She finished arranging her, stayed a few minutes talking to her and caressing her, and finally called in her husband and Father Antonio to make the burial arrangements. In a cookie tin they found the unopened envelopes of money Esteban had sent his sister once a month for all those years. Clara gave them to the priest for charitable works, sure that would be what Férula would have wanted.
The priest stayed with the dead woman so that the mice wouldn’t treat her disrespectfully. It was almost midnight when they left. Férula’s neighbors had gathered in the doorway to discuss the news of her death. Esteban and Clara had to make their way through the huddle of curious faces and shoo away the dogs that were sniffing among the crowd. Esteban walked quickly with his big strides, practically dragging Clara behind him, without noticing the dirty water that was spattering his impeccable gray trousers from the English tailor. He was furious because his sister, even now that she was dead, could still manage to make him feel guilty, just as she had when he was a boy. He recalled his childhood, when she surrounded him with dark solicitude, wrapping him in debts of gratitude so huge that as long as he lived he would never be able to pay them back. Once again he felt the sense of indignity that had frequently tormented him when he was with her. He despised her spirit of sacrifice, her severity, her vocation for poverty, and her unshakable chastity, which he felt as a reproach toward his own egotistical, sensual, power-hungry nature. Go to hell, bitch! he thought, refusing to admit even in the farthest corner of his heart that his wife had ceased belonging to him ever since he threw Férula out of his house.
“Why did she have to live like this when she had more than enough money?” Esteban shouted.
“Because she didn’t have anything else,” Clara answered gently.
* * *
During the months that they were separated, Blanca and Pedro Tercero exchanged burning letters, which he signed with a woman’s name and which she hid as soon as they arrived. Nana managed to intercept one or two, but she did not know how to read, and even if she had she would not have been able to break their secret code—fortunately for her, because her heart would not have withstood the shock. Blanca spent the winter knitting a sweater made of Scottish wool in her sewing class at school, with the boy’s measurements in mind. At night she slept with her arms around the sweater, inhaling the scent of the wool and dreaming that it was he who spent the night beside her. Pedro Tercero, meanwhile, spent his winter writing songs on the guitar that he would sing to Blanca and whittling her likeness on any scrap of wood he could lay his hands on, unable to separate his angelic memories of the girl from the storms that were raging in his blood, turning his bones to pulp, lowering his voice, and causing hair to appear on his face. He was torn between the demands of his body, which was becoming that of a man, and the sweetness of a feeling that was still tinged with the innocent games of childhood. Both young people awaited the coming of summer with aching impatience. When it finally arrived and they met once again, the sweater Blanca had knit for Pedro didn’t fit over his head, because in the intervening months he had left his childhood behind and acquired the dimensions of a man, and the tender songs he had composed now sounded ridiculous to her, because she had a woman’s bearing and a woman’s needs.
Pedro Tercero was still thin, and still had his stiff hair and sad eyes, but his voice had acquired a hoarse, passionate timbre that would one day make him famous, when he would sing songs of revolution. He seldom spoke and was rough and awkward in his social dealings, but gentle and delicate with his hands. He had the long fingers of an artist, which he used for whittling, for pulling laments from the strings of his guitar, and for drawing, just as easily as he used them to hold the reins of a horse or to raise an axe for chopping wood or to guide a plow. He was the only one in all Tres Marías who dared to confront the patrón. His father, Pedro Segundo, told him a thousand times not to look Esteban in the eye, not to answer back, and not to argue with him, and in his desire to protect him he had more than once given him a sound beating to knock some sense into his head. But his son was a born rebel. At the age of ten he already knew as much as his teacher in the school of Tres Marías, and at twelve he insisted on making the trip into town to attend the high school there. Rain or shine, he would leave his small brick house at five o’clock in the morning, by horse or on foot. He read and reread a thousand times the magic books from Uncle Marcos’s enchanted trunks, and continued to nourish himself with other volumes lent to him by the union organizers at the bar and by Father José Dulce María, who taught him how to cultivate his natural poetic gifts and to translate his ideas into songs.
“My son, the Holy Church is on the right, but Jesus Christ was always on the left,” he would say enigmatically between sips of the wine he used at mass, which he served to celebrate Pedro’s visits.
And so it was that one day Esteban Trueba, who was resting on the terrace after lunch, heard the boy sing about a bunch of hens who had organized to defeat a fox. He called him over.
“I want to hear that,” he said. “Go on, sing!”
Pedro Tercero lovingly picked up his guitar, rested his foot on a chair, and began to strum. His eyes did not leave the patrón’s face while his velvet voice rose passionately above the soporific air of the siesta. Esteban Trueba was no fool and immediately understood the defiance.
“So,” he said, “the stupidest things can be set to music. You’d be better off learning love songs.”
“I like this, patrón. In union there is strength, as Father José Dulce María says. If the hens can overcome the fox, what about human beings?”
He picked up his guitar and shuffled out without giving Esteban time to think of anything to say, even though anger had reached his lips and his tension was rising. From that day on, Esteban Trueba kept his eye on him and did not trust him. He tried to prevent him from continuing his schooling, inventing all sorts of tasks for him to do, men’s work, but the boy simply rose earlier and went to sleep later in order to finish the work. That was the year Esteban whipped him before his father because he brought the tenants the new ideas that were circulating among the unionists in town—ideas like Sundays off, a minimum wage, retirement and health plans, maternity leave for women, elections without coercion, and, most serious of all, a peasant organization that would confront the owners.
That summer, when Blanca went to spend her vacation at Tres Marías, she almost failed to recognize him; he had grown six inches and had left behind the potbellied little boy with whom she had spent her childhood summers. She got down from the car, smoothed her skirt, and for the first time in her life did not run to meet him, but simply nodded her head in greeting, although her eyes told him what could not be said in front of everyone—and anyway she had already told him in her unbridled letters in code. Nana watched it all from the corner of her eye and laughed mockingly. When she walked in front of Pedro Tercero, she sneered at him.
“It’s time you learned to stay with your own class instead of nosing around señoritas,” she said between clenched teeth.
That night Blanca ate with the rest of the family in the dining room. They were served the chicken casserole that always welcomed them to Tres Marías, and she showed no sign of her usual restlessness during the extended afterdinner conversation, while her father sipped his cognac and talked about imported cows and gold mines. She waited for her mother to signal to her that she was excused. Then she calmly stood up, wished everyone good night, and went to her room. For the first time in her life she locked it. She sat down on her bed without removing her clothes and waited in the dark until the twins’ raucous shouts in the room next door and the servants’ footsteps had subsided, and the doors, the locks, and the whole house had settled into sleep. Then she opened the window and jumped out, falling onto the hydrangea bushes that her Aunt Férula had planted long ago. It was a clear night, and she could hear the crickets and the frogs. She took a deep breath and the air brought her the sweet scent of peach
es that were drying in the courtyard to be used in preserves. She waited for her eyes to adjust to the darkness and then began to walk, but she was unable to continue because she heard the furious barking of the guard dogs that were left unleashed at night. They were four mastiffs that had been raised tied to chains and spent the daytime locked in a cage. She had never seen them up close and she was sure they would not recognize her. For a moment she was swept by panic and about to scream, but then she remembered that old Pedro García had once told her that thieves never wear clothes so dogs will not attack them. Without a moment’s hesitation she pulled off her clothes as fast as she could, threw them over her arm and continued walking calmly forward, praying that the animals wouldn’t smell her fear. She saw them spring forward, barking, and continued without losing rhythm. The dogs came closer, growling with suspicion, but she did not stop. One of them, bolder than the others, came close to sniff her. She felt his warm breath against her back, but she paid no attention. They continued to bark and growl for a long while, accompanied her part of the way, and then, frustrated, went away. Blanca gave a sigh of relief and realized that she was covered with sweat and shaking. She had to lean against a tree and wait until the exhaustion that had turned her knees to jelly passed. Then she quickly put her clothes on and ran toward the river.
Pedro Tercero was waiting for her in the place where they had met the summer before and where, years earlier, Esteban Trueba had stolen Pancha García’s humble virginity. When she saw him, Blanca blushed violently. During the months of separation, he had been toughened by the hard job of becoming a man, while she had been shut within the walls of her house and her convent school, preserved from the wear and tear of life and nursing her romantic fantasies while she knit with Scottish wool, but the image of her dreams had nothing to do with this tall young man who was walking toward her murmuring her name. Pedro Tercero reached out his hand and touched her neck by her ear. Blanca felt something hot run through her bones, loosening her limbs. She closed her eyes and surrendered to it. He pulled her gently toward him and wrapped his arms around her. She pressed her face against the chest of this man she did not know, so different from the scrawny boy with whom she had exchanged such passionate caresses only months before. She inhaled his new scent, rubbed herself against his bristly skin, ran her hands over his lean, strong body, and felt a full, all-encompassing sense of peace that had nothing at all to do with the state of agitation that had taken possession of him. They sought each other with their tongues, as they always did, even though it seemed like a new invention, and fell kneeling as they kissed in desperation. Then they rolled onto the soft bed of damp earth. They were discovering each other for the first time and there was no need for words. The moon crossed the whole horizon, but they did not see it; they were too busy exploring their deepest intimacy, insatiably entering each other’s skins.
From that night on, Blanca and Pedro Tercero met every night in the same place, at the same time. By day she embroidered, read, or painted insipid watercolors around the house, under Nana’s approving glance, now that she could finally sleep in peace. But Clara sensed that something strange was going on, because she could see a new color in her daughter’s aura, and she felt sure that she knew why. Pedro Tercero performed his usual tasks in the field and continued to go into town to see his friends. By nightfall he was dead with fatigue, but the idea of seeing Blanca gave him back his strength. It was not for nothing he was fifteen years old. Thus the summer passed, and years later they would both recall those passionate nights as the happiest time of their lives.
Meanwhile, Jaime and Nicolás used their vacations to do all the things that were forbidden in their British boarding school. They shouted until they were hoarse, fought at the slightest provocation, and came to resemble two filthy little urchins with scabby knees and heads full of lice, replete with warm freshly picked fruit, sun, and freedom. They left early in the morning and came home at sundown, spending their days hunting rabbits with their slingshots, riding horseback until they were worn out, and spying on the women who were washing clothes down by the river.
* * *
And so three years went by, until the earthquake changed things. After that vacation, the twins returned to the city ahead of the rest of the family, accompanied by Nana, the city servants, and most of the baggage. The boys went straight to their boarding school, while Nana and the other employees readied the big house on the corner for the arrival of the owners.
Blanca stayed behind in the country with her parents for a few more days. It was then that Clara began having nightmares, walking in her sleep, and waking up screaming. During the day, she went about half in a dream, seeing premonitions in the animals’ behavior: the hens were not laying their daily eggs, the cows were acting frightened, the dogs were howling to death, the rats, spiders, and worms were coming out of their hiding places, the birds were leaving their nests and flying off in great formations, while her pigeons were screaming with hunger in the treetops. She stared obsessively at the frail column of white smoke that was issuing from the volcano, and peered at the changes in the color of the sky. Blanca made her all sorts of soothing teas and warm baths, and Esteban resorted to the old box of homeopathic pills to calm her down, but her nightmares continued.
“There’s going to be an earthquake!” Clara announced, daily growing paler and more agitated.
“For God’s sake, Clara, there are always quakes!” Esteban replied.
“This time it’s going to be different. There will be ten thousand dead.”
“There aren’t even that many people in the whole country,” he said, laughing.
The cataclysm began at four o’clock in the morning. Clara woke a little before it, having had an apocalyptic nightmare of exploded horses, cows hurled into the sea, people crawling under stones, and gaping caverns in the earth into which whole houses were falling. She rose livid with terror and ran to Blanca’s room. But, as she did every night, Blanca had locked her door and slipped out the window in the direction of the river. The last few days before returning to the city, her summer passion took on a dramatic quality, and with a new separation imminent, the two young people seized every possible opportunity to give free rein to their desires. They spent the nights at the river, immune to their weariness and the cold, thrashing with the strength of their desperation, and only as the first glimpse of dawn came through the clouds did Blanca return to the house and climb through her bedroom window, falling into bed just as the first cocks crowed. Clara arrived at her daughter’s door and tried to open it, but it was bolted. She knocked, and when no one opened it she turned and ran outside the house, where she saw the window wide open and Férula’s hydrangeas trampled. In a flash she understood the color of Blanca’s aura, the bags under her eyes, her listlessness, her silence, her morning sleepiness, and her afternoon watercolors. And in that instant the earthquake began.
Clara felt the ground shake and was unable to keep her footing. She fell to her knees. The tiles on the roof gave way and crashed around her with a deafening roar. She saw the adobe walls of the house crumple as if they had been chopped with an axe, and then the earth opened just as she had seen it in her dream and an enormous crevice formed before her, swallowing the chicken coops, the laundry troughs, and part of the stable. The water tank swayed from side to side and smashed to the ground, spilling a thousand gallons of water on the few surviving hens, who flapped their wings desperately. In the distance the volcano began to shoot flames and smoke like a furious dragon. The dogs broke loose from their chains and raced madly up and down; the horses that had survived the collapse of the stable stomped the air and neighed in terror before bolting off into the open fields; the poplars teetered like drunks and fell with their roots in the air, crushing the swallows’ nests. Most terrible of all was the roar coming from the center of the earth, that hard-breathing giant that was heard at length, filling the air with fear. Clara tried to drag herself toward the house calling Blanca??
?s name, but the death-rattling shudders of the earth prevented her from moving. She saw the peasants running out of their houses terrified, imploring heaven, throwing their arms around each other, pulling their children, kicking their dogs, pushing their old people, and trying to salvage their few poor belongings in that din of brick and tile flying from the very bowels of the earth, like an interminable noise of the end of the world.
Esteban Trueba appeared in the doorway at the very instant when the house snapped in half like an eggshell and collapsed in a cloud of dust, flattening him beneath a pile of rubble. Clara pulled herself to where he was, shouting his name, but there was no reply.
The first tremor of the earthquake lasted nearly a minute and was the strongest that had ever been recorded in that country of catastrophes. It leveled almost everything that stood, and whatever was left was finished off in the string of secondary tremors that continued to shake the world until the sun came up. At Tres Marías they waited till daybreak to count the dead and dig out those who had been buried alive beneath the avalanche, many of whom were still moaning, among them Esteban Trueba, whose location was known to everyone although no one expected him to be alive. It took four men under Pedro Segundo’s guidance to remove the hill of dust, tile, and adobe that had fallen on top of him. Clara had lost her angelic distraction and was helping to remove the stones with the strength of a man.