The House of the Spirits

There are at least two kinds of retribution in the novel: immediate and personal, and delayed and transferred. One example of immediate and personal retribution occurs when Esteban Trueba sets out to kill Pedro Tercero García. Esteban wants to avenge his daughter's deflowering and his resulting loss of pride. Esteban takes the law into his own hands in order to fulfill his thirst for revenge, although he ultimately succeeds only in wounding the fugitive. Another example of this type of retribution occurs when Clara stops speaking to Esteban for the rest of her life after he knocks out her teeth. She punishes her husband immediately and without harming anyone but him, and her actions do indeed drive him mad. When she dies, he even wears her false teeth in a bag around his neck to show how sorry he is and how much he misses her. The novel's strongest example of delayed and transferred retribution is Esteban Garcí­a's continual mistreatment and eventual near-murder of Alba. As Alba explains it later, "The day my grandfather tumbled Pancha Garcí­a among the rushes of the riverbank, he added another link to the chain of events that had to complete itself. Afterward the grandson of the woman who was raped repeats the gesture with the granddaughter of the rapist, and perhaps forty years from now my grandson will knock Garcí­a's granddaughter down among the rushes, and so on down through the centuries in an unending tale of sorrow, blood, and love." Alba supposes that retribution is never complete; the next generation always pays for the mistakes of the last. It is especially poignant that Esteban Garcí­a chooses to punish Esteban Trueba only indirectly. He hurts Alba, when the patron is the one who raped his grandmother. It is as though he wishes to make the retribution more exact, to rape someone as dear to Esteban Trueba as his own grandmother was to him. Knowing he can never have the wealth and name to which he feels entitled as the patron's blood relative, he avenges...