The House of the Spirits (17 page)

*  *  *

Clara recovered quickly from the double birth. She entrusted the care of the children to her sister-in-law and to Nana, who came to work in the Trueba household after the death of her employers, “to continue working for the same blood,” as she put it. She had been born to cradle other people's children, wear their hand-me-down clothing, eat their leftovers, live on borrowed happiness and grief, grow old beneath other people's roofs, die one day in her miserable little room in the far courtyard in a bed that did not belong to her, and be buried in a common grave in the public cemetery. She was nearly seventy, but her zeal was unbending. She was still tireless in her comings and goings, untouched by time, still able to dress up as a ghost and jump on Clara in the nooks and crannies of the house whenever she had another of her spells of muteness, still strong enough to fight with the twins and softhearted enough to spoil Blanca, just as she had spoiled her mother and grandmother before her. She had acquired the habit of constantly mumbling prayers under her breath, because when she realized that no one in the house believed in God, she took it upon herself to pray for all the living members of the family—as well as, of course, for the dead, for whom her devotions were simply an extension of the service she had rendered while they were alive. In her old age she forgot whom she was praying for, but she kept up the habit, convinced that it would be of use to someone. Her piety was the only thing she shared with Férula. In everything else they were rivals.

One Friday afternoon, three translucent ladies knocked at the door to the big house on the corner. They had eyes like sea mist, covered their heads with old-fashioned flowered hats, and were bathed in a strong scent of wild violets, which infiltrated all the rooms and left the house smelling of flowers for days after their visit. They were the three Mora sisters. Clara was in the garden and appeared to have been waiting for them all that afternoon. She greeted them with a baby at each breast, and Blanca playing at her feet. They looked at each other, recognized each other, smiled at each other. It was the beginning of a passionate spiritual relationship that was to last the remainder of their lives and, if their predictions have come true, must still be flourishing in the Hereafter.

The three Mora sisters were students of spiritualism and supernatural phenomena. Thanks to a photograph that showed the three of them around a table with a misty, winged ectoplasm flying overhead, which some unbelievers attributed to a stain from the developer and others to a simple photographic trick, they were the only people who possessed irrefutable proof that souls can take on physical form. Via mysterious connections available only to initiates, they learned of Clara's existence, established telepathic contact with her, and immediately realized they were astral sisters. By way of a series of discreet inquiries, they managed to obtain her earthly address and arrived at her door with decks of cards impregnated with beneficent liquids, several sets of geometrical figures and mysterious tools of their own invention for unmasking fake parapsychologists, and a tray of ordinary pastries as a gift for Clara. They became intimate friends, and from that day on they met every Friday to summon spirits and exchange recipes and premonitions. They discovered a way to transmit mental energy from the big house on the corner to the other extreme of the city, where the Moras lived in an old mill they had converted into their singular abode, and also in the opposite direction, which enabled them to give each other moral support in difficult moments of their daily lives. The Moras knew many people, almost all of them interested in such matters, who gradually began to attend the Friday meetings, to which they brought their knowledge and their magnetic fluids. Esteban Trueba would see them crossing through his house and insisted on these few conditions: that they respect his library, that they not use the children for psychic experiments, and that they be discreet, because he did not want any public scandal. Férula disapproved of these activities of Clara's; to her they seemed at odds with religion and good manners. She observed their sessions from a prudent distance, without participating, but watching from the corner of her eye while she crocheted, ever ready to intervene in case Clara went too far in one of her trances. She had noticed that her sister-in-law was always exhausted at the end of the sessions where she served as medium, and she would begin to speak in pagan tongues, and in a voice that was not her own. Nana also kept her eye out, on the pretext of serving little cups of coffee, startling the spirits with her starched petticoats and the click of her whispered prayers and loose teeth—not to protect Clara from her own excesses, but rather to make sure no one stole the ashtrays. In vain Clara explained to her that her guests were not interested in ashtrays, primarily because none of them smoked; but Nana had already made up her mind that they were all, with the exception of the three enchanting Mora sisters, a bunch of evangelical scoundrels.

Nana and Férula despised each other. They squabbled over the children's affection and fought for the right to care for Clara in her rantings and ravings; their silent, continuous war was conducted in the kitchens, the courtyards, the hallways, but never near Clara, because the two of them had agreed to spare her that particular anguish. Férula had come to love Clara with a jealous passion that resembled that of a demanding husband more than it did that of a sister-in-law. With time she lost her prudence and began to let her adoration show in many ways that did not go unobserved by Esteban. Whenever he returned from the country, Férula would manage to persuade him that Clara was in what she called “one of her bad spells,” so that he could not sleep in the same bed with her and would enter her room rarely, and then only briefly. She would buttress her argument with recommendations from Dr. Cuevas, which later, when he was asked point-blank, turned out to have been made up. She found a thousand ways to come between the husband and wife and, if all else failed, she would encourage the children to beg their father to take them on an outing, their mother to read them a book, or both parents to watch over them because they had a fever or to play with them. “Poor things,” she would say. “They need their father and their mother. They spend the whole day with that ignorant old woman who fills their heads with outmoded ideas; she's making them into imbeciles with her superstition. What we should do with Nana is put her away. People say the Handmaidens of God have a marvelous asylum for old housekeepers. They treat them like real ladies. They don't have to work, there's good food—that's the most humane thing we could do. Poor Nana, she's all used up.” Without being able to pinpoint the cause, Esteban began to feel uncomfortable in his own house. His wife had grown increasingly remote, strange, and inaccessible. There was no way for him to reach her, not even with presents. His timid show of affection did not work, nor did the unbridled passion that always overcame him in her presence. In all that time his love for her had grown to the point where it had become an obsession. He wanted Clara to think of nothing but him, and he could not bear for her to have a life outside that did not include him. He wanted her to tell him everything and to own nothing he had not given her with his own two hands. He wanted her to be completely dependent.

But reality was different. Clara seemed to be flying in an airplane, like her Uncle Marcos, unmoored from land, seeking God through Tibetan sciences, consulting spirits with a three-legged table that gave little jolts—two for yes, three for no—deciphering messages from other worlds that could even give her the forecast for rain. Once they announced that there was a hidden treasure beneath the chimney. First she had the wall knocked down and then, when it was not found, the staircase and half of the main sitting room. Still nothing. Finally it turned out that the spirit, confused by the architectural alterations she had made to the house, was unable to detect that the hiding place of the gold doubloons was not in the Trueba mansion but across the street at the house of the Ugartes, who refused to demolish their dining room because they did not believe the story about the Spanish ghost. Clara was incapable of braiding Blanca's hair for school, a task she entrusted to Férula or Nana, but she had a wonderful relationship with her based on the same principles as the relationship she had had with Nívea. They told each other stories, read the magic books from the enchanted trunks, consulted family portraits, told anecdotes about uncles who let fly great amounts of wind, and others, blind, who fell like gargoyles from poplar trees; they went out to look at the
cordillera
and count the clouds, and spoke in a made-up language with no t's and with r's instead of l's, so that they sounded just like the man in the Chinese laundry. Meanwhile, Jaime and Nicolás were growing up apart from the feminine dyad, adhering to the then common belief that “we have to become men.” The twins grew strong and cruel in the games typical of their age. They chased lizards to slice off their tails, mice to make them run races, and butterflies to wipe the powder from their wings; then, when they were older, they punched and kicked each other on instructions from that Chinese laundryman, who was ahead of his time and had been the first to introduce the country to the millennial practice of the martial arts. But no one had paid any attention when he demonstrated how he could split bricks in two with his hand and had tried to open his own academy, so he had ended up washing other people's clothes. Years later, the twins put the finishing touches on their manhood by escaping from school and diving into the empty lot behind the garbage dump, where they traded some of their mother's silverware for a few minutes of forbidden love with an enormous woman who cradled both of them in breasts like those of a Dutch cow, drowning them in the soft wetness of her armpits, crushing them with her elephantine thighs and sending them both to heaven with the dark, hot, juicy cavern of her sex. But that was not until much later, and Clara never knew about it, so she could not write it in her notebooks that bore witness to life, for me to read one day. I found out from other sources.

Clara had no interest in domestic matters. She wandered from one room to the next without ever being the least surprised to find everything in perfect order and sparklingly clean. She sat down to eat without ever wondering who had cooked the food or where it had come from, just as she was oblivious to the person serving it. She forgot the names of the servants and even of her own children, yet she always managed to be present, like a cheerful, beneficent spirit, at whose slightest footfall clocks began to wind themselves. She dressed in white, because she had decided that it was the only color that did not change her aura, in simple dresses that Férula made for her on the sewing machine and that she preferred to the ruffled, sequined gowns her husband bought with the aim of showing her off in the latest fashions.

Esteban had bouts of despair because Clara treated him with the same kindness she displayed toward everybody else. She spoke to him in the same cajoling tones she used to address her cats, and was incapable of telling whether he was tired, sad, euphoric, or eager to make love. However, from the color of his rays she knew at a glance whether he was hatching a swindle, and she could defuse one of his tantrums with a few simple, mocking words. It exasperated him that Clara never seemed truly grateful for anything and never seemed to need anything that he could give her. She was as distracted and as smiling in bed as she was in everything else; relaxed and simple, but absent. He knew that her body was his to engage in all the acrobatics he had learned in the books he kept hidden in a corner of his library, but with Clara even the most abominable contortions were like the thrashings of a newborn; it was impossible to spice them up with the salt of evil or the pepper of submission. In a rage, Trueba sometimes reverted to his former sins, rolling with some robust peasant woman in the tall rushes of the riverbank while Clara stayed behind with the children in the city and he had to tend to the hacienda in the country, but instead of relieving him these episodes only left a bitter taste in his mouth. They brought no lasting pleasure, particularly since he knew that if he told his wife about them she would be appalled by his mistreatment of the other woman but not by his infidelity to her. Jealousy, like many other typical human reactions, was simply not part of Clara's vocabulary. He also went to the Red Lantern a few times, but he stopped going because he could not perform anymore with prostitutes and he had to swallow his humiliation by stammering various excuses: he had drunk too much wine, had eaten too much at lunch, had been walking around with a cold for several days. Nor did he return to Tránsito Soto, because he sensed that she embodied the real danger of addiction. He felt a terrible desire boiling up within him, a fire impossible to quench, a thirst for Clara that would never, even on the longest and most passionate nights, be satisfied. He fell asleep exhausted, his heart on the verge of bursting in his chest, but even in his dreams he was aware that the woman sleeping by his side was not really there: she was in some unknown, other dimension where he could never reach her. At times he would lose his patience and furiously shake her awake, shouting the worst accusations he could think of, but then he would end up weeping in her lap and begging her forgiveness for his cruelty. Clara understood, but there was nothing she could do. Esteban Trueba's exaggerated love for her was without a doubt the most powerful emotion of his life, greater by far than his rage and pride. Half a century later, he would still be speaking of it with the same shudder and the same sense of urgency. In his old man's bed, he would continue to call her name until the day he died.

Férula's comments increased Esteban's anxiety. Every obstacle his sister placed between himself and Clara drove him out of his mind. He even came to hate his own children for taking all their mother's time. He took Clara on a second honeymoon to the same places where they had spent the first, and on weekend escapades to a hotel, but it was all useless. He was convinced that Férula was entirely to blame, that she had planted an evil seed in his wife to prevent her from loving him, and that she was stealing forbidden kisses that properly belonged to him. He would grow livid with anger when he came upon Férula giving Clara her bath. He grabbed the sponge from her hands, thrust her out of the room, and pulled Clara from the tub practically in midair. He gave her a good shaking and forbade her to let herself be bathed again, because at her age it was a vice, and he dried her off himself, wrapping her in her robe and leading her to the bed, feeling all the while that he was acting like a fool. If Férula tried to serve his wife a cup of chocolate, he grabbed it from her hands on the pretext that she was treating her like an invalid; if she kissed her good night, he pulled her away with a sweep of his hand, saying that it was not right for them to kiss; if she chose the best portions for her from the serving tray, he rose from the table in a temper. Brother and sister became rivals, each scrutinizing the other with eyes full of hatred, concocting fine-edged arguments to disqualify each other in Clara's eyes, spying on each other, and growing ever more jealous. Esteban stopped going to the country and put Pedro Segundo García in charge of everything, including his imported cows. He stopped going out with his friends, stopped going to the golf course, stopped working, so as to watch his sister day and night and block her path every time she tried to get near Clara. The atmosphere of the house became dense, dark, and unbreathable. Even Nana walked around like someone haunted. The only one who continued completely unaffected was Clara, who in her distraction and innocence had no idea of what was going on.