Portrait in Sepia by Isabel Allende Read Free Book Online Page A

marry me off because I frighten men away, and that I should make myself pretty and keep my mouth closed if I want a husband. My family applauds the least sign of learning in my brothers—I say least because you already know how dim-witted they are—but in me the same achievement is considered boastful. The one person who tolerates me is my uncle Jose Francisco, because I offer him the opportunity to talk about science, astronomy, and politics, subjects he likes to hold forth on, although my opinions don't matter to him. You cannot imagine how I envy men like you, who have the world for a stage." Love never took up more than a couple of lines in Nívea's letters and a couple of words in Severo's, as if they had a tacit agreement to erase their intense and hasty caresses in the corners. Twice a year, Nívea sent Severo her photograph, so he could see that she was becoming a woman; he promised to send her one but always forgot, as he also forgot to tell her that he would not be coming home that Christmas. Another girl, one in greater haste to marry than Nívea, would have angled her antennae to locate a less evasive sweetheart, but she never doubted that Severo del Valle would be her husband. So sure was she that their separation, which dragged on for years, did not overly concern her; she was prepared to wait to the end of time. As for Severo, he held the memory of his cousin as a symbol of everything good, noble, and pure.
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    Matias's appearance possibly justified his mother's opinion that he was nothing but a well-dressed fool, but there was nothing of the fool about him. He had visited all the important museums of Europe, he knew about art, he could recite every classical poet who ever lived, and he was the one person who used the library in their home. He cultivated his own style, a mixture of bohemian and dandy: of the former he had the habit of nightlife and of the latter his mania for details of haberdashery. He was considered the best catch in San Francisco, but he made no bones about being a confirmed bachelor; he preferred a trivial conversation with the worst of his male enemies to a tryst with the most attractive of his female admirers. The only place his life might coincide with a woman's was for procreation, he said, a proposition absurd in itself. To answer the demands of nature he preferred a professional from among the many who were available. A late night among gentlemen that did not end with a brandy at the bar and a visit to a brothel was inconceivable; there were more than a quarter million prostitutes in the country, and a good percentage of them earned their living in San Francisco, from the miserable Singsong Girls of Chinatown to refined ladies from southern states forced by the Civil War into life as courtesans. The young heir, so little tolerant of feminine weaknesses, was a model of patience with the gross behavior of his bohemian friends; that was another of his eccentricities, like his taste for thin black cigarettes, which he ordered from Egypt, and for real and literary crimes. He lived in his parents' palatial home on Nob Hill and maintained a luxurious apartment in the heart of the city, crowned by a spacious garret he called the garçonnière , where he occasionally painted and frequently hosted soirees. He mixed with the bohemian underworld, poor devils sunk in stoic and inescapable poverty: poets, journalists, photographers, aspiring writers and artists, men without families who spent their lives half ill, coughing and conversing, and who lived on credit and never wore a watch because time had not been invented for them. Behind the back of the aristocratic Chilean, they made fun of his clothes and his manners, but they put up with him because they could always come to him for a few dollars, a drink of whiskey, or a spot in his garret to spend a foggy night.
    "Have you noticed that Matias has the mannerisms of a sodomite?" Paulina commented to her husband.
    "How could you even think of