Portrait in Sepia (6 page)

"If it is not asking too much, that you don your clothing, collect your weapon, and come with me."

Williams had waked a stable boy to ready one of the coaches, but since he wanted to keep the matter as quiet as possible, he himself took the reins and drove purposefully through the dark, empty streets toward the Chinese quarter, guided by the instinct of the horses after the wind kept blowing out the lamps on the carriage. Severo had the impression that this was not the first time the man had driven through these alleyways. Soon they got out of the coach and on foot plunged into a passageway that opened onto a shadowy courtyard filled with a strange, sweetish odor like roasted nuts. There was not a soul to be seen and no sound but the wind, and the only light filtered through the chinks in a pair of small windows at street level. Williams struck a match, once more read the address on the paper, and without ceremony pushed one of the doors that opened onto the courtyard. Severo, with his hand on his weapon, followed. They walked into a small, unventilated though clean and neat room in which they could barely breathe for the dense aroma of opium. Around a center table, lined against the walls, were wooden compartments, one above another like berths on a ship, covered by a mat and with a block of hollowed out wood in way of a pillow. These spaces were occupied by Chinese, sometimes two in a cubicle, lying on one side facing small trays containing a box with a black paste and a small lighted lamp. It was long past midnight, and the drug had already exerted its effect on most. Lethargic, the men lay wandering through their dreams; only two or three still had the strength to dip a thin metal rod into the opium, heat it over the lamp, fill the tiny thimble of the pipe, and inhale through the bamboo stem.

"Good God!" murmured Severo, who had heard of this but never seen it.

"It is less harmful than alcohol, if you will allow me to say so," replied Williams. "It does not induce violence, and it does no harm to others, only the person who smokes it. You may note how much calmer and cleaner this place is than any drinking establishment."

An ancient Chinese man dressed in a tunic and wide-legged cotton trousers limped forward to meet them. His red-rimmed eyes peered from between deep wrinkles; he had a sparse mustache, gray like the thin queue hanging down his back, and all his fingernails, except for thumb and index, were so long that they turned back on themselves, like the tail of some antediluvian mollusk. His mouth was a black hollow, and his few remaining teeth were stained by tobacco and opium. This lame great-grandfather spoke to the new arrivals in Chinese, and to Severo's surprise the English butler answered with a couple of barks in the same tongue. There was a very long pause in which no one moved. The Chinese man locked eyes with William, as if he were studying him, and finally he held out his hand, into which Williams deposited a few dollars the old man stowed beneath his tunic next to his heart. Then he picked up a candle stub and made signs that they should follow him. They passed through a second room, and then a third and a fourth, all similar to the first; they walked the length of a twisting corridor, went down a short staircase, and found themselves in another hallway. Their guide indicated that they should wait, and disappeared for a time that seemed endless. Severo, sweating, kept his finger on the trigger of his cocked weapon, alert and afraid to say a word. Finally the great-grandfather returned to lead them through a labyrinth to a closed door, which he contemplated with absurd attention, like someone deciphering a map, until Williams handed him an additional couple of dollars. Then he opened it. They entered a room smaller even than the others, darker, more smoke-filled, and more oppressive, because it was below street level and there was no ventilation; in all other details it was identical to the previous ones. On wooden litters lay five white Americans, four men and a middle-aged but still splendid woman with a cascade of red hair spilling out around her like an incandescent mantle. To judge by their fine clothing, these were well-to-do people. All were in the same state of happy stupor, except one who lay on his back barely breathing, his shirt ripped, his arms spread wide, his skin the color of chalk, and his eyes turned back in his head. It was Matias Rodríguez de Santa Cruz.

"Come, sir, assist me," Williams ordered Severo del Valle.

Between them, they succeeded in lifting him; each placed one of the unconscious man's arms around his neck, and that was how they carried him, like someone crucified: head hanging, body limp, feet dragging the dirt floor. They retraced the long way back through narrow passageways and suffocating rooms, one after the other, until suddenly they were out in the open air, in the incredible purity of the night, where they could take deep, eager, dazed breaths. They made Matias as comfortable as they could in the carriage, and Williams drove them to the
garçonnière
, which Severo had supposed his aunt's employee knew nothing about. Even greater was his surprise when Williams pulled out a key, opened the main door to the building, and then another to open the door to the garret.

"Then this isn't the first time you've rescued my cousin, Williams?"

"Let us say that it will not be the last," he replied.

They laid Matias on a bed in the corner of the room, behind a Japanese screen, and Severo proceeded to moisten his face with damp cloths and shake him to bring him back from the nirvana in which he was floating, while Williams went out to look for the family doctor, after warning that it would not be a good plan to notify Severo's aunt and uncle of what had occurred.

"My cousin may die!" exclaimed Severo, still trembling.

"In that eventuality we may have to inform the master and mistress," Williams conceded courteously.

Matias lay five days struggling through spasms of agony, poisoned to the marrow. Williams brought a nurse to the garret to look after him and made arrangements so that his absence would not be a cause of scandal at home. This incident created a strange bond between Severo and Williams, a tacit complicity that was never translated into actions or words. With another individual less hermetic than the butler, Severo would have thought he shared a kind of friendship, or at least that they liked each other, but the Englishman raised an impenetrable wall of reserve around himself. Severo began to observe him. He treated the employees under his orders with the same cool and impeccable civility he extended to his employers, and in that way succeeded in terrorizing them. Nothing escaped his vigilance, from the gleam of the ornate silver tableware to the secrets of each resident in that immense house. It was impossible to calculate his age or origins; he seemed eternally stalled in his forties and, except for the British accent, gave no hint of his past. He changed his white gloves thirty times a day, his black wool suit seemed always recently pressed, his snow-white shirt of the best Dutch linen was starched like cardboard, and his shoes gleamed like mirrors. He sucked mint pastilles for his breath and used eau de cologne, but he did so with such discretion that the only time Severo perceived the scent of mint and lavender was the time in the opium den when he had brushed against him as they lifted the unconscious Matias. On that occasion, Severo had also noticed the wood-hard muscles beneath the swallowtail coat, the tense tendons in his neck, as well as the man's strength and flexibility, none of which fit in with the picture of an English lord down on his luck.

•

As cousins, Severo and Matias had in common only their patrician features and a taste for sports and literature. In all else they seemed not to be of the same blood: the former was as noble, fearless, and naive as the latter was cynical, indolent, and libertine. But despite their contrasting temperaments and the years that separated them, they formed a friendship. Matias made a great effort to teach Severo to fence—though he lacked the elegance and quickness indispensable for that art—and to initiate him into the pleasures of San Francisco, but the younger man turned out to be a bad companion in revelry because he tended to fall asleep on his feet. He worked fourteen hours a day in the law office and spent the remaining hours reading and studying. The two cousins often swam naked in the pool in the mansion, and challenged each other to contests of Greco-Roman wrestling. They would dance about each other, alert, preparing to spring, and finally they would attack, scrambling for balance, rolling until one succeeded in subduing the other, pinning him to the floor. They would be wet with sweat, panting, excited. Severo would push away, perturbed, as if the competition had been an unconfessable embrace. They talked about books and commented on the classics. Matias loved poetry, and when they were alone recited from memory, so moved by the beauty of the verses that tears ran down his cheeks. Severo was also disturbed on those occasions because his cousin's intense emotion seemed to him a kind of intimacy forbidden between men. He lived for news of scientific advances and journeys of exploration, which he told Matias about in a vain attempt to interest him, but the only news that managed to dent his cousin's armor of indifference had to do with local crimes. Matias had a curious relationship, based on liters of whiskey, with Jacob Freemont, an old and unscrupulous journalist always short of funds, with whom he shared a morbid fascination for criminal behavior. Freemont still worked the police beat for the newspapers, but he had lost his reputation many years before when he invented the story of Joaquin Murieta, a supposed Mexican bandit during the days of the gold rush. His articles had created a myth and fueled the hatred of the white population toward Spanish-speaking peoples. To calm things, the authorities offered a reward to a certain Captain Harry Love to hunt down Murieta. After three months of riding around California in hot pursuit, the captain chose an expeditious solution: he killed seven Mexicans in an ambush and brought back a head and a hand. No one could identify the remains, but Love's exploit reassured the whites. The macabre trophies were still being exhibited in a museum, though there was a consensus that Joaquin Murieta was a monstrous creation of the press in general and of Jacob Freemont in particular. That and other episodes in which the newspaperman's guileful pen muddied reality finally won him the reputation of being a liar, and closed doors to him. Thanks to his strange connection with Freemont, the crime reporter, Matias was able to view murder victims before their bodies were removed and to witness autopsies at the morgue, spectacles that repelled as much as excited him. He would emerge from those adventures in the underworld of crime drunk with horror, proceed directly to the Turkish bath, where he spent hours sweating out the stench of death clinging to his skin, and then close himself in his
garçonnière
to paint disastrous scenes of people chopped into bits.

"What does all this mean?" asked Severo, the first time he saw those Dantesque paintings.

"Aren't you fascinated by the idea of death? Homicide is a tremendous adventure, and suicide is a practical solution. I toy with the idea of both. Some people deserve to be murdered, don't you agree? And as for me, cousin, well, I don't plan to die a decrepit old man. I would rather end my days with the same care I use in choosing my suits, and that's why I study crimes, as training."

"You're mad. And, besides, you have no talent," Severo concluded.

"You don't need talent to be an artist, just audacity. Have you heard of the Impressionists?"

"No, but if this is what those poor devils paint, they won't get far. Couldn't you find a more agreeable subject? A pretty girl, for example?"

Matias burst out laughing and announced that on Wednesday there would be a truly pretty young girl at his
garçonnière
, the most beautiful in San Francisco according to popular opinion, he added. She was a model his friends fought to immortalize in clay, on canvas, and on photographic plates, with the additional hope of making love to her. They exchanged bets to see who would be the first, but for the moment no one had succeeded in so much as touching her hand.

"She suffers from a detestable defect: virtue. She's the only virgin left in California, although that's easy to cure. Would you like to meet her?"

And that was how Severo del Valle came to see Lynn Sommers again. Until that day he had limited himself to secretly buying postcards with her image in shops for tourists and hiding them in the pages of his law books, like a shameful treasure. Many times he hung around the street on Union Square where the tea shop was located, hoping to see her from afar, and he made discreet inquiries of the coachman who drove every day to pick up pastries for Paulina del Valle, but he had never dared introduce himself honorably to Eliza Sommers and ask permission to visit her daughter. Any direct action seemed an irreparable betrayal of Nívea, his cherished lifetime sweetheart. It would be a different matter, he had decided, if he ran into Lynn accidentally, since in that case a meeting would be a prank of fate, and no one could blame him. It had never crossed his mind that he would see her in his cousin Matias's studio under such strange circumstances.

•

Lynn Sommers was the happy product of mixed races. Her name should have been Lin Chi'en, but her parents decided to Anglicize the names of their children and give them their mother's surname, Sommers, to make life easier for them in the United States, where the Chinese were treated like dogs. They named the older child Ebanizer, in honor of an old friend of his father, but called him Lucky because he had the best luck of anyone who had ever lived in Chinatown. Their younger child, a girl, born six years after their son, they named Lin in honor of her father's first wife, buried many years before in Hong Kong, but when they filled out her birth certificate they used the English spelling: Lynn. Tao Chi'en's first wife, who bequeathed her name to the girl, had been a fragile creature with tiny bound feet, adored by her husband but crushed by consumption. Eliza Sommers learned to live with the ever-present memory of Lin, and came to think of her as just another member of the family, a kind of invisible protectress who looked out for the well-being of her home. Twenty years earlier, when Eliza had found she was pregnant again, she had asked Lin to help her carry the baby to term; she had already had several miscarriages, and she did not have much hope that her depleted body could sustain the pregnancy. That was how she explained it to Tao Chi'en, who each time before had placed all his resources as a
zhong-yi
at his wife's disposal, in addition to taking her to the best Western medicine specialists in California.