The first sign announcing Margarita Laguna’s return was a stirring among the honeysuckle, the plants recognizing her touch the moment she stood under the gate with its funeral bow. It was a July morning, the air swarming with swallows and wasps. Eight months pregnant, Margarita walked down the daisy-strewn drive and knocked on the door. Her chestnut hair hung loose in the joy of summer, and her cheeks were damp with perspiration.
“Mamá, Mamá! Hug me if you can!”
Olvido could barely stammer her daughter’s name.
“I know I didn’t tell you I was expecting in my letters, but it was a surprise. I wanted to come home to Scarlet Manor and give birth, here, with you. Aren’t you happy?”
“If you are, darling, then so am I.” Olvido hugged her.
Then she saw him.
Tall. Strong. He was striding down the drive with a suitcase in each hand, tromping on Clara Laguna’s daisies.
“Who’s that?”
“Pierre Lesac, my boyfriend and the father of my child.”
Two big black eyes fell like a disaster on Olvido’s face.
“It’s a pleasure to meet you,” he said with a French accent, extending a hand.
There was a Gothic beauty to this young man of no more than twenty-five. He had a thin moustache that dripped over either side of his mouth to meet a neatly trimmed goatee. Olvido withdrew her hand, but Pierre’s touch remained, a touch she suddenly felt burrowing under her skin like a tick.
“Mamá, aren’t you going to say anything to Pierre?”
“Welcome.”
“Merci.”
He was wearing a beige shirt and beige pants. The sun shimmered on his short, dark hair, and his lips were plump.
A cough came from the entryway.
“Abuela?” Margarita asked.
The scent of lavender puffed out of the linen cupboard.
“Marriage certificate,” Manuela demanded, stretching out a white glove.
Those were the first words she had ever spoken to her granddaughter, and her bitter face awaited a reply. If this young gray-eyed thing had married, it might have been the start of a new era for the Laguna women.
“I’m not married and won’t ever be, Abuela. Things are different now, and that would be a step back. But Pierre, the father, is here with me.”
“You’re all the same,” Manuela growled, and marched back to her room, relieved. She would not have to stop hating that girl.
“She’ll never change, will she, Mamá?”
“No, it’s too late for that. I hope she didn’t upset you.”
Mother and daughter hugged again, and Olvido felt Pierre’s eyes on her.
Margarita’s baby was born premature due to a series of events all related to romantic desire. It started when Olvido encouraged her daughter to see the gynecologist who had just opened an office on the main street in town. His name was Antonino Montero.
A sultry heat lay over his building, the sun lighting up the doctor’s white sign, creating a mirage.
The sky would screw the earth if it could, Antonino Montero thought, imagining the sexual cataclysm. Humans would die, crushed between nature’s moist flesh. He trained his glasses, like black television sets, on a fifty-something vagina, but startled when he heard his nurse shout.
“I told you! The doctor will not see you without an appointment. Now, go!”
The gynecologist came out of the examination room and into reception.
“What’s going on?” he asked.
The nurse adjusted her cap as her boss’s robust figure approached.
“It’s these two, Doctor.” She waved a scornful hand at Olvido and Margarita. “They want to see you, but they don’t have an appointment. I told them there’s no way. We’re completely booked.”
A wave of murmurs rose up from the waiting room.
Antonino Montero studied Olvido. Her breasts were like those ripe mangoes he had eaten in that Caribbean city, at a conference on mammary gland tumors—before he was accused of wrongful death at his practice in Madrid, before he was forced into exile in this grungy town. Antonino continued to stare at her. Her waist and hips were as curvy as the road that dropped down to the beach, where clouds formed in the shape of thighs.
A girl stood beside her, arms crossed over her belly. Antonino Montero coughed inscrutably and said to his nurse:
“It is my duty as a doctor to examine this young woman whether or not she has an appointment. She is quite clearly far along in her pregnancy.”
“But, Doctor . . .”
“I must be true to my Hippocratic oath and would ask the ladies waiting to please understand. Have these two come in as soon as I’m finished.”
The murmurs in the waiting room grew louder.
“Thank you for seeing us,” Olvido said when they were seated across from the single, balding, forty-something gynecologist in his office.
“No need. It’s my duty.” Antonino smiled and saliva filtered into the channels of his jaw.
“My daughter is eight months pregnant, and I’d like you to examine her, make sure everything is all right.”
“How can this be your daughter? I thought she must be your sister.”
“I had her when I was young . . . Things were different back then.”
“You live in that lovely estate on the outskirts of town, Scarlet Manor, if I’m not mistaken. I haven’t been here long or had a chance to meet everyone yet.”
“Yes, that’s right, Doctor.”
Antonino recalled the story about Olvido’s grandmother that the pharmacist had told him over a game of cards at the tavern—about a prostitute with golden eyes named Clara Laguna who used to dance in an enormous bed covered by a purple canopy.
“May I ask how old you are?” Saliva pooled in the corners of his mouth.
“Thirty-nine.”
“I thought you were young. And tell me, how old were you when you had your daughter?”
“Doctor, I didn’t come to talk about me. We’re here to see about Margarita.”
Antonino did not hear her but was again savoring the stories he had heard at the tavern about the Laguna family. He pictured Olvido undressing by candlelight in the old carpentry shop. It would seem the pregnant girl was the result of her mother’s forbidden love with the carpenter’s apprentice, a boy found with his skull smashed and his pants down in the yard at Scarlet Manor. Yes, without a doubt, she was the Laguna of the dead boy.
“Since you’re here, let me offer a free checkup. I imagine it’s the first one since your daughter was born.”
“That’s not necessary. Again, I only came so you could see my daughter.”
“No, no. I insist.”
Antonino Montero now imagined himself in the yard at Scarlet Manor, surrounded by its devilish fertility, where Olvido Laguna mounted the dying boy. The doctor was spellbound by the grinding of her hips, the straight black hair cascading down her back, becoming entangled in twining plants.
“If you would like me to examine your daughter and attend the birth, then I will have to examine you first to determine whether there are any hereditary conditions.” His words were dictated purely by imagination.
“I see.”
“Go next door and undress from the waist up. First I must check the state of your breasts.”
Olvido stroked Margarita’s hair as she dozed in the chair. The trip from Paris had exhausted her.
“Rest here. I’ll be right back,” Olvido said.
The room was painted a soft peach color designed to soothe his patients’ nerves. An examination table was covered in a sheet, with a stool and a lamp at the far end. Olvido took off her blouse and bra, then sat on the edge of the table. The gynecologist came in—and explored her breasts with feverish fingers.
“Excuse me.” Antonino sucked in his stomach and hurried to the bathroom in the hall, where he spilled his pleasure all over the blue tiles.
Heat constricted his heart. He splashed water on the back of his neck, sucking clear droplets off his fingers, possessed by an unusual thirst.
When he returned, Olvido was dressed and waiting with her daughter. Margarita had taken off all her clothes, ready to get this exam over so she could nap in peace. Antonino Montero had her lie on the table and examined her under Olvido’s watchful eye.
“The entire family is in excellent shape,” he said to Olvido, his brow soaked in sweat. “Here is my home number if anything unexpected should occur, but I hope that won’t be for a few days.”
That afternoon, Olvido cooked dinner. She kissed each raspberry, washed them all, crushed them in the mortar, and threw them into a simmering pot of water, sugar, milk, and cinnamon. She gazed outside as she stirred and saw Pierre Lesac, pretending to be out for a walk in the garden. She turned back to her bubbling sauce. The sound reminded her of the river as it passed through the oak grove in spring. She sighed, turned off the heat, and set the pot aside, then began to cut up a piece of lamb. When she was done, her cheeks speckled with tiny drops of blood, she chopped a few onions. Tears fell from her eyes, drawn to the wet, pungent smell of the bulbs. Meanwhile, spying from between planted rows, Pierre watched her place the onion and lamb in a clay pot, then set it on the stove. He watched her sauté the meat; he watched her moisten her lips with a tongue he imagined like silk; wrapped in the glow of sunset through the pines, he watched as she left the clay pot on the stove and dropped her house robe to her waist. He felt ablaze at the sight of those breasts. Nothing would ever be the same again. The horizon began to meet the sun, and pierced by violet light, Olvido inhaled the smell of the cooling raspberry sauce, smearing a bit on her left nipple, then on her right.
“The perfect temperature and consistency,” she said aloud.
Olvido used this culinary trick with most of her recipes; it never failed her. Nipples were the perfect chef’s tool for tasting. She poured the sauce onto the meat, and that is where Antonino Montero’s desire came to rest. Pierre Lesac waited for Olvido to leave the kitchen before he entered, plunging his fingers into the clay pot and licking them clean. His yearning merged with the doctor’s. The moment Olvido poured the sauce on those slices of lamb, there was no going back.
By dinnertime, the moon had filled the dining room with a cosmic silence. A porcelain platter of steaming lamb sat on the lace tablecloth the diplomat had given Clara Laguna.
Olvido served Margarita four slices of meat. Margarita attacked them with fork and knife, resorting to her hands whenever any bits close to the bone resisted. She stared at the strands of meat as she brought them to her mouth, wolfing them down with a primordial hunger.
“Mamá, four more,” she said, holding up her plate.
“You shouldn’t eat so much after dark. It’ll take forever to digest in your condition.” Olvido glanced at Pierre.
“I’ve got a stomach of steel,” Margarita assured her mother, sopping up sauce with a piece of bread. “Isn’t that right, Pierre?”
He nodded.
“Can’t you just say yes? Would it kill you to open your mouth and pronounce a single syllable?”
Pierre nodded again.
“Can’t you just forget your stupid circle of inspiration until I’ve given birth?” Margarita exclaimed. “I can’t stand that you won’t speak to me. I need you.”
Pierre Lesac slowly chewed a piece of lamb.
“Talk to me, I said!”
He shook his finger no.
“You shouldn’t get so upset,” Olvido said, serving her daughter two more pieces of lamb.
“Give me two more, Mamá.”
“It won’t sit well, darling. Be reasonable.”
“Either you give me two more pieces, or I will throw myself on that platter.”
Olvido served her, and Margarita tore the pieces apart with her hands, barely chewing before swallowing. She then ripped the loaf of bread in half and began to sop up more sauce.
“This is divine. Just divine.” A raspberry moustache stained her upper lip.
Olvido decided to take the last piece of meat into the kitchen before her daughter consumed it.
“Where are you going, Mamá?”
“Darling, please don’t eat any more. Let Pierre have this piece.”
Again, the Frenchman shook that finger Olvido would grow to hate forever.
“The only thing you care about is your damn circle of inspiration. Well, tomorrow you’ll want me to speak to you, you’ll beg me, but I won’t say a word.”
“I’ll eat it, then,” Olvido said. “I’m still a bit hungry.”
“Don’t you dare! That’s mine.” Margarita speared the piece of lamb and gulped it down. “Now give me the platter. I want more sauce.”
“Please, darling. I know it won’t agree with you.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. I said give it to me.”
Olvido let the platter fall to the floor.
“You did that on purpose!” Margarita yelled as she stood from the table, her face flushed. “I need some air. I’m going outside.”
“Do you want me to come with you?”
“No, I’d rather be alone. You two stay here. You”—Margarita looked at Pierre—“and your circle of inspiration can go to hell. And you”—she looked at her mother—“you and your childish games.”
Margarita hauled herself out to the porch in search of oxygen.
Pierre Lesac had begun to draw as soon as he could hold a pencil. He colored the silk walls in his mother’s room, the servants’ legs, the Belgian lace tablecloths. He colored the desk of the banker who was legally his father and the floor tiles in the basement, where the banker locked him when he was bad. Hiding out in his mother’s room, he colored her stepbrother’s pants and the back of the satin-covered sofa. He colored the pews at Notre-Dame in Paris as darkness fueled his eyes and his mother wept in prayer, repenting her forbidden love. He colored the palms of his hands as he filed out of church, a distraction from the terror instilled by those gargoyles. He colored the curtains in the stepbrother’s parlor as he listened, yet again, to his mother’s pleasure. He colored his little bed, surrounded by the loneliness of parents at war. It was not until one morning, when the banker told him his mother had left with her stepbrother, that Pierre Lesac began to color on white paper. He was nine and his eyes were dark as sin.
In late adolescence, Pierre graduated from colored pencil and paper to oils. He left the banker’s house behind and with it a taste for still life: jars, fruit, tables. From then on he specialized in portraits. The first one he ever painted was thanks to the magic of memory. He spent an entire day in silence, searching for his mother’s features. When he found them in a corner of childhood, unable to forgive, he transferred them to canvas and sold them to an art gallery for more than he’d expected.