The House of the Spirits

by Isabel Allende

  The only time Jaime ever bothered to focus on the reality of his house was when he saw Amanda walking hand in hand with Nicolás. He rarely spoke to her and blushed violently whenever she spoke to him. He distrusted her exotic appearance and was convinced that if she wore her hair like other women and wiped the makeup off her eyes she would look like a very thin, greenish rat. Still, he could not keep his eyes off her. The rattle of bracelets that always accompanied her distracted him from his studies, and he had to make an enormous effort not to follow her around the house like a hypnotized chicken. Alone on his bed, unable to concentrate on what he was reading, he would imagine how Amanda looked naked, wrapped in her long black hair with all her noisy adornments, like an idol. Jaime was a recluse. He had been a reticent child, and later became a timid man. He did not love himself and perhaps for that reason felt that he did not deserve the love of others. The least manifestation of affection or gratitude toward him made him terribly embarrassed. Amanda represented the essence of everything feminine and, since she was Nicolás’s girlfriend, of everything forbidden. The young woman’s free, affectionate, adventurous personality fascinated him, and her appearance of a disguised rat aroused in him a tortured eagerness to protect her. He desired her with all his heart, but he would not go so far as to admit it, not even in his most hidden thoughts.

  In that period Amanda was often at the Truebas’. She had a flexible schedule at the newspaper, and whenever she could she arrived at the big house on the corner with her brother Miguel. Their presence went practically unnoticed in that immense mansion always filled with people and activity. Miguel must have been five years old then. He was quiet and clean, caused no special stir, and was able to blend in with the design of the wallpaper and the furniture; he played alone in the garden and followed Clara from one end of the house to the other, always calling her Mama. For this reason, and also because he called Jaime Papa, everyone assumed that Amanda and Miguel were orphans. Amanda took her brother everywhere, even to work. He learned to eat anything, at any time of day, and to sleep in the most uncomfortable places. She swathed him in her passionate and violent love, scratched him like a puppy, shouted at him when she got angry, and ran to hug him when she regretted it. She would not let anyone reprimand him or tell him what to do, refused to listen when people commented on the strange life to which she was subjecting him, and defended him like a lioness, even though no one was planning to attack him. The only one allowed to give an opinion on Miguel’s education was Clara, who managed to convince her that he should be sent to school, unless she wanted him to grow up to be an illiterate hermit. Clara was not especially keen on regular education, but she thought that in Miguel’s case it was imperative that he be given a few hours of discipline every day and the opportunity to be with children his own age. She offered to enroll him herself and buy his school supplies and a uniform, and she went along with Amanda on the first day of class. Amanda and Miguel embraced tearfully in the doorway of the school, and the teacher was unable to loosen the little boy from his sister’s skirt to which he clung tooth and nail, shrieking and kicking anyone who came near him. Finally, with Clara’s help, the teacher managed to drag the child into the building and closed the door of the school behind her. Amanda spent the entire morning sitting outside on the sidewalk. Clara stayed with her, because she felt guilty for having caused so much grief and had begun to doubt the wisdom of her enterprise. At noon the bell rang and the gate swung open. They saw a herd of pupils, and in their midst, silent and tearless, in his proper place, with a pencil smear on his nose and his socks deep in his shoes, was little Miguel, who in these few short hours had learned to fend for himself without always holding on to his sister’s hand. Amanda clasped him to her breast frenetically. She said in a moment of inspiration, “I’d give my life for you, Miguel.” She did not know then that one day she would have to.

  * * *

  Meanwhile, Esteban Trueba daily felt more lonely and furious. He had resigned himself to the idea that his wife would never speak to him again. Tired of pursuing her up and down the house, begging her with his eyes and drilling holes in the bathroom wall, he decided to devote himself to politics. Just as Clara had predicted, those who always win won the elections, but by such a small margin that the entire country was put on notice. In Trueba’s opinion, the time had arrived for him to come out in defense of the national interest and of the Conservative Party, since no one better personified the honest, uncontaminated politician, as he himself declared, adding that he had pulled himself up by his own bootstraps, and not only that, had created jobs and a decent life for all his workers and owned the only hacienda with little brick houses. He respected the law, the nation, and tradition, and no one could accuse him of any greater offense than tax evasion. He hired a foreman to replace Pedro Segundo García and put him in charge of the brood hens and imported cattle at Tres Marías and settled in the capital for good. He spent several months devoting himself to his campaign, drawing on the support of the Conservative Party, as well as his own fortune, which he placed at the disposal of the cause. The house filled with political propaganda and with the members of his party, who practically took it by storm, blending in with the hallway ghosts, the Rosicrucians, and the three Mora sisters. Clara’s retinue was gradually pushed into the back rooms of the house, and an invisible border arose between the parts of the house occupied by Esteban Trueba and those occupied by his wife. In response to Clara’s imagination and the requirements of the moment, the noble, seignorial architecture began sprouting all sorts of extra little rooms, staircases, turrets, and terraces. Each time a new guest arrived, the bricklayers would arrive and build another addition to the house. The big house on the corner soon came to resemble a labyrinth.

  “Someday this house will make a good hotel,” Nicolás declared.

  “Or a little hospital,” added Jaime, who was beginning to cherish the idea of bringing his poor patients to the High District.

  The façade of the house underwent no alterations. In front there were still the same heroic columns and the Versaillesesque garden, but in the back the style gradually disappeared. The rear garden was a tangled jungle in which every type of plant and flower had proliferated and where Clara’s birds kept up a steady din, along with many generations of cats and dogs. Among that entire domestic fauna, the only one to have any importance in the collective memory of the family was a rabbit Miguel had once brought home, a poor ordinary rabbit that the dogs had constantly licked until all its hair fell out and it became the only bald member of its species, boasting an iridescent coat that gave it the appearance of a large-eared reptile.

  As the day of the elections drew near, Esteban Trueba grew increasingly nervous. He had risked everything on this political adventure. One night he could not bear it anymore and went to knock on Clara’s bedroom door. She opened it. She was in her nightgown, and had put her teeth in because she liked to nibble crackers while she wrote in her diary. To Esteban she looked as young and beautiful as the day he had first brought her to this blue-silk-papered bedroom and stood her on Barrabás’s pelt. He smiled at the memory.

  “Forgive me, Clara,” he said, blushing like a schoolboy. “I feel lonely and worried. I’d like to stay here for a while if you don’t mind.”

  Clara also smiled, but she did not speak. She pointed to the armchair and Esteban sat down. They remained silent for a while, sharing the plate of crackers and looking at each other in surprise, for they had been living under the same roof a long time without seeing each other.

  “I suppose you know what’s tormenting me,” Esteban Trueba said finally.

  Clara nodded.

  “Do you think I’m going to win?”

  Clara nodded again, and Trueba felt completely relieved, exactly as if she had given him a written guarantee. He gave a loud, joyous guffaw. Then he stood up, put his hands on her shoulders, and kissed her on the forehead.

  “You’re fantastic, Clara!” he exc
laimed. “If you say so, I’ll be senator.”

  After that evening, the hostility between them seemed to ebb. Clara still said nothing, but he ignored her silence and spoke normally to her, interpreting her slightest gestures as replies. When it was necessary, Clara used the servants or her children to send him messages. She worried about her husband’s well-being, helped him with his work, and accompanied him when he asked her to. Sometimes she smiled at him.

  Ten days later, Esteban Trueba was elected Senator of the Republic, just as Clara had predicted. He celebrated the event by throwing a party for all his friends and coreligionists, giving a cash bonus to his employees and to the tenants at Tres Marías, and leaving an emerald necklace on Clara’s bed beside a bunch of violets. Clara began to attend social receptions and political events, where her presence was required so her husband could project the image of the simple family man that both the public and the Conservative Party found so appealing. On such occasions, Clara put in her teeth and wore some of the jewelry Esteban had given her. She was considered the most elegant, discreet, and charming lady of their social circle and no one would have dreamt that the distinguished couple never spoke.

  With Esteban Trueba’s new position, there were even more people to attend to in the big house on the corner. Clara had lost count of the number of mouths she fed and the expenses of the house. The bills were sent directly to Senator Trueba’s office in Congress, where they were paid with no questions asked, for Esteban had discovered that the more he spent the more his fortune seemed to grow; he had concluded that Clara, with her indiscriminate hospitality and charity works, was not about to ruin him. At first, political power was like a new toy to him. In middle age he was the wealthy, respected man he had wanted to be when he was a struggling adolescent without godfathers and with no greater capital than his pride and ambition. But he soon realized that he was as alone as ever. His two sons eluded him and he had had no further contact with his daughter Blanca. All he knew about her was what her brothers told him, and he simply mailed her a check once a month, faithful to the promise he had made to Jean de Satigny. He was so out of touch with his sons that every conversation he had with them ended in a shouting match. Trueba learned of Nicolás’s follies much too late, which is to say, after everyone else was already talking about them. Nor did he know anything of Jaime’s life. If it had ever occurred to him that Jaime met frequently with Pedro Tercero García, for whom he had developed a brotherly affection, Trueba would certainly have had a stroke, but Jaime was very careful not to discuss such matters with his father.

  Pedro Tercero García had left the countryside. After his terrible encounter with his patrón, he was taken in by Father José Dulce María in the parish house. The priest treated his hand. But the boy was deeply depressed and spoke constantly of the meaninglessness of life now that he had lost Blanca and could no longer play the guitar, which had been his one consolation. Father José Dulce María waited for the boy’s strong constitution to heal his severed fingers. Then he put him on a cart and took him to the Indian reservation, where he introduced him to a century-old blind woman whose hands were clawed from rheumatism but who was still strong-willed enough to make baskets with her feet. “If she can make baskets with her toes, you can play the guitar without your fingers,” he told him. And then the Jesuit told the boy his own story.

  “I was also in love when I was your age,” he said. “My girlfriend was the most beautiful girl in our village. We were going to get married and she had begun to embroider her trousseau and I had started saving money to build us a little house when I was called up for military service. When I returned, she had married the butcher and become a fat, matronly woman. I was about to throw myself into the river with a heavy stone tied to my feet, but then I decided to become a priest. A year after I took my vows, she became a widow and began to come to church and stare at me with languid eyes.” The frank laughter of the gigantic Jesuit lifted Pedro Tercero’s spirits and brought a smile to his lips for the first time in three weeks. “So you see, my child,” the priest concluded, “there’s no reason to lose hope. You’ll see Blanca again, the day you least expect to.”

  Healed in both body and soul, Pedro Tercero García made his way to the capital with a bundle of clothes and a few coins the priest had taken from the poor box. He had also given him the address of a Socialist leader, who took him in and gave him a place to sleep his first few nights in the city and then found him a job singing folk songs in a bohemian café. The young man settled in a working-class neighborhood, in a wooden shack that seemed like a palace to him. His only furniture was a box spring, a mattress, a chair, and two crates for a table. From there he preached Socialism and mulled over his disgust at Blanca’s having married someone else, refusing to accept Jaime’s explanations and consolation. He soon mastered his right hand and expanded his use of the two fingers that remained, continuing to compose songs about hens and hunted foxes. One day he was invited to appear on a radio program, which was the beginning of a giddy popularity he had never expected. His voice began to be heard often on the radio and his name became known. But Senator Trueba never heard it, because he did not allow radios in his house. He viewed them as instruments for the uneducated, and purveyors of sinister influences and vulgar ideas. No one was further removed from popular music than he was; the only melody he could stand to listen to was the sound of opera during the season and the zarzuela company that came from Spain each winter.

  * * *

  The day Jaime came home with the news that he wanted to change his last name because ever since his father had been a senator in the Conservative Party his fellow students at the university had been harassing him and the poor people in the Misericordia District no longer trusted him, Esteban Trueba lost his temper and was about to slap him when he realized that this time his son would not tolerate it.

  “I married so I would have legitimate sons to bear my name, not bastards with their mother’s!” he roared, livid with rage.

  Two weeks later it was whispered in the corridors of Congress and the sitting rooms of the club that his son Jaime had pulled off his pants in the middle of the Plaza Brasil to give them to a beggar, and had walked the fifteen blocks back to his house in his underwear, followed by a bevy of children and curious observers who cheered him on. Tired of defending his honor from ridicule and gossip, Esteban allowed his son to take whatever name he wanted, provided that it not be his own. That day, locked in his study, he wept with disappointment and rage. He tried to tell himself that his son’s eccentricities would disappear with age, and that sooner or later he would become a well-adjusted man who would join him in his business and become his support in his old age. With his other son he had given up hope. Nicolás went from one fantastic enterprise to another. His chief ambition at this point was to cross the cordillera in an unusual form of transportation, just as his Uncle Marcos had tried to do many years before. He had chosen to rise in a balloon, convinced that the spectacle of a gigantic balloon suspended in the clouds would be an irresistible form of publicity for almost any carbonated drink. He copied the model of a prewar German zeppelin, which lifted off by means of a hot-air system and could accommodate one or more passengers endowed with adventurous temperaments. His zeal to construct that enormous, inflatable sausage and to learn all its secret mechanisms, as well as to study wind currents, the predictions of his cards, and the laws of aerodynamics, kept him busy for quite some time. Weeks passed and he forgot all about the Friday spiritualist sessions with his mother and the three Mora sisters, and did not even notice that Amanda had stopped coming to the house. Once his flying ship was finished, he found himself face to face with an unexpected obstacle: the manager of the soda company, a gringo from Arkansas, refused to finance his project, arguing that if Nicolás was killed in his machine, sales of his beverage would decline. Nicolás tried to find other sponsors, but no one was interested. That did not dissuade him from his enterprise. He decided to go up anyway, e
ven if his trip was unpaid for. On the appointed day, Clara continued her knitting unperturbed, without noticing her son’s preparations, even though her family, friends, and neighbors were all horrified at the insane plan of crossing the mountains in that outlandish contraption.