A Handbook to Luck by Cristina Garcia Page B

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 mustache 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