Had Casiopea possessed her father’s pronounced romantic leanings, perhaps she might have seen herself as a Cinderella-like figure. Mother’s family had been charitable, if one’s definition of charity is that they were put immediately to work while their idle relatives twiddled their thumbs. His death sent Casiopea and her mother packing back to Grandfather’s house. A man whose heart gave up one morning, like a poorly wound clock.
What had God done for Casiopea, aside from taking her father from her? That quiet, patient clerk with a love for poetry, a fascination with Mayan and Greek mythology, a knack for bedtime stories. Casiopea, who had prayed at the age of ten for her cousin Martín to go off and live in another town, far from her, understood by now that God, if he existed, did not give a damn about her.
Casiopea swallowed her angry reply because it made no sense to discuss her mistreatment with Mother, whose solution to every problem was to pray to God. “Do as they ask we wouldn’t want them to say we are spongers,” Casiopea’s mother told her. When the old brute, who still had enough strength to beat her over the head with his cane when it pleased him, was not yelling for his grandchild to fetch him a glass of water or his slippers, her aunts and cousins were telling Casiopea to do the laundry, scrub the floors, and dust the living room. She served his meals, ironed his clothes, and combed his sparse hair. Cirilo was a bitter man, with more poison in his shriveled body than was in the stinger of a white scorpion.
However, she doubted that many other young women had to endure the living hell that was her daily life in grandfather Cirilo Leyva’s house. She was reasonable enough to recognize that many other young women lived in equally drab, equally small towns. She was eighteen, penniless, and had grown up in Uukumil, a drab town where mule-drawn railcars stopped twice a week and the sun scorched out dreams. Casiopea Tun, named after a constellation, was born under the most rotten star imaginable in the firmament. Some people are born under a lucky star, while others have their misfortune telegraphed by the position of the planets.
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