The professor lived near Notre-Dame, in an apartment overlooking the river. As Olvido descended from the taxi, the church towers looked like a pair of bat ears. A sparkling fog lay over the Seine. The temperature was dipping down near zero. As she walked up the stairs into the old apartment block, Olvido realized this was the first party she had ever attended. Before ringing the bell, she smoothed her hair; it hung loose, the first strands of gray appearing in the dark tresses. Margarita opened the door with a glass of wine in her hand.
“Mamá, I’m so glad you came.” Margarita kissed her on both cheeks. “Let me introduce you to two of my classmates from Spain so you’ll have someone to talk to.”
Olvido followed her daughter into a room thick with cigarette smoke and young intellectuals. She took off her jacket, hanging it on a rack. A record was playing French music. In the middle of the room, several pale girls with black-rimmed glasses were dancing and smoking with eyes closed.
“The first thing you’ve got to do at any party in Paris or anywhere else is loosen up,” Margarita said, pouring Olvido a glass of wine.
Olvido gripped the glass so tight her fingertips ached.
“Let me introduce you to Juan Montalvo and Andrés García.”
Two young men with bloodshot eyes reached out to shake her hand.
“Have fun, Mamá!” Margarita disappeared down a hall.
“All mothers should be as beautiful as you,” one of the men purred. “I hope you don’t mind my saying so; I’m just trying to be friendly.”
“Thank you.” Olvido drank her glass of wine in one gulp and moved on, using the excuse that she was going to get another.
A slow song was playing, and several couples held each other tight as they danced. Olvido picked up a bottle of red wine and went to drink it near a couple kissing in the corner. The wet sound of their lips caused her heart to race. The smell of a carpentry shop slipped through that home like a ghost. On a sofa, surrounded by young, red-lipped French girls, the host was carving a piece of wood. Shavings whirled at his feet. Olvido could not take her eyes off him. And as he gave form to his piece, the green-eyed man stared back. His name was Jean, and his female students said he had the most handsome arms in all of France. He taught sculpture at the university, and when not in class, he was carving at home.
The song ended. Olvido heard the bells of Notre-Dame play a somber melody as a young man changed the record. Feeling dizzy, she left the room. She walked down the hall in pursuit of the smell of wood and came to the kitchen. There, on the icebox, was a carving of a male foot. Olvido continued to the bathroom, where the towel rack was a torso of a Greek god made out of cedar.
By the time the host was able to get free of French lipstick and look for her, Olvido had reached the bedroom. He walked toward her like an adolescent approaching his first love. He took the bottle and glass from her hands, replacing them with a champagne flute. Olvido took a sip of that liquid reminiscent of Clara Laguna’s eyes and stroked behind the professor’s ear. She found what she was looking for—sawdust—and kissed that pale powder. The host returned the kiss on her lips, as if his mouth were a knife testing wood with a first cut, then slowly began to carve. After a moment, he pulled back from his piece and said: “Jean, c’est mon nom.”
Olvido’s lips were a brilliant sculpture.
At dawn, Olvido tasted wood beside her, the taste of a man. For a split second she thought that frozen night with the voice of a wolf and a celestial suicide never happened. She thought the gunpowder and her mother’s smile never happened. He was alive. He would open his leaden eyes, always darker on waking, and stroke her back. When she realized that more than twenty years had passed and the lips on her shoulder were not Esteban’s, she startled. She could not remember who this man was. Her head ached and champagne bubbles still fizzed in her stomach.
Olvido slipped out of bed, trying not to wake him. She gathered her clothes from among wood shavings on the bedroom floor and got dressed in the bathroom. She did not take a taxi, choosing to walk along the Seine to her hotel instead. As she skirted the frost sleeping on cobblestones, one word came to her lips like a prayer, the word
Jean
.
Jean woke to the ringing alarm. It was eight o’clock and he had to teach. He reached out for the woman who had spent the night. He wanted to hold her, kiss her, but the bed was empty. Disappointed, he headed for the shower to scrub away his hangover. He went back into the bedroom to dress, and in the closet, the image of a slave’s scarred back assaulted him from between shirts on hangers.
In the metro, he tried to remember her name but could not. As he walked up the stairs to the fine arts building, the fleeting belly of a woman appeared on every step. He walked into a room full of sleepy students. He said good morning and opened his briefcase; between the leather dividers, rosy crests bordering that perfect fissure lay in wait. He rubbed his eyes and began to explain certain techniques for mastering perspective. Champagne bubbles slipped out through his lips. Two breasts hovered over the room, aureoles spread like sails. He had to stop his lecture and swallow. He began again, this time writing on the board as his students looked on inquisitively, but the visions continued. On that scratched green surface was the outline of two thighs. Jean went to his seat behind a solid professor’s desk. He could not remember where he was in his explanation, could not remember a single thing about techniques for mastering perspective. A pair of hips sashayed toward him.
He canceled class and went down to the cafeteria. The body of that woman assumed various poses as he drank a cup of tea. He had to see her again. He hurried to find Margarita as she was leaving class, asking her mother’s name and where he might find her. Margarita hesitated. On the one hand, she was happy Olvido had left Scarlet Manor and was enjoying herself, but on the other, she was annoyed that her mother had been with the most sought-after professor in the entire university after just one night.
“Olvido Laguna. Hôtel la Madeleine,” she said at last with a frown.
“
Merci.
”
When Jean knocked at the door, Olvido was reading Saint John of the Cross. She had used her nail file on a bedside table, and her bare stomach held a little mound of sawdust.
“Margarita, is that you?”
Olvido heard a man speaking French as she reached the door and thought it must be a hotel employee.
“Je suis Jean.” The professor’s cheeks were rosy from the Parisian cold, his lips set in a tortured grimace.
Olvido silently repeated the word: Jean.
“Depuis que je me suis réveillé, je n’ai pensé qu’à toi,” he said.
Olvido went to the door and motioned for him to come in.
“Partout j’ai vu ton corps et tes yeux.” He stared at her lips.
“I don’t understand. I don’t speak French.”
“Olvido.”
“You know my name . . . Maybe I told it to you, I don’t remember. I’m afraid I had too much wine, too much champagne.”
Jean’s eyes took aim at her heart.
“Champagne,” he replied, smiling.
“Yes.” Olvido inhaled his aroma, a combination of wood and cologne, and kissed him on the lips.
He ran his hands over the body that had tormented him so, caressing it as if it might disappear at any moment.
They left the hotel arm in arm at noon. Both spoke words the other could not understand, and out on the sidewalks of Paris, eager for spring they kissed. They decided to have lunch at a bistro. Jean ordered two sandwiches, Olvido two more—pointing at the menu as Jean nibbled her neck. They needed to regain their strength. Later they had coffee and Jean showed her how to smoke a Gauloise. Olvido inhaled, opening her mouth to let the smoke escape. She coughed and they both laughed. The two walked back to her hotel late that afternoon, but Olvido did not ask him up to her room.
“I have to speak to Margarita,” she said.
“Margarita, oui, demain je viendrai te chercher.”
Margarita Laguna came to the hotel around eight o’clock that night. She was not wearing any panties, like when she was a child.
“I’ve been thinking about Scarlet Manor all day,” she told Olvido. “I suddenly realized how much I miss it. I think I’ll go back with you.”
“What are you talking about, darling? Your studies are here, your friends are here.”
Margarita slumped back on the bed.
“This doesn’t have anything to do with what happened at your professor’s party last night, does it? Before you answer, I want to apologize. I drank too much champagne, and that man . . .” A smile escaped. “I couldn’t help it. That smell, it reminded me so much of your father . . .”
“Really?”
“He smelled like wood, too, with sawdust behind his ears. He was working as a carpenter’s apprentice until he could become a teacher.”
“So that’s why you got together with Jean?”
“I liked him. Plus, as I said, I had too much wine. And that yellow nectar, champagne, it was the first time I’d ever tried it.”
“That’s what my Spanish friends said. They said you drank too much and were rude, leaving Juan hanging when he was just trying to be nice.”
“I’m sorry, darling. It was my first party and I was nervous. Are you ashamed of me?”
Margarita paused before answering.
“No, what do I care what they say. All I care is that you’re happy.”
“It won’t happen again. I promise.”
“That’s all right. Besides, it can’t happen again if we go back to Scarlet Manor.”
The next day Olvido Laguna packed her bags. She dressed in a suit with a dark gray jacket and called down to reception for a taxi.
It was a sunny morning that smelled of daisies and fresh-brewed coffee. The taxi was waiting.
“À l’aéroport.”
“Oui, madame.”
Olvido pulled a sheaf of hotel letterhead out of her purse and, in a script that bumped along with the car, wrote:
Darling,
The lawyer was in touch this morning to say your grandmother’s arthritis is worse. I have to go home. You stay in Paris. This is your place. Be happy. Tell Jean it was a pleasure to meet him.
13With love,
MAMÁ
W
HEN OLVIDO LAGUNA
returned to Scarlet Manor, her mother was waiting with a suitor to marry her. The man was a friend of the lawyer’s from a nearby town and met all of Manuela’s criteria. He had a spotless reputation, not even a hint of scandal that might tarnish it, as well as plenty of money and property. Widowed four years earlier, he was looking for a woman to ease the sorrow and solitude of retirement. The candidate was seventy-eight years old. But as far as the lawyer and Manuela Laguna were concerned, age posed no problem as long as the other two conditions had been met. It was unlikely Olvido would give the candidate children, a fact he did not mind in the least: with eleven children and twenty-seven grandchildren from his first marriage, the last thing he needed was another descendant to carry on his name.
The lawyer met with the candidate at his local tavern, listing not only Olvido’s beauty but also her culinary skill and fondness for good conversation. The suitor asked how such an extraordinary woman was still single, an opportunity the lawyer used to reveal that Olvido had a twenty-something daughter, the result of rape when Olvido herself was not much more than a girl. She had spent her life raising her daughter, who now lived in Paris, so Olvido could now look for a good man who would accept her past and keep her company.
The suitor came to Scarlet Manor one rainy afternoon in a fancy chauffeured car. The lawyer sat beside him in the back seat. The man’s face was jaundiced, and he leaned on a wooden cane with a silver handle. Olvido had spent the night weeping on Esteban’s grave, swearing between heavy sighs and earthen kisses that she was committing this sacrilege purely for Margarita’s sake, that she would hate her future husband whomever he might be. And yet, as she watched her suitor shuffling through the entryway after her mother and choked on the medicinal cloud surrounding him, she felt compassion.
Manuela Laguna showed him the house, peppering the tour with all manner of anecdotes about the aristocratic Laguna family. She seemed not to notice her future son-in-law’s precarious health, just as she ignored her own trembling white gloves. Fifteen days had gone by without her butchering a single chicken, and Manuela’s nerves were on edge. She had decided there should not be a whiff of fresh blood in the kitchen lest Olvido’s suitor think the house smelled of death.
Over coffee in the parlor, it was agreed that the wedding would take place in one month’s time. The lawyer gobbled sweets and slurped coffee. Given the groom’s poor health, he knew the marriage would last only a few months, but he suddenly realized that if Olvido were to inherit any money after her husband’s death, she would no longer need him to keep Margarita in Paris. His power over Olvido was in jeopardy.
A trip to the city was planned for the following week to finalize the paperwork and buy both the bride’s dress and her trousseau. Olvido’s suitor left Scarlet Manor feeling more alive than ever. He had fallen in love at first sight. On the ride home, he swore to always protect Olvido Laguna. Wanting nothing more than to make her happy, he decided a few days later to begin training at a brothel. The man had lost count of how long it had been since he was last with a woman, and on their wedding night he wanted his bride to forget her past trauma and take pleasure in the gentle passion of a loving man. His health proved too precarious, however, and he was found dead in a brothel bed a few hours later. The “pick-me-up” tonic he had taken erupted in the last orgasm his poor old body could handle.
Disguising his joy, the lawyer brought Manuela and Olvido the news. He proposed they postpone the search for another candidate at least a year, out of respect for the deceased. Olvido, who was saddened by the death of that man as jaunty as he was jaundiced, replied that she no longer intended to marry; she would not be introduced to every terminally ill old man in the province. Hearing this, Manuela flew into a rage, immediately butchering two roosters with reddish combs. The strain in the relationship between mother and daughter intensified. Manuela left charred pots of leftovers on the stove instead of delicacies and reduced Margarita’s allowance even further. The only reason she did not eliminate it entirely was because the bastard might decide to come home. In spite of this, after one more year of solitude, silence, and stews, that is exactly what happened.