The House of Impossible Loves (3 page)

The horse stopped before the high iron gate that led into the property. Clara contemplated the drive leading to the front door—big cobblestones, with ribbons of earth snaking between.

“It’s a magnificent estate, but there’s something that makes me uneasy. There’s a sad air about it,” the Andalusian said.

“Perhaps because it’s abandoned.”

“Would you like to live here one day?”

“I think so.”

Clara pressed her cheek into the back of his cape. “I want to show you something. Come. I know a way into the garden.”

They followed the stone wall and climbed into the rose garden where part of it had crumbled. Several paths wound in a circle, where dry stalks clung to tall posts, creating a skeletal pergola. Rain clouds were scattered across the sky, reaching down, creating an opaline fog that filtered through the dried stems. Wind rustled the remaining petals rotting on top of dry leaves amid patches of snow. Clara showed the Andalusian a yellow rose that was still in bud.

“If it can survive the first snows, then I can survive until you return.”

He took Clara in his arms.

“I’ll return next fall—before then, at the end of summer, if my lands allow. Wait for me, Clara. Don’t love another. Don’t even look at another.”

“Do you promise you’ll return?”

“I do, Clara. I promise I’ll return.”

When the landowner arrived at the inn, he settled into the armchair in front of the fire to warm bones chilled through by the Castilian cold. He drank a cup of red wine and closed his eyes. He missed the warmth of his estate, rows of orange trees, the sun, black bulls in the fields and horses harnessed with bells, the songs young Gypsies sang picked up by the breeze and carried across his lands. He was anxious to cross the plateau, now covered in snow, hauling the cart with his Andalusian hounds past castles perched high on hilltops.

Suddenly, there was a knock on his door. He opened it to find Clara’s mother with her one blind eye, one black pupil, and ashen, windblown hair. The woman held her sack with the cat bones in one hand and, in the other, a magnificent vulture’s claw on a string.

“I brought this amulet,” she said, holding it out, “to protect you on your trip home.”

“I have no doubt it’ll do just that. The one I bought for the hunt was very effective—I’ve got a big rack to take home.”

“Among other things.” The old witch clucked. “Among other things.”

“Let me pay you.”

“I’d expect nothing less. A few coins are always welcome to a woman like me, who has to look after her only daughter.”

“Take good care of her while I’m gone.” The Andalusian handed her the money as she hung the claw around his neck.

“So you plan to come back.”

“As soon as my lands allow, I’ll come see Clara and hunt again.” The Andalusian tried to smile, but this woman unsettled him deep in his gut.

“Think it over. My daughter is already a lost cause; nothing can save her. But you still have time. I suppose you’ve heard about our curse?” the Laguna witch asked. Her blind eye seemed to glow.

“They told me at the tavern, yes: that the Laguna women are cursed, that you only ever have daughters, that you’re doomed to a life of disgrace.” He cleared his throat, wishing he could take back that last word.

“They forgot to tell you the real bane of our existence. It’s true we only ever have girls who never marry, and they call this a life of disgrace, but we’re doomed to something far worse, my friend: we’re doomed to be unlucky in love. We’re fated to suffer for love, for the one love that steals our soul. It’s why no spell can end our suffering or make us forget. Once the soul is gone, no magic can cure it.”

“I promised Clara I would return, and I will keep my promise.” The landowner felt the heat from the fire on his cheeks.

“My daughter is a fine example of her father’s stock.” The old woman looked up at the ceiling, her blind eye staring blankly. “She’s attractive, proud, and brave. She knows how to take care of herself, but this thing with you was bound to happen sooner or later. The amulet I made her is useless. It was only to protect her from other men until the one who was destined to come came along. But she knew to stay away from the others. Clara fears the curse; it might be the only thing she fears. Now pour me some wine.” The old witch pointed to the bottle on the table. “All this talk of curses makes me thirsty.”

He poured a glass, and the witch swallowed the wine in a single gulp.

“Now, would you like me to predict your future with the cat bones? When you throw the bones, the position of the tail will tell whether you’ll have male heirs.”

“I have to get up early to catch the morning coach. Perhaps when I return.”

“I understand.” The tip of the old woman’s tongue, blackened from tasting her potions, protruded between her lips, and the Andalusian could not help but stare. “Why don’t you give me a few coins for something more useful, then.” She pulled a greenish bottle out of a leather bag that was slung across her shoulder and sat at her hip. She handed it to him. “Drink this when the moon wanes, then wash the area over your heart with thyme and rosemary water. It’ll help you forget, and you won’t ever have to return.”

“But I don’t want to forget.”

“Keep it. Pay me and I’ll be on my way.”

The Laguna witch picked up her rigid sack, took the Andalusian’s coins, and left. The landowner stood with the little jar in his hands as a soft pulse beat behind the glass. He let go, and it shattered on the floor. A yellowish liquid stinking of rotten figs seeped out as a lizard tail thrashed on the floor.

The young landowner was hardly able to sleep that night; whenever he did, his mouth grew dry and he dreamed of the potion’s smell and reptiles. The next morning, he took the first coach home to Andalusia, his eyes shot through with insomnia, his hounds in the cart behind, their barks throbbing in his temples.

Clara Laguna settled in to wait for the Andalusian landowner. She continued to fetch water from the town square at dawn, but now everyone she passed—man or woman, young or old—studied her belly to see if it had grown, to see if it hid another Laguna girl. The months passed as Clara tended her tomatoes, cleaned the pen, fed the chickens and the goat, helped her mother repair hymens and stir potions, as she went to the oak grove and to the estate to contemplate the yellow rose that ignored the tedium of the seasons. But the belly everyone expected to swell remained flat and silent.

Every two or three months Clara received a piece of mail from the Andalusian: pages drenched in olive oil and dried in the sun, orange blossoms and jasmine flowers wrapped in tissue paper rather than words because Clara was illiterate. She replied with dried leaves, bark from an oak tree, yellow rose petals, pine needles, and locks of her hair stuffed into blue envelopes it took all her courage to buy at the general store and fill out, copying her lover’s address in a tremulous hand.

By the middle of spring, when daisies and poppies bloomed in the fields, Clara Laguna had grown sick with impatience. She begged her mother to predict when the landowner would return. Dumping the cat bones onto the cot, Clara gathered them up and threw them as she thought only of him.

“He’ll be back in rutting season. I see it clearly here, in the shinbones.”

The Laguna witch was right. Just as the September foliage began to turn, the Andalusian arrived on the afternoon coach, accompanied by his two servants but without any trace of his hounds. He could hear stags bellowing in the surrounding woodlands as he settled into the same rooms at the inn. The animals’ howling grew more desperate as he dug his spurs into the flanks of a horse and headed to see Clara, where the echo of their first kisses sent rumbles all the way down to the outskirts of town. They set off for the oak grove, where they made love under a full moon.

The Andalusian’s skin was darkened by the joy of long summer nights. He also smelled of the sea, a scent unfamiliar to Clara. But he was not the only one in town to carry with him a hint of the ocean. A new priest, the man who would guide the souls of the faithful from the pulpit, arrived on the next morning’s coach.

The local priest had died a few months earlier, cursing old age and his liver, and parishioners had been forced to attend Mass in the neighboring town. The moment the new priest heard this, he knew this inhospitable land and its inhabitants had been exposed to the whims of evil. A fervent believer in the devil since his seminary days, he knew it was just a matter of opportunity before Lucifer appeared in the world. His obsession only grew when he volunteered to serve as chaplain with Spanish troops battling the rebels fighting for Cuban independence. For two years he hastily performed last rites over young men felled by bayonets, gunpowder, and fevers, crouched amid mosquitoes, sugar cane, and tobacco plants. Though he had sworn not to return to Spain until victory was won, they brought him home against his will after his battalion was ambushed and he wandered deep in the jungle for over a month, with hunger his only companion. They found him feverish in the hut of a Santeria priestess, who had read in his palm that his life would forever be linked to the devil’s, that wherever he went, the devil was sure to follow. The priest was a young man—not yet thirty—but his face was aged by the Caribbean sun and the sight of death.

Resigned to his fate, the young priest acquiesced to his superiors’ mandate that he go to this Castilian backwater, where news from the colonies rarely arrived. They hoped a pastoral life of sermons, card games, and anisette in this forgotten town surrounded by mountains and harsh terrain would rid him of this obsession with the devil—and if not, then the frigid air might freeze it out of him.

But on that first Sunday, as the new parish priest stood in the pulpit, his sermon was not about the coming harvest of wheat and rye. Instead, spreading his arms wide, like an eagle soaring over mountain peaks, he regaled the congregation with a sermon on the glory of the Spanish Empire, of witnessing the devil’s trickery in a land surrounded by turquoise water that evil hoped to drown. Expectations surrounding this new cleric were high, and the church was filled to capacity. Even the shepherds had come down from their pastures to hear the young priest with a face the color of
café con leche
. By the end of Mass, many parishioners felt their eyes brimming with tears without knowing exactly why—they had not understood a word of the sermon, confusing the devil with mosquitoes. Others left uncertain who the Spanish troops were fighting, or who in fact wanted to steal the empire from them. That feverish sermon was repeated on subsequent Sundays with just as many parishioners in attendance, squeezed into the pews. A censer swung from one side of the church to the other, incense masking the smell of sheep and other odors exuded by the faithful as the sermon grew more heated, with its battles in far-off, crocodile-infested lands where the sun caused faith to boil. If anything was clear to the townspeople after those first few sermons, it was that this dark-eyed young man in the oversized cassock knew how to reach straight into the hearts of his listeners, though they understood not a word. His name was Juan Antonio Escabel de Castro, but they began to call him Padre Imperio, a name he bore proudly for the rest of his life.

All of the commotion surrounding the priest’s arrival and his sermons deflected attention from the rekindled affair between Clara Laguna and the Andalusian. Whenever the old women saw him stride by, they gave only a moment’s thought to whether he could break the curse by marrying the Laguna girl and making her happy. Their minds immediately returned to Padre Imperio’s tropical crocodiles—no doubt the devil incarnate—devouring not only crabs but the fists and legs of Spaniards.

One night when the landowner went to the tavern for dinner, La Colorá offered him only mushrooms sautéed with egg and had no more to say than “I guess we’ll see what you’re willing to give up for a pretty woman now.”

Clara was one of very few women in town that fall of 1898 whose life was not affected by Padre Imperio’s sermons. Not exactly welcomed at church by the women in veils and mantillas, she and her mother did not go to Sunday Mass. Besides, the Laguna witch had taught her daughter that a cursed woman sets foot on hallowed ground only when the taste of death is on her lips. Clara, who barely believed in God, cared not at all. If she felt like praying, she would recite the only prayer she knew, wherever she was, to God or the town’s patron saint, Saint Pantolomina of the Flowers, a martyr with irises in her blond hair who was put to death by quartering.

Clara’s relationship with the Andalusian kept her busy enough. They rode out through forests and flocks in between his hunts, making love wherever they chose. She adored the feeling of his hands, inhaling his persistent salty aroma in the yard surrounding the estate, under the pergola with the last of the roses. Late one afternoon, after their pleasure, he asked her why she never went to church to hear the priest’s sermons; though their meaning was somewhat obscure, they were fascinating nevertheless.

“I can go with you this Sunday, if you like,” Clara replied, picturing herself walking into church in her Sunday best, her cursed arm entwined in his. She also imagined her dress was white and they were walking to the altar, where two rings and blessings awaited, her family’s curse barred at the door, shaking with fury.

The Andalusian, who had pictured the same thing, minus the wedding, knew he had gone too far. It was one thing to be seen walking with Clara in the street or on horseback in the woods and hills, quite another to be seen taking her arm in church.

“I think you should go with your mother.”

“Yes, or maybe the best thing to do is not go at all, or go with whoever I want.”

Clara walked away from him. A liquid cold surged through her bones as tears pricked like knives and the taste of blood filled her mouth, making her queasy. She recognized the symptoms her mother had described more than once: the symptoms of the curse, the first pain inflicted, announcing the corrosion of more to come.

The next Sunday, as usual, neither Clara nor her mother went to church. However, at midday Padre Imperio himself appeared at their door. Slices of stale bread toasted in the fire along with a piece of tallow, some mandrake root, and a pot brewing toads to ward off evil eye. The priest pulled out a handkerchief and pressed it against his nose and mouth.