Ezequiel Montes took off his oilskin coat and drank his coffee. Olvido told him about her annoyance with the bad weather, about her garden blessed with prodigious fertility, about her cooking show on the local radio. She even turned the radio on to listen to Santiago recite a poem by Fray Luis de León in a hoarse voice, a sign of his future torment.
“Will you come see me when the weather clears, to continue our chat?” Ezequiel looked at Olvido intensely.
“I’d like that.”
They heard coals crumble on the fire. Afternoon was dissolving in the sky as darkness timidly stuck out its tongue of stars. Ezequiel put on his jacket and hat. Outside, it continued to rain.
“See you soon.” He smiled.
Olvido stood in the doorway, watching.
Ezequiel spent his time reading the Bible until the skies cleared a week later. He rememorized the story of paradise in Genesis, and, when night fell and sleep would not come, trapped in thoughts of a woman’s hair, he read by candlelight how God’s people wandered through the desert. The day it cleared, Olvido headed straight for his hut. It was very early, the first scratches of dawn just visible on the horizon. Santiago had stayed over at the church to help Padre Rafael, whose incontinence had grown worse in recent years, so Olvido did not have to wait for him to leave for school. The dogs barked as they came to meet her, wagging their tails, announcing her arrival. She was carrying a book under her arm,
Legends
by Bécquer. Ezequiel Montes was milking the sheep, unshaven, his shirt untucked. He knocked over the bowl of milk when he saw her.
“It’s such a lovely day. I woke early and felt like taking a walk,” she said.
“You’re welcome here anytime.” The shepherd ran a hand over his face, wishing there were no shadow of stubble, and hurriedly tucked in his shirt.
“I brought a book, in case you might like to read it.”
“Oh . . . thank you. Have you had breakfast?”
“Just a little fruit.”
“Then I’ll make toast with cheese and a cup of fresh milk.”
They ate together sitting on stools outside the door to his hut. Though Olvido wanted to help him toast the bread and cut the cheese, Ezequiel insisted on doing it himself. The inside of the hut smelled like a bachelor’s home, the cot still unmade, last night’s dishes all over the table by the hearth. After breakfast, they chatted about the hunters arriving in town, the condition destroying the priest’s kidneys despite his strength, and the domino tournament at the tavern in a few weeks’ time. Ezequiel planned to enter; his father had taught him to play when he was just a boy, and it had been a passion ever since.
“We could play if you like. I sometimes play with my grandson,” Olvido said.
“Why don’t you read me a few pages of the book you brought?”
“Wouldn’t you like to try? Perhaps I could help.”
Olvido handed Ezequiel the book that had been sitting on her lap. Instead of reading it, he stroked the cover as if it harbored the soft touch of the woman now smiling expectantly at him. If the written word had seemed like rows of marching ants before, with Olvido beside him the ants piled up into a thick mane of hair hanging down a naked back. His face flushed, his lips trembled, and he recited a verse from Genesis by heart: “This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man.”
“Let me read it, then.”
“No, please. Another time. I can’t concentrate right now,” Ezequiel begged, setting the book on the grass.
“What’s wrong?”
Olvido felt Ezequiel’s hand in hers. They kissed, slowly at first, then in great crashing waves, as if they wanted those kisses to last until sleep, to last until death. They embraced and fell to their knees like penitents. Kisses dripped down their clothes, his shirt, her sweater; they dripped down her skirt and his pants, falling onto the pasture, creating a river where bellflowers rustled on the shore. It was not air they breathed, but lips. They touched as if they had found each other, touched as if they were thousands of miles apart. They lost their balance and rolled in each other’s arms. They continued to kiss, bathing in the river of kisses until Olvido could not catch her breath. She stood, brushed off her skirt, and ran from her own kisses, like a teenage girl, toward the pine forest.
By the time she reached the square, Olvido thought her heart would leap from her chest. She furrowed the crease in her brow and climbed the hill to the cemetery. The undertaker was weeding between headstones to keep roots from scratching the dead. He watched her walk past, pale, panting louder than the magpies’ caws.
“Something wrong?” he shouted.
Olvido said nothing, continued to weave her way between rows of crosses and dusty wreaths to the old part of the cemetery where Esteban was buried. She had stopped hiding in the crypt once she began to care for Santiago, but she still went every week during regular visiting hours to pray at her daughter’s grave, clean the headstone, and lay flowers.
MARGARITA LAGUNA. REST IN PEACE
. Olvido read the epitaph and crossed herself before kneeling on Esteban’s grave. She gathered two fistfuls of earth and held them tight. Slowly, she opened her palms and brought the dirt to her lips. The magpies heard her talk to it, heard her kiss it with all the affection of eternity, heard her cry over it until the perfume of rain slipped through the cemetery. Olvido lay down on the grave and closed her eyes.
The next morning, through the kitchen window, Olvido saw the outline of Ezequiel Montes pacing outside the iron fence, an apparition that maintained the robust form of the living. She busied herself washing seeds out of a pepper, frying onion, cutting chicken, until Ezequiel’s silhouette disappeared. She ate alone in the kitchen, staring out the window, promising to go out and meet him if he returned. She had no room for dessert, her stomach full of the memory of what happened the previous day. She wiped chicken grease from her lips, wrapped a shawl around her shoulders, put on her hiking boots, and left.
She found him sitting on a rock in the meadow that led from the hut to the ravine. He was holding the Bécquer book like a lump of stone.
“I was afraid you wouldn’t come back,” the shepherd said as he got to his feet.
“So was I,” Olvido replied.
The book fell to the ground, the river of their kisses flowing over it. They walked to the hut. Embers from the logs that had comforted Ezequiel’s sleepless nights still crackled in the hearth. They kissed against the wall, undressed on the unmade cot that groaned under the weight of love, the weight of bodies now come undone, and the smell of a man who lived alone drifted out the door.
T
HE CASTILIAN TOWN
was unprepared for Santiago Laguna’s fall from grace. The townspeople had watched him grow up on that altar dais in the church, singing Glorias and Ave Marias in an angelic voice that may have lost purity and gained gravity with the onset of adolescence but continued to fill hearts with faith, raising the hair on arms swathed in their Sunday best. (Some even remembered him lying in his crib, sleeping like a baby, as Manuela Laguna lifted his genitals on a stick to display proof of his exceptional birth.) They had grown used to hearing him recite sections of the Gospels or saintly poems on their radios, their hands greasy with bacon, a
café con leche
moustache over their lips. No one made announcements like him: times for Mass, times for catechism, times for retreats flowing out over the waves. “The boy speaks so clearly,” they said, “with such joy and conviction.” They had grown used to his poetry about honeysuckle, geranium, and morning glories every Saturday morning. Young girls sucked on lollipops as they thought about petals; older girls confused pine needles with wintry branches awaiting the return of an uncertain love; old women were invigorated as they made vegetable soup. They had even grown used to his beauty, adopting it as theirs, making it the pride of the town. “Shame there are only contests for the best-looking calf around here. If there were one for boys, our Santiago would win them all,” the old women in black shawls would comment in the late afternoon when they saw him pass by, offering a smile. It no longer mattered that his beauty came from Olvido, she who had given them recipes to soothe their longing for the dead. It no longer mattered that his saint’s name was followed by a last name sullied by a curse. Without a doubt, he had been born to put an end to that curse, to squash it with his prodigious gifts. So said Padre Rafael, who loved him like a son.
But once Santiago saw the way his grandmother and Ezequiel Montes looked at each other that October Sunday, his Glorias and Ave Marias were suffocated in a mantle of grief and rage that clouded any godly love in the hearts of the faithful. This affliction—inflamed on holiday afternoons when Ezequiel Montes drank boiled coffee and ate cinnamon cake in the parlor at Scarlet Manor, sitting between him and Olvido—also affected his ability to write and recite poetry. Santiago read the Gospels halfheartedly, like a simple instruction manual; he attributed verses by Matthew to Luke, and Luke’s to a nonexistent apostle. He recited sacred poems in fits and starts, with the intonation of a dying man, and he constantly mixed up the times for Mass, catechism, and retreats. Afternoon teatime became dull, cups of
café con leche
unsteady, and slices of bacon disappointing. Old women went to church in time for First Communion catechism, while children, excited by the prospect of holy wafers, arrived to hear talks on living with Christian principles after a spouse has died. The poems Santiago wrote for his Saturday-morning programs were no longer filled with nature’s nostalgia but steeped in eulogies to times gone by, to rough traitors who stole love and died poisoned by laudanum and rose fertilizer.
Padre Rafael began to do what he had never done before—censor Santiago’s poems—until there was nothing left to read, nothing but pursed lips before the solitude of a microphone. Fraught by the anguish of his love and incontinence, the priest wound up buying a mammoth collection of religious music to replace Santiago on the air until he was cured of the ill consuming him, an ill the priest attributed to nothing but a furious attack of adolescence.
October unfurled in the mountains, fields, and pine forests. Nights began to smell of snow, carpets of dry leaves were picked up by the wind, and the ground grew hard with the first frost.
The traitors who invaded Santiago’s poems appeared in Manuela Laguna’s stories as well. At Scarlet Manor, as night grew thick after dinner and Pierre Lesac’s portrait over the fireplace flushed with shadows, the Atlantic Ocean grew choppy between Olvido and Santiago, schooners splintering to pieces, waves flooding eyes, and the traitors the boy invented were the cause of all misfortune, of all the sailors’ laments, of all the losses in the world, as if they controlled nature itself. When Santiago fell silent, waiting for his grandmother to tell the end of the story, his cheeks would furrow with sad creases. But Olvido paid no attention to the traitors, treating them as if they did not exist. Nothing had or ever could change between them, she seemed to be saying to her grandson as she recounted the end of the story just as she had heard her mother tell it many years before.
Santiago fell ill and stopped going to school. In the mornings he would vomit the dinners he and his grandmother had made, now without laughter or games, dinners of silent squash, grief-stricken tuna, and bitter potatoes, dinners seasoned with the same question—“Is he your boyfriend?”—and the same answer—“For now he’s just a good friend.” But she was lying, even if it was to save him from hurt, to let him slowly get used to Ezequiel Montes on the periphery of their lives.
Santiago knew it was a lie. Olvido’s eyes sparkled when she talked about the shepherd; before they had only ever sparkled when she talked about him. Santiago twisted in his sheets, afflicted by cramps that filled him with joy, for as long as he was home, his grandmother could not meet Ezequiel in the meadow, could not walk in woods that had always been theirs. Olvido brought him chamomile tea, fed it to him by the spoonful, kissed his forehead when he was done, and he was as happy as when nothing stood in their gaze. Didn’t Ezequiel Montes know
he
was the one chosen to save his family? Didn’t Ezequiel Montes know who he was up against?
Olvido had had the occasional suitor since her cooking program opened doors to a social life. Santiago knew that Agustino, the widower from the fabric store, invited her to the summer cinema one day, but she offered apologies, saying she was going with her grandson. That night Agustino sat drinking wine in a corner of the plaza, fuming as he watched them laugh at the movie, arm in arm against a star-speckled sky. Santiago had also watched as the lawyer’s son—who had inherited the business after his father died of prostate cancer—tried to caress Olvido’s hand when he indicated where she was to sign. As she moved toward the paper, pen in hand, he was waiting with the vile sword of his fingers. It was not war they were seeking but love, and she knew it, a feverish Santiago thought, and would surreptitiously move her hand, leaving the office holding her grandson’s hand, squeezing it to include him in what had just happened.
The new doctor in town, a young blond man afflicted by alopecia and extreme myopia requiring thick glasses, came to Scarlet Manor to diagnose Santiago. Long fingers examined Santiago’s stomach, finding it contracted, as if wanting to escape his touch. He examined Santiago’s tonsils, as red as cod gills, and his ears, where he found a wax plug he extracted with a silver instrument and a gush of water.
“The boy is healthy,” he told Olvido at last. “The vomiting is a case of nerves. Make sure he gets out for fresh air, and if symptoms continue, give him a glass of water with baking soda and three drops of lemon every eight hours. If his nerves don’t settle on their own, they’ll need to be purged.”
That night there were no stories by the fire, replaced by baking soda purgatives. Olvido went to bed early in Clara Laguna’s room, wanting to avoid the bricked-up window in her room and hoping her grandmother might offer advice to help the boy understand her friendship with Ezequiel Montes. Olvido pictured the shepherd reading the Bible, lonely as a wolf, unable to eat, unshaven and in love, the candle nub melting onto the table, him lying on the iron cot, waiting for her. It had been over a week since she had seen him, since Santiago had grown ill. Sunday teatimes were suspended, as were Ezequiel’s visits during the week to bring them cheese and fresh milk or have a cup of coffee in the kitchen.