The House of the Spirits (35 page)

She groped for the light switch and flicked it on. She found herself in a spacious room with black walls and thick black curtains on the windows, through which not even a feeble ray of sunlight filtered. The floor was covered with dark, thick rugs. Everywhere were the bulbs, lamps, and screens she had first seen Jean use at old Pedro García's funeral, when he had been so enamored of photographing the living and the dead that he made everyone uneasy and the peasants ended up kicking his photographic plates to the ground. She looked around in bewilderment: she was standing in the middle of the strangest scene. She continued forward, sidestepping open trunks that held plumed garments from every period, curled wigs, and ostentatious hats. She stopped before a golden trapeze, suspended from the ceiling, on which hung a disjointed life-size puppet. In a corner she saw a stuffed llama; on the tables were bottles filled with amber-colored liquids, and on the floor the skins of exotic animals. But what most surprised her were the photographs. She stood open-mouthed before them. The walls of Jean de Satigny's studio were covered with distressing erotic scenes that revealed her husband's hidden character.

Blanca was slow to react, and it was a while before she realized what she saw, because she had no experience in such matters. Pleasure, to her, was the final, precious stage of the long road she had traveled with Pedro Tercero, on which she had moved unhurried and in good spirits, framed by the forests, the wheatfields, the river, and the immense sky, in the silence of the countryside. She had never felt the uncertainties of adolescence. While her classmates secretly read forbidden romances about passionate suitors and virgins aching to be so no longer, she sat in the shade of the plum trees in the convent courtyard, closed her eyes, and summoned with complete precision the magnificent vision of Pedro Tercero García holding her in his arms, stroking and kissing her, and eliciting from her the same profound harmony he drew from his guitar. Her instincts were satisfied as soon as they were awakened, and she had never imagined that passion could take other forms. These chaotic, tormented scenes were a thousand times more disconcerting than the scandalous mummies she had expected to find.

She recognized the faces of the household servants. There was the entire Incan court, as naked as God had put them on this earth, or barely clad in theatrical costumes. She saw the fathomless abyss between the thighs of the cook, the stuffed llama riding atop the lame servant girl, and the silent servant who waited on her at table, naked as a newborn babe, hairless and short-legged, with his expressionless stone face and his disproportionate, erect penis.

For an interminable second, Blanca was suspended in her own uncertainty; then she was overcome with horror. She managed to think clearly. She understood what Jean de Satigny had meant on their wedding night when he explained that he did not feel inclined to married life. She also glimpsed the sinister power of the Indian and the subtle mockery of the servants, and felt herself a prisoner in the anteroom of hell. Just then the child moved inside her and she jumped as if an alarm had just been sounded.

“My daughter! I have to get out of here!” she cried, hugging her womb. She ran out of the darkroom, crossed the entire house in a flash, and reached the street, where the leaden heat and the ruthless midday sun brought her back to reality. She understood that she would not get very far on foot with her nine-month belly. She returned to her bedroom, took all the money she could find, prepared a bundle containing some of the clothing from the splendid wardrobe she had knit, and left for the station.

Seated on the hard wooden bench near the tracks, with her bundle in her lap and her eyes full of fright, Blanca waited hours for the train, praying that the count, on returning home and discovering the damage to his laboratory door, would not come looking for her and force her to return to the evil kingdom of the Incas. She prayed for the train to be on time for once in its life so that she might arrive at her parents' before the creature that was crushing her insides and kicking at her ribs announced its arrival in the world. She prayed for the strength to endure this two-day journey. And she prayed that her desire to live would be stronger than this terrible sense of desolation that was beginning to paralyze her. She gritted her teeth and waited.

— NINE —

LITTLE ALBA

A
lba was born feet first, which is a sign of good luck. Her Grandmother Clara searched her back and found the tiny star-shaped mark that distinguishes those born to true happiness. “There's no need to worry about this little girl. She will be lucky and she will be happy. She will also have a good complexion, because that is inherited, and at my age I have no wrinkles and I've never had a pimple,” Clara declared two days after the birth. This is why they made no effort to prepare the child for life, since the stars had already conspired to endow her with so many gifts. Her sign was Leo. Her grandmother studied her astrological chart and recorded her destiny in white ink in an album with pages of black paper, in which she also pasted the child's first greenish locks of hair, the fingernails she clipped soon after her birth, and various portraits that allow one to see her as she was then: an extraordinarily tiny creature, almost bald, creased and pale, with no other sign of human intelligence than her sparkling black eyes, which bore an expression of ancient wisdom even when she was in the cradle. They were identical to those of her real father. Her mother wanted to call her Clara, but her grandmother did not believe in repeating names, because it created confusion in her notebooks that bore witness to life. They searched for a name in a thesaurus, where they found hers, the last in a chain of luminous words. Years later, Alba tormented herself with the thought that when she had a daughter there would be no other word with the same meaning to use as a name, but Blanca gave her the idea of using foreign languages, which offer a wide choice.

Alba was almost born in a narrow-gauged train, at three o'clock in the afternoon in the middle of the desert. That would have been fatal to her astrological chart. Fortunately, she managed to restrain herself within her mother for a few more hours and to enter the world in her grandparents' house, on the day, the hour, and in the place most propitious for her horoscope. Her mother arrived at the big house on the corner without advance notice. She was completely disheveled, covered with dust, bleary-eyed, and doubled over from the pain of the contractions with which Alba was pushing her way out. She knocked at the door in desperation, and when it opened, she rushed through, all the way to the sewing room, where Clara was putting the finishing touches on the last exquisite dress for her future granddaughter. There Blanca collapsed after her long journey, without explaining a thing, for her belly erupted in a long, liquid sigh and she felt as if all the water in the world were running out between her legs in a violent flush. At the sound of Clara's screams the servants came running, and so did Jaime, who was always in the house during that time, keeping watch on Amanda. They moved Blanca into Clara's room, and while they were laying her on the bed and pulling off her clothes, the minuscule human form of Alba began to appear. Her Uncle Jaime, who had assisted at several births at the clinic, helped her into the world, grasping her firmly by the buttocks with his right had while the fingers of his left groped in the darkness for the child's neck to remove the umbilical cord, which was strangling her. Meanwhile, drawn by the noise, Amanda ran in and pressed with all her weight on Blanca's belly while Clara, leaning over her daughter's suffering face, held a tea strainer covered with an ether-soaked rag to her nose. Alba was born quickly. Jaime removed the cord from around her neck, held her upside down and dangled her in the air, and with two resounding slaps introduced her into the suffering of life and the mechanics of breathing. But Amanda, who had read about the customs of African tribes and preached a return to nature, seized the newborn from his hands and gently placed her on the warm belly of her mother, where she found some consolation for the sadness of being born. Naked and embracing, mother and daughter lay resting while the others cleaned up the afterbirth and bustled about with the new sheets and the first batch of diapers. In the excitement of these first moments no one noticed the half-open door of the wardrobe, where little Miguel had observed the entire scene, paralyzed with fear, engraving in his mind forever the vision of a huge balloon of veins crowned with an enormous navel, from which that bruised creature emerged, wrapped in a hideous blue membrane.

Alba's name was entered in the Civil Registry and in the books of the parish with her father's French surname, but she never used it because her mother's was much easier to spell. Her grandfather, Esteban Trueba, did not approve of this bad habit. As he said every time he was given the opportunity, he had gone to a lot of trouble to be sure the child would have a known father and respectable name and would not have to use her mother's as if she were a child of shame and sin. Nor did he allow anyone to doubt the legitimate paternity of the count. Against all logic, he continued to hope that sooner or later the quiet, awkward little girl who glided through his house would display the Frenchman's elegant manners and refined charms. Clara made no mention of the matter either until much later, when she saw the little girl playing among the ruined statues in the garden and realized that she did not resemble anyone in the family, much less Jean de Satigny.

“I wonder where she got those old man's eyes?” she asked.

“They're her father's eyes,” Blanca replied absentmindedly.

“Pedro Tercero García, I suppose.”

“Uh-huh.”

It was the only time anyone ever mentioned Alba's origin within the family, because, as Clara noted, the issue was irrelevant since Jean de Satigny had disappeared from their life. They never heard a word about him, and no one bothered to investigate his whereabouts, not even to legalize Blanca's status, for she lacked the freedom of an unmarried woman and had all the limitations of a married one even though she had no husband. Alba never saw a picture of the count, for her mother did not leave a corner of the house untouched until she had destroyed them all, even those that showed them arm in arm on their wedding day. She had decided to forget the man she had married and act as if he had never existed. She never spoke of him again, nor did she offer any explanation for her flight from the conjugal abode. Clara, who had spent nine years without speaking, knew the advantages of silence and asked her daughter nothing, joining in her efforts to erase all memory of Jean de Satigny. Alba was told that her father was a distinguished and intelligent aristocrat who had unfortunately succumbed to fever in the northern desert. This was one of the few lies she had to put up with as a child; in everything else she was in direct contact with the prosaic truths of life. Her Uncle Jaime had taken it upon himself to destroy the myths that children come from under cabbage plants or are brought by stork from Paris, and her Uncle Nicolás had demolished those of the Three Kings, good fairies, and bogeymen. Alba had nightmares in which she saw her father's death. She dreamt of a young, handsome man dressed all in white, with patent-leather shoes and a straw hat, walking across the desert bathed in sunlight. In her dream the walker slackened his pace, hesitated, went slower and slower, stumbled and fell, picked himself up and stumbled again, burning with the heat, fever, and thirst. He pulled himself along the hot sand on his knees for a time, but in the end he lay stretched out in the vastness of those pale dunes as birds of prey circled over his inert body. She dreamt about him so many times that years later it came as a surprise when she was called to the central morgue to identify the body of the man she thought must be her father. By that time Alba was a bold young woman, much accustomed to adversity, so she went alone. She was met by a white-aproned technician, who led her down the long corridors of the ancient building to a large, cold room whose walls were painted gray. The man in the white apron opened the door of an immense refrigerator and withdrew a tray on which lay an old, swollen, bluish corpse. Alba examined it carefully, finding no resemblance to the image of her dreams. The man appeared to be an ordinary citizen, perhaps a post-office employee. She stared at his hands: they were not those of a refined, intelligent aristocrat, but of a man who has nothing interesting to say. But his identification papers gave irrefutable proof that the sad, blue corpse was Jean de Satigny, who had not died of fever in the golden dunes of a child's nightmare, but of a simple stroke as he crossed the street in his old age. But this all happened much later. When Clara was alive and Alba was still a child, the big house on the corner was a cloistered world in which she grew up protected even from her own nightmares.

Alba was not yet two weeks old when Amanda left the big house on the corner. Amanda had recovered her strength and had no trouble reading the desire in Jaime's heart. She took her little brother by the hand and left exactly as she had arrived, without making noise or promises. The family lost sight of her and the only one who could have gone to look for her chose not to because he did not wish to hurt his brother. After she left, Jaime drowned his sorrows in study and work. He resumed his old habits, living like a hermit and rarely appearing at the house. He never mentioned the young woman's name and had nothing more to do with his brother.

The presence of his granddaughter sweetened Esteban Trueba's character. The change was imperceptible, but Clara noticed it. Slight symptoms gave him away: the sparkle in his eyes when he saw the little girl, the expensive presents he bought her, the anguish he felt if he heard her cry. Still, it was not enough to bring him closer to Blanca. His relationship with his daughter had never been good, and after her unfortunate marriage it had deteriorated to the point where only the obligatory politeness Clara imposed allowed them to live under the same roof.

In those days almost all the rooms in the Trueba house were filled. The table was always set for the family, the guests, and one extra place for anyone who might arrive unannounced. The main door was left permanently open to allow guests and visitors to come and go. While Senator Trueba attempted to alter his country's destiny, his wife sailed masterfully through the agitated seas of social life and the other, more surprising ones of her spiritual voyage. Age and experience had sharpened Clara's ability to divine the occult and to move objects from afar. An exalted state of mind could easily put her into a trance in which she would move around the room while sitting in a chair, as if there were a hidden motor underneath the cushions. It was also during that time that a starving young artist, who had been given lodging in the house out of pity, paid for his stay by painting the only extant portrait of Clara. Much later, the impoverished artist was recognized as a master and today the painting hangs in a London museum, like so many works of art that left the country when people had to sell their furnishings to feed the victims of persecution. The canvas shows a middle-aged woman dressed in white, with silvery hair and the sweet gaze of a trapeze artist, resting in a rocking chair that hangs suspended just above the floor, floating amidst flowered curtains, a vase flying upside down, and a fat black cat that observes the scene like an important gentleman. Influence of Chagall, according to the catalogue, but that is not true. The picture captures precisely the reality the painter witnessed in Clara's house. That was the period when divine good humor and the hidden forces of human nature acted with impunity to provoke a state of emergency and upheaval in the laws of physics and logic. Clara's communication with wandering souls and extraterrestrials was conducted through telepathy, dreams, and the pendulum she used for that purpose, dangling it in the air above an alphabet she had arranged in proper order on the table. The pendulum's autonomous movement pointed to the letters, forming messages in Spanish and Esperanto, which proved that these, and not English, were the only languages of interest to beings from other dimensions, as Clara wrote in letters to the ambassadors of the English-speaking powers. They never answered her, and neither did the various ministers of education whom she wrote in order to explain her theory that instead of teaching English and French, which were languages for sailors, peddlers, and money lenders, the schools should insist that all the children in the country study Esperanto.

*  *  *

Alba's childhood was a mixture of vegetarian diets, Japanese martial arts, Tibetan dance, yogic breathing, relaxation and concentration with Professor Hausser, and many other interesting techniques, not to mention the contribution to her education made by her two uncles and the three enchanting Mora sisters. Her Grandmother Clara managed to keep that immense covered wagon of a house rolling with its population of eccentrics, even though she had no domestic talent and disdained the basic operations of arithmetic to the point of forgetting how to add. The daily organization of the household and the keeping of accounts therefore fell to Blanca, who divided her time between the job of chief steward of that miniature kingdom and her work at her ceramic studio in the back of the courtyard, the ultimate refuge for her sorrows, where she gave classes for both mongoloids and young ladies and created incredible crèches full of monsters, which, against all logic, sold like hotcakes.

From a tender age it had been Alba's responsibility to put fresh flowers in the vases. She would open the windows to let in streams of air and light, but the flowers never lasted until nightfall because Esteban Trueba's thundering voice and slashing cane were even powerful enough to frighten nature. At the sound of his footsteps, household pets scattered and plants withered. Blanca was raising a Brazilian rubber tree, a shy, squalid little bush whose one attraction was its price: it was sold by the leaf. Whenever Trueba was heard arriving, whoever was closest ran to hide the rubber tree out on the terrace, because as soon as the old man entered the room, the plant lowered its leaves and began to exude a whitish fluid, like tears of milk, from its stem. Alba did not go to school; her grandmother held that anyone as favored by the stars as she was needed only to know how to read and write, and she could learn that at home. Clara was in such a hurry to make her literate that at the age of five the little girl was already reading the newspaper over breakfast and discussing the news with her grandfather. At six she had discovered the magic books in the enchanted trunks of her legendary Great-Uncle Marcos and had fully entered the world-without-return of the imagination. Nor did anyone worry about her health; they did not believe in the benefits of vitamins and thought that vaccinations were for chickens; besides, her grandmother studied the lines of her hand and said that she was made of iron and was assured of a long life. The only frivolous attention they lavished on her was to comb her hair with bay rum to mitigate the dark-green hue it had when she was born; this despite the fact that Senator Trueba thought it should be left that way, since she was the only one who had inherited something from Rosa the Beautiful, even if, unfortunately, it was only the maritime color of her hair. To please him, Alba gave up the bay rum as an adolescent and rinsed her hair with parsley water, which allowed the green to reappear in its full leafiness. The rest of her was tiny and innocuous as opposed to the other women in her family, who were, almost without exception, splendid.