good to you," he promised, as emotional as she.

From the moment he lifted that red cloth, Tao adored the girl fate had
bequeathed him.  That love took him by surprise; he had not imagined
that such feelings could exist between a man and a woman.  He had never
heard anyone discuss that kind of love, he had only read vague
references in classical literature in which maidens, like landscapes or
the moon, were the obligatory subjects of poetic inspiration.  Even so,
he had believed that in the real world women were either creatures for
working and reproducing, like the peasant women he had grown up among,
or else were expensive ornaments.  Lin did not fit into either of those
categories, she was mysterious and complex person capable of disarming
him with her irony and challenging him with her questions.  She made
him laugh like no one else could, invented impossible stories, provoked
him with word games.  In Lin's presence, everything seemed to be
lighted with an irresistible glow.  That miraculous discovery of
intimacy with another person was the most profound experience of his
life.  He had had his share of hurried, cock-of-the-walk encounters
with prostitutes, but had never had the time and love to know anyone
deeply.  To open his eyes in the morning and see Lin sleeping beside
him made him laugh with happiness, and an instant later tremble with
anguish.  What if one morning she didn't wake up?

The sweet fragrance of her perspiration in their nights of love, the
fine line of her eyebrows lifted in an expression of perpetual
surprise, the impossible slenderness of her waist, everything about her
choked him with tenderness.  Oh, and the two of them laughing!

That was best of all, the natural joy of that love.  His old master's
pil

v Tao Chi en low books, which had caused such empty excitement in his
adolescence, proved to be a great benefit at the hour of their
pleasure.

As befitted a young, well-bred virgin, Lin was modest in her everyday
behavior, but almost as soon as she lost her fear of her husband, her
spontaneous and passionate femininity emerged.  In a short time, that
eager student learned the two hundred twenty-two manners of making love
and, always willing to follow in that headlong race, suggested to her
husband that he invent new ones.  Fortunately for Tao Chi'en, the
refined knowledge learned in theory in his mentor's library included
countless ways of pleasing a woman, and he knew that vigor counted for
much less than patience.  His fingers were trained to perceive the
body's pulses and to locate its most sensitive points blindfolded.  His
warm, strong hands, expert in soothing his patients' pain, became
instruments of infinite pleasure for Lin.  Furthermore, he had
discovered something the honorable zhong yi had forgotten to teach him:
that the best aphrodisiac is love.  In bed they could be so happy that
by night life's problems were erased.  But those problems were many,
which was evident all too soon.

The spirits Tao Chi'en had invoked to help in his matrimonial choice
had done their work to perfection: Lin had bound feet and was as sweet
and timid as a squirrel.  But Tao Chi'en had not thought to ask that
his wife also be strong and healthy.  The same woman who seemed
inexhaustible at night was during the day transformed into an
invalid.

She could walk no farther than a block or two on her tiny, mutilated
feet.  It is true that when she walked, she moved with the soft
delicacy of a reed in the breeze, as the ancient acupuncture master had
written in one of his poems, but it was no less true that a short trip
to the market to buy a cabbage for dinner was true torment to her
golden lilies.

She never complained aloud, but he had only to see her perspire and
bite her lips to guess the effort of every step.  She also had weak
lungs.

She breathed with the sharp whistle of the goldfinch, lived through the
rainy season with a runny nose and in the dry season choked because the
warm air seemed to pass no farther than her lips.

Neither her husband's herbs nor the tonics of his friend the English
doctor could help her.  When she became pregnant she grew worse, for
her fragile build could barely support the weight of the child.  In the
fourth month, she stopped going out altogether, and sat listlessly
before the window watching life passing in the street.  Tao Chi'en
hired two servant girls to take over the domestic chores and stay with
her, because he feared that Lin would die in his absence.  He doubled
his working hours and for the first time harassed his patients to pay,
which filled him with shame.  He could feel the critical gaze of his
master reminding him of the duty to serve without expecting a return,
for' he who knows most has the greatest obligation toward humanity." He
could not, nevertheless, work for free or in exchange of favors as he
had before; he needed every cent to keep Lin comfortable.  By then he
had rented the second floor of an old house, where he installed his
wife with refinements that neither of them had known before, but he
wasn't satisfied.  It was in his mind to get her a house with a garden;
that way she would have beauty and pure air.

His friend Ebanizer Hobbs told him--since Tao himself refused to see
the evidencc that Lin's tuberculosis was very advanced and that there
was no garden capable of curing her.

"Instead of working from dawn to midnight to buy her silk dresses and
beautiful furniture, stay with her as much as possible, Dr.  Chi'en.You
must enjoy her while you have her," Hobbs counseled.

The two physicians agreed, each from the perspective of his own
experience, that the birth would be a test of fire for Lin.  Neither
was expert on this subject, for in Europe as well as China births were
in the hands of midwives, but the men decided to study in that area.

Neither Hobbs nor Tao Chi'en had any confidence in the expertise of
some low, coarse woman--which was how they regarded all the women who
practiced midwivery.  They had watched them work, with their revolting
hands, their witchery, and their brutal methods for separating the baby
from the mother, and were determined to spare Lin that miserable
experience.  She, however, did not want to give birth in the presence
of the two men, especially when one of them was a jan wey with pale
eyes, someone who could not even speak the language of civilized
beings.  She begged her husband to go to the neighborhood midwife,
because the most elementary decency prohibited her from spreading her
legs before a foreign devil, but this time Tao Chi'en, always ready to
please her, was inflexible.

Finally, they agreed that he personally would attend her while Ebanizer
Hobbs stayed in the next room to lend verbal support, should it be
needed.

The first indication of the coming birth was an asthma attack that
nearly cost Lin her life.  Her efforts to breathe were enmeshed with
those of her womb to expel the infant, and both Tao Chi'en, with all
his love and science, and Ebanizer Hobbs, with his medical texts, were
helpless to know what to do.  Ten hours later, when the moans of the
mother had been reduced to the harsh gurgling of someone drowning and
the baby gave no signs of being born, Tao Chi'en raced out to look for
the midwife and despite his revulsion practically dragged her home.  As
Chi'en and Hobbs had feared, the woman was a foul-smelling old drab
with whom it was impossible to exchange the least medical information
because her knowledge came not from science but from long experience
and ancient instinct.  She began by shoving the two men aside,
forbidding them even to put their heads through the curtains that
separated the two rooms.  Tao Chi'en never learned what happened behind
that bar rier but he felt better when he heard Lin breathing without
choking and screaming.  In the following hours, while Ebanizar Hobbs
slept exhausted in a chair andWao Chi'en desperately consulted the
spirit of his master, Lin brought a lifeless girl child into the
world.

As the baby was female, neither the midwife nor the father made any
effort to revive her, though both gave themselves to the task of saving
the mother, who was losing what little strength she had at the rate the
blood flowed from between her legs.

Lin scarcely mourned the death of the baby girl, as if she knew she
would not live long enough to have raised her.  Slowly she recovered
from the difficult delivery and for a while tried to be the happy
companion of their nighttime game.  With the same discipline she had
used to mask the pain of her feet, she pretended enthusiasm for her
husband's passionate embraces.  "Sex is a voyage, a sacred voyage," she
had often said to him, but now she lacked the spirit to accompany him.
Tao Chi'en so longed for that love that one by one he ignored the
telltale signs and kept believing to the end that Lin was the same as
she had been.  For years he had dreamed of sons, but now all he wanted
was to protect his wife from another pregnancy.  His feelings for Lin
had become a veneration that he could confess only to her;

he thought that no one could understand such consuming love for a
woman, that no one knew Lin as he did, that no one knew the light she
brought to his life.  I am happy, I am happy, he kept repeating to
drive away the dark premonitions that assaulted him when he dropped his
guard.  But he was not happy.  He didn't laugh now with the same
lightheartedness, and when he was with Lin he took little pleasure from
it, except in some perfect moments of carnal intimacy, because he was
watching her every minute, worried, always thinking of her health,
aware of her fragility, measuring the rhythm of her breathing.  He came
to despise her golden lilies, which in the early days of their marriage
he had kissed with sublime passion.  Ebanizer

Hobbs wanted Lin to take long outings in the open air to strengthen her
lungs and pique her appetite, but she could barely take ten steps
without faltering.  Tao could not stay beside his wife every minute, as
Hobbs suggested, because he had to provide for them.  Each instant he
was away from her seemed life wasted in unhappiness, time stolen from
love.  He placed all his experience with herbs at the service of his
beloved, all the knowledge he had acquired over years of practicing
medicine, but one year after the birth Lin had become a shadow of the
happy gid she had once been.  Her husband kept trying to make her
laugh, but their laughter rang false to them both.

One day Lin could not get out of bed.  She lay choking, her strength
draining away, coughing blood and trying to breathe.  She refused to
eat anything except spoonfuls of a clear soup, because the effort
exhausted her.  She slept in spurts during the few moments she wasn't
coughing.  Tao Chi'en calculated that for six weeks her breathing had
been a liquid rasping, as if she were underwater.  When he picked her
up in his arms, he could tell how much weight she was losing, and his
heart shrank with terror.  He had watched her suffer so much that her
death should have come as a relief, but the fateful morning when he
awakened embracing Lin's icy body, he thought he, too, would die.A long
and terrible scream born from the depths of the earth, like the roar of
a volcano, shook the house and waked everyone in the vicinity.  The
neighbors came and kicked down the door to find him naked in the middle
of the room, holding his wife in his arms and howling.  They had to pry
her body from his arms and hold him down until Ebanizer Hobbs arrived
and made him drink a dose of laudanum capable of felling a lion.

Tao Chi'en sank into widowerhood with total despair.  He made an altar
with the portrait of Lin and some of her belongings, and spent hours
staring at it in desolation.  He stopped seeing his patients or sharing
studies and research with Ebanizer Hobbs, activities on which their
friendship was based.  He was repelled by the advice of the lishman,
who maintained that what he needed was a bit of the hair of the dog,
and that the best way to get over his grief was to visit the brothels
in the port, where he could choose all the women he wanted with
deformed feet--Hobbs's term for golden lilies.  How could his friend
suggest such an abhorrent idea?  The woman didn't live who could
replace Lin; he would never love another, of that Tao Chi'en was sure.
All he accepted from Hobbs during that period were his generous bottles
of whiskey.  For weeks he lived in a haze of alcohol;

gradually his money ran out and he had to sell or pawn his possessions,
until the day came that he couldn't pay his rent and had to move to a
cheap hotel.  Then he remembered that he was a zhong yi and began to
work again, although he barely managed, unshaven, dirty, the hair in
his queue flying.  Since he had a good reputation, his patients put up
with his unkempt appearance and drunken errors with resignation, but
gradually they stopped coming to see him.  And Ebanizer Hobbs stopped
calling on him to treat difficult cases because he had lost confidence
in Tao's judgment.  Until that time they had complemented each other
well: the Englishman was for the first time able to perform surgery
boldly, thanks to the power fill drugs and golden needles that soothed
pain, reduced hemorrhaging, and shortened the time of healing, and the
Chinese physician had learned to use the scalpel and other techniques
of European science.  But with his trembling hands and eyes clouded by
intoxication and tears' Tao Chi'en represented a danger more than he
did support and assistance.

In the spring of I84?"Tao Chien's destiny took a sudden turn, as it had
once or twice before in his life.  As he lost his regular patients and
the rumor spread of his downhill course as a physician, he had to
concentrate more in the poorest sections of the port, where no one

-Tao Chiten Rd asked for references.  The cases were routine:
contusions and knife and bullet wounds.  One night Tao Chi'en was
called to an emergency in a tavern to stitch a sailor's injuries
following a royal free-for-all.  They led him to the back of the room
where a man was lying unconscious, his head split open like a
watermelon.  His opponent, a gigantic Norwegian, had picked up a heavy
wood table and used it as a club to defend himself against his
attackers, a gang of Chinese intending to beat him to a pulp.  They had
rushed the Norwegian and would have made mincemeat out of him had not
several Scandinavian sailors drinking at the same bar come to his
rescue, and what had begun as an argument among drunken gamblers turned
into a racial brawl.  By the time Tao Chi'en arrived, anyone who could
walk had long since disappeared.  The Norwegian, uninjured, was
escorted to his ship by two English policemen, and the only ones left
in sight were the tavern keeper, the dying victim, and the ship's
pilot, who had worked out an arrangement to send the police on their
way.  Had the victim been European he would have been taken to the
British hospital, but since he was Asian the port authorities were not
putting themselves out too much.

Tao Chi'en took one look and could see that nothing could be done for
that poor devil whose skull was cracked wide open and his brains
spilling out.  This he explained to the pilot, a bearded, heavyset
Englishman.

"Damned chink!  Can't you stop the blood and sew him up?"

he demanded.

"With his head like that?  Why sew him up?  He has a right to die in
peace."

"He can't die!  My ship sails at dawn and I need this man onboard.

He's my cook!"

"Very regrettable, "Tao Chi'en replied with a courteous bow of his
head, trying to hide his disgust at the jan wey's insensitivity.

The pilot ordered a bottle of gin and invited Tao Chi'en to have a
drink with him.  If the cook was beyond consolation they might as well
lift a glass in his name, he said, so his fucking ghost, a pox on him,
didn't come and pull their toes at night.  They sat down a few feet
from the dying man to take their time getting drunk.

Occasionally Tao Chi'en bent down to take the man's pulse, calculating
that he couldn't have more than a couple of minutes longer to live, but
the man was slower to die than he'd thought.  The zhong yi was
oblivious to how the Englishman was pouring him drink after drink while
barely downing his.  Soon Tao felt so dizzy he couldn't remember what
he was doing in that place anyway.  And an hour later, when his patient
twice shuddered violently and actually died, Tao Chi'en missed it
because he had rolled to the floor, unconscious.

He waked to the blinding light of midday, opened his eyes, squinting,
and as soon as he could raise his head saw nothing but sky and water
all around him.  It took him quite a while to realize that he was lying
faceup on a large coil of rope on the deck of a ship.  The pounding of
the waves against the hull beat in his head like a clanging bell.

He thought he heard voices and shouting, but he wasn't sure of
anything; he could just as easily have been in hell.  He struggled to
his knees and crawled forward a couple of meters, but was overcome by
nausea and collapsed back onto the deck.  A few minutes later he felt
the shock of a pail of cold water splash over his head and heard a
voice speaking to him in Cantonese.  He looked up and saw a beardless,
sympathetic face greeting him with a wide smile from which half the
teeth were missing.A second pail of seawater shook him from his stupor.
The young Chinese man who had so solicitously dumped water on him
squatted down beside him, laughing loudly and slapping his thighs as if
Tao pathetic condition were irresistibly funny.

"Where am I?"Tao Chi'en managed to stammer.

-0 TaoChien S

"Welcome aboard the Liberty!  We're sailing west, I think."

"But I don't want to go anywhere.  I have to get off.

Immediately."

New guffaws met this statement.  When finally the man could control his
hilarity, he explained to Tao that he had been "shanghaied," just as he
himself had been a couple of months earlier.  Tao Chi'en felt he was
going to faint.  He knew what that meant.  If there weren't enough men
to fill out a crew, the captain or pilot fell back on stopgap measures:
getting some unwary bar patron drunk, even knocking him out and
"signing him on" against his will.  Life at sea was rough, and paid
badly; accidents, malnutrition, and illness cut into the ranks; on each
voyage one or more sailors died and their bodies ended up on the ocean
floor with no one to give them another thought.  Added to that, the
captains tended to be despots who did not have to give an accounting to
anyone and who punished the slightest offense with a lashing.  In
Shanghai it was so bad they'd had to reach a gentleman's agreement
among captains to put an end to kidnapping free men and stealing one
another's crew.  Before the accord, every time a sailor came into port
to have a few drinks he ran the risk of waking up on a different ship.
The pilot of the Liberty had decided to replace his dead cook with Tao
Chi'en--in his eyes all the "yellow" race were alike, one was as good
as the next--so after getting Tao drunk he had him hauled aboard.
Before Tao came to, the pilot had stamped his thumbprint on a contract
that signed him up for two years.  Slowly, the magnitude of what had
happened sank into Tao Chien's soggy brain.  The idea of rebelling was
never a consideration, that would be suicide, but he intended to desert
the minute they touched land, wherever on the planet that might be.

The young Asian helped Tao get to his feet and wash his face, then led
him belowdecks to where the berths and hammocks were lined up.  He
assignediao a bunk and a box to store his gear in.  Tao Chi'en feared
he had lost everything, but found the case containing his medical
instruments on the wood planks that would be his bed.  The pilot had
had the good sense to save it.  Lin's portrait, however, was left
behind on its altar.  He realized with horror that the spirit of his
wife might not be able to locate him in the middle of the ocean.  The
first few days at sea were torture; at times he was tempted by the
thought of jumping overboard and ending his suffering once and for
all.

Almost as soon as he could stay on his feet he was assigned to the
rudimentary galley, where the pots hung from hooks, clanging together
with every toss of the waves, making a deafening racket.  The fresh
provisions brought aboard in Hong Kong were rapidly deplered and soon
there was nothing but fish, salted meat, beans, sugar, lard, wormy
flour, and biscuits so stale that sometimes they had to be hacked into
pieces.  Every bite of food was smothered in soy sauce.

Each sailor had a pint of liquor per day to drown his sorrows and rinse
out his mouth, because inflamed gums were one of the problems of life
at sea.  For the captain's table, Tao Chi'en had eggs and marmalade,
which he had been directed to protect with his life.

Rations were calculated to last the trip if no unusual difficulties
arose--such as storms that blew them off course or lying
becalmed-complemented with fresh fish netted along the way.  Great
culinary skill was not expected of Tao Chi'en; his role was to dole out
the food, liquor, and fresh water assigned to each man and to do battle
against spoilage and rats.  He also had a normal share of swabbing and
sailing chores, like any other sailor.

After a week he began to enjoy the fresh air, the hard work, and the
company of those men who came from the four corners of the earth, each
with his stories, his nostalgia, and his skills.  During breaks from
work they would play instruments and tell tales of the phantoms of the
waves and the exotic women in distant ports.  The crew came from many
places, from many tongues and customs, but

Tao Chi en V

they were united by something that resembled friendship.  Isolation,
and the knowledge that they needed one another, made comrades of men
who on dry land would not have given one another a second look.  Tao
Chi'en began to laugh again, as he hadn't laughed since Lin's illness.
One morning the pilot called him to introduce him to Captain John
Sommers, whom Tao had seen only from a distance, on the bridge.  He
found himself facing a tall, darkly bearded, steely-eyed man tanned by
the winds of many latitudes.

He spoke to Tao through the pilot, who knew a little Cantonese, but Tao
replied in his book English, with the affected, aristocratic accent he
had learned from Ebanizer Hobbs.

"Mr.  Oglesby tells me that you are some kind of healer?"

"I am a zhong yi, a physician."

"Physician?  What do you mean, physician?"

"Chinese medicine is several centuries older than the Captain."  Tao
Chi'en laughed gently, using his friend Ebanizer Hobbs's exact words.

Captain Sommers raised his eyebrows, angered by the lowly crew member's
insolence, but was disarmed by the truth of the statement.  He laughed
with good nature.

"Well, we'll see.  Mr.  Oglesby, pour us three glasses of brandy.

We're going to drink a toast to our doctor, here.  This is a rare
luxury.  For the first time we're carrying our own physician
onboard!"

Tao Chi'en did not effect his plan to desert in the first port reached
by the Liberty, because he didn't know where to go.  To return to his
life as a miserable widower in Hong Kong made as little sense as to go
on sailing.  Here or there, it was all the same, and at least as a
seaman he would travel and learn the ways medicine was practiced in
other parts of the world.  The one thing that really tormented him was
that in all that wandering across the waves Lin might not be able to
find him, however much he screamed her name to the winds.

In the first port, he went ashore, like the others, with a six-hour
pass, but instead of spending that time in taverns, following the
captain's orders he dove into the market in search of spices and
medicinal plants.  Now that we have a doctor, we'll need remedies, he'd
said.

He gave Tao a pouch with a specified sum of coins, and warned him that
if he gave a thought to escaping or tricking him, he would hunt him
down and slit his throat with his own hands, for the man hadn't been
born who could cheat him and get away with it.

"Is that clear, Chinaman?"

"It is clear, Englishman."

"You address me as sir!"

"Yes, sir," Tao Chi'en replied, looking down, because he was learning
not to look white men in the face.

His first surprise had been to discover that China was not the absolute
center of the universe.  There were other cultures--more barbaric, that
was true, but much more power fill  He had not suspected that the
British controlled a large part of the globe, just as he had never
suspected that other jan wey were masters of far-reaching colonies in
distant lands spread across four continents, as Captain John Sommers
went to the trouble of explaining to him the day that Tao pulled his
infected tooth as they were sailing off the coast of Africa.

He accomplished that operation cleanly and almost painlessly, thanks to
a combination of his gold needles in the captain's temples and paste of
cloves and eucalyptus applied to his gums.  When it was over, and the
relieved and grateful patient was polishing off his bottle of liquor'
Tao Chi'en dared ask where they were going.  It was upsetting to him to
travel blindly, the blurred horizon between sea and an infinite sky the
only reference.

a TaoChi'en

"We're sailing in the direction of Europe, but for us nothing changes.
We are seafarers, always on water.  Do you want to go back home?"

"No, sir."

"Do you have a family somewhere?"

"No, sir."

"Than it's the same to you whether we're going north or south, east or
west, isn't that true?"

"Yes, but I like to know where I am."

"Why is that?"

"Because if I fall overboard, or the ship sinks, my spirit will need to
know where it is in order to find its way back to China; if not it will
wander around aimlessly.  The gates to heaven are in China."

"Where did you get that daft idea?"  the captain said, laughing.

"So, in order to get to paradise you have to die in China?  Take a look
at the map, man.  Your country is the largest, that's true, but there's
a lot of the world outside China.  Here is England, it is only a small
island, but if you add our colonies you will see that we are masters of
more than half the globe."

"How did you do that?"

"The same way we did it in Hong Kong: with war and deceit.

Let's say that it's a blend of naval power, greed, and discipline.  We
are not superior, we're crueler, and greedier.  I am not particularly
proud of being English, and after you've traveled as much as I have,
you won't be proud of being Chinese, either."

During the next two years' Tao Chi'en stepped on terra firma only three
times, one of which was in England.  He lost himself among the huge
throngs in the port, and walked through the streets of London looking
at new things with the eyes of an enchanted child.  The jan wey were
filled with surprises; on the one hand, they lacked any touch of
refinement and behaved like savages, but on the other, they were
capable of amazing inventiveness.  He confirmed that in their own
country the English suffered the same arrogance and bad manners they
exhibited in Hong Kong: they had no respect for him, and knew nothing
of courtesy or etiquette.  He tried to buy an ale, but they pushed him
out of the inn: No yellow dogs allowed in here, they told him.  Soon he
joined some other Asian sailors and they found a place run by an
elderly Chinese man where they could eat, drink, and smoke in peace.
Listening to the stories the other men told' Tao calculated how much he
still had to learn, and decided that first would be how to use his
fists and his knife.  Knowledge is not of much use if you can't defend
yourself:

the wise acupuncture master had also forgotten to teach him that
fundamental principle.

In February of I849 the Liberty moored inValparaiso.The next day,
Captain John Sommers called Tao to his cabin and handed him a letter.

"This was given to me in the port.  It's for you and it's from
England."

Tao Chi'en took the envelope, blushed, and a huge smile illuminated his
face.

"Don't tell me it's a love letter," the captain joked.

"Better than that," Tao answered, slipping it between his shirt and his
skin.  The letter could only be from his friend Ebanizer Hobbs, the
first he had received in the two years he had been at sea.

"You have done a good job, Chi'en."

"I thought, sir, you did not like my cooking.  "Tao Chi'en said, and
smiled.

"As a cook, you're a disaster, but you know your medicine.  In two
years' time I've not lost a single man, and none of the crew has
scurvy.  Do you know what that means?"

-> TaoChien n "Good fortune."

"Your contract is up today.  I suppose I could get you drunk and make
you sign an extension.  I might do that to another man, but I owe you
some favors and I pay my debts.  Do you want to go on with me?  I will
raise your wages."

"Where are you going?"

"To California.  But I'm going to leave this ship; I have been offered
a steamship, an opportunity I've been waiting a long time for.  I would
like you to come with me."

Tao Chi'en had heard of steamships, and had a horror of them.

The idea of enormous boilers filled with red-hot water to produce steam
and power infernal machinery could have occurred only to people always
in a hurry.  Wasn it far better to travel to the rhythm of the winds
and currents?  Why challenge nature?  He had heard rumors of boilers
that exploded at sea, cooking the crew alive.

Bits of human flesh, parboiled like shrimp, shooting off in all
directions to become fish food while the souls of those wretches,
fragmented in the force of the explosion and swirling steam, could
never rejoin their ancestors.  Tao Chi'en clearly remembered how his
young sister had looked after the pot of hot water emptied over her, as
clearly as he remembered her horrible moans of pain, and her
convulsions as she died.  He was not prepared to run that kind of
risk.

Neither was he overly tempted by the gold in California, although he
had heard it lay about on the ground like rocks.  He did not owe John
Sommers anything.  The captain was a little more tolerant than most of
the jan wey, and he treated his crew with a certain even handedness but
he was not his friend, and never would be.

"No, thank you, sir."

"Don't you want to see California?  You can get rich in a thrice, and
go back to China a man of parts."

"Yes, but on a sailing ship."

"Why is that?  Steamships are more modern, and much faster."

Tao Chi'en did not try to explain his reasons.  He stood silent,
staring at the deck, cap in hand, while the captain finished drinking
his whiskey.

"I can't force you," Sommers said finally.  "I will give you a letter
of recommendation to my friend Vincent Katz who captains the brigantine
Emilia; she is also sailing to California in the next few days.  Katz
is a rather strange Dutchman, very strict and very religious, but he is
a good man and a good sailor.  Your trip will be slower than mine, but
perhaps we will see each other in San Francisco, and if you regret your
decision you can always come back to work with me."

Captain John Sommers and Tao Chi'en shook hands for the first time.

= i ..

The Voyage

* curled in her burrow in the storeroom, Eliza

{ began to die.  To the darkness and the sensation 5_of being walled up
in life was added the odor, a foul blend of the contents of bales and
boxes, barrels of salted fish, and deposits of ocean extracts crusted
on the old planks of the ship.

Her acute sense of smell, so useful for getting through the world with
closed eyes, had become an instrument of torture.  Her only company was
a strange tri colored cat buried, like her, in the hold and there to
keep it free of rats.  Tao Chi'en assured her that she would get used
to the stench and to being closed up because in times of necessity the
body adapts to nearly everything; he added that the voyage would be a
long one and that she could not come out in the fresh air, so she would
be better off not to think if she didn't want to go mad.  She would
have water and food, he promised, he would take care of that when he
could come down to the hold without arousing suspicion.  The ship was
small, but it was crowded and it would be easy to find reasons to slip
down there.

"Thank you.  When we reach California I will give you the turquoise
brooch."

"Keep it, you already paid me.  You will need it.  Why are you going to
California?"

"To be married.  My sweetheart's name is Joaquin.  He was infected by
gold fever and went off to make his fortune.  He said he would be back,
but I can't wait for that."

Almost as soon as the ship left the bay of Valparaiso and was in open
water Eliza began to rave.  For hours she lay in darkness in her own
filth, like an animal, so ill that she didn't remember where she was,
or why; finally the door of the wooden hatch opened and Tao Chi'en
appeared, lighted by the {lame of a candle stub and carrying a plate of
food.  He needed only one look to realize that the girl would not be
able to get anything down.  He gave the meal to the cat and went back
to look for a pail of water so he could clean her up.  He began by
giving her strong ginger tea to drink and inserting a dozen of his
golden needles until her stomach was settled.  Eliza paid little
attention when he removed all her clothing, washed her delicately with
seawater, rinsed her with a cup of freshwater, and massaged her from
head to foot with the balm recommended for malarial fevers.  Minutes
later she was asleep, wrapped in her Castile mantle with the cat at her
feet, while Tao Chi'en was up on deck washing her clothes in the sea,
trying not to call attention, although the sailors were resting at that
hour.  The new passengers were as seasick as Eliza, to the indifference
of those from Europe who had been traveling for three months and had
passed that test.

In the following days, while the new passengers on the Emilia grew
accustomed to the battering of the waves and established the routines
they would follow for the rest of the journey, Eliza was growing
steadily sicker in the depths of the ship.  Tao Chi'en went down as
often as he could to take her water and try to calm her nausea,
surprised that, instead of diminishing, her discomfort was increasing
by the hour.  He tried to give her relief with the known treatments for
such cases and with others he improvised, but Eliza could keep almost
nothing in her stomach and was getting dehydrated.  He prepared water
with salt and sugar, and with infinite patience gave it to her by
spoonfuls, but two weeks went by without any apparent improvement and
the moment came when the girl's skin hung as loose as strips of

The Voyage G parchment and she could no longer get up to do the
exercises Tao insisted on.

"If you don't move, your body will swell and your mind will grow dark,"
he kept telling her.  The ship called briefly in the ports of Coquimbo,
Caldera'Antofagasta, Iquique, and Arica, and in each he tried to
convince Eliza to get off and find a way to go back home, because he
could see her growing weaker and weaker and he was afraid.

They had left the port of Callao behind them when Eliza's condition
took a lethal turn.  In the market Tao Chi'en had found a supply of
coca leaves, whose medicinal properties he knew well, and three live
hens he intended to hide and kill one by one, for the sick girl needed
something more appetizing than their meager ship's rations.  He cooked
the first hen in a broth rich with fresh ginger and went below ready to
feed Eliza the soup if he had to force it down her throat.  He lighted
a whale-oil lamp, picked his way through the cargo, and approached the
rat hole of his patient, who was lying with her eyes closed and did not
seem to know he was there.  Beneath her spread a large pool of blood.
The zhong yi grunted and bent over her, fearing that the pitiful
creature had found a way to commit suicide.  He couldn't blame her, in
similar circumstances he would have done the same he thought.  He
lifted her nightdress, but saw no visible wound, and when he touched
her he realized she was still alive.  He shook her until her eyes
opened.

"I am pregnant," she admitted finally in a thread of a voice.

Tao Chi'en clapped his hands to his head, lost in a litany of laments
in the dialect of his native village, a tongue he had not spoken in
fifteen years: had he known, he would never have helped her, what was
she thinking to leave for California pregnant?"  she was crazy, just
what he needed, a miscarriage, if she died he was lost, what kind of
mess had he gotten himself into?"  was he stupid?, why hadn't he
guessed the reason for her haste in leaving Chile?

He added a few oaths and curses in English, but she was again
unconscious and far beyond any reproach.  He held her in his arms,
rocking her as he would a child as his rage melted into overwhelming
compassion.  For an instant it occurred to him to go to Captain Katz
and confess the whole matter, but he could not predict his reaction.
That Dutch Lutheran, who treated the women on board as if they were
carriers of the plague, would undoubtedly be furious when he learned
that he had another woman aboard, this one a stowaway, and pregnant,
and half dead in the bargain.  And what punishment would he save for
Tao Chi'en?  No, he couldn't say a word to anyone.  His only salvation
would be to wait until Eliza passed on, if that was her karma, and then
throw her body overboard along with the bags of garbage from the
kitchen.  The most he could do for her, if he saw her suffering too
much, would be to help her die with dignity.

He was just leaving when he sensed a strange presence on his skin.
Frightened, he lifted the lamp and with absolute clarity saw in the
circle of the trembling flame his adored Lin watching him from short
distance away, and, on her trans lucid face that teasing expression
that was her greatest charm.  She was wearing her green silk dress with
the gold embroidery, the one she saved for great occasions, and her
hair was pulled back into a simple bun secured with ivory picks and
with a fresh peony over each ear.  That was how he had seen her for the
last time, when the neighbor women had dressed her for the funeral
ceremony.  So real was the apparition of his wife there in the hold
that he was thrown into a panic: spirits, however good in life, tended
to treat mortals very cruelly.  He rushed toward the ladder, but Lin
blocked the way.  Tao Chi'en fell to his knees, trembling, clutching
the lamp, his one tie with reality.  He attempted a prayer to exorcise
devils, in case they had taken Lin's form to confuse him, but he could
not remember the words and only a long moan of love for her and L.--
.o

@ The Voyage @

nostalgia for the past came from his lips.  Then Lin bent down to him
with her unforgettable delicacy, so close that had he dared he could
have kissed her, and whispered that she had not come so far to frighten
him but to remind him of the duties of an honorable physician.  She
herself had nearly bled to death after the birth of her daughter, and
he had been able to save her.  Why did he not do the same for this
young woman?  What had happened to her beloved Tao?  Had he perhaps
lost his kind heart and turned into a cockroach?  A premature death was
not Eliza's karma, she assured him.  If a woman is prepared to travel
the world buried in a nightmarish hole in order to find her man, it is
because she has much qi.

"You must help her, Tao, if she dies without seeing her lover she will
never be at peace and her ghost will pursue you forever," Lin warned
him before she faded away.

"Wait!"  Tao begged, reaching out to stop her, but his fingers closed
on air.

Tao Chi'en lay prostrate on the floor for a long time, struggling to
recapture his reason, until his crazed heart stopped galloping and the
faint scent of Lin had evaporated from the hold.

"Don't go, don't go," he repeated a thousand times, sick with love.
Finally he was able to get to his feet, open the hatch, and go out to
the fresh air.

It was a warm night.  The Pacific Ocean was gleaming like silver in the
moonlight and a light breeze bellied the worn sails of the Emilia. 
Many passengers had already gone to bed or were playing cards in their
cabins; others had hung their hammocks to pass the night amid the chaos
of machines, harnesses, and boxes that covered the decks, and some were
amusing themselves at the stern, watching the playful dolphins in the
foam of the wake.  Tao Chi'en looked up toward the enormous dome of the
sky with gratitude.  For the first time since her death, Lin had
visited him openly.  Before beginning his life as a sailor he had seen
her nearby from time to time, especially when he was deep in
meditation, but then it had been easy to confuse the tentative presence
of her spirit with his widower's longing.

Lin tended to touch him lightly with her fine fingers as she passed?

but he would be left with the doubt of whether it was really she or
just a figment of his tormented soul.  Moments earlier in the hold,
however, he had had no doubts: Lin's face had been as radiant and clear
as the moon over that sea.  He felt her with him, and was content, as
in those long ago nights when she nestled in his arms after they made
love.

Tao Chi'en went to the crew's quarters where he had a narrow wood bunk
far from what little ventilation filtered through the hatch.  It was
impossible to sleep there in the thick air and funk from the sleeping
men, but he hadn't had to do that since leaving Valparaiso because the
summer weather allowed him to stretch out on the deck.  He looked for
his trunk, nailed to the floor to secure it in the tossing of the ship,
removed the key from around his neck, opened the padlock, and took out
a vial of laudanum.  Then he quietly drew a double ration of freshwater
and went to get rags from the kitchen, which would do for lack of
something better.

He was on his way back to the hold when he was stopped by hand on his
arm.  He turned in surprise and saw one of the Chilean women who,
defying the captain's explicit order to stay out of sight after sunset,
had come out to entice clients.  He recognized her immediately.  Of all
the women on board, Azucena Placeres was the most sympathetic and most
outgoing.  During the first days she was the only one willing to help
seasick passengers and had also dutifully nursed a youIlg sailor who
had fallen from the mast and broken his arm.  She had won the respect
even of the stern Captain Katz, who, from that time, had looked the
other way when she broke the rules.  Azucena offered her services as a
nurse for free, but if anyone made so bold as to lay a hand on her firm
flesh he had to pay in coin of the realm, because, as she said, there
was no reason to confuse a good heart with

Al The Voyage :

stupidity.  This is my only capital, she would say, jauntily slapping
herself on the buttocks, and if I'm not careful with it, I'll screw up
for real.

Azucena Placeres spoke to Tao in four words that can be understood in
any language: chocolate, coffee, tobacco, and brandy.  As always when
she met him, she expressed in graphic sign language her wish to
exchange any of those luxuries for her favors, but the zhong yi pushed
her aside and kept on his way.

For a good part of the night Tao Chi'en sat beside the feverish Eliza.
He worked over her weakened body with the limited resources of his bag,
his long experience, and a wavering tenderness until she expelled a
bloody little mollusk.  Tao Chi'en examined it in the lamplight and
determined that without the slightest doubt it was a five- or six-week
fetus, and was whole.  To clean out her womb, he inserted his needles
in the girl's arms and legs, provoking strong contractions.  When he
was sure of the results, he sighed with relief:

all that remained was to ask Lin to do her part to prevent infection.

Until that night he had thought of Eliza as a business arrangement, and
he had the pearl necklace in the bottom of his trunk to prove it.  She
was just a stranger, a girl for whom he had no particular feelings, a
jan wey with big feet and an aggressive temperament who hadn't had any
luck in getting a husband since, it was easy to see, she had no
inclination to please or serve a man.  Now, with the misfortune of this
miscarriage, she would never marry.  Not even her lover, who had
already abandoned her once anyway, would want her for a wife--in the
unlikely event that she ever found him.  He had to admit that for a
foreigner Eliza was not all that ugly, at least there was a slightly
Oriental air about her almond eyes and her hair, as long, black, and
shiny as the proud tail of an imperial horse.

If she had had that diabolical yellow or red hair, like so many women
he had seen since leaving China, he might never have gone near her;
however, neither her looks nor her strong character would help her now;
her bad luck was cast, there was no hope for her: she would end up
walking the streets in California.  He had been with many such women in
Canton and Hong Kong.  He owed a large part of his medical knowledge to
the years he had practiced on the bodies of those luckless girls abused
by beatings, sickness, and drugs.  Several times during that long night
he asked himself whether it wouldn't be more noble to let her die,
despite Lin's instructions, and save her from a horrible fate, but she
had paid him in advance and he should carry out his part of the deal,
he told himself.  No, that wasn't the only reason, he concluded, since
from the beginning he had questioned his own motives for helping this
girl stow away.  The risk was enormous, he wasn't sure he had committed
such a foolish act merely for the value of the pearls.  Something in
Eliza's valiant determination had moved him, something about the
fragility of her body and the bold love she professed for her lover
reminded him of Lin.

Finally, near dawn, Eliza stopped bleeding.  She was delirious with
fever and shivering despite the unbearable heat of the hold, but her
pulse was steadier and she was breathing calmly in her sleep.  She was
not, however, out of danger.  Tao Chi'en wanted to stay with her and
watch her, but he calculated that soon the bell would sound to summon
him to his watch.  He dragged himself up the companionway, fell
facedown on the planks of the deck, and slept like a baby until a
friendly shove from the foot of another sailor woke him to his
duties.

He plunged his head into a pail of seawater to wash the sleep from his
eyes and, still in a stupor, went to the kitchen to boil the oatmeal
that constituted breakfast.  Everyone ate it without comment, even the
sober Captain Katz except for the Chileans, who chorused a protest
despite being better provided for than anyone, having been the latest a
... to come aboard.  Other passengers had polished off their provisions
of tobacco, alcohol, and sweets in insufferable months at sea before
reachingValparaiso.Word had spread that some of the Chileans were
aristocrats and that was why they didn't know how to wash their own
under drawers or boil water for tea.  The ones traveling in first class
had brought servants who would work for them in the gold mines, because
the concept of dirtying their hands personally had never crossed their
minds.  Others paid the sailors to wait on them, since the women, in a
block, refused: they could earn ten times the price by welcoming their
countrymen for ten minutes in the privacy of the women's room, so there
was no reason to spend two hours washing dirty laundry.  The crew and
the rest of the passengers mocked those spoiled sissies but never to
their faces.  The Chileans had good manners, they seemed timid enough
and made a great show of courtesy and gentle manliness but it took only
the tiniest spark to inflame their arrogance.  Tao Chi'en tried to
avoid them.  They did not mask their scorn for him or for the two Negro
passengers who boarded the ship in Brazil; they had paid for their
passage but they were the only ones who were not given a cabin or
allowed to eat at table with the others.

Tao preferred the five humble Chilean women, with their solid practical
sense, their unflagging good humor, and the maternal feelings that
flowered in times of emergency.

He finished his watch like a sleepwalker, his thoughts on but couldn't
find a free minute to see her until that night.  At midmorning the
sailors had caught an enormous shark, which died on deck, thrashing
wickedly in its death throes while no one dared go near enough to club
it.  It fell to Tao Chi'en, in his role as cook, to supervise the task
of skinning it, chopping it into pieces, cooking part of the meat and
salting the rest, while the sailors washed the blood from the deck and
the passengers celebrated the horrific spectacle with the last
remaining bottles of champagne, anticipating a feast at dinner.  Tao
kept the heart for Eliza's soup and the fins to dry:

they would be worth a fortune in the aphrodisiac market.  As the hours
went by in the chores involving the shark' Tao Chi'en imagined Eliza
dead in the heart of the ship.  He felt a surge of happiness when at
last he went down and found that she was still alive and looking
better.

The hemorrhaging had stopped, the jug of water was empty, and
everything indicated that there had been moments of lucidity during
that long day.  Briefly, he thanked Lin for her help.  The girl
struggled to open her eyes; her lips were dry and her face flushed with
fever.

He helped her to her feet and fed her a strong broth of tangknei to
build up her blood.  When he was sure she would keep it in her stomach,
he gave her a few sips of fresh milk, which she drank avidly.

Invigorated, she announced that she was hungry and asked for more.

The cows they were carrying onboard, unused to the sea, were producing
very little; nothing but bones, there was already talk of slaughtering
them.  Tao Chi'en found the idea of drinking milk repulsive but his
friend Ebanizer Hobbs had advised him of its properties for
replenishing lost blood.  If Hobbs recommended it in the diet of
someone gravely wounded, it should have the same effect in this
instance' Tao decided.

"Am I going to die' Tao

"Not yet."  He smiled and patted Eliza's head.

"How long before we reach California?"

"A long time.  Don't think about that.  Now you must urinate."

"No, please!"  she protested.

"Why not?  You must!"

"In front of you?"

"I am a zhong yi.You cannot feel embarrassed with me.  I have seen
everything there is to see of your body."

"I can't move, I can't survive this voyage, Tao, I would rather die,"
Eliza sobbed, steadying herself on him as she sat on the pot.

"Be brave, girl.  Lin says you have much qi and you have not come this
far to die in mid journey

"Who says that?"

"Not important."

That night Tao Chi'en realized that he could not care for alone, he
needed help.  The next morning, as soon as the women came out of their
cabin and went to the stern, as they always did to wash their clothes
and braid their hair, and to mend the feathers and bugle beads of their
professional attire, he beckoned Azucena Placeres to come talk to him.
During the voyage none of the women had worn their whoring clothes but
dressed in heavy, dark skirts, plain blouses, and house slippers; they
wrapped themselves in their mantles, combed their hair into two braids
down their backs, and skipped their makeup.  They looked like a group
of simple housewives busy at domestic chores.  Azucena gave a happy
wink to her partners in crime and followed Tao into the kitchen.  There
he handed her a large piece of chocolate that he had stolen from the
stores for the captain's table and tried to explain his problem, but
she didn't understand a word of English and he began to lose patience.
Azucena Placeres smelled the chocolate and a childlike smile
illuminated her round Indian face.  She took the cook's hand and placed
it on her breast, pointing toward the women's cabin, empty at that
hour, but he pulled away his hand, took hers, and led her to the
hatchway to the hold.  Azucena, half surprised, half curious, held back
a little but he did not give her a chance to refuse, he opened the
hatch and pushed her down the ladder, constantly smiling to calm her.
For a few instants they were in darkness, until he found the lamp
hanging from a beam and lighted it.  Azucena giggled; finally this
strange Chinese man had understood the terms of the bargain.  She had
never done it with an Asian and she was very curious to know if their
equipment was like other men's, but the cook showed no sign of
profiting from their privacy; instead he pulled on her arm, dragging
her through the labyrinths of the cargo.  She was afraid he was a
little unhinged and began to tug and try to get loose, but he hell on,
forcing her to follow him until the lamplight fell onto the hole where
Eliza lay.

"Jesus, Mana, y Jose!"  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 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

,..

^ > The Voyage t 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 quarrels erupted over the least pretext.
When a Chilean passenger was just at the point of firing his
blunderbuss at aYankee sailor with whomAzucena 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 himselfoftheir spilled

!

SL ..

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 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 inValparaiso.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 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 of funder 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 thingiao 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 Rodriguez 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 inValparaiso 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.

-v: TheVoyage^ "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.

Azucena Placeres did not hear the Yankees' news because Tao Chi'en took
her down to the hold as soon as he learned of the presence of the
customs agent.  They weren't going to be able to sneak Eliza ashore in
a sack over a stevedore's shoulder, as she had come aboard, because it
appeared that all goods were going to be checked.  Eliza was surprised
when she saw them; both were unrecognizable.  Tao was wearing a freshly
laundered smock and trousers;

his tightly braided hair gleamed as if it had been oiled, and he had
carefully shaved the last hair from his fore skull and face, while
Azucena Placeres had changed from country garb into full battle dress
and was wearing a blue gown with feathers trimming the decolletage; her
up swept hair was crowned by a hat, and her cheeks and lips were
rouged.

"The journey's over and you're still alive, girl," she trumpeted
gaily.

Her plan was to lend Eliza one of her most splendid outfits and smuggle
her off the ship as just another of their band--not far off the mark,
she told Eliza, since that was going to be her only choice of career
once on land.

"I have come to marry my sweetheart," Eliza replied, for the hundredth
time.

"No sweetheart is going to do you any good.  If in order to eat you
have to hustle your ass, you'll hustle your ass.  You can't be choosy
at this point, girl."

Tao Chi'en interrupted them.  If for two months there had been seven
women on the ship, they couldn't take eight off, he reasoned.

He had noticed the band of Mexicans and Chinese who had come aboard to
unload the ship and who were waiting on deck to hear the captain's and
the custom agent's orders.  Tao instructed Azucena to braid Eliza's
long hair in a queue like his own while he went to look for a set of
his clothes.  They dressed the girl in cut-off pants a smock tied at
the waist with a cord, and a straw hat like a Japanese parasol.

In those two months of slogging through the desert sands of hell, Eliza
had lost weight and looked as thin and pale as rice paper.

In Tao Chien's too large clothes she looked like a sad, undernourished,
little Chinese boy.  Azucena Placeres wrapped her in her robust
laundress's arms and planted an emotional kiss on her forehead.  She
had grown fond of Eliza, and in the depths of her heart was happy that
she had a sweetheart waiting for her, because she could not imagine
Eliza subjected to the brutalities of the life she herself led.

"You look like a lizard.  "Azucena Placeres laughed aloud.

"What if they discover me?"

"What's the worst that can happen?  That Katz will make you pay for
your passage?  You can pay for it with your jewels, isn't that what
they're for?"

The Voyage S

"No one must know you are here," said Tao Chi'en.  "That way, Captain
Sommers won't be looking for you in California."

"If he finds me, he will take me back to Chile with him."

"Why would he do that?"  Azucena interjected.

"Your reputation is already ruined, and that is something rich people
cannot tolerate.  Your family must be very happy that you disappeared,
it saves them having to throw you out."

"Only throw you out?  In China they would kill you for what you have
done."

"Well, Chino, we are not in your country.  Don't frighten the little
thing.  You can go with an easy heart, Eliza.  No one will notice you.
All eyes will be on me," Azucena Placeres assured her, making her exit
in a whirlwind of blue feathers, the turquoise brooch pinned to her
bosom.

And so it went.  The five Chileans and two Peruvians, in their most
exuberant sporting attire, were the spectacle of the day.  They climbed
down to the boats by way of a rope laddewpreceded by seven fortunate
sailors who had drawn straws for the privilege of bearing the weight of
those buttocks on their heads--in the midst of a chorus of whistles and
applause from the hundreds of spectators crowded into the port to
welcome them.  No one paid the least attention to the Mexicans and
Chinese who, like a line of ants, were passing bundles from hand to
hand.  Eliza went on one of the last boats, beside Tao Chi'en, who told
his compatriots that the boy was a deaf mute and a little slow, so
there was no point in trying to communicate with him.

 nao Chi'en's and Eliza Sommers' feet first touched the soil of San
Francisco on a Tuesday in April , of I849, at two o'clock in the
afternoon.  By then thousands of adventurers had briefly passed through
on their way to the placers.  A persistent wind made walking difficult,
but the day was clear and they could appreciate the panorama of the bay
in all its splendid beauty.  Tao Chi'en cut a bizarre figure with his
doctor's case, which he was never without, his seabag, his straw hat,
and a multicolored wool serape he had bought from one of the Mexican
stevedores.  It didn't matter, really; looks weren't what counted in
that town.  Eliza's legs were trembling; she hadn't used them in two
months, and she felt as land sick as she had before at sea, but the
man's clothing gave her an unfamiliar freedom; she had never felt so
invisible.  Once she got over the feeling that she was naked, she could
enjoy the breeze blowing up her sleeves and pants legs.  Accustomed to
the prison of her petticoats, she could now breathe deeply.  She was
struggling to carry her small suitcase filled with the exquisite
dresses Miss Rose had packed with the best intentions, and when he
noticed her difficulty Tao Chi'en took it from her and slung it over
his shoulder.  The Castile wool blanket rolled up beneath her arm
weighed as much as the suitcase, but she realized she couldn't leave
it, it would be her most precious possession at night.  Eyes to the
ground, hidden beneath her straw hat, she stumbled along through the
awesome anarchy of the port.  The vil

> The Argonauts ;O

lage of Yerba Buena, founded in I769 by a Spanish expedition, had fewer
than fifteen hundred inhabitants, but the adventurers had begun to
flock in with the first news of gold.Within a few months, that innocent
little village awakened with the name San Francisco and a fame that had
reached the farthest points of the globe.  More than a true city, it
was an enormous camp for men on the move.

Gold fever left no one unaffected: smiths, carpenters, teachers,
doctors, soldiers, fugitives from the law, preachers, bakers,
revolutionaries, and harmless madmen of various stripes who had left
family and possessions behind to traverse half the world in search of
adventure.

"They look for gold, and along the way lose their souls," Captain Katz
had repeated tirelessly in the brief religious services he imposed
every Sunday on the passengers and crew of the Emilia, but no one paid
any attention, blinded by dreams of the sudden riches that would change
their lives.  For the first time in history, gold lay scattered on the
ground, unclaimed, free, and plentiful, within the reach of anyone with
the will to go after it.  Argonauts came from distant shores:

Europeans fleeing wars, plagues, and tyrannies; Americans, ambitious
and short-tempered; blacks pursuing freedom; Oregonians and Russians
dressed in deerskin, like Indians; Mexicans, Chileans, and Peruvians;

Australian bandits; starving Chinese peasants who were risking their
necks by violating the imperial order against leaving their country.
All races flowed together in the muddy alleyways of San Francisco.

The main streets, laid out as broad semicircles touching the beach at
both ends, were intersected by other, straight, streets descending from
the steep hills to end at the dock, some so abrupt and deep in mud that
not even mules could climb them.  Suddenly a storm would blow in,
raising whirlwinds of sand along the shore, but soon the air would be
calm again and the sky blue.  There were already several solid
buildings and dozens under construction, including some announcing
themselves as future luxury hotels, but everything else was a shambles
of temporary dwellings, barracks, shacks of sheet metal, wood, or
cardboard, canvas tents, and straw roofs.  The recent rains of winter
had turned the dock into a swamp; any vehicle that had ventured there
sank hub-deep in mire, and planks were laid across ditches deep in
garbage, thousands of broken bottles, and other refuse.  There were no
drains or sewers, and the wells were contaminated; cholera and
dysentery reaped scores of lives--except among the Chinese, who by
custom drank tea, and the Chileans, who had been raised on polluted
water and were therefore immune to lesser bacteria.  The heterogeneous
throng pulsed with frenzied activity, pushing, bumping into building
materials, barrels, boxes, burros, and carts.  Chinese porters balanced
their loads on each end of a long pole, indifferent to whom they struck
as they went by; strong and patient Mexicans swung bundles equal to
their own weight onto their backs and trotted off up the hills;
Malaysians and Hawaiians seized any pretext to start a fight;

Americans charged into temporary businesses on horseback, bowling over
anyone in their way; native-born Californians strutted around in
handsome embroidered jackets, silver spurs, and slit pants legs trimmed
with a double row of gold buttons from belt to boot tops.

Shouts from fights and accidents added to the din of hammers, saws, and
picks.  Shots rang out with terrifying frequency, but no one was
affected by one more dead man; on the other hand, the theft of a box of
nails immediately drew a crowd of indignant citizens ready to mete out
justice with their own hands.  Property was much more valuable than
life; any robbery over a hundred dollars was paid for on the gallows.
There were scores of gaming houses, bars, and saloons decorated with
images of naked women in lieu of the real article.  Everything
imaginable especially liquor and weapons--was sold at exorbitant prices
because no one had time to bargain.  Customers nearly always paid in
gold, not even stopping to wipe up the dust clinging to the scales. 
Tao Chi'en decided that the famous Gum San, the Golden

L.=

T he Argonauts ASH

Mountain he had heard so much about, was a hell, and calculated that at
these prices his savings would not go very far.  Eliza's little bag of
jewels would be worthless, because the only acceptable tender was pure
gold.

Eliza made her way through the crowd as best she could, close behind
Tao Chi'en and grateful to be wearing men's clothing because she saw no
sign of a woman anywhere.  The Emilia's seven female passengers had
been carried off to one of the many saloons, where undoubtedly they had
already begun earning the two hundred seventy dollars they owed Captain
Vincent Katz for their passage.  Tao Chi'en had found out from the
stevedores that the town was divided into sectors and that every
nationality had its neighborhood.  He was warned not to go near the
Australian roughnecks, who might waylay a passerby for pure fun, and
then was pointed the way to a cluster of tents and shacks where the
Chinese lived.

And that was the direction in which they started walking.

"How am I going to find Joaquin in all this uproar?"

asked, feeling lost and helpless.

"If there is a Chinese barrio, there must be a Chilean one.  Look for
it."

"I'm not planning to leave you' Tao

"Tonight," he warned,"I'm going back to the ship."

"Why?  Aren't you interested in gold?"

Tao Chi'en walked faster, and she adjusted her pace to his in order not
to lose sight of him.  Soon they came to the Chinese sector--Little
Canton, it was called--a couple of unwholesome streets where Tao
immediately felt at home because not a single jan wey was to be seen;
on the air floated delicious odors of the food of his country and he
heard several Chinese dialects, mainly Cantonese.

To Eliza, in contrast, it was like being transported to another
planet;

she did not understand a single word, and it seemed to her that
everyone was furious because they were all yelling and waving their
arms.  Again she did not see any women, but Tao pointed to a couple of
barred windows at which she saw despondent faces.  Tao had been two
months without a woman and those at the window called to him but he
knew the ravages of venereal diseases too well to run that risk.  These
were peasant girls bought for a few coins and brought here from the
most remote provinces of China.  He thought of his sister, sold by his
father, and was bent double by wave of nausea.

"What's the matter' Tao

"Bad memories.  Those girls are slaves."

"I thought there weren't any slaves in California."

They went into a restaurant, identified by the traditional yellow
streamers.  There was a large table crowded with men sitting elbow to
elbow and wolfing down food.  The sound of lively conversation and
chopsticks clattering against tin plates was music to Tao Chi'en's
ears.

They stood in a double line until they could sit down.  It wasn't a
matter of choosing what to eat but of grabbing anything that came
within arm's reach.  It took skill to catch a plate on the fly before
someone more enterprising intercepted it, but Tao Chi'en got one for
Eliza and another for himself.  She eyed with suspicion a dubious green
liquid in which pale threads and gelatinous mollusks were floating. 
She prided herself on knowing any ingredient by its smell, but what sat
before her did not look edible, it reminded her of swamp water swarming
with polliwogs; it did, however, have the advantage of not requiring
chopsticks, she could drink it directly from the bowl.  Hunger overcame
skepticism and she dared take a taste, while behind her a line of
impatient customers yelled at her to hurry.  The dish was delicious and
she would happily have eaten more, but she was denied the opportunity
by Tao Chi'en, who took her by one arm and led her outside.  She
followed him, first, from shop to shop to replace the medicinal
supplies

;

for his kit and to talk with the two Chinese herbalists in the town,
and then to a gambling den, one of the many on every corner.  This was
a wooden building with a pretense of luxury and decorated with
paintings of voluptuous, half-clad women.  Gold dust was weighed to
exchange for coins at the rate of sixteen dollars per ounce, or
sometimes the whole pouch was laid on the table.  Americans French, and
Mexicans made up the majority of the customers but there were also
adventurers from Hawaii, Chile' Australia and Russia.  The most popular
games were the monte that had originated in Mexico, lasquenet, and
twenty-one.  Since the Chinese preferred fan-tan, and wagered only a
few cents, they were not welcome at the high-rolling tables.

There were no blacks gambling, although some were providing music or
waiting tables; Eliza and Tao later learned that if they went into a
bar or gambling hall they would be given one free drink but would then
have to leave or be thrown out.  There were three women in the saloon,
two young Mexican girls with large sparkling eyes, dressed in white and
smoking cigarette after cigarette, and a pretty, rather mature
Frenchwoman wearing a tight corset and heavy makeup.  They made the
rounds of the tables, urging the men to bet and drink, and often
disappeared with some customer behind a heavy drapery of red brocade.
Tao Chi'en was told that they charged an ounce of gold for an hour of
their company in the bar and several hundred dollars to spend the night
with a lonely man, although the Frenchwoman was more costly, and she
had no truck with Chinese or blacks.

Eliza, overlooked in her disguise as an Asian boy, sat in a corner,
exhausted, while Tao talked with various people, inquiring about gold
and life in California.  For Tao Chi'en, protected by the memory of
Lin, it was easier to resist the temptation of the women than of
gambling.  The sound of the fan-tan chips and the dice on the table
tops called to him with the voice of a siren.  The sight of the decks
of cards in the players' hands made him break out in a sweat, but he
forbore, fortified by the conviction that good luck would abandon him
forever if he broke his promise.  Years later, after many adventures,
Eliza asked him what good luck he was referring to, and he, without a
moment's hesitation, answered' The luck of being alive and of having
met her.  That evening he learned that the placers were located along
the Sacramento, American, and San Joaquin rivers and their hundreds of
tributaries, but the maps were untrustworthy, and distances immense.
The easy surface gold was growing scarce.  True, there were still
plenty of lucky miners who came across a nugget the size of a shoe, but
most had to be content with a handful of dust won with considerable
effort.  There was a lot of talk about gold, they told Tao, but little
about the sacrifice needed to get it.  It took an ounce a day to make
any profit, and that was only if you were willing to live like a dog,
because the prices of things were outrageous, and the gold melted away
in the blink of an eye.  Merchants and moneylenders, on the other hand,
were getting rich, like one of Tao's countrymen who had taken in
laundry and after a few months was able to build a solid house and was
thinking of going back to China to buy several wives and devote himself
to producing male offspring, or another who lent money to gamblers at
10 percent interest per hour, that is, more than 87,000 percent per
year.  Tao's informants told fantastic tales of enormous nuggets, of
beds of dust mixed in with sand, of veins in quartz rock, and of mules'
hooves shearing off rock face to reveal a treasure, but getting rich
demanded hard work as well as luck.  The Americans were short on
patience; they didn't know how to work as a team, and were defeated by
greed and a lack of discipline.  Mexicans and Chileans knew about
mining, but they squandered their earnings;

Oregonians and Russians wasted time fighting and drinking.  The

Chinese, on the other hand, got ahead however poor their beginnings
because they were frugal; they did not get drunk and worked like ants
eighteen hours a day without rest or complaint.  The fan wey were
indignant about the success of the Chinese; Tao was warned to play a
part, act stupid, not provoke them or they would get the same treatment
given arrogant Mexicans.  Yes they told him, there was a settlement of
Chileans; it were some distance from town on the hill over to the
right; they called the place Chilecito, Little Chile, but it was pretty
late to be going there with no company but his simpleminded brother.

"I am going back to the ship, "Tao Chi'en announced to when finally
they left the hall.

"I feel dizzy, I think I'm going to fall."

"You have been very sick, you need to eat well and rest."

"I can't do that alone' Tao  Please, don't leave me yet .  "

"I have a contract, the captain will send someone to look for me."

"And who will do that?  All the ships are deserted.  There is no one
left onboard.  Your captain can yell himself hoarse and none of his
sailors will come."

"What am I going to do with her," Tao Chi'en asked himself aloud in
Cantonese.  His responsibility ended in San Francisco, but he didn't
feel able to abandon Eliza to her fate in this place.  He was trapped,
at least until she was stronger and could meet other Chileans, or find
where her slippery lover had gotten to.  That shouldn't be difficult,
he supposed.  However chaotic San Francisco might seem, there were no
secrets anywhere for the Chinese; he could afford to wait until the
next day and take her to Little Chile.  Darkness had turned everything
into a dream world.  Nearly all the shelters were canvas, and with
lamps lighted inside they were as transparent and glowing as diamonds.
The torches and bonfires in the streets, and the music from the gaming
halls, contributed to the impression of unreality.  Tao Chi'en i_.>

looked for somewhere they could spend the night; he found a kind of
large shed some twenty-five meters long and eight wide built of boards
and tin salvaged from grounded ships and topped by the sign "Hotel."
Inside were two floors of cots, simple wooden planks where a man could
curl up and sleep, along with a counter at the rear where liquor was
sold.  There were no windows, and the only fresh air filtered through
cracks in the board walls.  For a dollar you bought the right to a
night's rest, and you provided your own bedding.  The first to get
there claimed the cots and latecomers had to hit the floor, and
although there were empty beds, they weren't given one because they
were Chinese.  They stretched out on the dirt floor using a bundle of
clothing for a pillow and the serape and Castile blanket for their only
cover.

Soon the place was filled with men of assorted races and types lying
elbow to elbow in tight rows, clothed, weapons in hand.  The stench of
filth, tobacco, and human exhalations, plus the snoring and strange
cries of those lost in nightmares, made it hard to sleep, but Eliza was
so tired she blacked out the passing hours.  She woke at dawn shivering
with cold, huddled close to Tao Chi'en's back, and that was when she
noticed that he smelled of the sea.  On the ship his scent had been
indistinguishable from the immensity of the ocean around them, but that
night she learned that this was the specific aroma of Tao's body.

She closed her eyes, pressed closer to him, and soon fell back
asleep.

The next morning they both set off to look for Little Chile, which she
recognized immediately both by the Chilean flag fluttering boldly atop
a pole and because most of the men were wearing maulinos, the typical
cone-shaped hats.  The settlement consisted of some eight or ten
densely populated blocks, including a few women and children who had
traveled with their men, all busy at some task or activity.  People
were living in tents or board shacks and huts set in the middle of a
junkyard of tools and garbage.  There were also restaurants, makeshift
hotels, and brothels.  Eliza andiao estimated that there ll were a
couple of thousand Chileans in that barrio, but no one had counted
them, and, in fact, it was nothing more than a place for new arrivals
to pause a while.  Eliza was happy to hear the language of her country
and to see a sign on a ragged tent advertising pequenes and chunchules.
She went right to it and, disguising her Chilean accent, asked for a
helping of the latter.  Tao Chi'en stood staring at that strange food
served on a piece of newspaper instead of a plate, unable to guess what
the devil it was.  Eliza explained that it was deep-fried hog tripe.

"I ate your Chinese soup yesterday.  Today you eat my chunchules," she
ordered.

"How is it you two Chinese speak Spanish?"  the vendor asked amiably.

"My friend doesn't, and I do only because I spent time in Peru," Eliza
replied.

"And what are you looking for around here?"

"A Chilean named Joaquin Andieta."

"What do you want him for?"

"We have a message for him.  Do you know him?"

"A lot of people have passed through here in recent months.

No one stays more than a few days, they're soon off to the placers.

Some come back, some don't."

"And Joaquin Andieta?"

"I don't remember, but I'll ask."

Eliza and Tao Chi'en sat down in the shade of a pine to eat.

Twenty minutes later the vendor returned with a short-legged,
wideshouldered man who looked like an Indian from the north of Chile,
who said that Joaquin Andieta had started off in the direction of the
placers of Sacramento at least a couple of months ago, although no one
kept time by calendars or kept track of other folks' whereabouts.

"Then we're going to Sacramento' Tao Eliza decided as soon as they left
Little Chile.

"You can't travel yet.  You need to rest awhile."

"I will rest there, when we find him."

"I would rather go back to Captain Katz.  California is not the place
for me."

"What is the matter with you?  Has your blood turned to water?

There's no one left on the ship, only that captain with his Bible.

Everyone has gone off looking for gold and you plan to go back and work
as a cook for a miserable salary?"

"I don't believe in easy fortune.  I want a peaceful life."

"Well, if not gold, there must be something else that interests you."

"Learning."

"Learning what?  You already know so much."

"I have everything to learn!"

"Then you have come to the perfect place.  You know nothing about this
country.  They need doctors here.  How many men do you think there are
in the mines?  Thousands!  And they all need a doctor.  This is the
land of opportunity, Tao.  Come to Sacramento with me.  Besides, if you
don't come with me, I won't get far."

For a bargain price, given the lamentable condition of the vessel, Tao
Chi'en and Eliza started north, sailing the entire length of San
Francisco Bay.  The ship was crammed with passengers with elaborate
mining equipment; no one could move in that space crowded with boxes,
tools, baskets, sacks of provisions, gunpowder, and weapons.  The
captain and his second mate were a pair of Yankee seamen sinister in
appearance but good sailors and generous with the limited rations, even
their bottles of liquor.  Tao Chi'en negotiated the cost of Eliza's
ticket and he was given his passage in exchange for working as crew.

The passengers, all with pistols in their waistbands, in addition to
knives or straight razors, scarcely spoke to one another the first day
except to curse some jab from an elbow or foot, inevitable in that
tight space.  At dawn on the second day, after a long, cold, damp night
anchored close to the shore because of the impossibility of navigating
in the dark, everyone felt as if he were surrounded by enemies.  The
scruffy beards, filth, unappetizing food, mosquitoes, opposing winds
and currents all contributed to the general irritation.  Tao Chi'en,
the only one without plans or goals, appeared to be the only serene
person aboard, and when he was not fighting the sail he was admiring
the extraordinary panorama of the bay.  Eliza, in contrast, was
miserable in her disguise as a slow-witted deaf-mute boy.  Tao Chi'en
presented her as his younger brother and quickly found her a place in a
corner more or less protected from the wind, where she sat, so quiet
and still that after a bit no one remembered her existence.  Her
Castile blanket dripped water, she was shivering with cold, and her
legs had fallen asleep, but she was fortified by the thought that every
minute she was getting closer to Joaquin.  She touched her bosom, where
she was carrying his love letters, and silently recited them by memory.
By the third day the passengers had lost much of their aggression and
were lying sprawled in their soaking-wet clothes, half drunk and very
dispirited.

The bay was much longer than they had imagined; the distances marked on
their pathetic maps had no bearing on actual miles, and just when they
thought they were approaching their destination it turned out they
still had to sail through a second bay, one called Pablo.  Along the
shores they glimpsed a few camps and boats overflowing with people and
goods, and beyond them thick woods.  Even then their voyage wasn't
over; they had to maneuver a canal with swift water and sail into
Suisun Bay, the third, where navigating became even slower and more
difficult, and then up the deep, narrow river that led to Sacramento.
At last they were near the place where the first gold had been found.
That insignificant little flake the size of a woman's fingernail had
provoked this uncontrollable invasion, changing the face of California
and the soul of the North American nation, as Jacob Todd, transformed
into a journalist, would write a few years later.  "The United States
was founded by pilgrims, pioneers, and humble immigrants with an ethic
of hard work and courage in the face of adversity.  Gold has brought
out the worst of the American character: greed and violence."

The captain of their ship told them that the city of Sacramento had
sprung up overnight, within the last year.  The port was bustling with
ships; it boasted of well-laid-out streets, wood houses and buildings,
commerce, a church, and a good number of gaming houses, bars, and
brothels; even so, it resembled the scene of a shipwreck, because the
ground was littered with bags, harnesses, tools, and all manner of
refuse left behind by miners in a hurry to get to the placers.  Huge
black birds swooped over garbage crawling with flies.  Eliza estimated
that in a couple of days she could cover the town house by house;

it would not be difficult to find Joaquin Andieta.  Their fellow
passengers, made animated and friendly by the proximity of the port,
shared the last swallows of liquor, clapped one another on the back,
and sang chorus after chorus about a girl named Susanna to the
confoundment of Tao Chi'en, who could not understand such a sudden
transformation.  He debarked with Eliza before the others because they
had so little baggage, and made a beeline for the Chinese district
where they found something to eat and a place to sleep in a tent of
waxed canvas.

Eliza could not follow the conversations in Cantonese, and all she had
on her mind was finding out something about her lover, but Tao Chi'en
reminded her that she was not to speak and asked her to be calm and
patient.  That same night the zhong yi was called on to treat a
countryman's dislocated shoulder, snapping the joint back into place
and earning the immediate respect of the camp.

^, The Argonauts S

The next morning Tao and Eliza went in search of Joaquin Andieta.  They
saw passengers from the ship already starting for the placers; some had
obtained mules to carry their equipment but most were going on foot,
leaving a good part of their possessions behind.  Tao and his "brother"
asked around the entire town without finding a trace of the person they
were seeking, although some Chileans thought they remembered someone by
that name who had passed through a month or two earlier.  They
suggested the pair head on upriver, where they might find him: it was
all a matter of luck.  A month was an eternity.  No one kept account of
who had been there the day before, and names, or where anyone else was
going, meant nothing.  The sole obsession was gold.

"What shall we do now' Tao

Work.  We can't get along without money," he replied, picking up a few
pieces of canvas he found among the abandoned supplies.

"I can't wait.  I must findJoaquin.  I have a little money."

"Chilean reales.They won't do you much good."

"And the jewels I have left?  They must be worth something."

"Keep them.  They have little value here.  We have to work and buy a
mule.  My father went from town to town as a healer.  My grandfather,
too.  I can do the same, but here the distances are much greater.  I
need a mule."

"A mule?  We already have one.  You  How stubborn you are!"

"Not as stubborn as you!"

They collected a few poles and some odd boards, borrowed some tools,
and built a shelter using the canvas pieces as a roof.  It was a
miserable hovel ready to collapse with the first wind, but at least it
protected them from the night dew and spring rains.  Word had spread of
Tao Chi'en's skills and he was soon visited by Chinese patients who
gave witness to the extraordinary talent of the zhong yi, then Mexicans
and Chileans, and finally a few Americans and Europeans.  When they
learned that Tao Chi'en was as competent as any of the three white
doctors, and charged less, many people conquered their repugnance of
the "celestials" and decided to test Asian science.  Some days Tao
Chi'en was so busy that Eliza had to help him.  It fascinated her to
watch his delicate, skillful hands finding pulses on arms and legs,
stroking the bodies of the ill as if caressing them, inserting his
needles in mysterious points that only he seemed to know.  How old was
he?

She had asked him once, and he replied that counting all his
reincarnations he had to be between seven and eight thousand years
old.

Looking at him, Eliza guessed about thirty, although at some moments,
when he laughed, he seemed much younger than she.  When he leaned over
a sick patient with total concentration, however, he seemed as ancient
as a turtle; it was easy then to believe that he had lived many
centuries.  She would watch with awe as he examined a glass of urine
and by the odor and color was able to determine hidden ills, or as he
studied a patient's pupils with a magnifying glass to deduce what was
lacking or overly abundant in his organism.  Sometimes all he did was
place his hand on the stomach or head of an ill person, close his eyes,
and give the impression of being lost in a long daydream.

"What were you doing?"  Eliza once asked.

"I was feeling his pain and passing him energy.  Negative energy
produces suffering and illness; positive energy can heal."

"And what is it like, that positive energy?"

"Like love: warm and luminous."

Extracting bullets and treating knife wounds were routine procedures,
and Eliza lost her horror of blood and learned to stitch human flesh as
calmly as formerly she had embroidered sheets for her trousseau. 
Having practiced surgery beside the Englishman Ebanizer Hobbs turned
out to be extremely useful to Tao Chi'en.  In that land infested with
venomous snakes there were more than a few snakebite victims, who
arrived swollen and blue on the backs of their comrades.

Polluted water democratically distributed cholera, for which no one
knew a remedy, as well as other illnesses of spectacular but not always
fatal symptoms.  Tao Chi'en charged very little, but always in advance,
because in his experience a frightened man pays without argument, while
one who is cured wants to bargain.  Every time he asked for money his
former mentor materialized wearing an expression of reproach, but Tao
refused to budge.

"I cannot afford the luxury of being generous in these circumstances,
master," he mumbled.  His fees did not include anesthesia; whoever
wanted the comfort of drugs or the gold needles had to pay extra.  He
made an exception with thieves, who after a quick trial were lashed or
had their ears cut off; the miners were proud of their speedy justice
and no one was willing to pay for or guard a jail.

"Why don't you charge criminals?"  Eliza asked him.

"Because I would rather they owe me a favor," he replied.

Tao Chi'en seemed ready to settle in.  He did not tell his friend, but
he wanted to stay in one place long enough for Lin to find him.  His
wife had not communicated with him for several weeks.

Eliza, in contrast, was counting the hours, eager to get on her way,
and as the days went by she was filled with conflicting sentiments
about her companion in adventure.  She was grateful for his protection
and the way he looked after her, dependent on him for food and shelter
at night, for his herbs and needles--to strengthen her qi--he said, but
she was irritated by his calm, which she mistook for a lack of action.
Tao Chi'en's serene expression and easy smile captivated her at times
but at others grated on her nerves.  She did not understand his
absolute indifference to trying his luck in the mines while everyone
around him, especially his Chinese compatriots, thought of nothing
else.

"But you are not interested in gold, either," he replied, unrufRed,
when she nagged him.

"I came for a different reason!  Why did you come?"

"Because I was a sailor.  Until you asked me, I didn't plan to stay."

"But you are not a sailor, you're a physician."

"Here I can be a physician again, at least for a while.  You were
right, there is a lot to be learned in this place."

And that was what he was doing, learning.  To find out about the
medicines of the shamans he hunted out Indians, who by now had lost
everything in the stampede for gold and were reduced to filthy bands of
nomads in mangy coyote skins and European rags.  They wandered from
pillar to post, dragging their weary women and hungry children, using
their finely woven wicker baskets to try to pan gold from the rivers,
but they no sooner found a promising spot than they were chased away.
When left in peace, they set up small villages of huts or tents and
stayed for a while, until once more they were forced to leave.  They
came to know the Chinese physician, to welcome him with a show of
respect because they considered him a medicine man, and were pleased to
share what they knew.  Eliza and Tao Chi'en would sit with them in a
circle around a pit filled with hot stones where they cooked a pap of
boiled acorns or roasted seeds and grasshoppers that Eliza found
delicious.  Then they smoked, speaking in a mixture of English, signs,
and the few words of their native Indian tongue the outsiders had
learned.

During that period some Yanqui miners mysteriously disappeared, and
although their bodies had not been found their buddies accused the
Indians of having murdered them; in retaliation the miners had attacked
an Indian village, taken forty prisoners, including women and children,
and as a lesson had executed seven of the men.

"If that's how they treat the Indians who own this land, Tao,

,--.

you can be sure they will treat anyone Chinese much worse.  You need to
make yourself invisible, like me," Eliza said, terrified when she
learned what had happened.

But Tao Chi'en had no time to learn tricks of invisibility, he was busy
studying plants.  He made long outings, collecting samples to compare
with plants he had used in China.  He would hire a team of horses, or
walk miles beneath a burning sun, taking Eliza along as interpreter, to
the ranchos of the Mexicans who had lived in that region for
generations and knew its natural world.  They had only recently lost
California in the war against the United States, and their huge
ranches, which once had sustained hundreds of peons in a communal
system, were beginning to break up.  The treaties between the countries
were still only paper and ink.  At first the Mexicans, who were skilled
miners, taught the newcomers the processes for obtaining gold, but
every day more foreigners came to invade territory they felt was
theirs.  In practice, the Yanquis scorned them, as they scorned anyone
of a different race.  A relentless persecution was waged against the
Hispanics; they were denied the right to work the mines because they
were not Americans, although Australian convicts and European
adventurers were accepted.  Thousands of unemployed peons tried their
luck in the mines, but when the harassment became intolerable, they
moved south or turned to crime.  In the rustic dwellings of the few
remaining families, Eliza was able to spend time in the company of
women, a rare luxury that for a brief while recalled the tranquil,
happy days in Mama Fresia's kitchen.  Those were the only occasions she
emerged from her enforced muteness and spoke in her own language. 
Those strong and generous maternal women who worked elbow to elbow with
their men in the most demanding chores, hardened by work and by demands
upon them, were fond of that fragile Chinese lad, awed that he spoke
Spanish like one of them.  They gladly shared secrets of nature that
had been used for centuries to ease many ills and, in passing,
delicious recipes that Eliza wrote in her notebooks, sure that sooner
or later they would be valuable to her.  In the meantime, the zhong yi
ordered from San Francisco the Western medicines his friend Ebanizer
Hobbs had taught him to use in Hong Kong.  He also cleared a piece of
land by their shack, fenced it to protect it from deer, and planted the
basic herbs of his calling.

Heavens' Tao  Do you plan to be here until those scrawny little things
grow?"  Eliza complained, exasperated by the sight of wilted stems and
yellow leaves, and getting no answer but a vague shrug.

She felt that with every day that went by she was farther from her
goal, and that Joaquin Andieta was plunging deeper and deeper into
unknown territory, maybe toward the mountains, while she was wasting
time in Sacramento passing herself off as the slow-witted brother of a
Chinese healer.  She often berated Tao, calling him terrible names, but
she had the good sense to do it in Spanish--as he must have been doing
when he spoke to her in Cantonese.  They had perfected a sign language
for communicating in front of others, and from being together
constantly they came to look so much alike that no one doubted they
were related.  When they were not busy with some patient, they would
wander through the port and shops, making friends and asking about
Joaquin Andieta.  Eliza did the cooking, andWao Chi'en soon got used to
her cuisine, although from time to time he went off to the Chinese
eating halls where he could eat his fill for a dollar or two.  They
used signs in public, but in private spoke only in English.  Despite
the occasional insults in two languages, they spent most of their time
working side by side as good comrades, and found many excuses to laugh.
Tao was surprised that he could share a sense of humor with Eliza, even
with the obstacles of language and cultural differences.  It was, in
fact, those very differences that were the greatest source of
amusement;

he couldn't believe that a woman would do and say such outlandish
things.  He would watch her with inexpressible curiosity and
tenderness; he was tongue-tied with admiration for her, and in his mind
granted her the courage of a warrior, but if he saw her at a vulnerable
moment she seemed a child and he was overcome with a desire to protect
her.  Although she had gained a little weight, and her color was
improved, it was obvious that she was still weak.  As soon as the sun
set she would begin to nod, unroll her blanket, and go to sleep, and he
would lie down beside her.  They became so accustomed to those hours of
intimacy, of breathing in unison, that their bodies adjusted in their
sleep and if one turned the other would follow, so they were always
touching.  Sometimes they awoke entwined, tangled in their covers.  If
Tao woke first, he savored those instants that brought memories of
happy hours with Lin, lying motionless so Eliza would not perceive his
desire.  He never suspected that Eliza did the same, grateful for that
male presence that allowed her to imagine what her life with Joaquin
Andieta might have been had she been more fortunate.  Neither of the
two ever mentioned what happened at night, as if that were a parallel
existence they were not aware of.As soon as they dressed, the secret
spell of those embraces disappeared entirely and they were again
brother and sister.  On rare occasions Tao Chi'en left alone on
mysterious nocturnal sallies from which he returned with great
stealth.

Eliza did not need to ask where he went because she could smell him: he
had been with a woman; she could even identify the cloying perfumes of
the Mexican whore.  She would burrow deep in her blanket, trembling in
the darkness, alert to the least sound around her, knife in hand,
frightened, calling Tao with her thoughts.  She could not rationalize
the longing to cry that swept over her, the feeling that she had been
betrayed.  She understood vaguely that men must be different from
women; she herself felt absolutely no need for sex.  Their chaste
nocturnal embraces were enough to fill her need for companionship and
tenderness, and not even when thinking of her long-lost lover did she
feel the need for times like those in the room of the armoires.  She
was unsure, but thought that in her case love and desire might be one
and the same, and so without the former the latter did not arise, or
that her long illness on the ship might have destroyed something basic
in her body.  Once, because she hadn't menstruated for several months,
she dared ask Tao Chi'en whether she could have children, and he
assured her that as soon as she regained her strength and health she
would be back to normal, and that that was the purpose of the
acupuncture needles.  When her friend slipped quietly in beside her
after one of his absences she pretended to be sleeping soundly even
though she lay awake for hours, offended by the scent of another woman
between them.  As soon as they got off the ship in San Francisco she
had gone back to the modest ways Miss Rose had taught her.  Tao Chi'en
had seen her naked all through the weeks at sea, and knew her inside
and out, but he divined her reasons and asked no questions except to
inquire about her health.  Even when he inserted his needles he was
careful not to offend her modesty.  They did not undress in front of
each other and had reached a tacit accord for respecting the privacy of
the pit that served as a latrine behind their shack, but everything
else they shared, from money to clothing.

Many years later, going over the notes in her diary for that period,
Eliza asked herself with amazement why neither of them had recognized
the undeniable attraction they felt, why they had used the pretext of
sleep to touch each other but feigned coolness during the day.  She
concluded that at the time loving someone of another race seemed
impossible; they believed there was no place for a couple like them
anywhere in the world.

j_..

"You were thinking only of your lover," amended Tao Chi'en, who by then
had gray hair.

"And you of Lin."

"In China it is possible to have several wives, and Lin was always
tolerant."

"You were also put off by my big feet," she teased him.

"That is true," he answered with complete seriousness.

In June a merciless summer set in, mosquitoes multiplied, snakes
slithered from their holes to parade at will, and Tao Chi'en's plants
budded as robustly as they had in China.  The hordes of argonauts kept
arriving, ever faster and in greater numbers.  As Sacramento was the
port of access, it did not suffer the fate of dozens of other towns,
which had sprung up like mushrooms at the site of gold beds, briskly
prospered, then vanished as the easy pickings dried up.  This town grew
by the minute; new shops opened and land was no longer given away, as
it had been at first, but was sold at prices as high as those in San
Francisco.  There was a skeletal government, and frequent meetings to
determine administrative details.  Speculators appeared--pettifoggers,
evangelists, professional gamblers, bandits, madams with their gay-life
girls--along with other heralds of progress and civilization.  Hundreds
of men passed through, aflame with hope and ambition, headed for the
placers as others, drained and sick, returned after months of
backbreaking work, wild to squander their earnings.  The numbers of
Chinese rose daily, and soon there were a couple of rival gangs.  These
tongs were closed clans; their members helped each other like brothers
with problems of everyday life and work, but they also spread
corruption and crime.  Among the new arrivals was another zhong yi with
whom Tao Chi'en spent hours of total happiness comparing treatments and
quoting Confucius.  He reminded Tao of Ebanizer Hobbs, because he was
not content to repeat traditional treatments;

he, too, sought new alternatives.

"We must study the medicine of the jan wey, ours is not sufficient," he
argued, and Tao agreed fully, because the more he learned the greater
was his impression that he knew nothing and that a lifetime would not
be enough to study all he had yet to learn.

Eliza organized a business in empanadas, delicious meat pies, which she
sold at the price of gold, first to Chileans and then to North
Americans, who quickly became addicted to them.  She had begun making
them with beef, when she was able to buy it from the Mexican ranchers
who drove cattle from Sonora, but since that meat was often scarce she
experimented with venison, hare, wild geese, turtle, salmon, and even
bear.  Her faithful customers gratefully ate them all, because the
alternatives were canned beans and salt pork, the unvarying diet of the
miners.  No one had time to hunt, fish, or cook;

there were no greens or fruits to be had and milk was a luxury rarer
than champagne.  There was no shortage, however, of flour and fat, and
sugar; nuts, chocolate, some spices, dried peaches and plums were also
available.  Eliza's pastries and cookies enjoyed the same success as
the empanadas, and, remembering Mama Fresia's, she added bread baked in
a clay oven she improvised.  When she could get eggs and bacon, she put
out a sign offering breakfast, and men would stand in line to sit in
the sunshine and eat at a broken-down table.  That delicious meal,
cooked by a deaf-mute Chinese boy, reminded them of family Sundays at
home, far, far away.  A large helping of fried eggs and bacon, freshly
baked bread, a fruit tart, and plenty of coffee cost three dollars.

Some customers, from sentiment, and grateful because they hadn't tasted
anything like that for months, left another dollar in the jar for tips.
One day in midsummer, Eliza came to Tao Chi'en with her savings in her
hand.

\

"With this we can buy horses and go," she announced.

"Go where?"

"To look forJoaquin."

"I have no interest in finding him.  I'm staying."

"Don't you want to know this country?  There is so much to see and
learn'Tao.While I am looking forJoaquin, you can acquire your famous
knowledge."

"My plants are growing and I don't like to be moving all the time."

"Very well.  I will go."

"You won't get far on your own."

"We shall see."

That night they slept in opposite corners of the shack, without a word.
The next morning Eliza left early to buy what she needed for her quest,
not an easy task in her guise as a deaf mute, but she returned at four
in the afternoon leading a Mexican horse, ugly and covered with bald
spots but sturdy.  She had also bought boots, two shirts, heavy pants,
leather gloves, a wide-brimmed hat, a couple of sacks of staples, a tin
plate, a cup and spoon, a good steel knife, water canteen, a pistol,
and a rifle she didn't know how to load, much less shoot.  She spent
the rest of the afternoon organizing her gear and sewing her jewels and
remaining money into the cotton sash--the one she used to flatten her
breasts--in which she always carried the little bundle of love letters.
She resigned herself to leaving behind her suitcase with the dresses,
petticoats, and high-button shoes she had never given away.  With her
Castile blanket she improvised a kind of saddle like the ones she had
often seen in Chile.  She took off Tao Chi'en's clothes, which she had
worn for months, and put on her new ones.  Then she honed her knife on
a leather strop and cut her hair to chin length.  Her long black braid
lay on the ground like a dead snake.  She studied herself in a piece of
broken mirror and was satisfied with what she saw: with a dirty face
and eyebrows thickened with a bit of charcoal, the deceit would be
perfect.  That was the moment Tao Chi'en returned from one of his
sessions with the other zhong yi, and for a minute he failed to
recognize the armed cowboy who had invaded his property.

"I am leaving tomorrow'Tao.Thank you for everything; you are more than
a friend, you are my brother.  I will miss you...."

Tao Chi'en said nothing.  As night fell, Eliza lay down, fully dressed,
in one corner and he went outside to sit in the summer breeze and count
the stars.

The Secret the same afternoon that Eliza had leftValparaiso hidden in
the belly of the Emilia, the three

_ , Sommers had dined in the Hotel Ingles at the invitation of Paulina,
the wife of Feliciano Rodriguez de Santa Cruz, then returned late to
their home on Cerro Alegre.  They had not learned of the girl's
disappearance until a week later because they believed she was at the
hacienda of Agustin delValle, accompanied by Mama Fresia.

The next day John Sommers signed his contract as captain of the
Fortuna, Paulina's brand-new steamship.  A simple document containing
the terms of their agreement sealed the pact.  It took only one meeting
for them to feel confident about each other; they had no time to waste
in legal minutia, the craze to get to California was all that
interested them.  All of Chile was obsessed with the topic, despite the
calls for cool heads published in newspapers and repeated in
apocalyptic homilies from church pulpits.  It took the captain only a
few hours to sign on his crew because the long lines of applicants
bitten with gold fever snaked all the way along the docks.  Many spent
the night sleeping on the ground in order to not lose their places.  To
the amazement of other seamen, who could not imagine his reasons' John
Sommers would not take any passengers, so his ship was practically
empty.  He offered no explanations.  He had a piratical plan to prevent
his sailors from deserting ship once they reached San Francisco, but he
kept that to himself because had he divulged it, he would never have
signed on a soul.  Nor did he inform the crew that before heading north
they would make an unscheduled detour to the south.  He would wait
until they were on the high seas to do that.

"So you believe you are capable of captaining my ship and keeping a
tight rein on the crew, eh, Captain?"  Paulina asked once more as she
handed him the contract to sign.

"Yes, senora, have no fear about that.  I can sail in three days'
time."

"Very well.  Do you know what they need most in California, Captain?
Fresh produce: fruit, vegetables, eggs, good cheeses, sausages.

And that is what we are going to provide."

"How?  It would all spoil before we get there."

"We are going to pack it in ice," she said without batting an eye.

"In what!"

"Ice.  First you will sail south and pick up ice.  Do you know where
San Rafael Bay is?"

"Near Puerto Aysen."

"I am happy you know that area.  I have been told that there is a
beautiful blue glacier there.  I want you to fill the Fortuna with
blocks of ice.  What do you think of my idea?"

"Forgive me, senora, it seems mad to me."

Precisely.  That is why no one has thought of it.  Carry tons of rock
salt, a good store of sacks, and use them to wrap large blocks.

Ah!  I expect you will need to provide warm clothing for your men so
they won't freeze.  And by the way, Captain, please do not discuss this
with anyone, I do not want to be beaten to the punch."

John Sommers was more than a little dubious as he said goodbye.  At
first he thought the woman was unhinged, but the more he thought about
it, the more he liked the adventure.  After all, he had nothing to
lose.  She was taking the chances; he, on the other hand, would earn
his salary even if all the ice melted on the way.  And if her

!

madcap scheme bore fruit, his contract stated that he would receive
healthy bonus.  At week's end, when the news of Eliza's disappearance
broke, he was on his way to the glacier with boilers throbbing and did
not learn about it until he was back inValparaiso to load on the
produce Paulina had ready to be transported in a bed of prehistoric ice
to California, where her husband and her brother-in-law would sell it
at many times its value.  If everything worked out as planned, in three
or four voyages of the Fortuna--and she wisely had calculated about how
long it would take other companies to copy her initiative and plague
her with competition--Paulina would have made more money than she had
ever dreamed of.  As for the captain, he, too, had a product he planned
to auction to the highest bidders: books.

When Eliza and her nana had not returned home on the expected day, Miss
Rose sent the coachman with a note to see if the del Vane family was
still at the hacienda and if Eliza was all right.  An hour later
Agustin delValle's wife appeared at their door, highly alarmed.  She
knew nothing at all about Eliza, she said.  The family had not left
Valparaiso because her husband was laid low with the gout.  She had not
seen Eliza in months.  Miss Rose had sufficient savoir faire to gloss
things over.  Her error.  She was so sorry.  Eliza was with a different
friend.  Such a silly mix-up.  She was so grateful that Senora delValle
had taken the trouble to come personally.... Not surprisingly, Senora
del Vane did not believe a word, and before Miss Rose could contact her
brother Jeremy at his office, the flight of Eliza Sommers was the talk
of Valparaiso.

Miss Rose spent the remainder of the day in tears, and Jeremy Sommers
in speculation.  When they searched Eliza's room, they found her
farewell note and read it several times, vainly searching for some
clue.  Neither could they locate Mama Fresia to question her, and only
then did they realize that the woman had worked for them for eighteen
years and they did not know her last name.  They had never asked where
she came from or whether she had a family.

Mama Fresia, like the other servants, belonged to that vague limbo of
useful wraiths.

"Valparaiso is not London'Jeremy.They cannot have gone very far.  We
must look for them."

"Do you realize what a hornet's nest we will stir up when we begin to
make inquiries among our friends?"

"What do I care what people say!  The only thing that matters is to
find Eliza quickly, before she gets into difficulty."

"Frankly, Rose, if she has left us in this manner, after all we have
done for her, she already is in difficulty."

"What do you mean?  What kind of difficulty?"  Miss Rose asked,
terrified.

"A man, Rose.  That is the only reason that a girl commits an
indiscretion of this magnitude.  You know that better than anyone.

Who can Eliza possibly be with?"

"I cannot imagine."

Miss Rose could imagine perfectly.  She knew the party responsible for
this calamitous state of affairs: that gloomy-looking fellow who had
brought cargo to the house several months ago, Jeremy's employee.  She
did not know his name, but she was going to find out.

She did not, however, tell her brother anything because she believed
there might still be time to rescue the girl from the pitfalls of
forbidden love.  She remembered with the precision of a notary every
detail of her own experience with the Viennese tenor: the anguish of
those days was etched in her mind.  She did not love him now, that was
true, she had purged him from her soul centuries before, but the mere
sound of his name was enough to start a bell clanging in her breast.

Karl Bretzner was the key to her past and her personality; their
fleeting affair had shaped her destiny and the woman she had become. 
If she should ever love again as she had then, she thought, she would
do s.L.

the same all over again, even knowing how that passion had twisted her
life.  Maybe Eliza would have better luck and her love would work out;
maybe in her case her lover was free and did not have children or a
deceived wife.  She had to find the girl, confront the accursed
seducer, force them to marry, and then present the fait accompli to
Jeremy, who, with time, would accept them.  It would be difficult,
given her brother's rigidity in questions of honor, but if he had
forgiven her, he would forgive Eliza as well.  Persuading him would be
her task.  She had not played the role of mother for all those years
just to cross her arms when her only daughter made a misstep.

While Jeremy Sommers locked himself in a stubborn, dignified silence
that did nothing, incidentally, to protect him from loose tongues, Miss
Rose swung into action.Within a few days she had discovered the
identity of Joaquin Andieta and to her horror learned that, in addition
to everything else, he was a fugitive from justice.  He was accused of
juggling the books of the British Import and Export Company, Ltd."  and
of having stolen merchandise from them.  She knew then that the
situation was far more serious than she had imagined' Jeremy would
never accept such an individual into the bosom of their family.  Worse
yet, the minute he caught up with his former employee he would send him
off to jail, even if he were Eliza's husband.  Unless, Miss Rose
muttered with rage, she could find some way to get her brother to
withdraw charges against that little worm and clear his name for the
good of all.  First she would have to find the lovers, then see how she
could work the rest out.  She was very careful not to reveal what she
had learned, and the remainder of the week she kept making inquiries
here and there until in the Santos Tornero bookshop someone mentioned
the name of Joaquin Andieta's mother.  She obtained her address by
asking in all the churches; as she suspected, the Catholic priests kept
close tabs on their parishioners.

Friday, at midday, she went to call on Andieta's mother.  She went
there filled with purpose, animated by righteous indignation and ready
to speak her mind, but she felt her resolve weakening the farther she
advanced through the twisting alleyways of that district where she had
never before set foot.  She regretted the dress she had chosen,
lamented her overly ornate hat and white high-button shoes; she felt
ridiculous.  She knocked at the door, slowed by a feeling of shame that
turned into honest humility when she saw Andieta's mother.  She had
never imagined such devastation.  Before her stood an ordinary little
woman with feverish eyes and a sad expression.  She seemed ancient, but
when Rose looked more closely she could see that the woman was still
young and had once been beautiful; there was no doubt that she was very
ill.  Senora Andieta was not surprised to find Rose at her door; she
was accustomed to having wealthy women bring sewing and embroidery for
her to do.

Her customers passed her name to friends; it wasn't unusual for a lady
she didn't know to knock at her door.  This one was a foreigner,
though, she could tell by that butterfly-bright dress; no Chilean woman
would dare wear anything like that.  She said hello without smiling,
and invited Rose in.

"Please sit down, senora.  What may I do for you?"

Miss Rose sat on the edge of the chair that had been offered to her,
but she could not speak a word.  Everything she had planned to say
vanished from her mind in the flash of deep compassion she felt for
that woman, for Eliza, and for herself, and tears poured like river,
flooding her face and her heart.  Upset, Joaquin Andieta's mother took
Rose's hand in her own.

"What is it, senora?  Can I help?"

And then between sobs, in her Anglicized Spanish, Miss Rose disclosed
that her only daughter had disappeared more than a week ago, that she
was in love with Joaquin, that they had met several months before, that
the girl hadn't been the same ever since, that she was iL The Secret
<^

burning with love anyone could see that, except for herself, Miss Rose,
who was so self-absorbed and distracted that she had not concerned
herself in time and now it was too late because they had both run away.
Eliza had ruined her life just as she, Miss Rose, had ruined hers.  And
she kept spinning out more and more words, unable to stop, until she
had told that stranger what she had never told anyone.

She told her about Karl Bretzner and her orphaned love, and the twenty
years that had slipped by uncounted in her slumbering heart and barren
womb.  With streaming tears she poured out the losses she had kept
silent all her life, the rage hidden beneath good breeding, the secrets
carried like invisible shackles to save appearances, and the exuberant,
youthful years wasted by the simple bad fortune of having been born a
woman.  And when finally she was out of breath from sobbing, she sat
there unable to understand what had come over her or the source of the
heady relief beginning to enfold her.

"Have a little tea," said Joaquin Andieta's mother after a long
silence, placing a chipped teacup in her hand.

"Please, I beg you, tell me whether Eliza and your son are lovers.

I am not mad, am I?"  Miss Rose whispered.

"You may be right, senora.Joaquin was not in his right senses, either,
but he never told me the girl's name."

"Help me.  I must find Eliza."

"I can tell you that she is not withJoaquin."

"How do you know that?"

"Didn't you tell me that the girl disappeared only a week ago?

My son left in December."

"Left, you say?  Where did he go?"

"I do not know."

"I understand, senora.  In your place, like you, I would try to protect
my son.  I know that he has problems with the law.  I give you my word
of honor that I will help him; my brother is the man ager of the
British Company and he will do what I ask.  I will not tell anyone
where your son is; all I want is to talk with Eliza."

"You daughter and Joaquin are not together, believe me."

"I know that Eliza followed him."

"She cannot have followed him, senora.  My son went to California."

The day that Captain John Sommers returned toValparaiso with the
Fortuna loaded with blue ice, he found his brother and sister waiting
for him on the dock, as usual, but one look at their faces and he knew
that something very serious had happened.  Rose was pale and wan, and
as soon as he hugged her she started crying uncontrollably.

"Eliza has disappeared," Jeremy informed him, so angry he could barely
mouth the words.

As soon as they were alone, Rose told John what she had learned from
Joaquin Andieta's mother.  In those endless days of waiting for her
favorite brother, and of trying to tie up loose ends, she had convinced
herself that the girl had followed her lover to California, because
that was what she would have done herseLf.  John Sommers spent the next
few days asking questions around the port.  He found that Eliza had not
bought a passage on any ship and that her name was not on any passenger
list; on the other hand, authorities listed the departure of a Joaquin
Andieta in December.  Given the possibility that the girl could have
changed her name to throw them off the trail, the captain made the same
rounds again, this time with a detailed description--but no one
remembered seeing her.  A young girl, nearly a child, traveling alone
or with an Indian servant, would immediately have attracted attention,
he was assured; besides, very few women were going to San Francisco,
and all of them of light morals, with the exception of an occasional
captain's or businessman's wife.

f; The Secret ;

"She can't have taken a ship without leaving a trace, Rose," the
captain concluded after a careful accounting of his inquiries.

"And Andieta?"

"His mother told you the truth.  His name is listed."

"He took some things from the British Company.  I am sure he did it
only because he had no other way to pay for his journey.

Jeremy has no idea that the thief he is looking for is Eliza's lover.

I

just hope he never finds out!"

"Aren't you tired of carrying so many secrets, Rose?"

"What do you want me to do?  My life is built on appearances, not
truths.  Jeremy is like stone, you know him as well as I.What can we do
about the girl?"

"I am leaving tomorrow for California, the ship is loaded.  If there
are as few women as they say, it will be easy to find her."

"That is not enough' John

"Can you think of anything better?"

That night at dinner Miss Rose insisted once again on the need to
mobilize all available resources to find the girl.  Jeremy who had
stayed at the margin of his sister's frenzied activity without offering
any advice or expressing any emotion other than dismay at being
involved in a social scandal, offered the opinion that Eliza was not
deserving of all the fuss.

"This atmosphere of hysteria is extremely unpleasant.  I suggest you
exert some self-control.  Why look for her?  Even if you find her, she
will never enter this house again," he proclaimed.

"Does Eliza mean nothing to you?"  Miss Rose rebuked him.

"That is not the point.  Eliza committed an unpardonable offense
against society, and she must pay the piper."

"As I have paid for nearly twenty years?"

A frozen silence fell over the dining room.  The family had never
spoken openly about Rose's past, and Jeremy was not even certain ill
lL

that John knew what had happened between his sister and the Viennese
tenor, because he himself had been careful not to reveal it.

"Paid what, Rose?  You were forgiven, and protected.  You have no
reason to reproach me."

"Why were you so generous with me but cannot be with

"Because you are my sister and it is my duty to protect you."

"Eliza is like my own daughter' Jeremy

"But she is not.  We have no obligation to her; she does not belong to
this family."

"Oh, but she does!"  Miss Rose cried.

"Enough!"  the captain interrupted, banging the table with his fist as
plates and cups danced.

Yes' Jeremy she belongs!  Eliza is one of us," Miss Rose repeated,
sobbing and burying her face in her hands.

"She is John's daughter."

Jeremy listened, aghast, as his brother and sister recounted the secret
they had kept for sixteen years.  That man of few words, so self
controlled that he seemed invulnerable to human emotion, exploded for
the first time, and everything held back for forty-six years of perfect
British self-possession boiled up, choking him with a torrent of
reproaches, rage, and humiliation.

"How could I have been so stupid!  Dear God, living beneath the same
roof, in a nest of lies, and never suspecting, confident that my
brother and sister were the right sort and that we trusted one another,
when, in fact, it was all a fiction, a web of lies; who knows how many
things you have systematically hidden from me?  But this is the
crowning blow.  Why the devil did you not tell me?  What have I done to
cause you to treat me like a monster?  To deserve to be manipulated in
this way?  To have you take advantage of my generosity all the while
you are scorning me?  Because there is no other face to put on the way
you have surrounded me with deceit, and excluded me.  You have used me,
happy to have me pay the bills.  It has been the same all my life, ever
since we were children you have made sport of me behind my back...."

Mute, finding no way to justify their behavior, Rose and John accepted
the tongue-lashing, and when Jeremy's tirade was exhausted the room
filled with silence.  All three were drained.  For the first time in
their lives they were seeing one another with the mask of good manners
and courtesy torn away.  Something fundamental, something that had
sustained the fragile equilibrium of their three-legged family table,
seemed irrevocably broken.  Nevertheless, as Jeremy began to catch his
breath, his features again assumed their usual impenetrable arrogance,
and he brushed back a lock of hair from his forehead and straightened
his tie.  Only then did Miss Rose stand, walk to the back of his chair,
and place one hand on his shoulder, the only gesture of intimacy she
dared; her heart ached with tenderness for that solitary brother, that
silent, melancholy man who had been like a father to her, whose eyes
she had never made the effort to meet.  She realized that, in fact, she
knew nothing about him and that she had never in her entire life
touched him.

Sixteen years before, on the morning of March IS, I832, Mama Fresia had
gone out into the garden and seen an ordinary box of Marseilles soap
covered with newspaper.  Curious, she had looked to see what it was and
when she lifted the paper discovered a newborn baby.

She had run into the house yelling, and an instant later her pa trona
was bending over the infant.  Miss Rose was twenty at the time, fresh
and beautiful as a peach; she was wearing a topaz-colored dress and the
wind was playing with her hair, just as Eliza remembered or imagined
it.  Between them, the women lifted the box and carried it to the
sewing room, where they removed the papers and picked up the baby girl
clumsily wrapped in a wool sweater.  She had not been outside

_L.

long, they deduced, because despite the cold morning wind the baby's
body was warm and she was sleeping peacefully.  Miss Rose ordered the
Indian woman to look for a clean blanket, sheets, and scissors to cut
diapers.  When Mama Fresia returned, the sweater had disappeared and
the naked baby was yelling in Miss Rose's arms.

"I recognized the sweater immediately.  I had knitted it for John the
year before.  I hid it because you would have recognized it, too," she
explained to Jeremy.

"Who is Eliza's mother' John

"I don't remember her name--"

"You do not know her name!  How many bastards have you strewn across
the world?  "Jeremy exclaimed.

"She was a girl from the port, a young Chilean.  I remember her as
being very pretty.  I never saw her again, and I didn't know she was
pregnant.  When Rose showed me the sweater a couple of years later, I
remembered that because it was cold, I had given it to the gid when we
were on the beach but forgotten to ask for it back.  You have to
understand' Jeremy that is how a sailor's life is.  I am not a
beast--"

"You were drunk."

"That's possible.  When I learned that Eliza was my daughter, I tried
to find the mother, but she had disappeared.  She may have died.  I
don't know."

"For some reason, that woman decided that we should bring up the girl'
Jeremy and I have never been sorry that we did.  We gave her affection,
a good life, an education," Miss Rose added.  "Possibly the mother
couldn't give her anything and that is why she wrapped Eliza in the
sweater and brought her here, so we would know who the father was."

"And that is all?  A filthy sweater?  That proves absolutely nothing!
Anyone could be the father.  The woman very cleverly pawned her
daughter off on us."

"I was afraid that would be your reaction, Jeremy," his sister replied.
"And that is precisely why I didn't tell you then."

Three weeks after telling Tao Chi'en good-bye, Eliza was with five
miners panning for gold on the banks of the American River.

She had not traveled alone.  The day she left Sacramento she had joined
a group of Chileans leaving for the placers.  They had bought mounts
and pack animals, but no one had any experience with livestock and the
Mexican ranchers had skillfully disguised the age and defects of the
horses and mules they bought.  These were pathetic beasts, doped, their
bald spots painted over with dye, and within a few hours after starting
they had come up lame.  Everyone in the party was carrying a full load
of tools, weapons, and tin utensils, so that the dreary caravan crept
along amid a clanging of metal.

Along the way, they began shedding equipment, which lay scattered among
the crosses that dotted the landscape to indicate the dead.

Eliza had introduced herself as Elias Andieta, only recently arrived
from Chile with instructions from his mother to look for his brother
Joaquin, and prepared to travel California from top to bottom to carry
out his duty.

"How old are you, kid?"  the miners had asked Eliza.

"Eighteen."

"You look more like fourteen.  Aren't you kind of young to be looking
for gold?"

"I am eighteen, and I am not looking for gold, only my brother
Joaquin," she repeated.

The Chileans were young, cheer fill and had not yet lost the enthusiasm
that had motivated them to leave their country and travel so far,
although they were beginning to realize that the streets were not paved
with treasure, as they had been told.  At first Eliza did not show them
her face and kept her hat pulled down over her eyes, but soon she
noticed that the men paid little attention to one another.

They took for granted that she was still a boy and were not surprised
by her size, her voice, or her behavior.  Each of them was
self-absorbed and didn't notice that she went off from them to relieve
herself or that when they came to a pool of water where they could take
a dip, while they were taking off their clothes Eliza jumped in with
hers on, even her hat, claiming that that way she could do her laundry
at the same time.  Besides, cleanliness was the least of their worries,
and after a few days Eliza was as filthy and sweaty as her companions.
She discovered that their grime made them all equally sordid: her
bloo&ound-sharp nose could scarcely distinguish her own body odor from
theirs.  The heavy cloth of her trousers chafed her legs; she was not
used to riding long distances, and the second day her buttocks were so
raw she could scarcely take a step, but the others were tenderfoots,
too, and in as much pain as she.  The dry, hot climate, the thirst,
fatigue, and constant assault of mosquitoes, quickly killed any banter.
They rode forward in silence, metal clanking, sorry before they began.
For weeks they looked for a good place to set up and look for gold,
time that used to ask around about Joaquin Andieta.  Neither the
information they had gathered nor their badly drawn maps were of much
use, and when they did reach a good site for panning they found
hundreds of miners ahead of them.  Every prospector had the right to
claim a hundred square feet; they marked their site, working it every
day and leaving their tools there when they were away, but if they were
gone for more than ten days, someone else could claim the spot and
register it in his name.  The worst crimes, claim jumping and stealing,
were punished with the gallows or with a horsewhipping, after a quick
trial in which the miners played the roles of judge, jury, and
executioner.

Eliza's party met bands of Chileans everywhere.  Recognizing them by
their clothing and accent, they would embrace enthusiastically, share f
The Secret ii their mate, liquor, and the jerked meat they called
charqui; they would exchange colorful tales of misadventures and sing
nostalgic songs beneath the stars, but the next day they would say
good-bye: there was no time for excessive cordiality.  From their
speech and conversation, Eliza deduced that some of her countrymen were
privileged young men from Santiago, upper-class dandies who a few
months before had been wearing frock coats, patent leather boots, kid
gloves, and slicked back hair, but in the placers it was nearly
impossible to tell them from the rough peasants with whom they were
working side by side.  Class affectations and prejudices went up in
smoke when they met the brutal reality of the mines, but not racial
hatred, which exploded in deadly fights on the least pretext.  The
Chileans, more numerous and more enterprising than other Hispanics, had
drawn the Yanquis' hatred.  Eliza heard that back in San Francisco, a
group of drunken Australians had attacked Little Chile, setting off a
pitched battle.  Several Chilean companies had peons from their fields
working at the placers, hands who for generations had worked for a
pittance under feudal system and so were not surprised that whatever
gold they found wasn't theirs but the patron's.  In the eyes of the
North Americans, that was simple slavery.  American laws favored the
individual:

each piece of land was reduced to the area a man could work by himself.
The Chilean associations scoffed at the law, registering claims in the
names of each of their peons in order to work more sites.

California was swarming with white men of various nationalities in
flannel shirts, pants tucked into their boats, revolvers in their
belts; Chinese in quilted jackets and full trousers; Indians in ruined
military jackets and bare behinds; Mexicans in white cotton and
enormous sombreros; South Americans in short ponchos and broad leather
belts in which they carried knife, tobacco, gunpowder, and money;
travelers from the Sandwich Islands, barefoot and wearing brilliant
silk sashes--all in a hodgepodge of colors, cultures, reli i .....
gions, and tongues, but with a single obsession.  Eliza asked each of
them about Joaquin Andieta and urged them to spread the word that his
brother Elias was looking for him.  As she moved deeper and deeper into
that territory, she realized how enormous it was and how difficult it
would be to find her lover in the middle of fifty thousand foreigners
constantly on the move.

Eliza's party of bone-weary Chileans finally decided to stop and set up
camp.  They had come to the valley of the American River in a time of
baking heat, with only two mules and Eliza's horse left:

the rest of the animals had fallen along the way.  The land was dry and
cracked, with no vegetation but pines and oaks, although a
swift-running, clear river rushed down from the mountains, leaping over
large boulders and cutting through the valley like a knife.  On both
banks were rows and rows of men, digging and filling pails with sandy
dirt they washed through a sluice, a contrivance that looked like a
child's cradle.  They worked bareheaded in the sun, legs in icy water,
clothes soaking wet; they slept stretched out on the ground, weapons in
hand; they ate hard tack and salted meat, drank water polluted by the
hundreds of excavations upriver and liquor so adulterated that many
ended up with cirrhosis or the D.T."s.  Eliza watched two men die
within a few days, writhing with pain and bathed in the foamy sweat of
cholera, and was thankful for the wisdom of Tao Chi'en, who had taught
her not to drink water that hadn't been boiled.  No matter how thirsty
she was, she waited until evening when they camped to brew tea or mate.
From time to time they would hear shouts of jubilation, which meant
someone had found a gold nugget, but most were content with extracting
a few precious grains from tons of useless dirt.  Months earlier, it
had still been possible to see gold particles gleaming beneath the
clear water, but now nature was turned upside down by human greed, the
landscape altered by heaps of dirt and rocks, great pits, rivers

and streams diverted from their beds and the water caught in countless
pockets, thousands of tree stumps where once there had been forests.
Getting at the gold sometimes called for the determination of titans.

Eliza did not mean to stay, but she was worn out and knew that she
could not keep aimlessly riding on alone.  Her companions had staked a
claim at the last of a line of miners, some distance from the nearest
burgeoning town with its tavern and general store where miners could
buy basic supplies.  Their neighbors were three Oregonians who worked
and drank with uncommon endurance and wasted no time greeting new
arrivals; on the contrary, they let Eliza and her companions know
immediately that they did not honor the right of greasers to exploit
American soil.

One of the Chileans countered with the argument that the Oregonians had
no claim, either, since the land belonged to the Indians, and the two
would have drawn their weapons if the others hadn't intervened and
cooled things down.  The air was filled with a constant uproar of
shovels, picks, rolling rock, running water, and curses, but the sky
was limpid and the air scented with bay.  Every evening the Chileans
would drop with fatigue while the counterfeit Elias Andieta started a
small campfire to brew coffee and water his horse.  Out of pity, Eliza
also watered the wretched mules, even though they weren't hers, and
unbuckled their loads to give them a rest.  Fatigue clouded her vision
and she could barely control the trembling of her knees; she realized
that Tao Chi'en had been right when he warned her that she needed to
build up her strength before setting out on this adventure.  She
thought about the little board and canvas shack in Sacramento, where at
that hour Tao would be meditating or writing with pen and China ink in
his beautiful calligraphy.  She smiled, amazed that her nostalgia did
not evoke Miss Rose's peaceful sewing room or Mama Fresia's warm
kitchen.  How I have changed, she sighed, looking at hands blistered
and burned by the harsh sun.

In the morning, Eliza's partners sent her to the store to buy the
supplies they would need to survive, and one of those cradle like
things for processing the dirt, because they saw how much more
efficient that contrivance was than their simple pans.  The one street
in the town--if that was what the cluster of buildings could be
called-was a mud pit littered with garbage.  The store, built of logs
and boards, was the center of social life in that community of solitary
men.

Anything bought in the area was sold there, and liquor was served in
large quantities, along with a little food.  At night, when the miners
came to drink, a violinist livened things up with his melodies.  A few
men would tuck a kerchief into their belts, a sign that they were
playing the part of women, and the others took turns asking them to
dance.  There wasn't a single woman for miles around, but occasionally
a mule drawn wagon would pass through filled with prostitutes.  They
were avidly awaited and generously compensated.  The store owner was a
talkative, good-natured Mormon with three wives in Utah, who offered
credit to anyone who would convert to his faith.  He never took a
drink, and while he sold liquor, he preached against the vice of
drinking it.  He had heard about a man namedJoaquin and he thought the
last name might be Andieta, he told Eliza when she questioned him, but
that man had come through quite some time ago and the proprietor
couldn't say what direction he had taken.  He remembered him because he
had gotten into a fight between some Americans and Hispanics over a
piece of land.  Chileans?  Maybe.  All he was sure of was that he spoke
Spanish; he could have been a Mexican, he said, to him all greasers
looked alike.

"And how did it turn out?"

"The Americans ended up with the land and the others had to move on.
How else would it be?  This Joaquin and another man

-A- The Secret iv stayed here at the store for two or three days.  They
laid out some blankets there in a corner, and I let them take it easy
until they mended a little because they were pretty well beat up.  They
weren't a bad sort.  I remember your brother, he was a young fellow
with black hair and big eyes, pretty good-looking."

"That's the one," said Eliza, her heart galloping.

PART THREE

1850-1853 El Dorado pour men, two on each side tugging at heavy I
ropes, led the bear into a ring where a fired-up , crowd sat waiting.
They dragged him to the center of the arena and tied one hind leg to a
post by a twenty-foot chain and then spent fifteen minutes undoing the
ropes while he clawed and snarled with world-stopping rage.  He weighed
more than thirteen hundred pounds, his coat was dark brown, one eye was
blind, he carried the rakes and scars of old fights on his back, but he
was still young.  Foaming slobber dripped from jaws filled with yellow
teeth.  Standing erect, slashing futilely with his prehistoric claws,
he looked over the crowd with his one good eye, jerking desperately at
his chain.

This town had sprung up from nothing in a few months' time, built in a
sigh by transients who never intended it to last.  In place of a
bullring, such as those in California's Mexican settlements, it had
large cleared space that was used for breaking horses and corralling
mules; the fence was reinforced with boards and wood bleachers had been
added to accommodate spectators.  The late November, steel colored sky
threatened rain, but it wasn't cold and the ground was dry.

From behind the barrier, hundreds of spectators answered the animal's
every roar with a chorus of jeers.  The only women, a half dozen young
Mexicans wearing embroidered white dresses and smoking their eternal
cigarettes, were as conspicuous as the bear, and the men greeted them
with shouts of" olE!  " while bottles of liquor and bettors'

bags of gold dust passed from hand to hand.  The gamblers, in their
city clothes, fancy vests, wide neckties, and top hats, stood out among
the rowdy, unkempt rabble.  Three musicians were playing favorite tunes
on crudely made violins, and as soon as they spiritedly attacked "Oh!

Susanna," the miners' hymn, a pair of bearded clowns dressed like women
leaped into the ring and athletically danced a jig amidst obscenities
and thunderous clapping, lifting their skirts to show hairy legs and
rufRed drawers.  They were rewarded with a generous shower of coins,
cheers, and raucous laughter.  When they left, a solemn bugle call and
drumroll announced the beginning of the contest, followed by the
guttural roar of an electrified crowd.

Lost in the throng, Eliza watched the spectacle with fascination and
horror.  She had bet the little money she had left, hoping to multiply
it in the next minutes.  At the third blast of the trumpet a wooden
gate was raised and a young, gleaming, black bull trotted into the
ring, snorting.  For an instant the gallery was silenced with awe and
then full-throated " Ole!"  engulfed the animal.  He stopped, dazed,
uplifted head crowned by long, un blunted horns, his intelligent eyes
measuring distances, his rear hooves pawing the sand, until a growl
from the bear caught his attention.  His opponent had seen him and was
scratching out a hole a few steps from his post, in which he lay flat,
hugging the ground.  At the cries from the crowd, the bull put his head
down, tensed his flanks, and, raising a cloud of sand, charged, blind
with rage, snuffling, steam issuing from his nostrils and slobber
streaming from his lips.  The bear was waiting.  He took the first hook
of the horn in the back; it tore a bloody furrow in his thick fur but
he did not budge an inch.  The bull trotted completely around the ring,
confused, while the crowd egged him on with catcalls; he charged again,
trying to lift the bear with his horns, but the bear took its
punishment without moving, until he saw his chance and with one sure
slash tore open the bull's nose.  Pouring blood, crazed with pain and
disoriented,

El Dorado S

the attacker made a series of blind thrusts, wounding his enemy again
and again but unable to rout him from the hole.  Suddenly the bear rose
up and grasped the bull's neck in a terrible embrace, clamping his
teeth in its flesh.  For long moments they danced together around the
circle described by the chain while the sand grew red with blood and
the galleries echoed with the yells of the men.  Finally the bull broke
free, staggered a few steps, his legs wobbly and his gleaming obsidian
hide stained crimson, until he collapsed onto his knees and sank to the
ground.  A great clamor celebrated the bear's victory.  Two horsemen
rode into the ring, shot the loser squarely between the eyes, roped him
by the hind legs, and dragged him from the ring.  Eliza pushed her way
to the exit, nauseated.  She had lost her last forty dollars.

During the summer and autumn months of I849, Eliza rode the length of
the mother lode from south to north, from Mariposa to Downieville and
back again, following the ever fainter trail of Andieta from the rivers
to the foothills of the Sierra Nevada.  At first when she asked about
him very few remembered anyone with that name or description, but
toward the end of the year his figure began to take on real
proportions, and that gave the girl strength to continue her search.
The rumor had circulated thatJoaquin's brother was looking for him, and
several times during that month the echo returned her own voice.  More
than once when she inquired aboutJoaquin she was identified as his
brother even before she could introduce herself.

In that broad region, mail from San Francisco arrived after months of
delay, and newspapers took weeks, but there was no shortage of news
that spread by word of mouth.  How could Joaquin not have heard that
she was looking for him?  Since he had no brothers, he must be
wondering who this Elias was, and if he had an iota of intuition, she
thought, he would associate that name with hers.  Even if he didn't
catch on, at least he must be curious to know who was posing as his
relative.  At night Eliza could scarcely sleep, fretting over various
theories and haunted by the persistent doubt that her lover's silence
could be explained only because he was dead--or didn't want to be
found.

And what if, in fact, he was running away from her, as Tao Chi'en had
hinted?  She spent her days on horseback and slept at night on the
ground, anywhere, in her clothes, with her Castile blanket as a cover
and her boots as a pillow.  Dirt and sweat no longer bothered her;

she ate when she could, her only precaution not to drink water before
she boiled it and not to look Anglos in the eye.

By that time there were more than a hundred thousand argonauts in
California, and more kept arriving, scattered all through the mother
lode, turning the world upside down, moving mountains, diverting
rivers, destroying forests, pulverizing rock, displacing tons of sand,
and digging monumental pits.  At the places where gold was found, the
idyllic land, which had remained untouched since the beginning of time,
was turned into a lunar nightmare.  Eliza was constantly exhausted, but
she had gotten her strength back and lost her fear.

She started menstruating again when it was least convenient, difficult
to disguise in the company of men, but she welcomed it as a sign that
her body was finally healed.  "Your acupuncture needles served me well,
Tao.  I hope to have children some day," she wrote her friend, sure
that he would understand without further explanations.  She was never
without her weapons, although she didn't know how to use them and hoped
she would never find herself in a spot where she had to.  Once only she
had shot into the air to frighten off some young Indians who came too
close and looked threatening to her, but if she'd had to fight she
would have come off badly because she couldn't hit a burro at five
paces.  She had not refined her marksmanship but had improved her
talent for making herself invisible.  She could ride into a town
without attracting attention, blending into groups of Hispanics where a
boy of her looks would go unnoticed.  She learned to imitate Peruvian
and Mexican accents to perfection and so pass for one of them when
she

!

was looking for company.  She also changed her British English for
American and adopted certain indispensable swear words in order to be
accepted among them.  She learned that if she talked their lingo they
respected her; the rules were to not offer any explanations, to say as
little as possible, to not ask for anything, to work for her food, to
stand up to provocation, and to hold tight to the small Bible she had
bought in Sonora.  Even the crudest among them felt a superstitious
reverence for that book.  They were amazed by the beardless youth with
a woman's voice who read the Holy Scripture every evening, but did not
make fun of him openly; just the opposite, some became his protectors,
ready to beat up anyone who did.  Among those solitary and brutal men
who had sallied forth in search of fortune like the mythic heroes of
ancient Greece only to find themselves reduced to an elemental
existence, often sick, prone to violence and alcohol, there was an un
confessed tenderness and longing for order.  Sentimental songs brought
tears to their eyes; they would pay any price for a piece of the apple
pie that gave them a moment's respite from homesickness, and they rode
miles out of their way to pass a place where children lived, and then
sit watching them in silence, as if they were some kind of miracle.

"Don't worry' Tao I don't travel alone, that would be insane," Eliza
wrote her friend.  "It's best to go in large groups, well armed and on
guard, because the gangs of outlaws have multiplied in recent months.

The Indians are fairly peaceful, although they look frightening, but
when they see an unprotected rider they may take his most prized
possessions: his horse, weapons, and boots.  I join up with other
travelers: salesmen going from town to town with their merchandise,
miners looking for new veins, families of farmers, hunters, the
speculators and land agents who are beginning to overrun California,
gamblers,

gunmen, lawyers, and other scoundrels who tend to be the most
entertaining and generous travel companions.  There are preachers
about; they are always young and look like holy madmen.  Imagine how
much faith it takes to travel three thousand miles across virgin
prairies for the purpose of battling others' sins.  They leave their
towns filled with strength and passion, determined to carry the word of
Christ to distant California, with no worry for obstacles or dangers
along the road because God is marching at their side.  They call the
miners 'worshipers of the golden calf.  "You have to read the Bible'
Tao or you will never understand Christians.  Those pastors are
defeated by broken spirits, not material reverses; they feel impotent
before the overpowering force of greed.  It is comforting to see them
when they have just arrived, still innocent, but sad to meet them when
they have been deserted by God, dragging from one camp to the next
under a burning sun, thirsty, preaching in squares and taverns to an
indifferent audience that listens with hats on and five minutes later
is getting drunk with the whores.  I met a troupe of itinerant actors'
Tao poor devils who stop in every town to entertain with pantomimes,
off color songs, and crude comedy.  I traveled with them for several
weeks, and they worked me into the show.  If we could find a piano,
played, but if not, I was the ingenue of the company and everyone was
amazed by how well I played the part of a woman.  I couldn't stay with
them, though, because the confusion was driving me crazy; I didn't know
whether I was a woman dressed as a man, a man dressed as a woman, or an
aberration of nature."

Eliza made friends with the mailman, and whenever possible rode with
him, because he kept on the move and had contacts; if anyone could find
Joaquin Andieta it would be him, she thought.  He delivered mail to the
miners and carried back bags of gold for safekeeping in banks.  He was
one of the many visionaries made rich by gold fever without ever having
held a pick or a shovel in his hands.  He charged

two and a half dollars to take a letter to San Francisco and, profiting
from the miners' hunger for news from home, he asked an ounce of gold
for every letter he brought them.  He made a fortune with that
business; he had customers to spare and no one complained about the
prices since there was no alternative; they couldn't abandon the mines
to go get their mail or deposit their earnings from a hundred miles
away.  Eliza also sought the company of Charley, a little man who
always had some story to tell, who was in competition with the Mexican
drovers who transported goods on mule back.  Although he wasn't afraid
of anything, including the devil, he always welcomed company because he
needed ears for his stories.  The longer she watched him, the surer
Eliza was that, like her, this was a woman dressed as a man.

Charley's hair was bleached by the sun, he chewed tobacco, swore like a
stage robber, and was never without his gloves or his pistols, but once
Eliza got a glimpse of his hands and they were small and white like
young girl's.

She fell in love with freedom.  In the Sommers' home she had lived shut
up within four walls, in a stagnant atmosphere where time moved in
circles and where she could barely glimpse the horizon through
distorted windowpanes.  She had grown up clad in the impenetrable armor
of good manners and conventions, trained from girlhood to please and
serve, bound by corset, routines, social norms, and fear.  Fear had
been her companion: fear of God and his unpredictable justice, of
authority, of her adoptive parents, of illness and evil tongues, of
anything unknown or different; fear of leaving the protection of her
home and facing the dangers outside; fear of her own fragility as a
woman, of dishonor and truth.  Hers had been a sugar-coated reality
built on the unspoken, on courteous silences, well-guarded secrets,
order, and discipline.  She had aspired to virtue but now she
questioned the meaning of the word.  When she had given herself to
Joaquin Andieta in the room of the armoires she had committed an
unpardonable sin in the eyes of the world, but in hers love justified
everything.  She did not know what she had lost or gained with that
passion.  She had left Chile with the purpose of finding her lover and
becoming his slave forever, believing that was the way to extinguish
her thirst to submit and her hidden wish for possession, but now she
doubted that she could give up those new wings beginning to sprout on
her shoulders.  She regretted nothing she had shared with her lover,
nor was she ashamed of the fires that had changed her life; just the
opposite, she felt that they had tempered her, made her strong, given
her pride in making decisions and paying the consequences for them. 
She owed no one an explanation; if she had made mistakes she had been
duly punished by giving up her family, suffering in the hold of the
ship, losing her baby, and facing a future of total uncertainty.  When
she found she was pregnant, trapped, she had written in her diary that
she had lost her right to happiness.  However, in those last months of
riding across the golden landscape of California she felt she was
flying free, like a condor.  She was awakened one morning by the
whinnying of her horse with the full light of dawn in her face,
surrounded by tall sequoias that, like centenary guards, had watched
over her sleep, by gentle hills, and, far in the distance, purple
mountaintops;

at that moment she was filled with an atavistic happiness that was
entirely new.  She realized that she had lost the feeling of panic that
had lain curled in the pit of her stomach like a rat, threatening to
gnaw her entrails.  Her fears had dissipated in the awesome grandeur of
this landscape.  To the measure that she confronted danger, she was
becoming bolder: she had lost her fear of fear.  "I am finding new
strength in myself; I may always have had it and just didn't know
because I'd never had to call on it.  I don't know at what turn in the
road I shed the person I used to be' Tao  Now I am only one of
thousands of adventurers scattered along the banks of s_.

these crystal-clear rivers and among the foothills of these eternal
mountains.  Here men are proud, with no one above them but the sky
overhead; they bow to no one because they are inventing equality.  And
I want to be one of them.  Some are winners with sacks of gold slung
over their backs; some, defeated, carry nothing but disillusion and
debts, but they all believe they are masters of their destiny, of the
ground they walk on, of the future, of their own undeniable dignity.
After knowing them I can never again be the lady Miss Rose intended me
to be.  Finally I understand Joaquin, why he stole precious hours from
our love to talk to me about freedom.  So, this was what he meant....
It was this euphoria, this light, this happiness as intense as the few
moments of shared love I can remember.  I miss you'Tao.There's no one I
can talk to about what I see, what I feel.  I don't have a friend in
all this lonely country, and in my role as a man I have to watch
everything I say.

go about with a scowl so people will think I'm tough.  It is tedious to
be a man, but being a woman is worse still."

Wandering here and there, Eliza got to know that rugged land as if she
had been born there; she could find her way and estimate distances; she
knew poisonous snakes from harmless ones and hostile bands of Indians
from friendly ones; she read the weather from the shape of the clouds
and time by the angle of her shadow; she knew what to do if she came
across a bear and how to approach an isolated cabin and not get shot.
Sometimes she met newcomers hauling complicated mining equipment up the
slopes, which eventually they would abandon as useless, or met groups
of feverish men coming down from the hills after months of futile
labor.  She would never forget the bird-pecked corpse swinging from an
oak and wearing a placard of warning.  In her pilgrimage she saw
Americans, Europeans, Kanakas, Mexicans, Chileans, Peruvians, and long
lines of silent nese under the command of a overseer who, although of
their race,

treated them like servants and paid them with crumbs.  They carried
bundles on their backs and boots in their hand because they had always
worn slippers and could not bear that weight on their feet.  They were
frugal people; they lived on nothing and spent as little as possible.
They bought their boots too large because they thought the big ones
were worth more, and were stunned when they learned that the price was
the same for the small sizes.  Eliza sharpened her instinct for
side-stepping danger.  She learned to live for the day, without making
plans, as Tao Chi'en had counseled her.  She thought of him often and
wrote frequently, but she could send letters only when she came to a
town with mail service to Sacramento.  It was like throwing bottles
with messages into the sea because she didn't know if Tao was still
living there, and the one reliable address she had was for the Chinese
restaurant.  If her letters ever got there, they would surely give them
to him.

She wrote him about the magnificent scenery, the heat and the thirst,
the voluptuous curves of the hills, the thick oaks and slim pines, the
icy rivers with water so clear you could see the gold glittering in the
beds, the wild geese honking in the sky, the deer and the huge bears,
the miners' rough life and the mirage of easy fortunes.  She told him
what both of them already knew: that it wasn't worth wasting one's life
to chase after yellow dust.  And she guessed Tao's response that
neither did it make sense to waste it following an illusory love but
she kept on going because she couldn't stop.

Joaquin Andieta was beginning to fade away; her excellent memory could
not limn her lover's features clearly; she had to reread his love
letters to be sure that in truth he had existed, that they had loved
one another and that the nights in the room of the armoires were not
her invention.  So she renewed the sweet torment of solitary love.  To
Tao Chi'en she described the people she met along her way, the masses
of Mexican immigrants in Sonora, the only town where there were
children to run through the streets, the humble iA El Dorado :

women who would invite her into their adobe houses, never knowing she
was one of them, the thousands of young Americans who came to the
placers that autumn after crossing the continent from the Atlantic
Coast to the Pacific.  It was estimated that the number of recent
arrivals was forty thousand, each of them expecting to get rich in the
blink of an eye and return home in triumph.

They called themselves the forty-niners, a name that became popular and
was soon adopted by all those who had come to California, either
earlier or later.  Back East, whole towns were left without men,
peopled only by women, children, and prisoners.

"I see very few women in the mines, but there are some with enough
pluck to accompany their husbands in this dog's life.  Their children
die in epidemics or accidents, they bury them, weep over them, and go
on working from sunup to sundown to keep this barbaric life from
stealing every vestige of decency.  They roll up their sleeves and wade
into the water to look for gold, but some find out that washing other
peoples' clothes or baking biscuits and selling them is more
productive; they can earn more in a week than their men do in a month's
back-breaking work in the placers.  A man on his own happily pays ten
times its value for a loaf of bread baked by a woman's hands; if I try
to sell the same thing, dressed as Elias Andieta, they give me only a
few cents' Tao  Men are willing to walk miles just to see woman up
close.A girl sitting in the sun outside a tavern will within minutes
have a collection of pouches of gold on her knees, gifts from besotted
men grateful for the provocative sight of skirts.  And prices keep
going up; the miners get poorer and poorer and the merchants richer and
richer.  In a moment of desperation, I paid a dollar for an egg and ate
it raw with salt and pepper and a splash of brandy, as Mama Fresia
taught me: an infallible remedy for despair.  I met a boy from Georgia,
a poor crazy thing, but they tell me he wasn't always like that.  At
the first of the year he hit a vein of ore and scraped nine thousand
dollars from the rocks with a knife, but then lost it all in one
afternoon playing monte.  Oh, Tao, you cannot imagine how much I long
to take a bath, brew some tea, and sit down and talk with you.

would like to put on a clean dress and the earrings Miss Rose gave me,
so you would see me looking pretty and not as a mannish woman.

I'm writing everything that happens to me in my diary so I can tell you
all the details when we see each other, because of this much I am sure:
one day we will be together again.  I think about Miss Rose and how
angry she must be with me but I can't write her until I find Joaquin,
because until then no one must know where I am.  If Miss Rose ever
suspected the things I have seen and heard, she would die.

Mr.  Sommers would say that this is an uncultivated land: no morality,
no laws; the vices of gambling, liquor, and brothels rule, but for me
this land is a blank page; here I can start life anew and become the
person I want.  No one knows me but you; no one knows my past, I can be
born again.  There are no lords and servants here, only working people.
I have seen former slaves who have put together enough gold to
establish newspapers, schools, and churches for their race; they fight
slavery from here in California.  I met a black man who bought his
mother's freedom.  The poor woman arrived here sick and old, but now
she earns whatever she wants selling meals; she bought a ranch and goes
to church on Sundays dressed in silk and riding in a four horse
carriage.  Did you know that many black sailors deserted their ships,
not just for the gold but because here they find their only chance at
freedom?  I remember the Chinese slave girls behind the iron bars you
pointed out to me in San Francisco; I can't forget them, they haunt me
like souls in pain.  In this part of the world a prostitute's life is
brutal, too; some kill themselves.  Men wait hours to greet the new
teacher with respect but they are brutal to the saloon girls.  You know
what they call them?

"Soiled doves."  And the Indians commit suicide, too'Tao.They run them
out of everywhere; they drift around,

hungry and desperate.  No one will hire them, then they charge them
with loitering and put them in chains to perform forced labor.  Mayors
pay five dollars for a dead Indian; they are killed for sport and
sometimes they scalp them.  There is no shortage of white men who
collect such trophies and tie them to their saddles.  You would be
pleased to know that there are Chinese who have gone to live with the
Indians.  They go far off to the woods in the north where there is
still hunting.  They say there aren't many buffalo left on the
prairies."

;

Eliza left the bear fight penniless and hungry; she hadn't eaten since
the previous day, and she swore she would never again bet her grubstake
on an empty stomach.  When she had nothing left to sell, she spent a
couple of days wondering how on earth to survive, until she looked for
work and found that earning a living was easier than she had suspected,
and in any case preferable to the task of finding someone else to pay
the bills.  Without a man to protect her and support her, a woman is
lost, Miss Rose had drummed into her, but discovered that was not
always so.  In her role as Elias Andieta she found work she could have
done dressed as a woman.  Working as a laborer or a cowboy was not in
the cards; she didn't know how to use a tool or a lasso, and she wasn't
strong enough to wield a shovel or bulldog a steer, but there were
other jobs available.  That day she turned to her pen, as she had done
so many times before.  The idea of writing letters had come from the
good advice of her friend the mailman.  If she couldn't set up shop in
a tavern, she would spread her Castile mantle in the middle of a
square, line up inkwell and paper, then hawk her skills in a loud
voice.  Many miners could barely read or sign their names; they had
never written a letter in their lives but they waited for mail with
heartrending anxiety: it was their only contact with faraway families.
The steamships of the Pacific Mail arrived in San Francisco every two
weeks with bags of mail, and as soon as one topped the horizon, people
ran to stand in line at the post office.

It took postal workers ten or twelve hours to sort the contents of the
sacks, but no one objected to waiting all day.  From there to the mines
the mail took several weeks more.  Eliza offered her services in and
Spanish; she read the letters and answered them.  If it was all her
customer could do to dream up two laconic sentences saying he was still
alive and to say hello to everyone, Eliza would patiently question him
and add a more flowery account until she filled at least a page.

She charged two dollars per letter, regardless of length, but when she
incorporated sentimental phrases the man would never have thought of,
she usually got a good tip.  Some men brought letters for her to read,
and she doctored them a little, too, so the pitiful fellow would have
the consolation of a few words of kindness.  The men's wives, weary of
waiting on the other side of the continent, often wrote nothing but
complaints, reproaches, or a string of Christian cautions, forgetting
that their men were sick with loneliness.  One sad Monday a sheriff
came to get Eliza to write down the last words of a prisoner condemned
to die, a young man from Wisconsin accused that same morning of
stealing a horse.  Imperturbable, despite being only nineteen, he
dictated to Eliza: "Dear Mama, I hope you are well when you get this
news and tell Bob and James that they're going to hang me today.
Greetings' Theodore  Eliza tried to soften the message a little, to
save the poor mother a heart attack, but the sheriff said there wasn't
time to pretty things up.  Minutes later, a group of honest citizens
led the criminal to the center of town, sat him on a horse after
placing a rope around his neck, threw the other end over the branch of
an oak, then slapped the horse on the rump and Theodore was hanged
without further ado.  That wasn't the first hanging Eliza saw.  At
least this punishment was quick, but if the accused was of another race
he was usually horsewhipped before he was executed and, even though
s_.

she tried to get out of earshot, the screams of the condemned and the
howls of the spectators pursued her for weeks.

That day she was about to ask in the tavern if she could set up her
scribe's table when she was distracted by a commotion in the
distance.

Just as the crowd was pouring out of a bear fight, a caravan of mule
driven wagons was approaching down the one street in town, preceded by
an Indian boy beating a drum.  These were not ordinary wagons; the
canvas tops were gaudily painted, and fringe and pompons and Chinese
lanterns hung from their roofs; the mules were bedecked like circus
animals and plodded forward amid a deafening clanging of copper bells.
Sitting on the driver's seat of the first carriage was a large woman
with hyperbolic breasts; she was dressed in men's clothes and clenching
a piratical pipe between her teeth.  The second wagon was driven by an
enormous character dressed in ratty wolf skins; his head was shaved, he
had hoops in his ears, and he was armed for war.  Each of the wagons
was towing a second in which the rest of the carnival rode: four young
women done up in threadbare velvets and faded brocades and throwing
kisses to the open-mouthed throng.

The stupor lasted but an instant; as soon as the covered wagons were
recognized, an explosion of yells and' Hurrahs  shook the afternoon
air.  In the early days the soiled doves had reigned without
competition, but that situation had changed when the first families and
preachers settled in the new towns, jolting consciences with threats of
eternal damnation.  Lacking churches, the preachers held religious
services in the very saloons where vices flourished.  For an hour the
sale of liquor would be suspended, the cards put away, and lascivious
paintings turned to the wall while the men endured the pastors'
warnings regarding their heresy and license.  Gathered on the
second-floor balcony, the "painted ladies" would philosophically listen
to the chastisement, consoled by the knowledge that an hour later
everything would be back to normal.  As long as business didn't suffer,
they didn't much care if the ones who paid them to fornicate turned
around and blamed them for doing so and taking their money, as if the
men weren't guilty, only the women who tempted them.  There were clear
lines drawn between decent women and those in the easy life.  Fed up
with bribing authorities and suffering humiliations, some of the
hookers would pack up their trunks and go elsewhere, where sooner or
later the cycle would be repeated.  The concept of a traveling bawdy
house offered the advantage of avoiding unpleasantness with wives and
churchgoers and, in addition, opened horizons to the most remote areas,
where they were paid double.  The enterprise prospered in good weather,
but it was nearly winter; soon snow would be falling and the roads
would be impassable.  This was one of the last rounds of the caravan.

The wagons rolled down the street and stopped at the edge of town,
followed by a parade of men titillated by alcohol and the recent
contest between the bull and the bear.  Eliza followed along to have
close look at this novelty.  She realized she would not have many
customers for her letter writing and would have to find another way to
earn her supper.  Taking advantage of the clear day, several volunteers
offered to unhitch the mules and help unload a battered piano that they
set on the grass, following the orders of the madam, whom they all knew
by the delicate name of Joe Bonecrusher.  In a thrice, a strip of land
had been cleared; tables were set up and as if by magic bottles of rum
and postcards of naked women appeared.  There were also two boxes of
pornographic books, advertised as "bedroom novels with the hottest
scenes in France."  They sold for ten dollars apiece, a bargain price,
because with them you could get excited as many times as you wanted and
lend them to your friends as well; the books were a much better
investment than a real woman' Joe Bonecrusher explained, and to prove
it, she read a paragraph while her public listened in sepulchral
silence, as if to a prophetic revelation.  A chorus of "Hot damns!"

a> El Dorado ^

greeted the end of the reading, and within minutes there wasn't a book
left.  In the meantime, it had grown dark and the party had to be
lighted with torches.  The madam announced the exorbitant price of the
bottles of rum, but you could dance with the girls for only a fourth of
that.  Did anyone here know how to play the fucking piano?

she asked.  That was when Eliza, whose stomach was growling, stepped
forward without a moment's hesitation and sat down at the out-of tune
instrument, invoking Miss Rose.  She hadn't played in ten months, and
did not have a good ear, but the years of training with the metal rod
and the knuckle-rapping of her Belgian professor came to her aid.  She
attacked one of the naughty songs Miss Rose and her brother, the
captain, used to sing together in the innocent days of the musical
gatherings, before fate lashed its tail and Eliza's world was turned
upside down.  To her surprise, her clumsy playing was well received. 
In less than two minutes, a rustic violin materialized to accompany
her, the dancing heated up, and men grabbed the four women to prance
around the improvised dance floor.  The ogre in the wolf skins whipped
off Eliza hat and plunked it down on the piano with a gesture so
determined that no one dared ignore it, and soon it was filling up with
tips.

One of the wagons was used as headquarters and dormitory for the madam
and her adopted son, the little boy with the drum; the rest of the
women traveled jammed together in the second, and the two towed
vehicles were converted into bedrooms.  Each was fitted out with
colorful scarves; a four-poster bed with canopy; a gold-framed mirror;
a porcelain pitcher and washbasin; faded, slightly moth-eaten, but
still exotic oriental rugs; and candlesticks with fat candles for
light.

This theatrical decor incited the customers and disguised the dust of
the roads and the wear and tear of use.  While two of the women danced
to the music, the other two hastily performed their business in the
covered wagons.  The madam, whose fingers had a magical touch with the
cards, never left the gaming tables or her duty of collecting in
advance for her doves' services, selling rum and encouraging the
revelry, her eternal pipe clamped between her teeth.  Eliza played all
the songs she knew by heart, and when she exhausted her repertoire
began with the first again, without anyone's noticing the repetition,
over and over, until she was giddy with fatigue.  When the colossus saw
Eliza was flagging, he called a break, scooped the money out of the hat
and stuck it in the piano player's pockets, then took her by the arm
and practically carried her to the first wagon where he placed a glass
of rum in her hand.  Eliza pushed it away weakly; to drink that on an
empty stomach would be like being hit on the head with a hammer.

The man then dug through a clutter of boxes and baskets and produced
bread and some sliced onion that Eliza attacked trembling with
anticipation.  When she had devoured that, she looked up and saw the
giant in the wolf skins studying her from his tremendous height.

His face lighted up with an innocent smile filled with the whitest,
most even teeth in this world.

"You have the face of a woman," he said, and Eliza started.

"My name is Elias Andieta," she answered, putting her hand to her
pistol as if ready to defend her name with gunshots.

"Mine is Babalu the Bad."

"Is there a good Babalu?"

"There was."

"What happened to him?"

"He met up with me.  Where are you from, boy?"

"Chile.  I'm looking for my brother.  Haven't you heard talk of Joaquin
Andieta?"

"I haven't heard about anyone with that name.  But if your brother has
his balls set right, sooner or later he'll come visit us.

Everyone knows Joe Bonecrusher's girls."

k..

Business Dealings

Captain John Sommers anchored the Fortuna in n ( San Francisco Bay, far
enough from land that

_ no hothead would be bold enough to jump overboard and swim to shore.
He had warned the crew that the cold water and the currents would do in
a swimmer in less than twenty minutes, in case the sharks didn't get
there first.  This was his second venture with ice, and he felt more
confident.  Before sailing into the narrow channel of the Golden Gate
he had opened several casks of rum and generously distributed the
contents among the sailors; once they were drunk he drew a pair of
large pistols and ordered the men to lie facedown on the deck.  The
mate fastened shackles around their feet, to the shock of the
passengers who had come aboard inValparaiso and who when they witnessed
the scene from the upper deck did not know what the devil was
happening.

In the meantime, the Rodriguez de Santa Cruz brothers had sent a
flotilla of boats to ferry the passengers and precious cargo to the
dock.  When it was time to ready the ship for the return trip the crew
would be freed, after being given more rum and a bonus of double their
salaries in good gold and silver coins.  While that didn't compensate
for not being able to strike off inland to look for the mines, as
nearly all had planned to do, at least it was some consolation.  The
captain had used the same method on his first voyage, with excellent
results: he prided himself on having one of the few merchant ships that
had not been abandoned in the gold madness.

No one dared defy that English pirate son of a whorish mother and
Francis Drake, as they described him--because they had no doubt that he
was capable of emptying his blunderbusses into the chest of anyone who
rebelled.

The produce Paulina had shipped fromMalparaiso was stacked on the docks
of San Francisco: eggs and fresh cheeses, the vegetables and fruit of a
Chilean summer, butter, cider, fish and shellfish, superior sausages,
beef, and a variety of poultry, stuffed and ready for the oven.

Paulina had commissioned nuns to make their colonial sweets--custards
and flaky pastries--as well as the favorite dishes of the kitchen, all
of which had been transported in chambers of blue ice.

The first shipment had been snapped up in fewer than three days at such
an astonishing profit that the brothers neglected their other dealings
to concentrate on the miracle of the ice.  The blocks of iceberg melted
slowly during the sailing, but there was enough left that the captain
intended to sell it at a usurer's price in Panama.  It was impossible
to keep the phenomenal success of the first trip quiet, and the news
that some Chileans were sailing with blocks of a glacier onboard spread
like wildfire.  Soon companies were formed to attempt the same with
Alaskan icebergs, but it was impossible to enlist a crew and obtain
fresh produce that could compete with those from Chile, and Paulina was
able to steam ahead with her business, sans rivals, during the time she
obtained a second steamship to expand her empire.

Captain Sommers' erotic books also sold in the blink of an eye, but
under a mantle of discretion and without passing through the hands of
the Rodriguez de Santa Cruz brothers.  Whatever else, the captain
wanted to avoid rousing virtuous voices, as had happened in other
cities where censors had confiscated the books for being immoral and
burned them in public bonfires.  In Europe, they circulated secretly in
deluxe editions among wealthy gentlemen and collectors, but the
greatest profits came from editions for popular ih Business Dealings
0

_ .

consumption.  The books were printed in England, where they were
clandestinely sold for a few pennies, but in California the captain
earned fifty times that price.  In view of the enthusiasm for this type
of literature, it had occurred to him to add illustrations since most
of the miners could scarcely read newspaper headlines.  New editions
were already in print in London with bawdy drawings, in the long run,
all that appealed to the buyers.

That same evening' John Sommers, seated in the dining room of the best
hotel in San Francisco, supped with the Rodriguez de Santa Cruz
brothers, who in a few months' time had recovered their gentlemanly
appearance.  There was no trace of the hairy Neanderthals who only
months before had been prospecting for gold.  The real fortune was
right there, in clean transactions they could carry out in plump hotel
easy chairs with whiskey in hand, like civilized folk and not ruffians,
they said.  Added to the five Chilean miners they had brought with them
at the end of I848 were eighty peasants, humble and submissive people
who knew nothing about mining but who learned quickly, followed orders,
and were not rebellious.  The brothers kept them working on the banks
of the American River under the command of loyal overseers while they
themselves looked after the ships and the business.  They bought two
vessels to ply the route from San Francisco to Sacramento, and two
hundred mules to transport merchandise to the placers, merchandise they
sold directly without involving middlemen.  The fugitive slave who had
worked as a bodyguard turned out to be a wizard with numbers and he now
did the bookkeeping, looking, like his employers, the grand lord with
top hat and cigar despite the grumbles of whites who had no tolerance
for his color but had no choice but to negotiate with him.

"Your wife asked me to tell you that she is coming on the next voyage
of the Fortuna and bringing the children, the maidservants, and the
dog.  She said for you to be thinking about a place to live,

because she doesn't plan to stay in a hotel," the captain communicated
to Feliciano Rodriguez de Santa Cruz.

"What a ridiculous idea!  This gold rush will come to a dead stop and
the city will go back to being the sleepy town it was two years ago.
There are already signs that the gold is about mined out;

they're not finding those boulder-size nuggets anymore.

And who will care anything about California when that happens?"

"When I first came here it looked like a refugee camp, but it's become
the kind of city God had in mind.  Frankly, I don't think it will dry
up and blow away: it's the gateway to the Pacific."

"That's what Paulina says in her letter."

"Follow your wife's advice, Feliciano; she has a sharp nose for
business," his brother interposed.

"Besides, there's no way to stop her.  She's coming with me on the next
voyage.  Let us not forget that she owns the Fortuna.  "The captain
smiled.  q

They were served fresh Pacific oysters, one of the few gastronomic
treats of San Francisco, and doves stuffed with almonds and pear
preserves from Paulina's shipment, which the hotel had immediately
bought up.  The red wine also came from Chile and the champagne from
France.  Word had spread about the arrival of the Chileans with the
ice, and all the restaurants and hotels in the city were filled with
customers eager to indulge in fresh delicacies before they were
depleted.  The men were lighting cigars to accompany their coffee and
brandy when John Sommers felt a clap on the back that nearly knocked
the glass from his hand.  He turned and found himself staring at Jacob
Todd, whom he had not seen for more than three years, when he had
delivered him to England, poor and humiliated.  Todd was the last
person he expected to see, and it took a moment to recognize him
because the former fraudulent missionary was now the caricature of a

Yankee.  He had lost weight and hair; two long sideburns framed his

face; he was wearing a checked suit, snakeskin boots, and a jarring
Virginia planter's hat; pencils, notebooks, and sheets of newspaper
protruded from the four pockets of his jacket.  They embraced like old
comrades.  Jacob Todd had been in San Francisco for five months writing
articles on the gold fever that were regularly published in England as
well as in Boston and New York  He had come to California thanks to the
generous intervention of Feliciano Rodriguez de Santa Cruz, who had not
tossed the old debt he owed the Englishman out the window.  Like a good
Chilean, he never forgot a favor--or an insult!--and when he learned of
the Englishman's straits he had sent money, a ticket, and a note
explaining that California was as far as his friend could go without
beginning to start back the other way.  In I845 Jacob Todd had gotten
off Captain John Sommers' ship with renewed health and energy, eager to
put behind him the shameful incident inValparaiso and devote himself
body and soul to establishing in England the Utopian community he had
so long dreamed of.

He carried a thick notebook, yellowed by use and sea air, filled with
ideas.  Every detail of the community had been studied and planned down
to the smallest detail; he was certain that many young people the old
would not be interested--would abandon their dreary lives to become
part of an idealistic brotherhood of free men and women under a system
of absolute equality, without authorities, police, or religion.
Potential candidates for the experiment were not as quick to respond as
he had expected, but after a few months he had two or three willing to
give it a try.  All he needed was a Maecenas to finance the costly
undertaking, which would require a sizable piece of land because the
community was to live apart from the aberrations of the world and yet
must satisfy all its wants.  Todd had initiated conversations with a
crackpot lord who had a large estate in Ireland, when rumors about the
scandal inValparaiso caught up with him in London and dogged him till
he had no breathing room left.  Again doors closed to him and he lost
his friends and disciples; his nobleman disclaimed him and his dream of
Utopia went down the drain.  As once before, Jacob Todd sought
consolation in alcohol, and he sank into a swamp of devastating
memories.  He was living like a rat in a third-rate boardinghouse when
the lifeline thrown by his friend reached him.  He did not think twice.
He changed his name and set sail for the United States, hoping to find
a bright new destiny.  His one goal was to bury his shame and live in
anonymity until the time he could revive his idyllic project.  First
and foremost he must get a job; his income had been reduced and the
glorious days of idleness had come to a halt.

When he reached New York he had introduced himself to a couple of
newspapermen, offering his services as a correspondent in California,
and then had made the trip west across the isthmus of Panama because he
didn't have the heart to go by way of the Straits of Magellan and find
himself back inValparaiso where his shame awaited, undiminished, and
the beautiful Miss Rose would hear his name besmirched once more.  In
California his friend Feliciano Rodriguez de Santa Cruz helped him find
a place to live and employment on the oldest newspaper in San
Francisco.  Jacob Todd, now Jacob Freemont, started working for the
first time in his life, discovering to his amazement that he enjoyed
it.  He wandered the region writing about anything that caught his eye,
including Indian massacres, immigrants flooding in from every corner of
the planet, uncontrolled price gouging by merchants, the miners' quick
justice, and vice in general.  One of his articles nearly cost him his
life.  He described, not naming names but with perfect clarity, the way
some gaming houses operated with marked dice, oiled cards, watered
liquor, drugs, prostitution, and the practice of getting women dead
drunk and then for a dollar selling them to as many men who wanted the
right to make sport with them.  "All of this protected by the same
authorities who should be combating such vices," he wrote in
conclusion.  He was threatened by gangsters, the

^ f Business Dealings a

=o chief of police, and politicians, and sometimes had to lie low until
tempers cooled.  Despite that misstep, his articles appeared regularly
and his was becoming a pen people respected.  As he told his friend
John Sommers, in seeking anonymity he was finding celebrity.

At the end of the meal' Jacob Freemont invited his friends to see the
sensation of the day: a Chinese girl whom one could watch but not
touch.  Her name was Ah Toy and she had sailed on a clipper with her
husband, an elderly merchant who had the good taste to die at sea and
leave her free.  She lost no time in a widow's laments and to enliven
the rest of the journey she became the lover of the captain, who turned
out to be a generous man.  When she debarked in San Francisco, showily
gowned and with a heavy purse, she noticed the lustful gazes that
followed her and was struck with the brilliant idea of charging for
those looks.  She rented two rooms, cut holes in the dividing wall, and
then charged an ounce of gold for the privilege of looking at her.

Jacob Freemont's friends followed him in good humor, and with the bribe
of a few dollars they were able to jump the line and be among the first
to enter.  They were led into a narrow room thick with tobacco smoke
where a dozen men stood elbow to elbow with noses pressed to the wall.
They peered through the uncomfortable peepholes, feeling like
ridiculous schoolboys, and saw in the next room a beautiful young woman
dressed in a silk kimono slit on both sides from waist to toes.

Underneath it, she was naked.  The voyeurs groaned at each of the
languid movements that revealed part of her delicate body.  John
Sommers and the Rodriguez de Santa Cruz brothers doubled over laughing,
unable to believe that hunger for women could be so consuming.

Afterward they went their separate ways, and the captain and the
newspaperman left to have a last drink.  After listening to the account
of Jacob's voyages and adventures, the captain decided to confide in
him.

"Do you remember Eliza, the girl who lived with my brother and sister
inValparaiso?"

"Perfectly."

"She ran away from home nearly a year ago and I have good reason to
believe that she is in California.  I have tried to find her but no one
knows anything about her or anyone of her description."

"The only women who have come here alone are prostitutes."

"I don't know how she came if she did.  The one fact we have is that
she left in search of her lover, a young Chilean by the name of Joaquin
Andieta."

"Joaquin Andieta!  I know him, he was my friend in Chile."

"He is a fugitive from justice.  Accused of theft

"I can't believe it.  Andieta was an upstanding young man.

In truth, he had such a strong sense of pride and honor that it made it
difficult to get close to him.  And you are telling me that he and
Eliza are in love?"

"I know only that he embarked for California in December of I848.Two
months later, the girl disappeared.  My sister believes she came here,
following Andieta, although I can't imagine how she did that without
leaving a trail.  Since you move around through the camps and towns in
the north, I thought you might find out something .. ."

"I will do what I can, Captain."

"My brother and sister would be eternally grateful' Jacob

Eliza Sommers stayed with the caravan of Joe Bonecrusher, where she
played the piano and shared her tips fifty-fifty with the madam.  She
bought books of songs in both English and Spanish to liven up the long
nights of entertainment, and for idle hours, which were many.  She
taught the Indian lad to read, and helped with the daily chores and the
cooking.  Everyone in the carnival said that they had never eaten
better.  With the same eternal dried beef,

!

beans, and bacon, she prepared savory dishes created in the inspiration
of the moment; she bought Mexican condiments and added them to Mama
Fresia's Chilean recipes, with delicious results: she had only lard,
flour, and preserved fruits, but she made pies, and when she could get
eggs and milk her creations rose to celestial gastronomic heights.
Babalu the Bad was not a believer in men cooks, but he was the first to
wolf down the young pianist's banquets and so had to stifle his
sarcastic comments.  In the habit of being on guard during the night,
the giant slept like a log most of the day, but as soon as a whiff from
the cook pots wafted to his dragon nostrils his eyes flew open and he
sat down near the kitchen to wait.  He had an insatiable appetite and
there was no way to fill his gigantic belly.  Before the arrival of
Chile Boy, as they called the supposed Elias Andieta, his basic diet
had been whatever game he caught, split down the middle, seasoned with
a handful of salt, and laid on the coals till it was black.  Following
that method, he would eat a whole deer in a couple of days.  Exposed to
the cuisine of the pianist, he refined his palate, hunted every day,
selected the most delicate prize, and delivered it skinned and
dressed.

On the road, Eliza led the caravan on her sturdy nag, which despite its
sorry appearance was as princely as the finest purebred, with her
useless rifle strapped onto her saddle and the young Indian drummer
riding on the horse's croup.  She felt so comfortable in men's clothes
that she wondered whether she would ever be able to dress like a woman
again.  Of one thing she was sure: she would never wear a corset, not
even on the day of her marriage to Joaquin Andieta.  If they came to a
river the women seized the opportunity to collect water in barrels,
wash clothes, and bathe.  Those were Eliza's most difficult moments;
she had to invent more and more contrived excuses for cleaning up out
of sight of observers.

Joe Bonecrusher was a corpulent Pennsylvania Dutch woman

X Business Dealings 0

who had found her destiny in the wide-open spaces of the West.  She had
a prestidigitator's skill with cards and dice, and she was passionate
about cheating.  She had earned a living betting, until she got the
idea to organize a crew of girls and travel the mother lode
"prospecting for gold," which was what she called her method of mining.
She was sure that the young pianist was homosexual and that was why she
made room for him in her heart beside the young Indian.  She did not
allow her girls to tease him or Babalu to call him names: it wasn't the
kid's fault that he was born without a beard and with that baby face,
just as it wasn't hers that she had been born a man in a woman's body.
These were just jokes God invented to screw things up.  She had bought
the Indian boy for thirty dollars from some vigilantes who had killed
the rest of his tribe.  He was four or five at the time, nothing but a
skeleton with a worm-filled belly, but within a few months of forcibly
feeding him and taming his rage so he didn't destroy everything within
reach or beat his head against the wagon wheels, he had grown a hand's
width and his true warrior's nature had emerged: he was stoic,
hermetic, and patient.  She named him Tom No-Tribe so he would never
forget the debt of revenge.  "The name is the person," Indians said,
and Joe believed it; that was why she had invented her own name.

The soiled doves of the caravan consisted of two sisters from Missouri
who had made the long trip overland and lost the rest of their family
on the way; Esther, a girl of eighteen who had run away from her
father, a religious fanatic who beat her; and a beautiful Mexican, the
daughter of a white father and an Indian mother, who passed for white
and had learned four phrases in French to bamboozle men who had only
one thing in mind, because according to popular myth French girls were
the best.  In that society of adventurers and ruffians, there was also
a racial hierarchy: whites accepted cinnamon-skinned gids but scorned
any mixture with black.  All four women were grate ^^d Business
Dealings

V

ful for having run across Joe Bonecrusher.  Esther was the only one
without previous experience; the others had practiced their trade in
San Francisco and knew the bad life.  They hadn't worked in the "best"
houses; they knew about beatings, sickness, drugs, and the evil of
pimps; they had had countless infections, suffered brutal remedies, and
had had so many abortions that they were sterile, which they considered
a blessing, not a tragedy.  Joe had rescued them from that vile world
and taken them out of the city.  Then she had supported them during
their long martyrdom of withdrawal to rid them of addiction to opium
and alcohol.  The women repaid her with the loyalty of daughters, and
besides, she treated them fair and square.  The intimidating presence
of Babalu discouraged violent customers and hateful drunks; they ate
well and the rambling wagons seemed a favorable atmosphere for good
health and spirits.  In those far-reaching spaces of hills and forests
they felt free.  There was nothing easy or romantic about their lives;
they had saved a little money and could leave, if they wanted, yet they
didn't because that small band of humans was the closest thing to a
family they had.

Joe Bonecrusher's girls, too, were convinced that young Elias Andieta,
with his effeminate manners and high voice, was homosexual.  That gave
them leave to undress, wash, and talk about any subject when he was
around, as if he were one of them.  They accepted him so naturally that
Eliza tended to forget she was supposed to be male, although Babalu
made it his job to remind her.  He had taken on the task of making a
man out of this lily-livered weakling, and he watched Elias closely,
quick to correct him when he sat with his legs crossed or shook back
his short mane with a very unmanly gesture.  He taught him to clean and
oil his weapons, but gave up trying to teach him to shoot because every
time his student pressed the trigger, he closed his eyes.  He was not
impressed by Elias Andieta's Bible; on the contrary, he suspected he
used it to justify his childish ways and complained that if the boy did
not want to become a damned preacher, why the hell did he read all that
foolishness, anyway?; he'd be better off reading dirty books to see if
that gave him any ideas about acting like a man.

Babalu was barely able to sign his name and read with great difficulty,
but he would die before admitting it.  He said that his sight was
failing and he couldn't see the letters well, although he could shoot a
terrified hare between the eyes at three hundred yards.  He used to ask
Chile Boy to read out-of-date newspapers and the Bonecrusher's erotic
books aloud, not so much for the sexy parts as the romantic, which
always brought him near to tears.  The plot invariably had to do with
burning love between a member of the European nobility and a common
peasant girl, or sometimes the reverse, an aristocratic lady who lost
her mind over a rustic but honest and proud man.  In these tales the
women were always beautiful and the gallants tireless in their ardor.
The backdrop was a series of bacchanals, but unlike pornographic dime
novels these had a plot.  Eliza would read aloud, masking her shock, as
if she had always been exposed to the worst vices, while Babalu and
three of the doves listened, mesmerized.  Esther did not participate in
those sessions because to her it seemed a worse sin to describe the
acts than to perform them.  Eliza's ears burned but she could not help
but recognize the unexpected elegance with which these lusty tales were
written; some of the sentences even reminded her of the impeccable
style of Miss Rose.  Joe Bonecrusher, who was not the least interested
in carnal passion of any sort and so was bored by the reading,
personally saw that not a word wounded the innocent ears of Tom
No-Tribe.

"I am raising him to be an Indian chief, not pimp for whores," she
said, and in her wish to make him strong she also refused to let the
boy call her Grandmother.

"Hell's fire, I'm not anyone's grandmother.  I'm the Bonecrusher, do
you hear what I'm saying, you damn brat?"

"Yes, Grandma."

9 Business Dealings

Babalu the Bad, an ex-convict from Chicago, had crossed the continent
on foot long before the gold rush.  He spoke Indian tongues and had
done a little of everything to earn a living, from strongman in a
traveling circus, where he might lift a horse over his head or pull a
wagonload of sand by his teeth, to stevedore on the docks of San
Francisco.  That was where he had been discovered by Joe Bonecrusher
and had taken a job in the caravan.  He could do the work of several
men, and with him they needed no further protection.  Together he and
his employer could scare off any number of attackers, as they had
demonstrated on more than one occasion.

"You have to be strong or they grind you down, Chile Boy," Babalu
counseled Eliza.  "Don't think I've always been the way you see me.
Once I was like you, weak and soft, but I began lifting weights and now
look at my muscles.  No one tries anything with me."

"Babalu, you're more than six feet tall and weigh as much as a cow.
I'll never be like you!"

"Size has nothing to do with it, man.  It's balls that count.  I may
have been big but they laughed at me just the same."

"Who laughed at you?"

"Everyone, even my mother, may she rest in peace.  I'm going to tell
you something nobody knows."

"Yes?"

"You remember Babalu the Good?  That was me before.  But ever since I
was twenty I've been Babalu the Bad, and things have gone much better
for me."

Soiled Doves

| n December, overnight, winter descended upon the foothills and
thousands of miners had to abandon their claims and move to town to
wait for spring.  A merciful blanket of snow covered that vast terrain
tunneled by greedy ants, and what gold was left again lay quietly in
nature's silence.  Joe Bonecrusher directed her caravan to one of the
new little towns in the mother lode, where she rented a dilapidated
barn in which to hibernate.  She sold the mules, bought a great wood
trough for a bathtub, one cook stove and two for heat, and a few
lengths of cheap cloth and boots for everyone because in the rain and
the cold you couldn't do without them.  She set them all to scrubbing
out the barn and making curtains to mark off rooms she installed the
canopy beds, the golden mirrors, and the piano.  Then she went off to
pay a courtesy call to the taverns, the general store, and the
blacksmith shop, the centers of social activity.  In the way of a
newspaper, the town had a one-sheet bulletin printed on an aged hand
press that had been hauled across the continent, in which Joe placed a
discreet announcement of her business.  Besides the girls, she offered
bottles of what she called "The Finest Cuban and Jamaican
Rum"--although, in truth, it was a savage brew that would curl a man's
soul--"torrid" books, and a couple of gambling tables.  Customers
showed up promptly.  There was another brothel, but novelty was
welcomed.  The madam of the other establishment launched a campaign of
slander against her rivals but refrained from

openly confronting the formidable duo of Joe Bonecrusher and Babalu the
Bad.  In their new quarters there was frolicking behind the improvised
curtains, dancing to the tune of the piano, and betting of considerable
sums under the watchful eye of the boss lady, who did not permit any
fighting or cheating under her roof-unless her own.  Eliza watched men
lose in a couple of nights what they'd won with months of titanic
effort, then weep on the bosom of the girls who had helped clean them
out.

In a short time the miners became very fond of Joe

Despite her piratical when the woman had a motherly heart, and that
winter fate put it to the test.  The area was visited by an epidemic of
dysentery that felled half the town, killing several of its victims. 
As soon as Joe heard about someone near death in some distant cabin,
she borrowed a couple of horses from the blacksmith and rode with
Babalu to help the poor devil.  They were often accompanied by the
smith, a formidable Quaker who disapproved of the mammoth woman's
livelihood but was always ready to help a neighbor.  Joe would cook for
the stricken miner, clean him up, wash his clothes, and console him by
reading letters from his far-off family for the hundredth time, while
Babalu and the blacksmith shoveled snow, hauled water, cut wood and
stacked it by the stove.  If the man was really bad off' Joe would wrap
him in blankets, throw him over her horse like a sack of flour, and
take him back home, where the girls would look after him with the
dedication of nurses, happy to have the chance to feel virtuous.

There wasn't much they could do besides make the patients drink liters
of sugary tea so they wouldn't get dehydrated, keep them clean, warm,
and in bed, with the hope that the trots would not drain their souls or
fever cook their bones.  Some died, and the rest took weeks to come
back to the world.  Joe was the only person who had the pluck to defy
the winter and ride out to the most isolated cabins;

sometimes she found bodies turned to ice statues.  They weren't all
victims of disease; more than once the fellow had shot himself in the
mouth because he couldn't take any more growling guts, loneliness, and
delirium.  Once or twice Joe had to close her business, because the
floor of the barn was crowded with mats and her doves had all they
could do to take care of the patients.  The town sheriff trembled when
Joe appeared with her Dutch pipe and booming prophet's voice to demand
help.  No one could refuse her.  The same men who gave a bad name to
the town tamely submitted to helping her.  There was nothing resembling
a hospital; the only doctor was worn out, and Joe just naturally
assumed the task of mobilizing forces when there was an emergency.  The
lucky ones whose lives she saved became her devout debtors, and during
that winter she wove the web of connections that would sustain her
after the fire.

The blacksmith's name was James Morton, and he was one of the few good
men in the town.  He felt an unassailable love for all humanity,
including his ideological enemies, whom he considered errant out of
ignorance, not intrinsic sinfulness.  Incapable of a mean act, he could
not imagine one in his neighbor; he preferred to believe that
perverseness was a twist of character that could be remedied once
exposed to the light of piety and affection.  He came from a long line
of Ohio Quakers, where he had worked with his brothers and sisters in
an underground railroad for runaway slaves, first hiding them then
leading them to free states and to Canada.  His activities had drawn
the ire of slave holders and one night a mob attacked their farm and
set fire to the buildings; his family had watched without lifting a
hand, because, faithful to their beliefs, they could not take up arms
against a fellow man.  The Mortons had to disperse and leave their land
behind but they kept in close contact through the humanitarian network
of abolitionists.  James did not consider prospecting for gold to be an
honorable way to earn a living because it did not create anything or
perform a service.  Riches debase the soul, complicate life, and
engender unhappiness, he maintained.  Besides, gold was a soft metal,
useless for making tools; he could not understand the fascination it
held for others.  Tall, robust, with a luxuriant chestnut-colored
beard, bright blue eyes, and muscular arms scarred from countless
burns, lighted by the glow of his forge he was the reincarnation of the
god Vulcan  In the town there were only three Quakers, men who
cherished hard work and family, content with their lot, the only men
who did not swear, drink, or frequent the whorehouses.  They met
regularly to practice their faith, modestly, preaching by example while
patiently awaiting the arrival of a group of friends from the East who
were coming to swell their community.  Morton was often at Joe
Bonecrusher's shack to help with victims of the epidemic, and there he
met Esther.  He would visit her, and pay her the regular fee, but all
he did was sit with her and talk.  He could not understand how she had
chosen the life she had.

"Between my father's beatings and this, I prefer the life I have a
thousand times over."

"Why did he beat you?"

"He accused me of provoking lust and inciting sin.  He believed that
Adam would still be in Paradise if Eve hadn't tempted him.

Maybe he was right.  You see how I'm earning my living."

"There is other work, Esther."

"This isn't so bad' James  I close my eyes and think of nothing.

It's just a few minutes and then it's over."

Despite the vicissitudes of her profession, the girl had kept the
freshness of her twenty years, and there was a certain charm in her
discreet and silent bearing, so different from that of her companions.
There was nothing of the flirt about her; she was plump, with a placid,
bovine face and a strong country girl's hands.  Compared to the other
doves, she was the least pretty, but her skin was glowing and her gaze
gentle.  The blacksmith didn't know when he had begun to dream about
her, to see her in the sparks of his forge, in the flare of the hot
metal and in the cloudless sky, until he was no longer able to ignore
that cotton wool feeling wrapped around his heart, threatening to choke
him.  Nothing worse could happen than to fall in love with a loose
woman; it would be impossible to justify in the eyes of God and his
community.  He decided to conquer temptation with sweat; he closed
himself in his shop and worked like a madman.  Some nights you could
hear the loud ringing of his hammer until near dawn.

As soon as she had a fixed address, Eliza wrote Tao Chi'en at the
Chinese restaurant in Sacramento, telling him her new name and asking
his advice about combating dysentery because the only remedy she knew
to prevent contagion was a piece of raw meat bound to the navel with a
strip of red wool, the way Mama Fresia did in Chile, but that was not
producing the hoped-for results.  She missed Tao painfully; sometimes
she awoke with Tom No-Tribe in her arms, imagining in the wooziness of
half sleep that it was Tao Chi'en, but the boy's smoky odor quickly
brought her back to reality.  No one had the fresh salt-air scent of
her friend.  The distance that separated them was short in miles but
storms made the route arduous and dangerous.

She thought of riding with the mailman to continue her search for
Joaquin Andieta, as she had in better weather, but weeks went by as she
waited for an opportunity.  It wasn't just the winter that got in the
way of her plans.  During that period the tension between American
miners and the Chileans in the south of the mother lode had
exploded.TheYanquis, fed up with the foreigners, joined together to run
them out, but the Chileans fought back, first with weapons and then
before a judge, who recognized their rights.  Far from intimidating the
aggressors, the judge's order merely fired them up; several Chileans
ended up on the gallows or thrown off cliffs, and the survivors had to
flee.  In answer, they formed gangs of marauders, as many

Mexicans had done.  Eliza realized that given her disguise as a Latin
youth she could not risk being accused of some invented crime.

The last days of January I850 witnessed one of the worst ice storms
ever seen in those parts.  No one dared leave shelter; the town seemed
dead, and for more than ten days not a single customer came to the
barn.  It was so cold that at dawn water in the washbasins was frozen
solid even though the stoves were kept burning, and some nights they
had to bring Eliza's horse indoors to save it from the fate of other
animals that woke up in blocks of ice.

The girls slept two to a bed, and Eliza paired up with the Indian boy,
for whom she felt a ferocious and jealous affection, which he returned
with stubborn constancy.  The only person among them who could compete
with Eliza for the boy's affection was Joe Bonecrusher.  "Some day I'm
going to have a strong, courageous son like Tom No-Tribe, but much
happier," Eliza wrote Tao Chi'en.  "This little one never laughs."
Babalu the Bad did not know how to sleep at night, and spent the long
hours of darkness pacing from one end of the barn to the other in his
Russian boots and seedy furs, with a blanket over his shoulders.  He
had stopped shaving his head and was sprouting a fuzz that matched his
wolfskin jacket.  Esther had knitted him a gosling-yellow wool cap that
covered his head to the ears and gave him the look of a monstrous baby.
He was the one who heard a few faint knocks that morning and had the
good sense to distinguish it from the noise of the storm.  He opened
the door a crack, with pistol in hand, and found a bundle heaped in the
snow.  Alarmed, he called Joe, and between them, fighting to keep the
wind from tearing the door off its hinges, they dragged it inside.  It
was a half-frozen man.

It was not easy to resuscitate their visitor.  While Babalu rubbed him
and tried to get some brandy down his throat, Joe waked the women, put
more wood in the stove, and set water to heat for the ii bathtub, where
they soaked him until gradually he began to revive, lose his blue
color, and mumble a few words.  His nose, feet, and hands were
frostbitten.  He was a campesino from the Mexican state of Sonora, he
said, who had come to the California placers like thousands of his
compatriots.  His name was Jack, a name that doubtlessly wasn't his,
but after all, no one else in that household used the one he was born
with.  For a few hours' Jack was several times on the threshold of
death, but just when it seemed that nothing more could be done for him,
he fought back from the other wodd and gagged down a few swallows of
liquor.  At about eight o'clock, when the storm had let up' Joe sent
Babalu for the doctor.  Overhearing her, the Mexican, who had been
lying motionless, gulping for air like a fish, opened his eyes, and
shouted an ear-splitting' No  that startled everyone.  No one was to
know he was there, he commanded, with such ferocity that none of them
dared cross him.  Explanations were not necessary:

it was obvious the man was in trouble with the law, and that town, with
a gallows in the middle of the square, was the last place in the world
a fugitive would want to look for asylum.  Only the cruelty of the
storm had forced him there.  Eliza said nothing, but the man's reaction
was no surprise to her: he smelled of evil.

After three days' Jack had regained some of his strength, but he lost
the tip of his nose and two fingers on his left hand were showing signs
of gangrene.  Not even that convinced him of the need to see the
doctor; he would rather rot by inches than hang, he said.  Joe
Bonecrusher gathered her people at the other end of the barn and held a
whispered conference: his fingers had to be amputated.  All eyes turned
to Babalu the Bad.

"Me?  Not fuckin' likely."

"Babalu, you sonofabitch.  Don't be such a pantywaist!"

shouted Joe, furious.

"You do it' Joe  I'm not good for things like that."

,1

At Soiled Doves i>

"If you can cut up a deer you can do this.  What's a couple of lousy
fingers?"

"An animal is one thing, a human being is something else."

"No!  I can't believe it!  This no-good sonofabitch, begging your
pardon, girls, can't do me this one little favor.  After everything
I've done for you, you bastard!"

Sorry' Joe  I've never harmed a hair on anyone's head."

"What are you telling me!  You never killed anyone?  You never did time
in prison?"

"That was for stealing cattle," the giant confessed, near tears with
humiliation.

"I will do it," Eliza interrupted, pale but decided.

Everyone stared at her, incredulous.  Even Tom No-Tribe seemed a more
likely candidate than the delicate Chile Boy.

"I'll need a really sharp knife, a hammer, a needle, thread, and

" clean rags.

Babalu sank to the floor with his huge head in his hands, horrified,
while the girls got everything ready in respectful silence.

reviewed what she had learned at Tao Chi'en's side when he extracted
bullets and stitched up wounds in Sacramento.  If she had watched that
without blinking, she should be able to do this now, she thought.  The
most important thing, according to her friend, was to prevent
hemorrhaging and infection.  She had not watched him do amputations,
but when he was treating unlucky patients whose ears had been cut off,
he had commented that in other lands they cut off hands and feet for
the same crime.

"The executioner's ax is quick but it doesn't leave any tissue to cover
the stump of the bone," Tao Chi'en had told her.  He described what he
had been taught by Ebanizer Hobbs, who had experience with war wounds
and had shown him what to do.  At least in this case it was only
fingers, Eliza concluded.

Joe Bonecrusher poured enough liquor down the patient to render him
unconscious, while Eliza disinfected the knife by heating it red hot.
She had them sit Jack in a chair; she wet the hand in a basin of
whiskey and then placed it on the edge of the table with the bad
fingers separated from the others.  She murmured one of Mama Fresia's
magical prayers and when she was ready gave a wordless signal to the
girls to hold down the patient.  She positioned the knife on the
fingers and hit it smartly with the hammer, driving the blade cleanly
through the bones and into the wood of the table.  Jack let out a yell
from the depths of his guts but he was so drunk he didn't feel a thing
as Eliza stitched the fingers and Esther bandaged them.  The torture
was over in a few minutes.  Eliza stood staring at the amputated
fingers, trying to keep from vomiting, while the women laid Jack on one
of the mats.  Babalu the Bad, who had kept his distance from the
spectacle, walked up timidly, baby's cap in hand, and admiringly
murmured:

"You're a real man, Chile Boy."

In March, Eliza quietly turned eighteen, still waiting for Joaquin to
show up at their house one day, just as Babalu had said any man within
a hundred miles would do.  "Jack," the Mexican, had recovered after a
few days and before his fingers healed had sneaked of fat night without
telling anyone good-bye.  He was a sinister brute, and everyone was
happy he was gone.  He didn't talk much and was forever edgy, defiant,
ready to spring at the hint of an imagined provocation.  He showed no
sign of gratitude for the help he had received, just the opposite; when
the whiskey wore off and he learned that his trigger finger had been
amputated, he let loose string of curses and threats, swearing that the
dog who had mutilated his hand would pay with his life.  That was when
Babalu's

2 0 Soiled Doves e

patience wore thin.  He picked Jack up like a doll, lifted him up to
his eye level, and said in the soft voice he used when he was about to
explode:

"That was me.  Babalu the Bad.  Any problem with that?"

As soon as his fever was gone, Jack wanted to cash in on the
opportunity to use the doves for his pleasure but, as one, they
rejected him: they were not about to give anything away, and he had
empty pockets, which they had observed when they undressed him to put
him in the bathtub the night he had come to their door half frozen. 
Joe Bonecrusher took the trouble to explain to Jack that if they hadn't
amputated his fingers he would have lost an arm, probably his life, and
that he should be thanking his lucky stars that he had stumbled on to
them.  Eliza would not allow Tom No-Tribe to go anywhere near the man,
and she approached him only to hand him food or change his bandages,
because his odor of evil was as disturbing to her as a tangible
presence.  Babalu couldn't stand him either, and refused to speak to
him all the time he was under their roof.  He thought of the gids as
his sisters and was wild whenever Jack obscenely tried to wheedle sex.
Not even when he was most desperate would it have occurred to Babalu to
use his companion's professional services; in his mind that would have
been the same as incest.  If his urges got too strong, he went to the
local competition, and he instructed Chile Boy to do the same in the
improbable case that he got over his missy-sissy habits.

Once when she was handing Jack a bowl of soup, Eliza worked up the
courage to ask him aboutJoaquin Andieta.

"Murieta?"  he asked, suspicious.

"Andieta."

"Don't know him."

"Maybe it's the same person," Eliza suggested.

"What do you want with him?"

3o9

"He's my brother.  I came from Chile to find him."

"What's your brother look like?"

"He's not very tall, and he has black hair and eyes and white skin,
like me, but we don't look alike.  He's thin, muscular, brave, and
passionate.  When he talks, everyone listens."

"That's Joaquin Murieta all right, but he's not Chilean, he's
Mexican."

"Are you sure?"

"Sure?  I'm not sure of anything, but if I see Murieta I'll tell him
you're looking for him."

It was the next night that he left, and they heard nothing more from
him, but two weeks afterward they found a two-pound sack of coffee at
the door.  A little later when Eliza opened it to fix breakfast she
found that it wasn't coffee but gold dust.  According to Joe
Bonecrusher, it could have come from any of the sick miners they had
looked after, but Eliza had a strong intuition that Jack had left it as
his payment.  He was a man who didn't want to owe anyone a favor.  On
Sunday they learned that the sheriff was organizing a party of
vigilantes to look for the murderer of a miner who had been found in
the cabin where he had spent the winter alone, with nine knife wounds
in his chest and slashed eyes.  There was no trace of his gold, but
because of the brutality of the crime they had placed the blame on
Indians.  Joe Bonecrusher, who did not want to get mixed up in any
trouble, buried the two pounds of gold beneath an oak and ordered all
her people to keep their mouths shut and not under any condition
mention the Mexican with the amputated fingers or the sack of' coffee
In the course of the next two months, the vigilantes murdered half
dozen Indians and then forgot the matter because they had more pressing
problems, and when the chief of the tribe came with great dignity to
ask for an explanation, they killed him, too.  Indians, blacks, and
mulattos could not testify against a white man.  James Morton and v 00
Soiled Doves the other three Quakers in the town were the only ones who
dared confront the mob at the lynching.  Unarmed, they formed a circle
around the chief, reciting from memory passages of the Bible that
prohibited killing one's fellow man, but the crowd pushed them aside.

No one knew it was Eliza's birthday and there was no celebration, but
even so, that night of March fifteenth was memorable for her, and for
everyone else.  Business was again booming at the barn.

The doves were steadily occupied, Chile Boy was banging away at the
piano with real gusto, and Joe was spinning optimistic tales.

Winter hadn't been so bad, after all; the worst of the epidemic was
past and they had no patients stretched out on the floor.  That night a
half dozen miners were drinking with true dedication while outside the
wind was ripping branches from the pines.  At about eleven, all hell
broke loose.  No one could explain how the fire began, but Joe always
suspected the other madam.  The wood caught fire like Roman candles and
the curtains, silk shawls, and bed canopies flared up within seconds.
Everyone got out safely, even managing to throw on a few blankets, and
Eliza snatched up the tin box that contained her precious letters.
Flames and smoke rapidly engulfed the building, and in less than ten
minutes it was blazing like a torch as half-naked women and tipsy
clients watched the spectacle in total helplessness.  Eliza thought to
count heads and realized with horror that Tom No-Tribe was missing. 
The boy had been fast asleep in the bed they shared.  Without thinking,
she grabbed a quilt from Esther's shoulders, covered her head, and ran
inside, with one push flattening the thin partition of blazing wood,
followed by Babalu, who yelled at her to stop, not realizing why she
was dashing into the fire.  Eliza found the boy standing stock-still in
the swirling smoke, his eyes wide with fright, but perfectly serene.

She threw the quilt over him and tried to pick him up, but he was very
heavy and she was bent double by a fit of coughing.  She dropped to her
knees, pushing Tom to make him run outside, but he did not move and
both of them would have been reduced to ashes had Babalu not appeared
at that instant, picked up one under each arm, as if they were parcels,
and bolted back outside to be greeted with loud cheers.

"Damned kid!  What were you doing in there!  "Joe scolded as she hugged
the small Indian, covering his face with kisses and slapping his cheeks
to make him breathe.

It was only because the shack was isolated that half the town didn't go
up in flames, the sheriff commented later; he had plenty of experience
with fires, they happened too frequently around there.  A dozen
volunteers had responded to the glow in the sky to fight the flames,
headed by the blacksmith, but it was too late and all they could do was
rescue Eliza's horse, which everyone had forgot in the confusion of the
first minutes and was still tied in its lean-to, crazed with terror.
Joe Bonecrusher lost everything she owned in the world that night, and
for the first time was seen to lose heart.  With the boy in her arms,
she watched the destruction, unable to hold back the tears, and when
all that remained was smoking embers she buried her face in the
enormous chest of Babalu, whose eyelashes and eyebrows were singed.

Seeing the surrogate mother whom they had thought invincible so
vulnerable, the four girls burst out bawling, forming a cluster of
petticoats, windblown hair, and trembling flesh.  The support network,
however, had begun to function even before the flames died out, and in
less than an hour lodging had been found for everyone in various homes
in town and one of the miners whom Joe had nursed through dysentery
took up a collection.  Chile Boy, Babalu, and the young Indian--the
three males of the group--spent the night in the blacksmith's shop.
James Morton laid two straw ticks with warm bed covers beside the still
warm forge and served his guests a splendid breakfast carefully
prepared by the wife of the preacher who on Sundays shouted his loud
denunciation of' such brazen exhibition of sin," as he referred to the
activities of the two brothels.

"This is no time for prudery, these poor Christians are shivering," the
reverend's wife had said when she showed up at the smithy with rabbit
stew, a pitcher of hot chocolate, and cinnamon cookies.

That same lady went door-to-door collecting clothing for the doves, who
were still in their petticoats, and the women of the town responded
with generosity.  They did not like to pass in front of the other
madam's establishment, but they had of necessity dealt with Joe
Bonecrusher during the epidemic and they respected her.

So that was how the four ladies of the night went around for a while
dressed as modest housewives, covered from neck to toe, until they
could replace their splendiferous professional outfits.

The night of the fire, the preacher's wife wanted to take Tom No-Tribe
home, but the boy clung to Babalu's neck and no human power could pry
him loose.  The giant spent sleepless hours with Chile Boy curled up in
one arm and the Indian in the other, piqued no little by the
blacksmith's lifted eyebrows.

"You can get that idea out of your head, man.  I'm no pansy," he
sputtered indignantly, but he did not disturb either of the two
sleepers.

The miners' collection and the pouch of gold dust buried beneath the
oak were enough to install the victims in a house so comfortable that
Joe Bonecrusher had about decided to give up her traveling company and
settle down there.  While other towns disappeared as the miners moved
to new sites, this one grew, maintained its growth, and even thought of
changing its name to one more dignified.  At the end of winter, new
waves of adventurers were climbing into the foothills, and the other
madam was getting ready for them.  Joe Bonecrusher now had only three
girls, because it was obvious that the blacksmith was planning to steal
Esther from

them, but she wanted to see if she could work things out.  Joe had won
considerable respect with her compassionate works and she did not want
to give that up: for the first time in her chaotic life she felt
accepted in a community.  That was far more than she had had in her
Pennsylvania Dutch homeland, and at her age putting down roots did not
seem like a bad idea.  When Eliza heard those plans she decided that if
Joaquin Andieta--or Murieta--had not appeared by spring she would have
to tell her friends good-bye and keep looking for him.

Disillusion i_

kt A t the end of autumn, Tao Chi'en received t LX Eliza's latest
letter, which had passed from hand to hand for several months,
following him to San Francisco.  He had left Sacramento in April.
Winter in that city seemed to go on and on; the only thing that
sustained him were Eliza's letters, which came sporadically, the hope
that Lin's spirit would locate him, and his friendship with his fellow
zhong yi.  Tao had acquired books on Western medicine and with great
pleasure had taken on the patient task of translating them line by line
for his friend; in that way both absorbed at the same time a knowledge
very different from their own.  They found that in the West little was
known about essential herbs, about preventing illness, or about qi, the
bodily energy never mentioned in those texts, but also that Western
medicine was more advanced in other aspects.  With his friend, Tao
spent days comparing and discussing, but study alone could not console
him: isolation and solitude weighed on him so heavily that he abandoned
the wooden hut and his garden of medicinal plants and moved to a hotel
run by Chinese, where at least he heard his language and ate food to
his taste.  Even though his patients were very poor and he often
treated them for nothing, he had saved money.  If Eliza came back they
would move into a house, he thought, but as long as he was alone the
hotel was good enough.  The other zhong yi planned to send for a young
wife from China and settle in the United States where, despite the fact
that he was a foreigner, he would have a better life than in his
country.  Tao Chi'en warned him against the vanity of the golden
lilies, especially in America, where everyone walked so much and the
jan wey made fun of a woman with a doll's feet.

"Ask the broker to bring you a smiling and healthy wife; nothing else
matters," he counseled, thinking of the brief passage through this
world of his unforgettable Lin and how much happier she would have been
with Eliza's feet and strong lungs.  His wife was wandering somewhere,
lost; she didn't know how to find her way in that foreign land.  He
invoked her in his meditation and in his poems but she did not come to
him again, not even in his dreams.  The last time he had been with her
was that day in the hold of the ship, when she visited him wearing her
green silk dress and peonies in her hair to ask him to save Eliza, but
that had been somewhere near Peru, and since then he had traveled
across so much water, land, and time that Lin was surely confused.  He
imagined her gentle spirit searching for him in this vast, unfamiliar
continent, unable to find him.  At the zhong yi's suggestion, he
commissioned an artist, a new emigre from Shanghai, to paint her
portrait; he was a true tattoo genius, and although the painting
followed Tao's precise instructions it did not do justice to Lin's
diaphanous beauty.  Tao Chi'en made a small altar for the portrait,
where he would sit to summon her.  He did not understand why solitude,
which he had previously considered a blessing and a luxury, now seemed
unbearable.  The worst of his years as a sailor had been not having a
private space for quiet and silence, but now all he wanted was
companionship.  The idea of ordering a bride, however, seemed
ill-conceived.  Once before, the spirits of his ancestors had found him
a perfect wife, but behind that apparent good fortune was a hidden
curse.  He knew what it was to be loved in return, and now could never
go back to the times of innocence when every woman with small feet and
a sweet nature seemed

< Disillusion t enough.  He felt condemned to live with the memory of
Lin because no other woman could take her place with dignity.  He did
not want a servant or a concubine.  Not even the need to have sons to
honor his name and tend his tomb would induce him.  He tried to explain
all this to his friend but he got tangled up in words;

there weren't enough in his vocabulary to express his torment.  A woman
is a creature useful for work, motherhood, and pleasure, but no
cultivated and intelligent man would try to make her his companion his
friend had said the only time Tao tried to confide his feelings.  In
China, one glance around made that reasoning understandable, but in
America the relationship between husband and wife seemed different.  To
begin with, no one had concubines--at least not openly.

To Tao Chi'en's mind, the few fan wey families he had met in this land
of solitary men were beyond comprehension.  He could not imagine how
they behaved in private, given that apparently the husbands treated
their wives as equals.  It was a mystery that he was interested in
exploring, like so many others in this extraordinary country.

Eliza's first letters were delivered to the restaurant, and as the
Chinese community knew Tao Chi'en, they were not long in reaching him.
Those lengthy missives, rich with details, were his best company.

Remembering Eliza, he was surprised at how much he missed her, because
he had never thought that friendship with a woman was possible, to say
nothing of one from a different culture.  He had almost always seen her
in masculine clothing but he thought of her as totally feminine and was
surprised that others accepted her disguise without asking questions.
"Men never really look at other men, and the women think I'm an
effeminate boy," she had written in one letter.  To him, on the other
hand, she was the girl dressed in white whose corset he had removed in
a fishing hut inValparaiso, the sick girl who had delivered herself
without reservation to his care in the hold of the

3l7

ship, the warm body snuggled against his on icy nights beneath the
canvas roof; he heard her happy voice humming as she cooked, and
remembered her serious expression when she helped him treat wounded
patients.  He no longer saw her as a young girl, but as a woman despite
her airy bones and youthful face.  He thought about how different she
looked after she cut her hair and regretted not having kept the braid,
a thought that had occurred to him at the time but had been discarded
as a shameful bit of sentimentality.  At least now he could have held
it in his hands to summon the presence of that singular friend.  When
he meditated he never failed to send protective energy to help her
survive the thousand deaths and possible disasters he tried not to
think about, because he knew that one who thinks of bad things ends up
convoking them.  Sometimes Tao dreamed about Eliza and woke in a sweat;
then he would throw his I Ching sticks to reveal the unseen.  In those
ambiguous messages, Eliza always appeared moving toward the mountain;
that calmed him somewhat.

In September of I8So'Tao was present at the noisy patriotic celebration
when California became the newest state in the union.  The American
nation took in the whole continent, from the Atlantic to the Pacific.
By then, the fever for gold was beginning to take the shape of enormous
collective disillusion, and Tao saw masses of debilitated and
impoverished miners waiting their turns to sail back where they had
come from.  The newspapers estimated that more than ninety thousand
were going home.  Sailors were no longer deserting; on the contrary,
there weren't enough ships to carry everyone who wanted to leave.  One
out of every five miners had died, of disease, cold, or drowning in the
rivers; many were murdered or had shot themselves in the head.
Foreigners were still coming, having embarked months earlier, but the
gold was no longer within easy reach of any bold adventurer with a pan,
a shovel, and a pair of boots.  The time of solitary heroes was over
and in their place were powerful companies l Disillusion^

equipped with machines able to open mountains with forceful bursts of
water.  Miners were working on salary and the ones getting rich were
the impresarios, as avid for sudden wealth as the adventurers of '49,
but much cleverer, like that tailor named Levi who was making pants
with double seams and metal studs, the obligatory miner's uniform.  At
the same time that many were leaving the Chinese kept streaming in like
mute ants.  Tao Chi'en often translated the language newspapers for his
friend, the zhong yi, who particularly liked the articles of a certain
Jacob Freemont because they coincided with his own opinions.

"Thousands of argonauts are returning home defeated without having
found the golden fleece, their odyssey turned into tragedy, but many
others, though poor, are staying because now they cannot live anywhere
else.  Two years in this wild and beautiful country transforms men. 
The danger, the adventure, and the good health and vigor they have
known in California are not found anywhere else.  Gold fulfilled its
function: it attracted the men who are conquering this region and
making of it the promised land.  That is irreversible .. ."  wrote
Freemont.

Tao Chi'en, however, felt that he was living in a paradise of greedy,
materialistic, and impatient people whose obsession was to get rich
quick.  There was no food for the spirit; instead, violence and
ignorance prospered.  All other evils derived from those, he was
convinced.  He had seen a lot in his twenty-seven years, and did not
consider himself a prude, but he was shocked by the standards of
behavior and the impunity of crime.  Such a place was destined to choke
in the muck of its own vices, he maintained.  He had lost hope of
finding in America the peace he so desired; definitely, this was not
the place for one who aspired to wisdom.  So why was he so strongly
attracted to it?  He must avoid being bewitched by this land, as had
happened to so many who had come here.  He intended either to go back
to Hong Kong or to visit his friend Ebanizer Hobbs in England where
they could study and practice together.  In the years that had gone by
since he was shanghaied onto the Liberty he had written several letters
to the English physician but during the days at sea it had taken a long
time to get an answer, until finally inValparaiso, in February of I849,
Captain John Sommers had received a letter for him and delivered it to
him.  In it, his friend told him that he was practicing surgery in
London, although his true calling was to mental illnesses, a new field
just being explored by science.

Tao Chi'en planned to work for a while in Dai Fao, the "great city" as
the Chinese called San Francisco, and then sail to China in case
Ebanizer Hobbs did not answer his most recent letter within a
reasonable time.  He was amazed to see how San Francisco had changed in
little more than a year.  Instead of the noisy camp of huts and tents
he remembered, he saw a city with well-planned streets and buildings of
several floors, organized and prosperous, with new dwellings going up
everywhere.A catastrophic fire had destroyed several blocks three
months earlier; one could still see the ruins of burned-out buildings,
but the coals were not yet cool before everyone had taken hammer in
hand to rebuild.  There were luxury hotels with verandahs and
balconies, casinos, bars, and restaurants, elegant carriages, along
with an unattractive, badly dressed multicultural throng, among whom
stood out the top hats of a few dandies.  The rest were mud-covered,
bearded types with the look of villains, although no one was who he
seemed: the stevedore on the dock might be a Latin American aristocrat,
and the coach driver a New York lawyer.  After minute's conversation
with any of those intimidating-looking types, one might uncover an
educated man who at the least pretext, with tears in his eyes, would
pull out a wrinkled letter from his wife.

And the opposite also happened: the foppish, well-cut suit might well
con

S Disillusion t.

ceal an unmitigated scoundrel.  Tao did not see any schools in his walk
through the center; instead he saw children working like adults,
digging holes, carrying bricks, driving mules, and shining boots, but
as soon as the breeze blew in the from the ocean they would run to fly
kites.  Later he learned that many of them were orphans, and that they
roamed the streets in gangs, stealing food to survive.  There were few
women, and when one strolled elegantly down the street, traffic stopped
to let her pass.  At the foot of Telegraph Hill, where there was a
semaphore flying flags to signal the registry of ships entering the
bay, lay a few blocks in which there was no shortage of women: that was
the red-light district, controlled by ruffians from Australia' Tasmania
and New Zealand.  Tao Chi'en had heard of them, and knew it was no
place for a Chinese man to venture by himself after sunset.  Peering
into shops, he saw they were offering the same goods he had seen in
London when he stopped there.  Everything came by sea, even a cargo of
cats, sold individually like luxury items, to wage war against the
rats.  The forest of masts of ships abandoned in the bay was reduced to
a tenth; many had been scuttled to make landfill for construction or
had been converted into hotels, storehouses, jails, and even an insane
asylum where poor wretches lost in the unreachable delirium of alcohol
were sent to die.  Such a haven was badly needed, since previously they
had tied lunatics to trees.

Tao Chi'en headed for Chinatown and found that the rumors were true:
his countrymen had built a complete city in the heart of San Francisco,
where Mandarin and Cantonese were spoken, signs were all in Chinese,
and the only faces were Chinese: the illusion of being transported to
the celestial empire was perfect.  Tao took a room in a decent hotel
and prepared to practice medicine as long as necessary to earn a little
more money because he had a long journey ahead of him.  Something
happened, however, that would overturn his plans and hold him in the
city.  "My karma was not to find peace in a monastery in the mountains,
as I sometimes dreamed, but to fight a merciless, no-holds-barred war,"
he concluded many years later, when he could look back at his past and
see clearly the roads he had traveled and those not taken.  Months
later, he received Eliza's last letter in a dirty, wrinkled envelope.

Paulina Rodriguez de Santa Cruz descended from the Fortuna like an
empress, surrounded by her entourage and ninety-three trunks.  Captain
John Sommers' third trip with the ice had been true torment for him,
the other passengers, and the crew.  Paulina let everyone know that the
ship was hers, and to prove it she contradicted the captain and gave
arbitrary orders to the sailors.  She had a stomach like an elephant
and was not even slowed by seasickness;

she was such a good sailor that her appetite merely increased.  Her
children continually got lost in the crannies of the ship even though
their nannies never took their eyes off them, and when that happened
the alarms sounded and they had to shut down the boilers because the
hysterical mother screamed that her children had fallen overboard.  The
captain tried to explain as delicately as possible that were that the
case she would have to resign herself to it, because the Pacific would
already have swallowed them up, but she ordered him to lower the
lifeboats.  Sooner or later the children would surface, and after
several hours of high drama they would resume their voyage.  Paulina's
objectionable little lap dog, however, did lose its footing one day and
slip into the ocean in front of several witnesses, who watched without
a word.  Paulina's husband and brother-in-law were waiting on the dock
in San Francisco with a row of carriages and wagons to transport the
family and the trunks.

The residence constructed for her, an elegant Victorian house, had been
shipped in crates from England with numbered pieces and

> Disillusion :@

blueprints for putting it together; the wallpaper, furniture, harp,
piano, lamps--even porcelain figurines and bucolic paintings to adorn
it--were also imported.  Paulina did not like it.  Compared to her
marble mansion in Chile, this new one looked like a dollhouse that
threatened to collapse every time she leaned against a wall, but for
the moment there was no alternative.  And she needed only one look at
the effervescent city to realize its possibilities.

"Here is where we are going to live, Feliciano.  The first to arrive
become aristocracy in a couple of years."

"You already have that in Chile, woman."

"I do, but you don't.  Believe me, this will be the most important city
of the Pacific."

"Founded by swine and whores!"

"Precisely.  They are the ones most eager for respectability.  No one
will be more respectable than the Cross family.  What a shame these
people cannot pronounce our real name.  Cross is a name for cheese
makers.  But after all, I suppose one cannot have everything."

That night Captain John Sommers went to the best restaurant in the
city, eager to eat and drink well and forget his five weeks in the
company of that woman.  He had brought several boxes of the newest
illustrated editions of erotic books.  The success of the first had
been stupendous, and he hoped his sister Rose would work up the spirit
to write again.  Ever since Eliza's disappearance she had been in a
slough of sadness and had not once taken up her pen.  His mood had been
affected, too.  "Shit, I am getting old," he said when he realized he
was foundering in futile nostalgia.  He had never had time to enjoy his
daughter, to take her to England as he had planned; nor had he told her
he was her father.  He was fed up with deceit and mystery.  The
business of the books was another family secret.  Fifteen years ago,
when his sister had confessed that behind Jeremy back she was writing
lewd stories to keep from dying of boredom, he had come up with the
idea of publishing them in London, where the market for erotica had
prospered, along with prostitution and clubs for flagellants, the
longer the rigid Victorian moral code was imposed.  In a remote
province in Chile, seated before a small dressing table of blond wood,
with no source of inspiration but memories of her one love affair
inflated and polished a thousand times over, his sister produced novel
after novel signed by "An Anonymous Lady."  No one believed that those
steamy stories, some with a tone suggestive of the Marquis de Sade and
already classics of their genre, were written by a woman.

It was the captain's job to take the manuscripts to the editor, monitor
expenses, collect the earnings, and deposit them in a London bank for
his sister.  It was his way of paying her for the huge favor she had
done him by taking in his daughter and saying nothing.  He could not
remember Eliza's mother, but if the girl had inherited her mother's
physical characteristics, she had undoubtedly gotten from him her urge
for adventure.  Where could she be?  And with whom?  Rose insisted she
had gone to California after her lover, but the more time that passed,
the more he doubted that.  His friend Jacob Todd--now Freemont--who had
made the search for Eliza a personal mission, assured him that she had
never set foot in San Francisco.

Freemont met the captain for dinner, and then invited him to a
frivolous show in one of the dance halls in the red-light district.

He told Sommers that Ah Toy, the Chinese woman they had peered at
through the holes in the wall, now had a chain of brothels and an
elegant "salon" staffed by the finest Oriental girls, some barely
eleven years old and trained to satisfy every whim.  He said they
weren't going there, however, but to see the Turkish harem dancers.
Soon afterward they were smoking and drinking in a two-story building
decorated with large marble tables, polished bronzes, and paintings of
mythological nymphs pursued by fauns.  Women of several races attended
the clientele, served drinks, and presided over the gar tung w
Disillusion 03

tables under the vigilant gaze of armed pimps, all dressed with eye
popping affectation.  On both sides of the main salon, in private
rooms, was high-stakes betting.  That was where the real tigers
gambled, risking thousands in one night: politicians, judges,
merchants, lawyers, and criminals, all equals in the same mania.  The
performance was a fiasco in the eyes of the captain, who had seen
authentic belly dancing in Istanbul and had no trouble recognizing that
those clumsy girls were undoubtedly from the last group of whores to
arrive from Chicago.  The audience, most of whom were uneducated miners
who couldn't have found Turkey on a map, whooped their approval of
those odalisques barely covered by bead skirts.  Bored, the captain
drifted to one of the betting tables where with incredible dexterity a
female dealer was shuffling the cards for monte.  A different woman
came up to him, grasped his arm, and breathed an invitation into his
ear.  He turned to look at her.  She was a plump, common, South
American, but she wore an expression of genuine happiness.  He was
about to send her on her way because he was planning to spend the rest
of the night with one of the expensive whores he had visited on earlier
trips to San Francisco when his eyes focused on her decolletage.
Between her breasts was a gold brooch set with turquoise stones.

"Where did you get that?"  he cried, gripping her shoulders with two
hands.

"It's mine!  I bought it!"  she blurted out, terrified.

"Where!"  and he shook her so roughly that one of the thugs sauntered
toward them.

"Any trouble, mister?"  he asked threateningly.

The captain made a sign that he wanted some time with this woman, and
hustled her off to one of the cubicles on the second floor.  He closed
the curtain and with a single slap tumbled her back on the bed.

"You are going to tell me where you got that brooch or I'm going to
knock all your teeth out, is that clear?"

"I didn't steal it, I swear.  Someone gave it to me!"

"Who?"

"You won't believe me when I tell you."

"Try me!"

"A girl, a long time ago, on a boat .. ."

And Azucena Placeres had no choice but to tell that man possessed that
a Chinese cook had given her the brooch in payment for looking after a
poor little girl who was dying from a miscarriage in the hold of a ship
in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.  As she talked, the captain's anger
turned to horror.

"What happened to her?"  asked John Sommers, his head in his hands,
stunned.

"I don't know, senor."

"I'll give you anything you want, woman, just tell me what happened to
her," he begged, dropping a sheaf of bills in her skirt.

"Who are you?"

"I'm her father."

"She bled to death and we threw her body into the ocean.

swear, that's the truth," Azucena Placeres replied without a second's
pause, because she thought that if that poor girl had traveled half the
world hidden like a rat in a hole, it would be an unforgivable betrayal
on her part to set the father on her trail.

Eliza spent the summer in the town because with one thing and another
the days got away from her.  First Babalu the Bad had a near fatal
attack of dysentery, which set off a panic since the epidemic was
supposed to be under control.  For months there had been no cases to
mourn except the death of a two-year-old boy, the

> L

- ;d Disillusion first child to be born and die in that stopping-off
place for newcomers and adventurers.  That baby had put a seal of
authenticity on the town, for now it was no longer an illusoly camp
with a gallows as its only reason to figure on the maps; it had a
Christian cemetery and the tiny grave of someone whose entire life had
been spent there.  During the time Joe Bonecrusher's barn had been
turned into a hospital, all of them had miraculously been spared from
the epidemic--miraculously, because Joe didn't believe in contagion.

She said everything was a matter of luck: the world is filled with
plagues; some get them and some don't.  That was why she didn't take
precautions; she allowed herself the luxury of ignoring the commonsense
warnings of the doctor and only under pressure boiled the drinking
water.  Once they had moved into a real house, they all felt safe; if
they hadn't been infected before, they wouldn't now.  But within a few
days, Babalu was down; then it became the turn of Joe Bonecrusher, the
girls from Missouri, and the beautiful Mexican.  They succumbed with
vile diarrhea, fevers you could fry an egg on, and uncontrollable
chills, which in Babalu's case shook the house.  Then came James Morton
in his Sunday clothes to ask formally for Esther's hand.

"Oh, son, you couldn't have chosen a worse time," sighed Joe
Bonecrusher, but she was too sick to object and between moans gave her
consent.

Esther divided her belongings among her companions because she did not
want to take anything to her new life, and they were married that same
day, without much fuss, attended by Tom No-Tribe and Eliza, the only
two of their company who weren't sick.  A double row of Esther's former
customers lined both sides of the street as the couple went by,
shooting into the air and yelling congratulations.  The couple moved
into the blacksmith shop, determined to make it their home and forget
the past, but still they went every day to Joe's house,

taking hot meals and clean clothing to the ill.  The unpleasant task of
nursing everyone fell to Eliza and Tom No-Tribe.  The town doctor-a
young man from Philadelphia who for months had been warning that the
water was polluted with waste from the manufacturers upriver, without
anyone's giving him the time of day--quarantined Joe's house.

Their finances went from bad to worse but they did not go hungry,
thanks to Esther and the anonymous gifts that mysteriously appeared at
the door: a sack of beans, a few pounds of sugar, tobacco, small
pouches of gold dust, silver dollars.  To tend her friends, Eliza
called on what she had learned in her girlhood from Mama Fresia and
fromEao Chi'en in Sacramento, until finally one by one her friends
began to recuperate, although for a long time they were unsteady and
befuddled.  Babalu the Bad had suffered the most.  His Cyclops girth
was unaccustomed to bad health; he lost weight and his flesh hung so
loose his tattoos were unrecognizable.

During that time, a brief news items was published in the local
newspaper about a Chilean or Mexican--no one was sure which-bandit
named Joaquin Murieta, who was becoming famous up and down the mother
lode.  By then, violence was the rule in gold country.  Disillusioned
when they learned that sudden fortune, a mockery of a miracle, had come
to only a few, the Americans accused foreigners of being greedy and of
getting rich without contributing to the nation's prosperity.  Liquor
fired them up, and impunity in doling out punishment gave them an
irrational sense of power.  An American was never sentenced for crimes
against another race; still worse, a white criminal often could choose
his own jury.  Racial hostility turned into blind hatred.  Mexicans
refused to accept the loss of their territory in the war, or to be run
off their ranches and the mines.  The Chinese bore abuse silently; they
did not leave, but kept prospecting, not earning enough for a flea, but
with such infinite tenacity that grain by grain they amassed wealth.
Thousands of Chileans and Peruvians, who had been the first to arrive
when gold fever blossomed, decided to return to their countries because
it wasn't worth pursuing their dreams under such conditions.  That
year, I850, the legislature of California approved a tax on mining
operations designed to protect whites.  Blacks and Indians were left
out, unless they worked like slaves, and foreigners had to pay twenty
dollars and renew rights to their claim monthly, which in practice was
impossible.  They couldn't leave the placers to travel several weeks to
the city to obey the law, but if they didn't, the sheriff took over
their mine and gave it to an American.  The people in charge of
enforcing those measures were chosen by the governor and earned their
salaries from taxes and fines, a perfect setup for encouraging
corruption.  The law applied only to darkskinned foreigners, even
though according to the treaty that ended the war in I848 the Mexicans
had rights to American citizenship.

Another decree was the last nail in the coffin: claims on their
ranches, where they had lived for generations, had to be ratified by a
court in San Francisco.  This procedure took years and cost a fortune;
in addition, the judges and constables were often the same ones who had
appropriated the claims.  In view of the fact that the law did not
protect them, some Mexicans decided to act outside it, spiritedly
throwing themselves into the role of outlaws.  Men who formerly had
been content to steal cattle now attacked solitary miners and
travelers.

Some gangs were famous for their cruelty; they not only robbed the
victims, they took pleasure in torturing them before they killed
them.

There was talk of one particular ban dido to whom they attributed,
among other offenses, the terrible death of two young Americans.

Their bodies were found tied to a tree, with signs of having been used
as a target for knife throwers: their tormentors had also cut out their
tongues, pierced their eyes, and cut off live flesh before leaving them
to slowly die.  This criminal was called Three-Finger Jack, and it was
said that he was right-hand man to Joaquin Murieta.

Not everything was savagery, nevertheless; the cities were developing,
and new towns were springing up and families moving in;

newspapers, theater companies, and orchestras were organized, schools,
churches, and banks were constructed, roads were built, and
communications improved.  There was stagecoach service and regular mail
delivery.  Women were less a novelty now, and a society was flourishing
that aspired to order and morality, replacing the disaster of solitary
men and prostitutes.  There was an attempt to establish the rule of law
and to return to the civilization forgotten in the delirium of easy
gold.  The town was given a respectable name in a solemn ceremony
featuring a marching band and a parade, which Joe Bonecrusher attended
dressed as a woman for the first time and backed by her entire company.
Wives who had only recently arrived blanched when they saw the "painted
women," but as Joe and her girls had saved so many lives during the
epidemic they overlooked their activities.  On the other hand, they
declared war on the other brothel--a losing battle, nonetheless, since
there was still only one woman for every nine men. At the end of that
year' James Morton welcomed five families of Quakers who had crossed
the continent in ox carts not for gold but drawn by the vastness of
that virgin land.

By now, Eliza had no idea what trail to follow.  Joaquin Andieta had
evaporated in the confusion of the times and in his place had begun to
materialize an outlaw with the same physical description and similar
name, a figure she found impossible to identify with the noble young
man she loved.  The author of the letters she kept as her only treasure
could not be the same person as the one to whom such horrendous crimes
were attributed.  The man she loved would never have associated with a
cold-blooded killer like Three-Finger Jack she was sure, but her
conviction melted away at night when Joaquin appeared to her wearing a
thousand different masks and bringing a thousand contradictory
messages.  She would wake up trembling,

33o

-aS Disillusion-SH

besieged by the raving specters of her nightmares.  She had lost the
ability to come and go from her dreams at will, as Mama Fresia had
taught her as a child, nor could she decipher the visions and symbols
that kept rattling in her head like pebbles rolling in the river.

She wrote tirelessly in her diary, hoping as she did so that the images
would acquire some meaning.  She reread the love letters syllable by
syllable, seeking clarifying signs but finding only deeper
perplexity.

Those letters were the one proof of her lover's existence and she clung
to them so as not to lose her bearings completely.  The temptation to
fall into apathy as a way to escape the torment of continuing her
search forJoaquin was becoming irresistible.  She doubted everything:

the embraces in the room of the armoires, the months buried in the hold
of the ship, the baby that had bled out of her.

,=..

The financial problems that arose from Esther's marriage to the
blacksmith, which deprived Joe's company of a quarter of their income
overnight, and from the weeks the other girls had been laid low by
dysentery, were so major that Joe nearly lost the house, but the
thought of seeing her doves working for the competition spurred her to
keep fighting adversity.  They had gone through hell, and she could not
let her girls slide back into that life, because much against her will
she had become fond of them.  She had always thought of herself as one
of God's serious mistakes, a man condemned to the body of a woman,
which is why she could not understand the maternal instinct that had
budded when it was least convenient.  She looked after Tom No-Tribe
religiously, but she liked to point out that she did it "like a
sergeant."

None of that mollycoddling, it wasn't in her nature, and besides, the
boy had to be strong like his ancestors; babying only screwed up a
kid's manliness, she warned Eliza when she found her with Tom No Tribe
in her lap, telling him folktales from Chile.  This new tenderness for
her doves was a serious stone around her neck, and, to top everything
off, they knew how she felt and had begun to call her Mother.

Her gorge rose at that; she had forbidden them to do it, but they
ignored her.  "We have a business relationship here, goddamn it.  I
can't put it any straighter.  As long as you work, you have a salary, a
roof, food, and protection, but the day you get sick, get lazy on me,
or get all wrinkled and gray .. . so long!"  she groused.  "Nothing
easier than replacing you, the world is full of easy women.  "And then,
all of a sudden, here came this syrupy sentimentality to foul up her
life, something no madam in her right mind would ever permit.  "All
this crap happens to you because you're a nice person," Babalu the Bad
teased her.  And it was probably true, because while she was wasting
precious time nursing sick people whose names she didn't even know, the
other madam in town had refused to let anyone who was sick come near
her place.  Joe was getting poorer while her rival put on weight, had
her hair bleached, and took a Russian lover ten years her junior with
muscles like an athlete and a diamond set in one tooth.  This
competitor had expanded her business and on weekends the miners lined
up at her door with money in one hand and hat in the other, for no
woman, no matter how low she had sunk, would put up with an un doffed
hat.  Very clearly' Joe maintained, there was no future for her in the
profession: the law didn't protect them, God had forgotten them, and
all she could see ahead was old age, poverty, and loneliness.

She considered taking in washing and baking pies to sell, meanwhile
holding on to the trade in gambling and dirty books, but her girls were
not interested in earning a living with such hard, and badly paid,
work.

"This is a shitty profession, girls.  Get yourselves married, go study
to be teachers.  Do something with your fucking lives and stop hanging
around me," she sighed sadly.

Babalu the Bad, what's more, was tired of acting as a pimp and
bodyguard.  Their sedentary life bored him, and Joe Bonecrusher

^ Disillusion i had changed so much that he didn't really feel like
working with her any longer.  If she had lost her enthusiasm for the
profession, where did that leave him?  In desperation he confided in
Chile Boy, and the two of them entertained each other making fanciful
plans to break free.  They contemplated organizing a traveling
spectacle.

They talked about buying a bear and training it to box, so they could
go from town to town challenging anyone brave enough to duke it out
with the animal.  Babalu was looking for adventure, and Eliza thought
it would be a good opportunity to have company while she looked for
Joaquin Andieta.  Besides cooking and playing the piano she didn't have
much to do at Joe place, and the inactivity was making her out of
sorts.  She wanted to feel the freedom of the open road again, but
she'd grown fond of these people and it broke her heart to think of
leaving Tom No-Tribe.  The boy was reading well now and was diligent in
learning to write; Eliza had convinced him that when he grew up he
should study to be a lawyer and defend the rights of the Indians
instead of avenging the dead with bullets, as Joe wanted him to do.

"You will be a much more powerful warrior that way, and all the gringos
will be afraid of you."  He still didn't laugh, but once or twice when
he sat beside her to have her scratch his head, the shadow of a smile
played over his angry Indian face.

Tao Chi'en walked into Joe Bonecrusher's house at three in the
afternoon one Wednesday in December.  Tom No-Tribe opened the door,
invited him into the parlor--empty at that hour--and called the doves.
Shortly thereafter the beautiful Mexican came into the kitchen where
Chile Boy was kneading dough to announce that some Chinaman was asking
about Elias Andieta, but Eliza was so preoccupied with her work, and
with remembering her dreams of the night before in which there had been
a blur of gambling tables and pierced eyes, that she didn't pay any
attention.

"I'm telling you that some Chinese man is waiting for you," the Mexican
repeated, and then Eliza's heart kicked like a mule in her chest.

"Tao!"  she screamed, and shot out of the room.

When she got to the parlor, however, she found a man so changed that it
took several seconds to recognize her friend.  His queue was gone; he
was wearing his hair short and combed back with brilliantine, round
eyeglasses with wire frames, a dark suit with a frock coat, a
three-button vest, and flared trousers.  Over one arm was an overcoat
and an umbrella, and in the other hand he held a top hat.

"God in heaven' Tao  What happened to you!"

"In America, you have to dress like the Americans."  He smiled.

In San Francisco he had been attacked by three bullies, and before he
could pull his knife from his sash they had knocked him out for the
pure fun of mopping up a "celestial.  "When he came to, he found
himself in an alley, covered with filth and with his queue cut off and
wrapped around his neck.  At that very moment, he decided to wear his
hair short and dress like the jarl wey.  His new aspect made him stand
out in Chinatown but he discovered that he was much better received
outside it, and that doors opened that had been closed to him before.
He was possibly the only Chinese man in the city who looked the way he
did.A queue was considered sacred and the decision to cut it proved
that he did not intend to go back to China but, rather, to stay in
America, an unpardonable betrayal of the emperor, his country, and his
ancestors.  His clothing and his haircut, nevertheless, were also the
source of a certain awe, for they indicated that he had access to the
world of the Americans.  Eliza could not take her eyes off him he was a
stranger she would have to get to know all over again.  Tao Chi'en
bowed several times, in his usual greeting, and she did not dare
indulge the impulse to hug him that was burning inside her.  She had
often slept cuddled against him but they had never touched without the
excuse of sleep.

"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."

S X wn the summer of I85I Jacob Freemont decided to interview Joaquin
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 Joaquin Murieta was on the way
to becoming a symbol.  Jacob Freemont took it upon himself to fan the
{lames 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 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' Robing Hood" and
people stopped Freemont in the street to ask him details about the
famous Joaquin Murieta.Without ever having seen him, the newspaperman
described Murieta as a young man of virile when,

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 Joaquin, if the fellow really existed, and write his biography,
and 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 in dispensables 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 knife point 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 girl 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 forJosefa.  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

-0e Singsong Girls 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, senores" 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 Calif ornia.What a waste, when there are so few!"  Freemont
wrote in his article.

Following Joaquin 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 Joaquin
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: Joaquin 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

<-; Singsong Girls ;:

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
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, silence 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 were always the jan 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 i; Singsong Girls 05 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.

One afternoon in early autumn' Tao Chi'en's assistant came to him with
an address on a piece of paper and a message to come as soon as
possible.  He attended his last patient of the day, and left.  The
wooden, two-story building decorated with dragons and paper lanterns
was in the heart of Chinatown.  One look was enough to tell him that
this was a brothel.  On either side of the door were small barred
windows where he could see the faces of young girls calling to him in
Cantonese: "Come in and do what you will with pretty Chinese girl." And
for the benefit of white visitors and sailors of all races they
repeated in indecipherable English, "Two bit tie lo okie four bit tee
fee lee six bit tee doee," as they exposed pitiful little breasts and
tempted passersby with obscene gestures which, coming from those
children, were a tragic pantomime.  Tao Chi'en had seen them many
times; he walked down that street every day and the mewing of the
"singsong" girls pursued him, reminding him of his sister.  What had
happened to her?  She would be twenty-three now, in the unlikely case
that she was still alive, he thought.  The poorest among the poor
prostitutes began very early and rarely lived to be eighteen; by
twenty, if they'd had the bad fortune to survive, they were ancient.
The memory of that missing sister kept him from going to Chinese
whorehouses; if he was maddened with desire, he sought out women of
other races.  The door was opened by a sinister-looking old woman with
dyed black hair and eyebrows drawn with charcoal pencil, who greeted
him in Cantonese.  Once it was established that they belonged to the
same tong, he was led inside.  All the length of an evil-smelling
corridor he saw the girls' cubicles; some were chained by an ankle to
the bed.  In the darkness of the hall he met two men adjusting their
trousers as they left.  The woman led him through a labyrinth of
passages and stairways that covered an entire block before they
descended rickety stairs into darkness.  She indicated that Tao Chi'en
should wait, and for a time that seemed interminable he waited in the
blackness of that hole, listening to the muted noises of the nearby
street.  He heard a faint screech and something brushed his ankle; he
kicked out and thought he had hit the creature, maybe a rat.  The old
woman returned with a candle and guided him through more twisting
passageways until they came to a padlocked door.  She took a key from a
pocket and struggled with the lock until it opened.  She held the
candle high, lighting a windowless room in which the only piece of
furniture was a board pallet a few inches above the ground.  A wave of
fetid odors struck them in the face and they had to cover nose and
mouth in order to go in.  On that platform were a small, cramped body,
an empty bowl, and a burned-out oil lamp.

"Check her," the crone ordered.

Tao Chi'en turned the body over to find that it was already stiff.  It
was a child of about thirteen, with two circles of rouge on her checks
and scars on her arms and legs.  Her only clothing was a thin blouse.
It was obvious she was nothing but bones, but she had not died of
hunger or illness.

"Poison," he determined without hesitation.

"You don't say.  "The woman laughed as if she had heard something very
funny.

Tao Chi'en had to sign a paper stating that the death was due to
natural causes.  The old woman stepped out into the corridor, banged a
small gong twice, and a man promptly appeared, stuffed the body in a
bag, slung it over his shoulder, and bore it off without a word as the
procuress placed twenty dollars in the hands of the

- :u Singsong Girls \

zhong yi.  Then she led him through new labyrinths and left him finally
before a door.  It was to a different street, and it took Tao Chi'en a
long time to find his way back to where he lived.

The next day he returned to the same address.  Again there were the
girls with rouged faces and crazed eyes, calling out in two languages.
Ten years ago, in Canton, he had begun his practice of medicine with
prostitutes; he had used them as rented flesh and to practice with his
master's gold acupuncture needles, but he had never paused to think
about their souls.  He thought of them as one of the universe's
misfortunes, yet another of the errors of creation, beings who suffered
ignominy to pay for offenses in former lives and improve their karma.

He felt sorry for them, but it never occurred to him that their fate
might be modified.  They awaited disaster in their cribs, exactly as
chicken in its coop in the market: that was their destiny.  That was
the anarchy of the world.  He had walked down that street a hundred
times without focusing on those small windows, on those faces behind
the bars or the beckoning hands.  He had some vague notion that they
were slaves, but in China more or less all women were slaves;

the most fortunate served fathers, husbands, or lovers, others,
employers for whom they labored from dawn to dusk, and many were like
these girls.  That morning, however, he did not see them with the same
indifference because something in him had changed.

He had not tried to sleep the night before.  After he left the brothel
he had gone to a public bath where he soaked for a long time to rid
himself of the dark energy of his sick patients and the deep repulsion
oppressing him.  When he got to his office he sent his assistant home
and brewed jasmine tea to purify himself.  He had not eaten in many
hours, but it was not the moment for food.  He took off his clothes,
lighted incense and a candle, knelt with his forehead to the ground,
and said a prayer for the soul of the dead girl.  Then he sat in
meditation for hours, in total immobility, until ll he was able to
isolate himself from the noise of the street and the odors of the
restaurant and sink into the void and silence of his own spirit.  He
did not know how long he sat, absorbed, calling, calling Lin, until
finally the delicate ghost heard him in the mysterious reaches she
inhabited and slowly found her way, moving toward him with the
lightness of a sigh, first nearly imperceptible but gradually more
substantial, until he clearly felt her presence.

He did not see Lin inside the room but, rather, in his bosom, in the
very core of his tranquil heart.  Tao Chi'en did not open his eyes, or
move.  For hours he sat in the same posture, separated from his body,
floating in a luminous space in perfect communication with Lin.  At
dawn, once both were sure they would not lose one another again, Lin
softly said good-bye.  Then the acupuncture master had come, smiling
and ironic as he had been in his best days, before he was beat down by
the delirium of senility, and stayed with Tao, keeping him company and
answering his questions until the sun rose, the neighborhood awoke, and
he heard the discreet taps of his assistant at the door.  Tao Chi'en
got up, refreshed and renewed, as if after a peaceful sleep, dressed,
and went to open the door.

"Close the office.  I will not attend patients today, I have other
things to do," he announced to his assistant.

The investigations of that day changed the course of Tao Chi'en's
destiny.  The girls behind the bars had come from China, picked up in
the street or sold by their own fathers with the promise that they were
going to the Golden Mountain to be married.  Brokers selected the
strongest and cheapest among them, not the most beautiful, unless it
was a matter of a special order by wealthy clients who acquired them as
concubines.  Ah Toy, the clever woman who had invented the spectacle of
the voyeuristic holes in the wall, had become the city's major >

importer of young flesh.  For her chain of establishments she bought
girls at the age of puberty because they were easy to tame and, after
all, none lasted very long anyway.  She was becoming famous and very
rich; her coffers were overflowing and she had bought a palace in China
where she planned to retire in her old age.  She prided herself on
being the Oriental madam with the best connections not only among
Chinese but also influential Americans  She trained her girls to gather
information, and so learned the personal secrets, political deals, and
weaknesses of men who had power.  If bribery failed, she had recourse
to blackmail.  No one dared defy her because everyone from the governor
down lived in a glass house.  Shipments of slaves came through the
docks of San Francisco with no legal tie-ups and in full light of day.
Ah Toy, however, was not the only trafficker; that vice was one of the
most profitable and secure business dealings in California, as golden
as the mines.  Expenses were minimal, the girls were cheap, and they
were transported in the holds of ships in large padded crates.

They lived for weeks without knowing where they were going, or why;
they saw daylight only when they were given lessons in their calling.
During the crossing the sailors made it their business to train them,
and by the time they got off the ship in San Francisco they had lost
the last trace of innocence.  Some died of dysentery, cholera, or
dehydration; others managed to jump overboard during the minutes they
were taken up to the deck to be washed down with saltwater.

The rest were trapped; they spoke no English, they did not know that
new country, they had no one to turn to.  The immigration agents took
bribes, turned a blind eye to the girls' obvious distress, and signed
the false adoption or marriage papers without reading them.  Newcomers
were met at the dock by an old prostitute whose heart had turned to
black stone.  She herded them with a cane, like cattle, right through
the center of the city, in plain view of anyone who wanted to look. The
minute they crossed into Chinatown they disappeared for ever in the
subterranean labyrinth of dark rooms, false corridors, twisting stairs,
hidden doors, and double walls where police never ventured because
everything that happened there, they said, was the business of the
Chinks, a yellow race of perverts with whom it was best not to
meddle.

In an enormous below-street-level area ironically called' The Queen's
Room," the girls confronted their fate.  They were allowed one night's
rest; they were bathed, fed, and sometimes forced to drink a cup of
liquor to quiet them a little.  At the hour of the auction, they were
taken naked into a room crowded with buyers of every conceivable ilk
who felt them, checked their teeth, put their fingers anywhere they
pleased, and finally made their offers.  Some girls were sold to
high-class bordellos or the harems of the rich; the strongest often
ended up with factory owners, miners, or Chinese farmers, where they
worked for the remainder of their brief existences.  Most stayed in the
cribs of Chinatown.  Old whores taught them their duties;

they learned to tell brass from gold, so they would not be cheated, to
attract clients and please them without complaint, however humiliating
or painful their demands.  To give the transaction an air of legality,
the girls signed a contract, which they couldn't read, selling
themselves for five years, but it was craftily calculated to ensure
that they would never be free.  For every day they were sick, two weeks
were added to their time of service, and if they attempted to escape
they were enslaved for life.  They lived crammed into unventilated
rooms divided by heavy curtains, laboring like galley slaves until they
died.  It was there Tao Chi'en went that morning, accompanied by the
spirits of Lin and his acupuncture master.  An adolescent scantily clad
in a smock led him to a filthy straw mattress behind a curtain, held
out her hand, and asked him to pay first.  She took his six dollars,
lay down on her back and spread her legs, her eyes fixed on the
ceiling.  Her pupils were dull and she was breathing with difficulty;
he realized she was drugged.  He sat

< Singsong Girls j

L

beside her, pulled down her smock, and tried to stroke her head, but
she screamed and bared her teeth, ready to bite him.  Tao Chi'en moved
away; he spoke to her a long time in Cantonese, without touching her,
observing recent bruises, until the litany of his voice calmed her.
Finally she began to answer his questions, more with gestures than
words, as if she had lost the use of language, and he learned some
details of her captivity.  She could not tell him how long she had been
there because counting days was a futile exercise, although it could
not have been long since she still remembered her family in China with
heartrending precision.

When Tao Chi'en estimated that his time behind the curtain was used up,
he left.  The same old woman who had received him the night before was
waiting at the door but she gave no sign of recognizing him.  From
there Tao went to ask questions in saloons, gambling halls, opium
parlors, and then visited other physicians in the quarter, until little
by little he fit together the pieces of that puzzle.  When the little
singsong girls were too sick to keep working, they were taken to the
"hospital," as they called the secret rooms he had seen the previous
night, and left there with a cup of water, a little rice, and a lamp
with oil enough for a few hours.  The door was opened again a few days
later when someone went in to be sure the girl was dead.  If she was
alive, she was killed; none ever saw sunlight again.  Tao Chi'en had
been called only because the usual zhong yi hadn't been available.

The idea of helping the girls wasn't his, he would tell Eliza nine
months later, but Lin's and the acupuncture master's.

"California is a free state' Tao  Slavery is outlawed.  Go to the
American authorities."

"Not everyone enjoys freedom.  White people are blind and deaf, Eliza.
Those girls are invisible, like the insane and beggars and dogs."

"And the Chinese don't care about them?"

"Some do, like me, but no one is willing to risk his life defying the
criminal tongs.  Most people believe that if things have been run that
way for centuries in China, there is no reason to criticize what goes
on here."

"But that's very cruel!"

"It isn't cruelty.  It's just that human life is not valued in my
country.  There are many, many people, and there are always more
children than the family can feed."

"But in your mind those girls aren't garbage' Tao .. "

"No.  Lin and you have taught me a lot about women."

"What are you going to do?"

"I should have listened when you told me to come look for gold, you
remember?  If I were wealthy, I would buy them."

"But you aren't.  Besides, all the gold in California wouldn't be
enough to buy every one of them.  You have to stop the traffic."

"That's impossible, but I can save a few if you help me."

Tao told Eliza that in recent months he had rescued eleven girls, but
only two had survived.  His formula was risky, and not very effective,
but he couldn't think of another way.  He had offered to treat the
girls without charge when they were sick or got pregnant if in exchange
they would hand over the dying girls to him.  He bribed the old whores
to call him when it was time to send a singsong girl to the "hospital";
he and his assistant would go to the brothel, load the dying girl onto
stretcher, and take her away.  "For experiments, "Tao Chi'en explained,
although he was rarely questioned.  The girl wasn't worth anything
anymore, and this doctor's extravagant perversion saved the management
the problem of getting rid of her.  The transaction benefited both
parties.  Before taking the sick girl Tao Chi'en would hand them a
death certificate and ask for the contract she had signed so there
would be no claims.  In nine instances, the girls were beyond help, and
Tao's role was simply to be with them in their last hours, but two had
lived.

"What did you do with them?"  asked Eliza.

"I have them in my room.  They are still weak, and one seems half
crazy, but they will get well.  My assistant stayed to look after them
while I came to find you."

"I see."

"I can't keep them cooped up any longer."

"Maybe we can send them back to their families in China."

"No!  They'll go right back to being slaves.  They can be saved in this
country, I just don't know how."

"If the authorities won't help you, good people will.  We go to the
churches and the missionaries."

"I don't think Christians are going to care about these Chinese
girls."

"How little you trust the human heart' Tao

Eliza left her friend drinking tea with Joe Bonecrusher, wrapped up a
loaf of freshly baked bread, and went to visit the blacksmith.

She found James Morton at the anvil, sweating, naked from the waist up,
wearing a leather apron and a kerchief tied around his forehead.  The
heat was unbearable and the place smelled of smoke and candescent
metal.  The forge was a large wood building with a dirt floor and a
double door that was left open winter and summer during work hours.  At
the front was a large table for conducting business with customers, and
behind it, the anvil.  The instruments of Morton's trade hung from
walls and roof beams, tools and wrought iron fashioned by Morton.  At
the rear, a ladder gave access to a loft that served as a bedroom,
protected from the customer's eyes by an oilcloth curtain.

The space below the loft was furnished with a tub for bathing and a
table and two chairs; the only decorations were an American flag on the
wall and three wildilowers in a vase on the table.  Esther was ironing
a mountain of clothes, her enormous belly bobbing and sweat pouring,
but she was singing as she wielded the heavy irons.  Love and pregnancy
had made her beautiful, and peace lighted her like a halo.

She took in washing, work as arduous as her husband's with his anvil
and hammer.  Three times a week she loaded a cart with dirty clothes,
went to the river, and spent a good part of the day on her knees,
soaping and scrubbing.  If the sun was shining she dried the clothes on
the rocks, but often she had to bring everything back wet.  Then came
the chore of starching and ironing.  James Morton had not been able to
persuade her to stop that brutal work; she did not want the baby to be
born where they were and was saving every cent to move their family to
a house in town.

"Chile Boy!"  she cried, and welcomed Eliza with a hug.  "it been a
long time since you came to visit."

"How pretty you're looking, Esther!  I've really come to see James,"
she said, handing her friend the bread.

The man put down his tools, mopped sweat with his kerchief, and led
Eliza to the backyard, where Esther joined them with three glasses of
lemonade.  The afternoon was cool and the sky cloudy but there were no
signs of winter.  The breeze bore the scent of newly mown hay and damp
earth.

Joaquin

' n the winter of I852, the residents of northern Call@go P t torma ate
peaches, apricots, grapes, sweet corn, watermelon, and cantaloupe while
in New York, Washington, Boston, and other important American cities
people resigned themselves to seasonal scarcities.  Paulina's ships
brought from Chile the delights of the Southern Hemisphere's summer,
which arrived unblemished in their beds of blue ice.  Her business was
doing much better than her husband's and brother-in-law's gold, even
though they no longer got three dollars for a peach or ten for a dozen
eggs.

The Chilean peasants the Rodriguez de Santa Cruz brothers had working
at their placers had been nearly wiped out by Yanquis who had
appropriated the fruit of months of work, hanged the overseers,
horsewhipped and cut off the ears of several men, and run off the
rest.

That episode had been published in the newspapers, but the Santa Cruz
family learned the hair-raising details from an eight-year-old boy, the
son of one of the overseers, who had seen the white men torture and
kill his father.  Paulina's ships also carried theater companies from
London, opera from Milan, and musical theater from Madrid, companies
that played for a short while inValparaiso and then continued north.
Tickets were sold months in advance, and on performance days San
Francisco's best society, in gala finery, attended theaters where they
sat beside rustic miners in work clothes.  Ships did not return empty:
they carried American flour, and passengers cured of the fantasy of
gold returning to Chile as poor as they had left.

j Lo

In San Francisco one saw everything but old people; the population was
young, strong, noisy, and brimming with health.  Gold had attracted a
legion of twenty-year-old adventurers but the fever had passed.
However, as Paulina had predicted, the city did not turn back into a
wide spot in the road; on the contrary, it kept growing, with
aspirations to refinement and culture.  Paulina was in her element in
that ambience; she liked the openness, the freedom, and the ostentation
of that young society, exactly the opposite of the hypocrisy of Chile.
She gloried in the thought of how her father would rage if he had to
sit down at the table with a corrupt upstart become a judge, or a
Frenchwoman of dubious past decked out like an empress.  She had grown
up within the thick stucco walls and grillwork windows of her paternal
home, looking toward the past, dependent on divine punishment and the
opinion of others.  In California neither past nor scruples counted;
eccentricity was welcomed and guilt did not exist as long as the
offense remained hidden.  Paulina wrote her sisters, with little hope
that her letters would get past her father's censorship, to tell them
about this extraordinary country where it was possible to invent a new
life and become a millionaire or a beggar in the wink of an eye.

It was the land of opportunity, open and generous.  Through the Golden
Gate came masses of beings escaping poverty or violence, hoping to find
work and erase the past.  It wasn't easy, but their descendants would
be Americans.  The marvel of this country was that everyone believed
their children would have a better life than theirs.  "Agriculture is
the true gold of California.  Farther than you can see are vast, sown
fields; everything grows luxuriantly in this blessed soil.  San
Francisco has become a great city but it has not lost the character of
a frontier outpost, and that enchants me.  It is still the cradle of
freethinkers, visionaries, heroes, and ruffians.  People come from the
most remote shores; you hear a hundred languages in the street, smell
the

J oaqu1n >

food of five continents, see every race," she wrote.  No longer a camp
of solitary men, women had arrived, and with them society changed.

They were as indomitable as the adventurers who came looking for gold;
crossing the continent in ox carts required a robust spirit, and these
pioneer women had it.  No namby-pambies like her mother and sisters;
here Amazons like herself reigned.  Day by day they proved their
mettle, competing tirelessly and tenaciously with the hardiest men; no
one called them the weaker sex, men respected them as equals.  They
worked in jobs forbidden to them elsewhere: they prospected for gold,
worked as cowgirls, drove mules, tracked outlaws for bounty, managed
gambling halls, restaurants, laundries, and hotels.

"Here women can own land, buy and sell property, get divorced if they
feel like it.  Feliciano has to walk a fine line because the first
thing he tries to get away with, I will leave him, all alone and poor,"
Paulina joked in her letters.  And she added that California had the
best of the worst: rats, fleas, weapons, and vices.

"People come west to escape the past and begin anew, but our obsessions
pursue us, like the wind, "Jacob Freemont wrote in a newspaper article.
He himself was a good example, because changing his name, becoming a
reporter, and dressing like an American had had little effect; he was
the same man.  The fraud of the missions inValparaiso was behind him
but now he was devising another, and he felt, as before, that his
creation was taking over and he was irrevocably sinking into his own
weaknesses.  His articles on Joaquin Murieta had become the hottest
item in the press.  Every day came new testimonials confirming what he
had written; dozens of individuals swore they had seen Murieta and
described him exactly as the character Freemont had invented.  He
wasn't sure of anything anymore.  He wished he had never written those
stories, and at moments was tempted to retract them publicly, confess
his lies, and disappear before the whole affair exploded and blew him
to hell, as had happened in Chile, but he didn't have the courage to
follow through.  His prestige had gone to his head and he was dizzied
by fame.

The story Jacob Freemont had been spinning had the earmarks of a dime
novel.  He wrote that Joaquin Murieta had been an upright, noble young
man working honorably in the placers in Stanislaus, accompanied by the
gid he was going to marry.  When they learned of his prosperity, some
Americans had attacked him, stolen his gold, beat him, and then raped
his sweetheart before his eyes.  There was nothing left for the
unfortunate pair but to flee, and they set out for the north, far from
the gold fields.  They settled down as farmers, and cultivated an
idyllic bit of land surrounded by forests and fed by a limpid stream,
Freemont wrote, but they were not to find peace there, either, because
once again Yanquis came and took what was his; the couple would have to
find another way to survive.  Shortly afterward Murieta showed up in
Calaveras, dealing at monte while his bride prepared their wedding
party in the home of her parents in Sonora.  It was in the stars,
however, that this man would never find tranquility anywhere.  He was
accused of stealing a horse, and without further ado group of Yanquis
tied him to a tree and savagely lashed him in the town square.  That
public humiliation was more than a proud young Latino could bear, and
his heart turned cold.  It wasn't long before the body of a white man
was found cut up in pieces like a hen for a stew, and once his parts
were put back together they recognized one of the men who had shamed
Murieta with the horsewhipping.  In the following weeks all the other
participants fell one by one, each tortured and killed in some novel
way.  Just as Jacob Freemont wrote in his articles: never had such
cruelty been seen in a land of cruel men.  In the next two years the
name of the outlaw cropped up everywhere.  His gang stole cattle and
horses, ambushed stagecoaches, attacked miners in the placers and
travelers on the road, defied the constables, killed

any careless American they came upon, and openly mocked the law.

Every unpunished crime and excess in California was attributed to
Murieta.  The terrain lent itself to disappearing; there were plenty of
fish and game to be had in its hills and valleys and rivers and woods;
a horseman could ride for hours through the high grass without leaving
a trail, and it had deep caves to take shelter in, secret mountain
passes where a man could throw offpursuers.The posses that rode out to
capture the wrongdoers returned empty-handed, or died in their attempt.
All this Jacob Freemont described with florid rhetoric, and no one
thought to ask for names, dates, or places.

Eliza Sommers worked for two years in San Francisco at Tao Chi'en's
side.  During that time, she left twice, during the summers, to search
for Joaquin Andieta, following the same procedure she had used before:
joining other travelers.  The first time she went with the idea of
looking until she found Andieta or until winter began, but after four
months she returned, exhausted and ill.  In the summer of I852 she
started out again, but after retracing the route she had followed
previously, and later visiting Joe Bonecrusher, now thoroughly immersed
in her role as Tom No-Tribe's grandmother, and James and Esther, who
were expecting their second child, she had returned home after five
weeks because she couldn't stand the anguish of being away from Tao
Chi'en.  They were so comfortable in their routines, paired in their
work and as close in spirit as an old married couple.  She collected
everything published about Joaquin Murieta and memorized it, as she had
Miss Rose's poems when a little girl, although she tried to ignore the
references to the outlaw's sweetheart.  "They invented that girl to
sell newspapers; you know how the public is fascinated by romance," she
argued to Tao Chi'en.  On a brittle map she tracked Murieta's steps
with the determination of a navigator, but the available information
was vague and contradictory: routes crisscrossed like the web of a
demented spider, leading nowhere.  Although at first she had rejected
the possibility that herJoaquin was the one responsible for the
bloodcurdling attacks, she soon was convinced that that person jibed
perfectly with the young man she remembered.  He, too, had rebelled
against abuses and was obsessed with helping the downtrodden.  Maybe it
wasn't Joaquin Murieta who tortured his victims but his gang, someone
like that Three-Finger Jack, whom she believed capable of any
atrocity.

She kept wearing men's clothing because it contributed to the
invisibility so necessary in the quixotic mission Tao Chi'en had
enrolled her in.  It had been three and a half years since she had worn
a dress, and she'd had no news of Miss Rose, Mama Fresia, or her uncle
John; it seemed a thousand years that she had been chasing an
increasingly improbable chimera.  The days of the furtive embraces with
her lover were long behind her; she wasn't sure of her feelings and she
didn't know whether it was love or pride that was driving her to wait
for him.  She was so caught up in her work that sometimes whole weeks
went by without her remembering him, but suddenly a memory would lunge
out at her and leave her trembling.  Then she would look around her,
confused, unable to identify the world in which she found herself. What
was she doing wearing trousers and surrounded by Chinese?  She had to
make an effort to shake off the confusion and remember that she was
there because of the intransigence of love.  Her mission was not to be
helping Tao Chi'en, she would think, but to search forJoaquin; that was
why she had come so far, and look for him she would, even if it was
just to tell him face-to face that he was a damned deserter and he had
ruined her youth.  That was her reason for having set out three times
before; she lacked the will, however, to start again.  She had gone to
Tao Chi'en to announce her determination to take up her pilgrimage but
the words stuck like sand in her throat.  She could not abandon this
strange companion fate had sent her way.

"What will you do if you find him?  "Tao Chi'en had asked her

"When I see him I will know whether I still love him."

"And if you never find him?"

"I will live with that doubt, I suppose."

Eliza had noticed a few premature gray hairs at her friend's temples.
At times the temptation to bury her fingers in that thick black hair,
or her nose in his neck to get the full effect of his ocean scent, was
unbearable, but now she did not have the excuse of sleeping on the
ground rolled up in a blanket, and opportunities to touch one another
were nonexistent.  Tao was working and studying too hard;

she could tell how tired he must be although he was always impeccably
groomed, and kept his calm in even the most trying moments.  He
faltered only when he came back from a sale leading a terrified gid by
the arm.  He would examine her to see what condition she was in and
hand her over to Eliza with necessary instructions, then lock himself
in his room for hours.  "He is with Lin," Eliza would conclude, and an
inexplicable pain would imbed itself deep in a hidden corner of her
heart.  In truth, he was.  In the silence of his meditation, Tao Chi'en
would try to recover his lost aplomb and rid himself of the temptation
of hatred and anger.  Gradually, memories, desires, and thoughts would
slip away, until he felt his body dissolving into nothingness.  For a
time, he ceased to exist, until he reemerged transformed into an eagle,
soaring effortlessly, borne by cold, limpid air that lifted him above
the highest mountains.  From there he could look down on vast prairies,
endless forests, and rivers of pure silver.  Then he knew perfect
harmony, like a fine instrument resonating with the heavens and the
earth.  Floating among milky clouds, superb wings outstretched, he
suddenly would feel Lin with him.  She materialized at his side,
another splendid eagle suspended in the infinite heavens.

"Where is your joy' Tao  she asked.

"The world is filled with suffering, Lin."

"Suffering fulfills a spiritual purpose."

"This is merely useless sorrow."

"Remember that the sage is always joyful because he accepts reality."

"And evil, must he accept that, too?"

"The only antidote is love.  And, incidentally .. . when will you marry
again?"

"I am married to you."

"I am a ghost.  I cannot visit you your whole lifetime' Tao  It is very
difficult to come when you call me; I do not belong in your world any
longer.  Marry, or you will be an old man before your time.  Besides,
if you do not practice the two hundred twenty-two positions of love,
you will forget them," she teased with her unforgettable crystalline
laugh.

The auctions were much worse that his visits to the' hospital

There was very little hope of helping the dying girls, and if that
happened it was a miraculous gift; on the other hand, he knew that for
every girl he bought, dozens were condemned to infamy.  He would
torture himself imagining how many he could rescue if he were wealthy,
until Eliza reminded him of the ones he had saved.  The two of them
were joined by a delicate web of affinities and shared secrets, but
also separated by mutual obsessions.  The ghost of Joaquin Andieta was
fading; in contrast, Lin's spirit was as detectable as the breeze or
the sound of waves on the shore.  All Tao Chi'en had to do was summon
her and she came, always smiling, as she had been in her lifetime.

Far from being Eliza's rival, however, she had become her ally,
although Eliza never knew that.  Lin was the first to realize that and
Tao's friendship was closer to love, and when her husband

-; Joaquin f rebutted that there was no place in China or in Chile for
a couple like them, she always laughed.

"Do not say foolish things; the world is large and life is long.  It is
all a question of taking a chance."

"You cannot imagine what racism is like, Lin; you always lived among
your own kind.  Here no one cares what I do or what I know; to white
people I am just a revolting Chinese pagan, and Eliza is a greaser.  In
Chinatown I am a renegade without a queue who dresses like an American.
I don't belong anywhere."

"Racism is nothing new.  In China you and I believed that the fan wey
were all savages."

"Here the only thing they respect is money, and apparently I will never
have enough."

"You are mistaken.  They also respect the person who commands respect.
Look in their eyes."

"If I follow your advice, I'll be shot at the first street corner."

"It's worth the chance to try.  You complain too much' Tao cannot
recognize you.  Where is the courageous man I love?"

Tao Chi'en had to admit that he felt bound to Eliza by countless fine
threads, each easily cut but when twisted together forming strands like
steel.  They had known each other only a few years but they could look
to the past and see the obstacle-filled road they had traveled
together.  Their similarities had erased differences of race.

"You look like a pretty Chinese girl, "Tao had said in an unguarded
moment.

"You have the face of a handsome Chilean," she had immediately
answered.  They were a strange pair in the quarter: a tall, elegant
Chinese man with an insignificant Spanish boy.

Outside Chinatown, however, they were nearly invisible in the
multifaceted throngs of San Francisco.

"You cannot wait for that man forever, Eliza.  It is a form of madness,
like gold fever.  You must set a deadline, "Tao said one day.

"And what do I do with my life when the time is up?"

"You can go back to your country."

"In Chile a woman like me is worse off than one of your singsong girls.
Would you go back to China?"

"That was my intention, but I am beginning to like America.

There I would be Fourth Son again.  I'm better off here

"So am 1. If I don't find Joaquin, I'll stay here and open a
restaurant.  I have everything I need: a good memory for recipes, love
of the ingredients, a good sense of taste and touch, an instinct for
seasonings .. ."

"And modesty, too.  "Tao Chi'en laughed.

"Why should I be modest about my talent?  Besides, I have nose like a
hound.  A good nose should be worth something; all I have to do is
smell a dish to know what's in it, and how to make it better."

"You can't do that with Chinese cooking."

"You eat such strange things, Tao!  Mine would be a French restaurant,
the best in the city."

"I will make you a deal, Eliza.  If within one year you do not find
thisJoaquin, marry me," saidWao Chi'en, and both burst out laughing.

After that conversation, something changed between them.  They felt
uncomfortable when they were alone, and although alone was what they
wanted to be, they began to avoid it.  The longing to follow Eliza when
she went to her room often tortured Tao Chi'en, but he was stopped
short by a blend of shyness and respect.  He felt that as long as Eliza
was clinging to the memory of her former lover he should not go near
her, but neither could he continue to waLk a tightrope indefinitely. 
He imagined her in her bed, counting the hours in the expectant silence
of the night, she, too, sleepless with love, but for another, not him. 
He knew her body so well that he could sketch it in detail, down to the
most secret mole, even though he had not seen her naked since the days
he had looked after her on the ship.  He daydreamed that if she fell
ill he would have an excuse to touch her, but then he was ashamed at
the thought.  The spontaneous laughter and quiet tenderness that had
used to bubble up between them was now replaced with oppressive
tension.  If they brushed against each other by accident they pulled
back, embarrassed; each was aware of the other's presence or absence,
the air seemed laden with presages and anticipation.  Instead of
sitting down to read or write in quiet companionship, they parted ways
as soon as work in the consulting room was finished.  Tao Chi'en would
visit bedfast patients, meet other zhong yi to discuss diagnoses and
treatments, or go to his room to study Western medical texts.  He hoped
to earn a permit to practice medicine legally in California, a project
he had confided to no one but Eliza and the spirits of Lin and his
acupuncture master.

In China a zhong yi began as an apprentice and then worked on his own,
which was why medicine hadn't changed for centuries but had preserved
the same methods and remedies.  The difference between a good
practitioner and one who was mediocre was that the former had a talent
for diagnosing and the gift of using his hands to heal.  Western
doctors, however, followed a demanding program of study, kept in
contact with one another, and were up-to-date on new discoveries;

they had laboratories and morgues for experimentation and exposed
themselves to the challenge of competition.  Science fascinated Tao,
but his enthusiasm was not seconded in a community faithful to
tradition.  He followed all the latest advances and bought every book
and magazine he could find on those subjects.  His curiosity for modern
ways was so great that he had to write his venerable master's adage on
the wall: "Knowledge is of little use without wisdom, and there is no
wisdom without spirituality."  Science isn't everything' Tao repeated
to himself, in order not to forget.  In any case, he needed American
citizenship--very difficult to obtain because of his race, but that was
the only way he could remain in that country without being a permanent
outsider.  And he needed a title; with a title he could earn a lot
more.

The jan wey knew nothing about acupuncture or the herbs used in Asia
for centuries; they considered him a kind of witch doctor,-and their
scorn for other races was so profound thatxslave owners on southern
plantations sent for a veterinarian when a Negro fell ill.

They held the same opinion of the Chinese, but there were a few
visionary doctors who had traveled, or had read about other cultures,
and were interested in Eastern techniques and the thousand drugs in the
Oriental pharmacopoeia.  Tao kept in touch with Ebanizer Hobbs in
England, and both lamented in their letters the great distance that
separated them.  "Come to London, Dr.  Chi'en, and give an acupuncture
demonstration to the Royal Medical Society.  You will leave them
openmouthed, I promise you," Hobbs wrote.  He had always said that if
they combined their knowledge they would be able to raise the dead.

An Unusual Pair

$ ever al singsong girls died of pneumonia from 4t > the winter cold,
and Tao Chi'en couldn't save _ them.  Twice he was called while the
girls were still alive; he managed to get them home but they died in
his arms few hours later, delirious with fever.  By then, the quiet
tentacles of his compassion had spread across North America, from San
Francisco to New York from the Rio Grande to Canada, but that
extraordinary effort was only a grain of salt in an ocean of misery.
Things were going well in his practice, and everything he was able to
save, or obtained through the charity of a few wealthy patients, went
toward buying the youngest girls in the auctions.  He was recognized
now in that subculture, and had the reputation of being a degenerate.
No one had ever seen alive any of the adolescents Tao acquired "for his
experiments," as he called them, but no one really cared what happened
behind his closed doors.  As a zhong yi he was the best; as long as he
did not create a scandal, and limited himself to the little whores, who
were no more than animals, anyway, they left him in peace.  In answer
to curious questions' Tao Chi'en's loyal assistant, the only person
qualified to give information, said only that his employer's mysterious
experiments resulted in the exceptional knowledge that was so
beneficial for his patients.  By that time Tao Chi'en had moved to a
fine house on the edge of Chinatown a few blocks from Union Square,
where he held his clinic, sold his remedies, and hid the girls until
they were able to travel.

Eliza had learned the rudiments of Chinese necessary for communicating
on an elementary level; the rest she improvised with pantomime,
drawings, and a few words of English.  The effort was rewarding; it was
much better than posing as the doctor's deaf-mute brother.  She could
not write or read Chinese but she recognized the medicines by their
smell, and as a safeguard she marked the bottles with a code of her own
invention.  There were always patients waiting for the gold needles,
the miraculous herbs, and the comfort of Tao Chi'en's voice.  More than
one asked himself how that man who was so wise and affable could be the
person who collected corpses and child concubines, but as they were not
absolutely sure what his vices consisted of, the community respected
him.  He had no friends, it was true, but neither did he have enemies.
His good name spread beyond the confines of Chinatown and some American
doctors consulted him when their knowledge was insufficient--always
very quietly, for it would have been embarrassing to admit that a
"celestial" had anything to teach them.  That was how Tao had occasion
to treat certain important figures in the city, and to meet the
celebrated Ah Toy.

The madam had summoned Tao Chi'en when she heard that he had helped the
wife of a judge.  She was suffering a rattle like castanets in her
lungs, so bad that at times it threatened to choke her.  Tao Chi'en's
first impulse was to refuse, but principle was overshadowed by his
curiosity to see at close hand the legend and her surroundings.

In his eyes, she was a viper, his personal enemy.  Knowing whatAhToy
represented for Tao, Eliza put enough arsenic in his bag to dispatch a
team of oxen.

"Just in case," she explained.

"Just in case what?"

"She may be very sick.  You wouldn't want her to suffer, would you?
Sometimes you have to help someone die."

; An Unusual Pair

Tao Chi'en laughed heartily but did not remove the bottle from his
satchel.  Ah Toy received him in one of the deluxe "retreats" where the
client paid a thousand dollars a session but always left satisfied.

Besides, she maintained, "If you need to ask the price, this is not the
place for you.  "A Negress in a starched uniform opened the door to Tao
and took him through several drawing rooms where beautiful girls in
silk robes were lounging.  Compared with their less fortunate sisters
they lived like princesses; they ate three times a day and had daily
baths.  The house, a true museum of Oriental antiques and American
conveniences, reeked of tobacco, stale perfumes, and dust.  It was
three in the afternoon but the heavy drapes were drawn; no breeze ever
freshened those rooms.  Ah Toy was sitting in a small study crammed
with furniture and bird cages  She was much smaller, younger, and more
beautiful than Tao had imagined.  She was carefully made-up but she
wore no jewels, was simply dressed, and eschewed the long fingernails
that indicated wealth and leisure.  His eyes were drawn to her
miniscule, sandal-shod feet.  Her gaze was penetrating and hard, but
she spoke in a caressing tone that reminded Tao of Lin.

Damn her' Tao Chi'en sighed, defeated with her first word.  He was
impassive as he examined her, cloaking his repugnance and agitation,
not knowing what to say to her because to lecture her for trafficking
was not only futile, it was dangerous and would call attention to his
own activities.  He prescribed mahuang for her asthma and other
remedies for cooling her liver, curtly warning her that as long as she
lived closed up behind those drapes, smoking tobacco and opium, her
lungs would continue to wheeze.  The temptation to leave the poison
with instructions to take one pinch daily flitted past like a nocturnal
butterfly and he shivered, shocked by that instant of doubt, because
until then he had believed he would never be angry enough to kill
anyone.

He left hurriedly, certain that in view of his rudeness, the woman
would never call him again.

"Well?"  asked Eliza on his return.

"Nothing."

"What do you mean, nothing!  Not even a little tuberculosis?

She won't die?"

"We are all going to die.  That snake will die an old woman.  She is as
strong as a buffalo."

"Most evil people are."

As for Eliza, she knew that she was at a definitive fork in her road
and that the direction she chose would determine the rest of her
life.

Tao Chi'en was right: she had to set a deadline.  She couldn't ignore
any longer the suspicion that she had fallen in love with love and was
trapped in the morass of a legendary passion with no link to reality.

She tried to remember the feelings that had driven her to embark on
this consuming adventure but she couldn't.  The woman she had become
had little in common with the moonstruck girl of the past.

Valparaiso and the room of the armoires belonged to a different time,
to a world that was disappearing in the mist.  She asked herself a
thousand times why she had hungered so desperately to belong body and
soul to Joaquin Andieta when in truth she had never been totally happy
in his arms, and could explain it only in terms of first love.  She had
been ready to fall in love when he came to the house to unload some
cargo; the rest was instinct.  She had merely obeyed the most powerful
and ancient of calls, but it had happened an eternity ago and seven
thousand miles away.  Who she was then and what she had seen in him she
could not say, only that now her heart was far away from there.  Not
only was she tired of looking for him, but deep down she did not want
to find him; at the same time, though, she could not go on riddled with
doubts.  She needed an ending for that phase in order to begin a new
love with a clean slate.

By the end of November her anxiety was too great, and without a word to
Tao Chi'en she visited the newspaper office to speak

An Unusual Pair vA

with the famous Jacob Freemont.  She was taken to the editorial room
where several journalists were working at their desks, surrounded by
appalling disorder.  They pointed to a small off fice behind a
glass-paned door and she went in.  She stood before the desk, waiting
for the Yanqui with red sideburns to look up from his papers.  He
seemed to be about medium height, with freckled skin, and had a faint
aroma of candles.  He was writing with his left hand and his head was
propped on his right; she could not see his face, but then, beneath the
scent of beeswax, she perceived a familiar odor that carried a vague,
distant, childhood memory.  She bent slightly toward him, discreetly
sniffing, at the very instant the newspaperman looked up.  Surprised,
they stared at each other from uncomfortably close quarters, then
simultaneously drew back.  Eliza recognized him from his scent, despite
the years, the eyeglasses, the sideburns, and the American garb.  Miss
Rose's perennial suitor!  The same Englishman who had faithfully
attended the Wednesday musicals inValparaiso.  Paralyzed, she could not
escape.

"What can I do for you, young fellow?"  asked Jacob Todd, removing his
eyeglasses to clean them with his handkerchief.

The speech Eliza had prepared was wiped from her brain.

She stood with her mouth open, hat in hand, sure that since she had
recognized him he would know her; but he carefully fitted his glasses
back on and repeated the question without looking at her.

"It's about Joaquin Murieta," she stammered, her voice squeaking higher
than usual.

"You have information about that outlaw?"  The newspaperman was
immediately interested.

"No, no.... Just the opposite, I came to ask you about him.  I need to
see him."

"You remind me of someone, kid.  Haven't we met somewhere?"

"I don't think so, senor."

"Are you Chilean?"

"Yes."

"I lived in Chile some years ago.  Beautiful country.  Why do you want
to see Murieta?"

"It's very important."

"I'm afraid I can't help you.  No one knows his whereabouts."

"But you have talked with him!"

"Only when Murieta summons me.  He gets in touch with me when he wants
some episode of his published.  Nothing modest about the man, he likes
his fame."

"What language do you use when you talk?"

"My Spanish is better than his English."

"Tell me, senor.  Is his accent Chilean or Mexican?"

"I couldn't say.  I repeat, kid, I can't help you," the journalist
replied, standing to indicate the end of the conversation, which was
beginning to annoy him.

Eliza quickly said good-bye, and Freemont stood with a quizzical look,
watching as she picked her way through the uproar of the editorial
room.  That boy looked familiar, but he couldn't place him.

Several minutes later, after his visitor had vanished, Freemont
remembered Captain John Sommers' request and the image of young Eliza
flashed through his memory.  Then he connected the name of the outlaw
with that of Joaquin Andieta and understood why she was asking.

He choked back a groan and ran outside, but Eliza had disappeared.

Tao Chi'en and Eliza Sommers did their most important work at night. 
In the darkness they disposed of the corpses of the poor creatures they
couldn't save and took the survivors across the city to their Quaker
friends.  One by one, girls emerged from hell to leap

-gA An Unusual Pair 1 ^

blindly into an adventure with no return.  They lost all hope of
returning to China or of seeing their families again; some would never
again speak their language or see anyone of their race.  They would
have to learn a skill and work hard the rest of their lives, but
anything was paradise compared to the life they had been living.

The girls Tao was able to buy adapted better.  They had been caged in
large crates and subjected to the lust and brutality of the sailors but
they were not completely broken in spirit and had kept some potential
for recovery.  The less fortunate, who were freed at almost their last
breaths from the "hospital," never lost the fear that like a disease in
the blood would consume them for the rest of their days.

Tao Chi'en hoped that with time they would at least learn to smile
occasionally.  As soon as they regained strengh, and understood that
they would never again be forced to submit to a man but would always be
refugees, their rescuers took them to the home of abolitionist friends,
a station in the underground railroad, the group the blacksmith James
Morton and his brothers belonged to.  Ordinarily these Quakers took in
fugitives from slave states and helped them get established in
California, but in this instance they had to operate in the opposite
direction, sending Chinese girls from California far away from
traffickers and criminal gangs, finding homes for them, and some way to
earn a living.  The Quakers assumed the risks with religious fervor;
for them their charges were innocents soiled by the human baseness
placed in their path as a test.  They welcomed those waifs so
wholeheartedly that they often reacted with violence or terror; they
did not know how to accept affection, but the patience of those good
people slowly won them over.  The girls were taught a few indispensable
phrases in English, given an idea of American customs, shown a map to
at least give them an idea of where they were, and an effort was made
to introduce them to some form of work while they waited for Babalu the
Bad to come for them.

That behemoth had at last found a good way to use his talents: he was
an indefatigable traveler who loved to stay up all night, and he craved
adventure.  When they first saw him, the singsong girls would run and
hide in terror, and it would take a great deal of persuasion on the
part of their protectors to calm them.  Babalu had learned a song in
Chinese and three magic tricks that he used to bedazzle and to blunt
the fright of that first encounter but he had refused to give up his
wolf skins, his shaved head, his pirate earrings, or his formidable
array of weapons.  This kind giant always stayed a couple of days,
until he convinced his lambs that he was not a devil and had no intent
of eating them, then set off with them by night.  Distances were
carefully calculated in order to reach the next refuge by dawn, where
they would rest during the day.  They traveled by horseback; a carriage
was useless because a major part of the journey was through open
country, avoiding the main roads.  They had discovered that it was much
safer to travel in darkness, as long as they knew where they were,
because bears, snakes, highwaymen, and Indians slept like everyone
else.  Babalu would leave the girls safe in the hands of other members
of the vast network of freedom.  They ended up on farms in Oregon,
laundries in Canada, and craft studios in Mexico; some were hired as
family servants and some were even wed.  Tao Chi'en and Eliza often
received news through James Morton, who kept track of every fugitive
rescued by his organization.  From time to time they would receive an
envelope from some distant spot and when they opened it find a paper
with a poorly written name, a few dried flowers or a drawing, and then
congratulate themselves on having saved another of the singsong
girls.

Occasionally Eliza shared her room for a few days with a newly rescued
girl but she never revealed that she was a woman, something only Tao
knew.  She had a spacious room behind her friend's consulting office,
the best in the house.  Its two windows looked out on a small inner
patio where medicinal plants for Tao's practice and aromatic herbs for
the kitchen were grown.  They often fantasized about moving to a larger
house where they would have a proper garden, not merely for practical
purposes but also for pleasuring their eyes and memories, a place where
they would cultivate the most beautiful plants from China and Chile and
construct a pergola where they would sit and drink tea in the evening
and in the early morning admire the sunrise over the bay.  Tao Chi'en
had noticed Eliza's diligence in beautifying the house, the care with
which she cleaned and organized, how she always kept small bouquets of
fresh flowers in every room.  He had never enjoyed such refinements; he
had grown up in total poverty, and the acupuncture master's mansion had
lacked a woman's hand to make it homelike.  Lin had been too fragile to
have strength for domestic tasks.  Eliza, on the other hand, like a
bird, had the instinct to nest.  She invested in the house part of what
she earned by playing the piano a couple of nights a week in a saloon,
and by selling meat pies and tarts in the Chilean barrio.  She had
contributed curtains, a damask tablecloth, kitchen utensils, and a set
of fine china.

For Eliza, the good manners she had learned as a child were
essential;

she made a ceremony of the one meal she and Tao shared each day;

she set a beautiful table and blushed with satisfaction when Tao
applauded her efforts.  The everyday chores seemed to do themselves, as
if by night generous spirits cleaned the doctor's office, brought the
records up to date, tiptoed into Tao Chi'en's room to gather his dirty
clothes, sew on his buttons, brush his suits, and change the water in
the roses on his desk.

"Don't drown me with attentions, Eliza."

"You said that Chinese men expect women to serve them."

"That is in China, but I never had that good fortune.  You spoiling
me."

"I was trying to.  Miss Rose said that to be a man's master you have to
let him get used to living well, and then when he misbehaves you
withdraw your favors."

"But wasn't Miss Rose a spinster?"

"By choice, not lack of opportunities."

"I am not planning to misbehave, but how will I manage on my own after
you leave?"

"You won't have to.  You not at all bad-looking, and there will always
be some bad-natured woman with big feet ready to marry you," she
replied, and he laughed with delight.

Tao had bought beautiful furniture for Eliza's room, the only one in
the house decorated with some luxury.  Walking together through
Chinatown, Eliza often admired traditional Chinese furniture.  "It's
very handsome, but heavy.  The mistake is to use too much of it," she
said.  He gave her a bed and armoire of dark, carved wood, and then she
chose a table, chairs, and bamboo screen.  She did not want a silk
spread, like the ones used in China, but something more European: white
embroidered linen with large pillowcases of the same fabric.

"Are you sure you want to spend that much' Tao

"You are thinking of the singsong girls .. . ?"

"Yes."

"You yourself told me that there wasn't enough gold in California to
buy them all.  Don't worry, we have enough."

Eliza repaid him in a thousand subtle ways: by respecting his silence
and hours of study, by helping him in the consulting office, with her
bravery in the work of rescuing the girls.  To Tao Chi'en,
nevertheless, her best gift was her irrepressible optimism, which
forced him to fight back when shadows threatened to envelop him
completely.

"If you go around so sad, you won't have the strength to help anyone.
Let's go take a walk, you need to smell the forest.

Chinatown smells of soy sauce," and she would take him by carriage to
the out 5A', An Unusual Pair i skirts of the city.  They would spend
the day in the open air, romping like children, and that night he would
sleep like an angel and awake vigorous and happy.

Captain John Sommers anchored in the port of Valparaiso on March I5,
I853, exhausted by his voyage and the demands of his employer, whose
most recent whim was to tow a whaling-ship-size slab of glacier from
southern Chile.  Her current idea was to make sorbets and ices to sell,
since the price of fresh vegetables and fruit had declined sharply once
agriculture had begun to prosper in California.

Gold had attracted a quarter of a million immigrants in four years'
time but the bonanza had passed.  Even so, Paulina Rodriguez de Santa
Cruz did not plan ever to leave San Francisco.  In her fiery heart she
had adopted that city of heroic immigrants where still there were no
social classes.  She had personally supervised the construction of
their future home, a mansion at the top of Nob Hill with the best view
of the bay, but she was expecting their fourth child and wanted it to
be born inValparaiso, where her mother and sisters could coddle her
sinfully.  Her father had suffered an opportune stroke, which left half
his body paralyzed and his brain softened.  Infirmity had not changed
the character of Agustin delValle but he feared death and, naturally,
hell.

Setting off for the other world with a string of mortal sins behind him
was not a good idea, his relative, the bishop, had repeated ad
nauseum.

Of the womanizer and hell raiser he had been, nothing remained-not out
of repentance but because his battered body was no longer capable of
such deviltry.  He heard mass every day in the chapel of his home and
stoically bore the reading of the Gospel and the countless rosaries his
wife recited.  None of those things, however, made him any more benign
toward his tenants and employees.  He was still a despot to his family
and the rest of the wodd, but part of his con version was a sudden and
inexplicable love for Paulina, the daughter who had left home.  He
forgot that he had repudiated her when she had run away from the
convent to marry "that Jew boy" whose name he could never remember
because the family wasn't of his class.  He wrote Paulina calling her
his favorite, the only child who had inherited his temperament and his
vision for business, begging her to come home because her poor papa
wanted to hug her before he died.  Is that old tyrant really sick?  a
hopeful Paulina asked her sisters in a letter.  He was not, actually,
and no doubt would live on for years driving everyone crazy from his
wheelchair.  In any event, it was Captain Sommers' lot to be saddled on
his most recent voyage with his employer, her screaming brats, her
hopelessly seasick servants, a boatload of trunks, two cows for the
children's milk, and the three lap dogs with a French courtesan's
ribbons on their ears that had replaced the precious pooch drowned on
Paulina's first voyage.  To the captain, the trip seemed eternal, and
he was terrified at the thought that soon he would have to take Paulina
and her circus back to San Francisco.  For the first time in his long
life as a sailor he considered retiring, to spend the time he had left
in this world on dry land.  His brother' Jeremy was waiting on the dock
and drove him home, making excuses for Rose, who was suffering from a
migraine.

"You know that she is always ill on Eliza's birthday.  She has never
been the same since the child's death," he explained.

"I wanted to talk to you about that," the captain replied.

Miss Rose had never known how much she loved Eliza until she was gone;
the realization of her maternal love had come too late.

She blamed herself for the years she had treated Eliza so casually,
with an arbitrary and chaotic affection, the times she had completely
forgotten her, too caught up in her own frivolities, and when she did
remember would find that the child had been in the patio with the hens
for a week.  Eliza had been the nearest thing to a daughter she would
ever have; for nearly sixteen years she had been her best friend, her
companion in games, the only person in the world who touched her.  Miss
Rose ached with pure loneliness.  She missed her baths with the child,
when they splashed happily in water scented with mint and rosemary. 
She remembered Eliza's small, skillful hands washing her hair, rubbing
her neck, polishing her fingernails with a piece of chamois, helping
her dress her hair.  At night she would lie awake, her ear cocked for
the girl's footsteps as she brought her small glass of anisette.  She
would have given anything to feel Eliza's good-night kiss on her
forehead. Miss Rose had stopped writing, and she had canceled the
musical gatherings that had once been the hub of her social life.  She
had lost her flirtatious spirit and was resigned to growing old
ungracefully: "At my age nothing is expected of a woman but to be
dignified and smell good," she would say.  She had not created a new
dress in years; she continued to wear her old ones and had failed to
notice that they were out of style.  The little sewing room stood
abandoned, and even the collection of bonnets and hats languished in
their hatboxes because Rose had opted to wear the black mantle of
Chilean women when she went out.  She spent her time rereading the
classics and playing melancholy airs on the piano.  As punishment, she
deliberately and methodically sank into boredom.  Eliza's absence
became a good pretext for wearing mourning for the pain and privations
of her forty years, especially her lost love.  That was like a thorn
under her fingernail, a constant, mute sorrow.  She regretted having
raised Eliza with a lie; she could not imagine why she had invented the
story of the basket with the batiste sheets, the improbable mink
coverlet and gold coins, when the truth would have been far more
comforting.  Eliza had a right to know that her adored uncle John was,
in fact, her father, and that she and Jeremy were her aunt and uncle,
that she belonged to the Sommers family and was not an orphan adopted
out of charity.  Miss Rose recalled with horror the time she

had dragged Eliza down to the orphanage to frighten her.  How old would
she have been then?  Eight or ten, a mere child.  If only she could
start over; she would be a very different mother.  To begin with, she
would have sympathized with Eliza when she fell in love instead of
opposing her; if she had, her adoptive daughter would be alive, she
sighed; it was her fault that Eliza had run away and died.  Why hadn't
she remembered her own experience, realized that the women of their
family were always deranged by their first love?  And saddest of all
was not having anyone she could talk to about Eliza, because Mama
Fresia was gone as well, and her brother Jeremy clenched his lips and
stalked off to his room whenever she mentioned the girl.

Miss Rose's grief infected everything around her; in the last four
years the house had had the heavy air of a mausoleum, and the quality
of their meals had deteriorated so badly that she was eating nothing
but tea and English biscuits.  She had not engaged a decent cook and,
in fact, was not seriously looking.  She was indifferent to how the
house appeared; there were no flowers in the vases and half the plants
in the garden were dying for lack of care.  For four winters, the
flowered summer cretonnes had hung in the parlor because no one had
made the effort to change them at the end of the season.

Jeremy never reproached his sister; he ate whatever was put before him
and said nothing when his shirts were badly ironed and his suits not
brushed.  He had read that single women are given to perilous
indispositions.  In England, a miraculous cure had been developed for
hysteria, which was to cauterize certain points with red-hot iron, but
such advances had not yet reached Chile, where holy water was employed
for those ills.  It was, in any case, a delicate matter, one difficult
to mention to Rose.  It never occurred to him to comfort her, the habit
of discretion and silence between them was very old.  He tried to
please her with gifts he bought from the contraband off the ships, but
he knew nothing about women and came

;

home with monstrosities that soon disappeared into the back of the
armoires.  He never suspected how many times his sister had crept near
when he was smoking in his easy chair, OII the verge of collapsing at
his feet, resting her head on his knees, and weeping till she could
weep no more, but at the last instant she would retrace her steps,
fearful, because any word of affection between them would have come out
as irony or unpardonable sentimentality.

Stiff-backed, morose, Rose kept up appearances out of discipline, with
the sensation that nothing but her corset held her together and if she
removed it she would break apart.  There was no hint of her former
merriment and mischievousness, nor of her bold opinions, her rebellious
behavior, her impertinent curiosity.  She had become what she had most
feared: aVictorian spinster.

"It's The Change; women of her age become unstable," the German
pharmacist diagnosed, and prescribed valerian for her nerves and
cod-liver oil for her pallor.

Captain John Sommers joined his brother and sister in the library to
tell them the news.

"Do you remember Jacob Todd?"

"The cad who defrauded us with that yarn about missions in Tierra del
Fuego?"  asked Jeremy Sommers.

"The same."

"He was enamored of Rose, if I recall correctly.  "Jeremy smiled,
gratified that at least they had been spared that prevaricator as
brother-in-law.

"He changed his name.  Now he calls himself Jacob Freemont, and he's a
newspaperman in San Francisco."

"Egad!  So it is true that in the United States any scoundrel may begin
a new life?"

"Jacob Todd paid for his offense several times over.  I think it is
splendid that there is a country where a man can have a second
chance."

"And honor means nothing?"

"There are other things besides honor' Jeremy

"Is there anything else?"

"What do we care about Jacob Todd?  I imagine you haven't b-b-brought
us here to talk about him, John," Rose stammered from behind her
vanilla-perfumed handkerchief.

"I was with Jacob Todd, that is, Freemont, before I sailed.  He told me
that he saw Eliza in San Francisco."

For the first time in her life, Miss Rose thought she was going to
faint.  She felt her heart pounding, her temples about to explode, as a
wave of blood rushed to her face.  She gasped, unable to articulate a
word.

"You cannot believe a word the man says!  Did you not tell us that a
woman swore she had seen Eliza on a ship in I849, and that she had not
the slightest doubt she had died?"  rebutted Jeremy Sommers, striding
back and forth across the library.

"That's true, but she was a harlot, and she had the turquoise brooch I
gave to Eliza.  She may have stolen it and lied to protect herself.
What reason would Jacob Freemont have to deceive me?"

"None, other than he is a four-flusher by nature."

"That's enough, please," Rose begged, making a colossal effort to get
the words out.  "The only thing that matters is that someone saw Eliza,
that she isn't dead, that we can find her."

"Do not raise your hopes, dear sister.  You do not see that this is a
pure fantasy?  It would be a terrible blow for you if it is proven that
this news is in error, "Jeremy warned.

John Sommers related the details of the meeting between Jacob Freemont
and Eliza, including the information that the girl was dressed as a man
and was so at ease in those clothes that the newspaperman had never
doubted he was talking with a boy.  He added that he and Freemont had
gone together to the Chilean barrio to ask about her but they didn't
know what name she was using, and no one could, or would, tell them
where she was.  He explained that Eliza had doubtlessly gone to
California to join her lover, but something had gone wrong and they
hadn't met, since the purpose of her visit to Jacob Freemont had been
to inquire about an outlaw with a similar name.

"It must be Joaquin Andieta.The man is a thief.  He decamped to escape
the law, "Jeremy Sommers sputtered.

It had been impossible to hide the identity of Eliza's lover from him.
Miss Rose had had to confess that she often went to see Andieta's
mother to ask for news, and that the unfortunate woman, poorer and
sicker at each visit, was convinced her son was dead.  There was no
other explanation for his long silence, she maintained.  She had
received one letter from California dated February I849, a week after
he had arrived there, in which he told her of his plans to leave for
the placers and repeated his promise to write her every two weeks. Then
nothing more: he had disappeared without further word.

"Does it not seem strange that Jacob Todd would recognize Eliza out of
context and dressed as a man?"  asked Jeremy Sommers.

"When he knew her, she was a child.  How long ago was that?  At least
six or seven years.  How could he imagine that Eliza was in California?
This is absurd!"

"Three years ago I told him what had happened, and he promised to look
for her.  I described her in detail' Jeremy

Besides, Eliza's face never changed much.  When she left here she still
looked like a little girl.  Jacob Freemont kept an eye out for a long
time, until I told him that she might be dead.  Now he has promised to
renew his search; he was even thinking of hiring a detective.  I expect
to have more concrete news on my next voyage."

"Why can we not forget this matter once and for all?"

sighed Jeremy.

"Because, brother, she is my daughter, for God's sake!"

the captain exclaimed.

"I am going to California to look for Eliza," Miss Rose interrupted,
jumping to her feet.

"You are not going anywhere!"  her older brother exploded.

But she had already left the room.  John's news had been an injection
of new blood for Miss Rose.  She was absolutely certain she would find
her adopted daughter, and for the first time in four years she had a
reason to go on living.  To her amazement, she found that her old
strength was intact, lurking in some secret part of her heart, ready to
serve her as it had before.  Her headache vanished as if by a charm;
she was perspiring, and her cheeks were pink with euphoria when she
called the servants to go with her to the room of the armoires to look
for suitcases.

In May of I853 Eliza read in the newspaper thatJoaquin Murieta and his
follower' Three-Finger Jack had attacked a camp of six peaceful
Chinese, held them by their queues, and slit their throats.

Then they had strung the heads from a tree, like a cluster of melons.

The roads were ruled by the bandits, no one was safe in the region,
everyone had to move about in large, heavily armed groups.  The outlaws
murdered American miners, French adventurers' Jewish peddlers, and
travelers of any race, although usually they did not attack Indians or
Mexicans, the Yanquis saw to them.  Terrorized settlers bolted doors
and windows, men with loaded rifles stood guard, and women hid, because
no one wanted to fall into the grasp of Three-Finger Jack  It was said
of Murieta, however, that he never abused a woman and that on more than
one occasion he had saved a young girl from being brutally ravished by
his gang.  Inns refused to put up travelers because they feared that
one of them might be Murieta.  No one had seen him in

Cx An Unusual Pair i person, and descriptions varied, although
Freemont's articles had created a romantic image of the bandit that
most readers accepted as authentic.  In Jackson they formed the first
group of volunteers charged with hunting down the outlaws; soon there
were vigilantes in every town and an unprecedented manhunt was set in
motion.  No one who spoke Spanish was free of suspicion, and within a
few weeks there were more summary lynchings than there had been in the
previous four years.  Speaking Spanish was enough to make a man a
public enemy and to attract the wrath of sheriffs and constables.  The
final outrage came when Murieta's gang was ileeing a party of American
soldiers that was close on their heels and in mi dElight detoured and
attacked a camp of Chinese.  Soldiers arrived seconds later to find
several men dead and others dying.  It was said thatJoaquin Murieta was
enraged by Asians because they rarely defended themselves, even when
they had weapons; the celestials feared him so much that the mere sound
of his name threw them into a panic.  The most persistent rumor,
however, was that Murieta was recruiting an army, and that in
partnership with wealthy Mexican ranchers in the area was planning to
foment an uprising, stir up the Hispanic population, massacre
Americans, and either return California to Mexico or form an
independent republic.

In answer to popular demand, the governor signed a decree authorizing
Captain Harry Love and a group of twenty volunteers to hunt Joaquin
Murieta for a period of three months.  They assigned a salary of one
hundred and fifty dollars a month to each man--not much considering
that they had to provide their own horses, weapons, and provisions, but
even so the company was ready for action in less than a week.  There
was a reward of a thousand dollars on Joaquin Murieta's head.  As Jacob
Freemont had pointed out in his newspaper, they were condemning a man
to death without knowing his identity, without having proved his
crimes, and without a trial:

Captain Love's mission was tantamount to a lynching.  Eliza felt a
mixture of horror and relief that she could not explain.  She did not
want those men to killJoaquin, but they might be the only ones capable
of finding him: all she wanted was to be sure, she was tired of
shadowboxing.  At any rate, it was not very likely that Captain Love
would be successful where so many others had failed.Joaquin Murieta
seemed invincible.  The myth was that nothing but a silver bullet could
kill him, because two pistols had been emptied point-blank into his
chest and he was still galloping up and down Calaveras County.

"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 inValparaiso.  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, Joaquin 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
Joaquin Andieta told her good-bye in Chile on that doleful December 22
in I848.  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 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 Joaquin 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 dif ;t An
Unusual Pair;

fe rent 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 Joaquin 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 Joaquin
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
have 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.

39o

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 nese 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 cuds 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 ofthatJuly.  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 inValparaiso, 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
forJoaquin 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 Joaquin 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."

She wanted to put her daguerreotype in a fine gilt and red velvet frame
for Miss Rose's desk.  She had brought Joaquin Andieta's letters to
immortalize them in the photograph before she destroyed them.

Inside the shop were enough backdrops for a small theater: canvases of
flowery pergolas and lakes with herons, cardboard Greek columns
garlanded with roses, even a stuffed bear.  The photographer was a
small, hurried man whose words tumbled out and who leapt about like a
toad among the implements in his studio.  Once they had agreed on the
details, he sat Eliza at a table with the love letters in her hand and
fitted a metal bar behind her with a support for her neck, not unlike
the rod Miss Rose had insisted on during Eliza's piano lessons.

"This is to keep you from moving.  Look at the camera and don't
breathe."

The gnome disappeared behind a black cloth; an instant later a white
flash blinded Eliza and a scorched smell made her sneeze.  For the
second portrait she put the letters aside and askediao Chi'en to help
her fasten the pearl necklace.

The next day Tao Chi'en went out early to buy a newspaper, as he always
did before opening the off fice and was met with a six column headline:
Joaquin Murieta had been killed.  He returned home with the paper
pressed to his chest, wondering how to tell Eliza, and how she would
receive the news.

At dawn on July 24, after three months of riding through California in
a game of blindman's bluff, Captain Harry Love and his twenty
mercenaries had come to the Tulare valley.  By then they were sick and
tired of chasing ghosts and following false trails; the heat and
mosquitoes had put them in a foul mood and they were beginning to
despise one another.  Three summer months of forced march through these
dry hills with the sun beating down on their heads was a lot of
sacrifice for what they were being paid.  They had seen the posters in
the towns offering a thousand dollars' reward for the capture of the
bandit.  On more than one they had seen a scrawled,"I will pay five
thousand," and signed Joaquin Murieta.  They were looking foolish, and
there were only three days left before time ran out: if they returned
empty-handed they wouldn't see a cent of the governor's thousand
dollars.  But this must have been their lucky day because just when
they were losing hope they had come across a group of seven unguarded
Mexicans camping under some trees.

Later the captain would say that they were wearing the finest clothes
and had only purebred horses, reasons enough to awaken their suspicion,
and that was why they rode over to ask for identification.

Instead of complying, the suspicious characters made a run for their
horses but before they could mount they were surrounded by Love's
guard.  The one person who olympic ally ignored the attackers and
walked on toward his mount as if he had not heard any warning was the
one who seemed to be the leader.  He was unarmed except for a hunting
knife at his belt; his guns were strapped to his saddle, but he never
fired a shot because by then the captain had his pistol to the man's
forehead.  A few steps away the other Mexicans watched, transfixed,
Love would write in his report, ready to come to their leader's aid at
the first careless move by the guards.  Suddenly they all made a
desperate attempt to escape, perhaps with the purpose of distracting
the guards, while their leader, with one formidable leap, was on his
restless stallion and bursting through their lines.  He did not get
far, however, because a blast from a shotgun caught his horse, which
rolled to the ground vomiting blood.  Then the outlaw, who was none
other than the famous Joaquin Murieta, Captain Love claimed, took off
like an antelope, and they had no choice but to empty their pistols
into his chest.

"Don't shoot anymore, you've done your job," the man said before he
slowly sank to the ground, dead.

That was the story dramatized in the press, and no Mexican was left
alive to tell his version of events.  The heroic Captain Harry Love
proceeded to cut off the head of the supposed Murieta with one slash of
his sword.  Someone noticed that one of the victims had a mutilated
hand, and it was immediately assumed that this was Three-Finger Jack,
so they cut off his head, too, and for good measure added the hand. The
twenty guards went galloping toward the nearest town, some miles away,
but the heat was hellish and Three Finger Jack's head was so full of
bullet holes it began to disintegrate, so they threw it by the side of
the road.  Pursued by flies and a terrible stench, Captain Harry Love
realized that he would have to preserve the remains or he would never
get them to San Francisco to collect the deserved reward, so he
immersed them in great jars of gin.  He was welcomed as a hero: he had
liberated California from the worst outlaw in its history.  But as
Jacob Freemont reported, the matter was not entirely cleared up; the
story smelled of fabrication.

To begin with, no one could prove that events had happened as portrayed
by Harry Love and his men, and it was somewhat suspicious that after
three months of fruitless searching they would find seven Mexicans just
when the captain most needed them.  Nor had anyone been able to
identify Joaquin Murieta: Freemont himself went to see the head and
could not be sure it was the bandit he knew, although it certainly
resembled him, he said.

For weeks the remains of the presumedJoaquin Murieta and the hand of
his abominable sidekick Three-Finger Jack were exhibited in San
Francisco before being taken on a triumphal tour through the remainder
of California.  The lines of the curious stretched around the block and
there was no one who hadn't taken a close look at the sinister
trophies.  Eliza was one of the first to go, andiao Chi'en accompanied
her because he did not want her to undergo such a test alone, even
though she had received the news with amazing calm.  After an eternal
wait in the sun, it was finally their turn and they went inside.

Eliza clung to Tao Chi'en's fingers but moved forward with
determination, indifferent to the river of sweat staining her dress and
the trembling that shook her bones.  They found themselves in a dark
room badly lighted by yellow candles emitting a breath from the tomb.
Black cloth covered the walls and in one corner a valiant pianist was
thumping out funereal chords with more resignation than real feeling.
On a table draped like a catafalque sat the two glass jars.  Eliza
closed her eyes and let Tao Chi'en guide her, sure that the beating of
her heart was drowning out the chords from the piano.  They stopped;

she felt her friend's grip grow stronger on hers; she gulped a mouthful
of air and opened her eyes.  She stared at the head for a few seconds
and then let herself be led outside.

"Was it him?"  askediao Chi'en.

"I am free," she replied, holding tightly to Tao's hand.

the end.