The House of the Spirits

  Esteban Trueba spent several hours pacing back and forth in his house, smashing his cane against the furniture and the walls, muttering curses between his teeth, and concocting ridiculous plans that ranged from sending Blanca to a convent in Extremadura to beating her to death. Finally, after he calmed down a bit, a miraculous idea occurred to him. He had his horse saddled, and galloped off in the direction of the town.

  He found Jean de Satigny, whom he had not seen since the disastrous night when he had awakened him to tell him about Blanca’s amorous adventures, sipping unsweetened melon juice in the only pastry shop in town. He was accompanied by the son of Indalecio Aguirrazábal, a dandified weakling with a high-pitched voice who was reciting the poetry of Rubén Dario. Without a trace of respect, Trueba lifted the French count by the lapels of his impeccable Scottish jacket and carried him straight out of the tearoom, practically dangling in midair, before the astonished stares of the other customers. He set him down in the middle of the sidewalk.

  “You’ve given me enough problems, young man,” he said. “First the business with your damned chinchillas and then my daughter. I’ve had enough. Go get your things, because you’re coming with me to the city. You’re going to marry Blanca.”

  He did not give him time to recover from the shock. He accompanied him to the local hotel, where he waited with his whip in one hand and his cane in the other while Jean de Satigny packed his bags. Afterward he took him directly to the station and unceremoniously loaded him onto the train. During the trip, the count tried to explain that he had nothing to do with all of this and that he had never so much as touched Blanca Trueba, and that probably the one responsible for what had happened was that bearded priest Blanca met down by the river every night. Esteban Trueba seared him with his fiercest look.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about, son. You must have dreamt that.”

  Trueba proceeded to explain to him the various clauses of the marriage contract, which did a great deal to assuage the Frenchman’s fears. Blanca’s dowry, her monthly income, and the prospect of inheriting a considerable fortune eventually brought him around.

  “As you can see, this is a better proposition than the chinchillas,” concluded his future father-in-law without noticing the young man’s nervous whimpering.

  So it was that on Saturday Esteban Trueba arrived at the big house on the corner with a husband for his deflowered daughter and a father for the little bastard. Esteban was shooting sparks of rage. With a sweep of his hand he knocked over the pot of chrysanthemums in the entryway and slapped Nicolás, who attempted to intercede and explain things, and he announced that he did not want to see Blanca, who was to remain locked up until her wedding day. Clara did not come out to greet him. She stayed in her room and did not open her door even after he broke his silver cane in two trying to break it down.

  The house entered a whirlwind of activity and quarrels. The atmosphere seemed unbreathable, and even the birds fell silent in their cages. The servants ran about on orders from their brusque, anxious patrón, who allowed for no delays in the execution of his wishes. Clara continued with her life, ignoring her husband and refusing to speak to him. The groom, a virtual prisoner of his future father-in-law, was settled into one of the numerous guest rooms, where he spent his time pacing the floor with nothing to do, without seeing Blanca, and not understanding how he had ended up in this melodrama. He did not know whether to feel sorry for himself for having fallen victim to these savage aborigines, or to rejoice at being on the verge of fulfilling his dream of marrying a rich, young, beautiful South American heiress. As he was of an optimistic bent and endowed with the common sense typical of all his countrymen, he opted for the second interpretation, and by the end of the week he had begun to relax.

  Esteban Trueba set the date of the wedding for two weeks hence. He decided that the best way to avoid a scandal was to go out and meet it by throwing a spectacular affair. He wanted to see his daughter married by the bishop, in a white gown, with an eighteen-foot train held aloft by pages and flower girls. He wanted her photograph to appear in the society pages of the local papers, and he wanted there to be a Caligulaesque party with sufficient fanfare and expense that no one would notice the belly of the bride. The only one who agreed with all his plans was Jean de Satigny.

  The day Esteban Trueba summoned his daughter to take her to the dressmaker and try on her wedding gown was the first time he had seen her since the night of the beating. He was shocked to see how fat she had become and that her face was covered with blotches.

  “I’m not getting married, Papa,” she said.

  “Be quiet!” he roared. “You’re getting married. I don’t want any bastards in the family, do you hear me?”

  “I thought we already had several,” Blanca replied.

  “Don’t talk back to me! I want you to know that Pedro Tercero García is dead. I killed him with my own hands, so you might as well forget about him and try to be a good wife to the man who’s going to lead you to the altar.”

  Blanca began to cry and continued to weep inconsolably in the days to come.

  The wedding Blanca had not wanted was held in the cathedral, with the blessings of the bishop and a train fit for a queen, sewn by the best tailor in the country, who had performed nothing short of a miracle by disguising the prominent stomach of the bride with layers of flowers and Greco-Roman pleats. The wedding culminated in a spectacular party, with five hundred guests in evening dress who invaded the big house on the corner, enlivened by an orchestra of hired musicians, with a scandalous number of whole steers grilled with herbs, fresh seafood, Baltic caviar, Norwegian salmon, birds stuffed with truffles, a torrent of exotic liquors, a flood of champagne, and an extravagance of desserts: ladyfingers, millefeuilles, éclairs, sugar cookies, huge glass goblets of glazed fruits, Argentine strawberries, Brazilian coconuts, Chilean papayas, Cuban pineapples, and other delicacies impossible to remember, all arrayed on a long table that ran the length of the garden, terminating in a colossal three-story wedding cake designed by an Italian artist born in Naples. This man, a friend of Jean de Satigny, had transformed his humble raw materials—flour, eggs, and sugar—into a replica of the Acropolis crowned with a cloud of meringue on which rested two mythological lovers, Venus and Adonis, fashioned out of almond paste colored to imitate the rosy tones of their flesh, their blond hair, and the cobalt blue of their eyes; with them was a pudgy Cupid, also edible, which was sliced in half with a silver knife by the proud groom and the dejected bride.

  Clara, who from the very start had objected to the idea of marrying Blanca off against her will, decided not to attend the party. She stayed in the sewing room, spinning out dire predictions for the newlyweds, every one of which was borne out to the letter, as all concerned were later able to verify. Finally her husband came to beg her to change her clothes and make an appearance in the garden, even if only for ten minutes, to quell the rumors of the guests. She did so unwillingly, but out of love for her daughter she put in her teeth and managed to smile at the assembled guests.

  Jaime arrived at the end of the party because he had stayed late working in the clinic for the poor where he was undergoing his first training as a medical student. Nicolás showed up with the lovely Amanda, who had just discovered Sartre and had adopted the dire look of the European existentialists, dressed all in black, pale-faced, her Arab eyes lined with kohl, her dark hair hanging to her waist, and a jangle of bracelets, necklaces, and earrings that caused a stir wherever she went. As for Nicolás, he was dressed in white, like a doctor, with amulets around his neck. His father came out to greet him, took him by the arm, and pushed him into a bathroom, where without a word he proceeded to pull off all his talismans.

  “Go to your room and put on a decent tie! Go back to the party and behave like a proper gentleman! Don’t let me catch you preaching some heretical religion among the guests! And tell that witch you’ve brought along to button up
her neckline!” Esteban shouted at his son.

  Nicolás obeyed him in the worst possible mood. On principle, he was a teetotaler, but he was so furious that he had a few drinks, lost his head, and jumped fully dressed into the garden fountain, from which he had to be rescued with his dignity thoroughly soaked.

  Blanca spent the entire evening sitting in a chair staring at the cake with a dazed expression, tears running down her face. Meanwhile, her new husband fluttered among the diners attributing his mother-in-law’s absence to a sudden attack of asthma and his bride’s tears to the emotions of the occasion. No one believed him. Jean de Satigny kept kissing Blanca on the neck, clasping her hands in his, and consoling her with sips of wine and bites of lobster, which he placed directly in her mouth, but it was all in vain: she continued to cry. Despite everything, the party was a great success, just as Esteban Trueba had hoped it would be. The guests ate and drank sumptuously, and watched the sun rise as they danced to the strains of the orchestra, while downtown, in the center of the city, groups of unemployed workers huddled around tiny bonfires, gangs of young men in dark shirts marched around raising their arms in stiff salute, imitating the figures they had seen in German movies, and in the headquarters of the various political parties the final touches were being put on campaign strategies for the upcoming elections.

  “The Socialists are going to win,” Jaime had said. After spending so much time living with the proletariat in the hospital where he worked, he had lost his reason.

  “No, Jaime, the ones who always win are going to win again,” Clara had replied, for she had seen it in the cards and her common sense had confirmed it.

  After the party, Esteban Trueba took his son-in-law into the library and handed him a check. It was his wedding present. He had made all the arrangements for the couple to go to the North, where Jean de Satigny hoped to settle down to a comfortable life supported by his wife’s income, far away from the comments of astute observers who would not be insensible to the size of his wife’s belly. He was thinking about starting a little business of Incan pottery and mummies.

  Before the newlyweds left the party, they went to say goodbye to Blanca’s mother. Clara took Blanca aside and spoke to her in private. The girl still had not stopped crying.

  “Stop crying, child,” she told her. “Too many tears will hurt the baby, and only make it unhappy.”

  Blanca replied with another sob.

  “Pedro Tercero García is alive,” Clara added.

  Blanca swallowed her hiccups and blew her nose.

  “How do you know, Mama?” she asked.

  “Because I dreamt it,” Clara replied.

  That was enough to reassure Blanca completely. She dried her tears, straightened her head, and didn’t weep again until the day her mother died, seven years later, although it was not for lack of suffering, loneliness, and other causes.

  * * *

  Separated from her daughter, with whom she had always been very close, Clara entered another of her confused, depressed periods. Her life went on as before. The big house was always open and full of people, but she had lost her ability to laugh easily and was often to be seen staring straight ahead, lost in thought. She attempted to establish a system of communication with Blanca that would allow them to circumvent the terrible delays of the postal system, but telepathy did not always work and she was never sure how the message would be received. She could tell that her communiqués were being distorted by influences beyond her control and that the message received never resembled the one she had sent. Besides, Blanca was not given to psychic experiments; even though she had always been extremely close to her mother, she had never shown the slightest curiosity for mental phenomena. She was a practical, worldly, diffident woman, and her modern, pragmatic character was a serious obstacle to telepathy. Clara had to resign herself to more conventional methods. Mother and daughter wrote each other almost daily, and for several months their abundant correspondence took the place of Clara’s notebooks that bore witness to life. Thus Blanca was kept abreast of everything that happened in the big house on the corner, and could entertain the illusion that she was still with her family and that her marriage was only a bad dream.

  That year the paths of Jaime and Nicolás separated for good, because their differences had become irreconcilable. Nicolás had discovered flamenco dancing, which he said he had learned from the gypsies in the caves of Granada, even though he had never left the country; such was the strength of his conviction that even his own family began to wonder. He offered demonstrations on the slightest pretext. He would leap up on the dining-room table, the enormous oak table that had served as Rosa’s bier so many years before and that Clara had inherited, and begin to beat his palms like a madman, tap his shoes spastically, and jump and shout so piercingly that he would attract all the inhabitants of the house as well as several neighbors and, on one occasion, even the police, who arrived with their nightsticks in hand, tracking mud across the carpets with their boots, but who wound up clapping their hands and shouting Olé! like everyone else. The table resisted heroically, although by the end of a week it looked like a butcher’s table that had been used to slaughter calves. Flamenco dancing had no practical application in the closed society prevailing in the capital back then, but Nicolás ran a discreet announcement in the paper offering his services as a teacher of that fiery art. The next day he had a female student, and by the end of the week word of his charms had got out. Young girls flocked to him in droves. At first they were ashamed and timid, but he would begin twirling them around, tapping loudly while his arm encircled their waists and giving them his most seductive smile, and soon they were enthusiastic. His classes were a great success. The dining-room table was on the verge of splintering, Clara was complaining of migraines, and Jaime was locked in his room with wax in his ears, trying to concentrate on his studies. When Esteban Trueba found out what was going on in his house during his absence, he was justly and terrifyingly enraged, and forbade his son to use the house as an academy of Spanish dance or any other thing. Nicolás was forced to give up his contortions, but the whole experience made him the most popular young man of the season, the king of all the parties and of all the young girls’ hearts, because while everybody else was busy studying, dressing in gray checked suits, and trying to grow a mustache to the rhythm of boleros, he was preaching free love, quoting Freud, drinking Pernod, and dancing flamenco. His social triumph did not, however, diminish his interest in his mother’s psychic talents. He tried in vain to imitate her. He studied vehemently, practiced until his health was in jeopardy, and attended the Friday-night sessions with the three Mora sisters, despite his father’s express orders to the contrary; for Esteban Trueba persisted in believing that these were not suitable matters for men. Clara tried to console him for his failures.

  “You can’t learn these things or inherit them,” she would tell him when she saw him going cross-eyed with concentration in his strenuous efforts to move the saltshaker without touching it.

  The three Mora sisters loved the boy very much. They lent him their secret books and helped him decipher the mysteries of horoscopes and divining cards. They would form a ring around him, holding each other by the hand, trying to suffuse him with their healing fluids, but that too failed to endow Nicolás with mental powers. They encouraged his love for Amanda. At first the young woman seemed to be fascinated by the three-legged table and the long-haired artists who flocked to Nicolás’s house, but she soon tired of summoning spirits and reciting the Poet’s verses, so she took a job as a newspaper reporter.

  “That’s a crooked profession,” Esteban Trueba declared when he found out.

  Trueba did not care for her. He did not even like to see her in his house. He thought she was a bad influence on his son and believed that her long hair, heavily made-up eyes, and glass beads were symptoms of some hidden vice, and that her tendency to kick her shoes off and sit cross-legged on the floor like
an aborigine was mannish behavior.

  Amanda had a very pessimistic view of the world, and to get through her depressions she smoked hashish. Nicolás joined her. Clara noticed that her son often had bad moments, but even her prodigious intuition did not allow her to make the connection between the Oriental pipes Nicolás smoked, his strange deliriums, his periodic drowsiness, and his attacks of sudden happiness, because she had never heard of that or any other drug. “It must be his age,” she would tell herself whenever Nicolás was acting strangely. “He’ll get over it.” She had forgotten that Jaime had been born on the same day and did not have such fits.

  Jaime’s madness took a very different form. He had a calling for both sacrifice and austerity. There were only two pairs of pants and three shirts in his closet. Clara spent the winters rapidly knitting all sorts of woolen clothes to keep him warm, but he wore them only until someone who needed them more than he did crossed his path. All the money his father gave him ended up in the pockets of the impoverished people he cared for in the hospital. Whenever some emaciated dog followed him in the street, he brought it home, and whenever he heard about an abandoned child, unwed mother, or an old woman who needed his help, he brought the poor ones home so his mother could take care of their problems. Clara became an expert in social benefits. She was acquainted with all the services the state and the church provided for taking care of the disadvantaged. When all else failed, she took them into her own house. Her friends grew afraid of her, for every time she showed up on a visit it was because she needed something. The network of Clara and Jaime’s protégés expanded, to the point where they lost count of how many people they were caring for; they were surprised whenever somebody appeared at the door to thank them for a favor they could not recall. Jaime approached the study of medicine as if it were a religious calling. Any diversion that took him away from his books or used up his time was a betrayal of the people he had sworn to serve. “This boy should have become a priest,” Clara declared. For Jaime, who would not have been the least disturbed by the priestly vows of humility, poverty, and chastity, religion was the cause of half the world’s misfortunes, so when his mother would make this comment he would become furious. He felt that Christianity, like almost all forms of superstition, made men weaker and more resigned, and that the point was not to await some reward in the sky but to fight for one’s rights on earth. These were things he discussed in private with his mother; it was impossible to do so with Esteban Trueba, who quickly lost patience and ended up shouting and slamming doors because, as he put it, he was up to here with living among a bunch of lunatics and all he wanted was a little normality, but he had had the misfortune of marrying an eccentric and siring three good-for-nothing crazies who were ruining his life. Jaime didn’t argue with his father. He was like a shadow in the house, giving his mother a distracted kiss whenever he saw her on his way to the kitchen, where, standing up, he would eat everyone else’s leftovers before returning to his room and locking himself up to read or study. His bedroom was a tunnel of books, the walls covered from floor to ceiling with shelves full of volumes no one ever dusted because he always locked his door; they made a perfect nest for spiders and mice. In the center of the room was his bed, actually an army cot, which was lit by a naked light bulb hanging from the ceiling directly above his pillow. During an earthquake that Clara neglected to predict, they heard a roar like that of a derailed train, and when they were able to open the door they saw that the bed had been buried beneath an avalanche of books. The bookshelves had come loose from the walls, and Jaime had been squashed beneath them. They pulled him out without a scratch. While Clara was removing the books, she remembered the great earthquake, and it seemed to her that she had already lived this moment. The event was an opportunity to sweep the dust from Jaime’s lair and chase away the insects and cobwebs with a broom.