On the day that Rosa took the baby home from the hospital, rain was pouring down. She nearly slipped on the wet cobblestones in the courtyard. Pale with fright—the baby’s skull was so fragile—she held Isabel more tightly as she climbed the four flights of stairs behind Antonio, who had gone ahead to unlock the door.
She put Isabel down on their big bed. She was still sleeping.
“La bébé is at home now with her mamá and papá,” said Antonio. He put his arm around Rosa. The two of them gazed fondly at the tiny bundle in pink flannel.
A little later Eleanor arrived with a bag of groceries. Antonio inspected the bottle of wine she had brought. “Ah, Madame, this is Chenin Blanc—very good. But we need a Cabernet with the roast. I go to buy a bottle.”
He ran out the door, evidently eager to escape.
Rosa went into the kitchen where a bottle of formula was heating. Eleanor noticed how thin she looked in her grey sweater and skirt—thinner than she remembered. Her shoulders were slightly bent, as if she were cold or fearful. She tested a drop of the liquid on her wrist to see if it was warm enough. “I wanted to nurse her, but I have no more milk.”
The air felt oppressive. Rosa glanced at her mother. Tears glistened in her eyes, and in that instant Eleanor felt that Rosa knew everything. Nonetheless, she shrugged off the thought and began to wash dishes that were piled in the sink while Rosa fed the baby.
Eleanor visited every day, bringing groceries, more baby clothes, a worn volume of Baudelaire. She ordered a diaper service. She watched over Isabel when Rosa went out during the day. Their apartment was nearly always cold, littered with clothing drying on a rack in front of the heater. Eleanor bought more blankets for Isabel, who would collapse against her like a soft kitten and give a sigh of contentment in her arms. How darling she was!
“A baby only cries if she needs something,” said Antonio. He and Rosa would pick Isabel up if she gave the smallest whimper. Once a week, her hair askew, Rosa would bundle the baby into her carriage early in the morning and run along the sidewalks to the clinic for her checkup. Each minor ailment—an attack of gas, a trace of diaper rash—loomed for Rosa like a catastrophe.
Antonio was out a lot. He said that he was looking for work. Although he was still the building janitor, he needed more income. Photography, painting and odd jobs he obtained through friends had kept him going up to now. Sometimes he brought people home with him. Sleek, flirtatious French girls. Chilean men who smoked and drank his wine and talked loudly over late dinners. At times he stayed out until two or three in the morning. Then Rosa’s nerves would be strung nearly at the breaking point. “Where have you been?” she would ask. “To the moon,” he would reply.
An editor in Santiago asked Antonio to write about Chilean artists in Paris. “I need to be alone. I need serenity,” he said. Rosa was thrilled, and she tiptoed around the apartment, keeping things as quiet as possible.
Nonetheless, he was attentive to the baby’s needs.
“This is how you burp her, Rosa. You never showed her, Madame?”
Eleanor was sitting in one of their rickety chairs. “No, I didn’t.”
“With her brothers?”
“Rosa was too young,” she said icily.
Rosa wandered around the room, the baby pressed against her shoulder, gently patting her tiny back to help her burp. Afterwards as she lay asleep in Rosa’s arms, Antonio leaned over and softly stroked Isabel’s face. “Babies are intelligent. They sense everything that is going on. Isabel wants harmony between her father and mother. She is a powerful personage. We need to be harmonious for her sake.”
The baby’s chest fluttered with light sleeping breaths.
He drew Rosa close, and despite herself Eleanor felt a twinge of jealousy.
There was always tension. One afternoon, as Rosa was carrying a pot of freshly brewed tea over to the dining table, she cried out, “You’re sitting too close!” Eleanor and Antonio had been sitting on the edge of the bed, while Antonio read to her from the article he had been writing. Eleanor moved away slightly. In defiance, Antonio moved closer. Rosa hurled the pot of tea. It shattered around his ankles, splattering his pants and forming a puddle on the tile floor. He sprang to his feet and gave her a resounding blow across the face.
“Stop!” Rosa screamed, sobbing.
“Don’t, Antonio!” cried Eleanor.
“Pas d’hysterie.” He turned to Eleanor, and he looked stricken. “I never hit a woman before,” he said. “She needs it, and it hurts me. She needs a man to set boundaries.”
“Fuck you! Fuck you both!” cried Rosa.
“Clean up the glass, Petite.”
Weeping, she did so, on her knees with a brush and dustpan and sponge.
Afterwards he embraced her tightly. “Who loves you?”
“Do you?” she asked through her tears. “Do you really?”