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By Root 1077 0

catch her, fell to the floor. Her father and Dr. Quinteros stood there motionless, thinking perhaps that she’d slipped and would get to her feet again in a moment, laughing fit to kill, but the commotion in the living room—exclamations, people pushing and shoving to reach her, her mama’s voice shouting “Elianita, Elianita, oh, my poor little darling!”—made them run to help her, too. Red Antúnez had leapt to her side and swooped her up in his arms, and with a group of friends following close behind, was now carrying her upstairs, with Senora Margarita leading the way, saying over and over: “This way, to her room, slowly, watch your step,” and pleading: “A doctor, somebody call a doctor.” Some of the members of the family—Uncle Fernando, Cousin Chabuca, Don Marcelino—were reassuring the guests, ordering the musicians to resume playing. Dr. Quinteros saw his brother Roberto motioning to him from the top of the stairs. How stupid of me, he thought. I’m a doctor, what am I waiting for? He bounded up the stairs two by two as people moved quickly aside to let him past.

They’d taken Elianita to her bedroom, a room decorated in pink, overlooking the garden. Roberto, Red, Venancia the nanny were standing around the bed, where the girl, still very pale, was beginning to come to and blink her eyes as her mother, sitting beside her, rubbed her forehead with a handkerchief soaked in alcohol. Red had taken one of his bride’s hands in his and was looking at her with mingled rapture and anguish in his eyes.

“For the moment, you are all to go outside and leave me alone with the bride,” Dr. Quinteros ordered, assuming his professional role. And as he ushered them toward the door: “Don’t worry, I’m sure it isn’t anything. But out you go—I want to have a look at her.”

The only one who refused to leave was old Venancia; Margarita practically had to drag her out bodily. Dr. Quinteros went back over to the bed and sat down next to Elianita, who looked at him in fear and trembling from between her long black eyelashes. He kissed her on the forehead and smiled at her as he took her temperature: it wasn’t anything, she mustn’t be frightened. Her pulse was a bit unsteady and she was having difficulty breathing. The doctor noticed that her dress was very tight-fitting across the bosom and he helped her unbutton and take it off.

“Since you have to change clothes in any case, you’ll save time this way, my girl.”

When he saw the cruelly tight girdle, he realized instantly what was wrong, but kept himself from making the slightest gesture or asking a single question that might betray the fact that he’d discovered his niece’s secret. Elianita’s face had grown redder and redder as she took off her dress, and she was so embarrassed now that she didn’t raise her eyes or say a word. Dr. Quinteros told her it wasn’t necessary to remove her underclothes, just the girdle, because it was making it hard for her to breathe. Smiling the while, and assuring her, his mind seemingly elsewhere, that it was the most natural thing in the world if on her wedding day, what with all the emotion of the occasion, plus all the hustling and bustling about and all the fatigue of getting ready for the big day, and above all if she were mad enough to go on dancing for hours on end without a minute’s rest, a bride happened to have a fainting spell, he palpated her breasts and her belly (which, on being freed from the powerful embrace of the girdle, had literally popped out) and deduced, with the certainty of a specialist through whose hands thousands of pregnant women had passed, that she was in her fourth month. He examined the pupils of her eyes, asked her a couple of stupid questions to put her off the track, and advised her to rest for a few minutes before going back downstairs—and above all not to go on dancing like that.

“You see, you just got a little too tired, my girl. In any event, I’m going to give you a little something to counteract all the day’s excitement.”

He stroked her hair, and to give her time to compose herself before her parents came back into the room,