“If she had been allowed to study instead of being forced to work from the age of 17, she would probably be a professional today. What my family owes her is not a ‘thank you,’ but justice.”
The house I arrived at belonged to the De la Vega family, one of the richest and most powerful clans in Mexico City. The mansion was so immense that I got lost the first day: gleaming marble floors, crystal chandeliers hanging like in a luxury hotel, gardens larger than the entire neighborhood where I had grown up, and a garage full of cars I had only ever seen on television.
But that beauty was not for me.
From the first day, the lady of the house, Doña Isabel de la Vega, looked me up and down as if I were a cheap object.
“This girl is too thin,” he said coldly to the butler. “But as long as she obeys, it doesn’t matter.”
I was assigned all sorts of tasks: getting up at five in the morning to sweep, do laundry, clean stairs, scrub the kitchen, tidy the living room, polish railings, help the cook, and run errands for the butler. I always had to walk with my head down, keep quiet, and remember my place.
—Don’t sit in the living room armchairs.
—Don’t look the guests in the eye.
—Finish everything before nightfall.
—And don’t make any noise so the young gentleman doesn’t hear you.
It was precisely that last sentence that made me notice.
I soon learned that there was a son in that house that almost no one talked about.
His name was Alejandro de la Vega, he was 20 years old, and the eldest son in the family. Three years earlier, he had been in a car accident on his way back from Monterrey to the capital. Since then, his legs had been practically paralyzed. Everyone outside knew that he lived isolated in a room on the third floor, that he almost never appeared, and that the best doctors in Mexico had come to see him, only to leave shaking their heads.
Inside that mansion, Alejandro was like a secret that everyone wanted to hide.
The first time I saw him was when I was bringing clean towels up to the third floor. His bedroom door was ajar. I caught a glimpse of a young man sitting in a wheelchair, his back to the door, looking out the window. The afternoon light highlighted his handsome, yet profoundly sad, profile. He was thinner than I had imagined, and his shoulders seemed tense with a never-ending fury.
The butler immediately pulled me aside and warned me:
“Don’t even think about going near Mr. Alejandro’s room without permission. He doesn’t like to be seen.”
But a few days later, it was Doña Isabel herself who called me.
She was sitting in the living room, drinking tea from a fine porcelain cup, not deigning to look at me.
“Starting today, in addition to the housework, you will bring Alejandro’s meals and clean his room. Do only what you are told. Don’t talk too much. Don’t touch him without permission. And don’t you dare tell anyone what you see. Understood?”
—Yes, ma’am—I replied in a low voice.
The first time I entered Alejandro’s room, my hands were trembling so much I almost dropped the tray. The room was spacious, elegant, filled with books, medications, and rehabilitation equipment, but it had an unbearable coldness. Alejandro was standing by the desk and didn’t even turn to look at me.
—Leave it there and go.
His voice was deep and tired.
I did as she said, but before leaving, I saw some dusty physical therapy splints under the bed. There was something in her gaze I couldn’t forget: it wasn’t arrogance, it was hopelessness.
As the days went by, I began to notice strange things. The physical therapist only came twice a week. Aside from that, Alejandro was practically abandoned. The family had the money to buy any modern machine, but no one had the time to sit with him for more than a few minutes. His father, Don Ricardo de la Vega, was always traveling. His mother was busy with parties, charity events, and photoshoots for magazines. In that house, they could spend hundreds of thousands of pesos on a single celebration, but they didn’t have the patience to listen to Alejandro finish a sentence.
One night, when I went upstairs to bring him his medicine, I heard a loud bang.
I opened the door and saw him lying on the floor, the wheelchair beside him. He had tried to transfer from the bed to the chair by himself and had fallen. His face was pale, but he kept his jaw clenched to stifle a groan.
I ran towards him, alarmed.
—Mr. Alejandro!
“Don’t call anyone,” he growled. “I don’t want them to see me like this.”
I tried to help him sit up. He weighed more than I expected, but what surprised me was something else: his legs weren’t as lifeless as everyone said. When I touched him, I noticed he could still bend his knee slightly.
I stared at him.
—You still feel.
Alejandro turned his face away and gave a bitter smile.
—And what good is it? I’m still a burden.
I don’t know where I got the courage to answer him:
—If you still feel, then there is still hope.
