Daughter of Fortune (48 page)

“Why can we not forget this matter once and for all?” sighed Jeremy.

“Because, brother, she is my daughter, for God's sake!” the captain exclaimed.

“I am going to California to look for Eliza,” Miss Rose interrupted, jumping to her feet.

“You are not going anywhere!” her older brother exploded.

But she had already left the room. John's news had been an injection of new blood for Miss Rose. She was absolutely certain she would find her adopted daughter, and for the first time in four years she had a reason to go on living. To her amazement, she found that her old strength was intact, lurking in some secret part of her heart, ready to serve her as it had before. Her headache vanished as if by a charm; she was perspiring, and her cheeks were pink with euphoria when she called the servants to go with her to the room of the armoires to look for suitcases.

In May of 1853 Eliza read in the newspaper that Joaquín Murieta and his follower, Three-Finger Jack, had attacked a camp of six peaceful Chinese, held them by their queues, and slit their throats. Then they had strung the heads from a tree, like a cluster of melons. The roads were ruled by the bandits, no one was safe in the region, everyone had to move about in large, heavily armed groups. The outlaws murdered American miners, French adventurers, Jewish peddlers, and travelers of any race, although usually they did not attack Indians or Mexicans, the Yanquis saw to them. Terrorized settlers bolted doors and windows, men with loaded rifles stood guard, and women hid, because no one wanted to fall into the grasp of Three-Finger Jack. It was said of Murieta, however, that he never abused a woman and that on more than one occasion he had saved a young girl from being brutally ravished by his gang. Inns refused to put up travelers because they feared that one of them might be Murieta. No one had seen him in person, and descriptions varied, although Freemont's articles had created a romantic image of the bandit that most readers accepted as authentic. In Jackson they formed the first group of volunteers charged with hunting down the outlaws; soon there were vigilantes in every town and an unprecedented manhunt was set in motion. No one who spoke Spanish was free of suspicion, and within a few weeks there were more summary lynchings than there had been in the previous four years. Speaking Spanish was enough to make a man a public enemy and to attract the wrath of sheriffs and constables. The final outrage came when Murieta's gang was fleeing a party of American soldiers that was close on their heels and in midflight detoured and attacked a camp of Chinese. Soldiers arrived seconds later to find several men dead and others dying. It was said that Joaquín Murieta was enraged by Asians because they rarely defended themselves, even when they had weapons; the celestials feared him so much that the mere sound of his name threw them into a panic. The most persistent rumor, however, was that Murieta was recruiting an army, and that in partnership with wealthy Mexican ranchers in the area was planning to foment an uprising, stir up the Hispanic population, massacre Americans, and either return California to Mexico or form an independent republic.

In answer to popular demand, the governor signed a decree authorizing Captain Harry Love and a group of twenty volunteers to hunt Joaquín Murieta for a period of three months. They assigned a salary of one hundred and fifty dollars a month to each man—not much considering that they had to provide their own horses, weapons, and provisions, but even so the company was ready for action in less than a week. There was a reward of a thousand dollars on Joaquín Murieta's head. As Jacob Freemont had pointed out in his newspaper, they were condemning a man to death without knowing his identity, without having proved his crimes, and without a trial: Captain Love's mission was tantamount to a lynching. Eliza felt a mixture of horror and relief that she could not explain. She did not want those men to kill Joaquín, but they might be the only ones capable of finding him: all she wanted was to be sure, she was tired of shadow-boxing. At any rate, it was not very likely that Captain Love would be successful where so many others had failed. Joaquín Murieta seemed invincible. The myth was that nothing but a silver bullet could kill him, because two pistols had been emptied point-blank into his chest and he was still galloping up and down Calaveras County.

“If that beast is your lover, you'd be better off never to find him,” was Tao Chi'en's comment when Eliza showed him the newspaper cuttings she had collected for more than a year.

“I don't think it's him.”

“How do you know?”

In her dreams she saw her former lover in the same worn suit and same threadbare but crisply ironed shirts of the days when they had made love in Valparaíso. He came with his tragic air, his intense eyes, his smell of soap and sweat, took her by the hands as he had then, and spoke feverishly of democracy. Sometimes they lay together on the pile of drapes in the room of the armoires, side by side, without touching, completely dressed, listening to creaking boards lashed by winds from the sea. And always, in every dream, Joaquín had a star of light on his forehead.

“And what does that signify?” Tao Chi'en wanted to know.

“No evil man has light on his forehead.”

“It's only a dream, Eliza.”

“Not one, Tao, many dreams.”

“Then you are looking for the wrong man.”

“Maybe, but I haven't wasted my time,” she replied without further explanation.

For the first time in four years she was again aware of her body, which had been relegated to an insignificant plane from the moment Joaquín Andieta told her good-bye in Chile on that doleful December 22 in 1848. In her obsession to find the man she had renounced everything, including her femininity. Somewhere along the way she had lost what made her a woman and turned into a strange, asexual creature. Sometimes, riding through woods and hills, exposed to the assault of the winds, she remembered the advice of Miss Rose, who bathed in milk and never allowed a ray of sun to touch her porcelain skin, but Eliza could not brood about such matters. She endured difficulties and punishment because she had no alternative. She considered her body, like her thoughts, her memory, or her sense of smell, an inseparable part of her being. She had never understood what Miss Rose was referring to when she spoke of the soul because she could not differentiate it from the whole of her person, but now she was beginning to get a glimpse of what it was. The soul was the immutable part of her being. The body, in contrast, was the fearsome beast that after years of hibernation was roaring back, filled with demands. It came to remind her of the ardor of the desire she had savored briefly in the room of the armoires. Since that time she had never felt any true urgency for love or physical pleasure, as if that part of herself was in profound, permanent slumber. She attributed that to the pain of having been abandoned by her lover, to the fear of finding herself pregnant, to her journey through the labyrinths of death on the ship, to the trauma of the miscarriage. Her body had been so mistreated that dread of finding herself in that condition again was stronger than the impulses of youth. She felt that she had paid too high a price for love, and that it would be better to avoid it altogether; but something had changed in the last two years she had been with Tao Chi'en, and suddenly love, like desire, seemed inevitable. The obligation to dress like a man was beginning to be a heavy burden. She remembered the little sewing room, where at that very moment Miss Rose must be stitching another of her exquisite dresses, and she was deluged by a wave of nostalgia for those fragile afternoons of her childhood, for five o'clock tea in cups Miss Rose had inherited from her mother, for the outings when they went to buy smuggled fripperies from the ships. And what had become of Mama Fresia? Eliza could see her, grumbling in the kitchen, fat and warm, smelling of sweet basil, always with a wooden spoon in her hand and a pot boiling on the stove, like an affable witch. She yearned for that long-lost female companionship, the sense that she was a woman again. She did not have a large mirror in her room in which to study that feminine being struggling to emerge. She wanted to see herself naked. Some days she awakened at dawn, feverish from impetuous dreams in which the image of Joaquín Andieta with a star on his forehead imposed itself upon visions from the erotic books she used to read aloud to Joe Bonecrusher's doves. In those days she had read with remarkable indifference because the descriptions evoked nothing in her, but now they came like lewd phantoms to haunt her in dreams. Alone in her beautiful room of Chinese furniture, she used the dawn light filtering weakly through the windows to make a rapturous exploration of her body. She took off her pajamas, studied with curiosity the parts of her body she could see, and ran her hands over the rest, as she had in the days she was discovering love. She found that little had changed. She was slimmer, but she also seemed much stronger. Her hands were roughened by sun and work, but the rest of her body was as pale and smooth as she remembered. It amazed her that after being crushed so long beneath a sash that she still had small, firm breasts, with nipples like garbanzos. She let down her hair, which she hadn't cut in four months, and fastened it at the back of her neck, then closed her eyes and shook her head, enjoying the weight and texture of the live animal of its length. She wondered at that nearly unknown woman with curved thighs and hips, small waist, and the curly, springy thatch on her pubis so different from the smooth, silky hair on her head. She lifted an arm to measure its length, appreciate its form, look at her fingernails from a distance; with the other hand she felt along her side, the ripples of her ribs, the hollow of her underarm, the contour of her arm. She paused at the most sensitive points of wrist and inner elbow, wondering whether Tao felt the same tickle at those spots. She caressed her neck, traced the outlines of her ears, the arch of her eyebrows, the line of her lips; she wet a finger in her mouth and then touched it to her nipples, which hardened with the contact of the warm saliva. She ran her hands down her hips to learn their shape, and then sensually, to feel the smoothness of her skin. She sat on her bed and stroked her legs from feet to groin, noticing for the first time the nearly imperceptible golden fuzz on her legs. She parted her thighs and found the mysterious cleft of her sex, soft and moist; she sought the bud of her clitoris, the very center of her desires and confusions, and, as she touched it, immediately came the unexpected vision of Tao Chi'en. It was not Joaquín Andieta, whose face she could barely remember, but her loyal friend who came to fuel her febrile fantasies with an irresistible blend of ardent embraces, gentle tenderness, and shared laughter. Afterward she smelled her hands, awed by the powerful aroma of salt and ripe fruit her body emitted.

Three days after the governor had put a price on the head of Joaquín Murieta, the steamship
Northerner
had anchored in the port of San Francisco carrying two hundred seventy-five sacks of mail and Lola Montez. She was the most famous courtesan in Europe but neither Tao Chi'en nor Eliza had ever heard her name. They were on the dock by accident, there to pick up a box of Chinese medicines brought by a sailor from Shanghai. They thought the reason for the carnival atmosphere was the mail—there had never been such a large number of sacks—but the festive fireworks made them reconsider. In that city accustomed to all manner of wonders a mob of curious men had congregated to see the incomparable Lola Montez, who had traveled across the isthmus of Panama preceded by the throbbing drums of her fame. She was carried from the dinghy in the arms of a pair of lucky sailors who set her on the ground with the reverence due a queen. And that was precisely the attitude of that celebrated Amazon as she accepted the cheers of her admirers. The hubbub caught Eliza and Tao Chi'en unaware; they had no inkling of the beauty's history, but other spectators quickly brought them up to date. Montez was an Irishwoman, a bastard of common stock who passed herself off as a noble Spanish ballerina and actress. She danced like a goose, and had nothing of an actress except excessive vanity, but her name invoked licentious images of great seductresses, from Delilah to Cleopatra, which was why so many delirious crowds went to applaud her. They did not go because of her talent but to witness firsthand her perturbing wickedness, her legendary beauty and fiery temperament. With little craft other than impudence and audacity, she filled theaters, ran through fortunes, collected jewels and lovers, threw epic rages, declared war on Jesuits, and had been thrown out of several cities, but her crowning feat was to have broken a king's heart. Ludwig I of Bavaria had been a good man, parsimonious and prudent, for sixty years, until Lola popped up in his life, worked him over, and left him limp as a straw doll. The monarch had lost his judgment, his health, and his honor, while she emptied the royal coffers of his small kingdom. The besotted Ludwig gave Lola everything she wanted, including the title of countess, but could not get his subjects to accept her. The woman's low habits and outrageous whims provoked the hatred of the citizens of Munich, who finally poured out into the streets to demand that the king's lover be exiled. Instead of quietly disappearing, Lola met the armed mob with a horsewhip and they would have chopped her to bits had her faithful servants not forcibly stuffed her into a carriage and taken her to the border. Desperate, Ludwig abdicated his throne and prepared to follow her into exile, but stripped of his crown, his power, and his bank account, the beauty found little of interest in him and left the old man flat.

“So her only virtue is her bad reputation,” said Tao Chi'en dismissively.

A group of Irishmen unhitched the horses from Lola's carriage, harnessed themselves in place, and pulled her to the hotel through streets carpeted with flower petals. Eliza and Tao Chi'en watched her pass by in a glorious procession.

“That's all this country of madmen needed,” sighed the Chinese without a second look at the beautiful Lola.