The House of the Spirits

by Isabel Allende

  I began to think I had been wrong to do as I had and that perhaps after all this was not the best way to overthrow Marxism. I felt more and more alone, for no one needed me anymore. I no longer had my sons, and Clara, with her habits of silence and distraction, seemed like a far-off ghost. Even Alba grew daily more remote. I hardly ever saw her in the house. She went by me like a gust of wind in her horrible long cotton skirts, with her incredible green hair like Rosa’s, busy in all sorts of mysterious chores that she carried out with the complicity of her mother. I’m sure that behind my back the two of them were weaving every kind of intrigue. My granddaughter was in a state, just like Clara in the days of the typhus epidemic, when she took everybody else’s suffering onto her own back.

  * * *

  Alba did not have long to mourn her Uncle Jaime’s death. The needs of others were so pressing that she was forced to put her grief aside for later. She did not see Miguel again until two months after the coup, and she began to fear that he too was dead. Still, she did not look for him; he had given her strict instructions in that regard and besides, she had heard that his name was on the lists of those who had been ordered to appear before the new authorities. That gave her hope. As long as they’re looking for him, he’s still alive, she concluded. She tortured herself with the idea that they might capture him alive, and invoked the spirit of her grandmother to ask her to prevent that from happening. “I’d rather see him dead a thousand times over, Grandmother,” she begged. She knew what was taking place in the country, which was why she walked around with knots in her stomach, why her hands shook, and why, whenever she heard that someone had been taken prisoner, she broke out in a rash from head to foot, like someone with the plague. But there was no one with whom she could speak about these things, not even her grandfather, because people preferred not to know.

  After that terrible Tuesday, Alba had to rearrange her feelings in order to continue living; to accept the idea that she would never again see those she loved the most, her Uncle Jaime, Miguel, and many others. She blamed her grandfather for what had taken place, but then, seeing him hunched in his armchair calling out to Clara and his son in an interminable murmur, her love for the old man returned and she ran to embrace him, running her hands through his white hair and comforting him. She felt that everything was made of glass, as fragile as a sigh, and that the machine-gun fire and bombs of that unforgettable Tuesday had destroyed most of what she knew, and that all the rest had been smashed to pieces and spattered with blood. As days, weeks, and months went by, what had at first appeared to be spared also began to show signs of destruction. She noticed that friends and relatives were avoiding her. Some crossed the street so as not to say hello to her, or turned away when she drew near. She imagined the word had spread that she was helping the victims of the persecution.

  And it was true. From the very first days, the most pressing need was to secure asylum for those in danger of death. At first it almost seemed like fun, because it kept her from thinking of Miguel, but Alba soon realized it was no game. Everywhere there were posters reminding citizens that it was their duty to inform on Marxists and turn in the fugitives or else they would be marked as traitors and brought to justice. Alba miraculously rescued Jaime’s car, which had survived the bombing and had been sitting for a week where he had parked it. She painted two large sunflowers on the doors with the brightest yellow she could find, to distinguish it from other cars and make her new job easier. She had to memorize the location of all the embassies, the shifts of the guardsmen who stood watch in front of them, the height of their walls and width of their doors. Word that someone needed asylum would reach her unexpectedly, often through a stranger who approached her on the street and who she imagined had been sent by Miguel. She would drive to the appointed place in broad daylight and when she saw someone motioning to her, recognizing the yellow flowers on her car, she stopped for a minute to let the man jump in. They never spoke on the way, because she preferred not to know his name. There were times when she had to spend the whole day with him, or even hide him for a night or two before finding the right moment to slip him into one of the more accessible embassies, climbing a wall behind the guards’ backs. This system turned out to be more reliable than working out complicated arrangements with the nervous ambassadors of the foreign democracies. She would never hear another word about the person she had helped, but she retained forever their trembling gratitude and once it was over she breathed a sigh of relief that at least this time someone had been saved. Occasionally she had to do the same thing with women who feared being separated from their children, and no matter how much Alba promised them that she would bring their children to them afterward through the front door, knowing as she did that not even the most timid ambassador would turn her down, the mothers refused to leave their children behind, and even the children had to be thrown over the walls or slipped through the iron gates. Soon all the embassies were ringed with barbed wire and machine guns and it was impossible to continue taking them by storm; but then there were other needs to keep her busy.

  It was Amanda who first put her in touch with the priests. The two friends would get together to whisper about Miguel, whom neither of them had seen, and to remember Jaime with dry-eyed yearning; there was no official proof that he had died and their desire to see him again was stronger than the soldier’s tale. Amanda had resumed her compulsive smoking; her hands shook and her gaze wandered. At times her pupils were dilated and she moved slowly, but she continued working in the hospital. She told Alba that she frequently took care of patients who were faint with hunger.

  “The families of prisoners, disappeared people, and the dead have nothing to eat. The unemployed don’t either. Barely a plate of corn mush every other day. The children are so undernourished that they fall asleep in school.”

  She added that the glass of milk and the crackers that schoolchildren used to receive each day had been discontinued, and that mothers were quieting their children’s hunger with cups of tea.

  “The only ones trying to help are the priests,” Amanda said. “People don’t want to know the truth. The Church has organized soup kitchens to feed children under seven a hot meal six times a week. Of course that’s not enough. For every child who eats a plate of lentils or potatoes once a day, there are five outside looking in because there’s not enough to go around.”

  Alba realized that they had returned to the old days when her Grandmother Clara went to the Misericordia District to replace justice with charity. Except that now charity was frowned upon. She noticed that whenever she went to the houses of her friends to ask for a package of rice or a tin of powdered milk no one dared to turn her down the first time, but afterward they avoided her. At first Blanca helped her. Alba had no trouble obtaining the key to her mother’s pantry, arguing that there was no need to hoard ordinary flour and poor men’s beans when you could buy Baltic crab and Swiss chocolate. This enabled her to stock the priests’ kitchens for a time, which, however, seemed all too brief to her. One day she took her mother to one of the soup kitchens. When Blanca saw the long unpolished wooden table where two rows of children were awaiting their portions with pleading eyes, she began to cry and wound up spending two days with a splitting headache. She would have gone on crying if her daughter hadn’t forced her to get dressed, forget about herself, and look for help, even if it meant she had to steal from her father’s household budget. Senator Trueba would not discuss the subject; like everyone else in his class, he denied the existence of hunger just as vehemently as he denied that of the prisoners and the torture; this meant that Alba could not rely on him, and later, when she could no longer rely on her mother either, she was forced to take more drastic measures. The farthest her grandfather went was to his club. He never went downtown, much less to the outskirts of the city or the shantytowns. It was no effort for him to believe that the misery his granddaughter reported was a Marxist fabrication.

  “Communist priests!” he sh
outed. “That’s the last thing I need to hear!”

  But when children and women began to appear outside people’s houses at every hour of the day and night begging for something to eat, Trueba—instead of ordering the gates to be shut and lowering the blinds so he wouldn’t have to see them, like everyone else—raised Blanca’s monthly stipend and said there should always be hot food on hand to give away.

  “This is just a temporary situation,” he assured them. “As soon as the military can straighten out the chaos that the Marxists left the country in, this kind of problem will be resolved.”

  The newspapers said that the beggars in the streets, a sight that had not been seen in years, had been sent by international Communism to discredit the military junta and undermine the return to order and progress. Cement walls were erected to hide the most unsightly shantytowns from the eyes of tourists and others who preferred not to see them. In a single night, as if by magic, beautifully pruned gardens and flowerbeds appeared on the avenues; they had been planted by the unemployed, to create the illusion of a peaceful spring. White paint was used to erase the murals of doves and to remove all political posters from sight. Any attempt to write political messages in public was punished with a burst of machine-gun fire on the spot. The clean, orderly, silent streets were reopened to commerce. Soon the beggar children disappeared, and Alba noticed that the stray dogs and piles of garbage were gone too. The black market came to an end at the very moment when the Presidential Palace was bombed, because speculators were threatened with martial law and execution by firing squad. Items whose very name was unheard of began to be sold in stores, along with things that only the rich had previously been able to buy as contraband. The city had never looked more beautiful. The upper middle class had never been so happy: they could buy as much whiskey as they wanted, and automobiles on credit.

  In the patriotic euphoria of the first few days, women brought their jewels to the barracks to help finance the national reconstruction. They even handed over their wedding rings, which were replaced with copper bands that bore the national seal. Blanca had to hide the woolen stocking that contained the jewels Clara had left her, to prevent Senator Trueba from handing them over to the authorities. They saw the birth of a proud new class. Illustrious ladies dressed in foreign clothes, as exotic and shimmering as fireflies, paraded themselves in the fashionable entertainment centers on the arm of the proud new economists. A caste of military men arose to fill key posts. Families who had previously considered it a disgrace to count a member of the military among their number were now pitted against each other in the struggle to see who could get their sons into the war academies and were offering their daughters to soldiers. The country filled with men in uniform, with war machines, flags, hymns, and parades, because the military understood the need for the people to have their own rituals and symbols. Senator Trueba, who despised these things on principle, realized what his friends at the club had meant when they had assured him that Marxism did not stand a chance in Latin America because it did not allow for the magical side of things. “Bread, circuses, and something to worship are all they need,” the senator concluded, regretting in his conscience that there should be a lack of bread.

  A campaign was orchestrated to erase from the face of the earth the good name of the former President, in the hope that the masses would stop mourning him. His house was opened and the public was invited to visit what they called “the dictator’s palace.” People could look into his closets and marvel at the quantity and quality of his suède jackets, go through his drawers, and rummage in his pantry to see the Cuban rum and bag of sugar he had put away. The most crudely touched-up photographs were circulated, depicting him dressed as Bacchus with a garland of grapes around his head, cavorting with opulent matrons and athletes of his own sex in a perpetual orgy. No one, not even Senator Trueba, believed they were authentic. “This is too much, this time they’ve gone too far,” he muttered when he saw them.

  With a stroke of the pen the military changed world history, erasing every incident, ideology, and historical figure of which the regime disapproved. They adjusted the maps because there was no reason why the North should be placed on top, so far away from their beloved fatherland, when it could be placed on the bottom, where it would appear in a more favorable light; and while they were at it they painted vast areas of Prussian-blue territorial waters that stretched all the way to Africa and Asia, and appropriated distant countries in the geography books, leaping borders with impunity until the neighboring countries lost their patience, sought help from the United Nations, and threatened to send in tanks and planes. Censorship, which at first covered only the mass media, was soon extended to textbooks, song lyrics, movie scripts, and even private conversation. There were words prohibited by military decree, such as the word “compañero,” and others that could not be mentioned even though no edict had swept them from the lexicon, such as “freedom,” “justice,” and “trade union.” Alba wondered where so many Fascists had come from overnight, because in the country’s long democratic history they had not been particularly noticeable, except for a few who got carried away during World War II and thought it amusing to parade in black shirts with their arms raised in salute—to the laughter and hissing of bystanders—and had never won any important role in the life of the country. Nor did she understand the attitude of the armed forces, most of whom came from the middle and working class and had traditionally been closer to the left than to the far right. She did not understand the state of civil war, nor did she realize that war is the soldiers’ work of art, the culmination of all their training, the gold medal of their profession. Soldiers are not made to shine in times of peace. The coup gave them a chance to put into practice what they had learned in their barracks: blind obedience, the use of arms, and other skills that soldiers can master once they silence the scruples of their hearts.

  Alba abandoned her studies; the school of philosophy, like many others that open the gateway of the mind, was closed. Nor did she continue with her music, because her cello seemed frivolous to her under the circumstances. Many professors were fired, arrested, or simply disappeared, in accordance with a blacklist in the hands of the political police. Sebastián Gómez was killed in the first raid, betrayed by his own students. The university was filled with spies.

  * * *

  The upper middle class and the economic right, who had favored the coup, were euphoric. At first they were a little shocked when they saw the consequences of their action; they had never lived in a dictatorship and did not know what it was like. They thought the loss of democratic freedoms would be temporary and that it was possible to go without individual or collective rights for a while so long as the regime respected the tenets of free enterprise. Nor did they put much stock in international condemnation, which lumped them in the same category as the other tyrannies of the region, because it seemed a small price to pay for the defeat of Marxism. When foreign investment capital began to flow into the country, they naturally attributed it to the stability of the new regime, ignoring the fact that for every peso that entered the country, two were lost to interest. When almost all the national industries were gradually shut down and businesses were beginning to go bankrupt, defeated by the massive importation of consumer goods, they said that Brazilian stoves, Taiwanese cloth, and Japanese motorcycles were superior to anything that had ever been manufactured in the country. Only when the concessions of the mines were returned to the North American companies after three years of nationalization did a few voices suggest that this amounted to giving the country away wrapped in cellophane. But when the lands that the agrarian reform had parceled out were returned to their former owners, they were reassured: things were returning to the good old days. They realized that only a dictatorship could act with the necessary force and without accounting to the people to guarantee their privileges, so they stopped talking about politics and accepted the idea that they held economic power, but the military was goin
g to rule. The right’s only task was to advise the military in the elaboration of new edicts and new laws. Within days they had eliminated labor unions. The union leaders were either in jail or dead, political parties had been indefinitely recessed, and all student-worker organizations, and even professional associations, had been dismantled. Gatherings of any size were forbidden. The only place people could congregate was in church, so religion quickly became fashionable, and priests and nuns were forced to postpone their spiritual tasks in order to minister to the earthly needs of their lost flocks. The government and the business community began to view them as potential enemies, and some dreamt of resolving the problem by assassinating the cardinal when it was clear that the Pope in Rome had no intention of removing him from his post and sending him to an asylum for insane priests.

  A large part of the middle class rejoiced at the military coup, because to them it signaled a return to law and order, to the beauty of tradition, skirts for women and short hair for men, but they soon began to suffer from the impact of high prices and the lack of jobs. Their salaries were not sufficient to buy food. There was someone to mourn for in every family, and the middle class could no longer say, as they had in the beginning, that if he was imprisoned, dead, or exiled it was because he deserved it. Nor could they go on denying the use of torture.

  While luxury stores, miraculous finance companies, exotic restaurants, and import business were flourishing, the unemployed lined up outside factory gates waiting for a chance to work at the minimum wage. The labor force was reduced to slavery, and for the first time in many decades management was able to fire people at will without granting any severance pay and to have them thrown in jail for the slightest protest.