The House of the Spirits

by Isabel Allende

Perhaps she feared the grandiose love that had stood so many tests would not be able to withstand the most dreadful test of all: living together.

Several years after my mother annulled her marriage to my father, she fell in love with an inconvenient man. He was Catholic, married, and had four young kids. In Chile there was no divorce, so their relationship faced unsurmountable obstacles. However, they fought for their love, he left his family, and was able to make a life with mother and her three kids. They couldn’t get legally married because he could not annul his marriage. In their youth they shared passion and romance but they had little in common and I always suspected that in their later years they were trapped in domestic routines and could not admit that their love had cooled off, By then they had become legendary lovers. That suspicion prompted me to imagine Blanca and Pedro Tercero’s relationship, which also confronted many obstacles. It survived because they couldn’t live together.