Isabel made a desperate effort to appear in control of herself. But her emotions were overwhelming her. She looked at Julia with insecure, vanquished eyes, shipwrecked. Out of the contradictory waves of greed and disappointment, lustfulness and remorse, Isabel had rescued no more than the salt of her white hair, the net of wrinkles across her forehead, her cheeks, her lips. Julia took pity on this mask of defeat and made a movement as if to erase it. Isabel dodged the caress as if it had wounded her.

“Don’t sing your victory song so quickly, Julia. Just so you don’t get too proud of yourself, I’ll tell you that the woman you pushed out of Idolina’s heart was not her mother. It was the nana, the Indian, Teresa.”

“Yes, I’ve seen how she takes care of her.”

Isabel made a gesture to show Julia that she hadn’t fully understood her words.

“It isn’t a recent thing. The roots are very old. When Idolina was born, I had no milk. They wrung my breasts, they made me drink gunpowder dissolved in liquor—

“How revolting!”

“—and it was all useless. The baby was already hoarse from crying so much. She was hungry and I couldn’t give her anything to eat.”

Isabel passed both hands through her hair, as if to smooth it down.

“We were living on my first husband’s finca. The middle of nowhere. The rainy season had trapped us there and my time came. It was my first child, and without anyone to give me advice, I had to work things out as best I could. A doctor? Not even to be dreamed of! Among the Indians there are some experienced midwives and one of them took care of me. I got through labor without much difficulty. The problems began afterwards. Idolina was crying from hunger.”

There was a pause Julia didn’t want to break with any comment or question.

“I knew that not far from there was another woman who had just had a baby. Teresa Entzín López. I had her brought to me. I offered her the Virgin’s pearls to act as a wet nurse to Idolina. She didn’t want to. She was skinny, weak. She claimed her milk wouldn’t be enough for two mouths. She even fled from the finca. But I ordered the vaqueros to find her. They scoured the mountain as if it were hunting season and found Teresa holed up in a cave with her baby in her arms. The only way to get her back to the big house was to drag her.”

Isabel stopped, suffocated by the intensity of the memory. The she added.

“And I was on my own through all of this. My husband had looked for any pretext to leave, to get away from the cry of hunger that was tearing apart my soul.”

“And Teresa agreed to stay?”