The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende Page B

the devil endowed with a life of its own, and refused to go anywhere near it, but Esteban was unyielding and in the end she mastered it. He also set up a modest general store where the tenants could buy whatever they needed without having to make the trip by oxcart all the way into San Lucas. The patrón would buy things wholesale and resell them at cost to his workers. He introduced a voucher system, which at first functioned as a form of credit, but gradually became a substitute for legal tender. With these slips of pink paper his tenants could buy everything in the general store; their wages were paid in them. In addition to the famous slips of paper, each worker also had the right to a small plot of land that he could cultivate in his free time, as well as six hens a year per family, a measure of seed, a share of the harvest to meet his basic needs, bread and milk for every day, and a bonus of fifty pesos that was distributed among the men at Christmas and on Independence Day. Even though they worked as equals with the men, the women did not receive this sum because, except for widows, they were not considered heads of family. Laundry soap, knitting wool, and a special syrup to strengthen the lungs were distributed free, for Trueba did not want anyone dirty, cold, or sick living on his land. One day he read in the encyclopedia about the advantages of a balanced diet, and so began his mania for vitamins, which was to last for the rest of his life. He had a tantrum whenever he saw any of the peasants giving their children only bread and feeding milk and eggs to the pigs. He began holding required meetings in the schoolhouse to inform them about vitamins and to let them know, in passing, whatever news he managed to pick up on his crystal set. He soon tired of chasing radio waves with his wire and ordered a short-wave radio with two enormous batteries. This apparatus enabled him to intercept a few coherent messages in the midst of a deafening roar from across the sea. Thus it was that he learned about the war in Europe and was able to follow the advances of the troops on a map he hung on the school blackboard, which he marked with pins. The tenants watched him in amazement, without the foggiest idea of why anyone would stick a pin in the color blue one day and move it to the color green the next. They could not imagine the world as the size of a piece of paper spread over a blackboard, in which whole armies were reduced to the head of a pin. In fact they cared not at all about the war, about scientific inventions, about the advance of industry, the price of gold, or the latest extravaganzas in the world of fashion. These were fairy tales, which did nothing to alter the narrowness of their existence. To that undaunted audience, the news on the radio was remote and alien, and the machine lost all its luster for them when it became evident that it was useless when it came to forecasting the weather. The only one who showed the slightest interest in the messages that came through was Pedro Segundo García.
    Esteban Trueba spent many hours with him, first in front of the crystal set, and then, with the battery-operated radio, awaiting the miracle of the distant, anonymous voice that gave them contact with civilization. Even so, this did not bring the two men closer. Trueba knew that this unformed peasant was more intelligent than the others. He was the only one who knew how to read or carry on a conversation more than three sentences long. He was the closest thing to a friend that Trueba had within a radius of fifty miles, but his monumental pride prevented him from recognizing in the man any virtues beyond those that marked him as a good peon. Trueba was not one to encourage intimacy with his subordinates. Pedro Segundo hated him, even though he had never given a name to the tortured feeling that gripped his soul and filled him with confusion. It was a mixture of fear and resentful admiration. His intuition told him that he