“It’s for your own good, my little angel!” Nana would sob, wrapped in a bloody sheet, her face blackened with burnt cork.
Nívea forbade her to continue frightening her daughter. She realized that the tension in the air increased Clara’s mental powers and disturbed the spirits that were hovering around the child. Besides, that procession of terrifying figures was destroying Barrabás’s nervous system. He had never had a well-developed sense of smell, and was incapable of recognizing Nana beneath her multiple disguises. The dog would begin to urinate on himself sitting down, leaving an immense puddle all around him, and frequently his teeth would chatter. But Nana took advantage of the slightest distraction on Nívea’s part to persist in her attempts to cure the child’s muteness with the same remedy she used for hiccups.
Clara was removed from the convent school at which all the del Valle sisters had been educated, and placed under the instruction of private tutors who came to the house. Severo brought in a special governess from England, Miss Agatha, who was tall and amber-colored, and had the large hands of a bricklayer, but she was no match for the climate, the spicy food, and the independent flights of the saltshaker across the dining-room table, and was forced to return to Liverpool. The next one was a Swiss girl, who fared no better, and then a French one, who arrived courtesy of the family’s acquaintance with the ambassador of that country; but she was so rosy, round, and sweet that within a few short months she was with child. A brief investigation revealed the father to be Luis, Clara’s older brother. Without asking their opinion, Severo made them marry, and, despite the predictions to the contrary of Nívea and her friends, they were very happy. After all these experiences, Nívea convinced her husband that the study of foreign languages was not important for a child with telepathic gifts, and that it would be far better for her to continue piano lessons and to learn how to sew.
Little Clara read all the time. Her interest in books was indiscriminate. She was as happy to read the magic books from her Uncle Marcos’s enchanted trunks as she was to contemplate the Liberal Party documents her father kept in his study. She filled innumerable notebooks with her private observations, recording the events of those years, thanks to which they were not erased by the mists of forgetfulness and I can now use them to reclaim her memory.
Clara the Clairvoyant could interpret dreams. It was an inborn talent, requiring none of the trying cabalistic study to which her Uncle Marcos had applied himself with far more effort and far less effect. The first one to realize this was Honorio, the gardener, who dreamt one night that there were snakes between his toes and that in order to get rid of them he had kicked and kicked until he had squashed nineteen. He told this to the little girl while he was pruning the rosebushes, simply to entertain her, because he adored her and it made him sad that she was mute. Clara took out her slate from her apron pocket and wrote down her interpretation of Honorio’s dream: “You will have a lot of money, it will last only a short while, you will make it without effort, play number 19.” Honorio did not know how to read, but Nívea read the message out to him amid joking and laughter. The gardener did everything Clara told him to do and won eighty pesos in an illegal numbers game that was held behind a coal store. He spent it on a new suit, an unforgettable drinking spree with all his friends, and a porcelain doll for Clara. From that day on, the child had more work than she could handle deciphering dreams behind her mother’s back—for once Honorio’s story made the rounds she was pursued by questions: what does it mean to fly above a tower with swans’ wings; to float out to sea on a raft and hear a siren with a widow’s voice; for someone to give birth to twins joined at the shoulder, each with a sword in his hand—and Clara would unhesitatingly write down on her little slate that the tower is death and whoever flies over it will be saved from an accidental death; that whoever is shipwrecked and hears the voice of a siren will lose his job and undergo great suffering, but he will be rescued by a woman with whom he will open a business; and that the twins are a husband and wife forced to share a single destiny, perpetually wounding one another with the blows of their swords.
Dreams were not the only thing that Clara read. She could also predict the future and recognize people’s intentions, abilities that she maintained throughout her life and that increased with time. She announced the death of her godfather, Don Salomón Valdes, a broker at the stock exchange, who, convinced that he had lost everything he owned, hanged himself from the chandelier in his elegant office. There they found him, at Clara’s insistence, looking every bit like a dejected sheep, exactly as she had described him on her slate. She predicted her father’s hernia; all the earthquakes and other natural disturbances; the one and only time snow fell in the capital, freezing to death the poor people in their shantytowns and the rosebushes in the gardens of the rich; and the identity of the murderer of schoolgirls long before the police discovered the second corpse; but no one believed her, and Severo did not want her giving her opinion on matters concerning criminals who were not related to the family. With a single glance Clara realized that Getulio Armando was going to swindle her father in the business of the Australian sheep, because she read it in the color of his aura. She wrote it to her father, but he did not pay attention, and by the time he remembered her prediction he had already lost half his fortune and his partner was off in the Caribbean, newly wealthy, with a harem of big-bottomed mulattas and his own private boat for sunbathing.
Clara’s ability to move objects without touching them did not disappear with the onset of menstruation, as Nana had predicted, but rather became more pronounced, until she was so accomplished that she could move the keys on the piano with the cover down, even though she never learned to move the instrument itself around the drawing room, as she wanted to. She spent the main part of her time and energy in these extravagant pursuits. She developed the capacity to guess an astonishing percentage of the cards in a deck, and invented games of fantasy to play with her brothers and sisters. Her father forbade her to read the future in cards and to invoke ghosts and mischievous spirits that annoyed the rest of the family and terrorized the servants, but Nívea understood that the more limitations and shocks her daughter was subjected to the madder she became, and decided to leave her in peace with her spiritualist tricks, her fortune-telling games and her cavernous silence, and did her best to love her unconditionally and accept her as she was. Clara grew like a wild plant, despite the recommendations of Dr. Cuevas, who had brought from Europe the novel idea of cold baths and electric shocks for the treatment of the insane.
Barrabás accompanied the child day and night, except during the normal periods of his sexual activity. He was always hovering around her like a gigantic shadow as silent as the little girl herself. He threw himself at her feet when she sat down and slept beside her every night, chugging like a locomotive. He became so attached to his mistress that when she sleepwalked through the house the dog followed imitating her posture. Whenever there was a full moon, they could be seen gliding down the corridors like two ghosts floating through the pale light. As the dog grew in size, his distractedness became more evident. He never comprehended, for example, the transparent nature of glass, and in moments of great emotion he would charge the windows at a gallop, with the innocent intention of catching a fly. He would fall through to the other side in a din of breaking glass, surprised and disappointed. In those days windowpanes were brought from France by ship and the animal’s mania for crashing into them became a problem, until Clara thought of painting cats on the glass. When Barrabás became an adult, he stopped fornicating with the feet of the piano, as he had in his childhood, and his reproductive instinct declared itself only when he sniffed a bitch in heat in his close environs. On such occasions there was neither chain nor door that could hold him back. He would hurl himself onto the street, overcoming every obstacle in his path, and remain at large for two or three days. He always returned with the poor dog hanging off him, suspended in the air, impaled on his immense masculi
nity. The children had to be whisked out of the way so they would not see the horrendous spectacle of the gardener hosing the dogs down with freezing water until, many gallons and kicks and other indignities later, Barrabás became unstuck from his beloved, leaving her to die in the courtyard of the house, where Severo was obliged to finish her off with a coup de grâce.
Clara’s adolescence passed calmly in her parents’ large house with its three courtyards. She was spoiled to death by her older brothers, by Severo, who preferred her to all his other children, by Nívea, and by Nana, who alternated her sinister attacks disguised as a ghost with the most tender of attentions. Almost all her brothers and sisters had married or left—some to travel, others to work in the provinces—and the big house, which had contained such a large family, was almost empty, with many of its rooms locked. The child spent whatever free time her tutors left her in reading, moving numerous different objects without touching them, chasing Barrabás, practicing various techniques of prognostication, and learning to knit, which was the only one of the domestic arts she ever mastered. Ever since the Holy Thursday on which Father Restrepo had accused her of being possessed, there had been a shadow over her head that the love of her parents and her siblings’ discretion kept under control; still, word of her unlikely talents circulated by whispers in gatherings of local ladies. Nívea realized that people never invited her daughter to their home and that even her own cousins did everything they could to avoid her. She so successfully compensated for the lack of friends with her own total dedication, however, that Clara grew up happily and in later years would recall her childhood as a luminous part of her existence, despite her solitude and muteness. All her life she would remember the afternoons spent in the company of her mother in the sewing room, where Nívea sewed clothing for the poor on her machine and told stories and anecdotes about the family. She would point to the daguerreotypes on the wall and tell Clara of the past.
“You see that serious man with a pirate’s beard? That’s your Uncle Mateo, who went to Brazil on some scheme that had to do with emeralds, but a fiery mulatta gave him the evil eye. All his hair fell out, his nails dropped off, he lost his teeth, and he had to go to see a sorcerer, a voodoo priest, a dark Negro, who gave him an amulet; and then his teeth grew back, his nails came out again, and he got back his hair. Look at him, Clara: he’s hairier than an Indian. He was the only bald man in the world who ever got a second head of hair.”
Clara would smile without saying a word and Nívea would go on talking because she had grown used to her daughter’s silence. In addition, she nourished the hope that if she kept putting ideas into Clara’s head, sooner or later she would ask a question and regain her speech.
“And this,” she would say, “is your Uncle Juan. I loved him very much. He once farted and that became his death sentence: a great disgrace. It was during a picnic lunch. All my cousins and I were out together on the most fragrant spring afternoon, with our muslin dresses and our hats full of flowers and ribbons, and the boys were wearing their Sunday best. Juan took off his white jacket—why, I can see him now! He rolled up his sleeves and swung gracefully from the branch of a tree, hoping that with his trapeze artist’s skill he could win the admiration of Constanza Andrade, the Harvest Queen, with whom, from the moment he laid eyes on her, he had been desperately in love. Juan did two impeccable push-ups and one complete somersault, but on his next flip over he let go a loud burst of wind. Don’t laugh, Clara! It was terrible. There was an embarrassed silence and the Harvest Queen began to laugh uncontrollably. Juan put on his jacket and grew very pale. He walked slowly away from the group and we never saw him again. They even looked for him in the Foreign Legion. They asked for him in all the consulates, but he was never heard of again. I think he must have become a missionary and gone to minister to the lepers out on Easter Island, which is as far away as a man can go to forget and be forgotten because it’s not on the normal routes of navigation and isn’t even shown on Dutch maps. From that day on, he was referred to as Juan of the Fart.”
Nívea would take her daughter to the window and show her the dried-out trunk of the poplar tree.
“It was an enormous tree,” she would say. “I had it cut before my oldest son was born. They say it was so tall that you could see the whole city from its top, but the only one who got that high had no eyes to see it with. It was a tradition in the del Valle family that when any of the young men wanted to wear long pants, he had to climb it to prove his valor. It was like an initiation rite. The tree was full of marks. I saw them with my own eyes when they knocked it down. From the first middle-sized branches, which were thick as chimneys, you could already see the marks left by the grandfathers, who had made the same ascent in their own youth. From the initials cut into the trunk you could tell who had climbed higher, who was the bravest, as well as who had stopped, too terrified to continue. One day it was the turn of Jerónimo, the blind cousin. He began the climb feeling his way up the branches without a moment’s hesitation, for he couldn’t see how high up he was and had no intuition of the void. He reached the top, but he wasn’t able to complete the J of his initial, because he came unstuck like a gargoyle and plummeted headfirst to the ground, landing at the feet of his father and brothers. He was fifteen years old. They wrapped the body in a sheet and took it to his mother, who spat in all their faces and shouted at them with a sailor’s insults and cursed the men who had induced her son to climb the tree, until finally the Sisters of Charity came to cart her off in a straitjacket. I knew that one day my sons would be expected to continue that barbarous tradition. That’s why I had them cut it down. I didn’t want Luis and the other children growing up in the shadow of that scaffold in the courtyard.”
At times Clara would accompany her mother and two or three of her suffragette friends on their visits to factories, where they would stand on soapboxes and make speeches to the women who worked there while the foremen and bosses, snickering and hostile, observed them from a prudent distance. Despite her tender age and complete ignorance of matters of this world, Clara grasped the absurdity of the situation and wrote in her notebook about the contrast of her mother and her friends, in their fur coats and suede boots, speaking of oppression, equality, and rights to a sad, resigned group of hard-working women in denim aprons, their hands red with chilblains. From the factory the ladies would move on to the tearoom on the Plaza de Armas, where they would stop for tea and pastry and discuss the progress of their campaign, not for a moment letting this frivolous distraction divert them from their flaming ideals. At other times her mother would take her to the slums on the outskirts of the city or to the tenements, where they arrived with their car piled high with food and with clothes that Nívea and her friends sewed for the poor. On these occasions too, the child wrote with formidable intuition that charity had no effect on such monumental injustice. Her relationship to her mother was close and cheerful, and Nívea, despite having given birth to fifteen children, treated Clara as if she were an only child, creating a tie so strong that it continued into succeeding generations as a family tradition.
Nana had become an ageless woman still in full possession of all the strength of her younger years. She was still able to leap out of corners hoping to scare the child’s muteness away, just as she could spend the entire day standing over the hellfire in the center of the third courtyard, pushing an enormous stick around in the copper pot where she bubbled the thick topaz-colored quince jam that, once cooled, Nívea delivered in molds of all shapes and sizes to the poor. Accustomed to living surrounded by children, Nana turned all her tenderness to Clara after the others left home. Even though the child was by now too old for it, she bathed her as if she were a baby, dousing her in the enameled tub with water scented with jasmine and basil, rubbing her with a sponge, soaping her meticulously without missing the least chink of ear or foot, massaging her with cologne and powdering her with a swan’s-down puff, and brushing her hair with infinite patience, until it was as soft a
nd shiny as an underwater plant. She dressed her, put her to bed, brought her breakfast on a tray, and forced her to drink linden tea for her nerves, camomile for her stomach, lemon for translucent skin, rue for bile, and mint for her breath, until the child became a beautiful, angelic being who walked through the halls and patios wrapped in a scent of flowers, a rustling of starched petticoats, and a halo of curls and ribbons.
Clara’s childhood came to an end and she entered her youth within the walls of her house in a world of terrifying stories and calm silences. It was a world in which time was not marked by calendars or watches and objects had a life of their own, in which apparitions sat at the table and conversed with human beings, the past and the future formed part of a single unit, and the reality of the present was a kaleidoscope of jumbled mirrors where everything and anything could happen. It is a delight for me to read her notebooks from those years, which describe a magic world that no longer exists. Clara lived in a universe of her own invention, protected from life’s inclement weather, where the prosaic truth of material objects mingled with the tumultuous reality of dreams and the laws of physics and logic did not always apply. Clara spent this time wrapped in her fantasies, accompanied by the spirits of the air, the water, and the earth. For nine years she was so happy that she felt no need to speak. Everyone had lost all hope of ever hearing her voice again, when on her birthday, after blowing out the nineteen candles on her chocolate cake, she tried out the voice that she had kept in storage all those years, and that sounded like an untuned instrument.
“I’m going to be married soon,” she said.
“To whom?” Severo asked.
“To Rosa’s fiancé,” Clara replied.
The House of the Spirits Page 10