The day I turned seven years old, April 14, 1873, my mother, Molly Walsh, dressed me in my Sunday best and brought me to Union Square to have my portrait taken. The only existing photograph of my childhood depicts me standing beside a harp with the terrified expression of a man on the gallows, a result of the long minutes spent staring into the black box of the camera, holding my breath, followed by the startle of the flashbulb. I should clarify that I do not know how to play any instrument; the harp was merely one of the dusty theatrical props crowded into the photography studio alongside cardboard columns, Chinese vases, and a stuffed horse.

The photographer was a small mustachioed Dutchman who had made a good living at his trade since the times of the gold rush when the miners came down from the mountains to deposit their nuggets in the banks and have their portraits taken to send home to their all-but-forgotten families. Gold fever soon died down, but San Francisco’s upper-class patrons still frequented the studio to pose for posterity. My family didn’t fall into that category, but my mother had her own reasons for wanting a photo of her daughter. She haggled on the price of the portrait, more on principle than out of real necessity; I’ve never known her to purchase anything without attempting to obtain a discount.

“While we’re here, we’ll go and see the head of Joaquín Murieta,” she told me as we left the Dutchman’s studio.

At the opposite end of the square, near the entrance to China-town, she bought me a cinnamon roll and led me to the door of an unsanitary tavern. We paid the entrance fee and traversed a long hallway to the rear of the locale. There, a scary thug lifted a heavy curtain and we entered a room hung with lugubrious draperies and lit with altar candles like some ghastly church. There was a table shrouded in black cloth at one end of the space and atop it sat two large glass jars. I cannot recall any further details of the décor because I was paralysed by fright. My mother seemed euphoric even as I quaked with fear, both hands clutching at her skirts. The first jar held a human hand floating in a yellowish liquid. The second, a man’s decapitated head with the eyelids sewn shut, lips pulled back, teeth barred, and hair standing on end.

“Joaquín Murieta was a bandit. A reprobate, like your father. This is how bandits usually end up,” my mother explained.

It goes without saying that I suffered horrible nightmares that night. I was even feverish, but my mother was of the opinion that unless a person was bleeding, there was no need to intervene. The following day, wearing the same dress and the same cursed lace-up boots that pinched terribly, since I had been forcing my feet into them for the past two years, we picked up my portrait and walked to the wealthy part of town, a neighbourhood I had never set foot in before. Cobbled streets wended their way up the hills flanked by stately homes overlooking rose gardens and tidily trimmed hedges, coach houses stocked with glossy horses, not a single beggar in sight.

Up to that point, my entire existence had transpired within the confines of the Mission District, that multicoloured, polyglot multitude of emigrants from Germany, Ireland, and Italy; Mexicans who had always lived in California; and a considerable cohort of Chileans who came with the gold rush in 1848 and, several decades later, were still as poor as when they had first arrived. They never saw any gold. If they did find anything in the mines, it was snatched from them by the whites who arrived a year later. Many returned to their homeland with nothing more than fabulous tales to tell. Others stayed because the return trip was long and costly. The Mission District was bursting with factories, workshops, piles of rubbish, stray dogs, skinny mules, clotheslines, and doors thrown open wide because there was nothing of value to steal.

That pilgrimage with my mother to the restricted universe of the upper class was my first hint that we were poor. We were far from hungry and plagued by rodents, like my maternal grandparents in Ireland, but we led a modest lifestyle like everyone else around us, who lived hand to mouth. I had never paid any mind to people of greater means before because I had never had any contact with them. I had seen them from afar when I went downtown with my parents, but that seldom happened. The coaches pulled by lustrous horses; ladies in exaggerated Victorian fashions festooned with ruffles, fringe, and rosettes; gentlemen with their top hats and canes; and children dressed in sailor suits were creatures of another species. Our working- class neighborhood was filled with barefoot children, eternally pregnant women, and drunken men working odd jobs to scrape together enough money for bread. Compared to our neighbours, my small family was fortunate. My honourable stepfather always said that as long as we had work, love, and dignity, we should want for nothing. We also had a decent little home, and we were not indebted to anyone.

I didn’t dare ask my mother where we were going. I followed her up and down the hills, enduring the blisters on my feet. At that time, Molly Walsh was a young woman with an angelic face, that is to say, with the beatific expression of church martyrs, and the crystal clear voice of a mockingbird, which she still retains. That voice is deceptive, however, because my mother is actually quite forceful and bossy. On the rare occasion that she has cause to mention my father, her voice changes and her singsong tone becomes halting as she spits out her words. She hadn’t said it, but I guessed that this torturous walk to the wealthy area of town was somehow related to him.

Finally, we reached the top of Nob Hill, panting from the effort, and took in the panoramic view of the city and San Francisco Bay. We came to a stop in front of the most imposing mansion on the street, with a marvelous garden hemmed in by a monumental iron fence. Through the bars, I glimpsed a statue of a fish shooting water from its mouth into a stone fountain. At the end of the garden an enormous butter-coloured house rose up with a columned porch and a heavy wooden door flanked by two stone lions. My mother said it was a nouveau riche eyesore, but my mouth hung agape; this must be what a fairy-tale palace looked like. We stood before the iron gate for a few minutes catching our breath, as my mother dabbed sweat from her brow and straightened her hat. Before she could pull the cord to ring the bell, a man stepped out from a side door, dressed in a black suit with a starched collar. He crossed the vast expanse of garden and stopped before us. He did not open the gate. A mere glance was all it took for him to accurately size us up despite the care my mother had taken with our appearance.

“How may I help you, madam?” he asked in a haughty British accent, his lips so tight we could hardly understand him.

“I am here to speak with Mr. Gonzalo Andrés del Valle,” my mother declared, trying to imitate the man’s petulant tone.

“Do you have an appointment with Mr. del Valle?”

“No, but he’ll see me.”

“I am afraid he is traveling at the moment, madam.”

“When will he return?” my mother asked, somewhat deflated.

“I couldn’t say, madam.”

The man stared at us for a moment and finally opened the gate, but he did not invite us in. I suppose he had reached the conclusion that we did not pose any real threat or major nuisance, because he took on a slightly more friendly tone.

“Mr. del Valle visits San Francisco from time to time, but he resides in Chile,” the Englishman explained before adding that the family did not accept visitors without previous appointments.

“Could you provide an address where I can send him a letter? It’s a very important matter,” my mother said.

“You can leave it with me, Mrs. . . .”

“Molly Walsh,” she replied, without mentioning her married name, Claro.

“I will personally see that it reaches him, Mrs. Walsh,” he assured her.

She then handed the man an envelope containing my photograph and a note introducing Gonzalo Andrés del Valle to his daughter, Emilia. This was not the last letter she would write to him, nor was it the first…