The House of the Spirits (7 page)

“I don't plan to be poor ever again!” he decided, dreaming of the seam of gold.

Through the window of the train he watched the passing landscape of the central valley. Vast fields stretched from the foot of the mountain range, a fertile countryside filled with vineyards, wheat fields, alfalfa, and marigolds. He compared it with the sterile plateaus of the North, where he had spent two years stuck in a hole in the midst of a rough and lunar horizon whose terrifying beauty never ceased to interest him. He had been fascinated by the colors of the desert, the blues, the purples, the yellows of the minerals lying on the surface of the earth.

“My life is changing,” he said softly. He closed his eyes and fell asleep.

*  *  *

He got off the train at the station of San Lucas. It was a wretched place. At that hour of the morning there was not a soul on the wooden platform, its roof eaten away by inclement weather and ants. From where he stood he could see the whole valley through an impalpable mist that rose from the earth the night rain had soaked. The distant mountains disappeared behind the clouds of a shrouded sky; only the snowy peak of the volcano could be seen in all its clarity, outlined against the landscape and lit by a timid winter sun. He looked around him. In his childhood, during the only happy time he could recall, before his father slid utterly into ruin and abandoned himself to alcohol and disgrace, the two of them had gone horseback riding in this part of the country. He remembered that he played during the summers at Tres Marías, but it was all so long ago that memory had almost erased it, and he did not recognize the place. He combed the landscape for the town of San Lucas, but was only able to make out a far-off hamlet that was faded in the dampness of the morning. He walked around the station. There was a padlock on the door to the only office. There was a penciled note tacked on it, but it was so smudged that he could not read it. He heard the train pull out behind him, leaving a column of white smoke. He was alone in the silent landscape. He picked up his bags and stepped out into the mud and stones of a path that led into the town. He walked for more than ten minutes, grateful that it was not raining, because it was only with great difficulty that he managed to advance along the path with his heavy suitcases, and he realized that the rain had rapidly converted it into an impassable mudhole. As he neared the hamlet, he saw smoke in several of the chimneys and breathed a sigh of relief, for it was so lonely and decayed, he had feared it was a ghost town.

He stopped at the edge of town and saw no one. Silence reigned on the only street, which was lined with modest adobe houses, and he felt as if he were walking in his sleep. He approached the nearest house, which had no windows; the door was open. Leaving his bags on the sidewalk, he stepped inside, calling out in a loud voice. It was dark inside because the only source of light was the door, and it took his eyes several seconds to adjust. Then he was able to make out two children playing on the hard earth floor, staring at him with great, astonished eyes, and beyond them, in a courtyard, a woman walking toward him, wiping her hands on the edge of her apron. When she saw him, she made an instinctive motion to arrange a lock of hair that had fallen over her forehead. He greeted her and she replied, covering her mouth with her fingers as she spoke, to hide her toothless gums. Trueba explained that he needed to rent a cart, but she appeared not to understand him and only stood there, hiding the children in her apron, with a vacant expression. He walked out the door, picked up his bags, and set out on his way again.

When he had walked nearly around the entire town without seeing anyone and was just beginning to grow desperate, he heard the hooves of a horse behind him. It was a rickety cart driven by a woodcutter. Trueba stood in front of it, forcing the driver to stop.

“Can you drive me to Tres Marías? I'll pay you handsomely!” he shouted.

“What takes you there, sir?” the man replied. “That place is just a lawless heap of rocks, a no-man's-land.”

But he agreed to take him, and helped him arrange his suitcases among the bundles of wood. Trueba sat down beside him on the coachman's seat. Here and there children darted out of doorways as they heard the wagon pass. Trueba felt lonelier than ever.

About five miles outside the town of San Lucas, along a ruined path overgrown with weeds and full of potholes, there was a wooden sign with the name of the property. It hung from a broken chain and the wind knocked it against the post with a muffled sound that made it echo like a funeral drum. A single glance was enough to make him understand that it would take a Hercules to rescue the place from desolation. The weeds had swallowed up the path, and wherever he looked all he saw were rocks, thick underbrush, and mountains. There was not even a suggestion of pasture or of the vineyards he remembered, and no one came out to greet him. The cart moved slowly, following the tracks that the passage of men and beasts had carved into the mass of weeds. After a moment he was able to make out the main house, which was still standing, although it looked like something from a nightmare, full of rubble, with chicken wire and garbage strewn across the floor. Half the tiles on the roof were broken, and a wild tangle of vines had grown through the windows and covered most of the outside wall. Around the house stood several windowless adobe huts. They had not been whitewashed and were black with soot. Two dogs were fighting ferociously in the courtyard.

The rattle of the cart wheels and the woodcutter's curses roused the inhabitants of the huts, who gradually emerged from their doorways. They stared at the new arrivals with amazement and mistrust. It had been fifteen years since they had seen an owner, and they had simply assumed that there no longer was one. They could not have recognized in this tall, imperious man the little boy with chestnut curls who had played in this same courtyard many years before. Esteban stared back at them and likewise remembered no one. They were a sorry lot. He saw various women of indecipherable age, their skin dry and cracked, some apparently pregnant, all of them barefoot and dressed in faded rags. He calculated that there must be at least a dozen children of all sizes and ages. The youngest ones were naked. Other faces peered from the doorways, too timid to come out. A few children scampered to hide behind the women.

Esteban stepped down from the cart, unloaded his two bags, and pressed a few coins into the woodcutter's hand.

“I'll wait for you if you like,
patrón,
” the man said.

“This is as far as I'm going.”

He walked up to the house, gave the door a single forceful push, and went in. There was enough light inside because morning entered through the broken shutters and the chinks in the ceiling where the tiles had fallen through. The place was full of dust and spiderwebs, and looked thoroughly abandoned; clearly in all these years none of the tenant farmers had dared to leave his hut to move into the large, empty house of the absent owner. They had not touched the furniture; it was all as it had been when he was a child, each piece exactly where it had stood before, except uglier, and more lugubrious and rickety than he remembered. The entire house was carpeted with a thick layer of grass, dust, and dried-out leaves. It smelled like a tomb. A skeletal dog barked angrily at him, but Esteban Trueba paid him no attention until the dog, too tired to continue, lay down in a corner to scratch his fleas. Esteban put his bags on a table and set out to walk through the house, fighting off the sadness that was beginning to overwhelm him. He went from one room to another, noticing how time had worn everything away, and the poverty and dirt, and it seemed to him that this was a hole far worse than the mine. The kitchen was a wide filthy room, with a high ceiling and walls blackened with smoke from the wood and coal stoves, moldy and in ruins. The copper pots and pans that had not been used for fifteen years, apparently untouched in all that time, still hung from their nails. The bedrooms had the same beds and huge wardrobes with full-length glasses that his father had bought long ago, but the mattresses were a pile of rotten wool in which bugs had nested for generations. He heard the faint passage of the rats in the rafters. He could not tell if the floors were made of wood or tiles, because they were invisible, completely covered with grime. A layer of gray dust blurred the contours of the furniture. Where the drawing room had been he could still see the German piano, with one broken leg and yellow keys, which sounded like an untuned harpsichord.

On the shelves there were still a few illegible books, their pages chewed up by the damp, and on the floor there were the remnants of ancient magazines whose pages had been scattered by the wind. The armchairs sat with their springs sticking out, and there was a mouse nest in the wing chair where his mother had liked to knit before her illness turned her hands to claws.

When he finished his tour, Esteban had a clearer view of things. He knew that an immense task lay ahead of him, for if the house was in such bad repair, he could scarcely expect the rest of the property to be in any better condition. For a second he was tempted to pile his two bags back on the cart and return whence he had come, but he rejected that plan in a flash and resolved that if there was anything that could alleviate the grief and rage of Rosa's loss it would be breaking his back working in this ruined land. He took off his coat, drew a deep breath, and went out into the courtyard where the woodcutter was still waiting, not far from the tenants who had grouped themselves at a certain distance, with the shyness typical of country people. They looked at each other with curiosity. Trueba took two steps toward them and noticed a slight backward movement in the tiny cluster; he let his eyes wander over the shabby peasants and tried to force a friendly smile to the runny-nosed children, the bleary-eyed old people, and the women without hope, but it came out like a grimace.

“Where are the men?” he asked.

The only young man stepped forward. He was probably the same age as Esteban Trueba, but he looked older.

“They left,” he said.

“What's your name?”

“Pedro Segundo García, sir,” the man replied.

“I'm the
patrón
here now. The party's over. We're going to work. Anyone who doesn't like the idea should clear out immediately. Whoever stays won't lack for food, but he'll have to work good and hard. I don't want any deadbeats or smart-alecks around, you understand?”

They looked at one another in amazement. They had not understood half of what he said, but they could recognize their master's voice when they heard it.

“We understand,
patrón,
” Pedro Segundo García said. “We have nowhere to go. We've always lived here. We'll stay.”

A little boy squatted on the ground and began to defecate, and a mangy dog ran up to sniff him. Revolted, Esteban ordered them to take the child away, hose the courtyard down, and kill the dog. Thus began the new life that, in time, would make him forget Rosa.

*  *  *

No one's going to convince me that I wasn't a good
patrón.
Anyone who saw Tres Marías in decline and who could see it now, when it's a model estate, would have to agree with me. That's why I can't go along with my granddaughter's story about class struggle. Because when it comes right down to it, those poor peasants are a lot worse off today than they were fifty years ago. I was like a father to them. Agrarian reform ruined things for everyone.

I used all the money I had saved to marry Rosa, and everything the foreman sent me from the mine, to pull Tres Marías out of misery, but it wasn't money that saved the place, it was hard work and organization. The word went out that there was a new
patrón
at Tres Marías and that we were using mules to clear the land of stones and plow the fields to ready them for planting. In no time at all men began to arrive, offering their service as hired hands, because I paid well and gave them meals. I bought animals. Animals were sacred to me, and even if we had to go a year without eating meat, they were never killed. Thus our livestock prospered. I organized the men into different crews, and after they had finished working in the fields we set to work on restoring the main house. They weren't carpenters or masons, and I had to teach them everything from books I bought. We even did the plumbing. We fixed the roofs, whitewashed the house from top to bottom, and cleaned it inside and out until it sparkled. I distributed the furniture among the various tenants, except the dining-room table, which was still intact despite the worms that had got into everything, and the wrought-iron bed that had belonged to my parents. I continued living in the empty house, with no other furniture apart from those two pieces and a few wooden crates to sit on, until Férula sent me the new furniture I had ordered from the capital. They were large, heavy, ostentatious pieces that were built to last for generations and to withstand country life. The proof is that it took an earthquake to destroy them. I arranged them along the walls, with an eye more to convenience than aesthetics, and once the house was comfortable I felt happy and began to get used to the idea that I was going to spend many years—perhaps even my whole life—in Tres Marías.

The tenants' wives took turns as servants in the main house, and they also tended my orchard. I soon saw the first flowers in the garden I had planned out with my own hand and that, with a few minor changes, is the same one that's there today. In those days people worked without grumbling. I think my presence made them feel secure again. They saw the land gradually restored to prosperity. They were good, simple men, with no rebels among them. It's also true that they were very poor and very ignorant. Before I got there, they were just tilling their own small family plots, which provided them with the bare necessities to keep from starving to death—providing, of course, that they weren't struck by some catastrophe such as drought, frost, plague, ants, or snails, in which case things became very difficult indeed. But after I arrived all that changed. One by one we rescued the old fields. We rebuilt the chicken coops and stables and began to plan an irrigation system so the crops wouldn't have to depend on the weather. But it wasn't an easy life. It was very hard. Sometimes I would walk to town and return with a veterinarian who would check the cows and hens and, while he was at it, anybody who was sick. It's not true that I assumed that if the vet knew how to treat animals his training was good enough for people, as my granddaughter says when she wants to get me mad. The fact is, you couldn't get a doctor in a godforsaken place like that. The peasants went to an Indian
curandera
who knew all about the power of herbs and suggestion, and in whom they had great confidence. More than in the vet. Mothers gave birth with help from their neighbors, prayers, and a midwife who almost never arrived on time, because she had to make the trip by burro, but she was as good at delivering babies as she was at pulling calves from wall-eyed cows. Those who were gravely ill, whom no spell of the
curandera
or potion from the vet could help, were placed on a cart and taken by Pedro Segundo García or me to a hospital run by nuns, where there was frequently a doctor who helped them die. The dead and their bones ended up in a tiny graveyard next to the abandoned church, at the foot of the volcano, where there is now a proper cemetery. Once or twice a year I arranged for a priest to come and bless unions, animals, and machines, baptize children, and say a belated prayer for the dead. The only amusement then was castrating pigs and bulls, cockfights, hopscotch, and the incredible tales of old Pedro García, may he rest in peace. He was Pedro Segundo's father and he said his grandfather had fought in the ranks of the patriots who kicked the Spaniards out of America. He showed the children how to let themselves be stung by spiders and drink the urine of pregnant women as a form of immunization. He knew almost as many herbs as the
curandera
, but he would get confused when it came to deciding on their use, and he had committed some irreparable mistakes. Nonetheless, I have to say that he had an unbeatable method for pulling teeth, which had made him justly famous throughout the region. It was a combination of red wine and Our Fathers, which plunged the patient into a hypnotic trance. He pulled one of my molars, and if he were alive today he would be my dentist.