Monkey Hunting by Cristina Garcia

Author:Cristina Garcia
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9780307416100
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2007-12-18T05:00:00+00:00

Ay, Sagrada Virgen, Señora de Regla, dame tu fuerza y protégenos de nuestros enemigos . . .

Once, when Lucrecia dared to call him Papá, Don Joaquín choked her so hard she stopped breathing. She saw flashes of white, then nothing at all. He slapped her awake. “Say that again and I’ll grind up your bones and sell you as pig feed.” It didn’t stop him from battering her harder that night.

From then on, the master made her keep her eyes open when he did it, made her watch his beastly face. He hit her if she blinked, made her repeat things she never since said aloud. For years, Lucrecia stopped dreaming. Everything inside her stayed tight and kneeling, waiting day after day, holding her breath like Mamá had taught her.

At one o’clock, Lucrecia closed the shop and climbed the stairs to their apartment. That morning she’d killed a chicken by whipping it around like a windmill until she’d broken its neck. Then she’d ground its meat into a paste for soup. Now she heated a spoonful of lard in her heaviest skillet and quickly chopped two onions. She peeled and minced several cloves of garlic, stirred them in the fat, and added yesterday’s bread crumbs.

Lucrecia remembered how Don Joaquín had refused to eat anything but steak. When he’d finally banished her to the convent, how relieved she’d been! It was cool there, not hot and sooty like in the mistress’s kitchen. It was agreed that Lucrecia would stay with the nuns until her baby came, until the master could sell them both. Unbaptized, unschooled, and cursed as she was, the sisters received her and took her to church. The priest swung a shiny gold censer that released clouds of smoke. It smelled to Lucrecia like a thousand dying flowers.

As her baby grew and fattened inside her, Lucrecia dipped hundreds of candles in the bubbling vats. Long white tapers for Sunday mass and society weddings. Thick ivory ones for the sacristy. Pastels for the various feast days. Gilded votives for La Virgen de la Caridad del Cobre, Cuba’s patron saint. For Good Friday, the nuns fashioned candles darkened with tar. To burn away the sins of the world.

Boom-tak-tak-a-tak. Boom tak-tak-a-tak. The banging in the street was growing louder, more insistent, as if all her neighbors had taken up grieving. Lucrecia finished the chicken soup and went back downstairs to the Lucky Find.

There was a customer waiting out front with a face like one of Chen Pan’s old maps. Lucrecia let him in, but she didn’t understand a word he said. Was he trying to speak Spanish? Usually she could tell which language a foreigner spoke by his accent, but this sounded like nothing she’d heard before. She motioned for the customer to look around, pointing to the items she guessed might interest him: the gilded cuckoo clock, the rosewood vanity set, the solid silver candlesticks.

Finally, she deciphered his painstaking introduction. He was a taxidermista from Poland! Lucrecia laughed and shook her head.

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