At about four o’clock, Delia sent Marta out to buy more wine coolers at the liquor store on Entrada Avenue. She was supposed to buy sparklers for the kids, too, if she could find any. The doorbell rang and a postman handed Enrique a special delivery letter from Iran. A delivery on a holiday? His last letters to Leila had gone unanswered for months. He didn’t know what to believe anymore. A part of him was giving up on her entirely; another part still wanted her to make him hope. Who was it that said the devil tortured men by keeping them waiting?
The letter was postmarked two weeks earlier, on their birthday. The stationery was thick and cream-colored and her handwriting was perfect, as if Leila had written a draft before copying out what she wanted to say. Enrique couldn’t focus on most of what she’d written. He tried to slow down his reading, but none of what she said made sense. Why was she apologizing to him? Why couldn’t she visit him? Had her husband found out about their affair?
Leila’s letter only went round and round with incomprehensible sorrow. There were no specifics, no promises, no explanations, just this one fact: she wasn’t coming to California. Enrique felt like overturning the damn barbecue, uprooting his jasmine vines, anything to relieve his frustration. Why couldn’t he convince her to trust him? Why couldn’t he convince himself? He read the letter for the tenth time, looking for a clue. Miserable, he jammed the letter in his pocket and returned to the backyard party.
Just then everything happened so fast that he couldn’t have related it with any coherence. In retrospect, every piece of the sequence might have been anticipated, recognized for its importance, for where it could lead. Accidents didn’t happen all at once. He had to believe that. What could be more predictable than a barbecue on the Fourth of July?
Yet it seemed to Enrique that everything did occur simultaneously: the girasoles’ faint lace in the sky; Marta gone off to the liquor store with forty dollars in her purse; the arrival of Leila’s last letter, with its sad, circular language; the kids crowding into the twins’ room to play Monopoly; the adults so busy with their card games and conversations that nobody—not one of the twelve of them—saw Marta’s son slip into the deep end of the pool.
Enrique returned to the backyard party and spotted the boy floating facedown in the water, his shorts ballooning a bright red. For a second he thought it might be Fernandito, and his heart jumped up his throat. As he raced toward the pool he saw that it was the babysitter’s son and immediately dove in after him. After the shock of the cold water, time slowed to an impossible degree. Enrique swam as hard as he could, terrified that he would run out of breath before reaching the boy.
José Antonio was unconscious, his skin sallow and cold. Enrique tucked him under one arm and pulled him to the edge of the pool. Gently, he settled the boy on the lawn. José Antonio’s head flopped to one side. Water poured from every orifice. Enrique pinched the boy’s nostrils, pressing his mouth over José Antonio’s. It tasted, disconcertingly, of potato chips. Above them, the palm trees rustled.
The children raced downstairs when they heard the commotion and started screaming, convinced that José Antonio was dead. But Enrique could feel the boy’s pulse and knew he still had a chance. José Antonio’s chest rose and fell with every breath. Then his jaw began moving from side to side. Suddenly, his eyes opened wide and he stared straight at Enrique. His pupils fanned closed like dark petals. Enrique leaned the boy forward and patted him on the back until everything in his stomach came up pale yellow.
“There’s still time for you,” Enrique whispered and held him close.
In life there was a before and an after, Enrique believed, a gap between what you wanted and what you got, between what you planned and what actually happened. There were no advance warnings, no billboards advertising a tragedy to come. The moment before always seemed so ordinary, like any other. Pink programs and straw hats whirling through the air. Wayward storks landing in a confusion of feathers and legs. It hurt Enrique to remember this.
There was no convincing “why” to anything, no answers, just good luck or bad tilting life one way or another. Enrique didn’t put faith in odds, or statistics, or reason anymore. Some things just couldn’t be outrun. Odds might be calculated, inattention focused, reasoning torn apart. But luck, he thought, luck was something else entirely.
By the time Marta returned from the liquor store, José Antonio was warmly wrapped in a beach towel and drinking hot chocolate. The soft stems of his legs jutted out from the white terry cloth. Fernandito tried to cheer him up by performing a magic trick but ended up dropping an egg on his foot instead. After checking his vital signs one last time, the ambulance crew packed up and left.
Marta was inconsolable, provoking defensiveness in the guests. “It could’ve happened to any of us,” the preschool teacher said. But Enrique could tell that Marta didn’t believe her. Meticulously, she checked her son for bruises and kissed him all over. At the liquor store she said she’d imagined wings on his back, like the ones Salvadoran women made for sick babies, the ones who couldn’t be saved. She’d rushed back to the house frightened to death.
Without warning Marta handed Enrique her purse, picked up her son, and started walking purposefully toward the sea. Enrique followed her, still soaking wet from the pool. What else could possibly happen this afternoon? Soon the whole party was following Marta to the beach—a half-dressed parade of his neighbors and their children holding Fourth of July sparklers (Marta had brought back a sack of them) and paper flags. A propeller plane hovered above the shoreline. A couple of miles to the south, the Ferris wheel on the Santa Monica pier turned. Enrique longed to hear its carnival tune.
The coast curved in both directions, looking as though the ends might eventually meet. Only the horizon was straight, two distinct shades of blue. The sun was so bright, it made everything glitter. Seagulls drifted overhead, calling to one another and shedding feathers. The beach was sticky with seaweed and tar. Enrique wasn’t sure what to do. Around him, people were jogging and picnicking and playing volleyball as if nothing bad ever happened. The children, led by his daughters, begged to go swimming but Enrique held them back.
Marta strode to the ocean’s edge, set José Antonio down in the sand, and instructed him not to move. “Watch me,” she ordered. Marta plunged into the cold water—to her hips, to her waist, to her chest and neck. A wave rolled over her, soft and enormous. She sputtered and rubbed the salt water from her eyes but quickly turned and waved to her son. Enrique watched her in silence from the shore. He was afraid that Marta might sink but instead she rose with the very next wave. Then in a synchrony of arms, legs, and lungs, Marta swam.
Epilogue
Evaristo
Evaristo had a difficult time remembering things. He was only twenty-six but it seemed to him that he was forgetting many lives’ worth of detail and incident. Perhaps it was this forgetting that was congesting his skull, splitting it with pain and dizziness. If he didn’t remember what he’d seen, nobody would. There were countless dead without anyone to speak for them, without anyone to say: I am your witness. But it was no good for him to sit by himself in the mountains. His silence was killing them all over again.
Evaristo lived alone on a remote hilltop with the money Marta sent him monthly from Los Angeles. She’d given him enough to build his wooden house, too: one room painted blue as the winter sky, with a tin roof and a door for each of the four walls. He’d built the house himself with help from a maguey spinner who lived downvalley. Evaristo had wanted each door to face precisely north, east, south, and west and so he’d bought a compass for this purpose.
After the house was finished, Evaristo hired a photographer to climb up the hill and take a picture of it. The portly man set up his tripod, slipped under a mysterious black cloth, and fainted. Evaristo had to revive him with a splash of river water. “Dear Marta,” he wrote on the back of the photograph in shaky block letters. “See how you help me find peace. Your loving brother.” Marta wrote back with the subsequent m
onth’s fifty dollars: “My dearest Evaristo, May God bless you and your little piece of sky. Forever yours, Marta.”
It was unusual for a man in the mountains of Morazán to live alone, without family or farming skills, but nobody ever asked Evaristo why he was there. Rumors sprang up about him, none of which he tried to dispel. People said that he’d come to the mountains to escape a witch, that he was dying of a liver disease that blackened his blood, that his heart was broken by an ill-advised love. Who couldn’t see this in his eyes? Still, his neighbors understood that the less they knew about him, about any stranger, the safer they were.
Each dawn Evaristo set his cane-backed chair outside the east door and slowly, dragging his chair inch by inch along the swept dirt girdling his house, followed the slow course of the sun. During the rainy season, he stayed inside with his doors wide open, lying in his hammock and watching the clouds descend on the mountains. He got up only to eat: tortillas and beans with eggs or a wedge of cheese. At night, he spent his time reading the hourless stars.
Over the summer, a businessman had opened a boot factory in Gotera and convinced the young people to abandon the fields and work for him. One evening he showed up at Evaristo’s place. “¡Qué vergüenza! A strong ox like you sitting around doing nothing. I’ll see you tomorrow at sunrise.” But the following morning, Evaristo arranged his chair for another day of minding the sun.
When the pain in his head subsided, memories taunted him like sharp filaments of light. The priests with sticks up their asses. The schoolgirls taken away by the guardias and raped. The year in the border prison awaiting deportation. A fat-bellied gunrunner from Jalisco had tried to force himself on Evaristo (the pendejo had climbed into his bunk in the middle of the night) but Evaristo had gouged out the man’s right eye. For this, he’d been put in a cell by himself.
It was noon and the mountains shone in the clear air. Not a shred was left of the morning fog. Evaristo traced the outline of individual pines with his forefinger, the arch of an abandoned church, its bell silently tolling for the dead. The barren mountaintops rose above the pines like a row of balding monks. To the north, directly over the sorghum fields, a flock of vultures circled. If only he could be like them, Evaristo thought, unhurried and free of anger.
The corn on the hillsides was almost ripe and Evaristo planned to help his neighbors with the harvest. The farmers joked about his uncalloused city hands, but they appreciated his strength. So many of them had been idled by the war, left with only leg stumps or half an arm, stripped to uselessness like that military jeep down the road.
If he listened closely, Evaristo could hear the river, an hour’s walk away. Last month, a curandera had come to visit him, smelling of bay leaves and mint. After her invocations and a sprinkling of purifying water, she’d advised him to bathe in the river every Sunday. Only regular baptisms, she said, could make him forget the evil he’d seen. But Evaristo didn’t want to forget, and he refused to go.
Today the river seemed to whisper the names of nearby villages: Cacaopera, Jocoatique, Meanguera, Arambala, Perquín. In Los Angeles, Evaristo had heard many beautiful names, too; Spanish names that had nothing to do with the places they described—El Monte, Sierra Bonita, La Cienega—names chewed up like gum in the Americans’ mouths.
A few yards from Evaristo’s house, a canary made its nest in a banana tree. It sang to him at dusk, sad songs, each one different from the next. As Evaristo watched the skies, he imagined that the canary was his sister come to his side. He laughed to think of this, and the sound of his own voice startled him. The canary stared at him until he grew quiet again. Then it fluttered to a lower leaf of the tree and began another woeful song.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
To my kind, unwavering friends and generous readers, thank you: Chris Abani; Wendy Calloway; Bobbie Bristol; José Garriga; Micheline Aharonian Marcom; Alice van Straalen; Bobby Antoni; Scott Brown; Richard Gilbert; Shideh Motamed-Zadeh; and, most especially, Ernesto Mestre; my sister Laura García; and my husband, Bruce Wood. Special thanks to Won Kim for ongoing support, to Ana Sánchez Granados for continual inspiration, and to Erika Abrahamian for her linguistic expertise. The biggest thanks of all, of course, goes to my daughter, Pilar García-Brown, for her irreverence, her humor, and her love.
ALSO BY CRISTINA GARCÍA
Monkey Hunting
The Agüero Sisters
Dreaming in Cuban
EDITOR
Bordering Fires: The Vintage Book of Contemporary Mexican and Chicano/a Literature ¡Cubanísimo! The Vintage Book of Contemporary
Cuban Literature
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Cristina García was born in Havana and grew up in New York City. She is the author of Dreaming in Cuban, a finalist for the National Book Award; The Agüero Sisters; and Monkey Hunting. Her books have been translated into a dozen languages. Ms. García has been a Guggenheim Fellow, a Hodder Fellow at Princeton University, and the recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award. She lives in California’s Napa Valley with her daughter and husband.
This Is a Borzoi Book
Published by Alfred A. Knopf
Copyright © 2007 by Cristina García
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
www.aaknopf.com
Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to Hal Leonard Corporation for permission to reprint an excerpt from “Roadhouse Blues,” words and music by The Doors. Copyright © 1970 by Doors Music Co. Copyright renewed. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of Hal Leonard Corporation.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
García, Cristina, [date]
A handbook to luck / Christina García.—1st ed.
p. cm.
Novel.
I. Title.
PS3557.A66H36 2007
813'.54—dc22 2006048736
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
eISBN: 978-0-307-26722-1
v3.0
A Handbook to Luck Page 22