The House of the Spirits (20 page)

“Férula is dead,” she announced.

Esteban Trueba dropped the carving implements on the tablecloth and ran out of the room and into the street, calling his sister's name into the night, but there was no trace of her. Meanwhile Clara ordered one of the servants to fetch their coats, and by the time her husband returned, she was halfway into hers and holding the car keys in her hand.

“Let's go to Father Antonio,” she said.

They rode in silence. Esteban was at the wheel, his heart contracted, as they searched for Father Antonio's old church in the poor quarters of the city where he hadn't been in years. The priest was sewing a button on his threadbare cassock when they arrived with the news of Férula's death.

“But that's impossible!” he exclaimed. “I was with her two days ago and she was in good spirits.”

“Please, Father, take us to her house,” Clara begged. “I know what I'm saying. She's dead.”

At Clara's insistence, Father Antonio accompanied them. He led Esteban down one narrow street after another until they came to where Férula lived. Through all those years of solitude she had lived in one of the tenements where she used to say the rosary against the wishes of its intended beneficiaries in the days of her youth. Esteban had to park the car several blocks away, because the streets had got narrower and narrower until they were only for bicycles and people on foot. They walked deeper into the neighborhood, avoiding the puddles of dirty water that overflowed from the gutters and dodging the piles of garbage in which cats were digging like silent shadows. The tenement was a long passageway of ruined houses, all exactly the same: small, impoverished dwellings built of cement, each with a single door and two windows. They were painted in drab colors and their peeling walls, half eaten by the damp, were linked across the narrow passageway by wires hung from side to side, which by day were used for laundry but this late at night swung empty in the dark. In the center of the little alley there was a single fountain, which was the only source of water for all the families who lived there, and only two lanterns lit the way between the houses. Father Antonio greeted an old woman who was standing by the fountain waiting for her pail to fill with the pathetic output of the faucet.

“Have you seen Señorita Férula?” he asked her.

“She should be in her house, Father. I haven't seen her these past few days,” the old woman replied.

Father Antonio pointed to one of the houses. It was just like all the others, sad, flayed, and dirty, but there were two pots hanging by the door in which grew a few small tufts of geraniums, the flower of the poor. The priest knocked at the door.

“Go on in!” the old woman shouted from the fountain. “The señorita never locks her door. There's nothing to steal in there anyway!”

Esteban Trueba called his sister's name, but he didn't dare go in. Clara was the first one across the threshold. It was dark inside and they were immediately met by the unmistakable aroma of lavender and lemon. Father Antonio lit a match. The weak flame cut a circle of light in the shadows, but before they could take a single step the match went out.

“Wait here,” he said. “I know the house.”

He groped his way, and a moment later lit a candle. His figure stood out grotesquely and his face, deformed by the light from below, floated halfway to the ceiling, while his giant shadow danced against the walls. Clara described this scene in her notebooks that bore witness to life in minute detail: the two dark rooms, their walls stained with damp, the small dirty bathroom without running water, the kitchen in which there were only a few dry crusts of bread and a jar with a little tea in it. The rest of Férula's quarters seemed to Clara to fit precisely with the nightmare that had begun when her sister-in-law appeared in the dining room of the big house on the corner to say goodbye. It reminded her of a used-clothing store or the dressing room of a struggling theater company. Hanging from a few nails on the wall were old dresses, feather boas, squalid bits of fur, imitation rhinestone necklaces, hats that had gone out of style fifty years before, stained petticoats with threadbare lace, dresses that were once flashy and whose sheen had long since disappeared, inexplicable admirals' jackets and bishops' chasubles, all thrown together in grotesque fraternity, in which the dust of years had made its nest. On the floor there was a jumble of satin shoes, debutante's handbags, belts studded with fake stones, suspenders, and even the shining sword of a military cadet. She saw dreary wigs, pots of rouge, empty flasks, and an unruly collection of impossible objects scattered everywhere.

A narrow door divided the only two rooms of the house. In the other room, Férula lay on the bed. Festooned like an Austrian queen, she wore a moth-eaten velvet dress and petticoats of yellow taffeta. On her head, firmly jammed down around her ears, shone the incredible curly wig of an opera star. No one was with her, no one had known she was dying, and they calculated that she must have been dead for many hours, because the mice were already beginning to nibble her feet and eat her fingers. She was magnificent in her queenly desolation, and on her face was an expression of sweetness and serenity she never had in her grievous life.

“She liked to wear used clothing that she bought in secondhand shops or picked from the garbage,” explained Father Antonio. “She would make herself up and put on these wigs, but she never hurt a fly. On the contrary, until her last she always said the rosary for the salvation of sinners.”

“Leave me alone with her,” Clara said firmly.

The two men went out into the alleyway, where neighbors were beginning to gather. Clara took off her white wool coat and rolled up her sleeves. She went up to her sister-in-law, gently removed the wig, and saw that she was nearly bald: aged and helpless. She kissed her on the forehead, just as Férula had kissed her only a few hours earlier in her own dining room, and then she calmly proceeded to improvise the rites of the dead. She undressed her, washed her, meticulously soaping her without missing a single crevice, rubbed her with cologne, dusted her with powder, lovingly brushed her four remaining strands of hair, dressed her in the most eccentric and elegant rags that she could find, and put back her soprano's wig, returning to her in death the infinite attentions that Férula had given her in life. While she worked, fighting off her asthma, she told her about Blanca, who was a young lady now, about the twins, about the big house on the corner, and about the country, “and if you only knew how much we missed you, Férula, how I've needed your help to look after the family, you know I'm no good at domestic matters, the boys are terrible but Blanca is a lovely child, and the hydrangeas that you planted with your own two hands in Tres Marías turned out beautiful, some are blue because I put some copper coins in the fertilizer, it's a secret of nature, and every time I arrange them in a vase I think of you, but I also think of you when there aren't any hydrangeas, I always think of you, Férula, because the truth is that since you left me no one has ever loved me as you did.”

She finished arranging her, stayed a few minutes talking to her and caressing her, and finally called in her husband and Father Antonio to make the burial arrangements. In a cookie tin they found the unopened envelopes of money Esteban had sent his sister once a month for all those years. Clara gave them to the priest for charitable works, sure that would be what Férula would have wanted.

The priest stayed with the dead woman so that the mice wouldn't treat her disrespectfully. It was almost midnight when they left. Férula's neighbors had gathered in the doorway to discuss the news of her death. Esteban and Clara had to make their way through the huddle of curious faces and shoo away the dogs that were sniffing among the crowd. Esteban walked quickly with his big strides, practically dragging Clara behind him, without noticing the dirty water that was spattering his impeccable gray trousers from the English tailor. He was furious because his sister, even now that she was dead, could still manage to make him feel guilty, just as she had when he was a boy. He recalled his childhood, when she surrounded him with dark solicitude, wrapping him in debts of gratitude so huge that as long as he lived he would never be able to pay them back. Once again he felt the sense of indignity that had frequently tormented him when he was with her. He despised her spirit of sacrifice, her severity, her vocation for poverty, and her unshakable chastity, which he felt as a reproach toward his own egotistical, sensual, power-hungry nature. Go to hell, bitch! he thought, refusing to admit even in the farthest corner of his heart that his wife had ceased belonging to him ever since he threw Férula out of his house.

“Why did she have to live like this when she had more than enough money?” Esteban shouted.

“Because she didn't have anything else,” Clara answered gently.

*  *  *

During the months that they were separated, Blanca and Pedro Tercero exchanged burning letters, which he signed with a woman's name and which she hid as soon as they arrived. Nana managed to intercept one or two, but she did not know how to read, and even if she had she would not have been able to break their secret code—fortunately for her, because her heart would not have withstood the shock. Blanca spent the winter knitting a sweater made of Scottish wool in her sewing class at school, with the boy's measurements in mind. At night she slept with her arms around the sweater, inhaling the scent of the wool and dreaming that it was he who spent the night beside her. Pedro Tercero, meanwhile, spent his winter writing songs on the guitar that he would sing to Blanca and whittling her likeness on any scrap of wood he could lay his hands on, unable to separate his angelic memories of the girl from the storms that were raging in his blood, turning his bones to pulp, lowering his voice, and causing hair to appear on his face. He was torn between the demands of his body, which was becoming that of a man, and the sweetness of a feeling that was still tinged with the innocent games of childhood. Both young people awaited the coming of summer with aching impatience. When it finally arrived and they met once again, the sweater Blanca had knit for Pedro didn't fit over his head, because in the intervening months he had left his childhood behind and acquired the dimensions of a man, and the tender songs he had composed now sounded ridiculous to her, because she had a woman's bearing and a woman's needs.

Pedro Tercero was still thin, and still had his stiff hair and sad eyes, but his voice had acquired a hoarse, passionate timbre that would one day make him famous, when he would sing songs of revolution. He seldom spoke and was rough and awkward in his social dealings, but gentle and delicate with his hands. He had the long fingers of an artist, which he used for whittling, for pulling laments from the strings of his guitar, and for drawing, just as easily as he used them to hold the reins of a horse or to raise an axe for chopping wood or to guide a plow. He was the only one in all Tres Marías who dared to confront the
patrón.
His father, Pedro Segundo, told him a thousand times not to look Esteban in the eye, not to answer back, and not to argue with him, and in his desire to protect him he had more than once given him a sound beating to knock some sense into his head. But his son was a born rebel. At the age of ten he already knew as much as his teacher in the school of Tres Marías, and at twelve he insisted on making the trip into town to attend the high school there. Rain or shine, he would leave his small brick house at five o'clock in the morning, by horse or on foot. He read and reread a thousand times the magic books from Uncle Marcos's enchanted trunks, and continued to nourish himself with other volumes lent to him by the union organizers at the bar and by Father José Dulce María, who taught him how to cultivate his natural poetic gifts and to translate his ideas into songs.

“My son, the Holy Church is on the right, but Jesus Christ was always on the left,” he would say enigmatically between sips of the wine he used at mass, which he served to celebrate Pedro's visits.

And so it was that one day Esteban Trueba, who was resting on the terrace after lunch, heard the boy sing about a bunch of hens who had organized to defeat a fox. He called him over.

“I want to hear that,” he said. “Go on, sing!”

Pedro Tercero lovingly picked up his guitar, rested his foot on a chair, and began to strum. His eyes did not leave the
patrón
's face while his velvet voice rose passionately above the soporific air of the siesta. Esteban Trueba was no fool and immediately understood the defiance.

“So,” he said, “the stupidest things can be set to music. You'd be better off learning love songs.”

“I like this,
patrón.
In union there is strength, as Father José Dulce María says. If the hens can overcome the fox, what about human beings?”

He picked up his guitar and shuffled out without giving Esteban time to think of anything to say, even though anger had reached his lips and his tension was rising. From that day on, Esteban Trueba kept his eye on him and did not trust him. He tried to prevent him from continuing his schooling, inventing all sorts of tasks for him to do, men's work, but the boy simply rose earlier and went to sleep later in order to finish the work. That was the year Esteban whipped him before his father because he brought the tenants the new ideas that were circulating among the unionists in town—ideas like Sundays off, a minimum wage, retirement and health plans, maternity leave for women, elections without coercion, and, most serious of all, a peasant organization that would confront the owners.

That summer, when Blanca went to spend her vacation at Tres Marías, she almost failed to recognize him; he had grown six inches and had left behind the potbellied little boy with whom she had spent her childhood summers. She got down from the car, smoothed her skirt, and for the first time in her life did not run to meet him, but simply nodded her head in greeting, although her eyes told him what could not be said in front of everyone—and anyway she had already told him in her unbridled letters in code. Nana watched it all from the corner of her eye and laughed mockingly. When she walked in front of Pedro Tercero, she sneered at him.