Daughter of Fortune (44 page)

When Tao Chi'en estimated that his time behind the curtain was used up, he left. The same old woman who had received him the night before was waiting at the door but she gave no sign of recognizing him. From there Tao went to ask questions in saloons, gambling halls, opium parlors, and then visited other physicians in the quarter, until little by little he fit together the pieces of that puzzle. When the little singsong girls were too sick to keep working, they were taken to the “hospital,” as they called the secret rooms he had seen the previous night, and left there with a cup of water, a little rice, and a lamp with oil enough for a few hours. The door was opened again a few days later when someone went in to be sure the girl was dead. If she was alive, she was killed; none ever saw sunlight again. Tao Chi'en had been called only because the usual
zhong yi
hadn't been available.

The idea of helping the girls wasn't his, he would tell Eliza nine months later, but Lin's and the acupuncture master's.

“California is a free state, Tao. Slavery is outlawed. Go to the American authorities.”

“Not everyone enjoys freedom. White people are blind and deaf, Eliza. Those girls are invisible, like the insane and beggars and dogs.”

“And the Chinese don't care about them?”

“Some do, like me, but no one is willing to risk his life defying the criminal tongs. Most people believe that if things have been run that way for centuries in China, there is no reason to criticize what goes on here.”

“But that's very cruel!”

“It isn't cruelty. It's just that human life is not valued in my country. There are many, many people, and there are always more children than the family can feed.”

“But in your mind those girls aren't garbage, Tao . . .”

“No. Lin and you have taught me a lot about women.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I should have listened when you told me to come look for gold, you remember? If I were wealthy, I would buy them.”

“But you aren't. Besides, all the gold in California wouldn't be enough to buy every one of them. You have to stop the traffic.”

“That's impossible, but I can save a few if you help me.”

Tao told Eliza that in recent months he had rescued eleven girls, but only two had survived. His formula was risky, and not very effective, but he couldn't think of another way. He had offered to treat the girls without charge when they were sick or got pregnant if in exchange they would hand over the dying girls to him. He bribed the old whores to call him when it was time to send a singsong girl to the “hospital”; he and his assistant would go to the brothel, load the dying girl onto a stretcher, and take her away. “For experiments,” Tao Chi'en explained, although he was rarely questioned. The girl wasn't worth anything anymore, and this doctor's extravagant perversion saved the management the problem of getting rid of her. The transaction benefited both parties. Before taking the sick girl Tao Chi'en would hand them a death certificate and ask for the contract she had signed so there would be no claims. In nine instances, the girls were beyond help, and Tao's role was simply to be with them in their last hours, but two had lived.

“What did you do with them?” asked Eliza.

“I have them in my room. They are still weak, and one seems half crazy, but they will get well. My assistant stayed to look after them while I came to find you.”

“I see.”

“I can't keep them cooped up any longer.”

“Maybe we can send them back to their families in China.”

“No! They'll go right back to being slaves. They can be saved in this country, I just don't know how.”

“If the authorities won't help you, good people will. We'll go to the churches and the missionaries.”

“I don't think Christians are going to care about these Chinese girls.”

“How little you trust the human heart, Tao!”

Eliza left her friend drinking tea with Joe Bonecrusher, wrapped up a loaf of freshly baked bread, and went to visit the blacksmith. She found James Morton at the anvil, sweating, naked from the waist up, wearing a leather apron and a kerchief tied around his forehead. The heat was unbearable and the place smelled of smoke and candescent metal. The forge was a large wood building with a dirt floor and a double door that was left open winter and summer during work hours. At the front was a large table for conducting business with customers, and behind it, the anvil. The instruments of Morton's trade hung from walls and roof beams, tools and wrought iron fashioned by Morton. At the rear, a ladder gave access to a loft that served as a bedroom, protected from the customer's eyes by an oilcloth curtain. The space below the loft was furnished with a tub for bathing and a table and two chairs; the only decorations were an American flag on the wall and three wildflowers in a vase on the table. Esther was ironing a mountain of clothes, her enormous belly bobbing and sweat pouring, but she was singing as she wielded the heavy irons. Love and pregnancy had made her beautiful, and peace lighted her like a halo. She took in washing, work as arduous as her husband's with his anvil and hammer. Three times a week she loaded a cart with dirty clothes, went to the river, and spent a good part of the day on her knees, soaping and scrubbing. If the sun was shining she dried the clothes on the rocks, but often she had to bring everything back wet. Then came the chore of starching and ironing. James Morton had not been able to persuade her to stop that brutal work; she did not want the baby to be born where they were and was saving every cent to move their family to a house in town.

“Chile Boy!” she cried, and welcomed Eliza with a hug. “It's been a long time since you came to visit.”

“How pretty you're looking, Esther! I've really come to see James,” she said, handing her friend the bread.

The man put down his tools, mopped sweat with his kerchief, and led Eliza to the backyard, where Esther joined them with three glasses of lemonade. The afternoon was cool and the sky cloudy but there were no signs of winter. The breeze bore the scent of newly mown hay and damp earth.

I
n the winter of 1852, the residents of northern California ate peaches, apricots, grapes, sweet corn, watermelon, and cantaloupe while in New York, Washington, Boston, and other important American cities people resigned themselves to seasonal scarcities. Paulina's ships brought from Chile the delights of the Southern Hemisphere's summer, which arrived unblemished in their beds of blue ice. Her business was doing much better than her husband's and brother-in-law's gold, even though they no longer got three dollars for a peach or ten for a dozen eggs. The Chilean peasants the Rodríguez de Santa Cruz brothers had working at their placers had been nearly wiped out by Yanquis who had appropriated the fruit of months of work, hanged the overseers, horsewhipped and cut off the ears of several men, and run off the rest. That episode had been published in the newspapers, but the Santa Cruz family learned the hair-raising details from an eight-year-old boy, the son of one of the overseers, who had seen the white men torture and kill his father. Paulina's ships also carried theater companies from London, opera from Milan, and musical theater from Madrid, companies that played for a short while in Valparaíso and then continued north. Tickets were sold months in advance, and on performance days San Francisco's best society, in gala finery, attended theaters where they sat beside rustic miners in work clothes. Ships did not return empty: they carried American flour, and passengers cured of the fantasy of gold returning to Chile as poor as they had left.

In San Francisco one saw everything but old people; the population was young, strong, noisy, and brimming with health. Gold had attracted a legion of twenty-year-old adventurers but the fever had passed. However, as Paulina had predicted, the city did not turn back into a wide spot in the road; on the contrary, it kept growing, with aspirations to refinement and culture. Paulina was in her element in that ambience; she liked the openness, the freedom, and the ostentation of that young society, exactly the opposite of the hypocrisy of Chile. She gloried in the thought of how her father would rage if he had to sit down at the table with a corrupt upstart become a judge, or a Frenchwoman of dubious past decked out like an empress. She had grown up within the thick stucco walls and grillwork windows of her paternal home, looking toward the past, dependent on divine punishment and the opinion of others. In California neither past nor scruples counted; eccentricity was welcomed and guilt did not exist as long as the offense remained hidden. Paulina wrote her sisters, with little hope that her letters would get past her father's censorship, to tell them about this extraordinary country where it was possible to invent a new life and become a millionaire or a beggar in the wink of an eye. It was the land of opportunity, open and generous. Through the Golden Gate came masses of beings escaping poverty or violence, hoping to find work and erase the past. It wasn't easy, but their descendants would be Americans. The marvel of this country was that everyone believed their children would have a better life than theirs. “Agriculture is the true gold of California. Farther than you can see are vast, sown fields; everything grows luxuriantly in this blessed soil. San Francisco has become a great city but it has not lost the character of a frontier outpost, and that enchants me. It is still the cradle of freethinkers, visionaries, heroes, and ruffians. People come from the most remote shores; you hear a hundred languages in the street, smell the food of five continents, see every race,” she wrote. No longer a camp of solitary men, women had arrived, and with them society changed. They were as indomitable as the adventurers who came looking for gold; crossing the continent in oxcarts required a robust spirit, and these pioneer women had it. No namby-pambies like her mother and sisters; here Amazons like herself reigned. Day by day they proved their mettle, competing tirelessly and tenaciously with the hardiest men; no one called them the weaker sex, men respected them as equals. They worked in jobs forbidden to them elsewhere: they prospected for gold, worked as cowgirls, drove mules, tracked outlaws for bounty, managed gambling halls, restaurants, laundries, and hotels. “Here women can own land, buy and sell property, get divorced if they feel like it. Feliciano has to walk a fine line because the first thing he tries to get away with, I will leave him, all alone and poor,” Paulina joked in her letters. And she added that California had the best of the worst: rats, fleas, weapons, and vices.

“People come west to escape the past and begin anew, but our obsessions pursue us, like the wind,” Jacob Freemont wrote in a newspaper article. He himself was a good example, because changing his name, becoming a reporter, and dressing like an American had had little effect; he was the same man. The fraud of the missions in Valparaíso was behind him but now he was devising another, and he felt, as before, that his creation was taking over and he was irrevocably sinking into his own weaknesses. His articles on Joaquín Murieta had become the hottest item in the press. Every day came new testimonials confirming what he had written; dozens of individuals swore they had seen Murieta and described him exactly as the character Freemont had invented. He wasn't sure of anything anymore. He wished he had never written those stories, and at moments was tempted to retract them publicly, confess his lies, and disappear before the whole affair exploded and blew him to hell, as had happened in Chile, but he didn't have the courage to follow through. His prestige had gone to his head and he was dizzied by fame.

The story Jacob Freemont had been spinning had the earmarks of a dime novel. He wrote that Joaquín Murieta had been an upright, noble young man working honorably in the placers in Stanislaus, accompanied by the girl he was going to marry. When they learned of his prosperity, some Americans had attacked him, stolen his gold, beat him, and then raped his sweetheart before his eyes. There was nothing left for the unfortunate pair but to flee, and they set out for the north, far from the gold fields. They settled down as farmers, and cultivated an idyllic bit of land surrounded by forests and fed by a limpid stream, Freemont wrote, but they were not to find peace there, either, because once again Yanquis came and took what was his; the couple would have to find another way to survive. Shortly afterward Murieta showed up in Calaveras, dealing at monte while his bride prepared their wedding party in the home of her parents in Sonora. It was in the stars, however, that this man would never find tranquility anywhere. He was accused of stealing a horse, and without further ado a group of Yanquis tied him to a tree and savagely lashed him in the town square. That public humiliation was more than a proud young Latino could bear, and his heart turned cold. It wasn't long before the body of a white man was found cut up in pieces like a hen for a stew, and once his parts were put back together they recognized one of the men who had shamed Murieta with the horsewhipping. In the following weeks all the other participants fell one by one, each tortured and killed in some novel way. Just as Jacob Freemont wrote in his articles: never had such cruelty been seen in a land of cruel men. In the next two years the name of the outlaw cropped up everywhere. His gang stole cattle and horses, ambushed stagecoaches, attacked miners in the placers and travelers on the road, defied the constables, killed any careless American they came upon, and openly mocked the law. Every unpunished crime and excess in California was attributed to Murieta. The terrain lent itself to disappearing; there were plenty of fish and game to be had in its hills and valleys and rivers and woods; a horseman could ride for hours through the high grass without leaving a trail, and it had deep caves to take shelter in, secret mountain passes where a man could throw off pursuers. The posses that rode out to capture the wrongdoers returned empty-handed, or died in their attempt. All this Jacob Freemont described with florid rhetoric, and no one thought to ask for names, dates, or places.