The House of the Spirits (23 page)

During the train ride, Clara brought her daughter up to date on the state of the family and her father's health, expecting that Blanca would ask the one question she knew she wanted to ask, but Blanca did not mention Pedro Tercero García, and Clara was not bold enough to do so herself. She believed that by giving problems a name they tended to manifest themselves, and then it was impossible to ignore them; whereas if they remained in the limbo of unspoken words, they could disappear by themselves, with the passage of time. Pedro Segundo was waiting for them at the station with the car, and Blanca was surprised to hear him whistling all the way to Tres Marías, because he had such a taciturn reputation.

They found Esteban Trueba sitting in a chair upholstered with blue felt, to which a set of bicycle wheels had been attached while he waited for the arrival of the wheelchair that they had ordered from the city and that Clara had brought with her luggage. He was running the house with energetic stabs of his cane and his usual panoply of insults, and was so absorbed in his duties that when they arrived he greeted them with an indifferent kiss and forgot to ask after his daughter's health.

That night they dined at a rustic table made of planks, their meal lit by a kerosene lamp. Blanca saw her mother serve the food on plates of handcrafted clay, such as was used for making bricks, since all the dishes had perished in the quake. Without Nana to run the kitchen, things had been simplified to the point of frugality; their meal consisted of lentil soup, bread, cheese, and quince jelly, which was less than Blanca ate at school on meatless Fridays. Esteban said that as soon as he could stand on his two feet he would go in person to the city to buy better, more refined furnishings for the new house; he was sick and tired of living like a peasant just because of the wild hysterical character of this godforsaken country of theirs. All Blanca remembered of the conversation was that he had fired Pedro Tercero García with the warning that he not set foot on the property again, because he had caught him spreading Communist ideas among the tenants. The girl went pale when she heard this, spilling the contents of her spoon on the tablecloth. Clara was the only one to notice the change in her expression, since Esteban was absorbed in his usual monologue about the ingrates who bite the hand that feeds them, “all because of those goddam politicians like that new Socialist candidate, a real nincompoop who has the nerve to ride up and down the country in his shabby little train, stirring the people up with his Bolshevik ideas, he'd better keep away from here if he knows what's good for him because we'll make mincemeat of him, we're ready and waiting, there's not an owner for miles around who doesn't feel the same way I do, we're not letting anyone in here to start preaching against honest work, the reward for work well done, the reward for those who meet life head-on, you can't expect the weak to have the same as those of us who've worked from sunup to sundown and know how to invest our money, run risks, and take on responsibilities, because when you get right down to it the land belongs to those who work it, which is going to boomerang on them because the only one who knows how to work around here is me, without me this place would have been a wreck and stayed one, not even Jesus Christ said we have to share the fruits of our labor with the lazy, and that little shit Pedro Tercero dares to say that on my land, the only reason I didn't shoot him through the eyes is because I respect his father and because you could say I owe my life to his grandfather, but I warned him that if I caught him prowling around here I'd blow his brains out.”

Clara took no part in the conversation. She was too busy putting things on the table and taking them away, and keeping an eye on her daughter, but as she removed the soup bowl with the leftover lentils she caught the final words of her husband's harangue.

“You can't keep the world from changing, Esteban,” she said. “If it's not Pedro Tercero García, someone else will bring new ideas to Tres Marías.”

Esteban Trueba brought his cane down on the soup tureen his wife had in her hands and knocked it to the floor, splattering its contents. Blanca jumped to her feet in horror. It was the first time she had seen her father's temper turned against her mother. She expected Clara to enter one of her moonstruck trances and exit through the window, but nothing of the sort took place. Clara picked up the broken pieces of tureen with her usual aplomb, not showing any sign that she was listening to the stream of curses issuing from Esteban's lips. She waited for him to finish, wished him good night with a gentle kiss on the cheek, and left the room, taking Blanca by the hand.

Blanca did not let Pedro Tercero's absence disturb her. She went to the river every day and waited. She knew that sooner or later word of her return to Tres Marías would reach the boy and that the call of love would overtake him no matter where he was. And so it happened. On the fifth day she saw a tramp in a winter poncho and a broad-brimmed hat coming toward her, pulling a burro weighed down with kitchen utensils, pewter pots, copper teapots, huge enameled casseroles, and ladles of all shapes and sizes, with a jangle of tin cans that heralded his arrival ten minutes in advance. She did not recognize him. He looked like an impoverished old man, one of those sad wandering souls who travel the provinces hawking their wares from door to door. He stopped in front of her and took off his hat, and then she saw the beautiful black eyes shining between a disheveled head of hair and a rough beard. The burro continued nibbling grass with its burden of noisy pots and pans, while Blanca and Pedro Tercero slaked the accumulated hunger and thirst of the long months of silence and separation, rolling among the rocks and brush and moaning passionately. Afterward they sat embracing among the rushes on the riverbank. Amid the buzz of the dragonflies and the croaking of the frogs, she told him how she had put banana peels and blotting paper in her shoes so she would develop a fever and had drunk ground chalk until she got a genuine cough, to convince the nuns that her lack of appetite and her pallor were the unmistakable symptoms of tuberculosis.

“I wanted to be with you!” she said, kissing him on the neck.

Pedro Tercero talked to her about what was going on in the rest of the world and in the country, about the distant war that had sent half of humanity into a hail of shrapnel, and an agony of concentration camps, and produced a flood of widows and orphans. He spoke of the workers of Europe and the United States, whose rights were respected because the slaughter of organizers and Socialists of the preceding decades had led to laws that were more just and republics that were governed properly, where the rulers did not steal powdered milk sent from abroad to the victims of disasters.

“The peasants are always the last to understand. We don't know what's going on in other parts of the world,” he said. “They hate your father here. But they're so afraid of him that they can't organize. You understand, Blanca?”

She understood, but right then she was interested in inhaling his scent of fresh grain, kissing his ears, running her fingers through his thick beard, and listening to his enamored moans. She was also afraid for him. She knew that not only would her father shoot the promised bullet into his head, but that any of the owners in the region would gladly do the same. Blanca reminded Pedro Tercero of the story of the Socialist leader who a few years earlier had bicycled across the province, distributing pamphlets on the haciendas and organizing the tenants until the Sánchez brothers caught him, beat him to death, and hanged him from a telephone pole at the intersection of two roads, where everyone could see him. There he had hung for a day and a half, swinging against the sky, until the mounted police arrived and cut him down. To cover up the affair, they accused the Indians on the reservation, even though everybody knew that they were peaceful and that anyone afraid to kill a chicken would hardly kill a man. But the Sánchez brothers dug him up from the cemetery and hauled the body out into full view, and then it was too much to attribute to the Indians. Still, despite the evidence, the law would not intervene, and the death of the Socialist was quickly forgotten.

“They could kill you,” Blanca pleaded, embracing him.

“I'm careful,” Pedro Tercero assured her. “I don't stay too long in the same place. That's why I won't be able to see you every day. Wait for me right here. I'll come whenever I can.”

“I love you,” she told him, weeping.

“I love you, too.”

They hugged with the insatiable passion of their youth, while the burro went on chewing grass.

*  *  *

Blanca managed not to be sent back to school by making herself nauseated with hot brine, giving herself diarrhea from eating green plums, and bringing herself to the point of exhaustion by tightly fastening a horse's girth around her waist, until she had acquired a reputation of sickliness, which was precisely what she wanted. She had learned to imitate the symptoms of various illnesses so well that she could have fooled a whole committee of physicians. She even convinced herself that she had a most delicate constitution. Every morning, as soon as she woke up, she ran her mind over her body, to see where she hurt and what new afflictions she had developed. She learned to take advantage of the slightest excuse for feeling ill, from a change in temperature to a shift in the pollen count, and to transform the least ache or pain into a full-blown agony. In Clara's view, the best thing for one's health was to keep one's hands busy, so she kept her daughter's illnesses in line by making her work. The girl had to awaken early like everybody else, take a cold bath, and do her chores, which included teaching in the schoolhouse, sewing in the workshop, and seeing to all the work of the infirmary, from giving enemas to suturing wounds with a needle and thread from the sewing basket, with no reprieve when she fainted at the sight of blood or broke out in a cold sweat when she had to wipe up someone's vomit. Old Pedro García, who was nearly ninety and could barely drag his bones from one place to another, shared Clara's notion that hands were meant to be used. This is why one day, when Blanca was complaining of a terrible migraine, he called her and without warning dropped a ball of clay into her lap. He spent that afternoon teaching her how to shape the clay into pieces of kitchen crockery, and the girl forgot all about her pains. The old man could not know that he was giving Blanca something that would later be her only means of survival, as well as her sole comfort in the sad hours to come. He taught her how to move the wheel with her foot while her hands flew across the moistened clay to make vases and jugs. But Blanca soon discovered that she was bored making utilitarian objects, and that it was far more amusing to make statues of animals and people. In time she created a whole miniature world of household animals and people engaged in every trade: carpenters, laundresses, cooks, each with his or her own tiny tools and furniture.

“This isn't good for anything!” Esteban Trueba said when he saw his daughter's output.

“Let's find a use for it,” Clara suggested.

Thus was born the idea of the crèches. Blanca began to create tiny figures for the family's Christmas manger, not only the Three Kings and the shepherds, but a whole crowd of every kind of people and every type of animal—African camels and zebras, American iguanas and Asian tigers—without worrying about the exact fauna of Bethlehem. Afterward she added imaginary animals, gluing half an elephant to half a crocodile, without realizing that she was doing in clay what her Aunt Rosa, whom she never knew, had done with thread on her enormous tablecloth. Clara decided that if craziness can repeat itself in a family, then there must be a genetic memory that prevents it from being swallowed by oblivion. Blanca's multitudinous crèches became a tourist attraction. She had to train two girls to help her, because she was unable to keep up with the orders. That year everybody wanted one of her crèches, especially since she did not charge for them. Esteban Trueba concluded that her mania for clay was fine as a form of amusement for a proper young lady, but that if it became a business, the name of Trueba would be brought down to the level of those merchants who sold nails in the hardware stores and fried fish in the market.

Blanca's meetings with Pedro Tercero became infrequent, but for that very reason they were all the more intense. During those years, she grew accustomed to sudden starts and protracted waits. She resigned herself to the idea that they would always have to make love on the sly and she stopped nursing the dream of getting married and living in one of her father's small brick houses. Often whole weeks went by without her having any news of him, but then suddenly a mailman on a bicycle would appear at the hacienda, or a Protestant preacher with a Bible tucked under his arm, or a gypsy speaking some half-pagan tongue, all of them so inoffensive that they entered the grounds without arousing the suspicion of the ever-watchful eye of the owner. She recognized Pedro Tercero by his pitch-black eyes. Nor was she the only one; the tenants at Tres Marías and many peasants from haciendas across the region also waited for him. Ever since the young man had been chased away by the owner, he had become a hero. Everyone wanted the honor of hiding him for the night; the women wove him ponchos and winter socks and the men saved him their best brandy and the best dried beef of the season. His father, Pedro Segundo García, suspected that his son was breaking Trueba's prohibition, and could well imagine the tracks he left behind. He was torn between his love for his son and his role as guardian of the hacienda. He was also afraid he might recognize him and that Esteban Trueba would read it on his face, but he secretly rejoiced at the thought that his son was behind some of the unusual things that were taking place throughout the countryside. The only thing that never crossed his mind was that his son's visits might have something to do with Blanca Trueba's outings by the river, because that possibility was simply not within the natural scheme of things. He never spoke of his son except within the privacy of his own family, but he was proud of him and preferred to see him as a fugitive than as one more of the peasants, planting potatoes and harvesting poverty like everybody else. When he heard other people humming the song about the hens and fox, he would smile at the thought that his son had made more converts with his subversive ballads than with the Socialist Party pamphlets he so tirelessly distributed.