Portrait in Sepia

by Isabel Allende

  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 Misión, 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.

  Lynn adored her father—impossible not to love that gentle, generous man—but she was ashamed of her race. She realized at an early age that the only place for Chinese was their quarter; they were detested in the rest of the city. The favorite sport of white youths was to stone the Celestials or cut off their queues after beating them up. Like her mother, Lynn lived with one foot in China and the other in the United States; they both spoke English and dressed in the American style, even though at home they usually wore silk tunics and trousers. Lynn had little of her father about her, except for her long bones and Oriental eyes, and even less of her mother. No one knew where her rare beauty had come from. Her parents never let her play outdoors, as they had her brother Lucky, because in Chinatown women and girls from proper families were recluses. On the rare occasions that she walked through the quarter, she held her father’s hand and kept her eyes lowered to keep from provoking the almost exclusively male throngs. Father and daughter attracted attention: she for her beauty and he because he dressed like an American. Tao Chi’en had years before renounced the typical queue of his people, and he wore his hair short and combed straight back; he dressed in an impeccable black suit, a shirt with a celluloid collar, and a top hat. Outside Chinatown, however, Lynn went around as free as any white girl. She attended a Presbyterian school where she learned the rudiments of Christianity, which, added to the Buddhist practices of her father, eventually convinced her that Christ was the reincarnation of Buddha. She went shopping alone, as she did to her piano lessons and to visit her school friends; in the afternoons she sat in her mother’s tearoom, where she did her homework and entertained herself rereading the romantic novels she bought for ten cents or that her aunt Rose sent her from London. Eliza Sommers’s efforts to interest Lynn in the kitchen or in other domestic activities were futile: her daughter did not seem cut out for everyday chores.

  As she grew older, Lynn kept her exotic angel face, but her body began to round with perturbing curves. For years her photographs had circulated without major consequences, but everything changed when by fifteen she was fully developed and had become aware of the devastating effect she had on men. Her mother, terrified by the consequences of that tremendous power, tried to tame her daughter’s bent for seduction, driving home the norms of modesty and teaching her to walk like a soldier, without moving her shoulders or hips. But to no avail; men of every age, race, and condition turned to stare at her. Once Lynn understood the advantages of her beauty, she stopped cursing it, as she had when she was young, and decided that she would be an artist’s model for a while until a prince on a winged horse came along to lead her to matrimonial bliss. During her childhood, her parents had tolerated the photographs of fairies and swings, thinking of them as an innocent caprice, but they considered it an enormous risk to let her show off her new womanly image in front of the cameras. “This business of posing isn’t decent work, it will be her ruination,” Eliza Sommers determined sadly; she knew that she could not dissuade her daughter from fantasies or protect her from the trap of beauty. She presented her qualms to Tao Chi’en in one of those perfect moments when they were resting after making love. He explained to her that every person has his or her karma, that it isn’t possible to direct others’ lives, only sometimes to amend the direction of one’s own, but Eliza was not prepared to allow misfortune to catch her daughter off guard. She had always accompanied Lynn when she posed for photographs, making sure of their decency—no bare calves using the excuse of art—and now that the girl was nineteen, she was ready to redouble her zeal.

  “There’s this painter following Lynn around. He wants her to pose for a painting of Salome,” she announced to her husband one day.

  “Who?”

  “Salome. The one with the seven veils, Tao. Read the Bible.”

  “If she’s in the Bible, I suppose it’s all right,” he murmured absentmindedly.

  “Do you know what the fashion was in the time of Saint John the Baptist? If I don’t keep an eye on her, they’ll be painting your daughter with her breasts bared!”

  “Then keep an eye on her.” Tao smiled. He caught his wife about the waist and pulled her down onto the large book open on his knees, telling her she shouldn’t be frightened by tricks of the imagination.

  “Oh, Tao! What are we going to do about Lynn?”

  “Nothing, Eliza. She will marry one day and give us grandchildren.”

  “She’s still a child!”

  “In China she would already be too old to get a bridegroom.”

  “We’re in America, and she’s not going to marry a Chinese man,” she said with conviction.

  “Why? Don’t you like Chinese?” the zhong-yi teased.

  “T
here isn’t another man like you in all the world, Tao, but I think Lynn will marry a white man.”

  “Americans don’t know how to make love, I’m told.”

  “Maybe you could teach them.” Eliza blushed, her nose in her husband’s neck.

  Lynn posed for the portrait of Salome wearing flesh-colored tights beneath her veils and scrupulously supervised by her mother, but Eliza Sommers could not take the same firm stand when her daughter was offered the enormous honor of modeling for the statue of the Republic that was to be displayed in the center of Union Square. The campaign to raise funds had lasted for months, and people contributed what they were able: schoolchildren their pennies, widows a few dollars, and magnates like Feliciano Rodríguez de Santa Cruz fat checks. Every day the newspapers published the amount raised the day before, until enough had been gathered to commission the monument from a famous sculptor brought especially from Philadelphia to carry out that ambitious project. The most distinguished families in the city competed by giving parties and balls to allow the artist the opportunity of choosing their daughters; it was known that the model for the Republic would be the symbol of all San Francisco, and every young girl aspired to the distinction. The sculptor, a modern man with bold ideas, looked for weeks for the ideal girl, but none satisfied him. To represent this vigorous American nation composed of valiant immigrants from the four corners of the world, he announced, he wanted a model of mixed blood. The financiers of the project and the city officials were alarmed: whites could not imagine that people of another color were entirely human, and no one wanted to hear of a mulatto girl presiding over the city from atop the obelisque in Union Square, as the artist intended. California was in the vanguard in questions of art, said the newspaper editorials, but the business of the mulatto was a lot to ask. The sculptor was at the point of succumbing to the pressure and selecting a descendant of some Danes when by chance one day he went into Eliza Sommers’s pastry shop, planning to console himself with a chocolate éclair, and saw Lynn. There was the woman he had been seeking to pose for his sculpture: tall, beautifully proportioned, with perfect bones, and not only did she have the dignity of an empress and a face with classic features, she also had the stamp of exoticism he desired. There was something about her beyond mere harmony, something unique, a blend of East and West, of sensuality and innocence, of strength and delicacy, that seduced him completely. When he informed Eliza that he had chosen her daughter to be his model, convinced that he was bestowing a tremendous honor on that modest family of pastry makers, he encountered firm resistance. Eliza Sommers was fed up with wasting her time chaperoning Lynn in the studios of photographers whose only task consisted of pressing a button; just the idea of having to do that for this little man who would be creating a bronze sculpture several meters tall exhausted her. Lynn, however, was so proud of the possibility of being the Republic that Eliza could not refuse her. The sculptor found he had to pull out all the stops to convince the mother that a brief tunic was the appropriate attire for this work, because she couldn’t see the relation between a North American republic and the clothing of ancient Greece, but finally they agreed that Lynn would pose with bare arms and legs, though with her breasts covered.

  Lynn was indifferent to her mother’s worries about protecting her virtue, lost as she was in her world of romantic fantasies. Except for her dazzling looks, Lynn was not outstanding; she was an ordinary young girl who collected china figurines and copied poems into notebooks with pink pages. Her languor was not elegance but laziness, and her melancholy shallowness, not mystery. “Just leave her alone; as long as I’m alive Lynn will never want for anything,” Lucky had promised again and again, because he was the only one who fully understood how silly his sister was.

  Lucky, several years older than Lynn, was a hundred percent Chinese. Except on the rare occasions when he had to sign some legal document or have his picture taken, he dressed in a smock, loose trousers, a sash at his waist, and slippers with wooden soles, but he also always wore a cowboy hat. He did not have his father’s distinguished bearing, his mother’s delicacy, or his sister’s beauty; he had short legs, a square head, and a slightly greenish complexion. People found him attractive, nevertheless, because of his irresistible smile and contagious optimism, which came from the certainty that he was marked by good luck. Nothing bad could happen to him, he believed; his happiness and fortune had been guaranteed from birth. He had discovered that gift when he was nine years old, playing fan-tan with other boys; that day he had run into the house announcing that from that moment his name would be Lucky—instead of Ebanizer—and that he would not answer to any other name. Good luck had followed him everywhere; he won at every game of chance, and although he was rebellious and impertinent, he had never had problems with the tongs or the white authorities. Even the Irish policemen fell victim to his charm, and while his buddies got beatings, he got out of jams with a joke or a magic trick, one of the many he performed with his prodigious prestidigitator’s hands. Tao Chi’en could not resign himself to the happy-go-lucky attitude of his only son and cursed the good star that allowed him to escape the hard work of ordinary mortals. It was not happiness he wished for him, but transcendence. He worried when he saw Lucky passing through this world like a songbird; with that attitude, he would damage his karma. Tao believed that the soul makes its way toward heaven through compassion and suffering, overcoming obstacles with nobility and generosity, but if Lucky’s road was easy all the way, what would he have to overcome? In his next incarnation Tao feared his son would come back as a flea. His firstborn, whose duty was to help him in his old age and honor his memory after his death, should continue the noble family tradition of healing; he even dreamed of seeing him become the first Chinese-American physician with a diploma. Lucky, however, was horrified by foul-smelling potions and acupuncture needles; nothing repelled him as much as others’ illnesses, and he could not understand his father’s pleasure when faced with an infected bladder or face spotted with pustules. Until he was sixteen and out on his own, he had to assist in the consulting room, where Tao Chi’en drummed in the names of remedies and their applications and tried to teach Lucky the indefinable art of taking pulses, balancing energy, and identifying humors, subtleties that went in one ear and out the other. At least Lucky was not traumatized by those chores, as he was by the scientific tomes of Western medicine his father studied so faithfully. The surgical operations described in crulest detail horrified him, as did the illustrations of bodies with peeled-back skin, their muscles, veins, and bones revealed, though not their modestly covered private parts. He never ran short of excuses for getting away from the clinic, but he was always available when it was time to hide one of the miserable Singsong Girls his father often brought to their house. That secret and dangerous activity was made to his measure. No one better than he for moving the lifeless girls under the very noses of the tongs; no one more skillful for spiriting them out of the quarter as soon as they had recovered a little; no one more ingenious in making them disappear forever on the four winds of freedom. He didn’t do these things for reasons of compassion, as Tao Chi’en did, but rather for the excitement of taking risks and putting his good luck to the test.

  Before she was nineteen, Lynn Sommers had rejected a number of suitors and was accustomed to male attentions, which she received with queenly disdain, for none of her admirers fit her image of a romantic prince, and none spoke the words her aunt Rose Sommers wrote in her novels; she judged every one of them to be ordinary, unworthy of her. She believed she had found the sublime destiny she so richly deserved when she met the one man who never looked at her twice, Matías Rodríguez de Santa Cruz. She had seen him several times from a distance, in the street or in a coach with Paulina del Valle, but they had never exchanged a word. He was older, and he moved in circles to which Lynn had no entrée; and had it not been for the statue of the Republic, they might never have crossed paths.

  Under the pretext of supervising the costly project, the politician
s and magnates who had contributed to the cost of the statue often met in the sculptor’s studio. The artist basked in fame and loved the good life; while he worked, seemingly absorbed in fashioning the mold into which the bronze would be poured, he enjoyed the boisterous male companionship, along with the bottles of champagne, the fresh oysters, and the good cigars his visitors brought with them. On a platform, illuminated by a skylight in the ceiling where natural light filtered through, Lynn Sommers balanced on tiptoe, arms upraised, in a pose impossible to maintain for more than a few minutes; dressed in a light pleated tunic that hung from one shoulder to her knees, revealing her body as much as covering it, she held a laurel wreath in one hand and a parchment with the U.S. Constitution in the other. San Francisco was a good market for the female nude: all the bars displayed paintings of voluptuous odalisques, photographs of courtesans with exposed buttocks, and plaster frescoes on which nymphs were chased by tireless satyrs. A totally naked model would have provoked less curiosity than this girl who refused to remove her clothes and was never free of her mother’s eagle eye. Eliza Sommers, in a dark dress, sitting stiffly in a chair beside the platform where her daughter was posing, kept watch, refusing the oysters and champagne offered in an attempt to distract her. Those foolish old men were motivated by lust, not love of art— that was clear as water. Eliza couldn’t keep them from being there, but at least she could be sure that her daughter did not accept any invitations and, when possible, that she didn’t laugh at their jokes or respond to their indiscreet questions. “Nothing is free in this world. You would pay a very dear price for those trinkets,” she warned whenever her daughter grumbled about refusing a gift. Posing for the statue was an interminable and boring process that left Lynn numb with cold and with cramps in her legs. It was early January, and the stoves in the corners were far from successful in warming the high-ceilinged room with its swirling air currents. The sculptor worked in his coat, progressing at a maddening pace, undoing today what he had done yesterday, as if he really had no final concept despite the hundreds of sketches of the Republic pinned to the walls.