“Have some water, you look pale. I told you this trip back would be rough.” Roberto took the glass. His hands trembled slightly. The ice clattered against the glass. “They won’t shut up, Gertrudis, they won’t shut up,” he muttered, running a hand over his sweaty forehead. “They’ve been at it for 10 minutes. What did that woman do to them?” Gertrudis sighed a long, theatrical sound as she crouched down with feigned tenderness toward Nico, though without actually touching him, as if the boy were a contagious museum piece.
“What did she do to them, sir?” The question is, “What didn’t she do to them?” the housekeeper whispered, injecting the poison drop by drop. “She’s spoiled them rotten, turned them into savages.” He saw her lying on the floor with her legs spread, and those rubber gloves she looked like. She paused dramatically, searching for the word that would most wound Roberto’s conservative pride. “She looked like a woman of the street, not an educator.” Roberto squeezed the glass. The image of Elena on the floor, laughing, returned to his mind.
Now, filtered through Gertrudis’s words, the scene seemed grotesque, sordid. “She said it was a game,” Roberto defended himself weakly, not because he wanted to defend Elena, but because he needed to believe he hadn’t been so bad. “A game.” Gertrudis gave a dry little laugh, looking him straight in the eye with compassionate seriousness. “Sir, I’ve worked in the finest homes in the city for 40 years. I’ve seen professional nannies. They read, teach languages, keep the children clean and presentable.”
This girl, this Elena, comes from the mud, sir, and the mud is all she has to offer. Nico threw a wooden toy that hit Gertrudis on the shin. The woman barely blinked, but her eyes flashed with icy coldness at the baby before she looked back at Roberto with tenderness. Look at them, they’re aggressive, they’re out of control. That’s what she teaches them, disobedience. She enjoys watching you lose control, sir. It’s her way of feeling powerful.
These poor girls are always envious of decent people. She wants to be the mother, she wants to take the place of the lady, may she rest in peace. The mention of his dead wife was the final straw. Roberto jumped to his feet, leaving Santi on the sofa. The pain of his wife’s absence was a wound that had never healed. And the idea that some nobody would try to usurp that sacred place blinded him with rage.
“She’ll never be like my wife,” Roberto growled, his jaw clenched. “Of course not, sir. My wife was an angel, a lady. This girl smells of bleach and cheap sweat,” Gertrudis insisted, taking another step closer, her voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper. “But children are innocent, they’re easily confused. If you let her stay here one more day, they’ll forget who their father is, they’ll forget the name they bear, they’ll become what you saw today, a circus.”
Roberto looked at his children; they were flushed, sweaty, their shirts untucked, crying inconsolably. They didn’t look like the heirs to an empire; they looked like broken children. And in his logic, twisted by pain and manipulation, Roberto decided that the fault lay not with his absence or his coldness, but with the nanny’s excessive warmth. “You’re right, Gertrudis,” Roberto said, straightening his posture, hardening his heart. “This ends today. I won’t allow my house to become a shantytown.”
Gertrudis nodded, concealing a triumphant smile as she smoothed her apron. “It’s for the best, sir, for the children’s sake. We have to stop the infection before it spreads. Do you want me to call security to have her removed?” “No,” Roberto said, adjusting his tie with a curt movement. “I’ll do it myself. I want to see your face when you realize you don’t mess with my family.” As Roberto marched out of the room toward the service area, Gertrudis was left alone with the twins.
She looked at them with disdain, took a handkerchief from her pocket, and dabbed the spot where Nico’s toy had hit her. “Cry all you want, brats,” she whispered to the babies who were still screaming. “The party’s over!” The maid’s quarters were at the end of a narrow corridor behind the kitchen, an architectural boundary separating luxury from labor. Elena stood there beside her small single bed. She hadn’t unpacked much because deep down she’d always dreaded this moment.
Her suitcase, an old canvas bag with a worn zipper, lay open on the mattress. Her hands, now free of her yellow gloves, trembled as she folded her street clothes. She wasn’t crying because she’d been fired. She’d been fired before by demanding employers. She was crying because she could hear Nico and Santi’s shouts through the walls of the house, calling for her. Each lullaby was a knife to her chest. She knew Santi needed his leg massage before his nap, or his muscles would ache.
He knew Nico needed to hear the song about the gray elephant, or he wouldn’t sleep. And he knew that Don Roberto, with all his wealth, knew nothing about it. The door opened without knocking. It wasn’t a knock, it was an invasion. Roberto entered, filling the small space with his overwhelming presence and barely contained anger. The room suddenly felt tiny. “Is it over yet?” he asked. His voice was like dry ice. There were no shouts now, only a quiet, devastating contempt.
Elena turned, clutching a t-shirt to her chest like a shield. “I’m just putting my things away, sir. I only need a few minutes.” Roberto stepped inside, scanning the room with a grimace of disgust, as if the air there were of lesser quality. He saw a drawing taped to the wall, a crayon doodle Nico had made the day before. Elena had kept it like a precious treasure. Roberto ripped it off the wall with a jerky movement.
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