Portrait in Sepia (3 page)

"Besides, it's a little late to repent, don't you think?" added John Sommers.

"You can live longer, and in better condition, if you stop drinking. Why don't you take a rest? Come live with us for a while. Eliza and I will take care of you until you recover," the
zhong-yi
proposed, looking away so the captain would not see his emotion. As so often happened in his role as a physician, he had to fight against the feeling of terrible impotence that overcame him when he was forced to confront how limited the resources of his science were and how immense man's suffering.

"What makes you think that of my own free will I would place myself in Eliza's hands and let her condemn me to abstinence! How much time do I have left, Tao?" asked John Sommers.

"I cannot tell you exactly. You should get another opinion."

"Yours is the only opinion I respect. Ever since you pulled my tooth halfway between Indonesia and the coast of Africa and I didn't feel a thing, no other doctor has laid his damned hands on me. How long ago was that?"

"About fifteen years. I appreciate your confidence, sir."

"Only fifteen years? Why does it seem to me that we have known each other all our lives?"

"Perhaps we knew one another in another lifetime."

"The idea of reincarnation terrifies me, Tao. Imagine if in my next life I turned out to be a Muslim. Do you know that those poor wretches don't touch alcohol?"

"That surely is your karma. In every incarnation we must resolve what we left unfinished in the previous one," Tao joked.

"I prefer the Christian hell, it's less cruel. Well, we'll say nothing of this to Eliza," John Sommers concluded as he dressed, struggling with the buttons that escaped his trembling fingers. "Since this may be my last visit, it's only right that she and my grandchildren remember me happy and healthy. I leave with a calm heart, Tao, because no one could look after my daughter Eliza better than you:'

"No one could love her more than I do, sir."

"When I'm no longer here, someone must look to my sister. You know that Rose was like a mother to Eliza."

"Don't worry. Eliza and I will always be in touch with her," his son-in-law assured him.

"My death… I mean… will it be quick, and with dignity? How will I know when the end is coming?"

"When you vomit blood, sir," Tao Chi'en said sadly.

That happened three weeks later, in the middle of the Pacific, in the privacy of the captain's cabin. As soon as he could stand, the old seaman cleaned up the traces of his vomit, rinsed out his mouth, changed his bloody shirt, lighted his pipe, and went to the bow of his ship, where he stood and looked for the last time at the stars winking in a sky of black velvet. Several sailors saw him and waited at a distance, caps in hand. When he had smoked the last of the tobacco, Captain John Sommers put his legs over the rail and noiselessly dropped into the sea.

•

Severo del Valle met Lynn Sommers in 1872 during a trip he made with his father from Chile to California to visit his aunt Paulina and uncle Feliciano, who were the subjects of the family's finest gossip. Severo had seen his aunt Paulina once or twice during her sporadic appearances in Valparaiso, but not until he knew her in her North American surroundings did he understand his family's sighs of Christian intolerance. Far away from the religious and conservative milieu of Chile, from his grandfather Agustin, confined to his paralytic's wheelchair, from his grandmother Emilia with her lugubrious laces and linseed enemas, from the rest of his envious and timid relatives, Paulina had reached her true Amazonian proportions. On his first journey, Severo del Valle was too young to measure either the power or the fortune of that famous aunt and uncle, although the differences between them and the rest of the del Valle tribe did not escape him. It was when he returned years later that he would realize that they were among the richest families in San Francisco, along with the silver, railroad, bank, and stagecoach barons. On that first trip, at fifteen, sitting at the foot of his aunt Paulina's polychrome bed while she planned the strategy of her mercantile wars, Severo had decided his own future.

"You should be a lawyer, so you can use all the power of the law to help me demolish my enemies," Paulina counseled that day between bites of a cream-filled pastry.

"Yes, Aunt. Grandfather Agustin says that every respectable family must have a lawyer, a doctor, and a bishop," her nephew replied.

"You also need a head for business:'

"Grandfather believes that commerce is not a profession for gentlemen."

"Tell him that gentlemanliness doesn't put food on the table, and he can stick it up his ass."

The youth had heard that phrase only in the mouth of their coachman, a Spaniard from Madrid who had escaped from prison in Tenerife, and who for incomprehensible reasons also said he shit on God and milk. Who could explain the Spanish?

"Don't be so goody-goody, dear boy," Paulina shouted, rolling with laughter at her nephew's expression. "We all have asses."

That same afternoon she took him to Eliza Sommers's pastry shop. San Francisco had dazzled Severo with his first glimpse from the ship: a luminous city set in a green landscape of tree-covered hills descending in waves to the edge of a bay of calm waters. From a distance it looked Severo, with its Spanish plan of a grid of streets, but on closer look it had all the charm of the unexpected. Accustomed to the sleepy aspect of the port of Valparaiso, where he had grown up, the boy was stunned by the dementia of houses and buildings in many styles, of luxury and poverty, all mixed together as if it had sprung up overnight. He saw a dead, fly-covered horse in front of an elegant shop selling violins and grand pianos. Through the noisy traffic of animals and coaches streamed a cosmopolitan throng of Americans, Spanish and Spanish Americans, French, Irish, Italians, Germans, a few American Indians, and former black slaves, freed now but still poor and rejected. They turned toward Chinatown and in the blink of an eye found themselves in a country inhabited by Celestials, as the Chinese were called, whom the coachman scattered with cracks of his whip as he drove the fiacre toward Union Square. He stopped before a Victorian-style house, simple in comparison to the delirium of molding, bas-relief, and rosettes prevalent in that neighborhood.

"This is Mrs. Sommers's tea shop, the only one around," Paulina explained. "You can get coffee anywhere you please, but for a cup of tea you have to come here. The Yankees have abominated this noble brew ever since their war of independence, which began when rebels burned the Englishmen's tea in Boston."

"But wasn't that a century ago?"

"Yes. You see, Severo, how stupid patriotism can be."

Tea wasn't the reason for Paulina's frequent visits to this shop, it was Eliza Sommers's famous pastries, which filled the room with a delicious aroma of sugar and vanilla. The house, one of many imported from England during the early days of San Francisco along with a manual of instructions for putting it together, like a toy, had two stories and was topped with a tower that gave it the air of a country church. On the first floor, two rooms had been combined to enlarge the dining room, which contained several chairs with twisted feet and five round tables covered with white cloths. On the second floor they sold boxes of hand-dipped candies made of the best Belgian chocolate, almond marzipan, and several kinds of Chilean sweets, Paulina del Valle's personal favorites. Two Mexican employees with long braids and white aprons and starched coifs served as waitresses, telepathically directed by the tiny Mrs. Sommers, who in comparison with Paulina's impetuous presence seemed barely to exist. The wasp-waisted, foaming underskirted fashions favored the former but magnified the bulk of the latter, in addition to which, Paulina del Valle was never known to scrimp on yardage, flounces, pompoms, or pleats. That day she was costumed like a queen bee, in black and yellow from head to toe, with a feather-topped hat and bodice of stripes. Many stripes. She invaded the tea shop, swallowing up all the air and with every step setting cups to rattling and making fragile wood walls moan. When the servants saw her enter, they ran to change one of the delicate caned chairs for one more solid, into which the grande dame settled herself with grace. Paulina always moved deliberately, for she considered that nothing made one as unattractive as haste; she also avoided all the noises of old age, never allowing any panting, coughing, groaning, or sighs of exhaustion to escape in public, even though her feet were killing her. "I don't want to have a fat woman's voice," she would say, and she gargled with lemon juice and honey every day to keep her voice "slim." Eliza Sommers, tiny and straight-backed as a sword, dressed in a dark blue skirt and melon-colored blouse buttoned at the neck and wrist, and with a modest pearl necklace as her only adornment, looked distinctly young. She spoke a Spanish rusty for lack of use and a British-accented English, jumping from one tongue to the other in the same sentence, just like Paulina. Señora del Valle's fortune and her aristocratic blood placed her far above Eliza's social level. A woman who worked for pleasure could only be accused of being mannish, but Paulina knew that Eliza no longer belonged to the class in which she had grown up in Chile, and worked because she needed to, not for pleasure. Paulina had also heard that Eliza lived with a China man, but even her devastating indiscretion was not sufficient to allow asking Eliza directly.

"Mrs. Eliza Sommers and I met in Chile in 1840," Paulina explained to her nephew. "She was eight years old at the time and I was sixteen, but now we are the same age."

While the waitresses were serving tea, an amused Eliza Sommers listened to Paulina's incessant chatter, interrupted barely long enough for her to gobble another bite. Severo forgot about the women when at the next table he discovered a precious little girl pasting pictures into an album by the light of the gas lamps and the soft glow of the stained-glass windowpanes that dappled her with sparks of gold. The girl was Lynn Sommers, Eliza's daughter, a creature of such rare beauty that even then, though she was only twelve years old, several of the city's photographers were using her as a model: her face illustrated postcards, posters, and calendars of angels plucking lyres and naughty nymphs in forests of cardboard trees. Severo was still of an age when girls are a slightly repugnant mystery to boys, but now he gave in to fascination. Standing beside her, he contemplated her openmouthed, not understanding why he felt a tightness in his chest and a desire to weep. Eliza Sommers interrupted his trance by calling the youngsters to have a cup of chocolate. The little girl closed the album without paying any attention to Severo, as if she didn't see him, and stood up lightly, floating. She sat down to her cup of chocolate without speaking a word or looking up, resigned to the boy's impertinent gaze and fully aware that her looks separated her from other mortals. She carried her beauty like a deformity, with the secret hope that with time it would go away.

A few weeks later Severo sailed back to Chile with his father, carrying in his memory the vastness of California and with the vision of Lynn Sommers firmly entrenched in his heart.

•

Severo del Valle did not see Lynn again until several years later. He returned to California at the end of 1876 to live with his aunt Paulina, but he did not renew his acquaintance with Lynn until one winter Wednesday in 1879, and by then it was already too late for both of them. By the time of his second visit to San Francisco, the young man had reached his definitive height, but he was still bone thin, pale, ungainly, and uncomfortable in his skin, as if he had too many elbows and knees. Three years later, when he stood mute before Lynn, he was a mature man, with the noble features of his Spanish ancestors, the flexible build of an Andalusian bullfighter, and the ascetic air of a seminarian. Much had changed in his life since the first time he saw Lynn. The image of that silent little girl with the languor of a relaxed cat had accompanied him throughout the difficult years of his adolescence and the grief of his mourning. His father, whom he had adored, had died, still comparatively young, in Chile, and his mother, confounded by her immature but overly lucid and irreverent son, had sent him to finish his studies in a Catholic school in Santiago. Soon, however, he returned home with a letter explaining in no uncertain terms that one bad apple spoils all the others in the barrel, or something of that nature. Then the self-sacrificing mother made a pilgrimage on her knees to a miraculous grotto where the Virgin, always ingenious, whispered the solution to her: pack him off to the military service and let a sergeant deal with the problem. For one year Severo marched with the troops, endured the rigor and stupidity of the regiment, and emerged with the rank of reserve officer, determined never again in his lifetime to go near a barracks. He had no more than set his foot out the door when he returned to his old friendships and erratic moods. This time his uncles got into the act. They met in council in the austere dining room in the home of Severo's grandfather Agustin, without the presence of the youth and his mother, who had no vote at the patriarchal table. In that same room thirty-five years earlier Paulina del Valle, her head shaved but crowned with a diamond tiara, had defied the males of her family to marry Feliciano Rodríguez de Santa Cruz, the man she had chosen for herself. There, that day, the charges against Severo were being presented to his grandfather: he refused to confess or take Communion; he ran around with bohemians; books on the blacklist had been discovered in his possession; in short, it was suspected that he had been recruited by the Masons or, worse yet, the liberals. Chile was going through a period of battles between irreconcilable ideologies, and the more government posts the liberals won, the greater the ire of ultraconservatives imbued with messianic fervor like the del Valles, all of whom were attempting to implant their ideas by means of excommunication and pistols, crush the Masons and anticlerics, and wipe out the liberals once and for all. The del Valles were not disposed to tolerate a dissident in the very bosom of the family and of their own blood. The idea of sending Severo to the United States came from Grandfather Agustin. "The Yankees will cure him of his hankering to run around raising hell," he predicted. So without asking his opinion, Severo was sent off to California, dressed in mourning and carrying his deceased father's gold watch in his jacket pocket, a meager array of luggage—including a huge Christ with a crown of thorns—and a sealed letter for his uncle Feliciano and aunt Paulina.