The House of the Spirits

by Isabel Allende

Just as she had gone with her mother in the days when she was mute, she now took Blanca with her on her visits to the poor, weighed down with gifts and comfort. “This is to assuage our conscience, darling,” she would explain to Blanca. “But it doesn’t help the poor. They don’t need charity; they need justice.”

Esteban Trueba appeared in the doorway at the very instant when the house snapped in half like an eggshell and collapsed in a cloud of dust, flattening him beneath a pile of rubble. Clara pulled herself to where he was, shouting his name, but there was no reply.

I highlighted this because I thought it was his death! If only!

One day he was discussing the situation with Blanca and Alba. He expressed his regret that the Army’s action, whose purpose had been to eliminate the threat of a Marxist dictatorship, had condemned the country to a dictatorship far more severe, one that, to all evidence, was fated to last a century. For the first time in his life, Senator Trueba admitted he had made a mistake. Sunk in his armchair like an old man at the end of his days, they saw him shed silent tears. He was not crying because he had lost power. He was crying for his country.

I don't really feel bad for him...

After that the old man turned to Pedro Tercero and looked him in the eye. He stretched out his hand, but he did not know how to shake Pedro’s hand because it was missing several fingers. Instead, he opened his arms and the two men said goodbye in a tight knot, free at last of the hatred and rancor that had poisoned their lives for so many years. “I’ll take good care of your daughter and I will try to make her happy,” Pedro Tercero García said, his voice breaking. “I have no doubt of that. Go in peace, my children,” the old man murmured. He knew he would never see them again.

I guess Blanca and Tercero get the happiest ending

Now he’s laid out on the sailboat of the gentle sea, smiling and calm, while I write at the blond wood table that belonged to my grandmother. I’ve opened the blue silk curtains to let the morning in and cheer up the room. A new canary is singing in the antique cage hanging by the window, and from the center of the room the glass eyes of Barrabás stare up at me. My grandfather told me Clara fainted the day he put the skin of the animal down as a rug, thinking it would please her. We both laughed until we cried and decided to go down to the basement and look for the remains of poor old Barrabás, sovereign in his indefinable biological constitution, despite the passage of time and so much neglect, and to put him where my grandfather had laid him half a century earlier in homage to the woman he loved most in his life.

okokok so Barrabás and Esteban are clearly connected fine yes I see now

I have them here at my feet, bound with colored ribbons, divided according to events and not in chronological order, just as she arranged them before she left. Clara wrote them so they would help me now to reclaim the past and overcome terrors of my own. The first is an ordinary school copybook with twenty pages, written in a child’s delicate calligraphy. It begins like this: Barrabás came to us by sea . . .