The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende

Author:Isabel Allende
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, pdf
Publisher: Washington Square Press

— EIGHT —

THE COUNT

Had it not been for the letters Clara and Blanca exchanged, that entire period would have remained submerged in a jumble of faded, timeworn memories. Their abundant correspondence salvaged events from the mists of improbable facts. From the very first letter she received from her daughter after her wedding, Clara could tell that her separation from Blanca would not last long. Without saying a word to anyone, she prepared one of the largest, sunniest rooms in the house. In it she placed the bronze cradle in which her own three children had slept.

Blanca was never able to explain to her mother why she had agreed to marry, because she herself did not know. Analyzing her past when she had reached middle age, she decided that the main reason was her fear of her father. Ever since she was a child, she had been familiar with the irrational strength of his anger, and she was used to obeying him. In the end, her pregnancy and the news of Pedro Tercero’s death decided her. Still, from the moment she accepted the liaison with Jean de Satigny, she knew that she would never consummate the marriage. She would invent every possible argument for postponing their union, at first relying on the discomforts peculiar to her state and afterward finding additional excuses, because she was convinced that it would be far easier to manage a husband like the count, who wore kidskin shoes, polished his fingernails, and was willing to marry a woman pregnant with someone else’s child, than to oppose a father like Esteban Trueba. Of two evils, she chose the one that struck her as the lesser. She realized that there was a commercial arrangement between the French count and her father in which she had no say. In exchange for a surname for his grandchild, Trueba gave Jean de Satigny a rich dowry and the promise that he would eventually receive an inheritance. Blanca lent herself to their negotiations, but she was not prepared to surrender either her love or her intimacy to her husband, because she was still in love with Pedro Tercero, more out of force of habit than out of any hope of ever seeing him again.

Blanca and her new husband spent their wedding night in the honeymoon suite of the best hotel in the capital, which Trueba had filled with flowers in the hope of winning his daughter’s forgiveness for the string of assaults to which he had subjected her during the preceding months. To her great surprise, there was no need for her to feign a migraine. As soon as they were alone together, Jean shed his role as the eager suitor who had planted furtive kisses on her neck and who had chosen the finest shrimp to put into her mouth one by one. It was as if he had thoroughly forgotten his seductive, silent-movie-idol manner, and become instead the brother he had been to her in the days of their country

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