The House of Impossible Loves (9 page)

Manuela Laguna did not have a pampered childhood. Every morning Bernarda repeated the instructions her mistress had given her—“make sure she’s fed and keep her warm”—then fattened the girl up as if she were preparing a lamb for slaughter. On cold nights she pulled the child to her body with its smell of stables, putting her to sleep with no more affection than the rhythm of her breath. Whenever Manuela cried, the cook grabbed oranges or tomatoes and juggled. But she did not bother to teach the girl to walk. Manuela took her first steps holding the hand of a regular client who often came into the kitchen to warm his chilblains by the stove with a bowl of stew or plate of roast. Nor did Bernarda teach the girl to speak. The cook had little faith in words and tried to use them as rarely as possible, preferring to communicate through her cooking and the occasional grunt. It took a new prostitute recently arrived from Galicia, a young girl with long, black braids and a eucalyptus heart, before Manuela spoke her first words in a northern accent she never lost.

It was early autumn 1902. Manuela was three years old and—apart from the few babbles and grunts she learned from Bernarda—as mute as the insects that were her friends. For the rest of her life, Manuela Laguna would groom cockroaches and centipedes as pets. She would bathe them in warm water, dry them with a cloth, and any that survived she would fit with a tiny leash requiring an artisan’s patience.

When the Galician woman first saw the little girl using a stick to pull cockroaches out from under the cupboard, she thought her mother was the woman with the deformed nose who stood smiling beside her, revealing the blackened teeth of a mule. Manuela was wearing a moth-eaten dress and booties the cook had knit for cold nights.

“What’s your name?” the Galician asked.

Manuela stood staring with big eyes, then brandished her stick.

“Aren’t you a little terror?” The woman smiled. “Would you like a present?”

In one hand she held the last of summer’s blackberries. The little girl dropped her stick, snatched the berries, and stuffed them all into her mouth.

“I’ll tell you a story if you tell me your name.”

With berry juice dripping down her chin, Manuela grunted and fled to the room where she slept with Bernarda.

As the leaves fell from the beech trees, the Galician woman learned that Manuela—who was always sucking on fruit or a chicken bone under Bernarda’s skirt or catching bugs in the garden—could not say a word. At breakfast one morning the spring air surrounding Scarlet Manor drifted in through the kitchen window. Wind lashed the pine forest, blanketing the yard with dry needles. The Galician prostitute sat at the table before a cup of milk and a slice of bread and butter, sweeping crumbs from the table with the end of her braid. Manuela laughed, drew closer, climbed onto the woman’s lap, took hold of the braid, and began to sweep.

“Your name is Ma-nue-la.” The Galician woman took advantage of this opportunity. “Little Manuela.”

First Manuela learned her own name, then Bernarda’s, then the names of fruits and vegetables. After that she learned the words for kitchen utensils and the meat used for that night’s dinner. Day after day, drenched in the aroma of warm milk and butter, bathed in the golden light of an autumn stretching beyond Scarlet Manor, Manuela learned to imitate the sounds that came out of the Galician woman’s mouth. If she did well, she would receive a strange smack of lips on her cheek. She had never felt such a thing; Bernarda only ever licked her as a cow does a calf. It was not long before Manuela learned this was called a kiss.

The cook watched suspiciously the girl’s progress with language and her fondness for the Galician woman.

“Lady say food, no cold. No say words.” She brought her deformed nose close to the Galician’s face, threatening with her quiet eyes, strange odor, and goose-pimpled skin, but she let Manuela continue learning.

“Does the madam tell you how to raise your own child?”

“No me daughter, lady daughter.”

This was how the Galician woman learned that Manuela’s mother was the woman who always seemed to be waiting for someone to arrive. She spent day and night dressed in diaphanous negligees, dressing gowns, and harem pants, painting her lips red and her eyelids blue, brushing her long hair as her gaze became lost in the cobblestone drive. Whenever she instructed the girls about brothel affairs, she always ended with the same phrase: “Do as you’re told. Any day now, his boots will trample those daisies.” The Galician had no idea what boots her mistress was referring to but assumed the daisies were those snaking through the front drive. All she cared about was doing her job to earn her keep and teaching that little girl about the world beyond the kitchen and pantry where Bernarda raised her.

When snow covered spring at Scarlet Manor, daisies broke through like chicks from an egg. One day the Galician woman took advantage of a flu that kept the rest of the house’s inhabitants, including her madam, bedridden, and took Manuela into the parlor. By the warmth of the fire, she recited the stories of sailors and mermaids she had been told as a child. And so Manuela Laguna learned about a body of water other than the Sunday soup in which chunks of leftover bread and the last of that week’s eggs floated. This other was a bluish green and devoured lives on a whim. Manuela would forever repeat its name—sea. She learned, too, about the steep Galician coastline and white-sand beaches where that mass of water splashed or rested, about the faces and smell of the fishermen whose tears were extracted by the sea, tears that now belonged to her, always letting her know the location of the sailors if on a whim she felt the need to kill them, with the violence of her waves.

That sea never changed, nor did the sailors, but Manuela grew and changed in the warmth of those stories, her imagination filled with sea foam and waves, seagulls and cliffs that Castilian hills and oak groves could never understand. Her big eyes grew even larger, her black hair curled like seaweed. By the age of fourteen, Manuela could speak Galician
,
wring a chicken’s neck, pluck and cook it with all of Bernarda’s skill. She never suspected that at that age she would learn her mother’s lessons as well.

One October morning in 1913, Clara Laguna strode into the kitchen having decided it was time to introduce Manuela to brothel life. Her heart no longer heard the hunters’ gunshots in the hills, the bawling stags, the crashing horns, the wind stripping beech trees of leaves, or the ghostly fighting in the fog. Just as the yard at Scarlet Manor had come to a standstill in spring, Clara’s heart had come to a stop on the cobblestone drive. All it could hear was the birth and death of the daisies. By now her hair was streaked with gray and the first wrinkles etched around her yellow eyes. She appeared in a purple negligee and silk dressing gown, her flesh no longer as firm as her revenge. She searched for her daughter’s face and found it distracted by the blood of a chicken she had just finished butchering with Bernarda.

“Shave?” the cook asked, running a hand over her freshly shaven face.

“No. I didn’t come for you but for her.” Clara looked at her daughter. “You already know I’m your mother. Come here so I can see you better.”

Manuela trembled in her ragged dress and refused to move. She had seen this woman flying through the parlor or up the stairs to the second floor, where Manuela was not allowed to go, her body sheathed in a jumble of transparent fabrics, her brown hair falling to her waist, her face more beautiful than that of Our Lady of Good Remedy, whose image the Galician woman slipped under her garter before and after every amorous assault.

Bernarda pushed the girl with a grunt. Trying not to look directly at her mistress, the cook anxiously sought a glimpse of white skin she could remember later, on her own.

“She scares me,” Manuela whispered into the cook’s chest. “She looks like a witch.”

Not understanding, Bernarda shoved the girl toward her mother.

“Do as you’re told!” Clara ordered, a thigh escaping from her dressing gown.

Manuela walked toward the golden eyes that time and hate had turned to stone.

“You’ve got your grandmother’s dark eyes and your father’s curly hair. I’ll teach you how to oil it.” She held her daughter’s chin.

Her cold touch made the girl imagine her as a mermaid, instead of a witch.

“As for the rest, you don’t take after anyone. Your skin is too coarse and hairy for a Laguna.” She pinched her daughter’s arms. “It’ll take some work to make you the best of all of us.”

Clara opened her dressing gown, pulled a roll of bills out of a lace bag attached to her garter belt, and handed it to the cook.

“You did well. My daughter is no longer your responsibility.”

Bernarda grabbed the money. Now she had something for dessert: she would cook the bills in chocolate, savor them as she thought of the delicious thigh that appeared fleetingly a moment ago.

“Come. Hurry up,” Clara said as she led her daughter into the parlor. “I’ve just received garters from the city that will go nicely with your hair. Your father could arrive any minute, so I want you to be prepared.”

The first time Manuela Laguna tasted a man, a butter maker from Burgos, she scrubbed her skin raw with a horse brush afterward. Hiding in the stable, she scoured and scoured until her skin no longer smelled of another human. Then she ran to the rose garden, wandering its paths for the rest of the day. Clara searched for Manuela in every room, even the attic with its dusty reminders of her mother. Unable to find her, the prostitutes searched the yard, all to no avail. Manuela dug a hole along one of the back paths. Whenever she heard footsteps on grass crunchy with frost, she slipped into it, covering the opening with branches and leaves. When night fell, the Galician woman feigned it was her time of the month and prayed to Our Lady of Good Remedy that the autumn chill would not kill the girl in a flash. Meanwhile, for the first time in fifteen years, Clara hoped her Andalusian lover would not stride up the daisy-strewn drive.

Late the next morning Clara shook off her sleepless night and headed to the pine forest. She searched for her daughter behind every granite rock rising up between yellowing ferns and beech trees. She called to Manuela, shouting herself hoarse, but still she did not find the girl. She decided to try the oak grove. She had told her daughter about it, how her father carved their love into an ash-gray trunk, how he sang folk songs along the riverbank. All of a sudden, a mule carrying bulging striped saddlebags came down the hill, and Clara distinguished the shape of a black cassock on top. Padre Imperio was on his way to give last rites to a parishioner in the hills. They had not spoken since her mother’s funeral. Clara had often seen him over the years but always managed to avoid him. That autumn morning, however, the landscape was vast and deserted.

“Good morning, Padre.”

The lines etched by the Caribbean sun on his face in youth were now joined by wrinkles acquired in his Castilian maturity.

“Good morning,” Clara repeated.

A saddlebag brushed against her dress.

“Good morning,” Padre Imperio replied.

“Is someone sick?”

“A shepherd.”

The mule carried on, the bottles of holy oil clinking in the saddlebags.

“Padre?”

“Yes?”

“Are you going to give him his last rites?”

Padre Imperio stopped the mule and turned to look at Clara.

“I’m going to help him die in peace.”

Clara recalled the Saint Pantolomina of the Flowers card she had tossed behind the cans of peaches in the pantry all those years ago.

“I hope you get there in time,” she said, staring into his dark eyes. “Goodbye, Padre.”

The mule set off again. Bottles rattled in the saddlebags, and the priest’s black cassock swayed, his hair tousled in the breeze.

“Goodbye, Clara.” Padre Imperio’s stomach knotted. He felt his red scar strangling him.

When Clara returned to Scarlet Manor, she set about shaving Bernarda in the kitchen. As she ran the razor over her chin, Clara blathered words so fast the cook could hardly understand. A pot of braised tongue simmered on the stove.

“No sad, lady. I know get daughter back.”

“You know where Manuela is?”

“I get.”

Bernarda picked up the pot with two towels so as not to burn her hands, then walked on tenterhooks around the house and through the yard. Out in the rose garden, her stomach aching from hunger, for she’d chewed on nothing but rose petals since hiding, Manuela smelled that aroma and thought Bernarda had come to feed her. But the moment she crawled out of her hole, she found her mother there, too. Clara grabbed her daughter by the ear and led her back to the house, tugging and scolding. Manuela Laguna swore she would never trust Bernarda again.

It was the Galician woman who treated Manuela’s raw skin, applying cold cloths and antiseptic as she told the story of sailors lost in the fog.

Manuela rejoined brothel life as soon as she was better. Never again did she scour herself raw, but after every client she rubbed her body with the first thing at hand, a hairbrush, a string of garlic, or a negligee. Nor did she ever run away again, but they all knew that whenever Manuela was not in the manor or at the general store, she was in the rose garden, talking away her sorrow as she strolled the paths, conversing with the roses like her mother had once done with the dead before she found Bernarda’s chin. Manuela washed centipedes in puddles, brushed them with dried petals, and laid them in beds of velvet. Every day she dreamed of the sea, the feel of cold waves as opposed to the warm hands of men.

Manuela’s brothel career was short-lived, thanks to her complete lack of charm. “The only thing going for this Laguna is her age,” they said in town. Whenever she went to the store for supplies with Bernarda, Manuela sat on the bench in the cart and stared at her feet or shawl. Once there, she simply recited the list to the shopkeeper. It was rumored her voice was as coarse as her skin and witch’s eyes. Soon they began to call her “the ugly Laguna.”

Manuela’s only prominent feature was the Andalusian hair she inherited from her father, hair Clara Laguna combed with olive oil. But this was hardly enough for clients, who readily chose one of the two pretty young girls who had replaced Ludovica, Tomasa, and the shepherd’s daughter when their flesh grew flaccid and they left for home. Manuela Laguna was rude to her clients, filling their pockets with cockroaches and spiders if ever they fell asleep. Clients even preferred the Galician, despite her age and expanding hips; at least she listened to them and indulged their heart’s desires.