Page 6 of The Familiar

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.