The House of Impossible Loves

by Cristina Lopez Barrio

  The image was blurry at first, and he thought it must be Saint Pantolomina of the Flowers revealing herself in the pallor of a miracle. But as the image grew more distinct, he realized this was not the martyr: her hair was entwined with irises and as blond as God’s embers, her light-colored eyes reflecting the resurrection of the dead. Instead, the woman floating on the white wall had the chestnut hair, sad black-olive eyes, and small nose that Santiago had seen in his dreams. A shiver brought him to his knees to contemplate the features he had sought for so long: plump lips, an oval chin, and svelte neck. The smell of ink and hundred-year-old parchment perfumed the splendor of the moon. The woman’s lips parted, and Santiago heard these words: “Take me to Scarlet Manor.” As if waking from a dream, the woman disappeared. The wall grew dark with shadows, and Santiago’s blood flowed again, dripping onto his pants and the stone floor as wine calmed his mind, inflaming his heart with uncertainty. Had he fallen asleep?

  20

  CIGARETTE SMOKE GREW thick in the July heat at the Madrid café. A Mecano song animated conversations, and candles on the tables highlighted the lurid eye shadow licking some of the girls’ brows. Santiago had left the stage to applause and cheers of “¡Tío bueno!” Sitting down at the bar, he drank his whiskey and cola under the admiring gaze of the bartender, a young thing just barely twenty, a brunette, her bangs teased up into a cresting wave.

  “Want to go downstairs for a bit?” Santiago asked when his drink was done.

  She had a waiter in a black T-shirt take her place.

  She and Santiago walked through a graffiti-scrawled door near the bathrooms and down a set of stairs. The subterranean world cooled their skin. The cave that served as the café storeroom was lit by only one bulb. They had sex in between cases of Pepsi and Orange Mirinda, on a mammoth sack of peanuts crushed by their passion as bottles of olives and pickles rattled on the shelves. The smell of fluorescent rat poison and insecticide seeped out from the corners, quite different from the romantic perfume of oak and the bones of Templar Knights in the crypt where Santiago had cavorted with local girls.

  The bartender tucked two polyester shoulder pads under her bra straps and put on her T-shirt, her bright blue eyelids half-closed. That color so like the sea and shoulders as square as a soldier’s jacket reminded Santiago of his military service in Valencia. He had received his papers when lodged at the hotel in town. Dominated by the obsession that drove him, he spent his days in the chapel to Saint Pantolomina, staring at the wall where the chestnut-haired woman had appeared, his nights wrapped in immaculate white sheets, searching for her amid a jumble of dreams.

  When the blood started to drip onto his pants that night, Santiago staunched the flow by tying his shirt around his wrist and burst in to see the doctor, who stitched him up without too many questions. There was no way Santiago could kill himself now that she had finally revealed herself in full: her face, her neck, her breasts. He believed that Saint Pantolomina, dismembered and miraculous, had rescued her from his dreams so he could search the world for the flesh-and-blood woman. The very thought of having her before him, being able to touch her, drove him mad. For now he would content himself with dreaming about her, slipping out from his wrist like smoke from the moon, like a genie out of a bottle. The only thing that unsettled him were her words: “Take me to Scarlet Manor.”

  When his military papers came, Santiago took it as a sign telling him where to begin his search. Besides, he thought, in Valencia he could finally see the sea that figured in all of his stories. A wave rippled in his chest, and he felt this was another reason to live.

  Santiago cut his hair, put a few changes of clothing into a kit bag, along with the charcoal drawing he had finished after he let her features course through his body for more than twenty-four hours. The afternoon before he left, he went to Scarlet Manor. The yard began to stir when he reached the gate with its funeral bow; the hydrangea and morning glories woke, the honeysuckle reached out, a rosebud the color of his eyes sprouted, and a squash revived in the garden. But Santiago could not walk through the rusted gate, where the stable of ashes stabbed at his heart. The flames of that night burned in his cheeks, the sheep with their terrible bleating, the horse mad with freedom. As so often before, he imagined his grandmother, naked but for her perfume of squash, more beautiful than ever, walk into the stable, set fire to the straw, and sit on a bale, waiting for heat to inflame his caresses, bubble up, and burst in purification. Santiago fell to his knees, gripping the iron bars, and wept tears of guilt, anger, sorrow; he vomited the smell of earth and rain, and would have hanged himself from the funeral bow—WELCOME TO SCARLET MANOR—if night had not cast the memory of the moon, the woman with the chestnut hair, and his trip to the seashore. He walked down the road with two crickets perched on his back, and the garden fell dark so the spirits could shine once again.

  At first light the next morning, Santiago said goodbye to Padre Rafael at the cemetery, praying at his mastodon grave, a favorite of the magpies. He had planned to steal Saint Pantolomina’s finger on his way to the church but changed his mind at the last minute out of respect for the memory of Padre Rafael, who would have flushed with shame at such a despicable act, and out of respect for the townspeople, who adored their saint and loved him. “Good luck, handsome Santiago,” the widows said as he walked down the narrow streets, his kit bag over his shoulder, on his way to the train. “Do your country proud, Laguna prodigy.” The mustard-colored wind blurred their faces amid trilling cicadas, and he could just make them out, like toothless wraiths.

  From the very first day, Santiago used the rigors of military service to purge his despair. He enthusiastically crawled over Mediterranean earth with a CETME assault rifle; hiked twenty-five miles with a backpack that felt light compared with the stones of his memories; acted as reserve guard, he and his machete listening to the snores, flatulence, and dreams of young recruits; and practiced maneuvers on hills, skewering invisible enemies with his bayonet. Whenever possible, Santiago volunteered for cleaning and kitchen duty—his fingertips cracked from scrubbing latrines, wiping down tables, scouring pots so big they could boil a man, taking out heaps of trash—and guard duty. When winter came, up in the pigeon loft of a guard tower, wearing a wool poncho and rain cape, he shivered in that cold so different from the harsh, dry Castilian climate, a cold that seeped into your bones with marine timidity. His favorite was guard duty at night, and Santiago would pay a hefty sum of pesetas to trade for it when the moon was full. They wound up calling him the Wolf Man. On those nights he would offer up the scar on his wrist and implore Saint Pantolomina, praying the chestnut-haired woman would appear on the grubby, peeled-paint wall, but she never did.

  Almost every month he received a letter from the pharmacist’s granddaughter, the pages wrinkled by tears and lipstick kisses, plus a few photos of her with fashionably disheveled blond ringlets. When fellow soldiers asked if she was his girlfriend, he denied it. They knew Santiago was an orphan, that he never went home on leave like they did, bringing back strings of chorizo and blood sausage; they knew he was obsessed with dark-eyed brunettes—he never looked at any other type of woman on their weekends in the city—but never seemed satisfied with his conquests: none was the woman he was searching for; they were just easy-to-forget substitutes. They also knew of his passion for the sea. The first time Santiago saw it, the resemblance to him and Olvido was clear. Strong, beautiful, hypnotic. Sitting on the beach, he could stare at it for hours, whether frozen in winter or broiling under a summer sky that melted into its waves.

  Santiago’s fellow soldiers suspected he was religious—taped to his locker door was a holy card of Saint Pantolomina of the Flowers, one he’d found when he was fifteen, creased and filthy on the pantry shelf where they kept cans of peaches, and whenever the sergeant called “Squad, cadence count!” on marches, he would hum Glorias and Ave Marias in his cricket warble—but they never discovered his newfound love of holy relics. During his service, Santiago saw most of the re
lics housed in cathedrals: the mummified arm of Saint Vincent the Martyr, one thorn from Christ’s crown of thorns, the holy chalice, threads from the Blessed Virgin Mary’s veil, the incorruptible body of a Holy Innocent massacred by Herod, and various other bones and objects belonging to martyrs and saints, all of which he begged for help in his search. Santiago bought every reliquary card available, hiding them in a secret pocket sewn into his kit bag.

  When Santiago was discharged, he returned to the austere Castilian climate of Ávila, tired of being stiff with cold and drawn by the number of Saint Teresa of Ávila relics there. He stayed at a hotel near the city walls for several months, eating his fill of roast lamb and yema sweets, getting drunk on red wine and every chestnut-haired woman he passed, reciting the saint’s poetry to them. He got his first job as a storyteller at a downtown café and was so popular the owner proposed he move to Madrid, where he had another, bigger venue. And so Santiago arrived in the capital with his kit bag of clothes and a pocket filled with reliquary cards, determined to keep looking for the woman whose charcoal portrait he kept there, too.

  The Madrid café was abuzz with conversation and pop music, thick with smoke and the smells of beer and sweat.

  “I’m on again the day after tomorrow. I’ll see you then,” Santiago told the bartender when they came up out of the cellar.

  He kissed her goodbye and stepped onto the street. Night exhaled light from the street lamps. It was Thursday. He walked up Calle de las Huertas. Every now and then a bar door would open and music would spill out, like a shout, and maybe a vendor carrying bright pink toys. Santiago’s footsteps echoed on the sidewalk, on asphalt cooked by the sun.

  “Got a smoke?” a kid asked with his lighter flickering.

  Santiago passed him one as the flame wavered in his eyes. He continued up the street. At Plaza de Matute the noise of a garbage truck was deafening. Santiago crossed quickly and came to Calle de Antocha, where he had just rented an apartment after living in a hotel.

  The second he arrived in the city a few months earlier, Santiago had been struck by a sudden longing for nature and chose a small hotel across from the botanical gardens, then bursting with spring. He would often wander down lanes of exotic trees, into tropical greenhouses, and around the duck pond. For the first time since leaving home, he missed the calm of the yard at Scarlet Manor, especially lying in the honeysuckle clearing to read or write poems. Though Madrid was a paradise of chestnut-haired beauties and churches filled with relics, the roar of traffic and jackhammers cracking sidewalks and the lightning-fast pace of life filled him with an unease only soothed by nature’s proximity.

  Santiago met his only friend at the botanical gardens. One mid-May afternoon near closing, he slipped into a greenhouse and stayed out of sight until he heard the plants breathing in the quiet of night. He walked over to some rows of potted dahlias. Sipping on a flask of whiskey and smoking cigarettes, he began to scrawl poems in his notebook, waiting for sleep to rain down from the stars.

  A guard with a thick moustache found him early the next morning.

  “Get up out of there, pal, unless you want me to call the police,” he said.

  Santiago stretched awake. A yellow petal was stuck to his lips, and his eyes were swollen with pollen.

  “You’ll get one hell of a fine for crushing the flowers. Get up, you hear me? And pick up that flask . . . I thought it stank like whiskey.”

  “Is it late?”

  “The sun’s been up for ages and will burn that binge right out of you.”

  Santiago smiled at him.

  “What are you doing sleeping here, anyhow? You’re young, but you don’t look like a delinquent.”

  “I’m new to the city and was lonely. I missed home . . .”

  “So you go and sleep in a garden? Do they sleep with plants where you’re from?”

  “I was born in a town in Castilla.”

  “Go on. As far as I know, everyone in Castilla sleeps in a bed—a good, sturdy one at that . . .” The guard clucked his tongue.

  “Would you like to hear a good story over breakfast?”

  “Son, I had my coffee and churros hours ago.”

  “I promise you’ll like my tale. I’m a storyteller, did you know?”

  “Yeah, that’s exactly what this is: a cock-and-bull story. Come on, pal, get up. We open soon and there are two school groups today. I don’t want the kids finding a dopey young man—not much of an example.”

  “You’ll see. I usually tell stories about the sea when I perform, stories my great-grandmother told me when I was little, but I’ve got one I just invented for you. It’s amazing. It’s about women who are cursed . . .”

  The guard, a soap opera aficionado, scratched his head.

  “All right, kid, I’ll listen as I walk you out. And if I like your story, I just might not call the authorities.”

  “You’ll love it. I tell a fantastic tale.”

  Santiago and the guard walked down leafy lanes, exotic treetops bending down to better hear the stream of words. The guard, a man near fifty named Isidro, walked more and more slowly as Santiago got to the heart of this story of passions. They took several trips around the duck pond, went in and out of the greenhouses three times before the tragedy came to an end. The guard honked into his handkerchief and wiped tears from his eyes, blaming it on allergies, before shaking Santiago’s hand goodbye.

  “Come by when you’ve got another story to tell—but this time during regular business hours.”

  From then on, Santiago would often visit before closing. He would accompany Isidro on his rounds, entertaining him with ocean waves and eucalyptus as fragrant as a prostitute’s heart. They began meeting outside the gardens as well. Isidro was single, childless, and his life consisted of TV and a passion for sports lotteries and the Atlético de Madrid soccer team. He was also devoted to the saint whose name he bore, one in a long line of Isidros that ended with him and his cousin, a priest at San Isidro Church. The guard was happy to learn that Santiago liked prayer, whiskey, and gardens, that he could recite the Gospels as if blessed and went in search of holy relics. The boy would kneel down and pray that his wish be granted, that he meet someone whose identity he did not reveal, someone—Isidro suspected—who tormented his soul, just like a Venezuelan soap star. Santiago was perfect for the part: impossibly good-looking, an orphan with a fortune—that’s what he told Isidro—working in the bohemian world of the theater, breaking the hearts of dark-haired beauties, the darker their eyes, the better. Isidro witnessed this one memorable June day that began with a favor to his cousin, going to view the incorruptible body of Saint Isidro the Laborer, followed by a fast as they sat in the Plaza de Oriente, needing time to digest the grace of such a relic, a day that ended in a bar hop toasting miracles and sampling tapas with a group of women tourists from Andalusia.

  Santiago would occasionally attend an Atlético game with Isidro. The guard was convinced his hobby—the shouting, the goals, the frittata sandwiches and insults hurled at the referee and linesmen—helped Santiago forget, for a while, whatever was tormenting his soul. But when he saw Santiago perform, he realized the boy would never quiver at a tremendous penalty-kick save or midfield goal quite like he did up on that stage telling his stories. Whenever he performed, Santiago felt as if he were up on the church dais at home, during those messianic years when his voice could raise the hair on the arms of the faithful, when he believed his happiness was destined to last forever.

  Their friendship grew as the months passed. In late July, when an apartment came free at the house on Calle de Antocha where Isidro lived, Santiago was easily persuaded to rent it.

  “Living at a hotel that long will only make you feel uprooted,” the guard assured him. “If you’re not going back, then you’d better find a home somewhere else.”

  “The home I want is impossible, Isidro. I’m only moving because I’ve missed having a kitchen where I can make my grandmother’s recipes.”

  The garbage
truck finished its work at Plaza de Matute and turned into Calle de Antocha. It passed Santiago, rumbling on in search of garbage cans. A full moon hung low over the roofs, as if it had come loose from the sky. Building façades looked bathed in milk, and bats flew into streetlights. When Santiago reached the house he had moved into just that morning, irises stirred in his chest. There were two great big wooden doors and a long, uneven cobblestone passage that carriages had once bumped down to the building that was now more than two hundred years old. The superintendent’s apartment was through a set of glass doors, with rusty mailboxes lined up outside, waiting for the postman. Santiago climbed a bleached, gray stairwell. The newly polished banister was attached to each step by an iron bar ending in a lion’s head. Like a child’s ice cream cone, the walls were two colors: vanilla from the ceiling halfway down and chocolate from there to the floor.

  Santiago stopped on the second-floor landing before a door with a gold metal peephole in the shape of a rosette. That was where Isidro lived. Santiago considered ringing the bell to see if he wanted a drink but looked at his watch and saw it was late. He continued up to the fourth floor, where his apartment was. He had liked it the moment he saw it: the large entryway with honey-colored floorboards, plaster cornices with a flower motif along the ceiling, like in some of the rooms at Scarlet Manor. The similarities did not stop there. White shutters on the windows and balconies, a turn-of-the-century boiler streaked with grime resistant to all cleaning, and a white clawfoot tub in the bathroom that brought to mind happy steam-filled afternoons that smelled of soap and his grandmother’s skin.