The House of Impossible Loves by Cristina López Barrio Page A

child.”
    “But my soul is gone, Padre, stolen by love and the curse on my family.”
    “That’s not true. Your soul belongs to God.”
    Padre Imperio wanted to say he would find the soul she thought she lost, but he said nothing. They did not shake hands or touch but said goodbye with their eyes. The priest walked toward his mule, dragging behind him the same solitude that engulfed Clara.
    It was a while before Padre Imperio returned to Scarlet Manor. Clara tried to think of him only when the pain of her curse was unbearable, like a balm, a dark-eyed remedy. She looked for other things to keep her busy. She grew to like her trips to town, not to fetch water from the fountain, like she had before, with her jug and her memories of a man who surely belonged to another by now. There was a never-ending well of fresh water just next to the vegetable garden at Scarlet Manor. Instead, Clara liked to parade her pregnancy in the square, up and down the narrow streets where the old women sat forming rows of black shawls. She wanted them to whisper about her, about the cursed line of Laguna women who would not die out but wantonly reproduced girls and disgrace. If the curse had stolen Clara’s soul, then she would steal their men.
    Sometimes, when Clara passed the church doors, she would forget her name, her background, her misfortune, just for a moment, and wish she could enter that sacred place with its crucified Christ on the altar, the gravestones of Castilian gentlemen set into the floor, the stone coffins of noblemen in somber side chapels. She wished she could sit on a pew and admire Padre Imperio in the pulpit, arms spread in his Sunday robes, his lips savoring his sermons, the yellow of her eyes reflected in his.
    But those strolls grew farther apart. By mid-May, Clara’s belly was so big she could no longer walk the distance from Scarlet Manor to town. Clara’s mother, wishing her daughter would stop parading before her clients, convinced her to help with her potions again. Although the Laguna witch’s business was initially affected by the brothel, it slowly picked up, thanks to the men curious about their future as they waited for their turn of carnal pleasure, and the women who missed her prophecies and cures for evil eye cast by rural envy. Since Clara had started to busy herself with the clients waiting in the parlor as well, the Laguna witch would some nights go to town, hauling her sack of cat bones.
     
    Bernarda did not like that half-blind woman in her kitchen, taking up the whole stove to prepare her potions and balms in blackened pots. She grunted that there was no room left to cook, scratched her deformed nose, and tugged angrily on her whiskers.
    “Be quiet, girl. You sound like a wounded boar! There’s room enough for two in this kitchen.”
    Bernarda stalked off to lie on her straw mattress, but when Clara started helping her mother, the cook showed a sudden interest in witchcraft, and in the needle and thread for repairing hymens.
    “Lady, lady good,” Bernarda grunted as she sharpened and polished the knives Clara used to dismember lizards, toads, and rodents.
    Bernarda shadowed Clara’s every move, watching her cut and store the pieces in a jar or simmer them in a pot. The moment her mistress was distracted, she devoured any little piece of meat or entrails Clara had touched. For Bernarda, love was a matter of the stomach.
    “Madre, did you take the lizard tail?” Clara asked.
    “Of course not! Be quiet now. Don’t distract me. I don’t want to mix up the herbs.”
    “And you, Bernarda?”
    With her mouth open, teeth and gums stained with blood, the girl laughed, savoring the touch she loved so much.
    “Don’t we feed you enough? These are for the potions, you beast!” Clara smacked her across the head.
    Still smiling, Bernarda ran to her room with one hand over the exact spot her mistress had struck.
    “Come out of your room and stop stinking up the place!” Clara yelled.
    But