Portrait in Sepia Read online

  Once Captain John Sommers had assured himself that the mythic bed was on the cart and that the coachman understood his instructions, he set off on foot in the direction of Chinatown, as he did each time he visited San Francisco. On this occasion, however, grit alone wasn’t enough to get him there, and after two blocks he had to call for a rented coach. He climbed in with difficulty, gave the driver the address, and leaned back in the seat, panting. His symptoms had begun a year ago, but in recent weeks they had become more acute. His legs were too weak to hold him, and his head was filled with fog; he had to battle constantly the temptation to abandon himself to the cottony indifference that was seeping into his soul. His sister Rose had been the first to notice that something was not going well, back before he felt any pain. He smiled as he thought of her: she was the person closest and dearest to him, the guiding light of his wandering existence, more real in his affections than his daughter Eliza or any of the women he had held in his arms during his long pilgrimage from port to port.

  Rose Sommers had spent her youth in Chile at the side of her older brother, Jeremy. At his death, however, she had returned to England to grow old in her own country. She lived in London in a small house a few blocks from theaters and the opera, a slightly down-at-the-heels neighborhood where she could live as she pleased. She was no longer the proper mistress of the house for Jeremy; now she could give free rein to her eccentric bent. She liked to dress as an out-of-luck actress and take tea at the Savoy, or as a Russian countess when she walked her dog; among her friends were beggars and street musicians, and she spent her money on trinkets and charities. “Nothing is as liberating as age,” she would say, happily counting her wrinkles. “It isn’t age, sister, it’s the economic freedom you’ve won with your pen,” John Sommers would reply. This white-haired spinster had made a small fortune writing pornography. The true irony, thought the captain, was that now that Rose had no need to hide, as she had when she lived in the shadow of her brother Jeremy, she had stopped writing erotic stories and devoted herself to turning out romantic novels at an exhausting pace, and with unparalleled success. There was no woman alive whose mother tongue was English, including Queen Victoria, who hadn’t read at least one of the romances written by Dame Rose Sommers. Her distinguished title merely legalized a position that Rose had taken by assault years before. Had Queen Victoria suspected that her favorite author, one upon whom she had personally bestowed the rank of dame, was responsible for a vast body of salacious books signed “An Anonymous Lady,” she would have swooned. It was the captain’s opinion that the pornography was delicious but that Rose’s love novels were pure trash. For years he had taken on the task of arranging publication and distribution of the forbidden stories Rose produced right under the nose of her elder brother, who died convinced that she was a virtuous maiden whose only mission was to make life agreeable for him. “Look after yourself, John. You know you can’t leave me alone in this world. You’re losing weight, and your color isn’t good,” Rose had repeated every day the captain visited her in London. Since then, a relentless metamorphosis had been transforming him into a lizard.

  Tao Chi’en had just removed his acupuncture needles from a patient’s ears and arms when his assistant advised him that his father-in-law had arrived. The zhong-yi carefully placed his gold needles in pure alcohol, washed his hands in a basin, put on his jacket, and went out to welcome his visitor, amazed that Eliza had not informed him that her father would be arriving that day. Captain Sommers’s every visit created a commotion. The family would await him eagerly, especially the children, who never tired of admiring his exotic gifts and hearing stories about sea monsters and Malaysian pirates from their colossal grandfather. Tall, solid, skin leathery from the salt of the seven seas, beard untamed, with a voice like thunder and a babe’s innocent blue eyes, the captain cut an imposing figure in his blue uniform, but the man Tao Chi’en saw seated in a chair in his clinic was so diminished that he had difficulty recognizing him. He greeted the captain with respect, having never overcome the habit of bowing before him in the Chinese manner. Tao had met John Sommers in his youth, when he was working as cook on his ship. “You address me as sir! Is that clear, Chinaman?” he had ordered the first time he spoke to Tao. Their hair was black then, thought Tao Chi’en, with a stab of anguish as he regarded the announcement of death standing before him. Laboriously the Englishman got to his feet, held out his hand, and then clasped Tao Chi’en in a brief embrace. The zhong-yi realized that now he was the taller and heavier of the two.

  “Did Eliza know that you were coming today, sir?” Tao asked.

  “No. You and I need to speak alone, Tao. I am dying.”

  The zhong-yi had known that the moment he saw him. Without a word he led the captain to the consulting room, where he helped him undress and lie down on a cot. His naked father-in-law presented a pathetic sight: dry, thickened skin, coppery in color, yellowed nails, bloodshot eyes, swollen belly. Tao began by palpating his body, and then he took the captain’s pulse at his wrists, neck, and ankles, to verify what he already knew.

  “Your liver is ruined, sir. Are you still drinking?”

  “You can’t ask me to give up the habit of a lifetime, Tao. Do you think anyone can endure a life at sea without taking a drink from time to time?”

  Tao Chi’en smiled. The Englishman drank half a bottle of gin on normal days—an entire bottle if there was something to mourn or celebrate—without its seeming to affect him in the least. He never even smelled of liquor because his strong, cheap tobacco permeated his breath and clothing.

  “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 Valparaíso, 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 Agustín, 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 Agustín 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 severe, 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 Valparaíso, 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 Chinaman, 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.