The House of Impossible Loves Read Online Free Page A

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