Daughter of Fortune (19 page)

The belly of the
Emilia
held the assorted luggage of the passengers and cargo destined for the California trade, organized in such a 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 a 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 in Valparaíso. 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 Valle family to come visit for a few days at their hacienda. It was not an outlandish subterfuge. On previous occasions the daughters of Agustín del Valle 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 Joaquín 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 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 Joaquín 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 Valle 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,
niña
” 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 Joaquín 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.

T
ao 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:
qi
. 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 1834 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 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 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 unoiled 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 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 mah-jongg. 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 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 with 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.