Free Daughter of Fortune by Isabel Allende Page B

German philosophers, along with scientific discoveries that were opening new horizons on human knowledge. He had long hours in which to think, read, and debate. He distilled ideas that he noted down in a thick notebook worn with use and spent a major part of his pension on books ordered from London and others he bought in the Santos Tornero bookstore in El Almendral, the district where the French lived and where all the best brothels in Valparaíso were located. The bookshop was a meeting place for intellectuals and aspiring writers. Todd sometimes spent whole days reading; later he passed his books on to his comrades, who translated them and published them in small, inexpensive pamphlets circulated from hand to hand.
    Among the group of intellectuals, the youngest was one Joaquín Andieta, who was barely eighteen but who made up for lack of experience with the qualities of a natural leader. His electrifying personality was even more notable given his youth and poverty. This Joaquín was not a man of many words, but of action, one of the few with enough clearmindedness and courage to transform ideas from books into revolutionary impulses; the others would rather argue forever around a bottle in the back room of the bookstore. Todd had picked Andieta out from the beginning; there was something disquieting and pathetic about him that drew him like an abyss. Todd had noticed Andieta’s scuffed satchel and threadbare suit, transparent and brittle as onion skin. To hide the holes in the soles of his boots, Andieta never crossed his legs, and Todd suspected that he did not remove his jacket because his shirt was mended and patched. He didn’t own a decent overcoat, but in winter he was the first to get up early to hand out pamphlets and paste up posters calling workers to rebel against employers’ abuses, or sailors against captains and ship companies, an often futile labor since most of those to whom the notices were directed were illiterate. His calls for justice were lost at the mercy of the wind and human indifference.
    Through discreet inquiries Jacob Todd discovered that his friend was employed by the British Import and Export Company, Ltd. In return for a miserly salary and exhausting work schedule he kept an accounting of the goods that passed through the port office. He was also expected to wear a starched collar and shined shoes. He spent his days in a badly lit, badly ventilated room in which the desks were lined up one after the other to infinity and piled with dusty files and ledgers that no one had looked at in years. Todd asked Jeremy Sommers about the boy but he could not place him. He must see him every day, he said, but he had no personal interchange with his subordinates and could barely recognize their names. Through other sources, Todd learned that Andieta lived with his mother, but could find out nothing about his father. He imagined that he had been a sailor passing through the port and the mother one of those luckless women who did not fit into any social category, perhaps illegitimate or renounced by her family. Joaquín Andieta had Andalusian features and the virile grace of a young toreador; everything about him suggested firmness, athleticism, control; his movements were precise, his gaze intense, his pride touching. To Todd’s Utopian idealism he posed a rock-hard realism. Todd preached the creation of a communal society without priests or police, governed democratically under a unique and flexible moral law.
    â€œYou live in the clouds, Mr. Todd. We have much to do, we can’t waste time discussing fantasies,” interrupted Joaquín Andieta.
    â€œBut if we don’t begin by imagining the perfect society, how shall we create one?” Todd responded, waving his constantly growing notebook, to which he had added plans of ideal cities in which each citizen cultivated his food and children grew up healthy and happy, cared for by the community, for since there was no