Daughter of Fortune

by Isabel Allende

  “I want you to meet my sister, Rose,” said Jeremy, leading him to the back of the drawing room.

  At that moment, sitting to the right of the fireplace, Jacob Todd saw the woman who would destroy his peace of heart. Rose Sommers dazzled him instantly, not so much for her beauty as for her self-assurance and good cheer. She had none of the captain’s gross exuberance nor the fastidious solemnity of her brother Jeremy; she was a woman with a sparkling expression who seemed always about to break into flirtatious laughter. When she did, a network of fine lines crinkled around her eyes, and for some reason that was what most attracted Jacob Todd. He could not judge her age—he thought somewhere between twenty and thirty—but he imagined that in ten years she would look the same because she had good bones and a queenly bearing. She was wearing a peach-colored taffeta dress and no adornment but a simple pair of coral earrings. The most elementary courtesy demanded that he do no more than simulate the gesture of kissing her hand, not actually touching it with his lips, but he was so overcome that unintentionally he planted a full kiss on her hand. That greeting was so inappropriate that for an eternal moment they both stood frozen in uncertainty, he clutching her hand the way you grip a sword, and she regarding the trace of his saliva, not daring to wipe it off for fear of embarrassing the visitor, until they were interrupted by a little girl dressed like a princess. Todd shook off his anguish, and as he straightened up intercepted a slightly mocking glance exchanged between the Sommers. Trying to smooth over his gaffe, he turned to the child with exaggerated attention, determined to win her over.

  “This is Eliza, our protégée,” said Jeremy Sommers.

  Jacob Todd committed his second blunder.

  “Protégée? I’m not sure I follow you.” he said.

  “It means that I do not belong to this family,” Eliza explained patiently, in the tone of someone speaking to an idiot.

  “No?”

  “If I do not behave, they will send me off to the Papist nuns.”

  “What are you saying, Eliza! Pay no attention to her, Mr. Todd. Children get strange ideas. Of course Eliza belongs to our family,” Miss Rose burst out, rising to her feet.

  Eliza had spent the day with Mama Fresia, preparing dinner. The kitchen was at the back of the patio, but Miss Rose had had it joined to the house with a walkway to avoid being embarrassed by serving dishes that were either cold or splattered with dove droppings. That room blackened by grease and soot was the indisputable kingdom of Mama Fresia. Cats, dogs, geese, and hens wandered at will across the floor of rough unwaxed bricks. There the goat that had nursed Eliza ruminated through the winter; by now it was very ancient, but no one would think of sacrificing it, for that would be like murdering one’s mother. The child loved the aroma of the dough in the pans as the yeast sighed and worked the mysterious process of leavening; the smell of caramel beaten to frost cakes; the fragrance of mounds of chocolate melting in milk. On Miss Rose’s musical Wednesdays the serving girls—two Indian adolescents who lived in the house and worked in exchange for food—polished silver, ironed tablecloths, and made the crystal sparkle. At noon they sent the coachman to the pastry shop to buy sweets prepared with recipes jealously guarded since the times of the colonies. Mama Fresia always used the occasion to hang a leather bag of fresh milk to the horses’ harness, and on the trip back and forth it was churned into butter.

  At three in the afternoon, Miss Rose called Eliza to her bedroom, where the coachman and the valet installed a lion’s paw–footed bronze bathtub that the chambermaids then lined with a sheet and filled with hot water perfumed with mint leaves and rosemary. Rose and Eliza splashed around in the tub like children until the water grew cool and the maidservants returned with armfuls of clothes and helped them into stockings and boots, underdrawers to the knees, batiste camisoles, contrivances with padding over the hips to accentuate a slim waist, then three starched petticoats and finally a dress, which covered the body completely, leaving only head and hands exposed. Miss Rose also wore a corset stiffened with whalebone and so tight that she could not take a deep breath or lift her arms higher than her shoulders. Neither could she get dressed without help nor bend from the waist because the whalebone would break and poke into her body like a knitting needle. That was the one bath of the week, a ceremony comparable only to Saturday’s hair washing, which could be canceled on the least pretext since it was considered dangerous for the health. During the week, Miss Rose used soap with caution; she preferred to scrub herself with a sponge dampened in milk and to freshen up with a vanilla-scented eau de toilette that she was informed had been in fashion in France since the time of Madame Pompadour. With eyes closed, Eliza could pick Miss Rose out in a crowd by her peculiar fragrance of vanilla pudding. Although over thirty, she had not lost that transparent, delicate skin some English-women have before the glare of the world and their own arrogance turns it to parchment. She cared for her looks, using rose and lemon water to blanch her skin, witch hazel blossom honey to keep it soft, chamomile to bring out the shine in her hair, and a collection of exotic balms and lotions her brother John brought her from the Far East, where, he said, the women were more beautiful than anywhere else in the universe. She designed dresses inspired by her magazines from London and stitched them herself in the sewing room; calling on intuition and cleverness she modified her wardrobe with the same ribbons, flowers, and feathers she had worn for years and yet never looked bedraggled. She did not, like Chilean women, wear a black mantle over her head when she went out, a custom she considered an aberration; she preferred short capes and assorted bonnets, even though people stared at her in the street as if she were a courtesan.

  Enchanted to see a new face at the weekly gathering, Miss Rose forgave Jacob Todd his impertinent kiss and, taking his arm, led him to a round table in a far corner of the room. She invited him to choose among various liqueurs, insisting that he try her mistela, a strange beverage of cinnamon, alcohol, and sugar that he could not get past his lips and later surreptitiously poured into a flowerpot. Then she introduced him to the other guests: Mr. Appelgreen, a furniture manufacturer who was accompanied by his daughter, a pallid, timid girl; Madame Colbert, headmistress of an English school for girls; Mr. Ebeling, proprietor of the best gentlemen’s haberdashery in town, and his wife, who latched on to Todd, pressing him for news of the English royal family as if they were her relatives. He also met two surgeons: Page and Poett.

  “These gentlemen use chloroform in their operations,” Miss Rose announced with admiration.

  “It is still a novelty here, but in Europe it has revolutionized the practice of medicine,” one of the surgeons clarified.

  “I understand that in England it is sometimes employed in obstetric practice. Did not Queen Victoria use it?” Todd added, merely to have something to say, since he knew nothing about the subject.

  “Here we encounter major opposition on the part of the Catholics. The biblical curse on women is that they bring forth children with pain, Mr. Todd.”

  “Does that not seem unjust, gentlemen? Man’s curse is to toil with the sweat of his brow, but the men in this room—without having to go any farther—earn their living from the sweat of others’ brows,” Miss Rose rejoined, turning red as a beet.

  The surgeons smiled with discomfort, but Todd was captivated. He would have stayed by her side the entire evening, even though, as he remembered, correct behavior at a London soirée dictated a stay of no more than half an hour. He noted, however, that in this gathering people seemed disposed to stay, and he imagined that social life must be quite limited and that perhaps the only occasion of the week was this one hosted by the Sommers. He was mulling this over when Miss Rose announced the musical entertainment. The maids brought more candelabras, making the room bright as day, and arranged chairs around a piano, a guitar, and a harp. The women were seated in a semicircle, and the men remained standing behind their chairs. A chubby-cheeked gentleman took his place at the piano and from his butcher’s fingers flowed a delightful mel
ody as the furniture manufacturer’s daughter interpreted an old Scots ballad in a voice so sweet that Todd quite forgot she had a face like a frightened mouse. The headmistress of the school for girls recited a heroic poem, unnecessarily long; Rose sang a couple of raffish songs in a duet with her brother John, despite Jeremy Sommers’ evident disapproval; and then Rose demanded that Jacob Todd give them the pleasure of a number from his repertoire, which allowed the visitor the opportunity to show off his fine voice.

  “You are a true find, Mr. Todd! We shall not let you escape. You are sentenced to come here every Wednesday!” Rose exclaimed when the applause died down, ignoring the bewitched expression on her visitor’s face.

  Todd felt as if his teeth were sugarcoated, and his head was whirling, whether from his admiration for Rose Sommers or the liqueurs he had imbibed and the potent Cuban cigar he had smoked in the company of Captain Sommers, he didn’t know. In that house no one could refuse a dish or a refreshment without causing offense; soon he would discover that this was a national characteristic in Chile, where hospitality was manifested by forcing one’s guests to drink and eat beyond the bounds of human endurance. At nine, dinner was announced, and everyone paraded into the dining room where a new series of overly generous entrées and desserts awaited. It was near midnight when the women got up and continued their conversation in the drawing room while the men drank brandy and smoked in the dining room. Finally, when Todd felt he was on the verge of passing out, the guests began to ask for their overcoats and their coaches. The Ebelings, vitally interested in Todd’s purported evangelizing mission in Tierra del Fuego, offered to take him back to his hotel and he immediately accepted, terrified at the idea of being driven through nightmarish streets in the black of night by the Sommers’ drunken coachman. He thought the ride to the hotel would never end; he felt incapable of concentrating on the conversation, he was dizzy and his stomach was churning.

  “My wife was born in Africa; she is the daughter of missionaries who preached the true faith in those lands; we know the sacrifices that entails, Mr. Todd. We do hope that you will allow us the privilege of assisting you in your noble endeavors among the natives,” Mr. Ebeling said with great solemnity as they bid one another good evening.

  That night Jacob Todd could not sleep. The vision of Rose Sommers assailed him repeatedly, and before day dawned he had made the decision to court her in earnest. He knew nothing about her, but he didn’t care; perhaps it was his destiny to lose a bet and travel to Chile in order to meet his future wife. He would have begun his courtship the very next day but he was unable to crawl out of bed, having been felled by a violent griping of the bowels. He lay there a day and a night, at some moments unconscious and at others thinking he was dying, until he could summon enough strength to put his head out the door and call for help. At his request, the hotel manager advised the Sommers, his only acquaintances in the city, and called a boy to clean up the room, which stank like a dung heap. Jeremy Sommers arrived at the hotel at midday, accompanied by the best bloodletter in Valparaíso, who fortunately had a smattering of English and who, after bleeding Jacob Todd’s legs and arms until he was nearly lifeless, explained to him that all newcomers fell ill when first they visited Chile.

  “There’s no reason to be alarmed, that I know of; very few die,” he said to reassure Todd.

  He left small rice-paper packets of quinine, but the suffering Englishman, doubled over with stomach cramps, could not get them down. He had been in India and he recognized the symptoms of malaria and other tropical illnesses treated with quinine, but his sickness did not resemble them even remotely. As soon as the phlebotomist left, the boy returned to take away the rags and wash down the room again. Jeremy Sommers had left the address of the doctors Page and Poett, but Todd did not get around to calling them because two hours later a formidable woman appeared at the hotel and demanded to see the sick man. She had by the hand a little girl dressed in blue velvet, white high-button shoes, and a bonnet embroidered with flowers, like a picture in a storybook. They were Mama Fresia and Eliza, whom Rose Sommers had sent because she had very little faith in bloodletting. They marched into Todd’s room with such assurance that the weakened man did not dare protest. The woman had come in the guise of healer, and the little girl as translator.

  “My mamita says that she is going to take off your pajamas. I will not look,” the child explained, and turned her face to the wall while the Indian woman stripped off his clothes in a thrice and proceeded to scrub his entire body with strong liquor.

  She placed hot bricks in Todd’s bed, wrapped him in blankets, and fed him teaspoons of a honey-sweetened bitter herb tea to ease his stomach pain.

  “Now my mamita is going to romance your sickness,” the girl said.

  “What is that?”

  “Don’t worry, it doesn’t hurt.”

  Mama Fresia closed her eyes and began to pass her hands over Jacob Todd’s torso and stomach as she whispered incantations in her Mapuche tongue. He felt a delicious drowsiness creep over him; even before the woman finished, he was sound asleep, unaware of when his two nurses left. He slept eighteen hours and awakened bathed in sweat. The next morning Mama Fresia and Eliza returned to administer another vigorous rubdown and feed him a bowl of chicken soup.

  “My mamita says not to drink any more water. Take steaming-hot tea, and don’t eat fruit, or else you will feel like you want to die again,” the girl translated.

  Within a week, when he could stand and look at himself in the mirror, Jacob Todd realized that he could not show himself before Miss Rose looking the way he did: he had lost several pounds and was so weak he could not take two steps without falling panting into a chair. When he was up to sending a note to thank Rose for saving his life, along with chocolates for Mama Fresia and Eliza, he learned that she had left with a friend and her chambermaid for Santiago, a perilous journey given the bad conditions of the road and the weather. Miss Sommers made the thirty-four-league trip once a year, usually at the beginning of autumn or in mid-spring, for the purpose of attending the theater, hearing good music, and making her yearly purchases in the Gran Almacén Japonés, an emporium perfumed with jasmine and lighted by gas lamps with rose-colored glass shades, where she purchased the bagatelles difficult to come by in the port. This year, however, there was good reason for going during the winter: she was to sit for a portrait. A famous French painter named Monvoisin had arrived in Chile, invited by the government to establish a school among the nation’s artists. The maestro painted only the head, the rest was done by his assistants, and to save time lace might be applied directly onto the canvas. Despite such ignoble devices, however, nothing was as prestigious as a portrait signed by the French master. Jeremy Sommers insisted on having one of his sister to preside over the drawing room. The painting cost six ounces of gold, plus an additional ounce for each hand, but this was no time to try to save money. The opportunity to have an authentic work by the great Monvoisin did not present itself twice in the same lifetime, as his clients were wont to say.

  “If expense is no problem, I want him to paint me with three hands. It will be his most famous painting, and someday will end up in a museum rather than over our fireplace,” was Miss Rose’s comment.

  That was the year of the floods, which were immortalized in schoolchildren’s textbooks and in their grandparents’ memories. The deluge swept away hundreds of dwellings, and when finally the storm abated and the waters began to recede, a series of minor temblors, which came like God’s wrath, finished destroying everything that had been softened by the pouring rain. Ruffians scrabbled through the rubble, taking advantage of the confusion to pillage ruined houses, and soldiers were issued orders to summarily execute anyone they surprised in such barbaric acts. Overly zealous in their duties, however, these same protectors began swinging away for the pleasure of hearing their victims yell and the order was revoked before they began slaughtering innocents. Jacob Todd, tucked in his hotel nursing a cold and still weak from his illness
, spent hours despairing of the incessant tolling of church bells calling for repentance, reading old newspapers, and looking for a partner at cards. He made one trip to a pharmacy, looking for a tonic to settle his stomach, but the shop was a jumble of dusty blue and green glass bottles where a Teutonic clerk tried to sell him scorpion oil and pinworm liqueur. For the first time, Todd lamented being so far from London.

  At night he was scarcely able to sleep because of drunken parties and quarrels, and because of the daily burials, which took place between twelve midnight and three in the morning. The new cemetery was high on a hill overlooking the city. The storm washed open graves and coffins rolled down the slopes in a muddle of bones that equalized all the dead in the same indignity. Many commented that the dead were better off ten years ago, when decent people were buried in the churchyard, the poor in the ravines, and foreigners on the beach. This is a truly eccentric country, concluded Todd, who kept a handkerchief tied around his face because of the sickening wind-borne stench of misfortune, which the authorities fought with great bonfires of eucalyptus branches. As soon as he felt a little better, he went out to watch the processions. Ordinarily they did not draw a crowd, since they were repeated every year during the seven days of Holy Week and on other religious holidays, but on this occasion they had become massive rallies imploring heaven to bring an end to the storms. Long lines of the faithful poured out of the churches, led by the associations of black-clad caballeros, each group carrying a platform bearing the statue of a saint in magnificent robes embroidered with gold thread and precious stones. One column bore a crucified Christ whose crown of thorns lay around his neck. Someone explained to Todd that this was the Cristo de Mayo, the May Christ, which had been brought from Santiago especially for the procession because it was the most miraculous image in the world, the only one capable of changing the weather. Two hundred years before, a devastating earthquake had leveled the capital, completely destroying the church of San Agustín except for the altar that held this Christ. His crown had slipped from his head to around his neck, where it stayed, because every time they tried to put it back where it belonged the earth began to tremble. The festivities brought together hundreds of monks and nuns, pious women faint from fasting, humble people praying and singing at the top of their lungs, penitents in coarse robes, and flagellants flaying their naked backs with scourges of leather strips tipped with sharp metal rosettes. Some swooned and were attended by women who cleaned their open wounds and gave them cooling drinks, but as soon as they recovered they pushed their way back into the procession. Lines of Indians filed by, punishing themselves with demented fervor, followed by bands of musicians playing religious hymns. Mourners’ prayers roared like a rushing stream, and the humid air was heavy with incense and sweat. There were processions of aristocrats, richly clad but all in black and stripped of jewelry, and others of the ragged, barefoot, down-and-out, all of whom crisscrossed the plaza without touching or mixing. The more who crowded in, the greater the uproar and the more intense the displays of piety: the faithful lifted their voices begging forgiveness for their sins, convinced that the bad weather was divine punishment for their failings. The repentant came in swarms, overflowing the churches, and rows of priests were installed beneath tents and umbrellas to hear confessions. The Englishman found the spectacle fascinating; he had seen nothing in any of his voyages to compare to such exoticism and gloom. Accustomed to Protestant sobriety, he felt he had awakened in the Middle Ages; his friends in London would never believe him. Even at a prudent distance he could sense the primitive shiver of animal suffering that swept in waves through the masses of humanity. With no little effort, he climbed upon the base of a monument in the church plaza facing the Iglesia de la Matriz, where he could enjoy a panoramic view. Suddenly he felt someone tugging at his pants leg; he looked down and saw a frightened little girl with a black mantle over her head, her face streaked with blood and tears. He jerked his leg away, but too late; his trousers were already stained. He swore and tried to shoo her away with gestures, since he could not remember the words to do it in Spanish. He was astounded when the child replied in perfect English that she was lost and that maybe he could take her home. He took a better look.