The House of the Spirits (37 page)

This was the period when Blanca's beauty was at its peak. She had a Moorish, languid, and abundant air about her, which induced repose and trust. She was tall and well endowed, of a rather helpless and tearful temperament that roused men's ancestral instinct for protection. Her father had no sympathy for her. He never forgave her love for Pedro Tercero García and made sure she did not forget that she was living off his pity. Trueba could not understand how his daughter had so many admirers, for she had none of the disarming gaiety and joviality he liked in women; besides, he felt that no normal man could want to marry a woman of ill health and uncertain civil status who already had a daughter. But Blanca did not seem the least surprised that men were interested in her. She was conscious of her beauty. Nevertheless, when she was with the gentlemen who called on her, she assumed a contradictory attitude, encouraging them with a batting of her Arabian eyes, but keeping them at a prudent distance. As soon as she saw that their intentions were serious, she broke off the relationship with a ferocious refusal. Some of them, those in a better economic position, attempted to win her heart by bribing her daughter. They showered Alba with expensive gifts and dolls with special mechanisms that enabled them to walk, cry, eat, and carry out other typically human feats, stuffed her with cream puffs and took her to the zoo, where the child wept with pity for the poor captive animals, especially the seal, who stirred dreadful omens in her soul. These visits to the zoo holding on to the hand of some conceited spendthrift suitor gave her a lifelong horror of enclosures, walls, cages, and isolation. Of all the contenders, the one who made the greatest progress toward winning Blanca's hand was the King of the Pressure Cookers. Despite his immense fortune and his peaceful, introspective character, Esteban Trueba detested him because he was circumcised and had a Sephardic nose and kinky hair. With his mocking, hostile attitude, Trueba managed to frighten off this man who had survived a concentration camp, overcome poverty and exile, and triumphed in the ruthless world of commerce. While their romance lasted, the King of the Pressure Cookers would come to call for Blanca and take her out to eat in the most exclusive restaurants; he drove a tiny car with only two seats, tractor tires, and the noise of a turbine under the hood, a unique model in its class, which provoked a rush of curiosity among the neighbors and derogatory remarks from the Trueba family. Ignoring her father's displeasure and the neighbors' nosy interest, Blanca would climb up into the vehicle with the majesty of a prime minister, dressed in her one and only black tailored suit and the white silk blouse she wore on all special occasions. Alba would kiss her goodbye and stand in the doorway, her mother's subtle jasmine perfume clinging to her nostrils and a knot of anxiety lying in her heart. Only her Uncle Nicolás's training helped her withstand her mother's outings without tears, because she feared that any day one of the suitors would convince her mother to marry him and Blanca would leave her all alone without a mother. She had decided a long time ago that she did not need a father, much less a stepfather, but that if she lost her mother she would plunge her head into a pail of water until she drowned, just as the cook did with the little kittens the cat gave birth to every four months or so.

Alba got over her fear that her mother would abandon her when she finally met Pedro Tercero. Her intuition told her that as long as that man existed, no one could win Blanca's love. It was a summer Sunday. Blanca set Alba's hair in corkscrew curls with a hot iron that singed her ears. She dressed her in white gloves and black patent-leather shoes and a straw hat with artificial cherries. Her Grandmother Clara laughed aloud when she caught sight of her, but her mother consoled her with two drops of her perfume on her neck.

“You're going to meet someone famous,” Blanca said mysteriously as they left the house.

She took the child to the Japanese Gardens, where she bought her caramel on a stick and a bag of popcorn. They sat down on a bench in the shade, holding hands, surrounded by pigeons that were pecking at the corn.

She saw him approaching before her mother pointed him out to her. He was wearing a mechanic's overalls and Franciscan sandals without socks, and he had a huge black beard that reached halfway down his chest. His hair was messy, but he had a magnificent smile, which immediately ranked him in the category of human beings who deserved to be painted into the gigantic fresco in her bedroom.

The man and the little girl looked at each other, recognizing themselves in the other's eyes.

“This is Pedro Tercero, the singer. You've heard him on the radio,” her mother said.

Alba held out her hand and he squeezed it with his left one. Then she noticed that he was missing several fingers on his right hand, but he explained that he could play the guitar anyway, because there is always a way to do what you want to do. The three of them strolled together through the Japanese Gardens. In midafternoon they took one of the last electric streetcars that still existed in the city and went to have fried fish at a stall in the market. At dusk he escorted them as far as their street. When they said goodbye, Blanca and Pedro Tercero kissed each other on the mouth. It was the first time Alba had seen that in her life, because no one around her was in love.

From that day on, Blanca began going out alone every weekend. She said she was going to visit some distant cousins. Esteban Trueba got furious with her and threatened to expel her from his house, but Blanca was unyielding. She left her daughter with Clara and took the bus, carrying a clown's valise covered with flowers.

“I promise you I'm not getting married and that I'll be back tomorrow night,” she would say to Alba when she said goodbye.

Alba liked to sit with the cook at siesta time, listening to popular singing on the radio, especially the songs of the man she had met in the Japanese Gardens. One day Senator Trueba entered the pantry and when he heard the voice on the radio he attacked the machine, smashing it with his cane until it was a pile of twisted wires and loose knobs, before the frightened eyes of his granddaughter, who could not understand her grandfather's sudden fit. The next day, Clara bought another radio so Alba could listen to Pedro Tercero whenever she felt like it, and old Trueba pretended not to notice.

That was still the era of the King of the Pressure Cookers. Pedro Tercero found out about his existence and had an attack of jealousy that was unwarranted if one compares the influence he had on Blanca with the timid siege of the Jewish merchant. As he had so many other times, he begged Blanca to leave the Trueba house, her father's ferocious guardianship, and the loneliness of her workshop filled with Mongoloids and leisured ladies, and to go with him once and for all to live out the wild love they had been hiding ever since their childhood. But Blanca could not make up her mind. She knew that if she went with Pedro Tercero she would be banished from her social circle and from the position she had always had, and she also realized that she would never be accepted by Pedro Tercero's friends or be able to adjust to the modest life of a working-class quarter. Years later, when Alba was old enough to analyze this aspect of her mother's life, she concluded that she had not gone with Pedro Tercero simply because she did not love him enough, for there was nothing in the Trueba house that he could not have given her. Blanca was a very poor woman. She had money only when Clara gave her some or when she sold one of her crèches. She earned a wretched income, almost every cent of which she spent on doctors because work and necessity had not diminished her capacity for suffering imaginary illnesses; on the contrary, it seemed to be expanding year by year. She managed not to ask her father for anything, so as not to give him the least opportunity to humiliate her. From time to time, Clara and Jaime bought her clothes or gave her something for her basic needs, but usually she could not afford to buy a pair of stockings. Her poverty contrasted with the embroidered dresses and custom-made shoes in which Senator Trueba dressed his granddaughter Alba. Her life was hard. She rose at six every morning, winter and summer. Then, dressed in a rubber apron and wooden clogs, she lit her kiln, prepared her worktables, and pounded the clay for her classes, her arms up to her elbows in the coarse, cold mud. This was why she always had broken nails and cracked skin and why, with time, her fingers grew deformed. At that time of the day she felt inspired, and since there was no one to interrupt her, she could start her day by making extraordinary animals for her crèches. Afterward she had to see to the house, the servants, and the shopping until her classes began. Her pupils were daughters of the best families who had nothing to do and had taken up the fashion of ceramics, which was more elegant than knitting for the poor, as their grandmothers had done.

The idea of giving classes for mongoloids had come about by chance. One day an old friend of Clara's came to Senator Trueba's house with her grandson, a fat, soft teenager with the round face of a docile moon and an expression of unchanging tenderness in his tiny Oriental eyes. He was fifteen, but Alba realized he was like a baby. Clara asked her granddaughter to take the boy out to play in the garden and make sure he did not soil his clothes, drown in the fountain, eat dirt, or play with his fly. Alba quickly tired of watching him, and when she saw it was impossible to communicate with him in any coherent language, she took him to the ceramic studio, where Blanca, to keep him amused, tied an apron around him to protect him from stains and water and placed a ball of clay in his hands. The boy played with it for more than three hours, shaping a number of crude figures that he took to show his grandmother. This lady, who had practically forgotten he was with her, was utterly delighted; thus the idea was born that ceramics was good for mongoloids. Blanca ended up giving classes to a group of children who came to her studio every Thursday afternoon. They were delivered by truck and escorted by two nuns in starched white coifs, who sat in the garden drinking chocolate with Clara and discussing the virtues of cross-stitching and the hierarchy of sin, while Blanca and her daughter taught the children how to fashion worms, balls, squashed dogs, and misshapen vases. At the end of the year the nuns organized an exhibition and a party, and the dreadful works of art were sold for charity. Blanca and Alba had quickly understood that the children worked much better when they felt loved, and that the only way to communicate with them was through affection. They learned to hug them, kiss them, and fondle them until they wound up genuinely loving them. Alba waited all week for the truck with the retarded children to come, and she jumped with glee when they ran to hug her. But those Thursdays wore them out. Alba fell asleep exhausted, the sweet Asiatic faces of the children spinning in her mind, and Blanca invariably had a migraine. After the nuns left, their herd of mongoloids in hand and their white wings aflutter, Blanca hugged her daughter passionately, covered her face with kisses, and told her they should thank God that she was normal. For this reason, Alba grew up thinking that normality was a gift from heaven. She discussed it with her grandmother.

“In almost every family there's a fool or a crazy person,” Clara assured her while she concentrated on her knitting—in all those years she had not learned to knit without looking. “You can't always see them, because they're kept out of sight as if they were something to be ashamed of. They're locked up in the back room so visitors won't see them. But actually there's nothing to be ashamed of. They're God's creatures too.”

“But there's no one like that in our family, Grandmother,” Alba replied.

“No. Here the madness was divided up equally, and there was nothing left over for us to have our own lunatic.”

This was how her conversations with Clara went, and why, for Alba, the most important person in the house and the strongest presence in her life was her grandmother. She was the motor that drove the magic universe that was the rear section of the big house on the corner, where Alba spent her first seven years in complete freedom. She grew accustomed to her grandmother's eccentricities. She was not surprised, for example, to see her moving around the room in a trance, seated in an armchair with her legs tucked under her, pulled by an invisible force. She followed her on her pilgrimages to hospitals and almshouses, where Clara tried to track down her needy flock; she even learned, using four-ply wool and enormous needles, to knit the sweaters her Uncle Jaime gave away after he had worn them once, just so she could see her grandmother's toothless smile while she squinted at the stitches. Clara frequently used her to send messages to Esteban, which earned her the nickname “carrier pigeon.” The little girl also took part in the Friday sessions, during which the three-legged table jumped in broad daylight without the aid of any special tricks, known form of energy, or outside leverage, as well as the literary soirées where she mingled with the acclaimed masters and a varying group of timid unknown artists whom Clara encouraged. In those days a large number of guests ate and drank in the big house on the corner. Almost all the most important people in the country took turns living there, or at least attending the spiritualist meetings, the cultural discussions, and the social gatherings. Among them was the Poet—years later considered the greatest of the century and translated into all the known languages on earth—on whose knees Alba often sat, little suspecting that one day she would walk behind his casket, with a bunch of bloody carnations in her hand, between two rows of machine guns.

Clara was still young, but to her granddaughter she looked very old because of her missing teeth. She had no wrinkles, and when her mouth was closed she gave the impression of extreme youth because of the innocent look on her face. She wore tunics of raw linen that looked like the robes crazy people wear, and in the winter she wore long woolen socks and fingerless gloves. She laughed at things that were not the least bit funny; on the other hand, she was incapable of understanding any joke, always laughing at the wrong time, and she could become very sad if she saw someone else behaving in a ridiculous fashion. Sometimes she had asthma attacks and would summon her granddaughter with a tiny silver bell she always carried on her person. Alba would come running to embrace her with consoling whispers, since they both knew from long experience that the only cure for asthma is the prolonged embrace of a loved one. She had laughing hazel eyes, shiny hair flecked with white and pulled into an untidy bun from which rebellious wisps escaped, and fine white hands with almond-shaped nails and long ringless fingers, which were useless except when it came to gestures of affection, arranging her divining cards, or putting in her denture before meals. Alba spent the day trailing after her, snuggling into her skirts and begging her to tell one of her stories or move the vases with the power of her mind. She found in her grandmother a sure refuge when she was haunted by nightmares or when her Uncle Nicolás's training became unbearable. Clara taught her how to take care of birds and speak to each of them in its own language, as well as how to read the premonitions in nature and knit chain-stitch scarves for the poor.