The House of the Spirits (40 page)

“I don't want to set eyes on you again until my granddaughter's hair has grown back!” he shouted before walking out with a final slam of the door.

Nicolás did not react until the next day. He began by throwing out the rubble his father's men had left and cleaning up his premises, breathing rhythmically to empty his insides of any trace of anger and to purify his spirit. Then, with his loinclothed followers bearing placards demanding religious freedom and respect for their civil rights, he marched them to the gates of Congress, where his disciples took out wooden flutes, bells, and some tiny makeshift gongs and made such a din that they stopped traffic. Once enough people had crowded around, Nicolás proceeded to remove all his clothes and, naked as a baby, lie down in the middle of the street with his arms stretched out, making a cross. There ensued such a commotion of screeching brakes, horns, screams, and whistles that alarm spread within the halls of Congress. In the Senate, discussion was suspended on the right of landowners to fence off neighboring paths with barbed wire, and the members of Congress appeared on the balcony to enjoy the spectacle of the son of Senator Trueba singing Asiatic psalms stark naked. Esteban Trueba ran down the broad stairs of Congress and hurled himself onto the street prepared to kill his son, but he was unable to get through the gates because he felt his heart explode with fury in his chest and a red veil clouded his sight. He fell to the ground.

Nicolás was removed in a police van and the senator in a Red Cross ambulance. Trueba's swoon lasted for three weeks and almost dispatched him to another world. When he was able to leave his bed, he grabbed Nicolás by the collar, pushed him onto an airplane, and shipped him overseas with instructions not to return for the rest of his life. However, he gave him enough money to settle down and live for a long time, because, as Jaime explained, that was one way to make sure Nicolás would not get involved in further acts of madness that could cast aspersions on his father abroad.

Over the course of the next few years Esteban Trueba kept abreast of the black sheep of the family through Blanca's sporadic correspondence with him. Thus he learned that in North America Nicolás had established another academy for uniting himself with nothingness, and that he had been so successful that he had acquired the wealth he had not been able to with his balloon or his sandwiches. He wound up lounging with his disciples in his very own rose-colored porcelain swimming pool and enjoying the full respect of the citizenry, having combined, without intending to, his quest for God with his luck in the world of business. Naturally, Esteban Trueba never believed a word of it.

*  *  *

The Senator waited for his granddaughter's hair to grow a little so no one would think she had ringworm; then he went to enroll her himself in a British school for young ladies, because he still believed that was the finest education, despite the contradictory results he had obtained with his two sons. Blanca went along with his decision, for she accepted that a good conjunction of planets in her daughter's astral chart would not provide Alba with everything she needed to get ahead in life. In this school Alba learned to eat boiled vegetables and burnt rice, to withstand the freezing courtyard, sing hymns, and give up worldly vanities except those in the realm of sports. She was taught to read the Bible, play tennis, and use a typewriter, which were the only useful things he was left with after all those years in a foreign language. For Alba, who until then had never heard of sin or proper manners for young ladies, who was completely ignorant of the boundary between the human and the divine, the possible and the impossible, and who was used to seeing one of her uncles performing karate leaps completely naked in the hallways and the other buried under a mountain of books, not to mention her grandfather smashing telephones and the flowerpots to pieces with his cane, her mother sneaking out with her clownlike valise, and her grandmother moving the three-legged table and playing Chopin without opening the piano, the school routine was simply unbearable. She found the classes boring, and during recess she would sit in the farthest corner of the courtyard so no one could see her, trembling with the hope that someone would invite her to play and simultaneously praying that no one would notice her. Her mother had warned her not to try to explain to her classmates what she had learned about human nature in her Uncle Jaime's medical texts, and not to tell the teachers about the advantages of Esperanto over English. Despite these precautions, from the very first day, the headmistress had no trouble discerning the eccentricities of her new pupil. She observed her for a couple of weeks, and when she was certain of the diagnosis she summoned Blanca Trueba to her office and explained as politely as she could that the child was simply not cut out for a British education, and suggested that she try placing her in a school run by Spanish nuns, who might be better at controlling her wild imagination and correcting her appalling manners. But Senator Trueba was not going to let any Miss Saint John walk all over him, and he brought all his influence to bear to prevent her from expelling his granddaughter. He wanted her, at all costs, to learn English. He was convinced of the superiority of English over Spanish, which in his view was a second-rate language, appropriate for domestic matters and magic, for unbridled passions and useless undertakings, but thoroughly inadequate for the world of science and technology in which he hoped to see Alba triumph. He had finally come to accept—beaten into it by the tide of new ideas—that not all women were complete idiots, and he believed that Alba, who was too plain to attract a well-to-do husband, could enter one of the professions and make her living like a man. On this point Blanca supported her father, because she had felt in her own life the consequences of facing the world with an inadequate education.

“I don't want you to be poor like me or have to depend on a man for support,” she told her daughter every time she saw her crying because she did not want to go to school.

They did not withdraw her from the school and she was forced to endure it for ten solid years.

For Alba, her mother was the only stable person in the drifting ship that was the big house on the corner after Clara's death. Blanca fought the destruction and decline with the ferocity of a lioness, but it was clear it was a losing proposition. She alone attempted to give the house the appearance of a home. Senator Trueba continued to live there, but he stopped inviting his friends and political cronies. He shut the drawing rooms and used only the library and his bedroom. He was deaf and blind to the needs of his house. He was very busy with his politics and his business, traveling constantly, financing new political campaigns, buying land and tractors, raising race horses, and speculating on the price of gold, sugar, and paper. He did not notice that the walls of his house were eager for a coat of paint, that the furniture was falling apart, and that the kitchen had turned into a pigsty. Nor did he see his granddaughter's worn sweaters or his daughter's antiquated clothing or her hands that had been ruined by household chores and clay. He did not behave this way out of avarice; it was simply that his family no longer interested him. At times he shook himself out of his indifference and showed up with some extraordinary, outsized present for his granddaughter, which only sharpened the contrast between the invisible wealth of his bank accounts and the austerity of the house. He gave Blanca varying amounts of money to maintain the dark, drafty, rambling, almost empty house, but she never had enough to cover all her expenses. She was continually borrowing from Jaime, and no matter how often she took a tuck in the budget here and a pleat there, by the end of the month she always had a stack of unpaid bills that kept piling up until she decided to take herself to the district of the Jewish diamond merchants to sell one of her gems, which had been bought a quarter of a century earlier in those very shops and which Clara had bequeathed to her tied up in the woolen sock.

Inside the house Blanca wore an apron and cloth sandals, which made her indistinguishable from the few remaining servants. When she went out, she wore her same black suit that had been ironed and reironed, with her same white silk blouse. After her grandfather had become a widower and stopped showing so much interest in her, Alba wore the hand-me-downs of some distant cousins who were either taller or shorter, which meant that in general the coats fit her like military greatcoats and the dresses were too short and tight. Jaime would have liked to do something for them, but his conscience told him it was better to spend his extra money buying food for the hungry than luxuries for his sister and his niece.

After her grandmother's death, Alba began to suffer nightmares from which she awoke screaming and feverish. She dreamt that everybody in the family was dying and that she was left to wander in the big house alone, with no other company than the faint, threadbare ghosts that wandered up and down the corridors. Jaime suggested that they move her into Blanca's room, which would soothe her nerves. From the moment she began to share her mother's room, she looked forward to bedtime with secret impatience. Curled up under the sheets, she watched her mother complete her nightly ritual and climb into bed. Blanca cleaned her face with Harem Cream, a pinkish grease that smelled of roses and was supposed to perform miracles on women's skin. She also brushed her long chestnut hair—now sprinkled with a few white hairs that were invisible to all but her—a hundred times. Blanca was prone to colds and slept winter and summer in woolen shifts she knit herself in her spare time. Whenever it rained, she put on a pair of gloves to relieve the arctic cold that had seeped into her bones from the damp clay she used, which all Jaime's injections and Nicolás's Chinese acupuncture were powerless to cure. Alba watched her come and go about the room, her novitiate's nightgown floating out from her body and her hair freed from its bun, wrapped in the gentle fragrance of her clean clothes and Harem Cream and lost in an incoherent monologue into which she poured complaints about the price of vegetables, the litany of her various aches and pains, her exhaustion from trying to run the house by herself, and her poetic fantasies of Pedro Tercero García, whom she would imagine among the clouds of sunset or in the golden wheatfields of Tres Marías. When she had finished her ritual, Blanca climbed into bed and turned out the light. Reaching across the narrow space between them, she took her daughter's hand and began to tell her stories from the magic books of the enchanted trunks of her Great-Uncle Marcos, which her poor memory had transformed into new tales. This was how Alba learned about a prince who slept a hundred years, damsels who fought dragons single-handed, and a wolf lost in a forest who was disemboweled by a little girl for no reason whatsoever. When Alba asked to hear these bizarre stories again, Blanca could not repeat them, for she had forgotten them. This led the little girl to write the stories down. She also began to record the things that struck her as important, just as her Grandmother Clara had before her.

*  *  *

Work on the mausoleum began soon after Clara's death, but it took almost two years to complete because I kept adding costly new details: tombstones with Gothic lettering in gold, a glass cupola to let the sunlight in, and an ingenious apparatus copied from the Roman fountains that allows a small interior garden, which I planted with roses and camellias, the favorite flowers of the two sisters who had won my heart, to be watered in perpetuity. The statues were a problem. I rejected several drawings because I didn't want a pair of moronic angels but faithful portraits of Rosa and Clara, with their faces, their hands, and their real shape. A Uruguayan sculptor finally did what I had in mind, and the statues turned out exactly as I wanted. When the project was complete, I came up against an unexpected obstacle: I was unable to transfer Rosa to the new tomb because the del Valle family objected. I tried to convince them, using every argument I could think of along with gifts and pressure, even bringing my political power to bear, but it was all in vain. My brothers-in-law were unyielding. I think they must have heard about Nívea's head and were angry with me for having kept it in the basement all that time. In light of their obstinacy, I called Jaime in and told him to get ready to accompany me to the cemetery to steal Rosa's body. He didn't look surprised.

“If they won't give her to us, we'll have to take her by force,” I told him.

As is customary in this sort of affair, we went at night and bribed the guard, just as I had done years earlier when I wanted to stay with Rosa her first night there. We carried our tools down the cypress-lined path, found the del Valle family tomb, and embarked on the lugubrious task of opening it. We cautiously removed the heavy stone that safeguarded Rosa's eternal rest and slid the white coffin from its niche. The coffin was much heavier than we had expected, and we had to ask the guard to help. It was uncomfortable to work in that narrow, poorly lit space, getting in each other's way with our tools. When we were finished, we replaced the stone over the niche so that no one would suspect the grave was empty. We were bathed in sweat. Jaime had had the foresight to bring a canteen filled with brandy and we each took a swig to keep our spirits up. Even though neither of us was superstitious, that necropolis of crosses, cupolas, and tombstones had us pretty nervous. I sat down at the entrance to the tomb to catch my breath and realized there was precious little youth left in me if moving a coffin was enough to knock my heart off beat and make me see bright dots in the dark. I closed my eyes and thought of Rosa: her perfect face, her milky skin, her mermaid hair, her honeyed eyes that caused such havoc, her hands clasping the mother-of-pearl rosary, her nuptial flower crown. I sighed as I recalled the image of that beautiful virgin who had slipped through my hands and lain there waiting all those years for me to come and take her to the place where she belonged.

“Let's open it up, son. I want to see Rosa,” I told Jaime.