The House of the Spirits (39 page)

When he heard about this, Jaime went to see her. He insisted on examining her. He found nothing abnormal in her appearance, but he knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that she was going to die. He left her room with a broad, hypocritical smile, and once he was out of his mother's field of vision he had to lean against a wall, because his legs were giving out. He told no one in the house. He called a specialist from the school of medicine, who appeared that very day in the Trueba home. After seeing Clara, he confirmed Jaime's diagnosis. They assembled the whole family in the drawing room and without much ado announced that she would not live more than two or three weeks and that the only thing to be done was to sit with her, so that she would die happy.

“I think she's decided to die, and science has no cure for that,” said Jaime.

Esteban Trueba grabbed his son by the collar and was on the verge of choking him. He pushed the specialist out the door and smashed all the lamps and china in the room. Finally he fell to his knees, moaning like a newborn baby. Just at that moment, Alba entered the room and saw her grandfather reduced to her own height. She went up to him and stared him in the eyes, and when she saw his tears she threw her arms around him. It was the old man's weeping that told her what the matter was. She was the only one in the family who did not lose her serenity, thanks to her training in surmounting pain and the fact that her grandmother had often explained to her the circumstances and rituals of death.

“Just as when we come into the world, when we die we are afraid of the unknown. But the fear is something from within us that has nothing to do with reality. Dying is like being born: just a change,” Clara had said.

She added that if she could easily communicate with those from the Hereafter, she was absolutely convinced that afterward she would be able to do the same with those of the Here-and-Now. Thus, instead of whimpering when the time came, she hoped Alba would be calm, because in her case death would not be a separation, but a way of being more united. Alba understood perfectly.

Soon afterward Clara seemed to enter a gentle sleep. Only the visible effort to take air into her lungs showed that she was alive. Still, asphyxiation did not seem to cause her undue anxiety now that she was not fighting for her life. Her granddaughter remained at her side the entire time. They had to improvise a bed for Alba on the floor because she refused to leave the room, and when they tried to take her out she had her first tantrum. She insisted that her grandmother was aware of everything and that she needed her. And this was true. Shortly before the end, Clara regained consciousness and was able to speak calmly. The first thing she noticed was Alba's hand in hers.

“I'm going to die, aren't I, darling?” she asked.

“Yes, Grandmother, but it doesn't matter, because I'm here with you,” the child replied.

“That's good. Take out the box of cards that's under the bed and hand them out, because I won't have time to say goodbye to everyone.”

Clara closed her eyes, breathed a contented sigh, and left for the other world without looking back. Gathered around her were all her family: Jaime and Blanca emaciated from the sleepless nights, Nicolás murmuring Sanskrit prayers, Esteban with his mouth and fists clenched tightly, infinitely furious and desolate, and little Alba, the only one who remained serene. There were also the servants, the Mora sisters, a couple of wretchedly poor artists who had survived in the house over the past few months, and a priest who had arrived at the summons of the cook, but he had nothing to do because Trueba forbade him to disturb the dying woman with last-minute confessions or sprinklings of holy water.

Jaime leaned over the body looking for some imperceptible heartbeat, but there was none.

“Mama's gone,” he said, sobbing.

— TEN —

THE EPOCH OF DECLINE

I
can't talk about it. But I'll try to write it. It's been twenty years and for a long time my grief was unabating. I thought I would never get over it but now that I'm almost ninety I understand what she meant when she promised us she'd always keep in touch. Before, I used to walk around as if I were lost, looking for her everywhere. Every night when I got into bed, I used to imagine she was lying there beside me, the way she did when she had all her teeth and still loved me. I would turn out the light and close my eyes, and in the silence of my bedroom I tried to summon up her image. I called her when I was awake, and they say I did so in my sleep as well.

The night she died I locked myself in the room with her. After all those years without speaking, we spent her final hours lying side by side in the sailboat of the gentle blue silk sea, as she liked to call her bed, and I took the opportunity to tell her everything I couldn't say before, everything I'd been holding in since that terrible night when I beat her. I took off her nightgown and examined her meticulously for any trace of illness that might have justified her death; when I found none, I realized that she had simply fulfilled her mission in this life and that she had escaped to another dimension where her spirit, finally free of its material burden, would be more at home. There was no deformity or anything terrible about her death. I examined her at length, because it had been years since I'd had a chance to look at her the way I wanted to, and in that time my wife had changed, as we all do with the passage of time. She looked as beautiful as ever. She had lost weight and at first I thought she might have grown, because she looked taller, but then I realized it was just an optical illusion, the effect of my own shrinking. Before, I had always felt like a giant next to her, but when I lay down next to her on the bed I saw that we were almost the same size. Her mane of rebellious curls, which had charmed me so when we were married, was muted by a few white strands that lit her sleeping face. She was very pale, with shadows around her eyes. I noticed for the first time tiny, delicate wrinkles at the corners of her lips and on her forehead. She looked like a child. She was cold, but she was the same sweet woman as ever: I spoke to her gently, caressed her, and slept awhile when weariness overcame my grief. The irremediable fact of her death did nothing to alter our reunion. We were finally reconciled.

At daybreak I began to fix her up so she would look good when the others came in. I dressed her in the white tunic she kept in her wardrobe. I was surprised to see how little clothing she had; I'd always thought of her as an elegant woman. I found some woolen socks and put them on her so her feet wouldn't be cold, because she was always easily chilled. Then I brushed her hair, intending to put it up in the bun she always wore, but when I pulled the bristles through her hair the curls floated up around her face and I decided she looked prettier that way. I looked for her jewels but couldn't find them anywhere, so I took off the gold ring I had worn since the day we were engaged and slipped it on her finger to replace the one she removed when she cut me out of her life. I arranged the pillows, straightened the bed, put a few drops of cologne on her neck, and opened the window to let the morning in. When everything was ready, I opened the door and let my children and granddaughter say goodbye to her. They saw Clara smiling, clean, and beautiful, just as she always had been. I had shrunk four inches; my shoes were swimming on me, and my hair had gone completely white, but I wasn't crying anymore.

“You can bury her now,” I said. “And while you're at it,” I added, “you might as well bury my mother-in-law's head. It's been gathering dust down in the basement since God knows when.” I left the room, dragging my feet to keep my shoes from falling off.

This was how my granddaughter learned that the contents of the pigskin hatbox she used for celebrating black masses and decorating her playhouse in the basement was the head of her Great-Grandmother Nívea, which had remained unburied for years—first to avoid scandal, and later because in the turmoil of this house we simply forgot about it. We buried it in the strictest privacy, so as not to set people talking. After the employees of the funeral home had finished placing Clara in her coffin and turning the drawing room into a proper funeral chapel by hanging it with black and setting up white candles and an improvised altar on the grand piano, Jaime and Nicolás laid their grandmother's head—by then nothing more than a yellow toy with an expression of sheer terror—in the coffin beside her favorite daughter.

Clara's funeral was an event. Even I could not explain where all those people appeared from to mourn my wife. I hadn't realized she knew everyone. Interminable lines of people streamed by to shake my hand, cars blocked all the cemetery gates, and a hodgepodge of delegations—poor people, students, labor unionists, nuns, mongoloid children, bohemians, and spiritualists—came to pay her their respects. Almost all the tenants from Tres Marías made the trip by bus or train, some for the first time in their lives, to say goodbye to her. In the crowd I caught a glimpse of Pedro Segundo García, whom I hadn't seen in many years. I went to greet him, but he ignored my wave. His head bowed, he walked up to Clara's grave and threw a spray of half-withered wild flowers on it that looked as if they had been stolen from some garden. He was weeping.

Alba went to the funeral. Holding on to my hand, she watched the coffin being lowered into the earth in the provisional spot we had obtained. She listened to speeches extolling virtues her grandmother never had, and when she returned to the house she ran to lock herself in the basement, where she waited for Clara's spirit to communicate with her, just as Clara had promised. I found her there, smiling in her sleep, stretched out on the moth-eaten remnants of old Barrabás.

That night I couldn't sleep. The two loves of my life, Rosa of the green hair and Clara the clairvoyant, the two sisters I adored, merged into one. At dawn I decided that if I hadn't been able to have them while I was alive, at least they would accompany me in death. I took a few sheets of paper from my desk and sat down to design the most fitting, most luxurious mausoleum in the world. It would be of salmon-colored Italian marble, with statues made of the same material showing Rosa and Clara with angel wings, because they were, and always would be, angels. One day I will lie between them there.

I wanted to die as soon as possible, because life without my wife had lost all meaning for me. I didn't know that I still had a lot to do in this world. Fortunately, Clara has returned, or perhaps she never left. I sometimes think that old age has affected my mind and that you can't just ignore the fact that I buried her twenty years ago. I suspect I'm seeing things, like a crazy old man. But those doubts melt away when I see her pass me in the halls or hear her laughing on the terrace. I know she's with me. I know she's forgiven my violent behavior and that she's closer to me now than she ever was before. She's still alive, and she's with me: Clara, the clearest.

*  *  *

Clara's death completely transformed life in the big house on the corner. Gone with her were the spirits and the guests, as well as that luminous gaiety that had always been present because she did not believe that the world was a vale of tears but rather a joke that God had played and that it was idiotic to take it seriously if He himself never had. Alba noticed the decline from the very first days. She saw it advancing slowly but inexorably. She noticed it before anybody else in the flowers wilting in their vases, saturating the air with a sickening odor that lingered while they dried up, lost their leaves, and fell apart, leaving only the musty stalks, which no one bothered to clean up until much later. Alba stopped cutting flowers to decorate the house. Then the plants died, because no one remembered to water them or talk to them as Clara had done. The cats crept away, disappearing just as they had arrived or been born in the cracks and crevices of the roof. Esteban Trueba dressed all in black and in a single night passed from his healthy middle years to a shrunken, stuttering old age, which, however, did nothing to curb his anger. He wore strict mourning attire for the rest of his life, even long after it had gone out of fashion and no one used it except the poor, who wore a black band around their sleeves. Under his shirt and close to his chest he wore a tiny suède bag that hung from a fine gold chain; in it were his wife's false teeth, which he treated as a token of good luck and expiation. Everybody in the family sensed that without Clara all reason for staying together had been lost: they had almost nothing to say to each other. Trueba realized that the only thing keeping him at home was the presence of his granddaughter.

Over the course of the next few years the house changed into a ruin. No one tended the garden, either to water it or to weed it, until it was swallowed up by oblivion, birds, and wild grasses. The blind statues and the singing fountains filled with dry leaves, bird droppings, and moss. The broken, dirty arbors served as a refuge for wild animals and a garbage dump for the neighbors. The whole garden became a thick underbrush, like an abandoned town, through which one could scarcely walk without slashing a path with a machete. The topiaries that had once been pruned with aspirations toward the baroque finished in a hopeless, tortured state, besieged by snails and disease. Inside the house, the curtains slowly came unmoored from their rings and hung like the petticoats of an old woman, dusty and faded. Pieces of furniture, trampled on by Alba, who used them to build her houses and trenches, turned into corpses with exposed springs, and the huge tapestry in the drawing room lost the dauntless beauty of its bucolic Versailles setting to become the dart board of Nicolás and his niece. The kitchen was covered with soot and grease and full of empty cans and piles of newspaper; no longer did it produce platters of roast pork and aromatic dishes as it had before. The inhabitants of the house resigned themselves to eating chickpeas and rice pudding almost every day, for no one had the courage to face the procession of wart-faced, ill-tempered, and despotic cooks who succeeded each other in that kingdom of abused and blackened saucepans. The earthquakes, the door slammings, and Esteban Trueba's cane had opened cracks in the walls and splintered the doors, and the venetian blinds had slipped from their hinges. No one took the initiative to repair them. The taps began to leak, the pipes to sweat, the roof tiles to crack, and green stains to spread across the walls. Only Clara's blue silk-covered room remained intact. Within its walls were the blond wood furniture, two white cotton dresses, the empty canary cage, the basket with her unfinished knitting, her decks of magic cards, her three-legged table, and the stacks of notebooks in which she had recorded fifty years of life and which much later, in the solitude of the empty house and the silence of the dead and disappeared, I put in order and read, completely mesmerized, so I could construct this story.

Jaime and Nicolás lost what little interest they had in the family and showed no compassion for their father, who in his loneliness tried in vain to build a friendship with them that would fill the void left by a lifetime of bad relationships. They lived in the house because they had nowhere more suitable to eat and sleep, but they came and went like indifferent shadows, never stopping to notice the destruction. Jaime practiced his profession with the vocation of a true apostle. With the same tenacity his father had brought to the task of lifting Tres Marías out of ruin and making his fortune, he spent his strength working in the clinic and treating the poor without charge in his spare time.

“You're a hopeless loser, son,” Trueba would say, sighing. “You have no sense of reality. You've never taken stock of how the world really is. You put your faith in utopian values that don't even exist.”

“Helping one's neighbor is a value that exists.”

“No. Charity, like Socialism, is an invention of the weak to exploit the strong and bring them to their knees.”

“I don't believe in your theory of the weak and the strong,” Jaime replied.

“That's the way it is in nature. We live in a jungle.”

“Yes, because the people who make up the rules think like you! But it won't always be that way.”

“Oh, yes, it will. Because we always win. We know how to move around in the world and how to use power. Listen to me, son. Pull yourself together and open your own clinic. I'll help you. But cut out your Socialist nonsense!” Esteban Trueba thundered, with no results.

After Amanda disappeared from his life, Nicolás seemed to find his emotional equilibrium. His experience in India had left him with a taste for spiritual endeavors. He abandoned the fantastic commercial escapades that had bedeviled his imagination in the early days of his youth, as well as his desire to possess every woman who passed in front of him, and turned his attention to his lifelong wish to find God on less traveled paths. He turned the same charm he had used to gather pupils for his Spanish dance class to collecting a growing number of disciples. Most of them were young people fed up with the good life, wanderers like him in search of a philosophy that would allow them to exist without participating in earthly strife. They formed a group that was prepared to receive the millennial knowledge Nicolás had acquired in the East. For a while they met in the back rooms of the abandoned part of the house, where Alba handed out walnuts and served them herbal teas while they meditated in a cross-legged position. When Esteban Trueba realized that behind his back these Contemporaries and Eponyms were breathing through their navels and taking off their clothes on the slightest pretext, he lost his patience and kicked them all out of his house, threatening them with his cane and shouting that he would call the police. Then Nicolás understood that there was no way he could continue teaching The Truth without money. He began to charge a modest fee for his knowledge, which enabled him to rent a house where he set up his academy of converts. Owing to legal constraints and the need for an official-sounding name, he called it the Institute for Union with Nothingness, or the I.U.N. But his father was not disposed to leave him in peace; Nicolás's followers began to appear in the newspaper with shaved heads, indecent loincloths, and beatific expressions, bringing public ridicule to the name of Trueba. As soon as they found out that the I.U.N. prophet was the son of Senator Trueba, the opposition blew the story out of proportion to make fun of him, using the son's spiritual quest as a political weapon against the father. Trueba resisted stoically until the day he found his granddaughter Alba with her head shaved like a billiard ball, endlessly repeating the sacred word
Om.
He had one of the worst tantrums of his life. He paid a surprise visit to his son's institute with two hired thugs, who broke what little furniture there was to pieces and were about to do the same to the peaceful worshippers when the old man, realizing that once again he had gone too far, ordered them to halt their destruction and wait for him outside. Alone with his son, he managed to control the furious tremor in his voice and to snarl at him that he was sick and tired of his clowning.