The House of the Spirits (11 page)

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 and 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.

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.