The House of Impossible Loves Read Online Free PDF Page A

in his black cassock, pressed the handkerchief even harder. A tropical sweat broke out on his brow. The smell of that concoction brought him back, and for a moment he thought he was in a ramshackle hut deep in the jungle, the Santeria priestess sucking on goat bones, smearing a yellowish poultice on his throat.
    “Sit, Padre. You’re as pale as a dead goat,” the Laguna witch said, offering a stool. He refused with a wave of his hand.
    “What they say seems to be true: you practice witchcraft in this house. Now I must know if you invoke the devil as well.” Just then he glanced into a corner of the room and caught Clara Laguna’s startling eyes.
    “The only devil I know is the one I treat in my customers.” The woman’s blind eye crossed, and Padre Imperio felt the need to cross himself.
    “Come to Mass, señora, and bring your daughter. You may be in mortal sin.”
    “You should know we’re cursed, and a cursed woman only goes to church to die. At least that’s what my mother always said.”
    “I’ve been told about your family affliction, and I’m here to tell you the only remedy is chastity. You must not bear children.”
    Clara Laguna’s eyes bore into Padre Imperio. He stuffed his handkerchief into his pocket and quickly said goodbye.
     
    Having felt the first symptoms of the curse, Clara believed she could follow the priest’s advice and not give herself to the Andalusian. But she was wrong. The more she denied him, the more his desire for her cursed flesh grew. He bought her a bracelet of freshwater pearls and appealed to her heart with verses he sang on one knee under an oak in the moonlight. Clara lost her appetite, the ability to hear or speak until she gave herself to him again in the rose garden on a bed of dried petals and leaves. When she returned home, the Laguna witch said: “You did well. You had no other choice.” She opened Clara’s mouth and inspected her gums, as if she were a horse, then had the girl urinate in a cauldron, added a handful of roots, and put the cauldron on the fire to boil. When the room filled with the sweet smell of entrails, the old witch half closed her blind eye and said: “You’re with child. You conceived in rutting season, over a month ago.”
     
    It was the time of the fog of the dead souls. An icy wind swept through the plaza. And yet, when Clara Laguna sat on the edge of the fountain, the wind turned warm as it caressed her face, the spirits’ laments mingling with her own. She loved a man she had known for just a year, she told them, and now she was expecting a child. The bells tolled their sad warning, and as the mist began to dissipate, Clara noticed a dark blot outside the church. It was Padre Imperio, splashing holy water. Through what remained of the fog, he saw those amber eyes and crossed himself. No matter how the bell ringer tried to explain the origin of this phenomenon of the fog, Padre Imperio was determined to blame it on Lucifer’s breath.
    “What are you doing here, inhaling these demonic signs?”
    “There’s nothing demonic here, Padre. Only a great sorrow. You’ll get used to it.”
     
    On the morning of All Souls’ Day, as the townspeople made their pilgrimage up to the cemetery armed with flowers and scouring pads, Clara went with the Andalusian to the oak grove. The day had dawned to a stormy sky, and just when she told him she was pregnant, thunder and lightning erupted and rain fell. Those still in the cemetery took refuge in family vaults, but all those wide mourning skirts and hats took up space, so a stampede of mourners raced along the ridge to the first porticoes. Meanwhile, Clara and the Andalusian embraced under a magnificent oak tree. As Clara wept, her tears mixed with the rain. He tried to whisper words of comfort, but they were not the ones Clara wanted to hear. He recalled La Colorá’s warning that no man had ever dared break the Laguna curse, and that a mysterious misfortune awaited anyone who tried.
    The