Rose and her brother John had been inseparable since they were children. In the wintertime she entertained herself by knitting sweaters and socks for the captain and he took great pains every voyage to bring her suitcases filled with gifts and huge boxes of books, several of which ended up under lock and key in Rose’s armoire. Jeremy, as master of the house and head of the family, had the right to open his sister’s correspondence, read her private diary, and demand a copy of the keys to her furniture, but he never showed any inclination to do it. Jeremy and Rose had a no-nonsense domestic relationship but had little in common except the mutual dependence that sometimes seemed closer to a hidden form of hatred. Jeremy paid for Rose’s necessities, but he financed none of her whims and never asked where she got the money for things she wanted, simply assuming that John gave it to her. In exchange, she managed the house efficiently and with style, kept impeccable accounts, and never bothered him with minutiae. She had good taste and effortless grace, she put a polish on both their lives, and her presence was a check to the belief, widely held on these shores, that a man without a family was a potential malefactor.
“It is man’s nature to be savage; it is woman’s destiny to preserve moral values and good conduct,” Jeremy Sommers pontificated.
“Really, brother. You and I both know that my nature is more savage than yours,” Rose would joke.
Jacob Todd, a charismatic redhead with the most beautiful preacher’s voice ever heard on those shores, disembarked in Valparaíso in 1843 with three hundred copies of the Bible in Spanish. No one was surprised to see him: he was just one more missionary among the many wandering all over preaching the Protestant faith. In his case, however, the voyage was not the result of religious fervor but an adventurer’s curiosity. With the braggadocio of a high-living man with too much beer in his belly, he had bet at a gaming table in his London club that he could sell Bibles anywhere on the planet. Todd’s friends had blindfolded him, spun a globe, and his finger had landed on a colony of the king of Spain lost at the bottom of the world where none of his merry cronies had suspected there was life. He soon found that the map was out-of-date; the colony had gained its independence more than thirty years before and was now the proud Republic of Chile, a Catholic country where Protestant ideas had little foothold, but the bet had been made and he was not disposed to turn back. He was a bachelor with no emotional or professional ties and the outlandishness of such a voyage attracted him immediately. Considering the three months over and another three back, sailing across two oceans, the project turned out to be a protracted one. Cheered by his friends, who predicted a tragic end at the hands of Papists in that unknown and barbarous country, and with the financial aid of the British and Foreign Bible Society, which provided him with the books and arranged his passage, he began the long crossing on a ship bound for the port of Valparaíso. The challenge was to sell the Bibles and return within a year’s time with a signed receipt for each sale. In the archives of the British Museum he read the letters of illustrious men, sailors and merchants, who had been in Chile. They described a mestizo people of a little more than a million souls and a wild geography of imposing mountains, clifflined coasts, fertile valleys, ancient forests, and eternal ice. Chile, he was assured by those who had visited it, had a reputation for being the most intolerant country in religious matters of any on the American continent. Despite that hindrance, virtuous missionaries were determined to broadcast their Protestant faith, and without speaking a word of Spanish or a syllable of the Indians’ tongue, they traveled south to where terra firma broke up into islands like a string of beads. Several died of hunger, cold, or, it was suspected, were devoured by their own flock. They had no better luck in the cities. The Chileans’ sacred sense of hospitality was stronger than their religious intolerance and out of courtesy they allowed the missionaries to preach, but gave them little consideration. When they attended the meetings of the occasional Protestant pastor, it was with the demeanor of someone witnessing a spectacle, amused by the peculiar notion that they were thought of as heretics. None of this, however, disheartened Jacob Todd, because he had come as a Bible salesman, not a missionary.
In those same library archives he discovered that since its independence in 1810 Chile had opened its doors to immigrants, who had come by the hundreds and settled in that long and narrow land bathed top to tail by the Pacific Ocean. The English quickly made fortunes as merchants and ships’ outfitters; many brought their families and stayed to live. They formed a small nation within the country, with their own customs, cults, newspapers, clubs, schools, and hospitals, but they did it with such refined manners that, far from arousing suspicion, they were considered an example of civility. The British harbored their fleet in Valparaíso to control the Pacific maritime traffic, and thus from a rude hamlet with no future at the beginnings of the republic Valparaíso had in less than twenty years become an important port where the ships that sailed across the Atlantic and around Cape Horn, and later those that steamed through the Straits of Magellan, came to anchor.
Valparaíso was a surprise to the weary voyager. There before his eyes was a port with a hundred ships flying the flags of half the world. The snow-capped mountains seemed so close they gave the impression of emerging directly from the sea, and from the inky-blue water rose the impossible fragrance of sirens. Jacob Todd never knew that beneath that peaceful-looking surface lay an entire city of sunken Spanish sailing ships and skeletons of patriots with quarry stones tied to their ankles, consigned to the deep by the soldiers of the captain general. The ship dropped anchor in the bay amid the thousands of gulls shattering the air with their tremendous wings and ravenous screeches. Countless small boats bobbed on the waves, some filled with huge live conger eels and sea bass flopping desperately for oxygen. Valparaíso, Todd was told, was the commercial emporium of the Pacific; in its warehouses were stored metals, sheep and alpaca wool, grains, and hides for the world’s markets. Several landing boats ferried the passengers and cargo from the sailing ship to dry land. Todd stepped onto the dock amid sailors, stevedores, passengers, visitors, burros, and carts and found himself in a city boxed into an amphitheater ringed by steep hills, a city as populous and filthy as many famous in Europe, an architectural blunder with narrow streets of adobe and wood houses that fire could turn to ashes in a few hours’ time. A coach drawn by two badly abused horses carried him and his trunks and boxes to the Hotel Inglés. They passed sturdy buildings set around a plaza, several rather unfinished-looking churches, and one-story residences surrounded by large gardens and orchards. He at first estimated an area of about a hundred blocks, but soon learned that the city was deceptive; it was a labyrinth of alleys and passageways. In the distance he glimpsed a fishing community where shacks were exposed to the wind off the ocean and nets stretched like enormous spiderwebs, and beyond them, fertile fields planted with vegetables and fruit trees. He saw coaches as modern as any in London, barouches, fiacres, and calashes, but also teams of mules driven by ragged children and carts drawn by oxen in the very center of the city. On street corners, priests and nuns begged for charity for the poor, surrounded by a sea of stray dogs and befuddled chickens. He saw women carrying bundles and baskets, children clinging to their skirt tails, barefoot but with black mantles over their heads, and quantities of idle men in cone-shaped hats sitting in doorways or talking in groups.
An hour after getting off the ship, Jacob Todd was sitting in the elegant salon of the Hotel Inglés, smoking black cigarettes imported from Cairo and thumbing through a British magazine long out of date. He sighed with pleasure. It seemed he would have no problems in adapting, and if he managed his funds carefully he could live here almost as comfortably as he did in London. As he was waiting for someone to come serve him—apparently no one hurried in this country—he was approached by John Sommers, the captain of the ship he had sailed on. Sommers was a large man with dark hair and skin tanned like shoe leather who took pride in his reputation as a hard drinker, woman chaser, and inexhaus
tible devotee of cards and dice. They had struck up a good friendship, and playing cards had entertained them through endless nights on the high seas and stormy, icy days rounding Cape Horn at the southern tip of the world. John Sommers was accompanied by a pale man dressed in black from head to toe and sporting a newly trimmed beard; although the captain introduced the man as his brother, Jeremy, it would be difficult to find two more different human beings. John was the image of good health and strength, open, loud, and likable, while his brother had the air of a ghost trapped in eternal winter. He was one of those persons who never seems to be entirely there, thought Jacob Todd, the kind it is difficult to remember because they have no outstanding features. Without waiting for an invitation, the two men joined him at his table with that familiarity of compatriots in a foreign land. Finally a waitress showed up and Captain John Sommers ordered a bottle of whiskey, while his brother asked for tea in the lingo invented by Britons to communicate with servants.
“How are things Back Home?” Jeremy inquired. He spoke in a low voice, almost a murmur, barely moving his lips, his accent rather affected.
“Nothing has happened in England for the last three hundred years,” the captain answered.
“Forgive my curiosity, Mr. Todd, but I saw you arrive at the hotel and could not help but notice your luggage. I thought I saw you had several boxes labeled ‘Bibles.’ Was I in error?” asked Jeremy Sommers.
“No, they are Bibles.”
“No one advised us they were sending another pastor—”
“We were three months together in that nutshell and I never made you out to be a pastor, Mr. Todd,” the captain exclaimed.
“I confess I am not,” Todd replied, hiding his discomfort behind a mouthful of cigarette smoke.
“A missionary, then. I suppose you are planning to go down to Tierra del Fuego. The Indians of Patagonia are ripe to be evangelized. Forget the Araucans, old boy, the Catholics have already reeled them in,” Jeremy Sommers commented.
“There are probably no more than a dozen Araucans left,” his brother added. “Those people have a mania for letting themselves be massacred.”
“They were the most savage Indians in America, Mr. Todd. Most of them died fighting the Spanish. They were cannibals.”
“They hacked pieces of flesh off living prisoners,” the captain elaborated, “they preferred their meat fresh. But then, you and I would do no less if someone slaughtered our family, burned our village, and stole our land.”
“Excellent, John! Now you are defending cannibalism,” his brother replied, annoyed. “In any case, Mr. Todd, I must warn you not to tread on the toes of our Catholic friends. We must not provoke the natives. These people are extremely superstitious.”
“Interesting that the beliefs of others are labeled mere superstitions, Mr. Todd. Ours we call religion. Did you know that the Indians of Tierra del Fuego, the Patagonians, are very different from the Araucans?”
“Equally savage, John. Why, they go about stark naked in an insupportable climate,” said Jeremy.
“Take them your religion, Mr. Todd. Let’s see if at least you can teach them to wear britches.” The captain laughed.
Todd had not heard the bad reports about those Indians, and the last thing he wanted to do was to preach something he himself did not believe in, but he didn’t dare confess that his voyage was the consequence of a drunken bet. He replied vaguely that he was thinking of forming a missionary expedition but that he still hadn’t decided how to finance it.
“Had I known, Mr. Todd, that you were coming to preach the designs of a tyrannical god among those good people, I would have thrown you overboard in the middle of the Atlantic.”
The waitress interrupted them, bringing their whiskey and tea. She was a young girl who deliciously filled out the black uniform with its starched coif and apron. When she bent down with the tray, she left a perturbing scent of crushed flowers and hot flat iron on the air. It had been weeks since Jacob Todd had seen a woman, and he sat staring at her with a stab of loneliness. John Sommers waited until the girl had left.
“Careful, my friend, Chilean women are fatal,” he said.
“They do not seem so to me. They are short, broad through the posterior, and they have most unpleasant voices,” said Jeremy Sommers, balancing his cup of tea.
“Sailors desert their ships for them!” the captain exclaimed.
“I admit I am no authority when it comes to women. I do not have time for that sort of thing. I must look after my business and our sister, or had you forgotten?”
“Not for a minute; you always remind me. You see, Mr. Todd, I am the black sheep of the family, a waster. If it were not for our good Jeremy here—”
“That girl looks Spanish,” interrupted Jacob Todd, his eyes still on the waitress, who was now at another table. “I lived two months in Madrid, and I saw many like her.”
“Here everyone has a touch of Indian blood, even those of the upper classes. They do not admit it, of course. Indian blood is hidden like the plague. I cannot say I blame them. Indians have a reputation for being filthy, drunken, and lazy. The government is trying to improve the race by importing European immigrants. Did you know, Mr. Todd, that in the south they are giving away land to colonists?”
“The favorite sport is killing Indians to take away their lands.”
“You exaggerate, John.”
“You don’t always have to shoot them, giving them alcohol will do it. But killing them is much more entertaining, of course. In any case, we English do not indulge in that pastime, Mr. Todd. We are not interested in land. Why plant potatoes if we can make a fortune without taking off our gloves?”
“There is no dearth of opportunities here for an enterprising man. There is much to be done in this country. If you want to prosper, dear fellow, head north. There you find silver, copper, nitrates, guano—”
“Guano?”
“Bird shit, Mr. Todd,” laughed the captain.
“I know nothing about that, Mr. Sommers.”
“Mr. Todd is not interested in making a fortune, Jeremy. His interest is the Christian faith, right?”
“The Protestant colony here is large, and prosperous; they will help you. Come to my home tomorrow. On Wednesdays my sister Rose organizes a little musicale; it will be a good opportunity for you to meet the right people. I shall send my coach to pick you up at five in the evening. You will enjoy it,” said Jeremy Sommers, excusing himself.
The next day, refreshed by a night free of dreams and a long bath that removed the coating of salt clinging to his soul but not the weaving step of the ocean traveler, Jacob Todd went out to stroll through the port. He walked slowly along the main street, which was parallel to the ocean and so close to the shore that it was splashed by the waves, had a few drinks in a cafe, and ate in a tavern in the market. He had left England in the middle of an icy February winter and, after crossing an endless desert of water and stars in which he was embroiled even in the count of his lost loves, had reached the Southern Hemisphere at the beginning of June and another merciless winter. Before he left it had not occurred to him to inquire about the climate. He imagined a Chile as warm and humid as India, because that was what one expected of poor countries; instead he found himself at the mercy of an icy wind that blasted his bones and lifted whirlwinds of sand and trash. He got lost more than once in twisting streets, and made turn after turn to get back to where he had begun. He climbed infinite stairs up tortuous alleyways bordered with houses absurdly suspended in midair, trying politely not to stare through windows and invade the privacy of others. He stumbled upon romantic plazas reminiscent of Europe, with bandstands where military ensembles were playing music for lovers, and walked through modest gardens trampled by burros. Lordly trees grew at the edge of the principal streets, nourished by fetid waters that poured down from the hills in open ditches. In the commercial zone the presence of the British was so evident that one breathed an illusory air of other latitudes. Signs on several shops were i
n English and he passed compatriots dressed in the mode of London fashion, even to the same black undertakers’ umbrellas. The moment he was out of the center, poverty met him like a slap in the face; people looked undernourished, sleepy; he saw soldiers in threadbare uniforms and beggars in the doorways of the churches. At noon all the church bells began to chime in unison and instantly the tumult quieted; people in the street stopped; men removed their hats, the few women about knelt, and everyone crossed himself. This vision lasted as the bells tolled twelve times, then the activity was renewed as if nothing had happened.
The English
The fiacre sent by Sommers arrived at the hotel a half hour late. The coachman had more than a bit of alcohol under his belt, but Jacob Todd was in no position to be choosy. The driver started off toward the south. It had rained for a couple of hours, and in some sections mud puddles masked fatal traps that could swallow a distracted horse. Children waited on either side of the street with teams of oxen, ready to rescue bogged-down coaches in exchange for a coin, but even in his cups the driver somehow avoided most of the potholes and they soon began climbing uphill. As soon as they reached Cerro Alegre, where most of the foreign colony lived, the look of the city changed abruptly; the shacks and crowded dwellings he’d seen below disappeared. The coach stopped before an estate of generous proportions but tortuous design, a mishmash of pretentious towers and useless stairways straddling various ground levels and lighted with so many torches that night was in full retreat. An Indian servant came to the door, wearing livery that was much too large for him. He took Todd’s overcoat and hat and led him to a spacious drawing room furnished with good furniture and somewhat theatrical green velvet drapes; the room was crammed with knickknacks and there was not an inch of wall space on which to rest the eyes. He assumed that in Chile, as in Europe, a bare wall was considered a sign of poverty; it was only later, when he visited the somber homes of the Chileans, that he learned better. Paintings leaned outward from the wall so they might be better appreciated, and much of the room was lost in the shadow of the high ceilings. Huge logs were blazing in the fireplace and several charcoal braziers dispensed an uneven warmth that left his feet icy and his head feverish. Over a dozen people dressed in the European mode were standing around as uniformed maids passed trays. Jeremy and John Sommers came forward to meet him.