Mama has planned the excursion. We are going from Mexico City to the hot springs of Cuautla, south of Cuernavaca. No. Daddy is not going. I don't hear all the reasons, but Mama is mad because she waited for him all night and he didn't come back, so Daddy is staying home. I saw the three suitcases that fit into each other and look like one until he fills them with books for their rare book business. He just came back from Guatemala with old, yellow Spanish volumes covered in sheepskin. This time it will be New York.

“The children are going,” Mama says. That means my brother and me and our friend from across the street, Chava, which is the nickname for his whole name, Salvador, just like his father. I don't hear the reasons, but his mother is not going either. She screams at her husband even though he is a famous sculptor. It's a high red scream with white fingernails in her mouth for teeth. Her green eyes are too bright and her hair is painted orange. When she cleans her house she puts a bandana around her head and ties it like a gypsy. Then she leaves rough, damp cloths spread out like rugs at every door in the house and tells us not to get her floors dirty. Across the street at Don Chucho's store, “La Malinche,” they say she's zafada to wash her marble floors on her knees when there are girls right around the corner who would do it for a few pesos.

There is no heart in her long white body, except when she bathes her boy Chava. Right after the bath, she wraps him up in a big white towel and sits him down on a bench with cushions. He's six. I'm five and she thinks I am so little that it's all right for me to watch. She doesn't know who sees out of me. She thinks I'm nobody. She dries her boy with the towel, then she takes out a tub of talcum powder with a round white velvet puff. She smoothes powder on him, moving the puff around on his body, on the back and the front. With two long white fingers she picks up his pajarilla, his little caterpillar — that's what Pilar calls it when my brothers are in the bath and their two pink caterpillars are bobbing in the water — and Chava's mother powders under it and pats his little lavender sack. It is wrinkled like a walnut with a raised seam between the halves. She dusts it and puts his worm back down on it. She powders his thighs and lifts his arms, ragdoll limp, to spin the powder puff in his armpits. Then his neck, his toes. I learned to powder the newborn baby next door. I didn't know you would powder a large boy with no diapers. Something in her is calm. Her eyes ride all over his skin.

Chava sits like a doll on the towel. He looks like the naked chickens Pilar props on the kitchen sink, washing them inside and out, rubbing lemon on them and drying them. He is not fun and mischievous he way he is with my brother. There is nothing in his eyes. He is like a tired dog waiting for his bath to be over. The white towel covers the bench and stretches over the floor like spilled milk. At last his mother pulls up the corners of it and wraps him. I think she wants to pick him up and carry him to his room, but she lets him walk by himself. I can go too and wait while she dresses him. She sits him on a bench of dark green leather under the window covered in vines. She pulls a thin white sock over one foot and then the other, smoothing the sock like a skin, her hand passing under his arch, over the instep and up the ankle, stopping as if she doesn't want to stop. She puts his undershirt over his head, pulling his arms through like the arms of a baby. Then his sweater and pants. He doesn't even have to tie his shoes himself. The thin leather is caked with white polish. Afterwards, he and I go down the corridor toward the garden where the sun leaks through tall vines onto ferns and the red bricks of the walk are covered with bright green moss. We march like soldiers to the gate and out onto the damp yellow earth of the street. After the gate closes, we run to where my brother Primo is waiting on his bicycle, and we dash screaming down to the corner to “La Malinche.” I jump when the side door opens. I think it is La Malinche herself, mummified, electrified, come to live at the house with Her Name on it, her black hair turned grey from too many years with Cortés. But it is only Chucho's mother who's never supposed to be let out. We buy paletas Mimí, our favorite suckers of burnt sugar. We rough up Chava's perfectly combed hair, kick dirt on his heels and step all over the white toes of his thin shoes. Chava grabs my brother's bicycle and jumps on it backwards. Making clown faces, he rides wobbling down the street to the wrought-iron gates of our house.

Once, Mama asked Chava's mother to paint Primo's portrait. Then Mama asked her to make my portrait. Her paintings are famous. Not as famous as her husband's sculptures, but big cars with chauffeurs bring people to her house to be painted.

The day of the portrait Mama walked with me across the street to leave me with Chava's mother.

“Dios de mi vida,” she said, staring at my head near Mama's waist. “Look at her eyes. What color are they? Don't worry. Maybe she'll be beautiful like you someday.”

I followed her to the studio at the back of the house and sat down facing the window on the chair with painted flowers. I looked out at the garden through the small panes of glass set from floor to ceiling. The trees had wet, twisted black trunks. But their blood came out in new green leaves. Primo and Chava and I knew how to skate and leave snake marks on the moss when no one was home. I wanted to look far away through the branches to what made shadows move.

“Over here!” she said, moving her thumb in the air to make me turn my head. I looked at her without blinking. She sat in a leather chair with green cushions, and her long green gown of silk poured like water down to the floor. A small canvas was already on the easel. She stuck her thumb through the hole in a round sheet of wood. It was covered with coils of paint as if birds had flown in and squirted out a dozen different colors. She took brushes from a bottle and stuck them in her fingers under the board of paint. She took another brush, held it, looked at it and then at me. She stared. I stared, trying to see her as a mother, an eye, a person. But she was made of thick glass and there was no way in. I waited stone still. Suddenly she screamed, “I cannot paint those eyes! I cannot paint those yellow eyes! Get out!” She threw a handful of brushes at me and I ran home.

Later she asked Mama for a photo and she painted me from that. When Mama brought it home she said, “This isn't a real portrait. It's not a likeness if you don't sit for it,” and she gave it to my nurse Pilar, and Primo's portrait too. We both hang in Ixtapalapa in the large room where Pilar's sisters sleep. The little girl in the painting has two long, brown braids over her ears. Crooked bangs come down to her gold eyes. Her face is there, but there's no one inside her. She looks out into Pilar's room in the village where Pilar takes us sometimes, even though she really lives at our house, in a small room off the kitchen.

Big Salvador is going to the springs at Cuautla. Mama says he studied in Paris with Maillol, and now his women lie in large bronzes at the edges of gigantic fountains. His figures, smoothed and polished by his hands, rinsed and gleaming under sprays of water, are goddesses at the crossroads of the wide avenidas of Mexico City. They sit at the tops of marble steps, their gold breasts pressed between long, round arms. The city is like his own sculpture garden. I saw one of them in his studio. The enormous room was full of clay figures, wax miniatures and bronzes ready to polish. I saw the beautiful white woman he was carving in marble. She was alive. The stone glowed. The breasts were like skin filled with water pulling toward the ground. One thigh, lying heavy on the other, was soft. Even though it was not her face, I knew that inside her, in the neck, in the shiny bones of the knees, was my Mama.

Salvador is special. I don't remember his voice but I remember his body. He let me lean against his firm belly, his soft gray sweater on my face when Primo and Chava were mean to me in his car. I didn't tattle when they pulled my neck hairs because then his red-hair wife would turn around with her eyes of green ice. I knew that if I said anything, the white nails of her teeth would slice out of her beautiful face and bite me. When the car stopped and the door opened, I fell against Salvador. The boys ran off. I hugged his soft gray tower then ran home with my notebook where Miss Galindo makes us write ajo, ojo, eje, even though Daddy already taught me to read and to copy words on his typewriter.

Mama has packed a picnic. There is something distant and excited in her. In the car she and Big Salvador sit in front and I have to sit in back with Primo and Chava, but I get a window and don't have to sit between them. Today the boys are laughing and punching each other and they leave me alone.

The spa is covered with trees. The hot volcanic waters come out of a white grotto and spill over gray-white rocks into pools strung on steaming rivers descending the hill. The eucalyptus and pepper trees trail their long leafy arms in the blue pools.

Water rushes in the river, speeding faster and faster as it goes downhill. A leaf drops. We run along on the mossy edges following it. We can see it caught up by the water, spun, swallowed, thrown against a blue-white rock and stuck, then washed back into the deep and out of sight, gone, faster than we can run.

Mama has picked a middle pool with a wide grassy lap that spreads out under the pepper trees. She lets the wind loft a teal green cloth and then she lowers it to the ground. She takes two whole roasted chickens out of the basket. The aroma of fried onions comes out of a tall paper bag still steaming from the rotisserie on Insurgentes. The bread from “La Malinche” is sour two-pointed bolillos like tiny feet. Pilar has stuffed them with sweet butter. They are crisp outside, and white as cotton inside. Mama is serving Salvador. She pulls off a slab of breast the same size as the roll and slips it onto the butter. She adds a handful of shredded, deep-fried onions. Before she passes it to him, she wipes her hands clean on a big white napkin. I don't think they see us. Primo and Chava and I grab drumsticks and bolillos and run through the trees to the river. The water is clear. We stare at rocks below the blue stream. Above us we hear the yelps of the people trying the hottest water straight out of the grotto. Below we hear the cooing of those resting in the cooler pools.

The boys play games in the trees. They don't want to play with a girl. Under the trees the shade is too cold. I go where I want to be, by the edge of the warm water to feel the river that rises up the side of the grainy white rock, lifting lips of waves at my skin. It runs its hands over my feet and over my legs. It spins hot and firm around my calf, pushing and turning, rising to the knee, pulling me, wanting to bathe me and hold me. It comes higher on my thigh. It is so clear on the bottom that I can see each grain of sand around the rocks. I want to reach down and bring up one small stone just for me. I bend forward and reach in as far as I can.

It's too deep. I can't touch the stones and I can't hold onto the edge. The water tips me, turns me, swallows me.

I cry out, but I am pulled and swept away. I'm upside down. I come up just before the river pours itself over and begins its fall, the riverstretch to the next pool. I cry out again but I choke, and now I'm in the long, straight part of the river. I don't close my eyes. I think of Pilar praying about death to Our Lady — ahora y en la hora de nuestra muerte, amen. I watch with my eyes open. All the froth and bubbles like the flowered skeleton of La Calaca, La Muerte, with her wide-brimmed hat flapping over her hollow skull. And Pilar in my head saying, “See? ¿Ves? ¿Quién te lo manda? Who told you to do such a thing?” The warm blue water twists me and throws me. Then I am face down. My arms and hands flail. I hit rocks and swirls and turns and deeps. When my head comes up through the water, I yell.

Suddenly I see Salvador running on the bank beside me. The river turns and plays. He runs straight along the edge but he can't keep up. He calls to me and I turn my eyes against the rolling of my neck to see him, to keep him with me. Please don't stop. Please don't stop running. He sees me. He's coming. But the river teases me to the other side. I turn again into a swirling eddy. Now he's running ahead. He's over the flat of the river. I see his legs straddling the water. I try to keep my eyes on his gray head, large and shining in the sun. His arms are open. He is motionless like one of his statues. The river is suddenly shallow and shoots me forward, stretched out, my hands and hair flying out behind me, my feet pointing toward the bridge of Salvador.

He lunges forward from the waist. I fly up into his arms. Stumbling and toppling, he carries me to the grass and sets me down. I don't know if I cry. My mind is full of him waiting to fish me. I only see his large sure head, his gray hair shining with pieces of sun, his wide brown face solemn. Panting, he bends over me on the grass.

I am safe. When my mother comes running up, he has to comfort her. The words they have are for each other. They take me back up the hill to the cloth of the picnic. They wrap me and sit me. Maybe they feed me or scold. They comfort each other. They don't look at me. What he did, he did it for her. What she feels for me, that I did not drown on the day of the picnic, she feels for him who saved me. They are one, and I am not.

Even if they don't see me, the blue above me is mine, below me is a hot white river, which is mine. The race when he carried me in his arms is mine, and the moment he leaned over me, on all fours, panting, is mine.

When Mama goes to the hospital, I go with Pilar. The white porcelain bowl under the bed is filled with pieces of blood. Pilar waits for Daddy to call again. He is rushing back from New York. He takes Primo and me with him to bring Mama home, away from her high white bed. Daddy holds her hand against his chest, balancing her on the way to the taxi. She lies in back with her head in his lap. In the front seat, Primo and I have to sit next to each other which we hate.

Mama whispers to me, “Choli, you were almost born in a taxi.”

“This one?”

“No, silly. Your father kept saying ‘Faster! Faster! The baby's coming!' And the driver yelled, “Not in my taxi! Not in my taxi!'”

At home, Mama lies all day on the sofa. Daddy kneels near her and holds her hand. Mama sobs and they talk softly to each other.

The baby, Leo, the baby.

My poor Darling. And the poor little halfling. Too little. Couldn't…. I'm so sorry I was gone.

Leo, I'm sorry, I was so lonely. I needed you. I needed…everything. But you were rescuing some dreadful woman. I gave up. It's my fault.

No, darling, mine.

I shouldn't have.

I was gone too long.

I thought you were never coming home.

I didn't know if you would take me back. Did you love the man?

Oh, yes. I love him.

Can we fix our lives?

I don't know. I'm so tired.

Can we try?

Maybe we can.

Please, let's try. I would have raised the baby as my own, you know.

I know.

Poor little thing. So, so small.

Big Salvador packs the car and goes away with little Chava and the portrait woman — the house emptied in one night. No one knows where they went. I want him to come back.

Mama has a key to Salvador's studio. After they have driven away forever from their house across the street, Mama takes me to his workroom a few blocks away on Higuera Street. We pass the red house of La Malinche. The house of treaties, dialects, agreements, women and betrayals. As we pass the open door, my body almost falls into the cool patio, as if that is where I lived, where I was needed and not needed, seen and not seen, where they used the name Malinche for her and sometimes even for Cortés.

Mama and I enter the studio. Her jade robe is on a hook near the door. A white curtain is pulled open between the clay women he is forming and the plaster statue ready to be cast. I have seen his hand on Mama's hip — Mama disguised, inside a larger woman, with round eyes, larger breasts and giant hands.

Her white marble self had been in the middle of the room. Now there are just pieces.

In my mind, I see him, alone, waiting for word from the hospital. Was his baby killing her, or would it, half-made, tear itself away and spare her? I see him, her Maillol, bellowing, crying over the white skin he had carved from the sight of her thighs. I see the mallet coming down, taking toes, elbows, flattening her stomach, smashing ribs. The hammer slashes at the swoop of her spine — his feet set firm to break, undo, reduce. His gray hair filled with white dust. Dust powdering the sweater that comforted me. My eyes stare at the pieces and I hear him groan, then roar, knowing the exact moment when his baby went to God. My own chest hurts as if it remembers how a piece of his heart tore out in a clot, how a slice of his chest broke and rose like a cradle to lift the small wild ribs of his unborn lamb to heaven.

I see him, cuts on his arms, blood on his face, falling over what is left of her, kissing her white Carrara palm.

Mama is crying. She sees the blood on the marble fingers. She sees in her mind what I see in mine. She pulls giant drawings off the table and rolls them up with rubber bands and we go to the car. There are things she burns in our fireplace at home. I know she will feed these papers to the fire.