The House of the Spirits

  “She trusts you. She says you’re the only one who can help her,” Nicolás replied.

  Jaime grabbed his brother by the lapels and lifted him off the floor, shaking him like a puppet and hurling every insult he could think of at him, until his own sobs obliged him to set him down. Nicolás whimpered in relief. He knew his brother, and his intuition told him that, as always, he had decided to accept the role of protector.

  “Thank you, Jaime!”

  Jaime gave him a listless slap on the back and pushed him out of his room. He turned his key in the lock and lay face down on his cot, shaken by the hoarse, terrible moans with which men weep for love.

  They waited until Sunday. Jaime agreed to see them in the clinic of the Misericordia District, where he was taking his training as a doctor. He had the key because he was always the last to leave, so he could get in with ease, but he felt like a thief because he would not be able to explain his presence there at such a time. For the previous three days, he had done nothing but study every step of the operation he was about to perform. He could repeat each word of the book in perfect order, but that did not bolster his confidence. He was shaking like a leaf. He tried not to think of all the women he had seen in the emergency room, those he had helped to save in this very examining room, and those who had died in these very beds, white as sheets, with a river of blood flowing between their legs and his science powerless to stop their life from running out of that open faucet. He had seen this drama close up, but until this moment he had never had to face the moral conflict of helping a desperate woman. Much less Amanda. He turned on the lights, donned the white tunic of his profession, and prepared his instruments, repeating aloud every detail he had memorized. He prayed for some monumental disaster to occur, some cataclysm that would shake the planet to its core, so that he would not have to do what he was about to do. But nothing happened until the appointed hour.

  Meanwhile Nicolás had gone to fetch Amanda in old Covadonga, which still ran, though it barely sputtered along on its remaining nuts and bolts, lost in a black cloud of burning oil. She was waiting for him seated in her chair, holding Miguel’s hand, the two of them deep in a mutual complicity from which, as always, Nicolás felt excluded. Amanda looked pale and emaciated after all the ups and downs of the last uncertain weeks, but she was calmer than Nicolás, who was practically incoherent and could not keep still, trying to cheer her with a false hilarity and pointless jokes. He had brought her an old ring with garnets and diamonds that he had taken from his mother’s room, knowing full well that she would never miss it and that, even if she saw it on Amanda’s hand, she would never recognize it because Clara could not keep track of things like that. Amanda gently returned it.

  “You see, Nicolás?” she said, unsmiling. “You’re still a child.”

  When it came time to leave, little Miguel put on a poncho and held tight to his sister’s hand. Nicolás had to use all his charm and then brute strength to deposit him with the owner of the house, who in the past few days had been completely won over by the supposed cousin of her tenant and had, much against her will, agreed to look after the child for the evening.

  They drove in silence, each lost in his own fear. To Nicolás, Amanda’s hostility was like a pestilence that had descended between them. In the past few days she had begun to dwell on the idea of death, which she feared less than the pain and humiliation she would have to face that night. He steered Covadonga through an unfamiliar section of the city, down dark back streets in which garbage was piled against the walls of factories, in a forest of smokestacks that shut out the sky. Stray dogs sniffed at the grime, and beggars wrapped in newspaper slept in the doorways. He was startled that this should be the scene of his brother’s daily activities.

  * * *

  Jaime was waiting for them in front of the clinic. His white smock and his own anxiety made him look much older than he was. He led them through a labyrinth of icy corridors to the room he had prepared, doing his best to distract Amanda from the ugliness of the place. He did not want her to notice the bins full of yellowed towels waiting to be washed on Monday, the graffiti on the walls, the loose tiles, and the rusty pipes that dripped continuously. Amanda stopped with a look of horror when they came to the door of the operating room: she had seen the instruments and the gynecological table. What until then had been an abstraction, a mere flirtation with the possibility of death, suddenly materialized before her. Nicolás was pale, but Jaime took them both by the arm and led them through the door.

  “Don’t look, Amanda!” he told her. “I’m going to put you to sleep.”

  He had never administered anesthesia or performed a surgical operation. As a student, his work was confined to administrative tasks, record-keeping, and providing assistance in treatment, suturing, and other minor tasks. He was even more afraid than Amanda, but to make her think this was all routine, he adopted the relaxed, pompous air he had seen doctors use. To spare her the embarrassment of undressing before him and to spare himself the pain of seeing her in the nude, he helped her lie down fully dressed on the operating table. While he washed his hands and showed Nicolás how to wash his too, he tried to distract her with the anecdote about the Spanish ghost that had appeared to Clara during one of the Friday-evening sessions, bringing word of a treasure buried in the foundations of the house; and he told her about his family: a collection of eccentric lunatics for several generations, whom even ghosts made fun of. But Amanda was not listening. She was as white as a sheet, and her teeth were chattering.

  “What are these straps for?” she asked. “I don’t want to be tied down.”

  “I’m not going to tie you down. Nicolás is going to give you the ether. Breathe normally, don’t get frightened, and when you wake up it will be all over,” Jaime told her, his eyes smiling above his mask.

  Nicolás brought the anesthesia mask over to Amanda. The last thing she saw before slipping into darkness was Jaime looking at her with such love in his eyes that she thought she must be dreaming. Nicolás removed her clothes and strapped her to the table, aware that this was even worse than rape, while his brother waited with gloved hands, trying not to see in her the woman of his dreams but only a body like so many others that crossed this table every day with screams of pain. He began to work slowly and carefully, telling himself again exactly what he had to do, mumbling the words he had learned by heart as the sweat poured down onto his eyes. He was keenly aware of the girl’s breathing, the color of her skin, the rhythm of her heart, so that he could signal to his brother to increase the ether every time she moaned, praying that no complications would arise as he probed deeply into her most secret parts, never for a moment ceasing to curse his brother in his thoughts. For if this child had been his instead of Nicolás’s, it would have been born healthy and intact, instead of exiting in bits and pieces in this sewer of a clinic. He would have cradled it and protected it instead of extracting it from its nest with a scoop. Twenty-five minutes later he was finished. He ordered Nicolás to help him with her until the effects of the ether had worn off, but when he looked up, he saw that his brother was slumped against the wall, retching violently.

  “Idiot!” Jaime roared. “Go to the bathroom, and when you’ve finished puking up your guilt wait for me outside, because we still have a long way to go!”

  Nicolás staggered out, and Jaime took off his mask and gloves and proceeded to loosen Amanda’s straps, gently slip on her clothes, hide the bloody traces of his work, and remove the instruments of torture from her sight. Then he lifted her in his arms, treasuring this moment in which he could clasp her to his chest, and carried her to a bed he had already made up with clean sheets, which was more than the women who usually came for help received. He covered her and sat down beside her. For the first time in his life he was able to observe her at his leisure. She was smaller and sweeter than she looked when she was running around in her fortune-teller’s costume and her armfuls of bracelets; and as h
e had imagined, the bones in her slender body were barely hinted at between the tiny hills and smooth alleys of her femininity. Without her scandalous mane of hair and her sphinx eyes, she looked fifteen. To Jaime, her vulnerability was more seductive than anything that had attracted him before. He felt twice as large, twice as heavy, and a thousand times stronger, but he knew he was defeated from the start because of the tenderness he felt and his desire to protect her. He cursed his invincible sentimentality and tried to see her as his brother’s lover, a woman on whom he had just performed an abortion, but he immediately realized how impossible that was and surrendered to the pleasure and suffering of loving her. He stroked her transparent hands, her slender fingers, the shells of her ears, and ran his hands over her neck, listening to the imperceptible sound of the life inside her veins. He moved his mouth close to her lips and eagerly inhaled the scent of anesthesia, but he was not bold enough to touch them.

  Amanda slowly emerged from sleep. First she felt cold and then she was seized by a fit of retching. Jaime comforted her by speaking to her in the same secret language he reserved for animals and for the smallest children in the hospital, until she gradually relaxed. She began to cry and he continued to caress her. They remained silent as she wavered between sleep, nausea, anxiety, and the pain that was beginning to grip her womb, and he fervently wished that this night would never end.

  “Do you think I’ll be able to have children?” she finally asked.

  “I suppose so,” he replied. “But try to find them a responsible father.”

  They both smiled with relief. Amanda searched Jaime’s dark face, which was leaning over her, for signs of some resemblance to Nicolás, but found none. For the first time in her nomadic existence she felt protected and safe. She gave a sigh of contentment and forgot all about the sordid surroundings, the peeling walls, the cold metal cupboards, the dreadful instruments, the smell of disinfectant, and even that raucous pain that had settled inside her.

  “Please lie down next to me and hold me,” she said.

  He lay down timidly on the narrow bed, wrapping his arms around her. He concentrated on being as still as he could so as not to disturb her and not to fall. He had the awkward tenderness of someone who has never been loved and is forced to improvise. Amanda closed her eyes and smiled. They lay there breathing together in utter calm, like brother and sister, until day began to break and the light from the window became stronger than the light of the lamp. Then Jaime helped her to her feet, put her coat around her shoulders, and led her by the arm to the waiting room, where Nicolás had spent the night sleeping in a chair.

  “Wake up!” Jaime said. “We’re going to take her home so Mama can look after her. It’s better for her not to be alone for a few days.”

  “I knew we could count on you,” Nicolás replied, his voice breaking with gratitude.

  “I didn’t do it for you, creep, I did it for her,” Jaime growled, turning his back on his brother.

  Clara let them into the big house on the corner without asking any questions. Or perhaps she had already asked them of her cards or the spirits. They had had to wake her, because the sun was just coming up and everyone was still asleep.

  “Mama, you have to help Amanda,” Jaime pleaded, with the certainty that came from their complicity in matters such as this. “She’s sick and she needs to stay here a few days.”

  “What about little Miguel?” Amanda asked.

  “I’ll go get him,” Nicolás replied, and he left.

  They prepared one of the guest rooms and Amanda got into bed. Jaime took her temperature and said she ought to rest. He started to go out, but remained in the doorway, leaning against the frame, still undecided. Just then Clara returned with a tray of coffee for the three of them.

  “I suppose we owe you an explanation, Mama,” Jaime murmured as they drank their coffee.

  “No, son,” Clara answered gaily. “If it’s a sin, I’d rather not know about it. Let’s use the occasion to pamper Amanda. She needs it.”

  Her son followed her out. Jaime looked at his mother a few paces ahead of him in the hallway, barefoot, her loose hair hanging down her back, and wrapped in her white bathrobe, and he realized that she was not as tall and strong as she had seemed to him in childhood. He reached out and took her by the shoulder. She turned around and smiled, and Jaime hugged her compulsively, clasping her to his chest and scratching her forehead with his chin, whose impossible beard was already clamoring for a shave. It was the first time he had embraced her spontaneously since he was a tiny baby rooted to her breast by need, and Clara was astonished to see how big her son had become; he had the thorax of a weight lifter and a pair of arms like hammers that could crush her with a terrifying force. Stirred and happy, she wondered how it was possible that this hairy giant with the strength of a bear and the candor of a novitiate could have ever lain inside her belly, especially as one of two.

  During the next few days, Amanda ran a fever. Shaken, Jaime kept constant watch and gave her sulfa drugs. Clara tended her. She couldn’t fail to notice that Nicolás discreetly asked about her but made no attempt to visit her. Jaime, on the other hand, lent her his favorite books and walked around like someone in a trance, babbling incoherently and crisscrossing the house as he had never done before. On Thursday night he forgot his Socialist meeting.

  Thus, for a little while, Amanda became a member of the family, and Miguel, through exceptional circumstances, was present, hidden in a wardrobe, the day Alba was born in the Trueba house. He never forgot the grandiose, terrible sight of that tiny child entering the world, coated with all her bloody membranes, between the shrieks of her mother and the cries of the women bustling around her.

  Meanwhile, Esteban Trueba had left on a trip to the United States. Tired of the pain in his bones and the secret illness that only he perceived, he had decided it was time to be examined by foreign doctors; he had reached the premature conclusion that Latin doctors were all charlatans who were closer to sorcerers than scientists. His shrinking was so infinitesimal, so slow and so sly, that no one other than himself had noticed it. He had to buy shoes one size smaller, shorten his trousers, and have a tuck taken in his shirtsleeves. One day he put on the black hat he had not worn all summer and it covered his ears completely, which led him to deduce that if his brain was shrinking, his ideas were also probably withering away. The gringo doctors measured his body, weighed each piece of him separately, interrogated him in English, injected liquids into him with one needle and extracted them with another, photographed him, turned him inside out like a glove, and even stuck a light up his anus. In the end, they concluded that it was all in his mind, that there was no reason for him to believe that he was shrinking, that he had always been the same size, but that perhaps he had dreamt that he was once six feet tall and wore a size-twelve shoe. Esteban Trueba lost patience and returned to his country prepared to ignore the problem of his height, since all great politicians in history had been small, from Napoleon to Hitler. When he arrived at his house, he saw Miguel playing in the garden and Amanda, thinner and with deep bags under her eyes, stripped of her makeup and her bracelets, sitting with Jaime on the terrace. He asked no questions, for he was accustomed to seeing total strangers living under his roof.

  — EIGHT —

  THE COUNT

  Had it not been for the letters Clara and Blanca exchanged, that entire period would have remained submerged in a jumble of faded, timeworn memories. Their abundant correspondence salvaged events from the mists of improbable facts. From the very first letter she received from her daughter after her wedding, Clara could tell that her separation from Blanca would not last long. Without saying a word to anyone, she prepared one of the largest, sunniest rooms in the house. In it she placed the bronze cradle in which her own three children had slept.

  Blanca was never able to explain to her mother why she had agreed to marry, because she herself did not know. Analyzing her pa
st when she had reached middle age, she decided that the main reason was her fear of her father. Ever since she was a child, she had been familiar with the irrational strength of his anger, and she was used to obeying him. In the end, her pregnancy and the news of Pedro Tercero’s death decided her. Still, from the moment she accepted the liaison with Jean de Satigny, she knew that she would never consummate the marriage. She would invent every possible argument for postponing their union, at first relying on the discomforts peculiar to her state and afterward finding additional excuses, because she was convinced that it would be far easier to manage a husband like the count, who wore kidskin shoes, polished his fingernails, and was willing to marry a woman pregnant with someone else’s child, than to oppose a father like Esteban Trueba. Of two evils, she chose the one that struck her as the lesser. She realized that there was a commercial arrangement between the French count and her father in which she had no say. In exchange for a surname for his grandchild, Trueba gave Jean de Satigny a rich dowry and the promise that he would eventually receive an inheritance. Blanca lent herself to their negotiations, but she was not prepared to surrender either her love or her intimacy to her husband, because she was still in love with Pedro Tercero, more out of force of habit than out of any hope of ever seeing him again.

  Blanca and her new husband spent their wedding night in the honeymoon suite of the best hotel in the capital, which Trueba had filled with flowers in the hope of winning his daughter’s forgiveness for the string of assaults to which he had subjected her during the preceding months. To her great surprise, there was no need for her to feign a migraine. As soon as they were alone together, Jean shed his role as the eager suitor who had planted furtive kisses on her neck and who had chosen the finest shrimp to put into her mouth one by one. It was as if he had thoroughly forgotten his seductive, silent-movie-idol manner, and become instead the brother he had been to her in the days of their country strolls, when they would spread their picnic lunch on the ground and take photographs and read aloud in French. Jean disappeared into the bathroom, where he stayed so long that by the time he returned to the bedroom Blanca was half asleep. She thought she must be dreaming when she saw that her husband had changed out of his wedding suit into black silk pajamas and a velvet Pompeian bathrobe. He had put a net over his impeccably waved hair and reeked of eau de cologne. He seemed to have no great amatory impatience. He sat down beside her on the bed and began to stroke her cheek with the same half-mocking touch he had used on earlier occasions. Then, in his affected, r-less Spanish, he proceeded to explain that he had no particular inclination for married life, being in love only with the arts, literature, and scientific curiosities, and therefore had no intention of disturbing her with the usual demands of a husband; they could live together, but not entwined, in perfect harmony and decorum. Relieved, Blanca threw her arms around his neck and kissed him on both cheeks.