A Handbook to Luck (9 page)

That evening Marta looked out the window of her apartment on Calle Sur. Political slogans covered the walls of the Catholic elementary school across the street. It was five minutes after curfew. The bread vendor from Santa Tecla was hurrying along the sidewalk with a last basket of loaves on her head. A single carnation enlivened her display. Marta thought of running downstairs to buy bread for her journey when—
Ra-ta-ta-ta-tata-ta-ta-ta!
—the basket tipped and a cascade of loaves fell to the pavement, as if a hundred years were passing.
Ay,
what hapless string of days had led this poor woman to her fate?

Fabián returned at ten o'clock, smelling of
chicha
and beer. Fabián got drunk on the worst days of shooting. (His other job was whitewashing the firing-squad wall to erase the remains of the dead.) Getting drunk was more acceptable to him than crying, which Marta had seen him do only once, at his grandmother's funeral. Without a word Fabián pushed her onto the bed and lifted her skirt, ignoring her protests. When he pulled down her panties and saw the blood, he reached for his pistol and aimed it between her legs.

“Whore! You're killing my babies!”

Marta didn't react at first. She noticed a thin line of ants, like tiny black letters, marching along the wall toward the kitchen. She waited, calming her nervousness, then smiled at him.
Dámelo, dámelo, mi niño.
Marta reached for the gun, her eyes steady on his, and unfastened his fingers one by one. When she had both hands tight on the pistol, Marta took three deliberate steps backward. Then she aimed carefully, very carefully, and shot her husband in the foot. Marta brought her face close to Fabián's pained, sweating one: “From this moment forward, my legs are sealed to you. Do you understand? You can no longer use me for your filth.”

She wiped off the pistol, gathered her things, and walked out the door. The overnight bus to Guatemala was leaving in less than an hour.

Marta had never seen a sky this dark. There was no moon, and the stars seemed to hide in the black folds of midnight. The silence was so complete that Marta feared life itself had withdrawn from these parts. At any moment she might cross the border from one world to the next, imperceptibly, like death.

The
coyote
said that a night like this was good cover, that the
yanquis'
fiercest lights couldn't penetrate it. Marta reached for the rosary in her pocket and fingered another bead. It was the same pink plastic one she'd used for her First Communion.
Dios te salve, María llena eres de gracia.
Marta knew she would make it across the border. She had to. With La Virgen's help, she would make it across, establish herself in Los Angeles, then send for her brother. This was her plan.

The
coyote
led the way up a mountain that Marta could barely see. Its smells enveloped her. Sage and mesquite, the thirsting earth, the looming dust-dry cacti. Marta imagined the scent of rain. She pictured pines flourishing here, a
zapote
taking root. Tía Matilde liked to say that water rose to the skies by means of invisible rivers that later showered down on the land. The rivers had currents so powerful that they carried fish and frogs and snakes in their depths.

There were other people crossing over, like her. A Oaxacan couple with their sickly infant, slung from his father's serape. Brothers from Tapachula, both cross-eyed. A Nicaraguan woman, Dinora Luna, who looked to be in her forties but said she was fifty-three. Dinora's only concession to age was her limp, the result, she said, of her truck rolling into a ditch outside Panama City in 1966. She blamed the country's water commissioner—a jealous lover whose daughter had run off with a Cuban magician—for tampering with her truck. Epifanio Carranza had been her
amante
for years, she said, and used to keep a beachfront home with full-time servants just for her. But when Dinora told him that she was getting married, he tried to kill her.

“My leg was pinned under the dashboard for nine hours,” she said with a shrug.

Dinora told Marta that she'd smuggled contraband from one end of Central America to another: liquor, tobacco, precious rain-forest woods. She, too, was leaving behind a husband, her third, and the violence that was ravaging her country. Marta couldn't see Dinora clearly in the darkness, only hear her voice. It was like talking with the dead.

On the steepest part of the climb, Marta stayed close behind the Nicaraguan woman. Their bodies leaned sharply into the blackness, their breath came hard, their blouses grew damp with sweat. Marta drank watered-down juice from her canteen but it barely quenched her thirst. She had to pace herself with little sips or she would make herself sick.

Despite her limp, Dinora was a sure-footed old goat. The
coyote
warned them not to dislodge any rocks that might start an avalanche. He said the border patrol had devices like giant ears that caught stray sounds in the desert, that it was dangerous even to sneeze. The slightest noise could bring helicopters, attack dogs, yellow-haired men seven feet tall.

Marta wondered what would happen if she died and became part of this land. Would her bones tick away slowly, like the fat heart of the mesquite? How long would night last if she were a stone, or a hawk lazily circling overhead? The air was chilly but she felt feverish. Around her, nothing stirred. A sudden coldness rose through her feet. Someone, Marta suspected, must have died on this very spot. She remembered the faces of the passengers on the bus out of El Salvador, the white banner of dust that ushered them into Guatemala. How many of them had made it this far?

When Marta's group reached the top of the mountain, the
coyote
refused to let them rest. Her legs were trembling from the climb and they weren't even halfway there yet. A part of her wanted to turn around but she was afraid to cross the desert by herself. The
coyote
explained that they needed to reach their checkpoint, seventeen miles away, before dawn. A truck would be waiting to take them to Mexicali, where they would be stacked three high in its false bottom container. Then on to California.
California.
Marta tried to pronounce it the way she'd heard it on her English-language tapes: “Peaches and oranges are only two of the many fruits grown in the fertile Central Valley of California.”

“Hungry?” Dinora offered Marta a handful of almonds. The Nicaraguan woman ate them soundlessly, splitting them between her front teeth. “They keep up your strength.”

Marta reached for the almonds, but her hand got tangled up in her rosary—it was coiled around a day-old sugar bun wrapped in wax paper—and the nuts scattered to the ground.

“Catholic or Evangelical?” Dinora asked.

“Catholic.”

“Thank God for that. I'm so sick of Evangelicals.” Dinora took a deep breath and pulled herself onto a rocky ledge. “They got hold of every one of my children. Now there's no talking sense to any of them. I can't light my candles or do my
pruebitas
without having them accuse me of doing the devil's work.”

“Candles?” Marta chewed an almond, gritty and mildly sweet. She had an urge for
horchata
from the vendor at the Plaza Masferrer, the one who'd gotten caught in a firefight between the guerrillas and the army and died.

“To tell the future,” Dinora said. “I learned as a girl.”

“Could you tell my future?”

“Of course,
amorcita.
But I don't think our leader here will let us play with matches.”

Marta laughed. She liked Dinora, in spite of her sacrilegious talk. Perhaps they could team up, share a room in Los Angeles to keep expenses down. Marta had a sudden vision of herself selling balloons, dozens of them tied with brightly colored string. Around her, everyone wore carnival masks.

“You'll be fine. I don't need a candle to see that,” Dinora said kindly. “You have an instinct for dreams.”

“Quiet over there,” the
coyote
scolded them. “Do you want to spend the rest of your lives in hell?”

“We're more alone than death here,” Dinora muttered.

It was freezing on the mountain and Marta drew her shawl more tightly around herself. What if it began to snow and they were buried alive? Last year she'd seen a show on television about an airplane crash in the Andes. Out of desperation, the survivors ate their dead companions' flesh. She couldn't imagine a worse sin. Marta rubbed her rosary beads again.
Bendita eres entre todas las mujeres y bendito es el fruto de tu vientre.

The Mexican woman began sobbing on the ridge below, and Marta knew without asking that her baby had died. Against the
coyote
's threats, they buried the boy on the hillside, fashioning a cross from sticks. His father dug the hole with his bare hands. Marta stood by the little grave and silently prayed. She wanted to cry, but no tears would come. For the next two hours, nobody said a word.

She could die here like this little boy, Marta thought, and nobody would know where to find her. Only Evaristo was aware of her plans and he'd promised to tell no one. Until Mamá got word, she would think that Marta had been abducted by the army or killed by her husband, especially if he recounted to her how she'd shot him in the foot. No, she decided, Fabián would be too embarrassed to admit what had happened.

It was remarkable how easy it had been to walk away from everything she knew: her family, her country, her habits, her belongings. Already, they were drifting away, like the balloons she imagined selling. But maybe remembering was just a form of forgetting, of choosing one thing over another, turning green into yellow, day into night. If it was true that she was leaving behind everything familiar, could she leave herself behind, too?

Marta heard the cry of crows in the distance. She envisioned their glossy plumage, the spread of their outsized wings. She searched the skies for the morning star, which she prayed would bring her good luck in the crossing. Then she recalled something Tía Matilde told her: Niña, it is always coldest before dawn.

Evaristo

The earth rumbles. Everything collapses. Buildings, trees, electrical lines, the sky itself. There's no more light. The birds are still. Not a single dog barks. I hold tight to the trunk of my old banyan and feel its roots tremble. I wait and wait for my sister but she doesn't come. She says she will send for me soon, that God will find a way. But I don't believe anymore. Marta believes. She believes with the soles of her feet.
Pobre hermana.
The world will end today. My arms are sore from hanging on. I don't know. I don't know how much longer I can wait.

(1979)

Marta Claros

I
t was eleven o'clock in the morning and Marta was tired from staying up most of the night with La Doctora. She pulled the dirty newspaper from the bottom of the biggest canary cage and cleaned out the food dish, rinsing it with warm water. Then she refilled the dish with minced spinach. Her employer had seven different types of canaries, each with their own dietary requirements. Singing in unison, they sounded like a dissonant church choir. Marta had been caring for the birds in Beverly Hills for over two years. They were supposed to be Marta's sole responsibility but La Doctora required more care than all her birds put together.

Her favorite canary, Benny, was the most enthusiastic singer by far. Marta had trained him to perform on cue.
A la una, a las dos, a las tres,
she instructed, waving her hands like an orchestra conductor. Marta loved changing Benny's bathwater and watched as he happily splashed himself. She laughed to imagine him with a miniature towel and bar of soap.

Marta continued her morning rounds in the backyard aviary. There was a hint of jasmine in the air and the wisteria hummed with bumblebees. The African gray parrot looked sullen. Yesterday he'd plucked out most of his feathers. When Marta spoke to him—his name was Homer—he lowered his head and deliberately shook it. How did he know that she was leaving him for good?

The new Gouldian finches were in love and chattered continuously, much to the annoyance of the scarlet macaw named Waldo. The peach-faced lovebirds' interminable squabbles agitated the other birds. Only the ringneck parakeets—there were eleven of them—stayed relatively quiet.

Marta had begun dreaming in the birds' different languages: warbles and trills, screeches and cries, all the signals of need and displeasure. It was something she understood now, as effortlessly as the mynah bird's imitations of everything—a slamming door, the neighbor's barking dog, a whistling teakettle. Marta chopped up a papaya and half a banana for the Tucumán parrot's breakfast and served it to him in his striped bowl. Then she clipped the wings of the green-cheeked conures and smoothed their ruffled plumage. For this work, Marta earned forty dollars a day. This had seemed a fortune to her at first, until she realized how little it bought here.

Shooting pains surged up the backs of her legs. She'd hurt herself on the crossing over, crawling under a barbed-wire fence near the Arizona border. Marta suspected a damaged nerve but La Doctora, a retired vascular surgeon, said there was nothing wrong with her. (Why did doctors always tell her this?) If only she could get her hands on some iguana lard and rub it into her legs, she would feel much better.

This morning, Marta noticed fresh cuts up the length of La Doctora's arm. She was left-handed and so the cuts—fifty or sixty gashes—appeared on the right. La Doctora had left the knife, smeared with blood, in the kitchen sink. Marta didn't understand why anyone would deliberately hurt themselves. She thought of the prisoners in El Salvador who were forced to wear
capuchas,
hoods coated with toxic chemicals, until they suffocated and died.

Today she read in the newspaper that a priest who'd spoken out against the violence was shot while saying Mass. His parishioners poured into the streets in protest, walking in circles, staring at one another in disbelief. First the bells of one church rang, then another and another, until the whole city was alive with the news. On the day of his funeral, Tía Matilde got in line at five in the morning to pay her respects and didn't file past the priest's body until two that afternoon.

Marta stood in La Doctora's kitchen and checked the contents of the refrigerator. The tortillas were gone and La Doctora had finished the last of the cheese. That was all her
patrona
ate: tiny squares of cheese, as if she were a mouse. La Doctora had separate dishes for dairy and meat, but the plates only collected dust in the cupboard. She said that it was a sin to eat anything that fed on garbage, which included pigs and shellfish. Marta agreed about the pigs but she wasn't about to give up her rice with shrimp.

Marta had lost thirty pounds working in Beverly Hills and was down to a size fourteen. Few things tasted good to her anymore. After caring for her birds she'd stopped eating poultry, too. How she used to enjoy a little roast chicken. Now what was left to savor? She was big-bosomed and curvaceous but her legs were thinning out. The owner of the dress factory, Frankie Soon, said she was beginning to look like those skinny
gringas
on television.

It was because of Frankie that she'd cut back her days with La Doctora. (Dinora worked at the factory and had gotten Marta part-time hours there.) At first Marta worked only on Saturdays to make extra money. Then she started working nights and a few Sundays, too. Sometimes she and her boss were the only ones at the factory.

Marta was a good seamstress, fast and reliable, never a crooked stitch. Frankie was pleased with her work and found ways to test her skills and her loyalty. He gave her take-home projects and asked her advice about the other workers at the factory. He said she was the only one he trusted. Finally, after sixteen months, Frankie convinced her to work for him full-time. On Monday she would begin her new job at the Back-to-Heaven dress factory in Koreatown.

Marta was fond of her birds and hadn't wanted to give them up entirely. Besides, La Doctora had promised to secure a green card for Marta as a bird-care specialist. Marta liked the way that sounded, crisp and professional. But La Doctora wore her out with her demands—and still no green card.

One thing Marta planned to do when she left Beverly Hills was sign up for English classes. Whenever she tried out new words—
chair, yellow, tissue
—she felt as though she were fighting traffic with her tongue. It wasn't easy to find the time to study. Just like back home, the poor did all the hard work here. Without them the floors in Bel Air wouldn't get mopped, the gardens in Brentwood watered, the dinners in Pacific Palisades cooked.

Marta swept the patio of leaves and fallen feathers and wondered how El Norte had changed her. Would her street-vendor friends in San Salvador recognize her in a crowd? When she looked at herself in the mirror, Marta saw another version of herself. Yes, that was the shape of her face, and the mole on her throat was the same.
Híjole,
but the expression in her eyes. Something was definitely different.

Most of the time, she felt lonely in Los Angeles. Marta had worked day and night for nearly three years but she still didn't have enough money to send for her brother. Last week she'd visited Dinora, who lived with her sister's family in Lincoln Heights, and they'd gone to the back porch to read her divining candles. Dinora said that she foresaw a great love for Marta, but when she lit a blue candle for Evaristo, it hissed with black smoke. That happens sometimes, Dinora said, waving the smoke away.

Dinora encouraged Marta to play the lottery but Marta was reluctant to gamble even a dollar or two. Her friend was lucky. Twice, Dinora had won fifty dollars. The one time Marta played she bet one dollar on a series of numbers that came to her in a dream—5, 17, 19, 28, 30, 41—but she lost her money just the same.

A hummingbird hovered near the bougainvillea, indifferent to the caged birds nearby. Marta wondered whether the canaries envied the hummingbird its freedom. Which would she prefer? To be well fed and comfortable in a cage or free to work herself to death? Marta studied the backyard aviary with its aimless rows of extravagant birds. They seemed like so many rich housewives, bored behind their metal bars. Perhaps she would choose to work, only not so hard.

The day was growing hot and the birds needed fresh water. The mynah bird imitated a plane flying overhead. Marta filled a pitcher with the expensive water the man in the spangled truck delivered in ten-gallon canisters. La Doctora spent a fortune on this water for her birds, but she made Marta drink from the tap.
Paciencia, paciencia.
To survive this day and every day that followed, patience was what she would need most.

It didn't make sense to Marta that her boss had invited her to dinner. Certainly, Frankie Soon wouldn't do this to fire her after she'd been working full-time for just a month. He'd dismissed others without warning—Yannett Hernández and Paquita Cruz, to name two. But she was his best employee, and he knew it. It was true that she'd been complaining to him about everything lately, from the stopped-up toilets and inadequate lighting to the meager pay. The other women were too afraid to say anything, so she said it for them. Would he get rid of her over that?

Marta suspected that Frankie might try to co-opt her, make her stop speaking out on behalf of the other workers. Well, he would soon learn that she wasn't so easily bought off. Marta remembered Sandra Mejía, the girl they'd nicknamed Canary at the shoe factory in San Salvador. According to Evaristo, Sandra had been abducted by the
guardias
in the central market and never heard from again.

At the Back-to-Heaven dress factory, the gossip flowed as the women rushed to complete an order for two thousand flamenco skirts. It was difficult to sew on the double tiers of ruffles just right. If the stitching was too tight, the bottoms puckered and impeded the swirl of the skirts; too loose, and the ruffles hung there lifelessly. At lunchtime Dinora tried on one of the skirts, black with red polka dots, twirling around and stamping her feet.
“¡Ándale!”
the women cheered, clapping their hands to the rhythm.

Frankie stormed over and put an end to their fun: “Enough dancing! Back to work!” Then he singled out Marta. “You!” he said in front of everyone. “You will come to dinner with me tonight.” It was impossible to concentrate after that. Speculation about Frankie's motives ricocheted around the factory faster than a flock of swallows. As the afternoon wore on, a consensus grew among the women that their gruff, potbellied boss was in love with Marta.

“What nonsense!” she retorted. But she secretly wondered whether it was true. All afternoon, she snuck glances at Frankie through the glass partition of his office. If she didn't inspect him too closely, he appeared to her like any well-to-do Latino instead of
un coreano.
He wasn't bad looking for someone his age and he had a lot of money. She could do a lot worse than Frankie Soon. Best of all, he was an American citizen, which meant that anyone who married him would become one, too. How old was Frankie, anyway? Nobody knew for sure. Marta studied the unnaturally black color of his hair and determined that it was dyed. He must be about sixty, she decided, a vain sixty.

Her coworkers said that Frankie was a serious gambler and went to Las Vegas twice a month. That he was a ladies' man and insisted that his girlfriends powder the napes of their necks. No matter that he had a wife back in Korea. Marta was just his type, Dinora insisted, busty and with a beautiful face. Usually he went for younger women, then wrote them big good-bye checks when he was through. Guilt was a good thing for a man to have, the women concluded.

To Marta's knowledge, Frankie hadn't disrespected a single one of the hundred and forty-two women who worked for him. But that didn't mean he paid them very well. Before punching out for the day, a group of workers, led by Dinora and Vilma Colón, came up to Marta and asked her to use her influence to get them a raise. Their boss could certainly afford it. He lived in a mansion in Long Beach, they said, drove a gold-trimmed Cadillac, slept on a mattress filled with goose down—not so much as a single feather inside.

Marta remembered the time she'd helped her father restring a neighbor's bed with rolls of twine. Papá was good with his hands and people often came to him for advice. Everyone respected José Antonio Claros. Now she didn't know whether he was dead or alive. She wondered how different her life would have been if Papá hadn't left them. In the countryside they'd survived without electricity, grown everything they ate, carved their own spoons and bowls. A bicycle had seemed an unimaginable luxury. Nobody made much of it because everyone lived this way. How many lifetimes ago was that?