“We won’t give him any peace, not even for a minute. He’ll have to resign,” he concluded firmly.
“And if that doesn’t work, Senator, we have this,” said General Hurtado, placing his service pistol on the table.
“We’re not interested in a military coup, General,” the head of Embassy intelligence replied in studied Spanish. “We want Marxism to be a colossal failure and for it to fall alone, so we can erase it from the people’s minds throughout the continent. You understand? We’re going to solve this problem with money. We can still buy a few members of Congress so they won’t confirm him as President. It’s in your Constitution: he didn’t get an absolute majority, and Congress has to make the final choice.”
“Get that idea out of your head, mister!” Trueba exclaimed. “You’re not going to bribe anyone around here! The Congress and the armed forces are above corruption. It would be better if we used the money to buy the mass media. That would give us a way to manipulate public opinion, which is the only thing that really counts.”
“You’re out of your mind! The first thing the Marxists are going to do is destroy freedom of the press!” several voices said.
“Believe me, gentlemen,” Senator Trueba replied. “I know this country. They’ll never do away with freedom of the press. Besides, it’s in their platform: they’ve sworn to respect democratic rights. We’ll catch them in their own trap.”
Senator Trueba was right. They were unable to bribe the members of Congress, and on the date stipulated by law the left calmly came to power. And on that date the right began to stockpile hatred.
* * *
After the election everyone’s life changed: those who thought they would be able to continue as before soon realized that was an illusion. For Pedro Tercero García the change was brutal. He had managed to avoid the snares of a routine, living as free and poor as a wandering minstrel, having never worn leather shoes, a tie, or a wristwatch, and indulging himself in the luxuries of affection, candor, shabbiness, and the siesta, for he was not accountable to anyone. It had become increasingly difficult for him to find the requisite anxiety and sorrow for new songs, because in the course of time he had found great inner peace. The rebelliousness that had inspired him in his youth had given way to the gentleness of a man satisfied with himself. He was as austere as a Franciscan. He had no ambition for either money or power. The only blot on his peace of mind was Blanca. He had lost interest in having dead-end love affairs with adolescent girls and now believed that Blanca was the only woman he was meant to love. He tallied up all the years he had loved her clandestinely and could not recall a moment of his life when she had not been present—at least in his thoughts. After the election, his equilibrium was destroyed by the urgency of working with the government. There was no way he could refuse because, as it was explained to him, the parties of the left had a shortage of skilled men for the many positions to be filled.
“But I’m just a peasant. I have no training,” he argued, trying to excuse himself.
“It doesn’t matter, compañero. You’re popular. Even if you put your foot in it, people will forgive you,” they replied.
So it was that he found himself sitting behind a desk for the first time in his life, with a personal secretary at his disposal and a grandiose portrait of the Founding Father at some valiant battle hanging behind him. Pedro Tercero García stared out the barred window of his luxurious office and could see only a small square of gray sky. His job was not a sinecure. He worked from seven in the morning until late at night, and by the time he left work he was so tired that he was incapable of striking a single chord on his guitar, much less making love to Blanca with his accustomed passion. When they were able to arrange a meeting, surmounting all of Blanca’s usual obstacles in addition to the new ones imposed by Pedro’s job, they would find themselves more full of anguish than desire. They made love wearily, interrupted by the telephone and harried by time, of which there was never enough. Blanca stopped wearing her risqué lingerie, because she decided that it was an unnecessary provocation that made her look ridiculous. In the end they met only so that they could sleep in each other’s arms like a pair of grandparents, and to hold friendly conversations about their daily problems and the serious matters that were shaking the country to its core. One day Pedro Tercero realized he had gone a whole month without making love and that, what was even worse to him, neither of them had really wanted to. This shocked him. He knew there was no reason for him to be impotent at his age, and was forced to attribute it to the kind of life he was leading and the bachelor ways he had developed. He imagined that if he could lead a normal life with Blanca, one in which she would be waiting for him every evening in a peaceful home, everything would be different. He announced he would marry her once and for all, because he was fed up with furtive love and too old to continue living like this. Blanca gave him the same answer she had given him so many times before.
“I have to think it over, my love,” she said.
She was sitting naked on Pedro Tercero’s narrow bed. He studied her dispassionately and saw that time was beginning to ravage her beauty: she was fatter and sadder, with hands deformed now by rheumatism, and the magnificent breasts that years earlier had kept him awake at night were slowly but surely approaching the broad lap of a matron firmly settled in her years. Still, he found her just as beautiful as he had when he was young, when they had made love in the reeds along the banks of the river at Tres Marías, and it was precisely this thought that made him regret that his exhaustion was stronger than his passion.
“You’ve been thinking it over for almost half a century,” he said. “That’s long enough. It’s now or never.”
Blanca was not surprised, for it was not the first time he had given her an ultimatum. Each time he broke off with one of his young mistresses and returned to her side, he demanded that she marry him, in a desperate attempt to hang on to her love and find forgiveness. When he agreed to move out of the working-class neighborhood where he had been happy for years and to resettle in the middle-class apartment, he had said the same thing.
“Either you marry me now or we never see each other again.”
Blanca did not realize that this time Pedro Tercero’s mind was made up.
They separated angrily. She got dressed, quickly gathering her clothes, which were strewn across the floor, and wrapped her hair into a bun that she moored to her head with a handful of hairpins she retrieved from the bed. Pedro Tercero lit a cigarette and did not take his eyes off her while she dressed. Blanca finished putting on her shoes and waved goodbye to him from the doorway. She was sure that he would call her the next day for one of his spectacular reconciliations. Pedro Tercero turned his face to the wall. A bitter grin had transformed his mouth into a single line. It would be two years before they met again.
In the days that followed, Blanca waited for him to get in touch with her, according to their timeworn pattern. He had never failed her, not even when she had married and they had spent a year apart. Even then it was he who had come looking for her. But after three days with no word from him she began to be alarmed. She tossed and turned in her bed, tormented by an unrelenting case of insomnia. She doubled her dose of tranquilizers, took refuge once again in her migraines and neuralgias, and, in an attempt to stay busy and not think, she stupefied herself by cooking hundreds of crèche monsters in her kiln for Christmas. Still, she was unable to suppress her impatience. Finally she called the Ministry. A female voice replied that Compañero García was in a meeting and could not be interrupted. The next day Blanca called again. She continued to call all the rest of that week, until she realized she would never get through to him that way. She forced herself to swallow the enormous pride she had inherited from her father, put on her best dress and striptease garter belt, and set out to visit him at his apartment. Her key did not fit the lock and she was obliged to ring the bell. The door was opened by a mustached giant with the
eyes of a schoolgirl.
“Compañero García isn’t here,” he said, without asking her in.
It was then she understood that she had lost him. She had a fleeting vision of her future, seeing herself in a vast desert where she was wasting away, devoting herself to tasks that used up her time, without the only man she had ever loved and far from the arms she had slept in since the long-gone days of her early childhood. She sat down on the stairs and burst into tears. The man with the mustache quietly shut the door.
She told no one what had happened. Alba asked her about Pedro Tercero and she answered evasively, saying that he was extremely busy with his new job in the government. She continued giving her classes for young ladies of leisure and mongoloid children, and even began to teach ceramics in the shantytowns, where the women had organized to learn new trades; and, for the first time, she took an active role in the political and social life of the country. Organization was necessary, because the “road to Socialism” quickly became a battlefield. While the people were celebrating their victory, letting their hair and beards grow, addressing each other as “compañero,” rescuing forgotten folklore and native crafts, and exercising their new power in lengthy meetings of workers where everyone spoke at once and never agreed on anything, the right was carrying out a series of strategic actions designed to tear the economy to shreds and discredit the government. They controlled the influential mass media and possessed nearly limitless financial resources, as well as the support of the gringos, who had allocated secret funds for the program of sabotage. Within a few months the results could be seen. For the first time in their lives, people had enough money to cover their basic needs and to buy a few things they had always wanted, but now they were unable to do so because the stores were nearly empty. Shortages of goods, which was soon to be a collective nightmare, had begun. Women woke at dawn to stand in endless lines where they could purchase an emaciated chicken, half a dozen diapers, or a roll of toilet paper. Shoe polish, needles, and coffee became luxury items to be gift-wrapped and given as presents for birthdays and other special occasions. The anxiety of scarcity had arrived: the country was swept with rumors about products supposedly going to disappear, and people bought anything they could, without thinking, as a precaution. They stood in line without even knowing what was being sold, just so they would not lose a chance to buy something, even if they did not need it. A new occupation was born: professional line standers, who held other people’s places for a reasonable sum. There were also peddlers of sweets who took advantage of the lines to hawk their goods, and people who rented blankets for the long nighttime lines. The black-market flourished. The police tried to restrain it, but it was like a plague that seeped in everywhere, and no matter how much they checked the trucks and stopped people carrying suspicious packages, they could not prevent it. Children made transactions in schoolyards. In the hysteria to get things, there were all sorts of confusions: people who had never smoked wound up paying an exorbitant sum for a pack of cigarettes, and those without children found themselves fighting over cans of baby formula. Spare parts for kitchens, for industrial machinery, and for cars disappeared from the market. Gasoline was rationed, and the lines of automobiles could last two days and a night, constricting the city like a gigantic motionless boa tanning itself in the sun. There was not enough time to stand in so many lines, and since office workers had to get around the city on foot or by bicycle, the streets filled with panting cyclists that looked like a frenzy of Dutchmen. This was the state of things when the teamsters declared their strike; by the second week, it was clear that this was not a union matter but a political one, and that the men had no intention of returning to work. The Army wanted to take control because the produce was rotting in the fields and there was nothing for housewives to buy in the markets, but the drivers had dismantled their engines and it was impossible to move the thousands of trucks that were strewn along the highways like so many fossilized remains. The President appeared on television asking the people to be patient. He warned the country that the teamsters were in the pay of the imperialists and that they would stay out on strike indefinitely; people would be wise, he said, to plant their own vegetables in their yards and on their terraces, at least until another solution was found. Meanwhile, the people, who were accustomed to poverty and most of whom had never eaten chicken except at Christmas and on Independence Day, did not give up the euphoria of the first days of victory. They organized themselves as if for war, determined not to let the economic sabotage spoil what they had won. They continued celebrating in a festive spirit and singing that the people united would never be defeated—even though each time they sang, it sounded more out of tune because divisiveness and hatred were inexorably growing.
Like everyone else, Senator Trueba also found his life changed. His enthusiasm for the struggle he had undertaken restored his former vigor and relieved some of the pain in his aching bones. He worked as he had in his heyday. He made numerous conspiratorial trips abroad and traveled the country tirelessly from north to south on planes, cars, and trains, on none of which were there now such things as first-class tickets. He endured the extravagant dinners with which his hosts received him in each city, town, and village he visited by pretending to have the appetite of a prisoner, despite the fact that his aging digestive tract was no longer up to such acrobatics. He lived in meetings. At first his long democratic experience impeded his ability to set traps for the new government, but he soon gave up the idea of obstructing it by legal means and came to accept the fact that the only way to unseat it was by using illegal ones. He was the first to declare in public that only a military coup could halt the advance of Marxism because people who had anxiously waited fifty years to be in power would not relinquish it because there was a chicken shortage.
“Stop acting like a bunch of faggots and take out your guns!” he shouted when there was talk of sabotage.
He made no secret of his ideas. He broadcast them to the four winds. Still dissatisfied, he went to the military school from time to time to throw corn at the cadets, shouting through the fence that they were all a bunch of chickens. He was forced to hire a pair of bodyguards to protect him from his own excesses. However, he often forgot that he had engaged them, and when he felt them spying on him he would have a tantrum, insulting them and threatening them with his cane until he was practically choking, his heart was beating so hard. He was convinced that if anyone tried to assassinate him, these two stocky morons would be powerless to prevent it, but he trusted that their presence would at least scare off spontaneous detractors. He also tried to place his granddaughter under surveillance, for he thought that since she moved in a circle of Communists, at any moment someone might mistreat her because of her relationship with him. But Alba would not hear of it. “A hired bully is the same as a confession of guilt. I have nothing to be afraid of,” she said. He did not dare insist; he was tired of fighting with the members of his family, and, besides, his granddaughter was the only person in the world with whom he could express tenderness and who was able to make him laugh.
Meanwhile, Blanca had organized a network for obtaining provisions through the black-market and her contacts in the working-class neighborhood where she went to teach ceramics to the women. She had to work and worry for every bar of soap or bag of sugar she could find. Eventually she developed a cunning she had not suspected in herself, managing to store all kinds of things in the empty rooms of the house, including some things that were downright useless, like the two barrels of soy sauce she bought from a Chinese immigrant. She sealed the windows, put padlocks on the doors, and wore the keys around her waist, not removing them even when she took a bath, because she distrusted everyone, including Jaime and her daughter, and not without reason. “You look like a jailer, Mama,” Alba would say, alarmed at this mania for insuring the future by embittering the present. Alba felt that if there was no meat they should eat potatoes, and that if there were no shoes they should wear sandals; but Bla
nca, horrified at her daughter’s simplicity, held to the theory that, whatever happened, one should not lower one’s standard of living, which she used to justify the time she spent in her smuggler’s ploys. Actually, they had never lived so well since Clara’s death, because for the first time since that date there was someone in the house to see to domestic order and take charge of what went into the pots. Crates of food were delivered regularly from Tres Marías, and Blanca promptly hid them. The first time, almost everything rotted, and the stench issued forth from the locked rooms, spreading through the house and seeping out into the neighborhood. Jaime suggested to his sister that she either donate, trade, or sell any perishable items, but Blanca refused to share her treasures. Alba understood then that her mother, who up till then had seemed like the only sane person in the family, also had a streak of madness. Alba made a hole in the wall, through which she removed part of what Blanca stored. She learned to do it so carefully, stealing cupfuls of sugar, rice, and flour, breaking off pieces of cheese, and spilling open the sacks of dried fruit to make it look like the work of mice, that it took Blanca more than four months to suspect her. At that point she made a written inventory of everything in her pantry and began to put a cross next to the things she removed for household use, convinced that the new system would bring the thief to light. But Alba took advantage of any carelessness on her mother’s part to make new crosses on the list; in the end Blanca was so confused she did not know if she had erred in her accounting, if they were eating three times more than she had calculated, or if it was true that there were still ghosts in that accursed mansion.
The House of the Spirits Page 41
