The House of the Spirits

by Isabel Allende

  * * *

  At the end of autumn, when the family had calmed down about Father Restrepo, who was forced to mitigate his inquisitional behavior after the bishop had personally warned him to leave little Clara del Valle alone, and when they had all resigned themselves to the fact that Uncle Marcos was truly dead, Severo’s political designs began to take shape. He had worked for years toward this end, so it was a personal triumph when he was invited to be the Liberal Party candidate in the upcoming Congressional elections, representing a southern province that he had never set foot in and that he had difficulty finding on the map. The party badly needed people and Severo was anxious for a seat in Congress, so they had no trouble convincing the downtrodden voters of the South to choose him as their candidate. Their invitation was supported by a monumental rose-colored roast pig, which the voters shipped directly to candidate del Valle’s home. It arrived on an enormous wooden tray, scented and gleaming, with a sprig of parsley in its mouth and a carrot protruding from its rump, the whole reposing on a bed of tomatoes. Its stomach had been stitched closed, and it was stuffed with partridges that in turn were stuffed with plums. It was accompanied by a decanter containing half a gallon of the best brandy in the country. The idea of becoming a deputy or, better still, a senator, was a long-cherished dream of Severo’s. Over the years he had been meticulously laying the groundwork, by means of contacts, friendships, secret meetings, discreet but effective public appearances, and gifts of money or favors made to the right people at the right moment. That southern province, however distant and unknown, was exactly what he had been waiting for.

  The pig arrived on a Tuesday. On Friday, when the pig was no more than a heap of skin and bones that Barrabás was gnawing in the courtyard, Clara announced that there would soon be another death in the del Valle family.

  “But it will be by mistake,” she added.

  On Saturday she slept badly and awoke screaming in the middle of the night. In the morning Nana made her a cup of linden tea but no one paid her much attention, because everyone was busy with the preparations for their father’s southern trip, and because Rosa the Beautiful had developed a chill. Nívea gave orders for Rosa to remain in bed, and Dr. Cuevas said that it was nothing serious and that she should be given sugared lemonade with a splash of liquor to help bring down her fever. Severo went in to see his daughter and found her flushed and wide-eyed, sunk deep in the butter-colored lace sheets. He took her a dance card as a present and gave Nana permission to open the decanter of brandy and pour some in the lemonade. Rosa drank the lemonade, wrapped herself in her woolen shawl, and immediately fell asleep next to Clara, with whom she shared the room.

  On the morning of that tragic Sunday, Nana woke up early as she always did. Before going to mass, she went into the kitchen to prepare breakfast for the family. The wood and coal stove had been readied the night before, and she lit the smoldering, still-warm embers. While the water heated and the milk boiled, she stacked the plates to be taken into the dining room. She put some oatmeal on the stove, strained the coffee, and toasted the bread. She arranged two trays, one for Nívea, who always breakfasted in bed, and one for Rosa, who by virtue of her illness was entitled to the same treatment as her mother. She covered Rosa’s tray with a linen napkin that had been embroidered by the nuns, to keep the coffee warm and prevent flies from getting in the food, and stuck her head out in the courtyard to make sure Barrabás was not in sight. He had a penchant for leaping at her whenever she went by with the breakfast tray. She saw him in the corner playing with a hen and took advantage of his momentary distraction to begin her long trip across courtyards and through hallways, from the kitchen, which was in the middle of the house, all the way to the girls’ room, which was on the other side. When she came to Rosa’s door, she stopped, gripped by a premonition. She entered without knocking, as she always did, and immediately noticed the scent of roses, even though they were not in season. This was how Nana understood that an inescapable disaster had occurred. She set the tray down carefully beside the bed and walked slowly to the window. She opened the heavy drapes and let the pale morning sun into the room. Grief-stricken, she turned around and was not at all surprised to see Rosa lying dead upon the bed, more beautiful than ever, her hair strikingly green, her skin the tone of new ivory, and her honey-gold eyes wide open, staring at the ceiling. Little Clara was at the foot of the bed observing her sister. Nana fell to her knees beside the bed, took Rosa’s hand in hers, and began to pray. She prayed for a long time, until the terrible moan of a lost freighter was heard throughout the house. It was the first and last time anyone heard Barrabás’s voice. He mourned the dead girl all that day, fraying the nerves of the whole family and all the neighbors, who came running at the sound of his shipwrecked howls.

  After taking one look at Rosa’s body, Dr. Cuevas knew that she had died of no ordinary fever. He began to search the entire house, going over the kitchen inch by inch, sticking his fingers into pots, opening flour sacks and bags of sugar, prying the tops off boxes of dried fruit, and leaving a wake of destruction behind him. He rummaged through Rosa’s drawers, questioned the servants one by one, and harassed Nana until she was beside herself; finally his search led to the decanter of brandy, which he requisitioned instantly. He shared his doubts with no one, but he took the bottle to his laboratory. He returned three hours later, his rosy face transformed by horror into the pale mask he wore throughout that whole dreadful episode. He walked up to Severo, took him by the arm, and led him off to one side.

  “There was enough poison in that brandy to fell an ox,” he said between tight lips. “But in order to be sure that that’s what killed the child, I’ll have to do an autopsy.”

  “Does that mean you have to cut her open?” Severo moaned.

  “Not completely. I won’t have to touch her head, just her digestive tract,” the doctor explained.

  Severo was overcome.

  By that point Nívea was worn out from weeping, but when she learned that they were thinking of taking her daughter to the morgue, she quickly regained her strength. She calmed down only when they swore that they would take Rosa directly from the house to the Catholic cemetery: only then did she accept the laudanum the doctor handed her. She slept for twenty hours.

  When evening fell, Severo made his preparations. He sent his children up to bed and gave the servants permission to retire early. He allowed Clara, who was too upset by what had happened, to spend the night in the bedroom of another sister. When all the lights were out and the house was silent, Dr. Cuevas’s assistant, a sickly, myopic young man with a stutter, arrived. They helped Severo carry his daughter’s body into the kitchen and set it gently down on the slab of marble where Nana kneaded pastry and chopped vegetables. Despite his sturdy character, Severo was overcome when his daughter’s nightgown was lifted to reveal the splendid body of a mermaid. He staggered out of the room, drunk with grief, and collapsed in an armchair, weeping like a child. Dr. Cuevas too, who had seen Rosa come into this world and knew her like the palm of his own hand, was taken aback at the sight of her nude body. The young assistant began to pant, so overwhelmed was he, and he panted for years to come, every time he recalled the extraordinary sight of Rosa naked and asleep on the kitchen table, her long hair sweeping to the floor in a cascade of green.

  While they were at work on their terrible task, Nana, bored with weeping and prayer and sensing that something strange was going on in her domain, got up, wrapped her shawl around her shoulders, and set out through the house. She saw a light in the kitchen, but the door and wooden shutters were closed. She continued down the frozen, silent hallways, crossing the three wings of the house, until she came to the drawing room. Through the open door she could see her employer pacing up and down with a desolate air. The fire in the fireplace had long since gone out. She stepped into the room.

  “Where is Rosa?” she asked.

  “Dr. Cuevas is with her, Nana,” he replied. “Come hav
e a drink with me.”

  Nana remained standing, her crossed arms holding her shawl against her chest. Severo pointed to the sofa and she approached shyly. She sat down beside him. It was the first time she had been this close to her employer since she had lived in his house. Severo poured them each a glass of sherry and downed his in a single gulp. He buried his head in his hands, tearing his hair and murmuring a strange litany between his teeth. Nana, who was sitting stiffly on the edge of her seat, relaxed when she saw him cry. She stretched out her rough, chapped hand and, with a gesture that came automatically, smoothed his hair with the same caress she had used to console his children for the past twenty years. He glanced up and when he saw the ageless face, the Indian cheekbones, the black bun, the broad lap against which he had seen all his descendants burped and rocked to sleep, he felt that this woman, as warm and generous as the earth itself, would be able to console him. He leaned his forehead on her skirt, inhaled the sweet scent of her starched apron, and broke into the sobs of a small boy, spilling all the tears he had held in during his life as a man. Nana scratched his back, patted him gently, spoke to him in the half-language that she used to put the littlest ones to sleep, and sang him one of her peasant ballads until he had calmed down. They remained seated side by side, sipping sherry and weeping from time to time as they recalled the happy days when Rosa scampered in the garden startling the butterflies with her beauty that could only have come from the bottom of the sea.

  In the kitchen, Dr. Cuevas and his assistant prepared their dread utensils and foul-smelling jars, donned rubber aprons, rolled up their sleeves, and proceeded to poke around in Rosa’s most intimate parts until they had proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that the girl had swallowed an extraordinary quantity of rat poison.

  “This was meant for Severo,” the doctor concluded, washing his hands in the sink.

  The assistant, overcome by the young girl’s beauty, could not resign himself to leaving her sewn up like a jacket and suggested that they fix her up a bit. Both men plunged into the work of preserving her with unguents and filling her with mortician’s paste. They worked until four o’clock in the morning, when Dr. Cuevas announced that he was too tired and too sad to continue. He went out of the room and Rosa was left in the hands of the assistant, who wiped the bloodstains from her skin with a sponge, put her embroidered nightgown back over her chest to cover up the seam that ran from her throat all the way to her sex, and arranged her hair. Then he cleaned up the mess that he and the doctor had made.

  Dr. Cuevas walked into the living room and found Severo and Nana half drunk with tears and sherry.

  “She’s ready,” he said. “We’ve fixed her up a little so her mother can go in and have a look at her.”

  He told Severo that his doubts had been well founded and that in his daughter’s stomach he had found the same lethal substance as in the gift of brandy. It was then that Severo recalled Clara’s prediction and lost whatever remained of his composure, for he was incapable of thinking that his daughter had died instead of him. He crumpled to the floor, moaning that he was the guilty one because of his ambition and bluster, that no one had told him to get involved in politics, that he had been much better off as an ordinary lawyer and family man, and that from then on he was renouncing his accursed candidacy, resigning from the Liberal Party and from all his public deeds and works, and that he hoped none of his descendants would ever get mixed up in politics, which was a trade for butchers and bandits—till finally Dr. Cuevas took pity on him and did him the favor of getting him drunk. The sherry was stronger than his suffering and guilt. Nana and the doctor carried him up to his bedroom, removed his clothes, and put him in his bed. Then they went into the kitchen, where the assistant was just putting the final touches on Rosa.

  Nívea and Severo del Valle woke up late the following morning. Their relatives had hung the house in mourning. The curtains were drawn and bore black crepe ribbons, and the walls were piled with wreaths of flowers whose sickly sweet odor filled the halls. A funeral chapel had been set up in the dining room. There on the big table, covered with a black cloth with gold fringes, lay Rosa’s white coffin with its silver rivets. Twelve yellow candles in bronze candelabras cast a dusky light over the girl. They had dressed her in the white gown and crown of wax orange blossoms that were being saved for her wedding day.

  At twelve o’clock the parade of friends, relatives, and acquaintances began to file in to express their sympathy to the family. Even their most confirmed enemies appeared at the house, and Severo del Valle interrogated each pair of eyes in the hope of discovering the identity of the assassin; but in each, even those of the president of the Conservative Party, he saw the same innocence and grief.

  During the wake, the men wandered through the sitting rooms and hallways of the house, speaking softly of business. They kept a respectful silence whenever any member of the family approached. When the time came to enter the dining room and pay their last respects to Rosa, everyone trembled, for if anything her beauty had grown more remarkable in death. The ladies moved into the living room, where they arranged the chairs in a circle. There they could weep at leisure, unburdening themselves of their own troubles as they wept for someone else’s death. The weeping was copious, but it was dignified and muted. Some of the women murmured prayers under their breath. The maids moved back and forth through the sitting rooms and halls, distributing tea and cognac, homemade sweets, handkerchiefs for the women, and cold compresses soaked in ammonia for those ladies who felt faint from the lack of air, the scent of candles, and the weight of their emotion. All the del Valle sisters except Clara, who was still only a child, were dressed in black from head to toe and flanked their mother like a row of crows. Nívea, who had shed all her tears, sat rigid on her chair without a sigh, without a word, and without ammonia, to which she was allergic. As they arrived at the house, visitors stopped in to pay her their condolences. Some kissed her on both cheeks and others held her tight for a few seconds, but she seemed not to recognize even those she numbered among her closest friends. She had seen others of her children die in early childhood or at birth, but none had caused the sense of loss that she felt now.

  All the brothers and sisters said goodbye to Rosa with a kiss on her cold forehead except for Clara, who refused to go anywhere near the dining room. They did not insist, because of both her extreme sensitivity and her tendency to sleepwalk whenever her imagination ran away with her. She stayed by herself in the garden curled up beside Barrabás, refusing to eat or have anything to do with the funeral. Only Nana kept an eye on her and tried to comfort her, but Clara pushed her away.

  Despite the care Severo took to hush all speculation, Rosa’s death became a public scandal. To anyone who listened, Dr. Cuevas offered the most logical explanation of her death, which was due, he said, to galloping pneumonia. But rumor had it that she had mistakenly been poisoned in her father’s stead. In those days political assassinations were unknown in the country, and in any case poison was a method only whores and fishwives would resort to, a lowly technique that had not been seen since colonial times; even crimes of passion were nowadays resolved face to face. There was a great uproar over the attempt on his life, and before Severo could do anything to stop it, an announcement appeared in the opposition paper in which veiled accusations were made against the oligarchy and it was asserted that the conservatives were even capable of this act, because they could not forgive Severo del Valle for throwing his lot in with the liberals despite his social class. The police tried to pursue the clue of the brandy decanter, but all they were able to learn was that its source was not the same as that of the roast pig stuffed with partridges and plums and that the voters of the South had nothing to do with the whole matter. The mysterious decanter had been found outside the service door to the del Valle house on the same day and at the same time that the roast pig was delivered. The cook had simply assumed that it was part of the same gift. Neither the zeal of the police nor
Severo’s own investigation, which was carried out with the help of a private detective he engaged, shed any light on the identity of the assassin, and the shadow of suspended vengeance has continued to hang over succeeding generations. It was the first of many acts of violence that marked the fate of the del Valle family.