The House of the Spirits

“I have no doubt of that. Go in peace, my children,” the old man murmured.

  He knew he would never see them again.

  * * *

  Senator Trueba was left alone in the house with his granddaughter and a few remaining servants. At least that was what he thought. But Alba had decided to adopt her mother’s plan and was using the abandoned wing of the house to hide people for a night or two until she found a safer place or a way to get them out of the country. She helped those who lived in shadow, fleeing by day and mingling with the bustle of the city, but who had to be hidden by nightfall, always in a different place. The most dangerous time was during the curfew, when fugitives could not be out on the street and the police could hunt them down at will. Alba thought her grandfather’s house was the last place they would search. Slowly but surely she transformed the empty rooms into a labyrinth of secret nooks where she hid those she took under her wing, sometimes whole families. Senator Trueba used only the library, the bathroom, and his bedroom. There he lived surrounded by his mahogany furniture, his Victorian glass cabinets, and his Persian carpets. Even for a man so little given to intuition as he was, the dark mansion was disquieting: it seemed to hold a hidden monster. Trueba could not understand the reason for his uneasiness, because he knew that the strange noises the servants said they heard were made by Clara as she wandered through the house in the company of her spirit friends. He had often come upon his wife gliding through the sitting rooms, in her white tunic, with her young girl’s laugh. He pretended not to see her, not moving and even holding his breath so as not to frighten her. If he closed his eyes and pretended to be asleep, he could feel her fingers gently stroking his forehead, her fresh breath touching him like a breeze, her hair brushing against his hand. He had no reason to suspect anything irregular, and yet he tried not to venture into the enchanted realm that belonged to his wife. The farthest he went was the neutral zone of the kitchen. His old cook had left because her husband had been accidentally shot, and her only son, who was doing his military service in a village in the South, had been hanged from a post with his guts wrapped around his neck, the people’s revenge for his having carried out the orders of his superiors. The poor woman had lost her mind and soon afterward Trueba lost his patience, fed up with finding in his food the hairs she had torn from her head in her unending grief. For a while, Alba experimented with the pots, using a cookbook, but despite her good intentions Trueba wound up dining almost every night at his club, so he could have at least one decent meal a day. That gave Alba greater freedom for her traffic in fugitives and greater safety for bringing people in, and taking them out of the house before curfew, without her grandfather suspecting.

  One day Miguel appeared. She was entering the house in the broad light of the siesta hour when he came walking toward her. He had been waiting for her hidden in the thick weeds of the garden. He had dyed his hair pale yellow and was wearing a blue checked suit. He looked like an ordinary bank employee, but Alba recognized him immediately and was unable to stifle the shout of joy that rose up from within her. They embraced in the garden, in view of the passersby and anyone who cared to look, until they came to their senses and understood how dangerous it was. Alba led him inside the house, to her bedroom. They fell onto the bed in a knot of arms and legs, each calling the other by the secret names they had used in the days of the basement. They made love impatiently until they felt that the very life was flowing out of them and their souls were bursting. Then they were forced to lie quiet, listening to the pounding of their hearts, in order to calm down a little. Looking at him for the first time, Alba saw that she had been cavorting with what looked like a total stranger, who not only had the hair of a Viking but also lacked the beard of Miguel and his small round schoolmaster’s spectacles, and seemed much thinner. “You look horrible!” she whispered in his ear. Miguel had become one of the guerrilla leaders, fulfilling the destiny he had been moving toward ever since he was a teenager. Many men and women had been interrogated to find out his whereabouts, a fact which weighed on Alba’s spirit like a millstone, but for him it was simply another part of the horror of war, and he was prepared to suffer the same fate when the moment came to cover up for others. Meanwhile, he fought clandestinely, faithful to his theory that the violence of the rich must be met by the violence of the people. Alba, who had imagined a thousand times over that he was a prisoner or that he had been put to death in the most dreadful manner, wept with joy as she savored his scent, his texture, his voice, his warmth, the brush of his hands—callused from handling weapons and the habit of crawling on all fours—praying, cursing, and kissing him at the same time that she hated him for all the accumulated suffering and wished she could die there on the spot so she would never have to feel his absence again.

  “You were right, Miguel,” Alba said, burying her face in his shoulder. “Everything happened exactly as you said.”

  Then she told him of the weapons she had stolen from her grandfather and hidden with her Uncle Jaime, and she offered to take him to look for them. She would also have liked to give him those she had been unable to steal, which had remained in the house, but a few days after the coup the civilian population had been ordered to surrender anything that could pass for arms, from scout knives to children’s penknives. People had left their little bundles wrapped in newspaper at the doors of the churches, because they were afraid to take them to the barracks, but Senator Trueba, who had real weapons in his possession, was not the least bit worried; his had been stockpiled for killing Communists, as everybody knew. He called up his friend General Hurtado, who sent a truck to pick them up. Trueba led the soldiers to his personal arsenal, and, mute with surprise, was amazed to find that half the boxes were filled with stones and straw, but he realized that if he admitted to the loss he would be compromising a member of his own family or getting himself into a jam. He began to make apologies, which no one paid any attention to, since the soldiers could hardly know how many weapons he had purchased. He suspected Blanca and Pedro Tercero García, but his granddaughter’s flushed cheeks also made him wonder. After the soldiers had removed the boxes, handing him a signed receipt, he took Alba by the shoulders and shook her as he never had before, to make her confess that she had something to do with the missing machine guns and rifles.

  “Don’t ask me questions you don’t want to know the answer to,” Alba replied, looking him in the eye. They never spoke of the matter again.

  “Your grandfather is a bastard, Alba,” Miguel told her. “Someday someone will kill him and give him what he deserves.”

  “He’ll die in bed. He’s very old now,” Alba said.

  “He who lives by the sword must die by the sword. Maybe I’ll kill him myself one of these days.”

  “God forbid, Miguel, because then I’d have to do the same to you,” Alba answered fervently.

  Miguel explained to her that they would not be able to see each other for a long while, perhaps never again. He tried to make her understand the danger of being the woman of a guerrilla, even if she was protected by her grandfather’s name, but she wept so and hugged him with such anxiety that he was forced to promise her that they would find a way to meet from time to time, even at the risk of their lives. Miguel also agreed to go with her and dig up the guns and ammunition buried in the mountains, because that was what he most needed in his reckless fight.

  “I hope they haven’t rusted in the ground,” Alba murmured. “And that I’ll be able to remember exactly where we hid them, because it was more than a year ago.”

  Two weeks later, Alba organized an outing for the children from the soup kitchen. They used a truck they were lent by the parish priests. She carried baskets of food, a bag of oranges, balls, and a guitar. None of the children paid attention when she stopped along the way to pick up a blond man. Alba drove the heavy van with its load of children along the same mountain route she had followed with her Uncle Jaime. She was stopped by two patrols and had to open all the
food baskets, but the children’s contagious gaiety and the innocent contents of the baskets sent all suspicion flying. They arrived calmly at the place where the arms were buried. The children played hide-and-seek. Miguel organized a football match. Then he sat them in a circle and told them stories, and afterward they all sang until they were hoarse. Later he sketched a map of the site to enable him to return with his comrades under cover of darkness. It was a happy day in the country, during which they were able to forget for a few hours the tension of the state of war and enjoy the warm mountain sun, listening to the children’s shouts as they raced among the rocks, their stomachs full for the first time in months.

  “I’m scared, Miguel,” Alba said. “Aren’t we ever going to be able to lead a normal life? Why don’t we go abroad? Why don’t we escape now, while we still can?”

  Miguel pointed to the children, and Alba understood what he meant.

  “Then let me go with you!” she begged, as she had so many times before.

  “Right now we can’t take someone who hasn’t been trained. Much less a girl in love.” Miguel smiled. “It’s more important for you to continue what you’re doing. These poor kids need all the help they can get until things get better.”

  “At least tell me how to find you!”

  “If the police ever get hold of you, it’s better if you don’t know anything,” Miguel replied.

  She shuddered.

  During the following months, Alba began to sell the furniture in the house. At first she dared to take only what was in the abandoned rooms and the basement, but when she had sold everything there she took the antique chairs from the drawing room, one by one, the baroque room dividers, the colonial chests, the engraved screens, and even the dining-room linens. Trueba noticed, but said nothing. He supposed that his granddaughter was giving the money to a forbidden cause, just as he imagined she had done with the weapons she had stolen, but he preferred not to know about it in order to retain his precarious stability in a world that was crumbling beneath his feet. He realized that all he really cared about was losing his granddaughter, because she was his last link to life. This was why he also said nothing when she took the paintings from the walls and the antique carpets to sell them to the nouveaux riches. He felt very old and tired, and did not have the strength to fight. His ideas were not as clear as they had been and the line between what was good and what was bad had blurred. During the night, when he was overcome by sleep, he had nightmares of small brick houses in flames. He thought that if his only heir was going to squander his fortune, he would do nothing to stop her, because he was going to be in his grave soon and all he would take with him was his shroud. Alba tried to speak to him, to explain what she was doing, but the old man refused to hear the story of the starving children who received a dish of charity with the profit from his Aubusson tapestry, or the unemployed who were able to last another week thanks to his jade Chinese dragon. All this, he continued to maintain, was a monstrous Communist lie; but in the remote event that it was true, it would still not be Alba’s responsibility to shoulder the burden, but the government’s or, as a last resort, the Church’s. Nevertheless, the day he came home and did not see Clara’s portrait hanging in the entry, he decided that matters had gone too far and confronted his granddaughter.

  “Where the devil is the portrait of your grandmother?” he lowered.

  “I sold it to the British consul. He told me he would put it in a museum in London.”

  “I forbid you to take another thing out of this house! Starting tomorrow, you’ll have your own bank account, for pin money,” he said.

  Esteban Trueba soon saw that Alba was the most expensive woman of his life, and that a whole harem would have cost him less than that green-haired granddaughter. He never reproached her, for his good luck had returned and the more he spent the more he had. After political activity had been forbidden, he had more time for his business matters, and he calculated that, against all his predictions, he was going to die a very rich man. He placed his money in the new investment houses that promised to multiply money overnight. He discovered that being rich was terribly annoying because it was so easy to make money and so difficult to find an incentive for spending it. Not even his granddaughter’s prodigious talent for extravagance was able to make a dent in his purse. He enthusiastically embarked on the reconstruction and improvement of Tres Marías, but after that he lost all interest in any other endeavor because he noticed that, thanks to the new economic system, there was no need to work hard and produce, inasmuch as money makes money and his bank accounts grew fatter every day without the slightest effort on his part. Thus, tallying up his accounts, he took a step he had never thought he would take in his life: once a month he sent a check to Pedro Tercero García, who was living with Blanca in exile in Canada, where they both felt completely fulfilled in the peace of satisfied love. Pedro Tercero composed revolutionary songs for workers, students, and, above all, the upper middle class, which had made his music, successfully translated into French and English, their own despite the fact that chickens and foxes are underdeveloped creatures that lack the zoological splendor of the eagles and wolves of that frozen country of the North. Meanwhile, placid and happy, Blanca was in splendid health for the first time in her life. She set up an enormous kiln in her house to fire her crèches of monsters, which sold extremely well as examples of indigenous folk art, just as Jean de Satigny had predicted twenty-five years earlier, when he had wanted to export them. The combination of this business, her father’s checks, and assistance from the Canadian government gave them more than enough to live on. Just to be on the safe side, however, Blanca hid the woolen sock with Clara’s jewels in the most secret place she could find. She hoped that she would never have to sell them, and that one day they would shine for Alba.

  * * *

  Esteban Trueba never knew that the political police had his house under surveillance until the night they came for Alba. They were both asleep, and by sheer chance there was no one hidden in the labyrinth of empty rooms in the back of the house. The slam of rifle butts against the door shook the old man from his sleep with a clear foreboding of misfortune. But Alba had already been awakened by the sound of brakes, the loud footsteps, and the hushed orders, and had begun to dress herself, because she had no doubt that her time had come.

  Throughout these months, the senator had learned that not even his own record as a supporter of the coup was any guarantee against terror. But he had never imagined that he would see a dozen plainclothesmen break into his house under cover of curfew, armed to the teeth, to drag him from his bed and push him into the sitting room, without even allowing him to put on his slippers or throw a shawl over his shoulders. He saw them kick open Alba’s bedroom door and storm in with machine guns in their hands, and he saw his granddaughter waiting for them; she was already dressed, and though her face was pale, she looked serene. He saw them push her out and take her at gunpoint to the drawing room, where they ordered her to stand beside him and not move. She obeyed without saying a word, oblivious to her grandfather’s anger and the violence of the men who were ransacking the house, kicking down doors, rifling wardrobes, knocking over furniture, ripping open mattresses, emptying dresser drawers, kicking the walls, and shouting orders in their search for hidden guerrillas, contraband weapons, and any other evidence they could find. They pulled the maids from their beds and locked them in a room where an armed man stood guard. They ransacked the bookshelves in the study, sending the senator’s bibelots and works of art crashing to the floor. The books from Jaime’s den were piled in the courtyard, doused with gasoline, and set on fire in an infamous pyre that was fed with the magic books from the enchanted trunks of Great-Uncle Marcos, the remaining copies of Nicolás’s esoteric treatise, the leather-bound set of the complete works of Marx, and even Trueba’s opera scores, producing a scandalous bonfire that filled the neighborhood with smoke and that, in normal times, would have brought fire truck
s from every direction.

  “Hand over all your notebooks, your address books, your checkbooks, and all your personal documents!” shouted the man who seemed to be in charge.

  “I’m Senator Trueba! For God’s sake, don’t you recognize me?” the grandfather shrieked in desperation. “You can’t do this to me! This is an outrage! I’m a friend of General Hurtado’s!”

  “Shut up, you old shit! You don’t open your mouth until I tell you to!” the man replied brutally.

  They forced him to surrender the contents of his desk, and put everything that interested them into paper bags. While one group finished checking the house, another continued throwing books out the window. Four smiling, mocking, threatening men remained in the drawing room. They put their feet up on the furniture, drank the senator’s Scotch straight from the bottle, and broke his classical records one by one. Alba calculated that at least two hours had passed. She was shaking, but not from cold—from fear. She had supposed this moment would come one day, but she had always had the irrational hope that somehow her grandfather’s influence would protect her. At the sight of him sitting fearfully on the sofa, tiny and wretched as a sick old man, she understood that she could expect no help.

  “Sign here!” the man in charge ordered Trueba, shoving a piece of paper in his face. “It’s a declaration that we entered with a court order, showed you our identification cards, and that everything proceeded properly, with all due respect and proper manners, and that you have no complaints. Sign it!”

  “I’ll never sign this!” the old man shouted furiously.

  The man spun around and slapped Alba in the face, a blow that knocked her to the floor. Senator Trueba was paralyzed with terror and surprise. He realized that his hour of truth was finally upon him, after living almost ninety years as his own boss.

  “Did you know that your granddaughter is the whore of a guerrilla?” the man asked.