The House of the Spirits (47 page)

“If you weren't my uncle, I'd marry you,” Alba joked.

“What about Miguel?”

“He'd be my lover.”

Jaime did not think that was amusing, and the remainder of the trip he was withdrawn. That night they climbed into their sleeping bags, put out the paraffin lantern, and lay in silence. Alba fell asleep almost immediately, but Jaime, his eyes open in the darkness, saw the sun come up. He liked to say that Alba was a daughter to him, but that night he caught himself thinking that he wished he was neither her uncle nor her father but Miguel. He thought about Amanda and regretted that she no longer moved him, and when he searched his memory for the last embers of their excessive passion he could not find them. He had become a recluse. At first, he had been very close to Amanda because he had taken charge of her treatment and had seen her nearly every day. She had been in agony for several weeks, until she was able to live without drugs. She also gave up cigarettes and alcohol and began to lead a healthy, orderly existence; she put on weight, cut her hair, made up her large eyes again, and went back to wearing her tinkling necklaces and bracelets in a pathetic attempt to remove the tarnished image of herself. She was in love. She went from depression to a state of permanent euphoria. Jaime was the focus of her obsession. As proof of her love, she offered him the enormous effort she had made to free herself from her numerous addictions. Jaime scarcely encouraged her, but he lacked the fortitude to reject her, because he felt that the illusion of love might help in her recovery although he knew that for the two of them it was too late. All he did was try to maintain a certain distance, on the pretext of being a hopeless bachelor when it came to matters of the heart. He was satisfied with his furtive encounters with an occasional willing nurse from the clinic or his sad visits to brothels, which were enough to meet his most pressing needs in the rare free moments his work afforded him. Despite himself, however, he was involved in a relationship with Amanda that he had desperately wished for in his youth but that no longer touched him deeply and he felt incapable of sustaining. He was inspired only with compassion, but this was one of the strongest emotions he was capable of feeling. In a lifetime of living with misery and pain, his soul had not hardened; if anything it was increasingly vulnerable to pity. The day Amanda threw her arms around his neck and told him that she loved him, he hugged her back mechanically and kissed her with a feigned passion so that she would not notice he did not desire her. He now found himself trapped in a demanding relationship at an age when he no longer saw himself capable of tumultuous love. I'm no good at these things anymore, he would think after those exhausting sessions with Amanda, who, in order to charm him, resorted to the most extreme expressions of her love, leaving both of them undone.

His relationship with Amanda and Alba's insistence often brought him in contact with Miguel. There was no way to avoid meeting him on certain occasions. Jaime did his best to seem indifferent, but in the end Miguel captivated him. He had matured, and was no longer an excitable youth, but his politics had not changed in the least; he still believed that it would be impossible to defeat the right without a violent revolution. Jaime did not agree, but he was fond of Miguel and admired his courage. Nevertheless, he could not help thinking of him as one of those fatal men possessed by a dangerous idealism and an intransigent purity that color everything they touch with disaster, especially the women who have the misfortune to fall in love with them. He also disliked his ideological position; he was convinced that left-wing extremists like Miguel were doing more to harm the President than those on the right. None of this, however, prevented him from feeling well disposed toward him or recognizing the strength of his convictions, his natural gaiety, his capacity for tenderness, and the generosity that made him willing to give his life for ideals that Jaime shared but lacked the courage to take to their ultimate conclusion.

That night Jaime slept fitfully and uneasily, uncomfortable in his sleeping bag as he listened to his niece breathing close beside him. When he awoke, she was already up and about and was heating coffee for breakfast. A chill wind was blowing and the sun lit the mountain peaks with golden reflections. Alba threw her arms around her uncle and gave him a kiss, but he kept his hands in his pockets and did not return the gesture. He was perturbed.

*  *  *

Tres Marías was one of the last haciendas in the South to be expropriated under the agrarian reform. The same peasants who had been born there and had farmed the land for generations formed a cooperative and took title to the property, because it had been three years and five months since they had last seen their
patrón
and they had long since forgotten his hurricane-like temper. The foreman, terrified by the turn of events and the fiery tone of the meetings the tenants held in the schoolhouse, gathered up his belongings and disappeared without a word to anyone, not even Senator Trueba, for he did not wish to face his anger and he felt he had done his duty by warning him many times in the past. With his departure Tres Marías was left adrift for quite a while. There was no one to give orders and no one to obey them; the peasants, for the first time in their lives, were savoring the taste of freedom and the experience of being their own
patrón.
They divided up the pastureland and each grew whatever he wanted, until the government sent an agronomist who gave them seed on credit and brought them up to date on the demands of the market, the difficulties of transporting produce, and the advantages of fertilizers and disinfectants. But the peasants paid him little attention, since he seemed like a city slicker and it was easy to see that he had never had a plow in his hand; still, they celebrated his arrival by opening the sacred wine cellar of their former
patrón,
sacking his aged wines, and slaughtering his breeding bulls in order to eat their testicles with onion and basil. After the agronomist had left, they also ate the imported cows and all the brood hens. Esteban Trueba discovered that he had lost his land when they notified him that they were going to pay him for it with government bonds that had a thirty-year maturation and at the same price he had listed on his tax statement. He lost control. He went to his arsenal, picked up a machine gun he did not know how to use, and—without telling anyone, not even his bodyguards—ordered his chauffeur to drive him straight to Tres Marías. He traveled for many hours, blind with rage and without any clear plan in mind.

When they arrived, the chauffeur had to slam on the brakes because a thick wooden beam had been thrown across the gate to the hacienda as a roadblock. One of the tenants was standing guard, armed with a pike and an unloaded shotgun. Trueba got out of the car. When he saw the
patrón,
the poor man frantically rang the schoolhouse bell, which had been hung nearby in case they needed to sound an alarm, and quickly threw himself to the ground. A hail of bullets sailed past his head and embedded themselves in the neighboring trees. Trueba did not stop to see if he was dead. With unusual dexterity for a man his age, he headed down the path to the hacienda without looking to either side, so that the blow to the back of his head took him by surprise and he fell flat on his face in the dust before he even realized what had happened. The next thing he knew he was in the dining room of the main house lying face up on the table, his hands tied and a pillow under his head. A woman was pressing moist compresses to his forehead, and gathered around him were almost all his tenants, staring at him with intense curiosity.

“How do you feel,
compañero?
” someone asked.

“Sons of bitches! I'm nobody's
compañero
!” the old man roared, trying to sit up.

He struggled and shouted so much that they loosened his bonds and helped him to his feet, but when he attempted to leave he saw that the windows had been bricked in from outside and that the door was locked. They tried to explain to him that things had changed and that he was no longer the
patrón,
but he refused to listen. He was foaming at the mouth and his heart was about to burst. Cursing like a madman, he threatened them with such punishment and vengeance that they could only respond with laughter. Finally they grew bored and left him alone, locked in the dining room. Esteban Trueba collapsed into a chair, thoroughly drained from the exertion. Hours later he was informed that he was now a hostage and that they wanted to film him for television. Alerted by his chauffeur, his two bodyguards and a number of excited young members of the Conservative Party had made the trip to Tres Marías armed with sticks, brass knuckles, and chains, but when they arrived to rescue him they found a double guard posted at the gate, training the barrel of Senator Trueba's own machine gun on them.

“No one's taking our hostage
compañero
anywhere,” one of the peasants said, and in order to emphasize the words they sent the would-be rescuers packing with a short volley fired into the air.

A television truck arrived to film the incident, and the tenants, who had never seen anything like it, let the truck through the gate and posed for the cameras with their broadest smiles, standing around their prisoner. That night, people all around the country saw on their television screens the leader of the opposition tied to a table and foaming at the mouth with rage, bellowing such vile curse words that the tape had to be censored. The President saw it too and the matter did not amuse him, for he realized it could be the detonator that would set off the powder keg on which his government was delicately perched. He called out the national guard to rescue the senator. When they reached the ranch, the peasants, emboldened by the support they had received from the press, refused to let them in, demanding a court order. The provincial judge, seeing that he could get himself in a fix and might wind up on national television excoriated by the leftist press, promptly went on a fishing trip. The guardsmen were forced to wait outside the gate of Tres Marías until they received an order from the capital.

Blanca and Alba found out, along with everybody else, when they saw it on the news. Blanca waited until the following morning without making any comment, but when she heard that the guardsmen had failed to rescue her father, she decided that the moment had come for her to see Pedro Tercero García again.

“Take off those filthy slacks and put on a decent dress,” she ordered Alba.

They appeared at the Ministry without an appointment. A male secretary tried to make them stay in the waiting room, but Blanca pushed him away and proceeded with a firm step, dragging her daughter after her. She opened the door without knocking and burst into Pedro Tercero's office. She had not seen him for two years, and she almost turned and left, thinking she had entered the wrong office, because in that short time the man of her life had grown thin and old. He looked very tired and sad, and even though his hair was still black and shiny it was thin and short. He had trimmed his beautiful beard and was dressed in a bureaucrat's gray suit and a faded tie of the same color. Only by the look in his old black eyes did Blanca recognize him.

“Jesus! How you've changed,” she exclaimed.

To Pedro Tercero, however, Blanca seemed more beautiful than he remembered, as if absence had rejuvenated her. In those two years he had had time to regret his decision and to learn that without Blanca he had lost his taste for the young girls who had previously attracted him. And when he spent twelve hours a day sitting at a desk, far from his guitar and the inspiration of the people, he had few opportunities to feel happy. The more time passed, the more he missed Blanca's calm, restful love. But the minute he saw her step across the threshold with her determined air, accompanied by Alba, he understood that she had not come to see him for sentimental reasons; he guessed that her visit was prompted by the scandal of Senator Trueba.

“I've come to ask you to accompany us,” Blanca said without prefacing her remarks. “Your daughter and I are going to Tres Marías to rescue the old man.”

That was how Alba learned that her father was Pedro Tercero García.

“All right. Let's stop at my house to pick up my guitar,” he replied, already rising from his chair.

They left the Ministry in a black car resembling a hearse with official license plates. Blanca and Alba waited in the street while he ran up to his apartment. When he returned, he had recovered some of his old charm. He had changed out of his gray suit into his overalls and poncho of past years; he was wearing sandals and had slung his guitar over his shoulder. Blanca smiled at him for the first time, and he bent down and kissed her quickly on the mouth. The first sixty miles of the trip were spent in silence, until Alba managed to get over her surprise and ask in a quavering voice why they had not told her sooner that Pedro Tercero was her father, and spared her endless nightmares about a count dressed in white who had died of fever in the desert.

“Better a dead father than an absent one,” Blanca enigmatically replied, and she never mentioned it again.

They arrived at Tres Marías at dusk. In front of the gate they met a large crowd gathered in amiable conversation around a bonfire on which a pig was roasting. It was the guardsmen, the journalists, and the peasants, who were finishing off the last of the senator's bottles. A few dogs and several children were playing in the glow of the flames, waiting for the shiny pink suckling pig to be served. The members of the press recognized Pedro Tercero García immediately because they had interviewed him many times, the guardsmen recognized his unmistakable face as that of the popular singer, and the peasants knew him because they had seen him born on this land. They welcomed him home with great affection.

“What brings you here,
compañero
?” someone asked.

“I've come to see the old man,” Pedro Tercero said, ­smiling.