the fortunes of a man in the autumn of a battered life, but the fate of a girl with many years to come.
The gypsy held my palm up to her cloudy eyes and began a thin, keening wail. Suddenly she threw off my hand as if it were burning her fingers. I curled it into a fist. After that, there was no getting it to open for a second look. The gypsy’s cries subsided. She shook her head as if she had just gazed into the most dire of fortunes. I curled my hand against the dry, wiry fingers that kept digging under my knuckles trying to pry it open. I kept my hand closed for days.
And for days, I was distracted, lost in an angry turmoil. When my hand did open to grasp something, the palm was red and marked with four deep wedges from my nails. Throughout my life, my marked palms would remind me of the door that had opened a crack and then slammed shut to reveal no more than a sudden glimpse of a black, fat-bellied spider clinging to the inside of my throat. It was all in the open hand, the line of life, the mound of love, the unformed M of death, the crossed paths of lust and loneliness. “Wait,” the gypsy had called after me. “There is more.”
Pep Saval kept trying to set me at ease. The gypsies were meddlesome women who fed off people’s fear and greed and loneliness. “The more you fear your life, the more you will pay for the best possible fortune they can tell. Here are some pesetas. Go back. Tell the old busybody that I insist you be rich and famous and live to a fine old age and die a happy death in the midst of luxury in a foreign land. America will do fine. Ever thought of going to America? That is the place to die. Under big open skies, surrounded by grazing buffalo and the cries of eagles overhead. Don’t die in Spain, all shriveled up on a wooden table surrounded by wailing old women, hovering about like crows, scheming to plunder whatever you’ll leave behind. Believe me, you will be different. The rest of us, your father, the man you will marry, your friends and teachers and colleagues, will all die like lost dogs on strange roads. You, however, will die a queen. Go to the fortune-teller again. Show her your hand. That’s what she will tell you.”
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