I am sending you this letter from very far away, from another life. Who knows where I will be when you learn what happened to you.
Eight years ago I arrived at your house, with all my little papers in order. The references from several wealthy families, and an impeccable list of up-to-date courses — first aid, food handling, early childhood stimulation, and my certificate in professional English. I love children and I love caring for them. There is never another candidate like me, Señora. In every house where I have worked they have always begged me to stay, that I am part of the family.
I of course have never believed that business about family, because I am no fool. I already have a family, and the truth is it is nothing to envy. I have two idiotic teenagers who smoke marijuana constantly and play at being gang members at school. Both of them I have had to raise on my own, while with the other hand I raised other women's children. The father of these two left one day supposedly for a very well-paid job in Texas, and never came back. Good riddance. None of this I told you, because you never asked.
I did not want to move on to another job so quickly, because I had just left a family that was leaving the country. But the neighbor who told me about the position made it clear that you were a special case. That you had a little girl of four and a baby boy of six months, and with the latter you had been consumed by a very deep postpartum depression. On top of caring for the children, of course, there was the whole house to clean — which was an absolute disaster — and coordinating with the meal delivery service that came daily, already prepared and ready for each member of the family in labeled little boxes.
I will confess to you, Señora, that I accepted this job because I too had postpartum depression, after the younger one. Of course, I had to go back to work as soon as I could walk again. What I remember well is living life looking through a hole, barely focused on the next action, on whatever was closest, on not abandoning the baby, on feeding him, on moving one foot in front of the other, all voices reaching me from outside my field of vision. I did not cry, I did not talk less, I did not walk differently, I gave no one any sign. The hole little by little kept opening, until some ambient light began to come in, enough at least to breathe while I kept working. Work is the inevitability; everything else simply passes.
It is possible you do not even remember, but I mentioned it to you — that I had gone through the same depression as you. By then I had already been with the family a few months, I had grown fond of the older girl, I knew how to get the baby to sleep almost instantly, and I was accustomed to the rhythms of the house. Señora, you looked at me from a great distance, as if our brains were of different species and the same thing could never happen to both of them. In that moment I thought: this woman is looking at me through the hole. But I was left with a doubt. Could it be that she cannot believe we were in the same place — her white hand the same as my brown hand, her despair and mine on the same plane?
Your husband, like all men, thinks mostly of himself. The señor at first was so distracted with his own affairs that he did not notice you spent your days locked in your room talking on the phone with a long list of friends, and left the house only for your various psychiatric appointments. Had we been on closer terms I would have advised you to get up, to pull yourself together, to get down and scrub the kitchen floor, not to let the hole swallow you whole. But we were not on those terms — you are not my sister or my daughter, you are not my family. So I confined myself to raising your children, who were so small. It is very easy to love them at this age.
The shelves of your bathroom began filling with little green bottles of various medications. I photographed all of them and then on my own time, in my own home, I looked them up on the internet trying to guess their purpose. At some point I took a couple to examine them more carefully. One was a small oval white pill, with a little line for splitting it in half. After rummaging through my drawers full of expired medications, I finally found a low-dose antidiarrheal, in a flat oval pill without any markings. The difference was minuscule; nobody would be able to tell.
I began switching out the pills very gradually, keeping in my head an exact tally of the proportion of real ones to false ones. One change here, one change there. It is good to keep the mind busy with calculations; it is good to have a project with an objective. I watched you slide back into your depression almost imperceptibly, a gentle descent across the months.
You will wonder why, of course. Unfortunately I have no reasons to give you, Señora. Why does one do things? At first I did it because I believed I was helping you — I do not have much faith in those pills myself. Then I became interested in the situation as a kind of project: I grew curious to see how far into madness she could go. Sometimes I picture you on the other side of the hole, almost content to be there, not wanting to come back.
At some point your husband began paying some attention. Your psychiatrists changed; your appointments multiplied. None of that matters, of course, because I still have access to your medications. I dedicate myself to cleaning the house until it looks brand new every day, during the hours when the girl goes to kindergarten and the little one takes his nap. One must not waste time, Señora. "We would not know what to do without you," the señor tells me every day, before leaving us alone in the house. At this point it is true: this house falls to ruin if I do not come for two days in a row.
When the weather allows I take the children to the playground in the park, so as not to make noise while you sleep. I would rather not tell you how many times other women approach me to make conversation, trying to hire me for their own homes — but above all to pry information out of me about your mysterious condition. You who no longer even leave your room, sad as a mule, for no reason at all. But I have always been very discreet, Señora, do not worry. I am not going to another house because I know you need me, and your children even more so. You will see: one of these days you are going to wake up wanting to live.