The baking soda and lemon revealed a new dimension to Santiago’s stomach, filled with longing for Olvido. Unwell, he went to her room, but not finding her there, he continued on to Clara Laguna’s. He stood for a moment, staring at his grandmother’s shape beneath the purple canopy, then climbed in silently beside her. He wrapped his arms around her waist and fell asleep as a lace dressing gown swished down one wall.
Fire. That was the first night Santiago dreamed of flames surrounding him, choking him. But the dream ended there. He woke in a cold sweat, his gaze lost in the purple canopy. He clung to his grandmother, who calmed him with kisses, rocking him as she had when he was a boy and the nightmare of Manuela Laguna drooling a blue sea of poison startled him awake. They held on to each other for over an hour, sharing secrets in the silent dawn filtering in through the window. Later, over a breakfast of toast, Santiago thought those flames must belong to the very hell Padre Rafael spoke of from the pulpit armored against his prehistoric weight. Santiago felt guilty about leaving the priest to his fate surrounded by bedpans, the theological treatises he wrote in the clarity of morning, and records of Gregorian chants, requiems, and solemn Masses. He refused the glass of water with baking soda and lemon and had no trouble with the previous night’s dinner or the morning slice of bread and butter.
“I’m going to church, Abuela,” Santiago said after drinking the last of his milk. “Padre Rafael needs me. I shouldn’t have left him like that.”
“I’m sure he understands. He loves you very much . . .”
“And tomorrow I’ll go to school.”
The day dawned to black clouds, so Santiago put on a raincoat and rubber boots. He went to stay goodbye to Olvido, busily skinning a rabbit for lunch, and found her smiling down at the blood and clumps of fur that escaped her knife.
Santiago headed down the gravel road. He knew Olvido would go see Ezequiel Montes and felt a stab in his chest as his bones became a mountain stream once again. But he needed to see Padre Rafael and resolve this issue with hell. As the first drops of rain fell, he began to think about the pharmacist’s granddaughter, his ringleted classmate whose breasts had grown from paella mussels to frosted cupcakes. They still kissed and caressed in the room behind the pharmacy amid balsams, bottles, and concoctions, though he had never dared tell Padre Rafael or his grandmother. Santiago thought he might be able to give up those afternoons that engorged adolescence in his pants, if in exchange God would separate Olvido and Ezequiel Montes. After all, Santiago told himself as rain pelted his forehead, this is all just a mistake; I wasn’t born for misfortune.
Padre Rafael was so happy to see Santiago that he had to race to the bathroom. The church echoed with his footsteps, but not like before, his illness softening both him and his journey through the world. Santiago waited for him in the small radio station room. It was more organized than he could believe. A new shelving unit stood in one corner, housing the collection of sacred music Padre Rafael had bought, the records arranged by choir or composer.
“How are you, my boy?” the priest asked when he came back from the bathroom wearing an oft-mended cassock.
“I want to help with the radio again, and with Mass if you need me. I don’t feel like doing my radio shows yet, but I could play the music.”
“I’m so happy to hear that, son. I was considering finding someone else—just until you were better, of course.”
“No need, Padre. I’m here. But I have to tell you, I dreamed of hell last night.”
“Such a place was not made for you, Santiago,” the priest replied, ruffling his hair.
When he arrived home for lunch, Santiago found a rosy-cheeked Olvido in hiking boots.
“You went up to the meadow to see your friend the shepherd,” Santiago said.
“In a few days, when the fog of the dead arrives, he’ll take his sheep to Extremadura and won’t be back until spring.”
Olvido knew shepherds led their flocks to pasture in Extremadura because of its warmer winter and returned once the cold weather was gone. Still, she had never paid attention to it until that morning, when Ezequiel Montes announced his departure. She would miss their conversations sitting by the door to his hut, their walks through the meadows, their hugs and kisses on the messy iron cot.
“Invite him to tea this Sunday to say goodbye,” Santiago proposed.
The boy was thrilled to see just how quickly God listened, taking Ezequiel Montes away. The second half of fall and one full winter seemed long enough for his grandmother to forget. Now he had no choice but to hold up his end of the bargain and stop his games with the pharmacist’s granddaughter.
Ezequiel Montes came to Scarlet Manor in his stiff suit, his hair neatly combed back with cologne. He watched Olvido pour the coffee and arrange the cinnamon cake on a porcelain platter. He spoke of his trip, the excellent pastures free of snow, and oak groves that turned the landscape into a world of giant shadows when night fell. Santiago was friendly that evening. He asked the shepherd how long it would take him to reach Extremadura, what towns he would pass, and other details that interested him not at all.
Just after eight o’clock, Ezequiel said he should go. Santiago said goodbye in the parlor, letting his grandmother walk the shepherd to the door. Hiding in a corner of the hallway, Santiago watched them hurriedly kiss, reach up to touch a face, as if hands were memory to be recalled later, and embrace as a blade of dark sliced their bodies through the half-open door. It took everything in Santiago to forget this painful image, and after dinner, when he and his grandmother sat in front of the fire to tell their stories, he had to fight the desire to inject a traitor responsible for the deepest sorrow.
The next day, when the first church bells rang, Ezequiel Montes set off with his flock and his dogs, leaving the town behind like a cloud billowing up at dawn.
November crept deep into the mountains and forests. Winds blew, making lime trees sing, mountain ash burn bright, beech trees turn yellow, ferns grow brown. Autumn marched wet and multi-hued into winter.
Santiago’s bones were bones once again. He sang at Sunday Mass once again, up on the dais with a voice still recovering, deeper but also more beautiful. He recited the Gospels and sacred poems once again, announcing times for Mass, catechism, and retreats without any mistakes. The only thing he could not do was write poetry, neither about nature nor traitors. Santiago asked his grandmother to pick him up from school a few days a week and accompany him in the room next to the sacristy for his radio shows. She would sit and watch him recite into the microphone, but every now and then Santiago sensed her gaze was far away, lost elsewhere, though her eyes were fixed on his, and it pained him to think that she might have traveled to Extremadura, to that rough man off in some pasture. Yet Olvido showed no sign of missing the shepherd.
The only noticeable change was that she went to the cemetery more often. Olvido always visited the graves of Esteban and her daughter, and sometimes Manuela’s mausoleum. It was a hexagonal, pink marble shrine held up by Ionic columns, a gloved goddess rising from the center. The townspeople whispered that it was a fitting grave for the life she had led: a whore who rose high because the flesh was weak. In winter no one was ever at her grave, but in spring and summer, entomologists from all over the province, even the capital, visited the mausoleum. At that time of year, thousands of insects—primarily centipedes and crickets—would pilgrimage there. Scientists had yet to discover a reasonable explanation for this phenomenon. Endless rows of insects climbed the hill with religious obstinacy, despite children throwing rocks to break their military formation, stray dogs sniffing them with wet snouts, and funeral processions stomping on them to avenge their pain.
By the time the first snow fell, Santiago noticed that his grandmother had become more absent-minded. She would forget her stews on the stove, burning them; use dessert ingredients in first and second courses, adding cinnamon and sugar to garlic soup or cooking meatballs in lemon cream. It was then she began to tell her grandson about Ezequiel Montes, his life, his childhood adding lambs and subtracting them, his extraordinary ability to read the Bible when he was illiterate before any other book, the little bag where he kept the shells of the bullets that killed his father and how for years he slept with them under his pillow.
Santiago’s bones ached and the vomiting returned; so did the traitors in Manuela Laguna’s stories and fire in his dreams. But this time Santiago did not fear they were the flames of hell. Even though they still surrounded him like that very first dream, now they were suddenly extinguished by a ray of moonlight. This heavenly glow bathed him in an albino fire, and it was in those fresh flames that the face of a woman appeared. Over several nights all Santiago could make out was a mass of wavy chestnut hair. But as the dream took root inside, one night he distinguished a smooth forehead, another night a pair of sorrowful black eyes. The next day Santiago was obsessed with the lumps of coal in the stove; he gorged on black olives and squid in its ink that Olvido prepared, surprised by her grandson’s sudden desire to consume anything dark she set before him.
Several days passed before Santiago was assaulted by the dream again. He had tried to sleep wherever he could, slumped over his desk at school, listening to the Gregorian chants and requiems he played on the radio, as his grandmother told the end of a story. He was no longer afraid of the fire. Instead he was anxious to decipher the woman’s whole face, anxious to see what lay beyond those eyes that held him captive.
One afternoon, after the radio show, he curled up on a pew in the chapel to Saint Pantolomina of the Flowers, and the veil of moonlight fell from the woman’s black pupils, revealing a small, straight nose. Santiago made it a habit to nap there, and a quick snooze offered up geometric cheekbones and ears one stormy night when he could not go home to Scarlet Manor. The more features Santiago saw, the less he recognized her and the more beautiful he found her.
When only her lips and chin had yet to be discovered, Olvido decided not to mention Ezequiel Montes until spring but to nurture the love she had given her grandson for the last sixteen years. Back were their games and jokes in the kitchen, nipples smeared with sauce, walks in snowy mountains, and afternoons gazing at each other in the room next to the sacristy. Meanwhile, the shepherd, alone in Extremadura, counted the days before he was to return to Castilla, and the ringleted girl dissolved in tears among elixirs in the room behind the pharmacy after Santiago approached at recess one morning, eating a piece of cinnamon cake, and simply said: “We can’t fool around anymore. We can’t even do homework together. I’ve had to sacrifice everything for something greater, but you’d never understand.”
Santiago’s dreams of fire simply ceased, and no matter how he tried to bring them back, he failed. And yet, the incomplete face of that woman crouched deep down in his heart.
Nothing could stop the sun’s rays from bringing an end to winter, lime trees bursting into bud, sparrows throwing themselves into the world with a manic trill, bees buzzing among roses like nannies to the dead. Faced with these inescapable signs of spring, nothing could stop Olvido Laguna from heading to the meadow one afternoon, where she found Ezequiel Montes, still smelling of cane fields. They slowly said hello, as if they hardly knew each other, months of silence standing firm between their eyes.
“How was your trip?”
“I thought of you and thought it would never end.”
It was only seven o’clock, but behind the treetops, the moon gave way to clouds. The weight of a storm lay heavy in the sky. The months of silence disappeared, and Ezequiel took Olvido by the waist, kissing her on the lips as lightning flashed. They walked arm in arm to his hut. Firewood crackled in the hearth, the room smelled of evening, and the shadow of the cot wavered large on the wall. Their clothing was soon unbearable. Ezequiel looked stronger, after months on the road. A torrential spring rain poured down on the mountain.
But before it soaked everything, Santiago arrived home after his radio show; not finding his grandmother there, he set out for the meadow. He crossed the pine forest with freezing hands. He climbed hills not caring that the sky spat rain down on him, until he saw the outline of the hut with its black smoke rising from the chimney, the gleam of fire escaping through the window. Water poured from his hair, plastering his clothes to his skin with the icy chill of a curse, but he trudged up the last bit that separated him from his suspicion. Santiago shook when he opened the door. A blade of wind and rain cut across the naked bodies making love on the cot. Santiago shook when he heard Ezequiel Montes propose marriage at the precise moment he arched his back, pulling away from his grandmother. Santiago grew deathly pale. Night descended over his throat and the ferocious mountain, and Santiago left the door open and ran across the puddle-strewn meadow.
By the time Olvido reached Scarlet Manor, the house was dark, the entryway dead. She climbed stairs that creaked under her feet. The second-floor hallway opened up, shadows filtering in through balconies, silence like snowfall. She found Santiago in Clara Laguna’s room, seeing him first through the haze of yellow eyes: lying on the bed, his body curled up like a fetus, unmoving, reeking of sorrow.
Olvido held her grandson’s name on her lips before approaching, finding his eyes swathed in sleep, his skin bright where raindrops had crystallized, smooth and frighteningly cold, his clothes stuck to his skin. It took some doing to undress him; his arms and legs were stiff, and he raved with fiery breath. When she wrapped him in the sheets and quilt he began to tremble, his blue lips pursed, his eyelids grew smaller. He seemed consumed by nightmares. Olvido took off her clothes and, in the skin of another, lay down beside him, pulled him to her, held him tight to offer warmth. Tears snaked from her eyes. The boy’s heart raced in the frenzy of tachycardia, and she wondered what would become of her if she lost him. She pictured her grandson dead, drenched by rain, the reflection of a new absence, a new grave on which to converse with worms. She felt like a heartless wretch for having hurt him, having found him as cold as an icicle. She covered his face with kisses, drowning in the desperation of the steely night; she kissed him more, lost all composure and reason, a moan escaping her throat that brought their bodies together, the same old story of “suffer no more, my child” as he woke from his delirium, his lips heavy with two generations of love, and pressed them to hers over and over again, falling into delirium once more, dreaming of a fire with no ray of moonlight, a fire that burned with such vigor it hardened desire, and he woke, recognizing his grandmother in those caresses, and he cried, and she cried more, they consoled each other in a whisper of kisses, the suck of two bodies that should never, ever touch. They merged in a tumble of “I can’t live without you,” of “nor I without you,” of a search for all the hidden corners of flesh, of loving each and every one of them. Stars filled the room, illuminating a premonition: the purple canopy danced as it had when Scarlet Manor was a brothel, and in a corner Clara Laguna smiled, adjusting a garter on an invisible leg.