Daughter of Fortune by Isabel Allende Read Free Book Online Page B

years went by.
    Jacob Todd came to feel as comfortable in Valparaíso as if he had been born there. Chileans and English shared a number of character traits: they resolved everything with solicitors and barristers; they had an absurd fondness for tradition, patriotic symbols, and routine; they prided themselves on being individualists and enemies of ostentation, which they scorned as a sin of social climbing; they seemed amiable and self-controlled but were capable of great cruelty. However, unlike the English, Chileans were horrified by eccentricity and feared nothing so much as ridicule. If only I spoke Spanish well, thought Jacob Todd, I would feel entirely at home. He had moved into the boarding-house of an English widow woman who took in stray cats and baked the most famous pastries in the port. He slept with four felines on his bed, better company than he had ever had, and breakfasted daily on his hostess’s tempting tarts. He connected with Chileans of every class, from the most humble, whom he met in his wanderings through the poor neighborhoods of the port, to the high-and-mightiest. Jeremy Sommers introduced him into the Club de la Unión, where he was accepted as an invited member. Only foreigners of recognized social status could boast of such privilege, since the club was an enclave of landowners and political conservatives whose members’ worth was determined by family name. Doors opened to him because of his skill with cards and dice; he lost with such grace that very few realized how much he won. It was there that he became a friend of Agustín del Valle, the owner of agricultural holdings in that area and flocks of sheep in the south, where del Valle had never thought of going since that was precisely why he had imported stewards from Scotland. That new friendship gave Todd occasion to visit the austere mansions of aristocratic Chilean families, dark, square edifices with huge, nearly empty rooms decorated with little refinement: heavy furniture, funereal candelabra, and a court of bloody, crucified Christs, plaster virgins, and saints dressed in the mode of ancient Spanish noblemen. These were houses that turned inward, closed to the street by tall iron railings, graceless and uncomfortable but relieved by cool colonnades and interior patios filled with jasmine, orange trees, and roses.
    With the first signs of spring, Agustín del Valle invited the Sommers and Jacob Todd to one of his country estates. The road was a nightmare: a lone horseman could make it in four or five hours, but the caravan of family and guests started at dawn and did not arrive until late at night. The del Valles traveled in oxcarts laden with tables and plush sofas. Behind them came a mule team with the luggage, along with peasants on horseback armed with primitive blunderbusses to defend against the highwaymen who all too often awaited around the curve of the hill. Added to the maddening pace of the animals were the washed-out track where carts sank to their axles and the frequent rest stops during which the servants served refreshments amid clouds of flies. Todd knew nothing about agriculture, but he needed only a look to realize how abundantly things grew in that fertile soil: fruit fell from the trees and rotted on the ground because no one made the effort to gather it. At the hacienda he encountered the same style of life he had observed years before in Spain: a large family united by intricate bloodlines and an inflexible code of honor. His host was a powerful and feudal patriarch who held the destinies of his descendants in his iron fist and made much of a family tree he could trace back to the first Spanish conquistadors. My ancestors, he would say, walked more than a thousand kilometers weighed down in heavy iron armor; they crossed mountains, rivers, and the world’s most arid desert to found the city of Santiago. Among his peers del Valle was a symbol of authority and decency, but outside his class he was