The House of the Spirits (56 page)

“I'm going to give you a little cup of tea. I don't have any sugar, but something warm will do you good,” she said.

She told me they had heard the van and knew what it meant to hear a vehicle in that out-of-the-way place during curfew. They had waited until they were sure it had gone away and then she had sent the boy out to see what had been left. They had expected to find a body.

“They sometimes leave us the bodies of people they've shot,” she said. “To intimidate us.”

We stayed up all night talking. She was one of those stoical, practical women of our country, the kind of woman who has a child with every man who passes through her life and, on top of that, takes in other people's abandoned children, her own poor relatives, and anybody else who needs a mother, a sister, or an aunt; the kind of woman who's the pillar of many other lives, who raises her children to grow up and leave her and lets her men leave too, without a word of reproach, because she has more pressing things to worry about. She looked like so many others I had met in the soup kitchens, in my Uncle Jaime's clinic, at the church office where they would go for information on their disappeared, and in the morgue where they would go to find their dead. I told her she had run an enormous risk rescuing me, and she smiled. It was then I understood that the days of Colonel García and all those like him are numbered, because they have not been able to destroy the spirit of these women.

The next morning, she took me to a close family friend who had a horse-drawn cart for hauling freight. She asked him to take me home, and that's how I arrived here. Along the way I could see the city in all its terrible contrasts: the huts surrounded by makeshift walls to create the illusion that they do not exist, the cramped, gray center, and the High District, with its English gardens, its parks, its glass skyscrapers, and its fair-haired children riding bicycles. Even the dogs looked happy to me. Everything in order, everything clean, everything calm, and that solid peace of a conscience without memory. This neighborhood is like another country.

My grandfather listened sadly. A world he had thought was good had crumbled at his feet.

“Well, since it looks as if we're going to stay here and wait for Miguel, we're going to fix this place up a little,” he said after a moment's silence.

And so we did. At first we spent the whole day in the library, worried that they could return for me and take me back to García, but then we decided that the worst thing is to be afraid of fear, as my Uncle Nicolás had said, and that we had to use the entire house and start to live a normal life. My grandfather engaged a special company to come in with polishing machines and clean the house; they washed the windows, painted, and disinfected the place from top to bottom until it was livable again. Half a dozen gardeners and a tractor got rid of the weeds. They brought in a lawn rolled up like a carpet, an ingenious invention of the gringos, and in less than a week we even had tall birches; water gushed from the singing fountains, and the Olympian statues once again stood tall and proud, free at last of so much bird droppings and neglect. We went together to buy birds for the cages that had been empty ever since my grandmother, sensing that she was about to die, had opened them and let the birds fly out. I put fresh flowers in the vases and platters of fruit on all the tables, as Clara had in the days of the spirits, and the air filled with their fragrance. Afterward my grandfather and I walked arm in arm through the house, stopping in each place to remember the past and salute the imperceptible ghosts of other eras, who, despite all the ups and downs, have remained in place.

It was my grandfather who had the idea that we should write this story.

“That way you'll be able to take your roots with you if you ever have to leave, my dear,” he said.

We unearthed the old albums from the forgotten nooks and crannies of the house. Here, on my grandmother's table, is the stack of photographs: Rosa the Beautiful beside a faded swing; my mother, with Pedro Tercero García at the age of four, feeding corn to the chickens in the courtyard of Tres Marías; my grandfather when he was young and stood six feet tall, irrefutable proof that Férula's curse came true and that his body shrank in the same proportions as his soul; my uncles Jaime and Nicolás, one dark, somber, gigantic, and vulnerable, the other lean, graceful, volatile, and smiling; also Nana and the del Valle great-grandparents before they were killed in the accident; everyone, in short, except the noble Jean de Satigny, of whom no scientific trace remains and whose very existence I have begun to doubt.

I began to write with the help of my grandfather, whose memory remained intact down to the last second of his ninety years. In his own hand he wrote a number of pages, and when he felt that he had written everything he had to say, he lay down on Clara's bed. I sat beside him to wait with him, and death was not long in coming, taking him by surprise as he lay sleeping peacefully. Perhaps he was dreaming that it was his wife who held his hand and kissed his forehead, because in his final days she did not leave him for a second, following him around the house, peering over his shoulder when he was reading in his library, lying down beside him and leaning her beautiful curly head against his shoulder when he got into bed. At first she was just a mysterious glow, but as my grandfather slowly lost the rage that had tormented him throughout his life, she appeared as she had been at her best, laughing with all her teeth and stirring up the other spirits as she sailed through the house. She also helped us write, and thanks to her presence Esteban Trueba was able to die happy, murmuring her name: Clara, clearest, clairvoyant.

When I was in the doghouse, I wrote in my mind that one day Colonel García would stand before me in defeat and that I would avenge myself on all those who need to be avenged. But now I have begun to question my own hatred. Within a few short weeks, ever since I returned to the house, it seems to have become diluted, to have lost its sharp edge. I am beginning to suspect that nothing that happens is fortuitous, that it all corresponds to a fate laid down before my birth, and that Esteban García is part of the design. He is a crude, twisted line, but no brushstroke is in vain. The day my grandfather tumbled his grandmother, Pancha García, among the rushes of the riverbank, he added another link to the chain of events that had to complete itself. Afterward the grandson of the woman who was raped repeats the gesture with the granddaughter of the rapist, and perhaps forty years from now my grandson will knock García's granddaughter down among the rushes, and so on down through the centuries in an unending tale of sorrow, blood, and love. When I was in the doghouse, I felt as if I were assembling a jigsaw puzzle in which each piece had a specific place. Before I put the puzzle together, it all seemed incomprehensible to me, but I was sure that if I ever managed to complete it, the separate parts would each have meaning and the whole would be harmonious. Each piece has a reason for being the way it is, even Colonel García. At times I feel as if I had lived all this before and that I have already written these very words, but I know it was not I: it was another woman, who kept her notebooks so that one day I could use them. I write, she wrote, that memory is fragile and the space of a single life is brief, passing so quickly that we never get a chance to see the relationship between events; we cannot gauge the consequences of our acts, and we believe in the fiction of past, present, and future, but it may also be true that everything happens simultaneously—as the three Mora sisters said, who could see the spirits of all eras mingled in space. That's why my Grandmother Clara wrote in her notebooks, in order to see things in their true dimension and to defy her own poor memory. And now I seek my hatred and cannot seem to find it. I feel its flame going out as I come to understand the existence of Colonel García and the others like him, as I understand my grandfather and piece things together from Clara's notebooks, my mother's letters, the ledgers of Tres Marías, and the many other documents spread before me on the table. It would be very difficult for me to avenge all those who should be avenged, because my revenge would be just another part of the same inexorable rite. I have to break that terrible chain. I want to think that my task is life and that my mission is not to prolong hatred but simply to fill these pages while I wait for Miguel, while I bury my grandfather, whose body lies beside me in this room, while I wait for better times to come, while I carry this child in my womb, the daughter of so many rapes or perhaps of Miguel, but above all, my own daughter.

My grandmother wrote in her notebooks that bore witness to life for fifty years. Smuggled out by certain friendly spirits, they miraculously escaped the infamous pyre in which so many other family papers perished. I have them here at my feet, bound with colored ribbons, divided according to events and not in chronological order, just as she arranged them before she left. Clara wrote them so they would help me now to reclaim the past and overcome terrors of my own. The first is an ordinary school copybook with twenty pages, written in a child's delicate calligraphy. It begins like this:
Barrabás came to us by sea . . .