Tránsito Soto has gotten where she has because, among other things, she knows how to pay her debts. I suppose she used her knowledge of the most secret side of the men in power to return the fifty pesos I once lent her. Two days later she called me on the phone.
“It’s Tránsito Soto, patrón. I did what you asked me to.”
EPILOGUE
My grandfather died last night. He did not die like a dog, as he feared he would, but peacefully, in my arms. In the end, he confused me with Clara, and at times with Rosa, but he died without pain or anguish, more lucid than ever and happy, conscious, and serene. Now he’s laid out on the sailboat of the gentle sea, smiling and calm, while I write at the blond wood table that belonged to my grandmother. I’ve opened the blue silk curtains to let the morning in and cheer up the room. A new canary is singing in the antique cage hanging by the window, and from the center of the room the glass eyes of Barrabás stare up at me. My grandfather told me Clara fainted the day he put the skin of the animal down as a rug, thinking it would please her. We both laughed until we cried and decided to go down to the basement and look for the remains of poor old Barrabás, sovereign in his indefinable biological constitution, despite the passage of time and so much neglect, and to put him where my grandfather had laid him half a century earlier in homage to the woman he loved most in his life.
“Let’s leave him here,” he said. “This is where he always should have been.”
I arrived at the house on a sparkling winter morning in a wagon drawn by a scrawny horse. With its double row of centenarian chestnut trees and its seignorial mansions, the street looked like an improbable setting for such a modest vehicle, but when it pulled up before my grandfather’s house it fit in very well. The big house on the corner was sadder and older than I had remembered, and looked absurd, with its architectural eccentricities, its pretensions to French style, its façade covered with diseased ivy. The garden was a tangle of weeds and almost all the shutters were hanging from their hinges. As always, the gate was open. I rang the bell, and after a while I heard a pair of sandals approach, and a maid I had never seen before came to the door. She looked at me blankly as I inhaled the marvelous scent of wood and seclusion of the house where I was born. My eyes filled with tears. I ran to the library, sensing that my grandfather would be waiting for me where he always sat, and there he was, shrunken in his armchair. I was surprised to see how old he looked, how small and trembling. All that remained from before was his leonine white mane and his heavy silver cane. We threw our arms around each other and remained locked together for a long while, whispering Alba, Grandfather, Grandfather, Alba, and then we kissed each other and when he saw my hand he began to cry and curse and smash his cane against the furniture, the way he used to, and I laughed because he was not as old or as worn out as he had looked at first.
That same day my grandfather wanted us to leave the country. He was afraid for me. But I explained that I could not leave, because far away from my country I would be like those trees they chop down at Christmastime, those poor rootless pines that last a little while and then die.
“I’m no fool, Alba,” he said, staring me straight in the eye. “The real reason you want to stay here is Miguel. Isn’t that so?”
I was taken aback. I had never spoken to him of Miguel.
“Ever since I met him, I knew I would never get you out of here,” he told me sadly.
“You met him? Is he alive, Grandfather?” I shook him, grabbing hold of his clothes.
“He was last week, my dear, the last time we saw each other,” he said.
He told me that after they arrested me Miguel had appeared one night at the big house on the corner. He almost gave my grandfather a stroke, but in a few minutes he realized that the two of them had a common goal: to rescue me. Afterward Miguel often came to see him. He kept him company and they pooled their efforts to discover where I was being held. It was Miguel who had the idea of going to see Tránsito Soto. My grandfather would never have thought of it.
“Listen to me, señor. I know who has the power in this country. My people have infiltrated everywhere. If there’s anyone who can help Alba now, it’s Tránsito Soto,” he assured him.
“If we can get her out of the hands of the police, she’ll have to leave here, son. You two go together. I can get you safe-conduct passes out of the country and you’ll never need money,” my grandfather offered.
But Miguel looked at him as if he were an old lunatic and proceeded to explain to him that he had a mission to fulfill and could not flee.
“I had to resign myself to the idea that you would stay here in spite of everything,” my grandfather said, embracing me. “Now tell me about it. I want to know it all, down to the last detail.”
So I told him. I told him that after my hand became infected they had taken me to a secret clinic where they send the prisoners they don’t want to die. There I was attended by a tall, fine-featured doctor who seemed to hate me as much as Colonel García and refused to give me any painkillers. He used each treatment to regale me with his personal theory about how to rid the country—and if possible, the world—of Communism. Aside from that, he left me in peace. For the first time in several weeks, I had clean sheets, enough to eat, and natural light. I was looked after by a male nurse named Rojas, a heavyset man with a round face, who always wore a dirty blue smock and was endowed with enormous kindness. He fed me, told me endless stories about distant football teams I had never heard of, and obtained painkillers with which he injected me on the sly until he managed to put a stop to my delirium. In this clinic, Rojas had already cared for an interminable procession of unlucky souls. He had been able to verify that most of them were neither killers nor traitors, and he was therefore well disposed toward the prisoners. It often happened that he had no sooner finished putting someone back together than the same prisoner was taken to be tortured again. “It’s like shoveling sand into the sea,” he used to say, sadly shaking his head. I found out that some of them asked him to help them die, and in at least one case I think he did. Rojas kept an exact tally of everyone who entered and left, and he could recite their names, dates of entry and departure, and their circumstances without hesitation. He swore to me that he had never heard of Miguel, and that gave me the courage to keep living, even though I sometimes fell into a black pit of depression and began to recite the refrain about how much I wanted to die. He was the one who told me about Amanda. They arrested her around the same time they arrested me. By the time they took her to Rojas, there was nothing he could do. She died without betraying her brother, fulfilling a promise she had made him many years before, the day she first took him to school. The only consolation is that she died much faster than they would have liked, because her body was so weak from drugs and from her infinite despair over Jaime’s death. Rojas took care of me until my fever had subsided, my hand began to heal, and I returned to my senses; after that he had no more excuses to keep me there. But they did not send me back to Esteban García, as I had feared. I suppose it was then that the beneficent influence of the woman with the pearls went into effect, the one my grandfather and I went to see to thank her for saving my life. Four men came to get me in the night. Rojas woke me up, helped me dress, and wished me good luck. I gave him a grateful kiss.
“Goodbye, little one! Change your bandage, don’t let it get wet, and if the fever comes back it means it’s infected again,” he told me from the doorway.
They led me into a narrow cell where I spent the rest of the night sitting in a chair. The next day they took me to a concentration camp for women. I will never forget the moment when they took my blindfold off and I found myself in the middle of a sun-filled, square courtyard, surrounded by women who were singing the Ode to Joy, just for me. My friend Ana Díaz was among them and ran to embrace me. They quickly laid me on a camp bed and explained the rules of the community and my responsibilities.
“Until you’re better, yo
u don’t have to wash or sew, but you have to help with the children,” they decided.
I had managed to resist the inferno with a certain integrity, but when I felt so much support, I broke down. The smallest expression of tenderness sent me into a crying fit. I spent the night with my eyes wide open, wrapped in the closeness of so many women, who took turns watching over me and never left me alone. They helped me when I began to suffer from bad memories or when I saw Colonel García coming to plunge me back into his world of terror, or when, with a sob, I imagined Miguel arrested.
“Don’t think about Miguel,” they told me, they insisted. “You mustn’t think about your loved ones or about the world that lies beyond these walls. It’s the only way to survive.”
Ana Díaz obtained a notebook and gave it to me. “For you to write in, to see if you can get out whatever’s worrying you inside, so you’ll get better once and for all and join our singing and help us sew,” she said.
I showed her my hand and shook my head, but she put the pencil in my left hand and told me to write with it. I began slowly. I tried to organize the story I had started in the doghouse. My companions helped me whenever my patience flagged and the pencil began to shake in my hand. There were times when I threw it all away, but I would quickly retrieve the notebook and lovingly smooth its pages, filled with regret, because I did not know when I could get another one. At other times I would wake up sad and filled with foreboding. I would turn my face to the wall and refuse to speak to anyone, but the women did not leave me alone. They shook me, made me work, made me tell stories to the children. They changed my bandage with great care and put the paper in front of me.
“If you want, I’ll tell you my story so you can write it down,” one said. Then they laughed and made jokes, arguing that everybody’s story was the same and that it would be better to write love stories because everyone likes them. They also forced me to eat. They divided up the servings with the strictest sense of justice, each according to her need; they gave me a little more because they said I was just skin and bones and not even the most desperate man would ever look at me. I shuddered, but Ana Díaz reminded me that I was not the only woman who had been raped, and that, along with many other things, it was something I had to forget. The women spent the whole day singing at the top of their lungs. The guards would pound on the wall.
“Shut up, whores!”
“Make us if you can, bastards! Let’s see if you dare!” And they sang even stronger but the guards did not come in, for they had learned that there is no way to avoid the unavoidable.
I tried to record the small events of the women’s section of the jail: that they had arrested the President’s sister, that they had taken our cigarettes away, that new prisoners had arrived, that Adriana had had another one of her attacks and had stood over her children threatening to kill them; how we had had to pull them away from her and I had sat with a child in each arm and told them magic stories from the enchanted trunks of my Great-Uncle Marcos until they fell asleep, and how in the meantime I thought about the fate of the children growing up in that place with a mother who had gone mad, cared for by other, unfamiliar mothers who had not lost their voice for lullabies, and I wondered, as I wrote, how Adriana’s children would be able to return the songs and the gestures to the children and grandchildren of the women who were rocking them to sleep.
I was in the concentration camp only a few days. One Wednesday afternoon, the police came to get me. I had a moment of panic, thinking they were taking me back to Esteban García, but my companions told me that if the men were in uniform they were not part of the security police, and that reassured me a little. I left the women my woolen sweater, so they could unravel it and knit something warm for Adriana’s children, along with the money I had had when I was arrested, which, with the military’s scrupulous honesty for the unimportant, had been returned to me. I put my notebook in my slacks and hugged each of the women one by one. The last thing I heard when I left was the chorus of my friends singing to give me courage, just as they did with all the women when they arrived or left the camp. I wept as I walked. I had been happy there.
I told my grandfather that they had put me in a van and driven me blindfolded, during curfew. I was shaking so hard that my teeth were chattering. One of the men who was with me in the back of the truck put a piece of candy in my hand and gave me a few comforting pats on the shoulder.
“Don’t worry, señorita,” he told me in a whisper. “Nothing’s going to happen to you. We’re going to release you, and in a few hours you’ll be back with your family.”
They left me in a dump near the Misericordia District. The same man who gave me the candy helped me down.
“Careful with the curfew,” he whispered in my ear. “Don’t move till sunrise.”
I heard the engine and thought they were going to run me down and that my name would appear in the papers saying I had died in a traffic accident, but the vehicle drove away without touching me. I waited for a while, paralyzed with fear and cold, until I finally decided to pull off the blindfold and see where they had left me. I looked around. It was an empty lot full of garbage, with rats scampering among the refuse. There was a pale moon that allowed me to make out in the distance the outlines of a wretched slum, with houses made of cardboard, planks, and corrugated metal. I realized I must pay attention to what the guard had said and stay there until morning. I would have spent the night there, but suddenly a boy appeared, crouching in the shadows. He motioned to me. Since I had nothing to lose, I walked toward him, stumbling. When I reached him, I saw his small, anxious face. He threw a blanket over my shoulders, took me by the hand, and led me to the settlement without saying a word. We walked squatting, avoiding the street and the few lamps that were lit. A couple of dogs began to bark, but no heads appeared to see what was going on. We crossed a dirt courtyard, where pieces of clothing hung like pennants from a wire, and entered a dilapidated hut like all the others. Inside, a single bulb cast its somber light. I was moved by the extreme poverty: the only furniture was a pine table, two crude chairs, and a bed on which several children were sleeping. A short, dark woman came out to meet me. Her legs were crossed with veins and her eyes were sunk in a web of generous wrinkles that did not make her look old. She smiled, and I saw that some of her teeth were missing. She came up to me and straightened the blanket with a brusque, timid gesture that took the place of the hug she was afraid to give me.
“I’m going to give you a little cup of tea. I don’t have any sugar, but something warm will do you good,” she said.
She told me they had heard the van and knew what it meant to hear a vehicle in that out-of-the-way place during curfew. They had waited until they were sure it had gone away and then she had sent the boy out to see what had been left. They had expected to find a body.
“They sometimes leave us the bodies of people they’ve shot,” she said. “To intimidate us.”
We stayed up all night talking. She was one of those stoical, practical women of our country, the kind of woman who has a child with every man who passes through her life and, on top of that, takes in other people’s abandoned children, her own poor relatives, and anybody else who needs a mother, a sister, or an aunt; the kind of woman who’s the pillar of many other lives, who raises her children to grow up and leave her and lets her men leave too, without a word of reproach, because she has more pressing things to worry about. She looked like so many others I had met in the soup kitchens, in my Uncle Jaime’s clinic, at the church office where they would go for information on their disappeared, and in the morgue where they would go to find their dead. I told her she had run an enormous risk rescuing me, and she smiled. It was then I understood that the days of Colonel García and all those like him are numbered, because they have not been able to destroy the spirit of these women.
The next morning, she took me to a close family friend who had a horse-drawn cart for hauling freight. She asked him
to take me home, and that’s how I arrived here. Along the way I could see the city in all its terrible contrasts: the huts surrounded by makeshift walls to create the illusion that they do not exist, the cramped, gray center, and the High District, with its English gardens, its parks, its glass skyscrapers, and its fair-haired children riding bicycles. Even the dogs looked happy to me. Everything in order, everything clean, everything calm, and that solid peace of a conscience without memory. This neighborhood is like another country.
The House of the Spirits Page 50
