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hurts me to ask such things.”
    Ignoring these impertinences, Encarnación set her child down and brushed past the old woman toward the stone basin in the laundry shed. The vieja followed her.
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    The toddler, meanwhile, hunkered in a wet spot under the flapping clothes, fascinated by the graceful schooling of Seville's pigeons. They careened overhead like scraps of half-charred paper buoyed on erratic updrafts. While Encarnación, heedless of the birds, flooded the basin with cold water and unwrapped her clothes, her son reached heavenward. All his yearning was for the wheeling pigeons.
    “How extraordinary, Señorita. Your baby is walking at—what?—seven months? He looks much younger, even though his head is very big. It's the blackness in him, I imagine, this power to walk at so young an age. Do you fear he'll lose this power if you have him christened? Do you believe you must raise him as a brujito , a warlock, to insure his survival? Is that your thinking?”
    For a brief moment, in the black mirror of the water, the child's mother saw her own unsmiling face. She resembled, even to herself, the bewildered representative of some lost tribe of humanity: sloe-black eyes, a sensuous mouth, and eyebrows growing together above her broad pug nose. In the shadowy water under her hands her swarthiness was emphasized by an even deeper shadow. Many Spaniards considered her a Negro. She shattered her image with a handful of cheap detergent and the limp bludgeon of a diaper.
    “Instead, Señorita Ocampo, you are fattening this baby for someone else's feast. You have deprived him of both baptism and the comfort of human speech, and, should you die, no one will stoop to help him.
    Never mind that he scrambles about your apartment like a Barbary ape. Outside, he will not be able to fend for himself—for at present he is only his selfish mother's juguete , a plaything. If you were to suffer a fatal accident or sicken unto death, he too would be doomed. It is wicked of you not to have thought of this.”
    At the conclusion of this part of the old woman's argument, the child hooted spontaneously and ambled to the railing overlooking the inner courtyard. Encarnación, not seeing him behind her, interrupted her washing to fetch the boy back. To reach him she had to bump the old woman aside, but the contact was less peremptory than she would have liked it to be. This persistent meddling in her affairs was insupportable. It sapped her of energy and self-esteem.
    “What of the little one's father? If he knew you had borne him a child, he would surely wish to rescue it from the folly of such an upbringing. A black man sired this one on you—anyone can see that—but even black men have tongues with which to speak their preferences. You should tell him he has a son.”
    Encarnación returned to the wash house. The child, emboldened by his most recent adventure, approached the old woman and gripped her stiff skirts. She, in turn, put the tip of one finger in the center of his woolly head and rubbed it around on that spot as if to ward off any evil implicit in his nearness.
    “Cruelty and arrogance,” the crone continued, still rubbing the boy's head. “It's pride that makes you take on a responsibility of which you are unworthy. Otherwise you would understand that what you do guarantees the ruin—yes, the damnation—of your brujaco . Time will undo both your pride and your son. And the shameful occupations you pursue—listen, Señorita, they will kill you before you think.”
    Her hands and arms dripping, Encarnación whirled about and broke her child's grip on the old woman's skirts. The vieja blinked but did not draw back. Although cadaverously skinny, she towered over the young woman, and her height advantage perhaps made her foolhardy. In a moment her mouth was working again, spilling out recriminations, advice, and ominous