A Handbook to Luck (23 page)

Epilogue

Evaristo

E
varisto 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 month'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