The Peacock Emporium(48)

It was here that Ale chose to speak to his mother, while his father supposedly busied himself in his study, and Milagros shuffled backward and forward across the marble floors with a mop to eavesdrop on the conversation. His mother sat upright at the table. With her helmet of blond hair, she was unrecognizable as the dark-haired beauty of the wedding photographs in gilt frames that littered the house.

“You are going where?” she said, for the second time.

“England.”

“To train? You have changed your mind? You’re going to be a doctor?”

“No, Mother, I’m still going to be a midwife.”

“You’re going to work in a private hospital? To advance your career?”

“No. Another state hospital.”

Milagros had stopped all pretense of cleaning, and stood still in the center of the room to listen.

“You are going to the other side of the world to do the same job that you do here?”

He nodded.

“But why there? Why so far?”

His answers had been rehearsed so many times in his head. “There are no opportunities here. They are offering good jobs in England, proper wages. I can work in some of the best hospitals.”

“But you can work here!” There was a rising note in his mother’s voice that spoke of panic or hysteria. “Is it not enough that I lose one child? Must I lose two?”

He had known it was coming, but that did not make the blow any lighter. He felt the vaguely malevolent presence that he always did when Estela was discussed. “You’re not losing me, Mother.” His voice was that of a doctor speaking to his patient.

“You’re moving ten thousand miles away! How is that not losing you? Why are you leaving me?” She appealed to Milagros, who shook her head in sorrowful agreement.

“I’m not moving from you.”

“But why not America? Why not Paraguay? Brazil? Why not Argentina, for heaven’s sake?”

He tried to explain how English hospitals were short of midwives, how those from other countries were being offered substantial financial rewards to fill the gaps. He tried to tell her that it would be good for his career, that he might end up working for one of the famous teaching hospitals, how the neonatal care was among the best in the world. She was always going on about their European ancestors—it would be good for him to experience Europe.

He considered telling her of the three babies he had watched handed over at birth because Argentina’s economic collapse meant their parents were too poor to keep them, of the anguished cries of the still-bloodied mothers, the painfully set jaws of the fathers. He said nothing of the fact that while he had chosen to work with the city’s dirt poor, nothing had prepared him for the lingering sorrow, or the sense of unwilling complicity he felt at the handing over of those children.

But he and his father did not talk to her of babies. They never had.

He knelt and took her hand. “What is there left for me here, Mama? The hospitals are dying. I could not afford to live in a slum on my salary. You want me to live with you until I am an old man?” He regretted the words as soon as he had spoken them, knowing she would be perfectly happy with such an arrangement.

“I knew you doing this—this thing would bring us no good.”

When he had initially gone into medicine, his mother had been proud. What professions were of a higher status in Buenos Aires, after all? Only plastic surgeons and psychoanalysts, and there were one of each in the family already. Then, two years in, he had returned home to announce a change in career: he was not at home among the doctors, he had realized. His future lay elsewhere. He was going, he said, to work in obstetric care.

“You’re going to be an obstetrician?” his mother had said, faint concern creasing her brow.

“No, I’m going to be a midwife.”

It was only the second time Milagros had seen her mistress faint—the first was when they told her Estela had died. It was not a suitable profession for the son of Buenos Aires’ most prominent cosmetic surgeon, and no profession for a red-blooded man, no matter what was said about equality and sexual liberation these days. To her friends, her son was only ever described as being “in medicine.” It wasn’t seemly. More importantly, she believed it might be, she confided to Milagros, the real reason why her beautiful son never brought girls home, why he didn’t seem to display the arrogant machismo that should have been shot through the firstborn son of such a family. Then, even worse, he had chosen to work in the state hospital.

“So, when are you thinking of going?”

“Next week. Tuesday.”

“Next week? Next week coming? Why so much hurry?”

“They need staff immediately, Mama. One has to take opportunities when they come.”

Shock had made her rigid. She held a hand to her face, then crumpled. “If it had been your sister who wanted this profession, who wanted to move continents . . . that I could have coped with. But you . . . It’s not right, Ale.”

So what is right? he wanted to ask. But as always, he said nothing. Alejandro closed his eyes, and braced himself against his mother’s hurt. “I’ll be able to come back, two, maybe three times a year.”

“My only son will be a visitor to my house. This is supposed to make me happy?” She didn’t look at Alejandro but appealed to Milagros, who sucked her teeth. There was a lengthy silence. Then, as he had expected, his mother broke into a noisy burst of sobbing. She reached a hand across to him, her fingers waving vainly in the air. “Don’t go, Ale. I promise I won’t mind where you work. You can stay at the Hospital de Clinicas. I won’t say a thing.”