In the kitchen, he found the servants and Dr. Doria standing around what he supposed was his child’s body. Noticing his presence, they all stepped aside to let him through.
He looked at his baby suckling the darkest breast he’d ever seen.
“We found a wet nurse for your son.”
“She’s very black.”
“But the milk’s white, as it should be.”
“Yes. Will the boy be all right?”
“The boy will be all right. He was just hungry. Look at him now.”
“Doctor, my wife was quiet when I woke.”
That had been the end of Sra. Morales.
Reja stayed away from the process of mourning: the wake, the burial, and the wailing. For her it was as if the señora had never existed, and sometimes, when the boy let her, when she allowed herself to listen to the silent call of the hills, she could almost believe that this baby that hadn’t come from her body had sprouted from the earth. Like her, with no memory of anything other than the sierras.
Something stronger than maternal instinct took hold of her, and for the next few years, the only thing in Reja’s world was the baby. She imagined she kept him alive for the earth, his helpless mother, so it never occurred to her to stop offering him her breast after his first tooth, or even a full set of teeth. She would simply say, Don’t bite, boy. Her milk was nourishment, comfort, lullaby. If the boy cried: to the breast; if the boy was angry, noisy, feeling down, sad, bad-tempered, snotty, or sleepless: to the breast.
The boy Guillermo Morales enjoyed six years at Nana Reja’s breast. Nobody could get the idea out of their head that the poor child had almost starved to death, so no one dared refuse him anything. But one day the Benítez aunts arrived to visit the poor widower, and shocked to see a boy almost of school age latched onto the servant’s black breast, they insisted to Sr. Morales that the kid should be weaned.
“It’s not as if he’s about to starve to death, man,” one of them said.
“It’s scandalous, Alberto,” said the other. “Obscene.”
At the end of their visit, as a favor to the bewildered father, the pair of spinsters took Guillermo off to Monterrey for a time, realizing there was no other way the boy would listen to reason or get to sleep, since he had never done so away from the breast of his nana Reja.
They left Reja with empty arms, and so full of milk that she left a trail wherever she went.
“What’re we going to do, Reja?” the other servants asked her, tired of cleaning up behind her.
She didn’t know what to say. All she knew was that she missed her boy.
“Ay, Reja. If you’re going to be like this, best it doesn’t go to waste.”
And so they brought her malnourished or orphaned babies to feed and glass bottles to fill, because the more she nursed, the more milk she had to give. Then the widower Morales married his second wife, María, the younger sister of his late spouse, and together they gave Reja twenty-two more little ones to feed.
In the following years, Reja would never be seen without a child at her breast, though she remembered Guillermo Morales with particular fondness: the first child she wet-nursed, the one who saved her from being utterly alone, who gave her a purpose that would keep her fulfilled for years.
Of course, Guillermo himself returned a short time later, but not to the old house in the square. Tired of living in the bustling center of Linares, his father had made the extravagant decision to abandon the family mansion and live on Hacienda La Amistad, which was located just outside the built-up area of town. There he grew into a man and started his own family. When he inherited the estate following the death of his father—victim of nothing other than old age—he also inherited his nana Reja, who wet-nursed his children, too, when they arrived.
A strange situation: a father who’d fed from the same breast as his children. And yet, when he’d suggested finding another wet nurse and giving Reja a rest, his wife had firmly refused: What better milk than their nana’s? There was none. Guillermo gave in, though he avoided thinking much about the situation and tried to pretend he had no memory of his prolonged turn at the breast.
It was at La Amistad that Reja grew old, as did Guillermo, his nana seeing him die of an infection. And like his father before him, when he bequeathed the estate to Francisco, the only son who’d survived epidemics of dysentery and yellow fever, he also bequeathed old Nana Reja, along with her rocking chair.
But she had not nursed the children of Francisco and Beatriz. Time had dried Reja, who no longer remembered how many local children had lived thanks to her abundance. She didn’t even remember the last white drop that had emerged when she squeezed her breasts or how they had once tingled even before she heard the cry of a hungry baby.
That morning in October 1910, the inhabitants of the hacienda woke as they did every day of the year, ready to begin their routine. Pola opened her eyes without turning to look at her roommate’s bed. After decades sharing a room with her, she knew that Nana Reja came and went unnoticed. The sounds of the hacienda were starting up: the laborers arrived with their tools to head to the sugarcane fields, and the house servants prepared to begin the day. She washed and dressed. She had to go to the kitchen to have coffee before leaving for town to buy freshly baked bread from the baker’s shop in the square. After finishing her milky coffee, she collected the money that Sra. Beatriz always left in a tin can.
It promised to be a sunny day, but she needed her shawl because, at that hour and that time of year, the cold night air persisted. She took the shortest path in the direction of town, as she did every day.
“Off to town, Doña Pola?” Martín, the gardener, asked her, as he did every day.
“Yes, Martín. I won’t be long.”
Pola liked this routine. She enjoyed going to fetch the bread every day. It meant she could find out the latest goings-on in Linares, and see from afar the boy, now a grandpa, whom she’d liked so much when she was young. She walked to the rhythm of the constant creaking of Reja’s rocking chair. She liked walking down the road flanked by giant trees that led from the estate to the center of town.
Back when she still spoke, Nana Reja had told her how the widower Alberto Morales had planted them when they were little more than branches.
On her return, she would take Reja her breakfast, as she always did.
Nana Pola stopped all of a sudden, trying to remember. What about Reja? As she did every day, Pola had passed by the black rocking chair. Many years ago, she had given up trying to converse with the old woman, but it comforted her to think that, like these old trees, Reja remained, and that perhaps she would remain forever.
And today? Did I see her when I went past? She turned around.
“What did you forget, Doña Pola?”
“Have you seen Reja, Martín?”
“Course I did, on her rocking chair.”
“You sure?”
“Where else could she be?” said Martín, following Nana Pola at her brisk pace.
They found the chair still rocking, but Reja wasn’t in it. Alarmed, they returned to the bedroom the nanas shared.
They did not find her there either.
“Martín, run and ask the workers if they’ve seen Nana Reja. Look for her on the way. I’ll let Sra. Beatriz know.”