She knew she had to ask for help, but she didn’t know how, even if it wasn’t for herself. She would ask for help for the baby she held in her arms, because for two days he hadn’t cried or wanted to feed.
That was the only reason she had walked down to the town she sometimes contemplated from afar, from her hut on the sierra.
She had never felt such cold, of that she was certain. And perhaps the inhabitants of the place felt it, too, for she saw no one walking outside, braving the freezing air like she was. All the houses seemed unapproachable. The windows and doors had bars, and behind them, closed shutters. So she stayed sitting on that bench in the square, wavering, growing colder and more afraid for her baby.
She was unsure how long she remained like that, and perhaps she would never have moved—would have become one of the square’s statues—had the town’s doctor, who was a good man, not come walking through the square just then and been shocked to come across such a desperate woman.
Dr. Doria had left his house in spite of the cold because Sra. Morales was about to die. Two days earlier, the woman had given birth to her first child, with a midwife tending to her. Now the husband had called on the doctor in the early hours, alarmed by his wife’s fever. Doria had to coax her to tell him where she felt the discomfort: in her breasts. The infection manifested as a sharp pain when the baby fed.
Mastitis.
“Why didn’t you tell me sooner, Señora?”
“I was embarrassed, Doctor.”
Now the infection was more advanced. The baby was crying nonstop because it hadn’t fed for more than twelve hours—the mother couldn’t bear to breastfeed it. He had never seen or heard of a woman dying from mastitis, and yet it was clear that Sra. Morales was dying. The ashen skin and that sickly shine in her eyes told the doctor that the new mother would soon give up the ghost. Dismayed, he took Sr. Morales out into the hall.
“You must allow me to examine your wife.”
“No, Doctor. Give her some medicine, nothing else.”
“What medicine? The señora is dying, Sr. Morales, and you have to let me establish what from.”
“It must be the milk.”
“It must be something else.”
The doctor did his utmost to convince him: he promised to touch and not look, or to look but not touch. In the end, the husband agreed and persuaded the dying woman to allow the doctor to palpate her breasts, and worse still, to examine her lower stomach and groin. There was little need to touch anything: the intense pain in her pelvis and the purulent lochia emerging from the ailing body betokened death.
The cause of maternal death and a way to prevent it would one day be discovered, but for Sra. Morales, that day would come too late.
There was nothing to be done but to keep the patient as comfortable as possible until God said enough.
To save the baby, the physician sent the Morales’s servant boy to find a dairy goat. Meanwhile, Dr. Doria tried to feed him with an improvised bottle filled with a solution of water and sugar. When the goat milk arrived, the newborn did not tolerate it. He was certain to die a slow and terrible death.
Doria was still worrying as he made his way home. He had said goodbye to the husband and father after declaring there was nothing more he could do.
“Be strong, Sr. Morales. God knows why He does things.”
“Thank you, Doctor.”
As he walked through the square, he caught sight of the woman of black ice, which struck Dr. Doria as a small miracle, for he was exhausted, and with the cold, he was walking with his head down. She was sitting right in front of the bronze plaque announcing that the Morales family had donated the bench to the town. Compassion cut through his fatigue, and he approached the woman to ask her what she was doing there and whether she needed help.
The man spoke too quickly for Reja to know what he was saying, but she understood the look in those eyes and trusted him enough to follow him to his home. Once inside the warm house, Reja plucked up the courage to peek at the baby’s face. It was blue and lifeless. She was unable to suppress a groan. The man, as the town’s doctor, did what he could to revive him. If she had been able to speak in spite of how numb she was from the cold, Reja would have said, What’s the use? But she could only groan and groan some more, besieged by the image of her blue son.
She didn’t recall the doctor undressing her, nor stop to think that it was the first time a man had done so without climbing on top of her. Like a ragdoll, she allowed herself to be touched and examined; she reacted only when the physician brushed against her enormous, warm breasts, tight and painful from the milk that had built up. Then she let herself be dressed in thicker, cleaner clothes without even asking to whom they belonged.
When the doctor guided her back out onto the street, she reflected that at least she would feel less cold when she was returned to the same bench. She was surprised when they passed the square and continued down a road that led them to the door of the most impressive house on the street.
Inside, the property was dark. As dark as she felt. Reja had never seen people as white as the woman who received her, though there was a shadow over her face: a sadness. They sat Reja in the kitchen, where she kept her head down. She didn’t want to see faces or eyes. She wanted to be alone, back in her hut made of wood and mud, even if she died of cold, alone with her sadness. Better that than endure the sadness of others.
She heard a newborn crying, first in her new-mother’s nipples and then with her ears. That was how her body had reacted every time her child cried with hunger, even when he was out of earshot. But her baby was blue now, wasn’t he? Or had the doctor saved him?
The throb in her breasts grew stronger. She needed relief. She needed her baby.
“I miss my boy,” she said softly. Nobody in the kitchen with her seemed to hear, so she ventured to repeat it more loudly: “I miss my boy.”
“What is she saying?”
“That she misses her boy.”
“What’s that about her missing something?”
“She wants her son.”
The doctor arrived with a bundle in his arms and passed it to her. “He’s very weak. He might not be able to nurse properly.”
“Is it my little one?”
“No, but he needs you just the same.”
They needed each other.
She opened her blouse and offered him her breast, and the child stopped crying. In the relief she felt as, little by little, her breasts emptied, Reja observed the baby: it wasn’t her boy. She knew it at once—the noises he made when he cried, suckled, or sighed were different. He also smelled different. For Reja, the effect was the same: she wanted to lower her face to inhale deeply in the hollow of the neck, though she thought they might not allow it, because among other things, the clearest indication that she was holding someone else’s baby was its color. While hers had gone from a dark brown to a deep blue, this one was gradually turning from bright red to white.
They all observed her in silence. The only sound in the kitchen was the baby sucking and swallowing.
Alberto Morales had fallen asleep, watching over his dying wife. After several days of his spouse’s moans and the newborn’s incessant cries, he had gotten used to the idea that, while they made noise, they were still alive. Now, he was woken by the deafening silence: neither was his wife moaning nor the baby crying. Anguished and not daring to touch his wife, he ran in search of his son.