The House of the Spirits (34 page)

Blanca got along well with him. The only times they argued were when she tried to look into their finances. She could not understand how Jean could buy porcelain and drive that spotted car when he did not have enough money to pay the Chinese man in the general store or the salaries of their numerous servants. Jean refused to discuss the matter, on the assumption that it was a man's business and that she had no need to fill her sparrow's brain with problems she could not understand. Blanca supposed that Jean de Satigny's account with Esteban Trueba gave him unlimited amounts of money, and since it was impossible to reach an understanding with him, she ended up pretending to be ignorant of such matters. In this house embedded in sand and inhabited by strange Indians who seemed to exist in some other dimension, she vegetated like a flower from another climate, frequently coming across certain small details that made her question her own sanity. Reality seemed blurred to her, as if the same implacable sun that erased all colors had also deformed the world around her, transforming even people into silent shadows.

In the soporific heat of those months Blanca, protected by the creature that was growing inside her, forgot about the magnitude of her disgrace. She stopped thinking about Pedro Tercero García with the terrible urgency she had felt before and took refuge in the sweet, faded memories she could always conjure up at will. Her sensuality was dormant, and on the rare occasions when she brooded over her unfortunate fate, she had a pleasant vision of herself floating in a nebula, without suffering or joy, far away from the cruelties of life, with her daughter as her sole companion. She came to believe that she had lost her capacity to love, and that the burning desire of her flesh had been quelled forever. She spent interminable hours staring at the pallid landscape that stretched out before her window. The house was on the very edge of the city, and was ringed by a few rickety trees that had managed to withstand the onslaught of the desert. To the north, the wind had destroyed all vegetation, and she could see the immense plains of dunes and distant hills quivering in the sweltering light. During the day, she was overcome by the suffocation of that leaden sun, and at night she shivered in her bed, protecting herself from chills with hot-water bottles and woolen shawls. She stared at the limpid, naked sky looking for traces of a cloud, hoping that sooner or later a drop of rain would fall to break the unbearable harshness of that lunar valley. The months rolled by unchanging, with no other distraction than her mother's letters, which told of her father's political campaign, Nicolás's madness, and the excesses of Jaime, who lived like a priest but walked around with lovesick eyes. In one of her letters Clara suggested that to keep her hands busy she go back to making crèches. She tried. She ordered some of the special clay she had used at Tres Marías, set up a studio in the back of the kitchen, and had a couple of Indians build her an oven for firing her pieces. But Jean de Satigny made fun of her artistic impulse, saying that if she wanted to do something with her hands she would be better off knitting booties and learning to make pastry. She finally abandoned her work, not so much because of her husband's sarcasm, but because it seemed impossible to compete with the ancient pottery of the Indians.

Jean had organized his business with the same tenacity he had formerly brought to the idea of the chinchillas, but this time with more success. Aside from a German priest who had spent thirty years ranging across the area digging up the Inca past, no one else had bothered with those relics, since they were thought to be of little or no value. The government forbade any trafficking in Indian antiquities and had given the priest a general concession, authorizing him to catalog whatever he found and hand it over to the museum. Jean saw them for the first time in the dusty display cases of the museum. He spent two days with the German. Happy after all these years to discover someone interested in his work, the priest had no misgivings about revealing his vast knowledge. Thus Jean learned how to determine the exact amount of time the relics had lain in the ground, how to differentiate the various styles and epochs, and how to locate burial grounds in the desert by means of signs invisible to civilized eyes. Finally, he decided that even if these shards lacked the golden splendor of Egyptian tombs, they nonetheless had a certain historical value. Once he obtained all the information that he needed, he organized teams of Indians to dig up whatever might have escaped the priest's zealous archaeological notice.

Magnificent ceramic jars, green with the patina of time, began to arrive at his house disguised in Indians' bundles and llama saddlebags, quickly filling the secret places that had been set aside for them. Blanca watched them piling up in the rooms and was astonished by their shapes. She held them in her hands, caressing them as if hypnotized, and whenever they were wrapped in straw and paper to be shipped to far-off, unknown destinations, she was grief-stricken. This pottery was just too beautiful. She felt that the monsters from her crèches did not belong under the same roof. For this reason, more than for any other, she abandoned her workshop.

The business of the Indian excavations was completely secret, since they were part of the historical heritage of the nation. Various teams of Indians who had slipped across the twisted passes of the border undetected were working for Jean de Satigny. They had no documents that proved they were human beings, and they were silent, stubborn, and inscrutable. Every time Blanca asked where these people who would suddenly appear in her courtyard came from, she was told they were cousins of the servant who waited on them in the dining room; and it was true, they all looked alike. They did not stay long, however. Most of the time they were in the desert, with only a shovel to dig the sand and a wad of coca in their mouths to keep them alive. Occasionally they were fortunate enough to unearth the half-buried remains of an Incan village, and in no time at all the house would fill with all the objects they had stolen from the site. The search, transport, and selling of this merchandise was conducted in such a cautious fashion that Blanca had no doubt that there was something highly illegal behind her husband's activities. Jean explained to her that the government was very interested in filthy pots and scrawny necklaces from the desert, and that in order to avoid the endless paperwork required by the official bureaucracy, he preferred to negotiate matters on his own. He shipped his items in boxes sealed with apple labels, thanks to the interested cooperation of certain customs inspectors.

None of this worried Blanca very much. The only thing that truly distressed her were the mummies. She was well acquainted with the dead, having spent much of her life in contact with them by means of her mother's three-legged table. She was used to seeing their transparent silhouettes gliding down the hallways of her parents' house, making noise in the wardrobes and appearing in people's dreams to predict calamities or lottery prizes. But the mummies were another matter. Those shrunken beings wrapped in rags that were decaying into dusty threads, with their wasted, yellow heads, their wrinkled hands, their sewn eyelids, the sparse hairs on their napes, their eternal, terrible, lipless smiles, their rancid odor, and that sad, impoverished aura of ancient corpses, made her sick in her soul. They were very rare. Only once in a great while did the Indians arrive with one in tow. Slow and immutable, they appeared at the door carrying an enormous vessel sealed with clay. Jean would carefully remove the lid in a room with all its doors and windows closed so that the first breath of air did not turn it to dust. Inside its jar, shrunken into a fetal position, wrapped in tatters, and accompanied by its wretched necklaces of teeth and a handful of rag dolls, the mummy looked like the pit of some exotic fruit. They were far more highly prized than any other objects that were brought out of the tombs, because private collectors and a few foreign museums paid very handsomely for them. Blanca wondered what sort of people collected the dead and where they put them. She could not imagine a mummy as part of the decoration in a drawing room, but Jean de Satigny told her that, displayed in a glass urn, they were even more valuable to European millionaires than works of art. It was not easy to get mummies onto the market, let alone through customs, which meant that there were times when they remained in the house for several weeks, awaiting their turn to embark on the long trip abroad. Blanca dreamt about them. She also had hallucinations, imagining that they were walking down the halls on tiptoe—tiny, cunning, furtive gnomes. She would close her bedroom door and put her head under the blankets, and there she would remain for hours at a time, trembling, praying, and calling for her mother with the power of thought. She told Clara about it in her letters, and her mother replied that there was no reason to fear the dead, only the living, because, despite their bad reputation, there was no evidence that mummies had ever attacked anyone; if anything, they were naturally timid. Emboldened by her mother's advice, Blanca decided to spy on them. She waited for them silently, watching through the half-open doorway of her bedroom. It was not long before she was convinced that they were walking up and down in the house, dragging their tiny feet across the carpets, whispering like schoolchildren, pushing and shoving their way in little groups of two and three, always moving toward the darkroom of Jean de Satigny. At times she thought she heard distant otherworldly moans, and she would fall prey to uncontrollable fits of terror, shouting for her husband, but no one came and she was too afraid to walk to the other side of the house to look for him. With the first rays of sunlight, Blanca would regain her good sense and control of her nerves. She realized that her nighttime anxiety was the fruit of the feverish imagination she had inherited from her mother, and this thought would console her until darkness began to fall again and the cycle of dread resumed. One day she simply could not stand the rising tension as night drew near, and she decided to tell Jean about the mummies. They were having dinner. When she told him about their nightly promenades, their whispers, and their suffocated cries, Jean de Satigny was rooted to his chair, his fork frozen in midair and his mouth locked open. The Indian who was just entering the dining room with the serving tray stumbled, and the roast chicken rolled under a chair. Jean employed all his charm, firmness, and reason to convince her that her nerves were playing tricks on her and that none of what she thought was really happening; that it was all the product of her unbridled fantasy. Blanca pretended to accept his explanation, but her husband's vehemence struck her as suspicious, since he normally paid no attention to her problems. So did the servant's face, which with its popped-out eyes had finally lost the impassive gaze of an Incan idol. She decided to embark on an investigation of the nomadic mummies. That night she excused herself early after telling her husband that she was going to take a tranquilizer to be sure of falling asleep. But instead she drank a large cup of black coffee and stationed herself behind her door, prepared to spend many hours waiting.

She heard the first footsteps close to midnight. She opened the door with the utmost caution and stuck her head out just as a tiny crouched figure was moving down the hall. This time she was positive she had not dreamt it, but because of the weight of her unborn child it took her almost a minute to reach the corridor. It was a chilly night and the desert breeze was blowing, making the old wooden ceilings creak and the curtains swell like black sails on the high seas. Ever since she was little, when she listened to Nana's stories of the bogeyman down in the kitchen, she had feared the dark, but now she did not dare turn on the lights or she would frighten the tiny mummies during their erratic strolls.

Suddenly a hoarse, muffled sound broke the thick silence of the night, as if it was coming from the bottom of a coffin, or so Blanca thought. She was beginning to fall victim to a morbid fascination with things from beyond the grave. She stopped in her tracks, her heart in her mouth, but a second moan pulled her to her senses, giving her the strength to continue toward Jean de Satigny's laboratory door. She tried to open it, but it was locked. She pressed her face to the door. It was then that she clearly heard the moans, suffocated cries, and laughter, and no longer doubted that something was going on with the mummies. She returned to her room relieved to know that her nerves were not failing her but that something atrocious was going on in her husband's secret den.

The next day Blanca waited for Jean de Satigny to finish his meticulous toilette, eat his usual parsimonious breakfast, read his newspaper cover to cover, and finally leave on his morning walk, letting nothing in her placid, expectant mother's countenance betray her fierce determination. When Jean went out, she called the high-heeled Indian and for the first time gave him an order.

“Go to the city and buy me some candied papaya,” she told him brusquely.

The Indian set off at the slow trot typical of his race, and she remained in the house with the other servants, whom she feared far less than that strange individual with the courtly inclinations. Since she estimated that she had a couple of hours before he returned, she decided not to be too hasty, and to proceed calmly. She was determined to clear up the mystery of the furtive mummies. Convinced that in daylight the mummies would be in no mood for clowning, she went to the darkroom hoping that the door would be open, but it was locked, as always. She tried all the keys on her ring but none of them worked. Then she took the biggest knife from the kitchen, slipped it into the doorjamb, and forced it until the dried-out wood splintered and came out in fragments. Thus she managed to pry the lock loose from the frame and open the door. The damage to the door was impossible to hide, and she realized that when her husband saw it she would have to give some rational explanation, but she consoled herself with the argument that as mistress of the house she had a right to know what was going on beneath her roof. Despite her common sense, which had withstood more than twenty years' worth of the three-legged table and her mother's prognostications, she was trembling as she crossed the threshold of the darkroom.