vendors who rode their battered motorized carts past her building several times a day. She also bought oranges from fruit stalls in the neighborhood and gave her child the juice. Because she was purposely denying him her nipples, she tried to compensate by introducing him to such effervescent soft drinks as Coca-Cola and Fanta, which might not be good for him but which he greedily enjoyed. This strategy worked very well. The boy soon ceased pestering her to present her breasts.
Another decision loomed for Encarnación. One day the city’s blue-collar henchmen would come to the building with a wrecking ball. What would happen after that? Her removal from the tenement complex had ruined her livelihood as a black-marketeer and prostitute, and what money she made nowadays came chiefly from doing errands for the owner of a nearby bodega and selling to his out-at-the-elbow customers the remainders of her cigarette and wristwatch inventories. If she should die, no one would appear to rescue her baby. And if she lived, she would have to find more lucrative work before the wrecking ball turned them out into the streets.
Her son was her joy and her martyrdom. Ever since their run-in with Dionisio’s mother, however, he had begun to change. First he had ceased vocalizing, almost as if aware that silence was the best means of preserving their squatters’ rights in the condemned building. Although he listened to the people jabbering on the sidewalk below their boarded balcony casements, he never tried to attract their attention with a hoot or a squeal. On trips into the streets on shopping errands, he habitually fixed his gaze on the lips of every speaking passerby or salesperson, but, Encarnación noticed, he did not attempt to emulate the sounds these people made. His fascination with the sequential sound patterns of human speech was entirely passive, and his mother began to fear that, having recognized her muteness, his infant mind had opted to achieve a similar state in himself.
The second change was in some ways even more worrisome. The child dreamed. These dreams, during which his eyelids flickered and his body thrashed, seemed to be especially vivid and captivating for one so young. Midnight horror shows. Morphean fantods. When his eyelids ceased jumping and his body lay perfectly still, the whites of his eyes showing like crescents of hard-boiled egg, Encarnación would panic and try to rouse him. Although he always came out of these swoons, they never failed to frighten her. She was afraid that her treatment of her son had mentally unbalanced him and that she had ruined his life forever. The final revenge of the vieja who had tormented her on the tenement rooftop was the accuracy of her analysis of the boy’s chances as an adult. Encarnación felt that she had doomed her son.
* * *
The highway to Santa Clara, the American housing area on the outskirts of Seville, was wide and desolate, the surrounding landscape forbidding under the summer moon. Encarnación, not without suffering and doubt, had made up her mind to brave the edge of this highway on foot.
Carrying her son, she crossed the final bridge before the jungle of minor industries flanking the highway on the south. Traffic was light but daunting, most demoralizingly so when the gigantic automobiles of American military personnel came whooshing by. Off to Encarnación’s right, the spooky amber of the CRUZ DEL CAMPO sign gleamed above the dark superstructure of the brewery. No one stopped to offer her and her child a ride, and she did not attempt to solicit one. She was prepared to walk the entire distance.
To rest her arms, however, she soon set the boy down. Delighted, he trotted out ahead of her. Even barefoot, he looked quite handsome, for Encarnación had dressed him in a striped jersey and a pair of navy-blue shorts. She hurried to catch up with him, took his hand in hers, and counted his tiny steps in order not to have to think about the implications of what she was doing. Shortly—all too soon—the American enclave emerged from the oppressive dark.
Santa Clara reposed in the arid Andalusian countryside like an oasis of elms, neat stucco houses, and towering shepherd’s-crook street lamps. At the housing area’s unguarded entrance, these lamps cast overlapping circles of green-white radiance, blotting out the color of the lawns and imparting an oily sheen to the asphalt streets. Insects whirred in the grass, and music issued from an open doorway somewhere along the nearer of two