The baby smells of cigarettes. The first thing María notices when she picks Carmen up is that she doesn’t smell anything like the other babies. The neighbors’ daughter, in the apartment next to her aunt and uncle’s, sometimes smells like onions, though the mother tries to cover it up with perfume; but the little boy at her place—the place where she works, María catches herself, not her own place, there’s no such thing—is a few months older than her daughter, and he has a sweet scent. It’s hard for María to explain—what is “a sweet scent”?—since she’d never come across anything like it, but now she picks it out in shops, in cafés. The neighbors’ daughter plays with the pots and pans in the afternoon, and the boy divides his time between the crib and the portable playpen in the living room; Carmen has her own way of moving through the house, from the bedroom to the arms of her grandmother, who sits at the big table. María realizes maybe the smell of cigarettes has something to do with her family. Her mother smokes in the kitchen; her father smokes constantly; and she suspects that her brother Chico has taken to smoking in the bedroom, trusting he won’t be found out. Carmen smells of cigarettes; maybe it feels to María like her daughter smells of that two-bedroom house, or maybe it’s just the strangeness of sleeping there next to her.
Carmen turned one a few weeks ago, and María is home for the first time since she moved away: on the bus, she rehearsed the words she would use to describe the wide streets of Madrid, the gaps she would insert in place of the neighborhoods her aunt and uncle had implored her to avoid. She tried to strike up a conversation with the woman in the seat next to hers, talked about the weather and the differences between the two cities—the avenues, the areas people tell you to stay away from—but in return María got gibberish, monosyllables, one cliché or another. Downtime frightened her; she needed to fill it somehow. She fell asleep at points, or watched the landscape changing color: the coarse yellow soil looked more and more scorched the farther south they went.
While her daughter naps, María tries to rest, but she only gets as far as lying down on her side, eyes open, gaze fixed on the rise and fall of her chest. She whiles the time away looking for her features in Carmen’s. She had remembered the soft little hands, but she’d forgotten all about that uneven chin—she has such a complex about her own. Carmen barely has any hair—it’s brown, like her father’s—and the little she has is so fine that María tries to avoid touching it, afraid that it might disintegrate. She’s smaller than María thought—much smaller than the boy she takes care of—and her belly is still swollen. She accepts that the very pale skin must have come from her mother’s side, and she has no trouble imagining her a few years younger than María is now, veins showing through on her arms and her chest. She wishes Carmen better luck.
In her memory, the entire length of her daughter fits in her open arms; she’s too big for that nowadays, and María carries her on one hip instead. It’s funny, María will think many years from now, how memory generates its own fictions: how what hasn’t stayed with us, because we think it insignificant or because it doesn’t align with our expectations, gets filled in with what we wish had happened instead. During the day, she cooks and cleans and irons and follows orders, but she sets nighttime aside for memory. Before she falls asleep, she takes herself back to her parents’ house, its layout: when you go inside, there’s the small entryway for hanging coats, her parents’ room is on the left—the wooden headboard, the blinds almost always lowered. When the house was turned over to them, there was a living room in that space, and it’s not hard for María to remember the hastily erected partitions. On the right is the room she shared with the siblings closer to her in age, Soledad and Chico, and in earlier times, with the older ones. At the back, the kitchen with the big table, and beyond that, the backyard and the toilet, which originally had been a hole in the ground—the weight of the bucket in the corner, full to the brim with water, don’t forget to empty it first and fill it up after for whoever comes next. They took apart her bed, and the girl’s crib now stands in its place: the same crib where her nieces, now nearly teenagers, slept, where her little brother slept. Now, eyes closed, she allows herself to revise certain moments: she doesn’t get on that bus, doesn’t say hello to that man, doesn’t go inside that house.
María wishes she had some of the photographs she chose not to bring along when she left for Madrid, now that she’s struggling to recall people’s faces clearly. She kept one old photo in her suitcase—her with her dad and her sister, in the backyard—and she sometimes becomes absorbed in the way the black and white of the image makes certain marks on the wall behind them stand out. A few months after she got to Madrid, her mother sent a letter she had dictated to Chico: it made her laugh to see the careful handwriting of the first lines, accelerating in the second paragraph, the misshapen calligraphy of Take care. Her mother had included one other photograph: in it, one of her nephews was posing in front of a birthday cake, and as Chico smeared Carmen’s nose with meringue, her mother sheltered the girl in her lap, cradling her head tenderly. María put it on her nightstand. She guessed that was what they had sent it for. But she put it there as a warning to her aunt: she shouldn’t be fooled by her obedience. Sure, she might jump out of bed at dawn, she might cook dinner or clean the bathrooms as soon as she gets home from work, but the truth is in the photograph.
When the girl wakes up, María looks into Carmen’s eyes: two black pinheads. The baby stretches, and María reacts: she sits up at the foot of the bed and cranes her neck to peer into the crib. María has grown used to the way the boy in the house twists her arm, to joking around with the neighbors’ daughter; but Carmen, being hers, seems made of different stuff. Carmen shifts as if she wants to sit up: she shakes her legs, just a little at first, kicking when that doesn’t work; she waves her arms, casts around for María’s eyes. Finally, María stands and goes to the crib, picks up her daughter—that cigarette smell—and gathers her in her arms. Her affection induces no response in the girl. She’s not kicking anymore, but she extends her little right arm. María thinks Carmen must be pointing to a threadbare stuffed animal in the corner of the bedroom. How proud she feels in that moment: Carmen is clever enough to access her memories and locate herself within them, mature enough to try to show off her toys. Is that it? Is that what’s happening, or is María projecting something completely imaginary? Still holding Carmen, María picks up the stuffed animal and hands it to her, but the girl smacks it away: there are no tears, no shrieks, although the baby’s movements take on a brusqueness. María takes her little left hand and places it on her chest. “Mommy,” she calls herself; “Mommy,” she repeats, though she knows that to Carmen, she may as well be a stranger. Carmen continues reaching out her right arm, pointing to something María doesn’t see.
“What do you want, Carmen?”
Clearly, Carmen understands María’s words about as well as María understands Carmen’s gestures. Should she let someone know, ask for help? Chico will be working into the evening; María imagines her father lying in bed, her mother sitting at one end of the kitchen table, Soledad sewing at the other. What does her daughter need? The baby extends one arm; she points to a chest of drawers, wide and low to the ground. They’ve explained to her that the top drawer is Carmen’s, the two below that are Chico’s, the next two are Soledad’s, and at the bottom, they’ve kept some things that belong to María. There was a time when her space was occupied by some clothing, a notebook, a thick, old enamel bracelet she found in the street and wore a few times; the bracelet she’d thrown out, and the rest she’d packed in her suitcase. But the baby, the baby now: the baby points at the chest of drawers where her mother—María’s mother, Carmen’s grandmother—changes her diaper every morning.
María realizes her error: it’s not affection or attention Carmen wants but routine. When Carmen wakes from her nap, she demands that someone pick her up, take her out of the crib, and lie her down on the improvised changing table. It doesn’t matter who: her mother’s mother, her mother’s brother, her mother’s sister, or just her actual mother. María is doing it today, but when she goes back to Madrid it could be anyone’s job, and Carmen will accept it with the same silence. Carmen isn’t afraid of strangers. She’s grown accustomed to meeting the night in the arms of women who live on the street, who gather outside the front door. Nor is she afraid of the unfamiliar woman who says “Mommy” over and over, and insists on holding her close, offers her a stuffed animal. On the towel, Carmen stops moving around, lifts her legs a little—the way she does several times every day—and whines because María has skipped some step in the changing. When she considers the girl done, and succeeds in getting the diaper on, María puts her back in the crib and lies down again on her brother’s bed. Before closing her eyes, María has the sensation that Carmen—a tiny body stretched out alongside an adult one, both of them searching for sleep—is watching her.
Three or four women at the front door, more later on: eight, maybe nine. Their voices blend together, too similar in tone to tell apart, the same words in different mouths. They gather on the pavement every night, making the pilgrimage with chairs from their neighboring homes, sometimes sharing food, if husbands won’t be getting back until late. The ritual took shape in the early years of the neighborhood, when María was very small, before her older siblings left home and before the younger ones had been born. In those years, before streetlights, they staved off the night with candles, and the legs of the chairs scraped against dirt. Chico still had the vaguest memory of trips to the spring with their mother. Now the neighborhood is something else entirely, although the streets still turn into mud when it rains: they’ve promised to fix that, Chico tells her, he heard as much at the bar a few weeks back. María doesn’t feel like so much has changed in the last year, but Chico insists there’s a lot she wouldn’t recognize if she’d go out for a walk with him.
“I’m barely tall enough to reach the bar.”
“I find that hard to believe.”
María can’t help but laugh when Chico explains: he’s so short that when he first started working at the bar, the customers didn’t even know he was there. Her brother is exaggerating. Reality is always worse in Chico’s accounts, or—when happier times come around—better, and María loves the way he describes Soledad’s silence, his anecdotes about Carmen, or conversations between the neighborhood women.
“The first few days, all they saw was the top of my head, nothing else: a kid’s head putting beers down in front of them. Then I made a little platform out of soft-drink crates, and now I can get my top half up there.”
Chico’s nickname won out over his given one. He even introduces himself that way, Chico, just as his father called him the day he was born: the littlest son, a blond baby more bone than flesh, with big blue eyes—like María’s—a baby determined not to get any bigger. At age six, he looked more like a four-year-old; now, at thirteen, he could pass for eleven. María had always believed that Chico would be the only one of her siblings who managed to get out of the neighborhood: he didn’t mind school, he liked numbers. She was sorry when she heard that he’d dropped out to work at their older brother’s bar. These were her thoughts as she tried to make out her brother’s words amid the chattering of the women, five or six or seven of them outside the window. Is she in there? She’s in there. In the bedroom, with the girl and her brother. She came? I could never have done it. I couldn’t have gone off and left her here, like a piece of trash you drop along the way. Well, I wouldn’t have gone and done what she did in the first place. Done what? Keep your voices down, her mother will hear. She’ll hear. What. Is she coming? Why not Soledad? She’s always so quiet, so calm. And the little one. I tried to tell their mother, and she didn’t want to hear it. Shh, the boy, he’s still just a child.
“Don’t listen to them,” Chico says, confirming María’s suspicions: he takes one quick drag after another in front of the crib, Carmen now in María’s arms.
“Since when do you smoke?”
“Since I started at the bar. They’re always making fun of me. They call me Chica, some of them. I don’t like it, but it makes me seem older, don’t you think?”
“How much of a nuisance is she?”
“I’m gone all day long. I help Soledad out with her morning jobs in town, same as always, but when I get back, I leave her with whatever’s still to do and go to the bar. It’s just Toñi and me, but that’s fine. We have something to eat, it’s usually pretty quiet then, maybe someone comes in for a coffee, then the men playing cards or dominoes, a couple of dinners, and we head home. The kid is almost always asleep. She doesn’t have much of a sense of humor, but she’s clever. Sometimes I talk to her, and the way she pays attention makes me think she understands. She likes me better than Soledad, that’s for sure.”
They stop talking, in case their sister hears. More than a link, Soledad represents an ellipsis between the two of them: she was born after María, before Chico, and to both of them, she seems from another planet; she has nothing in common with anyone. She sits in the kitchen, constantly sewing and listening to the radio, and she barely slows down to eat lunch or rest. Sometimes she’ll take a break to play some clapping game with Carmen, trying to feign affection, but she quickly gets bored and returns to her work. Chico stubs out his cigarette and reaches for Carmen.
“They left the neighborhood, María.”
“I don’t want to know.”
“Maybe you don’t. But they’re gone. You could come back.” Chico stops talking, giving María a chance to respond, but his sister is quiet. “What’s Madrid like? I’d like to go sometime. Even just to visit.”
“There isn’t much room at our aunt and uncle’s. At first, it all felt so strange, I barely knew them . . . I shared a bed with our cousin for a few months, but since the wedding, I’ve had the room to myself. I do the same thing as you: wake up and go straight to the bus stop, because the house is a long way away. The family is nice, and they pay me on time. Whatever I cook seems all right with them, and I don’t work on Sundays, because they always go out for the day. I’m lucky—that’s not how it is for most of the other girls working for families in the building: lots of them sleep there, some work seven days a week. The family has a son who’s a little older than Carmen, and he’s fussy, but the mother takes care of him. I worry that when he gets a little older, they won’t need me anymore.”
“Well, maybe then you could come back.”
“Or take Carmen with me.”
She notices that Chico looks upset: as if what she’s suggested would destroy her brother’s routine. Carmen shouldn’t be up this late, but María allows it because Chico’s jokes have provoked the first laugh from the girl all day. The conversation out in the street shows no sign of abating, and María can tell some of the neighbors are still talking about her, what kind of life she must lead out there, there’s a reason they sent her away the first chance they had, the baby’s better off here.
“Chico, do you miss school?”
“Not anymore, but I did at first. I didn’t like it at the bar. Think about it. I could have been a teacher. Maybe I’ll go back when I’m older, if I leave the bar and have time. I do miss the books they let me borrow, because some nights I get bored. I’ll have to come up with some way of passing the time.”
Chico is sounding older all of a sudden. María pictures him, hardly thirteen, making sure the neighbors don’t leave without paying their tabs, giving orders to his sister-in-law, behind the bar eating leftovers from the day’s special, cigarette dangling from his mouth. She thinks of the smile Chico keeps up in front of them all, but also of what Chico must think about every night, in his little bed, while the baby sleeps and tight-lipped Soledad goes on sewing.
“At night, she cries like you wouldn’t believe. Remember the first few months? Well, it’s the complete opposite. It doesn’t matter if you’re having the best dream of your life—she’ll knock you right out of it screaming. Soledad just pulls her pillow over her head, so I always have to deal with it. Do babies have nightmares?”
She was only there for a short time after Carmen was born; what she knows comes from phone calls or the odd letter, or the times when her employer goes out for a walk and leaves the boy behind—that’s how María found out about the sweet scent, so different from her daughter’s. The baby smells like cigarettes, just like Chico, whose nails are turning yellow from the nicotine. The conversations outside don’t stop, and even now, at the edge of sleep—everything just as it was right after she’d given birth: Carmen in the crib, she and her brother in the little bed, and the other bed reserved for Soledad—she can still hear the neighbors talking about her. Sometimes she makes out her mother’s voice, avoiding getting drawn into it or attempting to change the subject. They left the neighborhood, María hears one of the women say. The wife found out. How could anyone stick around and see her every day, on the same street, with those same eyes. They had to at least do that. María feels Chico’s slender form move away from hers, and her brother gets up to close the window.
“It’s chilly in here,” he says. “We can’t let the baby catch cold.”
She hears Chico rummage around in his drawer and leave the room. Soledad carefully opens the door, puts her pajamas on in the dark, says good night; the mattress creaks under the weight of her body. Silence: the neighbors are going home, chair legs scraping the sidewalk as they leave. Chico comes back and gets into bed, turning to face the wall. Her brother smells like cigarettes, María thinks, and moments later Carmen wakes up crying.
María starts to talk to herself, silently moving her lips, her daughter and siblings asleep in the room: she senses the heat from Chico’s back, the engine in her daughter’s chest, Soledad’s deep breathing. There’s so much I want to say, but I can’t get it in the right order. She does the same as on other nights: rehearsing the words she’ll say to her mother, the words she’ll say to Carmen once she can understand. She takes the situations she’s lived through back up again, start to finish, even the ones that don’t seem important; she corrects a few gestures and almost all the decisions, she supplies them with happy endings out of step with reality. Carmen, for example: in the stories María thinks up before going to sleep, Carmen doesn’t exist. María’s never heard the father’s voice, she’s never seen a gray city, or she’ll only see one on vacation years later. But Carmen does exist, her cry breaks open the night, and she wakes up María and Chico and Soledad, who—as María was forewarned—hides her head under the pillow, pretending she’s asleep. Carmen exists, and sometimes her eyes are like insects she’d stomp on, and at others like little dots she’d play at connecting into a shape, and it occurs to María that maybe she could bring her back to the city and ask her aunt to keep an eye on her while she works. María, to herself: I want to say so many things, but I can’t get them in order. They’re in my head, I think them all the time, but they disappear before I can put them into words. I understand that I made a mistake, that I was reckless, that I brought shame on myself, and on all of you. If I weren’t sending money here, if I kept it all, maybe I could give a little more to my aunt and uncle, save the rest, and at some point Carmen and I could live together. Just ask my aunt and uncle, they’ll tell you: I never go out except on some Sundays with my cousin and her husband, and I always come straight home from work. Carmen doesn’t know who I am, and I have no way of describing her to people. When they ask what she looks like, what faces she makes, I tell them about the portrait I keep on my nightstand. My daughter doesn’t move, she doesn’t talk, she doesn’t know who I am. She’s locked up in a photograph.
She doesn’t talk to her mother. None of them talk to their mother, really, nor to their father: each one plays a role, never deviating from the others’ expectations. The parents act like parents, they make plans and give orders, and the children act like children, they obey; María’s mistake was defying that logic. Since she returned, her mother has limited their conversations to sharing details about Carmen—don’t worry about that noise, we’ve figured out it’s not that she’s tired, or hungry, or hurting: she just likes to hear herself, that’s all—and complaining that Chico wastes his time at the bar then forgets to bring back ice for the fridge, or that her father sleeps too late. As soon as she arrived, she stuck her head in his room and said hello, went over to kiss his forehead. She wanted to ask him something, how things were going, to tell him about his brother—the one she lives with in Madrid, he’d said to send his regards—but Soledad called her back to the kitchen, and as María went out, her father asked her to shut the door.
Some dead leaves have appeared in the flowerpots in the backyard: María thinks her mother must not be tall enough to water them all, and they’re in direct sunlight. Sometimes she and Soledad take out the chairs when the weather is good, and they sit and sew, the clothing in their laps so it doesn’t get dirty, careful not to drop needles or thread on the ground. On one visit to the workshop, she had seen the sewing machines—the women operating them, quickly, quickly—the noise they made like a battle, but when she and her sister work, there’s nothing but the sharp intake of breath from Soledad pricking her finger, or an argument drifting over from a neighboring yard. When they drop something—a dress slipping from their hands onto the tiny gravel stones, or worse, a needle going missing between them—the two of them sit bolt upright as though struck by whatever had fallen. Sometimes María curses her own clumsiness, and then Soledad scolds her, but when it’s Soledad’s doing, she just falls silent. How many black and white threads, how many blue or green ones, have already disappeared in the gravel? How many pins? Carmen would play in the yard one day, and María foresaw her daughter’s future tantrum, after one of them pricked her bottom or the palm of her hand.
When the family moved into the house, María’s father roughed out a path to the toilet with large white stones—it was to go across the entire backyard so you could avoid walking in the dirt, which sometimes turned to mud, but he never actually filled it in. Some of her older brothers, who were bricklayers, went on to finish the job themselves, taking materials here and there from the other houses they were working on, some of which had cement paths, others tiled ones, the result being a clumsy mishmash. The solution at their parents’ house had more to do with carelessness than modesty: a few neighbors had asked her mother why she didn’t plant some fruit trees, as they had, instead of just scattering flowerpots against the dirty white wall, some hanging at the height of the sons who no longer lived there. María never heard her mother’s replies—there was silence, some evasive comment, better that than nothing—but she did hear what she said behind closed doors, her satisfaction when the roots buckled the most ambitious neighbors’ cement paths, and they had to remove the trees and pay for repairs; her mother’s glee when the wasps made their rounds through the grapevines in the other backyards, destroying the fruit, the odor of garlic compresses for the pain of the stings wafting all the way to their house. I wouldn’t mind if the wasps kept them up all night, she said through clenched teeth. I wouldn’t mind if they never got a decent night’s sleep again. But wasps can’t see in the dark, Chico said, so it doesn’t matter what those women plant in their yards, it’ll only be a problem during the day. María heard her mother’s laughter go flat.
Chico insists that the neighborhood has changed completely, and in the time it took for María to walk from the bus stop in the town center to the door of their house—no one met her to help with her suitcase—she thought her brother was exaggerating. But when she walks to the square with Carmen, she realizes he’s right, though for different reasons: in casting her mind back to the way these streets were, she places them alongside the ones where she lives now. She substitutes a gridded design—exact parallels, exact perpendiculars—for one of another sort: stones here, dirt there. They do, in fact, make their way diagonally to a center, María notices while she’s retracing the path of their beloved Saturday or Sunday morning walks, hers and Soledad’s and Chico’s, like this: the girls arm in arm, and him going on ahead. Now she holds Carmen against her chest, in her arms, facing outward, and if the weight gets to be too much, she shifts her to one hip; in the doorway of one of the houses, a girl the same age plays with two boys, one a little older than Carmen, the other a little younger. The church where the neighborhood association meets is in the square; the next-door neighbor’s daughter takes typing classes there, they ran into each other the moment María stepped outside the house, the girl called her Madrileña. “Madrileña!” she said, just a few years older than Chico, and asked if she’d met any famous artists in the capital yet. María said no, that all she does is work, and the girl was disappointed she’d moved to a whole other city just for that. As they were walking away, Carmen looked at María and brought her little fist up and hit her on the chin, possibly in agreement with the girl.
In her aunt and uncle’s neighborhood, in Madrid, the cars—the few there are—don’t get stuck in the mud, they go from place to place and crash into each other and speed along on cobblestone roads. The girls her age look like her and Soledad, and the parents look like their parents; she hears accents like her own. Even so, while she’s just like the girl from the typing class, or the one who’s keeping her children entertained on the pavement outside their house, she feels different: luckier than Chico or Carmen, even. She thinks about Soledad. How much time will she have to spend sewing in that kitchen, walking to the square alone on weekends for a breath of fresh air? There’s not enough room in the high school she and her siblings went to for all the kids born in the neighborhood now. Will that be Carmen’s fate? Will Chico teach her reading and math at night, sitting in bed so they don’t wake the grandparents? On those streets she hardly recognizes, a house and a shop and a bar, one house, another, another, all of them the same, María strolls along with Carmen, not serenely enjoying this window of time with her daughter before heading home, but rather hoping to cross paths with someone she knows, hoping to hear her name called out by some acquaintance, to be asked, How are you? She doesn’t recognize anyone: she’s forgotten the faces, the names. The houses run out, and there’s nothing left but countryside, more land, whatever else lies beyond. She asks a woman how to get home. Your home? Where do you live?
María places a towel on the dresser and lays the girl down on top of it: she smells of shit, of course, and she can tell from the way the cloth feels that she must have also wet herself on the walk. The boy at the house where she works, he’ll certainly let you know, he hates a damp diaper, but Carmen doesn’t make a peep, just waits until someone realizes it’s there, that time has passed. Legs up, María orders, lifting her little dress, undoing the diaper, which has a bit of diarrhea in it; she’ll ask her mother if that’s a frequent occurrence, and if not, make a mental note of what Carmen ate. Hands in the hot water, she rubs the bar of soap between them and then gives the dirty bottom a clean. She pats her dry with the towel, the wash mitt comes off, then a fine layer of talcum powder to cover her skin. Legs up, she says and then she says her name: Legs up, Carmen. Help me out, will you? That’s it. The girl raises her legs, and María takes hold of her by the ankles; unmindful of her own strength, she lifts the baby’s entire body, trying to get her up just enough to slide the diaper between the surface and her bum, but the girl protests. She whimpers softly at first, then the crying comes, the full fanfare. Soledad asks what happened, her father, too; her mother, off chatting on the doorstep of some neighbor or another, doesn’t hear. Soledad leaves before María can respond, scolding her for not lending a hand with the sewing, for all that she’s deigned to come and visit. What happened is, the baby is a baby, and she cries. María drops her ankles without thinking, not accounting for the hard wooden top; with all the noise, she barely registers the dull thud of delicate flesh. The girl is still whimpering on the dresser; maybe it’s the hard surface that’s bothering her, so María picks her up and moves the big towel over to Chico’s bed. She struggles to lay it out then sets Carmen down on top of it. Legs up, Carmen: please. Legs up, and keep them there. The girl isn’t whining anymore, but her face is all tears and snot, and her lips are trembling. Carmen, please, don’t make this difficult. Carmen doesn’t budge, so María tries to sneak the cloth under her body: it works. It gets dark too fast—every maneuver takes minutes and minutes—and she can hardly tell anymore where to tie one knot or the other. A hand moves hers aside. Chico, you’re back early.
“Yeah, Toñi let me go early. I told him you’re leaving first thing.”
María collapses onto the mattress, the side Carmen has left unoccupied. She watches the way her brother handles the baby, notices where his gestures differ from hers. Chico treats Carmen like a toy: he holds her wrists and brings her palms together in applause, sings to her while he tries to get her to blow her nose into a handkerchief. Chico sees her watching and explains: You treat her like you’re afraid of her, and she can sense it. Carmen sniffles, opens her arms, and closes them around Chico. María hears her speak a word: no one had told her Carmen was talking. Carmen hangs on to Chico, and María leans in to catch the word, does she know who María is? Carmen’s head on Chico’s shoulder, Carmen calling him Mama.