Portrait in Sepia Read Free

those who had tasted her. She sang and danced badly but with enthusiasm; she acted in inconsequential plays and enlivened wealthy men's parties. She had a snake of Panamanian pedigree, long, fat, and tame but spine-tingling in appearance, that she wound around her body during her exotic dances. It had never given any sign of aggression until one unfortunate night when La Lowell showed up with a feather diadem in her hair and the beastie, confusing the headdress for a distracted parrot, came close to strangling its mistress in its determination to swallow the bird. The beautiful Lowell was far from being one of the thousands of so-called soiled doves in the amatory landscape of California. She was a high-class courtesan whose favors were not attained simply with money: good manners and charm were also called for. Thanks to the generosity of her protectors, she lived well and had more than sufficient means to support an entourage of artists with no talent. She was condemned to die poor because she spent as much as a small nation's gross product and gave away what was left over. In the flower of her youth, she stopped traffic in the street with the grace of her bearing and her red lion's mane of hair, but her taste for scandal had undercut her luck: with one fit she could ruin a good name and a family. To Feliciano, the risk was but a further incentive; he had the soul of a pirate and the idea of playing with fire seduced him as much as La Lowell's incomparable buttocks. He installed her in an apartment in the heart of San Francisco, but he never appeared in public with her because he knew the nature of his wife, who once in a fit of jealousy had cut off the arms and legs of all his suits and left them in a heap at the door of his office. For a man as elegant as he, a man who ordered his clothing from Prince Albert's tailor in London, that was a mortal blow.
    In San Francisco, a man's city, the wife was always the last to learn of a conjugal infidelity, but in this case it was La Lowell herself who divulged it. The minute her protector turned his back, she began carving notches on the pillars of her bed, one for each lover received. She was a collector; she wasn't interested in men for their own merits, only the number of marks. It was her goal to surpass the myth of the fascinating Lola Montez, the Irish courtesan who had breezed through San Francisco during the gold fever. Word of La Lowell's notches flew from mouth to mouth, and local gallants fought to visit her, as much for the beauty's charms, whom many already knew in the biblical sense, as for the amusement of bedding the mistress of one of the city's most illustrious citizens. The news reached Paulina del Valle after it had made the complete circuit of California.
    "Most humiliating of all is that the bitch has been cuckolding you, and now everyone is saying that I'm married to a rooster with no cock-a-doodle-do," Paulina rebuked her husband—she had a tongue like a Saracen scimitar at such moments.
    Feliciano Rodríguez de Santa Cruz had known nothing of La Lowell's collecting tendencies, and his vexation nearly killed him. He had never imagined that friends, acquaintances, and men who owed him tremendous favors would mock him in that way. On the other hand, he never blamed his lover because he accepted with resignation the caprices of the fair sex, delicious creatures with little moral fiber, always ready to yield to temptation. Whereas they were bound to the earth, humus, blood, and organic functions, men were destined for heroism, great ideas, and—though not in his case—sainthood. Confronted by his wife, he defended himself as best he could, and took advantage of a moment of truce to throw in her face the business of the bolt she used to lock the door of her room. Did she think a man like him could live in abstinence? It was all her fault for having turned him away, he alleged. The business of the bolt was true. Paulina had renounced their carnal romps, not for