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created by Clara’s outfit and the parlor where they were made to wait, with its opera curtains and pictures of concubines. Hunters fell victim to these charms as well. The brothel run by a prostitute with golden eyes, bursting out of tulle and satin, became one more reason beyond wild boar and hares to return to the Castilian town year after year.
     
    The start of Clara’s amorous endeavors that early December of 1898 turned the spotlight away from Padre Imperio’s sermons. All talk of tropical crocodiles, swamps, and jungles crawling with Cuban rebels ceased among the black shawls. The brothel that Clara had opened on her estate, now known as Scarlet Manor, became the primary topic of conversation.
    When Padre Imperio learned of the brothel shortly after it opened, he pictured the Santeria priestess warning him that his destiny was forever linked to the arrival of evil on earth. He put on a cassock sprinkled with holy water and set out for Scarlet Manor. Riding the mule that carried him to the homes of his faithful, scattered throughout the hills, the priest witnessed how the beech trees stood naked to greet travelers, their yellow leaves shed on the earth, their branches swaying in the wind.
    The gate was open. Padre Imperio hitched his mule to one of the iron bars and walked down the cobblestone drive to the door at Scarlet Manor, his ecclesiastical boots trampling the clumps of daisies. Crossing himself first, he knocked on the door. It took several knocks before Clara opened it, yawning, wrapped in a wool shawl.
    “Come in, Padre.”
    “I’ll stay right here.”
    “As you like.”
    The house was damp and dusty inside, and the smell reminded Padre Imperio of sulfur. There was an abandoned look in Clara’s eyes, and a shiver ran through him. He had come to find out whether the devil hid in this house of ill repute.
    “There’s nothing hidden here,” Clara replied. “Not even my revenge.”
    Padre Imperio came with the courage of his stiff priest’s collar, prepared to march straight back to the church for his exorcism tools if necessary, prepared to confront the human face of evil if it had set up residence on Clara’s estate and filled her heart with wicked ideas.
    “I don’t need an exorcism, Padre, just a loaf of bread. No one will sell to me, and I haven’t had time to bake.”
    “Despite your cat’s eyes, the bad habit they say you have of speaking with the dead and the profession you have chosen, willingly or unwillingly, I am here to save you, whatever the cost, from the devil or yourself,” he said with all the sternness he had learned in the tropics.
    Padre Imperio walked back down the cobblestone drive, got onto his mule, and left for town.
     
    Clara Laguna did not want her mother to live with her—not, that is, until the weight of her household obligations and loneliness made her change her mind. She couldn’t please clients in the big canopy bed and attend to those arriving in the meantime. If she left the front door closed, men piled up in the frosty night; if she left it open, they wandered through the house, coming to stand in the doorway and spy on their neighbors, or into the pantry to eat the few provisions Clara managed to store. Nor did she have time to tend to the lettuce she planted next to the tomatoes and squash; to clean the parlor and her bedroom of the mud tracked in on her clients’ boots, their gobs of spit and tufts of mule hair; to prepare meals, buy supplies, and sweep the leaves from the drive being inundated by daisies.
    Late one afternoon, as she stood on the second-floor balcony, Clara realized she could never live alone in that brothel and bury her memories. Even the sight of the lonely moths awaiting death was a torment. She missed the odor of her mother’s potions, missed helping her butcher small animals and repair hymens. She missed the rattle of cat bones in the rigid sack. She even missed milking the goat each morning. And yet she blamed the Laguna witch