That night, Bernarda repeated “I’m not leaving,” and she stayed until her death. It took two years as brothel cook before anyone in the brothel could make sense of her grunts and mutterings. They learned her father had sold her to a circus on account of her facial hair. It was then clear where she acquired her skill and love of juggling cutlery, fruit, and vegetables. But Bernarda’s skills did not end there: she had an innate sense for food, and her stews became as famous as Clara’s pleasures under the purple canopy, drawing clients who savored a good plate of food before or after lovemaking. Bernarda communicated with the world through her stews more than her mumbles and grumbles.
She was also exceptionally good with animals, who calmed at the touch of her giant hands. As a result, she looked after not only the kitchen but the corrals and stables. As the brothel grew, so did the number of animals: chickens, sheep, and goats, even a pair of horses that whinnied with pleasure at the whiff of mare exuded by her skin.
A few years after she arrived, they learned that Bernarda was from Soria and had lost her mother at birth. It was clear she fled the circus because someone had abused her, but it was only then they learned it was the lion tamer who drank and beat her with a stick while tugging on her beard for kicks.
What they did learn within a few days of her arrival was that Bernarda’s simple nature was a result not of shyness or trauma but of a dreamy head lost in the clouds.
That night they set her up with a straw mattress on the floor in the room next to the pantry. As she undressed, her odor drifted through the rooms, up the stairs, creeping silently toward Clara Laguna. Clara sensed it in her dreams, and the child in her belly stirred.
T
HE YARD AT SCARLET MANOR
was bursting with flowers, bees, and grasshoppers. It was the next winter when they began to whisper in town about its refusal to heed the changing weather and seasons. The first sign of this was the daisies that began to sprout between the cobblestones the day Clara set up house. They continued to grow, even during the chill of winter, their robust faces seeding in the snow and dry leaves, taking over the land and Clara’s dreams once again.
When she was six months pregnant, Clara stopped receiving clients and sent her mother to recruit a replacement as she resigned herself to wait for the child’s birth. She moved her bed under the window, framing it between the iron bars. There she sat with her swollen belly, staring out at the cobblestone drive. She still dreamed of the Andalusian, striding up the drive, singing a folk song to announce his arrival, followed by a
saeta
to beg her forgiveness. That drive was the first thing Clara saw when she woke, the last thing before she slept, and the vision continued in her dreams. Her hair still smelled of flowers in the morning, just as when she first brought the landowner to see the estate, only the daisies now sprouted in the earth instead of her chestnut strands.
One morning, when she was seven months pregnant, her vision still fogged by her dreams, Clara thought she saw a man walking toward the house. She rubbed her eyes, not wanting sleep to come between her and her desires: he was back in town, earlier than promised. But this man was not wearing riding breeches and boots; there was no cape or oiled hair. His pants were black and coarse, his heavy boots calf-length, his coat two sizes too big, and peering out above the collar, a snow-white band bearing witness to a dedication to Christ: it was Padre Imperio. Clara burst into tears. He knocked and Clara’s mother answered. For a moment, the priest wondered whether the devil hid in the blind eye of that woman still reeking of witchcraft, and he crossed himself in his thoughts.
“What a surprise. Come in.”
“I’m fine right here.” Padre Imperio did not intend to ever cross that threshold.
“Well then, tell me why you’ve come.”
“I’d like to see Clara.”
“She’s resting, Father. She’s pregnant and needs all the rest she can get.”
“So I heard. I can wait. Tell her I have something for her.”
“But she’s not even awake and might not be up for hours! Pregnant women sleep late.”
“I’m up, Madre. Go inside. I’ll take care of him.” Clara Laguna appeared in the clay-tiled entryway. Her eyes were red from crying, her hair tousled, her pregnant belly bulging under a thin muslin
Il Seraglio
dressing gown.
The Laguna witch went into the kitchen for breakfast.
“Tell me what you want, then leave. I don’t want any deals with God until my death.”
The priest stared straight down at a violet-covered Bible in his hands.
“I came to bring you this.” He handed Clara the Bible. “You shouldn’t wait that long.”
“Does it look like I can read, Padre? Men and their obsession with educated women! Do you think he’d have abandoned me if I’d been able to read this book?”
“If you can’t read it, I’ll read it to you. I’ll be back this same time tomorrow morning. I’ll wait for you in the garden. But this time, be dressed.” He replied with the determination that had kept him alive in the jungle for over a month.
Padre Imperio’s eyes, those dark eyes in which Clara found solace one winter night, bore into her own. She said nothing but felt spring slipping in through the door with a breeze of tender shoots.
Clara spent the afternoon wandering among the tomatoes, lettuce, and squash in the garden, amid the fruit trees, hydrangea, and morning glories, their flowers intensifying the ache in her heart. It longed for the bare rigidity of winter. But her treasonous baby stirred in a belly nourished by spring. Nature’s creaky buzz reached deep inside Clara, the herbage exploding on what not long ago were barren branches rattling in the wind. But the most painful of all, what she could never forgive the fertile ground around Scarlet Manor, was the effervescence of multi-hued buds that filled the rose garden. Clara had not set foot on those paths where she’d once loved, where she had been happy, where a yellow rose—no less treasonous—would fade just like her, where its blue, white, and red companions had grown so big their petals were like tongues mocking her misfortune. She hated the place that had given her hope only to tear it away. Clara forbade her mother, Bernarda, and the other prostitutes from tending to that garden. She ordered that the breach in the stone wall, where the Andalusian had passed, be sealed and built a barricade of wheelbarrows under the arch at the entrance, condemning stray dogs to a fragrant death or a back scraped raw if they dared escape through the path of thorns. That rose garden would die bitter, dry, and abandoned.
That night, Clara vomited pollen, was tormented by nightmares of cologne and salve, used to soothe wounds. Her agitation finally abated under a cloak as black as a cassock, and she fell into a dreamless sleep.
Padre Imperio arrived at Scarlet Manor precisely on time, riding his mule, his priest’s collar in crisp contrast to his face lined by wrinkles acquired in the tropics. Clara spied him from her bedroom window as he marched over the daisies. She told her mother to send him away with the excuse that she was unwell. I haven’t got time for salvation, Clara thought, only for revenge. She began to brush her hair as she watched the old woman give the priest her message; rather than leave, he sat on the stone bench under the chestnut tree and stroked the violet cover of a book Clara sensed was sacred.
“That man is as stubborn as his mule! He says he’s not leaving.”
“So I see.”
Unable to squeeze her breasts and belly into her own dresses, Clara wore one of her mother’s. The birds sang too loudly for her liking, the sky was too blue, the breeze too soft. Padre Imperio stood when he saw her approach.
“You do know you’re in the garden of a brothel?”
“I’m in a garden blessed by nature, and therefore blessed by God’s generosity.” Padre Imperio shivered, as he did whenever he looked into Clara’s eyes, wondering whether the fires of hell might burn behind them.
She sat on one end of the bench, he on the other, a stone arm between them preventing any contact.
“I’d like to read you a passage from the Bible that will explain why I’m here and what I want to tell you.” The violet cover stuck to his sweaty fingers.
“Someone once told me about your sermons, said I should go hear them. What were they about?”
Padre Imperio set the Bible down. He inhaled the morning air in that garden that seemed to lean back, ready to listen, and began to speak of a far-off island called Cuba, where soldiers went to defend the glory of the empire. Clara looked at the ground, at the wildflowers swirling at her feet, but as the story wore on, she glanced at the priest, then turned her whole body and looked straight at him. She had never noticed his lips before; they were thin, a star-shaped scar in one corner. Dressed in a soldier’s uniform, a priest’s collar at his grimy throat and nothing but faith in his heart, Padre Imperio had marched with a battalion of men through swamps where rebels hid, where ceiba and palm trees harbored enemies and, in the distance, a beach. The priest’s eyes were no longer black but tinged Caribbean blue. There was gunfire and death; the first soldiers fell in the yard at Scarlet Manor, blood splattering the cobblestones and daisies, gunpowder and granules of pollen filling the air, crocodiles crawling out from behind the chestnut tree, holy water splashing from a canteen onto the priest’s boots, Clara’s feet, and the forehead of a fallen soldier. It was an ambush. Midday beat down on Scarlet Manor. Padre Imperio loosened his collar, and Clara Laguna saw the scar slashing right across his throat.
“I’ll come another day to read biblical parables.” He picked up the holy book and got to his feet, his mouth dry. His mule, tied to the gate, was getting restless.
“Come as long as they let you.”
“Or until you repent and come listen to my sermons where they should be heard, in church.”
“You obey God, I my revenge.”
“You’re still so young, and with child.”
“But my soul is gone, Padre, stolen by love and the curse on my family.”
“That’s not true. Your soul belongs to God.”
Padre Imperio wanted to say he would find the soul she thought she lost, but he said nothing. They did not shake hands or touch but said goodbye with their eyes. The priest walked toward his mule, dragging behind him the same solitude that engulfed Clara.
It was a while before Padre Imperio returned to Scarlet Manor. Clara tried to think of him only when the pain of her curse was unbearable, like a balm, a dark-eyed remedy. She looked for other things to keep her busy. She grew to like her trips to town, not to fetch water from the fountain, like she had before, with her jug and her memories of a man who surely belonged to another by now. There was a never-ending well of fresh water just next to the vegetable garden at Scarlet Manor. Instead, Clara liked to parade her pregnancy in the square, up and down the narrow streets where the old women sat forming rows of black shawls. She wanted them to whisper about her, about the cursed line of Laguna women who would not die out but wantonly reproduced girls and disgrace. If the curse had stolen Clara’s soul, then she would steal their men.
Sometimes, when Clara passed the church doors, she would forget her name, her background, her misfortune, just for a moment, and wish she could enter that sacred place with its crucified Christ on the altar, the gravestones of Castilian gentlemen set into the floor, the stone coffins of noblemen in somber side chapels. She wished she could sit on a pew and admire Padre Imperio in the pulpit, arms spread in his Sunday robes, his lips savoring his sermons, the yellow of her eyes reflected in his.
But those strolls grew farther apart. By mid-May, Clara’s belly was so big she could no longer walk the distance from Scarlet Manor to town. Clara’s mother, wishing her daughter would stop parading before her clients, convinced her to help with her potions again. Although the Laguna witch’s business was initially affected by the brothel, it slowly picked up, thanks to the men curious about their future as they waited for their turn of carnal pleasure, and the women who missed her prophecies and cures for evil eye cast by rural envy. Since Clara had started to busy herself with the clients waiting in the parlor as well, the Laguna witch would some nights go to town, hauling her sack of cat bones.
Bernarda did not like that half-blind woman in her kitchen, taking up the whole stove to prepare her potions and balms in blackened pots. She grunted that there was no room left to cook, scratched her deformed nose, and tugged angrily on her whiskers.
“Be quiet, girl. You sound like a wounded boar! There’s room enough for two in this kitchen.”
Bernarda stalked off to lie on her straw mattress, but when Clara started helping her mother, the cook showed a sudden interest in witchcraft, and in the needle and thread for repairing hymens.
“Lady, lady good,” Bernarda grunted as she sharpened and polished the knives Clara used to dismember lizards, toads, and rodents.
Bernarda shadowed Clara’s every move, watching her cut and store the pieces in a jar or simmer them in a pot. The moment her mistress was distracted, she devoured any little piece of meat or entrails Clara had touched. For Bernarda, love was a matter of the stomach.
“Madre, did you take the lizard tail?” Clara asked.
“Of course not! Be quiet now. Don’t distract me. I don’t want to mix up the herbs.”
“And you, Bernarda?”
With her mouth open, teeth and gums stained with blood, the girl laughed, savoring the touch she loved so much.
“Don’t we feed you enough? These are for the potions, you beast!” Clara smacked her across the head.
Still smiling, Bernarda ran to her room with one hand over the exact spot her mistress had struck.
“Come out of your room and stop stinking up the place!” Clara yelled.
But Bernarda hid away to cut off that piece of hair where Clara had slapped, swallowing it eagerly with a piece of fruit from the pantry.
Any other stomach would have cramped in unbearable pain, but Bernarda could digest anything her mistress’s love demanded and not feel the slightest prick of indigestion.