The House of Impossible Loves by Cristina López Barrio Page A

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