The House of the Spirits

by Isabel Allende

  Alba was not yet two weeks old when Amanda left the big house on the corner. Amanda had recovered her strength and had no trouble reading the desire in Jaime’s heart. She took her little brother by the hand and left exactly as she had arrived, without making noise or promises. The family lost sight of her and the only one who could have gone to look for her chose not to because he did not wish to hurt his brother. After she left, Jaime drowned his sorrows in study and work. He resumed his old habits, living like a hermit and rarely appearing at the house. He never mentioned the young woman’s name and had nothing more to do with his brother.

  The presence of his granddaughter sweetened Esteban Trueba’s character. The change was imperceptible, but Clara noticed it. Slight symptoms gave him away: the sparkle in his eyes when he saw the little girl, the expensive presents he bought her, the anguish he felt if he heard her cry. Still, it was not enough to bring him closer to Blanca. His relationship with his daughter had never been good, and after her unfortunate marriage it had deteriorated to the point where only the obligatory politeness Clara imposed allowed them to live under the same roof.

  In those days almost all the rooms in the Trueba house were filled. The table was always set for the family, the guests, and one extra place for anyone who might arrive unannounced. The main door was left permanently open to allow guests and visitors to come and go. While Senator Trueba attempted to alter his country’s destiny, his wife sailed masterfully through the agitated seas of social life and the other, more surprising ones of her spiritual voyage. Age and experience had sharpened Clara’s ability to divine the occult and to move objects from afar. An exalted state of mind could easily put her into a trance in which she would move around the room while sitting in a chair, as if there were a hidden motor underneath the cushions. It was also during that time that a starving young artist, who had been given lodging in the house out of pity, paid for his stay by painting the only extant portrait of Clara. Much later, the impoverished artist was recognized as a master and today the painting hangs in a London museum, like so many works of art that left the country when people had to sell their furnishings to feed the victims of persecution. The canvas shows a middle-aged woman dressed in white, with silvery hair and the sweet gaze of a trapeze artist, resting in a rocking chair that hangs suspended just above the floor, floating amidst flowered curtains, a vase flying upside down, and a fat black cat that observes the scene like an important gentleman. Influence of Chagall, according to the catalogue, but that is not true. The picture captures precisely the reality the painter witnessed in Clara’s house. That was the period when divine good humor and the hidden forces of human nature acted with impunity to provoke a state of emergency and upheaval in the laws of physics and logic. Clara’s communication with wandering souls and extraterrestrials was conducted through telepathy, dreams, and the pendulum she used for that purpose, dangling it in the air above an alphabet she had arranged in proper order on the table. The pendulum’s autonomous movement pointed to the letters, forming messages in Spanish and Esperanto, which proved that these, and not English, were the only languages of interest to beings from other dimensions, as Clara wrote in letters to the ambassadors of the English-speaking powers. They never answered her, and neither did the various ministers of education whom she wrote in order to explain her theory that instead of teaching English and French, which were languages for sailors, peddlers, and money lenders, the schools should insist that all the children in the country study Esperanto.

  * * *

  Alba’s childhood was a mixture of vegetarian diets, Japanese martial arts, Tibetan dance, yogic breathing, relaxation and concentration with Professor Hausser, and many other interesting techniques, not to mention the contribution to her education made by her two uncles and the three enchanting Mora sisters. Her Grandmother Clara managed to keep that immense covered wagon of a house rolling with its population of eccentrics, even though she had no domestic talent and disdained the basic operations of arithmetic to the point of forgetting how to add. The daily organization of the household and the keeping of accounts therefore fell to Blanca, who divided her time between the job of chief steward of that miniature kingdom and her work at her ceramic studio in the back of the courtyard, the ultimate refuge for her sorrows, where she gave classes for both mongoloids and young ladies and created incredible crèches full of monsters, which, against all logic, sold like hotcakes.

  From a tender age it had been Alba’s responsibility to put fresh flowers in the vases. She would open the windows to let in streams of air and light, but the flowers never lasted until nightfall because Esteban Trueba’s thundering voice and slashing cane were even powerful enough to frighten nature. At the sound of his footsteps, household pets scattered and plants withered. Blanca was raising a Brazilian rubber tree, a shy, squalid little bush whose one attraction was its price: it was sold by the leaf. Whenever Trueba was heard arriving, whoever was closest ran to hide the rubber tree out on the terrace, because as soon as the old man entered the room, the plant lowered its leaves and began to exude a whitish fluid, like tears of milk, from its stem. Alba did not go to school; her grandmother held that anyone as favored by the stars as she was needed only to know how to read and write, and she could learn that at home. Clara was in such a hurry to make her literate that at the age of five the little girl was already reading the newspaper over breakfast and discussing the news with her grandfather. At six she had discovered the magic books in the enchanted trunks of her legendary Great-Uncle Marcos and had fully entered the world-without-return of the imagination. Nor did anyone worry about her health; they did not believe in the benefits of vitamins and thought that vaccinations were for chickens; besides, her grandmother studied the lines of her hand and said that she was made of iron and was assured of a long life. The only frivolous attention they lavished on her was to comb her hair with bay rum to mitigate the dark-green hue it had when she was born; this despite the fact that Senator Trueba thought it should be left that way, since she was the only one who had inherited something from Rosa the Beautiful, even if, unfortunately, it was only the maritime color of her hair. To please him, Alba gave up the bay rum as an adolescent and rinsed her hair with parsley water, which allowed the green to reappear in its full leafiness. The rest of her was tiny and innocuous as opposed to the other women in her family, who were, almost without exception, splendid.

  In the rare moments of leisure Blanca had to think about herself and her daughter, she regretted that her child was so silent and solitary, and that she had no playmates her own age. But Alba did not feel the least bit lonely. In fact there were times when she would have been delighted to escape her grandmother’s clairvoyance, her mother’s intuition, and the clamor of all the eccentric people who were constantly appearing, disappearing, and reappearing in the big house on the corner. It also worried Blanca that her daughter did not play with dolls, but Clara took her granddaughter’s side, arguing that those tiny porcelain corpses with eyes that opened and shut and perverse, pouting mouths were repulsive. She herself constructed shapeless beings made of leftover scraps from the wool she used to knit for the poor. These creatures had no human traits, which made it much easier to cradle them, rock them, bathe them, and then throw them in the garbage. But the child’s favorite plaything was the basement. Because of the rats, Esteban Trueba had ordered the door bolted shut, but Alba would slip down through a skylight and land noiselessly in that paradise of long-forgotten objects. The place was always dark and protected from the ravages of time, like a sealed pyramid. There were piles of cast-off furniture, tools of mysterious utility, broken machinery, and pieces of Covadonga, the prehistoric automobile that her uncles had taken apart and rebuilt into a racing car and that had ended its days as a heap of scrap iron. Alba used these things to build houses in the corners. There were trunks and suitcases filled with old clothes, which she used to stage her solitary plays, and a sad, dark, moth-eaten rug with the head of a dog, which when laid ou
t on the floor resembled a wretched animal that had been split open. It was the last, ignominious vestige of faithful Barrabás.

  One Christmas Eve, Clara gave her granddaughter a fabulous present that occasionally superseded the fascination of the basement: a box filled with jars of paint, brushes, a small ladder, and permission to use the biggest wall in her bedroom whenever she wanted.

  “This will give her an outlet for her feelings,” Clara said, watching Alba balanced on the ladder, painting a train full of animals just below the ceiling.

  With the passage of time, Alba filled not only one but all her bedroom walls with an immense fresco. In the midst of a Venusian flora and an impossible fauna of invented animals much like those Rosa had embroidered on her tablecloth and Blanca baked in her kiln, she painted all the wishes, memories, sorrows, and joys of her childhood.

  Her two uncles were very close to her. Jaime was her favorite. He was a large, hairy man who shaved twice a day and still looked as if he had a four-day-old beard. He had black, evil-looking eyebrows that he combed upward to make his niece believe that he was in league with the devil, and hair stiff as a broom, which he slicked down to no avail and which was always damp. He came and went with his books under his arm and a plumber’s bag in his hand. He had told Alba that he worked as a jewelry thief and that the dreadful bag contained his picklocks and brass knuckles. The child pretended to be frightened, but she knew her uncle was a doctor and that the bag contained the tools of his profession. Together they had invented certain imaginary games to entertain themselves on rainy afternoons.

  “Bring on the elephant!” Uncle Jaime would command.

  Alba would go out and return pulling an imaginary pachyderm on an invisible rope. They could spend a good half hour giving him the herbs elephants like to eat, bathing his skin with mud to protect it from the harsh effects of bad weather, and polishing his ivory tusks while they heatedly discussed the advantages and disadvantages of living in the jungle.

  “This child is going to wind up stark raving mad!” Senator Trueba would say whenever he saw little Alba sitting on the balcony reading the medical treatises her Uncle Jaime lent her.

  She was the only person in the house who had the key to her uncle’s tunnel of books, along with his permission to take them out and read them. Blanca argued that her reading should be monitored because there were certain things that were inappropriate for her age, but her Uncle Jaime felt that people never read what did not interest them and that if it interested them that meant they were sufficiently mature to read it. He had the same theory about bathing and eating. He said that if the child did not want to take a bath, it was because she did not need to, and that she should be fed whatever she wanted whenever she was hungry, because the body knows its needs better than anyone. On this point, however, Blanca was inflexible, forcing her daughter to observe a strict schedule and the usual rules of hygiene. The upshot was that in addition to her normal baths and meals, Alba sucked the candies her uncle brought her and hosed herself down whenever she was hot, neither of these two activities having the slightest effect on her healthy constitution. Alba would have liked her Uncle Jaime to marry her mother, because it was safer to have him as a father than an uncle, but it was explained to her that this sort of incestuous union produces mongoloid offspring. As a result, she imagined that the pupils at her mother’s Thursday workshops were her uncles’ children.

  Nicolás was also close to the little girl’s heart, but there was something ephemeral and volatile about him. He was always in a hurry, always just passing through, as if he were jumping from one idea to another, and this made Alba uneasy. She was five years old when her Uncle Nicolás returned from India. Tired of invoking God through the three-legged table and a cloud of hashish, he had decided to seek Him in a region less harsh than his native land. He spent two months harassing Clara, following her around the house and whispering in her ear while she was asleep, until he finally convinced her to sell a diamond ring to pay his way to the land of Mahatma Gandhi. This time Esteban Trueba did not attempt to hold him back, because he thought a trip through that distant nation of starving people and nomadic cows would do his son a lot of good.

  “If you don’t die of a snakebite or some foreign plague, I hope you return a man, because I’m fed up with all your eccentricities,” his father told him when he said goodbye to him on the pier.

  Nicolás spent a year as a beggar, following the path of the yogis, across the Himalayas, through Katmandu, along the Ganges, and on to Benares, all on foot. By the end of this pilgrimage he was convinced that God exists, and had learned to pierce his cheeks and chest with hatpins and to live practically without eating. The family saw him coming toward the house one ordinary morning with an infant’s diaper covering his private parts, his skin clinging to his bones, and that lost gaze so often observed in those who eat only vegetables. He was escorted by two incredulous policemen who were ready to arrest him unless he could prove that he really was the son of Senator Trueba, and by a knot of children who were running along behind him throwing garbage at him and laughing. Clara was the only one who had no difficulty recognizing him. His father reassured the policemen and ordered Nicolás to take a bath and put on some normal clothes if he wanted stay in the house, but Nicolás stared at him without seeing and did not reply. He had become a vegetarian. He did not eat meat, milk, or eggs. His diet was the same as a rabbit’s, and his anxious face gradually came to resemble the face of that animal. He chewed each mouthful of his sparse nourishment fifty times. Meals became an endless ritual, during which Alba fell asleep on her empty plate and the servants dozed in the kitchen over their trays, while Nicolás solemnly chewed his food. Esteban Trueba stopped going to the house and took his meals at the club. Nicolás insisted he could walk barefoot on a bed of coals, but each time he announced a demonstration, Clara had an asthma attack and he was forced to stop. He spoke in Asiatic parables that could not always be understood. His only interests were of a spiritual nature. The materialism of domestic life and the excessive ministrations of his mother and his sister, who insisted on feeding and dressing him, irritated him, as did Alba’s fascinated pursuit. She followed him around the house like a puppy, begging him to show her how to stand on her head and stick pins through her skin. He remained naked even after winter set in. He could go three minutes without breathing and was ready to demonstrate this accomplishment whenever anybody asked, which was quite often. Jaime said it was a shame that air was free, because according to his calculations Nicolás breathed only half of what a normal person did, although this did not appear to affect him in the least. He spent the winter locked in his room eating carrots, without complaining about the cold, and filling page after page with his minute handwriting in black ink. With the first signs of spring, he announced that his book was completed. He had one thousand five hundred pages and managed to convince his father and brother Jaime to pay for it, against whatever profits its sale might bring. After being corrected and printed, the one thousand five hundred pages reduced themselves to six hundred, yielding a voluminous treatise on the ninety-nine names of God and formulas for attaining nirvana through respiratory exercise. The book was not the success he had hoped for, and boxes filled with copies wound up in the basement, where Alba used them as bricks to build her trenches, until the day years later when they were used to fuel an infamous bonfire.