Portrait in Sepia (2 page)

"That's where they'll build towns, because there's water, and in each one of those towns we will have a store," she explained. "That's a lot of money," Feliciano exclaimed, horrified.

"Then borrow it, that's what banks are for. Why should we risk our own money if we can use someone else's?" Paulina replied, as she always did in such cases.

That was where they were, negotiating with banks and buying land across half the country, when the matter of the concubine exploded. The lady in question was an actress named Amanda Lowell, a delicious Scottish mouthful with milky flesh, spinach-colored eyes, and peach flavor, according to those who had tasted her. She sang and danced badly but with enthusiasm; she acted in inconsequential plays and enlivened wealthy men's parties. She had a snake of Panamanian pedigree, long, fat, and tame but spine-tingling in appearance, that she wound around her body during her exotic dances. It had never given any sign of aggression until one unfortunate night when La Lowell showed up with a feather diadem in her hair and the beastie, confusing the headdress for a distracted parrot, came close to strangling its mistress in its determination to swallow the bird. The beautiful Lowell was far from being one of the thousands of so-called soiled doves in the amatory landscape of California. She was a high-class courtesan whose favors were not attained simply with money: good manners and charm were also called for. Thanks to the generosity of her protectors, she lived well and had more than sufficient means to support an entourage of artists with no talent. She was condemned to die poor because she spent as much as a small nation's gross product and gave away what was left over. In the flower of her youth, she stopped traffic in the street with the grace of her bearing and her red lion's mane of hair, but her taste for scandal had undercut her luck: with one fit she could ruin a good name and a family. To Feliciano, the risk was but a further incentive; he had the soul of a pirate and the idea of playing with fire seduced him as much as La Lowell's incomparable buttocks. He installed her in an apartment in the heart of San Francisco, but he never appeared in public with her because he knew the nature of his wife, who once in a fit of jealousy had cut off the arms and legs of all his suits and left them in a heap at the door of his office. For a man as elegant as he, a man who ordered his clothing from Prince Albert's tailor in London, that was a mortal blow.

In San Francisco, a man's city, the wife was always the last to learn of a conjugal infidelity, but in this case it was La Lowell herself who divulged it. The minute her protector turned his back, she began carving notches on the pillars of her bed, one for each lover received. She was a collector; she wasn't interested in men for their own merits, only the number of marks. It was her goal to surpass the myth of the fascinating Lola Montez, the Irish courtesan who had breezed through San Francisco during the gold fever. Word of La Lowell's notches flew from mouth to mouth, and local gallants fought to visit her, as much for the beauty's charms, whom many already knew in the biblical sense, as for the amusement of bedding the mistress of one of the city's most illustrious citizens. The news reached Paulina del Valle after it had made the complete circuit of California.

"Most humiliating of all is that the bitch has been cuckolding you, and now everyone is saying that I'm married to a rooster with no cock-a-doodle-do," Paulina rebuked her husband—she had a tongue like a Saracen scimitar at such moments.

Feliciano Rodríguez de Santa Cruz had known nothing of La Lowell's collecting tendencies, and his vexation nearly killed him. He had never imagined that friends, acquaintances, and men who owed him tremendous favors would mock him in that way. On the other hand, he never blamed his lover because he accepted with resignation the caprices of the fair sex, delicious creatures with little moral fiber, always ready to yield to temptation. Whereas they were bound to the earth, humus, blood, and organic functions, men were destined for heroism, great ideas, and—though not in his case—sainthood. Confronted by his wife, he defended himself as best he could, and took advantage of a moment of truce to throw in her face the business of the bolt she used to lock the door of her room. Did she think a man like him could live in abstinence? It was all her fault for having turned him away, he alleged. The business of the bolt was true. Paulina had renounced their carnal romps, not for lack of desire, as she confessed to me forty years later, but out of pride. It revolted her to look at herself in the mirror, and she assumed that any man would feel the same if he saw her naked. She remembered the exact moment she became aware that her body was becoming her enemy. A few years before, when Feliciano returned from a long business trip to Chile, he had caught her by the waist and with his usual hearty good humor tried to sweep her off her feet and carry her to bed, but was unable to budge her.

"Shit, Paulina! Do you have rocks in your underdrawers?" He laughed.

"It's fat," she sighed sadly.

"I want to see it!"

"Absolutely not. From now on, you can come to my room only at night and with the lamp out."

For a while those two, who had frolicked without restraint, made love in the dark. Paulina stood firm, impervious to the pleas and rages of her husband, who never got used to finding her beneath a pile of covers in the blackness of her room, or to embracing her with missionary haste while she held his hands to keep him from filling them with her flesh. That tug of war left them exhausted and with nerves screaming. Finally, using the pretext of the move to the new mansion on Nob Hill, Paulina installed her husband at the other end of the house and shot the bolt on the door to her bedroom. Disgust for her own body outweighed the desire she felt for her husband. Her neck disappeared behind her double chin, her breasts and belly were a single episcopal promontory, her feet could not bear her weight for more than a few minutes, she could not dress herself alone or fasten her shoes, but in her silk dresses and splendid jewels, which were what she nearly always wore, she presented a prodigious spectacle. Her greatest worry was sweat in the folds of her fat, and she used to ask me in whispers if she smelled bad, although I never perceived any aroma but eau de gardenia and talcum. Despite the widely held belief that water and soap were bad for the bronchial tubes, Paulina spent hours floating in her tub of enameled iron, where she felt as light as in her youth. At eighteen she had fallen in love with Feliciano when he was a handsome and ambitious young man, the owner of silver mines in the north of Chile. For the sake of his love, she defied her father, Agustin del Valle, who figures in the history books of Chile as the founder of a small and miserly, ultraconservative political party that disappeared more than two decades ago but every so often revives like a bald, pathetic phoenix. That same love for Feliciano sustained her when she decided to forbid him entry to her bedroom at an age when her nature called more than ever for his embrace. Unlike her, he matured gracefully. His hair had turned gray, but he was still the same happy, passionate, free-spending, and lusty man. Paulina liked his common side; the idea that this gentleman with the resonant family names came from a line of Sephardic Jews, and that beneath the silk shirts with embroidered initials was a devil-may-care tattoo acquired in a port during a binge. She longed to hear again the dirty words he'd whispered in the days they were still paddling about the bed with all the lights on and would have given anything to sleep once more with her head resting on the indelible blue ink dragon on her husband's shoulder. She could never believe that he wanted the same. To Feliciano, Paulina was always the daring young sweetheart he had run away with in his youth, the only woman he admired and feared. It occurs to me that those two never stopped loving each other, despite the cyclonic force of their fights, which left everyone in the house trembling. The embraces that once made them so happy turned into battles that culminated in long periods of truce and such memorable revenge as the Florentine bed, but nothing ever destroyed their relationship, and until the end, when Feliciano was fatally felled by a stroke, they were joined by the enviable complicity of true scoundrels.

•

Once Captain John Sommers had assured himself that the mythic bed was on the cart and that the coachman understood his instructions, he set off on foot in the direction of Chinatown, as he did each time he visited San Francisco. On this occasion, however, grit alone wasn't enough to get him there, and after two blocks he had to call for a rented coach. He climbed in with difficulty, gave the driver the address, and leaned back in the seat, panting. His symptoms had begun a year ago, but in recent weeks they had become more acute. His legs were too weak to hold him, and his head was filled with fog; he had to battle constantly the temptation to abandon himself to the cottony indifference that was seeping into his soul. His sister Rose had been the first to notice that something was not going well, back before he felt any pain. He smiled as he thought of her: she was the person closest and dearest to him, the guiding light of his wandering existence, more real in his affections than his daughter Eliza or any of the women he had held in his arms during his long pilgrimage from port to port.

Rose Sommers had spent her youth in Chile at the side of her older brother, Jeremy. At his death, however, she had returned to England to grow old in her own country. She lived in London in a small house a few blocks from theaters and the opera, a slightly down-at-the-heels neighborhood where she could live as she pleased. She was no longer the proper mistress of the house for Jeremy; now she could give free rein to her eccentric bent. She liked to dress as an out-of-luck actress and take tea at the Savoy, or as a Russian countess when she walked her dog; among her friends were beggars and street musicians, and she spent her money on trinkets and charities. "Nothing is as liberating as age," she would say, happily counting her wrinkles. "It isn't age, sister, it's the economic freedom you've won with your pen," John Sommers would reply. This white-haired spinster had made a small fortune writing pornography. The true irony, thought the captain, was that now that Rose had no need to hide, as she had when she lived in the shadow of her brother Jeremy, she had stopped writing erotic stories and devoted herself to turning out romantic novels at an exhausting pace, and with unparalleled success. There was no woman alive whose whose mother tongue was English, including Queen Victoria, who hadn't read at least one of the romances written by Dame Rose Sommers. Her distinguished title merely legalized a position that Rose had taken by assault years before. Had Queen Victoria suspected that her favorite author, one upon whom she had personally bestowed the rank of dame, was responsible for a vast body of salacious books signed "An Anonymous Lady," she would have swooned. It was the captain's opinion that the pornography was delicious but that Rose's love novels were pure trash. For years he had taken on the task of arranging publication and distribution of the forbidden stories Rose produced right under the nose of her elder brother, who died convinced that she was a virtuous maiden whose only mission was to make life agreeable for him. "Look after yourself, John. You know you can't leave me alone in this world. You're losing weight, and your color isn't good," Rose had repeated every day the captain visited her in London. Since then, a relentless metamorphosis had been transforming him into a lizard.

Tao Chi'en had just removed his acupuncture needles from a patient's ears and arms when his assistant advised him that his fatherin-law had arrived. The
zhong-yi
carefully placed his gold needles in pure alcohol, washed his hands in a basin, put on his jacket, and went out to welcome his visitor, amazed that Eliza had not informed him that her father would be arriving that day. Captain Sommers's every visit created a commotion. The family would await him eagerly, especially the children, who never tired of admiring his exotic gifts and hearing stories about sea monsters and Malaysian pirates from their colossal grandfather. Tall, solid, skin leathery from the salt of the seven seas, beard untamed, with a voice like thunder and a babe's innocent blue eyes, the captain cut an imposing figure in his blue uniform, but the man Tao Chi'en saw seated in a chair in his clinic was so diminished that he had difficulty recognizing him. He greeted the captain with respect, having never overcome the habit of bowing before him in the Chinese manner. Tao had met John Sommers in his youth, when he was working as cook on his ship. "You address me as sir! Is that clear, Chinaman?" he had ordered the first time he spoke to Tao. Their hair was black then, thought Tao Chi'en, with a stab of anguish as he regarded the announcement of death standing before him. Laboriously the Englishman got to his feet, held out his hand, and then clasped Tao Chi'en in a brief embrace. The
zhong-yi
realized that now he was the taller and heavier of the two.

"Did Eliza know that you were coming today, sir?" Tao asked.

"No. You and I need to speak alone, Tao. I am dying."

The
zhong-yi
had known that the moment he saw him. Without a word he led the captain to the consulting room, where he helped him undress and lie down on a cot. His naked fatherin-law presented a pathetic sight: dry, thickened skin, coppery in color, yellowed nails, bloodshot eyes, swollen belly. Tao began by palpating his body, and then he took the captain's pulse at his wrists, neck, and ankles, to verify that he already knew.

"Your liver is ruined, sir. Are you still drinking?"

"You can't ask me to give up the habit of a lifetime, Tao. Do you think anyone can endure a life at sea without taking a drink from time to time?"

Tao Chi'en smiled. The Englishman drank half a bottle of gin on normal days—an entire bottle if there was something to mourn or celebrate—without its seeming to affect him in the least. He never even smelled of liquor because his strong, cheap tobacco permeated his breath and clothing.