Daughter of Fortune (9 page)

“I would rather you opened an account in my name in the Bank of London, and from now on deposit twenty percent of the profits I earn for you.”

“Why? Don't I give you everything you want, and more?” asked Feliciano, offended.

“Life is long and filled with unpleasant surprises. I do not ever want to be a penniless widow, especially not with children,” she explained, rubbing her belly.

Feliciano slammed the door as he left, but his innate sense of fairness was stronger than his aggrieved husband's bad humor. Besides, he decided, that twenty percent would be a powerful incentive for Paulina. He did as she asked even though he had never heard of a married woman with money of her own. If a wife could not travel, sign legal documents, go to court, sell or buy anything without her husband's authorization, certainly it didn't make sense for her to have a bank account to use however she wished. It would be difficult to explain to the bank and to his associates.

“Come back north with us, the future is in the mines and there you can begin all over again,” Paulina suggested to Jacob Todd when in one of her brief visits to Valparaíso she learned that he had fallen into disgrace.

“What would I do there, my friend,” he murmured.

“Sell your Bibles,” Paulina joked, but moved immediately by the other's inconsolable sadness offered him her house, her friendship, and a job in her husband's various enterprises.

Todd, however, was so dejected by his bad luck and public shame that he could not find the strength to begin another adventure in the north. The curiosity and restlessness that had once driven him had been replaced by an obsession to regain the good name he had lost.

“I am ruined, señora, can't you see it? A man without honor is a dead man.”

“Times have changed,” Paulina consoled him. “Once a stain on a woman's honor could be washed away only with blood. But you see, Mr. Todd, in my case it was cleansed with a pitcher of hot chocolate. And men's honor is much more resilient than ours. Do not despair.”

Feliciano Rodríguez de Santa Cruz, who had not forgotten Todd's role in the period of his and Paulina's frustrated love, wanted to lend him enough money to return every last penny for the missions, but Todd decided that between owing money to a friend and owing a Protestant chaplain he preferred the latter, since his reputation was destroyed anyway. Soon thereafter he had to tell the cats and the tarts good-bye because the English widow who ran his boardinghouse asked him to leave, all the while shouting an unending stream of reproaches. The good woman had doubled her efforts in the kitchen to help spread her faith in those regions of immutable winter where spectral winds howled day and night—as Jacob Todd had described them, drunk with eloquence. When she learned the fate of her savings at the hand of the false missionary, she fell into a righteous rage and threw him out of her home. With the help of Joaquín Andieta, who had found other lodgings for him, Todd moved to a room—small but with a view of the sea—in one of the modest neighborhoods of the port. The house belonged to a Chilean family and did not have the European pretensions of his former chambers; it was built according to tradition: whitewashed adobe and red tile roof, entry hall, one large room nearly bare of furniture that served as living room, dining room, and bedroom for the parents, a smaller, windowless room where all the children slept, and the room at the rear that he rented. The owner worked as a schoolmaster, and his wife contributed to their income by making candles in the kitchen. The scent of wax permeated the house. Todd smelled that sweetish aroma in his books, his clothing, his hair, even his soul; it was so deep in his pores that many years later, on the other side of the world, he could still smell candles. He kept to the poor sections of the port where no one cared about the reputation, good
or
bad, of a red-haired Englishman. He ate in taverns that catered to the poor and spent entire days among the fishermen, working on their nets and boats. The physical exercise did him good and for a few hours he could forget his injured pride. Only Joaquín Andieta continued to visit him. They would lock themselves in Todd's room to argue politics and exchange texts of French philosophers while on the other side of the door the schoolmaster's children ran around and the wax of the candles flowed like a thread of molten gold. Joaquín Andieta never referred to the money for the missions, although considering that the scandal was a lively topic of discussion for weeks, he had to have known. When Todd tried to explain that it had never been his intention to steal and that everything was the result of his bad head for figures, his proverbial disarray, and his abominable luck, Joaquín Andieta put a finger to his lips in the universal gesture for silence. In an impulse of shame and affection, Jacob Todd clumsily threw his arms around Andieta and his friend embraced him for an instant but then abruptly dropped his arms, flushed to his ear tips. Both stepped back simultaneously, unable to comprehend how they could have violated the elementary rule of conduct that forbade physical contact between men, except in battle or brutal sports. In the following months the Englishman began to wander off course; he was careless in his appearance and tended to go about unshaven, smelling of candle wax and alcohol. When he overdid the gin, he ranted like a maniac, without pausing or taking a breath, against governments, the English royal family, the military and the police, the system of class privilege, which he compared to the caste system in India, religion in general, and Christianity in particular.

“You need to get out of here, Mr. Todd, you're losing touch,” Joaquín Andieta found the courage to tell his friend the day he rescued him just as he was about to be led from the plaza by the civil police.

It was exactly like that, railing like a lunatic on a street corner, that Todd was found by Captain John Sommers, who had debarked from his sailing ship in the port several weeks before. His vessel had taken such a beating in the trip around Cape Horn that it had to be put in dry dock for major repairs. John Sommers had spent an entire month in the home of his brother and sister, Jeremy and Rose. That had decided him; as soon as he returned to England he would look for a place on one of the modern steamships; he was not eager to repeat the experience of being cooped up with his family. He loved Jeremy and Rose, but preferred them at a distance. He had resisted the idea of steam until then because he could not conceive of the adventure of the sea without the challenges of sails and weather, challenges that tested the stuff the captain was made of, but he had to admit finally that the future lay in the new ships, larger, surer, and quicker. When he noticed that he was losing his hair, he naturally blamed it on a sedentary life. Soon boredom began to weigh on him like a suit of armor, and he escaped from the house to walk through the port with the restlessness of a caged animal. When Jacob Todd recognized the captain, he turned down the brim of his hat to save himself the humiliation of another rebuff and pretended not to see him, but the sailor stopped short and greeted him with affectionate claps on the back.

“Let's go drown our sorrows, old friend!” he said, and dragged Todd to a nearby bar.

It happened to be one of those places known among its clients for an honest drink, and they also served a unique dish of well-deserved fame: fried conger eel with potatoes and raw-onion salad. Todd, who tended those days to forget about eating, and was always short of money, thought he might faint when he smelled the delicious aroma of the food. A wave of gratitude and pleasure brought tears to his eyes. Out of courtesy, John Sommers looked away as his friend devoured every last crumb on his plate.

“I never did think that business of missions among the Indians was a good idea,” he said, just as Todd was beginning to wonder if the captain had heard about his financial disgrace. “Those poor people don't deserve the misery of being evangelized. What do you plan to do now?”

“I returned what I had left in the account, but I still owe a large sum.”

“And no way to pay it, right?”

“Not at the moment, no, but—”

“But nothing, my good fellow. You gave those good Christians an excuse to feel virtuous and now you've given them a scandal to chew on for a while. Entertainment cheap at the price. When I asked you what you plan to do I was referring to the future, not your debts.”

“I have no plans.”

“Come back to England with me. There's no place here for you. How many foreigners are there in this port? Four derelicts, and they all know each other. Believe me, they will never leave you in peace. In England, on the other hand, you can get lost in the crowd.”

Jacob Todd sat staring into the bottom of his glass with such a hopeless expression that the captain ripped loose with one of his hearty laughs.

“Don't tell me you're staying here on account of my sister, Rose!”

It was true. Todd would have found the general rejection a little easier to bear had Miss Rose demonstrated a whit of loyalty or understanding, but she had refused to receive him and had returned unopened the letters he had sent her hoping to clear his name. He never knew that his missives did not reach the hands of the person they were addressed to because Jeremy Sommers, violating the accord of mutual respect between him and his sister, had decided to protect her from her own soft heart and prevent her from committing some new and irreparable foolishness. The captain did not know that either, but he guessed the precautions Jeremy had taken and concluded that he himself would have done the same given the circumstances. The idea of the pathetic Bible salesman as an aspirant for his sister Rose's hand seemed unthinkable: for once he was in total agreement with Jeremy.

“Are my feelings about Miss Rose that obvious?” asked Jacob Todd, perturbed.

“Let us say they're no mystery, my friend.”

“I fear that I cannot have the least hope that some day she will accept me . . .”

“I fear the same.”

“Would you do me the enormous favor of interceding on my behalf, Captain? If Miss Rose would see me just once, I could explain to her—”

“Don't count on me to act as your go-between, Todd. If Rose returned your affection, you would know it by now. My sister is not at all timid, I assure you. I repeat, dear fellow, that the only thing left is for you to get out of this damned port; you'll be reduced to beggary if you stay here. My ship leaves in three days for Hong Kong, and from there to England. It will be a long trip but you are not in any hurry. Fresh air and hard work are infallible remedies for the stupidity of love. I should know that; I fall in love in every port and am cured as soon as I am back at sea.”

“I don't have money for the passage.”

“Then you will simply have to work as a sailor and play cards with me every evening. If you haven't forgotten those gambler's tricks you knew when I brought you to Chile three years ago, I expect you will strip me clean on the voyage.”

A few days after that conversation, Jacob Todd boarded the ship much poorer than he had arrived. The one person who came to see him off was Joaquín Andieta. The somber youth had asked permission at work to be gone for an hour. He bid Jacob Todd good-bye with a firm handshake.

“We will see each other again, my friend,” the Englishman said.

“I don't think so,” replied the Chilean, who had a much clearer intuition of destiny.

T
he definitive metamorphosis of Eliza took place two years after Jacob Todd's departure. From the angular little bug she had been in childhood she was transformed into a girl with soft curves and a delicate face. Under the tutelage of Miss Rose, she spent the unpleasant years of her puberty balancing a book on her head and studying piano, at the same time growing native herbs in Mama Fresia's garden and learning age-old recipes for curing known maladies and others yet to be learned, including mustard for an indifference to everyday life, hydrangea leaves for ripening tumors and restoring laughter, violets for enduring loneliness, and verbena, which she put in Miss Rose's soup because this noble plant cures the vagaries of bad humor. Miss Rose was unable to squelch her protégée's interest in cooking and finally resigned herself to watching her waste precious hours amid Mama Fresia's black cooking pots. Miss Rose considered culinary lore as an adornment to a young lady's education in that it prepared her for giving orders to the servants, as she herself did, but that was a far cry from plunging up to one's elbows in pans and skillets. A lady could not smell of garlic and onion, but Eliza preferred practice to theory and went to all their friends looking for recipes she copied in a notebook and then improved in their kitchen. She could spend entire days grinding spices and nuts for tortes or maize for Chilean cakes, dressing turtledoves for pickling and chopping fruit for preserves. By the time she was fourteen, she had surpassed Miss Rose's timid pastry skills and had learned all of Mama Fresia's repertory; at fifteen she was in charge of refreshments for the Wednesday musical evenings, and when local dishes were no longer a challenge she turned to the refined cuisine of the French, which Madame Colbert imparted, and the exotic spices of India, which her uncle John used to bring her and which she identified by smell although she didn't know their names. When the coachman took a message to one of the Sommers' friends, he delivered the envelope along with a treat fresh from the hands of Eliza, who had elevated the local custom of exchanging main dishes and desserts to the category of an art. So great was her dedication that Jeremy Sommers began to imagine her as the owner of her own tearoom, a project which, like all the others her brother had for the girl, Miss Rose discarded without a moment's consideration. A woman who earns her own living, however respectable the enterprise, descends on the social scale, she lectured. Her goal for Eliza was a good husband, and she had set a two-year limit for finding one in Chile; after that she would take Eliza to England, she could not run the risk of having her turn twenty without a fiancé and end up a spinster. The candidate would have to be someone willing to overlook her hazy origins and focus on her virtues. Among the Chileans, not a chance; the aristocracy married their cousins and she wasn't interested in the middle class, she did not want to see Eliza mired in penury. From time to time Rose had contact with impresarios in commerce or the mines who had business with her brother Jeremy, but those men were after the family names and coats of arms of the oligarchy. It was not likely they would be taken with Eliza because there was little in her physical appearance to spark passion: she was small and slender and did not have the milky-white skin or the opulent bust and hips so much in vogue. It was only when you looked at her a second time that you discovered her quiet beauty, her grace, and the intensity in her eyes; she looked like one of the porcelain dolls Captain John Sommers brought from China. Miss Rose was looking for a suitor able to appreciate her protégée's discernment, her strength of character, and her ability to turn situations in her favor, what Mama Fresia called luck and Rose preferred to call intelligence. She was looking for a man with economic solvency and good character who would offer Eliza security and respect, but one her adopted daughter could manage without any fuss. She planned in due time to teach her the subtle discipline of the everyday attentions that nourish the habit of domestic life in a man, the system of daring caresses that reward him and stubborn silences that punish him, secrets for melting his will that she herself had never had occasion to practice, and, of course, the millennial art of physical love. She had never dared speak of that to Eliza but she had several books under double lock and key in her armoire that she would lend her when the moment came. Everything can be said in writing, that was her theory, and in matters of theory no one was wiser than she. Miss Rose, though an old maid, could have taught a graduate course on all the possible and impossible ways to make love.