Magdalena remembered the way the gypsy woman had spread her fingers over the cards, as if she were pulling meanings out through the paper. She had talked in a singing voice and wore a silver shawl over her clothes to hide the fact that she was just a poor woman selling stories. “All in the pictures,” Magdalena said.
“Nobody knows about Colin,” Rachel said, very quietly.
Magdalena laughed. “This is just for playing, okay?” But Rachel didn’t laugh, so Magdalena said, “I am hearing you say this name Colin when you are dreaming or something in the night.”
“That fuck,” Rachel said. “I hope I didn’t say too much.”
“No, it’s okay, no one else is even hearing I think,” Magdalena said, and turned over a card with a picture of a woman kneeling at a stream, filling pots of water under the stars. She didn’t dare read anything else off of Rachel, so she made one up. “You will be very lucky with business,” she said. “You are going to make money like water.”
The next morning the woman who’d slept in the bunk above theirs came over as Magdalena was making a replacement strap for her sandal out of a piece of Sellotape that Brit and Olaf, retirees from Norway, had given her. “I hear you give Tarot readings,” the woman said.
“It was only for a game,” Magdalena said.
“Your friend said you learned from your grandmother.”
“Just some little things,” Magdalena said.
“Do you have time?” the woman asked. “There’s something I really need to know.” Then she said, “Your friend said ten euros, right?” and Magdalena nodded. Rachel cleared them a place on a bench outside and spread the blue scarf out in front of Magdalena, then stood a little way back to watch. Magdalena set the cards out in the pattern Rachel had used the night before and flipped them face up one by one for the woman who, it turned out, was following the pilgrimage not to where the remains of the saint were buried, but to get to the shrine of a pre-Christian fertility goddess. The man she was traveling with had turned back, she told Magdalena. Should she go on without him? Magdalena had no idea. She could see no names or birthdates of children on the woman’s face or shoulders or arms, but there was a wedding in the future, to a man whose name could only be Spanish, and on the woman’s calf was a ledger of mortgage payments to be made on an apartment in Madrid.
Magdalena turned over more cards and pretended to study them. “I think you will find something new in Spain to make you happy,” Magdalena said. The woman nodded but she didn’t look like she believed it. “You will find love,” Magdalena said.
“Mmm,” the woman said. Dates of another marriage and a divorce from a man named Jim were written on her cheek. Along her jaw it said A courthouse wedding, no white dress. He said the beach would be too expensive but really, he never liked the sand.
“You are married before, but this is not working.”
“That’s right,” the woman said, looking more interested.
“You have the dream of a marriage by the sea.”
“Well, yes,” the woman said. “A long time ago.”
Magdalena tilted her head as if she were thinking and read Level A2 instructor, Instituto Cervantes. A list of verb conjugations wrapped around the woman’s elbow. “You are a teacher for Spanish, right?”
“That’s right,” the woman said. Magdalena traced her finger across a card with a picture of a hand coming out of the sky, and leaned closer to read what was written along the woman’s shoulder.
“And you have wanted to come to Spain to work, but this couldn’t happen.” The first husband had something to do with it, Magdalena read, but what exactly was buried in the woman’s armpit.
“Yes, yes,” the woman said.
“There is a new marriage for you, by the sea, and you will live in Spain, I think, with a man who is better than the first,” Magdalena said, and gathered up the cards quickly, wondering if the woman would press her for details. But the woman was already taking some bills out of the pocket of her shorts. She added an extra five euros. “For the good news,” she said.
That afternoon Rachel caught up with Magdalena as they walked and suggested that now might be the time to fulfill the money-making prophecy Magdalena had seen in Rachel’s cards. Rachel would bring the customers and Magdalena would use what her gypsy grandmother had taught her to pay their way to Spain. Magdalena laughed at her at first, but that night when they stopped at an abbey where anyone with a stamp of a scallop shell from the previous town could stay for free, Rachel found her three more customers, all from a Swedish backpacking group, and told them the price was fifteen euros each. The words on their skin were all in Swedish, but Magdalena could pick out a few names and dates, and as it turned out, she didn’t need to do much more than mention the name of a person or a place to make the backpackers look at each other and laugh, a little nervously. Then whatever Magdalena told them next—generalities about luck or love or a phrase she remembered from the gypsy woman in the market—would strike the person listening as truth, decoded from the pictures on the cards as if they were precise hieroglyphics only Magdalena could understand.
And so, after spending all her literate life trying to avoid seeing the things written on the people around her, Magdalena became, almost by accident, a professional fortune-teller. As they made their way toward Spain she started wearing her glasses all the time, not only because they let her walk faster but because she might pass someone resting along the way with their sleeves rolled up and certain details about their life exposed, and then meet that person at a pilgrims’ hostel later on, when it was cool and everyone was wearing sweaters, and be asked to tell their fortune. She learned to mix stock fortune-telling phrases into her readings, finding that saying a thing like “There is a man in your life, you aren’t sure of his commitment” or “You are not quite satisfied in your profession”—things that were always true—put her customers at ease, and more often than not, despite pressing her for details of the future, it was really the vaguer warnings and assurances they wanted to hear.