Portrait in Sepia (7 page)

"This time we will have a healthy baby," Eliza assured him.

"How do you know," he asked.

"Because I asked Lin."

Eliza always believed that Tao's first wife had been by her side during the pregnancy and given her the strength to give birth to her daughter; then—like a good fairy—she had leaned over the cradle to offer the baby the gift of beauty. "She will be called Lin," the exhausted mother had announced when at last she held her daughter in her arms, but Tao Chi'en was frightened. It was not a good idea, he said, to give the child the name of a woman who had died so young. Finally they changed the spelling to keep from tempting fate. "It's pronounced the same," Eliza concluded. "That's all that counts."

On her mother's side, Lynn Sommers had English and Chilean blood, and from her father the genes of the tall Chinese of the north. Tao Chi'en's grandfather, a humble healer, had handed down to his male descendents his knowledge of medicinal plants and magic incantations for curing various ills of the body and mind. Tao Chi'en, the last of that line, had enriched the paternal legacy by training to be a
zhong-yi
with a wise man from Canton, and also through a lifetime of study, not only of traditional Chinese medicine but of everything that fell into his hands concerning Western medical science. He had built a solid reputation in San Francisco, and though he was consulted by American doctors and had patients of several races, he was not allowed to work in their hospitals; his practice was limited to the Chinese quarter, where he had bought a house large enough to install his clinic on the first floor and his residence on the second. His reputation protected him; no one interfered in his activities with the Singsong Girls, as those pathetic sex slaves, all children really, were known in Chinatown. Tao Chi'en had taken on his shoulders the mission of rescuing as many of them as he could from the brothels. The tongs that controlled and sold protection in the Chinese community knew that he was buying the tiny prostitutes to give them a second chance far away from California. He had been threatened a couple of times, but nothing drastic had happened to him because sooner or later some member of a tong might need the services of the famed
zhong-yi.
As long as Tao Chi'en didn't go to the American authorities, acted discreetly, and rescued the girls one by one with antlike patience, he was tolerated because his actions did not make a dent in the enormous profits of the enterprise. The one person who looked on Tao Chi'en as a public menace was Ah Toy, the most successful madam in San Francisco and the owner of several houses that specialized in adolescent Asian girls. She alone imported hundreds of young victims every year, right past the American customs officers, who, duly bribed, looked the other way. Ah Toy detested Tao Chi'en and, as she had often said, would rather die than consult him again. She had done that once when very ill from a cough no one could cure, but on that occasion both had understood that they would always be mortal enemies.

Every Singsong Girl Tao Chi'en saved was a bamboo shoot driven under Ah Toy's fingernail, whether or not the girl belonged to her. To Ah Toy, as well as to Tao Chi'en, the Singsong Girls' fate was a matter of principle.

•

Tao Chi'en always rose before dawn and went out into the garden, where he performed martial exercises to keep his body in shape and his mind clear. After that he meditated for thirty minutes and then lit the fire for the kettle. He would wake Eliza with a kiss and a cup of green tea, which she slowly sipped in bed. That moment was sacred for them both; the cups of tea they drank together sealed the night they had shared tightly embraced. What happened between them behind the closed door of their room compensated for all the day's efforts. Their love had begun as a gentle friendship, subtly woven in the midst of a tangle of obstacles ranging from being able to communicate only in English and having to overcome prejudices of culture and race to the difference in their ages. They had lived and worked together under the same roof for more than three years before they dared cross the invisible frontier that separated them. Eliza had been driven to wander in circles for thousands of miles of an endless journey pursuing a hypothetical lover who slipped through her fingers like a shadow. Along that road she would leave her past and her innocence in tatters and confront her obsessions before the decapitated, gin-preserved head of the legendary bandit Joaquin Murieta finally to understand that her destiny was Tao Chi'en. The
zhong-yi,
in contrast, had known that long before, and had waited for Eliza with the quiet tenacity of his mature love.

•

The night when finally Eliza dared travel the twenty-four feet of corridor that separated her room from that of Tao Chi'en, their lives changed completely, as if the past had been chopped off with one swipe of a hatchet. Beginning with that ardent night there was not the least hint of temptation to turn back, only the challenge of carving out a space in a world that did not tolerate the mixing of races. Eliza went there barefoot, in her nightgown, feeling her way in the shadow; she pushed Tao Chi'en's door, certain she would find it unlocked, because she sensed that he wanted her as much as she wanted him, but despite that certainty she was frightened by the finality of her decision. She had hesitated for a long time before taking that step because the zhong-yi was her protector, her father, her brother, her best friend, her only family in that foreign land. She was afraid she would lose everything when he became her lover, but she was standing at Tao's threshold and her eagerness to touch him was stronger than the sophistries of reason. She went into the room, and in the candlelight she saw Tao sitting cross-legged on the bed, dressed in white cotton tunic and trousers, waiting for her. Eliza did not have time to wonder how many nights he had spent that way, listening for the sound of her footsteps in the corridor, dazed as she was by her own boldness, trembling with shyness and anticipation. Tao Chi'en did not give her the opportunity to retreat. He came to meet her, opened his arms to her, and she walked forward blindly until she bumped against his chest, in which she buried her face, breathing the familiar salty sea scent of that man, clinging with both hands to his tunic because her knees were buckling beneath her, while a river of explanations poured from her lips and blended with the words of love he was murmuring in Chinese. She felt arms lifting her from the floor and gently placing her on the bed; she felt warm breath on her neck, and hands holding her, then she was seized by an uncontainable anxiety and she began to shiver, frightened and contrite.

From the time his wife died in Hong Kong, Tao Chi'en had occasionally consoled himself in the hasty embraces of paid women. He had not made loving love for more than six years, but he did not allow his eagerness to run away with him. So many times he had gone over Eliza's body in his thoughts, and he knew her so well that it was like exploring her soft valleys and gentle hills with a map. She thought she had known love in the arms of her first lover, but intimacy with Tao Chi'en revealed to her the extent of her ignorance. The passion that had swept over her at sixteen, a passion for which she had traveled halfway across the world and more than once risked her life, had been a mirage that seemed absurd by comparison. Then she had been in love with love, making do with the crumbs given her by a man more interested in leaving than in staying with her. She had searched for him four years, convinced that the young idealist she had known in Chile had in California been transformed into the fabled bandit Joaquin Murieta. During that time Tao Chi'en had waited with his proverbial calm, sure that sooner or later Eliza would cross the threshold that separated them. It was he who had accompanied her when the head of Joaquin Murieta had been exhibited as entertainment for Americans and as a warning to Latins. He had thought that Eliza would not be able to bear the sight of that repulsive trophy, but she had stopped before the large jar containing the head of the supposed criminal and looked at it without emotion, as if it were a marinated head of cabbage, until she was very sure that it was not the man whom she had followed for years. In truth, it didn't matter; on the long trail of an impossible romance, Eliza had acquired something as precious as love: freedom. "I am free," was all she had said when she viewed the head. Tao Chi'en understood that at last she had shed the burden of her former lover, that it didn't matter whether he was alive or had died looking for gold in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada; in any case she would not be searching any longer, and if one day the man appeared she would be able to see him in his true light. Tao Chi'en had taken Eliza's hand and they had left that sinister exhibition. Outside, they breathed the fresh air and walked away, at peace and ready to begin a new stage in their lives.

The night that Eliza went into Tao Chi'en's room was very different from the nights of secret and hurried embraces with her first lover in Chile. With Tao she discovered some of the many possibilities of pleasure and was initiated into the fathomless love that was to be hers for the rest of her life. With complete serenity, Tao Chi'en began freeing her from layers of accumulated fears and useless memories, caressing her with inexhaustible dedication until she stopped trembling and opened her eyes, until she relaxed beneath his wise fingers, until he felt her move like waves under his hands, open to him, illuminated from within. He heard her moan, call to him, plead with him: he saw her yielding, moist, eager to give herself and take him with complete abandon, until neither knew where they found themselves or who they were, where he ended and she began. Tao Chi'en led her beyond orgasm to a mysterious dimension where love and death are interchangeable. They felt their spirits were expanding, that desires and memory had disappeared, that they gave themselves to one another in an enormous pool of bright light. They held each other in that extraordinary space, recognizing each other, perhaps because they had been there in earlier lives and would be many times more in future lives, as Tao Chi'en suggested. They were lovers for all eternity; their karma, he said with emotion, was to seek and find each other, but Eliza laughed and replied that it was nothing as solemn as karma, only a simple urge to fornicate, that to tell the truth she had been dying to do that with him for several years and was hoping that in the future Tao's enthusiasm would not flag because that was going to be her priority in life. They pleasured themselves that night and a good part of the following day, until hunger and thirst forced them to stagger from the room, drunken and happy, holding hands for fear that they would suddenly wake and discover that they had been wandering lost in an hallucination.

The passion that joined them from that night, and that they nourished with extraordinary care, sustained and protected them in their inevitable moments of adversity. With time that passion resolved into tenderness and laughter; they ceased to explore the two hundred twenty-two ways to make love because they were satisfied with three or four, and now they felt no compulsion to surprise each other. The better they came to know each other, the greater was their affection. From that first night of love, they slept in a tight knot, breathing the same breaths and dreaming the same dreams. That did not mean their lives were easy. They had been together for almost thirty years in a world that had no place for a couple like them. Over the course of the years, the small white woman and the tall Chinese man became a familiar sight in Chinatown, but they were never completely accepted. They learned not to touch in public, to sit apart in the theater, and to walk down the street with some distance between them. In certain restaurants and hotels they could not go in together, and when they went to England—she to visit her adoptive mother, Rose Sommers, and he to give lectures on acupuncture at the Hobbs clinic—they could not travel in the first-class section of the ship or share a stateroom, although at night she would slip stealthily down the hall to sleep with him. They were married in a discreet Buddhist ceremony, but their union had no legal standing. Lucky and Lynn were registered as illegitimate children recognized by the father. Tao Chi'en had managed to become a citizen after an infinite number of negotiations and bribes; he was one of the few who escaped the Chinese Exclusion Act, another of the discriminatory laws of California. His admiration for and loyalty to his adoptive country was unconditional, as he had demonstrated during the Civil War, when he traveled across the continent to offer himself as a volunteer at the front and work as aid to Yankee medics for the four years of the conflict, but he felt profoundly foreign, and although he had spent all his life in America, he wanted his body to be buried in Hong Kong.

•

The family of Eliza Sommers and Tao Chi'en lived in a spacious and comfortable house more solid and of better construction than most in Chinatown. All around them the main language was Cantonese, and everything from food to newspapers was Chinese. Several blocks away was La Mision, where the Spanish speakers lived and where Eliza Sommers used to stroll for the sole pleasure of hearing her language, but her day was spent among Americans in the vicinity of Union Square, where her elegant tea room was located. With her pastries, Eliza had from the beginning contributed to the upkeep of the family. A major part of Tao Chi'en's income ended up in the hands of others: what didn't go toward helping poor Chinese laborers in times of sickness or misfortune would likely be spent at the clandestine auctions of child slaves. Saving those creatures from a life of ignominy had become Tao Chi'en's sacred mission; Eliza Sommers knew that from the beginning and accepted it as characteristic of her husband, another of the many reasons she loved him. She set up her pastry shop so she would not have to torment him by asking for money; she needed independence to give her children the best American education, for she wanted them to integrate completely in the United States and live without the limitations imposed on either Chinese or Chileans. With Lynn she succeeded, but her plans went awry with Lucky—the boy was proud of his origins and had no intention of ever leaving Chinatown.