The cemetery, a confusion of tombstones and nettled paths, seemed larger than Leila remembered. It wasn’t easy to find her brother’s grave, even with the help of the crippled attendant. She hadn’t been back since Hosein’s burial six years ago. The wailing had been unbearable and Baba had refused to let go of the coffin’s lid. Now there was only silence and a dry carpet of leaves.
Baba had aged visibly after Hosein’s death. It was as if the years were waiting patiently in a corner of his body, then pounced on him all at once. At fifty-four, he looked closer to seventy. He began to speak like an old man, too, reliving his past through a magnifying glass. Before he was arrested, Baba had spent his nights reading histories of the Qajar era, retelling the tales as if they were his own. At boarding school, Leila was shocked to discover that Persian history didn’t exist.
Thirty years ago, Baba said, peasant families used to bring their sick relatives to his hospital and camp out in the waiting room. The doctors and nurses would have to pick their way among rolled-out carpets, charcoal stoves, an occasional goat. Everybody would be smoking and talking loudly, coming and going as they pleased until all hours of the night. They wanted to see with their own eyes what they stood to lose. What would she give now, Leila thought, to hear Baba telling these stories again?
Maman also had changed. She’d given up on her garden, leaving it untended and wild. The wells went dry and the fountain painted with doves lay crumbling in the sun. These days, Maman lived for the mirror. She devoted herself to preserving her beauty with expensive creams and an occasional face-lift in London—and to finding a suitable husband for Leila. There would be an interesting young man at Aunt Parvin’s party tonight, a physics student from the States who was home for the winter break. He was an identical twin, Maman said, a lucky trait.
How could she be matchmaking at a time like this?
A fig tree spread its meager canopy over her brother’s plot, which was littered with rotten fruit. The seeds stuck out dully from the pulp like crooked teeth. An unruly vine was wound around the trunk, giving off an acrid scent that permeated everything. Leila imagined her whole family dead and buried beside Hosein, their bones slowly hollowing, submitting to the quiet claw of decay. For an instant, she longed to scratch each of their names in the dry earth.
“Are you still there?” Leila kicked the edge of her brother’s grave, dislodging a clod of dirt. She remembered their last day together: the stir of Hosein’s sheets, the taut warmth of him in her hand, the look from him that inhabited her still. Certain things, she decided, just couldn’t be erased. At boarding school, Leila liked to dress in her brother’s old clothes—his silk shirts and sweatpants, his sleek brown socks worn at the heels. In this way, she’d kept him close.
The wind blew hard against Leila’s lamb’s-wool jacket. Leilaleilaleila. A leaf floated past her face, dispersing the words. A thin lizard, encrusted with mud, waited at the foot of the grave. She listened for her name again, but nothing around her stirred. The insects mutely looted the last of the fruit.
“Help us, Hosein. Please help us find Baba,” Leila prayed. “Tell me he isn’t dead. Tell me he’ll be returned to us soon.”
Haq! Haq! Leila looked up, half hoping to catch a glimpse of the Bird of Truth. Instead she saw a dull brown thrush with thickset feathers singing off-key. What was it doing here in the bitter middle of winter?
A sudden excess of light scattered the sky’s fragile blue, then disappeared altogether. Raindrops pricked her scalp. Leila unwrapped her cinnamon bark and placed it on Hosein’s grave, securing it with a stone. The fig tree shed its final shadow. Then she hurried back to the waiting taxicab.
“Home,” she told the driver. “I want to go home.”
Marta Claros
Marta enjoyed the peace of Mrs. Sheffield’s house after the incessant clatter of the shoe factory. For the past two weeks, the factory had been in full swing, trying to meet the army’s deadline for a huge order of boots. Marta spent twelve hours a day, six days a week, staple gun in hand, affixing hundreds of leather soles to the stiff, shiny boots. She grew dizzy from the stink of the finishing glue, from the heat and the tedious repetition. It was a relief to spend some quiet time cleaning Mrs. Sheffield’s home.
She’d met Mrs. Sheffield outside the British embassy, where her husband was the consul general. Marta was waiting for a bus when the Englishwoman tripped and fell beside her, breaking a heel. Marta came to her assistance and fixed her shoe with the glue she used for after-hours piecework. They spoke for a few minutes—Mrs. Sheffield’s Spanish was excellent—and she ended up offering Marta a job cleaning her home every Sunday. It was this extra day of work, paid to her in dollars, that made it possible for her to save enough money to leave the country.
Marta had wanted to keep selling used clothes and toys on the street, but her husband wouldn’t permit it. Now that she was a married woman, he insisted, she couldn’t go peddling her body along with her wares up and down every alleyway of the city. But she refused to stay in their apartment all day, waiting for him to come home and testily give her a few coins for the market. That was much more intolerable to her than the hand-cramping work at the factory.
Besides, she needed the money. If she’d learned anything from her Tía Matilde, it was to ensure her own keep. How surprised Fabián would be when he woke up tomorrow and discovered her missing. It wouldn’t occur to him that she, or any woman for that matter, might leave him. But Marta had decided long ago to stop breaking her heart against his.
When she’d married Fabián, two days after her sixteenth birthday, Marta had said her vows in earnest, with every intention of staying with him forever. It was a simple church ceremony. Marta wore a crown of jasmine with her veil, and the hem of her wedding dress was embroidered with sequins and imitation pearls. Even Evaristo, reluctantly, had descended his banyan tree to attend. Marta thought that by marrying Fabián, her future was secured.
Nothing turned out the way she’d hoped. This wasn’t to say that she didn’t like her husband, at first—he surprised her with little gifts, buying her coconut ice cream or a pair of sneakers for her brother. Nobody had done that for her before. The fact was that Fabián had promised Marta two things she desperately wanted: to leave Mamá’s house, and to have a child of her own. Tía Matilde warned her about marrying a guardia (only her mother thought him a good opportunity) but Marta didn’t listen.
Today was their second anniversary. They were supposed to go out to dinner but Marta preferred going hungry to listening to Fabián complain about the price of a restaurant meal. To think that she’d once been swayed by his promise of a juicy steak. Marta decided that she was too tempted by easy comforts. Everything has a price, her aunt liked to say, and she was right. A woman’s real dowry was the one she carried inside her.
Marta felt a heaviness in her abdomen. The arrival of her period put her husband in a foul mood, as if she were childless on purpose. Fabián had fathered twins in the countryside when he was a teenager—so the problem wasn’t with him. Nobody in Marta’s family had trouble conceiving, so it was a mystery why she couldn’t get pregnant. Marta considered the children she saw living in the streets, urchins with no one to care for them, and wished she could adopt one. There was a gang of boys, no older than eight or nine, who rummaged through the factory’s garbage bins for leftover glue. Who might they become if they were loved? But Fabián refused, as he put it, to bring mongrels into their home.
Last year, Marta had consulted an expensive gynecologist on the far side of town; Dr. Canosa told her that there was nothing wrong with her, that her infertility was all in her head. But how could not having a baby be in her head when all she could think about was having a baby? She made certain to have regular relations with Fabián, though he soon grew more interested in late-night wrestling on TV than in her. Love evaporated when there were no children to hold it together.
Marta didn’t feel the giddy pleasures that made other women swoon, either. Fabián’s m
ustache scratched her face and she felt bruised by him inside. He was covered in coarse hair and his penis swung so far to the left when erect that Fabián had to hold it in place with both hands. Marta was too embarrassed to ask anyone about this. The whole act seemed bestial to her, like dogs copulating in the street. For Marta, sex was uncomfortable but mercifully brief. If there was any pleasure, it was in the anticipation of conceiving a child.
Her aunt had recommended that Marta visit a healer in Ilobasco. Together they’d traveled by bus to Doña Telma’s house, whose rafters were filled with squeaking bats. After a short consultation, Doña Telma told Marta that she had scars that were blocking the release of her eggs. She offered Marta a pouch of herbs to mingle with her bathwater but promised nothing—Yours is a delicate case, hija—and fondly wished her good luck.
Marta liked Mrs. Sheffield’s lemon-scented furniture polish, the way it foamed up quickly and made the wood shine like healing skin. She especially loved the toilet cleaner, a special blue liquid for use nowhere else. The tile floors were a cinch to mop, too, not like the dirt floors Marta was used to sweeping at Mamá’s house, sprinkling them with water to keep down the dust.
Just last month, Marta had installed a linoleum floor in her mother’s kitchen (the rest of the house still had dirt floors). It was the color of avocados with a stamped-on gold design. Fabián was furious that she’d wasted money on the floor but Marta didn’t care. She was proud that it was her money, earned at Mrs. Sheffield’s, which made the new floor possible. Her patrona had given her English-language tapes and a secondhand cassette player. The tapes made no sense to Marta, but she enjoyed the rhythm of the sentences just the same.
Outside, a flock of parakeets rushed by in a clamorous streak. Marta thought of her brother in his banyan tree. Evaristo was still shaken after having witnessed another abduction last Sunday. A group of soldiers dragged a young couple, shouting, into a van. The following morning, Evaristo found their mutilated bodies dumped behind the biggest department store on Paseo General Escalón. He recognized the couple by their clothes and the filigreed crucifix around the girl’s neck.
Marta tried to make her brother swear that he wouldn’t tell anyone about it. “Don’t invite trouble, hermano. God will punish the murderers, don’t worry.” Bodies were turning up everywhere, he insisted, heads in one place, limbs in another. Evaristo saw everything from his tree, everything that was supposed to go unseen. But who could he tell? Who would believe him? On the news, the right blamed the left and the left blamed the right, but nobody was brought to justice. If the soldiers succeeded in killing all the poor, Marta thought, who would be left to clear the fields, or harvest the coffee, or grind the corn?
At the shoe factory, a woman named Sandra Mejía was trying to organize the workers to petition for shorter hours. What paradise did she think they were living in? Marta suspected that Sandra was a guerrilla—a Communist agitator, Fabián would have said—but they ate lunch together every day. Everyone called Sandra “Canary” because she stood ready to sing against injustices. When Marta revealed that her own husband was a guardia, Sandra spat on the ground.
When they were first married, Marta used to bring Fabián his lunch, traveling to the outskirts of San Salvador where his platoon was conducting maneuvers. Once Marta saw a pig trotting along a road with a human hand in its mouth and vowed never to eat pork again. Fabián couldn’t explain where the hand had come from. Then her husband was transferred to the garrison in the capital. Mostly, the soldiers played cards there, or argued about sports, or listened to the same cumbia cassette week after week. Marta figured they were waiting for orders.
But Sandra Mejía said that the guardias tortured people in the back rooms of the garrison, that their methods grew more macabre by the day: people skinned alive, forced to swallow lye, choked to death with rags, slowly burned to ash. Fabián said that citizens who minded their own business had nothing to fear. Marta knew this wasn’t true. Plenty of innocent people were being killed.
She couldn’t imagine her husband torturing anybody. For all his bluster, he was a cowardly man. Yet he’d said that the only way for a real man to die was in battle. Men categorized things in ways Marta didn’t understand. Fabián finally confessed that he’d been assigned to the firing squad. He said that fear excited the kidneys and nearly all the prisoners urinated in their pants before they died. Marta pictured the prisoners lined up against the paredón, young men and women, blindfolded, her husband taking aim. Those were his orders, his job, the way her job was gluing shoes and cleaning Mrs. Sheffield’s house.
Marta opened the balcony doors of the Sheffields’ bedroom. The sky was clear after so many rainy days. Perhaps the city would be free of mosquitoes this afternoon. The man who sold cloth bolts on credit passed by with his singsong pregón. Marta fluffed the pillows on the king-sized bed. There were photographs on the nightstands framed in silver, children and grandchildren back in England, each with the same pink cheeks. It was difficult for Marta to distinguish the adults from the children.
She felt a sudden cramp in her stomach and stopped sweeping, leaning on her broom. Sometimes Marta liked to pretend she was pregnant and eat enough for two (she’d gained forty-five pounds since her wedding). She drank so much milk it upset her digestion. Marta prayed to La Virgen de Guadalupe every night to help guide her child, her little wanderer, to her womb. Ay, mi angelito, have you lost your way? She imagined an assembly line of babies in heaven, asleep and waiting for delivery. When would her turn come?
The master bathroom was painted mint green. The tuberoses looked cheerful in their Chinese vase, brightly enameled with dragonflies. The gilded mirror was big enough for an entire family to gaze in simultaneously. Marta watched herself undo her girdle (a birthday present from Esperanza, the lingerie peddler) and settled on the toilet seat as the first trickle of blood began. She caught a small clot and smeared it against her thumb, searching for a sign of her child. Then she left a fingerprint on the mirror.
On her way home, Marta tried to commit everything to memory: the cobblestoned streets up the hillsides, the volcanoes standing guard over the city, the orphans on the corners begging for coins. She studied the swallows circling and diving around Evaristo’s banyan tree. The north wind made the tree’s canopy shiver and the nearby kiskadees—cuio, cuio—announced death with their bugle-loud songs. This was her very last day in El Salvador. The sooner she got out of the country, the better off she and Evaristo would be. Their father had tried to cross the border twice, but he’d been caught and deported both times. Nobody knew where he was anymore.
Marta parked herself beneath her brother’s banyan and shouted into the leaves: “Come down, hermano! I need to talk to you!”
A moment later, Evaristo’s head appeared upside down from a branch. His hair was sparse and what was left of his clothes was in tatters. His feet, black with dirt, curled around the branch like claws. Marta offered her brother a few tortillas but Evaristo wasn’t hungry. He said the guardias had rounded up schoolgirls from a bus stop that day, called them Communists and whores. He said that he would do everything he could to find out who the girls were and memorize their names.
“Stay out of it, I beg you,” Marta whispered, holding her brother close. Evaristo gave off a sharp, troubling odor, one she feared no amount of soap could wash away. “Look.” She held up a key and pressed it into his dry, cracked hand. “This is for your post office box at the central station. The number is seven forty-one. Can you remember that?”
Evaristo’s eyes were half-closed, as if he were listening to another voice far away. He scratched his chest and dropped the key to the ground. Marta pulled a square of gingham from her purse and sewed a pocket into the waistband of her brother’s pants with thick black stitches. Then she tucked the key inside. Evaristo smiled at her with a corner of his mouth.
“Check the box once a month,” Marta instructed, trying not to sound as impatient as she felt. “Primero Dios, I’ll send for you soon.” S
he embraced him, harder this time, and gave him enough money to last him several months. His whole body seemed to shrivel as he climbed back into his banyan tree. She hoped he would take a nap. If nothing else, it might give him an hour of peace.
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.”
A Handbook to Luck Page 8
