Portrait in Sepia

by Isabel Allende

  “Then this isn’t the first time you’ve rescued my cousin, Williams?”

  “Let us say that it will not be the last,” he replied.

  They laid Matías on a bed in the corner of the room, behind a Japanese screen, and Severo proceeded to moisten his face with damp cloths and shake him to bring him back from the nirvana in which he was floating, while Williams went out to look for the family doctor, after warning that it would not be a good plan to notify Severo’s aunt and uncle of what had occurred.

  “My cousin may die!” exclaimed Severo, still trembling.

  “In that eventuality we may have to inform the master and mistress,” Williams conceded courteously.

  Matías lay five days struggling through spasms of agony, poisoned to the marrow. Williams brought a nurse to the garret to look after him and made arrangements so that his absence would not be a cause of scandal at home. This incident created a strange bond between Severo and Williams, a tacit complicity that was never translated into actions or words. With another individual less hermetic than the butler, Severo would have thought he shared a kind of friendship, or at least that they liked each other, but the Englishman raised an impenetrable wall of reserve around himself. Severo began to observe him. He treated the employees under his orders with the same cool and impeccable civility he extended to his employers, and in that way succeeded in terrorizing them. Nothing escaped his vigilance, from the gleam of the ornate silver tableware to the secrets of each resident in that immense house. It was impossible to calculate his age or origins; he seemed eternally stalled in his forties and, except for the British accent, gave no hint of his past. He changed his white gloves thirty times a day, his black wool suit seemed always recently pressed, his snow-white shirt of the best Dutch linen was starched like cardboard, and his shoes gleamed like mirrors. He sucked mint pastilles for his breath and used eau de cologne, but he did so with such discretion that the only time Severo perceived the scent of mint and lavender was the time in the opium den when he had brushed against him as they lifted the unconscious Matías. On that occasion, Severo had also noticed the wood-hard muscles beneath the swallowtail coat, the tense tendons in his neck, as well as the man’s strength and flexibility, none of which fit in with the picture of an English lord down on his luck.

  As cousins, Severo and Matías had in common only their patrician features and a taste for sports and literature. In all else they seemed not to be of the same blood: the former was as noble, fearless, and naive as the latter was cynical, indolent, and libertine. But despite their contrasting temperaments and the years that separated them, they formed a friendship. Matías made a great effort to teach Severo to fence—though he lacked the elegance and quickness indispensable for that art—and to initiate him into the pleasures of San Francisco, but the younger man turned out to be a bad companion in revelry because he tended to fall asleep on his feet. He worked fourteen hours a day in the law office and spent the remaining hours reading and studying. The two cousins often swam naked in the pool in the mansion, and challenged each other to contests of Greco-Roman wrestling. They would dance about each other, alert, preparing to spring, and finally they would attack, scrambling for balance, rolling until one succeeded in subduing the other, pinning him to the floor. They would be wet with sweat, panting, excited. Severo would push away, perturbed, as if the competition had been an unconfessable embrace. They talked about books and commented on the classics. Matías loved poetry, and when they were alone recited from memory, so moved by the beauty of the verses that tears ran down his cheeks. Severo was also disturbed on those occasions because his cousin’s intense emotion seemed to him a kind of intimacy forbidden between men. He lived for news of scientific advances and journeys of exploration, which he told Matías about in a vain attempt to interest him, but the only news that managed to dent his cousin’s armor of indifference had to do with local crimes. Matías had a curious relationship, based on liters of whiskey, with Jacob Freemont, an old and unscrupulous journalist always short of funds, with whom he shared a morbid fascination for criminal behavior. Freemont still worked the police beat for the newspapers, but he had lost his reputation many years before when he invented the story of Joaquín Murieta, a supposed Mexican bandit during the days of the gold rush. His articles had created a myth and fueled the hatred of the white population toward Spanish-speaking peoples. To calm things, the authorities offered a reward to a certain Captain Harry Love to hunt down Murieta. After three months of riding around California in hot pursuit, the captain chose an expeditious solution: he killed seven Mexicans in an ambush and brought back a head and a hand. No one could identify the remains, but Love’s exploit reassured the whites. The macabre trophies were still being exhibited in a museum, though there was a consensus that Joaquín Murieta was a monstrous creation of the press in general and of Jacob Freemont in particular. That and other episodes in which the newspaperman’s guileful pen muddied reality finally won him the reputation of being a liar, and closed doors to him. Thanks to his strange connection with Freemont, the crime reporter, Matías was able to view murder victims before their bodies were removed and to witness autopsies at the morgue, spectacles that repelled as much as excited him. He would emerge from those adventures in the underworld of crime drunk with horror, proceed directly to the Turkish bath, where he spent hours sweating out the stench of death clinging to his skin, and then close himself in his garçonnière to paint disastrous scenes of people chopped into bits.

  “What does all this mean?” asked Severo, the first time he saw those Dantesque paintings.

  “Aren’t you fascinated by the idea of death? Homicide is a tremendous adventure, and suicide is a practical solution. I toy with the idea of both. Some people deserve to be murdered, don’t you agree? And as for me, cousin, well, I don’t plan to die a decrepit old man. I would rather end my days with the same care I use in choosing my suits, and that’s why I study crimes, as training.”

  “You’re mad. And, besides, you have no talent,” Severo concluded.

  “You don’t need talent to be an artist, just audacity. Have you heard of the Impressionists?”

  “No, but if this is what those poor devils paint, they won’t get far. Couldn’t you find a more agreeable subject? A pretty girl, for example?”

  Matías burst out laughing and announced that on Wednesday there would be a truly pretty young girl at his garçonnière, the most beautiful in San Francisco according to popular opinion, he added. She was a model his friends fought to immortalize in clay, on canvas, and on photographic plates, with the additional hope of making love to her. They exchanged bets to see who would be the first, but for the moment no one had succeeded in so much as touching her hand.

  “She suffers from a detestable defect: virtue. She’s the only virgin left in California, although that’s easy to cure. Would you like to meet her?”

  And that was how Severo del Valle came to see Lynn Sommers again. Until that day he had limited himself to secretly buying postcards with her image in shops for tourists and hiding them in the pages of his law books, like a shameful treasure. Many times he hung around the street on Union Square where the tea shop was located, hoping to see her from afar, and he made discreet inquiries of the coachman who drove every day to pick up pastries for Paulina del Valle, but he had never dared introduce himself honorably to Eliza Sommers and ask permission to visit her daughter. Any direct action seemed an irreparable betrayal of Nívea, his cherished lifetime sweetheart. It would be a different matter, he had decided, if he ran into Lynn accidentally, since in that case a meeting would be a prank of fate, and no one could blame him. It had never crossed his mind that he would see her in his cousin Matías’s studio under such strange circumstances.

  Lynn Sommers was the happy product of mixed races. Her name should have been Lin Chi’en, but her parents decided to Anglicize the names of their children and give them their mother’s surname, Sommers, to make life easier for them in the United States, where the
Chinese were treated like dogs. They named the older child Ebanizer, in honor of an old friend of his father, but called him Lucky because he had the best luck of anyone who had ever lived in Chinatown. Their younger child, a girl, born six years after their son, they named Lin in honor of her father’s first wife, buried many years before in Hong Kong, but when they filled out her birth certificate they used the English spelling: Lynn. Tao Chi’en’s first wife, who bequeathed her name to the girl, had been a fragile creature with tiny bound feet, adored by her husband but crushed by consumption. Eliza Sommers learned to live with the ever-present memory of Lin, and came to think of her as just another member of the family, a kind of invisible protectress who looked out for the well-being of her home. Twenty years earlier, when Eliza had found she was pregnant again, she had asked Lin to help her carry the baby to term; she had already had several miscarriages, and she did not have much hope that her depleted body could sustain the pregnancy. That was how she explained it to Tao Chi’en, who each time before had placed all his resources as a zhong-yi at his wife’s disposal, in addition to taking her to the best Western medicine specialists in California.

  “This time we will have a healthy baby,” Eliza assured him.

  “How do you know,” he asked.

  “Because I asked Lin.”

  Eliza always believed that Tao’s first wife had been by her side during the pregnancy and given her the strength to give birth to her daughter; then—like a good fairy—she had leaned over the cradle to offer the baby the gift of beauty. “She will be called Lin,” the exhausted mother had announced when at last she held her daughter in her arms, but Tao Chi’en was frightened. It was not a good idea, he said, to give the child the name of a woman who had died so young. Finally they changed the spelling to keep from tempting fate. “It’s pronounced the same,” Eliza concluded. “That’s all that counts.”

  On her mother’s side, Lynn Sommers had English and Chilean blood, and from her father the genes of the tall Chinese of the north. Tao Chi’en’s grandfather, a humble healer, had handed down to his male descendents his knowledge of medicinal plants and magic incantations for curing various ills of the body and mind. Tao Chi’en, the last of that line, had enriched the paternal legacy by training to be a zhong-yi with a wise man from Canton, and also through a lifetime of study, not only of traditional Chinese medicine but of everything that fell into his hands concerning Western medical science. He had built a solid reputation in San Francisco, and though he was consulted by American doctors and had patients of several races, he was not allowed to work in their hospitals; his practice was limited to the Chinese quarter, where he had bought a house large enough to install his clinic on the first floor and his residence on the second. His reputation protected him; no one interfered in his activities with the Singsong Girls, as those pathetic sex slaves, all children really, were known in Chinatown. Tao Chi’en had taken on his shoulders the mission of rescuing as many of them as he could from the brothels. The tongs that controlled and sold protection in the Chinese community knew that he was buying the tiny prostitutes to give them a second chance far away from California. He had been threatened a couple of times, but nothing drastic had happened to him because sooner or later some member of a tong might need the services of the famed zhong-yi. As long as Tao Chi’en didn’t go to the American authorities, acted discreetly, and rescued the girls one by one with antlike patience, he was tolerated because his actions did not make a dent in the enormous profits of the enterprise. The one person who looked on Tao Chi’en as a public menace was Ah Toy, the most successful madam in San Francisco and the owner of several houses that specialized in adolescent Asian girls. She alone imported hundreds of young victims every year, right past the American customs officers, who, duly bribed, looked the other way. Ah Toy detested Tao Chi’en and, as she had often said, would rather die than consult him again. She had done that once when very ill from a cough no one could cure, but on that occasion both had understood that they would always be mortal enemies.

  Every Singsong Girl Tao Chi’en saved was a bamboo shoot driven under Ah Toy’s fingernail, whether or not the girl belonged to her. To Ah Toy, as well as to Tao Chi’en, the Singsong Girls’ fate was a matter of principle.

  Tao Chi’en always rose before dawn and went out into the garden, where he performed martial exercises to keep his body in shape and his mind clear. After that he meditated for thirty minutes and then lit the fire for the kettle. He would wake Eliza with a kiss and a cup of green tea, which she slowly sipped in bed. That moment was sacred for them both; the cups of tea they drank together sealed the night they had shared tightly embraced. What happened between them behind the closed door of their room compensated for all the day’s efforts. Their love had begun as a gentle friendship, subtly woven in the midst of a tangle of obstacles ranging from being able to communicate only in English and having to overcome prejudices of culture and race to the difference in their ages. They had lived and worked together under the same roof for more than three years before they dared cross the invisible frontier that separated them. Eliza had been driven to wander in circles for thousands of miles of an endless journey pursuing a hypothetical lover who slipped through her fingers like a shadow. Along that road she would leave her past and her innocence in tatters and confront her obsessions before the decapitated, gin-preserved head of the legendary bandit Joaquín Murieta finally to understand that her destiny was Tao Chi’en. The zhong-yi, in contrast, had known that long before, and had waited for Eliza with the quiet tenacity of his mature love.

  The night when finally Eliza dared travel the twenty-four feet of corridor that separated her room from that of Tao Chi’en, their lives changed completely, as if the past had been chopped off with one swipe of a hatchet. Beginning with that ardent night there was not the least hint of temptation to turn back, only the challenge of carving out a space in a world that did not tolerate the mixing of races. Eliza went there barefoot, in her nightgown, feeling her way in the shadow; she pushed Tao Chi’en’s door, certain she would find it unlocked, because she sensed that he wanted her as much as she wanted him, but despite that certainty she was frightened by the finality of her decision. She had hesitated for a long time before taking that step because the zhong-yi was her protector, her father, her brother, her best friend, her only family in that foreign land. She was afraid she would lose everything when he became her lover, but she was standing at Tao’s threshold and her eagerness to touch him was stronger than the sophistries of reason. She went into the room, and in the candlelight she saw Tao sitting cross-legged on the bed, dressed in white cotton tunic and trousers, waiting for her. Eliza did not have time to wonder how many nights he had spent that way, listening for the sound of her footsteps in the corridor, dazed as she was by her own boldness, trembling with shyness and anticipation. Tao Chi’en did not give her the opportunity to retreat. He came to meet her, opened his arms to her, and she walked forward blindly until she bumped against his chest, in which she buried her face, breathing the familiar salty sea scent of that man, clinging with both hands to his tunic because her knees were buckling beneath her, while a river of explanations poured from her lips and blended with the words of love he was murmuring in Chinese. She felt arms lifting her from the floor and gently placing her on the bed; she felt warm breath on her neck, and hands holding her, then she was seized by an uncontainable anxiety and she began to shiver, frightened and contrite.

  From the time his wife died in Hong Kong, Tao Chi’en had occasionally consoled himself in the hasty embraces of paid women. He had not made loving love for more than six years, but he did not allow his eagerness to run away with him. So many times he had gone over Eliza’s body in his thoughts, and he knew her so well that it was like exploring her soft valleys and gentle hills with a map. She thought she had known love in the arms of her first lover, but intimacy with Tao Chi’en revealed to her the extent of her ignorance. The passion that had swept over her at sixteen, a passion for whic
h she had traveled halfway across the world and more than once risked her life, had been a mirage that seemed absurd by comparison. Then she had been in love with love, making do with the crumbs given her by a man more interested in leaving than in staying with her. She had searched for him four years, convinced that the young idealist she had known in Chile had in California been transformed into the fabled bandit Joaquín Murieta. During that time Tao Chi’en had waited with his proverbial calm, sure that sooner or later Eliza would cross the threshold that separated them. It was he who had accompanied her when the head of Joaquín Murieta had been exhibited as entertainment for Americans and as a warning to Latins. He had thought that Eliza would not be able to bear the sight of that repulsive trophy, but she had stopped before the large jar containing the head of the supposed criminal and looked at it without emotion, as if it were a marinated head of cabbage, until she was very sure that it was not the man whom she had followed for years. In truth, it didn’t matter; on the long trail of an impossible romance, Eliza had acquired something as precious as love: freedom. “I am free,” was all she had said when she viewed the head. Tao Chi’en understood that at last she had shed the burden of her former lover, that it didn’t matter whether he was alive or had died looking for gold in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada; in any case she would not be searching any longer, and if one day the man appeared she would be able to see him in his true light. Tao Chi’en had taken Eliza’s hand and they had left that sinister exhibition. Outside, they breathed the fresh air and walked away, at peace and ready to begin a new stage in their lives.

  The night that Eliza went into Tao Chi’en’s room was very different from the nights of secret and hurried embraces with her first lover in Chile. With Tao she discovered some of the many possibilities of pleasure and was initiated into the fathomless love that was to be hers for the rest of her life. With complete serenity, Tao Chi’en began freeing her from layers of accumulated fears and useless memories, caressing her with inexhaustible dedication until she stopped trembling and opened her eyes, until she relaxed beneath his wise fingers, until he felt her move like waves under his hands, open to him, illuminated from within. He heard her moan, call to him, plead with him: he saw her yielding, moist, eager to give herself and take him with complete abandon, until neither knew where they found themselves or who they were, where he ended and she began. Tao Chi’en led her beyond orgasm to a mysterious dimension where love and death are interchangeable. They felt their spirits were expanding, that desires and memory had disappeared, that they gave themselves to one another in an enormous pool of bright light. They held each other in that extraordinary space, recognizing each other, perhaps because they had been there in earlier lives and would be many times more in future lives, as Tao Chi’en suggested. They were lovers for all eternity; their karma, he said with emotion, was to seek and find each other, but Eliza laughed and replied that it was nothing as solemn as karma, only a simple urge to fornicate, that to tell the truth she had been dying to do that with him for several years and was hoping that in the future Tao’s enthusiasm would not flag because that was going to be her priority in life. They pleasured themselves that night and a good part of the following day, until hunger and thirst forced them to stagger from the room, drunken and happy, holding hands for fear that they would suddenly wake and discover that they had been wandering lost in an hallucination.