Page 5 of The Familiar

“Well?” said Don Gustavo.

“Well?” repeated Don Marius.

Doña Valentina reached out and pinched her arm, hard. But Luzia didn’t budge.

“Just send her back to the kitchen,” Don Marius said. “It’s late.”

“It’s not so late,” Valentina protested.

Luzia didn’t look up from the table, from the burnt bread and the candles, but she heard the misery in Valentina’s voice. A party shouldn’t end so early. It was a failure of the host and hostess if it did, and if word got out, there would be fewer invitations offered or accepted. Valentina would sit in her window, and she and Don Marius would dine alone. But that wasn’t Luzia’s problem to solve.

Don Gustavo heaved a sigh and pushed back from the table. “It’s time we said our—”

“Luzia has something to show us,” Valentina insisted.

“What is wrong with you?” growled Don Marius. “This is an embarrassment to me and this house.”

“I only wanted—”

“There is no greater burden than a fool for a wife. I offer you my apologies, Don Gustavo, my friends.”

“Please,” Valentina said, “I … If you had seen—”

“And still she prattles on.”

Don Gustavo laughed. “What is it the poets say? God gave women beauty to tempt man and speech to drive him mad.”

Luzia didn’t mean to look. She didn’t want to see the shine of tears in Valentina’s eyes, the smirk on the woman in pearls, Don Marius and Don Gustavo smug and red-faced with wine. She had no intention of reaching for one of the goblets, Venetian glass, wedding gifts that Doña Valentina brought out only for special occasions, clear and perfect as drops of rain.

She smashed the glass against the table.

The room went silent. The guests were staring at her. The woman in pearls had covered her mouth with her hands.

Luzia felt as if she were floating up through the ceiling, over the roof, into the night sky, as if her arms had lost their shape, curving outward and becoming wings. Valentina would have recognized the emotion that spread through Luzia’s blood, the wild and terrible potential, the same mad daring that had caused her to overturn the rice and slap Luzia’s face. There is nothing I might not do.

Luzia clapped her hands together, hard and fast, hiding the words of the song she whispered, a quick, humming tune. She spread her palms over the shards of the ruined goblet and they drifted together, like petals caught in an invisible breeze, a trembling rose of broken pieces, and then in the barest breath, a drinking glass once more.

The guests gasped. Valentina released a happy sigh.

“Praise God,” Don Gustavo cried.

“Maravilloso!” said his wife.

Don Marius’s mouth hung open.

Luzia saw her reflection in the goblet, changed but unchanged, made perfect and ruined all the same.

CHAPTER 4

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.