The House of the Spirits

by Isabel Allende

  “Come in, Doctor. We were expecting you,” the Candidate said.

  He led him to the maid’s room, where his daughters were attempting to help a woman who appeared to be choking. Her pop-eyed face was purple, and her monstrously swollen tongue was hanging from her mouth.

  “She was eating fish,” one of the daughters explained.

  “Bring the oxygen that’s in the ambulance,” Jaime said, preparing a syringe.

  He remained with the Candidate, sitting beside him next to the bed until the woman began to breathe normally and was able to get her tongue back in her mouth. They discussed Socialism and chess, and it was the beginning of a strong friendship. Jaime introduced himself with his mother’s surname, which was the one he always used, never imagining that the next day the party’s security service would inform the Candidate that he was the son of Senator Trueba, his worst political enemy. The Candidate, however, never mentioned this, and right up to the final hour, when they shook each other’s hand for the last time in the din of fire and bullets, Jaime wondered if he would ever have the courage to tell him the truth.

  His long experience of defeat and his knowledge of the people allowed the Candidate to realize before anyone else that this time he was going to win. He told Jaime this, cautioning him not to let anybody know, so that the right would go into the elections sure of victory, as arrogant and divided as ever. Jaime replied that even if they told everyone, no one would believe it—not even the Socialists themselves—and as proof he told his father.

  Jaime continued working fourteen hours a day, including Sundays, and took no part in the political process. He was frightened by the violent turn the struggle had taken, polarizing everyone into two extremes and leaving the center to a flighty, indecisive group that was waiting to see who the winner might be so they could vote for him. He refused to be provoked by his father, who seized every opportunity to warn him of the handiwork of international Communism and the chaos that would sweep the country in the improbable event of a victory of the left. The only time Jaime lost his patience was one morning when he awoke to find the city plastered with angry posters that portrayed a full-bellied, lonely woman vainly attempting to wrest her son from the arms of a Communist soldier who was dragging him off to Moscow. It was part of the terror campaign organized by Senator Trueba and his co-religionists, with the help of foreign experts who had been especially imported to that end. This was too much for Jaime. He decided that he could no longer live beneath the same roof as his father. He closed the door to his tunnel, packed his clothes, and went to sleep at the hospital.

  The pace of events escalated during the final months of the campaign. Portraits of the candidates were on every wall; pamphlets were dropped from airplanes and carpeted the streets with printed refuse that fell from the sky like snow. Radios howled the various party slogans and preposterous wagers were made by party members on both sides. At night gangs of young people took to the streets to attack their ideological rivals. Enormous demonstrations were organized to measure the popularity of each party, and each time the city was jammed with the same numbers of people. Alba was euphoric, but Miguel explained that the election was a joke and that whoever won, it would make no difference because you would just be changing the needle on the same old syringe, and that you cannot make a revolution at the ballot box but only with the people’s blood. The idea of a peaceful, democratic revolution with complete freedom of expression was a contradiction in terms.

  “That poor boy is crazy!” Jaime exclaimed when Alba told him what Miguel had said. “We’re going to win and he’ll have to swallow his words.”

  Up until that moment, Jaime had always managed to avoid Miguel. He did not wish to know him, for he was tormented by a secret unconfessable jealousy. He had helped bring Alba into the world and had sat her on his knee a thousand times; had taught her to read, paid for her schooling, and celebrated all her birthdays. Feeling like a father, he could not shake off his uneasiness on seeing her become a woman. He had noticed her change in recent years, and had deceived himself with false arguments, even though his long experience in taking care of other human beings had taught him that only the knowledge of love could bring such splendor to a woman’s looks. He had seen Alba mature practically overnight, leaving behind the vague shape of adolescence to assume the body of a satisfied and gentle woman. With absurd intensity he hoped against hope that his niece’s infatuation would prove to be a passing fancy, because deep down he could not accept that she should need another man more than she needed him. Still, he could not continue to ignore Miguel. It was during this time that Alba told him Miguel’s sister was ill.

  “I want you to speak to Miguel. He’ll tell you about his sister. Would you do that for me?” Alba pleaded.

  When Jaime met Miguel in a neighborhood café, all his suspicion was swept away be a wave of sympathy, because the man across the table from him nervously stirring his coffee was not the petulant extremist bully he had expected, but a tremulous, sensitive young man who was fighting off tears as he described the symptoms of his sister’s illness.

  “Take me to see her,” Jaime said.

  Miguel and Alba led him to the bohemian quarter. In the center of town, only yards away from the modern buildings made of steel and glass, streets of painters, ceramists, and sculptors had sprung up on the side of a steep hill. There they had built their burrows, dividing ancient houses into tiny studios. The craftmen’s workshops had glass roofs to let the sky in, while the painters survived in dark hovels that were a paradise of misery and grandeur. Confident children played in the narrow streets, beautiful women in long tunics carried babies on their backs or anchored on their hips, and bearded, sleepy, indifferent men watched the stream of life pass by from chairs they had set up on street corners or in doorways. Miguel, Alba, and her uncle stopped before a French-style house that looked like a cream cake, with cherubs carved along the friezes. They ascended a narrow staircase that had been built as an emergency exit in case of fire but that the numerous subdivisions of the house had transformed into the only means of entrance. As they climbed, the staircase turned on itself and wrapped them in the penetrating smell of garlic, marijuana, and turpentine. Miguel stopped on the top floor before an orange door. He took out a key, turned it in the lock, and they went in. Jaime and Alba felt as if they had stepped into an aviary. The room was round, and capped by an absurd Byzantine cupola surrounded with windows, through which one could see all the rooftops of the city and feel close to the clouds. Doves had nested on the windowsill, adding their excrement and feathers to the spattered panes. Seated on a chair before the only table in the room was a woman in a ragged robe adorned with an embroidered dragon on its front. It took Jaime a few seconds to recognize her.

  “Amanda . . . Amanda . . .” he whispered.

  He had not seen her in more than twenty years, when the love they both felt for Nicolás was stronger than the love between them. In that time the dark, athletic young man with the damp slicked-down hair, who used to walk back and forth reading aloud from his medical textbooks, had become a man slightly curved from the habit of bending over his patients’ beds. Though he now had gray hair, a serious face, and wire-rimmed glasses, he was basically the same person as before. But to have recognized Amanda, he must have loved her a great deal. She looked older than she could possibly have been, and she was very thin, just skin and bones, with a wan, yellow complexion and neglected, nicotine-stained hands. Her eyes were red and bloated, without luster, and her pupils were dilated, which gave her a frightened, helpless look. She saw neither Jaime nor Alba, looking only at Miguel. She tried to get up, but she stumbled and swayed. Her brother jumped to catch her, holding her against his chest.

  “Did you two know each other?” Miguel asked in surprise.

  “Yes, a long time ago,” Jaime replied.

  He felt it would be useless to discuss the past and that Alba and Miguel were too young to understand the
sense of irreparable loss he was feeling at that moment. With a single brushstroke the image of the gypsy girl he had treasured all those years had been erased, the only love in his solitary fate. He helped Miguel lay the woman on the sofa she used as a bed and put a pillow under her head. Amanda held her robe with both hands, weakly trying to protect herself and mumbling incoherently. She was shaken by a series of convulsions and panted like a tired dog. Alba watched in horror. Only when Amanda was lying still, with her eyes closed, did she recognize the woman who smiled in the little photograph Miguel always carried in his wallet. Jaime spoke to her in a voice unfamiliar to Alba and gradually managed to calm her. He caressed her with the tender, fatherly touch he sometimes used with animals, until the woman finally relaxed and allowed him to roll up the sleeves of her old Chinese robe, revealing her skeletal arms. Alba saw that they were covered with thousands of tiny scars, bruises, and holes, some of which were infected and full of pus. Then he uncovered her legs: her thighs were also tortured. Jaime looked at her sadly, comprehending in that moment the abandon, the years of poverty, the frustrated loves, and the terrible road this woman had traveled before reaching the point of desperation where they now found her. He remembered her as she had been in her youth, when she had dazzled him with the flutter of her hair, the rattle of her trinkets, her bell-like laughter, and her eagerness to embrace outlandish ideas and pursue her dreams. He cursed himself for having let her go and for all the time they both had lost.

  “She’s got to be hospitalized. Only a detoxification program can save her now,” he said. “She’s going to go through hell.”

  — TWELVE —

  THE CONSPIRACY

  Just as the Candidate had predicted, the Socialists, in alliance with the other parties of the left, won the Presidential election. The balloting proceeded without incident on a shining September morning. Those who had always won, accustomed to being in power since time immemorial even though their strength had greatly waned in recent years, spent the weeks before the elections preparing for their triumph. Liquor stores sold out their stock, marketplaces sold their last fresh fish, and bakeries worked double shifts to meet the demand for cakes and pastries. In the High District there was no alarm at the first partial returns from the provinces, which favored the left, because everyone knew that it was the votes from the capital that would be decisive. Senator Trueba followed the returns from his party headquarters, perfectly relaxed and good-humored, laughing disdainfully when any of his men showed signs of nervousness at the unmistakable advance of the opposition candidate. In anticipation of victory, he had broken his strict mourning and placed a red rose in the buttonhole of his lapel. When he was interviewed on television, the entire country heard him say, “We who have always won will win again,” and then he invited everyone to join him in a toast to “the defenders of democracy.”

  In the big house on the corner, Blanca, Alba, and the servants were sitting in front of the television, sipping tea and eating toast. They were intently following the election returns, jotting down the results as they were announced, when they saw Trueba on the screen, looking older and more stubborn than ever.

  “He’s going to have a fit,” Alba said. “Because this time the other side is going to win.”

  Soon it was evident to everyone that only a miracle would alter the results, which were growing clearer throughout the day. In the white, blue, and yellow houses of the High District, venetian blinds were lowered, doors were bolted, and the flags and portraits of their candidate, which people had already hung from balconies, were hurriedly pulled inside. Meanwhile, in the shantytowns and working-class neighborhoods whole families—parents, children, and grandparents—took to the streets in their Sunday best, gaily making their way toward the center of the city. They carried portable radios to follow the latest returns. In the High District, a few students, afire with idealism, made faces at their relatives huddled before the television screen with grim expressions and went out to join the procession. Marching in orderly columns, their clenched fists raised, workers began to arrive from the industrial belt on the outskirts of the city, singing campaign songs. They converged in the center of the city, shouting in a single voice that the people united would never be defeated. They took out white handkerchiefs and waited. At midnight it was announced that the left had won. In the twinkling of an eye, the scattered groups filled out, swelled, and lengthened, and the streets filled with euphoric people jumping up and down and shouting and hugging each other and laughing. They lit torches, and the jumble of voices and dancing in the streets became a disciplined, jubilant procession that advanced toward the well-tended avenues of the bourgeoisie, creating the unaccustomed spectacle of ordinary citizens—factory workers in their heavy work shoes, women with babies in their arms, students in shirtsleeves—calmly marching through the private, expensive neighborhood where they had rarely ventured before, and in which they were complete foreigners. The noise of their songs, the sound of their footsteps, and the glow of their torches penetrated the shuttered, silent houses where those who believed their own prophecies of terror trembled in fear, expecting at any moment to be cut to pieces by the masses or, if they were lucky, to be stripped of their possessions and packed off to Siberia. But no roaring crowd forced their doors or trampled their flowerbeds. People surged forward without so much as touching the luxury cars that lined the streets—pouring into and out of squares and parks they had never entered in their lives and stopping to marvel at the shopwindows, which sparkled as if it were Christmas and in which were displayed objects they did not even know how to use—and continued peacefully on their way. When the columns passed in front of her house, Alba ran out and joined them, singing at the top of her voice. The people marched all night, beside themselves with joy. Inside the mansions of the rich, the bottles of champagne remained unopened, lobsters languished on their silver trays, and pastries swarmed with flies.

  At daybreak, in the crowd that was finally beginning to disperse, Alba glimpsed the unmistakable figure of Miguel shouting and waving a flag. She pushed her way toward him, calling his name in vain, because he could not hear her in the confusion. When she was standing in front of him and he finally saw her, he passed the flag to the person next to him and threw his arms around her, lifting her off the ground. They were both exhausted, and while they kissed, they wept with joy.

  “I told you we’d win, Miguel!” Alba said, laughing.

  “We’ve won, but now we’ll have to defend our victory,” he replied.

  The next day, the same people who had spent the night in frightened vigil in their houses poured out onto the streets like a crazed avalanche to storm the banks, demanding their money. Anyone who had anything of value decided to keep it under the mattress or send it overseas. Within twenty-four hours, property values had been halved and every available flight out of the country was booked in the hysteria to escape before the Russians came and strung barbed wire along the borders. The people who had marched in triumph went to watch the bourgeoisie standing in line and fighting to get through the doors of the banks, and roared with laughter. In a few hours the country had split into two irreconcilable groups, a division that began to spread within every family in the land.

  Senator Trueba spent the night in his party headquarters, forcibly restrained by his followers, who were convinced that if he went outside the crowd would recognize him and immediately hang him from the first lamppost they could find. Trueba was more surprised than angry. He could not believe what was happening, even though he had been singing the same old song for years about how the country was crawling with Marxists. But he was not depressed; far from it. In his old fighter’s heart fluttered a sense of elation he had not felt for years.

  “It’s one thing to win an election and quite another to be President,” he remarked mysteriously to his teary coreligionists.

  The idea of eliminating the new President, however, was not yet on anybody’s mind, for his enemies were sure
they would put an end to him through the same legal channels that had carried him to triumph. That was what Esteban Trueba was thinking. The next day, when it was clear that there was no need to fear the festive crowds, he left his refuge and headed to a country house on the outskirts of the city, where a secret lunch was held. There he met with other politicians, a group of military men, and gringos sent by their intelligence service to map a strategy for bringing down the new government: economic destabilization, as they called their sabotage.

  It was an enormous colonial-style house surrounded by a flagstone patio. When Senator Trueba arrived, there were already several cars parked in front of it. He was received effusively, because he was one of the undisputed leaders of the right and because, having prepared for what might happen, he had made the necessary contacts months in advance. After the meal—cold fish with avocado sauce, roast suckling pig in brandy, and chocolate mousse—they dismissed the waiters and bolted the doors to the dining room. There they sketched out the main lines of their strategy. When they were finished, they stood and made a toast to the fatherland. Everyone, except the foreigners, was willing to risk half his personal fortune in the endeavor, but only old Trueba was also willing to give his life.