“That woman is sick in the head!” Trueba would proclaim. “It would go against nature. If women don’t know that two and two are four, how are they going to be able to handle a scalpel? Their duty is motherhood and the home. At the rate they’re going, the next thing you know they’ll be asking to be deputies, judges—even President of the Republic! And in the meantime they’re sowing confusion and disorder that could lead to disaster. They’re printing obscene pamphlets, speaking on the radio, chaining themselves to public places till the police have to come with a blacksmith and cut them free, and they might even get arrested, which is what they should be. It’s a crying shame that there’s always some influential husband, some spineless judge or firebrand member of Congress to set them free. What these cases really need is a strong hand.”
The war in Europe had ended and the railroad cars piled high with dead were a distant clamor, though it had not quieted down entirely. It was from there that subversive ideas were carried on the uncontrollable winds of the radio, the telegraph, and the steamers laden with immigrants who stepped ashore in a daze, fleeing the hunger back home, stunned by the roar of the bombs and the corpses rotting in the plowed fields. It was an election year and there was reason for concern over the turn of events. The country was waking up. The wave of discontent that was stirring the people was beginning to strike at the heart of that oligarchic society. In the countryside that year, everything happened: drought, snails, and hoof-and-mouth disease. There was unemployment in the North, and in the capital the effects of the distant war were still being felt. It was a year of poverty, a year in which the only thing missing to complete the sense of disaster was an earthquake.
The upper class, however, in whose hands were concentrated all the power and wealth, was unaware of the danger that threatened the fragile equilibrium of their position. The rich amused themselves by dancing the Charleston and the new rhythms of jazz, the fox-trot, and some Negro cumbias that were marvelously indecent. Steamer crossings to Europe were resumed, after being suspended during four years of war, and new routes, this time to North America, became the rage. Golf was a novelty, bringing the cream of society together around a tiny ball that was struck with a stick, just as the Indians had done two hundred years before in these same places. The ladies wore long strings of cultured pearls that hung down to their knees, and cloche hats that hid their eyebrows. They cut their hair like men, made themselves up to look like prostitutes, stopped wearing corsets, and smoked like chimneys. The men were in a state of shock from the American automobiles, which arrived in the country in the morning and were sold by afternoon, despite the fact that they cost a small fortune and were hardly more than an explosion of smoke and clanking screws flying at a suicidal rate along roads that had been built for horses and other natural beasts and most certainly not for these products of the imagination. Whole inheritances were played at gambling tables, along with the easy fortunes of the postwar years. Champagne was uncorked and cocaine was introduced for the more wicked and refined. The collective madness looked as if it would never end.
But in the countryside the new automobiles were as unreal as short dresses, and those who were just emerging from the invasion of snails and hoof-and-mouth disease simply viewed it as a good year. Esteban Trueba and the other landowners in the area gathered in their club to plan political strategy for the upcoming Presidential elections. The peasants were still living exactly as they had in colonial times, and had not heard of unions, or Sundays off, or the minimum wage; but now delegates from the new-formed parties of the left, disguised as evangelicals, were beginning to infiltrate the haciendas, with a Bible tucked under one armpit and Marxist pamphlets under the other, simultaneously preaching the abstemious life and revolution or death. Those conspiratorial lunches of the patrones would culminate in either Romanesque debauchery or cockfights, and by evening the men would take the Red Lantern by storm, where twelve-year-old prostitutes and Carmelo, the only homosexual in the brothel and the town, would dance to the strains of an antediluvian Victrola beneath the watchful eye of Sofía, who was too old to go chasing around herself, although she still had the energy to run her business with an iron hand and keep the police from barging in and the customers from taking liberties with the girls—screwing them and then refusing to pay. Of all of them, the one who danced the best was Tránsito Soto, who was also best at resisting the drunk men’s attacks. She was indefatigable and never complained. It was as if she had the Tibetan gift of placing her skinny adolescent frame in her client’s hands and transporting her soul to some distant place. Esteban Trueba liked her because she was not squeamish about new ideas and the brutalities of love, sang with the voice of a hoarse bird, and had once told him she was going to go far in life and he had found that amusing.
“I’m not going to spend my life in the Red Lantern,” she had said. “I’m going to the capital, because I want to be rich and famous.”
Esteban went to the brothel as it was the only source of entertainment in the town, but he was not a man for whores. He did not like to pay for something he could get by other means. Still, he enjoyed spending time with Tránsito Soto. She made him laugh.
One day, after making love, he was in a generous mood, something that hardly ever happened, and he asked Tránsito Soto if she would like him to give her a present.
“Lend me fifty pesos!” she requested instantly.
“That’s a lot of money. Why so much?”
“For a train ticket, a red dress, high-heeled shoes, a bottle of perfume, and a permanent. That’s everything I need to start. I’ll pay you back someday. With interest.”
Esteban gave her the fifty pesos because that morning he had sold five bulls and his pockets were full of bills, and also because the exhaustion of pleasure made him rather sentimental.
“I’m only sorry that I won’t be seeing you again, Tránsito. I’ve grown accustomed to you.”
“But we will see each other, patrón. Life is long and full of unexpected turns.”
The immense meals in the club, the cockfights, and the afternoons in the brothel all culminated in a clever, although by no means original, plan for making sure that the peasants exercised their right to vote. The patrones threw them a big party with empanadas and lots of wine, barbecued a few cows specially slaughtered for the occasion, serenaded them with songs accompanied on the guitar, beat them over the head with a few political harangues, and promised them that if the conservative candidate won the election they would all receive a bonus, but that if he lost they would lose their jobs. In addition, they rigged the ballot boxes and bribed the police. At the end of the party they piled the peasants onto wooden carts and hauled them off to vote, under careful observation, amidst much joking and laughter. It was the one time in their lives they showed the peasants a trace of intimacy: pal this and pal that, don’t worry, patrón, I’m on your team, you can count on me, that’s the way I like it, pal, it’s nice to see you have a patriotic conscience, you know the liberals and radicals are all a bunch of morons and the Communists are atheist bastards who eat little children.
On the day of the election everything went according to plan, in perfect order. The armed forces were there to uphold the democratic process, and all was peaceful on a spring day more sprightly and sunny than usual.
“An example for this continent of Indians and Negroes who spend their time making revolutions to overthrow one dictator and install another. This is a different country. This country’s a genuine republic. We have civic pride. Here the Conservative Party wins cleanly and openly, and we don’t need a general to keep things orderly and calm, not like the neighboring dictatorships where they kill each other off while the gringos walk away with all their raw materials,” Trueba declared in the club dining room, raising his wineglass to offer a toast when the results of the elections were announced.
Three days later, when things were back to normal, the letter from Férula arrived at Tres Marías.
The night before, Esteban Trueba had dreamt of Rosa. It had been a long time since that had happened. In the dream she had appeared with her weeping-willow hair hanging over her shoulders, like a botanical mantle that covered her down to her waist. Her skin was hard and cold, the color and texture of alabaster. She was naked and held a bundle in her arms, and she walked as people do in dreams, with the shimmering green halo floating out around her body. He saw her coming slowly toward him, and when he reached out to touch her, she hurled her package to the ground, shattering its contents at his feet. He knelt down and picked it up: it was a tiny girl without eyes, and she was calling him Papa. He awoke in a state of anxiety and was grumpy all morning. Because of the dream he was already uneasy, long before Férula’s letter was delivered. As he did every morning, he went into the kitchen for his breakfast and saw a hen pecking crumbs from the floor. He gave it a kick that ripped its stomach open, leaving it to die in a pool of guts and feathers, flapping its wings. Instead of calming him down, this only increased his irritation, and he felt as if he were choking. He climbed up on his horse and galloped off to supervise the livestock that were being branded. He stopped first at the house of Pedro Segundo García, who had gone to the station in San Lucas to leave off a parcel and had passed through town to pick up the mail. Pedro had returned with Férula’s letter.
The envelope lay all morning on the table in the entrance hall. When Esteban Trueba arrived home, he went straight in to take a bath; he was covered with sweat and dust and saturated with the unmistakable odor of frightened beasts. Only later did he sit down at his desk to do his accounts and order a meal brought in to him on a tray. He did not look at his sister’s letter until nighttime, when he checked the house, as was his custom before going to bed, to be sure that all the lights were extinguished and all the doors were locked. Férula’s letter looked like all the others she had sent him, but even before opening it he knew, as he held it in his hand, that its contents would change his life. He felt exactly as he had years earlier when he held his sister’s telegram informing him of Rosa’s death.
He opened it, his temples pulsing with foreboding. The letter said briefly that Doña Ester Trueba was dying, and that after so many years of taking care of her and waiting on her hand and foot, Férula now had to suffer with the torment of her mother not recognizing her and calling day and night for her son Esteban, because she did not want to die without seeing him. Esteban had never really loved his mother or felt at ease in her presence, but the news shook him nonetheless. He understood that the excuses he had always made to avoid seeing her would not avail him now, and that the time had come for him to travel to the capital and face for the last time this woman who was always present in his nightmares, with her rancid smell of medicine, her frail moans, and her interminable prayers, this suffering woman who had peopled his childhood with prohibitions and terrors and weighed his manhood with responsibilities and guilt.
He summoned Pedro Segundo García and explained the situation. He led him to the desk and showed him the ledgers and accounts of the general store. He handed him a bunch of keys with all except the key to his wine cellar, and announced that from that moment till the day he returned, Pedro would be responsible for everything that happened in Tres Marías, and that he would pay dearly for any mishaps that occurred. Pedro Segundo García took the keys, tucked the ledgers under his arm, and smiled without a trace of happiness.
“One does one’s best, patrón,” he said, shrugging his shoulders.
The next day, for the first time in years, Esteban Trueba retraced the steps that had led him from his mother’s house to the countryside. An oxcart took him and his suitcases as far as the station in San Lucas, where he took the first-class coach from the days of the British railway, and crossed once more the vast fields that lay at the feet of the cordillera.
He closed his eyes and tried to sleep, but the image of his mother haunted his dreams.
— THREE —
CLARA THE CLAIRVOYANT
Clara was ten years old when she decided that speaking was pointless and locked herself in silence. Her life changed markedly. Fat, kindly Dr. Cuevas attempted to treat her with pills of his own devising, with vitamins in syrup and throat swabbings with borax honey, but all to no apparent effect. He soon realized that his remedies were useless and that his very presence induced a state of terror in the child. Whenever she saw him, Clara would begin to shriek, running for refuge to the farthest corner of the house, where she would huddle like a frightened animal; so he abandoned his treatments and suggested that Severo and Nívea take her to see a Rumanian named Rostipov, who was causing quite a sensation that season. Rostipov made his living as a magician in vaudeville shows and had achieved the incredible feat of stringing a wire from the pinnacle of the cathedral to the cupola of the Galician Brotherhood, on the other side of the plaza, which he walked across with only a frail stick for balance. Despite his more frivolous side, Rostipov had caused an uproar in scientific circles because he spent his free time curing hysteria with magic wands and hypnotic trances. Nívea and Severo took Clara to the consulting room that the Rumanian had improvised in his hotel. Rostipov carefully examined her. When he had finished, he declared that her case was not within his province to cure, since the child was silent because she did not feel like speaking, not because she was unable to. Nevertheless, at her parents’ insistence, he concocted some lilac-colored sugar pills, which he prescribed with the warning that they were a Siberian remedy for deaf-mutes. But in this case the power of suggestion failed, and the second bottle of pills was swallowed by Barrabás in a moment of oversight that fortunately had no appreciable results. Severo and Nívea attempted to make her speak with household remedies, threatening and cajoling and even refusing to let her eat, to see if hunger would force her to open her mouth to ask for food, but that, too, was to no avail.
Nana had the idea that a good fright might make the child speak, and spent nine years inventing all sorts of desperate strategies for frightening Clara, the end result of which was to immunize the girl forever against terror and surprise. Soon Clara was afraid of nothing. She was unmoved by the sudden appearance of the most livid and undernourished monsters in her room, or by the knock of devils and vampires at her bedroom window. Nana dressed up as a headless pirate, as the executioner of the Tower of London, as a werewolf or a horned devil, depending on her inspiration of the moment and on the ideas she got while flipping through the pages of certain horror magazines, which she bought for this purpose and from which, although she was unable to read, she copied the illustrations. She had acquired the habit of gliding silently through the hallways and jumping at the child in the dark, howling through the doorways, and hiding live animals between her sheets, but none of this elicited so much as a peep from the little girl. At times Clara lost her patience. She would throw herself on the floor, kicking and shouting, but without pronouncing a single word in any recognizable tongue; or she would scrawl on the tiny blackboard that never left her side, setting down the worst insults she could think of to say to the poor woman, who would weep disconsolately in the kitchen.