Daughter of Fortune (11 page)

“Watch what you're doing, Eliza!” Miss Rose exclaimed, alarmed, because the force of that instantaneous love had struck her as well.

“Go and change your dress and rinse that one in cold water to see if you can get the stain out,” she added sharply.

Eliza, however, did not move, locked to Joaquín Andieta's eyes, trembling, nostrils dilated, unabashedly sniffing, until Miss Rose took her by one arm and led her inside.

“I told you, child; any man, as miserable a man as he may be, can do whatever he wants with you,” the Indian reminded her that night.

“I don't know what you're talking about, Mama Fresia,” Eliza replied.

That autumn morning when she saw Joaquín Andieta in the patio of her home, Eliza thought she had met her destiny: she would be his slave forever. Although she hadn't lived enough to understand what had happened to her, to express in words the tumult that was drowning her, or to work out a plan, her intuition of the inevitable was fully functional. In some vague but painful way she realized she was trapped, and suffered a physical reaction not unlike the epizootic. For a week, until she saw Andieta again, she tried to fight off convulsive upsets that would not yield to Mama Fresia's miraculous herbs or to the German pharmacist's arsenic powders in cherry liqueur. She lost weight and her bones became as light as a turtledove's, to the terror of Mama Fresia, who went around closing windows to prevent the ocean wind from lifting her up and sweeping her away toward the horizon. The Indian administered various remedies and spells from her vast repertoire, but when she realized that nothing was taking effect she turned to Catholic saintdom. She collected some of her pitiful savings from the bottom of her trunk, bought a dozen candles, and set off to negotiate with the priest. After having the candles blessed during Sunday high mass, she lighted one before each of the saints in the side altars of the church, eight in all, and placed three before the image of Saint Anthony, patron of hopeless, unwed girls, unhappy wives, and other lost causes. The remaining candle she took with her, along with a lock of Eliza's hair and one of her nightdresses, to the most celebrated
machi
in the area, an ancient Mapuche Indian, blind from birth, a white-magic witch famous for her etched-in-stone predictions and her common sense in curing bodily ills and anxieties of the soul. Mama Fresia had spent her adolescent years serving this woman as her apprentice and servant, but she had not, as she had wished, been able to follow in her footsteps because she did not have the gift. Nothing to do for it: you are born with it or you're not. Once she had tried to explain to Eliza what the gift was and the only thing that came to her was that it was the ability to see what lies behind mirrors. Lacking that mysterious talent, Mama Fresia had to renounce her aspiration to be a healer and take a place in the service of the Sommers family.

The
machi
lived alone at the bottom of a ravine in a straw-roofed adobe hovel that looked about to cave in. Around the dwelling was a wasteland of rocks, firewood, plants in chamber pots, skin-and-bones dogs, and huge black birds futilely scratching the dirt for something to eat. Along the path to her hut was a small forest of offerings and amulets left there by satisfied clients to indicate the favors they had received. The
machi
smelled of the sum of all the concoctions she had prepared during her lifetime; her mantle was the color of the dry earth of the landscape; she was barefoot and filthy, but she was laden with a profusion of cheap silver necklaces. Her face was a dark mask of wrinkles; she had only two teeth in her head and her eyes were dead. She received her former disciple without any sign of recognition, accepted the gifts of food and the bottle of anise liquor, signaled Mama Fresia to sit before her, and sat in silence, waiting. A few sticks flickered reluctantly in the center of the hut, the smoke escaping through a hole in the roof. The soot-blackened walls were studded with clay and tin trifles, plants, and a collection of desiccated reptiles. The heavy fragrance of dried herbs and medicinal barks blended with the stink of dead animals. The two women spoke in Mapudungo, the language of the Mapuches. For a long time, the witch woman listened to the story of Eliza, from the moment of her arrival in the Marseilles soap crate to the recent crisis; then she took the candle, the hair, and the nightdress, and sent her visitor away with instructions to come back after she had completed her spells and rituals of divination.

“Everyone knows there's no cure for this,” she pronounced as soon as Mama Fresia stepped across her threshold two days later.

“Is my baby going to die, then?”

“That I cannot say, but she will suffer, oh that I do not doubt.”

“What is it she has?

“She has a fixation on love. Strong trouble. That girl left her window open one clear night and it crawled into her body while she was asleep. There's no spell can cure it.”

Resigned, Mama Fresia went back home. If the art of that all-wise
machi
could not change Eliza's fate, then the little she knew, and all her saints' candles, were not going to help.

M
iss Rose kept an eye on Eliza with more curiosity than compassion; she knew the symptoms well and, in her experience, time and obstacles extinguish even the most stubborn fires of love. She had been barely sixteen when she'd fallen head over heels in love with a Viennese tenor. She was living in England at that time, and dreamed of being a diva despite the stubborn opposition of her mother and her brother Jeremy, who had been head of the family since their father's death. Neither of them considered the opera to be a desirable occupation for a lady, principally because it was performed in theaters, at night, and wearing low-cut gowns. Nor could she count on the support of her brother John, who had joined the navy and showed up at home barely a couple of times a year, always in a rush. Exuberant and tanned by the sun of far-off lands and exhibiting some new tattoo or scar, he would always manage to disrupt the routines of the small family. He handed out gifts, dazzled them with his exotic tales, and immediately disappeared into the red-light district, where he stayed until the moment to ship out again. The Sommers were country gentry without any great ambitions. They had owned land for several generations, but the father, bored with dumb sheep and poor harvests, had wanted to try his fortunes in London. He loved books so much that he was quite capable of depriving his family of food and going into debt to acquire first editions signed by his favorite authors, but he lacked the greed of dyed-in-the-wool collectors. After fruitless ventures into commerce, he decided to give rein to his true vocation, and ended by opening a shop for antiquarian books and others he published himself. In the back of the bookstore he set up a small press, which he operated with the help of two assistants, and in an upstairs room of the same shop his trade in rare books grew at a snail's pace. Of his three children, only Rose shared his interests; she grew up with a passion for music and reading, and when she was not sitting at the piano or doing her voice exercises they could find her in a corner reading. Her father lamented that Rose was the one who loved books and not Jeremy or John, who could have inherited his business. At his death, the male heirs liquidated the press and bookshop. John went off to sea and Jeremy took over the care of his widowed mother and his sister. He earned a modest salary as an employee of the British Import and Export Company, Ltd., and had a small income from his father, in addition to his brother John's sporadic contributions, which often arrived in the form of contraband instead of negotiable currency. Jeremy, scandalized, would store those accursed boxes in the garret, unopened, until the next visit of his brother, who then took responsibility for selling the contents. The family moved to modest chambers that were expensive for their means but well situated in the heart of London. Jeremy considered it a good investment; they must marry Rose well.

At sixteen, the girl's beauty began to flower and there were suitors to spare, well placed and prepared to die of love, but while her friends busied themselves looking for husbands, Rose was looking for a singing master. Which was how she met Karl Bretzner, a Viennese tenor who had come to London to perform in several Mozart works, which were to culminate one stellar night in
The Marriage of Figaro
with the royal family in attendance. Bretzner's appearance revealed nothing of his enormous talent: he looked like a butcher. His physique—barrel-chested but thin in the pins—lacked elegance, and his ruddy face, topped with a mass of salt-and-pepper curls, added up to a rather vulgar whole, but when he opened his mouth to delight the world with the torrent of his voice he was transformed into a different creature: he grew taller, his potbelly was sucked up into the cavern of his chest, and his Teutonic, apoplectic face was filled with Olympic light. At least that was how he was seen by Rose Sommers, who was able to get tickets for every performance. She would come to the theater long before it opened and, defying the scandalized glances of passersby little accustomed to seeing a girl of her class unaccompanied, wait at the actor's entrance for hours to catch a glimpse of the maestro getting out of his carriage. On Sunday night, the man noticed the beauty stationed in the street, and went over to speak to her. Trembling, she answered his questions and confessed her admiration for him and her wishes to follow in his footsteps in the arduous but divine path of bel canto—to use her words.

“Come to my dressing room after the performance and we shall see what I can do for you,” he said in his precious, strongly Austrian-accented voice.

And that she did, walking on air. When the standing ovation faded, an usher sent by Karl Bretzner led Rose behind the wings. She had never seen the inner workings of a theater but she wasted no time admiring the ingenious machines for making storms or the painted landscapes on the drops; her only goal was to meet her idol. She found him enveloped in a gold-trimmed, royal-blue dressing gown, still wearing his makeup and an elaborate wig of white curls. The usher closed the door and left them alone. The room, crammed with mirrors, furniture, and draperies, smelled of tobacco, stage makeup, and mold. In one corner stood a screen painted with scenes of rosy-fleshed women in a Turkish harem and costumes on clothes racks lined the walls. Seeing her idol so near, Rose's enthusiasm flagged for a few moments, but he soon regained the lost ground. He took her hands in his, lifted them to his lips, and kissed them slowly, then from deep in his chest voiced a
do
that rattled the screen of the odalisques. Rose's last hesitations crumbled, like the walls of Jericho, in the cloud of powder that rose from the wig as the artist peeled it from his head with a passionate, virile gesture and tossed it upon a chair where it lay as inert as a dead rabbit. His hair was crushed beneath a tightly knit hair net that, added to the makeup, lent him the air of an aged courtesan.

Upon the same chaise longue where the wig had landed, Rose would offer Bretzner her virginity a couple of days afterward, at exactly three-fifteen in the afternoon. The Viennese tenor had made a date with her, using the pretext of showing her the theater that Tuesday when there was no performance. They met secretly in a tearoom, where he delicately savored five cream éclairs and two cups of chocolate while she stirred her tea, so frightened and excited she couldn't swallow. From there they went straight to the theater. At that hour there was no one around but two women cleaning the foyer and a man readying the oil lamps, torches, and candles for the following day. Karl Bretzner, skilled in the perils of love, produced a bottle of champagne with a magician's dexterity and poured each of them a glass, which they drank down in a toast to Mozart and Rossini. He then installed Rose in the imperial plush box where only the king sat, every inch of which was adorned with chubby cupids and overblown roses, then went down to the stage. Standing on a segment of painted plaster column, lighted by the foot lamps, he sang for her alone an aria from
The Barber of Seville
, displaying all his vocal agility and the soft delirium of his voice with endless embellishments. As the last note of his homage faded he heard the distant sobs of Rose Sommers; with unexpected agility he ran toward her; crossing the hall, he gained the box in two bounds and fell to his knees at her feet. Breathless, he laid his large head upon the girl's skirt, burying his face in folds of moss-colored silk. He wept with her because, without intending it, he, too, had fallen in love; what had begun as yet another fleeting conquest had in a few hours been transformed into incandescent passion.

Rose and Karl got to their feet, supporting one another, stumbling, terrified before the inevitable, and with no idea how, they walked down a long corridor in darkness, climbed a short staircase, and reached the area of the dressing rooms. The cursive letters of the tenor's name marked one of the doors. They went into the room cluttered with furniture and dusty, sweaty costumes where they had been alone for the first time only two days before. The room had no windows and for a moment they sank into the refuge of darkness, recovering breath lost in sobs and sighs while he lighted first a match and then the five candles of a candelabrum. In the trembling yellow light of the flames they admired one another, confused and clumsy, filled with a torrent of emotions but unable to articulate a single word. Rose could not withstand the eyes stripping her bare and hid her face in her hands, but he pulled them away with the same delicacy he had earlier used to demolish the cream pastries. They began with tiny, tear-wet kisses, dove pecks, which developed naturally into serious kisses. Rose had experienced tender, but very hesitant and hasty, encounters with some of her suitors, and one or two of them had managed to brush her cheek with his lips, but she had never imagined it possible to reach such a degree of intimacy that another's tongue could wind around hers like a lewd snake or that she could be slathered with someone else's saliva externally and invaded internally, but her initial repugnance was soon conquered by the stimulus of youth and her enthusiasm for the lyrical. Not only did she return Bretzner's caresses with equal intensity, she took the initiative by removing her hat and the short gray karakul cape around her shoulders. From there to allowing him to unbutton her jacket, and then her blouse, was but a few capitulations. She was able to follow the mating dance step by step, guided by instinct as well as the forbidden books she had furtively pulled from her father's shelves. That was the most memorable day of her life, and she would remember it—adorned and exaggerated—in the most minute detail in the years to come. That was to be her source of experience and knowledge, the fount of inspiration for nourishing her fantasies and, years later, for creating the art that would make her famous in certain very secret circles. That marvelous day she could compare in intensity with only one other, two years later in Valparaíso, in March, when the newborn Eliza fell into her arms as consolation for the children she would never have, for the men she would never love, and for the hearth she would never call hers.