When she woke up, Ricardo was at her side, naked and asleep. She hadn’t heard him come in. It was three in the morning: what kind of doorman or night watchman do these hotels have? What right did they have to let a stranger into her room without warning her? How had Ricardo proved that she was his wife, that he had a right to be in her bed? Elaine stood up with her gaze fixed on a point on the wall, so she wouldn’t faint. She leaned out the window, saw a corner of the deserted square, placed a hand on her belly and burst into silent tears. She thought the first thing she’d do when she got back to La Dorada would be to look for someone to take in Truman, because horseback riding would be forbidden for the next few months, maybe for a whole year. Yes, that would be the first thing, and the second would be to start looking seriously for a house, a family house. She wondered if she should advise the volunteer coordinator, or even call Bogotá. She decided it wasn’t necessary, that she’d work as long as her body allowed her to, and then circumstances would dictate her strategy. She looked at Ricardo, who was sleeping open-mouthed. She approached the bed and lifted up the sheet with two fingers. She saw his sleeping penis, the curly hair. Her other hand moved to her sex and then to her belly, as if to protect it. What’s there to live for? she thought all of a sudden, and hummed in her head: Who needs the Peace Corps? And then she went back to sleep.
Elaine worked until she couldn’t any more. Her belly grew more than expected in the first months, but, apart from the violent tiredness that forced her to take long morning naps, her pregnancy didn’t modify her routines. Other things changed, however. Elaine started to be aware of the heat and humidity as she never had before; in fact, she started to be aware of her body, which was no longer silent and discreet and from one day to the next suddenly insisted on desperately drawing attention to itself, like a problematic teenager or a drunk. Elaine hated the pressure her own weight put on her calves, hated the tension that appeared in her thighs every time she had to climb four measly steps, hated that her small nipples, which she’d always liked, grew bigger and darker all of a sudden. Embarrassed, guilt-ridden, she began to skip meetings saying she wasn’t feeling well, and she’d go to the expensive hotel to spend the afternoon in the pool just for the pleasure of tricking gravity for a few hours, of feeling, afloat in the cool water, that her body was back to being the light thing it had always been before.
Ricardo devoted himself to her: he made only one trip during the entire pregnancy, but it must have been a big shipment, because he came back with a tennis bag — dark blue imitation leather, gold zipper, a white panther leaping up — full of bundles of dollar notes so clean and shiny they looked fake, like the toy money of a board game. Not just the bag was full, but also the racket cover, which in this particular bag was sewn to the outside as a separate compartment. Ricardo locked it up in the tool cupboard he’d built himself and a couple of times a month he’d go up to Bogotá to change some of the dollars into pesos. He showered Elaine with attention. He drove her everywhere and picked her up in the Nissan, he went with her to her doctor’s appointments, he watched her step onto the scales and saw the hesitant needle and wrote down the latest result in a notebook, as if the doctor’s annotation might be imprecise or less reliable. He also went with her to work: if there was a school to be built, he would willingly pick up a trowel and put cement on the bricks, or carry wheelbarrow loads of gravel from one place to another, or fix with his own hands the broken mesh of a sieve; if she had to talk to Acción Comunal people, he would sit at the back of the room and listen to his wife’s ever-improving Spanish and sometimes offer the translation of a word Elaine didn’t remember. On one occasion Elaine had to visit a community leader in Doradal, a man with a luxuriant moustache and shirt open to his belly button who, in spite of his paisa snake oil hawker’s patter, couldn’t get a polio-vaccination campaign approved. It was a bureaucratic matter, things were going slowly and the children couldn’t wait. They said goodbye with a feeling of failure. Elaine climbed laboriously into the jeep, leaning on the door handle, grabbing hold of the back of the seat, and was just getting comfortable when Ricardo said, ‘Wait for me a moment, I’ll be right back.’ ‘Where are you going?’ ‘I’ll be right back. Wait one second.’ And she saw him walk back in and say something to the man in the open shirt, and then they both disappeared behind a door. Four days later, when Elaine got the news that the campaign had been approved in record time, an image came into Elaine’s head: that of Ricardo reaching into his pocket, taking out an incentive for public functionaries and promising more. She could have confirmed her suspicions, confronted Ricardo and demanded a confession, but she decided not to. The objective, after all, had been achieved. Children, think of the children. Children were what mattered.
When she was thirty weeks and the size of her belly was becoming an obstacle in her work, Elaine obtained a special permit from the volunteer coordinator and then authorization from Peace Corps headquarters in Bogotá, for which she had to send a medical report by post, hurriedly and badly written by a young doctor doing his year of rural service in La Dorada and who wanted, with no knowledge of obstetrics or any medical justification at all, to give her a genital examination. Elaine, who by that point in the appointment was half undressed, objected and even got angry, and the first thing she thought was that she’d better not say anything to Ricardo, whose reactions could be unpredictable. But later, coming home in the Nissan, looking at her husband’s profile and his hands with their long fingers and dark hairs, she felt a fit of desire. Ricardo’s right hand was resting on the gear lever; Elaine grabbed his wrist and opened her legs and his hand understood, Ricardo’s hand understood. They arrived home without a word and hurried in like thieves, and closed the curtains and bolted the back door, and Ricardo threw his clothes on the floor without caring that they’d soon be covered in ants. Elaine, meanwhile, lay down on her side on top of the sheets, facing the white curtains, the illuminated square of the curtains. The daylight was so strong that there were shadows in spite of the curtains being closed; Elaine looked at her belly as big as a half-moon, her smooth, strained skin and the violet line from top to bottom as if drawn on with a felt-tip pen, and she saw the shadows that her swollen breasts made on the sheet. She thought how her breasts had never cast shadows on anything ever before and then her breasts disappeared under Ricardo’s hand. Elaine felt her darkened nipples close at the contact of those fingers and then felt Ricardo’s mouth on her shoulder and then felt him enter her from behind. And so, connected like puzzle pieces, they made love for the last time before she gave birth.
Maya Laverde was born in the Palermo Clinic in Bogotá in July 1971, more or less at the same time President Nixon used the words War on Drugs for the first time in a public speech. Elaine and Ricardo had moved into the Laverdes’ house three weeks earlier, in spite of Elaine’s protests: ‘If the clinic in La Dorada is good enough for the poorest mothers,’ she said, ‘I don’t see why it’s not going to be good enough for me.’
‘Ay, Elena Fritts,’ Ricardo said, ‘why don’t you do us a favour and stop trying to change the world all the time.’
Then events proved him right: the baby girl was born with an intestinal problem and needed immediate surgery, and everyone agreed that a rural clinic would not have had either the surgeons or the neonatal instruments necessary to guarantee the child’s survival. Maya was kept under observation for several days, stuck in an incubator that had once, long ago, had transparent walls, which were now scratched and opaque like glasses that get too much use; when it was time to feed her, Elaine would sit in a chair beside the machine and a nurse would take the little girl out and put her in Elaine’s arms. The nurse was an older woman with wide hips who seemed to take her time on purpose when she was carrying Maya. She smiled down at her so sweetly that Elaine felt jealous for the first time, and was amazed that something like that — the threatening presence of another mother, the savage reaction of the blood — was possible.