The House of the Spirits (18 page)

Esteban's and Férula's hatred for each other took a long time to explode. It began with a concealed uneasiness and a desire to offend each other in small details, but it grew until it filled the house. That summer Esteban had to go to Tres Marías because exactly at harvest time Pedro Segundo García fell off a horse and ended up in the hospital with a cracked skull. As soon as the foreman had recovered, Esteban returned to the city without telling anyone. On the train he felt a terrible foreboding and an unspoken desire that something dramatic should take place, but he did not know that the drama had already begun when he desired it. He arrived back in the city in the middle of the afternoon, but went directly to his club, where he played a few hands of poker and dined, without successfully quelling his anxiety and impatience. During dinner, there was a slight earthquake. The crystal chandeliers swayed with their usual tinkling, but no one so much as looked up. Everyone continued eating and the musicians continued playing without missing a single note, but Esteban Trueba jumped up as if it were an omen. He finished his meal in a hurry, then asked for his check and left.

Férula, who usually had her nerves well under control, had never got used to earthquakes. She had conquered her fear of the ghosts Clara would invoke and the mice in the countryside, but earthquakes shook her to her bones and long after they had passed she was still trembling. That night she had not yet gone to bed, and she came running into Clara's room. Clara had drunk her evening tea and was sleeping peacefully. In search of a little company and warmth, Férula climbed into bed beside her, careful not to wake her up and whispering silent prayers so that the tremors would not become a full-blown quake. Esteban Trueba found her there. He entered the house as silently as a thief, went up to Clara's room without turning on the lights, and appeared like a tornado before the two sleeping women, who thought he was in Tres Marías. He leaned over his sister with the same rage he would have felt if she were his wife's seducer. He pulled her from the bed, dragged her down the hall, pushed her down the stairs, and thrust her into the library while Clara shouted from her bedroom doorway, not understanding what was going on. Alone with Férula, Esteban vented all his fury as an unhappy husband, shouting things at her he never should have said, calling her everything from a dyke to a whore and accusing her of perverting his wife with her spinster caresses and of driving her crazy, distracted, mute, and spiritualist with her arsenal of lesbian arts. He accused her of taking her pleasure with Clara while he was away, and of besmirching the names of the children, the honor of the house, and the memory of their dear departed mother, and told her he was sick and tired of her evil tricks and that he was throwing her out of the house. She should leave immediately and he never wanted to set eyes on her again. He forbade her to come near his wife and children and promised that she would never want for money; as long as he lived, he would see to it that she had enough to live on decently, as he had once promised her, but that if he ever caught her prowling around his family he would kill her on the spot, and she should get that through her head. “I swear to you in the name of our mother that I'll kill you!”

“I set my curse on you, Esteban!” Férula shouted back. “You will always be alone! Your body and soul will shrivel up and you'll die like a dog!”

And she left the big house on the corner forever, dressed only in her nightgown, taking nothing with her.

The next day, Esteban Trueba went to see Father Antonio and told him what had happened, without going into detail. The priest listened passively, with the bland expression of one who has heard it all before.

“What do you want from me, my son?” he asked when Esteban had finished speaking.

“That once a month you make sure my sister receives a certain envelope I'm going to deliver to you. I don't want her to have any financial worries. And I must explain that I'm not doing this out of kindness but because of a promise.”

Father Antonio took the first envelope with a sigh and sketched the sign of benediction with his hands, but Esteban had already turned to leave. He gave Clara no explanation of what had come between his sister and himself. He told her he had thrown her out of the house and that he strictly forbade her to mention his sister's name in his presence, suggesting that if she had a shred of decency she would also refrain from mentioning it behind his back. He had all Férula's clothing and any objects that might serve as reminders of her removed from the house and resolved that as far as he was concerned his sister was dead.

Clara understood that there was no point in asking any questions. She went to the sewing room to look for her pendulum. Then she spread a map of the city on the floor and held the pendulum a foot and a half above it, waiting for the oscillations to tell her her sister-in-law's address, but after trying all afternoon she realized that the system would not work unless Férula had a fixed address. The pendulum having failed, she went out to look for her by carriage, hoping that her instinct would guide her in her search, but that method also was unsuccessful. She consulted her three-legged table, but no spiritual guide showed up to lead her through the city to Férula. She called her with her mind and consulted her tarot cards, but it was all to no avail. Finally she decided to resort to more traditional techniques. She began to look for her through friends and by asking the various delivery men who came to the house and might have come across her, but no one had seen a trace of her. Eventually her investigation led her to Father Antonio's door.

“Don't look for her,” the priest told her. “She doesn't want to see you.”

Clara realized that that was why none of her infallible methods of divining had worked.

“The Mora sisters were right,” she said to herself. “You can't find someone who doesn't want to be found.”

*  *  *

Esteban Trueba entered a very prosperous period. His business deals seemed to have been touched by a magic wand. He felt pleased with life, and he was rich, just as he had once set out to be. He had acquired the concessions for other mines, was exporting fruit to foreign countries, had founded a construction firm, and Tres Marías, which had greatly expanded, was now the best hacienda in the area. He had been untouched by the economic crisis that convulsed the rest of the country. In the northern provinces, the collapse of the nitrate fields had left thousands of workers destitute. Hungry tribes of unemployed workers and their families—women, children, and old people—had taken to the roads in search of work and, as they approached the capital, were slowly forming a belt of misery around it. They settled in any way they could, under planks of wood and pieces of cardboard, in the midst of garbage and despair. They wandered the streets begging for a chance to work, but there were no jobs and slowly but surely the rugged workers, thin with hunger, shrunken with cold, ragged and desolate, stopped asking for work and asked for alms instead. The city filled with beggars, and then with thieves. Never had there been such terrible frosts as there were that year. There was snow in the capital city, an unaccustomed spectacle that remained on the front page of all the newspapers, touted as a festive decoration, while in the impoverished shantytowns on the city's outskirts the blue, frozen bodies of small children were discovered every morning. There was not enough charity for so many poor, defenseless people.

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.