YESTERDAY, WHEN THE WAGON ARRIVED with José, I already had the tub ready and water on the fire. I helped get him off the wagon. I was somewhat surprised that he had no blood on his face. The man who brought him handed me José’s lunch sack and shepherd’s staff and left. Old Gabriel watched us from his window. Despite his hundred and some years of age, he still sticks his nose in other people’s business. I stripped José, without removing the bonesetter’s bandage, and accommodated him as best I could in the tub. He couldn’t hold his neck up, his arms and legs drooped to the ground, his body adopted the shape of the tub, and only his eyes conserved a flicker of light or of life. The water was lukewarm, just the right temperature, and I poured the pans onto his chest: thick jets of water, small rivers of lukewarm water curving in the air and falling over his body, streams, lakes, reservoirs. I washed him, and his skin: I filled the palms of my hands with water and spread it over his chest, on his back; I rubbed soap over his legs, his shoulders, and my fingertips glided over the contours of his skin. I washed him, and his body: I passed the towel over his face, redrawing the lines of his face, more relaxed, serene; I wrapped him up in the towel, or maybe I hugged him, for I felt him inside my arms, next to my breasts. I tucked him in bed, and if his eyes hadn’t remained wide open in a fixed trance, he would have felt comfortable. The baby slept soundly. I slept soundly.
This morning I did my housework while he, immobile, remained in a deep insomnia or a deep sleep. I took care of the baby, who played a little and then got drowsy again, so I put him to bed. The tub was still next to the fireplace and I remembered the bath I took a month after the baby was born. It was the first time I’d had my period since getting pregnant, and it was on the last day, the amount of blood on the rags diminishing, diminishing until it was almost nothing, and at sundown I felt like taking a bath. I filled the tub and, standing up in it, threw water over myself. Hot water that felt cold anyway, clean water making me clean. On that day the baby was sleeping. I couldn’t resist and sat down. I let my arms and legs and hair hang outside the tub, closed my eyes and sat there. Thousands of armies in my body finally rested, I was out of breath in my bliss. Naked, I glowed in a honey light that passed through the curtains. In my body men knocked off work and put down their hoes, mules went home and tasted their first handful of grass after pulling wagons all day, and the turned earth finally found its order in the repose of night. My filth and my blood’s ardor slowly dissolved in the water. And slowly I was.