“They always were expensive.”
“They do say the house was opulent . . .”
“Wicked women . . .”
“And who is Olvido’s father?”
“Manuela might not even know!”
“That’s what the old women will say to their daughters,” Clara Laguna whispered into her granddaughter’s heart.
“Yes,” Olvido replied, her skin covered in goose bumps. “That’s what they’ll say.”
And that’s what they said when winter and spring ended and July crashed in, when Olvido Laguna’s belly was now swollen. The gossip whirled as well behind the windows of whitewashed stone houses and in small chairs placed outside when the sun set. They gathered in groups of two or three, at most, to avoid suspicion of trafficking in black-market goods or treason. The girl wore a mauve dress, tight across the hips, and shoes with a bit of a heel that clicked over the cobblestones, her hair loose, floating on the breeze that filled the town square and narrow streets in the evening, cooling off her sweaty temples.
Meanwhile, in the entryway, Manuela Laguna waited for her daughter’s return, armed with the cane. For months they had shared Scarlet Manor in a long-suffering silence. An invisible divide separated the rooms and their feelings. Sunset fell on Manuela’s dressing gown, her white gloves, her mouth with its taste of insects. Olvido appeared on the cobblestone drive, her eyes and cheeks puffy. She saw her mother waiting.
“Give me your hands, your hands, your hands,” she murmured softly and erratically. “So strong, how strong they are.” She saw the weapon shaking in her mother’s gloves.
“Don’t you dare; I won’t let you!” Olvido walked slowly, her shoes gripping the stones, the daisies, Clara Laguna’s amber gaze. She saw the menacing shadow of the cane, saw her mother’s murky eyes, and stared into them with contempt. The cane leaped toward her belly, but before it made contact, Olvido ripped it from her mother’s hands, spat on it, and threw it into the yard. It lay on the sand, covered in dust. Manuela Laguna had never felt as alone as she did that instant, not even when her fourteen-year-old body lay dying under the butter maker from Burgos. She had lost her power to a pair of gray eyes, and she cursed them.
Olvido headed into the kitchen. Ever since Manuela discovered she was pregnant, Olvido was afraid her mother would try to make her miscarry, stirring potions into the pots she left on the stove for Olvido to eat from, and so she decided to cook her own meals using the recipes her mother had taught her. According to Manuela, a good housewife knew how to make not only cinnamon cake and lemon pie for her husband but also the most delicious savory stews. At sixteen, Olvido had not had time to learn all of Bernarda’s culinary wisdom, but she had learned enough to not die of hunger.
More important, it was there in the kitchen that she found the perfect place to exhume the body of her beloved Esteban. The desire to feed her hunger soon gave way to the desire to remember, the desire for pleasure. Rope braids of garlic and onion, potatoes, tomatoes, and red peppers piled in straw baskets on top of cupboards, bay leaf, mint, sage and other herbs, the bloody meat of chicken, river trout—any ingredient, Olvido made love to it first. She washed it, sometimes, she kissed it, always, she smelled it, before the kiss, she caressed it, then she cut it, crying, warming it between her hands or on the open flame until it climaxed.
One early-August afternoon, Olvido was cooking lamb when a liquid flooded her legs. Her daughter was ready to come into the world. Olvido left the kitchen clutching her belly and slowly made her way upstairs. She would give birth in Clara’s room. Everything was ready, waiting. On the dressing table were clean towels and the scissors she had used to cut her hair the day after Esteban died. The fragrance of that room intensified as the birth of another Laguna girl drew near. The child’s first breath would fill her lungs with the smell of family.
For hours, Olvido’s hair and face were soaked by perspiration as she lay naked on the bed in labor. Downstairs, on the sofa in front of an empty hearth, Manuela sat embroidering. When the horizon slipped into darkness, Olvido squatted on the floor. The purple canopy shook as if performing an Eastern dance in the evening breeze. Amid gushes of blood and urine, Olvido screamed her lover’s name and pulled out a gray-eyed girl. She cut the umbilical cord at precisely the same moment as, downstairs, Manuela snipped her excess thread. Olvido walked over to the washstand and lowered the baby into the basin, washing her under the watchful gaze of two amber eyes. The church bells began to play a joyful melody. Since Esteban’s death, the bells had only ever rung on Sunday before Mass, on civic holidays, or when a wealthy family celebrated a wedding.
The little girl began to cry. A scarlet puddle lay on the wooden floor. Olvido wrapped the baby in a towel. I will call her Margarita, she thought, after the flowers on the cobblestone drive. Margarita Laguna. Olvido staggered toward the bed and collapsed as her daughter suckled at her breast.
W
HEN MARGARITA LAGUNA
was six months old, the kitchen at Scarlet Manor began to take on the odor of puréed food. It was never clear whether the girl’s sensuality—apparent from her first streams of urine—came from the pleasure and heartache her mother cooked at a low fire or the Eastern influence of the
Kama Sutra
that led to her conception. Margarita, at her young age, was already dark, toasted by steam from the cooking pots and exposed to the air. She was always tearing off her clothes: from diapers and christening robes to cotton underpants and dresses with bows. How she hates anything but the wind on her skin, Olvido thought, and she never feels cold, wrapped as she is in a cocoon of love.
Hidden in corners or behind the windows’ shutters, Manuela Laguna spied on her granddaughter’s nudity. She had hated the girl long before she was born, but one afternoon, when Olvido was distracted and Manuela peered over the side of the bassinet to find gray eyes she thought she had eradicated forever, she spontaneously went about a chicken massacre to calm her rage. From then on, whenever she saw those gray irises she delved into some new savagery. Armed with the kitchen knife, Manuela would guillotine giant roses, drown cockroaches and centipedes in perfumed water. But she knew the only thing to soothe her ire would be to cane her granddaughter’s little body until it simply disappeared. Perhaps then she would be free of that torturous smell, that smell that lay inside her like death since pushing the schoolmaster’s son from the window, that smell of his genitals and fear.
Olvido knew exactly what her mother was thinking and feeling. She had learned to read hate in the light of those eyes, in those hands gripping that lavender cane, long before she was ever given her first elementary school speller by her long-gone teacher. Olvido spent day and night watching over her daughter: as they played among the honeysuckle and daisies, as they napped in Clara Laguna’s room. If at last she succumbed to sleep, Olvido dreamed of small white coffins and sun-faded photos of little girls on headstones as her skin exuded the fragrance of the produce she cooked.
One day in mid-August of 1942, when Margarita was a year old, Olvido took her out for a walk through the pine forest. There they came upon Padre Imperio’s mule behind a large rock, bottles of holy oil clinking in the saddlebags as the priest lay on a clump of ferns, a gash on his forehead trickling blood. Olvido lifted his shoulders and set his head on her lap. At seventy-some years of age, he had lost his healthy complexion from his time in the colonies, had become an old man with fragile limbs. Olvido cleaned his cut with a handkerchief as Margarita played in the pine needles. It was early afternoon, the sun intensifying Padre Imperio’s distress. His priest’s collar was suffocating. Olvido removed it, undoing the top few buttons of his cassock, revealing the scar that crossed his once firm, now saggy neck.
“We must resist. Courage and faith in God! They were up in the palm trees, the bastards. Ambush! Ambush!” Padre Imperio ranted.
His eyes were again the color of the Caribbean Sea.
“I’ll take you to the doctor in town.” Olvido tore a strip off her slip and tied it around the old man’s head.
“Leave me to God’s mercy, soldier. Save yourself! The red ants are attacking as well.”
Margarita Laguna sat pricking the priest’s hand with pine needles. Olvido chastised her daughter, who tumbled laughing into the ferns. Meanwhile, lost in the jungle of his delirium, Padre Imperio grabbed his throat: a Cuban rebel had just slit it with the whoosh of a machete. He patted his cassock, searching for the canteen that hung from a soldier’s uniform. He found it, invisible, cleansing his wound with holy water, the medicine of miracles that stopped the bleeding just as it had forty years before.
“Can you put your arm around my neck, Padre?”
By now the sun had roasted him to the brink of starvation among lianas and soft earth, until the Santeria priestess found him, fed him cassava jam, and smeared his throat with a yellowish poultice. That color wedged in the chaos of his memories. He looked at Olvido for the first time when she helped him up, but he saw her grandmother instead. In his delirium, the priest traveled back to the dreams that had tormented him for years: that girl burning in the amber flame of her own eyes. Through parched lips, he called her Clara. A breeze stirred in the pines, ruffling their hair, calming the light of the insect bites. Olvido put the priest onto his mule, and as he sat tall for a mere instant Olvido stroked his red scar with fingers not her own. Padre Imperio slipped deeper into the past, remembering his own broad shoulders, dark hair, and the spark of determination in his eyes.
“Do not ruin your life for revenge. Help me save you,” he said before falling onto the beast’s neck.
Olvido picked Margarita up and secured her to her waist in a shawl.
“Hold on tight to the mule, Padre, and don’t say another word. Save your energy.” She took the reins and headed for town.
The saddlebags swung and clinked. The breeze died down and the heat of the afternoon intensified.
A week of mourning was decreed when Padre Imperio died of a stroke two days later. A priest was sent from the city to officiate at the funeral. In his thirties, Rafael Arizpicoitea was a big man with a ruddy complexion.
On the morning of the funeral, Manuela Laguna climbed into the cart and waited for Olvido and her granddaughter to do the same. Though they had not spoken since the night Esteban was killed, they still went to church together. Thanks to her many donations, Manuela now sat in a front-row pew, while Olvido chose to remain in the back with little Margarita.
Padre Imperio is gone, the women in mourning veils and mantillas whispered as they milled outside the church. Gone, and there’ll never be another like him to draw faith through tears and crocodiles, standing in the pulpit with arms spread. Manuela walked among the elite of society, acknowledging their greetings with all the dignity of a queen. Olvido, on the other hand, still searched among the parishioners for Esteban’s gray eyes so the church bells would play an angelic melody. All of the women looked at her accusingly, as if she and her own supernatural beauty were responsible for the priest’s death—after all, she had been seen leading the mule that carried his battered body. No longer did they call her the Laguna with the hats; now she was the Laguna of the dead boy. All of the men, however, studied her with the curiosity of desire and sat over a cup of red wine in the tavern after Mass, wishing she sold herself like her grandmother with the golden eyes.
When Padre Imperio’s funeral was over, August cooled with a sudden rain that turned to hail overnight. Hunger grew more acute in stomachs as the townspeople wept to the pounding of ice pellets, unsure whether their grief was over the loss of that magnificent man or the misery of this time of weevils and brown bread. The boy with the black-market stand was seen jumping over the cemetery wall when the moon rose; it was even rumored that fugitives came down from the hills, taking advantage of the dark and the bad weather to say goodbye to the priest who offered a safe haven from the Civil Guard in the church basement. Rarely in the week after his death was Padre Imperio’s grave unattended. The Sunday faithful went during the day, the outlaws at night. Until, that is, the Civil Guard set up watch; then only magpies sought the shade of the headstone when the hail stopped and August returned, leaving the policemen no choice but to go back to the station without a single prisoner, just star-flecked tricorne hats.
The constant coming and going in the cemetery prevented Olvido from visiting Esteban in the grave next to his father’s.
BELOVED SON AND BROTHER, REST IN PEACE,
read the epitaph engraved on a headstone sticking up from the earth like an ornamental comb. When the undertaker locked the gate at six o’clock, Olvido and her daughter slipped out of their hiding spot in a nobleman’s vault. At first the magpies squawked, nearly tearing their beaks apart, trying to warn the undertaker, who lived in a hut not far away, of this intruder. Olvido threw stones at their wings until they came to tolerate her. After closing, they flew up and down the cemetery paths in search of shiny objects dropped by grief-stricken mourners, while Olvido sat on her lover’s grave, earth warmed by decomposing kisses. She rested her head on the tombstone, stretched out her legs, and read Saint John of the Cross out loud in the cool of the spirits, while Margarita raked dirt into little piles she then knocked over. Sometimes Olvido would stop reading and play with her daughter; at seventeen, she herself was still a child. The grave was piled with little mounds harboring memories. One held the smell of sawdust from behind Esteban’s ears, another their icy embraces beneath the giant oaks.
When evening nodded off and the cemetery filled with the sounds of nightfall, the bones of the dead sparkled in the ossuary like giant fireflies, headstones glowed purple, and cypress shadows roamed the paths with their lances. Olvido lay on the grave, one cheek against the earth, and told Esteban about Margarita’s new teeth and the stews she made as she thought of him; in tears, she swore she would never forget him. Only when Margarita complained of hunger, demanded her dinner, did Olvido sweep the grave smooth and replace the bunches of flowers so as not to be discovered. Under cover of darkness, she jumped the lowest part of the wall with her daughter holding tight to her neck. Once, outside the church, Esteban’s sister threatened to tear Olvido’s hair out if she ever discovered Olvido was disturbing her brother’s grave at night.