“Only God can judge and damn, my child. What were they doing?”
Férula could spend half an hour on the details. She was a gifted narrator who knew exactly where to pause, how to measure her cadence, how to explain without too many gestures, painting a scene so true to life than her listener felt as if he were there. It was incredible how she could sense from the half-open door the quality of their trembling, the abundance of juices, the words whispered in the ear, the most secret smells—a veritable miracle. She unburdened herself of these agitated states of mind, returned to the house with her idol’s mask, impassive and severe, and resumed giving orders—put this here, and it was done; change the flowers in the vases, and they were changed; wash the windows; hush those damn birds, their noise won’t let Señora Clara sleep, and all that cackling is going to frighten the baby and who knows but it might be born with wings. Nothing escaped her watchful eye. She was always moving, unlike Clara, who found everything so lovely and who was as happy to eat truffles as she was to have leftover soup, to sleep in a featherbed as to sleep sitting up in a chair, or to bathe in scented water as not to bathe at all. As her pregnancy advanced, she seemed to be distractedly letting go of reality and turning inward in a secret, unceasing conversation with her baby.
Esteban wanted a son who would bear his name and pass his family name on down the generations.
“It’s a little girl and her name is Blanca,” Clara had said when she announced that she was pregnant.
And so it was.
Dr. Cuevas, whom Clara no longer feared, calculated that the birth would be sometime around the middle of October, but it was already the beginning of November and Clara was still swinging her enormous belly around, in a state of semi-somnambulance, ever more distracted, more exhausted, and more asthmatic, indifferent to everything around her, even her husband. From time to time she didn’t even recognize him and would ask “May I help you?” when she noticed him standing by her side. Once the doctor had ruled out the possibility of a miscalculation in the date and it was evident to all that Clara had not the slightest intention of giving birth the normal way, he proceeded to open her belly and extract little Blanca, who proved to be an uglier, hairier child than usual. Esteban jumped when he saw her, convinced that destiny was playing a cruel joke on him and that instead of the legitimate Trueba he had promised his mother on her deathbed, he had sired a monster, and a female one to boot. He personally examined the child and verified that she had all the necessary parts in their correct locations, at least those that could be seen with the naked eye. Dr. Cuevas consoled him by explaining that the child’s repulsive appearance was due to the fact that she had spent a longer time than usual in her mother’s body, to the effects of the Caesarean, and to her own small, thin, dark, and somewhat hairy constitution. Clara, on the other hand, was delighted with her daughter. She seemed to have wakened from a protracted stupor and discovered the joy of being alive. She took the child in her arms and would not let her go. She went everywhere with her little girl clutched to her breast, nursing her constantly without a set schedule and without regard for manners or modesty, like an Indian. She did not want to swaddle her, cut her hair, pierce her ears, or hire a nursemaid to take care of her, and least of all to use milk manufactured in some laboratory, as all the ladies did who could afford such luxuries. Nor would she accept Nana’s prescription for giving her cow’s milk diluted with rice water, because, she said, if nature had wanted human beings to be raised on that, she would have made women’s breasts capable of secreting it. Clara spoke to the child all the time, not in baby talk but in perfect Spanish, as if she were conversing with a grown-up, the same way she addressed plants and animals; she was convinced that if she had had such good results with flora and fauna, there was no reason why it should not work with her own child. The combination of mother’s milk and conversation transformed Blanca into a healthy, almost pretty child who bore no resemblance at all to the armadillo she had been at birth.
A few weeks after Blanca’s birth, Esteban Trueba was able to confirm, thanks to her lively kicks aboard the sailboat on the blue silk sea, that maternity had not diminished his wife’s enthusiasm for making love—just the opposite. And Férula, too busy in caring for the child, who had formidable lungs, an impulsive nature, and a voracious appetite, had no time to say the rosary in the slums or attend confession with Father Antonio, much less to peek through the half-open door.
— FOUR —
THE TIME OF THE SPIRITS
At an age when most children are still in diapers, Blanca looked like an intelligent midget. She stumbled when she walked, but she kept her balance and she spoke correctly and fed herself, all because her mother treated her like an adult. She had all her teeth and was just beginning to open the big wardrobes and wreak havoc on their contents when the family decided to spend the summer at Tres Marías, a place Clara had only heard about. At that moment in Blanca’s life, her curiosity was stronger than her instinct for survival, and Férula was constantly chasing the child up and down the hall, afraid she would fall from the second story, stick her head in the oven, or swallow a bar of soap. The idea of taking the child to the country seemed risky, exhausting, and unnecessary, since Esteban could do everything he needed to do by himself at Tres Marías while she and Clara enjoyed their civilized existence in the capital. But Clara was enthusiastic. To her the country was a romantic idea—because she had never been inside a stable, as Férula put it. The preparations for the trip kept the family busy for two weeks, and the house became a clutter of trunks, steamer baskets, and valises. They hired a special car on the train to accommodate the unbelievable amount of baggage and servants Férula thought they needed, not to mention the birds in their cages, which Clara could not leave behind, and Blanca’s toy chests, which were filled with mechanical clowns, porcelain figurines, stuffed animals, wind-up dancers, and dolls with real human hair and movable joints, who traveled with their own clothing, carriages, and china dishes. At the sight of that disorganized, nervous crowd and that pandemonium of belongings, Esteban felt defeated for the first time in his life, especially when he discovered, in the midst of all the baggage, a life-size statue of Saint Anthony, cross-eyed and wearing embossed sandals. He stared at the surrounding chaos and regretted his decision to travel with his wife and daughter, wondering how it could be possible that he had only packed two bags for this foray into the outside world when they had amassed a carload of dishes and a parade of servants that had nothing to do with the purpose of the trip.
At San Lucas they took three carriages, which conveyed them to Tres Marías in a cloud of dust, like a bunch of gypsies. Waiting for them in the courtyard of the hacienda were all the tenants, under orders from the foreman, Pedro Segundo García. They were speechless at the sight of this traveling circus. At Férula’s bidding they began to unload the carriages and take the things into the house. No one noticed a little boy of about Blanca’s age who was standing there with a runny nose, his naked belly swollen with parasites. He had a pair of beautiful black eyes that looked out at the world with an old man’s gaze. He was the foreman’s son and, to differentiate him from his father and grandfather, had been named Pedro Tercero García. In the tumult of getting settled, exploring the house, snooping around the orchard, greeting everyone, setting up the altar of Saint Anthony, and shooing the chickens from the beds and the mice from the closets, Blanca pulled off her clothes and ran out naked to play with Pedro Tercero. They played among the packages, hid beneath the furniture, exchanged wet kisses, chewed the same bread, ate the same snot, and smeared themselves with the same filth until, wrapped in each other’s arms, they finally fell asleep under the dining-room table. Clara found them there at ten o’clock at night. Everyone had spent hours looking for them with torches. Teams of tenants had gone up and down the riverbanks, the granaries, the fields, and the stables searching for them, and Férula had got down on her knees before the altar of Saint Anthony. Esteban was hoarse from ca
lling their names and Clara had vainly tried to summon her ability to read the future. When they found them, the little boy was on his back on the floor and Blanca was curled up with her head on the round belly of her new friend. Many years later, they would be found in the same position, and a whole lifetime would not be long enough for their atonement.
From the very first day, Clara understood that there was a place for her in Tres Marías and, just as she recorded it in her notebooks, she felt that she had finally discovered her mission in life. She was not impressed by the brick houses, the school, and the abundant food, because her ability to see what was invisible immediately detected the workers’ resentment, fear, and distrust; and the almost imperceptible noise that quieted whenever she turned her head enabled her to guess certain things about her husband’s character and past. Still, the patrón had changed. Everyone could appreciate that he had stopped going to the Red Lantern. His nights on the town, his cockfights, his gambling, his violent tantrums, and, above all, his bad habit of tumbling girls in the wheatfields were a thing of the past. This they attributed to Clara. And Clara too had changed. From one day to the next, her listlessness had vanished, she had stopped finding everything “so lovely,” and she seemed to have been cured of her habit of speaking with invisible spirits and moving the furniture by supernatural means. She rose at dawn with her husband and ate breakfast with him already dressed; then, while he went out to supervise the work in the fields, Férula took charge of the housework, the servants from the city, who could not adjust to the discomforts of the country and the flies, and Blanca. Clara divided her time between the sewing workshop, the general store, and the school, where she established her headquarters for treating mange and lice, untangling the mysteries of the alphabet, teaching the children to sing “I have a dairy cow, she’s not just any cow,” and the women to boil milk, cure diarrhea, and bleach clothes. At sundown, before the men came in from the fields, Férula gathered all the peasant women and children to say the rosary. They came more out of kindness than faith, giving the aging spinster a chance to recall her good old days in the tenements. Clara waited for her sister-in-law to finish the mystical litanies of Our Fathers and Hail Marys, then used the meetings to repeat the slogans she had heard her mother shout when she chained herself to the gates of Congress. The women listened with embarrassed smiles, for the same reason they prayed with Férula: so as not to displease the patrón’s wife. But those inflammatory cries only made them laugh. “Since when has a man not beaten his wife? If he doesn’t beat her, it’s either because he doesn’t love her or because he isn’t a real man. Since when is a man’s paycheck or the fruit of the earth or what the chickens lay shared between them, when everybody knows he is the one in charge? Since when has a woman ever done the same things as a man? Besides, she was born with a wound between her legs and without balls, right, Señora Clara?” they would say. Clara was beside herself. The women nudged each other in the ribs and smiled shyly with their toothless mouths and their wrinkled eyes, their skin toughened by the sun and their unhealthy lives, knowing full well that if they took it into their heads to put Clara’s ideas into practice, their husbands would beat them. And deservedly, to be sure, as Férula herself declared. Esteban soon found out about the second half of their prayer meetings and became enraged. It was the first time he had ever been angry with Clara and the first time she saw him have one of his famous tantrums. He shouted like a madman, pacing up and down the living room and slamming his fist against the furniture, arguing that if Clara intended to follow in her mother’s footsteps she was going to come face to face with a real man, who would pull her pants down and give her a good spanking so she’d get it out of her damned head to go around haranguing people, and that he categorically forbade her to go to prayer meetings or any other kind and that he wasn’t some ninny whose wife could go around making a fool of him. Clara let him scream his head off and bang on the furniture until he was exhausted. Then, inattentive as ever, she asked him if he knew how to wiggle his ears.
The vacation grew longer and the meetings in the schoolhouse continued. Summer came to an end and autumn covered the fields with fire and gold, changing the landscape. The first cold days arrived with their rain and mud, but Clara did not show the least sign of wanting to return to the city, despite a sustained campaign on the part of Férula, who hated the countryside. During the summer, she had complained about the stifling evenings, which she spent shooing flies, about the dust clouds in the courtyard, which covered the house as if they were living in a mine shaft, about the dirty water in the bathtub, where her special perfumed salts became a Chinese soup, about the flying cockroaches that got between the sheets, about the burrows of the mice and ants, about the half-drowned spiders she found kicking in the glass of water on her night table each morning, about the insolent hens who laid their eggs in her shoes and shat on the lingerie in her dresser. When the weather changed, she had new calamities to complain about: the mud in the courtyard, the abbreviated days—it was dark at five and there was nothing to do but face the long, solitary night—the wind, and the winter colds, which she countered with eucalyptus plasters that were powerless to keep the family from infecting each other in an endless chain. She was tired of struggling against the elements with nothing to break the monotony but watching Blanca grow. The child looked like a cannibal, she said, playing with that dirty little boy, Pedro Tercero, and worst of all the child had no one of her own class to mix with; she was picking up bad manners, and went around with flushed cheeks and scabs on her knees: “Look how she talks, she sounds like an Indian. I’m tired of pulling lice out of her hair and putting blue methylene on her mange.” Despite her muttering, she maintained her rigid dignity, her unchanged bun, her starched blouse, and the ring of keys that hung from her waist. She never perspired, never scratched herself, and always kept her faint scent of lavender and lemon. No one thought that anything could undermine her self-control, until one day she felt an itching on her back. It was such a strong itch that she could not refrain from discreetly scratching it, but nothing gave her any relief. Finally she went into the bathroom and took off her corset, which she always wore, even on the days when she had a lot of work. As she loosened the stays, a dazed mouse, which had spent the entire morning vainly trying to find an exit between the hard points of the corset and the oppressed flesh of its owner, fell to the floor. Férula had the first attack of nerves in her life. Everyone came running at her cries and found her standing in the tub, livid with terror and still half undressed, screaming like a maniac and pointing with a shaking finger at the tiny rodent, who was struggling to his feet and attempting to make his way to a safer place. Esteban said that it was menopause and that there was nothing anyone could do. They paid no more attention when she had the second spell. It was Esteban’s birthday, and that Sunday morning dawned as sunny as anyone could want. There was a great commotion in the house, because there was going to be a party in Tres Marías for the first time since the forgotten days when Doña Ester was a girl. They invited various relatives and friends, who took the train out from the city, and all the landed gentry from the neighborhood, without overlooking the town notables. A week before the party, they prepared the banquet: half a steer roasted in the courtyard, kidney pie, chicken casserole, various corn dishes, eggfruit, and the best harvest wines. At noon the guests began to arrive by coach and horse, and the great adobe house filled with laughter and conversation. Férula excused herself for a moment and ran to the bathroom, one of those immense bathrooms where the toilet was placed in the middle of the room surrounded by a vast desert of white tiles. She was ensconced on that throne-like solitary seat when the door opened and in walked one of the guests, no less a personage than the mayor of the town, already unbuttoning his fly and slightly tipsy from his apéritif. When he saw the lady, he became paralyzed with confusion and surprise, and by the time he was able to react the only thing he could think of was to walk toward her with a twisted smile, crossing the entire room an
d extending his hand.
“Zorebabel Blanco Jamasmié, pleased to meet you,” he introduced himself.
“For God’s sake! It’s impossible to live among such uncouth people! If the rest of you want to stay in this uncivilized purgatory, that’s your prerogative, but I’m returning to the city. I want to live like a human being, the way I always have,” Férula exclaimed when she was able to speak of the incident without bursting into tears. But she did not leave. She did not want to be separated from Clara. She had come to adore the very air Clara exhaled, and even though she no longer had occasion to give her baths and sleep in the same bed with her, she found a thousand ways to express her tender feelings, and to this she dedicated her existence. That woman who was so hard on herself and others could be sweet and smiling with Clara and at times, by extension, with Blanca. Only with Clara did she allow herself the luxury of giving in to her overwhelming desire to serve and be loved; with her, however slyly, she was able to express the secret, most delicate yearnings of her soul. The long years of solitude and unhappiness had distilled her emotions and purified her feelings down to a few terrible, magnificent passions, which possessed her totally. She had no gift for small perturbations, mean-spirited resentments, concealed envies, works of charity, faded endearments, ordinary friendly politeness, or day-to-day acts of kindness. She was one of those people who are born for the greatness of a single love, for exaggerated hatred, for apocalyptic vengeance, and for the most sublime forms of heroism, but she was unable to shape her fate to the dimensions of her amorous vocation, so it was lived out as something flat and gray trapped between her mother’s sickroom walls, wretched tenements, and the tortured confessions with which this large, opulent, hot-blooded woman—made for maternity, abundance, action, and ardor—was consuming herself. She was about forty-five years old then, and her splendid breeding and distant Moorish ancestors kept her looking fit and polished, with black, silky hair and a single white lock on her forehead, a strong and slender body and the resolute step of the healthy. Still, the emptiness of her life made her look far older than she was. I have a photograph of Férula taken around that time, on one of Blanca’s birthdays. It is an old sepia-toned picture, discolored with age, but you can still see how she looked. She was a regal matron, but with a bitter smile on her face that revealed her inner tragedy. Those years with Clara were probably the only happy period in her life, because only with Clara could she be herself. Clara was the one in whom she confided her most subtle feelings, and to her she consecrated her enormous capacity for sacrifice and veneration. She once was bold enough to tell her how she felt, and Clara wrote in her notebook that Férula loved her far more deeply than she deserved or than she could ever hope to repay. Because of that excessive love, Férula did not want to leave Tres Marías; not even after the plague of ants, which began with a humming in the pastures and quickly became a dark shadow that glided everywhere, devouring everything in its path—the corn, the wheat, the alfalfa, and the marigolds. The ants were sprinkled with gasoline and set on fire, but they reappeared, invigorated. The tree trunks were painted with quicklime, but the ants continued to climb, sparing neither pears, oranges, nor apples. They went into the garden and ate their way through the cantaloupes. They entered the dairy, and at dawn the milk was sour and full of minuscule cadavers. They got into the chicken coops and ate the chickens alive, leaving behind a whirl of feathers and a pile of pathetic little bones. They cut paths right through the house, tunneled through the pipes, took over the pantry. Everything that was cooked had to be eaten immediately, because if it was left on the table for even a few minutes, they arrived in a procession and gobbled it up. Pedro Segundo García fought them with fire and water and buried sponges soaked in honey so that it would attract them all to the same place, where he could kill them by surprise, but it was all in vain. Esteban Trueba went into town and returned weighed down with pesticides in every form known to man—powders, liquids, and pills—which he sprayed and sprinkled everywhere. No one could eat any vegetables, because they would get stomach cramps. But the ants continued to appear and multiply, daily growing more impudent and more decisive. Esteban went back into town and sent a telegram to the city. Three days later Mr. Brown, a tiny gringo, arrived at the train station clutching a mysterious suitcase; Esteban introduced him as an agricultural technician specializing in insecticides. After cooling off with a glass of wine with fruit in it, he opened his suitcase on the table. He removed a whole arsenal of tools that none of them had ever seen before and proceeded to trap an ant and carefully observe it with his microscope.
The House of the Spirits Page 13
