The House of the Spirits (8 page)

I soon felt at home in the country. My closest neighbors were a good horse ride away, but I wasn't interested in having a social life. I enjoyed my solitude, and besides I had a lot of work on my hands. I gradually became a savage. I began to forget words, my vocabulary grew smaller, and I became very demanding. Since I had no need to keep up appearances, the bad character I've always had only got worse. Everything made me angry. I got furious if I saw the children circling the kitchen to steal bread, if the hens were noisy in the courtyard, if sparrows invaded the cornfields. When my ill humor began to bother me and I felt uncomfortable in my own skin, I would go out hunting. I would wake up long before dawn and leave with my shotgun on my shoulder, with my game bag and my partridge hound. I liked to ride horseback in the dark, and I liked the cold air of those early hours, the long wait in the shadows, the silence, the smell of gunpowder and blood, the feel of the weapon drawn back against my shoulder with a dry knock, and the sight of the prey as it fell kicking. All this would calm me, and when I returned from hunting, with four wretched rabbits in my pouch, and a few partridges so full of holes that they couldn't even be cooked, half dead on my feet and covered with mud, I felt happy and relieved.

Whenever I think back on those days, I feel a great sadness. My life has gone by very fast. If I had it to do over again, there are a few mistakes I wouldn't make, but in general there's nothing I regret. Yes, I've been a good
patrón;
there's no doubt about it.

*  *  *

The first months, Esteban Trueba was so busy channeling water, digging wells, removing stones, clearing pastures, and repairing the chicken coops and stables that he had no time to think about anything. He went to bed thoroughly exhausted and woke at dawn, stopping just long enough to eat a meager breakfast in the kitchen before riding off to supervise the work in the fields. He did not return until sundown. Only then did he sit down to eat his one real meal of the day, alone at the dining-room table. The first months, he kept his promise to himself of always bathing and changing his clothes for dinner, as he had heard the British colonizers did in the most distant hamlets of Africa and Asia, so as not to lose their dignity and authority. He would put on his best clothes, shave, and play his favorite opera arias on the gramophone. But little by little he let himself be conquered by rusticity, and came to accept the fact that he had no calling as a dandy, especially since there was no one to appreciate his efforts. He stopped shaving, cut his hair only when it reached his shoulders, and continued to bathe once a day only because the habit was so ingrained in him, but he grew indifferent to his clothes and manners. He was slowly becoming a barbarian. Before going to sleep he would read for a while or play chess. He had developed the ability to compete against a book without cheating and had learned to lose matches without getting mad. Still, the exhaustion produced by so much hard work was not enough to suppress his robust and sensual nature. He began to have difficult nights in which the blankets seemed excessively heavy to him, the sheets too light. His horse played nasty tricks on him, suddenly becoming a formidable female, a hard, wild mountain of flesh, on which he rode until his bones ached. The warm, aromatic melons in his orchard looked to him like enormous breasts, and he was astonished to find himself burying his face in his saddle blanket, seeking in the sour smell of his horse's sweat the forbidden, distant scent of his first prostitutes. During the night, he sweated through nightmares of rotten shellfish, of enormous slabs of raw beef, of blood, semen, and tears. He would wake up tense, with his penis like an iron rod between his legs, angrier than ever. Hoping for relief, he would run out and plunge naked into the icy waters of the river until he couldn't breathe, but then he would feel invisible hands stroking his legs. Beaten, he would let himself float aimlessly, feeling the hug of the current, the kiss of the tadpoles, the lash of the rushes that grew along the banks. Soon his terrible need became notorious. Nothing could quench it, neither immersing himself in the river, nor cinnamon teas, nor placing a piece of flint beneath his mattress, not even those shameful manipulations that drove the boys in boarding school out of their minds, left them blind, and plunged them into eternal damnation. When he began to look with concupiscent eyes at the birds in the corral, the children playing naked in the orchard, and even at raw bread dough, he understood that his virility would not be soothed by priestly substitutes. His common sense told him that he would have to find a woman, and once he had made up his mind, the terrible anxiety that afflicted him began to ebb and his fury seemed to abate. That day he woke up smiling for the first time in months.

Pedro García, the old man, saw him whistling on his way to the stables, and shook his head in wonder.

All that day, the
patrón
was busy plowing a field that had just been cleared and that was slated to be planted with corn. Afterward he went with Pedro Segundo García to attend to a cow that was in the process of giving birth and whose calf was turned the wrong way around. He had to stick his arm in up to the elbow to turn the creature upside down and help it pull its head through. The cow died anyway, but he did not get upset about it. He ordered the calf bottle-fed, washed himself in a pail, and got back on his horse. Normally it would have been his dinnertime, but he was not hungry. He was in no hurry, for he had already made his choice.

He had seen the girl many times carrying her sniveling little brother on her hip, with a bag on her shoulder or a water jug on her head. He had watched her washing clothes, squatting on the flat stones of the river, her dark legs polished by the water, as she rubbed the faded rags with her rough peasant hands. She was big-boned and had an Indian face, with broad features, dark skin, and a sweet, peaceful expression. Her fleshy ample mouth still had all its teeth, and when she smiled her whole face lit up, but that did not happen very often. She had the beauty of early youth, although he could see that it would quickly fade, as it does with women who are born to have many children, work without rest, and bury their dead. Her name was Pancha García, and she was fifteen years old.

When Esteban Trueba went out to look for her, it was already late in the afternoon and the air was crisp. He rode his horse slowly through the long stretches of green that separated the pastures, asking after her as he went, until he spotted her on the path that led to her hut. She was doubled over beneath the weight of a sheaf of hawthorn for the kitchen hearth, barefoot, her head bowed. He looked at her from high in the saddle and immediately felt the urgent desire that had been tormenting him for so many months. He trotted up until he was right beside her. She heard him, but she continued walking without looking up, following the custom of all the women of her kind who bow their heads before the male. Esteban bent down and removed her burden, held it in the air for a moment, and then hurled it violently to the side of the path. He threw his arm around her waist, swept her up with an animal-like grunt, and placed her before him in the saddle. The girl did not resist. He kicked his heels in the stirrups and they took off at a gallop in the direction of the river. They dismounted without speaking and looked each other over. Esteban unfastened his broad leather belt and she stepped back, but he grabbed her with a single stroke of his hand. They fell arm in arm among the eucalyptus leaves.

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. Esteban Trueba adjusted his trousers, fastened his belt, helped her to her feet, and lifted her onto the haunches of his horse. They headed back. He was whistling. She continued to weep. Before dropping her off at her hut, the
patrón
kissed her on the lips.

“Starting tomorrow, I want you to work in the house,” he said.

Pancha agreed without looking up. Her mother and her grandmother had also been servants in the main house.

That night, Esteban Trueba slept like an angel, without dreaming of Rosa. He woke the next morning full of energy, feeling taller and stronger. He set off for the fields humming, and when he returned Pancha was in the kitchen, busily stirring marmalade in a huge copper pot. That night he waited for her with impatience, and when the sounds of housework fell silent in the old adobe house and the nocturnal scampering of the rats began, he felt the girl's presence in the doorway of his room.

“Come, Pancha,” he called. It was not an order, but an entreaty.

Now Esteban took the time to savor her fully and made sure that she felt pleasure too. He explored her slowly, learning by heart the smoky scent of her body and her clothes, which had been washed with ash and pressed with a coal-filled iron. He learned the texture of her straight, dark hair, of her skin that was soft in the most hidden places and rough and callused everywhere else, of her fresh lips, her tranquil sex, and her broad belly. He desired her calmly, initiating her into the most secret and most ancient of sciences. He was probably happy that night and the few nights after as the two of them cavorted like two puppies in the huge wrought-iron bed that had belonged to the first Trueba and was now somewhat wobbly, although it still withstood the thrusts of love.

Pancha García's breasts swelled and her hips filled out. Esteban Trueba's ill humor lifted for a while, and he took a certain interest in his tenants. He went to visit them in their wretched huts. In the shadows of one of them he came upon a box filled with newspaper, in which a newborn baby and a puppy lay in a shared sleep. In another he saw an old woman who had been slowly dying for the past four years, whose shoulder blades were jutting through the open wounds in her back. In a courtyard, moored to a post, he saw a teenaged idiot with a rope around his neck, drooling and babbling incoherently as he stood there naked, with a mule-sized penis that he beat incessantly against the ground. For the first time in his life, he realized that the worst abandonment of Tres Marías was not that of land and animals but of the people, who had lived unprotected ever since his father had gambled away his mother's dowry and inheritance. He decided it was time to bring a bit of civilization to this outpost hidden halfway between the mountains and the sea.

*  *  *

A fever of activity commenced that shook Tres Marías from its stupor. Esteban Trueba put people to work as they had never worked in their whole lives. Anxious to rescue in the course of a few months what had lain in ruins for years, the
patrón
hired every man, woman, old person, and child who could stand on his own two feet. He had a granary built, as well as larders for storing food in winter. He had horse meat salted and pork smoked, and set the women to making fruit preserves. He modernized the dairy, which was just an old shed filled with flies and manure, and forced the cows to produce enough milk to meet his needs. He began construction of a six-room schoolhouse, because he aspired to the day when all the children and adults of Tres Marías would know how to read, write, and do simple arithmetic, even though he was not in favor of their acquiring any additional learning, for fear they would fill their minds with ideas unsuited to their station and condition. Nonetheless, he was unable to obtain a teacher willing to work in such a remote area and, faced with the difficulty of luring the children to school with promises of lashings and caramels when he tried to teach them to read himself, he finally gave up his dream and relegated the school to other uses. His sister Férula sent him all the books he asked for from the city. They were practical texts, from which he learned to give injections by pricking himself in the leg, and to build a crystal radio set. He spent his first profits on rough cloth, a sewing machine, a box of homeopathic pills with an instruction booklet, an encyclopedia, and a shipment of readers, notebooks, and pencils. He cherished the idea of setting up a dining hall where every child would receive one full-course meal a day, so that they would grow up strong and healthy and be able to start work at a tender age, but he realized it was crazy to expect the children to arrive from all ends of the property just for a plate of food, so he transformed the project into a sewing workshop. Pancha García was chosen to decipher the mysteries of the sewing machine. At first she thought it was an instrument of the devil endowed with a life of its own, and refused to go anywhere near it, but Esteban was unyielding and in the end she mastered it. He also set up a modest general store where the tenants could buy whatever they needed without having to make the trip by oxcart all the way into San Lucas. The
patrón
would buy things wholesale and resell them at cost to his workers. He introduced a voucher system, which at first functioned as a form of credit, but gradually became a substitute for legal tender. With these slips of pink paper his tenants could buy everything in the general store; their wages were paid in them. In addition to the famous slips of paper, each worker also had the right to a small plot of land that he could cultivate in his free time, as well as six hens a year per family, a measure of seed, a share of the harvest to meet his basic needs, bread and milk for every day, and a bonus of fifty pesos that was distributed among the men at Christmas and on Independence Day. Even though they worked as equals with the men, the women did not receive this sum because, except for widows, they were not considered heads of family. Laundry soap, knitting wool, and a special syrup to strengthen the lungs were distributed free, for Trueba did not want anyone dirty, cold, or sick living on his land. One day he read in the encyclopedia about the advantages of a balanced diet, and so began his mania for vitamins, which was to last for the rest of his life. He had a tantrum whenever he saw any of the peasants giving their children only bread and feeding milk and eggs to the pigs. He began holding required meetings in the schoolhouse to inform them about vitamins and to let them know, in passing, whatever news he managed to pick up on his crystal set. He soon tired of chasing radio waves with his wire and ordered a short-wave radio with two enormous batteries. This apparatus enabled him to intercept a few coherent messages in the midst of a deafening roar from across the sea. Thus it was that he learned about the war in Europe and was able to follow the advances of the troops on a map he hung on the school blackboard, which he marked with pins. The tenants watched him in amazement, without the foggiest idea of why anyone would stick a pin in the color blue one day and move it to the color green the next. They could not imagine the world as the size of a piece of paper spread over a blackboard, in which whole armies were reduced to the head of a pin. In fact they cared not at all about the war, about scientific inventions, about the advance of industry, the price of gold, or the latest extravaganzas in the world of fashion. These were fairy tales, which did nothing to alter the narrowness of their existence. To that undaunted audience, the news on the radio was remote and alien, and the machine lost all its luster for them when it became evident that it was useless when it came to forecasting the weather. The only one who showed the slightest interest in the messages that came through was Pedro Segundo García.