The House of the Spirits Read online

  Marcos’s heroic resurrection made everyone forget about his barrel-organ phase. Once again he was a sought-after guest in all the city’s salons and, at least for a while, his name was cleared. Marcos stayed in his sister’s house for several months. One night he left without saying goodbye, leaving behind his trunks, his books, his weapons, his boots, and all his belongings. Severo, and even Nívea herself, breathed a sigh of relief. His visit had gone on too long. But Clara was so upset that she spent a week walking in her sleep and sucking her thumb. The little girl, who was only seven at the time, had learned to read from her uncle’s storybooks and been closer to him than any other member of the family because of her prophesying powers. Marcos maintained that his niece’s gift could be a source of income and a good opportunity for him to cultivate his own clairvoyance. He believed that all human beings possessed this ability, particularly his own family, and that if it did not function well it was simply due to a lack of training. He bought a crystal ball in the Persian bazaar, insisting that it had magic powers and was from the East (although it was later found to be part of a buoy from a fishing boat), set it down on a background of black velvet, and announced that he could tell people’s fortunes, cure the evil eye, and improve the quality of dreams, all for the modest sum of five centavos. His first customers were the maids from around the neighborhood. One of them had been accused of stealing, because her employer had misplaced a valuable ring. The crystal ball revealed the exact location of the object in question: it had rolled beneath a wardrobe. The next day there was a line outside the front door of the house. There were coachmen, storekeepers, and milkmen; later a few municipal employees and distinguished ladies made a discreet appearance, slinking along the side walls of the house to keep from being recognized. The customers were received by Nana, who ushered them into the waiting room and collected their fees. This task kept her busy throughout the day and demanded so much of her time that the family began to complain that all there ever was for dinner was old string beans and jellied quince. Marcos decorated the carriage house with some frayed curtains that had once belonged in the drawing room but that neglect and age had turned to dusty rags. There he and Clara received the customers. The two divines wore tunics “the color of the men of light,” as Marcos called the color yellow. Nana had dyed them with saffron powder, boiling them in pots usually reserved for rice and pasta. In addition to his tunic, Marcos wore a turban around his head and an Egyptian amulet around his neck. He had grown a beard and let his hair grow long and he was thinner than ever before. Marcos and Clara were utterly convincing, especially because the child had no need to look into the crystal ball to guess what her clients wanted to hear. She would whisper in her Uncle Marcos’s ear, and he in turn would transmit the message to the client, along with any improvisations of his own that he thought pertinent. Thus their fame spread, because all those who arrived sad and bedraggled at the consulting room left filled with hope. Unrequited lovers were told how to win over indifferent hearts, and the poor left with foolproof tips on how to place their money at the dog track. Business grew so prosperous that the waiting room was always packed with people, and Nana began to suffer dizzy spells from being on her feet so many hours a day. This time Severo had no need to intervene to put a stop to his brother-in-law’s venture, for both Marcos and Clara, realizing that their unerring guesses could alter the fate of their clients, who always followed their advice to the letter, became frightened and decided that this was a job for swindlers. They abandoned their carriage-house oracle and split the profits, even though the only one who had cared about the material side of things had been Nana.

  Of all the del Valle children, Clara was the one with the greatest interest in and stamina for her uncle’s stories. She could repeat each and every one of them. She knew by heart words from several dialects of the Indians, was acquainted with their customs, and could describe the exact way in which they pierced their lips and earlobes with wooden shafts, their initiation rites, the names of the most poisonous snakes, and the appropriate antidotes for each. Her uncle was so eloquent that the child could feel in her own skin the burning sting of snakebites, see reptiles slide across the carpet between the legs of the jacaranda room-divider, and hear the shrieks of macaws behind the drawing-room drapes. She did not hesitate as she recalled Lope de Aguirre’s search for El Dorado, or the unpronounceable names of the flora and fauna her extraordinary uncle had seen; she knew about the lamas who take salt tea with yak lard and she could give detailed descriptions of the opulent women of Tahiti, the rice fields of China, or the white prairies of the North, where the eternal ice kills animals and men who lose their way, turning them to stone in seconds. Marcos had various travel journals in which he recorded his excursions and impressions, as well as a collection of maps and books of stories and fairy tales that he kept in the trunks he stored in the junk room at the far end of the third courtyard. From there they were hauled out to inhabit the dreams of his descendants, until they were mistakenly burned half a century later on an infamous pyre.

  Now Marcos had returned from his last journey in a coffin. He had died of a mysterious African plague that had turned him as yellow and wrinkled as a piece of parchment. When he realized he was ill, he set out for home with the hope that his sister’s ministrations and Dr. Cuevas’s knowledge would restore his health and youth, but he was unable to withstand the sixty days on ship and died at the latitude of Guayaquil, ravaged by fever and hallucinating about musky women and hidden treasure. The captain of the ship, an Englishman by the name of Longfellow, was about to throw him overboard wrapped in a flag, but Marcos, despite his savage appearance and his delirium, had made so many friends on board and seduced so many women that the passengers prevented him from doing so, and Longfellow was obliged to store the body side by side with the vegetables of the Chinese cook, to preserve it from the heat and mosquitoes of the tropics until the ship’s carpenter had time to improvise a coffin. At El Callao they obtained a more appropriate container, and several days later the captain, furious at all the troubles this passenger had caused the shipping company and himself personally, unloaded him without a backward glance, surprised that not a soul was there to receive the body or cover the expenses he had incurred. Later he learned that the post office in these latitudes was not as reliable as that of far-off England, and that all his telegrams had vaporized en route. Fortunately for Longfellow, a customs lawyer who was a friend of the del Valle family appeared and offered to take charge, placing Marcos and all his paraphernalia in a freight car, which he shipped to the capital to the only known address of the deceased: his sister’s house.

  This would have been one of the most painful moments in Clara’s life if Barrabás had not arrived among her uncle’s things. Unaware of the commotion in the courtyard, she was led by instinct directly to the corner where the cage had been set down. In it was Barrabás. Or, rather, a pile of bones covered with a skin of indefinite color that was full of infected patches, with one eye sealed shut and the other crusted over, rigid as a corpse in his own excrement. Despite his appearance, the child had no trouble in identifying him.

  “A puppy!” she cried.

  The animal became her responsibility. She removed it from the cage, rocked it in her arms, and with a missionary’s care managed to get water down his parched, swollen throat. No one had bothered to feed him since Captain Longfellow—who, like most Englishmen, was kinder to animals than to people—had dropped him on the pier along with all the other baggage. While the dog had been on board with his dying master, the captain had fed him with his own hand and taken him up on deck, lavishing on him every attention that he had denied Marcos, but once on land he was treated as part of the baggage. Without any competition for the job, Clara became the creature’s mother, and she soon revived him. A few days later, after the storm of the corpse’s arrival had died down and Uncle Marcos had been laid to rest, Severo noticed the hairy animal his daughter was holding in her arms.

 
“What’s that?” he asked.

  “Barrabás,” Clara replied.

  “Give him to the gardener so he can get rid of him. He might be contagious,” Severo ordered.

  But Clara had adopted him. “He’s mine, Papa. If you take him away, I’ll stop breathing and I promise you I’ll die.”

  The dog remained in the house. Soon afterward he was running everywhere, devouring drape fringes, Oriental rugs, and all the table legs. He rapidly recovered from his terrible condition and began to grow. After he had had a bath, he was found to be black, with a square head, long legs, and short hair. Nana suggested cutting off his tail to make him more refined, but Clara had a tantrum that degenerated into an asthma attack and no one ever mentioned it again. Barrabás kept his tail, which in time grew to be as long as a golf club and developed a life all its own that led to lamps and china being swept from tabletops. He was of unknown pedigree. He had nothing in common with the stray dogs in the street, much less with the thoroughbred racers that assorted families of the aristocracy were raising. The veterinarian was unable to pinpoint his origin and Clara decided that he was from China, because most of her uncle’s baggage was from that distant land. The dog had a seemingly unlimited capacity for growth. Within six months he was the size of a sheep, and at the end of a year he was as big as a colt. In desperation the family began to question whether he would ever stop growing and whether he really was a dog. They suggested that he might be some exotic animal their uncle had caught in some remote corner of the world and that perhaps in his natural habitat he was wild. Nívea looked at his crocodile claws and his sharp little teeth and her heart leapt at the thought that if in one bite he could snap the head off any grown-up, it would be even easier for him to gobble up one of her children. But Barrabás gave no indication of ferocity. On the contrary, he had all the captivating ways of a frolicsome kitten. He slept by Clara’s side with his head on her feather pillow and a quilt up to his neck because he was very sensitive to cold, and later, when he was too big for the bed, he lay on the floor beside her, his horse’s hoof resting on the child’s hand. He never barked or growled. He was as black and silent as a panther, liked ham and every known type of marmalade, and whenever there was company and the family forgot to lock him up he would steal into the dining room and slink around the table, removing with the greatest delicacy all his favorite dishes, and of course none of the diners dared to interfere. Despite his docility, Barrabás inspired terror. Delivery men fled precipitously whenever he stuck his head out into the street, and once he caused a riot among the women who were lined up waiting to buy milk, startling the dray horse who took off like a shot, scattering milk pails every which way on the pavement. Severo had to pay for all the damage and ordered the dog tied up in the courtyard, but Clara had another fit and the decision was indefinitely postponed. Popular imagination and ignorance with respect to his past lent Barrabás the most mythological characteristics. It was said that he would not stop growing, and that if a butcher’s cruelty had not put an end to his existence, he would have reached the size of a camel. Some people believed him to be a cross between a dog and a mare, and expected him to sprout wings and horns and acquire the sulfuric breath of a dragon, like the beasts Rosa was embroidering on her endless tablecloth. Tired of picking up broken china and hearing rumors of how he turned into a wolf when there was a full moon, Nana applied the same method she had used with the parrot, but the overdose of cod-liver oil did not kill the dog. It simply gave him a four-day case of diarrhea that covered the house from top to bottom and that she herself had to clean.

  * * *

  Those were difficult times. I was about twenty-five then, but I felt as if I had only a little life left ahead of me to build my future and attain the position that I wanted. I worked like a beast and the few times I sat down to rest, not by choice but forced by the tedium of Sunday afternoons, I felt as if I were losing precious moments of my life: each idle minute meant another century away from Rosa. I lived in the mine, in a wooden shack with a zinc roof that I built myself with the help of a few peons. It was just one square room, in which I had arranged all my belongings, with a crude window in each wall so that by day the stifling desert air would have a chance to circulate, and with shutters to keep out the glacial wind that blew at night. My furniture consisted of a chair, a cot, a rough table, a typewriter, and a heavy safe I had hauled across the desert on a mule, in which I kept the miners’ logbooks, a few papers, and a canvas pouch containing the few sparkling pieces of gold that were the only fruit of all my effort. It wasn’t very pleasant, but I was used to discomfort. I had never taken a hot bath, and my childhood memories were of cold, of loneliness, and of a perpetually empty stomach. There I ate, slept, and wrote for two long years, with no greater distraction than the handful of books I read and reread, a stack of old magazines, some English grammars, from which I pieced together the rudiments of that magnificent language, and a box with a key, in which I kept my correspondence with Rosa. I had got into the habit of typing all my letters to her, keeping a copy for myself that I filed along with the few letters I received from her. I ate the same food that was cooked for all the miners, and I had forbidden the drinking of alcoholic beverages within the mine. I kept none in my own house either, because I’ve always held that loneliness and boredom can lead a man to drink. It may have been the memory of my father—open-collared, his tie loosened and stained, his eyes clouded and his breath heavy, glass in hand—that made me a teetotaler. Besides, I don’t hold my liquor well. I get drunk in nothing flat. I discovered this at the age of sixteen and I’ve never forgotten it. My granddaughter once asked me how I managed to live alone for so long far removed from civilization. The truth is I don’t know. But it must have been easier for me than for most people, because I’ve never been particularly sociable; I have few friends and I don’t enjoy parties or festivities. I’m much happier when I’m alone. At that time I had never lived with a woman, so I could hardly miss something I hadn’t grown accustomed to. I wasn’t the type who’s always falling in love—I never have been. I’m the faithful type, though it’s true that all it takes is the shadow of an arm, the curve of a waist, or the crease of a female knee to put ideas into my head even now when I’m so old that I don’t recognize myself when I look in the mirror. I look like a twisted tree. I’m not trying to justify the sins of my youth by saying that I couldn’t control my instincts: nothing of the sort. By that point I was used to having dead-end relationships with easy women, since there was no possibility of any other kind. In my generation we used to distinguish between decent women and all the rest, and we also divided up the decent ones into our own and others’. I had never thought of love until I met Rosa, and romance struck me as dangerous and pointless; if a young girl caught my eye, I didn’t dare approach her, since I was afraid of being rejected and ridiculed. I’ve always been very proud, and because of my pride I’ve suffered more than most.

  More than half a century has passed, but I can still remember the exact moment when Rosa the Beautiful entered my life like a distracted angel who stole my soul as she went by. She was with her Nana and another child, probably one of her younger sisters. I think she was wearing a violet dress, but I’m not sure, because I have no eye for women’s clothes and because she was so beautiful that even if she had been wearing an ermine cape all I would have noticed was her face. I don’t generally spend my time thinking about women, but only a fool could have failed to spot that apparition, who caused a stir wherever she went, and tied up traffic, with her incredible green hair, which framed her face like a fantastic hat, her fairy-tale manner, and her special way of moving as if she were flying. She crossed right in front of me without seeing me and floated into the pastry shop on the Plaza de Armas. Dumbstruck, I waited in the street while she bought licorice drops, which she selected one by one, with that tinkling laugh of hers, tossing some into her mouth and handing others to her sister. I wasn’t the only one to stand there hypnotized, for within a
few minutes a whole circle of men had formed, their noses pressed against the window. It was then that I reacted. It didn’t cross my mind that since I had no fortune, was no one’s idea of a proper young man, and faced a most uncertain future, I was far from being the ideal suitor for that heavenly girl. I didn’t even know her! But I was bewitched, and I decided then and there that she was the only woman in the world who was worthy to be my wife, and that if I couldn’t have her I would remain a bachelor. I followed her all the way home. I got on the same streetcar and took the seat behind her, unable to take my eyes off her perfect nape, her round neck, and her soft shoulders caressed by the green curls that had escaped from her coiffure. I didn’t feel the motion of the car, because I was in a dream. Suddenly she swept down the aisle and as she passed me her astonishing gold eyes rested for a moment on my own. Part of me must have died. I couldn’t breathe and my pulse stopped in its tracks. When I recovered my composure, I had to leap onto the sidewalk at the risk of breaking all my bones, and run toward the street down which she had already turned. Thanks to a cloud of violet disappearing behind a gate, I learned where she lived. From that day on I stood guard outside her house, pacing up and down the street like an orphaned dog, spying on her, slipping money to the gardener, engaging the maids in conversation, until I finally managed to speak to Nana, and she, God bless her, took pity on me and agreed to be our go-between, conveying my love letters, my flowers, and the innumerable boxes of licorice drops with which I tried to win Rosa’s affection. I also sent her acrostics. I don’t know how to write poetry, but there was a Spanish bookseller with a real genius for rhyme from whom I ordered poems and songs—anything whose raw material was paper and ink. My sister Férula helped me get closer to the del Valle family by uncovering distant links between our ancestors and theirs, and seeking out every opportunity to greet them as they came out of mass. That was how I was finally able to visit Rosa, but the day I entered her house and was within speaking range of her, I couldn’t think of anything to say. I stood there mute, my hat in my hand and my mouth gaping, until her parents, who were well acquainted with such symptoms, came to my rescue. I can’t imagine what Rosa could have seen in me—or why, with time, she came to accept me as her husband. I became her official suitor without having to perform any superhuman tasks because, despite her awesome beauty and her innumerable virtues, Rosa had no other wooers. Her mother explained it to me this way: she said that no one felt strong enough to spend his life protecting her from other men’s desire. Many had circled around her, even fallen head over heels in love with her, but until I came along none had made up his mind. Her beauty struck fear into their hearts and they preferred to admire her from afar, not daring to approach her. That had never occurred to me, to tell you the truth. My problem was that I didn’t have a cent, although I felt capable, through my love, of becoming a rich man. I looked around to find the quickest route within the limits of the honesty in which I had been raised, and I realized that success required godparents, advanced studies, or capital. It wasn’t enough to have a respectable last name. I suppose that if I had had the money to start out with, I would have tried my luck at the gaming tables or the races, but since that was not the case I had to think of a line of work that, while it might entail certain risks, held out the promise of a fortune. Gold and silver mines were the dream of all adventurers: a mine could plunge you into abject poverty, kill you with tuberculosis, or make you a rich man overnight. It was a question of luck. Thanks to the prestige of my mother’s name, I was able to obtain the concession for a mine in the North, for which the bank gave me a loan. I vowed to extract the last gram of precious metal even if it meant I had to crush the hills with my own hands and grind the rocks with my feet. For Rosa’s sake, I was prepared to do that and much more.