The House of Impossible Loves

by Cristina Lopez Barrio

  “I’ve been thinking about Scarlet Manor all day,” she told Olvido. “I suddenly realized how much I miss it. I think I’ll go back with you.”

  “What are you talking about, darling? Your studies are here, your friends are here.”

  Margarita slumped back on the bed.

  “This doesn’t have anything to do with what happened at your professor’s party last night, does it? Before you answer, I want to apologize. I drank too much champagne, and that man . . .” A smile escaped. “I couldn’t help it. That smell, it reminded me so much of your father . . .”

  “Really?”

  “He smelled like wood, too, with sawdust behind his ears. He was working as a carpenter’s apprentice until he could become a teacher.”

  “So that’s why you got together with Jean?”

  “I liked him. Plus, as I said, I had too much wine. And that yellow nectar, champagne, it was the first time I’d ever tried it.”

  “That’s what my Spanish friends said. They said you drank too much and were rude, leaving Juan hanging when he was just trying to be nice.”

  “I’m sorry, darling. It was my first party and I was nervous. Are you ashamed of me?”

  Margarita paused before answering.

  “No, what do I care what they say. All I care is that you’re happy.”

  “It won’t happen again. I promise.”

  “That’s all right. Besides, it can’t happen again if we go back to Scarlet Manor.”

  The next day Olvido Laguna packed her bags. She dressed in a suit with a dark gray jacket and called down to reception for a taxi.

  It was a sunny morning that smelled of daisies and fresh-brewed coffee. The taxi was waiting.

  “À l’aéroport.”

  “Oui, madame.”

  Olvido pulled a sheaf of hotel letterhead out of her purse and, in a script that bumped along with the car, wrote:

  Darling,

  The lawyer was in touch this morning to say your grandmother’s arthritis is worse. I have to go home. You stay in Paris. This is your place. Be happy. Tell Jean it was a pleasure to meet him.

  With love,

  MAMÁ

  13

  WHEN OLVIDO LAGUNA returned to Scarlet Manor, her mother was waiting with a suitor to marry her. The man was a friend of the lawyer’s from a nearby town and met all of Manuela’s criteria. He had a spotless reputation, not even a hint of scandal that might tarnish it, as well as plenty of money and property. Widowed four years earlier, he was looking for a woman to ease the sorrow and solitude of retirement. The candidate was seventy-eight years old. But as far as the lawyer and Manuela Laguna were concerned, age posed no problem as long as the other two conditions had been met. It was unlikely Olvido would give the candidate children, a fact he did not mind in the least: with eleven children and twenty-seven grandchildren from his first marriage, the last thing he needed was another descendant to carry on his name.

  The lawyer met with the candidate at his local tavern, listing not only Olvido’s beauty but also her culinary skill and fondness for good conversation. The suitor asked how such an extraordinary woman was still single, an opportunity the lawyer used to reveal that Olvido had a twenty-something daughter, the result of rape when Olvido herself was not much more than a girl. She had spent her life raising her daughter, who now lived in Paris, so Olvido could now look for a good man who would accept her past and keep her company.

  The suitor came to Scarlet Manor one rainy afternoon in a fancy chauffeured car. The lawyer sat beside him in the back seat. The man’s face was jaundiced, and he leaned on a wooden cane with a silver handle. Olvido had spent the night weeping on Esteban’s grave, swearing between heavy sighs and earthen kisses that she was committing this sacrilege purely for Margarita’s sake, that she would hate her future husband whomever he might be. And yet, as she watched her suitor shuffling through the entryway after her mother and choked on the medicinal cloud surrounding him, she felt compassion.

  Manuela Laguna showed him the house, peppering the tour with all manner of anecdotes about the aristocratic Laguna family. She seemed not to notice her future son-in-law’s precarious health, just as she ignored her own trembling white gloves. Fifteen days had gone by without her butchering a single chicken, and Manuela’s nerves were on edge. She had decided there should not be a whiff of fresh blood in the kitchen lest Olvido’s suitor think the house smelled of death.

  Over coffee in the parlor, it was agreed that the wedding would take place in one month’s time. The lawyer gobbled sweets and slurped coffee. Given the groom’s poor health, he knew the marriage would last only a few months, but he suddenly realized that if Olvido were to inherit any money after her husband’s death, she would no longer need him to keep Margarita in Paris. His power over Olvido was in jeopardy.

  A trip to the city was planned for the following week to finalize the paperwork and buy both the bride’s dress and her trousseau. Olvido’s suitor left Scarlet Manor feeling more alive than ever. He had fallen in love at first sight. On the ride home, he swore to always protect Olvido Laguna. Wanting nothing more than to make her happy, he decided a few days later to begin training at a brothel. The man had lost count of how long it had been since he was last with a woman, and on their wedding night he wanted his bride to forget her past trauma and take pleasure in the gentle passion of a loving man. His health proved too precarious, however, and he was found dead in a brothel bed a few hours later. The “pick-me-up” tonic he had taken erupted in the last orgasm his poor old body could handle.

  Disguising his joy, the lawyer brought Manuela and Olvido the news. He proposed they postpone the search for another candidate at least a year, out of respect for the deceased. Olvido, who was saddened by the death of that man as jaunty as he was jaundiced, replied that she no longer intended to marry; she would not be introduced to every terminally ill old man in the province. Hearing this, Manuela flew into a rage, immediately butchering two roosters with reddish combs. The strain in the relationship between mother and daughter intensified. Manuela left charred pots of leftovers on the stove instead of delicacies and reduced Margarita’s allowance even further. The only reason she did not eliminate it entirely was because the bastard might decide to come home. In spite of this, after one more year of solitude, silence, and stews, that is exactly what happened.

  The first sign announcing Margarita Laguna’s return was a stirring among the honeysuckle, the plants recognizing her touch the moment she stood under the gate with its funeral bow. It was a July morning, the air swarming with swallows and wasps. Eight months pregnant, Margarita walked down the daisy-strewn drive and knocked on the door. Her chestnut hair hung loose in the joy of summer, and her cheeks were damp with perspiration.

  “Mamá, Mamá! Hug me if you can!”

  Olvido could barely stammer her daughter’s name.

  “I know I didn’t tell you I was expecting in my letters, but it was a surprise. I wanted to come home to Scarlet Manor and give birth, here, with you. Aren’t you happy?”

  “If you are, darling, then so am I.” Olvido hugged her.

  Then she saw him.

  Tall. Strong. He was striding down the drive with a suitcase in each hand, tromping on Clara Laguna’s daisies.

  “Who’s that?”

  “Pierre Lesac, my boyfriend and the father of my child.”

  Two big black eyes fell like a disaster on Olvido’s face.

  “It’s a pleasure to meet you,” he said with a French accent, extending a hand.

  There was a Gothic beauty to this young man of no more than twenty-five. He had a thin moustache that dripped over either side of his mouth to meet a neatly trimmed goatee. Olvido withdrew her hand, but Pierre’s touch remained, a touch she suddenly felt burrowing under her skin like a tick.

  “Mamá, aren’t you going to say anything to Pierre?”

  “Welcome.”

  “Merci.”

  He was wearing a beige shirt and beige pants. The sun
shimmered on his short, dark hair, and his lips were plump.

  A cough came from the entryway.

  “Abuela?” Margarita asked.

  The scent of lavender puffed out of the linen cupboard.

  “Marriage certificate,” Manuela demanded, stretching out a white glove.

  Those were the first words she had ever spoken to her granddaughter, and her bitter face awaited a reply. If this young gray-eyed thing had married, it might have been the start of a new era for the Laguna women.

  “I’m not married and won’t ever be, Abuela. Things are different now, and that would be a step back. But Pierre, the father, is here with me.”

  “You’re all the same,” Manuela growled, and marched back to her room, relieved. She would not have to stop hating that girl.

  “She’ll never change, will she, Mamá?”

  “No, it’s too late for that. I hope she didn’t upset you.”

  Mother and daughter hugged again, and Olvido felt Pierre’s eyes on her.

  Margarita’s baby was born premature due to a series of events all related to romantic desire. It started when Olvido encouraged her daughter to see the gynecologist who had just opened an office on the main street in town. His name was Antonino Montero.

  A sultry heat lay over his building, the sun lighting up the doctor’s white sign, creating a mirage.

  The sky would screw the earth if it could, Antonino Montero thought, imagining the sexual cataclysm. Humans would die, crushed between nature’s moist flesh. He trained his glasses, like black television sets, on a fifty-something vagina, but startled when he heard his nurse shout.

  “I told you! The doctor will not see you without an appointment. Now, go!”

  The gynecologist came out of the examination room and into reception.

  “What’s going on?” he asked.

  The nurse adjusted her cap as her boss’s robust figure approached.

  “It’s these two, Doctor.” She waved a scornful hand at Olvido and Margarita. “They want to see you, but they don’t have an appointment. I told them there’s no way. We’re completely booked.”

  A wave of murmurs rose up from the waiting room.

  Antonino Montero studied Olvido. Her breasts were like those ripe mangoes he had eaten in that Caribbean city, at a conference on mammary gland tumors—before he was accused of wrongful death at his practice in Madrid, before he was forced into exile in this grungy town. Antonino continued to stare at her. Her waist and hips were as curvy as the road that dropped down to the beach, where clouds formed in the shape of thighs.

  A girl stood beside her, arms crossed over her belly. Antonino Montero coughed inscrutably and said to his nurse:

  “It is my duty as a doctor to examine this young woman whether or not she has an appointment. She is quite clearly far along in her pregnancy.”

  “But, Doctor . . .”

  “I must be true to my Hippocratic oath and would ask the ladies waiting to please understand. Have these two come in as soon as I’m finished.”

  The murmurs in the waiting room grew louder.

  “Thank you for seeing us,” Olvido said when they were seated across from the single, balding, forty-something gynecologist in his office.

  “No need. It’s my duty.” Antonino smiled and saliva filtered into the channels of his jaw.

  “My daughter is eight months pregnant, and I’d like you to examine her, make sure everything is all right.”

  “How can this be your daughter? I thought she must be your sister.”

  “I had her when I was young . . . Things were different back then.”

  “You live in that lovely estate on the outskirts of town, Scarlet Manor, if I’m not mistaken. I haven’t been here long or had a chance to meet everyone yet.”

  “Yes, that’s right, Doctor.”

  Antonino recalled the story about Olvido’s grandmother that the pharmacist had told him over a game of cards at the tavern—about a prostitute with golden eyes named Clara Laguna who used to dance in an enormous bed covered by a purple canopy.

  “May I ask how old you are?” Saliva pooled in the corners of his mouth.

  “Thirty-nine.”

  “I thought you were young. And tell me, how old were you when you had your daughter?”

  “Doctor, I didn’t come to talk about me. We’re here to see about Margarita.”

  Antonino did not hear her but was again savoring the stories he had heard at the tavern about the Laguna family. He pictured Olvido undressing by candlelight in the old carpentry shop. It would seem the pregnant girl was the result of her mother’s forbidden love with the carpenter’s apprentice, a boy found with his skull smashed and his pants down in the yard at Scarlet Manor. Yes, without a doubt, she was the Laguna of the dead boy.

  “Since you’re here, let me offer a free checkup. I imagine it’s the first one since your daughter was born.”

  “That’s not necessary. Again, I only came so you could see my daughter.”

  “No, no. I insist.”

  Antonino Montero now imagined himself in the yard at Scarlet Manor, surrounded by its devilish fertility, where Olvido Laguna mounted the dying boy. The doctor was spellbound by the grinding of her hips, the straight black hair cascading down her back, becoming entangled in twining plants.

  “If you would like me to examine your daughter and attend the birth, then I will have to examine you first to determine whether there are any hereditary conditions.” His words were dictated purely by imagination.

  “I see.”

  “Go next door and undress from the waist up. First I must check the state of your breasts.”

  Olvido stroked Margarita’s hair as she dozed in the chair. The trip from Paris had exhausted her.

  “Rest here. I’ll be right back,” Olvido said.

  The room was painted a soft peach color designed to soothe his patients’ nerves. An examination table was covered in a sheet, with a stool and a lamp at the far end. Olvido took off her blouse and bra, then sat on the edge of the table. The gynecologist came in—and explored her breasts with feverish fingers.

  “Excuse me.” Antonino sucked in his stomach and hurried to the bathroom in the hall, where he spilled his pleasure all over the blue tiles.

  Heat constricted his heart. He splashed water on the back of his neck, sucking clear droplets off his fingers, possessed by an unusual thirst.

  When he returned, Olvido was dressed and waiting with her daughter. Margarita had taken off all her clothes, ready to get this exam over so she could nap in peace. Antonino Montero had her lie on the table and examined her under Olvido’s watchful eye.

  “The entire family is in excellent shape,” he said to Olvido, his brow soaked in sweat. “Here is my home number if anything unexpected should occur, but I hope that won’t be for a few days.”

  That afternoon, Olvido cooked dinner. She kissed each raspberry, washed them all, crushed them in the mortar, and threw them into a simmering pot of water, sugar, milk, and cinnamon. She gazed outside as she stirred and saw Pierre Lesac, pretending to be out for a walk in the garden. She turned back to her bubbling sauce. The sound reminded her of the river as it passed through the oak grove in spring. She sighed, turned off the heat, and set the pot aside, then began to cut up a piece of lamb. When she was done, her cheeks speckled with tiny drops of blood, she chopped a few onions. Tears fell from her eyes, drawn to the wet, pungent smell of the bulbs. Meanwhile, spying from between planted rows, Pierre watched her place the onion and lamb in a clay pot, then set it on the stove. He watched her sauté the meat; he watched her moisten her lips with a tongue he imagined like silk; wrapped in the glow of sunset through the pines, he watched as she left the clay pot on the stove and dropped her house robe to her waist. He felt ablaze at the sight of those breasts. Nothing would ever be the same again. The horizon began to meet the sun, and pierced by violet light, Olvido inhaled the smell of the cooling raspberry sauce, smearing a bit on her left nipple, then on her right.<
br />
  “The perfect temperature and consistency,” she said aloud.

  Olvido used this culinary trick with most of her recipes; it never failed her. Nipples were the perfect chef’s tool for tasting. She poured the sauce onto the meat, and that is where Antonino Montero’s desire came to rest. Pierre Lesac waited for Olvido to leave the kitchen before he entered, plunging his fingers into the clay pot and licking them clean. His yearning merged with the doctor’s. The moment Olvido poured the sauce on those slices of lamb, there was no going back.

  By dinnertime, the moon had filled the dining room with a cosmic silence. A porcelain platter of steaming lamb sat on the lace tablecloth the diplomat had given Clara Laguna.

  Olvido served Margarita four slices of meat. Margarita attacked them with fork and knife, resorting to her hands whenever any bits close to the bone resisted. She stared at the strands of meat as she brought them to her mouth, wolfing them down with a primordial hunger.

  “Mamá, four more,” she said, holding up her plate.

  “You shouldn’t eat so much after dark. It’ll take forever to digest in your condition.” Olvido glanced at Pierre.

  “I’ve got a stomach of steel,” Margarita assured her mother, sopping up sauce with a piece of bread. “Isn’t that right, Pierre?”

  He nodded.

  “Can’t you just say yes? Would it kill you to open your mouth and pronounce a single syllable?”

  Pierre nodded again.

  “Can’t you just forget your stupid circle of inspiration until I’ve given birth?” Margarita exclaimed. “I can’t stand that you won’t speak to me. I need you.”

  Pierre Lesac slowly chewed a piece of lamb.

  “Talk to me, I said!”

  He shook his finger no.

  “You shouldn’t get so upset,” Olvido said, serving her daughter two more pieces of lamb.