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We have a lot of traditions, including locking each other away, but we don’t eat lamb because lambs have never done us any harm and it feels rude to eat them.
In this house you don’t inherit money or gold rings or monogrammed sheet sets; beds and bad blood are all the dead pass down. Rage and a place to lay your head, that’s the most you’ll be left around here.
But one day the old girl saw angels for real and it turned out that whoever drew those pictures obviously hadn’t seen any themselves, because angels don’t have blonde curls or beautiful faces. They’re more like giant insects, like praying mantises.
It was the same outfit I wore for job interviews, when I also wanted to give an impression of innocence, virtue and a pretty much total willingness to be brutally exploited.
if I spend too much time twiddling my thumbs, the jitters and rot set in.
The thirst for attention rose in their throats and coated their tongues and all that came out of their mouths was bile and more bile, and it made little difference if it’d been brewing for years or had only just bubbled up.
I don’t care if people think I’m crazy or dumb but as for feeling sorry for me, no way, I draw the line.
It was a picture of the Archangel Gabriel in golden armour with his wings outstretched. He had a sword in one hand and some weighing scales in the other, which I liked because it seemed to be saying there’s no justice without death and no death without punishment.
I’d take fear over pity any day.
there’s nothing else to do in this house but stew in your own anger, and I’m pretty sure I’ve got that covered.
I might not remember my mother but my grandma’s shown me photos hundreds of times, photos she keeps in an old cookie tin and takes out whenever she gets choked up on grief or anger, which in this house are the same thing. But
I tried my best but it’s no easy task getting rid of what’s inside us.
May the Virgin forgive me but sometimes I don’t think God exists because if he did he’d surely have found a place in heaven for those poor souls, who never did anything in their lives but go hungry and slave away for other people.
But how can there be a God who sends those people to hell if hell’s where they were already living, cheek by jowl in those caves without a crumb to eat.
He was scared their fleas and their nits and their poverty would spread to him, because poverty’s catching too.
He decided to do what all men who hate themselves do: exploit the people beneath him.
His whole life he’d thought he didn’t have anything, but now he realized that wasn’t the case. He had power. True, it was a small and squirming power, a sort of slug that slipped through your fingers if you weren’t careful and left a frothing trail of slime in its wake, but it might just get him what he wanted.
My father wasn’t a handsome man, but he’d picked up a thing or two on his travels from barn to barn. What words to use, what to do. And it wasn’t exactly difficult. Adela was just a stupid girl who’d never had anything nice to call her own. I was a stupid girl once, too, but I was lucky enough not to meet a man like my father.
Felisa didn’t believe my father but she wanted to believe him, and the two things can end up looking alike.
My father understood that money likes a certain order, it favors a servile smile over a held gaze.
Maybe she fell in love with him and believed he’d change once they were married. That’s how stupid we women were back then.
He might have kept his promise, but she quickly learned that my father was much worse the times when he kept his word than the times when he didn’t.
My father hadn’t given her that house, he’d condemned her to live in it. It
When my mother realized she was never getting out of that house, she stopped praying to the saints and started talking to the shadows.
What my father did leave us was too much pride to ever have a master.
When you’re on your own and poor you can’t afford to make the same mistake twice, and that’s another thing we know all about in this house.
dawn is a time for regrets or hopes, not distress; a time for feeling guilty about the night before or chipper about the day ahead. At dawn the day still hasn’t got you latched onto its breast.
People think the saints listen to her, but they don’t know that really she listens to them.
Around here people only give you something if you’ve got something already and they can take it from you later. And if you’ve got nothing, that’s what they give you, nothing.
We spend our days hunting around for anything to throw in the cooking pot and they spend theirs showing off, and it’s always been that way.
All families keep their dead under the mattress, my mother used to tell me, it’s just that we can see ours.
disgust, like compassion, is a luxury the poor can’t afford.
I think that’s what cemented our friendship—spitting in our masters’ dinner.
She’d grown up with hardship but with love as well and you could tell from her character. She didn’t have that gnawing restlessness, that woodworm my mother and I had, that bastard itch that won’t leave you in peace or let you leave others in peace either.
Carmen had grown up around dancing, and I around yelling, and how could that not leave its mark?
I knew she was my mother and I also knew that, where she’d come from, it didn’t matter.
She just stared at me the way she always did, trying to force my thoughts from my head and replace them with other ones. Sometimes she managed it.
To the police I said he’s a restless child with an independent streak, which is what teachers at fancy schools tell the parents of unbearable children and those parents think it means their kid’s going to revolutionize robotics when really it just means no one can stand them.
May death bring him all the suffering he should have been dealt in life.
I preferred her loathing to her indifference because at least then I could give her something to hate me for,
He did his work, never raised his voice or his fist, and I never saw him come home looking shifty because he’d been with other women. You can’t ask much more of a man. Maybe, at a push, to not get in the way, and he didn’t do that either. He ate what was put in front of him and was silent more than he spoke.
María had stayed at home to take care of her mother since her father couldn’t be trusted to boil a potato and her brothers had gone off to university and never come back. But my boys worry terribly about me, her mother would say to the neighbors who’d come to see her when she couldn’t even move. They phone every week. And I don’t know if María saw red whenever she heard her mother say those things, while she herself scrubbed the bathroom or mopped the kitchen floor, but it was enough to make anyone bubble over with rage and throw the pail of dirty water in the old cow’s face and drag her by
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Those people don’t want their little darlings brought up by some poor hick with market-stall clothes and visible roots because what could she possibly offer them if she’d never had anything, never amounted to anything herself? How would she show the boy his place in the world and the importance of money and success, how would she teach him to walk over others when she’d only ever been walked over?
The boy’s mother had looked us both up and down and given the job to me because she knew when her city friends came to visit they’d wonder how much she was paying and who’d given my references and how many languages I’d speak with the boy. I’d never taken care of a child in my life and only knew a bit of English from school but that didn’t matter, what mattered was that I didn’t look like a pauper a peasant a dunce who’d done nothing in her life but scrub floors. What mattered was that her friends would see me and think I must be charging a tidy sum. I could tell all that just from the way she
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they were more than capable of flaunting me and hating me at the same time, like someone showing their guests a hunting trophy or a wild animal in a cage.
My great-grandfather had refused to serve them and they’d turned a blind eye, but only up to a point and only because they’d recognized something of themselves in him: the urge to crush whoever’s beneath you. They knew he was no threat to them because his kind never look up the ladder, they never target anyone higher, only those below. And they’re handy to have around because sometimes you need to impose order and they’re the ones who’ll take aim and shoot where you tell them, the ones who’ll stop at nothing.
They told me the men would boast about what they’d do to my daughter, some with desire and others with hate, which men often mistake for desire.
Stuck-up and dry as a nun’s tit, not a drop of charm and skinny as a rake. But nicely dressed and with private-school manners, even the way she had of walking like a countess, as if she’d paid for every paving stone on the street herself.
heard all about it from my saint, who climbed into bed with me one night. I remember she burned the sheets with her halo and I had to throw them out.
I’d also learned that not even money can free you from men like that. Your family can own companies and annuities and land and apartments, but shitty men will come down on you all the same. I thought rich women had it easier with that stuff, that they just packed their bags and left, called a lawyer or two or three or four and got their ex-husband’s cash but then I realized that no, that’s not how it works, the men break them too, bit by bit, day after day, like someone digging a grave with a teaspoon. And when they screw up their courage and call a friend and say I can’t take it anymore the
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