The House of the Spirits: Chapter 2 Summary & Analysis

In the dining room of what had been a superb Victorian home, Esteban sits at the breakfast table with Férula. Their mother, Doña Ester Trueba, does not join them. Doña Ester Trueba spends her mornings immobile in a chair, watching from the window as the neighborhood declines. After breakfast, she is assisted back to bed, where she stays in a semi-seated position until the next morning, when the process begins again. Esteban places his silverware on his empty plate. He sits stiffly, just as he walks. He is strong, and he is known for his quick temper and violence. Esteban tells his sister that he won’t be returning to the mine.

Férula reminds Esteban that he must do something to make money. Doña Ester’s medications are expensive, she says. Esteban looks at his sister. She is still a beautiful woman, but she has resigned herself to the role of their mother’s fulltime nurse. Férula is a miserable woman, and while she will never tell Esteban, she has already turned down two marriage proposals. She adored Esteban as a child, but he has been pulling away from her since the first time he put on “long pants.” Now, Férula sits and watches the clock, waiting for mother’s scheduled medication times, angry that her brother isn’t obligated to the same fate.

Esteban tells Férula that he has decided to go to Tres Marías, but Férula tries to talk him out of it. The place is in ruins, she says, and Esteban would do well to sell it for the price of the land. Esteban refuses. Land, he says, is all that is left when everything else is gone. “I would like to have been born a man,” Férula says with venom and hatred in her voice, “so I could leave too.” Esteban can’t relate; he has never wanted to be a woman.

Doña Ester has suffered with crippling arthritis for several years, but she was once heir to the highest surname of the viceroyalty of Lima. That all changed, however, when she met and feel in love with Esteban and Férula’s father, a “good-for-nothing immigrant” who wasted her dowry and inheritance. Now, there isn’t enough money to pay the grocer, and Tres Marías, a country hacienda, is all that is left of their once-great fortune. Esteban leaves two days later for the country, and Férula kisses him coldly on the cheek. Esteban tells his sister that he will never be poor again and climbs onto the train.

Esteban arrives in the town of San Lucas, a terrible place nestled in the valley of a large volcano. He played at Tres Marías during school breaks as a boy, but that was a long time ago and memory has all but erased those summers. San Lucas is like a ghost town, and Esteban walks around the entire town without seeing another soul. Then, he notices a woodcutter in a wobbly cart and asks for a ride to Tres Marías. The man tells Esteban that Tres Marías is “a no-man’s-land,” but Esteban insists. As they approach the hacienda, the inhabitants come out of their huts and watch. 

The cart pulls up to the main house of Tres Marías, and Esteban goes inside. The house is covered in dust and cobwebs, and he marvels at how time has worn the house away, leaving only dirt and poverty. To Esteban, Tres Marías looks worse than the mine. He walks through the entire house, and when he is done, Esteban goes outside. Looking around, he sees only women and children and asks where the men are. A man, Pedro Segundo García, steps forward and tells Esteban that all the other men have left. Esteban says he is the new patrón, and he tells them all that it is time to get to work. 

No one can convince Esteban that he isn’t a good patrón, which is why he refuses to believe in “class struggle.” Esteban thinks the peasants are much better off with him than without him. He uses all the money he saved to marry Rosa to fix up Tres Marías, and with hard work and organization, it begins to resemble the estate it once was. The livestock flourishes, and they rebuild the main house. The peasants’ wives take turns working in the main house, and they tend to the orchards as well. The old fields are replanted, and they build stables and chicken coops, and even a new irrigation system. Anyone who falls ill is taken to the hospital, and Esteban even arranges for a priest to come bless the property and people and perform baptisms.

Soon, Esteban begins to feel at home at Tres Marías, and he especially enjoys the solitude and the work. Despite this, however, Esteban’s bad character only grows worse, and he treats the peasants and their children badly. The only thing that calms Esteban’s foul mood is hunting, and he takes frequent horseback rides with his rifle. Still, Esteban maintains that he is a very good patrón, and no one will ever convince him otherwise.

During his first months at Tres Marías, Esteban goes to bed exhausted each night and wakes before dawn ready to work. However, the nights soon grow difficult, and the blankets feel too heavy and the sheets too thin. Esteban’s horse begins to play tricks on him and turns into “a formidable female,” which he rides until his body aches. At night, he wakes from terrible nightmares of “rotten shellfish, of enormous slabs of raw beef, of blood, semen, and tears,” always with a massive erection that he must jump into the icy river to relieve. It is clear to Esteban that he needs a woman, and he smiles for the first time in months.

Esteban has seen the peasant girl, Pancha García, many times on the hacienda, washing clothes in the river, and it is late afternoon when he goes out to look for her. He finds her, bent over a kitchen hearth. She doesn’t look up at him (peasant women always bow their head as a sign of respect in front of Esteban), but he rides his horse right up to the hearth and, placing his arm firmly around her waist, pulls Pancha up into the saddle.

Esteban rides with Pancha in the saddle down to the river, and they climb down from the horse. Without removing his clothes, Esteban attacks her, “savagely thrusting himself into her without preamble, with unnecessary brutality.” He can tell she is a virgin, but Pancha makes no attempt to resist him, as both Pancha’s mother and grandmother before her “suffered the same animal fate.” When Esteban is satisfied, he stops and whistles as Pancha weeps. From that day on, Esteban orders Pancha to work in the main house, where he takes his time with her, making sure she enjoys their sexual encounters, too.

Esteban begins construction on a six-room schoolhouse so that everyone on Tres Marías will know how to read, write, and do simple arithmetic. Esteban isn’t exactly comfortable with the peasants learning and filling their minds with new ideas, but he builds the school anyway, and he even finds a teacher to work for him. He considers building a dining hall where all the hacienda’s children can get one good meal a day, but he doesn’t think the children will come from all over the property just for a plate of food, so he scraps the idea. Instead, Esteban builds a sewing workshop and introduces Pancha to her first sewing machine. 

Esteban builds a general store, where the peasants can buy whatever they need, and he sets up a voucher system using pink slips of paper. The pink paper serves as legal tender on the hacienda, and Esteban pays each of the peasants with the small pieces of paper. Women are expected to work just like the men, but Esteban doesn’t pay them. He only pays the widows, who are considered heads of family. Esteban gives everyone free soap, knitting wool, and medicine, since he doesn’t want dirty, cold, or sick peasants. He even gets a short-wave radio and listens to news of a great war, but Pedro Segundo García is the only peasant interested in outside events.

Esteban and Pedro Segundo spend a lot of time together, listening to the radio and working, and he is the closest Esteban has to a friend. Esteban’s pride, however, won’t recognize a peasant as a friend. Pedro Segundo was the unofficial foreman of the hacienda in the years before Esteban arrived, and sometimes Esteban thinks he can see “murderous hatred” in Pedro Segundo’s eyes. Still, Pedro Segundo is honest and loyal, and says nothing when he sees his sister, Pancha, in the main house.

Soon, Esteban realizes that Pancha is obviously pregnant, although he is certainly the last one to notice. He cares very little and only uses her to relieve tension and get a good night’s sleep. In truth, he is “repulsed” by Pancha, and he can’t view any child she gives birth to as his own. Esteban looks out the window to another young peasant girl, about 13 or 14 years old, and smiles.

Over the next ten years, Esteban continues to improve Tres Marías. He builds brick houses for the peasants and raises their standard of living, but his bad temper is well-known. There isn’t a peasant girl around that isn’t taken into the woods by Esteban, and the entire region is soon overflowing with Esteban’s “bastard offspring.” Pedro Segundo tries to convince Esteban that it isn’t brick houses and free milk that makes a good patrón, but a good salary not paid in pink paper and a workload that doesn’t break one’s back. Esteban refuses to listen. Such ideas are “Bolshevik” nonsense, Esteban says. Peasants are like children, he maintains. What would they do without him?

Esteban claims that the peasants can’t properly care for themselves, yet they want the right to vote. They will likely vote for communists, Esteban thinks, because they don’t understand that governments must be ran by strong men. It is nice to think that all humankind is created equal, but Esteban knows this isn’t true. In fact, the idea of equality is so ridiculous, it makes Esteban laugh.

In the meantime, Esteban sends Férula and Doña Ester money and food, because he has plenty, but he has no desire to see them. He can tell them whatever he wants by letter, but he doesn’t mention his string of illegitimate children. Every peasant girl Esteban conquers seems to get pregnant, although he doesn’t believe they are his children. He does believe that Pancha’s son (also named Esteban) is his—Pancha was a virgin before they began having sex, after all. But Esteban still doesn’t take responsibility for the boy. Whenever a new peasant girl accuses him of fathering her child, he gives her a few banknotes, threatens her with his whip, and tells her never to come back. Esteban wants a woman of his own class to birth his children, so they can have his surname and the blessing of the church. 

Esteban thinks of Rosa’s mother, Nívea, who campaigned for women’s rights with the other suffragettes. Such women made their husbands look ridiculous, and Esteban always thought Nívea was “sick in the head.” A woman’s role is in the home, Esteban believes, not as doctors or presidents of nations. What women like Nívea really need, according to Esteban, is a “strong hand.” That year, the country begins “waking up,” and discontent spreads far and wide that strikes fear in their oligarchic society. The upper classes, however, are largely unaware of this looming threat. Esteban and the other landowners devise a plan for dealing with the upcoming presidential election. Their peasants still live like they did in colonial times, and the landowners want to keep it that way. Still, there is talk of unions, and Marxist pamphlets somehow find their way into circulation.

Esteban begins to frequent the Red Lantern, a local brothel, where the best dancer, Tránsito Soto, is his favorite. Even though he hates paying for something he can simply take whenever he wants, Esteban likes Tránsito because she isn’t afraid of the “brutalities of love.” One day, Tránsito asks to borrow 50 pesos, so she can move on. She is meant for bigger things, Tránsito says, and she promises to pay him back with interest. Esteban agrees, disappointed that he won’t see her anymore, but Tránsito says their paths will cross again. Life is full of the unexpected twists, she says. 

In the meantime, Esteban and the other landowners promise the peasants a bonus if the conservative candidate wins the presidential election, and they promise to fire them if their candidate doesn’t win. They rig ballot boxes and bribe the police, and they even transport the peasants to vote “under careful observation.” Liberals and radicals, Esteban says, are idiots, and communists are “atheist bastards who eat little children.”

One morning, after a particularly disturbing dream in which a tiny girl without eyes keeps calling him “Papa,” Esteban wakes to a telegram from Férula. Doña Ester is sick, the telegram says, and she wants to see her son before she dies. Esteban doesn’t really love his mother, but the telegram still bothers him. He calls Pedro Segundo, explains the situation, and leaves him in charge. As Esteban hands over the keys—except the keys to the wine cellar—Pedro Segundo smiles without happiness.