The House of the Spirits (21 page)

“It's time you learned to stay with your own class instead of nosing around señoritas,” she said between clenched teeth.

That night Blanca ate with the rest of the family in the dining room. They were served the chicken casserole that always welcomed them to Tres Marías, and she showed no sign of her usual restlessness during the extended afterdinner conversation, while her father sipped his cognac and talked about imported cows and gold mines. She waited for her mother to signal to her that she was excused. Then she calmly stood up, wished everyone good night, and went to her room. For the first time in her life she locked it. She sat down on her bed without removing her clothes and waited in the dark until the twins' raucous shouts in the room next door and the servants' footsteps had subsided, and the doors, the locks, and the whole house had settled into sleep. Then she opened the window and jumped out, falling onto the hydrangea bushes that her Aunt Férula had planted long ago. It was a clear night, and she could hear the crickets and the frogs. She took a deep breath and the air brought her the sweet scent of peaches that were drying in the courtyard to be used in preserves. She waited for her eyes to adjust to the darkness and then began to walk, but she was unable to continue because she heard the furious barking of the guard dogs that were left unleashed at night. They were four mastiffs that had been raised tied to chains and spent the daytime locked in a cage. She had never seen them up close and she was sure they would not recognize her. For a moment she was swept by panic and about to scream, but then she remembered that old Pedro García had once told her that thieves never wear clothes so dogs will not attack them. Without a moment's hesitation she pulled off her clothes as fast as she could, threw them over her arm and continued walking calmly forward, praying that the animals wouldn't smell her fear. She saw them spring forward, barking, and continued without losing rhythm. The dogs came closer, growling with suspicion, but she did not stop. One of them, bolder than the others, came close to sniff her. She felt his warm breath against her back, but she paid no attention. They continued to bark and growl for a long while, accompanied her part of the way, and then, frustrated, went away. Blanca gave a sigh of relief and realized that she was covered with sweat and shaking. She had to lean against a tree and wait until the exhaustion that had turned her knees to jelly passed. Then she quickly put her clothes on and ran toward the river.

Pedro Tercero was waiting for her in the place where they had met the summer before and where, years earlier, Esteban Trueba had stolen Pancha García's humble virginity. When she saw him, Blanca blushed violently. During the months of separation, he had been toughened by the hard job of becoming a man, while she had been shut within the walls of her house and her convent school, preserved from the wear and tear of life and nursing her romantic fantasies while she knit with Scottish wool, but the image of her dreams had nothing to do with this tall young man who was walking toward her murmuring her name. Pedro Tercero reached out his hand and touched her neck by her ear. Blanca felt something hot run through her bones, loosening her limbs. She closed her eyes and surrendered to it. He pulled her gently toward him and wrapped his arms around her. She pressed her face against the chest of this man she did not know, so different from the scrawny boy with whom she had exchanged such passionate caresses only months before. She inhaled his new scent, rubbed herself against his bristly skin, ran her hands over his lean, strong body, and felt a full, all-encompassing sense of peace that had nothing at all to do with the state of agitation that had taken possession of him. They sought each other with their tongues, as they always did, even though it seemed like a new invention, and fell kneeling as they kissed in desperation. Then they rolled onto the soft bed of damp earth. They were discovering each other for the first time and there was no need for words. The moon crossed the whole horizon, but they did not see it; they were too busy exploring their deepest intimacy, insatiably entering each other's skins.

From that night on, Blanca and Pedro Tercero met every night in the same place, at the same time. By day she embroidered, read, or painted insipid watercolors around the house, under Nana's approving glance, now that she could finally sleep in peace. But Clara sensed that something strange was going on, because she could see a new color in her daughter's aura, and she felt sure that she knew why. Pedro Tercero performed his usual tasks in the field and continued to go into town to see his friends. By nightfall he was dead with fatigue, but the idea of seeing Blanca gave him back his strength. It was not for nothing he was fifteen years old. Thus the summer passed, and years later they would both recall those passionate nights as the happiest time of their lives.

Meanwhile, Jaime and Nicolás used their vacations to do all the things that were forbidden in their British boarding school. They shouted until they were hoarse, fought at the slightest provocation, and came to resemble two filthy little urchins with scabby knees and heads full of lice, replete with warm freshly picked fruit, sun, and freedom. They left early in the morning and came home at sundown, spending their days hunting rabbits with their slingshots, riding horseback until they were worn out, and spying on the women who were washing clothes down by the river.

*  *  *

And so three years went by, until the earthquake changed things. After that vacation, the twins returned to the city ahead of the rest of the family, accompanied by Nana, the city servants, and most of the baggage. The boys went straight to their boarding school, while Nana and the other employees readied the big house on the corner for the arrival of the owners.

Blanca stayed behind in the country with her parents for a few more days. It was then that Clara began having nightmares, walking in her sleep, and waking up screaming. During the day, she went about half in a dream, seeing premonitions in the animals' behavior: the hens were not laying their daily eggs, the cows were acting frightened, the dogs were howling to death, the rats, spiders, and worms were coming out of their hiding places, the birds were leaving their nests and flying off in great formations, while her pigeons were screaming with hunger in the treetops. She stared obsessively at the frail column of white smoke that was issuing from the volcano, and peered at the changes in the color of the sky. Blanca made her all sorts of soothing teas and warm baths, and Esteban resorted to the old box of homeopathic pills to calm her down, but her nightmares continued.

“There's going to be an earthquake!” Clara announced, daily growing paler and more agitated.

“For God's sake, Clara, there are always quakes!” Esteban replied.

“This time it's going to be different. There will be ten thousand dead.”

“There aren't even that many people in the whole country,” he said, laughing.

The cataclysm began at four o'clock in the morning. Clara woke a little before it, having had an apocalyptic nightmare of exploded horses, cows hurled into the sea, people crawling under stones, and gaping caverns in the earth into which whole houses were falling. She rose livid with terror and ran to Blanca's room. But, as she did every night, Blanca had locked her door and slipped out the window in the direction of the river. The last few days before returning to the city, her summer passion took on a dramatic quality, and with a new separation imminent, the two young people seized every possible opportunity to give free rein to their desires. They spent the nights at the river, immune to their weariness and the cold, thrashing with the strength of their desperation, and only as the first glimpse of dawn came through the clouds did Blanca return to the house and climb through her bedroom window, falling into bed just as the first cocks crowed. Clara arrived at her daughter's door and tried to open it, but it was bolted. She knocked, and when no one opened it she turned and ran outside the house, where she saw the window wide open and Férula's hydrangeas trampled. In a flash she understood the color of Blanca's aura, the bags under her eyes, her listlessness, her silence, her morning sleepiness, and her afternoon watercolors. And in that instant the earthquake began.

Clara felt the ground shake and was unable to keep her footing. She fell to her knees. The tiles on the roof gave way and crashed around her with a deafening roar. She saw the adobe walls of the house crumple as if they had been chopped with an axe, and then the earth opened just as she had seen it in her dream and an enormous crevice formed before her, swallowing the chicken coops, the laundry troughs, and part of the stable. The water tank swayed from side to side and smashed to the ground, spilling a thousand gallons of water on the few surviving hens, who flapped their wings desperately. In the distance the volcano began to shoot flames and smoke like a furious dragon. The dogs broke loose from their chains and raced madly up and down; the horses that had survived the collapse of the stable stomped the air and neighed in terror before bolting off into the open fields; the poplars teetered like drunks and fell with their roots in the air, crushing the swallows' nests. Most terrible of all was the roar coming from the center of the earth, that hard-breathing giant that was heard at length, filling the air with fear. Clara tried to drag herself toward the house calling Blanca's name, but the death-rattling shudders of the earth prevented her from moving. She saw the peasants running out of their houses terrified, imploring heaven, throwing their arms around each other, pulling their children, kicking their dogs, pushing their old people, and trying to salvage their few poor belongings in that din of brick and tile flying from the very bowels of the earth, like an interminable noise of the end of the world.

Esteban Trueba appeared in the doorway at the very instant when the house snapped in half like an eggshell and collapsed in a cloud of dust, flattening him beneath a pile of rubble. Clara pulled herself to where he was, shouting his name, but there was no reply.

The first tremor of the earthquake lasted nearly a minute and was the strongest that had ever been recorded in that country of catastrophes. It leveled almost everything that stood, and whatever was left was finished off in the string of secondary tremors that continued to shake the world until the sun came up. At Tres Marías they waited till daybreak to count the dead and dig out those who had been buried alive beneath the avalanche, many of whom were still moaning, among them Esteban Trueba, whose location was known to everyone although no one expected him to be alive. It took four men under Pedro Segundo's guidance to remove the hill of dust, tile, and adobe that had fallen on top of him. Clara had lost her angelic distraction and was helping to remove the stones with the strength of a man.

“We have to get him out! He's still alive and he can hear us!” Clara assured them, and that gave them the courage to continue.

Blanca and Pedro Tercero appeared at first light, unhurt. Clara hurled herself at her daughter and slapped her on the face, but then she embraced her tearfully, relieved to know she was alive and to have her by her side.

“Your father's in there!” Clara cried, pointing.

The young people joined in, and after an hour, when the sun was already shining on that anguished landscape, they lifted the
patrón
from his tomb. He had so many broken bones that they could not be counted, but he was alive and his eyes were open.

“We have to take him into town to see a doctor,” said Pedro Segundo.

They were discussing how to transport him without his bones popping through his skin like a broken bag, when old Pedro García came up; thanks to his blindness and his age, he had survived the earthquake without getting upset. He bent down beside the wounded man, feeling him with his hands, looking with his ancient fingers, until there was not an inch he had not covered or a bone he had not felt.

“If you move him, he'll die,” he concluded.

Esteban Trueba was still conscious and he heard the words quite clearly. He remembered the ant plague and decided that the old man was his only hope.

“He knows what he's doing,” he stammered.

Pedro García had a blanket brought and, between his son and his grandson, they laid the
patrón
on it, lifted him carefully, and raised him onto an improvised table that they had set up in what was formerly the courtyard but was now no more than a small clearing in that nightmare of debris, animal corpses, crying children, moaning dogs, and praying women. They had rescued a wineskin from among the ruins, which Pedro García divided three ways: a third to wash the injured man's body, a third for Esteban to drink, and the other third he drank parsimoniously himself before beginning to set Esteban's bones, one by one, patiently and calmly, pulling here, adjusting there, putting each one back in its proper place, splinting them, wrapping them in strips of sheet to keep them immobile, mumbling litanies to the healing saints, invoking good luck and the Virgin Mary, and putting up with the screams and blasphemies of Esteban Trueba, without ever altering his beatific blind man's expression. By touch he restored the body so perfectly that the doctors who examined Trueba afterward could not believe such a thing was possible.

“I wouldn't even have tried,” said Dr. Cuevas when he heard what had happened.

The destruction from the earthquake plunged the country into a long period of mourning. It was not enough that the earth shook until everything was flung to the ground; the sea drew back for several miles and returned in a single gigantic wave that sent boats to the top of mountains far from the coast, removed whole villages, roads, and animals, and submerged a number of southern islands more than a foot below the surface. Buildings fell like wounded dinosaurs; others collapsed like a house of cards. The dead numbered in the thousands and there was not a single family that had not lost one of its own. The salt water from the sea ruined the crops, and fires razed whole regions of cities and towns. Finally lava began to flow, and as a crowning punishment, ash fell on the villages close to the volcano. People stopped sleeping in their houses, terrified at the thought that such a disaster could recur, improvising tents in open spaces or sleeping in the middle of squares and streets. Soldiers had to take control of the chaos. They shot anyone they caught stealing, because while the faithful crowded into the churches begging forgiveness for their sins and beseeching God to stay his fury, thieves were running through the ruins slicing off ears with earrings and fingers with rings, not stopping to ascertain whether the victims were dead or only trapped in the cave-in. A wave of germs was unleashed, causing all sorts of epidemics across the country. The rest of the world, too busy with another war, barely noticed that nature had gone berserk in that remote corner of the globe, but even so shiploads of medicine, blankets, food, and building material arrived, all of which disappeared in the mysterious labyrinths of various bureaucracies and were still available for purchase years later, when canned vegetables from the United States and powdered milk from Europe could be bought in the most exclusive stores at the same price as any other gourmet food.