Luzia couldn’t sleep. She lay down on the dirt floor of the larder and stared up at the shelves, at the jars of preserves, at the dangling ropes of
garlic, the hams hanging like disembodied limbs. She thought of lighting a candle and trying to read, but all she had was Alejo de Venegas’s manual on dying well. Her aunt had passed it to her on their last visit and Luzia had hidden it behind a jar of pickled eggs that no one ever touched.
“Poetry next time,” Luzia had pleaded.
Hualit only laughed. “Take what you get and be glad for it.”
But Luzia doubted poetry would be any comfort now either. She didn’t weep, though she wished she could. Instead, she looked into the darkness, unable to fathom what she had done. It was as if she were standing at the
base of a wall, looking up and up. She had no way of knowing how tall the wall might be or how wide or what shape the building might have. Was she looking at a palace or a prison?
It’s over, she told herself. It’s done. Valentina is appeased. Morning will come, and you will wake and start the bread and walk to the market and that will be the end of it. She told herself this again and again, until at last she dozed off.
When dawn came, the air was cold and no one was on the street yet except the cats and the farmers and the fishermen calling to one another from somewhere near the plaza. She walked to the fountain and filled her buckets and tried not to think. Lorenzo Botas was in his chair by the fishmongers’ stalls. He would sit there all day, making change and
wrapping up mackerel, then falling off to sleep until his son slung him over his shoulders to carry him home.
“The garrucha,” Águeda once told her. “They hung Lorenzo from the ceiling and put weights on his feet. Then they dropped him. I don’t know how many times. His bones never fit right after.”
“Why did the inquisitors take him?”
“A joke about the Virgin. A dirty one. He was always a filthy old man.
Maybe if he’d confessed sooner he’d still be walking.”
Luzia tried not to think of the old man’s knees slipping from their sockets as she walked home. She was not the same girl who had stood in her clean apron at the table, moved by pity or anger or something equally pointless.
The night had been a dream, the glass no glass at all but a soap bubble, born and burst in the same breath. If she could simply not think about it, then
maybe it had never happened.
Luzia held this thought of nonthinking as if she cupped that soap bubble carefully in her hands. She considered only the flour and the water and the making of the bread, the heat of the cooking fire, the papery skin of the
onions as they slid beneath her rough hands, the weeping fragrance of their flesh as they were cut. She noted Águeda’s arrival at the kitchen door, the slam and rattle of the pots and pans as she set about the day’s work. The cook’s muttering was a comfort today. Luzia didn’t think about the fact that Doña Valentina hadn’t descended the stairs to nag at them this morning. She refused to listen when a knock sounded at the front door, echoing through
the rooms above.
Visitors came rarely to Casa Ordoño and never this early.
Twenty minutes later, another knock came, a sudden drumbeat, like a clattering of hooves on the front step. Luzia hissed as the knife missed the garlic and sliced into her hand.
“Imbecile!” Águeda smacked Luzia’s hand with her wooden spoon. “Stop bleeding into the vegetables.”
Luzia wrapped a piece of cloth around her finger and continued her work. Águeda was singing now, as if the sacrifice of Luzia’s blood had improved her mood.
The iron knocker sounded again and again. All morning long.
Águeda clucked her tongue against her teeth. “What’s happening up there? Did someone die?”
Maybe, thought Luzia. Maybe.
“Luzia.” Valentina’s voice snaked into the kitchen. Her step was light this morning, as if she were dancing down the stairs, and her cheeks seemed to glow in the dim light. “Come with me.”
Valentina led Luzia to her chambers on the second floor. She had never known the pleasure of anticipation. Marius’s courtship of her had been solemn and brief, the preparations for her wedding businesslike. When she’d left her parents’ home it had been with all the pomp of a wardrobe being moved to a different wall. But now she was buoyed, borne aloft.
Though she’d never been drunk, this sensation was so new, so dizzying, she felt certain it must be the same.
“Look!” she said, her hand sweeping over her dressing table where folded bits of paper were scattered like a snowfall.
The scullion stared mutely at the bounty, a girl who had never tasted sugar presented with a banquet of cakes.
“They are invitations,” Valentina explained.
“I know. How will you afford to feed them all?”
Valentina wanted to slap her. She supposed she could. But she was troubled to discover that didn’t seem wise anymore. She wasn’t afraid, she told herself. It was only that she wanted to be careful as one would be with an expensive bit of lace or a well-made brooch.
She could at least be rid of the sight of her. “Fine. Go back to the kitchen and enjoy your time by the spit.”
Luzia went as if she wanted nothing more. Valentina wondered why she’d shown the dim-witted girl in the first place. Because she had never known the pleasure of excitement, she didn’t understand the impulse to bring someone else into that glimmering state, the instinct to multiply her delight, to offer it up in a glass to be shared. Valentina began to collect the invitations, little white doves in her hands. She could almost feel their
hearts beating with possibility. Muñoz. Aguilar. Llorens. Olmeda. Good names, if not great. Certainly better than hers. These people had only invited Valentina with the knowledge that she must invite them to her home in turn, so that they might catch a glimpse of the miraculous. She had no heavy silver candlesticks, no fine musicians to play for her guests. She could not serve pheasant or peaches in saffron. She had only Luzia, stubborn and sullen.
Stubborn and sullen, and smelling of damp, and dressed so shabbily it couldn’t help but reflect on their household. She ran to her trunk. A fine lady would give Luzia one of her discarded dresses. But Valentina had no dresses she could afford to bestow. The rotten truth was that Luzia was
right. Valentina didn’t know how she would feed all these guests when she was forced to reciprocate their hospitality, and if she couldn’t offer hospitality in turn, she couldn’t accept a single invitation. All her precious doves would fly away.
“I will borrow.” Marius stood in the doorway. She was so startled she dropped the trunk lid on her fingertips and had to swallow her yelp of pain. Valentina tucked her hands behind her back and realized she couldn’t remember the last time she had seen her husband at her bedroom door. “We will have meat to serve our guests.”
She bobbed a small curtsy.
“This is a good thing that has happened,” he said.
She was torn between her joy at his praise and a desire to shout that this was not just a thing that had happened. It was not God’s hand moving the
stars or rain falling over the city. She, Valentina, had trusted her suspicions, trapped the girl into revealing her gift, maybe changed their fortunes. Was it blasphemous to think so? As a sin, pride was as unfamiliar to her as excitement.
“She is not bright,” Valentina said.
“Or pretty,” Marius replied. “But perhaps she doesn’t have to be.”
Valentina forced herself not to look at her reflection in the glass, the
smudge of her ordinary face. She hoped that Marius was right, that it wasn’t beauty life required, but will.
In the days and weeks that followed, Luzia never knew how Don Marius managed to pay for the candles that arrived with their wicks bound together like bushels of wheat, the lamb and pork and fish for Fridays, the sweet wines, and paper packets of spices. She went up the stairs and down the stairs, marveling at how quickly word had spread, grateful for the nights when Doña Valentina and Don Marius dined with friends instead of at home.
The whispers of the hidalgos were overheard by servants and became whispers in sculleries and markets. Doña Valentina had a girl who could work milagritos beneath her roof. Just how miraculous were these little
miracles? Well, that was hard to say. It all might just be a bit of trickery— but good trickery. And wasn’t the chance for such entertainment worth an evening of Don Marius drinking all of your wine and Doña Valentina’s
meager conversation? So they came to Casa Ordoño and ate whatever sad stew and scrap of meat Valentina served. They endured the tepid broth and equally tepid gossip, and then, when they’d suffered enough, Valentina would excuse herself and call the scullion.
Every night Luzia would serve the fruit and every night one of Valentina’s guests would be offered a slender goblet, its rainbow glass gleaming in the candlelight. The chosen guest would take it giddily in her
hands and then—sometimes with the nervous bravado of light blasphemy or the theatrical confidence of a player laying down a winning card—she would smash the goblet on the floor. The others would shriek and jump as if startled. But how could they be taken by surprise when the breaking was
inevitable? Luzia wondered but didn’t ask. Each night she clapped her
hands or stomped her feet to hide her whispered words. The tune would fly from her lips like sparks caught on a draft. The pieces of glass whirled and reassembled, the goblet made whole again.
Each night the guests gasped and cheered.
“How is it done?” they demanded. “What is the trick?”
“Now, now,” Don Marius would say, beaming at Luzia like a fond father, his finger ticking as if setting a rhythm to play by. “Her secrets are her
own.”
“Is she mute?” a woman asked one night. The pearls hanging from her ears were big as quail eggs.
“A servant who can’t speak?” her husband said. “Dios, we should all be so blessed.”
“Are you mute, Luzia?” Don Marius asked in that same warm way, a generous man always ready to grant a gift. It was the first time he’d ever
spoken anything other than a command to her, certainly the first time he’d ever used her name.
Luzia didn’t look up, but she could imagine Valentina’s hands twisting her napkin in her lap, clutching the cloth as if squeezing Luzia’s hand and urging her to speak, to keep her from embarrassment, to please Don Marius as nothing seemed to.
“No, señor,” she said. “It is only that I have nothing to say.” She had plenty to say. About the thin stew and those pearl earrings and the price of salt and about the unpleasant surprise that even magic could become drudgery. But it was nothing they wanted to hear.
“Never stopped me before!” boomed the husband, and everyone roared with laughter. Luzia thought, If I could really work miracles you wouldn’t laugh so easily.
That night, she undid her mistress’s hair, the braids bound so tightly that Valentina’s face seemed to sag when they were released. Luzia brushed out the strands, that murky shade somewhere between blond and brown, a sluggish river in her hands.
“This cannot continue,” she said, without breaking the rhythm of her stroke, surprised and pleased at the heavy quality of the words.
Valentina grabbed her hand. It was not quite a rich woman’s hand. She had to turn it to far too many tasks for it to be properly smooth. “It will
continue or I will throw you out in the street.”
But Valentina’s grip was like a woman clinging to a wet rope, afraid she’d lose hold and be plunged into the sea. She was watching a ship full of guests sail away, a lighted galleon full of gossip and delight.
Luzia met Valentina’s eyes in the mirror. “I don’t think you will.” “What do you want?”
“Money.”
“I don’t have money.”
“Then I don’t have miracles.”
Valentina reached up and drew the lump of pearl from her left earlobe. It was nothing like the warm, glossy dollops that had hung from her guest’s ears. But it was the only pearl Luzia had ever held.
It was useless, of course. If she tried to sell it, she’d be accused of theft.
And yet still she clutched it in her palm as she fell asleep on the larder floor, a moon she’d plucked from the sky when such a thing shouldn’t be possible, a treasure all her own.
