The House of the Spirits

by Isabel Allende

  The rattle of the cart wheels and the woodcutter’s curses roused the inhabitants of the huts, who gradually emerged from their doorways. They stared at the new arrivals with amazement and mistrust. It had been fifteen years since they had seen an owner, and they had simply assumed that there no longer was one. They could not have recognized in this tall, imperious man the little boy with chestnut curls who had played in this same courtyard many years before. Esteban stared back at them and likewise remembered no one. They were a sorry lot. He saw various women of indecipherable age, their skin dry and cracked, some apparently pregnant, all of them barefoot and dressed in faded rags. He calculated that there must be at least a dozen children of all sizes and ages. The youngest ones were naked. Other faces peered from the doorways, too timid to come out. A few children scampered to hide behind the women.

  Esteban stepped down from the cart, unloaded his two bags, and pressed a few coins into the woodcutter’s hand.

  “I’ll wait for you if you like, patrón,” the man said.

  “This is as far as I’m going.”

  He walked up to the house, gave the door a single forceful push, and went in. There was enough light inside because morning entered through the broken shutters and the chinks in the ceiling where the tiles had fallen through. The place was full of dust and spiderwebs, and looked thoroughly abandoned; clearly in all these years none of the tenant farmers had dared to leave his hut to move into the large, empty house of the absent owner. They had not touched the furniture; it was all as it had been when he was a child, each piece exactly where it had stood before, except uglier, and more lugubrious and rickety than he remembered. The entire house was carpeted with a thick layer of grass, dust, and dried-out leaves. It smelled like a tomb. A skeletal dog barked angrily at him, but Esteban Trueba paid him no attention until the dog, too tired to continue, lay down in a corner to scratch his fleas. Esteban put his bags on a table and set out to walk through the house, fighting off the sadness that was beginning to overwhelm him. He went from one room to another, noticing how time had worn everything away, and the poverty and dirt, and it seemed to him that this was a hole far worse than the mine. The kitchen was a wide filthy room, with a high ceiling and walls blackened with smoke from the wood and coal stoves, moldy and in ruins. The copper pots and pans that had not been used for fifteen years, apparently untouched in all that time, still hung from their nails. The bedrooms had the same beds and huge wardrobes with full-length glasses that his father had bought long ago, but the mattresses were a pile of rotten wool in which bugs had nested for generations. He heard the faint passage of the rats in the rafters. He could not tell if the floors were made of wood or tiles, because they were invisible, completely covered with grime. A layer of gray dust blurred the contours of the furniture. Where the drawing room had been he could still see the German piano, with one broken leg and yellow keys, which sounded like an untuned harpsichord.

  On the shelves there were still a few illegible books, their pages chewed up by the damp, and on the floor there were the remnants of ancient magazines whose pages had been scattered by the wind. The armchairs sat with their springs sticking out, and there was a mouse nest in the wing chair where his mother had liked to knit before her illness turned her hands to claws.

  When he finished his tour, Esteban had a clearer view of things. He knew that an immense task lay ahead of him, for if the house was in such bad repair, he could scarcely expect the rest of the property to be in any better condition. For a second he was tempted to pile his two bags back on the cart and return whence he had come, but he rejected that plan in a flash and resolved that if there was anything that could alleviate the grief and rage of Rosa’s loss it would be breaking his back working in this ruined land. He took off his coat, drew a deep breath, and went out into the courtyard where the woodcutter was still waiting, not far from the tenants who had grouped themselves at a certain distance, with the shyness typical of country people. They looked at each other with curiosity. Trueba took two steps toward them and noticed a slight backward movement in the tiny cluster; he let his eyes wander over the shabby peasants and tried to force a friendly smile to the runny-nosed children, the bleary-eyed old people, and the women without hope, but it came out like a grimace.

  “Where are the men?” he asked.

  The only young man stepped forward. He was probably the same age as Esteban Trueba, but he looked older.

  “They left,” he said.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Pedro Segundo García, sir,” the man replied.

  “I’m the patrón here now. The party’s over. We’re going to work. Anyone who doesn’t like the idea should clear out immediately. Whoever stays won’t lack for food, but he’ll have to work good and hard. I don’t want any deadbeats or smart-alecks around, you understand?”

  They looked at one another in amazement. They had not understood half of what he said, but they could recognize their master’s voice when they heard it.

  “We understand, patrón,” Pedro Segundo García said. “We have nowhere to go. We’ve always lived here. We’ll stay.”

  A little boy squatted on the ground and began to defecate, and a mangy dog ran up to sniff him. Revolted, Esteban ordered them to take the child away, hose the courtyard down, and kill the dog. Thus began the new life that, in time, would make him forget Rosa.

  * * *

  No one’s going to convince me that I wasn’t a good patrón. Anyone who saw Tres Marías in decline and who could see it now, when it’s a model estate, would have to agree with me. That’s why I can’t go along with my granddaughter’s story about class struggle. Because when it comes right down to it, those poor peasants are a lot worse off today than they were fifty years ago. I was like a father to them. Agrarian reform ruined things for everyone.

  I used all the money I had saved to marry Rosa, and everything the foreman sent me from the mine, to pull Tres Marías out of misery, but it wasn’t money that saved the place, it was hard work and organization. The word went out that there was a new patrón at Tres Marías and that we were using mules to clear the land of stones and plow the fields to ready them for planting. In no time at all men began to arrive, offering their service as hired hands, because I paid well and gave them meals. I bought animals. Animals were sacred to me, and even if we had to go a year without eating meat, they were never killed. Thus our livestock prospered. I organized the men into different crews, and after they had finished working in the fields we set to work on restoring the main house. They weren’t carpenters or masons, and I had to teach them everything from books I bought. We even did the plumbing. We fixed the roofs, whitewashed the house from top to bottom, and cleaned it inside and out until it sparkled. I distributed the furniture among the various tenants, except the dining-room table, which was still intact despite the worms that had got into everything, and the wrought-iron bed that had belonged to my parents. I continued living in the empty house, with no other furniture apart from those two pieces and a few wooden crates to sit on, until Férula sent me the new furniture I had ordered from the capital. They were large, heavy, ostentatious pieces that were built to last for generations and to withstand country life. The proof is that it took an earthquake to destroy them. I arranged them along the walls, with an eye more to convenience than aesthetics, and once the house was comfortable I felt happy and began to get used to the idea that I was going to spend many years—perhaps even my whole life—in Tres Marías.

  The tenants’ wives took turns as servants in the main house, and they also tended my orchard. I soon saw the first flowers in the garden I had planned out with my own hand and that, with a few minor changes, is the same one that’s there today. In those days people worked without grumbling. I think my presence made them feel secure again. They saw the land gradually restored to prosperity. They were good, simple men, with no rebels among them. It’s also true that they were very poor and very
ignorant. Before I got there, they were just tilling their own small family plots, which provided them with the bare necessities to keep from starving to death—providing, of course, that they weren’t struck by some catastrophe such as drought, frost, plague, ants, or snails, in which case things became very difficult indeed. But after I arrived all that changed. One by one we rescued the old fields. We rebuilt the chicken coops and stables and began to plan an irrigation system so the crops wouldn’t have to depend on the weather. But it wasn’t an easy life. It was very hard. Sometimes I would walk to town and return with a veterinarian who would check the cows and hens and, while he was at it, anybody who was sick. It’s not true that I assumed that if the vet knew how to treat animals his training was good enough for people, as my granddaughter says when she wants to get me mad. The fact is, you couldn’t get a doctor in a godforsaken place like that. The peasants went to an Indian curandera who knew all about the power of herbs and suggestion, and in whom they had great confidence. More than in the vet. Mothers gave birth with help from their neighbors, prayers, and a midwife who almost never arrived on time, because she had to make the trip by burro, but she was as good at delivering babies as she was at pulling calves from wall-eyed cows. Those who were gravely ill, whom no spell of the curandera or potion from the vet could help, were placed on a cart and taken by Pedro Segundo García or me to a hospital run by nuns, where there was frequently a doctor who helped them die. The dead and their bones ended up in a tiny graveyard next to the abandoned church, at the foot of the volcano, where there is now a proper cemetery. Once or twice a year I arranged for a priest to come and bless unions, animals, and machines, baptize children, and say a belated prayer for the dead. The only amusement then was castrating pigs and bulls, cockfights, hopscotch, and the incredible tales of old Pedro García, may he rest in peace. He was Pedro Segundo’s father and he said his grandfather had fought in the ranks of the patriots who kicked the Spaniards out of America. He showed the children how to let themselves be stung by spiders and drink the urine of pregnant women as a form of immunization. He knew almost as many herbs as the curandera, but he would get confused when it came to deciding on their use, and he had committed some irreparable mistakes. Nonetheless, I have to say that he had an unbeatable method for pulling teeth, which had made him justly famous throughout the region. It was a combination of red wine and Our Fathers, which plunged the patient into a hypnotic trance. He pulled one of my molars, and if he were alive today he would be my dentist.

  I soon felt at home in the country. My closest neighbors were a good horse ride away, but I wasn’t interested in having a social life. I enjoyed my solitude, and besides I had a lot of work on my hands. I gradually became a savage. I began to forget words, my vocabulary grew smaller, and I became very demanding. Since I had no need to keep up appearances, the bad character I’ve always had only got worse. Everything made me angry. I got furious if I saw the children circling the kitchen to steal bread, if the hens were noisy in the courtyard, if sparrows invaded the cornfields. When my ill humor began to bother me and I felt uncomfortable in my own skin, I would go out hunting. I would wake up long before dawn and leave with my shotgun on my shoulder, with my game bag and my partridge hound. I liked to ride horseback in the dark, and I liked the cold air of those early hours, the long wait in the shadows, the silence, the smell of gunpowder and blood, the feel of the weapon drawn back against my shoulder with a dry knock, and the sight of the prey as it fell kicking. All this would calm me, and when I returned from hunting, with four wretched rabbits in my pouch, and a few partridges so full of holes that they couldn’t even be cooked, half dead on my feet and covered with mud, I felt happy and relieved.

  Whenever I think back on those days, I feel a great sadness. My life has gone by very fast. If I had it to do over again, there are a few mistakes I wouldn’t make, but in general there’s nothing I regret. Yes, I’ve been a good patrón; there’s no doubt about it.

  * * *

  The first months, Esteban Trueba was so busy channeling water, digging wells, removing stones, clearing pastures, and repairing the chicken coops and stables that he had no time to think about anything. He went to bed thoroughly exhausted and woke at dawn, stopping just long enough to eat a meager breakfast in the kitchen before riding off to supervise the work in the fields. He did not return until sundown. Only then did he sit down to eat his one real meal of the day, alone at the dining-room table. The first months, he kept his promise to himself of always bathing and changing his clothes for dinner, as he had heard the British colonizers did in the most distant hamlets of Africa and Asia, so as not to lose their dignity and authority. He would put on his best clothes, shave, and play his favorite opera arias on the gramophone. But little by little he let himself be conquered by rusticity, and came to accept the fact that he had no calling as a dandy, especially since there was no one to appreciate his efforts. He stopped shaving, cut his hair only when it reached his shoulders, and continued to bathe once a day only because the habit was so ingrained in him, but he grew indifferent to his clothes and manners. He was slowly becoming a barbarian. Before going to sleep he would read for a while or play chess. He had developed the ability to compete against a book without cheating and had learned to lose matches without getting mad. Still, the exhaustion produced by so much hard work was not enough to suppress his robust and sensual nature. He began to have difficult nights in which the blankets seemed excessively heavy to him, the sheets too light. His horse played nasty tricks on him, suddenly becoming a formidable female, a hard, wild mountain of flesh, on which he rode until his bones ached. The warm, aromatic melons in his orchard looked to him like enormous breasts, and he was astonished to find himself burying his face in his saddle blanket, seeking in the sour smell of his horse’s sweat the forbidden, distant scent of his first prostitutes. During the night, he sweated through nightmares of rotten shellfish, of enormous slabs of raw beef, of blood, semen, and tears. He would wake up tense, with his penis like an iron rod between his legs, angrier than ever. Hoping for relief, he would run out and plunge naked into the icy waters of the river until he couldn’t breathe, but then he would feel invisible hands stroking his legs. Beaten, he would let himself float aimlessly, feeling the hug of the current, the kiss of the tadpoles, the lash of the rushes that grew along the banks. Soon his terrible need became notorious. Nothing could quench it, neither immersing himself in the river, nor cinnamon teas, nor placing a piece of flint beneath his mattress, not even those shameful manipulations that drove the boys in boarding school out of their minds, left them blind, and plunged them into eternal damnation. When he began to look with concupiscent eyes at the birds in the corral, the children playing naked in the orchard, and even at raw bread dough, he understood that his virility would not be soothed by priestly substitutes. His common sense told him that he would have to find a woman, and once he had made up his mind, the terrible anxiety that afflicted him began to ebb and his fury seemed to abate. That day he woke up smiling for the first time in months.

  Pedro García, the old man, saw him whistling on his way to the stables, and shook his head in wonder.

  All that day, the patrón was busy plowing a field that had just been cleared and that was slated to be planted with corn. Afterward he went with Pedro Segundo García to attend to a cow that was in the process of giving birth and whose calf was turned the wrong way around. He had to stick his arm in up to the elbow to turn the creature upside down and help it pull its head through. The cow died anyway, but he did not get upset about it. He ordered the calf bottle-fed, washed himself in a pail, and got back on his horse. Normally it would have been his dinnertime, but he was not hungry. He was in no hurry, for he had already made his choice.

  He had seen the girl many times carrying her sniveling little brother on her hip, with a bag on her shoulder or a water jug on her head. He had watched her washing clothes, squatting on the flat stones of the river, her dark legs polished by the water, a
s she rubbed the faded rags with her rough peasant hands. She was big-boned and had an Indian face, with broad features, dark skin, and a sweet, peaceful expression. Her fleshy ample mouth still had all its teeth, and when she smiled her whole face lit up, but that did not happen very often. She had the beauty of early youth, although he could see that it would quickly fade, as it does with women who are born to have many children, work without rest, and bury their dead. Her name was Pancha García, and she was fifteen years old.

  When Esteban Trueba went out to look for her, it was already late in the afternoon and the air was crisp. He rode his horse slowly through the long stretches of green that separated the pastures, asking after her as he went, until he spotted her on the path that led to her hut. She was doubled over beneath the weight of a sheaf of hawthorn for the kitchen hearth, barefoot, her head bowed. He looked at her from high in the saddle and immediately felt the urgent desire that had been tormenting him for so many months. He trotted up until he was right beside her. She heard him, but she continued walking without looking up, following the custom of all the women of her kind who bow their heads before the male. Esteban bent down and removed her burden, held it in the air for a moment, and then hurled it violently to the side of the path. He threw his arm around her waist, swept her up with an animal-like grunt, and placed her before him in the saddle. The girl did not resist. He kicked his heels in the stirrups and they took off at a gallop in the direction of the river. They dismounted without speaking and looked each other over. Esteban unfastened his broad leather belt and she stepped back, but he grabbed her with a single stroke of his hand. They fell arm in arm among the eucalyptus leaves.