A Handbook to Luck Read Online Free PDF Page A

Evaristo asked.
    â€œSí,”
Marta said. “I did.”

Evaristo
    It rains all night long. The birds are huddled together on the thickest branch. At least there’ll be worms in the morning, they say, plenty of worms. It’s hard to sleep. Everything stinks. Flowers. Donkey shit. I can’t see the stars through the clouds. The rain doesn’t stop. Big fat drops. A lot happens under my tree. Only the birds see what I see. But they never shut up. This seed or that one. That bug or this one. The same stupid fights. Don’t believe me if you don’t want to, but I’m telling the truth. Up here, the water’s still warm from the sky.

(1970)

Leila Rezvani
    B efore her mother imported the horticulturist from London, the garden was a friendlier place. Leila Rezvani walked along its manicured paths, past a showy rhododendron and a fountain painted with doves. A thin film of moisture coated every leaf and petal. The roses looked perfect, delicate and darkly veined. Yet to her the garden seemed decorous and static, like a roomful of her mother’s friends. There was no comfortable place to sit anymore, nowhere to think or watch the clouds. She missed the date palms and the stubborn pomegranate tree and the old poplars and plane trees, too. Their previous gardener, a dwarf from Tabriz, used to coax peonies from the parched earth, laying down straw in early spring to protect them from frost.
    When her family had first moved to the northern part of Tehran, her mother complained that their home was too close to the mountains, that the soil was spongy and wild rabbits came to graze on what little she grew. A proper garden was impossible. Leila hated their new home because there was no one her age to play with—only her older brother, Hosein, who disdained girls. That was six years ago. Now there were many more families in the neighborhood and Leila’s best friend, Yasmine, lived right down the street. Together they listened to the Beatles and tried on their mothers’ makeup and designer evening gowns.
    The horticulturist, Mr. Fifield, had arrived in the middle of January. By May he had the garden blooming with exotic flora: boxwood hedges, blue hydrangeas, dogwoods, azaleas, periwinkles. He left no room for native species. Gone were the cypress and greengage trees, the narcissi and asphodels. Even the butterflies were driven away. Mr. Fifield’s foreign vegetation drank enormous quantities of water, which was pumped in by a complex system of pipes and wells, prompting Leila’s father to grumble, “How long do you think, Fatemeh, before we drain the country of water? Do you want to live under the sea then?”
    Mr. Fifield inspected the English ivy along the garden’s back wall as Maman rapturously watched. Leila didn’t like the way her mother hovered around the Englishman, complimenting him, ordering that tea and sweets be brought to him on silver trays. Maman took extra care with her lipstick, too, a fierce shade of red that didn’t suit her. And since when had she worn her skirts so short, flaunting her plump knees like a schoolgirl?
    â€œLeila, go inside and bring Mr. Fifield a glass of lemonade,” her mother insisted. “Hurry now. Don’t keep him waiting.”
    Leila detested the Englishman. To her, he looked like one of those stiff-stemmed magnolias he’d planted. She especially hated the lilting way he spoke to her mother, elongating the first vowel of her name as if he were out of breath.
    â€œAh, my dear Faaatemeh,” Mr. Fifield sighed, his hair damp from his toils. “
You
are the vital perfume of this garden.”
    Why couldn’t Maman see through his flattering nonsense?
    Sometimes Leila concocted dramas with the flowers to help take her mind off him and the fact that her brother was dying. Lilacs were definitely aristocratic and Leila cast them in regal roles. Petunias had an air of villainy about them, lovely and evil