The House of Impossible Loves (41 page)

“How many times do I have to tell you that everyone has a place in this house and I decide where that is?” Olvido whispered so as not to wake her grandson. “You ruined my life; I will not let you ruin my death!”

Slowly but surely, the struggle was reduced to small odiferous skirmishes, primarily when Olvido was in the garden, which she resurrected much as she did herself.

When the old women in black, fanning fresh air in their chairs, first saw her walk by on Santiago’s arm, they recognized the most beautiful woman in the world under that white hair and wrinkles, and retreated into their houses. Some crossed themselves at having witnessed a miracle, others at having seen Beelzebub himself stroll by.

Olvido’s trip to the general store, which modernity had turned into a convenience store, caused such a commotion it paralyzed the August sunset, leaving it suspended in a purple puff of fright. Olvido Laguna eggplants and squash were still for sale, and nearby shoppers who knew who she was backed away, as if the vegetables themselves were ghostly, too.

“Don’t be afraid,” Olvido said with a smile. “Just think of it as an early resurrection.”

This comment, repeated and exaggerated for days in the town square, narrow streets, living rooms, and kitchens, was eventually sown in hallowed ground. The new priest—a vain young man, his hair slicked back with gel—was forced to address it at church on Sunday when Olvido came with her grandson.

“Brothers and sisters, those of us here today are and have always been alive; anything else is just a tall tale told by mortals.” He coughed, his neck scrawny like a baby bird’s.

Santiago squirmed in the last pew, tortured by memories of Padre Rafael, the magic dais, and Saint Pantolomina’s finger.

From that Sunday on, tongues wagged about where Olvido had been these last years and why she had faked her death. Olvido refuted not one rumor; on the contrary, she liked to encourage them all. Some said the sight of the fire led to amnesia, causing her to flee into the hills, where she survived by eating roots and live animals by the light of the moon, until her hair turned white and her memory returned one night when she was nearly devoured by wolves. The women in town preferred the story that Olvido had pretended to die in order to leave town, run away, and travel the world with a grandee from Logroño, wealthy but old, with a penchant for the descendants of famous prostitutes.

The lawyer’s son, who managed the Laguna fortune for Santiago and had filed the papers for Olvido to be considered dead, called her into his office to legalize her return to life.

“Don’t bother,” she assured him. “It’s not worth it. By the time the papers are ready, they’ll only tell another lie. Leave things be. They’ll soon sort themselves out.”

Just as she had with her return home, Olvido Laguna held nothing back when it came time to revive the garden. She pulled mummified squash and tomatoes out by the roots, annihilated beetles and ants with a pink fog of insecticide that crystallized the insects, then fertilized the earth, pampered it, planted it, and sat each afternoon awaiting the breeze from its growth. Meanwhile, Santiago cleared the rest of the yard. He swept away the autumn floods, dismembered skeletons with a lawn mower, pulled out weeds; and when every trace of desolation had been erased from the yard, fertility flourished in the heat of a living Laguna. The hydrangea and morning glories leafed out, the honeysuckle turned green, the chestnut tree burst with white buds, and the rose garden was a multi-hued resurgence of eternal spring.

It was then time to decide what to do with the mountain of ash that had once been the stable. Santiago had noticed his grandmother cry every time she looked at it. He extended his stay one more week, even though he thought of Úrsula every hour of every day and was anxious to hold her in his arms. Shovelful after shovelful, as the August heat burned his back, he carried the ash in a wheelbarrow, pushing it outside the gate and helping to load it onto a truck that took it away.

In the weeks that passed as they dealt with resurrections and a spiritual truce, exhaustion barely allowed Olvido and Santiago to savor memories of resentment and forbidden love. More than once they tried to renew their evening storytelling before the fire, but by the first swell they were fast asleep, snoring until morning. Nor did they speak of Olvido’s illness. However, on the day Santiago was finally to return to Madrid, her symptoms came crashing down, though she tried to hide them.

“I’m staying,” Santiago said, dropping his suitcase in the entryway.

“But she’s waiting for you,” Olvido whispered with an ashen face.

“I’m in charge here now, and I say I’m going to look after you.”

Santiago gave Olvido her medicine, dressed her, pressed cold cloths to her forehead when fever spiked and hallucinations brought her back to adolescence, where she walked through the pine grove with Esteban, he looking down at his shoes, then his nails, she chattering about the black horse while staring at his strong, sun-toasted hands. Santiago also cooked when his grandmother was too weak to get out of bed, and it was when he kissed the squash, caressed the red peppers, that his heart fumed with nostalgia. Sometimes he thought he could smell sheep belonging to the traitor Ezequiel Montes or would catch a glimpse of his figure, chiseled by the power of mountains, coming down the daisy-strewn drive. But Santiago knew this was impossible. They said it had been three winters now since the shepherd had taken his flock to Extremadura and was never heard from again. Either he had found a local woman in the meadows or he’d fallen into a ravine.

The one person Santiago missed was his companion in potions and love, the pharmacist’s granddaughter. She was at university in the provincial capital, studying her family trade.

Just as he did with Padre Rafael, Santiago used stories and sedatives to distract Olvido from her pain. Whenever she dozed, he would sit on the porch and think of Úrsula, write her poems, read her novels. Once phone service had been reconnected, he would call her late at night. Often there was no answer, and he would imagine her working in the desert dust of parchment scrolls.

One morning, when he had been at Scarlet Manor for nearly six weeks, Santiago woke in tears and knew that would be the day. He carried his grandmother out to the honeysuckle clearing and, lying in the sun, wrote his last poems about the passion of nature while she read Saint John of the Cross. Then he took her into the kitchen—Olvido now a sparrow on the wings of death—where they made rabbit with onions, cinnamon cake, and palmiers, though her stomach refused to admit a single bite. They napped in chairs on the porch, comforted by the yard’s fertile murmuring, and when the sun set, Santiago lit the fire and told stories for Olvido to finish. But the end did not come. Santiago held on to the hope that, for the first time, his dreams had been wrong.

“Why are you smiling?” his grandmother asked.

Santiago held her tight, and Olvido watched her life rush backward to that Sunday when he sucked at her empty breast in the pine grove inundated by the deluge.

Olvido went to bed early. Afraid it might happen near midnight, Santiago waited for his grandmother to fall asleep and sat in the easy chair Manuela Laguna once profaned to watch his grandmother breathe. He prayed to Saint Pantolomina of the Flowers, prayed to her iris-filled hair with the faith of the truly desperate. It was after twelve when he went back to his room, where he kept praying until overcome by exhaustion.

The next morning Olvido was miraculously better. She got out of bed with no pain, no fever, the color of the hills in her cheeks.

“You can go back to her now,” she told her grandson as she prepared breakfast.

But Santiago waited another week in case she suffered a relapse. Despite his premonition, Olvido had been granted respite among the living, for her eyes had yet to witness one last wonder.

O
CTOBER HAD BLANCHED
the color from Úrsula Perla Montoya’s face. Madrid was its usual frenzy of activity and
cafés con leche
. The day dawned to a blue sky dotted with chubby clouds. Santiago still smelled of the train when he reached the city, when he reached Úrsula’s apartment and she opened the door, nausea in her cheeks, bathed in perspiration unusual for early fall. The moment Santiago saw her, transparent in a white nightgown, he realized he would have loved her even if she had never appeared in his dreams, even if she had not emerged from his wrist in a puff of smoke. He would have fallen in love with her anyway, the first time he saw her writing with a quill, fanning herself half-naked; smiling as she lunched on a sandwich, delighting in his stories, her face bathed in moonlight, reciting her grandmother’s poems. And even if he could not have her, he thought as he held her by the waist, he would still love her in a state of platonic ecstasy for which there was no cure, not even in death.

“I missed you so much . . .” he said.

Úrsula pulled back and slapped his face. In accordance with his Christian upbringing, Santiago offered the other cheek as his skin burned red. Úrsula had ink spots on her lips, her neck, her hands, as if she had rolled in the quagmire of violet loss. Her fingers still hurt from her feverish scrawling that night and many other nights, when the tip of her pen hurtled forward out of a desire for his return. She had written like a wild woman, feeding on the inspiration he sowed in her belly, living for and because of it, scorched by the ice of remembering but not having him there, of waiting but not hearing him arrive. She had written hundreds of reckless pages, the best of her literary career as a romance novelist, and ripped them up at the first glimmer of dawn, lost in the madness of wanting to write them all over the next day, to feel him even more—if that were even possible. She had ripped them up in the fury of passion but also a fear of losing him, a fear of finishing the novel her editor was demanding, a fear that the void of being without it would drain her of him, banish her forever to the divan of forgotten novels and forgotten men, to continue a cycle of affairs that come and go, inspire and die. And yet, part of Úrsula wanted to go back to the peace of a routine that, until then, had provided her with precisely the right impetus. Too late, she thought, looking into Santiago’s eyes, damning his beauty, his absurd youth, his infuriating voraciousness in love, the memory of which would not let her sleep. She damned the torment that was pleasure, the pleasure that was fear, the fear that sparked hate. Santiago kissed her on the mouth, pulling him to her, fierce, tearing sleep away with his hands, tearing her nightie, her conscience, as the Laguna child that swam inside her recognized the taste of its father.

Úrsula continued to write throughout her pregnancy, weaving a shroud of Penelope from words that unraveled in the morning as she watched Santiago sleep in her bed. She continued to write and rewrite when he began to draw woodland creatures on her growing belly, when he covered it in kisses, as happy as in his messianic years; she continued to write and rewrite after autumn days spent reading to him from her grandmother’s dusty scrolls; she continued to write and rewrite after winter walks in luminous cold that hurried them home to their amorous romps; she continued to write and rewrite the snowy day when Santiago held her from behind and whispered “Marry me,” as she laughingly reminded him of the story in her last novel.

“A love that’s not free is miserable. Look what happened to the divan lovers: every move was calculated so no part of her body could leave its bounds, and that slavery was the end of them.”

Úrsula continued to write and rewrite when Santiago countered with how the story ended.

“But remember, when they could not vanquish the genie’s spell, the desert man wished only to suffer the same fate as his lover. Remember, that one evening the sorceress slave brought the genie to the bedchamber. When he found the maiden on the divan, in all her glorious nudity, he was so furious he cast another spell at the precise moment the desert man appeared, and he, too, became a diamond. And so they suffered their eternal condemnation together.”

Úrsula continued to write and tear up her work while assuring her editor the novel would be ready in a few more months, as she worked away, promising not to rip up any more pages on afternoons when Santiago was at an Atlético match with Isidro or evenings when he was performing in a café.

But none of it was any use. At nearly eight months pregnant, Úrsula Perla Montoya continued to write and rip, even the spring afternoon when she fell asleep on the scrolls and dreamed of a gate with a funeral bow welcoming guests, a manor house painted scarlet red surrounded by an enormous yard and a woman who looked like Santiago waiting for her in a clay-tiled entryway. Úrsula watched a profusion of daisies, roses, and honeysuckle take root in her belly and woke with the taste of acorns in her mouth. She was so unsettled by this dream—which repeated whenever she napped, on nights interrupted by countless trips to relieve herself—that one radiant morning she said to Santiago, enveloped in the delirium of Persian eyes: “Take me to Scarlet Manor.”

Úrsula continued to write and rip up pages when, moved by the wisdom of blessed Saint Pantolomina, Santiago granted her wish in order to placate fate. One late-March afternoon, with the baby turning somersaults the closer they came, Úrsula looked out the taxi window at the fountain with its three spouts, the church with its medieval tombs where her lover had lived, the pine grove split by an asphalt scar, and her dreams paved the way to reality: the gate, the bow, the house, the woman in the hall who swept Santiago into an embrace and kissed her affectionately on the forehead.

“Úrsula Perla Montoya, what a lovely name. Welcome to Scarlet Manor.”

“Thank you. Would you mind if I rest for a while? It was an exhausting trip.”

“Let me show you to the biggest bed in the house. It’s where you belong now,” Olvido said, taking her by the arm.

Ever since Santiago phoned to say they were coming, Olvido knew Úrsula had come to give birth to another Laguna child. And so it was. The moment Úrsula stepped into Clara Laguna’s room, she recognized the aroma as the one in her mouth day in and day out. Olvido pulled back the heavy quilt and helped her climb into bed as Santiago watched from the door. It was then Úrsula’s belly constricted, hurtling toward the agony of contractions. The child refused to wait. Ashen, Úrsula moaned and writhed on that mattress of revenge. She spread her legs and a torrent of water rushed out. Santiago, who had gone to her when the pain first started, asked Olvido: “What’s happening?”