Free The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende

tendency to grow violent and lose his head, a characteristic he had had since childhood, when he used to throw himself on the floor foaming at the mouth, so furious that he could scarcely breathe, and kicking like one possessed by the devil. He had to be plunged into freezing water to regain control. Later on he learned to manage these fits, but he was left with a short temper, which needed very little provocation to blossom into terrible attacks.
    â€œI’m not returning to the mine,” he said.
    It was the first sentence he had exchanged at the table with his sister. He had made his mind up the night before, when he realized that it was senseless to continue leading a hermit’s life while seeking for a quick fortune. He still had two years left on the concession to the mine, enough time to finish exploring the marvelous lode he had discovered, but he felt that even if the foreman robbed him a little or did not know how to work it as well as he himself might, that was no reason for him to bury himself alive in the desert. He had no wish to become rich by such a sacrifice. He had his whole life ahead of him to make money if he could, time enough to be bored and to await death, without Rosa.
    â€œYou’ll have to work at something, Esteban,” Férula replied. “It’s true we spend almost nothing, but Mama’s medicines are expensive.”
    Esteban looked at his sister. She was still a beautiful woman, with rich curves and the oval face of a Roman madonna, but already the ugliness of resignation could be glimpsed through her pale, peach-toned skin and her eyes full of shadows. Férula had accepted the role of her mother’s nurse. She slept in the room that adjoined her mother’s, ready at any moment to run in and administer her potions, hold her bedpan, or straighten her pillows. She was a tormented soul. She took pleasure in humiliation and in menial tasks, and since she believed that she would get to heaven by suffering terrible injustice, she was content to clean her mother’s ulcerated legs, washing her and sinking deeply into her stench and wretchedness, even peering into her bedpan. And, much as she hated herself for these torturous and unconfessable pleasures, she hated her mother more for being their instrument. She waited on her without complaint, but she managed subtly to extract from her the price of her invalidism. Without anything being said openly, the fact remained that the daughter had sacrificed her life to care for the mother, and that she had become a spinster for that reason. Férula had turned down two suitors on the pretext of her mother’s illness. She never spoke of it, but everyone knew about it. She moved thickly and awkwardly and had the same sour character as her brother, but life and the fact that she was a woman had forced her to overcome it and to clamp down on the bit. She seemed so perfect that word had spread she was a saint. She was cited as an example because of the devotion that she lavished on Doña Ester and because of the way she had raised her only brother when their mother became ill and their father died, leaving them in dire poverty. Férula had adored her brother Esteban when he was a child. She slept with him, bathed him, took him out for strolls, did other people’s sewing from dawn to dusk to pay for his schooling, and wept with rage and helplessness the day Esteban took a job in a notary’s office because they could not make ends meet with what she earned. She had taken care of him and waited on him as she now did her mother, and she had woven him too into her invisible net of guilt and unrepayable debts of gratitude.
    The boy began to move away from her the day he first put on long pants. Esteban could recall the exact moment when he had realized that his sister was an ominous shadow in his life. It was when he had received his first wages. He had decided to save fifty centavos to fulfill a dream he had cherished