The House of Impossible Loves

by Cristina Lopez Barrio

  Olvido took off her coat, sat across from his desk, spread her legs, and shimmied her skirt up to her waist. The lawyer adjusted a pair of round silver glasses on his nose.

  “Your secret is almost more beautiful than your face, and that is no easy feat.” His hands shook. “My dear Olvido, how often I have dreamed of this moment.”

  Faced with that universe opened lusciously before him, the lawyer pulled down his pants and boxers ironed with rose water. But nothing else happened. His member shrank at such beauty, at the sight of pink mounds softly rising and falling, surrounded by a thoroughbred’s crimped mane.

  Seven times, on seven different weeks, the lawyer tried to sleep with Olvido Laguna. And seven times, confronted by his own age and such divine topography, the lawyer was overcome by a wave of impotence that left him prostrate on the couch, sipping lime blossom tea. Olvido breathed a sigh of relief. Every morning she washed her vulva with well water, scrubbed it with a poppy and citrus blossom paste to enhance its magnificence, leaving its mounds as smooth and radiant as a bride’s skin.

  But her nightmares were what helped Olvido break free of the lawyer for a time. Ever since her daughter moved to Paris, Olvido had dreamed of Esteban’s blood. She would wake drenched in the scent of squash and crawl under the covers, shaking. Every now and then she vomited a clear moonlight-colored liquid.

  One Sunday night a blizzard thrust the smell of pines into the hearts of sleepwalkers and insomniacs alike. It ripped Padre Rafael’s speakers from the front of the church and blew open the kitchen window at Scarlet Manor just as Olvido was about to make cinnamon cake. The blizzard carried the death of leaves, the damp of mushrooms, and the solitude of a land only just recovering from adversity. The bottle of cinnamon shattered on the floor, and its perfume filled the room with the memory of Margarita. It had been years since Olvido had kissed her, held her. Olvido Laguna knew she had to visit her daughter before the nightmares engulfed her forever.

  The next morning, as the town surveyed the destruction wrought by the blizzard, Olvido wrote to the lawyer:

  My dear friend,

  Please advise Manuela Laguna of my immediate departure to see my daughter in Paris. In the name of our mutual friendship, I must trust you to finalize the financial details of this trip, if you understand.

  With heartfelt thanks, yours truly,

  OLVIDO LAGUNA

  “You can’t leave just when we’re becoming intimate,” the lawyer protested from behind his desk.

  “I’ll be back soon, I promise. My daughter is in trouble. She needs me. Surely you understand a mother’s obligation.”

  “Well, I spoke with your mother yesterday, and she did not approve your trip. Without her consent, there is no money for you to go. And if I give it to you, she will discover our secret.”

  “Tell my mother that, if she gives me the money, I will marry whomever she chooses when I return.”

  “What madness is this, my dear Olvido? Who would want to marry a woman with your reputation?”

  “My mother will do whatever it takes to find him. Someone will want me.”

  “I haven’t offended you, have I? I adore you, Olvido, but I am constrained by a fifty-year marriage, seven children, ten grandchildren.”

  “I know. I wasn’t thinking of you. Propose this to my mother. Find me a good match, and I will repay you once I return.”

  Three weeks later Olvido Laguna was on a plane to Paris. Looking through the window of this amazing contraption floating among the clouds, she recalled her mother’s smile as she left. “I’ll be here, waiting for the wedding,” it seemed to say. “I’ll do my petit point, tend to my roses, and butcher my chickens—and find you a husband, of course. Come back soon!”

  Margarita was waiting at the airport when she arrived. This time it was Olvido who walked downstairs with a suitcase in each hand. She was thirty-seven years old, and for the first time since Esteban died, she wanted to live.

  “Mamá! I don’t want us to be apart ever again. Stay with me here!” Margarita said as they embraced.

  “As you wish, darling. I give in. I’ll do whatever you ask.”

  “Then it’s settled. You’ll stay.” Margarita kissed her mother’s cheeks. “And how is Abuela?”

  “Her arthritis has worsened.”

  “Arthritis. I used to repeat that word at boarding school as I went to sleep. The other girls thought I was praying. Tell me, Mamá, does Abuela know how to write?”

  “No, she’s illiterate.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes, of course. She doesn’t know how to read or write.”

  “And is there anyone who can write letters for her?”

  “Only her lawyer . . . Why do you ask? Have you received a letter from her?”

  “No! I’ve told you a thousand times, I just feel sorry for her. I wonder how someone like that can get by.” Margarita was pensive for a moment. “I also wanted to ask if one day you’ll tell me about my father.”

  “What’s gotten into you, darling?” Olvido asked, stroking her daughter’s hair. “I’ve just arrived and—”

  “I want to know more about my family. That’s all, Mamá. You never tell me anything. It’s as if you have something to hide.”

  The stench of gunpowder filled Olvido’s nose. How could she tell Margarita the truth about her father’s death? How could she tell her she was born into a family burdened by a curse that would chill her bones?

  On the taxi ride into the center of Paris, Olvido admired the beauty of the city. The sorrow she’d felt moments earlier began to dissipate.

  Following his client’s instructions, the lawyer had booked a five-star hotel. Manuela wanted to make sure Olvido was happy, that not a single complaint would derail her plan to marry off her daughter. The lobby floor was tiled in pink and white marble; on the walls, mirrors and paintings glittered in the light of a crystal chandelier. Three women shuffling on rags were polishing tiles in step to a military beat.

  Margarita checked her mother in at reception. A bellboy carried both suitcases, leading them to Olvido’s room. It was large but a bit dark, classically furnished with heavy green curtains. Margarita tipped the bellboy as he left.

  “Mamá, can I ask you a question about my father now?”

  “Of course.”

  “Did you love him a lot? I mean, did you love him like in the movies?”

  “I did, darling. I loved him like that and more. Your father was everything to me.”

  “And then he fell out a window.”

  “It was an accident.”

  “Do you think he died just because he loved you?”

  “Of course not.”

  “I’m never going to fall in love.” Margarita plunked down on the double bed. “I’ve decided.”

  “Well, that’s a shame. Besides, you should know by now it’s not something you can stop. It just happens and that’s that.”

  “But you were unlucky and I’m sure I will be, too.”

  “That makes me sad, darling.” Olvido took her daughter’s face in her hands. “There’s no reason the same thing will happen to you. Your life is completely different from mine. And I was lucky; I was so lucky to know your father. He taught me to read and write. It was wartime, and a bomb destroyed the school. Now, is this on your mind because you like someone?”

  “No.” Margarita sighed and looked at the clock. “I’ve got to go, Mamá. I have a meeting at university. Rest, and I’ll come back in a few hours for dinner.”

  Olvido took a shower when her daughter left. She turned the water hot, letting it cascade over her memories. In the distance, she thought she heard a bomb explode.

  The phone rang at nine-thirty that night.

  “Hello?”

  “Mamá, were you asleep?” Margarita’s voice crackled.

  “No, just resting.”

  “Something’s come up at university, so I won’t make it for dinner. I’m sorry.”

  “Do what you need to, darling. I
’ll eat here at the hotel and see you tomorrow.”

  “See you then.”

  Olvido had no appetite. She walked over to the window. Through lace curtains she could see the silhouette of a full moon, lighting the sky over Paris with a milky halo. Olvido shivered. That moon was just a phantom. She knew. It couldn’t fool her, even if it did illuminate the rooftops and chimneys with its melancholy obesity. “As far as I’m concerned, you died that icy night,” she whispered, narrowing her eyes as she recalled Esteban’s last kiss and how it tasted of fear. That moon was rotting in some celestial graveyard.

  Margarita spent so much time at university that Olvido had to get used to being alone again. Every day she would walk along the Champs-Élysées, around the Eiffel Tower and the stunning Invalides, carrying a newspaper or magazine in a language she did not understand. Longing for Esteban’s grave led her to wander through Père Lachaise Cemetery from the time it opened until it closed. She was fascinated by the vaults, the sculptures that adorned tombs, anchored by thick foliage. She liked to sit on one with the statue of a soldier on his knees, his jacket open to receive imaginary bullets. Olvido stuffed the soil from Père Lachaise into the pockets of her raincoat, the weight of death preventing the Parisian wind from lifting her airborne, as if she did not exist. She also spent time at the Louvre and some galleries Margarita recommended. At sunset she would sit by the window in a Montmartre café to admire the domes of Sacré-Coeur or paintings set up on easels in the square, and feel Paris gaze upon her. She would drink one, two, three, four glasses of wine, damning its blood-red color as moss from the yard at Scarlet Manor grew thick in her mouth.

  One day in late February, the day dawned to a mass of clouds that unleashed a mountain rain, and Olvido’s luck changed. Margarita phoned to ask her to attend a party one of her professors was holding. Olvido noted the address and lay back in bed to wait for nightfall.

  The professor lived near Notre-Dame, in an apartment overlooking the river. As Olvido descended from the taxi, the church towers looked like a pair of bat ears. A sparkling fog lay over the Seine. The temperature was dipping down near zero. As she walked up the stairs into the old apartment block, Olvido realized this was the first party she had ever attended. Before ringing the bell, she smoothed her hair; it hung loose, the first strands of gray appearing in the dark tresses. Margarita opened the door with a glass of wine in her hand.

  “Mamá, I’m so glad you came.” Margarita kissed her on both cheeks. “Let me introduce you to two of my classmates from Spain so you’ll have someone to talk to.”

  Olvido followed her daughter into a room thick with cigarette smoke and young intellectuals. She took off her jacket, hanging it on a rack. A record was playing French music. In the middle of the room, several pale girls with black-rimmed glasses were dancing and smoking with eyes closed.

  “The first thing you’ve got to do at any party in Paris or anywhere else is loosen up,” Margarita said, pouring Olvido a glass of wine.

  Olvido gripped the glass so tight her fingertips ached.

  “Let me introduce you to Juan Montalvo and Andrés García.”

  Two young men with bloodshot eyes reached out to shake her hand.

  “Have fun, Mamá!” Margarita disappeared down a hall.

  “All mothers should be as beautiful as you,” one of the men purred. “I hope you don’t mind my saying so; I’m just trying to be friendly.”

  “Thank you.” Olvido drank her glass of wine in one gulp and moved on, using the excuse that she was going to get another.

  A slow song was playing, and several couples held each other tight as they danced. Olvido picked up a bottle of red wine and went to drink it near a couple kissing in the corner. The wet sound of their lips caused her heart to race. The smell of a carpentry shop slipped through that home like a ghost. On a sofa, surrounded by young, red-lipped French girls, the host was carving a piece of wood. Shavings whirled at his feet. Olvido could not take her eyes off him. And as he gave form to his piece, the green-eyed man stared back. His name was Jean, and his female students said he had the most handsome arms in all of France. He taught sculpture at the university, and when not in class, he was carving at home.

  The song ended. Olvido heard the bells of Notre-Dame play a somber melody as a young man changed the record. Feeling dizzy, she left the room. She walked down the hall in pursuit of the smell of wood and came to the kitchen. There, on the icebox, was a carving of a male foot. Olvido continued to the bathroom, where the towel rack was a torso of a Greek god made out of cedar.

  By the time the host was able to get free of French lipstick and look for her, Olvido had reached the bedroom. He walked toward her like an adolescent approaching his first love. He took the bottle and glass from her hands, replacing them with a champagne flute. Olvido took a sip of that liquid reminiscent of Clara Laguna’s eyes and stroked behind the professor’s ear. She found what she was looking for—sawdust—and kissed that pale powder. The host returned the kiss on her lips, as if his mouth were a knife testing wood with a first cut, then slowly began to carve. After a moment, he pulled back from his piece and said: “Jean, c’est mon nom.”

  Olvido’s lips were a brilliant sculpture.

  At dawn, Olvido tasted wood beside her, the taste of a man. For a split second she thought that frozen night with the voice of a wolf and a celestial suicide never happened. She thought the gunpowder and her mother’s smile never happened. He was alive. He would open his leaden eyes, always darker on waking, and stroke her back. When she realized that more than twenty years had passed and the lips on her shoulder were not Esteban’s, she startled. She could not remember who this man was. Her head ached and champagne bubbles still fizzed in her stomach.

  Olvido slipped out of bed, trying not to wake him. She gathered her clothes from among wood shavings on the bedroom floor and got dressed in the bathroom. She did not take a taxi, choosing to walk along the Seine to her hotel instead. As she skirted the frost sleeping on cobblestones, one word came to her lips like a prayer, the word Jean.

  Jean woke to the ringing alarm. It was eight o’clock and he had to teach. He reached out for the woman who had spent the night. He wanted to hold her, kiss her, but the bed was empty. Disappointed, he headed for the shower to scrub away his hangover. He went back into the bedroom to dress, and in the closet, the image of a slave’s scarred back assaulted him from between shirts on hangers.

  In the metro, he tried to remember her name but could not. As he walked up the stairs to the fine arts building, the fleeting belly of a woman appeared on every step. He walked into a room full of sleepy students. He said good morning and opened his briefcase; between the leather dividers, rosy crests bordering that perfect fissure lay in wait. He rubbed his eyes and began to explain certain techniques for mastering perspective. Champagne bubbles slipped out through his lips. Two breasts hovered over the room, aureoles spread like sails. He had to stop his lecture and swallow. He began again, this time writing on the board as his students looked on inquisitively, but the visions continued. On that scratched green surface was the outline of two thighs. Jean went to his seat behind a solid professor’s desk. He could not remember where he was in his explanation, could not remember a single thing about techniques for mastering perspective. A pair of hips sashayed toward him.

  He canceled class and went down to the cafeteria. The body of that woman assumed various poses as he drank a cup of tea. He had to see her again. He hurried to find Margarita as she was leaving class, asking her mother’s name and where he might find her. Margarita hesitated. On the one hand, she was happy Olvido had left Scarlet Manor and was enjoying herself, but on the other, she was annoyed that her mother had been with the most sought-after professor in the entire university after just one night.

  “Olvido Laguna. Hôtel la Madeleine,” she said at last with a frown.

  “Merci.”

  When Jean knocked at the door, Olvido was reading Saint John of the Cross. She had used her nail fil
e on a bedside table, and her bare stomach held a little mound of sawdust.

  “Margarita, is that you?”

  Olvido heard a man speaking French as she reached the door and thought it must be a hotel employee.

  “Je suis Jean.” The professor’s cheeks were rosy from the Parisian cold, his lips set in a tortured grimace.

  Olvido silently repeated the word: Jean.

  “Depuis que je me suis réveillé, je n’ai pensé qu’à toi,” he said.

  Olvido went to the door and motioned for him to come in.

  “Partout j’ai vu ton corps et tes yeux.” He stared at her lips.

  “I don’t understand. I don’t speak French.”

  “Olvido.”

  “You know my name . . . Maybe I told it to you, I don’t remember. I’m afraid I had too much wine, too much champagne.”

  Jean’s eyes took aim at her heart.

  “Champagne,” he replied, smiling.

  “Yes.” Olvido inhaled his aroma, a combination of wood and cologne, and kissed him on the lips.

  He ran his hands over the body that had tormented him so, caressing it as if it might disappear at any moment.

  They left the hotel arm in arm at noon. Both spoke words the other could not understand, and out on the sidewalks of Paris, eager for spring they kissed. They decided to have lunch at a bistro. Jean ordered two sandwiches, Olvido two more—pointing at the menu as Jean nibbled her neck. They needed to regain their strength. Later they had coffee and Jean showed her how to smoke a Gauloise. Olvido inhaled, opening her mouth to let the smoke escape. She coughed and they both laughed. The two walked back to her hotel late that afternoon, but Olvido did not ask him up to her room.

  “I have to speak to Margarita,” she said.

  “Margarita, oui, demain je viendrai te chercher.”

  Margarita Laguna came to the hotel around eight o’clock that night. She was not wearing any panties, like when she was a child.