Free The Invisible Mountain by Carolina de Robertis Page B

children: toast and warm milk and what was left of butter. Today was Ignazio’s payday. When he arrived, more butter would come.
    But he didn’t arrive that day. Or that night. Or the next. Onions—she had onions; she could fry them for dinner and serve them on bread. More bread with mayonnaise for lunch.
    He arrived on the sixth night. He looked ashy and haggard and did not meet her eyes. He smelled as if he had just been spit out of a war zone. He slouched in silence at the kitchen table. It took Pajarita two hours of pouring
mate
to coax him and discover what he’d done.
    After his last night at home, Ignazio asked his boss for an advance on the next two months of work. He was a faithful employee, and so the request was granted. The loan constituted a third of what he needed for a fleet of gondolas. He took it straight to El Corriente, to triple it at the poker table. It didn’t triple. He lost it all.
How smooth the wooden table was between them. Solid, it seemed—and yet one bite of an ax could, at any moment, break it open. Send halves reeling. Pajarita gripped the table’s edge as though that act alone were keeping it in place. Gone. Two months of pay. And days yawning in front of them like mouths.
    “What will we do?”
    No answer.
    “Ignazio—”
    “Shut up, woman!” Ignazio stood so suddenly that the table knocked from her hands and fell. “Shut your stupid fucking mouth.”
    Pajarita stood too. “Don’t shout at me.”
    Ignazio tightened backward in an enormous bow and arrow and the force of him flew forward in a fist that crashed against her face so that she fell against the wall, toward the floor; she curled around her burning face—the world was turning turning, full of shouting, full of stars, full of silence. Silence. Pain ebbed slightly. She was alone. No, not quite alone; his sounds came from the living room. She should go to him. She would not. She would stay here, furled on the floor, while he wept. But she was bleeding. She stood and sought a rag to wipe her face. The taste of iron tinged her tongue. She wet the rag and wiped again. Thank god thank god the children were asleep. She lifted the table into place, back onto four legs, and cleaned blood from the floor. Dizzy. She listened for living room sobs. None. She went to look. There he was, her husband, tear-streaked, drunk, fast asleep in the rocking chair. She walked past him to her room, to bed, to sleep.
    The next morning, when she woke, the rocking chair was empty. No Ignazio. She used the last of the flour for bread that day. Crackers. There were still crackers. The days went by. No Ignazio. The crackers ran out. Only a quarter jar of mayonnaise left. Her hands (scrubbing, folding, brushing Bruno’s hair, opening her blouse for hungry Tomás) shook.
    Coco saved her with free meat, and an idea.
    “First of all,” Coco said, pushing a hefty package into Pajarita’s hands, “you’re taking this meat. I don’t care what you say. I know your husband’s gone—the
desgraciado.”
She sat her ample body down at Pajarita’s table. Pajarita stared at the gift.
“I have no way to thank you.”
    Coco continued as if she hadn’t heard. “Secondly: your plants. They’re strong. You should sell them.”
    “Sell?”
    “To women in the
barrio
. You can start in the store, behind the counter with me. Look, once word spreads about your cures, better than a doctor and cheaper too, you’ll be putting food in those boys’ bellies.”
    It had never occurred to her, but she couldn’t think of a reason not to try. She took her children and a basket of leaves and roots and barks to the butcher shop. The boys resumed an epic pretend game of gauchos-in-the-
campo
, riding imaginary horses among the chunks of flesh that hung from the ceiling. In one corner of the room, between the chopping block and meat hooks, Pajarita arranged two small wooden stools and sat down on one. Ignazio, she thought, I want to kill you, to kiss you, to carve you