Disillusion
At the end of autumn, Tao Chi’en received Eliza’s latest letter, which had passed from hand to hand for several months, following him to San Francisco. He had left Sacramento in April. Winter in that city seemed to go on and on; the only thing that sustained him were Eliza’s letters, which came sporadically, the hope that Lin’s spirit would locate him, and his friendship with his fellow zhong yi. Tao had acquired books on Western medicine and with great pleasure had taken on the patient task of translating them line by line for his friend; in that way both absorbed at the same time a knowledge very different from their own. They found that in the West little was known about essential herbs, about preventing illness, or about qi, the bodily energy never mentioned in those texts, but also that Western medicine was more advanced in other aspects. With his friend, Tao spent days comparing and discussing, but study alone could not console him: isolation and solitude weighed on him so heavily that he abandoned the wooden hut and his garden of medicinal plants and moved to a hotel run by Chinese, where at least he heard his language and ate food to his taste. Even though his patients were very poor and he often treated them for nothing, he had saved money. If Eliza came back they would move into a house, he thought, but as long as he was alone the hotel was good enough. The other zhong yi planned to send for a young wife from China and settle in the United States where, despite the fact that he was a foreigner, he would have a better life than in his country. Tao Chi’en warned him against the vanity of the golden lilies, especially in America, where everyone walked so much and the fan wey made fun of a woman with a doll’s feet. “Ask the broker to bring you a smiling and healthy wife; nothing else matters,” he counseled, thinking of the brief passage through this world of his unforgettable Lin and how much happier she would have been with Eliza’s feet and strong lungs. His wife was wandering somewhere, lost; she didn’t know how to find her way in that foreign land. He invoked her in his meditation and in his poems but she did not come to him again, not even in his dreams. The last time he had been with her was that day in the hold of the ship, when she visited him wearing her green silk dress and peonies in her hair to ask him to save Eliza, but that had been somewhere near Peru, and since then he had traveled across so much water, land, and time that Lin was surely confused. He imagined her gentle spirit searching for him in this vast, unfamiliar continent, unable to find him. At the zhong yi’s suggestion, he commissioned an artist, a new émigré from Shanghai, to paint her portrait; he was a true tattoo genius, and although the painting followed Tao’s precise instructions it did not do justice to Lin’s diaphanous beauty. Tao Chi’en made a small altar for the portrait, where he would sit to summon her. He did not understand why solitude, which he had previously considered a blessing and a luxury, now seemed unbearable. The worst of his years as a sailor had been not having a private space for quiet and silence, but now all he wanted was companionship. The idea of ordering a bride, however, seemed ill-conceived. Once before, the spirits of his ancestors had found him a perfect wife, but behind that apparent good fortune was a hidden curse. He knew what it was to be loved in return, and now could never go back to the times of innocence when every woman with small feet and a sweet nature seemed enough. He felt condemned to live with the memory of Lin because no other woman could take her place with dignity. He did not want a servant or a concubine. Not even the need to have sons to honor his name and tend his tomb would induce him. He tried to explain all this to his friend but he got tangled up in words; there weren’t enough in his vocabulary to express his torment. A woman is a creature useful for work, motherhood, and pleasure, but no cultivated and intelligent man would try to make her his companion his friend had said the only time Tao tried to confide his feelings. In China, one glance around made that reasoning understandable, but in America the relationship between husband and wife seemed different. To begin with, no one had concubines—at least not openly. To Tao Chi’en’s mind, the few fan wey families he had met in this land of solitary men were beyond comprehension. He could not imagine how they behaved in private, given that apparently the husbands treated their wives as equals. It was a mystery that he was interested in exploring, like so many others in this extraordinary country.
Eliza’s first letters were delivered to the restaurant, and as the Chinese community knew Tao Chi’en, they were not long in reaching him. Those lengthy missives, rich with details, were his best company. Remembering Eliza, he was surprised at how much he missed her, because he had never thought that friendship with a woman was possible, to say nothing of one from a different culture. He had almost always seen her in masculine clothing but he thought of her as totally feminine and was surprised that others accepted her disguise without asking questions. “Men never really look at other men, and the women think I’m an effeminate boy,” she had written in one letter. To him, on the other hand, she was the girl dressed in white whose corset he had removed in a fishing hut in Valparaíso, the sick girl who had delivered herself without reservation to his care in the hold of the ship, the warm body snuggled against his on icy nights beneath the canvas roof; he heard her happy voice humming as she cooked, and remembered her serious expression when she helped him treat wounded patients. He no longer saw her as a young girl, but as a woman despite her airy bones and youthful face. He thought about how different she looked after she cut her hair and regretted not having kept the braid, a thought that had occurred to him at the time but had been discarded as a shameful bit of sentimentality. At least now he could have held it in his hands to summon the presence of that singular friend. When he meditated he never failed to send protective energy to help her survive the thousand deaths and possible disasters he tried not to think about, because he knew that one who thinks of bad things ends up convoking them. Sometimes Tao dreamed about Eliza and woke in a sweat; then he would throw his I Ching sticks to reveal the unseen. In those ambiguous messages, Eliza always appeared moving toward the mountain; that calmed him somewhat.
In September of 1850, Tao was present at the noisy patriotic celebration when California became the newest state in the union. The American nation took in the whole continent, from the Atlantic to the Pacific. By then, the fever for gold was beginning to take the shape of enormous collective disillusion, and Tao saw masses of debilitated and impoverished miners waiting their turns to sail back where they had come from. The newspapers estimated that more than ninety thousand were going home. Sailors were no longer deserting; on the contrary, there weren’t enough ships to carry everyone who wanted to leave. One out of every five miners had died, of disease, cold, or drowning in the rivers; many were murdered or had shot themselves in the head. Foreigners were still coming, having embarked months earlier, but the gold was no longer within easy reach of any bold adventurer with a pan, a shovel, and a pair of boots. The time of solitary heroes was over and in their place were powerful companies equipped with machines able to open mountains with forceful bursts of water. Miners were working on salary and the ones getting rich were the impresarios, as avid for sudden wealth as the adventurers of ’49, but much cleverer, like that tailor named Levi who was making pants with double seams and metal studs, the obligatory miner’s uniform. At the same time that many were leaving the Chinese kept streaming in like mute ants. Tao Chi’en often translated the English-language newspapers for his friend, the zhong yi, who particularly liked the articles of a certain Jacob Freemont because they coincided with his own opinions.
“Thousands of argonauts are returning home defeated without having found the golden fleece, their odyssey turned into tragedy, but many others, though poor, are staying because now they cannot live anywhere else. Two years in this wild and beautiful country transforms men. The danger, the adventure, and the good health and vigor they have known in California are not found anywhere else. Gold fulfilled its function: it attracted the men who are conquering this region and making of it the promised land. That is irreversible . . .” wrote Freemont.
Tao Chi’en,
however, felt that he was living in a paradise of greedy, materialistic, and impatient people whose obsession was to get rich quick. There was no food for the spirit; instead, violence and ignorance prospered. All other evils derived from those, he was convinced. He had seen a lot in his twenty-seven years, and did not consider himself a prude, but he was shocked by the standards of behavior and the impunity of crime. Such a place was destined to choke in the muck of its own vices, he maintained. He had lost hope of finding in America the peace he so desired; definitely, this was not the place for one who aspired to wisdom. So why was he so strongly attracted to it? He must avoid being bewitched by this land, as had happened to so many who had come here. He intended either to go back to Hong Kong or to visit his friend Ebanizer Hobbs in England where they could study and practice together. In the years that had gone by since he was shanghaied onto the Liberty he had written several letters to the English physician but during the days at sea it had taken a long time to get an answer, until finally in Valparaíso, in February of 1849, Captain John Sommers had received a letter for him and delivered it to him. In it, his friend told him that he was practicing surgery in London, although his true calling was to mental illnesses, a new field just being explored by science.
Tao Chi’en planned to work for a while in Dai Fao, the “great city” as the Chinese called San Francisco, and then sail to China in case Ebanizer Hobbs did not answer his most recent letter within a reasonable time. He was amazed to see how San Francisco had changed in little more than a year. Instead of the noisy camp of huts and tents he remembered, he saw a city with well-planned streets and buildings of several floors, organized and prosperous, with new dwellings going up everywhere. A catastrophic fire had destroyed several blocks three months earlier; one could still see the ruins of burned-out buildings, but the coals were not yet cool before everyone had taken hammer in hand to rebuild. There were luxury hotels with verandahs and balconies, casinos, bars, and restaurants, elegant carriages, along with an unattractive, badly dressed multicultural throng, among whom stood out the top hats of a few dandies. The rest were mud-covered, bearded types with the look of villains, although no one was who he seemed: the stevedore on the dock might be a Latin American aristocrat, and the coach driver a New York lawyer. After a minute’s conversation with any of those intimidating-looking types, one might uncover an educated man who at the least pretext, with tears in his eyes, would pull out a wrinkled letter from his wife. And the opposite also happened: the foppish, well-cut suit might well conceal an unmitigated scoundrel. Tao did not see any schools in his walk through the center; instead he saw children working like adults, digging holes, carrying bricks, driving mules, and shining boots, but as soon as the breeze blew in the from the ocean they would run to fly kites. Later he learned that many of them were orphans, and that they roamed the streets in gangs, stealing food to survive. There were few women, and when one strolled elegantly down the street, traffic stopped to let her pass. At the foot of Telegraph Hill, where there was a semaphore flying flags to signal the registry of ships entering the bay, lay a few blocks in which there was no shortage of women: that was the red-light district, controlled by ruffians from Australia, Tasmania, and New Zealand. Tao Chi’en had heard of them, and knew it was no place for a Chinese man to venture by himself after sunset. Peering into shops, he saw they were offering the same goods he had seen in London when he stopped there. Everything came by sea, even a cargo of cats, sold individually like luxury items, to wage war against the rats. The forest of masts of ships abandoned in the bay was reduced to a tenth; many had been scuttled to make landfill for construction or had been converted into hotels, storehouses, jails, and even an insane asylum where poor wretches lost in the unreachable delirium of alcohol were sent to die. Such a haven was badly needed, since previously they had tied lunatics to trees.
Tao Chi’en headed for Chinatown and found that the rumors were true: his countrymen had built a complete city in the heart of San Francisco, where Mandarin and Cantonese were spoken, signs were all in Chinese, and the only faces were Chinese: the illusion of being transported to the celestial empire was perfect. Tao took a room in a decent hotel and prepared to practice medicine as long as necessary to earn a little more money because he had a long journey ahead of him. Something happened, however, that would overturn his plans and hold him in the city. “My karma was not to find peace in a monastery in the mountains, as I sometimes dreamed, but to fight a merciless, no-holds-barred war,” he concluded many years later, when he could look back at his past and see clearly the roads he had traveled and those not taken. Months later, he received Eliza’s last letter in a dirty, wrinkled envelope.
Paulina Rodríguez de Santa Cruz descended from the Fortuna like an empress, surrounded by her entourage and ninety-three trunks. Captain John Sommers’ third trip with the ice had been true torment for him, the other passengers, and the crew. Paulina let everyone know that the ship was hers, and to prove it she contradicted the captain and gave arbitrary orders to the sailors. She had a stomach like an elephant and was not even slowed by seasickness; she was such a good sailor that her appetite merely increased. Her children continually got lost in the crannies of the ship even though their nannies never took their eyes off them, and when that happened the alarms sounded and they had to shut down the boilers because the hysterical mother screamed that her children had fallen overboard. The captain tried to explain as delicately as possible that were that the case she would have to resign herself to it, because the Pacific would already have swallowed them up, but she ordered him to lower the lifeboats. Sooner or later the children would surface, and after several hours of high drama they would resume their voyage. Paulina’s objectionable little lap dog, however, did lose its footing one day and slip into the ocean in front of several witnesses, who watched without a word. Paulina’s husband and brother-in-law were waiting on the dock in San Francisco with a row of carriages and wagons to transport the family and the trunks. The residence constructed for her, an elegant Victorian house, had been shipped in crates from England with numbered pieces and blueprints for putting it together; the wallpaper, furniture, harp, piano, lamps—even porcelain figurines and bucolic paintings to adorn it—were also imported. Paulina did not like it. Compared to her marble mansion in Chile, this new one looked like a dollhouse that threatened to collapse every time she leaned against a wall, but for the moment there was no alternative. And she needed only one look at the effervescent city to realize its possibilities.
“Here is where we are going to live, Feliciano. The first to arrive become aristocracy in a couple of years.”
“You already have that in Chile, woman.”
“I do, but you don’t. Believe me, this will be the most important city of the Pacific.”
“Founded by swine and whores!”
“Precisely. They are the ones most eager for respectability. No one will be more respectable than the Cross family. What a shame these people cannot pronounce our real name. Cross is a name for cheese makers. But after all, I suppose one cannot have everything.”
That night Captain John Sommers went to the best restaurant in the city, eager to eat and drink well and forget his five weeks in the company of that woman. He had brought several boxes of the newest illustrated editions of erotic books. The success of the first had been stupendous, and he hoped his sister Rose would work up the spirit to write again. Ever since Eliza’s disappearance she had been in a slough of sadness and had not once taken up her pen. His mood had been affected, too. “Shit, I am getting old,” he said when he realized he was foundering in futile nostalgia. He had never had time to enjoy his daughter, to take her to England as he had planned; nor had he told her he was her father. He was fed up with deceit and mystery. The business of the books was another family secret. Fifteen years ago, when his sister had confessed that behind Jeremy’s back she was writing lewd stories to keep from dying of boredom, he had come up with the idea of publishing them in London, where the market
for erotica had prospered, along with prostitution and clubs for flagellants, the longer the rigid Victorian moral code was imposed. In a remote province in Chile, seated before a small dressing table of blond wood, with no source of inspiration but memories of her one love affair inflated and polished a thousand times over, his sister produced novel after novel signed by “An Anonymous Lady.” No one believed that those steamy stories, some with a tone suggestive of the Marquis de Sade and already classics of their genre, were written by a woman. It was the captain’s job to take the manuscripts to the editor, monitor expenses, collect the earnings, and deposit them in a London bank for his sister. It was his way of paying her for the huge favor she had done him by taking in his daughter and saying nothing. He could not remember Eliza’s mother, but if the girl had inherited her mother’s physical characteristics, she had undoubtedly gotten from him her urge for adventure. Where could she be? And with whom? Rose insisted she had gone to California after her lover, but the more time that passed, the more he doubted that. His friend Jacob Todd—now Freemont—who had made the search for Eliza a personal mission, assured him that she had never set foot in San Francisco.
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