Portrait in Sepia Read Online Free PDF Page A

Eliza Sommers listened to Paulina's incessant chatter, interrupted barely long enough for her to gobble another bite. Severo forgot about the women when at the next table he discovered a precious little girl pasting pictures into an album by the light of the gas lamps and the soft glow of the stained-glass windowpanes that dappled her with sparks of gold. The girl was Lynn Sommers, Eliza's daughter, a creature of such rare beauty that even then, though she was only twelve years old, several of the city's photographers were using her as a model: her face illustrated postcards, posters, and calendars of angels plucking lyres and naughty nymphs in forests of cardboard trees. Severo was still of an age when girls are a slightly repugnant mystery to boys, but now he gave in to fascination. Standing beside her, he contemplated her openmouthed, not understanding why he felt a tightness in his chest and a desire to weep. Eliza Sommers interrupted his trance by calling the youngsters to have a cup of chocolate. The little girl closed the album without paying any attention to Severo, as if she didn't see him, and stood up lightly, floating. She sat down to her cup of chocolate without speaking a word or looking up, resigned to the boy's impertinent gaze and fully aware that her looks separated her from other mortals. She carried her beauty like a deformity, with the secret hope that with time it would go away.
    A few weeks later Severo sailed back to Chile with his father, carrying in his memory the vastness of California and with the vision of Lynn Sommers firmly entrenched in his heart.
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    Severo del Valle did not see Lynn again until several years later. He returned to California at the end of 1876 to live with his aunt Paulina, but he did not renew his acquaintance with Lynn until one winter Wednesday in 1879, and by then it was already too late for both of them. By the time of his second visit to San Francisco, the young man had reached his definitive height, but he was still bone thin, pale, ungainly, and uncomfortable in his skin, as if he had too many elbows and knees. Three years later, when he stood mute before Lynn, he was a mature man, with the noble features of his Spanish ancestors, the flexible build of an Andalusian bullfighter, and the ascetic air of a seminarian. Much had changed in his life since the first time he saw Lynn. The image of that silent little girl with the languor of a relaxed cat had accompanied him throughout the difficult years of his adolescence and the grief of his mourning. His father, whom he had adored, had died, still comparatively young, in Chile, and his mother, confounded by her immature but overly lucid and irreverent son, had sent him to finish his studies in a Catholic school in Santiago. Soon, however, he returned home with a letter explaining in no uncertain terms that one bad apple spoils all the others in the barrel, or something of that nature. Then the self-sacrificing mother made a pilgrimage on her knees to a miraculous grotto where the Virgin, always ingenious, whispered the solution to her: pack him off to the military service and let a sergeant deal with the problem. For one year Severo marched with the troops, endured the rigor and stupidity of the regiment, and emerged with the rank of reserve officer, determined never again in his lifetime to go near a barracks. He had no more than set his foot out the door when he returned to his old friendships and erratic moods. This time his uncles got into the act. They met in council in the austere dining room in the home of Severo's grandfather Agustin, without the presence of the youth and his mother, who had no vote at the patriarchal table. In that same room thirty-five years earlier Paulina del Valle, her head shaved but crowned with a diamond tiara, had defied the males of her family to marry Feliciano Rodríguez de Santa Cruz, the man she had chosen for herself. There, that day, the charges against Severo were being presented