A Handbook to Luck (3 page)

“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?

Marta watched two
garrobo
lizards chase each other around the trunk of the tree. In lean times people roasted the lizards, skewering them on sticks. Everyone swore that if you closed your eyes, the lizards tasted like chicken.

“Okay, I'll go with you for a while,” Evaristo said, giving her back the rosary and shimmying down the tree. “Did you hear about that mechanic in Soyapango?”

How did her brother get the latest news? The night before, a friend of their uncle's was hacked to pieces by drunks with machetes in the center of town. Was it bad luck or God's will? This was the family argument whenever anybody died unexpectedly. Tía Patricia had lost two husbands in five years. Now everyone whispered that she was one of those white-spleened women who caused the violent deaths of their men.

“Do you know Jacinto López, the boy who sells firewood?” Marta blushed, linking her arm with her brother's.

“Is he bothering you?” Evaristo demanded.

Marta was pleased. If it came down to it, her brother would defend her. “He's declared his love for me.”

“Do you like him then?”

“Not so much.”

Marta enjoyed talking to Jacinto, though. He was smart and funny and he snuck into movies without paying. Afterward he told her the plots of the American westerns, playing out every scene. He was so good at dying that Marta often mistook his acting for reality. But Jacinto was too scrawny, like a stick in one of his firewood bundles. She preferred big, tall men like her father. Evaristo was spindly but he would probably grow as big as Papá one day.

“So where do you go when it rains?” Marta asked.

“Nowhere special.”

Marta didn't stay much drier at home. The water seeped through the tin roof, which was patched here and there with wads of plastic. Marta stored her Communion dress (her cousin Erlinda's secondhand one) in her mother's cardboard suitcase to keep it dry.

“You know what Mamá did today?”

“What?”

“She spat on the floor and told me to run to the store and get her more face powder. She said that if I wasn't back by the time the spit dried, she would beat me.”

“Did you make it?” Evaristo asked.

“Sí,”
Marta said. “I did.”

Evaristo

It rains all night long. The birds are huddled together on the thickest branch. At least there'll be worms in the morning, they say, plenty of worms. It's hard to sleep. Everything stinks. Flowers. Donkey shit. I can't see the stars through the clouds. The rain doesn't stop. Big fat drops. A lot happens under my tree. Only the birds see what I see. But they never shut up. This seed or that one. That bug or this one. The same stupid fights. Don't believe me if you don't want to, but I'm telling the truth. Up here, the water's still warm from the sky.

(1970)

Leila Rezvani

B
efore her mother imported the horticulturist from London, the garden was a friendlier place. Leila Rezvani walked along its manicured paths, past a showy rhododendron and a fountain painted with doves. A thin film of moisture coated every leaf and petal. The roses looked perfect, delicate and darkly veined. Yet to her the garden seemed decorous and static, like a roomful of her mother's friends. There was no comfortable place to sit anymore, nowhere to think or watch the clouds. She missed the date palms and the stubborn pomegranate tree and the old poplars and plane trees, too. Their previous gardener, a dwarf from Tabriz, used to coax peonies from the parched earth, laying down straw in early spring to protect them from frost.

When her family had first moved to the northern part of Tehran, her mother complained that their home was too close to the mountains, that the soil was spongy and wild rabbits came to graze on what little she grew. A proper garden was impossible. Leila hated their new home because there was no one her age to play with—only her older brother, Hosein, who disdained girls. That was six years ago. Now there were many more families in the neighborhood and Leila's best friend, Yasmine, lived right down the street. Together they listened to the Beatles and tried on their mothers' makeup and designer evening gowns.

The horticulturist, Mr. Fifield, had arrived in the middle of January. By May he had the garden blooming with exotic flora: boxwood hedges, blue hydrangeas, dogwoods, azaleas, periwinkles. He left no room for native species. Gone were the cypress and greengage trees, the narcissi and asphodels. Even the butterflies were driven away. Mr. Fifield's foreign vegetation drank enormous quantities of water, which was pumped in by a complex system of pipes and wells, prompting Leila's father to grumble, “How long do you think, Fatemeh, before we drain the country of water? Do you want to live under the sea then?”

Mr. Fifield inspected the English ivy along the garden's back wall as Maman rapturously watched. Leila didn't like the way her mother hovered around the Englishman, complimenting him, ordering that tea and sweets be brought to him on silver trays. Maman took extra care with her lipstick, too, a fierce shade of red that didn't suit her. And since when had she worn her skirts so short, flaunting her plump knees like a schoolgirl?

“Leila, go inside and bring Mr. Fifield a glass of lemonade,” her mother insisted. “Hurry now. Don't keep him waiting.”

Leila detested the Englishman. To her, he looked like one of those stiff-stemmed magnolias he'd planted. She especially hated the lilting way he spoke to her mother, elongating the first vowel of her name as if he were out of breath.

“Ah, my dear Faaatemeh,” Mr. Fifield sighed, his hair damp from his toils. “
You
are the vital perfume of this garden.”

Why couldn't Maman see through his flattering nonsense?

Sometimes Leila concocted dramas with the flowers to help take her mind off him and the fact that her brother was dying. Lilacs were definitely aristocratic and Leila cast them in regal roles. Petunias had an air of villainy about them, lovely and evil with their deceitful funnels. Lilies of the valley were excitable girls with an annoying tendency to swoon. Yesterday Leila had learned the word
virgin
from Yasmine, who'd heard it from an older cousin. It was curious to her that people could be defined as much by what they were as by what they weren't.

Her brother slept all day long. Not even the gusting winds woke him. Hosein was four years older and for most of their growing up had shown no interest in her. He hadn't been unkind, just indifferent. Mostly Leila had watched him from afar, as if he were a god. Since his illness, Hosein spoke to her more often, bestowing small compliments: the becoming blue of her blouse; her glossy hair pulled back in a single braid. His attentions pleased Leila, but they also made her uneasy.

Earlier today, Leila had brought him a bit of lavash and mint tea but Hosein wanted only sugar cubes to suck on. He said it was the last thing left he could really taste.

During Ramezan, Hosein had been exempt from fasting on account of his illness. He couldn't eat much without vomiting, anyway. Yet the scent of his meager portions of lamb and rice drove everyone mad with hunger and envy. Each day he drenched his bed with sweat, growing thin as a stalk of wheat. He missed the entire school year and wouldn't be returning to Switzerland to finish his studies.

Over Christmas, the doctors in London diagnosed Hosein with a rare form of leukemia. They prescribed their strongest painkillers and gave him four or five months to live. Out of desperation, Baba tried giving him experimental drugs. At first Hosein improved but then the treatments only made him sicker. By the time Baba turned for help to his superstitious sister, Aunt Parvin (who recommended an “egg breaker” to find out who'd cursed him), Leila knew her brother would die. No amount of medicine, or prayer, or exorcism would cure him.

Nobody in the family admitted that Hosein was dying, but nobody denied it anymore either. Leila wondered what it would be like to be dead. Was it a permanent silence, where nothing, not a leaf or the slightest breeze, ever stirred?

Next year she would leave for Switzerland to attend Hosein's old boarding school on the shores of Lake Geneva. She would receive a generous monthly allowance and perfect her English and French (she'd attended the trilingual International Academy since kindergarten). Children from the world's finest families were accepted to the Swiss school, Maman told her, and Leila would make many important friends. Eventually she would go to college in America, as Hosein would have done. But first, Maman insisted, Leila would need to have her nose fixed. (“We'll just have that nasty Rezvani bump shaved off and bring in the tip a little…”)

Leila entered the kitchen, rousing the cook from her nap. “Maman wants lemonade for the Englishman,” she said.

“Besm-Allah-o-Rahman-e-Rahim,”
Nasrin recited automatically as she sliced and juiced ten lemons. She looked continually weary, as if her very existence burdened her. Around her, the copper pots gleamed.

Leila found it irritating that Nasrin quoted the Koran for the most mundane of tasks. Polishing the marble floors and beating the day's dust from the rugs called for longer recitations. Nasrin put cookies and pistachios in gold-rimmed dishes and arranged them on a tray with the fresh lemonade. She wanted to deliver the refreshments herself but Leila insisted on carrying the tray.

“Silly girl, what took you so long?” Maman scolded her in English.

Leila watched Mr. Fifield pour gin from a silver flask into his lemonade. He offered some to her mother and she accepted, giggling. This would likely go on all afternoon. The Englishman's forehead was blotchy where his sunburned skin was peeling. Behind them, the sky spread its thick haze.

Leila wondered if the changes in the garden were confusing to the birds that had lived there before. Was one perch the same as another to the blue rollers and the gray hooded crows? Why hadn't the swallows built their usual nests in the eaves? And where were the nightingales? It was difficult for her to study the birds now, to watch their takeoffs and landings amid all this strange foliage.

“What can I do with a lazy girl like this?” Maman asked, as if Leila's shortcomings were a fit subject for conversation. “In the sun all day, turning her skin brown as a farmer's. And that nose! She certainly didn't get it from my side of the family.”

Leila was tired of hearing about her mother's family—White Russians and Christians who'd immigrated to Iran after 1917 and thought themselves superior to Persians. Yes, their noses were smaller but so was everything else about them. According to Aunt Parvin, the Petrovnas had grown impoverished in less than a generation and Maman had had to support them with her nursing career. Naturally, Maman denied this. But nobody denied that Fatemeh Petrovna had been a great beauty in her day. It had taken Nader Rezvani, a young heart surgeon, the better part of a year to outmaneuver her other suitors.

Leila didn't understand what her parents had in common. At dinnertime, Maman complained about the servants' minor infractions, or reported the latest horticultural news—the camellias were taking root, the blighted hibiscus was finally rid of pests. Or she criticized whatever they happened to be eating: the underseasoned meatballs, the overcooked kebabs, the soggy eggplant stew. She never mentioned her son dying thirty meters away.

Whenever Baba asked Leila a question, Maman would dismiss it. “Don't waste your time with this sparrow-brain, my dear. She does nothing all day but daydream in the sun.”

When Leila wanted to join the swim team at school, Maman refused on the grounds that swimming built up too much unfeminine muscle. Leila appealed to her father but it didn't do any good. He left all domestic decisions to Maman. After dinner Baba would retire to his vast library of poetry, history, and the sciences, or go to Hosein's room and read him philosophy books until bedtime.

At family gatherings, Baba openly disputed the Shah's policies. He ridiculed the royal edict banning the plays of Molière because they exposed the vices of the monarchy. After his outbursts, the family whispered behind his back:
Nader is losing his mind. Imagine his firstborn, his only son, with an incurable disease of the blood.
A few maliciously speculated that perhaps the good doctor was a collaborator, waiting for his chance to turn in members of his own family to the secret police. No matter; his complaints made everyone, even his friends, feel unsafe.

Leila held the silver tray as Mr. Fifield nibbled on his cookies. Maman coyly nodded at everything the Englishman said, her pearl earrings swaying in assent. She liked to say that pearls brought good luck or bad, depending on the wearer. Her voice seemed distant to Leila, farther than the bee-eater lingering in the fig tree. The sun beat down on her arms, warming her skin. Leila studied the pomp of colors around her. If the sun helped things flourish—ripened the figs, coaxed the violets from their dank hiding places—then surely it could help her grow faster, reduce the time it took for her to grow up.

Mostly, Leila wished she could return to the Caspian Sea. Three summers ago her family had rented a villa there and spent a happy month swimming, hiking, and collecting rocks. In the evenings, Baba would sit in the garden and tell stories about the constellations. The sky seemed a mysterious expanse of velvet, pinpricked with promises. After their parents went to bed, Hosein would frighten Leila with tales of monsters like the Bakhtak (the chest crusher) or the Pa-lees (the foot licker) who murdered children in their sleep. Even Maman had seemed content that summer by the sea.

Nearby a magpie hopped on a branch of the lemon tree. During Ramezan, Leila ate lemons from this tree all month. She sliced each fruit in half, carefully studying its pulpy buttresses, and squeezed the sourness onto her tongue. Then she sucked on the rinds until they burned her lips and the insides of her cheeks. She did this every day during the endless fasting. Lemons, she rationalized, didn't count as real food.

Baba had suggested that she read to distract her grumbling stomach. He'd recommended Rudyard Kipling and Jules Verne, but their stories bored her. If the events they recounted hadn't really happened, why should she bother reading them? There was too much to explore in the real world.

The magpie stared at Leila and whined. The language of birds was something she wished she could learn. At times, Leila felt she understood them: their split-second hesitations before flight, their solemn meetings before migrations south. Baba told her that the bones of birds were hollow, that he could hear them whistling over the Zagros Mountains as they journeyed toward the Persian Gulf.

“Go check on your brother,” Maman ordered. “Worthless girl, he's overdue for his injection. What would he do if I didn't remind you?” Then she turned with a shrug to Mr. Fifield, and let him kiss her hand.

Leila slipped into the house and down the marble hallway to Hosein's bedroom. A light flickered from the doorway, from the television, which stayed on whether he was watching it or not. Last summer everyone had seen the U.S. astronauts walking on the moon, but few people believed it was true. Yasmine said that her Uncle Mostafa, who worked for the minister of the interior, claimed that the whole thing was a hoax, that the so-called lunar landscape was nothing but a barren stretch of American desert. If you looked closely, Uncle Mostafa said, you could see lizards scurrying across the astronauts' boots.

Leila stopped in the bathroom to wash her hands with her father's green hospital soap. The lace curtains in Hosein's room fluttered. Leila approached her brother, asleep in his bed, and prepared his morphine shot. Her father had shown her how to calibrate the precise amount of the drug necessary to relieve Hosein's pain, how to inject him so gently that it wouldn't leave a bruise. Maman, the former nurse, couldn't bear to do this herself.

After moistening a cotton ball with alcohol, Leila pressed it firmly to the crook of her brother's elbow. Hosein opened his eyes and stared at her. His head looked swollen and fragile, like a too big blossom on a spindly stem. And his lips stuck out, as if they were clumsily pasted in place. She pictured his blood with its deadly froth of germs. Why had his body turned against him so viciously?

Last year at Baba's hospital, Leila had seen the body of a man, a traffic accident victim, lying on a dissecting table for the medical students to examine. On display were his heart and intestines, his honeycombed lungs, the wilted flesh between his legs. It jolted her to think that not long before, his organs had worked in graceful concert to keep him alive.

Hosein summoned Leila closer, his eyes pleading and wary. She put down the syringe and studied his face. Even sick as he was, her brother was more beautiful than she would ever be. He had Maman's fine features: a straight nose; a heart-shaped face ending in a dimpled chin. Once he'd had the rosy complexion of a pretty girl and was so tall—“a descendant of trees” was how Aunt Parvin described him—that it was difficult to see him clearly when he was standing up.