The House of the Spirits (29 page)

Clara, who from the very start had objected to the idea of marrying Blanca off against her will, decided not to attend the party. She stayed in the sewing room, spinning out dire predictions for the newlyweds, every one of which was borne out to the letter, as all concerned were later able to verify. Finally her husband came to beg her to change her clothes and make an appearance in the garden, even if only for ten minutes, to quell the rumors of the guests. She did so unwillingly, but out of love for her daughter she put in her teeth and managed to smile at the assembled guests.

Jaime arrived at the end of the party because he had stayed late working in the clinic for the poor where he was undergoing his first training as a medical student. Nicolás showed up with the lovely Amanda, who had just discovered Sartre and had adopted the dire look of the European existentialists, dressed all in black, pale-faced, her Arab eyes lined with kohl, her dark hair hanging to her waist, and a jangle of bracelets, necklaces, and earrings that caused a stir wherever she went. As for Nicolás, he was dressed in white, like a doctor, with amulets around his neck. His father came out to greet him, took him by the arm, and pushed him into a bathroom, where without a word he proceeded to pull off all his talismans.

“Go to your room and put on a decent tie! Go back to the party and behave like a proper gentleman! Don't let me catch you preaching some heretical religion among the guests! And tell that witch you've brought along to button up her neckline!” Esteban shouted at his son.

Nicolás obeyed him in the worst possible mood. On principle, he was a teetotaler, but he was so furious that he had a few drinks, lost his head, and jumped fully dressed into the garden fountain, from which he had to be rescued with his dignity thoroughly soaked.

Blanca spent the entire evening sitting in a chair staring at the cake with a dazed expression, tears running down her face. Meanwhile, her new husband fluttered among the diners attributing his mother-in-law's absence to a sudden attack of asthma and his bride's tears to the emotions of the occasion. No one believed him. Jean de Satigny kept kissing Blanca on the neck, clasping her hands in his, and consoling her with sips of wine and bites of lobster, which he placed directly in her mouth, but it was all in vain: she continued to cry. Despite everything, the party was a great success, just as Esteban Trueba had hoped it would be. The guests ate and drank sumptuously, and watched the sun rise as they danced to the strains of the orchestra, while downtown, in the center of the city, groups of unemployed workers huddled around tiny bonfires, gangs of young men in dark shirts marched around raising their arms in stiff salute, imitating the figures they had seen in German movies, and in the headquarters of the various political parties the final touches were being put on campaign strategies for the upcoming elections.

“The Socialists are going to win,” Jaime had said. After spending so much time living with the proletariat in the hospital where he worked, he had lost his reason.

“No, Jaime, the ones who always win are going to win again,” Clara had replied, for she had seen it in the cards and her common sense had confirmed it.

After the party, Esteban Trueba took his son-in-law into the library and handed him a check. It was his wedding present. He had made all the arrangements for the couple to go to the North, where Jean de Satigny hoped to settle down to a comfortable life supported by his wife's income, far away from the comments of astute observers who would not be insensible to the size of his wife's belly. He was thinking about starting a little business of Incan pottery and mummies.

Before the newlyweds left the party, they went to say goodbye to Blanca's mother. Clara took Blanca aside and spoke to her in private. The girl still had not stopped crying.

“Stop crying, child,” she told her. “Too many tears will hurt the baby, and only make it unhappy.”

Blanca replied with another sob.

“Pedro Tercero García is alive,” Clara added.

Blanca swallowed her hiccups and blew her nose.

“How do you know, Mama?” she asked.

“Because I dreamt it,” Clara replied.

That was enough to reassure Blanca completely. She dried her tears, straightened her head, and didn't weep again until the day her mother died, seven years later, although it was not for lack of suffering, loneliness, and other causes.

*  *  *

Separated from her daughter, with whom she had always been very close, Clara entered another of her confused, depressed periods. Her life went on as before. The big house was always open and full of people, but she had lost her ability to laugh easily and was often to be seen staring straight ahead, lost in thought. She attempted to establish a system of communication with Blanca that would allow them to circumvent the terrible delays of the postal system, but telepathy did not always work and she was never sure how the message would be received. She could tell that her communiqués were being distorted by influences beyond her control and that the message received never resembled the one she had sent. Besides, Blanca was not given to psychic experiments; even though she had always been extremely close to her mother, she had never shown the slightest curiosity for mental phenomena. She was a practical, worldly, diffident woman, and her modern, pragmatic character was a serious obstacle to telepathy. Clara had to resign herself to more conventional methods. Mother and daughter wrote each other almost daily, and for several months their abundant correspondence took the place of Clara's notebooks that bore witness to life. Thus Blanca was kept abreast of everything that happened in the big house on the corner, and could entertain the illusion that she was still with her family and that her marriage was only a bad dream.

That year the paths of Jaime and Nicolás separated for good, because their differences had become irreconcilable. Nicolás had discovered flamenco dancing, which he said he had learned from the gypsies in the caves of Granada, even though he had never left the country; such was the strength of his conviction that even his own family began to wonder. He offered demonstrations on the slightest pretext. He would leap up on the dining-room table, the enormous oak table that had served as Rosa's bier so many years before and that Clara had inherited, and begin to beat his palms like a madman, tap his shoes spastically, and jump and shout so piercingly that he would attract all the inhabitants of the house as well as several neighbors and, on one occasion, even the police, who arrived with their nightsticks in hand, tracking mud across the carpets with their boots, but who wound up clapping their hands and shouting
Olé!
like everyone else. The table resisted heroically, although by the end of a week it looked like a butcher's table that had been used to slaughter calves. Flamenco dancing had no practical application in the closed society prevailing in the capital back then, but Nicolás ran a discreet announcement in the paper offering his services as a teacher of that fiery art. The next day he had a female student, and by the end of the week word of his charms had got out. Young girls flocked to him in droves. At first they were ashamed and timid, but he would begin twirling them around, tapping loudly while his arm encircled their waists and giving them his most seductive smile, and soon they were enthusiastic. His classes were a great success. The dining-room table was on the verge of splintering, Clara was complaining of migraines, and Jaime was locked in his room with wax in his ears, trying to concentrate on his studies. When Esteban Trueba found out what was going on in his house during his absence, he was justly and terrifyingly enraged, and forbade his son to use the house as an academy of Spanish dance or any other thing. Nicolás was forced to give up his contortions, but the whole experience made him the most popular young man of the season, the king of all the parties and of all the young girls' hearts, because while everybody else was busy studying, dressing in gray checked suits, and trying to grow a mustache to the rhythm of boleros, he was preaching free love, quoting Freud, drinking Pernod, and dancing flamenco. His social triumph did not, however, diminish his interest in his mother's psychic talents. He tried in vain to imitate her. He studied vehemently, practiced until his health was in jeopardy, and attended the Friday-night sessions with the three Mora sisters, despite his father's express orders to the contrary; for Esteban Trueba persisted in believing that these were not suitable matters for men. Clara tried to console him for his failures.

“You can't learn these things or inherit them,” she would tell him when she saw him going cross-eyed with concentration in his strenuous efforts to move the saltshaker without touching it.

The three Mora sisters loved the boy very much. They lent him their secret books and helped him decipher the mysteries of horoscopes and divining cards. They would form a ring around him, holding each other by the hand, trying to suffuse him with their healing fluids, but that too failed to endow Nicolás with mental powers. They encouraged his love for Amanda. At first the young woman seemed to be fascinated by the three-legged table and the long-haired artists who flocked to Nicolás's house, but she soon tired of summoning spirits and reciting the Poet's verses, so she took a job as a newspaper reporter.

“That's a crooked profession,” Esteban Trueba declared when he found out.

Trueba did not care for her. He did not even like to see her in his house. He thought she was a bad influence on his son and believed that her long hair, heavily made-up eyes, and glass beads were symptoms of some hidden vice, and that her tendency to kick her shoes off and sit cross-legged on the floor like an aborigine was mannish behavior.

Amanda had a very pessimistic view of the world, and to get through her depressions she smoked hashish. Nicolás joined her. Clara noticed that her son often had bad moments, but even her prodigious intuition did not allow her to make the connection between the Oriental pipes Nicolás smoked, his strange deliriums, his periodic drowsiness, and his attacks of sudden happiness, because she had never heard of that or any other drug. “It must be his age,” she would tell herself whenever Nicolás was acting strangely. “He'll get over it.” She had forgotten that Jaime had been born on the same day and did not have such fits.

Jaime's madness took a very different form. He had a calling for both sacrifice and austerity. There were only two pairs of pants and three shirts in his closet. Clara spent the winters rapidly knitting all sorts of woolen clothes to keep him warm, but he wore them only until someone who needed them more than he did crossed his path. All the money his father gave him ended up in the pockets of the impoverished people he cared for in the hospital. Whenever some emaciated dog followed him in the street, he brought it home, and whenever he heard about an abandoned child, unwed mother, or an old woman who needed his help, he brought the poor ones home so his mother could take care of their problems. Clara became an expert in social benefits. She was acquainted with all the services the state and the church provided for taking care of the disadvantaged. When all else failed, she took them into her own house. Her friends grew afraid of her, for every time she showed up on a visit it was because she needed something. The network of Clara and Jaime's protégés expanded, to the point where they lost count of how many people they were caring for; they were surprised whenever somebody appeared at the door to thank them for a favor they could not recall. Jaime approached the study of medicine as if it were a religious calling. Any diversion that took him away from his books or used up his time was a betrayal of the people he had sworn to serve. “This boy should have become a priest,” Clara declared. For Jaime, who would not have been the least disturbed by the priestly vows of humility, poverty, and chastity, religion was the cause of half the world's misfortunes, so when his mother would make this comment he would become furious. He felt that Christianity, like almost all forms of superstition, made men weaker and more resigned, and that the point was not to await some reward in the sky but to fight for one's rights on earth. These were things he discussed in private with his mother; it was impossible to do so with Esteban Trueba, who quickly lost patience and ended up shouting and slamming doors because, as he put it, he was up to here with living among a bunch of lunatics and all he wanted was a little normality, but he had had the misfortune of marrying an eccentric and siring three good-for-nothing crazies who were ruining his life. Jaime didn't argue with his father. He was like a shadow in the house, giving his mother a distracted kiss whenever he saw her on his way to the kitchen, where, standing up, he would eat everyone else's leftovers before returning to his room and locking himself up to read or study. His bedroom was a tunnel of books, the walls covered from floor to ceiling with shelves full of volumes no one ever dusted because he always locked his door; they made a perfect nest for spiders and mice. In the center of the room was his bed, actually an army cot, which was lit by a naked light bulb hanging from the ceiling directly above his pillow. During an earthquake that Clara neglected to predict, they heard a roar like that of a derailed train, and when they were able to open the door they saw that the bed had been buried beneath an avalanche of books. The bookshelves had come loose from the walls, and Jaime had been squashed beneath them. They pulled him out without a scratch. While Clara was removing the books, she remembered the great earthquake, and it seemed to her that she had already lived this moment. The event was an opportunity to sweep the dust from Jaime's lair and chase away the insects and cobwebs with a broom.

The only time Jaime ever bothered to focus on the reality of his house was when he saw Amanda walking hand in hand with Nicolás. He rarely spoke to her and blushed violently whenever she spoke to him. He distrusted her exotic appearance and was convinced that if she wore her hair like other women and wiped the makeup off her eyes she would look like a very thin, greenish rat. Still, he could not keep his eyes off her. The rattle of bracelets that always accompanied her distracted him from his studies, and he had to make an enormous effort not to follow her around the house like a hypnotized chicken. Alone on his bed, unable to concentrate on what he was reading, he would imagine how Amanda looked naked, wrapped in her long black hair with all her noisy adornments, like an idol. Jaime was a recluse. He had been a reticent child, and later became a timid man. He did not love himself and perhaps for that reason felt that he did not deserve the love of others. The least manifestation of affection or gratitude toward him made him terribly embarrassed. Amanda represented the essence of everything feminine and, since she was Nicolás's girlfriend, of everything forbidden. The young woman's free, affectionate, adventurous personality fascinated him, and her appearance of a disguised rat aroused in him a tortured eagerness to protect her. He desired her with all his heart, but he would not go so far as to admit it, not even in his most hidden thoughts.