Chapter 2
Ygnacio
This is where the story begins:
Bam.
Minerva pounds on the door of a stranger’s house. Her knuckles pale as she curls her fingers tighter, as she pulls her spine stiff and straight.
Be charming. Keep pretending until you’ve gotten what you want. That is what Arnulfo would say. Easy for him. Arnulfo is the sly one, a fox with many faces, ready to talk himself out of any dangerous situation and into many others.
Shoulders back. Be firm. That voice is Armando’s, the eldest of the three. She must keep her resolve as he would, noble even in the thick of certain defeat, teeth gritted as he faced down Papá.
Minerva does not have Armando’s and Arnulfo’s gifts. When her older brothers fled their father’s house six weeks ago, all they left her with was memories of their voices. And memories are not enough.
Minerva is alone.
She has nothing but a stolen dress on her back. A dull hunger hangs from her ribs, achingly persistent. It whittles her bones down like sandpaper.
So she knocks again. Harder this time.
The Capital has a slum, a cluttered knot of soot-stained stucco and tin roofs. In between this slum and the outlying neighborhoods of the city runs a shallow ravine where the servants of the wealthy bring refuse.
That morning, thin curls of smoke rose over the dump.
Hints of orange peeked through the sharp clefts of mountains in the east. It was cold, that damp, bone-weary kind of cold that hugs the valley through the winters.
Minerva’s toes were numb and clumsy from it as she waded into the garbage.
She kept her fingers tucked beneath her armpits, withdrawing them only to throw out her arms for balance.
She followed a pack of street dogs deeper into the dump, mutts with nipped ears and ribs like the keys of a strange instrument.
She knew their noses would lead them to the places where the clubs and restaurants of the wealthy discarded half-eaten food.
That was where she would find the most recent refuse, and perhaps, her quarry.
You must be wondering why this girl, the girl with whom our story begins, followed stray dogs into mountains of the Capital’s garbage. Surely she could not be that desperate. You know her brothers are gone, but she has a father, at least, doesn’t she? A home where she must be cared for.
Ah, but that is where you would be wrong.
She also has a stepmother, a small, hard-eyed woman her father took in when Minerva was five or six, too young to remember anything but the iron reign this new woman drew taut over the family.
That stepmother has children of her own now—four at last count.
Four red, wet mouths mewling for food. Mouths need money, money that Minerva knows her father turns to aguardiente minutes after he receives it from the foreman at the mine.
It was bad when he did so during the reign of the Viceroyalty.
It is worse now that there is a president, now that uncertainty and the threat of war cinch purses around the Capital.
So this stepmother brings Minerva into the dark corner of their house that serves as a kitchen. She takes the clean rag wrapped around the family’s tortillas and opens it as if to give Minerva what was denied to her at dinner.
Instead, she counts.
Then she wraps the tortillas and locks eyes with Minerva.
“Eight,” she says.
If there are not eight in the morning, red welts will bloom across the backs of Minerva’s legs. Her father is not the only one with hands accustomed to gripping belts.
Arnulfo would have found a way to talk himself into the stepmother’s good graces. Or batted his dark lashes and stolen a place at another family’s table. Armando would have taken the tortillas and borne the punishment, his face stoic before the flash of the belt buckle in candlelight.
Minerva was not her brothers.
But she had to follow the example of their flight.
So that morning, when she noticed a flyer with the words Lady’s maid wanted.
No experi—curling and blackening among embers as the stepmother started a fire with household garbage at dawn, she decided to go to the dump.
The stepmother could not read; all she saw in the flyer was kindling.
But before the letters blackened and disappeared, Minerva noticed they were printed, not written by hand.
Printing meant quantity, and quantity meant that she could find another.
In the dump, Minerva watched from a safe distance as the dogs descended on a pile of trash.
She scanned her surroundings for paper. Hunger needled her, gnawing at the pit of her belly.
It drew her frozen feet forward one step, then another, watching the dogs cautiously as they pawed through kitchen scraps and fell upon a spoil of bones.
Minerva crinkled her nose, thinking of bad meat and curdling stomachs.
No, she would not find anything edible here. She had to find a copy of that flyer.
One dog stumbled into a crate, which tipped over and spilled its contents. An orange rolled away from the crate and stilled, a bright smudge of color among dark, slimy cilantro and withered tomato stems.
Its rind was untouched, full and round and unblemished as a harvest moon.
Saliva slicked her mouth. Everything around her fell away in a swift tumble—the smell of garbage, the insistent damp, the pain in her gut.
She could already feel the resistance of the rind against her thumb as she pried it open.
She could feel the gentle sprinkle of juice on her cheeks as the fruit gave way, the sweet acidity of its flesh breaking against her teeth.
She darted forward.
One dog slid in front of her, every dark hair on its body standing on end. It planted its feet and bared yellowed teeth. Spit frothed at its gums as it locked eyes with Minerva, a rumble rising from its chest and ending in a wet snarl against its gums.
Other dogs raised their heads from their plunder and turned on her, ears flat against their skulls. Growls erupted around her. Fear lit like kindling in her veins. Run.
But she could not turn her back on the dogs. She retreated, one step at a time, settling her worn shoes in slippery filth with care. Her heart danced in the hollow of her throat, irregular and stumbling. If she fell, the dogs would lunge, and—
Something crinkled underfoot, bright and dry. She spared a glance down.
A piece of paper.
She lifted her chin to refocus on the dogs, but they had turned away. Perhaps her moment of apparent submission was enough to convince them that she would not threaten their meal. Perhaps she had moved back far enough.
Minerva’s hands shook. They rattled down to bone. When a cold breeze lifted and struck her face with damp, she realized her cheeks were wet.
She was a coward. She would only ever be a coward. A sack of trembling flesh too fearful to keep itself alive. Too fearful to steal an orange from a dump.
Sobs built in her chest, quivering, pushing, willing themselves to be unleashed. She wanted to sit and curl her knees to her face and let everything go: her brothers’ abandonment, the stepmother’s cruelty, her papá’s neglect.
Paper crinkled underfoot.
Beneath her toe was a flyer, its header embossed with the flowering sigil of a wealthy family. It was printed. She lifted her foot.
Lady’s maid wanted. No experience necessary. Inquire at Casa Azafrán, 18 Calle Jacaranda.
Calle Jacaranda. She never went to that corner of the city, but the wide avenue was canonized in proverb.
As proud as if she lived on Calle Jacaranda, women might say of a haughty girl.
It was where the wealthiest of the old Viceroyalty lived.
Where windows were made of glass and lined with silver.
Where not even the Valbuenista insurgents who overthrew the Viceroy and now worked in el Presidente’s mansion at the end of the avenue were brave enough to tread.
Minerva picked up the paper. No experience necessary. Its date was recent.
A hole near the sigil at the top indicated that it had been nailed to a wall, advertising this position for all to see.
Someone might have already applied for the position. Or perhaps not.
Minerva folded the flyer into a small square, a plan taking shape and settling with each new crease.
The sun was rising. She had no time to waste.
She reached home before the sun was fully risen. The stepmother was gone—off to get water from the stream, probably, and grumbling all the way because this was Minerva’s chore.
The other children and Papá were still snoring in the one room they all shared. At the back of that room was a single chest of the stepmother’s things. All Minerva had to do was get to it and leave without waking anyone.
She picked through piles of half siblings like she had picked her way through the dump.
Home did not use to have this many bodies in it.
Back before the stepmother, only Armando’s and Arnulfo’s laughter echoed against Minerva’s.
Three sets of hands made chores vanish before the sun was high; after that, Minerva could tend to her small garden.
Sink her hands into the earth. Nurse her seedlings with water from the creek, the afternoon sun warm on her back.
One night, when unease grew with the coming dark and Papá’s impending return from the chispa mines, Armando took a piece of string and tied seven knots in it.
“Yancho jiarú,” he whispered, his brow furrowed as he ensured that the knots were evenly spaced and tight. The syllables had no meaning for her, but carried the weight of incantation. “This will protect you,” he said, and fastened it around Minerva’s wrist.
“From what?”
“Everything bad in the world,” he said. He tested the tightness of the knot. Then he squeezed her hand. “Spirits, especially. But also el ojo, bad luck. All of it.”
“Or at least that’s what Mamá always said,” Arnulfo added. “She said that’s what the miners wear when they go into the dark alone.”
In the end, the amulet was just string. It did not protect her from the stepmother when the woman arrived on their doorstep, nor would it protect Minerva now, not as she slinked past the great mound of a sleeping father with its aromas of sweat and stale aguardiente.
Not as she crouched before the chest. Opened it a sliver, careful of its creaking hinges. At the first sign of dark fabric, she shot her hand in like the head of a snake.
She could not turn up on the doorstep of a house on Calle Jacaranda smelling of the dump and wearing a dress that she had worn for nearly a year straight. Its patches and stains would spell her fate before she could even open her mouth.
So instead, she took the one fine dress the stepmother owned.
She yanked it over her head in the kitchen, fumbling the buttons with clammy fingers. She balled her old dress up and stuffed it in a corner with the rest of the trash. No—she couldn’t leave it in the house. She took it again, crumpling it in one fist. There must be no sign of her crime.
She stepped through the doorway, sealing the life behind her without so much as a final look.
At the bottom of the hill, near the stream, a shadowy figure approached.
“Minerva?” The figure picked up its pace; the stepmother’s voice sounded sharp and hawkish as she spoke again. “What are—”
Minerva sucked in a breath. It tasted of cold morning. Of soot and empty bellies. It already tasted of the past.
She turned and took off at a run toward the city.