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that Paulina was closely following his progress in the legal firm, keeping a close eye on his friendships and a close accounting of his expenses, and anticipating his every step even before he took it. How she knew so much was a mystery, unless Williams, the inscrutable butler, had organized a network of spies. The man directed an army of servants who discharged their duties like silent shadows; they lived in separate quarters at the back of the grounds and were forbidden to speak to the master and mistress of the family unless they were rung for. Nor could they speak to the butler without first passing through the head housekeeper. Severo had difficulty understanding such hierarchies, because in Chile things were much simpler. The patrones , even the most despotic like his grandfather, treated their employees harshly but attended to their needs and considered them part of the family. Severo had never known a maidservant to be dismissed; those women came to work in their home at puberty and stayed until they died. The small palace on Nob Hill was very different from the monastic homes of his childhood, with their thick adobe walls and lugubrious iron gates, and their sparse furniture lined up against bare walls. In his aunt Paulina's home it would have been an impossible task to compile an inventory of contents, from the heavy silver door latches and faucets in the bathroom to the collections of porcelain figurines, lacquered Russian boxes, Chinese ivories, and whatever objet d'art or whim of greed was in vogue. Feliciano Rodríguez de Santa Cruz bought things to impress his visitors, but he was not a barbarian like others of his wealthy friends who bought books by the pound and paintings to match the upholstery. As for Paulina, she was not in the least attached to those treasures: the only piece of furniture she had ordered in her life was her bed, and she had done that for reasons that had nothing to do with aesthetics or ostentation. What interested Paulina was money, pure and simple; her challenge lay in earning it astutely, accumulating it tenaciously, and investing it wisely. She paid no attention to the things here husband acquired or to where they were displayed, so the result was a grandiose house in which the residents felt like strangers. The paintings were enormous, the frames massive, the themes intrepid— Alexander the Great at the Conquest of Persia —and there were also hundreds of lesser paintings, organized by subject, for which various rooms were named: the hunting salon, the marine salon, the watercolor salon. The drapes were heavy velvet weighed down with fringe, and the Venetian mirrors reflected to infinity: marble columns, tall Sevres vases, bronze statuary, and urns overflowing with flowers and fruit. There was a two-story library and two music salons filled with fine Italian instruments, although no one in the family knew how to play them and music gave Paulina a headache. Gold-initialed silver spittoons sat in every corner, because in that frontier city it was perfectly acceptable to spit in public. Feliciano had his suite in the Oriental wing, and his wife had hers on the same floor but at the opposite end of the mansion. Between the two, joined by a broad corridor, were the children's bedrooms and guest rooms, all empty except for Severo's and one occupied by Matias, the eldest son, the only one still living at home. Severo del Valle, accustomed to the discomfort and cold that in Chile were considered good for one's health, spent several weeks becoming accustomed to the oppressive embrace of the feather mattress and pillows, the eternal summer of the stoves, and the daily surprise of turning the bathroom tap and being rewarded by a stream of warm water. In his grandfather's house the toilets were stinking privies at the back of the patio, and on early winter mornings there was a film of ice in the washbasins.
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    The hours of the siesta often found the young nephew and his incomparable aunt on