Portrait in Sepia

by Isabel Allende

  DEDICATION

  For Carmen Balcells and Ramón Huidobro,

  two lions born on the same day,

  forever alive

  EPIGRAPH

  And that’s why I have to go back

  to so many places in the future,

  there to find myself

  and constantly examine myself

  with no witness but the moon

  and then whistle with joy,

  ambling over rocks and clods of earth,

  with no task but to live,

  with no family but the road.

  —PABLO NERUDA, End of the World (Wind)

  CONTENTS

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Part One

  Part Two

  Part Three

  Epilogue

  P.S.Insight Interviews & More . . .

  About the Author

  About the book

  Read on

  Praise for Portrait in Sepia

  Also by Isabel Allende

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  PART ONE

  1862–1880

  I came into the world one Tuesday in the autumn of 1880, in San Francisco, in the home of my maternal grandparents. While inside that labyrinthine wood house my mother panted and pushed, her valiant heart and desperate bones laboring to open a way out to me, the savage life of the Chinese quarter was seething outside, with its unforgettable aroma of exotic food, its deafening torrent of shouted dialects, its inexhaustible swarms of human bees hurrying back and forth. I was born in the early morning, but in Chinatown the clocks obey no rules, and at that hour the market, the cart traffic, the woeful barking of caged dogs awaiting the butcher’s cleaver, were beginning to heat up. I have come to know the details of my birth rather late in life, but it would have been worse not to discover them at all, they could have been lost forever in the cracks and crannies of oblivion. There are so many secrets in my family that I may never have time to unveil them all: truth is short-lived, watered down by torrents of rain. My maternal grandparents welcomed me with emotion—even though according to several witnesses I was ugly as sin—and placed me at my mother’s breast, where I lay cuddled for a few minutes, the only ones I was to have with her. Afterward my uncle Lucky blew his breath in my face to pass his good luck on to me. His intention was generous and the method infallible, because at least for these first thirty years of my life, things have gone well. But careful! I don’t want to get ahead of myself. This is a long story, and it begins before my birth; it requires patience in the telling and even more in the listening. If I lose the thread along the way, don’t despair, because you can count on picking it up a few pages further on. Since we have to begin at some date, let’s make it 1862, and let’s say, to choose something at random, that the story begins with a piece of furniture of unlikely proportions.

  Paulina del Valle’s bed was ordered from Florence the year following the coronation of Victor Emmanuel, when in the new kingdom of Italy the echoes of Garibaldi’s cannon shots were still reverberating. It crossed the ocean, dismantled, in a Genoese vessel, was unloaded in New York in the midst of a bloody strike, and was transferred to one of the steamships of the shipping line of my paternal grandparents, the Rodríguez de Santa Cruzes, Chileans residing in the United States. It was the task of Captain John Sommers to receive the crates marked in Italian with a single word: naiads. That robust English seaman, of whom all that remains is a faded portrait and a leather trunk badly scuffed from infinite sea journeys and filled with strange manuscripts, was my great-grandfather, as I found out recently when my past finally began to come clear after many years of mystery. I never met Captain John Sommers, the father of Eliza Sommers, my maternal grandmother, but from him I inherited a certain bent for wandering. To that man of the sea, pure horizon and salt, fell the task of transporting the Florentine bed in the hold of his ship to the other side of the American continent. He had to make his way through the Yankee blockade and Confederate attacks, sail to the southern limits of the Atlantic, pass through the treacherous waters of the Strait of Magellan, sail into the Pacific Ocean, and then, after putting in briefly at several South American ports, point the bow of his ship toward northern California, that venerable land of gold. He had precise orders to open the crates on the pier in San Francisco, supervise the ship’s carpenter while he assembled the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle, taking care not to nick the carvings, install the mattress and ruby-colored canopy, set the whole construction on a cart, and dispatch it at a leisurely pace to the heart of the city. The coachman was to make two complete turns around Union Square, and another two—while jingling a little bell—before the balcony of my grandfather’s concubine, before depositing it at its final destination, the home of Paulina del Valle. This fanfaronade was to be performed in the midst of the Civil War, when Yankee and Confederate armies were massacring each other in the South and no one was in any mood for jokes or little bells. John Sommers fulfilled the instructions cursing, because during months of sailing that bed had come to symbolize what he most detested about his job: the whims of his employer, Paulina del Valle. When he saw the bed displayed on the cart, he sighed and decided that that would be the last thing he would ever do for her. He had spent twelve years following her orders and had reached the limits of his patience. That bed still exists, intact. It is a weighty dinosaur of polychrome wood; the headboard is presided over by the god Neptune surrounded by foaming waves and undersea creatures in bas-relief, and the foot, frolicking dolphins and cavorting sirens. Within a few hours, half of San Francisco had the opportunity to appreciate that Olympian bed. My grandfather’s amour, however, the one to whom the spectacle was dedicated, hid as the cart went by, and then went by a second time with its little bell.

  “My triumph lasted about a minute,” Paulina confessed to me many years later, when I insisted on photographing the bed and knowing all the details. “The joke backfired on me. I thought everyone would make fun of Feliciano, but they turned it on me. I misjudged. Who would have imagined such hypocrisy? In those days San Francisco was a hornet’s nest of corrupt politicians, bandits, and loose women.”

  “They didn’t like your defiance,” I suggested.

  “No, they didn’t. It’s expected that we women will protect our husband’s reputation, no matter how vile.”

  “Your husband wasn’t vile,” I rebutted.

  “No, but he did a lot of stupid things. In any case, I’m not sorry about the famous bed, I’ve slept in it for forty years.”

  “What did your husband do when he found he was discovered?”

  “He told me that while the country was bleeding through a civil war, I was buying furniture fit for Caligula. And he denied everything, of course. No one with an ounce of sense admits an infidelity, even if they catch you in bed.”

  “Do you say that from experience?”

  “I wish it were so, Aurora!” replied Paulina del Valle unhesitatingly.

  In the first photograph I took of her, when I was thirteen, Paulina is in her mythological bed, propped up on pillows of embroidered satin, wearing a lace nightgown, and decked out in a pound of jewels. That’s how I saw her many times, and that’s how I would have liked to see her at her wake, but she wanted to go to the grave in the somber habit of the Carmelites and for several years have masses sung for the repose of her soul. “I’ve created plenty of scandal, it’s time to pay the piper,” was her explanation when she sank into the wintry melancholy of her last days. Seeing herself so near the end, she became terrified. She banished the bed to the cellar and in its place installed a wooden platform with a horsehair mattress, to die without luxuries after living with such excess, and see if Saint Peter would start a new account in the book
of her sins, as she said. Her fear, nevertheless, was not so far-reaching that she gave up other material goods, and up to her last breath she held the reins of her financial empire, by then very reduced, in her hands. Of the bravura of her youth very little was left at the end, even her irony was wearing thin, but my grandmother created her own legend, and no horsehair mattress or Carmelite habit could stand in her way. The Florentine bed, which she granted herself the pleasure of parading through the main streets to mortify her husband, was one of her most glorious moments. At that time the family was living in San Francisco, using another name—Cross—because no North American could pronounce the rotund syllables of Rodríguez de Santa Cruz y del Valle, a true shame since their authentic name carried centuries-old resonances of the Inquisition. They had just moved to Nob Hill, where they had constructed an outlandish mansion, one of the most opulent in the city, a delirium conceived by a number of competing architects contracted and dismissed every other day. The family had not made its fortune during the gold rush in 1849, as Feliciano claimed, but, rather, thanks to the unequaled entrepreneurial instincts of his wife, who had come up with the idea of transporting fresh produce packed in beds of Antarctic ice from Chile to California. During that tumultuous era a peach fetched an ounce of gold, and Paulina knew how to capitalize on those circumstances. Her enterprise prospered, and the family came to own a flotilla of ships sailing between Valparaíso and San Francisco. At first they had returned empty, but soon they were retracing their route laden with California flour. In the process they ruined several Chilean agriculturists, including Paulina’s father, the daunting Agustín del Valle, whose wheat rotted in warehouses because he could not compete with the Yankee’s finely ground white flour. His liver rotted as well, from rage. At the end of the gold fever, after losing their health and soul in pursuit of a dream, thousands and thousands of adventurers returned home poorer than when they had left, but Paulina and Feliciano made a fortune. They took their place at the apogee of San Francisco society, despite the almost insuperable obstacle of having a Spanish accent. “In California everyone is newly rich and lowborn,” Paulina always muttered in the days before she folded her tent and went back to Chile, “whereas our genealogical tree goes back to the time of the Crusades.” Titles of nobility or bank accounts were not, however, the only thing that opened doors to them; there was also the congeniality of Feliciano, who made friends among the most powerful men of the city. It was quite difficult, in contrast, to swallow his wife, who was ostentatious, foulmouthed, and irreverent, a woman who trampled over everyone in her path. No way to deny it: at first Paulina inspired the mixture of fascination and fear you feel when you see an iguana; only when you knew her better did you discover her sentimental side. In 1862 she launched her husband in a commercial enterprise linked with the transcontinental railroad—one that made them enormously wealthy. I can’t explain where that woman got her nose for business. She came from a family of Chilean landowners, rigid in judgment and limited of spirit. She was raised in her father’s family home in Valparaíso, saying the rosary and embroidering, because her father believed that ignorance guaranteed the submission of women and the poor. She barely mastered the rudiments of writing and arithmetic, she never read a book in her life, and she added on her fingers—she never subtracted—yet everything she touched made money. Had it not been for her spendthrift sons and relatives, she would have died with all the splendor of an empress. Those were the years the railroad connecting the east and the west coasts of the United States was being built. While everyone was investing in the stocks of the two companies and betting on which could lay rails the faster, she, indifferent to that frivolous race, spread a map on the dining room table and with a topographer’s patience studied the future route of the train along with locations where abundant water was to be found. Long before the humble Chinese laborers drove the last nail joining the tracks in Promontory, Utah, and the first locomotive crossed the continent with its clashing iron and volcanic smoke, bawling like a ship in distress, she had convinced her husband to buy land at the places marked on her map with crosses in red ink.

  “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 i
deas, 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, Agustín 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.