Portrait in Sepia

Isabel Allende

PORTRAIT IN SEPIA

A Novel

Translated from the Spanish by Margaret Sayers Peden

I came into the world one Tuesday in the autumn of 1880, in San Francisco, in the home of my maternal grandparents. While inside that labyrinthine wood house my mother panted and pushed, her valiant heart and desperate bones laboring to open a way out to me, the savage life of the Chinese quarter was seething outside, with its unforgettable aroma of exotic food, its deafening torrent of shouted dialects, its inexhaustible swarms of human bees hurrying back and forth. I was born in the early morning, but in Chinatown the clocks obey no rules, and at that hour the market, the cart traffic, the woeful barking of caged dogs awaiting the butcher's cleaver, were beginning to heat up. I have come to know the details of my birth rather late in life, but it would have been worse not to discover them at all, they could have been lost forever in the cracks and crannies of oblivion. There are so many secrets in my family that I may never have time to unveil them all: truth is short-lived, watered down by torrents of rain. My maternal grandparents welcomed me with emotion—even though according to several witnesses I was ugly as sin—and placed me at my mother's breast, where I lay cuddled for a few minutes, the only ones I was to have with her. Afterward my uncle Lucky blew his breath in my face to pass his good luck on to me. His intention was generous and the method infallible, because at least for these first thirty years of my life, things have gone well. But careful! I don't want to get ahead of myself. This is a long story, and it begins before my birth; it requires patience in the telling and even more in the listening. If I lose the thread along the way, don't despair, because you can count on picking it up a few pages further on. Since we have to begin at some date, let's make it 1862, and let's say, to choose something at random, that the story begins with a piece of furniture of unlikely proportions.

Paulina del Valle's bed was ordered from Florence the year following the coronation of Victor Emmanuel, when in the new kingdom of Italy the echoes of Garibaldi's cannon shots were still reverberating. It crossed the ocean, dismantled, in a Genoese vessel, was unloaded in New York in the midst of a bloody strike, and was transferred to one of the steamships of the shipping line of my paternal grandparents, the Rodríguez de Santa Cruzes, Chileans residing in the United States. It was the task of Captain John Sommers to receive the crates marked in Italian with a single word:
naiads
. That robust English seaman, of whom all that remains is a faded portrait and a leather trunk badly scuffed from infinite sea journeys and filled with strange manuscripts, was my great-grandfather, as I found out recently when my past finally began to come clear after many years of mystery. I never met Captain John Sommers, the father of Eliza Sommers, my maternal grandmother, but from him I inherited a certain bent for wandering. To that man of the sea, pure horizon and salt, fell the task of transporting the Florentine bed in the hold of his ship to the other side of the American continent. He had to make his way through the Yankee blockade and Confederate attacks, sail to the southern limits of the Atlantic, pass through the treacherous waters of the Strait of Magellan, sail into the Pacific Ocean, and then, after putting in briefly at several South American ports, point the bow of his ship toward northern California, that venerable land of gold. He had precise orders to open the crates on the pier in San Francisco, supervise the ship's carpenter while he assembled the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle, taking care not to nick the carvings, install the mattress and ruby-colored canopy, set the whole construction on a cart, and dispatch it at a leisurely pace to the heart of the city. The coachman was to make two complete turns around Union Square, and another two—while jingling a little bell—before the balcony of my grandfather's concubine, before depositing it at its final destination, the home of Paulina del Valle. This fanfaronade was to be performed in the midst of the Civil War, when Yankee and Confederate armies were massacring each other in the South and no one was in any mood for jokes or little bells. John Sommers fulfilled the instructions cursing, because during months of sailing that bed had come to symbolize what he most detested about his job: the whims of his employer, Paulina del Valle. When he saw the bed displayed on the cart, he sighed and decided that that would be the last thing he would ever do for her. He had spent twelve years following her orders and had reached the limits of his patience. That bed still exists, intact. It is a weighty dinosaur of polychrome wood; the headboard is presided over by the god Neptune surrounded by foaming waves and undersea creatures in bas-relief, and the foot, frolicking dolphins and cavorting sirens. Within a few hours, half of San Francisco had the opportunity to appreciate that Olympian bed. My grandfather's amour, however, the one to whom the spectacle was dedicated, hid as the cart went by, and then went by a second time with its little bell.

"My triumph lasted about a minute," Paulina confessed to me many years later, when I insisted on photographing the bed and knowing all the details. "The joke backfired on me. I thought every one would make fun of Feliciano, but they turned it on me. I misjudged. Who would have imagined such hypocrisy? In those days San Francisco was a hornet's nest of corrupt politicians, bandits, and loose women."

"They didn't like your defiance," I suggested.

"No, they didn't. It's expected that we women will protect our husband's reputation, no matter how vile."

"Your husband wasn't vile," I rebutted.

"No, but he did a lot of stupid things. In any case, I'm not sorry about the famous bed, I've slept in it for forty years."

"What did your husband do when he found he was discovered?"

"He told me that while the country was bleeding through a civil war, I was buying furniture fit for Caligula. And he denied everything, of course. No one with an ounce of sense admits an infidelity, even if they catch you in bed."

"Do you say that from experience?"

"I wish it were so, Aurora!" replied Paulina del Valle unhesitatingly.

In the first photograph I took of her, when I was thirteen, Paulina is in her mythological bed, propped up on pillows of embroidered satin, wearing a lace nightgown, and decked out in a pound of jewels. That's how I saw her many times, and that's how I would have liked to see her at her wake, but she wanted to go to the grave in the somber habit of the Carmelites and for several years have masses sung for the repose of her soul. "I've created plenty of scandal, it's time to pay the piper," was her explanation when she sank into the wintry melancholy of her last days. Seeing herself so near the end, she became terrified. She banished the bed to the cellar and in its place installed a wooden platform with a horsehair mattress, to die without luxuries after living with such excess, and see if Saint Peter would start a new account in the book of her sins, as she said. Her fear, nevertheless, was not so far-reaching that she gave up other material goods, and up to her last breath she held the reins of her financial empire, by then very reduced, in her hands. Of the bravura of her youth very little was left at the end, even her irony was wearing thin, but my grandmother created her own legend, and no horsehair mattress or Carmelite habit could stand in her way. The Florentine bed, which she granted herself the pleasure of parading through the main streets to mortify her husband, was one of her most glorious moments. At that time the family was living in San Francisco, using another name—Cross—because no North American could pronounce the rotund syllables of Rodríguez de Santa Cruz y del Valle, a true shame since their authentic name carried centuries-old resonances of the Inquisition. They had just moved to Nob Hill, where they had constructed an outlandish mansion, one of the most opulent in the city, a delirium conceived by a number of competing architects contracted and dismissed every other day. The family had not made its fortune during the gold rush in 1849, as Feliciano claimed, but, rather, thanks to the unequaled entrepreneurial instincts of his wife, who had come up with the idea of transporting fresh produce packed in beds of Antarctic ice from Chile to California. During that tumultuous era a peach fetched an ounce of gold, and Paulina knew how to capitalize on those circumstances. Her enterprise prospered, and the family came to own a flotilla of ships sailing between Valparaiso and San Francisco. At first they had returned empty, but soon they were retracing their route laden with California flour. In the process they ruined several Chilean agriculturists, including Paulina's father, the daunting Agustin del Valle, whose wheat rotted in warehouses because he could not compete with the Yankee's finely ground white flour. His liver rotted as well, from rage. At the end of the gold fever, after losing their health and soul in pursuit of a dream, thousands and thousands of adventurers returned home poorer than when they had left, but Paulina and Feliciano made a fortune. They took their place at the apogee of San Francisco society, despite the almost insuperable obstacle of having a Spanish accent. "In California everyone is newly rich and lowborn," Paulina always muttered in the days before she folded her tent and went back to Chile, "whereas our genealogical tree goes back to the time of the Crusades." Titles of nobility or bank accounts were not, however, the only thing that opened doors to them; there was also the congeniality of Feliciano, who made friends among the most powerful men of the city. It was quite difficult, in contrast, to swallow his wife, who was ostentatious, foulmouthed, and irreverent, a woman who trampled over everyone in her path. No way to deny it: at first Paulina inspired the mixture of fascination and fear you feel when you see an iguana; only when you knew her better did you discover her sentimental side. In 1862 she launched her husband in a commercial enterprise linked with the transcontinental railroad—one that made them enormously wealthy. I can't explain where that woman got her nose for business. She came from a family of Chilean landowners, rigid in judgment and limited of spirit. She was raised in her father's family home in Valparaiso, saying the rosary and embroidering, because her father believed that ignorance guaranteed the submission of women and the poor. She barely mastered the rudiments of writing and arithmetic, she never read a book in her life, and she added on her fingers—she never subtracted—yet everything she touched made money. Had it not been for her spendthrift sons and relatives, she would have died with all the splendor of an empress. Those were the years the railroad connecting the east and the west coasts of the United States was being built. While everyone was investing in the stocks of the two companies and betting on which could lay rails the faster, she, indifferent to that frivolous race, spread a map on the dining room table and with a topographer's patience studied the future route of the train along with locations where abundant water was to be found. Long before the humble Chinese laborers drove the last nail joining the tracks in Promontory, Utah, and the first locomotive crossed the continent with its clashing iron and volcanic smoke, bawling like a ship in distress, she had convinced her husband to buy land at the places marked on her map with crosses in red ink.