The House of the Spirits

by Isabel Allende

  That was the year of exanthematic typhus. It began like any other calamity that strikes the poor but quickly took on the characteristics of a divine punishment. It was born in the poorest quarters of the city, because of the harsh winter, the malnutrition, and the dirty water, and it joined forces with the unemployment and spread in every direction. The hospitals could not cope. The sick wandered through the streets with missing eyes, picking the lice from their hair and throwing them at the healthy. The plague spread to every house, infecting schools and factories, so that no one felt secure. Everyone lived in fear, inspecting themselves for the first signs of the dread disease. Those who caught it began to shake with an icy cold that lodged in their bones, and gradually fell prey to a deep lethargy. They were left gazing like madmen to be eaten alive by their own fever, filling with sores, shitting blood, hallucinating scenes of fire and drowning, falling to the ground with bones like wool, legs like rags, and a taste of bile in their mouths. Their bodies became raw meat, with a red pustule next to a blue one next to a yellow one next to a black one, as they vomited up their own intestines and cried out to God for mercy, begging Him to let them die for they could not go on, their heads were bursting and their souls escaping in a blur of shit and fear.

  Esteban proposed to take his whole family to the countryside to protect them from the infection, but Clara would not hear of it. She was busy tending to the poor in a task that had neither beginning nor end. She left the house early in the morning and at times returned close to midnight. She emptied the wardrobes of the house, taking the children’s clothes, the blankets from the beds, her husband’s jackets. She packed up food from the pantry and established a shipping system with Pedro Segundo García, who sent cheese, eggs, smoked meat, fruit, and chicken from Tres Marías for her to distribute among the poor. She lost weight and looked emaciated. She began to walk in her sleep again.

  Férula’s absence was a cataclysm in the house. Even Nana, who had always wished for this moment, was upset. When spring came and Clara was able to get some rest, her tendency to escape reality and lose herself in daydreams became more pronounced. Even though she could no longer rely on her sister-in-law’s impeccable skills for ordering the chaos of the big house on the corner, she still paid no attention to domestic matters. She left everything in the hands of Nana and the other servants, and immersed herself in the world of apparitions and psychic experiments. Her notebooks that bore witness to life grew confused, and her calligraphy lost its convent elegance, degenerating into a series of mangled scribbles that were sometimes so tiny they were impossible to read and sometimes so large that three words would fill a page.

  In the years that followed, a group of Gurdjieff students, Rosicrucians, spiritualists, and sleepless bohemians gathered around Clara and the three Mora sisters. They ate three meals a day in the house and spent their time alternating between urgent consultations with the spirits of the three-legged table and reading the verses of the latest mystic poet to land in Clara’s lap. Esteban allowed this invasion of grotesqueries because he had long ago realized that it was pointless to interfere in his wife’s life. But he was determined that at least his sons would be kept at a safe distance from her magic, so Jaime and Nicolás were sent to a Victorian English boarding school, where any excuse sufficed for pulling down a student’s pants and caning his buttocks. This happened especially to Jaime, who made fun of the British royal family and at the age of twelve displayed an interest in reading Marx, a Jew who was spreading revolution around the world. Nicolás inherited the adventurous spirit of his great-uncle Marcos and his mother’s propensity for making up astrological charts and reading the future, but this did not constitute a major crime in the rigid code of the school, only an eccentricity, so he fared far better there than his brother.

  Blanca’s case was a different matter, because her father did not interfere with her education. He believed that her destiny was marriage and a brilliant life in society, where the ability to converse with the dead, if kept on a frivolous level, could be an asset. He maintained that magic, like cooking and religion, was a particularly feminine affair; for this reason, perhaps, he was able to feel a certain sympathy for the three Mora sisters, while he despised male spiritualists almost as much as he did priests. As for Clara, she went everywhere with her daughter hanging from her skirts. She included her in the Friday sessions and raised her in the greatest intimacy with spirits, with the members of secret societies, and with the impoverished artists whose patroness she was. Just as she had gone with her mother in the days when she was mute, she now took Blanca with her on her visits to the poor, weighed down with gifts and comfort.

  “This is to assuage our conscience, darling,” she would explain to Blanca. “But it doesn’t help the poor. They don’t need charity; they need justice.”

  This was the point on which she had her worst arguments with Esteban, who was of a different opinion on the subject.

  “Justice! Is it just for everyone to have the same amount? The lazy the same as those who work? The foolish the same as the intelligent? Even animals don’t live like that! It’s not a matter of rich and poor, it’s a matter of strong and weak. I agree that we should all have the same opportunities, but those people don’t even try. It’s very easy to stretch out your hand and beg for alms! But I believe in effort and reward. Thanks to that, I’ve been able to achieve what I’ve achieved. I’ve never asked anybody for a favor and I’ve never been dishonest, which goes to prove that anyone can do it. I was destined to be a poor, unhappy notary’s assistant. That’s why I won’t have these Bolshevik ideas brought into my house. Go do your charitable work in the slums, for all I care! It’s all well and good: good for building the character of young ladies. But don’t start coming in here with the same half-cocked ideas as Pedro Tercero García, because I won’t stand for it!”

  It was true that Pedro Tercero García was talking about justice in Tres Marías. He was the only one who dared to speak back to the patrón, despite the beatings his father gave him every time he caught him in the act. Since he was a child, the boy had been making surreptitious journeys into town to borrow books, read the newspapers, and converse with the local schoolteacher, a fervent Communist who years later would be shot dead by a bullet between the eyes. He also stole away at night to the bar in San Lucas, where he met with certain union leaders who had a passion for fixing the world’s troubles between sips of beer, or with the huge, magnificent Father Jose Dulce María, a Spanish priest with a head full of revolutionary ideas that had earned him the honor of being relegated by the Society of Jesus to that hidden corner of the world, although that didn’t keep him from transforming biblical parables into Socialist propaganda. The day Esteban Trueba discovered that the son of his administrator was slipping subversive pamphlets to his tenants, he summoned him to his office and, in the presence of his father, gave him a lashing with his snakeskin whip.

  “This is the first warning, you insolent little shit!” he said without raising his voice and staring at him with fire in his eyes. “But the next time I catch you bothering people, I’m going to lock you up. I don’t want rebels on my land, you hear, because I’m the one in charge here and I have the right to surround myself with people I like. And I don’t like you, and now you know it. I put up with you because of your father, who’s served me faithfully for all these years, but you’d better watch out, because things could turn out very bad for you. Now get out of here!”

  Pedro Tercero García closely resembled his father. He was dark-skinned, and had the same hard features that looked as if they had been sculpted in stone, the same big sad eyes, and the same dark, stiff hair that stood up like a brush. He had only two loves, his father and the patrón’s daughter, whom he had loved from the day they slept together naked beneath the dining-room table, back in his early childhood. Nor had Blanca escaped the same fate. Every time she went on vacation to the country and arrived at Tres Marías in the whirl of dust that always precede
d the coaches piled high with their chaotic baggage, her heart would pound with impatience and longing, like an African drum. She was always the first to jump down from the carriage and run toward the house, and she always found Pedro Tercero García in the place where they had seen each other for the first time, standing barefoot in the doorway, half hidden by the shadow of the door, timid and sullen in his worn pants, his old man’s eyes scanning the horizon as he awaited her arrival. The two ran to each other, hugging, kissing, laughing, and affectionately punching each other and rolling on the ground as they pulled each other’s hair and shouted with joy.

  “That’s enough, young lady! Let go of that raggedy child!” Nana would shriek, trying to pull them apart.

  “Let them be, Nana,” Clara would say, for she knew better. “They’re only children, and they like each other.”

  The children ran off to hide and tell each other everything that they had stored up during the long months of separation. Pedro blushingly handed her some whittled animals he had made for her, and Blanca gave him the gifts she had brought for him: a penknife that opened like a flower, a tiny magnet that magically picked up rusty nails from the ground. The summer she arrived with half the contents of the trunk of magic books that had belonged to Uncle Marcos, she was nearly ten years old. Pedro Tercero still had trouble reading, but his curiosity and desire accomplished what his schoolmistress had been unable to do with all her canings. They spent that summer reading among the rushes by the river, the pine trees in the forest, and the sprouting stalks of the wheatfields, discussing the virtues of Sinbad and Robin Hood, the bad luck of the Black Pirate, the true and edifying stories from the Treasury of Youth, the worst meanings of the words that did not appear in the dictionary of the Spanish Royal Academy, the cardiovascular system in illustrated plates where you could see a man with no skin and all his veins and arteries exposed for all to see, but wearing underpants. Within a few weeks, the boy had learned to read voraciously. They entered the wide, deep world of impossible stories, gnomes, fairies, men stranded on islands who eat their comrades after casting their fate at dice, tigers who let themselves be tamed for love, fascinating inventions, geographical and zoological curiosities, Oriental countries with genies in bottles, dragons in caves, and princesses held prisoner in towers. They often went to see old Pedro García, whose senses had been worn away by time. He had gradually grown blind; his eyes slowly filled with a sky-blue film of which he said, “The clouds are taking over my sight.” He was grateful for the visits from Blanca and Pedro, who was his grandson, although he had already forgotten that fact. He listened to the stories they had chosen from the magic books, which they had to shout into his ear, because also he said that the wind was invading his ears and making him deaf. In return he showed them how to protect themselves from the stings of poisonous insects and demonstrated the effectiveness of his antidote by placing a live scorpion on his arm. He taught them how to search for water. You have to hold a dry stick in your two hands and walk tapping the ground, in silence, thinking only of water and the thirst of the stick, until suddenly, sensing the presence of moisture, the stick began to tremble. That’s where you have to dig, the old man said, but he explained that this was not the system he used for digging wells around Tres Marías, because he needed no stick. His bones were so thirsty that whenever he walked on top of underground water, no matter how far down, his own skeleton told him where it was. He taught them about the different grasses and herbs that grew in the fields, and made them smell them and taste them, even caress them, until they were able to identify them one by one according to their healing properties: this one to calm the mind, that one to get rid of diabolic influence, this one to make the eyes shine, that one to strengthen the stomach, this to stimulate the flow of blood. In this realm his knowledge was so vast that the doctor from the nuns’ hospital used to come and ask his advice. Nevertheless, all his knowledge was powerless to cure the chicken fever of his daughter Pancha, which had dispatched her to the Hereafter. He had made her eat cow dung, and when that did not produce results he gave her horse manure, wrapped her in blankets, and made her sweat up her illness until there was nothing left of her but skin and bones. Then he massaged her with brandy and gunpowder, but it was all useless; Pancha’s life ebbed away in an interminable case of diarrhea that destroyed her body and left her with an insatiable thirst. Defeated, Pedro García asked the patrón for permission to take her into town on a cart. The two children went with them. The doctor in the nuns’ hospital carefully examined Pancha and told the old man there was nothing he could do, that if he had brought her earlier and not induced the sweating, he would have been able to treat her, but now her body could hold no liquid. She was just like a plant when its roots have gone completely dry. Pedro García took offense at that, and continued to deny his failure even when he returned to the hacienda with his daughter’s body wrapped in a blanket, accompanied by the two frightened children, and unloaded her in the courtyard of Tres Marías grumbling about the doctor’s ignorance. They buried her in a special plot in the tiny graveyard alongside the abandoned church, at the foot of the volcano, because she had been the patrón’s wife, in a manner of speaking, since she had given him the only son who bore his name, though not his surname, and a grandson, the strange Esteban García, who was destined to play a terrible role in the history of the family.

  One day the old man Pedro García told Blanca and Pedro Tercero the story of the hens who joined forces to confront a fox who came into the chicken coop every night to steal eggs and eat the baby chicks. The hens decided they had had enough of the fox’s abuse. They waited for him in a group, and when he entered the chicken coop they blocked his path, surrounded him, and pecked him half to death before he knew what had happened.

  “And that fox escaped with his tail between his legs, with all the hens chasing after him,” the old man finished.

  Blanca laughed at the story and said it was impossible, because hens are born stupid and weak and foxes are born astute and strong, but Pedro Tercero did not laugh. He spent the whole evening absorbed in thought, ruminating on the story of the fox and the hens, and perhaps that was the night the boy began to become a man.

  — FIVE —

  THE LOVERS

  Blanca’s childhood went by without any major surprises. The hot summers at Tres Marías, where she discovered the strength of a love that grew as she did, alternating with the routine of the city, was not unlike that of other girls of her age and class, although Clara’s presence added a note of eccentricity to her life. Every morning Nana would appear with the breakfast tray to shake her from her sleep, watch as she put on her uniform, stretch her socks for her, place her hat just so, help her into her gloves, arrange her handkerchief, and make sure she had all her books, all the while mumbling prayers for the souls of the dead and loudly advising Clara not to be deceived by the nuns.

  “Those women are all depraved,” she warned her. “They choose the prettiest, smartest girls from the best families to be sent to the convent. They shave the heads of the novitiates, poor girls, and set them up for a lifetime of baking cakes and taking care of other people’s old folks.”

  The chauffeur took the little girl to school, where the first activity of the day was mass and obligatory communion. Kneeling in her pew, Blanca would inhale the intense smell of the virgin’s incense and lilies, suffering the combined torment of nausea, guilt, and boredom. It was the only thing she disliked about the school. She loved the high-vaulted stone corridors, the immaculate cleanliness of the marble floors, the naked white walls, and the iron Christ who stood watch in the vestibule. She was a romantic, sentimental child, with a preference for solitude, few friends, and a propensity to be moved to tears when the roses in the garden bloomed, when she smelled the rags and soap the nuns used as they bent over their tasks, and when she stayed behind to experience the melancholy stillness of the empty classrooms. She was considered timid and morose. Only in the country, her skin tanned
by the sun and her belly full of ripe fruit, running through the fields with Pedro Tercero, was she smiling and happy. Her mother said that that was the real Blanca, and that the other one, the one back in the city, was a Blanca in hibernation.

  Because of the constant agitation that reigned in the big house on the corner, no one, except Nana, noticed that Blanca was becoming a woman. She entered adolescence overnight. She had inherited the Truebas’s Spanish and Arab blood, their regal bearing and haughty grin, and the olive skin and dark eyes of her Mediterranean genes, all colored by her mother’s heritage, from which she drew a sweetness no Trueba had ever known. She was a tranquil soul who entertained herself, studied hard, played with her dolls, and showed not the slightest inclination for her mother’s spiritualism or her father’s fits of rage. The family jokingly said that she was the only normal person for many generations, and it was true she was a miracle of equilibrium and serenity. At around thirteen she began to develop breasts; she lost weight, her waist thinned out, and she shot up like a transplanted tree. Nana pulled her hair back in a bun and took her to buy her first corset, her first pair of silk stockings, her first grown-up dress, and a collection of miniature towels for what she continued to call “demonstration.” Meanwhile, her mother continued making chairs dance through the house, playing Chopin with the lid of the piano shut, and declaiming the beautiful verses of a young poet she had taken under her wing—a poet who was beginning to be talked about everywhere—never noticing the split seams of the schoolgirl’s uniform or seeing that the apple face of her daughter was subtly changing into the face of a grown woman, because Clara paid more attention to auras and fluids than she did to pounds and inches. One day she saw her walk into the sewing room in her party dress and was astonished to discover that that tall, dark lady was her little Blanca. She put her arms around her, covered her with kisses, and warned her that she would soon begin to menstruate.