“Go pray, my child, go pray.” The priest reached for the boy’s hand and gave it a squeeze.
“I’ll tell you a whole story as soon as I’m back. Rest now, Padre.”
Santiago left the room and headed for the sacristy. There, instead of praying, he drank the last drop of consecrated wine and any unconsecrated he could find. Meanwhile, the priest huffed and puffed to sit up in bed, peed through a tube that terminated in a bag, and writhed in pain, caused not by his illness but by a confession secret that had troubled his soul since the night of the fire.
That day, with his mouth tasting of the bread and cheese he had eaten to disguise any trace of wine, Santiago Laguna told Padre Rafael a complete story. But before the end, he paused for a minute, as if waiting for Olvido’s voice to come back from the deepest recess of death. That silence, which from then on preceded the end of every story, grew shorter as the weeks and months passed but never disappeared entirely. Even after one August night, when Padre Rafael reached up and held the boy’s face in his hands, leaving this world, the bitter taste of an untold secret on his breath, and Santiago began to work as a storyteller, that silence continued to float among the public in cafés and halls, sometimes only for the briefest second it takes to drop a flower on a grave.
Santiago lost his voice after the fire. Days passed as he sat staring at the smoking remains of the stable, petrified by misfortune, leading to an elephantine chill that left him shaking with fever and gibbering insect obscenities for over a week. Padre Rafael, who gave him cough syrup and menthol steam baths, cooled his forehead with a handkerchief soaked in holy water, came to believe the boy would not survive such sorrow at just sixteen years of age. But one day Santiago woke with no fever, and the blond doctor with alopecia assured the priest that the danger had passed. Santiago’s recovery was considered nearly miraculous. Even so, he rose from bed smelling like earth after a rain, an odor that never left him.
When Sunday came and Santiago climbed up onto the dais to sing the Gloria, a mechanical warble like a cricket chirp had invaded his baritone. He stepped down from the dais before the hymn was done, before the expectant eyes of the townspeople who for the first time ever felt sorry for a Laguna, and never stood on it again. Padre Rafael had the doctor examine the boy’s throat: the inflammation in his tonsils was gone, and there was no physical reason for the warble. It was then Padre Rafael realized that an infirmity of the soul had stolen Santiago’s melodious voice.
Santiago moved into the broom closet, where Clara Laguna had taken off her harem attire to put on the charwoman’s clothes while Padre Imperio waited in the chapel to Saint Pantolomina of the Flowers. There was no other place in the small parish house, with its one small kitchen, bathroom, the priest’s austere room, and the room next to the sacristy with the radio station; catechism classes and seniors’ retreats were held at the town hall. The priest proposed they shut down the radio station, sell all the equipment, and make that Santiago’s room, a place from his childhood where he would feel at home. But the boy needed the distraction of the radio programs. He would rather sleep in the other room, a room that, after a thorough cleaning, a fresh coat of paint, the addition of a hard old bed, a chair, and a folding table, became a Cistercian six-by-six cell. The boy’s clothes were divided between Padre Imperio’s wardrobe and the wardrobe that held the ecclesiastical clothes for important celebrations.
Santiago read the Bible and religious poems on the radio with such mystic determination and care that, when the old women listened on the communal radio, they were sure he would be ordained a priest despite his illegitimate, cursed beginnings. The young girls, however, had doubts about this vocation. Just as his grandmother Olvido had licked her nostalgic wounds by cooking the memory of her lover, and his great-grandmother had placated her arrogant fury by slitting the throats of chickens, Santiago placated his guilt and loneliness by fornicating in a crypt near the cemetery, where it was said Knights Templar had been buried. Even though not a bone or medieval strand of chain mail remained, it was a magnificent place to frolic, maintaining the temperature of the earth’s core all year-round. The crypt was reached through a secret passage starting at a trapdoor in the floor of the chapel to Saint Pantolomina of the Flowers that Padre Rafael showed the boy, hoping to distract him soon after he moved into the parish house.
An aura of torment had surrounded Santiago ever since the fire, intensifying his good looks and the blue of his eyes. As if that were not enough, his movements had acquired a French charm inherited from his father, and this distinguished him from the other boys in town. He spoke to his conquests with the intimacy of a deep voice that had fallen from grace, and though as a child he did not allow anyone to think of him as “cursed,” it was how he described himself now. And so—he explained, rippling their skin with the vapor of his breath—loving him would only condemn them to being unlucky in love and total social disgrace. With such a fate, they were left no choice but to lie like beasts in the secret of the crypt, without reason or conscience, accompanied only by the flicker of candles for the dead, made from bits of wax Santiago took from the church and placed on little zinc platters all around the bed of passion he built from sacks of straw covered by Clara Laguna’s quilt. Thanks to these preparations, the rocky oval of the crypt filled with a familiar aroma.
The first to smell it was the pharmacist’s granddaughter. After forgiving Santiago for abandoning her in the room behind the pharmacy, she threw herself into consoling him with a fervor that could only have been stoked by the fires of love. At seventeen, she was willing to condemn herself to any misfortune as long as her breasts remained in this young man’s hands, where they had grown, her mouth on his, her body in blue eyes that contemplated her naked even if they were thinking of someone else.
The pharmacist’s granddaughter soon learned she was not the only one, and she slapped Santiago, scratched him, pulled his hair, but came back to him because her heart had no choice. She learned to share him in exchange for those moments when, after their amorous romp, Santiago would twirl her golden ringlets and they would talk of their childhood adventures like two old lovers. They would laugh in the complicity of plasters and potions for one-eyed cats, and this—she dreamed—he could never have with another. Afterward, in the monastic silence of his room, Santiago wished he could love her, blaming himself in tears when his affection cooled with the first song of dawn.
Santiago did not dream again of that fire extinguished by rays of moonlight or the woman who appeared to him afterward. He tried everything to bring her back. He gorged on black olives, even peppercorns and bitter chocolate, trying to attract the dark he did not find in any other woman’s eyes. He gave in to endless naps on a pew in the chapel to Saint Pantolomina of the Flowers, thinking of her as he slept, reconstructing the pieces of her face like a puzzle, hoping that dreams would provide the missing ones: her lips, her chin, her neck . . . He went to the oak grove one night and got drunk on eau de vie under the waterfall of a full moon, invoking her like a pagan goddess. In an alcoholic stupor, her tore off his clothes, lit a fire, and was about to sacrifice himself in memory of Olvido when a shepherd found him and knocked the inebriation right out of him. Santiago lamented that it was this savage beast who’d saved him and not the woman whose lips he had just invented.
It was then he decided to paint her. No one had ever told him about Pierre Lesac’s circle of inspiration, but the day before he began the portrait, he told Padre Rafael he was ill. He did not go to class or help with the radio programs. Locked in his room, he spent hours thinking about her, feeling her features travel through his veins, devising potions to dream about her. When night fell, he placed a glass of water on the windowsill, right in the moonlight’s path. At dawn he drank it all down and lay back in bed, waiting for a dream that never came.
Unlike his father, Santiago painted the portrait in charcoal. Her wavy, chestnut hair, her sad, black eyes, her prominent cheekbones, her small nose. He did not dare draw the lips he had ima
gined. Leaving the portrait unfinished, he hid it among his books and, for weeks, would stare at it before bed, expose it to lunar winds, all to no avail.
A little more than two years passed since that fiery spring before Padre Rafael became terminal and took to his bed. It was early summer. Santiago was almost nineteen and had finished school with good grades. The new priest arrived in town with camphor hair and tight lips. The radio station was closed, the technical equipment and sacred-music collection driven away from Santiago’s life in a van, destined for parts unknown. As he stood in the square to watch the van go, the rumbling of its epileptic motor took what was left of his soul.
Santiago cloistered himself in the church to care for Padre Rafael during the dog days of summer that dulled the senses. He put an end to his frolics in the crypt, and the pharmacist’s granddaughter had to content herself with seeing him only on Sundays after Mass. She would slip into his little room and wait impatiently for him to come and hold her, desperate for consolation after the impertinence of Ezequiel Montes’s eyes, fixed on him as a little leather bag, pinned to the shepherd’s pants, wafted a fine putrefaction between them that smelled like the ashes of death. The censer swung from one side of the church to the other as a mustard-colored wind slipped in through the cracks in the walls and panes of glass, baking both the faithful and Padre Rafael, who, aided by an ear trumpet, strained to hear Mass from his bed.
Santiago began to write poetry again as the dying man slept. The two of them shared the same medicinal air, the same suppurating heat. Padre Rafael’s snores were interrupted by nightmares and hallucinations when, in Latin and in Basque, he would recite that bitter confession secret his vows forbade him from revealing to the boy sitting lucid and awake beside him.
“Easy, Padre.” Santiago mopped the priest’s brow.
“Do you understand? She thought there was no other way,” the priest insisted in the language of his dreams.
“Who?”
“Her, her.” Pain clouded his eyes.
“Easy now, Padre. Please.”
“Morituri te salutamus,” Padre Rafael burst out, smiling.
Secrets merged with the Roman movies he adored and with his own death. Once Padre Rafael had calmed, Santiago drank all of the sacristy wine; later the new priest would find it missing.
A plague of cicadas had come to town, riding the mustard-colored air like a flying carpet. Santiago found them buzzing in the corners of the priest’s room and killed them with a broom, then sat down at his bedside to write poems filled with nostalgia for a body and name stained by the green eyes of a traitor. Every now and then Santiago would succumb to the sacramental torpor of wine and fall asleep. He dreamed that hundreds of cicadas were humming a requiem and woke in a fit of tears, clinging to Padre Rafael’s torso as if it were the one from yesteryear, big and ebullient, not the scrawny mass it had become. Still half-asleep, the priest consoled him in Latin, until the boy’s sorrow faded and together they said the afternoon prayers.
One suffocating midday in late August, Padre Rafael watched his mother’s spirit killing cicadas covering the windowsill and knew God would come for him at sundown. He asked Santiago, who had not seen the Basque woman in farm clogs squashing insects, to take an envelope with red and blue airmail lines out of his drawer. Before handing it to the priest, the boy saw the words Paris and France, and his heart began to gallop.
“Santiago, God willing, I’ll soon be gone to bathe in his glory in heaven. I worry about you even though you’re of age and can live comfortably on your inheritance.”
“You’re not leaving me yet.”
“I would love to stay, son. Truly I would. But don’t worry; when I go, you will not be alone in this world. This letter is from your father, Pierre Lesac. He lives in Paris, as you know, and he wants you to go to him there. You can study whatever you choose at university, like your mother.”
Santiago stared at Padre Rafael as his skin exuded the scent of moist earth.
“I wrote him before I took to bed,” Padre Rafael went on, “and he is so sorry for hardly communicating all these years. But God—who is all-powerful, never forget that—showed him the way, and now your father is a priest in that cathedral in Paris, Notre-Dame.”
“He never answered, so I stopped writing when I was young. I always got a Christmas card, sometimes a birthday card. Once he even sent me one of his paintings, a portrait of my grandmother. It made me so happy. My father was an artist and I was proud. But I haven’t heard from him since I was fifteen.”
“He is repentant and has joined the priesthood, as I said. He deserves another chance.”
“How did you find him?”
“Your grandmother gave me the last address she had for him.” Padre Rafael choked at the mention of Olvido.
“When?” The stable fire burned in Santiago’s cheeks.
“Years ago she begged me to look after you if anything ever happened to her, and if I couldn’t, then I was to do everything possible to find your father. She gave me a letter to send to Pierre Lesac, and that’s what I did.”
“Do you know what it said?”
“Of course not, child. I don’t make it a habit to read other people’s mail.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“Will you go to Paris when I’m gone? Please say yes so I can die in peace. It’s for the best. After all, he is your father.”
“You’re the only father I have.” Santiago burst into tears. “You’re the only father I’ve ever loved, and when God takes you to him, I’ll be left with nothing, nothing . . .”
The priest bolted up, his catheter coming out, and hugged Santiago with all the strength he had had when his weight cracked the wooden pulpit floor.
The woman in charge of cooking and cleaning brought their lunch on two trays, where she found them praying. Later Santiago told Padre Rafael one of Manuela Laguna’s stories, and the priest fell asleep. Afternoon slipped toward death as the boy held Padre Rafael’s hand, glancing at Pierre Lesac’s letter on the bedside table.
When the first stars began to shine at twilight, Padre Rafael’s mother came back to kill the cicadas and it was over. The blond doctor pronounced the priest dead, and the undertakers took his body to prepare it for burial. This, however, was delayed three days, the time it took—spurred on by the speed of decomposition—to make a pine coffin large enough, for Padre Rafael’s body had suddenly recovered its size from when he was in his prime. Overcoming illness, death had granted this one final grace, and Padre Rafael would go to his grave as he had been in life, a giant Basque who had made the ground tremble.
All the while, the new priest watched Santiago wander through the church and parish house like a sleepwalking animal. Everywhere it smelled like damp earth. The new priest checked the windows, running a hand along the edge, expecting it to be wet, finding only the dry heat of mustard-colored air. He was going mad, tracking this stormy consequence through side chapels, the sacristy, the little room that once housed the radio station, only to find Santiago at the end of every trail, his blue eyes bewildered by pain, reciting Saint Teresa of Ávila poems by heart, holding piles of cicadas embalmed in wax, palms open as if in offering. The new priest and his superiors agreed the boy was to leave the parish house right after Padre Rafael was buried. When he went to give Santiago this news one evening, the priest found him in the old broom closet with a half-naked, blond-ringleted girl, drawing woodland creatures on her skin with a blue marker as he recited a chapter of Revelations.
It took years to wipe that image from his mind.
“Tomorrow, after the service, you are to leave and never profane this house again,” he said in a voice mesmerized by ire.
“Don’t worry, tomorrow I’ll leave forever.”
Meanwhile, with no living Laguna there, Scarlet Manor slowly succumbed to spirits and the yard surrendered to the weather. The hydrangea and morning glories dried up with the furor of summer; the chestnut tree grew pale; the roses shrank; honeysuckle branches
snapped; lettuce, tomato, and squash rotted in the garden, refusing to sprout. Its prodigious fertility waned with Santiago. Only the daisies continued to sputter in hate.
Padre Rafael was buried in late afternoon to escape the high-summer, mustard-colored heat. Since the coffin would not fit in the hearse, arrangements were made for it to be brought to the cemetery in a cart pulled by two draft horses. The entire town was there. It took thirteen men to carry the coffin to the grave. “There goes Padre Gigante,” the widows murmured. “Our teeth and dishes will rattle no more.” It then took that many more to handle the ropes that lowered the coffin into the ground. The afternoon wound down on a red horizon of Our Fathers, and the townspeople hurried home under the threat of a downpour. But by the time night came, not a drop of rain had fallen and the wind had grown drier.
Santiago decided it was the perfect time to die. Evading the new priest who had by now moved into Padre Rafael’s room, he slipped into the chapel to Saint Pantolomina of the Flowers. He lit the two candles that illuminated the portrait of the saint and burned the letter from Pierre Lesac. The flame reflected in his pupils, and he was brought back to that night. His mouth tasted of ash. Santiago went to the sacristy to wash it away with wine, then returned to the chapel in silence. Light from a full moon filtered in through the windows and cracks in the wall like liquid silver, puddling on the stone floor.
Like the cursed man he thought he was, Santiago decided to die in church like his ancestors—even though Manuela Laguna had taught him to scorn this tradition. Sacramental wine swirled in his head, forcing an unconscious smile. Below Saint Pantolomina’s portrait, in a glass reliquary, was her right middle finger, not a scrap of flesh on it, its two bone phalanges pearly with the glitter of the divine. Santiago crossed himself before opening the little lock of the reliquary with the key he had taken from the sacristy. He picked up the finger and lay on a pew. The relic narrowed to a pointed ivory tip. Saint Pantolomina had been dismembered by infidels, her bones broken to crush her faith, and only that finger had been saved. In times past it was said to possess the curative power of miracles. Santiago used it to slit one wrist, and his blood began to flow. Just as he was about to cut the other, a ray of moonlight fell across his wound, solidifying the blood in silver bubbles, moving on until it struck the stone wall, where he watched the face of a woman appear.
The House of Impossible Loves Page 27
