The House of Impossible Loves (12 page)

When Mass was over, Olvido was burdened by the weight of her hat once again. She did, however, take advantage of the spectacle before them—day laborers and peasants demanding their rights, chanting
¡Viva!
for the new republic. She folded back the brim of her hat and smiled at a few people. Only one person smiled back, a boy playing between the adults’ legs. It was the schoolmaster’s youngest child. He was seven years old, had a cowlick of brown hair at the base of his neck, gray eyes, a dimpled chin, and plump lips. He curled up the corners of his mouth for Olvido to see, and she remembered that image forever.

“What are you doing? What do you think you’re doing?” Manuela had just discovered her daughter’s beaming face. “Never smile at strangers!” She squeezed the girl’s thin arm. “Let’s go home, where I’ll teach you to behave like a respectable child!”

The two of them climbed into the cart. Restless, the black horse whinnied. The schoolmaster, a lean man with ash-colored eyes, stared. Manuela nodded, but he did not return the greeting. It’s still too soon to forgive the Laguna women their carnal shame, she thought as she seized the reins, but one day they would acknowledge her. She lashed the animal’s back. The horse’s smell always made her hungry; she would make chicken in egg and almond sauce.

Olvido played with the memory of that gray-eyed boy as her mother raced home. Springtime accosted them as they came close to Scarlet Manor: bees buzzing, fields of poppy and bellflower, the breeze laden with pollen. Manuela took Olvido’s hat off only when they reached the iron gate with its funeral bow.

“Get down and open it.”

They heard a dog barking.

“I’ll never smile at a stranger again. I promise, Madre.”

Manuela gripped the reins with gloved hands.

“Be quiet. Wait for me inside.”

Olvido walked down the drive worn by the force of Clara Laguna’s gaze and waited in the entryway. She leaned against the linen cupboard, the smell of lavender sachets hidden between sheets and towels slipping out through the latticework doors.

When Manuela came in, she pulled out the cane used to beat rugs.

“Take off your dress. I don’t want to soil it.”

Olvido undid the buttons and the zipper along one side. “This child will cleanse the memory of this family,” Manuela muttered as she studied the slight figure stepping out of her daughter’s dress. “And if I need to cane her senseless to make that happen, then that is God’s will.” She brought the cane down on the girl’s back. The sun perched high in the afternoon sky, its light mingling with the sound of tender young bones bearing the brunt of the lashes.

Once the cane was back in its bed of clean linen and lavender sachets, the smell of rain washed through the pine trees, and Olvido ran into the yard, to “her father,” who lived among the hydrangea and morning glories. The girl liked to pretend a curse had turned her father into the scrawny black flea-bitten dog who frequented the yard.

“Papi, Papi! Look what I brought you!” Olvido pulled two slices of cinnamon cake and some chorizo out of a little pouch.

At the sight of such treats the dog’s eyes sparkled and his snout grew wet, and he crept toward the girl wagging a tattered tail.

“Oh, Papi, I missed you,” Olvido said, hugging him around the neck as he licked her face. “That tickles!” She opened her little hands and the dog gobbled up the treats, then she petted his head. “It’s good, isn’t it, Papi? You have to eat if you want to get better.”

The dog licked her with a desperate love.

“Now rest for a while on your bed of leaves, and your fleas will soon be gone. I asked some fairies in church to get rid of them. Bye, Papi. I’m going to play with my friend.”

Olvido walked away from the dog’s dark eyes. She wandered through the tomatoes, lettuce, and squash in the garden, her back stinging all the way. The sun hid behind a raft of clouds as Olvido walked into the clearing surrounded by lush honeysuckle. It began to rain.

“Hi,” she greeted the bushiest plant. “What do you want to play?” she asked.

There was a whisper of leaves and stalks rustling.

“You always want to play that.”

Olvido picked up a long vine and began to jump rope. It started to rain harder, the water soothing her burning back.

“When I’m bigger, I’m going to learn magic and undo the spell that bewitched you and my papi. Then you’ll have hands and feet again, and blond, blond hair that I’ll braid for you.” Her brow was damp and her shoes sank into rain-soaked earth.

Olvido returned home when the smell of chicken in egg and almond sauce filled the garden. Manuela had been preparing dishes from her childhood ever since Bernarda died a few months earlier in an accident in the stable. One morning, after finishing her chores, the cook decided to hide away among bags of alfalfa to suck on her greatest treasure: a scrap of Clara Laguna’s shroud. The black horse inhaled the odor she emanated, mistaking it for a mare in heat. He rammed the stall door until it opened, then he shot out and kicked the bags of alfalfa in glee. Bernarda’s skull shattered at the first strike, her brains lying naked on their yellow hiding spot, the scrap of shroud between her lips. They buried her at the cemetery in town. “After all, she never practiced the profession, and her simple nature shielded her from sin,” Padre Imperio declared. It was winter, and snow streamed from the sky. The pine forest and hills around the graveyard reeked of mare for weeks.

Manuela moved down to Bernarda’s room, next to the pantry, the room where she was raised. The smell of whitewashed walls and fresh provisions was comforting. She kept the straight razor her mother had used to shave the cook, which Bernarda continued to use in memory of her mistress. You could have been with me much longer, Manuela thought as she lightly fried the pieces of chicken, but you always did prefer her over me.

After lunch, Olvido went to her room on the second floor for a siesta, wishing time would speed up to her favorite part of the day. After dinner, she and her mother would sit in the parlor, in front of the fire, and Manuela would tell stories. Her voice lost its gruffness as she spoke of the sea, of beaches and cliffs. Although every now and then she would glare at Olvido and snap: “I did it for you.”

“Did what, Madre?”

“Asked her to leave.”

“Who?”

“She should have understood and never hung herself from the chestnut tree.”

“Who did that, Madre?”

“Be quiet. You’ll make it up to me.”

Manuela would fill the fireplace with logs once more and recite another story to keep the flame alive.

Olvido grew up with Mass, her mother’s stories, savory chicken dishes, remedies, and beatings. Manuela was sure her plans for her daughter would come to pass, but one thing did worry her: Olvido was illiterate. For several years Manuela tried to get her into school. Every September she put on her plainest dress and headed through town. The rows of women who had taken their mothers’ place were now split into two camps. Their whispers had grown silent; they kept an eye out for traces of treasonous behavior instead. Whenever Manuela passed, they would simply look her up and down and purse their lips.

The school was a two-story ancestral home with mildewed walls and a vine-covered roof littered with cat feces—it was their favorite place to mate, screeching in a flood of moonlight.

“Your daughter doesn’t need an education. No doubt she’ll practice the same lowly profession as you, and there’s no need to be literate for that,” the schoolmaster said to Manuela Laguna year after year, his gray eyes flashing.

“My daughter will be respectable and must have an education!”

“I told you to go and never come back. As long as I’m in charge, there’s no point wasting your breath or the soles of your shoes.”

At that, Manuela would march down to the town hall to file a complaint.

“My daughter has a right to go to school,” she would tell an official. “Times have changed. This I know, even if I can’t read it in the paper.”

“Place an
X
here,” the middle-aged man would say, smiling. “I’ll fill out the form, and you’ll hear from us soon.”

But no reply ever came to Scarlet Manor or anywhere else, as if the Lagunas did not exist—or no one wanted to admit they did.

The summer after Olvido turned eleven, several men seized the Republican flag flapping outside town hall and burned it in the square; meanwhile, red wine stuck like a blood clot in the craw of others at the tavern. Silence and sidelong glances clogged the air along with smoke from unfiltered cigarettes. The Spanish Civil War had begun.

In September the usual hunters did not come with their packs of hounds and handsome rifles. The town reeked of gunpowder from the killing of friends and relatives rather than stags and wild boar. Many, including the schoolmaster, enlisted to fight on the front. A kind-looking young miss was sent from the provincial capital to replace him. The minute Manuela heard, she went to town and waited by the door until school was out. The children stared at her white gloves as they left, certain they hid a wolf’s claws.

“Good afternoon, señorita. I would like you to allow my only daughter into your temple of knowledge. She’s eleven years old and can neither read nor write.”

“Eleven years old and illiterate? That’s atrocious!” The young miss glanced down at Manuela’s cotton-sheathed hands. “Say no more. Bring her tomorrow and we’ll straighten this out.”

From the time her daughter turned six, Manuela had had everything ready for the first day of school: colored pencils, sheets of paper, a book bag, and, most important of all, a white cotton hat she had enlarged as each year passed and Olvido grew. Manuela was determined to hide the girl’s face; life had taught her that nothing brought dishonor like extreme beauty, and school would be full of adolescent boys.

Manuela woke her daughter at dawn and led Olvido to her room. Armed with sewing scissors, she cut a swath of hair to create bangs that fell below Olvido’s eyes.

“Now, listen very carefully: if you brush your hair from your face, I will cane you.” Lilac-colored light from the yard infused the room.

“Yes, Madre.”

Manuela put the white hat on her daughter’s head; stiff strands of black hair poked through the lace border encircling her forehead.

“Now, go bathe and put on the clothes I set out for you.”

“Yes, Madre.”

In the pine forest a magpie cawed, and the sound of distant gunshots drifted on the breeze.

Olvido put on an ankle-length brown wool dress and slid her feet into boots two sizes too big. She had toast with butter and a glass of milk, then went into the entryway to wait for her mother. Standing on the clay tiles, watching her approach with a leather strap in her gloved hand, Olvido shivered. The smell of toasted bread still pervaded the house. Any thought of a caress or a kiss was swept from Olvido’s mind. Silently, Manuela circled the girl’s throat with the strap and sewed the ends to either side of her hat.

“I’ll undo this when you get home.”

“But it looks like the helmets soldiers wear to war.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

A cool fog still lay across that September morning, and Manuela disappeared into it on her way to the stable. Olvido watched this phantom breath swallow her whole, afraid the morning might be only a dream. She so wanted to go to school and make friends. She rubbed the bangs across her eyes and said her name out loud. The horse’s black head, with his crystal gaze and curly mane, emerged from the fog, then his square chest in its harness and his big horseshoed hooves that clattered like rain. Next she saw the cart and, on the seat, Manuela’s blood-red shawl and spite-filled face.

The fog disappeared as they came into town. The horse’s hooves on cobblestones sounded like a hailstorm. As the cart crossed the town square, a few women carrying laundry baskets watched it go down the street toward the school.

Children’s voices drifted out through the window. They were reciting the names of all the rivers in Spain.

“Go on in. It’ll be fine. It’s respectable to learn how to read and write.”

Olvido got down from the cart. Her mother snapped the reins and disappeared to the rumble of a pending storm. Olvido put her hand on the doorknob and pushed into the unknown. The door opened slowly. She walked down the hall to the room where the voices could be heard. Maps hung on the side walls, and a chalkboard was situated at the front. Sitting at their desks, her classmates stared. Olvido smiled, feeling every pair of eyes on her clothes, on her skin. As the teacher introduced the “new girl,” Olvido walked toward her desk, but someone tripped her and she fell. A tide of laughter rippled through the classroom.

“Clumsy! You’re a stupid, clumsy monster!”

The young schoolteacher helped Olvido to her feet, leading her by the arm to the last row of desks. Then, unable to control her students, she began to write a list of mountain ranges on the board.

Olvido Laguna crumpled over her desk and cried silently. Tears bounced on her desk as a sudden rainstorm pelted the windows.

“Monsters don’t know how to cry, dummy! Don’t you know anything?” the children taunted.

Olvido shut her eyes. She imagined she was climbing onto the thrashed back of her horse, burying her face in its black mane as she disappeared into the woods.

“Don’t you have anything to say, stupid? Don’t you know how to speak? Answer, ugly monster!”

A tall boy in the front row stood and shouted: “Shut up! Leave her alone!”

His classmates looked up in surprise. It was the schoolmaster’s son, the boy who smiled at Olvido after church these last few years. His name was Esteban.

“You shut up!” Olvido replied, wiping away her tears. “I don’t need anyone to defend me! I can take care of myself.”

The boy’s gray eyes traveled to the last row of desks to meet Olvido’s enraged gaze. The second their eyes met, the young schoolteacher from the city forgot all about her list of mountain ranges, her naughty pupils, and their hateful parents.

That night, for the first time, Esteban did not think about trenches, rifles firing in the name of freedom, and bodies decomposing beneath the pines, put to death for treason. He did not think about his father or the war that hovered over town like a vulture. He did think about Olvido’s eyes staring at him through strands of dark hair and what happened after school, when his classmates leaped on her, determined to rip off her white hat as she ate a piece of cinnamon cake. He remembered how fearful she’d been as he confronted the boys, yelling, “Cowards! Animals! You don’t hit a girl!” He remembered their insults, the taunts, and the bared teeth threatening him. He remembered that pang he first felt at the church door, as she cowered like an animal trying to escape the rain in a cave, her body shoved against the mildewed wall, her lips dusted with cinnamon. He thought about how much he wanted to touch them but didn’t dare, how he wanted to say, “Don’t be scared. I’ll always protect you, and when I’m bigger, I’ll enlist in my father’s war.” But he said nothing, just held out a hand to help her, which she refused, throwing the cake in his face and running off. “I don’t need anyone to defend me! I don’t need anyone!” she yelled.