The House of the Spirits (50 page)

It was Amanda who first put her in touch with the priests. The two friends would get together to whisper about Miguel, whom neither of them had seen, and to remember Jaime with dry-eyed yearning; there was no official proof that he had died and their desire to see him again was stronger than the soldier's tale. Amanda had resumed her compulsive smoking; her hands shook and her gaze wandered. At times her pupils were dilated and she moved slowly, but she continued working in the hospital. She told Alba that she frequently took care of patients who were faint with hunger.

“The families of prisoners, disappeared people, and the dead have nothing to eat. The unemployed don't either. Barely a plate of corn mush every other day. The children are so undernourished that they fall asleep in school.”

She added that the glass of milk and the crackers that schoolchildren used to receive each day had been discontinued, and that mothers were quieting their children's hunger with cups of tea.

“The only ones trying to help are the priests,” Amanda said. “People don't want to know the truth. The Church has organized soup kitchens to feed children under seven a hot meal six times a week. Of course that's not enough. For every child who eats a plate of lentils or potatoes once a day, there are five outside looking in because there's not enough to go around.”

Alba realized that they had returned to the old days when her Grandmother Clara went to the Misericordia District to replace justice with charity. Except that now charity was frowned upon. She noticed that whenever she went to the houses of her friends to ask for a package of rice or a tin of powdered milk no one dared to turn her down the first time, but afterward they avoided her. At first Blanca helped her. Alba had no trouble obtaining the key to her mother's pantry, arguing that there was no need to hoard ordinary flour and poor men's beans when you could buy Baltic crab and Swiss chocolate. This enabled her to stock the priests' kitchens for a time, which, however, seemed all too brief to her. One day she took her mother to one of the soup kitchens. When Blanca saw the long unpolished wooden table where two rows of children were awaiting their portions with pleading eyes, she began to cry and wound up spending two days with a splitting headache. She would have gone on crying if her daughter hadn't forced her to get dressed, forget about herself, and look for help, even if it meant she had to steal from her father's household budget. Senator Trueba would not discuss the subject; like everyone else in his class, he denied the existence of hunger just as vehemently as he denied that of the prisoners and the torture; this meant that Alba could not rely on him, and later, when she could no longer rely on her mother either, she was forced to take more drastic measures. The farthest her grandfather went was to his club. He never went downtown, much less to the outskirts of the city or the shantytowns. It was no effort for him to believe that the misery his granddaughter reported was a Marxist fabrication.

“Communist priests!” he shouted. “That's the last thing I need to hear!”

But when children and women began to appear outside people's houses at every hour of the day and night begging for something to eat, Trueba—instead of ordering the gates to be shut and lowering the blinds so he wouldn't have to see them, like everyone else—raised Blanca's monthly stipend and said there should always be hot food on hand to give away.

“This is just a temporary situation,” he assured them. “As soon as the military can straighten out the chaos that the Marxists left the country in, this kind of problem will be resolved.”

The newspapers said that the beggars in the streets, a sight that had not been seen in years, had been sent by international Communism to discredit the military junta and undermine the return to order and progress. Cement walls were erected to hide the most unsightly shantytowns from the eyes of tourists and others who preferred not to see them. In a single night, as if by magic, beautifully pruned gardens and flowerbeds appeared on the avenues; they had been planted by the unemployed, to create the illusion of a peaceful spring. White paint was used to erase the murals of doves and to remove all political posters from sight. Any attempt to write political messages in public was punished with a burst of machine-gun fire on the spot. The clean, orderly, silent streets were reopened to commerce. Soon the beggar children disappeared, and Alba noticed that the stray dogs and piles of garbage were gone too. The black market came to an end at the very moment when the Presidential Palace was bombed, because speculators were threatened with martial law and execution by firing squad. Items whose very name was unheard of began to be sold in stores, along with things that only the rich had previously been able to buy as contraband. The city had never looked more beautiful. The upper middle class had never been so happy: they could buy as much whiskey as they wanted, and automobiles on credit.

In the patriotic euphoria of the first few days, women brought their jewels to the barracks to help finance the national reconstruction. They even handed over their wedding rings, which were replaced with copper bands that bore the national seal. Blanca had to hide the woolen stocking that contained the jewels Clara had left her, to prevent Senator Trueba from handing them over to the authorities. They saw the birth of a proud new class. Illustrious ladies dressed in foreign clothes, as exotic and shimmering as fireflies, paraded themselves in the fashionable entertainment centers on the arm of the proud new economists. A caste of military men arose to fill key posts. Families who had previously considered it a disgrace to count a member of the military among their number were now pitted against each other in the struggle to see who could get their sons into the war academies and were offering their daughters to soldiers. The country filled with men in uniform, with war machines, flags, hymns, and parades, because the military understood the need for the people to have their own rituals and symbols. Senator Trueba, who despised these things on principle, realized what his friends at the club had meant when they had assured him that Marxism did not stand a chance in Latin America because it did not allow for the magical side of things. “Bread, circuses, and something to worship are all they need,” the senator concluded, regretting in his conscience that there should be a lack of bread.

A campaign was orchestrated to erase from the face of the earth the good name of the former President, in the hope that the masses would stop mourning him. His house was opened and the public was invited to visit what they called “the dictator's palace.” People could look into his closets and marvel at the quantity and quality of his suède jackets, go through his drawers, and rummage in his pantry to see the Cuban rum and bag of sugar he had put away. The most crudely touched-up photographs were circulated, depicting him dressed as Bacchus with a garland of grapes around his head, cavorting with opulent matrons and athletes of his own sex in a perpetual orgy. No one, not even Senator Trueba, believed they were authentic. “This is too much, this time they've gone too far,” he muttered when he saw them.

With a stroke of the pen the military changed world history, erasing every incident, ideology, and historical figure of which the regime disapproved. They adjusted the maps because there was no reason why the North should be placed on top, so far away from their beloved fatherland, when it could be placed on the bottom, where it would appear in a more favorable light; and while they were at it they painted vast areas of Prussian-blue territorial waters that stretched all the way to Africa and Asia, and appropriated distant countries in the geography books, leaping borders with impunity until the neighboring countries lost their patience, sought help from the United Nations, and threatened to send in tanks and planes. Censorship, which at first covered only the mass media, was soon extended to textbooks, song lyrics, movie scripts, and even private conversation. There were words prohibited by military decree, such as the word
“compañero,”
and others that could not be mentioned even though no edict had swept them from the lexicon, such as “freedom,” “justice,” and “trade union.” Alba wondered where so many Fascists had come from overnight, because in the country's long democratic history they had not been particularly noticeable, except for a few who got carried away during World War II and thought it amusing to parade in black shirts with their arms raised in salute—to the laughter and hissing of bystanders—and had never won any important role in the life of the country. Nor did she understand the attitude of the armed forces, most of whom came from the middle and working class and had traditionally been closer to the left than to the far right. She did not understand the state of civil war, nor did she realize that war is the soldiers' work of art, the culmination of all their training, the gold medal of their profession. Soldiers are not made to shine in times of peace. The coup gave them a chance to put into practice what they had learned in their barracks: blind obedience, the use of arms, and other skills that soldiers can master once they silence the scruples of their hearts.

Alba abandoned her studies; the school of philosophy, like many others that open the gateway of the mind, was closed. Nor did she continue with her music, because her cello seemed frivolous to her under the circumstances. Many professors were fired, arrested, or simply disappeared, in accordance with a blacklist in the hands of the political police. Sebastián Gómez was killed in the first raid, betrayed by his own students. The university was filled with spies.

*  *  *

The upper middle class and the economic right, who had favored the coup, were euphoric. At first they were a little shocked when they saw the consequences of their action; they had never lived in a dictatorship and did not know what it was like. They thought the loss of democratic freedoms would be temporary and that it was possible to go without individual or collective rights for a while so long as the regime respected the tenets of free enterprise. Nor did they put much stock in international condemnation, which lumped them in the same category as the other tyrannies of the region, because it seemed a small price to pay for the defeat of Marxism. When foreign investment capital began to flow into the country, they naturally attributed it to the stability of the new regime, ignoring the fact that for every peso that entered the country, two were lost to interest. When almost all the national industries were gradually shut down and businesses were beginning to go bankrupt, defeated by the massive importation of consumer goods, they said that Brazilian stoves, Taiwanese cloth, and Japanese motorcycles were superior to anything that had ever been manufactured in the country. Only when the concessions of the mines were returned to the North American companies after three years of nationalization did a few voices suggest that this amounted to giving the country away wrapped in cellophane. But when the lands that the agrarian reform had parceled out were returned to their former owners, they were reassured: things were returning to the good old days. They realized that only a dictatorship could act with the necessary force and without accounting to the people to guarantee their privileges, so they stopped talking about politics and accepted the idea that they held economic power, but the military was going to rule. The right's only task was to advise the military in the elaboration of new edicts and new laws. Within days they had eliminated labor unions. The union leaders were either in jail or dead, political parties had been indefinitely recessed, and all student-worker organizations, and even professional associations, had been dismantled. Gatherings of any size were forbidden. The only place people could congregate was in church, so religion quickly became fashionable, and priests and nuns were forced to postpone their spiritual tasks in order to minister to the earthly needs of their lost flocks. The government and the business community began to view them as potential enemies, and some dreamt of resolving the problem by assassinating the cardinal when it was clear that the Pope in Rome had no intention of removing him from his post and sending him to an asylum for insane priests.

A large part of the middle class rejoiced at the military coup, because to them it signaled a return to law and order, to the beauty of tradition, skirts for women and short hair for men, but they soon began to suffer from the impact of high prices and the lack of jobs. Their salaries were not sufficient to buy food. There was someone to mourn for in every family, and the middle class could no longer say, as they had in the beginning, that if he was imprisoned, dead, or exiled it was because he deserved it. Nor could they go on denying the use of torture.

While luxury stores, miraculous finance companies, exotic restaurants, and import business were flourishing, the unemployed lined up outside factory gates waiting for a chance to work at the minimum wage. The labor force was reduced to slavery, and for the first time in many decades management was able to fire people at will without granting any severance pay and to have them thrown in jail for the slightest protest.

During the first months, Senator Trueba shared the opportunism of his class. He was convinced that a period of dictatorship was necessary to bring the country back into the fold it never should have left. He was one of the first landowners to regain his land. Tres Marías was returned to him in ruins but intact down to the last square yard. He had waited more than two years for this moment, nursing his anger. Without giving it a second thought he left for the countryside with half a dozen hired thugs to avenge himself to his heart's content against the peasants who had dared to defy him and rob him of his property. They arrived on a fine Sunday morning shortly before Christmas, entering the hacienda with all the clamor of a pirate crew. His men spread out, rounding people up with curses, blows, and kicks. Then they gathered humans and animals in the courtyard, poured gasoline on the little brick houses that had once been Trueba's pride and joy, and set fire to them and everything inside them. They shot the animals to death. They burned the fields, the chicken coops, the bicycles, and even the cradles of newborn babies, in a noontime witches' Sabbath that nearly made Trueba die of joy. He dismissed all the tenants, warning them that if he ever caught them prowling around his property they would suffer the same fate as their animals. He watched them depart poorer than ever in a long, sad procession, with their children, their old people, and the few dogs that had survived the shooting, and some chickens saved from the inferno, dragging their feet along the dusty road that led away from the land where they had lived for generations. At the gate to Tres Marías there was a group of wretched people waiting with anxious eyes. They were peasants who had also been expelled from their hacienda, arriving as humbly as their ancestors of the preceding century to beg the
patrón
to give them work in the coming harvest.