The House of the Spirits (25 page)

“At least he's civilizing us,” she said.

Esteban Trueba was less impressed by the nobleman's bragging than he was by the chinchillas. He wondered why in God's name he had not thought of tanning their skins himself, instead of wasting so much time raising all those stupid chickens that died of diarrhea at the drop of a hat, and all those cows that had to chew through acres of pasture and a whole box of vitamins for one lousy quart of milk and were always covered with shit and flies. But Clara and Pedro Segundo García did not share Esteban's enthusiasm for the rodents, she for humanitarian reasons, since she thought it was horrendous to raise them just so you could skin them, and he because he had never heard of keeping rats in special houses.

One night the count went out to smoke one of his Oriental cigarettes, specially imported from Lebanon—wherever that was, as Trueba always said—and to inhale the scent of the flowers, which rose in great mouthfuls from the garden, filling every room in the house. He walked up and down the terrace, taking in the expanse of the land around the house, sighing aloud at the thought of that exuberant nature which could assemble, in the most godforsaken country on the planet, mountains and sea, valleys and sky-scraping peaks, rivers of crystalline water, and a peaceful fauna that allowed you to wander tranquilly without having to worry about poisonous snakes or starving beasts. And, completing his idea of perfection, there were no resentful Negroes or wild Indians. He was fed up with traveling through exotic countries selling shark-fin aphrodisiacs, ginseng to cure all ills, carved Eskimo statues, stuffed Amazonian piranhas, and chinchillas for ladies' coats. He was thirty-eight years old, at least that is what he admitted to, and he felt that he had finally found paradise on earth, where he could settle into some sort of easygoing business with a few ingenuous partners. He sat down on a log to smoke in the darkness. Suddenly he saw a shadow moving. For a fleeting second he thought it might be a thief, but then he discounted that, because robbers in a place like this were as unlikely as wild animals. He approached cautiously and saw that it was Blanca, who was letting her legs out the window and slipping down the wall like a cat, falling noiselessly onto the hydrangeas below. She was dressed like a man, because by now the dogs knew her and she no longer needed to go naked. Jean de Satigny observed her walk off under the eaves of the house and in the shadow of the trees; he was going to follow her, but then he thought better of it. He was frightened of the dogs, and he realized that he did not need to follow her to know where a young girl would be going who escaped through her bedroom window in the dead of night. But he was worried, because what he had just seen jeopardized the scheme he had in mind.

The next day the count asked for Blanca Trueba's hand in marriage. Esteban, who had not had a chance to get to know his daughter, mistook her placid amiability and her eagerness to set the table with the silver candlesticks for love. He was delighted that his daughter, so bored and in such bad health, should have managed to land the most sought-after bachelor in the area. What could he have seen in her? he wondered, taken aback. He told the count that he would have to discuss it with his daughter, but that he was sure there would be no objection and that, as for himself, he was overjoyed to welcome him into his family. He summoned his daughter, who was giving a geography class in the school, and locked himself in his office with her. Five minutes later the door swung open and the count saw the young girl exit with her cheeks aflame. She shot him a murderous look and turned her face away. Someone less tenacious would have packed his bags and gone to stay in the only hotel in town, but the count told Esteban that he was sure of winning the girl's love if they only gave him enough time. Esteban Trueba told him he was welcome to stay in Tres Marías for as long as he thought necessary. Blanca said nothing, but from that day on she refused to join them at the table and missed no opportunity to make the Frenchman feel unwanted. She put away her party dresses and the silver candlesticks and carefully avoided him. She told her father that if he ever mentioned marriage again, she would take the first train out of town and return to her convent as a novice.

“You'll change your mind!” Esteban Trueba roared.

“I doubt it,” she replied.

The arrival of the twins at Tres Marías that year was a great relief. They brought a gust of freshness and vitality to the oppressed atmosphere of the hacienda. Neither of the two brothers appreciated the Frenchman's charms, despite his discreet attempts to win their favor. Jaime and Nicolás made fun of his fine manners, his effeminate shoes, and his foreign name, but Jean de Satigny did not seem to mind. His good humor disarmed them in the end, and they wound up spending the remainder of the summer on good terms. They even joined forces with him to lure Blanca out of her determined obstinacy.

“You're already twenty-four, sister. Do you want to end up saying rosaries for the poor?”

They tried to convince her to cut her hair and copy the dresses that were all the rage in the fashion magazines, but she had no interest in those exotic styles, which would not have had a prayer of surviving the dustbowl of the countryside.

The twins were so different they did not even look like brothers. Jaime was tall, robust, timid, and studious. Since his school required it, he had managed to develop an athletic build in gym, but he viewed sports as a dull and useless pastime. He could not understand how Jean de Satigny could spend the whole morning hitting a ball with a stick just to knock it through a metal hoop when it was so much easier to put it in with your hand. Jaime had various strange habits that became evident around that time and grew more pronounced over the course of his life. He did not like anyone to breathe too close to him, shake his hand, ask him personal questions, ask to borrow books, or write him letters. This made his dealings with people difficult, but it did not isolate him, because within five minutes of meeting him it was clear that, despite his peevish attitude, he was generous and candid and had a tremendous capacity for kindness, which he tried in vain to cover up because it embarrassed him. He was much more interested in others than he let on, and it was easy to move him. The tenants of Tres Marías called him “the little
patrón,
” and he was the one they turned to whenever they needed something. Jaime would listen to them without saying a word, respond in monosyllables, and then turn his back on them, but he would not rest until he had solved their problem. He was unsociable, and his mother said that even as a child he would not let anybody touch him. From the time he was a little boy he had had outlandish habits. He would take his clothes off and give them to someone else. Affection and the expression of emotions struck him as signs of inferiority. Only with animals did he relax his exaggerated modesty; he rolled on the ground with them, ran his hands over them, fed them directly in the mouth, and slept curled up with the dogs. He would do the same with very young children, provided no one was watching; when there were other people around, he preferred to play the strong, solitary man. His twelve years of British schooling had failed to give him spleen, which was considered a gentleman's most attractive trait. He was incorrigibly sentimental. This was why he had become interested in politics and decided not to be a lawyer, as his father wished, but a doctor who would help the needy, as his mother, who knew him better, had suggested. Jaime had played with Pedro Tercero García throughout his childhood, but not until that year did he come to admire him. Blanca had to forgo two of their meetings by the river in order for the young men to meet. They talked of justice, of equality, of the peasant movement and of Socialism, while Blanca listened with impatience, wishing they would hurry up and finish their discussion so she could be alone with her lover. This friendship linked the two boys until death, without Esteban Trueba's ever finding out.

Nicolás was as pretty as a girl. He had inherited his mother's delicate, transparent skin, and was small, astute, and fleet-footed as a fox. He was blindingly intelligent, and effortlessly surpassed his brother in everything they undertook together. He had invented a game to torture him with: he would take the opposing side on any argument, and would argue so well and so persuasively that he always ended convincing Jaime that he was wrong, forcing him to admit his error.

“Are you sure I'm right?” Nicolás would finally ask his brother.

“Yes, you're right,” Jaime would grudgingly admit with a rectitude that prevented him from arguing in bad faith.

“Good!” Nicolás would exclaim. “Because now I'm going to prove that you're right and I'm wrong. I'm going to give you the arguments you would have given me if you were smarter.”

Jaime would lose patience and start beating up his brother but he would quickly regret it, because he was much stronger than Nicolás and his own strength made him feel guilty. At school, Nicolás used his intelligence to pester others, and whenever he found himself faced with a violent situation he would call in his brother to defend him while he egged him on from behind. Jaime got used to standing in for Nicolás, and it seemed perfectly normal to him to be punished instead of his brother, to do his homework, and cover up his lies. Apart from girls, Nicolás's primary interest in that period of his life was to cultivate Clara's capacity for predicting the future. He bought books about secret societies, about horoscopes, and anything that had to do with the supernatural. That year he also took to exposing miracles. He bought a popular edition of
The Lives of the Saints
and spent the summer looking for ordinary explanations of the most extraordinary spiritual feats. His mother made fun of him.

“If you can't understand how the telephone works,” she would say, “how do you expect to understand miracles?”

Nicolás's interest in supernatural things had begun a few years earlier. On the weekends when he was allowed to leave his boarding school, he would visit the three Mora sisters in their old mill to study various occult sciences. But it soon became abundantly clear that he had not the slightest talent for clairvoyance or telekinesis, and he was forced to be content with the mechanics of astrological charts, tarot cards, and the
I Ching.
And since one thing always leads to another, at the house of the Mora sisters he met a beautiful young woman named Amanda, somewhat older than himself, who initiated him into yogic meditation and acupuncture, sciences that Nicolás later used to treat rheumatism and other minor pains, which was more than his brother would be able to do with traditional medicine after seven years of school. But that was all much later. That summer he was twenty-one and he was bored in the country. His brother kept close watch to prevent him from giving the girls a hard time, for Jaime had proclaimed himself the protector of the maidenly virtues of Tres Marías; despite this, Nicolás managed to seduce almost all the adolescent girls around, using acts of gallantry never seen before in those parts. The rest of his time Nicolás spent investigating miracles, trying to learn the tricks his mother used to move saltcellars with her mind, and writing passionate stanzas to Amanda, who sent them back by return mail, corrected and improved, without deterring her admirer in the least.

*  *  *

Old Pedro García died a few days before the Presidential elections. The nation was convulsed by the campaign; special trains crossed the country from north to south, the candidates appearing at the rear with their retinue of proselytes, greeting everyone exactly the same way, promising exactly the same things, festooned with banners and roaring with a choral society and loudspeakers that shattered the tranquil landscape and stunned the cattle. The old man had lived so long that he was nothing more than a pile of glass bones covered by a yellow skin. His face was a latticework of wrinkles. He clacked as he walked, rattling like a pair of castanets, and since he had no teeth he was forced to eat baby food. Though he was blind and deaf, he never failed to recognize things and his memory of the past and the immediate present was remarkable. He died sitting in his wicker chair at dusk. He liked to sit in the doorway of his little house and feel the sun go down, which he could sense from the subtle change in temperature, the sounds in the courtyard, the haste of the cooks, and the silence of the hens. It was there that death found him. At his feet was his great-grandson Esteban García, who was by that time almost ten, driving a nail through the eyes of a chicken. 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. Esteban Trueba did not treat him any differently from any of the other children around the property. He was simply one more in the pile of creatures who sang the national anthem in the schoolhouse and stood in line to receive their Christmas presents. Trueba had forgotten all about Pancha García and the fact that he had had a child with her, much less the sullen little grandson who despised him but watched him from afar to imitate his gestures and his speech. The child would lie awake at night imagining all sorts of dreadful illnesses and accidents that could put an end to the life of the
patrón
and his children so that he could inherit the property. Tres Marías would become his kingdom. He nursed these fantasies throughout his life, even long after it was evident that he would receive nothing by way of inheritance. He always reproached Trueba for the dark existence he had forged for him, and he felt constantly punished, even in the days when he had reached the height of his power and had them all in his fist.