Chapter 35
The development had finally begun to take shape.
One could now see outlines of buildings, curving paths, brown swaths where grassy lawns would be.
I marked the progress from Louise’s with a detachment remarkable even to myself.
“Isn’t it loathsome?” she would remark, standing at the window after putting on a record, and I would nod and sip my wine as though it had nothing whatever to do with me.
Occasionally I would remind her that Tom himself disliked the project.
If it had been up to Tom, it would be entirely different, something of actual value, in meaningful dialogue with the colonial architecture that surrounded it, the landscape.
Louise let such statements pass unchallenged, saying only that love had triumphed despite the construction; couples were still making nightly use of the field.
She often spied them entering, holding hands.
One Sunday afternoon coming home, there was a terrible traffic jam.
Only Henry was with me; I’d gone to Louise’s on a whim, after taking him to get a new pair of school shoes in town.
Now, with cars at a standstill, I became agitated.
Tom and I had planned a family outing to the botanical gardens near our house; now I’d have to explain everything to him, and to Ida, who would be upset that we’d gone to Louise’s without her.
I decided to bypass the Cuesta and use the alternate route Tom had once shown me.
But all the one-way streets confused me. Soon nothing was familiar.
“Are we lost?” Henry asked.
I answered in a quick high voice, “Not at all! But can you not talk for a moment, darling?”
The windows were up and sweat prickled the back of my neck.
Taking the next turn, without hope, like a miracle I spied María walking along the sidewalk.
I could ask her for directions! She was moving away from me, but the pendulum of her thick braid, her bandy-legged tread, was unmistakable.
Only as I neared, I had a tremor of doubt.
She was wearing a dress I’d never seen and sandals with a slight heel.
She held a girl’s hand, the girl maybe a year or two older than Ida.
Presently she bent on her knee, saying something to the little girl, whose face, I saw, was round and shiny like buffed clay, a small replica of María’s.
I slowed, watching, rapt, as María lifted her finger to her own mouth and then pressed it over the girl’s eyebrow to smooth it, the girl impassive in the same way María so often was, allowing her mother to groom her, María brusquer with her than she was with my own children.
It suddenly occurred to me that I didn’t know María’s last name. For perhaps the first time, I wondered about her life without us. What did her house look like? Were the rooms empty; did they smell of lavender as ours did? Was she taking her daughter to church or a relative’s, a sister’s maybe?
Into these imaginings, Henry suddenly shouted, “María!”
I started and blushed, as though I’d been caught trespassing. Since I’d asked him not to speak, he’d been sprawled over the back seat, paging through a book Louise had given him.
“She’s over there!” he shouted, his hands and face pressed at the window, almost desperate now. “Mommy, you’re going to pass her!”
The moment of decision. I was drawing ahead, about to pull over, when Henry suddenly drew back from the window, his mood shifting.
“Why is she holding that girl’s hand?” he said, as though it were incomprehensible that she could hold the hand of a child he’d never seen, be absorbed in her needs, her appearance, rather than his and Ida’s.
“Where was she going?” he asked a little later. We had turned onto a broader avenue, funneling toward Centro.
“Home,” I told him. Then, realizing he still hadn’t understood: “Her own house.”