Daughter of Fortune (8 page)

Finally Agustín del Valle accepted the fact that this was not the time to defy the law and that a public wedding would go farther than a double murder to cleanse the family honor. They set the guidelines for a negotiated peace and a week later, when everything was ready, Feliciano returned. The fugitives presented themselves at the del Valles' home, accompanied by the groom's brother, a lawyer, and the bishop. Jacob Todd was discreetly absent. Paulina wore a very simple dress, but when she took off her mantle she defiantly displayed a queen's diadem. She entered on the arm of her future mother-in-law, who was prepared to speak for her virtue but was not given the opportunity. The last thing the family wanted was a second story in the newspaper, so Agustín del Valle had no choice but to receive his rebellious daughter and her undesirable suitor. He did so surrounded by his sons and nephews in the dining room, which had been converted into a tribunal for the occasion, while the women of the family, secluded at the opposite end of the house, learned the details from the maidservants, who listened behind doors and then ran to them with every word. They reported that the girl had shown up with diamonds glittering in her bristly new hair and had faced her father without a trace of shyness or fear, announcing that she still had the candelabras, and, in fact, had taken them only to gall the nuns. Agustín del Valle raised his riding crop but Feliciano stepped forward to receive the punishment. Then the bishop, very weary but with the weight of his authority intact, intervened with the irrefutable argument that there could be no public marriage to still the gossip if the bride and groom showed up with bruised faces.

“Ask them to bring us hot chocolate, Agustín, and let us sit down and converse like decent people,” this officer of the Church proposed.

And so they did. They ordered Paulina and the widow Rodríguez de Santa Cruz to wait outside the room because this was a man's affair, and after consuming several pots of foaming chocolate they reached an agreement. They dictated a document in which the economic terms were set out clearly and the honor of both parties saved, signed it before a notary, and proceeded to plan the details of the wedding. One month later Jacob Todd attended an unforgettable ball in which the prodigal hospitality of the del Valle family reached new heights: the dancing, singing, and feasting lasted into the following morning and the guests all commented on the beauty of the bride, the happiness of the groom, and the good fortune of the del Valles, who had wed their daughter to a solid, if brand-new, fortune. The couple immediately left for the north.

J
acob Todd was sorry to see Feliciano and Paulina go; he had become good friends with the mining millionaire and his spunky wife. He felt as much at ease with the young impresarios as he began to feel ill at ease among the members of the Club de la Unión. Like him, the new industrialists were imbued with European ideas, they were modern and liberal, unlike the old Chilean oligarchy which at midcentury was decades behind the times. He still had one hundred and seventy Bibles stacked beneath his bed, which by now he had forgotten because he had long ago lost his bet. He had enough command of Spanish to manage on his own and, though it was not returned, he had never stopped loving Rose Sommers: two good reasons for staying in Chile. Her unfailing rebuffs had become a pleasant habit and no longer humiliated him. He learned to deflect them with irony and return them without malice, like a game of catch whose mysterious rules only they knew. He was acquainted with a few intellectuals and spent entire nights discussing French and German philosophers, along with scientific discoveries that were opening new horizons on human knowledge. He had long hours in which to think, read, and debate. He distilled ideas that he noted down in a thick notebook worn with use and spent a major part of his pension on books ordered from London and others he bought in the Santos Tornero bookstore in El Almendral, the district where the French lived and where all the best brothels in Valparaíso were located. The bookshop was a meeting place for intellectuals and aspiring writers. Todd sometimes spent whole days reading; later he passed his books on to his comrades, who translated them and published them in small, inexpensive pamphlets circulated from hand to hand.

Among the group of intellectuals, the youngest was one Joaquín Andieta, who was barely eighteen but who made up for lack of experience with the qualities of a natural leader. His electrifying personality was even more notable given his youth and poverty. This Joaquín was not a man of many words, but of action, one of the few with enough clearmindedness and courage to transform ideas from books into revolutionary impulses; the others would rather argue forever around a bottle in the back room of the bookstore. Todd had picked Andieta out from the beginning; there was something disquieting and pathetic about him that drew him like an abyss. Todd had noticed Andieta's scuffed satchel and threadbare suit, transparent and brittle as onion skin. To hide the holes in the soles of his boots, Andieta never crossed his legs, and Todd suspected that he did not remove his jacket because his shirt was mended and patched. He didn't own a decent overcoat, but in winter he was the first to get up early to hand out pamphlets and paste up posters calling workers to rebel against employers' abuses, or sailors against captains and ship companies, an often futile labor since most of those to whom the notices were directed were illiterate. His calls for justice were lost at the mercy of the wind and human indifference.

Through discreet inquiries Jacob Todd discovered that his friend was employed by the British Import and Export Company, Ltd. In return for a miserly salary and exhausting work schedule he kept an accounting of the goods that passed through the port office. He was also expected to wear a starched collar and shined shoes. He spent his days in a badly lit, badly ventilated room in which the desks were lined up one after the other to infinity and piled with dusty files and ledgers that no one had looked at in years. Todd asked Jeremy Sommers about the boy but he could not place him. He must see him every day, he said, but he had no personal interchange with his subordinates and could barely recognize their names. Through other sources, Todd learned that Andieta lived with his mother, but could find out nothing about his father. He imagined that he had been a sailor passing through the port and the mother one of those luckless women who did not fit into any social category, perhaps illegitimate or renounced by her family. Joaquín Andieta had Andalusian features and the virile grace of a young toreador; everything about him suggested firmness, athleticism, control; his movements were precise, his gaze intense, his pride touching. To Todd's Utopian idealism he posed a rock-hard realism. Todd preached the creation of a communal society without priests or police, governed democratically under a unique and flexible moral law.

“You live in the clouds, Mr. Todd. We have much to do, we can't waste time discussing fantasies,” interrupted Joaquín Andieta.

“But if we don't begin by imagining the perfect society, how shall we create one?” Todd responded, waving his constantly growing notebook, to which he had added plans of ideal cities in which each citizen cultivated his food and children grew up healthy and happy, cared for by the community, for since there was no private property neither could one claim possession of children.

“We must improve the disaster of the here and now. The first thing is to organize the workers, the poor, and the Indians, give land to the campesinos and seize power from the priests. We must change the constitution, Mr. Todd. Here only property owners vote, which means the rich govern. The poor don't count.”

At first, Jacob Todd sought ways to help his friend, but soon he had to give that up because his attempts were taken as offense by him. He assigned Andieta little jobs in order to have an excuse to give him money, but Andieta completed them scrupulously and then refused payment. If Todd offered him tobacco, a glass of brandy, or his umbrella on a stormy night, Andieta reacted with icy pride, leaving Todd upset and sometimes insulted. The young man never mentioned his private affairs or his past; he seemed briefly to come to life in order to share a few hours of revolutionary conversation or feverish reading in the bookshop before vanishing like smoke at the end of those evenings. He did not have money to accompany the others to the tavern and would not accept an invitation he couldn't repay.

One night Todd could not bear the uncertainty any longer and followed Andieta through the labyrinth of the port streets, hiding in the shadows of colonnades and around the bends of the absurd alleyways that people told him twisted purposely to keep the devil from entering them. He watched Joaquín Andieta turn up his pants legs, take off his shoes, wrap them in a sheet of newspaper, and carefully put them in his worn satchel, from which he took a pair of peasant sandals to wear. At that late hour there were only a few lost souls about and stray cats pawing through garbage. Feeling like a thief, Todd slunk through the darkness, close upon his friend's heels; he could hear Andieta's agitated breathing and the chafing of skin as he rubbed his hands to combat the needles of icy wind. His steps led to a wretched house on one of those narrow alleys so typical of the city. The stench of urine and excrement struck Todd in the face; the crew that policed the neighborhoods with long hooks to clear the drains rarely came here. He now understood Andieta's precaution in taking off his only pair of shoes: Todd had no idea what he was walking through, only that his feet were sinking into a pestilential broth. In the moonless night a faint light filtered through the battered shutters at the windows, many without windowpanes but closed with boards or pasteboard. Through the cracks he glimpsed a miserable candlelit room. The gentle mist gave the scene an air of unreality. He watched Joaquín Andieta light a match, protecting it from the wind with his body, take out a key, and open a door in the tremulous light of the flame. “Is that you, son?” Todd heard a woman's voice, younger than he had expected. The door immediately closed. He stood a long while in the darkness, staring at the shabby house, fighting a powerful urge to knock at the door, a desire born not of mere curiosity but from an overwhelming affection for his friend. “I'm a bloody idiot,” he muttered finally.

He turned and started back to the Club de la Unión to have a drink and read the newspapers, but before he got there he went home, unable to face the contrast between the poverty he had just left and those rooms with their leather furniture and crystal chandeliers. He went back to his lodgings, burning with a fire of compassion not unlike the fever that had so nearly done him in during his first week in Chile.

And that was the state of things at the end of 1845 when the commercial maritime fleet of Great Britain assigned a chaplain in Valparaíso to attend to the spiritual needs of the Protestants. He arrived eager to challenge the Catholics, build a solid Anglican temple, and put new life in his congregation. He announced that his first official act would be to examine the accounts of the missionary project in Tierra del Fuego, the results of which were nowhere in evidence. Jacob Todd had Agustín del Valle invite him to the country, with the idea of giving the new pastor time to cool down, but when he returned two weeks later he found that the chaplain had not forgotten the matter. For a while Todd invented new excuses to forestall the inevitable, but finally he had to face an auditor and then a commission of the Anglican Church. He became entangled in explanations that became more and more fantastic the more clearly the numbers exposed the deficit to the bright light of day. He turned over what money was left in the account but his reputation suffered irreparable damage. The Wednesday musicales in the home of the Sommers were ended for him, and no one in the foreign colony invited him anywhere again; friends avoided him in the street and everyone who had business with him considered it terminated. News of the deception filtered through to his Chilean friends, who discreetly but firmly suggested that he not show his face again in the Club de la Unión if he wanted to avoid the embarrassment of being ejected. He was not welcome at the cricket matches or in the bar of the Hotel Inglés. Soon he was isolated and even his liberal friends turned their backs on him. The del Valle family, as a block, stopped speaking to him, except for Paulina, with whom he maintained a sporadic correspondence.

Still in the north, Paulina had given birth to her first son and revealed in her letters her satisfaction with married life. Feliciano Rodríguez de Santa Cruz, richer by the day if what people said was true, had turned out to be a very unusual husband. He was convinced that the boldness Paulina had shown in running away from the convent and defying her family to marry him should not be diluted in domestic chores but should be used to their mutual benefit. His wife, educated as a lady, scarcely knew how to read or add but she had developed a true passion for business. At first Feliciano was amazed at her interest in learning details about the process of mining and transporting minerals, as well as the ups and downs of the stock exchange, but he had soon learned to respect his wife's uncommon intuition. Following her advice, only seven months after they were married he earned huge profits from speculations in sugar. Grateful, he gave her an ornate tea service of Peruvian silver that weighed nineteen kilos. Paulina, who was nearly immobilized by the bulk of their first child, waved off the gift without looking up from the booties she was knitting.