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Eliza
Everyone is born with some special talent, and Eliza Sommers discovered early on that she
had two: a good sense of smell and a good memory. She used the first to earn a living and
the second to recall her life-if not in precise detail, at least with an astrologer's
poetic vagueness. The things we forget may as well never have happened, but she had many
memories, both real and illusory, and that was like living twice. She used to tell her
faithful friend, the sage Tao Chi'en, that her memory was like the hold of the ship where
they had come to know one another: vast and somber, bursting with boxes, barrels, and
sacks in which all the events of her life were jammed. Awake it was difficult to find
anything in that chaotic clutter, but asleep she could, just as Mama Fresia had taught her
in the gentle nights of her childhood, when the contours of reality were as faint as a
tracery of pale ink. She entered the place of her dreams along a much traveled path and
returned treading very carefully in order not to shatter the tenuous visions against the
harsh light of consciousness. She put as much store in that process as others put in
numbers, and she so refined the art of remembering that she could see Miss Rose bent over
the crate of Marseilles soap that was her first cradle.
"You cannot possibly remember that, Eliza. Newborns are like cats, they have no
emotions and no memory," Miss Rose insisted the few times the subject arose. Possible
or not, that woman peering down at her, her topaz-colored dress, the loose strands from
her bun stirring in the breeze were engraved in Eliza's mind, and she could never accept
the other explanation of her origins.
"You have English blood, like us," Miss Rose assured Eliza when she was old
enough to understand. "Only someone from the British colony would have thought to
leave you in a basket on the doorstep of the British Import and Export Company, Limited. I
am sure they knew how good-hearted my brother Jeremy is, and felt sure he would take you
in. In those days I was longing to have a child, and you fell into my arms, sent by God to
be brought up in the solid principles of the Protestant faith and the English
language."
"You, English? Don't get any ideas, child. You have Indian hair, like mine,"
Mama Fresia rebutted behind her patrona's back.
But Eliza's birth was a forbidden subject in that house, and the child grew accustomed to
the mystery. It, along with other delicate matters, was never mentioned between Rose and
Jeremy Sommers, but it was aired in whispers in the kitchen with Mama Fresia, who never
wavered in her description of the soap crate, while Miss Rose's version was, with the
years, embroidered into a fairy tale. According to her, the basket they had found at the
office door was woven of the finest wicker and lined in batiste; Eliza's nightgown was
worked with French knots and the sheets edged with Brussels lace, and topping everything
was a mink coverlet, an extravagance never seen in Chile. Over time, other details were
added: six gold coins tied up in a silk handkerchief and a note in English explaining that
the baby, though illegitimate, was of good stock-although Eliza never set eyes on any of
that. The mink, the coins, and the note conveniently disappeared, erasing any trace of her
birth. Closer to Eliza's memories was Mama Fresia's explanation: when she opened the door
one morning at the end of summer, she had found a naked baby girl in a crate.
"No mink coverlet, no gold coins. I was there and I remember very well. You were
shivering and bundled up in a man's sweater. They hadn't even put a diaper on you, and you
were covered with your own caca. Your nose was running and you were red as a boiled
lobster, with a head full of fuzz like corn silk. That's how it was. Don't get any
ideas," she repeated stoutly. "You weren't born to be a princess and if your
hair had been as black as it is now, Miss Rose and her brother would have tossed the crate
in the trash."
Excerpted from DAUGHTER OF FORTUNE (c) Copyright 1999 by Isabel Allende.
Reprinted with permission from the publisher. All rights reserved.
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