The House of the Spirits

by Isabel Allende

She was already in the habit of writing down important matters, and afterward, when she was mute, she also recorded trivialities, never suspecting that fifty years later I would use her notebooks to reclaim the past and overcome terrors of my own.

The girl’s strange beauty had a disturbing quality that even she could not help noticing, for this child of hers seemed to have been made of a different material from the rest of the human race.

He did not know that she had seen her own destiny, that she had summoned him with the power of her thought, and that she had already made up her mind to marry without love.

“That’s the way it’s always been, son. You can’t change the law of God,” his father would reply. “Yes, you can, Papa. There are people doing it right now, but we don’t even get the news here. Important things are happening in the world,”

It took me several minutes to calm down and realize that I hadn’t killed him. My first reaction was one of relief, because the feel of his warm blood on my face had quickly taken the edge off my hatred, and I had to make a real effort to remember how badly I had wanted to kill him

She often said that perhaps it was not the souls of the dead, wandering in another dimension, but rather beings from other planets who were trying to establish a relationship with earthlings but who, because they were made of an intangible matter, could easily be confused with souls.

She was a practical, worldly, diffident woman, and her modern, pragmatic character was a serious obstacle to telepathy.

Blanca argued that her reading should be monitored because there were certain things that were inappropriate for her age, but her Uncle Jaime felt that people never read what did not interest them and that if it interested them that meant they were sufficiently mature to read it. He had the same theory about bathing and eating.

After the nuns left, their herd of charges in hand and their white wings aflutter, Blanca hugged her daughter passionately, covered her face with kisses, and told her they should thank God that she was normal. For this reason, Alba grew up thinking that normality was a gift from heaven.

She seemed to be detaching herself from the world, growing ever lighter, more transparent, more winged.

“Just as when we come into the world, when we die we are afraid of the unknown. But the fear is something from within us that has nothing to do with reality. Dying is like being born: just a change,” Clara had said.

Clara’s death completely transformed life in the big house on the corner. Gone with her were the spirits and the guests, as well as that luminous gaiety that had always been present because she did not believe that the world was a vale of tears but rather a joke that God had played and that it was idiotic to take it seriously if He himself never had.

He was astute enough to be the first to call the left “the enemy of democracy,” never suspecting that years later that would be the slogan of the dictatorship.

“Public opinion wouldn’t stand for it,” Gómez replied. “This is a democracy. It’s not a dictatorship and it never will be.” “We always think things like that only happen elsewhere,” said Miguel, “until they happen to us too.”

“Go to hell,” Trueba said without conviction. “Fine. That’s where we’re going. You’re coming with me.”

The coup gave them a chance to put into practice what they had learned in their barracks: blind obedience, the use of arms, and other skills that soldiers can master once they silence the scruples of their hearts.

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.