“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 Joaquín 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 Joaquín Andieta. Eliza did the cooking, and Tao 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 Joaquín 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.
“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 fan 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 o
ffering 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 for Joaquín.”
“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 for Joaquín, 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, a 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 left Valparaíso hidden in the belly of the Emilia, the three Sommers had dined in the Hotel Inglés at the invitation of Paulina, the wife of Feliciano Rodríguez 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 Agustín del Valle, 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, señora, 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 Aysén.”
“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, señora, 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 a 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 in Valparaíso 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 Valle family was still at the hacienda and if Eliza was all right. An hour later Agustín del Valle’s wife appeared at their door, highly alarmed. She knew nothing at all about Eliza, she said. The family had not left Valparaíso 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 Señora del Valle had taken the trouble to come personally. . . . Not surprisingly, Señora del Valle 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 Valparaíso.
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.
“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.
Daughter of Fortune Page 24
