The House of Impossible Loves (29 page)

Santiago’s artistic abilities did not end there. After Manuela Laguna died, the boy read the parable of the wheat and the tares from the book of Matthew during catechism, and Padre Rafael discovered his oratorical skills. The priest had not abandoned his passion for modern technology when the public address system was ruined in the great storm. This time he set up a radio station that broadcast all over town from a little room next to the sacristy. He immediately decided Santiago would take one of the afternoon religious programs. The boy would come twice a week, after school, to read passages from the book of Matthew, Romans, and Corinthians, and poems by Saint Teresa of Ávila as the townspeople had their
café con leche
and sponge cake or bread and bacon. It was then that they stopped referring to him as the Laguna boy and began to call him the Laguna prodigy.

Olvido bought a transistor radio just to hear her grandson as she sat in the kitchen, the pots in the cupboards, the vegetables in the baskets, the knives in the drawers, and silence in her hands so nothing could distract her from that child’s voice praising God. When the program ended, she climbed into the cart to pick up Santiago in town.

“Did you hear me, Abuela? Was I good?”

“Better than good. If I weren’t a believer, I would be after I listened to you.”

“You always have to listen because I think about you when I read, just like when I sing.”

Olvido hugged him as the jolting cart carried them, with their identical black hair and identical ocean-blue eyes, into the horizon. Evening was settling over Scarlet Manor, the daisies on the drive enveloped in shadow. The kitchen waited for them to make dinner.

Santiago sank his hands into a porcelain bowl of flour. He felt its warmth, felt it growl softly as he held it in his fists. He let the flour sift through his fingers, smiled, and watched his grandmother in front of the counter, silhouetted against the window like another star embellishing the night. Olvido was preparing sole, caressing the skin, kissing the tail as rough as sideburns. Her hair was pulled into a ponytail with strands of pewter. The circles under her eyes looked like boats pulled up on the beach, small against the blue horizon of her eyes. Her supernatural beauty remained, as immune to time as it was to Manuela Laguna’s potions and poultices.

Santiago flicked flour into her hair.

“I’m going to turn your hair even whiter, Abuela.”

Olvido furrowed her brow, waving the sole like a weapon.

“Only if you can, young man.”

She caught the boy and tickled his ribs.

“I give up!” Santiago laughed.

After dinner they sat together in front of the fire: Santiago in his great-grandmother’s chair and Olvido in another beside him. The fire crackled and flushed their cheeks. It was Santiago who told Manuela Laguna’s tales; it was he who let them float up into the air of their happy lives. Fingers entwined, they rode the waves that filled the parlor, listened to the fishermen’s hoarse voices, the mermaids’ bubbled song. Together they were startled by the storms, the vengeance of sperm whales, and dozed to the romance of sand and tar. Night had fallen and darkness curled up behind them when Santiago paused and kissed his grandmother’s hand. It was she who always told the end of the story.

The summer Santiago Laguna turned twelve, a six-by-three-foot package arrived at Scarlet Manor. Tied with seven or eight pieces of twine, some thicker than others, it was wrapped in cardboard stained by lichen and grime from all over Europe. Stamps from post offices in London, Lisbon, Paris, Brussels, and Amsterdam, among other cities and towns, were smudged by the rain, the journey, or the porters’ sweat. It smelled of cat piss, tulips, french fries, and mayonnaise, rancid chocolate, train soot, and filthy boulevards.

“Sign here, señora,” the postman said to Olvido Laguna, holding out a receipt.

“What did you buy, Abuela?” Santiago looked at the package, curious.

“Nothing,” she replied with a shrug.

The boy went to get the tree shears. Some of the twine was stiff with a layer of dry grease, while other strands melted like butter, rotted by mildew and time. Once Santiago had removed all the twine, he used a knife to split the tape that held the cardboard together. Olvido helped him peel it back from the corners to reveal the portrait of a stunning woman. It was painted in oil, the strokes full of pain, pastel colors, and memory infused with love and abandonment.

“It’s you, Abuela.”

Olvido’s cheeks burned in anger. On the bottom right-hand corner of the painting was a black signature resembling a dead cricket.

“Don’t you like it?”

Olvido said nothing. She had noticed a letter at her feet; it must have fallen out when they opened the package. Her hands shook as she tore open the envelope.

“Who’s it from, Abuela?”

“Your father.”

“I knew it.” Santiago smiled.

The paper was crinkled, spotted with yellow and perfumed like lemonade.

“What does it say?” the boy asked.

“It’s illegible.” She pursed her lips. “It must have gotten wet. All you can make out at the bottom is your father’s name—Pierre Lesac—and the date.”

“Can I see it?”

Olvido passed the letter to Santiago. It was dated two years earlier. The painting had been touring Europe ever since, either lost or cheating fate.

“It’s the first time I’ve seen my father’s work. I love it. He seems like a magnificent artist. Can I have the letter, even though it’s smudged? I’ll keep it with the others.”

Every year at Christmas Pierre Lesac sent his son greetings from Paris, sometimes even a photo. Occasionally he remembered his birthday and would send a postcard. The postscript always read, “Give your grandmother a kiss and take good care of her.”

“Do you think he was writing to say the painting’s my birthday present—not this year’s, but when I turned ten, only it’s late arriving because it got lost?”

“I’m positive it’s your birthday present.” Olvido caressed his cheek.

“Where’ll we put it?”

“How about in the attic, to keep it safe?”

“No, Abuela. We’ll hang it in the parlor. You’re so pretty in it . . .”

From then on, Pierre Lesac’s painting accompanied their evening stories. Olvido tried not to look at it so the end of the story would not fade on her lips, so the vine of memory would not creep up her tongue.

That summer, Santiago Laguna began to develop another of his artistic abilities. He could draw well and had loved to do so ever since he was small, but by the age of twelve it was clear he did not have his father’s skill. Santiago preferred writing poetry. Lying in the honeysuckle clearing, in nothing but his underwear, he would sun himself next to his grandmother. She reread Saint John of the Cross while he drafted his first poems in a notebook. They dealt with a nostalgia he had not yet felt, a nostalgia he observed and intuited in nature. The branches of honeysuckle resting gently on top of one another seemed to be waiting for someone who was gone, seemed to be waiting for a return that saw them dry out and bloom again. They lived and died waiting, over and over again, in a never-ending cycle of snow, parched leaves, and sunny laments.

Santiago, on the other hand, was a boy who wanted for nothing; he had everything he desired. He made friends that first day of school, though he was never particularly close with anyone. He liked to play bottle caps, painting them various colors, and soccer, their ball a chickpea or a marble. Sometimes they played hide-and-seek in the square or dodge ball on the outskirts of town. Once, during a game, the undertaker’s son dared call him cursed. Santiago crossed his arms, laughed in his face, and said: “
You’re
the one who’s unlucky. I’m the only one in town born in the light of the angels.”

“Well, my mother says your great-grandmother was a whore, and your grandmother, too.”

Santiago punched him in the eye and kicked him in the shin. In pain, the boy tried to fight back, but Santiago shoved him to the ground. None of the other boys defended the undertaker’s son; none dared go up against Santiago Laguna, the tallest among them and the only one with supernatural ancestors.

Only one girl dared call him cursed and pick on his family: the florist’s granddaughter. Santiago shot her a blue-eyed stare, bit his tongue, and walked away, determined to punish her with the power he discovered early on that he held over the opposite sex. From then on, he would wink at her as he sang in church, offer her wildflowers, do her science homework. When she was besotted and begged forgiveness, he spat: “I guess you’re the unlucky one now.”

That was the only problem Santiago ever had with a girl. Most of his female classmates were dying to be his girlfriend. Not only was he the best-looking boy in town, he was also the funniest and sang like an angel. But Santiago never settled on anyone, though he did quite like the pharmacist’s granddaughter, a delicate girl with blond ringlets and bark-brown eyes who had been crazy about him since the age of six, when he drew a blue squirrel on her arm. On afternoons when he did not have his radio show, they would go into the room behind the pharmacy where Santiago would help with her homework—she pretended to need help in literature, biology, and chemistry, all of his favorite subjects. In that room with its sparkling tiles, he would set aside the books and convince her to concoct poultices to cure mange in dogs, anise and rose water enemas for constipated cats. The room would fill with the vapor of his elixirs, bits of herbs floating in the fog of his own invention, as the girl watched him stirring.

What Santiago most desired, however, was his grandmother’s love; he was her world, too. Padre Rafael’s affection, as immense and resounding as his presence, replaced that of a distant father who never came to visit.

By thirteen, Santiago had perfected his poems to the extent that he began to read them on the Saturday-morning culture show he hosted on the radio. Padre Rafael was so proud to hear him recite his poetry on air. The priest had aged but still looked ten or fifteen years younger than he was. The men in his family were known to live to a hundred, dying not of old age but of boredom. Most were in excellent health right until the end, marred only in some generations by a nasty case of incontinence. This had just hit Padre Rafael. It rattled his nerves, and every chance cough, sneeze, or laugh tied him to a porcelain bedpan. He was therefore forced to teach Santiago how the radio transmitter worked. More often than not, it was the boy who played the Gregorian chants or read the sermons Padre Rafael wrote in pages and pages during sleepless nights, summarized in the light of day and prayer. Santiago spent so much time in that little room next to the sacristy that he began to miss his grandmother. He suggested that the priest expand the cultural programming to include one on cooking, which Olvido Laguna could offer. Padre Rafael thought it was an excellent idea.

The first show was broadcast one Saturday morning. Olvido agreed only because she could not deny Santiago anything. Sitting before the microphone, an eggplant across her throat, she began to talk about batters. Her hesitant speech lugged the solitude of years spent in the silence of meat, fish, and vegetables but grew stronger as she delved into her recipes. Tears, revenge, nostalgia, laughter: all these left the kitchen at Scarlet Manor to explode over the airways in that little room next to the sacristy. Olvido’s voice was a rushing stream that soaked the microphone; she had tasted the sweetness of communication, and nothing could stop her now. The women from good families licked their lips and nibbled on their pens as they jotted down recipes, refreshed cheeks with a cool hand, and rolled their eyes in lace-filled parlors over
café con leche
. The old widows, meanwhile, gathered around the one transistor radio owned by the wealthiest among them, eyes cemented with gossip, tongues clucking, nodding malevolently.

Olvido Laguna’s social life slowly progressed from polite conversation when Santiago began to sing at church to a clamor of culinary exchanges. The women and cooks from noble families, the wives and daughters of merchants, and those of lesser standing would stop her in the square, in the narrow streets, at the pharmacy, to congratulate her on the program and clarify doubts about sautéing or rabbit stew. At the store they began to sell squash and cabbage with a sign that read:
ESPECIALLY FOR OLVIDO’S RECIPES
. Her beauty seemed to have been miraculously forgiven. Her curse disappeared among batters and fresh poached cod. She was invited to dine with the undertaker’s family and once even to the mayor’s estate. They stopped calling her the Laguna of the Dead Boy and began to call her the Laguna Chef. The women in black shawls greeted her with a nod as she passed, as if now they understood her story. Manuela Laguna twirled with glee in her pink marble crypt. Esteban’s sister, however, grew more resentful amid heaps of pulled stockings.

It was around then that construction was finished on the sports complex Manuela Laguna financed through her last will and testament. A municipal edict—approved by almost everyone in town—declared that, out of respect for the deceased, it would be named after Santiago Laguna. To celebrate such an honor bestowed on a boy his age, the pharmacist’s granddaughter kissed him on the lips as he prepared a rosemary and mint poultice to treat horsefly bites. Santiago enjoyed the warm feel of that small mouth. He savored it like an apricot, pried it open with his tongue, as if to remove the stone, and explored until he captured her tongue with his own. All thought of the poultice escaped him. With paste-covered hands, he held tight to that adolescent waist, sensed the mass of curls, intimate desire slipping out through feminine cheeks.

“I love you,” she said. “I’ve loved you for so long.”

The girl’s ardor condensed on the tiles. Santiago kissed her again, pulling her to him, her breasts like Sunday paella mussels cleaving to his chest.

“Will you write me a poem?” she whispered in his ear.

That night, alone in his room, keeping the day’s events from Olvido in case she felt betrayed, Santiago wrote a poem not to the ringleted girl but to the kiss, which had become a thing unto itself, floating in the room.