The House of the Spirits

by Isabel Allende

  During the first months, Senator Trueba shared the opportunism of his class. He was convinced that a period of dictatorship was necessary to bring the country back into the fold it never should have left. He was one of the first landowners to regain his land. Tres Marías was returned to him in ruins but intact down to the last square yard. He had waited more than two years for this moment, nursing his anger. Without giving it a second thought he left for the countryside with half a dozen hired thugs to avenge himself to his heart’s content against the peasants who had dared to defy him and rob him of his property. They arrived on a fine Sunday morning shortly before Christmas, entering the hacienda with all the clamor of a pirate crew. His men spread out, rounding people up with curses, blows, and kicks. Then they gathered humans and animals in the courtyard, poured gasoline on the little brick houses that had once been Trueba’s pride and joy, and set fire to them and everything inside them. They shot the animals to death. They burned the fields, the chicken coops, the bicycles, and even the cradles of newborn babies, in a noontime witches’ Sabbath that nearly made Trueba die of joy. He dismissed all the tenants, warning them that if he ever caught them prowling around his property they would suffer the same fate as their animals. He watched them depart poorer than ever in a long, sad procession, with their children, their old people, and the few dogs that had survived the shooting, and some chickens saved from the inferno, dragging their feet along the dusty road that led away from the land where they had lived for generations. At the gate to Tres Marías there was a group of wretched people waiting with anxious eyes. They were peasants who had also been expelled from their hacienda, arriving as humbly as their ancestors of the preceding century to beg the patrón to give them work in the coming harvest.

  That night Esteban Trueba lay down in the iron bed that had belonged to his parents, in the old main house where he had not slept in years. He was tired. The smell of the fire, and the animals that had had to be burned so that their rotting corpses would not infect the air, clung to his nostrils. The remains of the little houses were still burning; everywhere around him was death and destruction. But he knew that he could restore the land again, just as he had once before, because the pastures were intact and so was his strength. Despite the pleasure of his revenge, he was unable to sleep. He felt like a father who has punished his children too severely. All that night he kept recalling the faces of the peasants, whom he had seen come into this world on his property, as they moved off along the highway. He cursed his bad temper. Nor was he able to sleep well the rest of that week, and when he finally did he dreamt of Rosa. He decided not to tell anyone what he had done, and promised himself that Tres Marías would again become the model farm it had once been. He let it be known that he was willing to have his tenants back—under certain conditions, of course—but none of them returned. They had scattered through the countryside, across the mountains and along the coast. Some had walked all the way to the mines, others to the islands of the South, all of them seeking their families’ daily bread wherever they could find it. Disgusted with himself, the patrón returned to the city, feeling older than ever. His soul weighed heavy.

  * * *

  The Poet was dying in his house by the sea. He had been ailing, and the recent events had exhausted his desire to go on living. Soldiers broke into his house, ransacked his snail collection, his shells, his butterflies, his bottles, the ship figureheads he had rescued from so many seas, his books, his paintings, and his unfinished poems, looking for subversive weapons and hidden Communists, until his old poet’s heart began to falter. They took him to the capital, where he died four days later. The last words of this man who had sung to life were: “They’re going to shoot them! They’re going to shoot them!” Not one of his friends could be with him at the hour of his death; they were all outlaws, fugitives, exiles, or dead. His blue house on the hill lay half in ruins, its floor burnt and its windows broken. No one knew if it was the work of the military, as the neighbors said, or of the neighbors, as the military said. A wake was held by those few who were brave enough to attend, along with journalists from all over the world who came to cover his funeral. Senator Trueba was his ideological enemy, but he had often had him in his house and knew his poetry by heart. He appeared at the wake dressed in rigorous black, with his granddaughter Alba. Both stood watch beside the simple wooden coffin and accompanied it to the cemetery on that unfortunate morning. Alba was holding a bouquet of the first carnations of the season, as red as blood. The small cortege walked on foot, slowly, all the way to the cemetery, between two rows of soldiers who had cordoned off the streets.

  People went in silence. Suddenly, someone hoarsely called out the Poet’s name and in a single voice everyone replied, “Here! Now and forever!” It was as if they had opened a valve and all the pain, fear, and anger of those days had issued from their chests and rolled onto the street, rising in a terrible shout to the thick black clouds above. Another shouted, “Compañero President!” and everyone answered in a single wail, the way men grieve: “Here! Now and forever!” The Poet’s funeral had turned into the symbolic burial of freedom.

  The cameramen of Swedish television were filming close by Alba and her grandfather, to send back to Nobel’s frozen land the terrifying image of machine guns posted on both sides of the street, people’s faces, the flower-covered coffin, as well as the silent group of women clustered in the doorway of the morgue, two blocks from the cemetery, reading the names on the lists of dead. Voices mingled in a single chant and the air filled with forbidden slogans as, face to face with the guns that were shaking in the soldiers’ hands, they shouted that the people united would never be defeated. The cortege passed in front of a construction site and the workers dropped their tools, removed their helmets, and, with bowed heads, formed a single line. A man with a shirt frayed at the cuffs, without a jacket and wearing broken shoes, marched along reciting the Poet’s most revolutionary poems, his grief streaming down his face. Senator Trueba gazed at him in astonishment.

  “It’s a shame he was a Communist!” the senator told his granddaughter. “Such a fine poet, and such confused ideas! If he had died before the coup, I suppose he would have received a national tribute.”

  “He knew how to die, just as he knew how to live, Grandfather,” Alba replied.

  She was convinced that he had died at the proper time, because no tribute could have been any greater than this modest procession of a handful of men and women who lowered him into a borrowed grave, shouting his verses of freedom and justice for the last time. Two days later a notice from the military junta appeared in the papers, decreeing national mourning for the Poet and authorizing those who wanted to do so to fly the flag at half-mast in front of their houses. The permission was valid from the moment of his death until the day the notice appeared.

  In the same way that she could not sit down to mourn her Uncle Jaime, Alba could not lose her head thinking of Miguel or grieving for the Poet. She was absorbed in the task of tracking down the disappeared, comforting the victims of torture who returned with their backs flayed and their eyes unfocused, and searching for food for the priests’ soup kitchens. Still, in the silence of the night, when the city lost its stage-set normality and operetta peace, she was besieged by the agonizing thoughts she had repressed during the day. At that time of night, the only traffic consisted of trucks filled with bodies and detainees, and police cars that roamed the streets like lost wolves howling in the darkness of the curfew. Alba shook in her bed. She saw the ghosts of all those unknown dead, heard the great house pant with the labored breath of an old woman. Her hearing sharpened and she felt the dreadful noises in her bones: a distant screeching of brakes, the slam of a door, gunfire, the crush of boots, a muffled scream. Then the long silence would return, lasting until dawn, when the city reawakened and the sun seemed to erase the terrors of the night. She was not the only one in the house who lay awake at night. She often came upon her grandfather in his nightshirt and
slippers, older and sadder than during the day, heating up a cup of bouillon and muttering the curses of a buccaneer because his bones and his soul were killing him. Her mother also rummaged in the kitchen or walked like some midnight apparition through the empty rooms.

  Thus the months went by, and it became clear to everyone, even Senator Trueba, that the military had seized power to keep it for themselves and not to hand the country over to the politicians of the right who had made the coup possible. The military were a breed apart, brothers who spoke a different dialect from the civilians and with whom any attempt at dialogue would be a conversation of the deaf, because the slightest dissent was considered treason in their rigid honor code. Trueba realized that they had messianic plans that did not include the politicians. One day he was discussing the situation with Blanca and Alba. He expressed his regret that the Army’s action, whose purpose had been to eliminate the threat of a Marxist dictatorship, had condemned the country to a dictatorship far more severe, one that, to all evidence, was fated to last a century. For the first time in his life, Senator Trueba admitted he had made a mistake. Sunk in his armchair like an old man at the end of his days, they saw him shed silent tears. He was not crying because he had lost power. He was crying for his country.

  Then Blanca knelt beside him and took his hand. She confessed that Pedro Tercero was living like a hermit in one of the abandoned rooms Clara had had built in the time of the spirits. The day after the coup, the lists of people who were supposed to present themselves to the authorities had been published and the name of Pedro Tercero García was among them. There were some who, convinced that in their country nothing like this could ever happen, had gone on their own to surrender to the Ministry of Defense and had paid for it with their lives. But Pedro Tercero had had a premonition of the ferocity of the new regime long before anyone else, perhaps because during those three years he had come to know the armed forces and no longer believed that they were any different from those elsewhere in the world. That same night, while the curfew was in force, he had crawled to the big house on the corner and knocked at Blanca’s window. When she looked out, her eyes blurred from her migraine, she did not recognize him because he had shaved his beard and was wearing spectacles.

  “They’ve killed the President,” Pedro Tercero said.

  She hid him in one of the empty rooms. She set up an emergency refuge, never thinking that she would have to keep him hidden for several months while the soldiers combed the country looking for him.

  Blanca assumed that it would occur to no one to think that Pedro Tercero García was in Senator Trueba’s house at the very moment when the senator was attending the Te Deum in the cathedral. It was the happiest period in Blanca’s life.

  But for Pedro Tercero the hours passed as slowly as if he were in jail. He spent his day shut within four walls behind a locked door, so that no one would happen to walk in to clean his room, and with the blinds lowered and the curtains drawn. Daylight could not come in, but he was able to recognize it by the tenuous change in the cracks of the blinds. At night he opened the window as wide as he could to air out the room—where he had to keep a covered pail in which to relieve himself—and to inhale great mouthfuls of the air of freedom. He spent his time reading Jaime’s books, which Blanca brought him on the sly, and listening to the street sounds and to the whisper of the radio, which he kept at the lowest volume. Blanca managed to bring him a guitar and stuffed some rags beneath the strings so no one would hear him composing muted songs of widows, orphans, prisoners, and the disappeared. He tried to work out a schedule to organize his day. He did calisthenics, read, studied English, took a siesta, wrote music, and did some more calisthenics, but even with all this he had endless amounts of spare time until he finally heard the key turn in the lock and saw Blanca coming through the door with newspapers, food, and clean water for him to wash with. They made love desperately, inventing forbidden formulas that fear and passion transformed into wild journeys to the stars. Blanca had already resigned herself to chastity, middle age, and her various aches and pains, but the shock of love had brought her a new youth. The sheen of her skin, the rhythm of her gait, and the cadence of her voice all became more pronounced. She smiled inwardly and walked around like a woman asleep. She had never been more beautiful. Even her father noticed, attributing it to the peace of abundance. “Ever since Blanca stopped having to stand in line, she looks like a new woman,” Senator Trueba remarked. Alba also noticed it. She watched her mother. Her strange somnambulism seemed suspicious to her, as did her new mania for taking food to her room. On more than one occasion, she set out to spy on her during the night, but she was overcome by the fatigue of her own many acts of consolation, and when she had insomnia she was afraid to venture into the empty rooms that were full of whispering ghosts.

  Pedro Tercero grew thin and lost the good humor and sweetness that had characterized him up till then. He was bored. He cursed his voluntary imprisonment, and raged impatiently for news of his friends. Only Blanca’s presence could pacify him. When she entered the room, he hurled himself upon her like a madman to calm the terrors of the day and the tedium of his weeks. He began to be obsessed by the idea that he was a coward and a traitor for not having shared the fate of so many others, and felt that it would be more honorable to surrender and meet his fate. Blanca tried to dissuade him with the best of arguments, but he seemed not to hear her. She tried to hold him back with the force of her newfound love, fed him with her hands, bathed him by rubbing him with a damp cloth and dusting him with powder like an infant, cut his hair and fingernails, and even shaved him. Finally she had no choice but to put tranquilizers in his food and sleeping pills in his water, which stunned him into a profound, tormented sleep, from which he would awake with a dry mouth and a sadder heart. After a few months Blanca realized that she could not hold him prisoner indefinitely and gave up her plans to reduce his spirit in order to make him her permanent lover. She understood that he was being eaten up alive because for him freedom was even more important than love, and that there were no magic pills that would make him change his mind.

  “Help me, Father!” Blanca begged Senator Trueba. “I have to get him out of the country.”

  The old man was paralyzed with bewilderment, recognizing how worn out he was, when he tried to summon up his fury and his hatred and was unable to find them. He thought of the peasant who had shared his daughter’s love for half a century and was unable to find a single reason for detesting him, not even his poncho, his Socialist beard, his tenacity, or his damned fox-chasing hens.

  “Hell!” he exclaimed. “We’ll have to get him asylum, because if they find him here we’ll all be screwed” was all he could think to say.

  Blanca threw her arms around his neck and covered him with kisses, weeping like a child. It was the first spontaneous hug she had given her father since her most remote childhood.

  “I can get him into an embassy,” Alba said. “But we have to wait for the right moment and he’ll have to leap over a wall.”

  “That won’t be necessary, my dear,” Senator Trueba replied. “I still have some influential friends in this country.”

  Forty-eight hours later the door to Pedro Tercero García’s room swung open. This time, instead of Blanca, Senator Trueba was standing in the doorway. The fugitive thought his final hour had arrived and, in a strange way, he was happy.

  “I’ve come to get you out of here,” Trueba said.

  “Why?” Pedro Tercero asked.

  “Because Blanca asked me to,” the other answered.

  “Go to hell,” Pedro Tercero said.

  “Fine, that’s where we’re going. You’re coming with me.”

  The two of them smiled simultaneously. The silver limousine of a Nordic ambassador was waiting in the courtyard. Pedro Tercero was put in the trunk of the car, curled up like a package, and covered with market baskets full of fruit and vegetables. Blanca, Alba, Senator Tru
eba, and their friend the ambassador rode inside the car. The chauffeur drove them to the residence of the Papal Nuncio, passing in front of a police barricade without anyone attempting to stop them. There was a double guard stationed at the nunciature gate, but when they recognized Senator Trueba and saw the diplomatic plates on the car, they let them in with a salute. Behind the gate, safely within the seat of the Vatican, they let Pedro Tercero out from under a mountain of lettuce leaves and bruised tomatoes. They led him to the office of the Nuncio, who was waiting for him dressed in his bishop’s cassock and holding a new safe-conduct pass that would allow him to go abroad with Blanca, who had decided to live out in exile the love she had postponed since her childhood. The Nuncio welcomed them. He was an admirer of Pedro Tercero García and had all his records.

  While the priest and the Nordic ambassador discussed the international situation, the family said goodbye. Blanca and Alba wept disconsolately. They had never been separated before. Esteban Trueba gave his daughter a long hug. He did not cry, but his mouth was clamped shut and he shook from the effort of holding back his sobs.

  “I haven’t been a good father to you, my dear,” he said. “Do you think you’ll ever be able to forgive me and forget the past?”

  “I love you so much, Papa!” Blanca wept, throwing her arms around his neck, clasping him to her ardently, and covering his face with kisses.

  After that the old man turned to Pedro Tercero and looked him in the eye. He stretched out his hand, but he did not know how to shake Pedro’s hand because it was missing several fingers. Instead, he opened his arms and the two men said goodbye in a tight knot, free at last of the hatred and rancor that had poisoned their lives for so many years.

  “I’ll take good care of your daughter and I will try to make her happy,” Pedro Tercero García said, his voice breaking.