Daughter of Fortune (15 page)

With the same gravity she invested in all her acts, Eliza gave herself to the task of idealizing her lover until he became an obsession. All she wanted was to serve him wholeheartedly for the rest of her life, to sacrifice herself and suffer to prove her selflessness, to die for him if necessary. She was so befogged by the witchery of that first passion that she did not see that her love was not returned with equal intensity. Her lover was never completely present. Even in the most rousing embraces on the pile of drapes, his mind was somewhere else, ready to leave or already absent. He revealed himself only partly, fleetingly, in an exasperating game of Chinese shadow plays, but when he left, when she was so starved for love that she was at the point of bursting into tears, he would hand her another of his marvelous letters. Then the entire universe would turn into a prism whose one purpose was to reflect her emotions. Captive to the demanding task of besotted love, she never doubted her capacity to give without reserve, and therefore did not recognize Joaquín's ambiguity. She had invented a perfect lover, and she obstinately nurtured that illusion. Her imagination compensated for the unrewarding embraces with her lover that left her in the dark limbo of unsatisfied desire.

S
eptember twenty-first, the first day of spring according to Miss Rose's calendar, they aired the rooms, hung the feather beds and bedding in the sun, waxed the wood furniture, and changed the curtains in the drawing room. Mama Fresia washed the flowered cretonne without comment, convinced that the dried stains were mouse urine. In the patio, she prepared great pots of hot, strained,
quillay
bark, soaked the curtains one whole day, starched them with rice water, and dried them in the sun; then two women ironed them, and when they were good as new she hung them at the windows of the drawing room to welcome the new season. In the meantime, Eliza and Joaquín, indifferent to Miss Rose's springtime pandemonium, indulged their love on the green velvet drapes, more cushiony than the cretonne. It wasn't cold anymore, and the nights were bright. They had been lovers for three months, and Joaquín Andieta's letters, sprinkled with poetic figures and torrid declarations, were noticeably fewer and farther between. Eliza sensed that her lover was somewhere else, that at times she embraced a ghost. Despite the anguish of unsatisfied love and the heavy load of so many secrets, the girl had regained a superficial calm. She spent the hours of the day in her usual occupations, absorbed in her books and her piano exercises, or busy about the kitchen and sewing room, not showing the slightest interest in leaving the house, although if Miss Rose asked her to, she went along with the willingness of someone who has nothing better to do. She got up early and went to bed early, as always; she had a good appetite and looked healthy, although these symptoms of perfect normality raised terrifying suspicions in the minds of Miss Rose and Mama Fresia. They never let her out of their sight. They doubted that the intoxication of love had dissipated so suddenly, but as the weeks went by and Eliza showed no signs of distress they slowly relaxed their vigilance. Maybe the candles to Saint Anthony did help, the Indian speculated; maybe it wasn't love after all, Miss Rose thought without much conviction.

The news of the gold discovered in California reached Chile in August. First it was a wild rumor from the mouths of drunken sailors in the brothels of El Almendral, but a few days later the captain of the schooner
Adelaida
announced that half his crew had deserted in San Francisco.

“There's gold everywhere, you can shovel it up, they say there are nuggets the size of oranges! Anyone with a lick of gumption can be a millionaire!” he reported, choked with excitement.

In January of that year, near the mill of a Swiss farmer on the banks of the American River, a man by the name of Marshall had found a scale of gold in the water. The yellow pellet that unleashed the madness was found nine days after the war between Mexico and the United States had ended with the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. By the time the news spread, California no longer belonged to Mexico. That territory had been largely ignored before it was known that it was sitting on a never-ending treasure. North Americans had thought of it as Indian hunting grounds, and the pioneers had preferred Oregon, which they'd found better suited for agriculture. Mexico had considered it a wasteland bristling with thieves and hadn't bothered to send troops to defend it during the war. But a little later, Sam Brannan, a newspaper editor and Mormon preacher sent to spread the faith, went up and down the streets of San Francisco broadcasting the news. He might not have been believed, considering he had a slightly murky reputation—it was rumored that he had misappropriated God's money and when the Mormon church asked him to return it he had said he would . . . if he got a receipt signed by God—but he backed up his words with a small pouch filled with gold dust, which passed from hand to hand inflaming his audience. At the cry of “Gold! Gold!” three out of four men dropped everything and set out for the placers. They had to close the only school because there weren't any children left. In Chile the news had the same impact. The average salary was twenty cents per day, and the newspapers wrote that the long-lost El Dorado had been found, the city the conquistadors had dreamed of, where the streets were paved with pure gold. “The riches of the mines recall the stories of Sinbad and Aladdin's lamp; without fear of exaggeration, the day's take averages an ounce of pure gold,” proclaimed the newspapers, and they added that there was enough to make thousands rich for decades. The wildfire of greed flared immediately among Chileans, who had the souls of miners, and the rush to California began the next month. They were already halfway there compared to any adventurer crossing the Atlantic. The trip from Europe to Valparaíso took three months, and then two more to reach California. The distance between Valparaíso and San Francisco was less than seven thousand miles, while from the east coast of North America, passing around Cape Horn, it was nearly twenty thousand. That, as Joaquín Andieta calculated, represented a considerable head start for the Chileans, and the first to get there would stake the best claims.

Feliciano Rodríguez de Santa Cruz came to the same conclusion, and he decided to leave immediately with five of his best and most loyal miners, promising them a reward as incentive to get them to leave their families and jump into such a risky enterprise. He spent three weeks organizing supplies for a stay of several months in that land to the north, which he imagined as desolate and savage. He was miles ahead of most of the reckless who set out blindly, destitute, spurred by the temptation of an easy fortune but with no hint of the dangers and exertion involved. He was not about to break his back slaving like a common laborer, which was why he was going to be well supplied and take workmen he trusted, he explained to his wife, who was expecting their second child but insisted she wanted to go with him. Paulina planned to make the voyage with two nursemaids, their cook, and a cow and several chickens to provide milk and eggs for the babies during the trip, but for once her husband stood firm in his refusal. The idea of setting off on such an odyssey with a family on his back was clearly on the level of idiocy. His wife had lost her mind.

“What was that captain's name? Mr. Todd's friend?” Paulina interrupted in the middle of his harangue, balancing a cup of chocolate on her enormous belly as she nibbled a cream-filled flaky pastry, a recipe of the Clarisa nuns.

“You mean John Sommers?”

“I mean that man who was fed up with navigating under sail and was talking about steamships.”

“That's the one.”

Paulina sat thinking awhile, stuffing her mouth with pastries and totally ignoring the list of dangers her husband was invoking. By now she was Rubenesque, and little remained of the slender girl with the shaved head who had run off from the convent.

“How much do I have in my account in London?” she asked finally.

“Fifty thousand pounds. You are a very wealthy woman.”

“Not enough. Can you lend me twice that amount with ten percent interest payable in three years?”

“Where do you get such harebrained ideas, woman? For God's sake! What the devil do you want with that much money?”

“I want to buy a steamship. The real money isn't in gold, Feliciano; when all's said and done, it's just yellow crap. The real money is in the miners. They are going to need everything when they get to California, and they will have ready cash. They say that the steamships plow right ahead; they are not at the mercy of the wind, and are bigger and faster. Sailing ships are a thing of the past.”

Feliciano went ahead with his plans, but experience had taught him not to disdain his wife's financial premonitions. For several nights he couldn't sleep. Wide-eyed, he paced through the ostentatious rooms of his mansion, stepping carefully among sacks of provisions, boxes of tools, barrels of gunpowder, and piles of weapons for the voyage, measuring and pondering Paulina's words. The longer he thought about it, the sounder it seemed to invest in transport, but before making a decision he consulted his brother, who was his partner in all his business negotiations. His brother listened open-mouthed, and when Feliciano had set out the plan, he clapped his hand to his head.

“Caramba, brother! Why didn't we think of that?”

In the meantime, Joaquín Andieta was, like thousands of other Chileans his age, no matter their situation, dreaming of bags of gold dust and nuggets scattered across the ground. Several of his acquaintances had already left, including one of his comrades at the Santos Tornero bookshop, a young liberal who ranted against the rich and was the first to denounce the evils of money, but who could not resist the siren call of gold and had taken off without a good-bye to anyone. For Joaquín, California represented his one way out of poverty, his only chance to take his mother out of the slums and seek a cure for her lungs, to stand before Jeremy Sommers with his head high and his pockets filled to ask for Eliza's hand. Gold . . . gold within his reach. . . . He could see pouches bulging with gold dust, baskets of huge nuggets, greenbacks in his pockets, the palace he would build, more solid and with more marble than the Club de la Unión, to shut the mouths of the relatives who had humiliated his mother. He also saw himself leaving the Iglesia de La Matriz with Eliza Sommers on his arm, the happiest bride and groom on the planet. It was just a question of daring. What future did Chile offer? In the best of cases, growing old counting the products that passed over the desk of the British Import and Export Company, Ltd. What could he lose, since he had nothing to his name to begin with? He was ill with gold fever; he lost his appetite and couldn't sleep, he went around in a high heat, staring at the sea with the eyes of a madman. His bookseller friend lent him maps and books about California, and a pamphlet on how to pan for treasure, which he read avidly as he thought up desperate schemes to finance the adventure. Reports in the newspapers could not be more tempting: “In one kind of mine called dry diggings, the only tool needed to pry gold from the rocks is a common pocketknife. In other places the gold is already loose and to wash it up one uses a simple machine called a sluice, or rocker, an ordinary round-bottomed trough some ten feet long and two wide across the top. No capital is necessary, so the competition is fierce, but men who were barely able to make ends meet for a month now have thousands of dollars of precious metal.”

When Andieta mentioned the possibility of sailing north, his mother protested as loudly as Eliza had. Without ever having seen each other, the two women said exactly the same thing: If you go, Joaquín, I will die. Both tried to make him see the countless dangers of such an endeavor, and swore to him that they would a thousand times rather live with him in inescapable poverty than have him pursue an illusory fortune and risk losing him forever. His mother told him that she wouldn't leave the hovel where she lived even if she were very wealthy, because all her friends were there and she had nowhere else in this world to go. And as for her lungs, nothing could be done for them, she said, except wait for them to give out. Eliza, for her part, offered to run away with him if her family wouldn't let them marry. Joaquín didn't listen, however, rapt in his nightmare of gold, convinced he would never have another chance like this and that if he let it go by it would be unpardonable cowardice. He put into his new mania the same intensity he had once devoted to espousing liberal ideals, but he lacked the means to realize his plans. He couldn't live out his destiny unless he could raise the sum for the passage and outfit himself with the bare necessities. He went to the bank to ask for a small loan, but he had no collateral and with one look they saw he was as poor as a church mouse; he was icily rejected. For the first time he considered going to his mother's family, whom he had never spoken to in his life, but he was too proud. He was haunted by the vision of a dazzling future; it was all he could do to go on with his work; the long hours at his desk became a martyrdom. He would sit holding his pen in the air, staring blindly at the blank page as he repeated by heart the names of the ships that could take him north. Nights drained away in tumultuous dreams and nervous insomnia; he awakened exhausted, his imagination boiling over. He made childish errors, while all around him the exaltation of gold reached the level of hysteria. Everyone wanted to go, and those who couldn't go in person set up corporations, invested in hastily formed companies, or sent a trusted representative in their stead with an agreement to share the profits. Bachelors were the first to set sail; soon married men were leaving their children and starting off without a backward look, despite harrowing stories of obscure illnesses, disastrous accidents, and brutal crimes. The most peaceful men were ready to confront the dangers of pistols and knives, the most prudent abandoned the security won with years of daily struggle and threw themselves into the adventure with their carpetbags of illusions. Some spent their life's savings on a passage, others paid for the voyage by hiring on as sailors or signing indentures, but there were so many candidates that Joaquín Andieta could not find a berth on a single ship, even after days of haunting the docks.