Daughter of Fortune (6 page)

With the first signs of spring, Agustín del Valle invited the Sommers and Jacob Todd to one of his country estates. The road was a nightmare: a lone horseman could make it in four or five hours, but the caravan of family and guests started at dawn and did not arrive until late at night. The del Valles traveled in oxcarts laden with tables and plush sofas. Behind them came a mule team with the luggage, along with peasants on horseback armed with primitive blunderbusses to defend against the highwaymen who all too often awaited around the curve of the hill. Added to the maddening pace of the animals were the washed-out track where carts sank to their axles and the frequent rest stops during which the servants served refreshments amid clouds of flies. Todd knew nothing about agriculture, but he needed only a look to realize how abundantly things grew in that fertile soil: fruit fell from the trees and rotted on the ground because no one made the effort to gather it. At the hacienda he encountered the same style of life he had observed years before in Spain: a large family united by intricate bloodlines and an inflexible code of honor. His host was a powerful and feudal patriarch who held the destinies of his descendants in his iron fist and made much of a family tree he could trace back to the first Spanish conquistadors. My ancestors, he would say, walked more than a thousand kilometers weighed down in heavy iron armor; they crossed mountains, rivers, and the world's most arid desert to found the city of Santiago. Among his peers del Valle was a symbol of authority and decency, but outside his class he was known as a rake. He had untold bastards and a reputation for having killed more than one of his tenants in a legendary fit of temper, but those deaths, along with many other sins, were never mentioned. His wife was in her forties but she looked like an old woman, tremulous and hangdog, always dressed in mourning for the children who died in infancy and squeezed breathless by the pressure of her corset, her religion, and the husband fate had dealt her. Male offspring idled away the days in masses, outings, siestas, gambling, and carousing, while the girls floated like mysterious nymphs through the house and gardens in whispering petticoats, always beneath the vigilant eye of their chaperones. They had been trained since early childhood for a life of virtue, faith, and abnegation; their fate was a marriage of convenience and motherhood.

In the country, the party attended a bullfight that did not even remotely resemble the brilliant Spanish spectacle of courage and death: no suit of lights, no fanfare, no passion or glory, only a handful of reckless drunks tormenting an animal with spears and insults, then tossed into the dust to the tune of curses and guffaws. The most dangerous part of the fight was getting the enraged and ill-treated, but still unharmed, beast from the ring. Todd was grateful that they spared it the ultimate indignity of public execution, for in his good English heart he would rather have seen the bullfighter die than the bull. In the afternoons the men played ombre and
rocambor
, waited on like princes by a true army of humble, dark-skinned servants who never lifted their eyes from the ground or their voices above a murmur. They weren't slaves but may as well have been. They worked in exchange for protection, a roof over their heads, and a portion of the harvest; in theory they were free but they stayed with the
patron
, however despotic he might be or however harsh their conditions, since they had nowhere else to go. Slavery had been quietly abolished ten years before. The African slave trade had never been profitable in these lands because there were no large plantations—although no one mentioned the fate of the Indians who had been deprived of their lands and reduced to penury, or the tenants in the fields who were sold or inherited with the property, like the animals. Neither was there any reference to the shiploads of Chinese and Polynesian slaves destined for the guano deposits of the Chincha Islands. As long as they didn't leave the ship there was no problem: the law prohibited slavery on dry land but said nothing about the sea. While the men played cards, Miss Rose grew discreetly bored in the company of Señora del Valle and her many daughters. Eliza, in contrast, raced through the open fields with Paulina, the one daughter of Agustín del Valle who had escaped the languid pattern of the women of that family. She was several years older than Eliza, but that day she romped and played as if they were the same age, faces bare to the sun, their hair blowing loose in the wind as they whipped their horses on.

E
liza Sommers was a small, slender girl with features as delicate as a quill drawing. In 1845, when she was thirteen and beginning to show signs of breasts and a waist, she still looked like a child, although one with glimpses of the grace that would be her greatest attribute in beauty. Thanks to the implacable vigilance of Miss Rose—who made her charge sit with a metal rod strapped to her backbone through interminable hours of piano exercises and embroidery—Eliza stood straight as a spear. She did not grow much, and with the years kept the same deceptively youthful look that would save her life more than once. She was so much a little girl at heart that when she reached puberty she continued to sleep curled up in a ball in her childhood bed, surrounded by her dolls and sucking her thumb. She imitated Jeremy Sommers' air of ennui because she thought it was a sign of internal strength. As she got older she tired of pretending to be bored, but that training helped her tame her nature. She helped in the servants' chores: one day making bread, another grinding maize, one maybe sunning feather beds, yet another boiling the white clothes. She spent hours huddled behind the drapes in the living room, devouring the classics in Jeremy Sommers' library one by one, along with Miss Rose's romantic novels, out-of-date newspapers—anything that fell into her hands, however dull. She got Jacob Todd to give her one of his Bibles in Spanish, and set about deciphering it—with enormous patience, since all her schooling had been in English. She soaked up the Old Testament with a morbid fascination for the vices and passions of kings who seduced other men's wives, prophets who dealt out punishment with terrible lightning bolts, and parents who fathered children on their own daughters. In the storeroom where they kept castoffs, she found her uncle John's old maps, travel books, and logs, which gave her a feel for the shape of the world. Instructors hired by Miss Rose taught her French, writing, history, geography, and a little Latin, considerably more than was doled out in the best girls' schools in the capital, where, after all was said and done, all that was learned were prayers and good manners. Eliza's random reading, as well as Captain Sommers' tales, gave wing to her imagination. That world-traveling uncle would appear with his load of gifts, stirring her fantasy with his extraordinary stories of black emperors on thrones of pure gold, Malaysian pirates who collected human eyeballs in little mother-of-pearl boxes, and princesses immolated on the funeral pyres of aged husbands. On each of his visits everything was set aside, from school lessons to piano lessons. The year went by in waiting for him and putting pins in the map, imagining the point on the high seas where his ship was sailing. Eliza had little contact with other girls her age; she lived in the closed world of her benefactors' home, in the eternal illusion of being in England rather than Valparaíso. Jeremy Sommers ordered everything from a catalogue, from soap to shoes, and wore light clothing in the winter and an overcoat in the summer because he followed the calendar of the Northern Hemisphere. The little girl listened and observed attentively; she had a happy and independent temperament, she never asked for help, and she had the rare gift of making herself invisible at will, blending into the furniture, curtains, and flowered wallpaper. The day she waked to find her nightgown stained with red she went to Miss Rose to tell her she was bleeding “down there.”

“Do not discuss this with anyone, it is very private. This means you are a woman now and you must conduct yourself as such; your days as a child are over. It is time for you to attend Madame Colbert's school for girls.” That was her adoptive mother's complete explanation, blurted out in one breath and without meeting Eliza's eyes, as from her armoire she produced a dozen small towels she herself had hemmed.

“You're in for it now, child. Your body will change, your thoughts will be jumbled, and any man will be able to do what he wants with you,” Eliza was advised by Mama Fresia, from whom she could not hide her new state.

The Indian knew of plants that would stop the menstrual flow permanently, but she did not give them to Eliza for fear of her
patrones
. Eliza took her nana's warning seriously and decided to be on the watch to keep those things from happening. She bound her chest tightly with a silk sash, sure that if that method had worked for centuries with the feet of Chinese women, as her uncle John had told her, there was no reason it would not do the same with her breasts. She also decided to write. For years she had seen Miss Rose writing in her notebooks and she supposed that she did it to combat the curse of jumbled ideas. As for the last part of the prophecy—that any man would be able to do what he wanted with her-—she attached less importance to that because she was incapable of imagining a case in which there would be men in her future. They were all tired and old, at least twenty; the world was void of boys of her generation and the only men she would like for a husband, Captain John Sommers and Jacob Todd, were out of bounds because the first was her uncle and the second was in love with Miss Rose, as all Valparaíso could testify.

Years later, remembering her childhood and youth, Eliza thought that Miss Rose and Mr. Todd would have made a good couple; Rose would have softened Mr. Todd's harsh edges and he would have rescued her from boredom, but things had worked out differently. In their later years, when both were combing the gray in their hair and they had the long habit of solitude, they would meet in California under strange circumstances; then he would court her again with the same intensity and she would reject him with equal determination. But all that would come much later.

Jacob Todd lost no opportunity to be near the Sommers; there was no more faithful or punctual visitor at their musical evenings, no one more attentive to Miss Rose's impassioned trills or more disposed to appreciate her wit, including the slightly cruel remarks she tormented him with. She was a person filled with contradictions, but was that not true of him as well? Was he not an atheist selling Bibles and deluding half the world with the story of a purported evangelizing mission? He often asked himself why such an attractive woman had never married; a single woman of her age had no future in society. Among the foreign colony there were whispers of a certain scandal in England, years ago; that would explain her presence in Chile, where she acted as chatelaine for her brother, but he never tried to learn the details, preferring mystery to the knowledge of something he might not have been able to bear. The past didn't matter, he told himself. It took only one error in discretion or calculation to stain a woman's reputation and prevent her from making a good marriage. He would have given years of his life to have her love, but she gave no indication of yielding to his siege, although neither did she try to discourage him; she enjoyed the game of giving him rope only to rein him back in.

“Mr. Todd is a bird of ill omen; he has bizarre ideas, teeth like a horse, and his hands perspire. I would never marry him, even if he were the last bachelor in the universe,” Miss Rose confessed to Eliza, laughing.

The girl was sorry to hear that. She was indebted to Jacob Todd, not only for having rescued her at the procession of the Cristo de Mayo, but also because he acted as if it had never happened. She was fond of her strange ally; both he and her uncle John smelled like big dogs. The good impression she had of him turned into loyal affection the day that, hidden behind heavy velvet drapes in the drawing room, she overheard a conversation between him and Jeremy Sommers.

“I must make some decision regarding Eliza, Jacob. She hasn't the least notion of her place in society. People are beginning to ask questions and Eliza surely imagines a future that does not befit her. Nothing as perilous, you know, as the demon of fantasy embedded in every female heart.”

“Don't exaggerate, my friend. Eliza is still a little girl, but she is intelligent and surely she will find her place.”

“Intelligence is a drawback in a woman. Rose wants to send her to Madame Colbert's school, but I am not in favor of that much schooling for girls; it makes them unmanageable. ‘Let us always know our proper stations,' that is my motto.”

“The world is changing, Jeremy. In the United States free men are equal before the law. Social classes have been abolished.”

“We are speaking of women, old boy, not men. As for the rest, the United States is a country of merchants and pioneers, totally lacking in tradition or a sense of history. Equality does not exist anywhere, not even among animals, and much less in Chile.”