Daughter of Fortune (35 page)

Wandering here and there, Eliza got to know that rugged land as if she had been born there; she could find her way and estimate distances; she knew poisonous snakes from harmless ones and hostile bands of Indians from friendly ones; she read the weather from the shape of the clouds and time by the angle of her shadow; she knew what to do if she came across a bear and how to approach an isolated cabin and not get shot. Sometimes she met newcomers hauling complicated mining equipment up the slopes, which eventually they would abandon as useless, or met groups of feverish men coming down from the hills after months of futile labor. She would never forget the bird-pecked corpse swinging from an oak and wearing a placard of warning. In her pilgrimage she saw Americans, Europeans, Kanakas, Mexicans, Chileans, Peruvians, and long lines of silent Chinese under the command of a overseer who, although of their race, treated them like servants and paid them with crumbs. They carried bundles on their backs and boots in their hand because they had always worn slippers and could not bear that weight on their feet. They were frugal people; they lived on nothing and spent as little as possible. They bought their boots too large because they thought the big ones were worth more, and were stunned when they learned that the price was the same for the small sizes. Eliza sharpened her instinct for side-stepping danger. She learned to live for the day, without making plans, as Tao Chi'en had counseled her. She thought of him often and wrote frequently, but she could send letters only when she came to a town with mail service to Sacramento. It was like throwing bottles with messages into the sea because she didn't know if Tao was still living there, and the one reliable address she had was for the Chinese restaurant. If her letters ever got there, they would surely give them to him.

She wrote him about the magnificent scenery, the heat and the thirst, the voluptuous curves of the hills, the thick oaks and slim pines, the icy rivers with water so clear you could see the gold glittering in the beds, the wild geese honking in the sky, the deer and the huge bears, the miners' rough life and the mirage of easy fortunes. She told him what both of them already knew: that it wasn't worth wasting one's life to chase after yellow dust. And she guessed Tao's response—that neither did it make sense to waste it following an illusory love—but she kept on going because she couldn't stop. Joaquín Andieta was beginning to fade away; her excellent memory could not limn her lover's features clearly; she had to reread his love letters to be sure that in truth he had existed, that they had loved one another and that the nights in the room of the armoires were not her invention. So she renewed the sweet torment of solitary love. To Tao Chi'en she described the people she met along her way, the masses of Mexican immigrants in Sonora, the only town where there were children to run through the streets, the humble women who would invite her into their adobe houses, never knowing she was one of them, the thousands of young Americans who came to the placers that autumn after crossing the continent from the Atlantic Coast to the Pacific. It was estimated that the number of recent arrivals was forty thousand, each of them expecting to get rich in the blink of an eye and return home in triumph. They called themselves the forty-niners, a name that became popular and was soon adopted by all those who had come to California, either earlier or later. Back East, whole towns were left without men, peopled only by women, children, and prisoners.

“I see very few women in the mines, but there are some with enough pluck to accompany their husbands in this dog's life. Their children die in epidemics or accidents, they bury them, weep over them, and go on working from sunup to sundown to keep this barbaric life from stealing every vestige of decency. They roll up their sleeves and wade into the water to look for gold, but some find out that washing other peoples' clothes or baking biscuits and selling them is more productive; they can earn more in a week than their men do in a month's back-breaking work in the placers. A man on his own happily pays ten times its value for a loaf of bread baked by a woman's hands; if I try to sell the same thing, dressed as Elías Andieta, they give me only a few cents, Tao. Men are willing to walk miles just to see a woman up close. A girl sitting in the sun outside a tavern will within minutes have a collection of pouches of gold on her knees, gifts from besotted men grateful for the provocative sight of skirts. And prices keep going up; the miners get poorer and poorer and the merchants richer and richer. In a moment of desperation, I paid a dollar for an egg and ate it raw with salt and pepper and a splash of brandy, as Mama Fresia taught me: an infallible remedy for despair. I met a boy from Georgia, a poor crazy thing, but they tell me he wasn't always like that. At the first of the year he hit a vein of ore and scraped nine thousand dollars from the rocks with a knife, but then lost it all in one afternoon playing monte. Oh, Tao, you cannot imagine how much I long to take a bath, brew some tea, and sit down and talk with you. I would like to put on a clean dress and the earrings Miss Rose gave me, so you would see me looking pretty and not as a mannish woman. I'm writing everything that happens to me in my diary so I can tell you all the details when we see each other, because of this much I am sure: one day we will be together again. I think about Miss Rose and how angry she must be with me but I can't write her until I find Joaquín, because until then no one must know where I am. If Miss Rose ever suspected the things I have seen and heard, she would die. Mr. Sommers would say that this is an uncultivated land: no morality, no laws; the vices of gambling, liquor, and brothels rule, but for me this land is a blank page; here I can start life anew and become the person I want. No one knows me but you; no one knows my past, I can be born again. There are no lords and servants here, only working people. I have seen former slaves who have put together enough gold to establish newspapers, schools, and churches for their race; they fight slavery from here in California. I met a black man who bought his mother's freedom. The poor woman arrived here sick and old, but now she earns whatever she wants selling meals; she bought a ranch and goes to church on Sundays dressed in silk and riding in a four-horse carriage. Did you know that many black sailors deserted their ships, not just for the gold but because here they find their only chance at freedom? I remember the Chinese slave girls behind the iron bars you pointed out to me in San Francisco; I can't forget them, they haunt me like souls in pain. In this part of the world a prostitute's life is brutal, too; some kill themselves. Men wait hours to greet the new teacher with respect but they are brutal to the saloon girls. You know what they call them? ‘Soiled doves.' And the Indians commit suicide, too, Tao. They run them out of everywhere; they drift around, hungry and desperate. No one will hire them, then they charge them with loitering and put them in chains to perform forced labor. Mayors pay five dollars for a dead Indian; they are killed for sport and sometimes they scalp them. There is no shortage of white men who collect such trophies and tie them to their saddles. You would be pleased to know that there are Chinese who have gone to live with the Indians. They go far off to the woods in the north where there is still hunting. They say there aren't many buffalo left on the prairies.”

Eliza left the bear fight penniless and hungry; she hadn't eaten since the previous day, and she swore she would never again bet her grubstake on an empty stomach. When she had nothing left to sell, she spent a couple of days wondering how on earth to survive, until she looked for work and found that earning a living was easier than she had suspected, and in any case preferable to the task of finding someone else to pay the bills. Without a man to protect her and support her, a woman is lost, Miss Rose had drummed into her, but Eliza discovered that was not always so. In her role as Elías Andieta she found work she could have done dressed as a woman. Working as a laborer or a cowboy was not in the cards; she didn't know how to use a tool or a lasso, and she wasn't strong enough to wield a shovel or bulldog a steer, but there were other jobs available. That day she turned to her pen, as she had done so many times before. The idea of writing letters had come from the good advice of her friend the mailman. If she couldn't set up shop in a tavern, she would spread her Castile mantle in the middle of a square, line up inkwell and paper, then hawk her skills in a loud voice. Many miners could barely read or sign their names; they had never written a letter in their lives but they waited for mail with heartrending anxiety: it was their only contact with faraway families. The steamships of the Pacific Mail arrived in San Francisco every two weeks with bags of mail, and as soon as one topped the horizon, people ran to stand in line at the post office. It took postal workers ten or twelve hours to sort the contents of the sacks, but no one objected to waiting all day. From there to the mines the mail took several weeks more. Eliza offered her services in English and Spanish; she read the letters and answered them. If it was all her customer could do to dream up two laconic sentences saying he was still alive and to say hello to everyone, Eliza would patiently question him and add a more flowery account until she filled at least a page. She charged two dollars per letter, regardless of length, but when she incorporated sentimental phrases the man would never have thought of, she usually got a good tip. Some men brought letters for her to read, and she doctored them a little, too, so the pitiful fellow would have the consolation of a few words of kindness. The men's wives, weary of waiting on the other side of the continent, often wrote nothing but complaints, reproaches, or a string of Christian cautions, forgetting that their men were sick with loneliness. One sad Monday a sheriff came to get Eliza to write down the last words of a prisoner condemned to die, a young man from Wisconsin accused that same morning of stealing a horse. Imperturbable, despite being only nineteen, he dictated to Eliza: “Dear Mama, I hope you are well when you get this news and tell Bob and James that they're going to hang me today. Greetings, Theodore.” Eliza tried to soften the message a little, to save the poor mother a heart attack, but the sheriff said there wasn't time to pretty things up. Minutes later, a group of honest citizens led the criminal to the center of town, sat him on a horse after placing a rope around his neck, threw the other end over the branch of an oak, then slapped the horse on the rump and Theodore was hanged without further ado. That wasn't the first hanging Eliza saw. At least this punishment was quick, but if the accused was of another race he was usually horsewhipped before he was executed and, even though she tried to get out of earshot, the screams of the condemned and the howls of the spectators pursued her for weeks.

That day she was about to ask in the tavern if she could set up her scribe's table when she was distracted by a commotion in the distance. Just as the crowd was pouring out of a bear fight, a caravan of mule-driven wagons was approaching down the one street in town, preceded by an Indian boy beating a drum. These were not ordinary wagons; the canvas tops were gaudily painted, and fringe and pompons and Chinese lanterns hung from their roofs; the mules were bedecked like circus animals and plodded forward amid a deafening clanging of copper bells. Sitting on the driver's seat of the first carriage was a large woman with hyperbolic breasts; she was dressed in men's clothes and clenching a piratical pipe between her teeth. The second wagon was driven by an enormous character dressed in ratty wolf skins; his head was shaved, he had hoops in his ears, and he was armed for war. Each of the wagons was towing a second in which the rest of the carnival rode: four young women done up in threadbare velvets and faded brocades and throwing kisses to the open-mouthed throng. The stupor lasted but an instant; as soon as the covered wagons were recognized, an explosion of yells and “Hurrahs!” shook the afternoon air. In the early days the soiled doves had reigned without competition, but that situation had changed when the first families and preachers settled in the new towns, jolting consciences with threats of eternal damnation. Lacking churches, the preachers held religious services in the very saloons where vices flourished. For an hour the sale of liquor would be suspended, the cards put away, and lascivious paintings turned to the wall while the men endured the pastors' warnings regarding their heresy and license. Gathered on the second-floor balcony, the “painted ladies” would philosophically listen to the chastisement, consoled by the knowledge that an hour later everything would be back to normal. As long as business didn't suffer, they didn't much care if the ones who paid them to fornicate turned around and blamed them for doing so and taking their money, as if the men weren't guilty, only the women who tempted them. There were clear lines drawn between decent women and those in the easy life. Fed up with bribing authorities and suffering humiliations, some of the hookers would pack up their trunks and go elsewhere, where sooner or later the cycle would be repeated. The concept of a traveling bawdy house offered the advantage of avoiding unpleasantness with wives and churchgoers and, in addition, opened horizons to the most remote areas, where they were paid double. The enterprise prospered in good weather, but it was nearly winter; soon snow would be falling and the roads would be impassable. This was one of the last rounds of the caravan.

The wagons rolled down the street and stopped at the edge of town, followed by a parade of men titillated by alcohol and the recent contest between the bull and the bear. Eliza followed along to have a close look at this novelty. She realized she would not have many customers for her letter writing and would have to find another way to earn her supper. Taking advantage of the clear day, several volunteers offered to unhitch the mules and help unload a battered piano that they set on the grass, following the orders of the madam, whom they all knew by the delicate name of Joe Bonecrusher. In a thrice, a strip of land had been cleared; tables were set up and as if by magic bottles of rum and postcards of naked women appeared. There were also two boxes of pornographic books, advertised as “bedroom novels with the hottest scenes in France.” They sold for ten dollars apiece, a bargain price, because with them you could get excited as many times as you wanted and lend them to your friends as well; the books were a much better investment than a real woman, Joe Bonecrusher explained, and to prove it, she read a paragraph while her public listened in sepulchral silence, as if to a prophetic revelation. A chorus of “Hot damns!” greeted the end of the reading, and within minutes there wasn't a book left. In the meantime, it had grown dark and the party had to be lighted with torches. The madam announced the exorbitant price of the bottles of rum, but you could dance with the girls for only a fourth of that. Did anyone here know how to play the fucking piano? she asked. That was when Eliza, whose stomach was growling, stepped forward without a moment's hesitation and sat down at the out-of-tune instrument, invoking Miss Rose. She hadn't played in ten months, and did not have a good ear, but the years of training with the metal rod and the knuckle-rapping of her Belgian professor came to her aid. She attacked one of the naughty songs Miss Rose and her brother, the captain, used to sing together in the innocent days of the musical gatherings, before fate lashed its tail and Eliza's world was turned upside down. To her surprise, her clumsy playing was well received. In less than two minutes, a rustic violin materialized to accompany her, the dancing heated up, and men grabbed the four women to prance around the improvised dance floor. The ogre in the wolf skins whipped off Eliza's hat and plunked it down on the piano with a gesture so determined that no one dared ignore it, and soon it was filling up with tips.