Lucía Zárate: The odyssey of the world’s smallest woman

by Cecilia Velástegui

  Here in Eisenmann’s studio, among all his artistic photographs of human affliction, Zoila had been shot with an arrow of truth about the tragic trajectory of Julia—and others like her. They were treated as less than human, and had no peace or dignity, in life or death. What was going to happen to Lucía?

  Julia Pastrana

  Like a moth to the flame, Zoila singed her heart each time she opened the Julia Pastrana photo album at Eisenmann’s studio. Although she always slammed the album shut a moment later, she couldn’t stop herself from peeking inside. Reluctant to read the news clippings Eisenmann had inserted in the album, Zoila paused and ran her fingers over the raised leather name on the album cover: Julia Pastrana. The peppy Mexican singer and dancer who loved to entertain, but whose audiences only came to gawk—and jeer—at the abundant, dark hair that covered her body from head to toe. Their attraction to her was not for her soprano voice, but for the set of double teeth evident when Julia reached the high notes.

  In Paplanta she’d read random details about Julia, but back then she hadn’t believed that such cruelty could exist in the world. Now, the graphically aberrant photos of Julia torched her mind. Zoila longed to find out more about Julia, to read details of her life, and to commiserate with the tumultuous path of Julia’s journey from the warmth of her native Mexico to the garish sideshows of United States and the chilly circuses of Europe.

  Zoila took pity on the naiveté and optimism that Julia must have felt; of her self-deceptive desire to be accepted abroad for whom she was—a sparkling singer and a dashing dancer. Zoila knew all about delusions. Once she’d believed that her own linguistic talents and vanilla-trade knowledge would be appreciated in Paplanta, and that people would see she had the skills to negotiate with the best of the vanilla traders. Back then, her own mirror of deception reflected a studious linguist with immense knowledge about the much-desired vanilla vines. That image had shattered upon her father’s demise. Now, sitting in this stifling photography studio in New York City, feeling the shards of her own painful truth, Zoila could see the purpose of her future clearly.

  She resolved to uncover the devious ways these so-called promoters employed to entice unique girls such as Julia Pastrana and to use this knowledge to prevent Lucía from falling victim to their sadistic and cunning ways. Zoila would make Frank Uffner and his cronies pay. She pumped up her chest, like a guajolote—one of Mexico’s ubiquitous wild turkeys—showing off its feathers. After all, she was still her father’s daughter. She would turn a Lucía’s upcoming circus journey into a profitable one, one where Lucía— along with Zoila, of course—would make enough money to return to the warm breezes of Veracruz, replant their roots and control their own destinies.

  With this conviction swelling inside her chest, Zoila gazed at Julia’s early photographs and felt a glimmer of hope. How could Julia ever have known, as she boarded foreign ships and was hauled in wagons all over Europe, that her only attraction was her monumental hairiness and not her cheerful voice, her merry whistles, or the bounce in her dance steps? No one cared about her talents and certainly not one soul realized that she had her own big dreams for her future. Her life had been nothing but heartache in Mexico, but she’d dreamed that elsewhere in the world her uniqueness would be welcomed.

  How wrong Julia had been. The crowds didn’t give a hoot if she could sing like a nightingale or that her dancing exuded charm and gaiety. They only paid to gawk at her, the Monkey Woman from Mexico, the Bear Woman, the Bearded Lady. The more they could revile her hairy features and protruding jaw, its double row of teeth offering a constant, theatrical smile at her observers, the more they felt superior to this lowly beast pretending to be an entertainer. They could relish their human perfection and quote Dr. Alexander B. Mott’s assessment after he personally examined Julia: that she was a hybrid, half-human and half-orangutan.

  Zoila turned each page of the photo album slowly, as if she were walking along a funeral cortege in the bitter cold of Moscow where Julia had eventually died. Zoila shivered at each photograph and continued paying her silent respects to Julia, page after woeful page.

  In Julia’s story, just as in the lamentable saga of the Sicilian Fairy, Zoila recognized a cautionary tale, one that might prevent Lucía from following in the same footsteps as these two innocent girls whose singular bodies attracted avaricious men and hungry hordes. And it wasn’t just an impoverished orphan like Julia who fell prey to vile opportunists. Carolina Crachami had ended up alone and in the cold-blooded hands of a malevolent charlatan despite having talented and educated parents. Perhaps the Italian musicians justified having given-up custody of their miniature, frail child to a physician because they thought they were doing what was best for the Sicilian Fairy. But Zoila’s pulsating heart told her otherwise.

  Every decent person she had ever known, like Felipe and Felipe’s mother, never would have neglected or deserted a needy child. Zoila had stumbled upon this explicit photo album for a purpose greater than herself. Of this she was certain. She tapped her own forehead repeatedly, in the rigid manner of her father when he chastised her, in an effort to knock some sense into herself. There had to be a meaningful lesson to be learned from her being in this studio perusing Eisenmann’s pictorial homage to horror.

  Among the haunting photographs of Julia, Eisenmann had inserted numerous handbills that advertised Julia’s appearances abroad. Zoila picked up the one for Julia’s 1857 appearance at the Regent Gallery in London. It listed her as “The Nondescript, the Bear Woman, the grand and novel attraction.” Zoila continued reading articles that described Julia’s torturous journey from Mexico to New York City, where her new manager, Theodore Lent*, married her and continued to exploit her as a circus freak. Even in the frosty ambience of Moscow, Julia had continued to bring her sunny performances to jeering crowds. Once Julia gave birth in 1860 to a son with a similar condition—congenital terminal hypertrichosis—Lent rejoiced at having two money-makers in his household. But his greedy happiness was short-lived, since both the infant and Julia died within days of each other shortly after childbirth.

  Zoila recoiled at the photographs of the tragic mother and child. She wanted to snap shut the album, but the subsequent photographs paralyzed her. Theodore Lent had continued to exhibit the embalmed bodies of Julia and her baby throughout Europe, and not one scientist, not one religious leader, not one monarch had raised a protest against this unholy crime.

  Zoila reread all the names of scientists, medical doctors, and aristocrats who posited inhumane and outlandish theories about Julia and others like her, though not one of them had stood up in her defense when she was alive. The more Zoila thought about the lessons to be learned from the past lives of the unique humans photographed and displayed in Eisenmann’s studio, the more she regretted what she’d told Lucía. She encouraged Lucía to rejoice about embarking on an odyssey, and tempted her with the myth that her life could be heroic and enchanting, like a fairytale. The reality of the photos on the walls and the news clippings in the albums attested to the grim reality, the painful path of these tortured beings.

  On the first morning that the lethargic group of Frank Uffer’s little people woke up in Philadelphia, Lucía’s energy level soared high like the flying birdmen of Paplanta. While all the other performers sat in a sullen stupor, as sour as the milk and hard bread Mrs. Uffner offered for breakfast, and as glum as the quiescent General Mite, Lucía twirled around Zoila’s ample skirt and sang at the top of her lungs. Frank Uffner glared at Zoila and said, “Better tame that wee monkey or I will, you hear me, big girl?”

  Before Zoila could reprimand Lucía, the little sprite hopped onto Zoila’s arms. She pinched Zoila’s cheeks and asked, “Aren’t you happy that we’re finally in Philadelphia?”

  Lucía didn’t wait for a reply. “Zoila,” she chattered on, “is this the day I will be the star of the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition?”

  Frank overheard the question, and although he didn’t quite understand all the Span
ish words, he beat Zoila to the answer. He shouted back to Lucía, “You’ll be the star of the show only if I let you be the star. First, you gotta smile real pretty at the folks coming to see you, can you do that?’

  Lucía ignored him, but Zoila understood Frank’s bigger point. He was making it clear that he was the one who was in command here. So Zoila smiled wide at Frank and, fortunately, Lucía followed suit.

  Frank squatted at Lucía’s eye level and smiled back at her.

  “And don’t you forget to let my missus sell them photograph cards of you first,” he said. “Them cartes de visite or whatever fancy name they call’em. The people gotta buy your photograph first, before you start your entertaining. Do you understand me?”

  Frank rubbed his thumb and forefinger together.

  “Mucho dinero,” he said, standing up, and laughed uproariously at his deft display of the international gesture for money.

  His wife spoke under her breath. “I’d be real careful about spending the money you ain’t yet got, Frank. We haven’t even paid for the cartes de visite. And there’s quite a few we have to sell.”

  Frank swatted his wife’s derriere—a typically crude and rough gesture, Zoila thought, though she was still pretending to smile.

  “Don’t go about correcting me,” he barked at his wife. “Even if it’s only in front of the midgets and the big Mexican. I’m the one who decides what happens to this troupe. I only see my name here.”

  He pointed to a handbill resting on a side table and read it aloud so that everyone could hear him. “I guess your reading ain’t too good, is it missus?”

  The handbill read: Frank Uffner’s Marvelous American Midgets.

  His wife didn’t miss a beat nor did she look particularly threatened by her domineering husband.

  “You’re the boss, Frank,” she said. “Now, are we heading to the stage we rented or not? It’s already plenty crowded out on the streets.”

  Lucía stood on her tippy-toes and pointed to her photograph on the handbill. “Me big star, Mister Frank!”

  “Don’t you be gettin’ no big ideas, girlie.” Frank shoved Lucía away from the table. Zoila jumped up to grab her, determined to protect her from Frank’s roughness.

  “I done told you to keep this here monkey under control,” he hissed at Zoila, tapping a forefinger on the crown of Lucía’s delicate head. “If you can’t do that, what the hell good are you?”

  Frank moved around to slap Zoila on her rear end and cackled.

  “In a pinch,” he said, leaning in to whisper in her ear, “you’ll have to do if my missus is too tired.”

  He winked at Zoila and walked away with a loud snort.

  Zoila wanted to strike back, but she knew better than to pounce. Although she would have loved to pummel him for making his threats and insinuations, visions of the abused corpse of Julia Pastrana and the shriveled body of the Sicilian Fairy danced before her eyes. Their supposed managers, agents, and promoters had mistreated them savagely, and now Frank Uffner had bared his venomous fangs at her. He’d just demonstrated that he could hit Zoila or Lucía whenever he liked—and though Zoila could put up with it, an attack could prove fatal for Lucía.

  Zoila had seen Julia Pastrana’s hopeful gaze in the early photographs at Eisenman’s studio. Based on the dates of the photographs, Julia’s starry-eyed look of optimism, suggesting love for her manager-husband, had turned into empty eye-sockets of defeat. Life moved at such an accelerated pace outside of Mexico, and Zoila felt off-balance, unable to react rationally and confidently.

  Her heart began to pound with a perilous warning from Felipe. During his short life he had learned to weave in and out of the vanilla trade like a quivering shadow. As an indigenous Totonac, Felipe knew he had to tread gently in order not to offend the Italian and Spanish traders who had the resources to turn his vanilla vines into a vanilla goldmine. Felipe relied on his knowledge of the temperamental vanilla vines and the Melipona bees that pollinated it—and, more significantly, he kept the locations of the vines a secret. Although gentle by nature, Felipe could dispose of an intruder among his vanilla beans in an efficient —and lethal—manner. Often, when he performed the ancient aerial ritual at 120 feet above the ground, he allowed a few teardrops of remorse to wet the soil below, to pay tribute to the men he had buried deep underground. But when Felipe whirled to the four cardinal directions, which he and the other flyers represented the four elements, he also accepted his role in his universe: to protect his people’s fragrant goldmine at all costs.

  Zoila gulped with trepidation, acknowledging her own role as Lucía’s protector. She attempted to lift Lucía in a protective gesture, as if her wide hug could shield both of them from an impending gloom, a dark, vaporous miasma of misery, but Lucía stood her ground. Zoila knelt down.

  “Ignore Frank when he’s rough,” she whispered to Lucía. “He just wants you to entertain the crowds and—”

  Lucía put her soft hand on Zoila’s cheek and sighed.

  “I’m almost thirteen-years-old, you know. I know that Mister Frank just wants to show the world what an incredible treasure he discovered.” Lucía giggled and tapped her chest. “And that treasure is me!”

  “But you have to follow his commands or he might get angry with you and send you back to Mexico and—”

  Now it was Lucía’s turn to snort. “He’s not sending me back to Mexico. He’s going to make so much money showing me to all these gringos.” She performed her own hand gesture imitating the exchange of money. “You and I are going to take all my money and live like princesses back in Mexico.”

  She punctuated her financial forecast with a giggle as high-pitched as the reed flute notes of the flying birdmen of Paplanta.

  Zoila held her breath with a new awareness. Since leaving Mexico, clearly Lucía had undergone a rapid metamorphosis, as if nature had bestowed upon her intuition and wisdom in inverse quantity to her diminutive size. The Lucía who cowered on the boat as it swayed towards New Orleans, the same girl who shook with fear at the sight of the brujo, the sorcerer who had slithered onboard, was growing into a confident teen willing to go toe-to toe with Frank Uffner’s commands.

  Zoila had underestimated Lucía completely. True, her actions revealed a contradictory temperament: at times she was impetuous as a toddler only to quickly surrender to docility, But now she was transforming into a butterfly unafraid to flap her own unique colors knowing full-well that she was the marvelous star attraction in Frank Uffner’s gaudy troupe.

  Zoila admired Lucía’s bravado; such confidence would be helpful on the stage. But back in Papantla, Zoila had once been sure of her own negotiating and linguistic skills, only to discover that the vanilla traders in town considered her an inferior girl, dismissing her soundly after her father died. From across the room, Zoila watched Lucía try to befriend General Mite. She even wondered if Lucía was flirting unsuccessfully with him. Zoila realized she would have to keep a close eye out for Frank Uffner’s ulterior motives, and an equally close eye on Lucía’s amorous intentions towards General Mite.

  Zoila’s heart quivered and she felt apprehensive, as if Felipe wasn’t quite done with his warning. She felt inadequate maneuvering this strange business world in the United States. Would she be able to fend off Frank Uffner’s advances? Would she be able to keep Lucía innocent and teach her how to charm audiences? Would she ever collect the money she was promised for taking charge of Lucía?

  Frank Uffner interrupted her musings with a sharp elbow to her side. He handed her two heavy boxes.

  “You go with the missus to the stage and help her set up,” he commanded. “Then you come right back and carry Lucía out there in her fancy basket. Cover her up real well so no one sees her for free, you hear? We aim to make these folks in Philadelphia pay big—real big—to see this wee monkey.”

  The streets of Philadelphia were jam-packed with enthusiastic fair goers, modern streetcars, old-fashioned wagons, and loud peddlers galore. All were engulfed in
a chaotic yet earnest display of civic pride that impressed Zoila. She followed Mrs. Uffner’s booming steps as they zigzagged through the masses. For a small woman, Mrs. Uffner’s footsteps resembled galloping hoofs at a racetrack. Zoila grappled with her heavy packages, perspiration streaming into her eyes. She blinked, unable to focus on anything beyond the tall fence surrounding the grounds of the Centennial Exhibition.

  Zoila had read about the architectural gems that had been constructed on the festival grounds to impress international delegations. She had heard about the imposing dome of the Memorial Hall and its Beaux-Art style. She’d never laid eyes on such an architectural style back in Mexico and she couldn’t even fathom how a raised monorail could operate—but still, she couldn’t wait to ride in it. Zoila wanted to take-in all the hoopla of the exhibition, so she attempted to slow-down Mrs. Uffner by chatting her up.

  “Will we be riding the monorail, Madam?”

  Mrs. Uffner guffawed. Zoila decided she needed to butter her up.

  “You Americans are the most industrious people on earth, Madam. Every day you seem to have so many inventions. The new monorail is supposed to run on a track high above the ground and there’s a double-decker—”

  Mrs. Uffner paused long enough to give Zoila a contemptuous stare. “Does it look like I invented anything other than hell on earth with all you freaks eating me out of house and home? Would we be laden like pack mules right now if I had the coins to ride a whatchamacallit?”

  “Perhaps I can sell some of Lucía’s photographs by that beautiful building with the wrought iron roof trusses over there?” Zoila suggested, pointing to the imposing main building. She knew that Mr. and Mrs. Uffner placed a premium on the importance of money, and she really wanted to enter the exhibition grounds.

  “You may know about roof trusses and mono-whatevers, but you don’t know diddly about the people who are going to pay to see Lucía.” Mrs. Uffner stood still long enough to pile yet another of her heavy boxes on top of Zoila’s burdensome load. “You may know other languages but you ain’t here for any new inventions. You’s here to do what I tell you to do. Now shut up. We’s got many more blocks to walk.”