The House of the Spirits

by Isabel Allende

  Esteban finished picking the whitish fish from the tangle of bones and laid his knife and fork across his plate. He sat as stiffly as he walked, straight as a pole, his head thrown slightly back and to one side, with a sidelong glance that held a mixture of pride, distrust, and myopia. His gesture would have been unpleasant if his eyes had not been so astonishingly sweet and bright. His tense posture would have suited a short stubby man who wanted to appear taller, but he himself was almost six feet tall and slender. All the lines of his body were vertical and swept upward, from his sharp aquiline nose and pointed eyebrows to his high forehead, which was crowned with a lion’s mane of hair that he combed straight back. He was big-boned, with thick, spatulate fingers. He walked with a long stride, and moved with energy; he appeared to be very strong, although there was no lack of grace to his movements. He had a very agreeable face, despite his severe, somber demeanor and his frequently sour expression. His most salient trait was his moodiness and a tendency to grow violent and lose his head, a characteristic he had had since childhood, when he used to throw himself on the floor foaming at the mouth, so furious that he could scarcely breathe, and kicking like one possessed by the devil. He had to be plunged into freezing water to regain control. Later on he learned to manage these fits, but he was left with a short temper, which needed very little provocation to blossom into terrible attacks.

  “I’m not returning to the mine,” he said.

  It was the first sentence he had exchanged at the table with his sister. He had made his mind up the night before, when he realized that it was senseless to continue leading a hermit’s life while seeking for a quick fortune. He still had two years left on the concession to the mine, enough time to finish exploring the marvelous lode he had discovered, but he felt that even if the foreman robbed him a little or did not know how to work it as well as he himself might, that was no reason for him to bury himself alive in the desert. He had no wish to become rich by such a sacrifice. He had his whole life ahead of him to make money if he could, time enough to be bored and to await death, without Rosa.

  “You’ll have to work at something, Esteban,” Férula replied. “It’s true we spend almost nothing, but Mama’s medicines are expensive.”

  Esteban looked at his sister. She was still a beautiful woman, with rich curves and the oval face of a Roman madonna, but already the ugliness of resignation could be glimpsed through her pale, peach-toned skin and her eyes full of shadows. Férula had accepted the role of her mother’s nurse. She slept in the room that adjoined her mother’s, ready at any moment to run in and administer her potions, hold her bedpan, or straighten her pillows. She was a tormented soul. She took pleasure in humiliation and in menial tasks, and since she believed that she would get to heaven by suffering terrible injustice, she was content to clean her mother’s ulcerated legs, washing her and sinking deeply into her stench and wretchedness, even peering into her bedpan. And, much as she hated herself for these torturous and unconfessable pleasures, she hated her mother more for being their instrument. She waited on her without complaint, but she managed subtly to extract from her the price of her invalidism. Without anything being said openly, the fact remained that the daughter had sacrificed her life to care for the mother, and that she had become a spinster for that reason. Férula had turned down two suitors on the pretext of her mother’s illness. She never spoke of it, but everyone knew about it. She moved thickly and awkwardly and had the same sour character as her brother, but life and the fact that she was a woman had forced her to overcome it and to clamp down on the bit. She seemed so perfect that word had spread she was a saint. She was cited as an example because of the devotion that she lavished on Doña Ester and because of the way she had raised her only brother when their mother became ill and their father died, leaving them in dire poverty. Férula had adored her brother Esteban when he was a child. She slept with him, bathed him, took him out for strolls, did other people’s sewing from dawn to dusk to pay for his schooling, and wept with rage and helplessness the day Esteban took a job in a notary’s office because they could not make ends meet with what she earned. She had taken care of him and waited on him as she now did her mother, and she had woven him too into her invisible net of guilt and unrepayable debts of gratitude.

  The boy began to move away from her the day he first put on long pants. Esteban could recall the exact moment when he had realized that his sister was an ominous shadow in his life. It was when he had received his first wages. He had decided to save fifty centavos to fulfill a dream he had cherished ever since he was a child: to have a cup of Viennese coffee. Through the windows of the Hotel Francés he had seen the waiters pass with trays held high above their heads on which lay these treasures: tall glass goblets crowned with towers of whipped cream and adorned with beautiful glazed maraschino cherries. The day of his first paycheck, he had crossed back and forth outside the establishment before getting up the courage to go through the door.

  Finally, beret in hand, he had stepped timidly across the threshold and entered the luxurious dining room, with its teardrop chandeliers and stylish furniture, convinced that everyone was staring at him, that their thousand eyes found his suit too tight and his shoes old. He sat down on the edge of the chair, his ears burning, and gave his order to the waiter with a mere thread of a voice. He waited impatiently, watching people come and go in the tall mirrors, tasting with anticipation that pleasure he had so often dreamed of. His Viennese coffee arrived, far more impressive than he had imagined—superb, delicious, and accompanied by three honey biscuits. He stared at it in fascination for a long while, until he finally dared to pick up the long-handled spoon and, with a sigh of ecstasy, plunge it into the cream. His mouth was watering. He wanted to make this moment last as long as possible, to stretch it all the way to infinity. He began to stir the spoon, observing the way the dark liquid of the cup slowly moved into the cream. He stirred and stirred and stirred . . . and suddenly the tip of the spoon knocked against the glass, opening a crack through which the coffee leapt, pouring onto his clothes. Horrified, Esteban watched the entire contents of the goblet spill onto his only suit before the amused glances of the occupants of the adjoining tables. Pale with frustration, he stood up and walked out of the Hotel Francés fifty centavos poorer, leaving a trail of Viennese coffee on the springy carpet. When he reached his house, he was soaked and furious, beside himself. When Férula found out what had happened, she told him acidly, “That’s what you get for spending Mama’s medicine money on your private little whims. God punished you.” At that moment Esteban saw clearly the ways his sister used to keep him down and how she managed to make him feel guilty. He understood that he would have to escape. As he made moves to get out from under her tutelage, Férula began to dislike him. His freedom to come and go stung her like a reproach, like an injustice. When he fell in love with Rosa and Férula saw how desperate he was, like a little boy begging for her help, needing her, following her around the house pleading with her to intercede on his behalf with the del Valle family, that she speak to Rosa, that she bribe Nana, she again felt important to her brother. For a time they seemed to have been reconciled. But that rapprochement did not last long, and Férula was quick to realize that she had been used. She was happy when she saw her brother leave for the mine. From the time he had begun to work, when he was fifteen, Esteban had supported the household and had promised always to do so, but for Férula that had not been enough. It bothered her to have to stay locked up within these walls that stank of medicine and age, to be kept awake at night by the moans of her sick mother, always attentive to the clock so as to administer each dose at the proper time, bored, tired, and unhappy while her brother had no taste of such obligations. Before him lay a destiny that was bright, free, and full of promise. He could marry, have children, know what love was. The day she sent the telegram telling him of Rosa’s death she had felt a strange shiver, almost of joy.

  “You’ll have to work at something,” Férula
repeated.

  “You’ll never lack for anything so long as I live,” he said.

  “That’s easy to say,” Férula replied, drawing a fish bone from between her teeth.

  “I think I’m going to go to the country, maybe to Tres Marías.”

  “That place is in ruins, Esteban. I’ve always told you that the best thing you could do with it is sell it, but you’re as stubborn as a mule.”

  “Land is something one should never sell. It’s the only thing that’s left when everything else is gone.”

  “I don’t agree. Land is a romantic idea. What makes a man rich is a good eye for business,” Férula insisted. “But you always said that one day you would go and live in the country.”

  “That day has arrived. I hate this city.”

  “Why don’t you say it’s because you hate this house?”

  “That too,” he answered brutally.

  “I would like to have been born a man, so I could leave too,” she said, full of hatred.

  “And I would not have liked to be a woman,” he said.

  They finished eating in silence. The brother and sister had drifted apart, and the only thing that remained to unite them was the presence of their mother and the vague memory of the love they had had for each other as children. They had grown up in a ruined home, witness to the moral and economic deterioration of their father and then the slow illness of their mother. Doña Ester had begun to suffer from arthritis at an early age, becoming stiffer and stiffer until she could only move with the greatest difficulty, like a living corpse; finally, no long able to bend her knees, she had settled for good into her wheelchair, her widowhood, and her despair. Esteban remembered his childhood and adolescence, his tight-fitting suits, the rope of Saint Francis he was forced to tie around his waist as a sign of who only knew what vows his mother or his sister had made, his carefully mended shirts, and his loneliness. Férula, five years his senior, washed and starched his only two shirts every other day so that he would always look fresh and properly dressed, and reminded him that on their mother’s side they were heir to the noblest and most highborn surname of the viceroyalty of Lima. Trueba had simply been a regrettable accident in the life of Doña Ester, who was destined to marry someone of her own class, but she had fallen hopelessly in love with that good-for-nothing immigrant, a first-generation settler who within a few short years had squandered first her dowry and then her inheritance.

  But his blue-blood past was of no use to Esteban if there was not enough money in the house to pay the grocer and he had to go to school on foot because he did not have the fare for the streetcar. He recalled how they had packed him off to school with his chest and back lined with newspaper, because he had no woolen underclothes and his overcoat was in tatters, and how he had suffered at the thought that his schoolmates might be able to hear, as he could, the crunch of the paper as it moved against his skin. In winter, the only source of heat in the whole house was the brazier in his mother’s bedroom, where the three of them huddled together to save on candles and coal. His had been a childhood of privations, discomfort, harshness, interminable nighttime rosaries, fear, and guilt. All that remained of those days was his fury and his outsized pride.

  Two days later Esteban Trueba left for the country. Férula accompanied him to the train station. She kissed him a cold goodbye on the cheek and waited for him to board the train carrying his two leather suitcases with the bronze locks, the same ones he had bought when he left for the mine and that were supposed to last him the rest of his life, according to the salesman’s promise. She told him to be sure to take care of himself and to try to visit them from time to time; she said she would miss him, but they both knew they were destined not to see each other for many years, and underneath it all they were both rather relieved.

  “Let me know if Mother takes a turn for the worse!” Esteban shouted through the window as the train pulled out.

  “Don’t worry!” Férula replied, waving her handkerchief from the platform.

  Esteban Trueba leaned back in the red velvet seat and felt deep gratitude to the British, who had had the foresight to build first-class cars in which one could travel like a gentleman, without having to put up with chickens, baskets, string-tied bundles, and the howls of other people’s children. He congratulated himself for having decided on the more expensive ticket for the first time in his life, and observed that this was one of the details that marked the difference between a yokel and a gentleman. He decided that from that day on, no matter how tight his circumstances, he would always pay for the small comforts that made him feel rich.

  “I don’t plan to be poor ever again!” he decided, dreaming of the seam of gold.

  Through the window of the train he watched the passing landscape of the central valley. Vast fields stretched from the foot of the mountain range, a fertile countryside filled with vineyards, wheat fields, alfalfa, and marigolds. He compared it with the sterile plateaus of the North, where he had spent two years stuck in a hole in the midst of a rough and lunar horizon whose terrifying beauty never ceased to interest him. He had been fascinated by the colors of the desert, the blues, the purples, the yellows of the minerals lying on the surface of the earth.

  “My life is changing,” he said softly. He closed his eyes and fell asleep.

  * * *

  He got off the train at the station of San Lucas. It was a wretched place. At that hour of the morning there was not a soul on the wooden platform, its roof eaten away by inclement weather and ants. From where he stood he could see the whole valley through an impalpable mist that rose from the earth the night rain had soaked. The distant mountains disappeared behind the clouds of a shrouded sky; only the snowy peak of the volcano could be seen in all its clarity, outlined against the landscape and lit by a timid winter sun. He looked around him. In his childhood, during the only happy time he could recall, before his father slid utterly into ruin and abandoned himself to alcohol and disgrace, the two of them had gone horseback riding in this part of the country. He remembered that he played during the summers at Tres Marías, but it was all so long ago that memory had almost erased it, and he did not recognize the place. He combed the landscape for the town of San Lucas, but was only able to make out a far-off hamlet that was faded in the dampness of the morning. He walked around the station. There was a padlock on the door to the only office. There was a penciled note tacked on it, but it was so smudged that he could not read it. He heard the train pull out behind him, leaving a column of white smoke. He was alone in the silent landscape. He picked up his bags and stepped out into the mud and stones of a path that led into the town. He walked for more than ten minutes, grateful that it was not raining, because it was only with great difficulty that he managed to advance along the path with his heavy suitcases, and he realized that the rain had rapidly converted it into an impassable mudhole. As he neared the hamlet, he saw smoke in several of the chimneys and breathed a sigh of relief, for it was so lonely and decayed, he had feared it was a ghost town.

  He stopped at the edge of town and saw no one. Silence reigned on the only street, which was lined with modest adobe houses, and he felt as if he were walking in his sleep. He approached the nearest house, which had no windows; the door was open. Leaving his bags on the sidewalk, he stepped inside, calling out in a loud voice. It was dark inside because the only source of light was the door, and it took his eyes several seconds to adjust. Then he was able to make out two children playing on the hard earth floor, staring at him with great, astonished eyes, and beyond them, in a courtyard, a woman walking toward him, wiping her hands on the edge of her apron. When she saw him, she made an instinctive motion to arrange a lock of hair that had fallen over her forehead. He greeted her and she replied, covering her mouth with her fingers as she spoke, to hide her toothless gums. Trueba explained that he needed to rent a cart, but she appeared not to understand him and only stood there, hiding the children in her
apron, with a vacant expression. He walked out the door, picked up his bags, and set out on his way again.

  When he had walked nearly around the entire town without seeing anyone and was just beginning to grow desperate, he heard the hooves of a horse behind him. It was a rickety cart driven by a woodcutter. Trueba stood in front of it, forcing the driver to stop.

  “Can you drive me to Tres Marías? I’ll pay you handsomely!” he shouted.

  “What takes you there, sir?” the man replied. “That place is just a lawless heap of rocks, a no-man’s-land.”

  But he agreed to take him, and helped him arrange his suitcases among the bundles of wood. Trueba sat down beside him on the coachman’s seat. Here and there children darted out of doorways as they heard the wagon pass. Trueba felt lonelier than ever.

  About five miles outside the town of San Lucas, along a ruined path overgrown with weeds and full of potholes, there was a wooden sign with the name of the property. It hung from a broken chain and the wind knocked it against the post with a muffled sound that made it echo like a funeral drum. A single glance was enough to make him understand that it would take a Hercules to rescue the place from desolation. The weeds had swallowed up the path, and wherever he looked all he saw were rocks, thick underbrush, and mountains. There was not even a suggestion of pasture or of the vineyards he remembered, and no one came out to greet him. The cart moved slowly, following the tracks that the passage of men and beasts had carved into the mass of weeds. After a moment he was able to make out the main house, which was still standing, although it looked like something from a nightmare, full of rubble, with chicken wire and garbage strewn across the floor. Half the tiles on the roof were broken, and a wild tangle of vines had grown through the windows and covered most of the outside wall. Around the house stood several windowless adobe huts. They had not been whitewashed and were black with soot. Two dogs were fighting ferociously in the courtyard.