Marta and José Antonio crossed themselves with holy water before entering Saint Cecilia’s church. It took a moment for their eyes to adjust to the dim light. The same viejitas occupied the front pews: Doña Filomena, whose eldest was awaiting trial in Houston for killing his girlfriend, and Doña Anselma, who, though childless, prayed for everyone else’s wayward children. Nearby the three widowed sisters—Leoncia, Eugenia, and Saturnina—sat in their identical black shawls. The sisters had been married to carpenter triplets from Tegucigalpa who, tragically, had been killed on Highway 60 when their truck was hit by an eighteen-wheeler filled with porcelain sinks.
A scent of sandalwood incense filled the air. Marta nodded to the women, who blinked with astonishment at their fancy clothes. Then she led José Antonio to La Virgen’s alcove, where they offered her red tulips from their garden. Marta wound her old rosary around her son’s clasped hands and together they prayed for the great blessing of José Antonio’s impending citizenship. “We couldn’t have done it without you, Virgencita.”
José Antonio pointed to the stained-glass window showing a distraught Saint Cecilia imploring God for salvation. Saint Cecilia had made a vow of chastity as a young girl, Marta told her son, and she’d kept it in spite of her parents marrying her off to a nobleman. “I want you to think of Saint Cecilia when the girls start coming around and wanting you to do this and that.”
“I don’t like girls,” José Antonio said, sticking out his tongue.
“That’s right. And remember that nobody but Mami is allowed to touch you down there or give you a bath. ¿Me entiendes bien?”
“Sí, Mami.”
“Whenever you’re tempted to do something bad, you’ll feel the hot breath of the devil on your neck. Do you know what to do then?”
“Step on his tail!” José Antonio shouted and stamped his foot.
“Just like that. Then if you’re very quiet, you’ll feel the flutter of your guardian angel on your cheek, just like a butterfly. That’s the brush of his wings, letting you know that you’re safe again.”
It pleased Marta to see the votive candles burning so cheerfully. She gave her son a dollar for the offerings box, seventy-five cents more than her usual. José Antonio stared at the flames. His eyes looked translucent, as though light were shining through them. How could there be enough room in her heart to hold all the love she felt?
Frankie adored him, too. He was teaching José Antonio to speak Korean and cut his steak into tiny pieces so he wouldn’t choke. Each day their love grew, embroidered with tender efforts. What would it be like to love their son five years from now, or ten? Marta felt sorry for the women who expended all their emotions on husbands and lovers. Men came and went—this was a law of the universe—but children were forever.
Marta lit a candle and watched the gray, petaled smoke rise to heaven. As she pulled the stick from the flame, a drop of wax landed on her thumb. She thought of Dinora’s candles, stuck with straight pins, foretelling the future. A single red-hot pin meant unrequited love. Wax that melted into the shape of a foot warned of a straying husband (no surprise there). A cascade of wax on the candle’s right side signaled a windfall of money.
Confessions were under way on the other side of the church. Marta left José Antonio sitting with the widowed sisters and entered the booth of Padre Ramón, the young priest recently ordained in Guatemala. Everyone said that Padre Ramón was understanding, certainly more so than that doomsday Irish pastor, who warned every penitent that they were on the brink of eternal damnation.
“This is embarrassing for me to admit, Padre, but lately I’ve been thinking of another man when my husband makes love to me.”
“Who do you think of, hija?”
“Well, you know that actor Félix Curbela? The one who plays the evil brother on Mala Sangre?”
“I’m afraid I don’t.”
“Ay, he’s very, very handsome. All the women love him. Bueno, every time I picture him smoothing his mustache, I feel something inside me I can’t explain. Is this adultery, Padre?”
“No, hija. But perhaps you can try to think of something less, shall we say, inflammatory?”
“I’ll try, Padre.”
“Now, is there anything else?”
“I lied to the immigration officials so that my son could become a citizen.”
“Have you prayed to our Lord Jesus Christ for guidance?”
“Sí, Padre, but I haven’t received an answer yet.”
“Has the matter been settled?”
“Primero Dios, this morning he becomes a yanqui.”
“Then God’s will be done.”
Outside the immigration office, a jacaranda tree was in full bloom. Marta took this as a good omen. A cluster of aloe plants girded the entrance of the building. With her pocketknife, Marta cut off a thick leaf. A bit of aloe sap would help heal her son’s forehead better than any nurse’s ointments, and the cut wouldn’t leave a scar.
A woman wearing the traditional apron of Oaxaca sold chicken tamales and churros from her cart. Marta was hungry again, but she didn’t want to risk staining her clothes before the ceremony. Instead she bought an American flag from a Chinese vendor and gave it to José Antonio, who waved it as if he were in a parade. With the little flag and the bandage on his head, he looked like a tiny war veteran.
In the government building, over three hundred people were gathered in their Sunday best to take their vows of citizenship. The air was close and thick as wool. Marta removed her son’s Panama hat. She looked around and recognized a few faces from her previous visits. She was glad to see that Willi Piedra, the composer from Veracruz, had made it this far. And Cresencia Ortíz was here with her two teenaged sons, whom she’d managed to bring over from Chiapas. They were handsome boys, quiet and malnourished looking. A year from now, they would be fluent in English and each twenty pounds heavier.
A sense of excitement pervaded the hall as the judge entered. Everyone was trying to stay calm until they were sworn in. It wasn’t an easy thing to become an American citizen if you were poor and came from a little country like El Salvador. It took lawyers and more money than anybody had. It took patience and prayers and a willingness to wait and wait and possibly still lose everything. Marta rubbed the evil eye charm pinned inside José Antonio’s jacket. When he became a citizen, it would be a matter of public record that he was Marta’s son. Then they could shout to the skies: “We belong here!” And nobody, nobody could take that away.
June 20
Leila
It was a hot summer morning near the Caspian Sea. Leila stood on the balcony of her villa and looked out over the blue water. In the eaves, a mourning dove was cooing over the fledglings in her nest. The winds were shifting south, ruffling the sea. A patch of clouds was darkening like a slow stain across the skies. A man stood by the edge of the sea gutting fish. Leila had read in the local paper that the number of sturgeon in the sea had shrunk by twenty-five percent. Thousands of seals, turtles, and migratory birds were also dying. What decided these natural catastrophes?
The kitchen was nearly empty. Leila had given away most of the villa’s contents to the people in town. Only the chandeliers, the grandfather clock, a side table, and two chairs remained of the furniture. Her husband knew nothing of this because he hadn’t been to the villa in a year. Leila made herself a cup of tea and set out her breakfast: flatbread with cherry preserves and dates. Then she served herself a dish of coffee ice cream, crushing a few walnuts with the flat of a knife and sprinkling them on top. It cheered her up to have a little ice cream with breakfast.
Today was Leila’s birthday. She was twenty-nine years old. Nobody had remembered it—not her daughter, not her husband, not her father or friends. The grandfather clock in the dining room chimed nine times. She’d listened to it every hour for the past two days. Every minute weighed on her like a tiny sinker, dragging her to an airless place. It was worst after midnight, when the glaze of another day seemed unbearable and the stars lo
oked so shockingly white.
Leila felt guilty leaving her daughter in Tehran with a sore throat but she knew the servants would take good care of her. All Mehri had to do was call and someone would be there to sharpen her pencils, or bring her a cup of tea, or pick up one of her blue exercise books from the floor. Already, she’d forgotten the dream of going to California.
The water level of the Caspian was rising an average of eighteen centimeters a year for reasons that were mysterious to scientists. Was it the clearing of the local land for agriculture that had increased the runoff? Were the underlying movements of tectonic plates responsible? (Seismologists were detecting an unprecedented amount of activity below the sea.) Was it the increase in rainfall? Nobody knew for certain. The Caspian was thirty meters below sea level. Leila studied the graceful curve of the coast and thought it only a matter of time before they were all underwater.
It was confusing to organize the day’s pills. Dr. Pezechpour made certain not to give Leila enough at any one time to kill herself, but she’d still managed to collect quite a few. (He’d told her that Iranians killed themselves with stunning infrequency. Was this supposed to be encouraging?) The silver bracelet Enrique had given her was tucked next to her peach-colored pills. Leila slipped it on. It felt heavier than she’d remembered.
There were few psychiatrists left in Iran. Baba had inquired discreetly among his colleagues until he’d found Dr. Pezechpour at the University of Tehran, teaching anatomy and willing to see Leila on the sly. Dr. Pezechpour could be trenchant but he was annoyingly fond of maxims. “Iranians are like wheat fields,” he said. “When the storm comes, they bend; when the storm passes, they stand up again.” He never considered abandoning the storm altogether.
Behind the villa, the Alborz Mountains shone blue-black in the sunlight. The cypress trees formed a protective ring around her house, giving off a sharp, medicinal scent. What would she give to go running naked into the sea? Men were judged by the risks they took. And women? By how few. In April, Sadegh had changed his mind and forbidden her to leave the country. No amount of begging would make him relent. Do you think I’m stupid, Leila? A fool with no eyes in my head? It was her own fault, she decided, for losing weight and getting those beauty treatments. Her husband knew she wasn’t looking this good for him. Tell me who you were planning to see in California! Tell me, whore, or I’ll have you locked up for adultery! Leila retreated to her room and stayed there for days.
New hatcheries were rising up along the Caspian. Breeders were releasing millions of sturgeon fingerlings into the waves. The hope was that the fingerlings would grow and produce more of the roe that was selling for hundreds of dollars per kilo on the world market. How many lives, Leila wondered, depended on this caviar? She pictured herself slowly entering the sea, surrounded by fingerlings, her chador snatched by the wind like a lost, dark kite.
What would Enrique remember of her then? And Mehri? Would she join forces with Sadegh to vilify her? Sometimes Leila looked at her daughter and knew she was raising a girl who would end up hating her.
Others had managed to find a sense of purpose. Maman was happily married to Mr. Fifield, who’d just bought the biggest landscape architecture firm in Great Britain. Yasmine had left the country and was studying engineering in Munich. (In her last letter she’d quoted some German: “Every hour moves through your heart and the last one kills.”) Uncles and aunts and cousins were forging new lives overseas. But Leila merely had the sensation of no sensation, of being outside her body, of watching it from a faraway shore that was already vanishing.
Her bathrobe slipped off one shoulder and Leila gazed down at her body, sheathed in its soiled nightgown. She’d grown flaccid again, heavy with gravity. She was what she couldn’t have imagined becoming: a matron, a housewife, a nobody. Was this, too, written on her brow? There were two cigarettes left in her pack. She secured one between her lips and lit it. How satisfying to feel the hot smoke filling her lungs. She smoked and swept the apartment to calm her nerves. Sometimes she read poetry. The birds have gone in search of the blue direction. The horizon is vertical, vertical, and movement fountain-like and at the limits of vision shining planets spin.
The same dream plagued Leila night after night: peasant women, their faces veiled, gathered around her in groups of three or four, unraveling mountains of fine thread for hosiery factories. Would they use the untangled strands on the spindles, idle in the dim corners of the room? Would they make something beautiful and new? When she told Dr. Pezechpour her dream, he said: “No matter how fast you run, your shadow keeps up.”
Leila went to her bedroom and extracted the tan suitcase from the closet. It contained the wet suit that Enrique had sent her for her birthday seven years ago. She unfolded the rubbery legs, creased from so much time in storage. They looked as if they might crawl around on their own. The flippers were faded but still sturdy and good. She set everything down by the front door of the villa.
This afternoon she would write to Enrique on her best stationery and apologize to him for raising his hopes. She would say that it wasn’t enough anymore for the seasons to turn, for the mourning dove to tend to her fledglings. Everything was a copy of something else, unoriginal, uninspiring. She would tell him that all she wanted now was to follow the birds in a blue direction, learn more than she knew before. (Last night she’d seen an owl swoop past her window, its eyes swathed in white like gleaming bandages, and she’d imagined it was her brother.) Maybe the end was like the beginning, she would say, all loneliness and nothingness.
Leila lit her last cigarette. Outside her window, wooden boats methodically plowed the sea. How much sturgeon would be harvested from the Caspian today? Leila no longer cared. She didn’t believe in the sea anymore. With the French doors of the balcony shut, the villa was, at last, completely silent. Even the leaves of the cypress trees were mute. Leila extinguished her cigarette in the crystal ashtray and watched the smoke drift through her fingers. She noticed the veins in her right hand, the way they wound around her wrist. Her pulse was surprisingly steady, like the strokes of the clock announcing the hour.
July 4
Enrique
The Fourth of July started out promisingly enough, pure and hot. The neighbors trickled in with their children and fruit pies, cole slaw and ice cream. Marta arrived to help with the party and brought her son along. Soon the kids were clamoring to jump in the pool. The boys from down the block insisted on holding a swimming contest but Camille and Sirenita won every race. Enrique knew it was petty, but he loved that his daughters beat every boy in the neighborhood. Those expensive swimming lessons had really paid off.
Enrique offered his guests beer and wine coolers. Everyone was drinking heavily but nobody seemed the worse for it in this sun. He felt a slight buzz himself, which made him blandly anxious. Enrique looked around at his life—the children in the pool, his wife tossing a salad, the solidity of his house and his neighborhood (they didn’t have an ocean view but they were a short walk to the ocean), the hummingbird whirring near his newly planted jasmine. Did any of this really belong to him?
Things weren’t ideal at home but they were still better than he could’ve hoped for growing up. The hotel rooms and cheap apartments that he and Papi had lived in had seemed normal at the time. Nobody they knew would’ve told them differently. The truth was that there was no logic to their existence, but it existed all the same. And they’d been happy in their own way. What Enrique worried about most in those days was that his father would die before him. Now that the worst had happened, what else did he have to fear?
Maybe his childhood had ruined him for any ordinary life. He never trusted when things were good, at least not in any calculable way. He wasn’t even sure what “good” meant. In any case, it probably wasn’t how most people defined it. Besides, what did “good” matter when it could so easily disappear? Since he’d begun corresponding with Leila, he’d been tempted to walk away from his life every day. It scared him that he might be cap
able of this.
Enrique wanted to go to Las Vegas for a while and clear his head. Nothing else focused his attention like a high-stakes poker game. He missed the twenty-four-hour neon, and the crowds on Fremont Street, and the endless sunsets at Red Rock Canyon. And he could always count on a good table at the Diamond Pin. Last he’d heard, Jim Gumbel had remarried and Johnny Langston had shot up the giant cowboy at the Pioneer Club that repeated, Howdy pardner, welcome to Las Vegas. How else was he supposed to get any sleep?
Enrique planned to take his son with him this time, show him where Papi used to perform. Already, Fernandito could do a few decent magic tricks, including one with fake blood and a stuffed vampire bat that made his sisters scream. For his birthday he’d asked for a fine top hat and a magic wand just like his grandfather’s. It unsettled Enrique to think that Fernandito might follow in Papi’s footsteps. How was it possible to both encourage and protect his son? It pained him to think of leaving his children. No matter their troubles, Papi hadn’t abandoned him.
The barbecue was sizzling with burgers and prime cuts of steak. The women, slightly sunburned and wearing pastels and plaids, were bunched together in a far corner of the patio. Their husbands settled around the picnic table for a poker game. Enrique had known most of the men for years—several were regulars at the Grand Casino—but nobody ever exchanged anything more than a few pro forma complaints about the Dodgers.
The afternoon whistled with early fireworks. The kids climbed out of the pool, towel-wrapped and shivering, and ate their cheeseburgers and chips, except for Fernandito, who was busy practicing a trick with brown eggs and pennies. One of the mothers, a preschool teacher, read a story to the younger children about a lonely circus elephant. Enrique remembered the poster from Varadero from his and Papi’s first apartment in Santa Monica. In the poster, an elephant with a jeweled headdress stood on its hind legs warily eyeing the ringmaster while a tiger roared behind them. No animals—humans included—were meant to be domesticated, Enrique decided. It took away their fire for survival.
A Handbook to Luck Page 21