The House of the Spirits

“I would like to have been born a man, so I could leave too,” she said, full of hatred.

“And I would not have liked to be a woman,” he said.

Esteban did not remove his clothes. He attacked her savagely, thrusting himself into her without preamble, with unnecessary brutality. He realized too late, from the blood spattered on her dress, that the young girl was a virgin, but neither Pancha’s humble origin nor the pressing demands of his desire allowed him to reconsider. Pancha García made no attempt to defend herself. She did not complain, nor did she shut her eyes. She lay on her back, staring at the sky with terror, until she felt the man drop to the ground beside her with a moan. She began to whimper softly. Before her, her mother—and before her, her grandmother—had suffered the same animal fate.

In vain, Pedro Segundo García and the old priest from the nuns’ hospital tried to suggest to him that it was not little brick houses or pints of milk that made a man a good employer or an honest Christian, but rather giving his workers a decent salary instead of slips of pink paper, a workload that did not grind their bones to dust, and a little respect and dignity. Trueba would not listen to this sort of thing: it smacked, he said, of Communism.

His house would be the reflection of himself, his family, and the prestige he planned to give the surname that his father had stained. […] He could hardly guess that that solemn, cubic, dense, pompous house, which sat like a hat amid its green and geometric surroundings, would end up full of protuberances and incrustations, of twisted staircases that led to empty spaces, of turrets, of small windows that could not be opened, doors hanging in midair, crooked hallways, and portholes that linked the living quarters so that people could communicate during the siesta, all of which were Clara’s inspiration. Every time a new guest arrived, she would have another room built in another part of the house, and if the spirits told her that there was a hidden treasure or an unburied body in the foundation, she would have a wall knocked down, until the mansion was transformed into an enchanted labyrinth that was impossible to clean and that defied any number of state and city laws.

“Father, 1 don’t know how to say this. I think I committed a sin.”

“Of the flesh, my child?”

“My flesh is withered, Father, but not my spirit! The devil is tormenting me.”

“The mercy of the Lord is infinite.”

“You don’t know the thoughts that can run through the mind of a single woman, Father, a virgin who has never been with a man, not for any lack of opportunities but because God sent my mother a protracted illness and I had to be her nurse.”

“That sacrifice is recorded in heaven, my child.”

“Even if I sinned in my thoughts?”

“Well, it depends on your thoughts....”

“I can’t sleep at night. I feel as if I’m choking. I get up and walk around the garden and then I walk inside the house. I go to my sister-in-law’s room and put my ear to her door. Sometimes I tiptoe in and watch her while she sleeps. She looks like an angel. I want to climb into bed with her and feel the warmth of her skin and her gentle breathing.”

He was the son of Esteban García, the only bastard offspring of the patrón named for him. No one knew his origin, or the reason he had that name, except himself, because his grandmother, Pancha García, had managed before she died to poison his childhood with the story that if only his father had been born in place of Blanca, Jaime, or Nicolás, he would have inherited Tres Marías, and could even have been President of the Republic if he wanted. In that part of the country, which was littered with illegitimate children and even legitimate ones who had never met their fathers, he was probably the only one to grow up hating his last name. He hated Esteban Trueba, his seduced grandmother, his bastard father, and his own inexorable peasant fate.

It was Pedro Tercero García, who hadn’t wanted to miss his grandfather’s funeral and took advantage of the borrowed cassock to harangue the workers house by house, explaining that the coming elections were their chance to shake off the yoke under which they had always lived. They listened in surprise and confusion. For them, time was measured in seasons, and thought by generations. They were slow and cautious. Only the very young ones, those who had radios and listened to the news, those who sometimes went to town and talked with the union men, were able to follow his train of thought. The others listened to him because he was the hero the owners were after, but they were convinced that he was talking nonsense.

In Trueba’s opinion, the time had arrived for him to come out in defense of the national interest and of the Conservative Party, since no one better personified the honest, uncontaminated politician, as he himself declared, adding that he had pulled himself up by his own bootstraps, and not only that, had created jobs and a decent life for all his workers and owned the only hacienda with little brick houses. He respected the law, the nation, and tradition, and no one could accuse him of any greater offense than tax evasion.

“You’re a hopeless loser, son,” Trueba would say, sighing. “You have no sense of reality. You’ve never taken stock of how the world really is. You put your faith in utopian values that don’t even exist.”

“Helping one’s neighbor is a value that exists.”

“No. Charity, like Socialism, is an invention of the weak to exploit the strong and bring them to their knees.”

He had finally come to accept—beaten into it by the tide of new ideas— that not all women were complete idiots, and he believed that Alba, who was too plain to attract a well-to-do husband, could enter one of the professions and make her living like a man.

When the project was complete, I came up against an unexpected obstacle: I was unable to transfer Rosa to the new tomb because the del Valle family objected. I tried to convince them, using every argument I could think of along with gifts and pressure, even bringing my political power to bear, but it was all in vain. My brothers-in-law were unyielding. I think they must have heard about Nívea’s head and were angry with me for having kept it in the basement all that time. In light of their obstinacy, I called Jaime in and told him to get ready to accompany me to the cemetery to steal Rosa’s body. He didn’t look surprised.

“If they won’t give her to us, we’ll have to take her by force,” I told him.

“We’re not interested in a military coup, General,” the head of Embassy intelligence replied in studied Spanish. “We want Marxism to be a colossal failure and for it to fall alone, so we can erase it from the people’s minds throughout the continent. You understand? We’re going to solve this problem with money. We can still buy a few members of Congress so they won’t confirm him as President. It’s in your Constitution: he didn’t get an absolute majority, and Congress has to make the final choice.”

“Get that idea out of your head, mister!” Trueba exclaimed. “You’re not going to bribe anyone around here! The Congress and the armed forces are above corruption. It would be better if we used the money to buy the mass media. That would give us a way to manipulate public opinion, which is the only thing that really counts.”

At first his long democratic experience impeded his ability to set traps for the new government, but he soon gave up the idea of obstructing it by legal means and came to accept the fact that the only way to unseat it was by using illegal ones. He was the first to declare in public that only a military coup could halt the advance of Marxism because people who had anxiously waited fifty years to be in power would not relinquish it because there was a chicken shortage.

[…] I’ve spent a whole month looking for her and I’m going crazy, these are the things that make the junta look so bad abroad and give the United Nations reason to screw around with human rights, at first I didn’t want to hear about the dead, the tortured, and the disappeared, but now I can’t keep thinking they’re just Communist lies, because even the gringos, who were the first to help the military and sent their own pilots to bombard the Presidential Palace, are scandalized by all the killing, it’s not that I’m against repression, I understand that in the beginning you have to be firm if you want a return to order, but things have gotten out of hand […].

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.