The House of Impossible Loves

by Cristina Lopez Barrio

  One morning, when she was seven months pregnant, her vision still fogged by her dreams, Clara thought she saw a man walking toward the house. She rubbed her eyes, not wanting sleep to come between her and her desires: he was back in town, earlier than promised. But this man was not wearing riding breeches and boots; there was no cape or oiled hair. His pants were black and coarse, his heavy boots calf-length, his coat two sizes too big, and peering out above the collar, a snow-white band bearing witness to a dedication to Christ: it was Padre Imperio. Clara burst into tears. He knocked and Clara’s mother answered. For a moment, the priest wondered whether the devil hid in the blind eye of that woman still reeking of witchcraft, and he crossed himself in his thoughts.

  “What a surprise. Come in.”

  “I’m fine right here.” Padre Imperio did not intend to ever cross that threshold.

  “Well then, tell me why you’ve come.”

  “I’d like to see Clara.”

  “She’s resting, Father. She’s pregnant and needs all the rest she can get.”

  “So I heard. I can wait. Tell her I have something for her.”

  “But she’s not even awake and might not be up for hours! Pregnant women sleep late.”

  “I’m up, Madre. Go inside. I’ll take care of him.” Clara Laguna appeared in the clay-tiled entryway. Her eyes were red from crying, her hair tousled, her pregnant belly bulging under a thin muslin Il Seraglio dressing gown.

  The Laguna witch went into the kitchen for breakfast.

  “Tell me what you want, then leave. I don’t want any deals with God until my death.”

  The priest stared straight down at a violet-covered Bible in his hands.

  “I came to bring you this.” He handed Clara the Bible. “You shouldn’t wait that long.”

  “Does it look like I can read, Padre? Men and their obsession with educated women! Do you think he’d have abandoned me if I’d been able to read this book?”

  “If you can’t read it, I’ll read it to you. I’ll be back this same time tomorrow morning. I’ll wait for you in the garden. But this time, be dressed.” He replied with the determination that had kept him alive in the jungle for over a month.

  Padre Imperio’s eyes, those dark eyes in which Clara found solace one winter night, bore into her own. She said nothing but felt spring slipping in through the door with a breeze of tender shoots.

  Clara spent the afternoon wandering among the tomatoes, lettuce, and squash in the garden, amid the fruit trees, hydrangea, and morning glories, their flowers intensifying the ache in her heart. It longed for the bare rigidity of winter. But her treasonous baby stirred in a belly nourished by spring. Nature’s creaky buzz reached deep inside Clara, the herbage exploding on what not long ago were barren branches rattling in the wind. But the most painful of all, what she could never forgive the fertile ground around Scarlet Manor, was the effervescence of multi-hued buds that filled the rose garden. Clara had not set foot on those paths where she’d once loved, where she had been happy, where a yellow rose—no less treasonous—would fade just like her, where its blue, white, and red companions had grown so big their petals were like tongues mocking her misfortune. She hated the place that had given her hope only to tear it away. Clara forbade her mother, Bernarda, and the other prostitutes from tending to that garden. She ordered that the breach in the stone wall, where the Andalusian had passed, be sealed and built a barricade of wheelbarrows under the arch at the entrance, condemning stray dogs to a fragrant death or a back scraped raw if they dared escape through the path of thorns. That rose garden would die bitter, dry, and abandoned.

  That night, Clara vomited pollen, was tormented by nightmares of cologne and salve, used to soothe wounds. Her agitation finally abated under a cloak as black as a cassock, and she fell into a dreamless sleep.

  Padre Imperio arrived at Scarlet Manor precisely on time, riding his mule, his priest’s collar in crisp contrast to his face lined by wrinkles acquired in the tropics. Clara spied him from her bedroom window as he marched over the daisies. She told her mother to send him away with the excuse that she was unwell. I haven’t got time for salvation, Clara thought, only for revenge. She began to brush her hair as she watched the old woman give the priest her message; rather than leave, he sat on the stone bench under the chestnut tree and stroked the violet cover of a book Clara sensed was sacred.

  “That man is as stubborn as his mule! He says he’s not leaving.”

  “So I see.”

  Unable to squeeze her breasts and belly into her own dresses, Clara wore one of her mother’s. The birds sang too loudly for her liking, the sky was too blue, the breeze too soft. Padre Imperio stood when he saw her approach.

  “You do know you’re in the garden of a brothel?”

  “I’m in a garden blessed by nature, and therefore blessed by God’s generosity.” Padre Imperio shivered, as he did whenever he looked into Clara’s eyes, wondering whether the fires of hell might burn behind them.

  She sat on one end of the bench, he on the other, a stone arm between them preventing any contact.

  “I’d like to read you a passage from the Bible that will explain why I’m here and what I want to tell you.” The violet cover stuck to his sweaty fingers.

  “Someone once told me about your sermons, said I should go hear them. What were they about?”

  Padre Imperio set the Bible down. He inhaled the morning air in that garden that seemed to lean back, ready to listen, and began to speak of a far-off island called Cuba, where soldiers went to defend the glory of the empire. Clara looked at the ground, at the wildflowers swirling at her feet, but as the story wore on, she glanced at the priest, then turned her whole body and looked straight at him. She had never noticed his lips before; they were thin, a star-shaped scar in one corner. Dressed in a soldier’s uniform, a priest’s collar at his grimy throat and nothing but faith in his heart, Padre Imperio had marched with a battalion of men through swamps where rebels hid, where ceiba and palm trees harbored enemies and, in the distance, a beach. The priest’s eyes were no longer black but tinged Caribbean blue. There was gunfire and death; the first soldiers fell in the yard at Scarlet Manor, blood splattering the cobblestones and daisies, gunpowder and granules of pollen filling the air, crocodiles crawling out from behind the chestnut tree, holy water splashing from a canteen onto the priest’s boots, Clara’s feet, and the forehead of a fallen soldier. It was an ambush. Midday beat down on Scarlet Manor. Padre Imperio loosened his collar, and Clara Laguna saw the scar slashing right across his throat.

  “I’ll come another day to read biblical parables.” He picked up the holy book and got to his feet, his mouth dry. His mule, tied to the gate, was getting restless.

  “Come as long as they let you.”

  “Or until you repent and come listen to my sermons where they should be heard, in church.”

  “You obey God, I my revenge.”

  “You’re still so young, and with child.”

  “But my soul is gone, Padre, stolen by love and the curse on my family.”

  “That’s not true. Your soul belongs to God.”

  Padre Imperio wanted to say he would find the soul she thought she lost, but he said nothing. They did not shake hands or touch but said goodbye with their eyes. The priest walked toward his mule, dragging behind him the same solitude that engulfed Clara.

  It was a while before Padre Imperio returned to Scarlet Manor. Clara tried to think of him only when the pain of her curse was unbearable, like a balm, a dark-eyed remedy. She looked for other things to keep her busy. She grew to like her trips to town, not to fetch water from the fountain, like she had before, with her jug and her memories of a man who surely belonged to another by now. There was a never-ending well of fresh water just next to the vegetable garden at Scarlet Manor. Instead, Clara liked to parade her pregnancy in the square, up and down the narrow streets where the old women sat forming rows of black shawls. She wanted them to whisper about her, about the cursed line
of Laguna women who would not die out but wantonly reproduced girls and disgrace. If the curse had stolen Clara’s soul, then she would steal their men.

  Sometimes, when Clara passed the church doors, she would forget her name, her background, her misfortune, just for a moment, and wish she could enter that sacred place with its crucified Christ on the altar, the gravestones of Castilian gentlemen set into the floor, the stone coffins of noblemen in somber side chapels. She wished she could sit on a pew and admire Padre Imperio in the pulpit, arms spread in his Sunday robes, his lips savoring his sermons, the yellow of her eyes reflected in his.

  But those strolls grew farther apart. By mid-May, Clara’s belly was so big she could no longer walk the distance from Scarlet Manor to town. Clara’s mother, wishing her daughter would stop parading before her clients, convinced her to help with her potions again. Although the Laguna witch’s business was initially affected by the brothel, it slowly picked up, thanks to the men curious about their future as they waited for their turn of carnal pleasure, and the women who missed her prophecies and cures for evil eye cast by rural envy. Since Clara had started to busy herself with the clients waiting in the parlor as well, the Laguna witch would some nights go to town, hauling her sack of cat bones.

  Bernarda did not like that half-blind woman in her kitchen, taking up the whole stove to prepare her potions and balms in blackened pots. She grunted that there was no room left to cook, scratched her deformed nose, and tugged angrily on her whiskers.

  “Be quiet, girl. You sound like a wounded boar! There’s room enough for two in this kitchen.”

  Bernarda stalked off to lie on her straw mattress, but when Clara started helping her mother, the cook showed a sudden interest in witchcraft, and in the needle and thread for repairing hymens.

  “Lady, lady good,” Bernarda grunted as she sharpened and polished the knives Clara used to dismember lizards, toads, and rodents.

  Bernarda shadowed Clara’s every move, watching her cut and store the pieces in a jar or simmer them in a pot. The moment her mistress was distracted, she devoured any little piece of meat or entrails Clara had touched. For Bernarda, love was a matter of the stomach.

  “Madre, did you take the lizard tail?” Clara asked.

  “Of course not! Be quiet now. Don’t distract me. I don’t want to mix up the herbs.”

  “And you, Bernarda?”

  With her mouth open, teeth and gums stained with blood, the girl laughed, savoring the touch she loved so much.

  “Don’t we feed you enough? These are for the potions, you beast!” Clara smacked her across the head.

  Still smiling, Bernarda ran to her room with one hand over the exact spot her mistress had struck.

  “Come out of your room and stop stinking up the place!” Clara yelled.

  But Bernarda hid away to cut off that piece of hair where Clara had slapped, swallowing it eagerly with a piece of fruit from the pantry.

  Any other stomach would have cramped in unbearable pain, but Bernarda could digest anything her mistress’s love demanded and not feel the slightest prick of indigestion.

  “Go on and prepare dinner for the men tonight,” Clara ordered when Bernarda returned to the kitchen, her anger subdued. “And stop following me around!”

  Bernarda grunted in reply. She plucked a chicken and disemboweled a rabbit, working as close to her mistress as possible, keeping an eye on which ingredients she touched.

  The magic smell from the pots Clara’s mother stirred rose up over the gypsum counter where Clara worked, over the table in the middle of the room where Bernarda plucked and skinned the meat for lunch and dinner, intermingling with the whiff of blood, snaking among the ropes of garlic and onion hanging from the wall, through the cupboards, and over the dining room table where clients were served.

  When Bernarda was alone, she stuck her hand in the pots, scooped out the ingredients her mistress had touched, and saved them jealously to cook later. Sometimes she went through the bother of replacing them with others that looked the same—but did not bear Clara’s touch—but most often she indulged in her feast without worry. And so potions to cure evil eye suddenly became remedies for a migraine or young love. The old woman’s credibility was being undermined by these alterations, and she could not understand why. Until one day, suspecting the cook’s voracity, she hid behind the door and caught her stealing a pair of frog’s legs. The Laguna witch whipped Bernarda so hard she never stuck her hand in a pot again, and settled instead for licking clean the utensils Clara had used for tomato sauce or porridge.

  Another of Clara’s distractions was to oversee the grooming of the three women who now worked for her. The most recent arrival, a shepherd’s daughter from a nearby town, had a habit of sticking tufts of wool behind her ears, receiving clients with ears that stuck out and smelling like a flock of sheep. If it weren’t for her wet nurse’s breasts flapping about in her dressing gown, few would have been willing to lie with her. Before sending her into the parlor, Clara dressed her in negligees and Moorish pants that complemented her skin and hair, and inspected behind her ears. If the girl disobeyed, Clara docked her Sunday pay or cuffed her across the head.

  Although the girls were about her own age, Clara rarely spoke to them about anything other than brothel affairs, chores, or tricks of the trade to better satisfy clients. This was her business and her revenge, and there was no room for friendship or chitchat. For that, she met with the dead gentlemen in town once a year. They understood her better than anyone. And yet sometimes she was jealous of the secrets Ludovica and Tomasa shared, wondered what it might be like to have a living friend to share her happiness, dreams, and sorrows.

  One day Clara decided to shave Bernarda’s circus beard and sideburns. Though the cook did not have to satisfy clients, when they wandered into the kitchen for a taste of her stews, they were startled to see her tugging on her whiskers in the light and shadow thrown by the lamps. Bernarda squirmed and squealed like a pig at slaughter the morning Ludovica and Tomasa led her to a chair on the back porch, the Laguna witch approaching with a razor, a bowl of water, and a bar of soap.

  “Quiet! It’s not like we’re going to slit your throat!” the old woman yelled, rolling her blind eye.

  Bernarda calmed the moment Clara appeared, letting her mistress cover her face with a warm cloth, lather it, and shave it as she reveled in the closeness of Clara’s breath and touch.

  From that day on, Bernarda would run her hands over her face in search of any hair that would draw near the soft, fragrant skin she adored.

  “Lady, lady, lady,” she said, pointing to the fuzz that would offer another ration of her mistress’s time.

  “Not yet, Bernarda. When there’s more.”

  “Itchy, itchy,” she complained, scratching her cheeks, pouting her lips.

  “Then scratch like it’s just another of your many fleas.”

  On one of the days she shaved Bernarda on the porch, Clara was struck by her cook’s smell of lonely horse stables. She had smelled it many times before, but that morning it reminded her of her rides with the Andalusian, and she was overcome by nostalgia. The razor trembled in her hands. Without realizing, Clara began to tell Bernarda about that day galloping through the pines, rocks, and beech trees, ending deep in the valley, in the shade of an oak tree, with a wet kiss. The cook shivered at all that talk: Clara wasn’t barking orders and scolding, and her voice was rich with confidence and trust. Bernarda did not know how to swallow those delicious sounds she could neither see nor touch. She had never imagined anything inedible could fill her with such a feeling of glory.

  This was how Clara Laguna found someone with whom to share her sleepless nights, her memories. Bernarda listened adoringly each time her mistress shaved her, the only time Clara felt comfortable enough to share. The cook never interrupted her mistress, but if Clara cried, Bernarda cried, too; if she laughed, Bernarda laughed, too; and if she was angry, Bernarda was angry, too.

  “Not a word to anyone,
or it’s the whip for you, do you understand?” Clara warned.

  “Shhh.” The cook brought a finger to her lips and smiled.

  Clara Laguna’s daughter was born in the canopy bed early that month of June 1899. Bernarda, used to helping birth sheep, pulled the baby from her mistress as she bawled in pain and, between pushing and panting, swore revenge. The newborn sucked her little fingers covered in blood and placenta, demonstrating from birth a primitive appetite that would dominate her for the rest of her life. Clara named her Manuela.

  The arrival of another Laguna girl was seen in town as proof of the family’s curse. The old women huddled, having exchanged heavy black shawls for lighter ones, delighted over the stigma the girl would carry for having been born in a brothel to a whore, predicting even worse disgrace. The young women wondered aloud whether the father would come back to meet his bastard child, whether they would see him with his curly black hair, rifle slung over his shoulder. The men in the tavern celebrated the news with shots of anisette and cigars; the Laguna with the flaxen eyes had given birth to the girl she deserved and would soon receive them in her ethereal pants and dressing gowns.

  Padre Imperio came to Scarlet Manor in the heat of July. If he was to save the mother at all costs, then he must also look out for her daughter, and that began with a Christian baptism. He tied his mule to the gate. From her window, Clara watched him walk his melancholy walk down the cobblestone drive, stomping on the daisies. The high temperatures that baked the region reminded him of the time he spent fighting with his battalion; his faith, the mosquitoes, and the dust reminded him of their defeat and his exile to this town of crude souls. On his last visit to Clara, a few days before she gave birth, he had told her about the Santeria priestess who found him in the jungle and treated him with poultices that he didn’t tell her reminded him of the color of her eyes. He took advantage of her good mood that day to read a few parables from the violet-covered Bible and gave her a holy card featuring Saint Pantolomina of the Flowers, which Clara slipped into her bra, next to her heart.