The House of the Spirits (36 page)

In the rare moments of leisure Blanca had to think about herself and her daughter, she regretted that her child was so silent and solitary, and that she had no playmates her own age. But Alba did not feel the least bit lonely. In fact there were times when she would have been delighted to escape her grandmother's clairvoyance, her mother's intuition, and the clamor of all the eccentric people who were constantly appearing, disappearing, and reappearing in the big house on the corner. It also worried Blanca that her daughter did not play with dolls, but Clara took her granddaughter's side, arguing that those tiny porcelain corpses with eyes that opened and shut and perverse, pouting mouths were repulsive. She herself constructed shapeless beings made of leftover scraps from the wool she used to knit for the poor. These creatures had no human traits, which made it much easier to cradle them, rock them, bathe them, and then throw them in the garbage. But the child's favorite plaything was the basement. Because of the rats, Esteban Trueba had ordered the door bolted shut, but Alba would slip down through a skylight and land noiselessly in that paradise of long-forgotten objects. The place was always dark and protected from the ravages of time, like a sealed pyramid. There were piles of cast-off furniture, tools of mysterious utility, broken machinery, and pieces of Covadonga, the prehistoric automobile that her uncles had taken apart and rebuilt into a racing car and that had ended its days as a heap of scrap iron. Alba used these things to build houses in the corners. There were trunks and suitcases filled with old clothes, which she used to stage her solitary plays, and a sad, dark, moth-eaten rug with the head of a dog, which when laid out on the floor resembled a wretched animal that had been split open. It was the last, ignominious vestige of faithful Barrabás.

One Christmas Eve, Clara gave her granddaughter a fabulous present that occasionally superseded the fascination of the basement: a box filled with jars of paint, brushes, a small ladder, and permission to use the biggest wall in her bedroom whenever she wanted.

“This will give her an outlet for her feelings,” Clara said, watching Alba balanced on the ladder, painting a train full of animals just below the ceiling.

With the passage of time, Alba filled not only one but all her bedroom walls with an immense fresco. In the midst of a Venusian flora and an impossible fauna of invented animals much like those Rosa had embroidered on her tablecloth and Blanca baked in her kiln, she painted all the wishes, memories, sorrows, and joys of her childhood.

Her two uncles were very close to her. Jaime was her favorite. He was a large, hairy man who shaved twice a day and still looked as if he had a four-day-old beard. He had black, evil-looking eyebrows that he combed upward to make his niece believe that he was in league with the devil, and hair stiff as a broom, which he slicked down to no avail and which was always damp. He came and went with his books under his arm and a plumber's bag in his hand. He had told Alba that he worked as a jewelry thief and that the dreadful bag contained his picklocks and brass knuckles. The child pretended to be frightened, but she knew her uncle was a doctor and that the bag contained the tools of his profession. Together they had invented certain imaginary games to entertain themselves on rainy afternoons.

“Bring on the elephant!” Uncle Jaime would command.

Alba would go out and return pulling an imaginary pachyderm on an invisible rope. They could spend a good half hour giving him the herbs elephants like to eat, bathing his skin with mud to protect it from the harsh effects of bad weather, and polishing his ivory tusks while they heatedly discussed the advantages and disadvantages of living in the jungle.

“This child is going to wind up stark raving mad!” Senator Trueba would say whenever he saw little Alba sitting on the balcony reading the medical treatises her Uncle Jaime lent her.

She was the only person in the house who had the key to her uncle's tunnel of books, along with his permission to take them out and read them. Blanca argued that her reading should be monitored because there were certain things that were inappropriate for her age, but her Uncle Jaime felt that people never read what did not interest them and that if it interested them that meant they were sufficiently mature to read it. He had the same theory about bathing and eating. He said that if the child did not want to take a bath, it was because she did not need to, and that she should be fed whatever she wanted whenever she was hungry, because the body knows its needs better than anyone. On this point, however, Blanca was inflexible, forcing her daughter to observe a strict schedule and the usual rules of hygiene. The upshot was that in addition to her normal baths and meals, Alba sucked the candies her uncle brought her and hosed herself down whenever she was hot, neither of these two activities having the slightest effect on her healthy constitution. Alba would have liked her Uncle Jaime to marry her mother, because it was safer to have him as a father than an uncle, but it was explained to her that this sort of incestuous union produces mongoloid offspring. As a result, she imagined that the pupils at her mother's Thursday workshops were her uncles' children.

Nicolás was also close to the little girl's heart, but there was something ephemeral and volatile about him. He was always in a hurry, always just passing through, as if he were jumping from one idea to another, and this made Alba uneasy. She was five years old when her Uncle Nicolás returned from India. Tired of invoking God through the three-legged table and a cloud of hashish, he had decided to seek Him in a region less harsh than his native land. He spent two months harassing Clara, following her around the house and whispering in her ear while she was asleep, until he finally convinced her to sell a diamond ring to pay his way to the land of Mahatma Gandhi. This time Esteban Trueba did not attempt to hold him back, because he thought a trip through that distant nation of starving people and nomadic cows would do his son a lot of good.

“If you don't die of a snakebite or some foreign plague, I hope you return a man, because I'm fed up with all your eccentricities,” his father told him when he said goodbye to him on the pier.

Nicolás spent a year as a beggar, following the path of the yogis, across the Himalayas, through Katmandu, along the Ganges, and on to Benares, all on foot. By the end of this pilgrimage he was convinced that God exists, and had learned to pierce his cheeks and chest with hatpins and to live practically without eating. The family saw him coming toward the house one ordinary morning with an infant's diaper covering his private parts, his skin clinging to his bones, and that lost gaze so often observed in those who eat only vegetables. He was escorted by two incredulous policemen who were ready to arrest him unless he could prove that he really was the son of Senator Trueba, and by a knot of children who were running along behind him throwing garbage at him and laughing. Clara was the only one who had no difficulty recognizing him. His father reassured the policemen and ordered Nicolás to take a bath and put on some normal clothes if he wanted stay in the house, but Nicolás stared at him without seeing and did not reply. He had become a vegetarian. He did not eat meat, milk, or eggs. His diet was the same as a rabbit's, and his anxious face gradually came to resemble the face of that animal. He chewed each mouthful of his sparse nourishment fifty times. Meals became an endless ritual, during which Alba fell asleep on her empty plate and the servants dozed in the kitchen over their trays, while Nicolás solemnly chewed his food. Esteban Trueba stopped going to the house and took his meals at the club. Nicolás insisted he could walk barefoot on a bed of coals, but each time he announced a demonstration, Clara had an asthma attack and he was forced to stop. He spoke in Asiatic parables that could not always be understood. His only interests were of a spiritual nature. The materialism of domestic life and the excessive ministrations of his mother and his sister, who insisted on feeding and dressing him, irritated him, as did Alba's fascinated pursuit. She followed him around the house like a puppy, begging him to show her how to stand on her head and stick pins through her skin. He remained naked even after winter set in. He could go three minutes without breathing and was ready to demonstrate this accomplishment whenever anybody asked, which was quite often. Jaime said it was a shame that air was free, because according to his calculations Nicolás breathed only half of what a normal person did, although this did not appear to affect him in the least. He spent the winter locked in his room eating carrots, without complaining about the cold, and filling page after page with his minute handwriting in black ink. With the first signs of spring, he announced that his book was completed. He had one thousand five hundred pages and managed to convince his father and brother Jaime to pay for it, against whatever profits its sale might bring. After being corrected and printed, the one thousand five hundred pages reduced themselves to six hundred, yielding a voluminous treatise on the ninety-nine names of God and formulas for attaining nirvana through respiratory exercise. The book was not the success he had hoped for, and boxes filled with copies wound up in the basement, where Alba used them as bricks to build her trenches, until the day years later when they were used to fuel an infamous bonfire.

As soon as the book was off the presses, Nicolás cradled it lovingly in his arms, recovered his hyena smile, put on decent clothes, and announced that the time had come to bring The Truth to those of his generation who remained shrouded in darkness. Esteban Trueba reminded him that he was not welcome to use the house as an academy and warned him that he would not tolerate his putting pagan ideas into Alba's head, much less teaching her his fakir's tricks. Nicolás went off to preach at the cafeteria in the university, where he acquired an impressive number of followers for his classes in spiritual and respiratory exercise. He spent his free time riding his motorcycle and teaching his niece how to conquer pain and other weaknesses of the flesh. His method consisted of identifying whatever made her frightened. The child, who had a certain inclination for the macabre, would concentrate according to her uncle's instructions until she was able to visualize her mother's death as if it were really happening. She saw her chalk-white and cold, her beautiful purple eyes shut, lying in her coffin. She heard the weeping of the family. She saw the silent procession of friends file in, leave their calling cards on a tray, and walk out with bowed heads. She smelled the flowers and heard the neighing of the plumed horses of the funeral carriage. She felt how her feet hurt in her new mourning shoes. She imagined her loneliness, her abandonment, her orphanhood. Her uncle helped her think of all these things without crying, and taught her to relax and not resist the pain so that it would pass through her without stopping. Other times, Alba would squeeze a finger in the door and learn to withstand the burning pain without complaint. If she managed to get through an entire week without crying, overcoming all the tests Nicolás imposed, she won a prize, which almost always consisted of a motorcycle ride at breakneck speed—an unforgettable experience. Once they wound up in the middle of a herd of cows that were going toward the stable, along a road on the edge of the city where Nicolás had taken his niece as her reward. She would always remember the heavy animals, their slowness, their filthy tails hitting her in the face, the smell of dung, the horns grazing her, and the terrible sensation of emptiness in her stomach, of fantastic vertigo, of incredible excitement, a mixture of passionate curiosity and terror that she only felt again in a few fleeting moments of her life.

Esteban Trueba, who had always found it difficult to express his emotions and had had no access to tenderness ever since his relationship with Clara had deteriorated, transferred all his finest sentiments to Alba. The child meant more to him than his own children ever had. Every morning, still in her pajamas, she went to her grandfather's room. She entered without knocking and climbed into his bed. He would pretend to wake up with a start, even though he was actually expecting her, and growled that she should not disturb him and that she should go back to her room and let him sleep. Alba tickled him until, apparently defeated, he permitted her to look for the chocolate he always had hidden for her. Alba knew all his hiding places and her grandfather always used them in the exact same order, but so as not to disappoint him she spent a long time looking, and when she found it she shrieked with joy. Esteban never knew that his granddaughter hated chocolate and that she ate it only out of love for him. Those morning games satisfied the senator's need for human contact. The rest of the day he was busy with the Congress, the club, playing golf, his business, and his political meetings. Twice a year he went to Tres Marías with his granddaughter for two or three weeks. They both returned looking tanned, happier, and fatter. There they distilled a homemade brandy that was used as a drink, to light the stove, to disinfect wounds, and to kill cockroaches; they pompously called it “vodka.” At the end of his life, when his ninety years had turned him into a twisted, fragile tree, Esteban Trueba would recall those moments with his granddaughter as the happiest of his whole existence. Alba too remembered the complicity of those trips to the country holding on to her grandfather's hand, the jaunts behind him in the saddle of his horse, the sunsets in the vast pastures, the long nights beside the living-room fireplace telling ghost stories and drawing pictures.

Senator Trueba's relationship with the rest of his family only worsened with time. Once a week, on Saturday, they all dined around the great oak table that had always been in the family and had first belonged to the del Valles; it was the most ancient of antiques, and had been used for laying out the dead, for Spanish dances, and for other unexpected needs. Alba was seated between her grandmother and mother, with a cushion on her chair so that her nose would reach her plate. The child watched the adults in fascination. There was her radiant grandmother, her teeth in place for the occasion, sending messages to her husband through her children or the servants; Jaime flaunting his bad manners by burping after each course and picking his teeth with his little finger to annoy his father; Nicolás with his eyes half closed chewing every bite fifty times; and Blanca chattering about anything she could think of just to create the illusion of a normal meal. Trueba remained relatively silent until his bad temper betrayed him and he began to argue with Jaime about the poor, the elections, the Socialists, and basic principles, or to insult Nicolás for his attempts to launch a balloon and practice acupuncture on Alba, or to punish Blanca with his harsh replies, his indifference, and his useless warnings that she had already ruined her life and that she would never inherit so much as a peso from him. The only one he did not confront was Clara, but, of course, he barely spoke to her. At times Alba caught her grandfather staring at Clara until he turned white and sweet, and looked like an old man they had never seen before. But this happened only rarely; typically, husband and wife ignored each other. Sometimes Senator Trueba lost his temper and screamed so much that he turned red and they had to throw a jugful of cold water in his face so that the fit would pass and his breathing would return to normal.