The House of the Spirits (33 page)

“Wake up!” Jaime said. “We're going to take her home so Mama can look after her. It's better for her not to be alone for a few days.”

“I knew we could count on you,” Nicolás replied, his voice breaking with gratitude.

“I didn't do it for you, creep, I did it for her,” Jaime growled, turning his back on his brother.

Clara let them into the big house on the corner without asking any questions. Or perhaps she had already asked them of her cards or the spirits. They had had to wake her, because the sun was just coming up and everyone was still asleep.

“Mama, you have to help Amanda,” Jaime pleaded, with the certainty that came from their complicity in matters such as this. “She's sick and she needs to stay here a few days.”

“What about little Miguel?” Amanda asked.

“I'll go get him,” Nicolás replied, and he left.

They prepared one of the guest rooms and Amanda got into bed. Jaime took her temperature and said she ought to rest. He started to go out, but remained in the doorway, leaning against the frame, still undecided. Just then Clara returned with a tray of coffee for the three of them.

“I suppose we owe you an explanation, Mama,” Jaime murmured as they drank their coffee.

“No, son,” Clara answered gaily. “If it's a sin, I'd rather not know about it. Let's use the occasion to pamper Amanda. She needs it.”

Her son followed her out. Jaime looked at his mother a few paces ahead of him in the hallway, barefoot, her loose hair hanging down her back, and wrapped in her white bathrobe, and he realized that she was not as tall and strong as she had seemed to him in childhood. He reached out and took her by the shoulder. She turned around and smiled, and Jaime hugged her compulsively, clasping her to his chest and scratching her forehead with his chin, whose impossible beard was already clamoring for a shave. It was the first time he had embraced her spontaneously since he was a tiny baby rooted to her breast by need, and Clara was astonished to see how big her son had become; he had the thorax of a weight lifter and a pair of arms like hammers that could crush her with a terrifying force. Stirred and happy, she wondered how it was possible that this hairy giant with the strength of a bear and the candor of a novitiate could have ever lain inside her belly, especially as one of two.

During the next few days, Amanda ran a fever. Shaken, Jaime kept constant watch and gave her sulfa drugs. Clara tended her. She couldn't fail to notice that Nicolás discreetly asked about her but made no attempt to visit her. Jaime, on the other hand, lent her his favorite books and walked around like someone in a trance, babbling incoherently and crisscrossing the house as he had never done before. On Thursday night he forgot his Socialist meeting.

Thus, for a little while, Amanda became a member of the family, and Miguel, through exceptional circumstances, was present, hidden in a wardrobe, the day Alba was born in the Trueba house. He never forgot the grandiose, terrible sight of that tiny child entering the world, coated with all her bloody membranes, between the shrieks of her mother and the cries of the women bustling around her.

Meanwhile, Esteban Trueba had left on a trip to the United States. Tired of the pain in his bones and the secret illness that only he perceived, he had decided it was time to be examined by foreign doctors; he had reached the premature conclusion that Latin doctors were all charlatans who were closer to sorcerers than scientists. His shrinking was so infinitesimal, so slow and so sly, that no one other than himself had noticed it. He had to buy shoes one size smaller, shorten his trousers, and have a tuck taken in his shirtsleeves. One day he put on the black hat he had not worn all summer and it covered his ears completely, which led him to deduce that if his brain was shrinking, his ideas were also probably withering away. The gringo doctors measured his body, weighed each piece of him separately, interrogated him in English, injected liquids into him with one needle and extracted them with another, photographed him, turned him inside out like a glove, and even stuck a light up his anus. In the end, they concluded that it was all in his mind, that there was no reason for him to believe that he was shrinking, that he had always been the same size, but that perhaps he had dreamt that he was once six feet tall and wore a size-twelve shoe. Esteban Trueba lost patience and returned to his country prepared to ignore the problem of his height, since all great politicians in history had been small, from Napoleon to Hitler. When he arrived at his house, he saw Miguel playing in the garden and Amanda, thinner and with deep bags under her eyes, stripped of her makeup and her bracelets, sitting with Jaime on the terrace. He asked no questions, for he was accustomed to seeing total strangers living under his roof.

— EIGHT —

THE COUNT

H
ad it not been for the letters Clara and Blanca exchanged, that entire period would have remained submerged in a jumble of faded, timeworn memories. Their abundant correspondence salvaged events from the mists of improbable facts. From the very first letter she received from her daughter after her wedding, Clara could tell that her separation from Blanca would not last long. Without saying a word to anyone, she prepared one of the largest, sunniest rooms in the house. In it she placed the bronze cradle in which her own three children had slept.

Blanca was never able to explain to her mother why she had agreed to marry, because she herself did not know. Analyzing her past when she had reached middle age, she decided that the main reason was her fear of her father. Ever since she was a child, she had been familiar with the irrational strength of his anger, and she was used to obeying him. In the end, her pregnancy and the news of Pedro Tercero's death decided her. Still, from the moment she accepted the liaison with Jean de Satigny, she knew that she would never consummate the marriage. She would invent every possible argument for postponing their union, at first relying on the discomforts peculiar to her state and afterward finding additional excuses, because she was convinced that it would be far easier to manage a husband like the count, who wore kidskin shoes, polished his fingernails, and was willing to marry a woman pregnant with someone else's child, than to oppose a father like Esteban Trueba. Of two evils, she chose the one that struck her as the lesser. She realized that there was a commercial arrangement between the French count and her father in which she had no say. In exchange for a surname for his grandchild, Trueba gave Jean de Satigny a rich dowry and the promise that he would eventually receive an inheritance. Blanca lent herself to their negotiations, but she was not prepared to surrender either her love or her intimacy to her husband, because she was still in love with Pedro Tercero, more out of force of habit than out of any hope of ever seeing him again.

Blanca and her new husband spent their wedding night in the honeymoon suite of the best hotel in the capital, which Trueba had filled with flowers in the hope of winning his daughter's forgiveness for the string of assaults to which he had subjected her during the preceding months. To her great surprise, there was no need for her to feign a migraine. As soon as they were alone together, Jean shed his role as the eager suitor who had planted furtive kisses on her neck and who had chosen the finest shrimp to put into her mouth one by one. It was as if he had thoroughly forgotten his seductive, silent-movie-idol manner, and become instead the brother he had been to her in the days of their country strolls, when they would spread their picnic lunch on the ground and take photographs and read aloud in French. Jean disappeared into the bathroom, where he stayed so long that by the time he returned to the bedroom Blanca was half asleep. She thought she must be dreaming when she saw that her husband had changed out of his wedding suit into black silk pajamas and a velvet Pompeian bathrobe. He had put a net over his impeccably waved hair and reeked of eau de cologne. He seemed to have no great amatory impatience. He sat down beside her on the bed and began to stroke her cheek with the same half-mocking touch he had used on earlier occasions. Then, in his affected, r-less Spanish, he proceeded to explain that he had no particular inclination for married life, being in love only with the arts, literature, and scientific curiosities, and therefore had no intention of disturbing her with the usual demands of a husband; they could live together, but not entwined, in perfect harmony and decorum. Relieved, Blanca threw her arms around his neck and kissed him on both cheeks.

“Thank you, Jean!” she exclaimed.

“You're welcome,” he replied courteously.

They settled into the large Empire-style bed, talking about the wedding party and making plans for their future life.

“Don't you want to know who the father of my child is?” Blanca asked.

“I am,” Jean replied, kissing her on the forehead.

They each slept on their own side of the bed, back to back. At five o'clock in the morning, Blanca awoke with an upset stomach from the cloyingly sweet smell of the flowers with which her father had adorned the nuptial chamber. Jean de Satigny helped her to the bathroom, supported her while she leaned over the toilet, led her back to bed, and put the flowers out in the hall. Afterward he was unable to fall back to sleep, and spent the rest of the night reading
La Philosophie dans le boudoir,
of the Marquis de Sade, while Blanca sighed through her dreams that it was marvelous to be married to an intellectual.

The next day, Jean went to the bank to cash a check from his father-in-law and spent nearly the whole day going from one store to another buying the attire he considered appropriate to his new economic position. Meanwhile, bored with waiting for him in the hotel lobby, Blanca decided to pay a visit to her mother. She put on her best morning hat and took a cab to the big house on the corner, where the rest of her family was eating in silence, still irritable and tired from the upheaval of the wedding and the aftereffects of their recent fights. When he saw her enter the dining room, her father gave a shout of horror.

“What are you doing here!” he roared.

“Nothing . . . I've come to see you,” Blanca murmured, terrified.

“You're out of your mind! Don't you realize that if anybody sees you they're going to say that your husband sent you home in the middle of your honeymoon? They'll think you weren't a virgin!”

“But I wasn't, Papa.”

Esteban was about to strike her in the face, but Jaime stood between them with such firmness that Esteban resigned himself to insulting her for her stupidity. Clara, unshakable, led Blanca to a chair and served her a plate of cold fish with caper sauce. While Esteban continued screaming and Nicolás went to get the car to return her to her husband, the two women whispered just like in old times.

That same afternoon Blanca and Jean took the train to the port, where they boarded an English ocean liner. He was wearing white linen trousers with a blue jacket styled like a sailor's, which went beautifully with the blue skirt and white jacket of his wife's tailored suit. Four days later, the vessel deposited them in the farthest province of the North, where their elegant travel attire and crocodile bags went unnoticed in the dry, suffocating heat of the siesta. Jean de Satigny settled his wife provisionally in a hotel and turned his attention to the task of finding them lodgings worthy of his new status. Within twenty-four hours the small provincial society world knew that an authentic count had arrived in their midst. This did much to advance Jean's cause. He was able to rent an ancient mansion that had belonged to one of the great saltpeter fortunes before they invented the synthetic substitute that had shot the whole industry to hell. The house was somewhat musty and abandoned, like everything in sight, and needed a number of repairs, but its former dignity and
fin de siècle
charms were intact. The count decorated it according to this personal taste, with a decadent, ambiguous refinement that startled Blanca, accustomed as she was to country life and her father's classical sobriety. Jean brought in suspicious Chinese porcelain vases that, instead of flowers, held dyed ostrich feathers, damask curtains with pleats and tassels, cushions with fringe and pompons, furniture of every style, gold room dividers, and screens and several incredible standing lamps held aloft by life-sized ceramic statues of half-naked Abyssinian Negroes wearing turbans and slippers with upturned toes. The curtains were almost always drawn, leaving the house in a tenuous darkness that kept the cruel desert light at bay. In the corners, Jean had placed Oriental incense burners in which he burnt special perfumed herbs and sticks of incense that at first turned Blanca's stomach but to which she quickly became accustomed. He hired several Indians to work for him, in addition to a monumentally fat woman cook, whom he taught to make the spicy sauces that he was so fond of, and a lame, illiterate maid to wait on Blanca. They were all outfitted with showy uniforms that looked like costumes from an operetta, but he was unable to make them wear shoes, because they were accustomed to going barefoot and could not adjust. Blanca was uncomfortable in the house. She did not trust the expressionless Indians who waited on her with such evident ill will and seemed to make fun of her behind her back. They moved around her like ghosts, gliding soundlessly through the rooms, almost always bored and empty-handed. They never answered when she spoke to them, as if they did not understand Spanish, and when they spoke among themselves they always whispered or used one of the mountain dialects. Whenever Blanca told her husband the strange things she had observed among the servants, he replied that they were Indian customs to which she should pay no heed. Clara gave her the same answer in a letter after Blanca wrote that one day she had seen one of the Indians standing in a pair of astonishing antique shoes with twisted heels and velvet laces, in which the man's broad, callused feet had got stuck. “The heat of the desert, your pregnancy, and your unconscious desire to live like a countess, in accordance with your husband's lineage, are making you see things, darling,” Clara wrote in jest, adding that the best cure for Louis XV shoes was a cold shower and a cup of camomile tea. Another time, Blanca found a small dead lizard on her plate, which she was about to put in her mouth. When she recovered from the shock and managed to regain her voice, she called for the cook and pointed to the plate with a trembling finger. The cook approached, her mountainous fat and her braids swaying, and picked up the plate without a word. But as she turned around, Blanca could have sworn she caught a wink of complicity between her husband and the cook. That night she lay awake very late, wondering about what she had seen, until she finally concluded that she had imagined it. Her mother was right: the heat and her pregnancy were affecting her mind.

The farthest rooms in the house were allocated to Jean's mania for photography. In them he set up his lights, his tripods, and his various machines. He begged Blanca never to enter what he called his “laboratory” without permission, because, he explained, the plates could be destroyed by natural light. He installed a lock on the door and carried the key everywhere he went on a gold watch chain, a completely useless precaution since his wife had practically no interest in her surroundings, much less in the art of photography.

The larger she grew, the deeper Blanca sank into an Oriental placidity that dashed all her husband's attempts to introduce her into society. He wanted to take her to parties, to drive her around by car, and to involve her in the decoration of her new home, but Blanca, heavy, torpid, solitary, and the victim of an unshakable fatigue, took refuge in her knitting and embroidery. She slept most of the day, and spent her few waking hours sewing tiny articles of clothing for a complete pink wardrobe, for she was convinced that her baby would be a girl. As her mother had done with her, she developed a whole system for communicating with the infant that was growing inside her, turning in on herself in a silent, uninterrupted dialogue. Her letters described her secluded, melancholy life, and she referred to her husband with blind sympathy, as a fine, discreet, considerate man. Thus, without ever setting out to do so, she set in motion the myth that Jean de Satigny was practically a prince, never mentioning the fact that he spent his afternoons inhaling cocaine and smoking opium, because she was sure her parents would not understand. She had a whole wing of the house to herself. There she had arranged her headquarters and begun to pile up all the things she was preparing for her daughter's arrival. Jean said that fifty children would not be able to wear all the clothes and play with all those toys, but Blanca's only amusement was to scour the paltry downtown stores, where she purchased every pink baby item she could find. She spent her days embroidering infants' dresses, knitting woolen booties, decorating little baskets, arranging the stacks of tiny blouses, bibs, and diapers, and ironing the sheets she had embroidered. After the siesta she would write her mother and sometimes her brother Jaime, and when the sun began to set and the air grew cooler she would go for a walk around the property to shake the numbness from her legs. In the evening she joined her husband in the enormous dining room, whose bordello lighting was supplied by the ceramic Negroes standing in the corners. They sat at opposite ends of the table, which was set with a long tablecloth, a full service of china and glassware, and adorned with artificial flowers, because no real ones grew in that inhospitable region. They were always attended by the same impassive, silent Indian, who constantly sucked a green ball of coca leaves that was his chief sustenance. He was a peculiar servant, and had no specific duties within the domestic hierarchy. Waiting on table was certainly not his forte; he had still to master platters and serving implements, and would fling the food down however he could. One time, Blanca had to remind him please not to grab the potatoes with his hand and put them on her plate. But Jean de Satigny held him in mysterious regard and was training him to be his assistant in the laboratory.

“If he can't talk like a human being, how do you expect him to take pictures?” Blanca observed when Jean told her his plan.

This was the Indian Blanca thought she had seen in Louis XV heels.

Her first months as a wife were peaceful and boring. Blanca's natural tendency to isolation and solitude became accentuated. Since she refused to partake of the local social life, Jean de Satigny was forced to go alone to the numerous events to which they were invited. Later, returning home, he regaled Blanca with accounts of the vulgarity of these stale, out-of-date families, whose daughters were still chaperoned and whose gentlemen wore scapulars. Blanca led the idle life that was her true vocation, while her husband gave himself to those small pleasures that only money can buy and that he had denied himself for such a long time. Every night he went to the casino. His wife calculated that he must be losing huge sums of money, because at the end of the month there was invariably a long line of creditors at their door. Jean had very strange ideas about their household finances. He bought himself the most up-to-date automobile, with leopard-skin upholstery and golden fittings worthy of an Arab prince, the largest, most ostentatious car ever seen in those parts. He established a network of mysterious contacts that enabled him to buy antiques, particularly baroque French porcelain, for which he had a weakness. He also imported crates of fine liqueurs that were cleared through customs without incident. His contraband entered the house through the service door and exited through the front door on its way to other destinations, where Jean consumed it in secret revels or sold it at exorbitant prices. They never invited people to their house, and within weeks the ladies of the neighborhood had stopped inviting Blanca. Rumor had it she was proud, arrogant, and ill, which only increased the general sympathy for the count, who gained a reputation as a patient, long-suffering husband.