The House of the Spirits (46 page)

“Either you marry me now or we never see each other again.”

Blanca did not realize that this time Pedro Tercero's mind was made up.

They separated angrily. She got dressed, quickly gathering her clothes, which were strewn across the floor, and wrapped her hair into a bun that she moored to her head with a handful of hairpins she retrieved from the bed. Pedro Tercero lit a cigarette and did not take his eyes off her while she dressed. Blanca finished putting on her shoes and waved goodbye to him from the doorway. She was sure that he would call her the next day for one of his spectacular reconciliations. Pedro Tercero turned his face to the wall. A bitter grin had transformed his mouth into a single line. It would be two years before they met again.

In the days that followed, Blanca waited for him to get in touch with her, according to their timeworn pattern. He had never failed her, not even when she had married and they had spent a year apart. Even then it was he who had come looking for her. But after three days with no word from him she began to be alarmed. She tossed and turned in her bed, tormented by an unrelenting case of insomnia. She doubled her dose of tranquilizers, took refuge once again in her migraines and neuralgias, and, in an attempt to stay busy and not think, she stupefied herself by cooking hundreds of crèche monsters in her kiln for Christmas. Still, she was unable to suppress her impatience. Finally she called the Ministry. A female voice replied that Compañero García was in a meeting and could not be interrupted. The next day Blanca called again. She continued to call all the rest of that week, until she realized she would never get through to him that way. She forced herself to swallow the enormous pride she had inherited from her father, put on her best dress and striptease garter belt, and set out to visit him at his apartment. Her key did not fit the lock and she was obliged to ring the bell. The door was opened by a mustached giant with the eyes of a schoolgirl.

“Compañero García isn't here,” he said, without asking her in.

It was then she understood that she had lost him. She had a fleeting vision of her future, seeing herself in a vast desert where she was wasting away, devoting herself to tasks that used up her time, without the only man she had ever loved and far from the arms she had slept in since the long-gone days of her early childhood. She sat down on the stairs and burst into tears. The man with the mustache quietly shut the door.

She told no one what had happened. Alba asked her about Pedro Tercero and she answered evasively, saying that he was extremely busy with his new job in the government. She continued giving her classes for young ladies of leisure and mongoloid children, and even began to teach ceramics in the shantytowns, where the women had organized to learn new trades; and, for the first time, she took an active role in the political and social life of the country. Organization was necessary, because the “road to Socialism” quickly became a battlefield. While the people were celebrating their victory, letting their hair and beards grow, addressing each other as
“compañero,”
rescuing forgotten folklore and native crafts, and exercising their new power in lengthy meetings of workers where everyone spoke at once and never agreed on anything, the right was carrying out a series of strategic actions designed to tear the economy to shreds and discredit the government. They controlled the influential mass media and possessed nearly limitless financial resources, as well as the support of the gringos, who had allocated secret funds for the program of sabotage. Within a few months the results could be seen. For the first time in their lives, people had enough money to cover their basic needs and to buy a few things they had always wanted, but now they were unable to do so because the stores were nearly empty. Shortages of goods, which was soon to be a collective nightmare, had begun. Women woke at dawn to stand in endless lines where they could purchase an emaciated chicken, half a dozen diapers, or a roll of toilet paper. Shoe polish, needles, and coffee became luxury items to be gift-wrapped and given as presents for birthdays and other special occasions. The anxiety of scarcity had arrived: the country was swept with rumors about products supposedly going to disappear, and people bought anything they could, without thinking, as a precaution. They stood in line without even knowing what was being sold, just so they would not lose a chance to buy something, even if they did not need it. A new occupation was born: professional line standers, who held other people's places for a reasonable sum. There were also peddlers of sweets who took advantage of the lines to hawk their goods, and people who rented blankets for the long nighttime lines. The black-market flourished. The police tried to restrain it, but it was like a plague that seeped in everywhere, and no matter how much they checked the trucks and stopped people carrying suspicious packages, they could not prevent it. Children made transactions in schoolyards. In the hysteria to get things, there were all sorts of confusions: people who had never smoked wound up paying an exorbitant sum for a pack of cigarettes, and those without children found themselves fighting over cans of baby formula. Spare parts for kitchens, for industrial machinery, and for cars disappeared from the market. Gasoline was rationed, and the lines of automobiles could last two days and a night, constricting the city like a gigantic motionless boa tanning itself in the sun. There was not enough time to stand in so many lines, and since office workers had to get around the city on foot or by bicycle, the streets filled with panting cyclists that looked like a frenzy of Dutchmen. This was the state of things when the teamsters declared their strike; by the second week, it was clear that this was not a union matter but a political one, and that the men had no intention of returning to work. The Army wanted to take control because the produce was rotting in the fields and there was nothing for housewives to buy in the markets, but the drivers had dismantled their engines and it was impossible to move the thousands of trucks that were strewn along the highways like so many fossilized remains. The President appeared on television asking the people to be patient. He warned the country that the teamsters were in the pay of the imperialists and that they would stay out on strike indefinitely; people would be wise, he said, to plant their own vegetables in their yards and on their terraces, at least until another solution was found. Meanwhile, the people, who were accustomed to poverty and most of whom had never eaten chicken except at Christmas and on Independence Day, did not give up the euphoria of the first days of victory. They organized themselves as if for war, determined not to let the economic sabotage spoil what they had won. They continued celebrating in a festive spirit and singing that the people united would never be defeated—even though each time they sang, it sounded more out of tune because divisiveness and hatred were inexorably growing.

Like everyone else, Senator Trueba also found his life changed. His enthusiasm for the struggle he had undertaken restored his former vigor and relieved some of the pain in his aching bones. He worked as he had in his heyday. He made numerous conspiratorial trips abroad and traveled the country tirelessly from north to south on planes, cars, and trains, on none of which were there now such things as first-class tickets. He endured the extravagant dinners with which his hosts received him in each city, town, and village he visited by pretending to have the appetite of a prisoner, despite the fact that his aging digestive tract was no longer up to such acrobatics. He lived in meetings. At first his long democratic experience impeded his ability to set traps for the new government, but he soon gave up the idea of obstructing it by legal means and came to accept the fact that the only way to unseat it was by using illegal ones. He was the first to declare in public that only a military coup could halt the advance of Marxism because people who had anxiously waited fifty years to be in power would not relinquish it because there was a chicken shortage.

“Stop acting like a bunch of faggots and take out your guns!” he shouted when there was talk of sabotage.

He made no secret of his ideas. He broadcast them to the four winds. Still dissatisfied, he went to the military school from time to time to throw corn at the cadets, shouting through the fence that they were all a bunch of chickens. He was forced to hire a pair of bodyguards to protect him from his own excesses. However, he often forgot that he had engaged them, and when he felt them spying on him he would have a tantrum, insulting them and threatening them with his cane until he was practically choking, his heart was beating so hard. He was convinced that if anyone tried to assassinate him, these two stocky morons would be powerless to prevent it, but he trusted that their presence would at least scare off spontaneous detractors. He also tried to place his granddaughter under surveillance, for he thought that since she moved in a circle of Communists, at any moment someone might mistreat her because of her relationship with him. But Alba would not hear of it. “A hired bully is the same as a confession of guilt. I have nothing to be afraid of,” she said. He did not dare insist; he was tired of fighting with the members of his family, and, besides, his granddaughter was the only person in the world with whom he could express tenderness and who was able to make him laugh.

Meanwhile, Blanca had organized a network for obtaining provisions through the black-market and her contacts in the working-class neighborhood where she went to teach ceramics to the women. She had to work and worry for every bar of soap or bag of sugar she could find. Eventually she developed a cunning she had not suspected in herself, managing to store all kinds of things in the empty rooms of the house, including some things that were downright useless, like the two barrels of soy sauce she bought from a Chinese immigrant. She sealed the windows, put padlocks on the doors, and wore the keys around her waist, not removing them even when she took a bath, because she distrusted everyone, including Jaime and her daughter, and not without reason. “You look like a jailer, Mama,” Alba would say, alarmed at this mania for insuring the future by embittering the present. Alba felt that if there was no meat they should eat potatoes, and that if there were no shoes they should wear sandals; but Blanca, horrified at her daughter's simplicity, held to the theory that, whatever happened, one should not lower one's standard of living, which she used to justify the time she spent in her smuggler's ploys. Actually, they had never lived so well since Clara's death, because for the first time since that date there was someone in the house to see to domestic order and take charge of what went into the pots. Crates of food were delivered regularly from Tres Marías, and Blanca promptly hid them. The first time, almost everything rotted, and the stench issued forth from the locked rooms, spreading through the house and seeping out into the neighborhood. Jaime suggested to his sister that she either donate, trade, or sell any perishable items, but Blanca refused to share her treasures. Alba understood then that her mother, who up till then had seemed like the only sane person in the family, also had a streak of madness. Alba made a hole in the wall, through which she removed part of what Blanca stored. She learned to do it so carefully, stealing cupfuls of sugar, rice, and flour, breaking off pieces of cheese, and spilling open the sacks of dried fruit to make it look like the work of mice, that it took Blanca more than four months to suspect her. At that point she made a written inventory of everything in her pantry and began to put a cross next to the things she removed for household use, convinced that the new system would bring the thief to light. But Alba took advantage of any carelessness on her mother's part to make new crosses on the list; in the end Blanca was so confused she did not know if she had erred in her accounting, if they were eating three times more than she had calculated, or if it was true that there were still ghosts in that accursed mansion.

The product of Alba's thefts wound up in the hands of Miguel, who distributed it in poor neighborhoods and in factories, along with his revolutionary pamphlets calling on the people to join in an armed struggle to bring down the oligarchy. But no one paid any attention to him. They were convinced that since they had come to power through legal means, no one could take it away from them, at least not until the next Presidential election.

“They're fools! They don't realize that the right is arming itself!” Miguel said to Alba.

Alba believed him. She had seen enormous wooden crates unloaded in the courtyard of her house in the middle of the night and their contents silently stored, under Trueba's orders, in another of the unused back rooms of the house. Like her mother, her grandfather put a padlock on the door, and kept the key around his neck in the same suède pouch where he carried Clara's teeth. Alba told this to her Uncle Jaime, who, having made peace with his father, had moved back into the house. “I'm almost certain that they're weapons,” she confided. Jaime, who at that time was preoccupied and more or less continued to be until the day they killed him, could not believe it, but his niece was so insistent that he agreed to ask his father at the dinner table. The old man's answer removed any doubts.

“In my house I do as I see fit and store as many boxes as I feel like! Don't stick your nose into my affairs!” Senator Trueba thundered, slamming his fist on the table so that the glassware jumped, and stopping the discussion in its tracks.

That night Alba went to see her uncle in his tunnel of books and proposed that they apply the same system to his father's weapons as she had to her mother's provisions. And so they did. They spent the rest of the night boring a hole in the wall of the room adjacent to the arsenal, which they hid with a large wardrobe on one side and on the other with the forbidden boxes themselves. This entrance enabled them, armed with a hammer and a pair of pliers, to gain access to the room Trueba had shut. Alba, who already had experience in this line of work, suggested that they start with the boxes on the bottom. They found a military cache that left them openmouthed, for they had never seen such perfect instruments of death. In the days that followed, they stole everything they could, leaving the empty boxes under the other ones after filling them with stones so they would go unnoticed if anybody tried to lift them. Between them they pulled out pistols, submachine guns, rifles, and hand grenades, which they hid in Jaime's room until Alba could take them in her cello case to a safer place. Senator Trueba saw his granddaughter walk by pulling the heavy case, never suspecting that the bullets he had worked so hard to bring across the border and into his house were rolling about in the velvet lining. Alba wanted to hand the confiscated weapons over to Miguel, but her Uncle Jaime convinced her that Miguel was no less a terrorist than her grandfather and that it would be better to get rid of them in such a way that they would not harm anyone. They discussed various alternatives, from throwing them in the river to burning them on a pyre, but finally decided that the most practical solution would be to bury them in plastic bags in a safe, secret location, in case they were ever needed for a nobler cause. Senator Trueba was surprised to see his son and granddaughter planning an outing to the mountains, for neither Jaime nor Alba had participated in any sport since they left the English school and had never shown the slightest inclination for the discomforts of hiking in the Andes. One Saturday morning they drove off in a borrowed jeep, supplied with a tent, a basket of food, and a mysterious suitcase that they had to carry between them because it was as heavy as a corpse. In it were the weapons they had stolen from the old man. They took off enthusiastically in the direction of the mountains, driving as far as they could and then continuing on foot until they found a tranquil spot in the midst of that wind- and cold-swept vegetation. There they dropped their gear and clumsily pitched their tent, dug holes, and buried the plastic bags, carefully indicating each spot with a little pile of stones. They spent the rest of the weekend trout-fishing in the nearby river and roasting their catch on a fire of brambles, exploring the hills like children, and talking about the past. At night they drank hot wine with cinnamon and sugar and, huddled in their shawls, raised a toast to the face old Trueba would make when he discovered that he had been robbed, laughing until the tears rolled down their cheeks.