Portrait in Sepia (37 page)

No, I am not going to talk about how close my lover and I are, but there is an episode I have to tell because it has to do with memory, and
that
, after all, is the reason I'm writing these pages. My nightmares are a blind journey through the shadowy caverns where my oldest recollections lie locked in the deep strata of consciousness. Photography and writing are a tentative way of seizing those moments before they vanish, of fixing those memories in order to give meaning to my life. Iván and I had been together several months; we had already become accustomed to the routine of seeing each other discreetly, thanks to good Uncle Frederick, who harbored our love from the beginning. Iván had to give a medical lecture in a city in the north, and I went with him under the pretext of photographing the nitrate mines, where the working conditions are very unhealthful. The English managers refused to negotiate with the workers, and there was a climate of growing violence that would explode a few years later. When that happened, in 1907, I happened by chance to be there, and my photographs are the only irrefutable documents that the slaughter at Iquique occurred, because government censorship erased from the face of history the two thousand dead that I saw in the plaza. But that is another story, and has no place in these pages. The first time I went to that city with Iván, I could not suspect the tragedy I would later witness; it was a brief honeymoon for us both. We registered separately in the hotel, and that night, after each of us finished the work of the day, he came to my room, where I was waiting with a magnificent bottle of Vina Paulina. Until then our relationship had been an adventure of the flesh, an exploration of the senses that for me was fundamental because as a result I managed to overcome the humiliation of having been rejected by Diego and to understand that I was not an incomplete woman, as I feared. In every meeting with Iván Radovic I had been gaining more confidence, conquering my shyness and repressions, but I hadn't realized that our glorious intimacy was turning into love. That night we embraced with the languor of the good wine and the day's fatigue, slowly, like two wise grandparents who have made love nine hundred times and can no longer surprise or deceive one another. What was special about it for me? Nothing, I suppose, except that series of happy experiences with Iván, which that night reached the critical number necessary to crumble my defenses. After an orgasm, when I came back to myself in the strong arms of my lover, I felt a sob shaking my body, and then another and another, until I was rocked by an sea swell of accumulated weeping. I cried and cried, surrendered, abandoned, more sure in those arms than I could remember ever having been. A dam burst inside me, and an ancient pain overflowed like melted snow. Iván did not ask questions or try to console me; he held me firmly against his chest, let me cry until my tears ran out, and when I tried to explain, he closed my lips with a long kiss. At that moment I had no explanation for anything, I would have had to invent it, but now I know—because it has happened several times more—that when I feel absolutely safe, sheltered and protected, the memory of those first five years of my life begins to come back, the years that my grandmother Paulina and everyone else cloaked in a mantle of mystery. First, in a flash of clarity, I saw the image of my grandfather Tao Chi'en whispering my name in Chinese: Lai Ming. It was a brief instant, but luminous as the moon. Then awake, I relived the recurrent nightmare that has tormented me forever, and I realized that there is a direct relationship between my beloved grandfather and those demons in black pajamas. The hand that lets go of mine in the dream is the hand of Tao Chi'en. The one who slowly falls is Tao Chi'en. The stain that spreads relentlessly across the paving stones of the street is the blood of Tao Chi'en.

•

I had been living officially with Frederick Williams a little more than two years, but always more dedicated to my relationship with Iván Radovic, without whom I could not envision my destiny, when my maternal grandmother, Eliza Sommers, reappeared in my life. She came back whole, with the same aroma of sugar and vanilla, invulnerable to the ravages of trouble or oblivion. I recognized her at first glance, although many years had gone by since she came to leave me at the home of Paulina del Valle, and in all that time I had not seen a photograph of her and her name had been spoken only rarely in my presence. Her image was tangled in the gears of my nostalgia and she had changed so little that when she materialized in our doorway, suitcase in hand, it seemed that we had said good-bye only the day before, and that everything that has happened since was illusion. The one novelty was that she was shorter than I had remembered, but that could be the effect of my own height; the last time we were together I was a child of five, and had to look up at her. She was still as stiff-backed as an admiral, with the same young face and the same severe hairdo, though now the hair was streaked with white. She was even wearing the same pearl necklace I had always seen her wear and now know she never takes off even to sleep. She was brought by Severo del Valle, who had been in touch with her all those years but had not told me because she wouldn't let him. Eliza Sommers had given her word to Paulina del Valle that she would never try to contact her granddaughter, and she had kept her word religiously until Paulina's death freed her from that promise. When Severo wrote to tell her, she packed her trunks and closed her house, as she had done many times before, and set sail for Chile. When she was widowed in 1885, in San Francisco, she undertook the pilgrimage to China with the embalmed body of her husband, to bury him in Hong Kong. Tao Chi'en had lived most of his life in California, and was one of the few Chinese immigrants to obtain American citizenship, but he had always expressed his wish that his bones end in Chinese soil; that way his soul would not be lost in the enormity of the universe, unable to find the gates to heaven. That precaution was not sufficient, though, because I am sure that the ghost of my ineffable grandfather Tao Chi'en still wanders these worlds; otherwise I can't explain how it is that I feel him with me. It's not just imagination; my grandmother Eliza has confirmed some clues, such as the scent of the sea that sometimes envelops me, and the voice that whispers a magical word: my name in Chinese.

"Hello, Lai Ming," was the greeting from that extraordinary grandmother when she saw me.

"
Oi poa
!" I exclaimed.

I hadn't spoken those words—"maternal grandmother" in Cantonese—since the remote days when I lived with her on the upper floor of an acupuncture clinic in the Chinese quarter of San Francisco, but I hadn't forgotten them. She put one hand on my shoulder and scrutinized me from head to foot, then nodded her approval and finally hugged me.

"I am happy that you are not as beautiful as your mother," she said.

"My father said the same thing."

"You are tall, like Tao. And Severo tells me that you are also clever like him."

In our family we serve tea when a situation is slightly uncomfortable, and since I feel self-conscious almost all the time, I serve a lot of it. That beverage has the virtue of helping me steady my nerves. I was dying to grab my grandmother by the waist and waltz her around the room, to babble everything about my life, and to list for her the reproaches I had mumbled to myself all those years, but none of that was possible. Eliza Sommers is not the type of person you treat familiarly; her dignity is intimidating, and it would be weeks before she and I finally could talk with ease. Fortunately the tea, and the presence of Severo del Valle and Frederick Williams—who came back from one of his walks around the property decked out like an explorer in Africa—relieved the tension. As soon as Uncle Frederick took off his pith helmet and smoked glasses and saw Eliza Sommers, something changed in his attitude: he puffed out his chest, raised his voice a notch, and fluffed out his feathers. His admiration doubled when he saw the steamer trunks and suitcases with souvenirs labels of her travels and learned that that tiny woman was one of the few foreigners who had gone to Tibet.

I don't know whether the only reason my
oi poa
came to Chile was to meet me—I suspect that she was planning to go on to the South Pole, where no woman had as yet set foot—but whatever the reason, her visit was essential for me. Without her my life would still be obscured with nebulae; without her I would not be writing this memoir. It was my maternal grandmother who provided the missing pieces for fitting together the jigsaw puzzle of my life, who told me about my mother, about the circumstances of my birth, and gave me the final key to my nightmares. It was also she who later would go with me to San Francisco to meet my uncle Lucky, a prosperous Chinese merchant, fat, short-legged, and absolutely delightful, and to unearth the documents I needed to tie together the loose ends of my story. The relationship between Eliza Sommers and Severo del Valle is as deep as the secrets they shared for many years; she thinks of him as being my true father, because he was the man who loved her daughter and married her. All Matias Rodríguez de Santa Cruz did was accidentally supply some genes.

"Who conceived you is not really important, Lai Ming; anyone could do that. Severo is the one who gave you his name and took responsibility for you," she assured me.

"In that case, Paulina del Valle was my mother and my father; I carry her name and
she
took responsibility for me. All the others passed like comets through my childhood, leaving not much more than a faint trail of stardust," I rejoined.

"Before her, Tao and I were your father and your mother. We raised you first, Lai Ming," she insisted, and rightly, because those maternal grandparents had such a powerful influence on me that for thirty years I have carried their gentle presence inside me, and I am sure they will be there for the rest of my life.

Eliza Sommers lived in another dimension, beside Tao Chi'en, whose death was a major inconvenience but not an obstacle to loving him as she always had. My grandmother Eliza is one of those beings destined to have one spectacular love; I don't believe she has room for another man in her widow's heart. After burying her husband in China beside the tomb of Lin, his first wife, and performing the Buddhist funeral rituals he wished, she was free. She could have returned to San Francisco to live with her son Lucky and the young wife he had ordered by catalog from Shanghai, but the idea of becoming a feared and venerated mother-in-law was to her the equivalent of giving in to old age. She did not feel alone, or frightened of the future, since the protective spirit of Tao Chi'en was always with her. In fact, they are closer than before, since now they are never separated for a single instant. She acquired the habit of talking with her husband in a very low voice—in order not to be taken for a mental case—and at night of sleeping on the left side of the bed in order to leave space for him on the right, which was their custom. The adventurous spirit that had impelled her to flee Chile when she was sixteen, hidden in the belly of a sailing vessel bound for California, awakened in her again once she became a widow. She recalled an epiphany when she was eighteen, right at the height of the gold rush, when the neighing of her horse and the first light of dawn woke her in the immensity of a wild and solitary landscape. That morning she discovered the exaltation of freedom. She had spent the night alone beneath the trees, surrounded by a thousand dangers: pitiless bandits, unfriendly Indians, snakes, bears, and other wild animals, yet for the first time in her life she was not afraid. She had been brought up wearing a corset, bound in body, soul, and imagination, frightened even of her own thoughts, but that adventure had released her. She had to develop a strength that she may always have had but until then ignored because she had no need for it. She had left the protection of her hearth when still a young girl, and pregnant, following the trail of an elusive lover; she had stowed away on a ship, on which she lost the baby and nearly her life as well. She reached California dressed as a man, and prepared to scour the territory from tip to tail, with no weapons or tools but the desperate spur of love. She had been able to survive alone in a land of machos where greed and violence were the rule; in the process she acquired courage and a taste for independence. She would never forget the intense euphoria of adventure. Also for love, she had lived for thirty years with Tao Chi'en as his discreet wife, a mother and pastry maker, fulfilling her duty, her only horizon her home in Chinatown—but the germ planted in those early years as a nomad lay intact in her spirit, ready to burst into bud at the propitious moment. When Tao Chi'en died, the polestar of her life, the moment to drift on the tide had come. "At heart I have always been a rover; what I want is to travel with no fixed course," she wrote her son Lucky. She decided, however, that first she had to carry out the promise she had made her father, Captain John Sommers: not to abandon her aunt Rose in her old age. From Hong Kong she had gone to England, prepared to stay with the aged lady in her last years; it was the least she could do for a woman who had been like a mother. Rose Sommers was more than seventy years old, and her health had begun to fail, but she kept writing her novels—all more or less the same—and was now the most famous romance writer in the English language. There were people who traveled great distances to get a glimpse of her tiny figure walking her dog in the park, and it was said that Queen Victoria consoled her lonely life as a widow by reading Rose's syrupy stories of love triumphant. When Eliza arrived, whom she had cared for like a daughter, it was an enormous comfort to Rose Sommers; among other reasons because her hand was growing unsteady, and it was more and more difficult for her to clasp a pen. From then on she dictated her novels, and later, when she was also becoming less lucid, Eliza pretended to take notes but in fact did the writing, without the editor or the readers ever suspecting; all she had to do was repeat the formula. When Rose Sommers died, Eliza stayed on in her little house in the bohemian quarter—very valuable because the area had become stylish—and inherited the fortune accumulated from her adoptive mother's little romances. The first thing she did was visit her son Lucky in San Francisco and meet her grandchildren, who to her seemed rather ugly and boring; then she set off for more exotic places, finally realizing her destiny as a wanderer. She was one of those travelers who make an effort to get to places from which other people escape. Nothing satisfied her as much as seeing labels and seals from the most obscure countries on the planet on her luggage; nothing gave her as much pride as contracting some foul disease or being bitten by some foreign vermin. She traveled for years with her explorer's trunks, but always returned to the little house in London, where Severo del Valle's correspondence would be waiting with news about ine. When she learned that Paulina del Valle had shuffled off this coil, she decided to return to Chile, where she had been born but which she hadn't given a thought to for more than a half century, for a reunion with her granddaughter.