Nights were cold. The family wore their coats even to sleep, the children released from their blanket cocoons only for changing or to be fed. Karina was three. Nando, two. Madame looked after them so Mauro could stay in the hospital and hold the baby as Elena slept. She shared a room with another woman. The new mother of a boy. Elena noticed nobody came to visit them. She didn’t speak Spanish, but when they were alone she brought the baby to Elena’s bedside and they held each other’s children until her boy cried and they traded back.
According to an American nurse who spoke Spanish, the woman and her son left the next morning in a taxi. Before the hospital discharged Elena, the same nurse came to speak to her. She stood by the bed and asked if her husband was around. When Elena said he’d gone home to check on the other babies, the nurse looked pleased. “Now that you’ve got three little ones, you should think about not having more children,” she said as Elena fed the baby from her breast. “There is a procedure you can have done here in the hospital to prevent you from finding yourself in the same situation again. You don’t need your husband’s consent.”
The hospital people in Houston told Elena the same thing after Nando was born. For a time, she thought they might have sterilized her. She’d heard stories like that back in Colombia. Foreign-aid workers, Peace Corps, and NGOs. How they lured women to clinics offering free gynecological services and the women came out unaware they could no longer have children. When she discovered she was pregnant a third time, she felt a surge of relief that the Texas doctors had left her intact.
The nurse seemed frustrated when Elena said nothing in response. “I know your family is already struggling. How are you going to care for three children with just your husband’s income when you don’t have any other support?”
Elena was uneasy with how the nurse spoke of her babies as burdens. She never thought of them that way. In Colombia people said a baby arrives with a loaf of bread under its arm. Where four eat, so can five. Even Madame told her every baby brings luck to its family. She informed the nurse they lived with a nice couple who helped watch the children on nights when the pizzeria downstairs needed extra hands in the kitchen. The nurse nodded, and Elena assumed she understood they would manage.
When she and her baby were alone again, Elena held her and watched her sleep. This fat glowing child, pale from not having yet met the sun. They’d had many conversations in the months before her arrival. Elena promised she would protect her from harm and felt nudges from within letting her know the baby had heard. She’d made the same vows to her other children, and they lived shelled in happiness, playing in the back seats of the minivan, laughing even while hungry, making up songs for each other those nights they spent at highway rest stops before they found a new place to live, which she hoped would not be etched into memory.
The baby was named Talia for the actress who played the wife of Rocky. Mauro loved those movies, and Elena always thought the wife much tougher than the boxer. Only women knew the strength it took to love men through their evolution to who they thought they were supposed to be.
Mauro was never much of a fighter though. At least not with his fists. He found his corner in liquor when he came up against stronger, unbeatable opponents: a supervisor, a landlord, rent to be paid. The winter of Talia’s birth, he drank as if it nourished his cells. When they were teenagers, Mauro and Elena went to parties where they gulped aguardiente and danced cumbia, shared beers and sipped wiskisitos at nightclubs and festivals when famous rockeros and salseros came to town. Mauro was the one who bragged he could drink more than anyone they knew and walk a straight line along the edge of a building. She saw him do it many times on the roof of her house in Chapinero. But now he was belly-bloated and clumsy. He bought cheaper alcohol every time because it was all he could afford without Elena noticing.
He drank at work sometimes, which got him fired more than once. At meals, even when Elena asked him to help by feeding one child so she could feed the other. But at the hospital after Talia was born, he promised, his head resting beside Elena’s deflated abdomen, the child swaddled and asleep in the plastic basinet next to the bed, that he would never drink again. He’d found a church and knelt before an altar to Saint Jude, patron of the impossible, and begged for assistance in giving up the bottle.
“I want to be better,” he told her. “The kind of father people remember for honorable reasons. The kind of father neither of us had.”
He was the only man she’d ever been with, ever kissed. She knew Mauro had always seen her as a kind of seraph. It didn’t bother her. Perla said it was normal for men to exalt the women they love. That’s why so many had mistresses and why brothels were always busy. But Elena had the same desires as anyone else. When she met Mauro at Paloquemao—lean and long-haired, brows downturned in fatigue, in the moth-eaten ruana he wore till he saved enough to buy a flea market leather jacket—though he wasn’t like the more educated or family-bred boys she knew, he had an elegance she could not explain. She remembered how she thought of him after their initial market encounters, the tide of love beginning to roll over her as she worked at the lavandería, hoping with every jangle of the door chain that the next customer would be him.