Daughter of Fortune (2 page)

“We will call her Eliza, after our mother, and she will have our family name,” Rose decided almost as soon as she had fed, bathed, then wrapped the baby in her own little blanket.

“We will do no such thing, Rose! Whatever would people say?”

“I'll take responsibility for that. People will say you are a saint for taking in a poor little orphan, Jeremy. There is no worse fate than not having a family. Where should I be without a brother like you?” she replied, conscious of her brother's horror of the least hint of sentimentality.

Gossip was inevitable, but Jeremy Sommers had to resign himself even to that, just as he accepted that the baby would have his mother's name, sleep all her early years in his sister's bedroom, and create an uproar in the house. Rose spread the implausible story of the lavish basket left anonymously at the office of the British Import and Export Company, Ltd., and no one swallowed it, but since they could not accuse her of a misstep—they saw her every Sunday of her life singing in the Anglican service and her tiny waist was a challenge to the laws of anatomy—they said that the baby was the product of Jeremy's relation with some loose woman and that was why they were bringing Eliza up as one of the family. Jeremy made no effort to defend himself against the malicious rumors. Children's irrationality in general upset him, but Eliza managed to enchant him. Although he would not admit it, he liked watching her play at his feet in the evenings when he sat down in his easy chair to read the newspaper. There were no demonstrations of affection between them; Jeremy went stiff just shaking a human hand, and the thought of more intimate contact sent him into a panic.

When the tiny newborn appeared at the Sommers' home that March fifteenth, Mama Fresia, who served them as cook and housekeeper, argued against keeping her.

“If her own mother abandoned her, it's because she is cursed, better not to touch her,” she said, but she could do nothing to dent her
patrona
's determination.

The minute Miss Rose picked up the baby, Eliza started screeching at the top of her lungs, shaking the house and grating on the nerves of everyone in it. Unable to get the infant to stop crying, Miss Rose improvised a cradle in a dresser drawer and pulled a cover over her while she rushed out to look for a wet nurse. She soon returned with a woman she had found in the market. It had never occurred to Miss Rose to examine her find close up; all she had needed to engage the woman on the spot was one glimpse of huge breasts straining to escape a billowing blouse. She turned out to be a rather dull-witted campesina who brought her baby with her, a poor creature as begrimed as she was. They had to soak that child a long time in warm water to loosen the filth on his bottom and dip the woman's head in a bucket of water with lye to get rid of her lice. The two babies, Eliza and the wet nurse's, came down with colic and a bilious diarrhea that rendered the family's physician and the German pharmacist helpless. Done in by the babies' howling, which was pain and misery added to hunger, Miss Rose wept, too. Finally, on the third day, Mama Fresia reluctantly intervened.

“Can't you see that woman has sour breasts?” she grumbled. “Buy a she-goat to feed your baby and dose her with cinnamon tea, because if you don't she'll be gone before Friday.”

At that time Miss Rose barely stumbled through a little Spanish, but she understood the word “she-goat”; she sent the coachman to fetch one and dismissed the wet nurse. The minute the coachman brought the goat, Mama Fresia lay Eliza directly beneath its swollen udders—to the horror of Miss Rose, who had never seen such a revolting spectacle. The warm milk and cinnamon infusions promptly addressed the situation, however; the baby stopped crying, slept seven hours in a row, and awoke making frantic sucking sounds. After a few days she had the placid expression of a healthy infant and it was evident that she was gaining weight. Miss Rose bought a baby bottle when she realized that when the she-goat bleated in the patio, Eliza began sniffing, looking for the teat. Rose did not want to see the child grow up with the bizarre notion that the animal was her mother. That colic was one of the few upsets Eliza suffered in her infancy; the others were headed off at the first symptoms by Mama Fresia's herbs and incantations, including the fierce epidemic of African measles carried to Valparaíso by a Greek sailor. As long as that danger lasted, Mama Fresia placed a piece of raw meat on Eliza's navel every night and bound it with a strip of red flannel, nature's secret for preventing contagion.

In the following years, Miss Rose made Eliza her play toy. She spent happy hours teaching her to sing and dance, reciting verses her charge memorized with no effort, braiding her hair and dressing her up, but the minute she found another diversion or was felled by a headache, she sent the child to the kitchen with Mama Fresia. Eliza grew up between Miss Rose's sewing room and the back patios, speaking English in one part of the house and a mixture of Spanish and Mapuche, her nana's native tongue, in the other, one day dressed and shod like a duchess and the next playing with hens and dogs, barefoot and barely covered by an orphan's smock. Miss Rose presented her at her musical evenings, and took her out in the coach to go shopping, or to visit the ships at the dock, or to stop at the finest pastry shop for hot chocolate, but she could just as easily spend days at a time writing in her mysterious notebooks or reading a novel without a thought for her protégée. When she did remember her, she would run repentently to look for her, cover her with kisses, shower her with treats, and dress her up like a doll and take her out for a ride. She devoted herself to giving Eliza the broadest possible education, not overlooking the skills appropriate for a young lady. The day Eliza threw a tantrum because she didn't want to practice the piano, Miss Rose grabbed her by an arm and without waiting for the coachman dragged Eliza twelve blocks downhill to a convent. On the adobe wall, above a heavy oak door with iron studs, you could read in letters faded by the salt air: “Foundling Home.”

“Be thankful that my brother and I took you under our wing. This is where little bastards and abandoned children end up. Is this what you want?”

Speechless, the girl shook her head.

“Then you would do well to learn to play the piano like a little lady. Do you understand me?”

Eliza learned to play without either talent or grace, but through dint of strict discipline could by the time she was twelve accompany Miss Rose at her musical evenings. She never lost that skill, despite long periods without playing, and several years later she was able to earn her daily bread in a traveling brothel, an application that had never crossed Miss Rose's mind when she had insisted on teaching her ward the sublime art of music.

Many years later, on a tranquil evening as she drank tea and chatted with her friend Tao Chi'en in the delicate garden they both tended, Eliza concluded that the erratic Englishwoman had been a very good mother and that she was grateful to her for the large spaces of internal freedom she had given her. Mama Fresia was the second pillar of Eliza's childhood. She clung to her full black skirts, followed her around while she did her chores, and in the meantime drove her crazy with questions. That was how Eliza learned Indian legends and myths, how to read signs of the animals and the sea, how to recognize the habits of the spirits, and the messages in dreams, and also how to cook. With her prodigious nose, she was able to identify herbs, spices, and other ingredients with her eyes closed, and just the way she memorized poems, she remembered how to combine them. Soon Mama Fresia's complicated Chilean dishes and Miss Rose's delicate pastries lost all their mysteries for her. She had a rare culinary gift; at seven, without turning a hair, she could skin a beef tongue, dress a hen, make twenty empanadas without drawing a breath, and spend hours on end shelling beans while she listened openmouthed to Mama Fresia's cruel Indian legends and her colorful versions of the lives of the saints.

Rose and her brother John had been inseparable since they were children. In the wintertime she entertained herself by knitting sweaters and socks for the captain and he took great pains every voyage to bring her suitcases filled with gifts and huge boxes of books, several of which ended up under lock and key in Rose's armoire. Jeremy, as master of the house and head of the family, had the right to open his sister's correspondence, read her private diary, and demand a copy of the keys to her furniture, but he never showed any inclination to do it. Jeremy and Rose had a no-nonsense domestic relationship but had little in common except the mutual dependence that sometimes seemed closer to a hidden form of hatred. Jeremy paid for Rose's necessities, but he financed none of her whims and never asked where she got the money for things she wanted, simply assuming that John gave it to her. In exchange, she managed the house efficiently and with style, kept impeccable accounts, and never bothered him with minutiae. She had good taste and effortless grace, she put a polish on both their lives, and her presence was a check to the belief, widely held on these shores, that a man without a family was a potential malefactor.

“It is man's nature to be savage; it is woman's destiny to preserve moral values and good conduct,” Jeremy Sommers pontificated.

“Really, brother. You and I both know that my nature is more savage than yours,” Rose would joke.

Jacob Todd, a charismatic redhead with the most beautiful preacher's voice ever heard on those shores, disembarked in Valparaíso in 1843 with three hundred copies of the Bible in Spanish. No one was surprised to see him: he was just one more missionary among the many wandering all over preaching the Protestant faith. In his case, however, the voyage was not the result of religious fervor but an adventurer's curiosity. With the braggadocio of a high-living man with too much beer in his belly, he had bet at a gaming table in his London club that he could sell Bibles anywhere on the planet. Todd's friends had blindfolded him, spun a globe, and his finger had landed on a colony of the king of Spain lost at the bottom of the world where none of his merry cronies had suspected there was life. He soon found that the map was out-of-date; the colony had gained its independence more than thirty years before and was now the proud Republic of Chile, a Catholic country where Protestant ideas had little foothold, but the bet had been made and he was not disposed to turn back. He was a bachelor with no emotional or professional ties and the outlandishness of such a voyage attracted him immediately. Considering the three months over and another three back, sailing across two oceans, the project turned out to be a protracted one. Cheered by his friends, who predicted a tragic end at the hands of Papists in that unknown and barbarous country, and with the financial aid of the British and Foreign Bible Society, which provided him with the books and arranged his passage, he began the long crossing on a ship bound for the port of Valparaíso. The challenge was to sell the Bibles and return within a year's time with a signed receipt for each sale. In the archives of the British Museum he read the letters of illustrious men, sailors and merchants, who had been in Chile. They described a mestizo people of a little more than a million souls and a wild geography of imposing mountains, clifflined coasts, fertile valleys, ancient forests, and eternal ice. Chile, he was assured by those who had visited it, had a reputation for being the most intolerant country in religious matters of any on the American continent. Despite that hindrance, virtuous missionaries were determined to broadcast their Protestant faith, and without speaking a word of Spanish or a syllable of the Indians' tongue, they traveled south to where terra firma broke up into islands like a string of beads. Several died of hunger, cold, or, it was suspected, were devoured by their own flock. They had no better luck in the cities. The Chileans' sacred sense of hospitality was stronger than their religious intolerance and out of courtesy they allowed the missionaries to preach, but gave them little consideration. When they attended the meetings of the occasional Protestant pastor, it was with the demeanor of someone witnessing a spectacle, amused by the peculiar notion that they were thought of as heretics. None of this, however, disheartened Jacob Todd, because he had come as a Bible salesman, not a missionary.

In those same library archives he discovered that since its independence in 1810 Chile had opened its doors to immigrants, who had come by the hundreds and settled in that long and narrow land bathed top to tail by the Pacific Ocean. The English quickly made fortunes as merchants and ships' outfitters; many brought their families and stayed to live. They formed a small nation within the country, with their own customs, cults, newspapers, clubs, schools, and hospitals, but they did it with such refined manners that, far from arousing suspicion, they were considered an example of civility. The British harbored their fleet in Valparaíso to control the Pacific maritime traffic, and thus from a rude hamlet with no future at the beginnings of the republic Valparaíso had in less than twenty years become an important port where the ships that sailed across the Atlantic and around Cape Horn, and later those that steamed through the Straits of Magellan, came to anchor.

Valparaíso was a surprise to the weary voyager. There before his eyes was a port with a hundred ships flying the flags of half the world. The snow-capped mountains seemed so close they gave the impression of emerging directly from the sea, and from the inky-blue water rose the impossible fragrance of sirens. Jacob Todd never knew that beneath that peaceful-looking surface lay an entire city of sunken Spanish sailing ships and skeletons of patriots with quarry stones tied to their ankles, consigned to the deep by the soldiers of the captain general. The ship dropped anchor in the bay amid the thousands of gulls shattering the air with their tremendous wings and ravenous screeches. Countless small boats bobbed on the waves, some filled with huge live conger eels and sea bass flopping desperately for oxygen. Valparaíso, Todd was told, was the commercial emporium of the Pacific; in its warehouses were stored metals, sheep and alpaca wool, grains, and hides for the world's markets. Several landing boats ferried the passengers and cargo from the sailing ship to dry land. Todd stepped onto the dock amid sailors, stevedores, passengers, visitors, burros, and carts and found himself in a city boxed into an amphitheater ringed by steep hills, a city as populous and filthy as many famous in Europe, an architectural blunder with narrow streets of adobe and wood houses that fire could turn to ashes in a few hours' time. A coach drawn by two badly abused horses carried him and his trunks and boxes to the Hotel Inglés. They passed sturdy buildings set around a plaza, several rather unfinished-looking churches, and one-story residences surrounded by large gardens and orchards. He at first estimated an area of about a hundred blocks, but soon learned that the city was deceptive; it was a labyrinth of alleys and passageways. In the distance he glimpsed a fishing community where shacks were exposed to the wind off the ocean and nets stretched like enormous spiderwebs, and beyond them, fertile fields planted with vegetables and fruit trees. He saw coaches as modern as any in London, barouches, fiacres, and calashes, but also teams of mules driven by ragged children and carts drawn by oxen in the very center of the city. On street corners, priests and nuns begged for charity for the poor, surrounded by a sea of stray dogs and befuddled chickens. He saw women carrying bundles and baskets, children clinging to their skirt tails, barefoot but with black mantles over their heads, and quantities of idle men in cone-shaped hats sitting in doorways or talking in groups.