Clara continues to play a significant part in the story of the Trueba family even after her death. These qualities can often provoke her to come down to earth for a while and engage in the practical matters of feeding the hungry and comforting the poor and sick. Clara is softhearted and clings tenaciously to her ideas about social justice. But there's more to Clara than the fanciful spiritual exercises that provide a bit of comic relief to a novel that is often dark. She's forever exhausting herself in the séances she holds with the loonies who gather around her. It's characterized by psychic experiments, prophecies, dream interpretations, and communication with aliens from outer space.
But Clara's spiritual affinities lie far outside of the strict bounds of Catholicism that permeate her society. Clara's innocence and the childlike purity that she maintains even during her wildest romps in bed with Esteban Trueba might make her sound a bit like a Virgin Mary figure. Just imagine all of the other characters, human and animal, living and dead, floating around Clara like babes in a state of embryonic bliss.
Birds and cats, flowers and ghosts flock to Clara, and spiritualists and artists crowd her doorstep. Clara is the alpha and the omega of The House of the Spirits – the glue that holds the Trueba family together, and the life force of the big house on the corner and of the novel as a whole. The novel begins with Clara's childish scribbles, and ends the same way. People are going to die, but the weather is nice. Well, after all those hints from the narrator, we knew it was coming, didn't we The sun is shining. One might say that Clara gives birth to the novel with the inaugural words: "Barrabás came to us by sea" (1.1). The House of the Spirits Chapter 13 Back Chapter 13 The Terror It's the day of the coup. If this matriarchal family saga has a mother-of-all-mother-figures, it's Clara del Valle.
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