“I will not let you hurt that boy. This time I will be ruthless. I would even kill you, Madre. Although, by some miracle, you do seem to truly love him. I’ve never seen you so happy, never seen you touch anyone the way you touch him. Never once have I felt a single caress from you.” Olvido rubbed her tear-filled eyes with her fists. “But still, I don’t trust you. I will keep my eye on you, Madre. I will not leave you alone with my grandson for even one moment, much less in this cursed place, where your hate vomits up roses as big as calf heads.”
By the time Olvido entered the rose garden, she realized Pierre Lesac was stalking her. What she did not yet know was that behind him, naked and in love, hurried her daughter, Margarita Laguna.
Pierre began to paint what he considered his masterpiece the day Santiago was born. He erected a stand with an enormous canvas on the porch. There he would capture the face and body that gave him not a moment’s peace. After dreaming of a lyrical tumble with his muse, he woke with lips as blue as a dead man’s and blisters on his member that began to ooze what looked like sea foam as soon as the first rooster crowed. Pierre set out on his silent pilgrimage to the kitchen. A flood of light illuminated his way across the clay tiles, dust-speckled rays falling on his hair.
Olvido, who began using the kitchen in the mornings once her daughter arrived, sensed the Frenchman’s footsteps and black eyes.
“Good morning, Pierre. I’ll bring breakfast to the dining room. Have a seat and wait for me there.”
But instead he stood watching her. His muse was preparing coffee and toast; her hair tumbled over her shoulders and arms, her throat pulsed like the ocean, her eyes blank, her house robe wilted by the July heat.
“You know I need to watch you. An artist must spend as much time near his model as possible, and you refuse to sit for me. But that’s all right. My work will be perfect, like you.”
Pierre’s torso was bare; paint-spattered pants hung reluctantly on his hips, displaying young muscles that reminded Olvido of Esteban.
“Don’t stop on my account. I won’t say a word or bother you.” Pierre placed a hand on his lips, then moved it away and said, “I promise.”
Olvido ignored this half-baked vision, the long, strong fingers, the smooth palm.
“Would you like some cake as well as toast?” She was not, however, afraid to look him in the eye, for they were not gray but as dark and melancholy as a solemn chant.
“No.”
“Go into the dining room.”
“That’s not possible.”
“Is my daughter still asleep?”
“I don’t know.”
“Go on now.”
But Pierre only moved closer to observe her face, filled with the pleasure of remembering. His tongue sketched on his palate as he thought, This afternoon I will put more vermillion on the precipice of her neck, a stroke of garnet in the corner of her right cheek. Neither of them suspected that, behind the kitchen door, Margarita was spying, her face ravaged by brutal insomnia, eyelids puffy, and underneath her eyes, two furrows the color of mud.
After giving birth, Margarita did not move out of the big bed where Clara Laguna devoted her body not only to the Eastern exoticism of the
Kama Sutra
but also to certain postures of a more Castilian nature invented to exact revenge on her Andalusian lover. Margarita did not mind offering her breast to the baby every three hours, did not mind that, shortly after falling asleep, she was woken by a golden-eyed woman’s laughter. She did not mind that the room filled with the smell of wine consumed a half century earlier or that moans and shouts of ecstasy sprang from the walls. The only thing she minded was the complete absence of a certain Frenchman. Pierre Lesac needed solitude to focus on his masterpiece.
“You don’t love me anymore. You don’t kiss me like you used to,” Margarita complained.
“Je t’aime, mon amour. Je t’aime.”
“Ever since our son was born, I disgust you. Yes, that’s it . . .”
“My love, I need to work on my masterpiece. That’s all. I’ll sleep next to you when I’m done.” His skin gave off a faint smell of a large, white Paschal candle.
“You’re lying. You smell like a church.”
“Don’t be silly . . . I smell of paint. Blue paint. As pure as your mother’s eyes.”
“My mother! My mother! I’m sick of you and of her . . . and this house . . . and your masterpiece! I want to make love in Paris . . . Are you listening to me, Pierre?”
But the Frenchman was only thinking, mesmerized, of the painting of his muse.
“Pierre . . .” A heavy afternoon air hung over the porch. “I love you. I’ll love you until the day I die. I would die for you, Pierre . . .”
“A little more pink in the corner of her lips? No, it’s fine as is.
Merci,
my love. Your help with my masterpiece is indispensable.”
“I hate you! Do you hear me, Pierre? I hate you!”
In the mornings, Margarita Laguna waited impatiently for Pierre to wake. If Santiago began to cry, she would recite the prayer the nuns taught her in the silence of the Holy Sepulcher, rocking the boy, disgusted by the oak smell surrounding her. The moment she heard Pierre leaving the guest room, she would lay her son in the cradle and follow him down the hall. His hair’s messy after another night without me, Margarita thought; his eyes still lost in dreams, where I no longer exist, she lamented; his chest so smooth, just as the fried eggs in the American breakfasts I used to eat in Paris. She licked her lips. And wet patches on his shorts. Who could he have desired to cause those traitorous ejaculations, she wondered, hammering a fist on the wall.
The memory of honeysuckle flowed in through the window, and for a few brief seconds, Margarita remembered how happy she had been drawing among those plants as she bathed naked in the sun. But now her destiny lay in the kitchen, with her mother, with Pierre, until the hunched silhouette of Manuela crossed the vegetable garden. Olvido followed her mother, and Pierre his muse. All that remained on the kitchen floor was a few drops of milk as Margarita followed the three of them, her breasts agitated by the to-and-fro of suspicion.
Every now and then, whenever she heard a rustling of the thorns, Manuela would interrupt her conversation with the Galician woman. She stood alert, cradling her great-grandson, but carried on a few minutes later, convinced the sound was only the July heat as it lay heavy on the roses. Meanwhile, those hiding behind her were scratched by thorny stems, and scarlet-colored cuts opened up.
Before heading back to the house, Manuela made the sign of the cross and warned the Galician woman: “Don’t you dare leave here. I told you to go and you died, so dead you’ll stay. And don’t send your putrid menthol smell out beyond the last rose. I have to protect my great-grandson’s reputation. Oh, and by the way, I tried to kill the chestnut tree you hung yourself from, pouring three bottles of bleach right into its mouth. I know you know, but I like to tell you so you’ll see how I try to protect you, too.”
At lunch, they all gathered around the delicious meals Olvido prepared, glancing at one another’s scratches, silence floating between them.
Afternoons were even quieter. Manuela Laguna sat in the parlor embroidering, as she recalled the Galician woman’s stories. These were for Santiago now.
Olvido read poetry in her room, the older books belonging to Esteban. She laid one by Saint John of the Cross on her chest, like a tombstone, and imagined her body surrounded by damp earth. Later she returned to the kitchen. Her cooking had never been so prolific. Every lunch and dinner there were dishes upon dishes: squash soup, ham and leek soufflé, chicken mousse, hens stuffed with foie gras and pine nuts, vegetable salad with raisins, steamed sole with butter and herbs, truffle Bavarois, honey-soaked pastries . . . Olvido was possessed by a fertility of biblical proportions. Yet no one ever knew if this had anything to do with the plague of miniature violets that began to fill the yard, eventually spreading into the house.
A clump of these violets took root on Pierre Lesac’s masterpiece, right on the chest of his muse. Infuriated at first, he later fell asleep on the porch sofa, like he did every afternoon. Margarita was not nearby, watching him breathe.
They all gathered for dinner.
“Magic, Olvido. Your dinners are magic.” Pierre ran his tongue over his juice-soaked moustache. “What a banquet! It’s like a wedding feast.”
“Well, I don’t think you cook nearly as well as you used to, Mamá. All quantity and no quality. The chicken is salty”—Margarita spat a piece onto her plate—“and the bread is as hard as a rock. You really can’t cook French recipes. They don’t taste anything like what we ate in Paris, do they, Pierre?”
“You’re so cruel,
mon amour.
Don’t mind her, Olvido. Your French cooking is wonderful, like everything else you—”
“No, Pierre. Margarita is right. I can’t cook French dishes no matter how hard I try. And the chicken really is very salty.”
“Mamá, why don’t you let Yaya cook?”
Manuela Laguna pulled her teeth back from a chicken leg. Ever since Santiago’s birth, she had stopped eating alone in the kitchen. It was hard for Olvido to see her so near Margarita. But the only thing the birth of a Laguna boy did not change was the silence that reigned between Olvido and her mother. Neither was prepared to give in.
“I’ll fry up some nice gizzards with garlic and pepper, and sweetbreads with rice. You’ll lick your fingers clean.” Manuela opened her mouth, and a chortle of stones escaped.
Olvido noticed her mother had only three teeth left in her upper jaw, but their ridged edges looked like they could tear apart an ox.
“Mind now, I can’t make this crap from France. If the cook who raised me ever saw this . . . What do you call it? Cluché?”
“Soufflé, Yaya. It’s soufflé.” Margarita smiled.
“Well, this fluché thing. If she ever saw it on the table, she’d have flogged the horse for having shat where it shouldn’t.”
Margarita burst out laughing.
In mid-August there was a downpour. The sun did not set when it should have, was still high in the sky after ten o’clock. The townspeople sat down to dinner in its rays, but hardly anyone ate. They stared out the window with empty forks, tore bread into little pieces on the table, checked their clocks. Perhaps nature had taken a break. The old, toothless farmers consoled themselves by chewing on their tongues.
Suddenly, without a hint of warning, the sun plunged into the pines. Most animals were startled and fled into the oak grove. The sky turned black, not a single hue on the horizon. A half-moon reluctantly appeared, tired of waiting for nightfall. A few hours passed as giant clouds filled the sky. The townspeople had by now gone to bed. There were one or two flashes of lightning. No stars shone, however much they were missed. More lightning. One flash struck the rose garden at Scarlet Manor, and the yard filled with the smell of charred earth. The half-moon disappeared behind a cloud. The breeze that had assaulted the town every evening died, and a stillness crept in through the townspeople’s navels, causing bouts of insomnia. But no one turned on a light. House fronts remained dark, though the people were there, immobile behind bricks, eyes open, necks bathed in perspiration, bodies wrapped in sheets, imprisoned, unable to escape their fate, a fate that grew more and more humid. Another flash struck rockroses in the pine forest. Resin clumps on tree trunks looked like strings of incandescent drool. The rain came. Not a few drops to start but a deluge unleashed by the sky, enveloping houses, yards, and hills. For hours, falling water was the only sound that night. Not a soul dared get out of bed; hands grew slick with cold sweat, eyes fixed on windows and balconies. The storm battered everything.
Margarita thought Clara Laguna’s window might burst and glass shards would pierce her face. She saw herself covered in blood, the purple canopy splattered by the tragedy, and felt an overwhelming desire for Pierre Lesac, his black eyes and skin, but suppressed it calmly. Santiago grasped his pacifier between his fingers. Downstairs at Scarlet Manor, it smelled of damp whitewash. A tide of water streamed down one spongy wall in Manuela Laguna’s room. The old woman could hardly breathe, sure such oppression could only be God, and muttered an an illiterate prayer. Her gloves lay stiff on the sheets; if only she stayed still, misfortune would pass her by. There was a blue flash of lightning, followed by a roll of thunder. The half-moon melted over the fields, over the tops of the pines. Face-down on her mattress, Olvido could feel the sting of childhood scars on her back and bit down on her pillow. The yard was not visible through her window, only the face of the deluge.
A section of the church roof collapsed onto the altar. The sound of rubble tumbling was quickly gobbled by that of rain, until every corner of town was under its spell again. Dawn did not come. Only a wafer of moon remained, and clouds were battling to overtake it. The weathervane at Scarlet Manor, a cock on one leg, spun crazily, pointing north, then south. An icy wind blew. Curled up in a tangle of sheets, Pierre Lesac listened to water rushing through the gutters. He tried to think about his masterwork helpless on the porch. He tried to get out of bed and save it from the storm but could not, held captive by his childish fear of the gargoyles at Notre-Dame. He remembered their jaws, their feet and daggerlike claws. They could rip off his head and devour his heart. Unbidden, a memory of his mother came to him, of the dark cathedral and the word
sin
she repeated so often. He remembered her stepbrother’s pants, the toast with plum jam the banker made him eat the morning his mother left. He wanted to vomit, but it was caught in his throat. For the rest of the night, as the storm spewed its torment, he felt the gargoyle’s stone touch.
The rain ended toward morning just as it had begun, suddenly. It was cold for August. Patches of frost lay on drenched grass. The young man who had replaced Tolón rang the church bells. The Christ on the altar was broken—a rotten beam had fallen on its back. The sacristy echoed with Padre Rafael’s restless pacing. Outside, it smelled of rain corpse. The sun began to shine. The road to the city had flooded; so had the winding path through the pines, beech trees, and rocks, and the oak grove. The labyrinthine rose garden had flooded, too, its twisting paths now canals transporting thousands of petals. They floated white, yellow, red, blue, black . . . making the rose garden a multi-hued cemetery. The deluge had dismembered rosebushes and left their bodies limp.