A Handbook to Luck

by Cristina Garcia

  “Doesn’t he have a glass eye?” Enrique asked.

  “Yes, but it did not impede Mr. Junior’s ability to assess my gifts in the slightest. He was particularly taken with my re-creations of nineteenth-century magic tricks.”

  “Great.” Those were Enrique’s favorites, too: restoring a playing card that had been burned to ashes; walking through a brick wall; pulling souvenirs from an antique cornucopia. “How much will they pay you?”

  “The details will be worked out in due time, my little accountant. Haven’t I taught you that a magician may disregard fortune, but never opportunity?”

  Enrique didn’t question his father’s talents, but his business sense often left them penniless. “How long are they giving you?”

  “I’m not certain what the standard warm-up act is for a man of Mr. Junior’s stature,” Papi said, somewhat impatiently, “but I would imagine it would be, at minimum, thirty minutes.”

  “You could do a lot in half an hour.” Enrique tried to sound encouraging, not that Papi needed it. His father’s optimism was not a fragile thing.

  “Mi hijo, we will shake out our wings like butterflies!”

  “Right.” Enrique pushed the last of the kung pao chicken around on his plate. His insides were flip-flopping uneasily. He had inherited his mother’s nervous stomach. His father, on the other hand, could have eaten the bark off a tree without ill effect.

  Papi didn’t like to talk about Mamá but he couldn’t help himself sometimes. They’d been, he said, very much in love. Enrique remembered his parents holding hands and kissing a lot and slowly dancing to boleros. Sometimes they’d recited poetry to each other on the front porch, to the amusement of their neighbors. Now on his most despairing days, Papi paced the apartment trying to change history with “if only”s. If only he’d refused to let her do those dangerous aquarium tricks; if only he’d checked the weather report that day. If only this and if only that before he collapsed tearfully in Enrique’s arms. These episodes exhausted them both and still explained nothing.

  Last week Enrique had come across a library book called The Odds. In it, the probabilities of even the most seemingly random events were mathematically calculated. The odds of dying in a taxicab, of being born a quintuplet, or with only one kidney, or a sixth finger. Everything could be reliably predicted. The book also pointed out that the smallest carelessness, a hiccup of nature, could alter a person’s life. On the day his mother died, a flock of storks, thrown off course by the strong autumn winds and looking like parasols, had landed in Colón Park, near the stage where his parents were performing. One of the storks got tangled up in an electrical cable and died at the same time as Mamá. What were the odds of that?

  At the kitchen table, Papi retold the story of Sammy Davis Jr., but Enrique was only half listening. The last thing he wanted was to start over in a new place. In photographs of Las Vegas, everybody looked old and too tanned. Plus it hardly rained there. He’d read somewhere about the one time it snowed and thirty-seven people froze to death. If he and Papi went anywhere, it should be back to Cuba, where they belonged.

  Enrique looked over at his father, happily chatting at him in Spanish. Papi was six feet tall and weighed an eighth of a ton, but he could still pass for a kid. With his broad waxy face and his babyish teeth, he would look right at home in a pair of short pants or licking a giant lollipop. For dessert, he offered Enrique a chocolate éclair, then ate the remaining three himself.

  “What do you say we go out and celebrate with an ice-cream sundae?” Papi smiled, his hair shiny under the kitchen’s single bulb. A bit of custard wobbled at the corner of his mouth.

  Enrique took a bite of his éclair. He looked out the window for a sign of the moon. There was supposed to be an eclipse tonight but he wasn’t sure exactly when. If he listened closely, he could hear the doves’ gentle clamor on the roof.

  Marta Claros

  It was noon and the streets were quiet. Only the doves cooed and fluttered in the tamarind tree, wings blazing in the sun. Now and then Marta Claros overheard tired voices from behind the shutters and gates. She shuffled along the familiar, roughly paved streets of her San Salvador neighborhood and spotted the orange tree at the top of the hill. It was thick with blossoms, and the sweet scent of its fruit drifted toward her in fragrant wisps. The tree grew in the yard of the nicest house around. Marta didn’t understand why everyone referred to the house as La Casa Azul when it wasn’t blue at all but a hazy white, like when the sun shone through clouds on a winter day.

  A drowsy-looking moth struggled up the hill beside her. Marta thought it might be injured and she wanted to adopt it. The moth was so tiny it wouldn’t eat much, not like the skinny dogs and kittens she’d brought home and then was forced by her mother to abandon again. Marta put down her basket of used clothing—darned socks, blouses, skirts, and pants—and held out her finger.

  “Come here, little moth,” she coaxed. At least it wasn’t a caterpillar. Caterpillars frightened her. Their miniature green horns made them look like devils. She avoided dragonflies, too, because everyone said that if you touched one, you would wake up with your eyes glued shut.

  Marta was hungry but she didn’t dare go home yet. So far today, she’d sold only two pairs of socks and a cotton blouse to the grocer’s wife. Mamá had warned her not to return until her basket was empty and her pockets chiming with coins. If only Marta could make up customers the way she made up friends, like Caridad and Tomasina, who played with her whenever she wanted and didn’t cheat at games the way her real cousins did.

  She imagined her ideal customer: a fine lady with lace gloves and a wide-brimmed hat to protect her from the sun. The lady would live in a house by herself and invite Marta in for cookies and a glass of horchata. Then she would read aloud the way her teacher had read to the class, not to learn anything but just to hear a good story. The hour would unravel slowly, like a piece of frayed cloth. After Marta had a second helping of cookies, politely leaving a few crumbs on her plate, the lady would ask her: How much for your entire basket of clothes?

  Recently, Marta had quit first grade (at nine she’d been the oldest in her class) because her mother needed help. Mamá was pregnant again and wanted Marta back on the streets selling used clothes—“barely worn” was what she was instructed to tell potential customers. Mamá had lost three babies in the past two years and didn’t want to risk losing another. The one baby who’d survived lived only four days, his bones soft as clay. Then he got diarrhea, and his forehead sunk in, and he didn’t cry anymore.

  Shortly after Marta left school, her teacher came to their house wearing a flowered dress and white sandals. She tried to convince Mamá to keep our Martita in school, at least until she finished learning how to read. (Marta loved the way Señorita Dora said our Martita, as if Marta belonged to both of them.) Señorita Dora said that Marta had attended school for barely a year, and for a bright girl like her that wasn’t nearly enough.

  It was a shame, too, because Marta was finally figuring out the alphabet and running the letters together to form words. P-a-l-o-m-a-s. Doves. It seemed a miracle to her that entire stories were trapped in those haphazard scratches of black, stories that the best readers in the class could recite at the top of their lungs. The only thing she didn’t understand was why the words in the books didn’t sound the way real people talked.

  “Will you pay for my daughter’s food and her medicine when she’s sick?” Mamá asked the teacher in a rude tone that embarrassed Marta. Señorita Dora remained silent. “Ah, just as I thought. Then this is none of your concern.” The conversation ended there.

  “Daydreaming again?” a lilting voice rang out.

  It was Esperanza Núñez, coming down the street with a straw basket on her hip. Esperanza peddled ladies’ underwear door-to-door, mostly to rich housewives who bought her fancy panties and baby doll pajamas. She said that her customers must be putas in bed, judging by their purchases. Lately, all they wanted were items imported from Fran
ce that cost three times as much as the local products. Marta wondered how far away France was and why they made better underwear than the people right here in El Salvador.

  Esperanza leaned forward and Marta glimpsed in her basket a tantalizing array of silk and lace underthings—scanty red and black pieces with minute hooks and ribbons that gave off an unfamiliar perfume. Could women go to the bathroom wearing all that?

  A mariachi band blared mechanically from a radio, playing the theme song to a popular novela. Esperanza and her mother and every woman they knew listened to the radio show Amor Perdido at seven o’clock. It was about a spoiled, rich girl named Genovesa de Navarre, who, against the will of her family, snuck around with a tinsmith named Ambrosio Peón.

  “What does it mean when your heart dries out?” Marta blurted out. Mamá had said this at breakfast while reheating tortillas and beans. For a heart to dry out, this must be a terrible thing.

  “It means,” Esperanza began, sad like Mamá, “that sometimes a woman has to learn how to pretend love.”

  But how could anyone pretend that? Maybe it was like pretending you weren’t hungry when you really were. Marta wanted to ask Esperanza more questions but she kept her mouth shut. When people thought she wasn’t so curious, they spoke more freely in front of her. Tía Matilde, the kindest and prettiest of her aunts, told Marta that sometimes a person had to chew on the truth like a tough piece of meat to get any satisfaction.

  Now that she wasn’t in school, Marta would have to learn everything by herself. Like why canaries sang and other birds didn’t and could they all talk to each other. Or why her stepfather hit Mamá so hard that she had to buy face powder on credit to cover the bruises.

  Esperanza climbed the hill and rang the bell of La Casa Azul. It took forever for the iron gate to open. A plump woman appeared. Her eyes looked enormous, like a cow’s, with thick fringes of lashes. She wore a sleeveless nightgown with a collar of feathers. If Marta had seen her after dark she might have thought the woman was an angel, or a snowy owl (there was a picture of one at school), or the foamy edge of a wave.

  The sun felt hot on her head. If she didn’t get in the shade soon, the sun could burn a hole in her skull and the words and ideas accumulating inside might leak out. Marta settled the basket of clothes on her head and started down the hill. A breath of wind stirred the hibiscus. She looked over her shoulder and saw Esperanza offering a glossy black brassiere, like a baby vulture, to the woman in white.

  That afternoon, Marta went to her First Communion class at Holy Trinity Church. Sister Concepción only had to repeat a prayer twice for Marta to know it by heart. It was as if each word had its place in a procession, like the prancing horses in the Easter parade. In two Sundays she would walk down the aisle in her starched dress and veil, a bride of Christ, ready to receive His body.

  The church was downtown, not far from her brother’s tree. Evaristo had run away from home two months ago. After living in alleys and sleeping at the zoo (he liked the sloths and jungle monkeys best), he decided to move into an enormous coral tree near the Plaza Barrios. If Marta wanted to speak to him, she had to hoist herself up limb by limb and join him in the tree’s uppermost branches. He’d wedged a wooden platform there and hung a scrap of plastic for a roof. It was a miracle he didn’t fall and break his neck. Evaristo was stubborn, though. He’d suffered many thrashings from their mother but left the house after just one beating from their stepfather.

  Marta brought her brother tortillas and beans wrapped in a banana leaf along with a tomato she’d stolen from Mamá’s kitchen. She charged her customers a few extra cents in order to buy Evaristo treats. Once she brought him a chicken tamale with chili peppers, another time a slice of day-old marquesote that she got for next to nothing from the bakery around the corner. Evaristo loved lemon ice cones but it was impossible to carry these up to him in his tree.

  “My Communion is in ten days, hermanito. I want you to come.”

  A river of sparrows noisily flowed above them. Her brother turned toward the mountains, encircled with ash-colored clouds. From his perch, he saw many things: two purse snatchings; a prostitute servicing a customer in the heliotropes (her sour milk scent drifted up to him in his tree); a group of protesting students rounded up by the police.

  “Primero Dios,” Marta begged him. “You must forgive our stepfather, Evaristo. Remember our Lord’s great sacrifice.” She liked to repeat, word for word, what Sister Concepción said. This way her tongue wouldn’t trip on sins by mistake. If Marta didn’t know her brother so well, she would think that it was shame and not anger turning his skin pink.

  “Why don’t we work together?” She tried to sound encouraging. Marta knew that Evaristo shined shoes now and then. Once she saw him crossing La Avenida Independencia with his battered kit; another time polishing a businessman’s boots outside La Mariposa, the famous steak restaurant. She didn’t let on, though. Her brother was proud. Pride, too, she’d learned, was a sin.

  “If you don’t help me, who will? Maybe we could make paper flowers. I know where I can get some spine glue very cheap. Or we could sell oranges or brooms, it doesn’t matter.”

  Evaristo looked away.

  “Mamá’s getting really big.” Marta tried changing the subject. “I’m hoping it’s a girl this time.” Their mother’s stomach was flatter than during her other pregnancies. Everyone knew that a high, round stomach meant a boy and a flat, wide one meant a girl. It seemed to Marta that their mother was happiest when she was expecting a child, as if her live children meant less to her.

  She remembered Evaristo slipping out like a bloody tadpole from between Mamá’s legs. He’d weighed barely three pounds and had sores on his head that looked like mosquito bites. “This one has a taste for death,” the midwife said. She let Marta watch so that she wouldn’t be afraid when her own time came. They were living outside San Vicente then, with their real father. The next morning, Papá left to find work in Honduras and never returned.

  Everyone told Marta not to get too attached to her baby brother because he wouldn’t live long. No amount of rubbing alcohol or guarumo leaves would stop his fevers. The village women were making his angel wings—better to pray for death than let a sick baby suffer—when Evaristo unexpectedly recovered. Mamá didn’t report his birth at first, still convinced that he would die. Then she had to lie to the local officials about his birth date to avoid the five-colón fine.

  Evaristo almost died again when he was two years old. They’d been walking along the muddy riverbank near their family’s ranchito when he slipped and fell into the water. Down, down, down he sank, his eyes wide open, transfixed by the weeds and shiny fish. When he finally rose to the surface, Marta managed to pull him to shore by his hair. She carried him slung on her back like a sack of beans and staggered all the way home. That night, Evaristo woke up stinking of the camphor-coated banana leaves that covered him from head to toe.

  “I miss you,” Marta said, reaching for her brother’s hand. It was dirty and calloused but he allowed her to hold it. She petted his knuckles, soothing him like she did their mother’s chickens. At home the birds were everywhere, pecking through the rooms and the cement patio where the washing and cooking got done. Mamá let the chickens sleep in her hammock and had taken to raising a baby turkey in a woolen hat.

  “Look at this,” Marta said, pulling a pink plastic rosary from her pocket. “I won this for reciting the Hail Mary ten times without making a single mistake.”

  Evaristo took the rosary and examined it closely, fingering the edge of the crucifix. Marta swallowed hard. She felt something sticking in her throat, small and sharp as a hook. Long ago her father had hanged a rabid dog from their mango tree in the countryside so that the disease would float to heaven. Why was she thinking of this right now?

  “I’ve been praying a lot to the Virgins lately,” Marta said, coughing a little. “La María Auxiliadora. La Señora del Perpetuo Socorro. La Virgen del Carmen. I mean, I know they’re the same,
they’re all one Virgin. But I like hearing their different stories, how they appeared to ordinary people in their villages.”

  “Do you think the Virgin could visit us?” Evaristo asked, his head resting on his knees.

  “Maybe.”

  “Sometimes at night, I feel like there’s somebody next to me.”

  “Do you think it could be her?”

  “No creo. It’s probably just some bird.”

  Why did people make such a fuss about virgins, anyway? Not the Virgin Mary, but regular women. In their own family, scandals erupted over women whose “pitchers” were discovered broken on their wedding nights. Tía Matilde had told her the story of poor Luz, whose husband marched her back to her parents the night of her wedding. He’d beaten the truth out of her: that the one who’d gotten to her first was the parish priest. Of course, Luz was to blame no matter which picaflor had trapped her. She left her parents’ house in disgrace and nobody knew what became of her.

  “Don’t you miss listening to the radio?” Marta knew her brother was fond of sentimental rancheras, especially the one called “Look How My Heart Beats for You,” although he would rather die than admit this.

  “I have my birds.” Evaristo pointed to a solitaire, whistling its lonely fuiii fuiii on a nearby branch. He told Marta that solitaires liked to admire their reflections and drank water from street puddles, like dogs.

  A part of her secretly liked that Evaristo didn’t live like everyone else. None of her friends had a brother who lived in a tree. But she feared that he might fall prey to the Cipitío or the cadejos or other goblins, unprotected as he was among the leaves. And what about La Siguanaba, with her frozen skin and hairy hand, who looked to grab boys by their nipples?