The House of the Spirits

by Isabel Allende

  “What’s the matter with you?” García asked, pointing at Alba’s pants. “It looks like an abortion.”

  Alba straightened her head and stared him straight in the eye. “That is none of your business. Take me home!” she ordered, copying the authoritarian tone her grandfather employed with everyone he considered beneath his social station.

  García hesitated. It had been a long time since he had heard orders from the mouth of a civilian, and for a moment he was tempted to take her to the stockade and leave her there to rot in a cell, bathed in her own blood, until she got down on her knees and begged him, but his profession had taught him that there were men more powerful than he and that he could not afford the luxury of acting with impunity. Besides, the memory of Alba in her starched dresses, drinking lemonade on the terrace of Tres Marías while he shuffled around barefoot and sniffling in the chicken yard, and the fear he still had of Senator Trueba were more powerful than his desire to humiliate her. He could not bear the way she stared at him and he lowered his head imperceptibly. He turned around, barked out a brief instruction, and two policemen led Alba by the arms to a van. This was how she reached her house. When Blanca saw her, her first reaction was that the grandfather’s predictions had been true and that the police had attacked the students with their clubs. She began to scream and did not stop until Jaime had examined Alba and assured her that she had not been injured and there was nothing wrong with her that a couple of injections and some rest would not cure.

  Alba spent two days in bed, during which the student strike was peacefully terminated. The Minister of Education was relieved of his post and transferred to the Ministry of Agriculture.

  “If he could be the Minister of Education without finishing school, there’s no reason why he can’t be the Minister of Agriculture without ever having seen a cow,” Senator Trueba remarked.

  While she was in bed, Alba had time to think back to when she had met Esteban García. Poring over her childhood memories, she remembered a dark-skinned boy, the library, the fireplace ablaze with enormous pine logs whose perfume filled the room, evening or night, and herself sitting on his knees. But that vision came and went quickly in her mind and she began to wonder whether she had dreamt it. The first definite image she had of him was later. She knew the exact date because it was her fourteenth birthday, and her mother had recorded it in the black album her grandmother had started when she was born. She had curled her hair in honor of the occasion and was out on the terrace in her coat, waiting for her Uncle Jaime to take her out to buy her present. It was very cold, but she liked the garden in wintertime. She blew on her hands and pulled up her coat collar to protect her ears. From where she was standing she could see the window of the library, where her grandfather was speaking with a man. The glass was clouded, but she recognized the uniform of a policeman and wondered what her grandfather could be doing with one of them in his library. The man had his back to the window and was sitting stiffly on the edge of a chair with a straight back and the pathetic air of a leaden soldier. Alba watched them for a while, until she guessed that her uncle must be about to arrive, and then she walked through the garden to a half-ruined gazebo. She rubbed her hands together to keep warm, brushed away the wet leaves that had fallen on the stone bench, and sat down to wait. Soon afterward, Esteban García encountered her there when he left the house and crossed the garden on his way toward the front gate. He stopped abruptly when he saw her. He looked all around him, hesitated for a moment, and then approached her.

  “Do you remember me?” García asked.

  “No . . .” She spoke doubtfully.

  “I’m Esteban García. We met at Tres Marías.”

  Alba smiled mechanically. He stirred up bad memories. There was something in his eyes that made her uneasy, but she could not say why. García swept the leaves away with his hands and sat down beside her in the gazebo, so near that their legs were touching.

  “This garden looks like a jungle,” he said, breathing very close to her.

  He took off his police cap and she saw that his hair was short and stiff, groomed with hair tonic. Suddenly, García’s hand was on her shoulder. The familiarity of his gesture disconcerted the girl, who was paralyzed for a second but quickly drew back, trying to struggle free. The policeman’s hand squeezed her shoulder, and his fingers dug through the thick cloth of her coat. Alba felt her heart pound like a machine, and her cheeks turned red.

  “You’ve grown, Alba. You almost look like a woman now,” the man whispered in her ear.

  “I’m fourteen. Today’s my birthday,” she said hesitantly.

  “Then I have a present for you,” Esteban García said, his mouth twisting into a smile.

  Alba tried to turn her face away, but he held it firmly in both hands, forcing her to look at him. It was her first kiss. She felt a warm, brutal sensation as his rough, badly shaven skin scraped her face. She smelled his scent of stale tobacco and onion, and his violence. García’s tongue tried to pry open her lips while his hand pressed against her jaw until he forced it open. She imagined that tongue as a warm, slimy mollusk, and she was overcome by a wave of nausea, but she kept her eyes open. She saw the hard cloth of his uniform and felt the ferocious hands wrap themselves around her neck; then without interrupting the kiss, the fingers began to tighten. Alba thought she was choking, and pushed him with such force that she managed to get away from him. García got up off the bench, smiling ironically. He had red splotches on his cheeks and was breathing rapidly.

  “Did you like my present?” He laughed.

  Alba watched him disappear across the garden with enormous strides, then sat down and wept. She felt dirty and humiliated. Afterward she ran into the house and washed her mouth with soap and brushed her teeth, as if that could remove the stain in her memory. When her Uncle Jaime came to find her, she clung to his neck, buried her face in his shirt, and told him that she did not want a present, she had decided to become a nun. Jaime gave one of his deep laughs that rose up from his stomach and that, since he was a taciturn man, she rarely heard.

  “I swear I’m going to become a nun!” Alba sobbed.

  “You’d have to be born all over again,” Jaime replied. “Besides, you’d have to do it over my dead body.”

  Alba did not see Esteban García again until he was standing next to her in the university parking lot, but she could never forget him. She told no one of that repulsive kiss or of the dreams that she had afterward, in which García appeared as a green beast that tried to strangle her with his paws and asphyxiate her by shoving a slimy tentacle down her throat.

  Remembering all that, Alba discovered that the nightmare had been crouched inside her all those years and that García was still the beast waiting for her in the shadows, ready to jump on top of her at any turn of life. She could not know it was a premonition.

  * * *

  Miguel’s disappointment and rage at Alba’s being the granddaughter of Senator Trueba vanished the second time he saw her wandering like a lost soul down the corridors near the cafeteria where they had met. He decided that it was unfair to blame the granddaughter for the ideas of the grandfather, and they resumed their stroll with their arms around each other. Soon their kisses were not enough and they began to meet in the rented room where Miguel lived. It was a mediocre boardinghouse for penniless students, presided over by a middle-aged couple with a calling for espionage. They watched with undisguised hostility when Alba went upstairs holding Miguel’s hand, and it was a torture for her to overcome her timidity and face the criticism of those stares that ruined the joy of her meetings with Miguel. She would have preferred to avoid seeing them, but she rejected the idea of taking a hotel room together for the same reasons she did not want to be seen in Miguel’s boardinghouse.

  “You’re the worst bourgeois I know!” Miguel would say, laughing.

  Once in a while, he managed to borrow a motorcycle and they escaped for a fe
w hours, traveling at reckless speed, crouched low on the machine, with frozen ears and anxious hearts. They liked to go to deserted beaches in the winter, where they walked on the wet sand, leaving their tracks to be lapped away by the waves, frightening the sea gulls and gulping great mouthfuls of salt air. In the summer they preferred the thickest forests, where they could frolic as they wished as soon as they got away from hikers and Boy Scouts. Alba soon discovered that the safest place of all was her own house, because in the labyrinth of the rear rooms, where no one ever went, they could make love undisturbed.

  “If the servants hear noise, they’ll think the ghosts are back,” Alba said, and she told him of the glorious past of visiting spirits and flying tables in the big house on the corner.

  The first time she led him through the back door of the garden, making a path in the jungle and stepping around the statues that were covered with moss and bird droppings, the young man did a double take when he saw the house. “I’ve been here before,” he murmured, but he could not recall when, because that nightmare jungle and dilapidated mansion bore only meager resemblance to the luminous image he had treasured in his mind ever since his childhood.

  One by one the lovers tried out all the abandoned rooms, and finally chose an improvised nest in the depths of the basement. It had been years since Alba had been there, and she had almost forgotten that it existed, but the minute she opened the door and inhaled its unmistakable odor, she felt again the old magical attraction. They used her Uncle Nicolás’s books, the dishes, the boxes, the furniture, and the drapes of bygone days to arrange their astonishing nuptial chamber. In the center they created a bed by piling together several mattresses, which they covered with pieces of moth-eaten velvet. From the trunks they took innumerable treasures. They made their sheets out of old topaz-colored damask curtains. They unstitched the sumptuous dress of Chantilly lace that Clara had worn the day Barrabás died, and made a time-colored mosquito net, which also protected them from the spiders that fell down unexpectedly from embroidering on the ceiling. They lighted their way with candles and ignored the rodents, the cold, and that fog from the other world. They walked around stark naked in the eternal twilight of the basement, defying the humidity and drafts. They drank white wine from crystal goblets that Alba took from the dining room, and made a detailed inventory of each other’s bodies and the multiple possibilities of pleasure. They played like children. It was difficult for her to recognize in this sweet infatuated young man, who could laugh and romp in an endless bacchanal, the eager revolutionary so committed to the idea of justice that he took secret courses in the use of firearms and revolutionary strategy. Alba invented irresistible techniques of seduction, and Miguel created new and marvelous ways of making love to her. They were blinded by the strength of their passion, which was like an insatiable thirst. In their ambitious effort to possess each other totally, there were not hours or words enough to tell each other their most intimate thoughts and deepest memories. Alba stopped practicing the cello, except to play it naked on the topaz bed, and she attended classes at the university with a hallucinated look in her eyes. Miguel put off his thesis and his political meetings, because he and Alba wanted to be together every hour of the day. They used the least distraction on the part of the inhabitants of the house to sneak down to the basement. Alba learned to lie and dissimulate. On the pretext that she had to study late at night, she left the room she had shared with her mother ever since her grandmother died and set up a room on the first floor, facing the garden, so she could let Miguel in through the window and lead him on tiptoe through the sleeping house to their enchanted lair. But they did not meet only at night. Love’s impatience was sometimes so unbearable that Miguel ran the risk of daytime visits, slinking through the bushes like a thief until he reached the basement door, where Alba waited for him, her heart in her mouth. They embraced with the desperation of a parting and slipped down to their refuge suffocating with complicity.

  For the first time in her life, Alba wanted to be beautiful. She regretted that the splendid women in her family had not bequeathed their attributes to her, that the only one who had, Rosa the Beautiful, had given her only the algae tones in her hair, which seemed more like a hairdresser’s mistake than anything else. Miguel understood the source of her anxiety. He led her by the hand to the huge Venetian mirror that adorned one wall of their secret room, shook the dust from the cracked glass, and lit all the candles they had and arranged them around her. She stared at herself in the thousand pieces of the mirror. In the candlelight her skin was the unreal color of wax statues. Miguel began to caress her and she saw her face transformed in the kaleidoscope of the mirror, and she finally believed that she was the most beautiful woman in the universe because she was able to see herself with Miguel’s eyes.

  That seemingly interminable orgy lasted more than a year. Finally, Miguel finished his thesis, graduated, and began to look for work. When the pressing need of unsatisfied love had passed, they regained their composure and were able to return to normal. Alba made an effort to take an interest in her studies again, and he turned once more to his political activities, because events were taking place at breakneck pace and the country was torn apart by a series of ideological disputes. Miguel rented a small apartment near the place where he worked, and this was where they made love; in the year they had spent frisking naked in the basement they had both contracted chronic bronchitis, which dampened somewhat the attraction of their subterranean paradise. Alba helped decorate the new apartment, hanging curtains and political posters everywhere she could and even suggesting that she might move in with him, but on this point Miguel was unyielding.

  “Bad times are coming, my love,” he explained. “I can’t have you with me, because when it becomes necessary I’m going to join the guerrillas.”

  “I’ll follow you wherever you go,” she promised.

  “You can’t do that for love. You do it out of political conviction, and that’s something you don’t have,” Miguel replied. “We can’t afford the luxury of accepting amateurs.”

  His words seemed cruel to Alba, but it was several years before she was able to understand their full meaning.

  * * *

  Senator Trueba was already old enough to retire, but the thought had not even crossed his mind. He read the daily papers and muttered under his breath. Things had changed a good deal in the preceding years, and he felt overtaken by events that he had not expected to live long enough to have to confront. He had been born before the city had electric lights and had lived to see a man walking on the moon, but none of the upheavals of his long existence had prepared him for the revolution that was brewing in his country, right under his eyes, and that had everyone in a state of agitation.

  The only person who did not speak about what was happening was Jaime. To avoid arguing with his father, he acquired the habit of silence and soon discovered it was far more comfortable. The only time he abandoned his Trappist laconism was when Alba went to visit him in his tunnel of books. His niece always arrived in her nightgown, her hair wet from the shower, and sat at the foot of his bed to tell him happy stories, because, as she put it, he was a magnet for other people’s problems and irreversible disasters, and someone had to keep him posted about spring and love. But her good intentions clashed with her need to talk with her uncle about the things that preoccupied her. They never agreed. They shared the same books, but when it came time to analyze what they had read, their opinions were different. Jaime made fun of her political ideas and bearded friends, and scolded her for having fallen in love with a café terrorist. He was the only one in the family who knew about Miguel.

  “Tell that spoiled brat to come and spend a day in the hospital with me. We’ll see if he still wants to waste his time on pamphlets and speeches,” he said to Alba.

  “He’s a lawyer, Uncle, not a doctor,” she replied.

  “I don’t care. We need whatever we can get. Even plumbers would be a he
lp.”

  Jaime was convinced that after so many years of struggle the Socialists were finally going to win. This he attributed to the fact that the people had become conscious of their needs and their own strength. Alba would repeat Miguel’s words: that only through armed struggle could the bourgeoisie be toppled. Jaime was horrified by any form of extremism and held that guerrilla warfare is only justified by tyranny, where the only solution is to shoot it out, but that it would be an aberration in a country where change can be obtained by popular vote.

  “Don’t be so naïve, Uncle. You know that’s never happened,” Alba answered. “They’ll never let your Socialists win!”

  She tried to explain Miguel’s point of view: that it was not possible to keep waiting for the slow passage of history, the laborious process of educating and organizing the people, because the world was moving ahead by leaps and bounds and they were being left behind; and that radical change is never brought about willingly and without violence. History confirmed this. The argument went on and on, and they became locked in a confused rhetorical exchange that left them exhausted, each accusing the other of being more stubborn than a mule. But in the end they kissed each other good night and both were left with the feeling that the other was an extraordinary human being.

  One night at dinner, Jaime announced that the Socialists were going to win, but since he had been saying that for twenty years, no one believed him.

  “If your mother were alive, she’d say that those who always win are going to win again,” Senator Trueba replied disdainfully.

  But Jaime knew what he was talking about. He had heard it from the Candidate. They had been friends for years, and Jaime often went to play chess with him at night. He was the same Socialist who had had his eye on the Presidency for the past eighteen years. Jaime had first seen him behind his father’s back, when the Candidate rode the trains of victory in a cloud of smoke during the electoral campaigns of his youth. In those days, the Candidate was a robust young man with the angular face of a hunting dog, who shouted impassioned speeches over the hissing and heckling of the landowners, and the silent fury of the peasants. It was the era when the Sánchez brothers had hanged the Socialist leader at the crossroads and when Esteban Trueba had whipped Pedro Tercero García in front of his father for spreading Father José Dulce María’s strange interpretations of the Bible among the tenants. Jaime’s friendship with the Candidate was born by chance one Sunday night when he was summoned from the hospital to make an emergency house call. He arrived at the appropriate address in an ambulance, rang the doorbell, and was ushered in by the Candidate himself. Jaime had no trouble recognizing him, because he had seen his picture many times and he had not changed much since the time he had seen him on the train.