The House of Spirits

3 uses

I suppose it was useless for me to expect her to forget my sour temper of the daytime with all sorts of amorous attentions in the evening.†

1 use

...culminate in either Romanesque debauchery or cockfights, and by evening the men would take the Red Lantern by storm, where twelve-year-old prostitutes and Carmelo, the only homosexual in the brothel and the town, would dance to the strains of an antediluvian Victrola beneath the watchful eye of Sofia, who was too old to go chasing around herself, although she still had the energy to run her business with an iron hand and keep the police from barging in and the customers from taking...†

2 uses

"This is to assuage our conscience, darling," she would explain to Blanca.†

2 uses

She returned to her room relieved to know that her nerves were not failing her but that something atrocious was going on in her husband's secret den.†

2 uses

Owing to legal constraints and the need for an official-sounding name, he called it the Institute for Union with Nothingness, or the I.U.N. But his father was not disposed to leave him in peace; Nicolas's followers began to appear in the newspaper with shaved heads, indecent loincloths, and beatific expressions, bringing public ridicule to the name of Trueba.†

2 uses

She regretted that the splendid women in her family had not bequeathed their attributes to her, that the only one who had, Rosa the Beautiful, had given her only the algae tones in her hair, which seemed more like a hairdresser's mistake than anything else.†

4 uses

He was probably happy that night and the few nights after as the two of them cavorted like two puppies in the huge wrought-iron bed that had belonged to the first Trueba and was now somewhat wobbly, although it still withstood the thrusts of love.†

2 uses

I have them here at my feet, bound with colored ribbons, divided according to events and not in chronological order, just as she arranged them before she left.†

1 use

The weeping was copious, but it was dignified and muted.†

1 use

While their romance lasted, the King of the Pressure Cookers would come to call for Blanca and take her out to eat in the most exclusive restaurants; he drove a tiny car with only two seats, tractor tires, and the noise of a turbine under the hood, a unique model in its class, which provoked a rush of curiosity among the neighbors and derogatory remarks from the Trueba family.†

1 use

For the first time in his life, he managed to link those didactic anecdotes with a reality he could see.†

1 use

She was a practical, worldly, diffident woman, and her modern, pragmatic character was a serious obstacle to telepathy.†

1 use

She was faithful to him even in those moments when he lost himself in a sea of straight-haired, long-boned nymphs, and never loved him any the less for his digressions.†

1 use

They continued celebrating in a festive spirit and singing that the people united would never be defeated—even though each time they sang, it sounded more out of tune because divisiveness and hatred were inexorably growing.†

3 uses

Carried away by vocational zeal, the priest had all he could do to avoid openly disobeying the instructions of his ecclesiastic superiors, who, shaken by the winds of modernism, were opposed to hair shirts and flagellation.†

1 use

They spent that summer reading among the rushes by the river, the pine trees in the forest, and the sprouting stalks of the wheatfields, discussing the virtues of Sinbad and Robin Hood, the bad luck of the Black Pirate, the true and edifying stories from the Treasury of Youth, the worst meanings of the words that did not appear in the dictionary of the Spanish Royal Academy, the cardiovascular system in illustrated plates where you could see a man with no skin and all his veins and...†

6 uses

She was too busy putting things on the table and taking them away, and keeping an eye on her daughter, but as she removed the soup bowl with the leftover lentils she caught the final words of her husband's harangue.†

2 uses

His wife, Nfvea, preferred to deal with God without benefit of intermediaries.†

2 uses

The next day Blanca waited for Jean de Satigny to finish his meticulous toilette, eat his usual parsimonious breakfast, read his newspaper cover to cover, and finally leave on his morning walk, letting nothing in her placid, expectant mother's countenance betray her fierce determination.†

4 uses

From there they were hauled out to inhabit the dreams of his descendants, until they were mistakenly burned half a century later on an infamous pyre.†