The House of Impossible Loves by Cristina López Barrio Page B

here.”
    “Who?”
    She recoiled at the tarry smell of the hotel wafting from the woman’s dress.
    Another day, strange men came to visit, asking questions she had no idea how to answer. They kept saying: “You were so lucky. You almost drowned!”
    When she was discharged a week later, a smiling, bespectacled doctor said: “Now, you learn to swim. If not, no more diving into the sea, you hear? Promise me.” He held out his hand.
    Manuela stared at the man’s skin, then asked for some gloves.
    “What for?”
    “To wear.”
    Manuela left the hospital wearing a pair of the gloves nurses used when tending to burn victims. At a store in town, she replaced them with white cotton gloves. Then, at an art gallery, she bought an oil painting of a calm sea, a boat, and seagulls.
    The hotel owner was happy to see her. Manuela had dark circles under her eyes and bluish lips, as if the sea remained inside her permanently, using her body as a host.
    “Would you like to stay and work in the kitchen? I’d pay you a small wage, and the room would be free. What do you say?”
    Manuela accepted the offer. She cooked with her gloves on, never taking them off. She had to buy four or five pair on account of how quickly they soiled. The owner wanted her to take them off when she butchered chickens or rabbits—it wasn’t good to be seen walking down the hall with blood-soaked gloves—but she didn’t dare ask.
    Manuela resumed her afternoons on the patio, embroidering petit point as she stared out at the sea. But never again did she go onto the beach at night.
    One morning in late fall, when her dresses had grown too tight, Manuela left without a word, just as she had come, saying goodbye to no one, not even to the salty breeze that followed her to the station.
    As inscrutable as ever, Manuela returned to Scarlet Manor. She had acquired two new features: the white cotton gloves she would wear until she died and a growing belly that settled between expanding hips. A few months later, Manuela collapsed on the bed with the purple canopy and, as her mother had done years before, called out to a now more healthy-looking Bernarda.
    “Get between my legs and pull the baby out like you would a lamb!”
    The cook grunted, spit on her hands, and rubbed them together.
    At sundown, Manuela gave birth to an otherworldly little girl she named Olvido. The old women in town whispered about the provenance of a name that meant “forget,” but they never learned whether it was chosen out of a desire to erase some event from her past or simply on a whim.
    After Olvido was born, Manuela decided to dedicate her life and her daughter’s to achieving one goal: the Laguna women were to become decent and garner the town’s respect, something they had never had. Her first act was to light a sacrificial bonfire in the yard at Scarlet Manor. She burned the opera sofas, the silk damask curtains, the pictures of harem concubines, the garters, the satin dressing gowns, the
Il Seraglio
negligees and Moorish pants. She burned any potential reminder of the manor’s past as an opulent brothel, and she did it before the eyes and noses of the town. They needed to understand that the era of Laguna whores died in those purifying flames.
    Since she did not dare burn the girls who worked for her—though she did relish the thought of such sacrifice—Manuela gave them each a stack of bills and told them to go practice the profession elsewhere.
    The Galician woman, who had acted as madam over the last year, believed she was safe from this inquisitorial cleansing. She was wrong. Early one morning, as she ate breakfast in the kitchen, Manuela announced in her northern accent that she, too, must leave.
    “But I’ve nowhere to go. I don’t even remember the way back to the sea. This was my home, here, with you . . .”
    “I’ll pay you enough to jog your memory. Just go. My daughter and I are respectable now.”
    That night the Galician woman took a rope and hanged