Daughter of Fortune (41 page)

“Where did you get that?” he cried, gripping her shoulders with two hands.

“It's mine! I bought it!” she blurted out, terrified.

“Where!” and he shook her so roughly that one of the thugs sauntered toward them.

“Any trouble, mister?” he asked threateningly.

The captain made a sign that he wanted some time with this woman, and hustled her off to one of the cubicles on the second floor. He closed the curtain and with a single slap tumbled her back on the bed.

“You are going to tell me where you got that brooch or I'm going to knock all your teeth out, is that clear?”

“I didn't steal it, I swear. Someone gave it to me!”

“Who?”

“You won't believe me when I tell you.”

“Try me!”

“A girl, a long time ago, on a boat . . .”

And Azucena Placeres had no choice but to tell that man possessed that a Chinese cook had given her the brooch in payment for looking after a poor little girl who was dying from a miscarriage in the hold of a ship in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. As she talked, the captain's anger turned to horror.

“What happened to her?” asked John Sommers, his head in his hands, stunned.

“I don't know, señor.”

“I'll give you anything you want, woman, just tell me what happened to her,” he begged, dropping a sheaf of bills in her skirt.

“Who are you?”

“I'm her father.”

“She bled to death and we threw her body into the ocean. I swear, that's the truth,” Azucena Placeres replied without a second's pause, because she thought that if that poor girl had traveled half the world hidden like a rat in a hole, it would be an unforgivable betrayal on her part to set the father on her trail.

Eliza spent the summer in the town because with one thing and another the days got away from her. First Babalú the Bad had a near fatal attack of dysentery, which set off a panic since the epidemic was supposed to be under control. For months there had been no cases to mourn except the death of a two-year-old boy, the first child to be born and die in that stopping-off place for newcomers and adventurers. That baby had put a seal of authenticity on the town, for now it was no longer an illusory camp with a gallows as its only reason to figure on the maps; it had a Christian cemetery and the tiny grave of someone whose entire life had been spent there. During the time Joe Bonecrusher's barn had been turned into a hospital, all of them had miraculously been spared from the epidemic—miraculously, because Joe didn't believe in contagion. She said everything was a matter of luck: the world is filled with plagues; some get them and some don't. That was why she didn't take precautions; she allowed herself the luxury of ignoring the commonsense warnings of the doctor and only under pressure boiled the drinking water. Once they had moved into a real house, they all felt safe; if they hadn't been infected before, they wouldn't now. But within a few days, Babalú was down; then it became the turn of Joe Bonecrusher, the girls from Missouri, and the beautiful Mexican. They succumbed with vile diarrhea, fevers you could fry an egg on, and uncontrollable chills, which in Babalú's case shook the house. Then came James Morton in his Sunday clothes to ask formally for Esther's hand.

“Oh, son, you couldn't have chosen a worse time,” sighed Joe Bonecrusher, but she was too sick to object and between moans gave her consent.

Esther divided her belongings among her companions because she did not want to take anything to her new life, and they were married that same day, without much fuss, attended by Tom No-Tribe and Eliza, the only two of their company who weren't sick. A double row of Esther's former customers lined both sides of the street as the couple went by, shooting into the air and yelling congratulations. The couple moved into the blacksmith shop, determined to make it their home and forget the past, but still they went every day to Joe's house, taking hot meals and clean clothing to the ill. The unpleasant task of nursing everyone fell to Eliza and Tom No-Tribe. The town doctor—a young man from Philadelphia who for months had been warning that the water was polluted with waste from the miners upriver, without anyone's giving him the time of day—quarantined Joe's house. Their finances went from bad to worse but they did not go hungry, thanks to Esther and the anonymous gifts that mysteriously appeared at the door: a sack of beans, a few pounds of sugar, tobacco, small pouches of gold dust, silver dollars. To tend her friends, Eliza called on what she had learned in her girlhood from Mama Fresia and from Tao Chi'en in Sacramento, until finally one by one her friends began to recuperate, although for a long time they were unsteady and befuddled. Babalú the Bad had suffered the most. His Cyclops girth was unaccustomed to bad health; he lost weight and his flesh hung so loose his tattoos were unrecognizable.

During that time, a brief news items was published in the local newspaper about a Chilean or Mexican—no one was sure which—bandit named Joaquín Murieta, who was becoming famous up and down the mother lode. By then, violence was the rule in gold country. Disillusioned when they learned that sudden fortune, a mockery of a miracle, had come to only a few, the Americans accused foreigners of being greedy and of getting rich without contributing to the nation's prosperity. Liquor fired them up, and impunity in doling out punishment gave them an irrational sense of power. An American was never sentenced for crimes against another race; still worse, a white criminal often could choose his own jury. Racial hostility turned into blind hatred. Mexicans refused to accept the loss of their territory in the war, or to be run off their ranches and the mines. The Chinese bore abuse silently; they did not leave, but kept prospecting, not earning enough for a flea, but with such infinite tenacity that grain by grain they amassed wealth. Thousands of Chileans and Peruvians, who had been the first to arrive when gold fever blossomed, decided to return to their countries because it wasn't worth pursuing their dreams under such conditions. That year, 1850, the legislature of California approved a tax on mining operations designed to protect whites. Blacks and Indians were left out, unless they worked like slaves, and foreigners had to pay twenty dollars and renew rights to their claim monthly, which in practice was impossible. They couldn't leave the placers to travel several weeks to the city to obey the law, but if they didn't, the sheriff took over their mine and gave it to an American. The people in charge of enforcing those measures were chosen by the governor and earned their salaries from taxes and fines, a perfect setup for encouraging corruption. The law applied only to dark-skinned foreigners, even though according to the treaty that ended the war in 1848 the Mexicans had rights to American citizenship. Another decree was the last nail in the coffin: claims on their ranches, where they had lived for generations, had to be ratified by a court in San Francisco. This procedure took years and cost a fortune; in addition, the judges and constables were often the same ones who had appropriated the claims. In view of the fact that the law did not protect them, some Mexicans decided to act outside it, spiritedly throwing themselves into the role of outlaws. Men who formerly had been content to steal cattle now attacked solitary miners and travelers. Some gangs were famous for their cruelty; they not only robbed the victims, they took pleasure in torturing them before they killed them. There was talk of one particular
bandido
to whom they attributed, among other offenses, the terrible death of two young Americans. Their bodies were found tied to a tree, with signs of having been used as a target for knife throwers: their tormentors had also cut out their tongues, pierced their eyes, and cut off live flesh before leaving them to slowly die. This criminal was called Three-Finger Jack, and it was said that he was right-hand man to Joaquín Murieta.

Not everything was savagery, nevertheless; the cities were developing, and new towns were springing up and families moving in; newspapers, theater companies, and orchestras were organized, schools, churches, and banks were constructed, roads were built, and communications improved. There was stagecoach service and regular mail delivery. Women were less a novelty now, and a society was flourishing that aspired to order and morality, replacing the disaster of solitary men and prostitutes. There was an attempt to establish the rule of law and to return to the civilization forgotten in the delirium of easy gold. The town was given a respectable name in a solemn ceremony featuring a marching band and a parade, which Joe Bonecrusher attended dressed as a woman for the first time and backed by her entire company. Wives who had only recently arrived blanched when they saw the “painted women,” but as Joe and her girls had saved so many lives during the epidemic they overlooked their activities. On the other hand, they declared war on the other brothel—a losing battle, nonetheless, since there was still only one woman for every nine men. At the end of that year, James Morton welcomed five families of Quakers who had crossed the continent in oxcarts, not for gold but drawn by the vastness of that virgin land.

By now, Eliza had no idea what trail to follow. Joaquín Andieta had evaporated in the confusion of the times and in his place had begun to materialize an outlaw with the same physical description and similar name, a figure she found impossible to identify with the noble young man she loved. The author of the letters she kept as her only treasure could not be the same person as the one to whom such horrendous crimes were attributed. The man she loved would never have associated with a cold-blooded killer like Three-Finger Jack, she was sure, but her conviction melted away at night when Joaquín appeared to her wearing a thousand different masks and bringing a thousand contradictory messages. She would wake up trembling, besieged by the raving specters of her nightmares. She had lost the ability to come and go from her dreams at will, as Mama Fresia had taught her as a child, nor could she decipher the visions and symbols that kept rattling in her head like pebbles rolling in the river. She wrote tirelessly in her diary, hoping as she did so that the images would acquire some meaning. She reread the love letters syllable by syllable, seeking clarifying signs but finding only deeper perplexity. Those letters were the one proof of her lover's existence and she clung to them so as not to lose her bearings completely. The temptation to fall into apathy as a way to escape the torment of continuing her search for Joaquín was becoming irresistible. She doubted everything: the embraces in the room of the armoires, the months buried in the hold of the ship, the baby that had bled out of her.

The financial problems that arose from Esther's marriage to the blacksmith, which deprived Joe's company of a quarter of their income overnight, and from the weeks the other girls had been laid low by dysentery, were so major that Joe nearly lost the house, but the thought of seeing her doves working for the competition spurred her to keep fighting adversity. They had gone through hell, and she could not let her girls slide back into that life, because much against her will she had become fond of them. She had always thought of herself as one of God's serious mistakes, a man condemned to the body of a woman, which is why she could not understand the maternal instinct that had budded when it was least convenient. She looked after Tom No-Tribe religiously, but she liked to point out that she did it “like a sergeant.” None of that mollycoddling, it wasn't in her nature, and besides, the boy had to be strong like his ancestors; babying only screwed up a kid's manliness, she warned Eliza when she found her with Tom No-Tribe in her lap, telling him folktales from Chile. This new tenderness for her doves was a serious stone around her neck, and, to top everything off, they knew how she felt and had begun to call her Mother. Her gorge rose at that; she had forbidden them to do it, but they ignored her. “We have a business relationship here, goddamn it. I can't put it any straighter. As long as you work, you have a salary, a roof, food, and protection, but the day you get sick, get lazy on me, or get all wrinkled and gray . . . so long!” she groused. “Nothing easier than replacing you, the world is full of easy women.” And then, all of a sudden, here came this syrupy sentimentality to foul up her life, something no madam in her right mind would ever permit. “All this crap happens to you because you're a nice person,” Babalú the Bad teased her. And it was probably true, because while she was wasting precious time nursing sick people whose names she didn't even know, the other madam in town had refused to let anyone who was sick come near her place. Joe was getting poorer while her rival put on weight, had her hair bleached, and took a Russian lover ten years her junior with muscles like an athlete and a diamond set in one tooth. This competitor had expanded her business and on weekends the miners lined up at her door with money in one hand and hat in the other, for no woman, no matter how low she had sunk, would put up with an undoffed hat. Very clearly, Joe maintained, there was no future for her in the profession: the law didn't protect them, God had forgotten them, and all she could see ahead was old age, poverty, and loneliness. She considered taking in washing and baking pies to sell, meanwhile holding on to the trade in gambling and dirty books, but her girls were not interested in earning a living with such hard, and badly paid, work.

“This is a shitty profession, girls. Get yourselves married, go study to be teachers. Do something with your fucking lives and stop hanging around me,” she sighed sadly.

Babalú the Bad, what's more, was tired of acting as a pimp and bodyguard. Their sedentary life bored him, and Joe Bonecrusher had changed so much that he didn't really feel like working with her any longer. If she had lost her enthusiasm for the profession, where did that leave him? In desperation he confided in Chile Boy, and the two of them entertained each other making fanciful plans to break free. They contemplated organizing a traveling spectacle. They talked about buying a bear and training it to box, so they could go from town to town challenging anyone brave enough to duke it out with the animal. Babalú was looking for adventure, and Eliza thought it would be a good opportunity to have company while she looked for Joaquín Andieta. Besides cooking and playing the piano she didn't have much to do at Joe's place, and the inactivity was making her out of sorts. She wanted to feel the freedom of the open road again, but she'd grown fond of these people and it broke her heart to think of leaving Tom No-Tribe. The boy was reading well now and was diligent in learning to write; Eliza had convinced him that when he grew up he should study to be a lawyer and defend the rights of the Indians instead of avenging the dead with bullets, as Joe wanted him to do. “You will be a much more powerful warrior that way, and all the gringos will be afraid of you.” He still didn't laugh, but once or twice when he sat beside her to have her scratch his head, the shadow of a smile played over his angry Indian face.