As the plane passed over the square, it lost a bomb attached to one side. A roar splintered the air and the school disappeared. The plane continued on its ghostly trajectory until it crashed into the horizon, its flames creating the most beautiful, fleeting sunset anyone had ever seen.
The plane itself was swallowed by the hills, but for a long while after, the school’s ruins lay scattered about the town. Pieces of its vine-covered roof, cat feces, and mildewed walls stuck in the women’s brooms, and they grew afraid to sweep with these constant reminders of death. One hot morning on his way to offer a parishioner his last rites, Padre Imperio felt thirsty and drank from the fountain in the square. Suddenly tormented by the purest terrors of his youth, he raced to the church and climbed into the pulpit that evening to announce that they were under surveillance by the devil, his bloody eye spying on the town from the fountain basin. Caught up by Padre Imperio’s novena prayers, the town pharmacist rescued what scientific study determined to be a war trophy worthy of the highest honors: it was, without a doubt, the young schoolteacher’s eye, with its bright, brown pupil. The woman had exploded along with the school, and her body rained down on the town like biblical hail.
“Thank God that plane dropped its bomb after midday when school was out,” Padre Imperio declared. “Death is wise and in its wisdom decides when to attack.”
Yet nothing could erase the smell of the bomb from that place. The townspeople did not want to rebuild on that piece of land. For years parents and grandparents took their young children and grandchildren there, to learn to recognize the smell of war.
Olvido Laguna was walking through the forest to Scarlet Manor when the bomb hit. She felt the pine tops and the branches of the beech trees shake. Throwing herself to the ground, she waited for war to come and kill her. But war was slow; it took its time. Bored, she stared at a pinecone resting on a bed of yellow needles. Niches without pine nuts, like a cemetery without any dead. Then Olvido thought she heard her name, off in the distance. She was afraid someone had ratted her out and war was coming to kill her, repeating her name with its long rifle larynx. “Olvido, Olvido.” Her name drew closer, faster. She wondered whether the bullets would hurt when they entered her body, whether war would rip out her guts, like it did Esteban’s father. She thought of the chickens her mother plucked and eviscerated, the soft whiff that lingered in kitchen corners, the color of blood on the table and floor tiles; she thought of Manuela gripping the knife and plunging it into the bird’s flesh. Olvido retched, and her name fell behind her. “Olvido.” She felt a hand through her blouse and knew that touch belonged not to war but to the gray-eyed boy. Drops of blood fell onto the pinecone.
“A bomb fell off a plane and blew up the school,” Esteban said, reaching down to help Olvido stand. “The teacher was inside and exploded, too.”
Olvido wanted to hold him, to plaster her life to his dirty shirt.
“I came to make sure you were all right.”
“Your ear is bleeding.”
“Oh, that.” The boy raised a hand to his right ear. “Don’t worry, it happens to soldiers when a bomb goes off nearby. My father told me in a letter, hoping it would stop me from enlisting. The only trouble is I’m a bit deaf right now, but I should be fine soon.”
“Let me help you,” Olvido said, pulling a handkerchief from her skirt pocket.
“Oh, okay. But just for a minute.”
The breeze was heavy with human laments and the smell of war, but for Esteban, inhaling the nearness of Olvido, the tragedy had become a delight.
“You’re not hurt?” he asked, wondering if he might be able to touch her, too.
“No. Just a little scared,” she replied, raising her voice. “I got down on the ground in case a bomb fell in the forest. There. All better.” Olvido put the stained handkerchief back into her pocket. “I better get home. My mother will be worried. Goodbye, then.”
“Goodbye.”
Olvido turned and took a few steps. Esteban stayed where he was. His hands were cold and his throat hurt. Suddenly, Olvido turned to look at him and said: “I was just thinking, if the school blew up and the teacher’s dead, we won’t be able to see each other again. My mother only lets me out to go to school.”
“Maybe they’ll find somewhere else for us to study and get a new teacher.”
“But what if they don’t?”
“Then we’ll see each other at church, like the first time.” Esteban smiled.
“Yes, but I’ll never learn to read or write. Without a school or a teacher, and in wartime, who’ll teach me?” Olvido brushed the bangs from her eyes.
“I could. When I’m older, when I get back from the war, I’m going to be a teacher like my father.”
“Would you do that?”
“You’ll be my first pupil.”
“So you’ll come to my house?”
“Scarlet Manor?”
Esteban could hear his father’s booming words deep inside his head: “Don’t go back there, son. Don’t ever go back!”
“Of course. Where else?” Olvido asked.
“After your mother’s threat, I don’t think I should go back.”
“She was awful the other day. I understand why you don’t want to go. But she doesn’t have to know. Every Thursday at five, she locks the door when she goes to see the lawyer on business. Then she shops at the general store and isn’t back until at least eight o’clock.” Esteban felt a blue noose around his neck. “We’d have plenty of time for lessons, and you’d never cross paths. What do you think?”
“Are you sure she won’t find out?”
“Yes.”
“What if she comes home early?”
“She never does. Trust me.”
“All right.”
As they went their separate ways, Olvido listened to each step Esteban took on the needles and ferns until she reached the gates with their funeral bow. He could not hear her footsteps but felt them in his gut until he reached the edge of town, where he faced the misfortune once again. Bits of the school lay in the streets, and an ashy rain soiled people’s hair.
Esteban stayed in his room until Thursday. Hanging on one wall was a picture of his father in a corduroy jacket and black tie, standing proudly in front of the school.
“I tried to keep my word, Padre,” he said, his heart full of sorrow. “I have to go. It would be rude not to. I promise I’ll be careful.”
An herb and garlic cramp twisted his stomach, and a forceful thrust of vomit rose to his mouth.
“Don’t keep on about it, Padre. I have to go.”
Esteban belched at his father’s photo and fell into a deep sleep on a patched old mattress. In his dreams he was trapped among the hydrangea and morning glories at Scarlet Manor, unable to find Olvido in all that vegetation, unable to escape that floral embrace as it snapped at his penis, unable to die when Manuela Laguna appeared out of a sudden fog, her gloves stained with chicken blood as she stared at his crotch, dented by flowery tooth marks.
Esteban’s mother attributed his behavior to the loss of his father. Mending socks with her daughter, she wondered if she should send him to the store or tell him to fix the leaky roof, work a good distraction for his soul. In the end, she decided to leave her son alone, continuing to baste her own life with determined stitches.
On Thursday at five o’clock, wearing his Sunday best and a cardboard cup fashioned to protect his crotch against plant fangs, Esteban did exactly as Olvido told him. He climbed over the stone wall that surrounded the yard, found the entrance to the rose garden but carried on, avoiding it, crossing the honeysuckle clearing and the garden with its tomatoes, lettuce, and squash. Accompanied by an entourage of bees, he reached the porch at the back of the house, where years before Clara Laguna had shaved Bernarda, where sofas and a wicker table now sagged under the weight of so many siestas.
“You came.” Olvido’s voice emerged from beside an ivy-laden trellis climbing the wall. “I was afraid you’d change your mind.�
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“A soldier always keeps his word.”
Esteban brought his hand to the cardboard cup; he was finding it hard to breathe. Even though he had reached his destination free of leafy attacks or Manuela Laguna wringing his neck with bloody gloves, he still felt in peril.
Olvido was not wearing the hat with the cotton lace border she wore to school or the one with the wide brim she wore to church. Her bangs were pushed back from her forehead.
“We’ll climb up to my window,” she said, pointing to the trellis. “It’s how I get out when my mother locks me in.”
But Esteban was unable to move. Olvido held out her hand. He took it, blushing at her beauty. For the first time she felt his strong, sun-toasted touch, the texture of skin quite different from white cotton.
“Do you like my hands?”
“You have very long fingers . . .”
The springtime sky was bright. They looked at each other, unsure what to say. The breeze, sparkling with pollen, wrapped around them. Whispers of life could be heard from every corner of the yard. Cicadas, blackbirds, cats in heat. Esteban kissed Olvido on the cheek. She returned it with a kiss on the lips. The boy’s cup crunched against his Sunday pants, and Olvido thought kisses crunched like the skin of crisply fried chicken.
“If you ever see a pot of chrysanthemums in my window, it means my mother’s plans changed and you should go,” Olvido warned as they climbed the trellis.
“I hope that never happens.”
Olvido’s room was large but simple. A blue rug on the wood floor, an iron bed against the wall opposite the window, an armchair with broken springs upholstered in floral fabric, and, in one corner, a desk with a chair and a stool she had put there that afternoon for her teacher.
“Don’t you have any photos of your father?” Esteban asked.
The oil painting Manuela Laguna bought in Galicia hung over the bed. A calm sea, boats, and seagulls.
“I never knew my father.” Olvido was ashamed to admit the only father ever to love her was a black, flea-bitten mutt now dead a few years.
Esteban stroked her hair. He could no longer recall how to read or write, his multiplication tables, or the Tajo River tributaries his father had made him write a hundred times. With Olvido Laguna, all Esteban knew how to do was look at her.
That September a temporary classroom was erected in a room with a leaky roof and flea-infested carpet inside the town hall. While they waited for another, more fortunate teacher to be sent from the city—a teacher who never arrived—Padre Imperio taught the children to read and write and gave a few basic lessons in geography and math. Olvido Laguna went back to school, but Esteban still tutored her at home every Thursday. The boy no longer took such monumental naps, but at night he still dreamed of hydrangea and morning glories devouring his member, of chicken necks dripping with blood. At thirteen, Esteban already knew everything Padre Imperio could teach and so did not go to the improvised school. Instead he spent his days in the hills looking for stray bullets and bits of bombs with the few children who’d remained his friends since the day he defended Olvido. He took his slingshot to hunt pigeons and rabbits his mother stewed in between mending sock after sock.
Esteban learned to live with the fear that Manuela Laguna might suddenly appear in Olvido’s room and wring his neck with her gloved hands. But she continued to meet with her lawyer, one of the few men between the ages of fifteen and sixty still in town. His money and influence afforded him a medical exception, a case of chronic liver disease that prevented him from fighting on the front. He was still seen driving his black cockroach car, but the old women in black shawls no longer paid attention when they heard its futuristic purr. They stayed inside, twisting handkerchiefs or rosary beads, waiting for sons and grandsons to come home from war. Some nights, camouflaged by the darkened sky, they would slip from one house to another to exchange tales of woe, chickpeas for sugar, or rumors of trenches and fugitives in the hills.
In the spring of 1939, men in blue shirts in the back of trucks stormed the town square chanting victory. The Spanish Civil War had ended. Not a single piece of chorizo from the last slaughter or gallon jug of wine survived the night; they devoured everything that passed their lips and blacked out on the tables, snoring in their glory.
By now Esteban was fifteen, and his mother found him work as a carpenter’s apprentice. He assured Olvido he would become a teacher, like his father, but—his studies interrupted by war and the destruction of the school—he would have to finish high school and move to the city to get a degree. A scholarship was the only way; he did not earn enough and his mother would never earn that much, no matter how many socks she and her daughter mended.
Esteban worked at the carpenter’s shop from Monday to Saturday until eight o’clock. Every Thursday, as the hour of his meeting with Olvido drew near, splinters rammed under his nails and sawdust filled his mouth, settling on his heart. Sometimes it was as if the sea from the picture in Olvido’s room speckled the workshop walls. He imagined the smell and sound of it as a distraction to keep from crying.
“What’s the matter with you, boy?” his boss demanded. “Thursday is not your day! You don’t get anything right. You sanded the wrong side of the wine-barrel boards.” He slapped Esteban on the back of the head.
“Can I leave now?”
“Fix those boards and then you can go.”
Esteban dove into the task with renewed energy. His hands shook and he sanded his thumbs instead of the wood, drops of blood signaling his misfortune. Consumed by thoughts of the girl he loved sounding out syllables, waiting for him, he simply licked it off and got back to work. When he was done, he threw on a clean shirt and raced through town, through the pine forest, until Scarlet Manor filled his view. He leaped over the stone wall and, through the arms of the vegetation, saw a pot of chrysanthemums on the windowsill, killing his joy. Dejected, he sat and touched himself among the honeysuckle that surrounded him every Thursday, multiplying in the heat of his adolescent juices.
On other days of the week, Esteban disobeyed his mother and went into the hills late at night, bringing cigarettes, red wine, and antiseptic for the wounds of his cousin, who was in hiding from the Civil Guard gendarmerie with others from the Republican Army.
“Can I carry your gun?” Esteban asked his cousin one night.
“Boy, don’t play around with death,” his cousin warned before handing it to him.
It was long and cold, smelled of gunpowder and decaying moss. Esteban set it on his shoulder. He imagined he was marching down a big city avenue, not stuck in the hills as the moon bared its teeth. Olvido was in the cheering crowd, her head free of any hat. He tossed her a kiss. She smiled and clapped.
School was still being held in the town hall, but construction had begun on a new building just outside of town; children should not study under the lingering odor of bomb. But since the municipal coffers had been emptied by war, Manuela Laguna donated the money. She hoped such generosity would help cleanse her family’s sins and find her daughter the rich, distinguished husband of her dreams. Olvido, fourteen, had already learned to read and write, and where the Tajo River and Seville were situated on a map. Deciding this was sufficient for her to lead a quiet life of embroidery and social engagements, Manuela pulled her from school, keeping her locked up at Scarlet Manor once again. The girl’s beauty now required the solitude of the garden and kitchen, where Olvido practiced the patisserie appropriate to the social position her mother dreamed she would achieve as a result of her donations.
Manuela continued to take Olvido to church on Sundays, still covering her with a hat. Until her daughter was of marriageable age, she would take every precaution to keep dishonor at bay. Never did she imagine that, tormented by Esteban’s absence, Olvido sat on the pew at the back of the church fanning the flames of her love rather than expiating the Laguna sins. Olvido searched among the heads of the faithful for that brown cowlick, begging Christ to return the passion of her Thursdays. In a ro
w at the front of the church, sitting stiffly next to his still-grieving mother and sister, Esteban felt blue heat radiating from the back of his neck. Instead of reciting the creed, he would recite Saint John of the Cross poems he had read in his father’s books, and when he took Communion he devoured the host with sacrilegious gluttony because Olvido was the only taste that penetrated his mouth.
Outside after Mass, the fresh, biting air accelerated their pulses, which had been reined in by the holy. Gone were the days of childhood smiles; now they tried to pass each other, brushing an arm, a hand, a thigh, without being caught by the adults. And when their eyes met, sick from evenings alone and a surfeit of kisses, their desire caused the green-tinged church bells to ring. The townspeople raised their ignorance to the sky, congratulating Padre Imperio on Tolón’s newfound mastery—after twenty years of standing over piles of bird droppings ringing those bells, he was suddenly able to play an angelic melody. The priest stammered at such praise and crossed himself under his cassock; he knew Tolón suffered from prostate problems and had a habit of running to relieve himself against the sacristy wall the moment the service was over.
In dark clothes and bright white gloves, Manuela Laguna walked over to congratulate Padre Imperio as well, nodding when anyone addressed her, offering a gravelly “good morning” now that she was the school benefactor. So absorbed in her joy was she that she failed to watch over Olvido. Not knowing whether she had looked or smiled at anyone, Manuela did not cane her at home but prepared her favorite cake, the cinnamon one.
Summer arrived as Manuela reveled in her joy. The honeysuckle at Scarlet Manor began to wither when Olvido stopped visiting every afternoon, like she used to. Instead she stayed in her room, reading poems by Saint John of the Cross from a book Esteban loaned her on his last visit, before the war ended. Manuela attributed her daughter’s melancholy to her first menstruation as her body shed the last remnants of childhood.
The House of Impossible Loves Page 11
