“Don Russell, no tengo donde irme.” I don’t have anywhere to go, she said. She said it evenly, without emotion, as if all her emotions had been used up and there was nothing left.

“I’m sorry, señora, but I—” For some reason, with his mother’s photo in his hand, he couldn’t lie to her. He’d lied and he’d lied about his family, but he couldn’t lie to this woman.

“I breast feed you,” she said. “When your mother was sick.” She was looking at him hopefully.

He moved away from her. She stepped towards him and knelt down on the floor at his knees.

“I want to go back to the plantation, but your aunt says I can’t go,” she said, pleading. “Please, Don Russell, please take me back. I was born there. I gave you the milk.” She held one of her breasts.

He was shocked by her kneeling. He turned the light on in the hallway; his finger had been on the switch. The foyer lit up. He saw the top of her head, the part of her black hair.

“Señora, please get up. Please,” he said. He bent down and made her get up off the floor. He would never forget her on the floor, in that position. He remembered so well, in the church at Colomba when he was a child. The Indians would sometimes prostrate themselves in front of the altar. It frightened him as a child, and she’d brought it all back. She’d brought back the afternoons coming onto the plantation with his mother. The way the old men would stop, their machetes in their hands, the way they’d doff their caps, the way the children would stop playing as he and his mother rode by, the way the Indian women would bow silently as they carried enormous loads of firewood on their heads, and all of this as they sailed by, he not realizing his mother was a little drunk, and her automatically giving the nod. The nod that said conquest and tradition. The nod that said: This is my land and you will be my people, we are never to touch, but I am the princess and you the subjects. We have a social and historical contract. He had understood it all, and he had buried it so deep that he didn’t know where it had been until now.

It was the afternoon, with the shadows of clouds and no rain coming, and him thinking only about seeing Beatrice again, when he opened the door to confront this woman and his past, and he didn’t want any of it. Nothing.

He wanted to tell her to leave. But he couldn’t, because suddenly he realized that the woman and he were connected; that he had a place here, a responsibility to her, whether he liked it or not. He couldn’t run away from that. It was his duty to do something for her. He embraced her, and heard her start to sob.

“Olga. Yes, of course I remember. Of course,” he said again, holding her. “Of course you can go back.”

For a moment he stood looking at her, at her poverty, and her dirty plastic shoes and her helplessness, at her raggedy ignorance and her inability to read, at the ten children she’d had, at the war that had killed half of them, at the husband who had beaten her, at the warm rain that had soaked her as she’d wandered the streets of the capital looking for jobs as a maid, and the rejections she’d gotten because she was crippled. All of it sickened him, making him look at his briefcase by the door and then the phone and the door again as he closed it and led her to the kitchen, her cardboard box in his hand as she talked about his mother. She was home; he could tell it in her voice. This was where she belonged, with him, her voice said.

He turned and wanted to tell her to please stop crying. Instead, he told her that she needed to rest. She looked at him and said, “Sí, patron.” The contract that had been lost was found again: the contract that had been written the day his great grandfather and some pistoleros cleaned the land and said, “We are the whites, you are the conquered, and we will take care of you.” It was a filthy contract, written in Indian blood, and it had been honored for a hundred years—only interrupted by the war. Now this woman had come with her torn end, asking for her meager rights. That the contract had been unfair wasn’t the point, he realized. It had been signed, and he had to live up to it for better or worse, because she had nothing else.

He walked silently towards the maid’s quarters that he’d never wanted filled. He could have hired a maid, but none had come like this, with the contract and his mother’s photo.

He glanced at the photo again. His mother in the photo was maybe ten years old. She had her arm around an Indian girl of the same age. His mother was well-dressed, the other girl was in dirty clothes.

Russell threw Olga’s cardboard box on the little bunk bed and looked around the room. Some other maid had left a picture of Jesus Christ on the wall. He’d never taken it down, as he thought it quaint and ridiculous: The bleeding heart of Jesus Christ. He’d come in drunk with friends and shown it to them, and they’d laughed about the saccharine quality of it, with its pretense of authority. He looked at it now, ashamed for laughing, and thought about all the women who had lived in this room and been the conquered. He thought about all the times their names had been called with no love, only with the cold hard reality of their position. How lonely had this room been at midnight for those wretched women?

“I take breakfast early, Olga. And I eat very little. Toast and coffee. You’ll find everything in the kitchen,” he said quietly in Spanish. “We’ll see about you going back as soon as I speak to my aunt. Back home,” he said.

“Sí, Don Russell,” she said. He remembered her then; she’d been so much younger then that he hadn’t recognized her. Suddenly he remembered her very well, at the hotel in San Francisco, and the way his mother and she had cried over him.

He handed her the photo and walked out of the room.

Later, he called his aunt. She told him she had no idea how Olga had found him, or what had happened to Olga over the years. She said that during the war one of Olga’s children had turned out to be a Communist. Olga and her family had been driven off the plantation by the administrator because of it.

They’d met in Hangar 28 at Aurora airport. His boss was writing a series of articles on the state of the drug war in Latin America, and he’d moved his office out to the DEA’s hangar to be closer to the action.

The hangar had offices on the second floor that looked down on the cavernous ground floor. A DEA pilot had once caught fire by accident on the shop floor when he’d lit a cigarette, forgetting about the bucket of fuel nearby. Someone else from the DEA had jumped from his office during a meeting with Russell, who was then writing the de rigueur article on the drug war; they managed to put the man out. Russell remembered now how everyone for a moment had sat frozen and watched the man’s jacket go from black to orange. That was Guatemala out of the blue, something like that. The DEA officer broke his leg but managed to put the pilot out, although his hands were left terribly burnt.

The hangar door was partially open; Russell could see the lights from the airfield at night. The airport was busy at this time of night. A commercial jet and two private planes were queued up waiting to take off, out on the tarmac.

They heard the roar of the commercial jet as it started down the runway, the jet’s engines pouring out hot air.

“You’ve been away a lot the last few weeks,” Russell’s boss said to him. They looked at each other. The good thing about their office was that there was so much extracurricular activity that no one was beyond reproach. It made for a relaxed environment. Everyone seemed to be carrying on a double life of one kind or another. His boss—a drug addict—had his. Now, Russell had Beatrice.

“I know about your girlfriend,” his boss added. “I saw the two of you at the Q Bar the other night. So did a lot of people. You’re out of your mind, you know that. If her husband finds out, you’ll be killed. Normally it wouldn’t matter, but in his case, of course, it has to. If he found out, he might hold it against us—this office. You know these Guatemalans, he’s liable to kill us all. Only natural, don’t you think? The cuckold can be a mean race of people,” his boss said. “He’s killed a lot of people. A couple more wouldn’t matter.”