The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende

“It doesn’t matter,” she told Alba when she returned to her cell. “Someday I’ll have another one.”

  That night Alba heard her cry for the first time, covering her face with her blanket to suffocate her grief. She went to her and put her arms around her, rocking her and wiping her tears. She told her all the tender things she could think of, but that night there was no comfort for Ana Díaz, so Alba simply rocked her in her arms, lulling her to sleep like a tiny baby and wishing she could take on her shoulders the terrible pain of Ana’s soul. Dawn found them huddled together like two small animals. During the day, they anxiously awaited the moment when the long line of men went by on their way to the latrine. They were blindfolded, and to guide themselves each had his hand on the shoulder of the man ahead of him, watched over by armed guards. Among the prisoners was Andrés. From the tiny barred window of their cell the women could see them, so close that if they had been able to reach out they could have touched them. Each time they passed, Ana and Alba sang with the strength of their despair, and female voices rose from the other cells. Then the prisoners would stand up tall, straighten their backs, and turn their heads in the direction of the women’s cells, and Andrés would smile. His shirt was torn and covered with dried blood.

  One of the guards was moved by the women’s hymns. One night he brought them three carnations in a can of water to put in their window. Another time he came to tell Ana Díaz that he needed a volunteer to wash one of the prisoners’ clothes and clean out his cell. He led her to where Andrés was and left them alone together for a few minutes. When Ana Díaz returned, she was transfigured. Alba did not dare speak to her, so as not to break the spell of her happiness.

  One day Colonel García was surprised to find himself caressing Alba like a lover and talking to her of his childhood in the country, when he would see her walking hand in hand with her grandfather, dressed in her starched pinafores and with the green halo of her hair, while he, barefoot in the mud, swore that one day he would make her pay for her arrogance and avenge himself for his cursed bastard fate. Rigid and absent, naked and trembling with disgust and cold, Alba neither heard nor felt him, but that crack in his eagerness to torture her sounded an alarm in the colonel’s mind. He ordered Alba to be thrown in the doghouse, and furiously prepared to forget that she existed.

  The doghouse was a small, sealed cell like a dark, frozen, airless tomb. There were six of them altogether, constructed in an empty water tank especially for punishment. They were used for relatively short stretches of time, because no one could withstand them very long, at most a few days, before beginning to ramble—to lose the sense of things, the meaning of words, and the anxiety of passing time—or simply, beginning to die. At first, huddled in her sepulcher, unable either to stand up or sit down despite her small size, Alba managed to stave off madness. Now that she was alone, she realized how much she needed Ana Díaz. She thought she heard an imperceptible tapping in the distance, as if someone were sending her coded messages from another cell, but she soon stopped paying attention to it because she realized that all attempts at communication were completely hopeless. She gave up, deciding to end this torture once and for all. She stopped eating, and only when her feebleness became too much for her did she take a sip of water. She tried not to breathe or move, and began eagerly to await her death. She stayed like this for a long time. When she had nearly achieved her goal, her Grandmother Clara, whom she had invoked so many times to help her die, appeared with the novel idea that the point was not to die, since death came anyway, but to survive, which would be a miracle. With her white linen dress, her winter gloves, her sweet toothless smile, and the mischievous gleam in her hazel eyes, she looked exactly as she had when Alba was a child. Clara also brought the saving idea of writing in her mind, without paper or pencil, to keep her thoughts occupied and to escape from the doghouse and live. She suggested that she write a testimony that might one day call attention to the terrible secret she was living through, so that the world would know about this horror that was taking place parallel to the peaceful existence of those who did not want to know, who could afford the illusion of a normal life, and of those who could deny that they were on a raft adrift in a sea of sorrow, ignoring, despite all evidence, that only blocks away from their happy world there were others, these others who live or die on the dark side. “You have a lot to do, so stop feeling sorry for yourself, drink some water, and start writing,” Clara told her granddaughter before disappearing the same way she had come.

  Alba tried to obey her grandmother, but as soon as she began to take notes with her mind, the doghouse filled with all the characters of her story, who rushed in, shoved each other out of the way to wrap her in their anecdotes, their vices, and their virtues, trampled on her intention to compose a documentary, and threw her testimony to the floor, pressing, insisting, and egging her on. She took down their words at breakneck pace, despairing because while she was filling a page, the one before it was erased. This activity kept her fully occupied. At first, she constantly lost her train of thought and forgot new facts as fast as she remembered them. The slightest distraction or additional fear or pain caused her story to snarl like a ball of yarn. But she invented a code for recalling things in order, and then she was able to bury herself so deeply in her story that she stopped eating, scratching herself, smelling herself, and complaining, and overcame all her varied agonies.

  Word went out that she was dying. The guards opened the hatch of the doghouse and lifted her effortlessly, because she was very light. They took her back to Colonel García, whose hatred had returned during these days, but she did not recognize him. She was beyond his power.

  * * *

  On the outside, the Hotel Christopher Columbus looked as ordinary as an elementary school, just as I remembered. I had lost count of the years that had passed since I had last been there, and I tried to tell myself that the same Mustafá as before would come out to greet me, that blue Negro dressed like an Oriental apparition, with his double row of leaden teeth and the politeness of a vizier, the only authentic Negro in the country since all the others were painted, as Tránsito Soto had assured me. But that was not what happened. A porter led me to a tiny cubicle, showed me to a seat, and told me to wait. After a while, instead of the spectacular Mustafá, a lady appeared who had the unhappy, tidy air of a provincial aunt, dressed in a blue uniform with a starched white collar. She gave a start when she saw how old and helpless I was. She was holding a red rose.

  “The gentleman is alone?”

  “Of course I’m alone!” I shouted.

  The woman handed me the rose and asked me which room I preferred.

  “It makes no difference,” I replied, surprised.

  “We can offer you the Stable, the Temple, and the Thousand and One Nights. Which one do you want?”

  “The Thousand and One Nights,” I said, for no particular reason.

  She led me down a long hallway that was lined with green lights and bright-red arrows. Leaning on my cane, dragging my feet along, I followed her with great difficulty. We arrived in a small courtyard with a miniature mosque that had been fitted with absurd arched windows made of painted glass.

  “This is it. If you want something to drink, order it by phone,” she said, pointing.

  “I want to speak with Tránsito Soto. That’s why I’ve come,” I said.

  “I’m sorry, but Madam doesn’t see private individuals, only suppliers.”

  “I have to speak with her! Tell her that Senator Trueba is here. She knows who I am.”

  “I already told you, she won’t see anyone,” the woman replied, crossing her arms.

  I picked up my cane and told her that if Tránsito Soto did not appear in person within ten minutes, I would break all the windows and everything else inside that Pandora’s box. The woman in the uniform jumped back in fright. I opened the door of the mosque and found myself inside a cheap Alhambra. A short tiled staircase covered with
false Persian carpets led to a hexagonal room with a cupola on the roof, where someone who had never been in an Arab harem had arrayed everything thought to have existed in one: damask cushions, glass incense burners, bells, and every conceivable trinket from a bazaar. Through the columns, which were infinitely multiplied by the clever placement of the mirrors, I saw a blue mosaic bathtub that was as big as the room and a pool large enough to bathe a cow in—or, more to the point, for two playful lovers to cavort in. It bore no resemblance to the Christopher Columbus I remembered. I lowered myself painfully onto the round bed, suddenly feeling very tired. My bones ached. I looked up, and the mirror on the ceiling returned my image: an old, shriveled body, the sad face of a biblical patriarch furrowed with bitter wrinkles, and what was left of a mane of white hair. “How time has passed!” I sighed.

  Tránsito Soto entered without knocking.

  “I’m glad to see you, patrón,” she said, as she always greeted me.

  She had become a slender, middle-aged woman with her hair in a bun, wearing a black woolen dress with two strands of simple pearls around her neck, majestic and serene; she looked more like a concert pianist than the owner of a brothel. It was hard for me to connect her to the woman I had known, who had a tattooed snake around her navel. I stood up to greet her, and found I was unable to be as informal as I’d been before.

  “You’re looking well, Tránsito,” I said, figuring she must be past sixty-five.

  “Life has been good to me, patrón. Do you remember that when we met I told you one day I’d be rich?” She smiled.

  “Well, I’m glad you have achieved that.”

  We sat down side by side on the round bed. Tránsito poured us each a glass of cognac and told me that the cooperative of whores and homosexuals had done stupendously well for ten years, but that times had changed and they had had to give it a new twist, because thanks to the modern ways—free love, the pill, and other innovations—no one needed prostitutes, except sailors and old men. “Good girls sleep with men for free, so you can just imagine the competition,” she said. She explained that the cooperative had begun to go downhill and that the partners had had to look for higher-paying jobs and that even Mustafá had gone back to his country. Then she had realized that what was really needed was a hotel for rendezvous, a pleasant place where secret couples could make love and where a man would not be embarrassed to bring a girl for the first time. No women: those were furnished by the customer. She had decorated it herself, following the whims of her imagination and taking her customers’ taste into account. Thus, thanks to her commercial vision, which had led her to create a different atmosphere in every available corner, the Hotel Christopher Columbus had become the paradise of lost souls and furtive lovers. Tránsito Soto had made French sitting rooms with quilted furniture, mangers with fresh hay and papier-mâché horses that observed the lovers with their immutable glass eyes, prehistoric caves with real stalactites, and telephones covered with the skins of pumas.

  “Since you’re not here to make love, patrón, let’s go talk in my office,” Tránsito Soto said. “That way we can leave this room to customers.”

  On the way she told me that after the coup the political police had raided the hotel a couple of times, but that each time they dragged the couples out of bed and lined them up at gunpoint in the main drawing room, they had found a general or two, so the police had quickly stopped annoying her. She had an excellent relationship with the new government, just as she had had with the preceding ones. She told me that the Christopher Columbus was a thriving business and that every year she renovated part of the decor, replacing the stranded hulls of Polynesian shipwrecks with severe monastic cloisters, and baroque garden swings with torture racks, depending on the latest fashion. Thanks to the gimmickry of the mirrors and lights, which could multiply space, transform the climate, create the illusion of infinity, and suspend time, she could bring all this into a residence of relatively normal size.

  We arrived at her office, which was decorated like the cockpit of an airplane and from which she ran her incredible organization with the efficiency of a banker. She told me how many sheets had to be washed, how much toilet paper bought, how much liquor was consumed, how many quail eggs prepared daily—they’re aphrodisiacs—how many employees she needed, and how much she paid for water, electricity, and the phone in order to keep that outsized aircraft carrier of forbidden love afloat.

  “And now, patrón, tell me what I can do for you,” Tránsito Soto finally said, settling into the reclining seat of an airplane pilot while she toyed with the pearls around her neck. “I suppose you’ve come because you want me to repay the favor that I’ve owed you for half a century, right?”

  Then, having waited for her to ask me that, I opened the floodgates of my soul and told her everything; I didn’t hold back anything and didn’t stop for a second from beginning to end. I told her that Alba is my only granddaughter, that I’m practically all alone in the world, and that my body and my soul have shrunken away, just as Férula predicted with her curse; that all that awaits me now is to die like a dog, and that my green-haired granddaughter is all I have left, the only person I really care about; that unfortunately she turned out to be an idealist, a family disease, one of those people cut out to get involved in problems and make those closest to her suffer; that she took it into her head to help fugitives get asylum in the foreign embassies, something she did without thinking, I’m sure, without realizing that the country is at war, whether war against international Communism or its own people it’s hard to tell, but war one way or the other, and these things are punishable by law, but Alba always has her head in the clouds and doesn’t realize she’s in danger, she doesn’t do it to be mean, really, just the opposite, she does it because her heart knows no limits, just like her grandmother, who still runs around ministering to the poor behind my back in the abandoned wing of the house, my clairvoyant Clara, and anyone who tells Alba people are after him gets her to risk her life for him, even if he’s a total stranger, I’ve already told her, I warned her time and again they could lay a trap for her and one day it would turn out that the supposed Marxist was an agent of the secret police, but she never listened to me, she’s never listened to me in her life, she’s more stubborn than I am, but even so, it’s not a crime to help some poor devil get asylum every once in a while, it’s not so serious that they should arrest her without taking into account that she’s my granddaughter, the granddaughter of a senator of the Republic, a distinguished member of the Conservative Party, they can’t do that to someone from my own family, in my own house, because then what the hell is left for everybody else, if people like us can be arrested then nobody is safe, that more than twenty years in Congress aren’t worth a damn and all the acquaintances I have, I know everybody in this country, at least everyone important, even General Hurtado, who’s my personal friend but in this case hasn’t lifted a finger to help me, not even the cardinal’s been able to help me locate my granddaughter, it’s not possible she could just disappear as if by magic, that they could take her away in the night and that I should never hear a word of her again, I’ve spent a whole month looking for her and I’m going crazy, these are the things that make the junta look so bad abroad and give the United Nations reason to screw around with human rights, at first I didn’t want to hear about the dead, the tortured, and the disappeared, but now I can’t keep thinking they’re just Communist lies, because even the gringos, who were the first to help the military and sent their own pilots to bombard the Presidential Palace, are scandalized by all the killing, it’s not that I’m against repression, I understand that in the beginning you have to be firm if you want a return to order, but things have gotten out of hand, they’re going overboard now and no one can go along with the story about internal security and how you have to eliminate your ideological enemies, they’re finishing off everyone, no one can go along with that, not even me, and I was the first to throw corn at the military c
adets and to suggest the coup, before the others took it into their heads, and I was the first to applaud them, I was present for the Te Deum in the cathedral, and precisely because I was I can’t accept that this sort of thing should happen in my country, that people disappear, that my granddaughter is dragged from my house by force and I’m powerless to stop them, things like this never happened here and that’s why I’ve come to see you, Tránsito, because fifty years ago when you were just a skinny little thing in the Red Lantern I never thought that one day I’d be coming to you on my knees to beg you to do me this favor, to help me find my granddaughter, I dare to ask you such a thing because I know you’re on good terms with the new government, I’ve heard about you, Tránsito, I’m sure no one knows the top brass of the armed forces better than you do, I know you organize their parties for them and that you have access to places I could never penetrate and that’s why I’m asking you to do something for my granddaughter before it’s too late, I’ve gone weeks without sleeping, I’ve been to every office, every ministry, seen all my old friends, and no one’s been able to do anything, they don’t want to see me anymore, they make me wait outside for hours, please, Tránsito, ask me for anything you want, I’m still a wealthy man even though under the Communists things got a little tough for me, you probably heard, you must have seen it in the papers and on television, a real scandal, those ignorant peasants ate my breeding bulls and hitched my racing horses to the plow and in less than a year Tres Marías was in ruins, but now I’ve filled the place with tractors and I’m picking up the pieces, just as I did before, when I was young, I’m doing the same thing now that I’m an old man, but I’m not done for, while those poor souls who had the title to my property—my property—are dying of hunger like a bunch of miserable wretches, poor things, it wasn’t their fault they were taken in by that damned agrarian reform, when it comes right down to it I’ve forgiven them and I’d like them to return to Tres Marías, I’ve even placed notices in the papers summoning them back, someday they’ll return and I’ll have no choice but to shake their hands, they’re like children, but anyway that’s not what I came to talk to you about, Tránsito, I don’t want to waste your time, what counts is that I’m well placed and my affairs are sailing along, so I can give you anything you ask for, anything, so long as you find my granddaughter Alba before some madman sends me any more chopped-off fingers or starts to send me cut-off ears and winds up driving me stark raving mad or giving me a heart attack, forgive me for getting all worked up like this, my hands are shaking, I’m very nervous, I can’t explain what happened, a package in the mail and in it only three human fingers, cleanly amputated, a macabre joke that brings back memories, but memories that have nothing to do with Alba, my granddaughter wasn’t even born then, I’m sure I have a lot of enemies, all of us politicians have enemies, it’s not surprising there should be some maniac out there who wants to torture me by sending me fingers through the mail just when I’m out of my mind about Alba’s arrest, to put terrible ideas into my head, and if I weren’t at the end of my rope and hadn’t exhausted all my other possibilities I wouldn’t bother you with this, please, Tránsito, in the name of our old friendship, have pity on me, I’m just a poor destroyed old man, have pity on me and look for my granddaughter Alba before they send her to me in the mail all cut up in little pieces, I sobbed.