Free The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende Page B

say,” Férula replied, drawing a fish bone from between her teeth.
    â€œI think I’m going to go to the country, maybe to Tres Marías.”
    â€œThat place is in ruins, Esteban. I’ve always told you that the best thing you could do with it is sell it, but you’re as stubborn as a mule.”
    â€œLand is something one should never sell. It’s the only thing that’s left when everything else is gone.”
    â€œI don’t agree. Land is a romantic idea. What makes a man rich is a good eye for business,” Férula insisted. “But you always said that one day you would go and live in the country.”
    â€œThat day has arrived. I hate this city.”
    â€œWhy don’t you say it’s because you hate this house?”
    â€œThat too,” he answered brutally.
    â€œI would like to have been born a man, so I could leave too,” she said, full of hatred.
    â€œAnd I would not have liked to be a woman,” he said.
    They finished eating in silence. The brother and sister had drifted apart, and the only thing that remained to unite them was the presence of their mother and the vague memory of the love they had had for each other as children. They had grown up in a ruined home, witness to the moral and economic deterioration of their father and then the slow illness of their mother. Doña Ester had begun to suffer from arthritis at an early age, becoming stiffer and stiffer until she could only move with the greatest difficulty, like a living corpse; finally, no long able to bend her knees, she had settled for good into her wheelchair, her widowhood, and her despair. Esteban remembered his childhood and adolescence, his tight-fitting suits, the rope of Saint Francis he was forced to tie around his waist as a sign of who only knew what vows his mother or his sister had made, his carefully mended shirts, and his loneliness. Férula, five years his senior, washed and starched his only two shirts every other day so that he would always look fresh and properly dressed, and reminded him that on their mother’s side they were heir to the noblest and most highborn surname of the viceroyalty of Lima. Trueba had simply been a regrettable accident in the life of Doña Ester, who was destined to marry someone of her own class, but she had fallen hopelessly in love with that good-for-nothing immigrant, a first-generation settler who within a few short years had squandered first her dowry and then her inheritance.
    But his blue-blood past was of no use to Esteban if there was not enough money in the house to pay the grocer and he had to go to school on foot because he did not have the fare for the streetcar. He recalled how they had packed him off to school with his chest and back lined with newspaper, because he had no woolen underclothes and his overcoat was in tatters, and how he had suffered at the thought that his schoolmates might be able to hear, as he could, the crunch of the paper as it moved against his skin. In winter, the only source of heat in the whole house was the brazier in his mother’s bedroom, where the three of them huddled together to save on candles and coal. His had been a childhood of privations, discomfort, harshness, interminable nighttime rosaries, fear, and guilt. All that remained of those days was his fury and his outsized pride.
    Two days later Esteban Trueba left for the country. Férula accompanied him to the train station. She kissed him a cold goodbye on the cheek and waited for him to board the train carrying his two leather suitcases with the bronze locks, the same ones he had bought when he left for the mine and that were supposed to last him the rest of his life, according to the salesman’s promise. She told him to be sure to take care of himself and to try to visit them from time to time; she said she would miss him, but they both knew they were destined not to see each other for many years, and underneath it all they