The House of the Spirits

  “I’m not going anywhere, Your Excellency!” he roared. “The minute I look away, the Marxists will pull that chair right out from under you!”

  He was astute enough to be the first to call the left “the enemy of democracy,” never suspecting that years later that would be the slogan of the dictatorship. He spent almost all his time and a good part of his fortune on the political front. He noticed that, despite the fact that he was constantly hatching new schemes, his finances seemed to have been dwindling since Clara’s death; still, this caused him no undue alarm because he supposed that it was part of the natural order of things that she had breathed good luck into his life and that she could hardly continue to help him after her death. Besides, according to his calculations, he had enough to continue living like a rich man for the time that remained to him in this world. He felt old, and had decided that none of his three children deserved to inherit anything from him, and that he would secure his granddaughter’s happiness by leaving her Tres Marías, even though the countryside was not as prosperous as before. Thanks to the new highways and cars, what had once been an expedition was now a mere six-hour drive from the capital; but he was always busy now and never had the time to make the trip. Every once in a while he spoke to his foreman on the telephone to go over the accounts, but these calls left him in a bad mood for several days afterward. His foreman was a man defeated by his own pessimistic views, and his news was mostly a series of misfortunes: the strawberries froze, the chickens caught the pip, the grapes rotted. Thus the countryside, which had been the source of his wealth, became a burden, and Senator Trueba frequently had to withdraw money from his other businesses to prop up that insatiable land, which seemed to want to return to the days of oblivion, before he rescued it from misery.

  “I have to go straighten things out. They need the patrón’s eye on them,” he murmured.

  “Things are getting stormy in the countryside, patrón,” his foreman often warned him. “The peasants are up in arms. Every day there are new demands. It seems as if they want to be patrones themselves. The best thing you can do is sell the property.”

  But Trueba would not hear of selling. “Land is all you have left when everything else falls apart,” he would repeat, almost exactly as he had at the age of twenty-five when his mother and sister were putting pressure on him for the same reason. But with the weight of age and politics, Tres Marías, like many other things that had once seemed essential, had ceased to interest him. Its only value was symbolic.

  The foreman was right: those were stormy years. And that was precisely what Pedro Tercero García was proclaiming in his velvet voice, which, thanks to the miracle of radio, now reached the most remote corners of the country. In his mid-thirties, he still looked like a coarse peasant, although it had become more a matter of style since success and his knowledge of the world had softened his roughness and refined his ideas. He wore a woodsman’s beard and the flowing hair of a prophet, which he trimmed himself, by memory, with a razor that had been his father’s, anticipating by several years the style that was to become all the rage among protest singers. He wore canvas pants, homemade sandals, and a raw wool poncho in the winter. That was his battle dress, and it was how he appeared on the stage and on the covers of his records. Disillusioned with political organizations, he had distilled his thoughts down to three or four basic ideas, on which he built his whole philosophy. He was an anarchist. From the chickens and the foxes he had gone on to sing of life, friendship, love, and also revolution. His music was very popular, and only someone as stubborn as Esteban Trueba could ignore his existence. The old man had refused to allow radios in his house, both to prevent his granddaughter from listening to the soap operas and serials in which mothers lose their children and only recover them years later, and to spare himself the ill effects on his digestion of hearing the subversive songs of his enemy. He did, however, keep a modern radio in his bedroom, but he listened only to the news. He never suspected that Pedro Tercero García was his own son Jaime’s best friend, or that he met with Blanca every time she left the house with her clownish suitcase, mumbling excuses. Nor did he know that on certain sunny Sundays Pedro Tercero took Alba hiking, and that as they sat looking out over the city, eating bread and cheese, before tumbling down the slopes, bursting with laughter like two happy puppies, he told her about the poor, the oppressed, the desperate, and other matters that Trueba did not want his granddaughter to know about.

  Pedro Tercero watched Alba grow. He tried to be close to her but he never came to think of her as his daughter, because on that point Blanca was inflexible. She said that Alba had withstood many shocking things and that it was a miracle she had turned out to be a relatively normal child; the last thing she needed was any additional confusion about the circumstances of her birth. It was better for her to believe the official version. Besides, she did not want the child discussing this with her grandfather, which would certainly lead to disaster. In any case, the child’s free spirit and rebellious nature were gratifying to Pedro Tercero.

  “If she’s not my daughter, she deserves to be,” he would say proudly.

  During all those years, Pedro Tercero never got used to the life of a bachelor, despite his success with women, especially the magnificent adolescents whom the laments of his guitar inflamed with love. Some of them forced their way into his life, and he thrived on the freshness of those love affairs. He tried to make these young girls happy for a short while, but from the very first moment of illusion he began to say goodbye, until he finally, delicately, left them. Frequently, when he was in bed with one of them and she was sighing in her sleep beside him, he would close his eyes and think of Blanca, with her ample, ripe body, her warm, generous breasts, the fine wrinkles at her mouth, and the shadows underneath her Arab eyes, and he would feel a cry pressing in his heart. He tried to stay with other women. He discovered many roads and many bodies trying to distance himself from her, but at the moment of greatest intimacy, the exact point of loneliness and the foreknowledge of death, Blanca was always the only one. The next morning, the whole slow process of withdrawing from his new love would begin. As soon as he was free again, he returned to Blanca, thinner, guiltier, and with deeper rings under his eyes, a new song on his guitar, and a wealth of never-ending caresses for her.

  But Blanca was used to living by herself. When all was said and done, she had found peace in her household chores, her ceramics studio, and her crèches of made-up animals in which the only figures that corresponded to the laws of reality were the Holy Family lost in a crowd of monsters. The only man in her life was Pedro Tercero, for she was born to have one love. The strength of this immutable desire saved her from the mediocrity and sadness of her fate. She was faithful to him even in those moments when he lost himself in a sea of straight-haired, long-boned nymphs, and never loved him any the less for his digressions. At first she thought she would die every time he moved away from her, but she soon realized that his absences were only as long as a sigh and that he invariably returned more in love and sweeter than ever. Blanca preferred those furtive hotel rendezvous with her lover to the routine of everyday life, the weariness of marriage and the shared poverty at the end of every month, the bad taste in the mouth on waking up, the tedium of Sundays, and the complaints of old age. She was an incurable romantic. Every once in a while she was tempted to take her clown’s suitcase and whatever was left of the jewels from the sock and go off with her daughter to live with him, but she always lost her nerve. Perhaps she feared the grandiose love that had stood so many tests would not be able to withstand the most dreadful test of all: living together. Alba was growing rapidly, and Blanca understood that she would not be able to rely much longer on the excuse that she had to watch over her daughter in order to postpone her lover’s needs, but she still preferred to put off the decision to some other time. Actually, much as she feared routine, she was horrified by Pedro Tercero’s way of living, and by his modest little house—in a workin
g-class neighborhood among hundreds of others as poorly built—of boards and corrugated metal, with packed earth floors and a single light bulb hanging from the ceiling. For her, Pedro moved out of his neighborhood into a downtown apartment, thereby, without intending to do so, ascending to the middle class to which he had never aspired. But even this was not enough for Blanca, who found the apartment sordid, dark, and narrow and the building crowded. She said she could not let Alba grow up there, playing with other children in the street and on the steps, and attending public school. Thus Blanca’s youth went by and she entered middle age, resigned to the fact that her only moments of pleasure would come when she dressed up in her best clothes, her perfume, and her whorish underwear, which captivated Pedro Tercero and which she hid, red with shame, in the bottom of her wardrobe, imagining the explanations she would have to give if anyone discovered them. This woman who was so down to earth and practical in all other aspects of life sublimated her childhood passion and lived it tragically. She fed it with fantasies, idealized it, savagely defended it, stripped it of its prosaic truth, and turned it into the kind of love one found in novels.

  As for Alba, she learned not to mention Pedro Tercero García’s name because she understood the effect it caused in the family. She guessed that something terrible had taken place between her grandfather and the man with the missing fingers who kissed her mother on the mouth, but everyone, even Pedro Tercero himself, gave evasive answers to her questions. Sometimes, in the intimacy of their bedroom, Blanca told her anecdotes about him and taught her his songs, warning her not to hum them in the house. But she never told her that he was her father, and she even seemed to have forgotten it herself. She recalled the past as a series of violent acts, abandonments, and sorrows, and she was not certain things had been the way she remembered. The episode of the mummies, the photographs, and the hairless Indian in Louis XV shoes that had prompted her flight from her husband’s house had grown hazy with time. She had told and retold the story of the count’s death of fever in the desert so often that she had come to believe it. Years later, the day her daughter came to tell her that the body of Jean de Satigny was lying in the icebox at the morgue, she was not relieved, for she had felt like a widow for years. Nor did she attempt to justify her lie. She took her old black tailored suit from the wardrobe, arranged the hairpins in her bun, and went with Alba to bury the Frenchman in the main cemetery, in a municipal grave, which was where the poor ended up, because Senator Trueba refused to make room for him in the salmon-colored mausoleum. Mother and daughter walked alone behind the black coffin they arranged to buy with Jaime’s help. They felt a little ridiculous in the oppressive summer heat, with a bouquet of wilting flowers in their hands and not a single tear for the solitary body they were laying to rest.

  “I see my father didn’t have a single friend,” Alba observed.

  Even on that occasion Blanca did not tell her daughter the truth.

  * * *

  After I had settled Rosa and Clara in my mausoleum, I felt better because I knew that sooner or later the three of us would be reunited there, along with our other loved ones, like my mother, Nana, and even Férula, who I hope has forgiven me. I never imagined I was going to live as long as I have and that they’d have to wait so long for me.

  Clara’s bedroom was kept locked. I didn’t want anybody going in there. I wanted everything to stay exactly where it was, so I’d be able to find her spirit whenever I wanted to. I began to suffer from insomnia, the old people’s disease. Unable to sleep, I shuffled up and down the halls all night in my slippers that were too big for me, wrapped in the old ecclesiastical bathrobe I had kept for sentimental reasons, and railing against my fate like an old man at the end of his days. But with the first rays of sunlight I regained my desire to live. At breakfast, I appeared in my starched shirt and mourning suit, shaved and calm. I read the newspaper with my granddaughter, verified that my affairs were up to date, handled my correspondence, and went out for the rest of the day. I stopped eating in the house, even on the weekends, because without Clara’s catalyzing presence there was no reason why I should put up with my children’s bickering.

  My only two friends tried to rid me of the grief in my soul. They had lunch with me, played golf with me, challenged me to games of dominoes. We talked about business, politics, and, at times, about the family. One afternoon when they saw I was a little livelier than usual, they invited me to the Christopher Columbus, hoping that a pleasing woman would help me recover my good humor. None of the three of us was of an age for such adventures, but we had a couple of drinks and set off.

  Though I had been in the Christopher Columbus years before, I had practically forgotten it. In recent times the hotel had acquired a certain prestige among tourists, and people traveled from the provinces to the capital just to see it and go back and tell their friends about it. When we arrived at the old house, which on the outside looked the same as it had for years, we were received by a doorman who led us in to the main room, where I remembered having been before in the days of the French madam—or, better put, the madam with the French accent. A young girl dressed like a schoolgirl offered us a glass of wine on the house. One of my friends tried to put his arm around her waist, but she warned him that she was only a servant and that he would have to wait for the professionals. Moments later a curtain opened and we saw a vision out of one of the ancient Arabian courts: a huge Negro so black that he looked blue, dressed in baggy carrot-colored silk trousers, a vest, a purple lamé turban, and Turkish slippers, with oiled muscles and a gold ring in his nose. When he smiled, we saw that all his teeth were made of lead. He introduced himself as Mustafá and handed us a photo album so we could choose our merchandise. For the first time in ages I laughed spontaneously; I found the idea of a catalog of prostitutes very amusing. We flipped through the pictures, looking at women who were fat, thin, long-haired, short-haired, dressed as nymphs, amazons, nuns, and courtesans, but I was unable to decide because they all looked like trampled banquet flowers. The last three pages of the album were devoted to boys in Greek tunics, crowned with laurel, playing among false Hellenic ruins, with chubby bottoms and heavy eyelashes—repulsive. I have to admit I had never seen a fag close up except Carmelo, the one who dressed like a Japanese girl at the Red Lantern, so I was taken aback when one of my friends, a family man and a broker on the stock exchange, chose one of those fat-assed boys in the pictures. The boy appeared as if by magic from behind the curtains and led my friend off by the hand, giggling and wiggling his hips like a woman. My other friend chose a fat odalisque, with whom I doubt he was able to achieve any great feats, owing to his advanced age and fragile frame, but they, too, went out together, swallowed up by the curtain.

  “I see the señor’s having a hard time deciding,” Mustafá remarked cordially. “Allow me to offer you the best in the house. I’m going to introduce you to Aphrodite.”

  And Aphrodite appeared in the room, with her hair piled three stories high, barely covered by a few layers of tulle and dripping with artificial grapes from her shoulders to her knees. It was Tránsito Soto, who had acquired a definite mythological look, despite the tasteless grapes and circus gauze.

  “I’m glad to see you, patrón,” she greeted me.

  She led me through the curtain into a small interior courtyard, the heart of that labyrinthine structure. The Christopher Columbus was built out of three old houses, strategically connected by a series of back courtyards, corridors, and specially constructed bridges. Tránsito Soto conducted me to a room that was nondescript but clean; its only sign of extravagance was a series of frescoes that were poor copies of the ones at Pompeii, which some mediocre painter had reproduced on the walls, and a large, slightly rusty antique bathtub with running water. I whistled in admiration.

  “We’ve made a few changes in the décor,” she said.

  Tránsito took off her grapes and gauze and was once again the woman I remembered, only more appetizing and
less vulnerable, but with the same ambitious look in her eyes that had captivated me when I first met her. She told me about the cooperative of prostitutes and homosexuals, which had had fantastic success. Together they had lifted the Christopher Columbus out of the ruin in which the phony French madam had left it, and had worked to transform it into a social event and historic monument whose reputation was passed by word of mouth from sailor to sailor on the farthest seas. The costumes had been the greatest success of all, because they awakened the customers’ erotic fantasies, as did the catalog of whores, which they had managed to reproduce and distribute throughout certain provinces, arousing in the men a desire one day to visit the famous brothel.

  “It’s boring to walk around in these rags and grapes, patrón, but the men like it. When they leave, they tell others and that brings us new customers. We’re doing very well. It’s a good business, and no one here feels exploited. We’re all partners. This is the only whorehouse in the country with its own authentic Negro. You might have seen others, but they’re all painted. But you can rub Mustafá with sandpaper and he’ll still be black. And this place is clean. You can drink the water from the toilet bowl if you want to, because we pour lye where you’d least expect it and we’re all supervised by the Board of Health. No venereal diseases here.”