“Who needs a grave?” she asked.
“Your granddaughter.”
“I never had a granddaughter.” Her voice turned vicious. “You’re mistaken.”
“Her name was Margarita Laguna, and as you well know, she had your son’s eyes.”
The old woman chewed on her lip.
“What’ve you got there?”
“Your great-grandson. His name is Santiago. Santiago Laguna.”
“I know. Manuela made sure to announce it all over town, as if an heir to the throne had been born. But we’re not interested in a relationship with you, no matter how rich you are.” Her hands and lips trembled; her voice was a sharp thorn. “Everyone knows where he came from . . .”
“Would you like to see him?” Olvido held out the baby.
An infant’s sigh was heard.
“Bring him closer. I just want to see whether your kind actually gave birth to a boy.”
Light shone in through the dirty window.
“Better let me hold him. Can’t tell anything if I don’t actually touch him.”
The old woman took Santiago in her arms, and he gave a sleepy smile. Her heart felt the weight of soft bones, the warmth of newborn skin, the caress of talcum powder.
“I’ve come to ask whether I can bury my daughter with Esteban. She should be near her father.”
“Don’t even dream of it,” came a harsh, unrecognizable voice.
Olvido turned. It was Esteban’s sister. She had aged since the day her small, bony frame supported her mother’s grief over that gaping hole in the cemetery.
“You will not bury your bastard with my brother.” She strode through the room as if a lake were not covering the floor. “And let me tell you something else: if I hear you’ve spent one more night on Esteban’s grave, eating flowers, like a savage, you’ll have to deal with more than me. I’ll have you locked up—in prison or an insane asylum.”
“If you want me to beg, I will,” Olvido replied.
“Take your mourning and your new bastard, and get out of my house.”
The old woman’s cheeks burned as her eyes pleaded with her daughter.
“Return the baby, Madre. He’s got nothing to do with you.”
Olvido took Santiago from her two old arms.
“Let me see him for a minute.” Esteban’s sister took the baby’s face in a hand wounded by pinpricks and frostbite. “If it weren’t for your age, I’d swear he was yours,” she spat. “He’s got your demonic eyes.”
Even though it was Sunday, the lawyer had the mortician come from the city to repair Margarita Laguna’s disfigured face. They had laid her out in the dining room, in a white coffin with a bleeding Christ on the lid.
“Get me the plot as close to Esteban’s as possible,” Olvido begged the lawyer. “That way my daughter won’t feel so alone. Cost is no issue.”
Manuela nodded when the lawyer looked to her for approval.
“She’ll be buried where you want, don’t worry,” he replied, regretting the veil, the safety pin, and the thick stockings on the woman he desired.
Olvido sat next to the coffin, watching how that man from the city used brushes and creams to erase the truth of Margarita’s death from her face. Behind Olvido stood Pierre Lesac. No one noticed, but he had painted a dagger on the coffin.
When night fell, and the lawyer and the mortician left Scarlet Manor, Olvido locked herself in her room and bricked up the window both Esteban and her daughter had fallen from. Never again would the sun shine in that room with its seascape; never again would her dead loved ones peer in from that outline on the moss. That room would forever remain in shadows, despair eventually filtering out through the gap she left between two bricks.
They had to wait three more days before Margarita could be buried. The cemetery had flooded, and inscriptions and bones drifted through the neighborhood. The ground was too soft to hold the recently departed.
Olvido found a large leaf left over from Palm Sunday in the attic and like a Nubian slave began to fan the body. The August heat was accelerating the decomposition. Accustomed to the presence of death, Manuela Laguna continued her petit point in front of the hearth, while Pierre Lesac spent hours wandering through the house with a clothespin on his nose and a blue pencil in his hand. Hiding in corners, he would murmur prayers in French and stuff himself with sweet peaches to keep the rotten stench of Margarita’s body from sticking to the back of his throat.
On the third night, hot and remorseful, Pierre ran into the yard. He was sorry he had betrayed Margarita but sorrier still that his muse had scorned him ever since. More than once he tried to take her hand or kiss her cheek, whispering apologies and declarations of love, but she rejected his touch, his breath, his words.
Lying on the damp porch, Pierre watched Olvido walk barefoot toward him.
“Go,” she demanded. “Go back to France.”
He was soaking wet, like a shipwrecked sailor.
“Et l’amour?”
“The only woman who loved you is inside a box.”
“Perhaps in time . . .” His right hand ached to hold a pencil.
“Even a thousand years from now, your touch will remind me of my dead daughter. Go. I’ll look after Santiago.”
His shouts and wails reverberated in the garden for hours.
By dawn, the only trace of Pierre Lesac at Scarlet Manor was a colored pencil, a helpless pencil abandoned on the tiles like a motherless child.
Margarita Laguna was buried with the first echoes of evening. She lay naked in the casket, surrounded by honeysuckle flowers. Padre Rafael, with his shaking of earth and spitting of Latin, did not attend; nor did the lawyer, or anyone from town. Only the undertaker was there, in rubber boots, his three teeth chewing a wad of tobacco with each shovelful of earth. When the coffin disappeared from view, Olvido felt a strange warmth on her shoulder and turned to find a cotton glove clutching her grief. It was immaculate, not a drop of chicken blood on it. Olvido held her breath for a moment, savoring this maternal weight. The sun sank into a row of headstones. The sky was cloudless and the heat of August had abated.
At that moment, Scarlet Manor entered an era of peace. Olvido and Manuela sat together on the porch every afternoon. They bought chairs and a table, burning what was left of the old ones after the flood—burning Pierre Lesac’s painting, too. Manuela embroidered while Olvido read poems and tended to Santiago.
“I think fall’s come,” Manuela said one day, after twenty-some years of not speaking to her daughter. “It’s going to be a cool one this year.”
“We’ll need more wood,” Olvido replied, turning back to Saint John of the Cross as if reading it for the first time.
From his mother, Santiago Laguna inherited a passion for lying among the flowers; from his father, an obsession with coloring everything in his path—when he was four, they gave him a blue pencil from France; from his grandmother Olvido, her extraordinary beauty; from his grandfather Esteban, a love of poetry; and from his great-grandmother Manuela, a taste for tales and for death.
Santiago learned to cook from a very young age. He loved being in the kitchen with Olvido, helping her prepare the recipes she invented over years of dreaming about the past. They spent their days handling squash, peppers, any ingredient to be used in their stews. Olvido taught him to love boiling water, the bubbling like a river in spring; the aroma of acorns; the color of ash where chestnuts roasted, for it was the same color as his mother’s and grandfather’s eyes. She taught him that well-trained nipples could become a chef’s best tool and that the family’s most cherished recipe was cinnamon cake, served with boiled coffee. After a day of affection and games, Santiago would sink into the clawfoot tub, where his grandmother would scrub away the flour or oil spattering his body. Sometimes she joined him in the tub, and Santiago would stretch his little feet out and slowly walk them up her skin in a tickle.
At dinnertime, they would sit at the dining room table with Manuela to savor the dishes they had prepared. Manuela no longer cooked; the arthritis in her hands was now complicated by Parkinson’s, and she could not hold a pot without spilling it, peel a potato without skinning a finger. She could barely eat by herself. It was little Santiago who brought food to her mouth with the patience of a saint. Manuela’s ailments resulted in unprecedented longevity in the chicken coop, and the smell of entrails faded from the corners of the kitchen.
After dinner the family would gather before the embers of the fire—the heat from the smoking bricks warming their faces—to listen to the stories Manuela told choked with memory.
“In far-off lands they say that many years ago a phantom ship sailed the northern seas, terrorizing sailors and captains alike. A cold fog as thick as the manes of the dead blanketed water and sky so nothing was clear, not even whether it was day or night. Few dared head out on such seas, but those who did and made it back alive told that, from out of the fog came the monstrous silhouette of a galleon fitted with mermaid cannons. The foam parted reverently and a vast silence reigned. They all knew what would happen next and covered their ears in vain, hoping to escape the terrible threat: the red bell that hung from the mainmast, as brilliant as fire, was rung by a shadow as the name of one sailor was pronounced. No matter how that poor man cried and begged, the captain was forced to hand him over to the specter unless he wanted to suffer the same fate. For that phantom ship, once it filled its hold with victims, would set sail for hell.” Manuela bared her teeth in a smile.
“One day or night—no one knew which—a young man arrived on these northern shores with horseshoes on the soles of his boots, like a mule. Tattooed on his tongue was a list of his exploits and glories across the many seas. Eager to add one more, he assured the people—cowards, he called them—that he would free them from the threat of the phantom ship in exchange for three barrels of gold. ‘All you have to do is take the red bell,’ he said. ‘The next time it rings with the name of some poor sod, I’ll go in his place and take it.’ And so he did. He took the bell no problem, but once it was in his hands, before the frightened eyes of the entire crew, he became a fabulous galleon that replaced the phantom ship. His neck stretched until it was as long as the mainmast, with the red bell hanging there. They say the fog disappeared and the man-boat sailed into the horizon, his tongue now a flag flapping in the breeze.
“A hundred years passed before they saw him again, on stormy nights, when the sound of his approach is like mule hoofs on the earth, and sailors tremble in fear. They know he will have to make the bell ring and steal their souls.”
Santiago Laguna’s introduction to society came at the age of six. The town needed to meet and learn to accept the first boy in that family of cursed women. He went to church on Sundays, sitting in the front row with Manuela. (Olvido still preferred the last row.) The Christ whose back had been snapped by a beam years ago had been fixed and stood resplendent on the high altar. A gold plaque on the pedestal reminded readers of the catastrophe and how the great storm had damaged the church. The chapel to Saint Pantolomina of the Flowers, however, had remained unscathed.
Santiago then started at the school built on the outskirts of town with Manuela Laguna’s donation. It was a brick building with a slate roof, where no cats ever mated by moonlight and no weeds ever grew. Santiago’s grandmother walked him to school the first day. They crossed the pine forest bright and early that morning. Olvido had bought him a new pair of boots, a canvas book bag, and a white shirt with a striped tie; there was no hat with a lace border on his head or black bangs to cover his eyes. On the way, his grandmother lectured him on all the things he should not do at school. Among other things, he was not to take off his clothes in the schoolyard, no matter how much they might itch; he was not to color the desks, walls, or chairs with felt-tip pens; and he was not to fight with his classmates if they said mean things.
Olvido watched him walk excitedly into the school. She did not go back to Scarlet Manor but waited for the mothers of the other children to leave before peering in through a window to see whether Santiago was receiving the same treatment as she had on her first day of school. Santiago had sat in the second row, next to the fruit merchant’s son, and was drawing a squirrel on his hand. I should’ve told him not to color his classmates, Olvido thought. When he was done, the girl in front held out a coquettish arm for him to draw another. It was the pharmacist’s granddaughter.
At recess, Santiago was looking forward to eating the cinnamon cake he and his grandmother had made but found himself surrounded by girls. He drew dogs, roosters, cats. As he walked home to Scarlet Manor with Olvido, a smile danced on his lips.
“Did you have a good first day at school?”
“I did. My classmates are nice, especially the girls.”
“What about the boys?”
“One of them stared and said I looked like a girl.”
“Did you fight?”
“There wasn’t time, Abuela. All the girls defended me. They said he was just jealous.”
“Tomorrow, why don’t you ask if he wants to be friends?”
“No! He should ask me.”
That afternoon the Laguna family sat on the porch. Santiago wrote rows of vowels in a lined notebook, while his grandmother peeled potatoes and his great-grandmother monitored his penmanship.
“Make them all nice and neat, Santiago. You have to be head of your class and go to university, become an engineer or a doctor, the most honorable profession of all. You’re the family savior—don’t ever forget that your birth was a good omen.”
Three years later the town fell prey to an extremely long winter. At the end of March the pine forest was covered in a blast of snow, the treetops becoming white roofs. Even their scent hibernated among the branches, dreaming of warm spring air. The beech trees looked like icy wraiths blanketed in early-morning frost. The road to town was impassable, and Santiago stayed home from school.
One night, Olvido came in from the stable with her cheeks aglow; the dapple-gray horse was dying.
“I’ll try to reach the veterinarian’s; it’s less than a mile from here. Maybe there’s something he can do.”