The House of the Spirits (41 page)

He didn't try to talk me out of it, because he recognized the tone that creeps into my voice when I've made an irrevocable decision. We angled the lantern just so, and he loosened the bronze screws that had grown dark with time. We lifted the top, which was as heavy as a piece of lead, and in the white light of the carbide lantern I saw Rosa the Beautiful, with her orange-blossom crown, her green hair, and her unruffled beauty, just as I had seen her many years before, lying in her white coffin on my in-laws' dining room table. I stared at her in fascination, unsurprised that time had left her intact, because she was exactly as I'd seen her in my dreams. I leaned over and, through the glass covering her face, placed a kiss on the lips of my immortal beloved. At just that moment a breeze crept through the cypresses, slipped through a crack in the coffin, which until that instant had remained hermetically sealed, and in a flash the unchanged bride dissolved like a spell, disintegrating into a fine gray powder. When I raised my head and opened my eyes, the cold kiss still on my lips, Rosa the Beautiful was gone. In her place was a skull with empty sockets, a few strips of marble-colored skin clinging to its cheekbones, and a lock or two of moldy hair at its nape.

Jaime and the guard quickly slapped the coffin lid back on, placed Rosa in a wheelbarrow, and took her to the place that had been readied for her next to Clara in the salmon-colored mausoleum. I sat down on a grave in the middle of the cypresses and looked up at the moon.

Férula was right, I thought; I've been left all alone and my body and my soul are shriveling up. All that's left for me is to die like a dog.

*  *  *

Senator Trueba fought off his political enemies, who were making daily gains in the quest for power. While other leaders of the Conservative Party grew fat and old and spent their time in hair-splitting discussions, he devoted himself to work and study, crossing the country from north to south in a nonstop personal campaign, ignoring both his age and the muffled cry of his bones. He was reelected senator in every parliamentary election. But he was not interested in power, wealth, or prestige. His one obsession was to destroy what he called “the Marxist cancer,” which was slowly gaining ground among the people.

“You look under any stone and a Communist jumps out!” he said.

No one believed him. Not even the Communists. They made fun of his tantrums, his outdated cane, and his apocalyptic predictions, and said he looked like a crow in his mourning. When he brandished his statistics and the results of the last elections in front of them, his own party members suspected they were just the senile rantings of an old man.

“The day we can't get our hands on the ballot boxes before the vote is counted we're done for,” Trueba argued.

“The Marxists haven't won by popular vote anywhere in the world,” his confreres replied. “At the very least it takes a revolution, and that kind of thing doesn't happen in this country.”

“Until it happens!” Trueba answered furiously.

“Relax,
hombre.
We're not going to let that happen,” they consoled him. “Marxism doesn't stand a chance in Latin America. Don't you know it doesn't allow for the magical side of things? It's an atheistic, practical, functional doctrine. There's no way it can succeed here!”

Not even Colonel Hurtado, who saw traitors everywhere he looked, considered the Communists a danger. On more than one occasion he explained to Trueba that the Communist Party was composed of four bums without any statistical importance who followed Moscow's instructions with a piety worthy of a better cause.

“Moscow's on the other side of the globe, Esteban,” Colonel Hurtado told him. “They have no grasp of the condition of this country. If you don't believe me, just look at them: they're more lost than Little Red Riding Hood. A while ago they published a manifesto calling on the peasants, sailors, and Indians to unite in the first national soviet, which from any point of view is a joke. How are the peasants supposed to know what a soviet is? The sailors are mostly at sea, and when they're not they're more interested in brothels than they are in politics. And the Indians! We've only got two hundred left. I doubt any more than that survived the massacres of the last century, but if they want to make a soviet on the reservations, that's their problem!” The colonel laughed.

“Yes, but it's not just Communists. There are Socialists, radicals, and lots of other splinter groups. They're all pretty much the same,” Trueba replied.

To Senator Trueba, all political parties except his own were potentially Marxist, and he could not distinguish one ideology from another. Since he did not hesitate to explain his position in public every time he had the chance, for everyone but his own co-religionists he soon became a caricature of the picturesque, reactionary oligarch. The Conservative Party had to hold him back to keep him from saying things that could ruin their reputation. He was a furious crusader, ready to do battle in forums, press conferences, and universities; wherever no one else was brave enough to stand up, there he would be, unshakable in his dark suit, with his lion's mane of hair and his silver cane. He was the butt of cartoonists, thanks to whose constant mockery he became a popular figure and delivered a landslide vote for the conservatives in every election. He was fanatical, violent, and antiquated, but he represented better than anybody else the values of family, tradition, private property, law and order. Everyone recognized him on the street. People made up jokes and anecdotes about him that were the talk of the town. It was said that when he had his heart attack the day his son took off his clothes before the gates of Congress, the President of the Republic called him to his office to offer him the post of Ambassador to Switzerland, a job appropriate to his age that would allow him to recover his health. They said that Senator Trueba replied by slamming his fist down on the presidential desk, knocking down the flag and the bust of the Founding Father.

“I'm not going anywhere, Your Excellency!” he roared. “The minute I look away, the Marxists will pull that chair right out from under you!”

He was astute enough to be the first to call the left “the enemy of democracy,” never suspecting that years later that would be the slogan of the dictatorship. He spent almost all his time and a good part of his fortune on the political front. He noticed that, despite the fact that he was constantly hatching new schemes, his finances seemed to have been dwindling since Clara's death; still, this caused him no undue alarm because he supposed that it was part of the natural order of things that she had breathed good luck into his life and that she could hardly continue to help him after her death. Besides, according to his calculations, he had enough to continue living like a rich man for the time that remained to him in this world. He felt old, and had decided that none of his three children deserved to inherit anything from him, and that he would secure his granddaughter's happiness by leaving her Tres Marías, even though the countryside was not as prosperous as before. Thanks to the new highways and cars, what had once been an expedition was now a mere six-hour drive from the capital; but he was always busy now and never had the time to make the trip. Every once in a while he spoke to his foreman on the telephone to go over the accounts, but these calls left him in a bad mood for several days afterward. His foreman was a man defeated by his own pessimistic views, and his news was mostly a series of misfortunes: the strawberries froze, the chickens caught the pip, the grapes rotted. Thus the countryside, which had been the source of his wealth, became a burden, and Senator Trueba frequently had to withdraw money from his other businesses to prop up that insatiable land, which seemed to want to return to the days of oblivion, before he rescued it from misery.

“I have to go straighten things out. They need the
patrón
's eye on them,” he murmured.

“Things are getting stormy in the countryside,
patrón
,” his foreman often warned him. “The peasants are up in arms. Every day there are new demands. It seems as if they want to be
patrones
themselves. The best thing you can do is sell the property.”

But Trueba would not hear of selling. “Land is all you have left when everything else falls apart,” he would repeat, almost exactly as he had at the age of twenty-five when his mother and sister were putting pressure on him for the same reason. But with the weight of age and politics, Tres Marías, like many other things that had once seemed essential, had ceased to interest him. Its only value was symbolic.

The foreman was right: those were stormy years. And that was precisely what Pedro Tercero García was proclaiming in his velvet voice, which, thanks to the miracle of radio, now reached the most remote corners of the country. In his mid-thirties, he still looked like a coarse peasant, although it had become more a matter of style since success and his knowledge of the world had softened his roughness and refined his ideas. He wore a woodsman's beard and the flowing hair of a prophet, which he trimmed himself, by memory, with a razor that had been his father's, anticipating by several years the style that was to become all the rage among protest singers. He wore canvas pants, homemade sandals, and a raw wool poncho in the winter. That was his battle dress, and it was how he appeared on the stage and on the covers of his records. Disillusioned with political organizations, he had distilled his thoughts down to three or four basic ideas, on which he built his whole philosophy. He was an anarchist. From the chickens and the foxes he had gone on to sing of life, friendship, love, and also revolution. His music was very popular, and only someone as stubborn as Esteban Trueba could ignore his existence. The old man had refused to allow radios in his house, both to prevent his granddaughter from listening to the soap operas and serials in which mothers lose their children and only recover them years later, and to spare himself the ill effects on his digestion of hearing the subversive songs of his enemy. He did, however, keep a modern radio in his bedroom, but he listened only to the news. He never suspected that Pedro Tercero García was his own son Jaime's best friend, or that he met with Blanca every time she left the house with her clownish suitcase, mumbling excuses. Nor did he know that on certain sunny Sundays Pedro Tercero took Alba hiking, and that as they sat looking out over the city, eating bread and cheese, before tumbling down the slopes, bursting with laughter like two happy puppies, he told her about the poor, the oppressed, the desperate, and other matters that Trueba did not want his granddaughter to know about.

Pedro Tercero watched Alba grow. He tried to be close to her but he never came to think of her as his daughter, because on that point Blanca was inflexible. She said that Alba had withstood many shocking things and that it was a miracle she had turned out to be a relatively normal child; the last thing she needed was any additional confusion about the circumstances of her birth. It was better for her to believe the official version. Besides, she did not want the child discussing this with her grandfather, which would certainly lead to disaster. In any case, the child's free spirit and rebellious nature were gratifying to Pedro Tercero.

“If she's not my daughter, she deserves to be,” he would say proudly.

During all those years, Pedro Tercero never got used to the life of a bachelor, despite his success with women, especially the magnificent adolescents whom the laments of his guitar inflamed with love. Some of them forced their way into his life, and he thrived on the freshness of those love affairs. He tried to make these young girls happy for a short while, but from the very first moment of illusion he began to say goodbye, until he finally, delicately, left them. Frequently, when he was in bed with one of them and she was sighing in her sleep beside him, he would close his eyes and think of Blanca, with her ample, ripe body, her warm, generous breasts, the fine wrinkles at her mouth, and the shadows underneath her Arab eyes, and he would feel a cry pressing in his heart. He tried to stay with other women. He discovered many roads and many bodies trying to distance himself from her, but at the moment of greatest intimacy, the exact point of loneliness and the foreknowledge of death, Blanca was always the only one. The next morning, the whole slow process of withdrawing from his new love would begin. As soon as he was free again, he returned to Blanca, thinner, guiltier, and with deeper rings under his eyes, a new song on his guitar, and a wealth of never-ending caresses for her.

But Blanca was used to living by herself. When all was said and done, she had found peace in her household chores, her ceramics studio, and her crèches of made-up animals in which the only figures that corresponded to the laws of reality were the Holy Family lost in a crowd of monsters. The only man in her life was Pedro Tercero, for she was born to have one love. The strength of this immutable desire saved her from the mediocrity and sadness of her fate. She was faithful to him even in those moments when he lost himself in a sea of straight-haired, long-boned nymphs, and never loved him any the less for his digressions. At first she thought she would die every time he moved away from her, but she soon realized that his absences were only as long as a sigh and that he invariably returned more in love and sweeter than ever. Blanca preferred those furtive hotel rendezvous with her lover to the routine of everyday life, the weariness of marriage and the shared poverty at the end of every month, the bad taste in the mouth on waking up, the tedium of Sundays, and the complaints of old age. She was an incurable romantic. Every once in a while she was tempted to take her clown's suitcase and whatever was left of the jewels from the sock and go off with her daughter to live with him, but she always lost her nerve. Perhaps she feared the grandiose love that had stood so many tests would not be able to withstand the most dreadful test of all: living together. Alba was growing rapidly, and Blanca understood that she would not be able to rely much longer on the excuse that she had to watch over her daughter in order to postpone her lover's needs, but she still preferred to put off the decision to some other time. Actually, much as she feared routine, she was horrified by Pedro Tercero's way of living, and by his modest little house—in a working-class neighborhood among hundreds of others as poorly built—of boards and corrugated metal, with packed earth floors and a single light bulb hanging from the ceiling. For her, Pedro moved out of his neighborhood into a downtown apartment, thereby, without intending to do so, ascending to the middle class to which he had never aspired. But even this was not enough for Blanca, who found the apartment sordid, dark, and narrow and the building crowded. She said she could not let Alba grow up there, playing with other children in the street and on the steps, and attending public school. Thus Blanca's youth went by and she entered middle age, resigned to the fact that her only moments of pleasure would come when she dressed up in her best clothes, her perfume, and her whorish underwear, which captivated Pedro Tercero and which she hid, red with shame, in the bottom of her wardrobe, imagining the explanations she would have to give if anyone discovered them. This woman who was so down to earth and practical in all other aspects of life sublimated her childhood passion and lived it tragically. She fed it with fantasies, idealized it, savagely defended it, stripped it of its prosaic truth, and turned it into the kind of love one found in novels.