Only then did they realize she had spoken for the first time in all those years. The miracle shook the house to its foundations and set the whole family weeping. They called each other on the telephone, word went out across the city, and they summoned Dr. Cuevas, who could not believe the news. In the uproar about Clara’s regaining her voice they all forgot what she had said, and they did not remember until two months later, when Esteban Trueba, whom they had not seen since Rosa’s funeral, showed up at the door to ask for Clara’s hand.
* * *
Esteban Trueba alighted in the station and carried his two suitcases himself. The iron cupola the British had built in imitation of Victoria Station in the days when they had the concession to the national railways had not changed at all since the last time he had been there several years before—the same dirty windows, the same little shoeshine boys, the same women selling biscuits and candies, and the same porters with their dark caps bearing the insignia of the British crown, which no one had thought to replace with the colors of the national flag. He hailed a carriage, and gave his mother’s address. The city looked unfamiliar. There was a jumble of modernity; a myriad of women showing their bare calves, and men in vests and pleated pants; an uproar of workers drilling holes in the pavement, knocking down trees to make room for telephone poles, knocking down telephone poles to make room for buildings, knocking down buildings to plant trees; a blockade of itinerant vendors hawking the wonders of this grindstone, that toasted peanut, this little doll that dances by itself without a single wire or thread, look for yourself, run your hand over it; a whirlwind of garbage dumps, food stands, factories, cars hurtling into carriages and sweat-drawn trolleys, as they called the old horses that hauled the municipal transport; a heavy breathing of crowds, a sound of running, of scurrying this way and that, of impatience and schedules. Esteban felt oppressed by it. He hated the city much more than he had remembered. He recalled the open meadows of the countryside, days clocked by the fall of rain, the vast solitude of his fields, the cool quiet of the river and his silent house.
This city is a shithole, he concluded.
The carriage trotted toward the house where he had grown up. He shuddered at how badly the neighborhood had declined over the years, ever since the rich had decided to move their houses farther up the hill from everyone else and the city had expanded into the foothills of the cordillera. There was not a trace of the square where he had played as a little boy; it was now an empty lot filled with carts from the market that were parked among piles of garbage where stray dogs rummaged. His house was a ruin. He saw all the signs of the passage of time. On the rickety, old-fashioned stained-glass door, with its motifs of exotic birds, there was a bronze knocker in the shape of a woman’s hand pressing on a ball. He knocked and waited what seemed like an interminable while until the door was opened with a tug on a string that ran from the doorknob to the top of the stairs. His mother lived on the second floor and rented out the first floor to a button factory. Esteban began to climb the creaky steps, which had not been waxed in a long time. An ancient servant, whose existence he had completely forgotten, stood waiting for him on the landing and embraced him tearfully, just as she had greeted him at fifteen when he came home from working at the notary office where he earned his living copying property transfers and powers of attorney. Nothing had changed, not even the placement of the furniture, but everything struck him as different: the hallways with their worn wood floors, the broken windowpanes patched with scraps of cardboard, the dusty ferns languishing in rusty tin cans and chipped ceramic pots, the fetid smells of urine mixed with food that turned his stomach. What poverty! Esteban thought. He wondered what on earth his sister did with all the money he sent her so that she could live in dignity.
Férula came out to meet him with a sad grimace of welcome. She was greatly changed. She was no longer the opulent woman he had left years ago. She had lost weight, and her nose seemed enormous on her angular face. She gave off an aura of melancholy and bewilderment, a scent of lavender and old clothes. They embraced in silence.
“How’s Mama?” Esteban asked.
“Come see. She’s waiting for you,” Férula replied.
They walked down a corridor of connecting rooms, each identical to the next, dark and small, with tomblike walls, high ceilings, and narrow windows, their wallpaper of discolored flowers and languid maidens stained from the soot of the coal stoves and the patina of time and poverty. From far away they could hear the voice of a radio announcer singing the praises of Dr. Ross’s pills, tiny but effective against constipation, insomnia, and bad breath. They stopped outside the closed door of the bedroom of Doña Ester Trueba.
“Here she is,” said Férula.
Esteban opened the door. It was several seconds before he could see in the darkness. The smell of medicine and decay hit him in the face, a sweetish odor of sweat, dampness, confinement, and something else that at first he could not quite identify but that quickly stuck to him like a plague: the smell of decomposing flesh. A thread of light leaked through the window, which was ajar, and he was able to make out the wide bed in which his father had died and his mother had slept every night since she was married. It was carved in black wood, with a canopy of angels in relief and a few scraps of red brocade that were frayed with age. His mother was propped up in a half-seated position. She was a block of solid flesh, a monstrous pyramid of fat and rags that came to a point in a tiny bald head with a pair of eyes that were sweet, blue, innocent, and surprisingly alive. Arthritis had transformed her into a monolithic being. She could no longer bend any of her joints or turn her head. Her fingers were clawed like the feet of a fossil, and in order to sit up in bed she had to be supported by a pillow at her back held in place by a wooden beam that, in turn, was propped against the wall. The passage of time could be read by the marks the beam had cut into the plaster: a path of suffering, a trail of pain.
“Mama,” Esteban murmured, and his voice broke in his chest, exploding into a contained sobbing that erased in a single stroke his sad memories, the rancid smells, frozen mornings, and greasy soup of his impoverished childhood, his invalid mother and absent father, and the rage that had been gnawing at him ever since the day he first learned how to think, so that he forgot everything except those rare, luminous moments in which this unknown woman who now lay before him in her bed had rocked him in her arms, felt his forehead for fever, sung him lullabies, bent over to read the pages of a favorite book with him, had wept with grief to see him leave for work so early in the morning when he was still a boy, wept with joy when he returned at night, had wept, Mother, for me.
Doña Ester reached out her hand, but not in greeting; the gesture was intended to hold him back.
“Don’t come any closer, son,” she said, and her voice was still intact, just as he remembered it, the healthy, songlike voice of a young girl.
“It’s because of the smell,” Férula said brusquely. “It clings.”
Esteban pulled back the threadbare damask quilt and saw his mother’s legs. They were two bruised, elephantine columns covered with open wounds in which the larvae of flies and worms had made their nests and were busy tunneling; two legs rotting alive, with two outsized, pale blue feet with no nails on the toes, full to bursting with the pus, the black blood, and the abominable animals that were feeding on her flesh, mother, in God’s name, of my own flesh.
“The doctor wants to amputate them, darling,” Doña Ester said in her calm little-girl voice, “but I’m too old for that. I’m tired of suffering. It’s time for me to die. But I didn’t want to die without seeing you again, because after all these years I began to think that you were dead, and that perhaps your sister was writing your letters to spare me that additional pain. Come into the light, son, so I can get a good look at you. My God! You look like a savage!”
“It’s country life, Mama,” he murmured.
“Finally! You still look strong. How old are you now?
”
“Thirty-five.”
“A good age to get married and settle down, so I can die in peace.”
“You’re not going to die, Mama!” Esteban begged.
“I want to know that I’ll have grandchildren, someone to carry on our name, with our blood in his veins. Férula’s given up all hope of marrying, but you must find yourself a wife. A decent, Christian woman. But first you’d better cut your hair and shave your beard. Do you hear me?”
Esteban nodded. He knelt beside his mother and buried his face in her swollen hand, but the stench threw him back. Férula took him by the arm and led him out of that afflicted room. Once outside he inhaled deeply, the smell still clinging to his nostrils, and it was then he felt the rage—the rage he knew so well—that rose to his head like a blazing wave, injecting his eyes and bringing a pirate’s curses to his lips. Rage at all the time he had gone without thinking of his mother, rage at having let her go uncared for, at not having loved her and cared for her enough, at being a miserable son of a bitch, no, forgive me, Mother, that’s not what I meant to say; Jesus, she’s dying, she’s an old woman and I can’t do a damned thing, not even ease her pain, alleviate the decay, get rid of that terrifying stench, that death soup in which you are boiling alive, Mother.
Two days later, Doña Ester Trueba died in the bed of pain where she had spent the final years of her life. She was alone, because her daughter Férula had gone as she did every Friday to the tenements in the Misericordia District to say the rosary for the poor, the atheists, the prostitutes, and the orphans, who threw garbage at her, dumped chamber pots onto her, and spat on her while she, kneeling in the desolate slum alleyway, shouted an unbroken litany of Our Fathers and Hail Marys as she dripped with the slop of the poor, the spit of atheists, the garbage of prostitutes, and the refuse of orphans, weeping her lament of humiliation, begging forgiveness for those who know not what they do and feeling that her bones were turning to rubber, her legs to cotton, and that a summer heat was pressing sin between her thighs—take from me this chalice, Lord, that her groin was bursting into hellfire: flames of fear, of holiness, ay, Our Father, don’t let me fall into temptation, Jesus.
Esteban was not with Doña Ester either when she died quietly in her bed of pain. He had gone to see the del Valle family to inquire if they might still have an unmarried daughter, because after so many years of absence and barbarism, he knew of nowhere else to begin to keep his promise to his mother of giving her legitimate grandchildren, and he concluded that if Severo and Nívea had accepted him as a prospective son-in-law back in the days of Rosa the Beautiful, there was no reason they should refuse him, especially now that he was a rich man and no longer needed to scrape the earth for gold and had everything he needed on deposit at the bank.
That night Esteban and Férula found their mother dead in bed. She was smiling peacefully, as if at the last moment of her life her illness had wished to spare her its familiar torture.
* * *
The day Esteban Trueba asked to be received, Severo and Nívea del Valle remembered the words with which Clara had broken her lengthy silence. Thus they were not the least surprised when their visitor asked if they had any daughters of marriageable age and condition. They tallied things up, telling him that Ana had become a nun, Teresa was very ill, and all the others were already married except for Clara, the youngest, who was still available, although she was a rather eccentric creature not particularly well suited to the duties of marriage and domestic life. With all due honesty, they told him of their daughter’s traits, without omitting the fact that she had spent more than half her lifetime without speaking because she did not feel like it and not because she was unable to, as the Rumanian Rostipov had made quite clear and as Dr. Cuevas had confirmed after innumerable examinations. But Esteban Trueba was not the kind of man to let himself be scared away by tales of ghosts in hallways, objects that move of their own accord, or prognostications of bad luck, much less by Clara’s prolonged silence, which he considered a virtue. He concluded that none of these things posed any obstacle to bringing healthy, legitimate children into the world, and he asked to be introduced to Clara. Nívea went out to fetch her daughter and the two men were left alone in the drawing room, an occasion that Trueba, with characteristic candor, took advantage of to present his economic position.
“Please, Esteban, one thing at a time!” Severo interrupted him. “First you have to see the girl and get to know her a little, and then we also have to consider Clara’s wishes. Don’t you think so?”
Nívea returned with Clara. The young girl entered the room with blazing cheeks and blackened nails; she had been outside helping the gardener plant dahlia bulbs, and just this once her clairvoyant faculties had failed her, leaving her unprepared to meet her visitor in more suitable attire. When he saw her, Esteban jumped to his feet in astonishment. He recalled her as a thin, asthmatic child without the least grace, but the young woman who stood before him was a delicate ivory medallion, with a sweet face and a mane of chestnut hair whose curls spilled from her coiffure, melancholy eyes that gave her a sparkling, half-mocking look when she laughed her frank, open laugh, her head gently thrown back. She greeted him with a strong handshake that showed no trace of shyness.
“I was expecting you,” she said simply.
They spent a few hours in this formal visit, speaking of the opera season, trips to Europe, the political situation, and the winter chills, while they drank sweet wine and ate puff pastries. Esteban watched Clara with all the discretion he could muster, feeling himself gradually coming under the young girl’s spell. He could not recall being this interested in anyone since the glorious day when he had first set eyes on Rosa the Beautiful buying licorice in the pastry shop on the Plaza de Armas. He compared the two sisters in his mind and concluded that Clara had the advantage when it came to charm, although there was no doubt that Rosa had been far more beautiful. Night fell and two maids came in to draw the curtains and light the lamps. Esteban realized that his visit had gone on too long. His manners left a great deal to be desired. He said a stiff good night to Severo and Nívea and asked permission to visit Clara again.
“I hope I don’t bore you, Clara,” he said, blushing. “I’m a simple country man, and I’m at least fifteen years older than you. I don’t know how to act with a young girl like yourself. . . .”
“Do you want to marry me?” Clara asked, and he noticed an ironic gleam in her hazel eyes.
“My God, Clara!” exclaimed her mother, horrified. “Forgive her, Esteban, the child’s always been impertinent.”
“I want to know, Mama. I don’t want to waste my time,” Clara said.
“I also like things to be direct.” Esteban smiled happily. “Yes, Clara, that’s why I came.”
Clara took him by the arm and accompanied him to the gate. In the final glance they exchanged, Esteban understood that she had accepted him. He was overcome with happiness. As he got into his carriage, he was smiling, unable to believe his good fortune and not understanding how such a charming girl as Clara could have accepted his proposal without even being acquainted with him. He did not know that she had seen her own destiny, that she had summoned him with the power of her thought, and that she had already made up her mind to marry without love.
Out of respect for Esteban Trueba’s mourning, they waited a few months, during which he courted Clara the old-fashioned way, just as he had done with her sister Rosa, without knowing that Clara hated licorice and that acrostics made her laugh. At the end of the year, around Christmastime, they officially announced their engagement in the newspaper and exchanged rings in the presence of their closest friends, more than a hundred all together, at a Pantagruelian banquet that was an endless parade of stuffed turkey, sugar-cured pork, fresh-water eel, lobster au gratin, raw oysters, the Carmelite nuns’ special orange and lemon pies, the Dominicans’ walnut and almond tortes, the Clarisas’ chocolate and cream cakes, and case
s of French champagne that were brought courtesy of the consul, who took advantage of his diplomatic privileges to traffic in contraband. All was served and presented with the utmost simplicity by the old servants of the house, who wore their everyday black aprons to give the celebration the appearance of a simple family gathering, because any display of extravagance was a sign of vulgarity that would be condemned as a sin of vanity and bad taste, according to the austere and somewhat lugubrious ancestry of that society descended from hard-working Basque and Spanish immigrants. Clara was a vision in white Chantilly lace and natural camellias, as happy as a parrot after her nine years of silence, dancing with her fiancé beneath the canopies and lanterns, completely oblivious to the warnings of the spirits that gestured desperately at her from the curtains, because in the tumult and whirl she could not see them. The ceremony of the rings had remained unchanged ever since colonial times. At ten o’clock at night, one of the menservants circulated among the guests ringing a tiny glass bell. The music stopped and the guests gathered in the main hall where a small, innocent priest, adorned with the vestments of high mass, read the complicated sermon he had written exalting confused and impracticable virtues. Clara did not listen to him, because when the din of the music had died down and the whirl of the dancers had subsided, she began to pay attention to the whispering spirits behind the curtains and she realized that it had been hours since she had last seen Barrabás. She looked everywhere for him, summoning all her senses, but her mother’s elbow in her ribs brought her back to the pressing matter of the ceremony. The priest finished his speech and blessed the two gold rings. Esteban quickly put one on his bride-to-be and slipped the other on his own finger.
At that moment a scream of horror shook the guests. The crowd cleared to either side, making a path for Barrabás, who staggered out blacker and larger than ever with a butcher’s knife stuck in his back clear to the hilt, bleeding to death like an ox, his long colt legs trembling, his muzzle dripping with threads of blood, his eyes clouded in agony; dragging one paw after the other, he traced the zigzag path of a wounded dinosaur. Clara fell back onto the French silk loveseat. The enormous dog approached her, laid his huge, millennial animal head in her lap, and looked up at her with lovesick eyes that gradually dimmed and grew blind, while the white Chantilly lace, the French silk of the sofa, the Persian carpet, and the parquet floor absorbed his blood. Barrabás was dying without any hurry, his eyes riveted on Clara, who stroked his ears and murmured words of comfort until finally, with a single rattle, the dog fell rigid at her feet. Suddenly it was as if they had all been wakened from a nightmare, and the sounds of panic spread through the room. The guests hurriedly said goodbye, stepping over the pools of blood and quickly gathering up their fur stoles, their top hats, their canes, their umbrellas, and their beaded evening bags. The only ones left in the parlor were Clara, with the animal on her lap, her parents, who were locked in terrified embrace at the thought of such an evil omen, and her fiancé, who could not comprehend such an uproar over a dead dog; but when he realized that Clara was transfixed, he picked her up in his arms and carried her half-conscious to her room, where Nana’s ministrations and Dr. Cuevas’s pills prevented her from falling back into her stupor and her muteness. Esteban Trueba asked the gardener to help him, and between the two of them they threw Barrabás’s body into the car. Death had made him so heavy that it was nearly impossible to lift him.
The House of the Spirits Page 11