The House of the Spirits

  “What are you looking for, mister? They’re all the same,” said Pedro Segundo García.

  The gringo did not answer him. When he had finished identifying the species, its lifestyle, the location of its burrows, its habits, and even its most secret desires, a whole week had passed and the ants were beginning to crawl into the children’s beds, had finished off the winter food reserve, and were starting to attack the cows and horses. So Mr. Brown explained that they would have to be sprayed with one of his special products, which would make the males of the species sterile. Thus they would cease to reproduce. Then they had to be sprinkled with still another poison, also of his own invention, which would bring about a fatal illness in the females, and that, he promised, would put an end to the whole problem.

  “How long will it take?” asked Esteban Trueba, whose patience was giving way to fury.

  “One month,” said Mr. Brown.

  “By that time they’ll have eaten all the people, Mr. Brown,” said Pedro Segundo García. “If you’ll allow me, patrón, I’m going to call in my father. For the past three weeks he’s been telling me he has a cure for plagues. I’m sure it’s just one of those old people’s tales, but there’s no harm trying.”

  They brought in old Pedro García, who shuffled in looking so dark, small, and toothless that Esteban was surprised at this sign of time’s relentless passage. The old man listened with his hat in his hand, looking down at the ground and chewing the air with his empty gums. Then he asked for a white handkerchief, which Férula brought from Esteban’s wardrobe, and went outside. He crossed through the courtyard and entered the orchard, followed by all the inhabitants of the house as well as the foreign midget, who was smiling scornfully, these poor savages, oh God! The old man squatted down with difficulty and began to collect ants. When he had a fistful, he put them in the handkerchief, knotted its four corners, and placed the little bundle in his hat.

  “I’m going to show you the way out, ants, so you get out of here and take the rest of them with you.”

  The old man climbed up onto a horse and ambled slowly, mumbling advice and recommendations, prayers of wisdom and enchanted formulas, to the ants. The others saw him disappearing off the edge of the property. The gringo sat down on the ground and laughed like a madman, until Pedro Segundo García grabbed him and shook him.

  “Go laugh at your grandmother, mister. That old man is my father,” he warned.

  Pedro García returned at dusk. He slowly dismounted, told the patrón he had led the ants to the edge of the highway, and went into his house. He was tired. The next morning there were no ants in the kitchen, none in the pantry, the granary, the stable, the chicken coops, the pastures. The family and the tenants went all the way to the river, checking everywhere along the way, and found not a single ant, not even one to use as a sample. The expert was furious.

  “You have to show me how to do that!” he shouted.

  “By talking to them, mister. Tell them to go, that they’re a nuisance here. They understand,” explained old Pedro García.

  Clara was the only one to whom the procedure seemed completely normal. Férula latched on to it as proof that they were living in a hole, an inhuman region in which neither God’s laws nor scientific progress seemed to have made inroads, and that any day now they were all going to be traveling by broom; but Esteban Trueba told her to be still, because he did not want anyone putting any new ideas into his wife’s head. In the past few days Clara had reverted to her visionary tasks, speaking with apparitions and spending hours writing in her notebooks. When she lost all interest in the schoolhouse, the sewing workshop, and the women’s meetings and once again found everything ever so lovely, they knew that she was pregnant again.

  “And it’s your fault!” Férula shouted at her brother.

  “I hope so,” he replied.

  It was soon evident that Clara was in no condition to spend her pregnancy in the country and give birth in the village, so they began getting ready to return to the city. This was of some consolation to Férula, who took Clara’s pregnancy as a personal affront. She traveled ahead with most of the baggage and servants, to open the big house on the corner and prepare for Clara’s arrival. Several days later, Esteban accompanied his wife and daughter back to the city, leaving Tres Marías once again in the hands of Pedro Segundo García, whose responsibilities as foreman had brought him no more privileges, but only more work.

  * * *

  The trip from Tres Marías to the city used up all of Clara’s remaining strength. I saw her grow paler and more asthmatic, with dark rings under her eyes. With the jouncing up and down first of the horses and then the train, the dust of the road, and her natural inclination to get queasy, she was losing energy before my very eyes. There wasn’t much I could do to help her, because when she felt ill she didn’t like anyone to talk to her. When we got out in the station, I had to hold her up because her legs were giving out.

  “I think I’m going to elevate,” she said.

  “Not here!” I shouted, terrified at the idea of Clara flying over the heads of the passengers along the track.

  But she wasn’t talking about physical levitation; she meant she wanted to rise to a level that would allow her to leave behind the discomfort and heaviness of pregnancy and the deep fatigue that had begun to seep into her bones. She entered one of her long periods of silence—I think it lasted several months—during which she used her little slate, as she had in her days of muteness. This time I wasn’t worried, since I expected she would return to normal just as she had after Blanca was born. Besides, I had come to understand that silence was my wife’s last refuge, not a mental illness as Dr. Cuevas said it was. Férula looked after her as obsessively as if she had been an invalid. She refused to leave her alone and completely neglected Blanca, who cried all day long because she wanted to return to Tres Marías. Clara walked around the house like a silent, overweight shadow, with a Buddhistic indifference toward everything around her. She didn’t even look at me. She walked right by me as if I were a piece of furniture, and whenever I spoke to her she acted as if she were on the moon, as if she hadn’t heard me or didn’t know who I was. We hadn’t resumed sleeping in the same bed. The lazy, empty days in the city and the irrational atmosphere in the house set my nerves on edge. I managed to keep myself busy, but it wasn’t enough: I was always in a bad mood. I went out every day to check on my business affairs. It was around that time that I began speculating in the stock market, and I spent hours studying the ups and downs of international finance. I devoted myself to investing money, starting new companies, and importing. I spent a lot of time in my club. I also began to get involved in politics, and even joined a gym where a gigantic trainer forced me to exercise certain muscles I hadn’t even known I had. I had been advised to have massages, but I never liked them: I hate to be touched by mercenary hands. But none of this was enough to fill my days. I was uncomfortable and bored. I wanted to return to the country, but I didn’t dare leave my house, where there was clearly need for a man among so many hysterical women. Besides, Clara was putting on too much weight. Her belly was so huge that it could barely be supported by her fragile frame. She was embarrassed to be seen undressed, but she was my wife and I couldn’t allow her to be ashamed in front of me. I helped her bathe and dress—if Férula didn’t beat me to it—and I felt infinitely sorry for her, so tiny and thin with that monstrous belly, as the moment of delivery approached. I lay awake at night thinking that she could die giving birth, and I would closet myself with Dr. Cuevas trying to figure out the best way to help her. We had agreed that if things didn’t look good it was better to do another Caesarean, but I didn’t want her to be sent to a hospital, and he refused to do another operation like the first one in the house. He said we didn’t have the proper facilities, but in those days hospitals were a major source of infection, and more people died in them than were saved.

  One day a short time before
her delivery date, Clara came down from her Brahmanic refuge without warning and began to speak again. She asked for a cup of hot chocolate and then asked me to take her out for a walk. My heart skipped a beat. The whole house was filled with joy. We opened a bottle of champagne, I had fresh flowers put in all the vases, ordered camellias, her favorite flower, and carpeted her room with them until they began to give her asthma and we had to remove them in a hurry. I ran to buy her a diamond brooch on the street of the Jewish jewelers. Clara thanked me effusively and found it ever so lovely, but she never put it on. I suppose she must have locked it up in some unlikely place and then forgotten all about it, like almost all the other jewels I bought for her over the years we spent together. I called Dr. Cuevas, who came over on the pretext of having tea but was really there to examine Clara. He took her to her room and then told Férula and myself that even though she seemed to have recovered from her mental crisis, we would have to expect a difficult delivery because the child was very big. Just then Clara stepped into the sitting room. She must have heard his final sentence.

  “Everything will turn out fine,” she said. “There’s no need for you to worry.”

  “I hope this time it will be a boy so we can give him my name,” I joked.

  “It’s not one, it’s two,” Clara replied. “The twins will be called Jaime and Nicolás, respectively,” she added.

  That was too much for me. I suppose I blew my stack from all the pressure I’d been under the preceding months. I got furious, arguing that those were names for foreign merchants, that no one in my family or hers had ever had such names, that at least one of them should be called Esteban, like myself and my father, but Clara explained that repeating the same name just caused confusion in her notebooks that bore witness to life. Her decision was inflexible. To frighten her, I smashed a porcelain jar that, I believe, was the last vestige of the splendid days of my great-grandfather, but she was unmoved. Dr. Cuevas smiled from behind his teacup, which only made me more indignant. I slammed the door behind me and went to the club.

  That night I got drunk. Partly because I needed to and partly for vengeance, I went to the best-known brothel in the city, which had a historic name. Now I want to make it clear that I’m not a man for whores and that I’ve only resorted to them during periods when I’ve been forced to live alone. I don’t know what got into me on that particular day. I was annoyed with Clara, I was in a bad mood, I had excess energy, I was tempted. In those days, the Christopher Columbus was flourishing, but it hadn’t yet acquired the international reputation it attained when it appeared on the navigational charts of the British shipping companies and in all the guidebooks, and when they showed it on television. I stepped into a sitting room with French provincial furniture, the type with twisted claws, where I was received by a native matron who did a perfect imitation of a Parisian accent; she reeled off the price list, and asked me if I had anything special in mind. I told her that my experience was limited to the Red Lantern and a few wretched miners’ whorehouses in the North, so that any young, clean woman would be fine with me.

  “I like you, monsieur,” she said. “I’m going to bring you the best in the house.”

  At her summons, a woman appeared sheathed in a black satin dress that was far too tight and could barely contain her exuberant femininity. Her hair was combed over one ear, a hairstyle I’ve never liked, and as she walked she gave off a terrible musky scent that floated on the air, as insistent as a moan.

  “I’m glad to see you, patrón,” she said, and it was then I recognized her, because her voice was the only thing that hadn’t changed about Tránsito Soto.

  She led me by the hand to a room shut like a tomb, its windows covered with dark curtains, in which the light of day could not have entered in eons but which was nonetheless a palace compared to the sordid quarters of the Red Lantern. There I personally undressed Tránsito, undid her dreadful hairdo, and was able to observe that with the years she had grown taller, put on weight, and become more beautiful.

  “I see you’ve made some progress,” I said.

  “Thanks to your fifty pesos, patrón,” she replied. “They helped me get started. Now I can return them to you readjusted, because with inflation they’re not worth what they once were.”

  “I’d rather have you owe me a favor, Tránsito,” I said, laughing.

  I finished taking off her petticoats and verified that there was almost nothing left of the slender girl with jutting knees and elbows who had worked in the Red Lantern, except for her tireless sensual appetite and her voice that sounded like a hoarse bird. Her body was hairless and her skin had been rubbed with lemon and cream of witch hazel, as she explained to me, which made it as soft as a baby’s. Her nails were painted red and she had a snake tattooed around her navel, which could move in circles while the rest of her body remained absolutely still. While she was demonstrating her skill at making the serpent wiggle, she told me the story of her life.

  “What would have become of me if I had stayed at the Red Lantern, patrón? I would have lost my teeth. I’d be an old woman now. You get used up fast in this profession, you have to look out for yourself. And I’m not even a streetwalker! I’ve never liked that—it’s very dangerous. To work the street, you have to have a pimp; otherwise it’s too risky. Nobody respects you. But why give a man something it’s so hard to earn? In that respect women are really thick. They’re the daughters of rigidity. They need a man to feel secure but they don’t realize that the one thing they should be afraid of is men. They don’t know how to run their lives. They have to sacrifice themselves for the sake of someone else. Whores are the worst, patrón, believe me. They throw their lives away working for some pimp, smile when he beats them, feel proud when he’s well dressed, with his gold teeth and rings on his fingers, and when he goes off and takes up with a woman half their age they forgive him everything because ‘he’s a man.’ No, sir, I’m not like that. No one’s ever supported me and that’s why you’ll never find me supporting someone else. I work for myself, and whatever I earn I spend as I see fit. It’s been a struggle, believe me—don’t think I’ve had an easy time of it, because the madams of these places don’t like to deal with women. They prefer pimps. They don’t help you out. They have no consideration.”

  “But it looks as if they really appreciate you here, Tránsito. They told me you’re the best in the house.”

  “I am. But this business would fall on its face if not for me, because I work like a horse. The rest of the girls are like a bunch of dishrags. All we get now are old men; it’s not the way it used to be. We ought to modernize the whole business, bring in civil servants, who have nothing to do in the middle of the day, and young people, and students. We ought to get better furnishings, liven the place up, and clean it. Clean the whole place! That way the customers would feel more trusting and they wouldn’t go around worrying about catching some venereal disease, right? This place is a pigsty. They never clean. Look, pick up the pillow and I guarantee you a tick will come hopping out. I’ve told the madam, but she doesn’t listen. She doesn’t have a head for business.”