“How are you?” a flat voice asked. “Is there someone we can contact?”
Manuela shook her head no.
“It’s over now. You’ll be fine.”
Manuela still had the taste of the sea in her mouth and sand in her teeth.
The hotel owner came to visit. They had grown close working together in the kitchen. The girl’s a marvelous cook, the woman thought. I should hire her, but after what happened, she’ll likely be scared and want to go home.
“Feeling better?” the woman asked, running a hand over Manuela’s forehead. “I hear they were Norwegians off a boat moored here.”
“Who?”
She recoiled at the tarry smell of the hotel wafting from the woman’s dress.
Another day, strange men came to visit, asking questions she had no idea how to answer. They kept saying: “You were so lucky. You almost drowned!”
When she was discharged a week later, a smiling, bespectacled doctor said: “Now, you learn to swim. If not, no more diving into the sea, you hear? Promise me.” He held out his hand.
Manuela stared at the man’s skin, then asked for some gloves.
“What for?”
“To wear.”
Manuela left the hospital wearing a pair of the gloves nurses used when tending to burn victims. At a store in town, she replaced them with white cotton gloves. Then, at an art gallery, she bought an oil painting of a calm sea, a boat, and seagulls.
The hotel owner was happy to see her. Manuela had dark circles under her eyes and bluish lips, as if the sea remained inside her permanently, using her body as a host.
“Would you like to stay and work in the kitchen? I’d pay you a small wage, and the room would be free. What do you say?”
Manuela accepted the offer. She cooked with her gloves on, never taking them off. She had to buy four or five pair on account of how quickly they soiled. The owner wanted her to take them off when she butchered chickens or rabbits—it wasn’t good to be seen walking down the hall with blood-soaked gloves—but she didn’t dare ask.
Manuela resumed her afternoons on the patio, embroidering petit point as she stared out at the sea. But never again did she go onto the beach at night.
One morning in late fall, when her dresses had grown too tight, Manuela left without a word, just as she had come, saying goodbye to no one, not even to the salty breeze that followed her to the station.
As inscrutable as ever, Manuela returned to Scarlet Manor. She had acquired two new features: the white cotton gloves she would wear until she died and a growing belly that settled between expanding hips. A few months later, Manuela collapsed on the bed with the purple canopy and, as her mother had done years before, called out to a now more healthy-looking Bernarda.
“Get between my legs and pull the baby out like you would a lamb!”
The cook grunted, spit on her hands, and rubbed them together.
At sundown, Manuela gave birth to an otherworldly little girl she named Olvido. The old women in town whispered about the provenance of a name that meant “forget,” but they never learned whether it was chosen out of a desire to erase some event from her past or simply on a whim.
After Olvido was born, Manuela decided to dedicate her life and her daughter’s to achieving one goal: the Laguna women were to become decent and garner the town’s respect, something they had never had. Her first act was to light a sacrificial bonfire in the yard at Scarlet Manor. She burned the opera sofas, the silk damask curtains, the pictures of harem concubines, the garters, the satin dressing gowns, the
Il Seraglio
negligees and Moorish pants. She burned any potential reminder of the manor’s past as an opulent brothel, and she did it before the eyes and noses of the town. They needed to understand that the era of Laguna whores died in those purifying flames.
Since she did not dare burn the girls who worked for her—though she did relish the thought of such sacrifice—Manuela gave them each a stack of bills and told them to go practice the profession elsewhere.
The Galician woman, who had acted as madam over the last year, believed she was safe from this inquisitorial cleansing. She was wrong. Early one morning, as she ate breakfast in the kitchen, Manuela announced in her northern accent that she, too, must leave.
“But I’ve nowhere to go. I don’t even remember the way back to the sea. This was my home, here, with you . . .”
“I’ll pay you enough to jog your memory. Just go. My daughter and I are respectable now.”
That night the Galician woman took a rope and hanged herself from the chestnut tree. Her body swung there until morning, like a censer perfuming the town with the eucalyptus exuded by her dead heart. Manuela buried her in the very center of the labyrinthine rose garden. Only she knew which winding paths led there: she did not want to share that grave or that place with anyone. There, multi-hued roses climbed up and over one another, creating a tower. The sun shone down on the earth, and Manuela felt at peace.
Bernarda was the only one to stay on at Scarlet Manor. Manuela was afraid to evict her for fear she’d hang herself from the chestnut tree, too. The town would accuse her of filling the streets with the smell of a horse stable.
When Padre Imperio heard news of the brothel’s demise, he cried uncontrollably. Kneeling before Christ on the cross, he thanked God while lamenting, between snuffles and tears, that this destruction came too late. As he pounded his chest to stop his heart from aching with memories, he heard the clatter of uneven floor tiles. Someone had come up behind him.
“It’s done, Father. I burned everything evil in Scarlet Manor.”
The priest turned to find Manuela. He studied her carefully—her hair, her eyes, her lips, her slim frame—but could see not the slightest resemblance to Clara Laguna.
“Why are you staring? It’s me, Manuela. Don’t you recognize me?”
Not even her voice resembled her mother’s. Clara’s had been deep but beautifully melodious; Manuela’s was rough, like Bernarda’s grunts.
“You did what you had to, my child,” Padre Imperio replied.
“Can I come to Mass now like the town nobles and respectable families?”
“God’s house is always open, especially to those who need it most,” the priest confirmed as he crossed himself.
Manuela Laguna’s final act of purification was completed when she met with a lawyer with an office on the main street who’d recently arrived from Segovia. His business was inheritance law, wealth and estate management. Around forty, he had an air of modernity; the black automobile he drove was the envy of all. A man familiar with the region, who had sampled the Eastern pleasures of Scarlet Manor more than once, he was not of the opinion that money was in any way tied to morality and so agreed to represent Manuela. He would manage the fortune her mother had amassed, a fortune he invested in bonds and real estate far from the locals’ forked tongues. The Laguna riches, and his own—for he kept a generous share of the profits—soon grew to a sizeable beast.
Manuela now decided to renovate Scarlet Manor. Decency should feel at home if it were to stay, she thought. She painted the smoke-scarred exterior a soft red and the shutters white. She decorated the bedrooms and parlor with flowered cornice moldings, bought a clawfoot tub for the bathroom, and installed a linen closet in the entryway. The only piece of furniture to survive the brothel massacre was the big iron bed, with the purple canopy and wool mattress that had witnessed her mother’s carnal exploits, her own birth, and that of her daughter, Olvido. Keeping it was the closest Manuela had ever come to nostalgia.
E
VERY SUNDAY THE
Castilian town woke to the sound of church bells that announced the start of a day dedicated to God and rest. The doves that filled the bell tower stirred and took flight when the man they called “el Tolón” summoned the faithful to Mass, as he stood on piles of bird droppings. The smell of toasted bread, homemade soap, and freshly washed clothes began to flow through the streets and over the fields. Mass started at ten, but Padre Imperio opened the heavy doors at nine-thirty to silently let in parishioners—the rich in their veils, mantillas, and flannel, the poor in their patches and corduroy. The town square would empty, bereft of gossip, mules, and screeching children as the sound of the fountain with its three spouts lulled dogs to sleep, lying in ditches, their snouts pointed skyward. And yet, on that last Sunday in May, as the Republican flag flapped outside the town hall, a neoclassical building across from the church, the square was still full when the priest closed the wooden doors. Peasants and day laborers were protesting in their work clothes, demanding better pay and land reform.
Manuela had attended Sunday Mass ever since she burned the brothel luxuries and received Padre Imperio’s blessing—despite Clara’s warning that a cursed woman only ever went to church on her deathbed. Manuela rode into town on a cart pulled by a black horse without a name. She dressed in dark clothing, blouses that throttled her neck, wide skirts, shawls knitted in solitude by her gloved hands. She was not yet thirty-two, but her face had aged—her eyes dull, her cheeks sunken, her lips scored by deep lines. No one, especially no one who had known her mother, could fathom why Manuela Laguna was so ugly. To top it off, she was losing her one charm, her Andalusian hair. Whenever she traveled by cart, mangy clumps would fall out and sail on the wind. Every now and then—and no one could ever explain why—they would appear on top of the maroon Bible on the church altar, floating in the mayor’s breakfast bowl or the pharmacist’s expertly prepared medicines.
That Sunday, Olvido Laguna went to church for the very first time. She had just turned six and had left Scarlet Manor on only a few occasions. Manuela kept her hidden away, washing her face with insect-infused water, scrubbing it with honeysuckle root and pig bristle, but none of those remedies worked, nor did any other Manuela invented. The child’s inexplicable beauty, which her mother strove to eradicate with miracle potions, scouring, and poultices, was not only immune to it all but grew even more intense. The girl would wake up even prettier after these artisanal exfoliations, her skin even softer, her cheekbones more luminous, her lips more attractive with their blood-red curves, her eyes an even purer, more brilliant blue. Olvido’s beauty was exceptionally disobedient.
After every failure, Manuela locked herself in her room and wailed with an adolescent fury. Sometimes she cried from morning until afternoon, and when her daughter softly rapped her knuckles against the door, she was startled that the girl was still alive. Manuela thought Olvido would suddenly die—no one could survive the burden of such beauty. The very thought of losing her daughter infuriated Manuela. She wanted to see her married to a rich, honorable man and bear children unencumbered by the Laguna name. Manuela believed this was the only way to earn the townspeople’s respect, and until that day arrived, Olvido must live. After that, it didn’t matter if her daughter died. After all, how dare she be more beautiful than her grandmother, the whore with the golden eyes?
On this Sunday, Olvido was wearing a new dress, thick wool herringbone. It swathed her from chin to heel as spring pricked at her skin underneath. What bothered Olvido even more than the welts that rose up from her incessant scratching was the blindness her mother imposed. On the way to town she could not see the rockrose in flower or squirrels jumping from branch to branch because a hat with an enormous brim covered her eyes.
When they arrived at church, Manuela helped her daughter out of the cart and smoothed her wrinkled dress before leading her into the shadow of the open doorway. Olvido walked into that place of worship and sat with her mother in one of the back pews, the townspeople’s glances reeking with disdain. The Laguna family sins necessitated this distant pew. Sitting still on the hard wood, free of her tyrannical hat at last (Manuela had been forced to take it off out of respect for God), the girl watched candle flames flicker for the spirits of the dead, choosing to believe those little lights were fairies. She smiled at them, avoiding her mother’s strained yellow grin, and dared to make a few wishes: Dear luminous fairies, please let someone play with me, let my mother’s cane break and my father be rid of his fleas. Her hands interlaced, Olvido held her breath after every wish.
In the distance, at the altar, Padre Imperio spread his arms like the eagle he once was and recited from memory the Spanish Empire sermons that gave him his name when he first arrived from the colonies, full of the furor of youth. The church filled once more with Caribbean seas, ambushes amid coconut palms and tobacco plants, and swampy deaths. The devil reappeared in the form of a bayonet, a mosquito, a burning sun, and raging fevers. The old parishioners grew as emotional as ever, though some were still unsure after thirty years what it all meant. Others wept because they finally understood. Not even the young parishioners were immune to the glory and fear sparkling in the priest’s dark pupils. They did not know the story behind his name, but tears still sprang from their eyes. Some of the girls suspected Padre Imperio was a distant relative of Imperio Argentina, the star of
La hermana San Sulpicio,
a film they had seen when the summer cinema came to town a few years earlier.
Padre Imperio wiped the sweat from his brow with a linen handkerchief, his white hair glowing like a halo, and crossed himself when he realized some of the pews were empty, that the church was not bursting with faith and the smell of sheep as it had the century before. He lowered his arms. There was no need for the censer to swing from side to side, leaving a perfumed wake among the faithful’s prayers. He set his hands on the maroon Bible and sighed.
When it came time to sing the Gloria, Manuela Laguna joined in until all the others heard her and grew silent, a frosty insult rippling through the church. The song eventually returned to the parishioners’ lips, but it was now an arctic hymn that would have turned Christ’s lips blue. Padre Imperio then offered Communion, but Manuela stayed where she was; there was much to repent before she dared fall in line.