Summary
Alba is held along with a great number of other prisoners.
She is physically, sexually, and emotionally tortured by guards
as well as by Esteban Garcia. Alba is always blindfolded when she
meets Esteban Garcia, but after a few days, Esteban Garcia realizes
that she has recognized him. Esteban Garcia and the guards demand
that Alba tell them where Miguel is. She steadfastly refuses. The
tortures increase to electric shocks. Ana Diaz, who had been at
the first occupation of the university with Alba years before, is
also in the women's section of the prison. Ana cares for Alba when
she is at her worst, and the two women establish a friendship. Esteban
Garcia pays special attention to Alba, and she realizes that he
is torturing her not only to find out where Miguel is, but also
to "avenge himself for injuries that had been inflicted on him from
birth." Esteban Garcia's strange desire for Alba takes him over
during one of the torture sessions, and so he sends her off to solitary
confinement. Alba tries to kill herself, but Clara appears to her
and explains to her that she must try to survive. Clara suggests
that Alba write her testimony in her mind, in order to keep herself
sane and to testify to her experiences. Alba follows Clara's advice
and becomes so involved in her mental writing that she stops eating
and drinking. When the guards realize that she is on the brink of
death, they remove her from solitary confinement and return her
to Esteban Garcia, whom she no longer recognizes.
Meanwhile, Esteban Trueba uses every connection he has
to try to locate Alba. After a month of fruitless searching, he
goes to the Hotel Christopher Columbus in search of Transito Soto.
Transito is still there, although the Christopher Columbus has changed
with the times. With the advent of sexual liberation and birth control, demand
for prostitutes diminished, and Transito transformed her cooperative
into a hotel that rents out rooms for lovers to use. The business
has prospered under the military regime as under all of the others,
because a good number of her clients are high-ranking officials
in the regime. Transito realizes that Esteban has come to ask her
to repay the debt she owes him from over fifty years before when he
gave her the money she needed to leave Tres Marias and move to the
city. Esteban asks Transito to help him locate Alba, who is the only
person left in his family who he loves. Transito agrees, and two days
later she calls Esteban to tell him she has found Alba.
Analysis
In keeping with the attention to the particulars of women's
experiences found throughout the novel, special consideration is
given to Alba's experience not only as an individual but also as
a woman. Alba suffers tortures particular to her gender, most notably
rape, which may very well leave her pregnant. She is also supported
by a community of women prisoners. The women employ techniques that
are traditionally viewed as feminine to withstand the torture, such
as singing together. When she is transferred to a concentration camp,
Alba again finds a community of women who bond together to help
raise each other's children and to mend each other's broken bodies
and spirits.
In prison, Clara teaches Alba to write. Of course Alba
was already quite able to write, but Clara teaches her to use writing. Clara
took up writing in journals when she stopped speaking, in order
to keep track of and to record the events of her life. Clara's writing
served a personal interest. As she teaches it to Alba, however,
Clara demonstrates that this personal practice can also fulfill
a political end. Alba will write to resist torture and save her
own life and also to create a testimony to her experience. Testimony
bears witness to events for the purpose of broadcasting them to
a wider audience that may be able to learn from, or even remedy,
the events. While Clara wrote in notebooks, Alba can only write
in her head, as she is in solitary confinement. Her writing is therefore
metaphorical rather than literal. However, as Alba is also revealed
to be the narrator of The House of the Spirits, she
is shown employing literal writing to describe her metaphorical
writing. Alba's writing of her testimony is also a metaphor for
Isabel Allende's writing of The House of the Spirits as
a testimony to events that took place in her native Chile during
her lifetime.
As part of the cyclical nature of events in The
House of the Spirits, in this penultimate—second to last—chapter
Transito Soto returns the favor Esteban did for her in the second
chapter. Also in this chapter, Esteban Garcia exacts revenge on
Alba for what her grandfather did to his grandmother in the second
chapter. The place of each event in the structure of the story shows
that cycles and symmetry are part of the form as well as the content
of The House of the Spirits. Each debt is repaid,
each revenge is exacted, and each character comes full circle. Since
everything is cyclical, it all balances out; there is as much bad
as there is good. The balance of good and evil takes form in this
chapter in the crossing of the results of two sides of Esteban's
character: his generosity towards Transito Soto and his cruelty
towards Pancha, which result in Alba's abduction and in her recovery.
The cycles are completed not randomly, but at precisely situated
moments in the novel that demonstrate the text's own cyclical structure.
