Page 2 of An Immaculate Deception

I swallow. “Who…what?”

Her eyes drop to my belly, then narrow. I have no visible bump yet, but the way she looks at my belly makes me question my sanity. Am I showing already and didn’t realize it? Did I put on weight? Are there other visible signs, which all expecting mothers know except me?

“Who was it?” she demands. “Leandro? Or someone else?”

“Of course no one else!”

Mother turns to stone and so do I. I inadvertently confessed. I could have at least feigned ignorance, but now it’s too late. We both know that the other knows it’s too late.

Of course she suspected it. Mother lives in a constant state of predicting the worst. Even the slightest mishap—a nap at an unusual time, not finishing my carne de sol at lunch—would have led her to nefarious conclusions (which so happened, in this case, to be correct).

“Did he force himself on you?”

I freeze. In all the weeks I’ve spent fretting over this moment, I never once considered that this would be her first inquiry.

I shake my head. I can’t face her, so I drop my gaze and brace for the raising of her hand. I hold my breath and my muscles clench in anticipation of pain. But Mother sweeps past me in silence.

When she’s behind me, I breathe again.

The silence is so unlike her. Her face is tight and red like she’s been holding her breath for an hour.

“He’s going to propose, Mother,” I say in a shaky voice. “He’s genuine in his affections. You know how often he visits, the letters and poems, the way he treats me—”

“I see the way he treats you, all right.” She casts a pointed look at my belly. “The odds were stacked against you before, with him being a Neves, and now…” She shakes her head, arms crossed against her chest. Then she stills, as though struck by a new thought. “He’ll say it isn’t his.”

“He will not!”

Her grim prediction catches me off guard a second time. I find myself repeating the same words over and over again to decreasing effect: He will know the baby is his, he will be happy about it, he would never deny it.

Mother watches me with a somber expression. “How can you be so foolish?”

“Because he loves me. I know it.”

She turns away, muttering under her breath: “Only a mother could love you.”

I shrink inside myself. The line is the telltale sign of her fury, and stings more than a beating.

I am nine or ten years old. I’m in the crowded market, surrounded by loud, sweaty adults. The shopkeeper hands me the bag of yucca and stretches out his hand for the coins. I reach into my pocket but feel only loose fabric. I seek the cold, hard feel of the metal on my fingertips. Panic rises to my throat.

Back home I confess to Mother, in between hiccups, that I lost the copper coins she gave me for the yucca. Mother sits in her rocking chair, gazing out the window. Dreadful child…only a mother could love you.

“How could you allow this disgrace?” she barks, jerking me back into the present. “Have you no fear of God?”

I press my palm to my forehead and squeeze my eyes shut as a wave of dizziness rolls through me. In my mind I see the souls in the second circle, rolling and clashing in that furious whirlwind. I have asked myself this, too: How could I have fallen prey to temptation?

It was, as Dante says, a wind. We were on our way home from the circus, my fingers sticky with molasses-coated popcorn, my mind buzzing with laughter. He proposed a detour: Mere minutes off the main road, there was a secret spot with a marvelous sunset stretching over the river valley. A spot only he knew. The detour turned out to be half an hour’s walk off the main path, and the dirt road was deserted—not a single soul there or back. But he wasn’t wrong about the views. The secret spot was completely secluded, partly encircled by rocky hillside and dense woods. A narrow gap in the trees framed a view of rolling hills and fields amid swaths of pink-and-orange sky. I drew a breath in wonder. We sat together at the cliff edge and watched the sun’s rays deepen as day turned to dusk.

When Leandro kissed me, he drew me into his arms and I floated into the clouds with the macaws. The clouds tasted like sweet apples with caramel sauce. Could the apple of knowledge have tasted this good to Eve? Euphoria laid waste to my mind, and an air lighter than light filled my body.

I did not care about God then.

Like the tormented souls in the second circle of Hell, I did not stop what came next. But the wind was extinguished almost as soon as the sin began. Somewhere between the unbuttoning of my dress and the merging of our bodies, a little seed of fear bloomed into dread. I found myself silently begging for God’s forgiveness, then I remembered that such a thing was not allowed—you cannot repent before the act.

I cannot tell Mother any of that.

“Arrangements shall have to be made…” Mother says, “if he does not propose.”

“Arrangements?” I manage, swallowing the lump in my throat. I think of Santa Casa da Misericórdia’s overcrowded, disease-ridden yellow fortress, where the nuns have far more orphaned children to care for than they can manage. Death abounds there, though perhaps death would be better than growing up in such a place. When he wakes up in the middle of the night with a nightmare or a fright, who will comfort him? Who will remember to buy him presents on his birthday, or even remember his birthday at all?