Like a moth to the flame, Zoila singed her heart each time she opened the Julia Pastrana photo album at Eisenmann’s studio. Although she always slammed the album shut a moment later, she couldn’t stop herself from peeking inside. Reluctant to read the news clippings Eisenmann had inserted in the album, Zoila paused and ran her fingers over the raised leather name on the album cover: Julia Pastrana. The peppy Mexican singer and dancer who loved to entertain, but whose audiences only came to gawk—and jeer—at the abundant, dark hair that covered her body from head to toe. Their attraction to her was not for her soprano voice, but for the set of double teeth evident when Julia reached the high notes.

In Paplanta she’d read random details about Julia, but back then she hadn’t believed that such cruelty could exist in the world. Now, the graphically aberrant photos of Julia torched her mind. Zoila longed to find out more about Julia, to read details of her life, and to commiserate with the tumultuous path of Julia’s journey from the warmth of her native Mexico to the garish sideshows of United States and the chilly circuses of Europe.

Zoila took pity on the naiveté and optimism that Julia must have felt; of her self-deceptive desire to be accepted abroad for whom she was—a sparkling singer and a dashing dancer. Zoila knew all about delusions. Once she’d believed that her own linguistic talents and vanilla-trade knowledge would be appreciated in Paplanta, and that people would see she had the skills to negotiate with the best of the vanilla traders. Back then, her own mirror of deception reflected a studious linguist with immense knowledge about the much-desired vanilla vines. That image had shattered upon her father’s demise. Now, sitting in this stifling photography studio in New York City, feeling the shards of her own painful truth, Zoila could see the purpose of her future clearly.

She resolved to uncover the devious ways these so-called promoters employed to entice unique girls such as Julia Pastrana and to use this knowledge to prevent Lucía from falling victim to their sadistic and cunning ways. Zoila would make Frank Uffner and his cronies pay. She pumped up her chest, like a guajolote—one of Mexico’s ubiquitous wild turkeys—showing off its feathers. After all, she was still her father’s daughter. She would turn a Lucía’s upcoming circus journey into a profitable one, one where Lucía— along with Zoila, of course—would make enough money to return to the warm breezes of Veracruz, replant their roots and control their own destinies.

With this conviction swelling inside her chest, Zoila gazed at Julia’s early photographs and felt a glimmer of hope. How could Julia ever have known, as she boarded foreign ships and was hauled in wagons all over Europe, that her only attraction was her monumental hairiness and not her cheerful voice, her merry whistles, or the bounce in her dance steps? No one cared about her talents and certainly not one soul realized that she had her own big dreams for her future. Her life had been nothing but heartache in Mexico, but she’d dreamed that elsewhere in the world her uniqueness would be welcomed.

How wrong Julia had been. The crowds didn’t give a hoot if she could sing like a nightingale or that her dancing exuded charm and gaiety. They only paid to gawk at her, the Monkey Woman from Mexico, the Bear Woman, the Bearded Lady. The more they could revile her hairy features and protruding jaw, its double row of teeth offering a constant, theatrical smile at her observers, the more they felt superior to this lowly beast pretending to be an entertainer. They could relish their human perfection and quote Dr. Alexander B. Mott’s assessment after he personally examined Julia: that she was a hybrid, half-human and half-orangutan.

Zoila turned each page of the photo album slowly, as if she were walking along a funeral cortege in the bitter cold of Moscow where Julia had eventually died. Zoila shivered at each photograph and continued paying her silent respects to Julia, page after woeful page.

In Julia’s story, just as in the lamentable saga of the Sicilian Fairy, Zoila recognized a cautionary tale, one that might prevent Lucía from following in the same footsteps as these two innocent girls whose singular bodies attracted avaricious men and hungry hordes. And it wasn’t just an impoverished orphan like Julia who fell prey to vile opportunists. Carolina Crachami had ended up alone and in the cold-blooded hands of a malevolent charlatan despite having talented and educated parents. Perhaps the Italian musicians justified having given-up custody of their miniature, frail child to a physician because they thought they were doing what was best for the Sicilian Fairy. But Zoila’s pulsating heart told her otherwise.

Every decent person she had ever known, like Felipe and Felipe’s mother, never would have neglected or deserted a needy child. Zoila had stumbled upon this explicit photo album for a purpose greater than herself. Of this she was certain. She tapped her own forehead repeatedly, in the rigid manner of her father when he chastised her, in an effort to knock some sense into herself. There had to be a meaningful lesson to be learned from her being in this studio perusing Eisenmann’s pictorial homage to horror.

Among the haunting photographs of Julia, Eisenmann had inserted numerous handbills that advertised Julia’s appearances abroad. Zoila picked up the one for Julia’s 1857 appearance at the Regent Gallery in London. It listed her as “The Nondescript, the Bear Woman, the grand and novel attraction.” Zoila continued reading articles that described Julia’s torturous journey from Mexico to New York City, where her new manager, Theodore Lent*, married her and continued to exploit her as a circus freak. Even in the frosty ambience of Moscow, Julia had continued to bring her sunny performances to jeering crowds. Once Julia gave birth in 1860 to a son with a similar condition—congenital terminal hypertrichosis—Lent rejoiced at having two money-makers in his household. But his greedy happiness was short-lived, since both the infant and Julia died within days of each other shortly after childbirth.

Zoila recoiled at the photographs of the tragic mother and child. She wanted to snap shut the album, but the subsequent photographs paralyzed her. Theodore Lent had continued to exhibit the embalmed bodies of Julia and her baby throughout Europe, and not one scientist, not one religious leader, not one monarch had raised a protest against this unholy crime.

Zoila reread all the names of scientists, medical doctors, and aristocrats who posited inhumane and outlandish theories about Julia and others like her, though not one of them had stood up in her defense when she was alive. The more Zoila thought about the lessons to be learned from the past lives of the unique humans photographed and displayed in Eisenmann’s studio, the more she regretted what she’d told Lucía. She encouraged Lucía to rejoice about embarking on an odyssey, and tempted her with the myth that her life could be heroic and enchanting, like a fairytale. The reality of the photos on the walls and the news clippings in the albums attested to the grim reality, the painful path of these tortured beings.