Portrait in Sepia

by Isabel Allende

  “That’s your problem, my boy. What you do with your life is not incumbent on me.”

  Nevertheless, in the next months Severo was aware that Paulina was closely following his progress in the legal firm, keeping a close eye on his friendships and a close accounting of his expenses, and anticipating his every step even before he took it. How she knew so much was a mystery, unless Williams, the inscrutable butler, had organized a network of spies. The man directed an army of servants who discharged their duties like silent shadows; they lived in separate quarters at the back of the grounds and were forbidden to speak to the master and mistress of the family unless they were rung for. Nor could they speak to the butler without first passing through the head housekeeper. Severo had difficulty understanding such hierarchies, because in Chile things were much simpler. The patrones, even the most despotic like his grandfather, treated their employees harshly but attended to their needs and considered them part of the family. Severo had never known a maidservant to be dismissed; those women came to work in their home at puberty and stayed until they died. The small palace on Nob Hill was very different from the monastic homes of his childhood, with their thick adobe walls and lugubrious iron gates, and their sparse furniture lined up against bare walls. In his aunt Paulina’s home it would have been an impossible task to compile an inventory of contents, from the heavy silver door latches and faucets in the bathroom to the collections of porcelain figurines, lacquered Russian boxes, Chinese ivories, and whatever objet d’art or whim of greed was in vogue. Feliciano Rodríguez de Santa Cruz bought things to impress his visitors, but he was not a barbarian like others of his wealthy friends who bought books by the pound and paintings to match the upholstery. As for Paulina, she was not in the least attached to those treasures: the only piece of furniture she had ordered in her life was her bed, and she had done that for reasons that had nothing to do with aesthetics or ostentation. What interested Paulina was money, pure and simple; her challenge lay in earning it astutely, accumulating it tenaciously, and investing it wisely. She paid no attention to the things her husband acquired or to where they were displayed, so the result was a grandiose house in which the residents felt like strangers. The paintings were enormous, the frames massive, the themes intrepid—Alexander the Great at the Conquest of Persia—and there were also hundreds of lesser paintings, organized by subject, for which various rooms were named: the hunting salon, the marine salon, the watercolor salon. The drapes were heavy velvet weighed down with fringe, and the Venetian mirrors reflected to infinity: marble columns, tall Sèvres vases, bronze statuary, and urns overflowing with flowers and fruit. There was a two-story library and two music salons filled with fine Italian instruments, although no one in the family knew how to play them and music gave Paulina a headache. Gold-initialed silver spittoons sat in every corner, because in that frontier city it was perfectly acceptable to spit in public. Feliciano had his suite in the Oriental wing, and his wife had hers on the same floor but at the opposite end of the mansion. Between the two, joined by a broad corridor, were the children’s bedrooms and guest rooms, all empty except for Severo’s and one occupied by Matías, the eldest son, the only one still living at home. Severo del Valle, accustomed to the discomfort and cold that in Chile were considered good for one’s health, spent several weeks becoming accustomed to the oppressive embrace of the feather mattress and pillows, the eternal summer of the stoves, and the daily surprise of turning the bathroom tap and being rewarded by a stream of warm water. In his grandfather’s house the toilets were stinking privies at the back of the patio, and on early winter mornings there was a film of ice in the washbasins.

  The hours of the siesta often found the young nephew and his incomparable aunt on the mythological bed, she under the covers, with her account books on one side and her pastries on the other, and he, sitting at her feet between the naiad and the dolphin, discussing family and business affairs. Only with Severo did Paulina permit such a level of intimacy; very few people had access to her private rooms, but with him she felt totally at ease in her nightgown. This nephew gave her the satisfaction she never received from her children. The two younger sons lived the life of heirs, luxuriating in symbolic employment as directors of the clan’s enterprises, one in London, the other in Boston. Matías, the firstborn, was destined to head the line of the Rodríguez de Santa Cruz y del Valles, but he didn’t have the least vocation for it. Far from following in the footsteps of his spirited parents, taking an interest in their empire, or fathering male sons to prolong the family name, he had made hedonism and celibacy an art form. “He’s little more than a well-dressed fool,” Paulina described him once to Severo, but when she learned how well her son and her nephew got on, she worked diligently to foster that emerging friendship. “My mother never takes a stitch with an unthreaded needle,” Matías joked. “She must be planning for you to save me from a life of dissipation.” Severo had no thought of taking on the task of changing his cousin. Just the opposite—he would have been happy to be like him; by comparison he felt stiff and funereal. Everything about Matías astounded him: his impeccable style, his glacial irony, the ease with which he threw money around.

  “I want you to be familiar with my business dealings. This is a vulgar and materialistic society, with very little respect for women. Here nothing matters except fortune and contacts—that’s why I need you,” Paulina announced to her nephew a few months after he arrived. “You will be my eyes and ears.”

  “I don’t know anything about business.”

  “But I do. I’m not asking you to think, that’s my job. You keep your mouth shut, watch, listen, and report to me. Then you do what I tell you, without asking too many questions. Are we clear on this?”

  “Don’t ask me to play any tricks, Aunt,” Severo replied with dignity.

  “I see you’ve heard gossip about me. Look, my boy, laws were invented by the strong in order to dominate the weak—there are so many more of them. But I have no obligation to respect those laws. I need a lawyer I have complete confidence in so I can do whatever I please without getting into trouble.”

  “In an honorable fashion, I hope,” Severo warned.

  “Oh, child! We won’t get anywhere that way. Your honor will be safe, as long as you don’t exaggerate.”

  So they sealed a pact as strong as the blood ties that united them. Paulina, who had taken him in with no expectations, convinced that he was a rogue or they would never have sent him to her from Chile, was happily surprised by this clever nephew with the noble sentiments. Within a few years, Severo had learned to speak English with a facility no one else in the family had shown; he had come to know his aunt’s various undertakings like the palm of his hand, had traveled twice across the United States by train—one of them attacked by Mexican bandits—and even had time to complete his legal training. Severo maintained a weekly correspondence with his cousin Nívea, which with the passing years was becoming more intellectual than romantic. She wrote him about the family and Chilean politics; he bought her books and clipped articles about the advances of the suffragettes in Europe and the United States. The news that an amendment to authorize the vote for women had been presented before the North American Congress was celebrated by both, long distance, although they were in agreement that to imagine anything similar in Chile was madness. “What do I gain by studying and reading so much, Cousin,” wrote his sweetheart, “if there is no place for action in a woman’s life? My mother says it will be impossible to marry me off because I frighten men away, and that I should make myself pretty and keep my mouth closed if I want a husband. My family applauds the least sign of learning in my brothers—I say least because you already know how dim-witted they are—but in me the same achievement is considered boastful. The one person who tolerates me is my uncle José Francisco, because I offer him the opportunity to talk about science, astronomy, and politics, subjects he likes to hold forth on, although my opinions don’t matter to him. You cannot imagine how I envy men like you, who
have the world for a stage.” Love never took up more than a couple of lines in Nívea’s letters and a couple of words in Severo’s, as if they had a tacit agreement to erase their intense and hasty caresses in the corners. Twice a year, Nívea sent Severo her photograph, so he could see that she was becoming a woman; he promised to send her one but always forgot, as he also forgot to tell her that he would not be coming home that Christmas. Another girl, one in greater haste to marry than Nívea, would have angled her antennae to locate a less evasive sweetheart, but she never doubted that Severo del Valle would be her husband. So sure was she that their separation, which dragged on for years, did not overly concern her; she was prepared to wait to the end of time. As for Severo, he held the memory of his cousin as a symbol of everything good, noble, and pure.

  Matías’s appearance possibly justified his mother’s opinion that he was nothing but a well-dressed fool, but there was nothing of the fool about him. He had visited all the important museums of Europe, he knew about art, he could recite every classical poet who ever lived, and he was the one person who used the library in their home. He cultivated his own style, a mixture of bohemian and dandy: of the former he had the habit of nightlife and of the latter his mania for details of haberdashery. He was considered the best catch in San Francisco, but he made no bones about being a confirmed bachelor; he preferred a trivial conversation with the worst of his male enemies to a tryst with the most attractive of his female admirers. The only place his life might coincide with a woman’s was for procreation, he said, a proposition absurd in itself. To answer the demands of nature he preferred a professional from among the many who were available. A late night among gentlemen that did not end with a brandy at the bar and a visit to a brothel was inconceivable; there were more than a quarter million prostitutes in the country, and a good percentage of them earned their living in San Francisco, from the miserable Singsong Girls of Chinatown to refined ladies from southern states forced by the Civil War into life as courtesans. The young heir, so little tolerant of feminine weaknesses, was a model of patience with the gross behavior of his bohemian friends; that was another of his eccentricities, like his taste for thin black cigarettes, which he ordered from Egypt, and for real and literary crimes. He lived in his parents’ palatial home on Nob Hill and maintained a luxurious apartment in the heart of the city, crowned by a spacious garret he called the garçonnière, where he occasionally painted and frequently hosted soirees. He mixed with the bohemian underworld, poor devils sunk in stoic and inescapable poverty: poets, journalists, photographers, aspiring writers and artists, men without families who spent their lives half ill, coughing and conversing, and who lived on credit and never wore a watch because time had not been invented for them. Behind the back of the aristocratic Chilean, they made fun of his clothes and his manners, but they put up with him because they could always come to him for a few dollars, a drink of whiskey, or a spot in his garret to spend a foggy night.

  “Have you noticed that Matías has the mannerisms of a sodomite?” Paulina commented to her husband.

  “How could you even think of saying such a barbarous thing about your own son!” protested Feliciano. “We’ve never had one of those in my family, or in yours!”

  “Do you know any normal man who matches the color of his muffler to his wallpaper?” snorted Paulina.

  “All right, goddammit! You’re his mother, and it’s up to you to find a sweetheart for him! This boy is already thirty and is still a bachelor. You’d better be finding one soon, before we have a tubercular alcoholic on our hands, or worse,” warned Feliciano, unaware that it was already too late for lukewarm measures of salvation.

  On one of those nights of chilling winds so typical of summer in San Francisco, Williams, the butler of the swallowtail coat, knocked at the door of Severo del Valle’s room.

  “Forgive the intrusion, sir,” he murmured with a discreet cough, entering with a three-candle candelabrum in his gloved hand.

  “What is it, Williams?” asked Severo, alarmed because it was the first time anyone had interrupted his sleep in that house.

  “I fear we have a small difficulty on our hands. It’s Mr. Matías,” said Williams, with that pompous British deference, unknown in California, that always sounded more ironic than respectful. At that late hour, he explained, a message had been delivered to the house, sent by a lady of doubtful reputation, one Amanda Lowell, whom the young gentleman often visited, one of those people from “a different ambience,” as Williams put it. Severo read the note by the light of the candles: only three lines, seeking immediate help for Matías.

  “We must advise my aunt and uncle—Matías may have had an accident,” Severo del Valle decided.

  “Look at the address, sir. Right in the very center of Chinatown. It seems to me that it would be better if the master and his lady were not informed,” suggested the butler.

  “Really! I thought you had no secrets from my aunt Paulina.”

  “I try to avoid upsetting her, sir.”

  “What do you suggest we do?”

  “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 s
imilar 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 Matías 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 Matías 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.