Read Online Portrait in Sepia by Isabel Allende - Free Book Online Page B

uncontainable anxiety and she began to shiver, frightened and contrite.
    From the time his wife died in Hong Kong, Tao Chi'en had occasionally consoled himself in the hasty embraces of paid women. He had not made loving love for more than six years, but he did not allow his eagerness to run away with him. So many times he had gone over Eliza's body in his thoughts, and he knew her so well that it was like exploring her soft valleys and gentle hills with a map. She thought she had known love in the arms of her first lover, but intimacy with Tao Chi'en revealed to her the extent of her ignorance. The passion that had swept over her at sixteen, a passion for which she had traveled halfway across the world and more than once risked her life, had been a mirage that seemed absurd by comparison. Then she had been in love with love, making do with the crumbs given her by a man more interested in leaving than in staying with her. She had searched for him four years, convinced that the young idealist she had known in Chile had in California been transformed into the fabled bandit Joaquin Murieta. During that time Tao Chi'en had waited with his proverbial calm, sure that sooner or later Eliza would cross the threshold that separated them. It was he who had accompanied her when the head of Joaquin Murieta had been exhibited as entertainment for Americans and as a warning to Latins. He had thought that Eliza would not be able to bear the sight of that repulsive trophy, but she had stopped before the large jar containing the head of the supposed criminal and looked at it without emotion, as if it were a marinated head of cabbage, until she was very sure that it was not the man whom she had followed for years. In truth, it didn't matter; on the long trail of an impossible romance, Eliza had acquired something as precious as love: freedom. "I am free," was all she had said when she viewed the head. Tao Chi'en understood that at last she had shed the burden of her former lover, that it didn't matter whether he was alive or had died looking for gold in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada; in any case she would not be searching any longer, and if one day the man appeared she would be able to see him in his true light. Tao Chi'en had taken Eliza's hand and they had left that sinister exhibition. Outside, they breathed the fresh air and walked away, at peace and ready to begin a new stage in their lives.
    The night that Eliza went into Tao Chi'en's room was very different from the nights of secret and hurried embraces with her first lover in Chile. With Tao she discovered some of the many possibilities of pleasure and was initiated into the fathomless love that was to be hers for the rest of her life. With complete serenity, Tao Chi'en began freeing her from layers of accumulated fears and useless memories, caressing her with inexhaustible dedication until she stopped trembling and opened her eyes, until she relaxed beneath his wise fingers, until he felt her move like waves under his hands, open to him, illuminated from within. He heard her moan, call to him, plead with him: he saw her yielding, moist, eager to give herself and take him with complete abandon, until neither knew where they found themselves or who they were, where he ended and she began. Tao Chi'en led her beyond orgasm to a mysterious dimension where love and death are interchangeable. They felt their spirits were expanding, that desires and memory had disappeared, that they gave themselves to one another in an enormous pool of bright light. They held each other in that extraordinary space, recognizing each other, perhaps because they had been there in earlier lives and would be many times more in future lives, as Tao Chi'en suggested. They were lovers for all eternity; their karma, he said with emotion, was to seek and find each other, but Eliza laughed and replied that it was nothing as solemn as karma, only a simple urge to fornicate, that to tell the truth she had been dying to