Daughter of Fortune (49 page)

Eliza followed the carnival for a few blocks, half amused and half admiring, while Roman candles and pistols flashed all around. Lola Montez was carrying her hat in her hand; her black hair was parted in the middle with curls over her ears, and her eyes were a hallucinatory midnight blue; she was wearing a skirt of crimson velvet, a blouse with lace at the neck and wrists, and a bolero embroidered with bugle beads. Her attitude was mocking and defiant; she was fully aware that she embodied the men's most primitive and secret desires and symbolized all that was most feared by defenders of morality; she was an idol of perversity and she loved the role. In the excitement of the moment, someone tossed a handful of gold dust over her and it clung to her hair and clothing like an aura. The vision of that young woman, triumphant and fearless, shook Eliza. She thought of Miss Rose, as she did more and more often, and felt a surge of compassion and tenderness for her. She remembered her armored in her corset, back straight, waist constricted, sweating under her five petticoats. “Sit with your knees together, stand up straight, never be in haste, speak in a low voice, smile, do not make faces because that causes wrinkles, be silent and feign interest, men are flattered by women who listen to them.” Miss Rose, with her scent of vanilla, always obliging. But she also remembered her in her bath, nearly naked in her wet nightdress, eyes shining with laughter, hair wild, cheeks pink, chattering happily: “A woman can do anything she wants, Eliza, as long as she does it discreetly.” Lola Montez, however, did what she wanted openly; she had lived more lives than the boldest adventurer, and had done it proudly, as a beautiful woman. That night a pensive Eliza went to her room and stealthily, like someone committing a crime, opened the suitcase with her dresses. She had left the case in Sacramento when she left to look for her lover the first time, but Tao Chi'en had kept it for her, thinking that someday she might want it. When she opened it, something fell out; surprised, she saw her pearl necklace, her payment to Tao Chi'en for smuggling her onto the ship. She stood for a long time with the pearls in her hand, deeply moved. She shook out the dresses and laid them on the bed; they were wrinkled and smelled musty. The next day she took them to the best laundry in Chinatown.

“I am going to write Miss Rose, Tao,” she announced.

“Why?”

“She is like my mother. If I love her this much, I am sure she loves me back. Four years have gone by; she must think I'm dead.”

“Would you like to see her?”

“Of course, but that isn't possible. I'm going to write just to ease her doubts, but it would be nice if she could answer me. Do you mind if I give her this address?”

“You want your family to find you,” he said, and something cracked in his voice.

She looked at him and realized that she had never been so close to anyone in this world as she was at that moment to Tao Chi'en. She felt the man in her own blood, with such ancient and fierce certainty that she marveled at the time she had spent by his side without realizing. She missed him even though she saw him every day. She longed for the carefree days when they were good friends; everything had seemed simpler then, but neither did she want to turn back. Now there was something unfinished between them, something much more complex and fascinating than their old friendship.

Eliza's dresses and petticoats had come back from the laundry and were laid out on her bed, wrapped in paper. She opened the suitcase and took out her white stockings and high-button shoes, but left the corset inside. She smiled at the thought that she had never dressed as a woman without help, then put on the petticoats and tried on the dresses one by one in order to choose the one most appropriate for the occasion. She felt alien in those clothes and got tangled in the ribbons, laces, and buttons; it took her several minutes to button the boots and get her balance under so many petticoats, but with each garment she put on she was overcoming her doubts and confirming her desire to be a woman again. Mama Fresia had warned her about the risks of womanhood: “Your body will change, your thoughts will be jumbled, and any man will be able to do what he wants with you,” she had said, but now Eliza did not fear those risks.

Tao Chi'en had attended the last patient of the day. He was in his shirt sleeves and had taken off the jacket and tie he always wore out of respect for his patients, following the counsel of his acupuncture master. He was perspiring, because the sun hadn't set and it had been one of the few hot days of that July. He thought he never would get used to the caprices of the San Francisco climate, where summer wore the face of winter. It usually dawned with a radiant sun but within hours a thick fog rolled in through the Golden Gate or a chilling wind blew off the sea. He was sterilizing the needles in alcohol and arranging his medicine bottles when Eliza came in. The assistant had left and at the moment there was no singsong girl in their care; they were alone in the house.

“I have something for you, Tao,” Eliza said.

Tao Chi'en looked up; he was so startled that a bottle dropped from his hands. Eliza was wearing an elegant dark dress trimmed with white lace. He had seen her only twice in women's clothing in Valparaíso, but he had not forgotten how she had looked.

“Do you like me this way?”

“I like you any way.” He smiled as he removed his eyeglasses to admire her from a distance.

“This is my Sunday dress. I put it on because I want to have a portrait taken. Here, this is for you,” and she handed him a pouch.

“What is this?”

“My savings . . . for you to buy another girl, Tao. I planned to look for Joaquín this summer, but I'm not going. I know now I will never find him.”

“It seems that like everyone who came to California we found something different from what we were looking for.”

“What were you looking for?”

“Knowledge, wisdom, I don't remember. Instead I found the singsong girls, and look at the mess I'm in.”

“Why are you so unromantic, Tao? My God! Gallantry demands that you say you also found me.”

“I would have found you anyway, it was predestined.”

“Not the old story about reincarnation.”

“Of course. In every incarnation we will keep meeting until we work out our karma.”

“It sounds frightening. Whatever the case, I am not going back to Chile; but I'm not going to keep hiding, either, Tao. I want to be myself.”

“You always have been.”

“My life is here. That is, if you want me to stay and help you.”

“And Joaquín Andieta?”

“Maybe the star on his forehead means he is dead. Imagine. All this long, dreadful journey in vain.”

“Nothing is in vain. You don't
go
anywhere in life, Eliza, you just keep walking.”

“The part we've walked together hasn't been bad. Come with me, I am going to have my portrait taken to send to Miss Rose.”

“Can you have one made for me?”

They walked arm in arm to Union Square, where there were several photography shops, and chose the one that looked the best. In the window was a collection of images of forty-niners: a young man with a blond beard and determined expression, holding a pick and shovel; a group of miners in shirt sleeves, eyes fixed on the camera, very serious; some Chinese on the banks of a river; Indians panning for gold with finely woven baskets; pioneer families posing beside their wagons. Daguerreotypes were in vogue; they were the link to distant friends and family, proof that they were living the gold adventure. It was said that in Eastern cities many men who had never been to California had their portraits made in mining garb. Eliza was convinced that the extraordinary invention of the photograph had dealt the death blow to painters, who rarely caught a likeness.

“Miss Rose had her portrait painted with three hands, Tao. It was by a famous artist, but I don't remember his name.”

“Three hands?”

“Well, the painter put two, but she added another. Her brother Jeremy nearly died when he saw it.”

She wanted to put her daguerreotype in a fine gilt and red velvet frame for Miss Rose's desk. She had brought Joaquín Andieta's letters to immortalize them in the photograph before she destroyed them. Inside the shop were enough backdrops for a small theater: canvases of flowery pergolas and lakes with herons, cardboard Greek columns garlanded with roses, even a stuffed bear. The photographer was a small, hurried man whose words tumbled out and who leapt about like a toad among the implements in his studio. Once they had agreed on the details, he sat Eliza at a table with the love letters in her hand and fitted a metal bar behind her with a support for her neck, not unlike the rod Miss Rose had insisted on during Eliza's piano lessons.

“This is to keep you from moving. Look at the camera and don't breathe.”

The gnome disappeared behind a black cloth; an instant later a white flash blinded Eliza and a scorched smell made her sneeze. For the second portrait she put the letters aside and asked Tao Chi'en to help her fasten the pearl necklace.

The next day Tao Chi'en went out early to buy a newspaper, as he always did before opening the office, and was met with a six-column headline: Joaquín Murieta had been killed. He returned home with the paper pressed to his chest, wondering how to tell Eliza, and how she would receive the news.

At dawn on July 24, after three months of riding through California in a game of blindman's bluff, Captain Harry Love and his twenty mercenaries had come to the Tulare valley. By then they were sick and tired of chasing ghosts and following false trails; the heat and mosquitoes had put them in a foul mood and they were beginning to despise one another. Three summer months of forced march through these dry hills with the sun beating down on their heads was a lot of sacrifice for what they were being paid. They had seen the posters in the towns offering a thousand dollars' reward for the capture of the bandit. On more than one they had seen a scrawled, “I will pay five thousand,” and signed Joaquín Murieta. They were looking foolish, and there were only three days left before time ran out: if they returned empty-handed they wouldn't see a cent of the governor's thousand dollars. But this must have been their lucky day because just when they were losing hope they had come across a group of seven unguarded Mexicans camping under some trees.

Later the captain would say that they were wearing the finest clothes and had only purebred horses, reasons enough to awaken their suspicion, and that was why they rode over to ask for identification. Instead of complying, the suspicious characters made a run for their horses but before they could mount they were surrounded by Love's guard. The one person who olympically ignored the attackers and walked on toward his mount as if he had not heard any warning was the one who seemed to be the leader. He was unarmed except for a hunting knife at his belt; his guns were strapped to his saddle, but he never fired a shot because by then the captain had his pistol to the man's forehead. A few steps away the other Mexicans watched, transfixed, Love would write in his report, ready to come to their leader's aid at the first careless move by the guards. Suddenly they all made a desperate attempt to escape, perhaps with the purpose of distracting the guards, while their leader, with one formidable leap, was on his restless stallion and bursting through their lines. He did not get far, however, because a blast from a shotgun caught his horse, which rolled to the ground vomiting blood. Then the outlaw, who was none other than the famous Joaquín Murieta, Captain Love claimed, took off like an antelope, and they had no choice but to empty their pistols into his chest.

“Don't shoot anymore, you've done your job,” the man said before he slowly sank to the ground, dead.

That was the story dramatized in the press, and no Mexican was left alive to tell his version of events. The heroic Captain Harry Love proceeded to cut off the head of the supposed Murieta with one slash of his sword. Someone noticed that one of the victims had a mutilated hand, and it was immediately assumed that this was Three-Finger Jack, so they cut off his head, too, and for good measure added the hand. The twenty guards went galloping toward the nearest town, some miles away, but the heat was hellish and Three-Finger Jack's head was so full of bullet holes it began to disintegrate, so they threw it by the side of the road. Pursued by flies and a terrible stench, Captain Harry Love realized that he would have to preserve the remains or he would never get them to San Francisco to collect the deserved reward, so he immersed them in great jars of gin. He was welcomed as a hero: he had liberated California from the worst outlaw in its history. But as Jacob Freemont reported, the matter was not entirely cleared up; the story smelled of fabrication. To begin with, no one could prove that events had happened as portrayed by Harry Love and his men, and it was somewhat suspicious that after three months of fruitless searching they would find seven Mexicans just when the captain most needed them. Nor had anyone been able to identify Joaquín Murieta: Freemont himself went to see the head and could not be sure it was the bandit he knew, although it certainly resembled him, he said.

For weeks the remains of the presumed Joaquín Murieta and the hand of his abominable sidekick Three-Finger Jack were exhibited in San Francisco before being taken on a triumphal tour through the remainder of California. The lines of the curious stretched around the block and there was no one who hadn't taken a close look at the sinister trophies. Eliza was one of the first to go, and Tao Chi'en accompanied her because he did not want her to undergo such a test alone, even though she had received the news with amazing calm. After an eternal wait in the sun, it was finally their turn and they went inside. Eliza clung to Tao Chi'en's fingers but moved forward with determination, indifferent to the river of sweat staining her dress and the trembling that shook her bones. They found themselves in a dark room badly lighted by yellow candles emitting a breath from the tomb. Black cloth covered the walls and in one corner a valiant pianist was thumping out funereal chords with more resignation than real feeling. On a table draped like a catafalque sat the two glass jars. Eliza closed her eyes and let Tao Chi'en guide her, sure that the beating of her heart was drowning out the chords from the piano. They stopped; she felt her friend's grip grow stronger on hers; she gulped a mouthful of air and opened her eyes. She stared at the head for a few seconds and then let herself be led outside.