They traveled the roads and byways of the West, unhurriedly and with no set itinerary, changing their route according to the whim of the moment, the premonitory sign of a flock of birds, the lure of an unknown name. The Reeveses interrupted their erratic pilgrimage wherever they were overcome by weariness or wherever they found someone disposed to buy their intangible merchandise. They sold hope. In this way they traveled up and down the desert, they crossed mountains, and one early morning they saw day break over a beach on the Pacific coast. Forty-some years later, during a long confession in which he reviewed his life and drew up an accounting of his errors and achievements, Gregory Reeves told me of his earliest memory: a boy of four, himself, urinating on a hilltop at sunset, the horizon stained red and amber by the last rays of the sun; at his back were the sharp peaks of the hills, and, below, a plain stretched farther than the eye could see. The warm liquid flows like some essence of body and spirit, each drop, as it sinks into the dirt, marking the territory with his signature. He prolongs the pleasure, playing with the stream, tracing a topaz-colored circle on the dust. He feels the perfect peace of the late afternoon; he is moved by the enormity of the world, pervaded with a sense of euphoria because he is part of this unblemished landscape filled with marvels, a boundless geography to be explored. Not far away, his family is waiting. All is well; for the first time he is aware of happiness: it is a moment he will never forget. At other times in his life, when confronted by the world’s surprises, Gregory Reeves felt that wonder, that sensation of belonging to a splendid place where everything is possible and where each thing, from the most sublime to the most horrendous, has a reason for being, where nothing happens by chance and nothing is without purpose—a message his father, blazing with messianic fervor as a snake coiled about his feet, used to preach at the top of his lungs. And every time he had felt that glint of understanding, he remembered the sunset on the hill. His childhood had been an overly long period of confusion and darkness, except for those years of traveling with his family. His father, Charles Reeves, guided his small tribe by employing severe but clear-cut rules; all of them worked together, each fulfilling his duties: reward and punishment, cause and effect, a discipline based on a scale of immutable values. The father’s eye was upon them like the eye of God. Their travels determined the fate of the Reeveses without altering their stability, because routines and standards were fixed. That was the only time in his life that Gregory had felt secure. The rage began later, after his father was gone and reality began, irreparably, to deteriorate.
The soldier had begun the march in the morning, with his knapsack on his back, but by early afternoon he was already sorry he had not taken the bus. He had set out whistling contentedly, but as the hours passed he felt the strain in his back, and his song became sprinkled with curses. It was his first furlough following a year of service in the Pacific, and he was returning home with the aftereffects of a bout with malaria, a scar on his belly, and as poor as he had always been. He had draped his shirt over a branch to improvise some shade; he was sweating, and his skin gleamed like a dark mirror. He intended to take advantage of every second of his two weeks’ liberty and spend the nights playing pool with his friends and dancing with the girls who had answered his letters, then sleep like a log and wake to the smell of freshly brewed coffee and his mother’s pancakes, the only appetizing dish from her kitchen—everything else smelled like burned rubber, but who was going to complain about the culinary abilities of the most beautiful woman for a hundred miles around, a living legend, with the elongated bones of a fine sculpture and the yellow eyes of a leopard. After hours without sign of a soul in this lonely countryside, he heard a motor coughing behind him; in the distance he could just make out the hazy outlines of a truck shuddering like an animated mirage in the reverberating light. He waited for it to come closer, hoping to hitch a ride, but as it approached he changed his mind; he was startled by the eccentric apparition, a pile of tin painted in insolent colors and loaded to overflowing with household goods crowned with a chicken coop, a dog tied with a rope, and, attached to the roof of the cab, a loudspeaker and a sign in large letters, reading THE INFINITE PLAN. He stepped back to let it pass, then watched it come to a halt a few meters farther on, where a woman with tomato-red hair leaned from a window and beckoned him to join them. He was hesitant to take this as a blessing; cautiously, he walked toward the truck, calculating that he could not possibly ride in the cab, which already contained three adults and two children, and would require an acrobat’s skill to clamber onto the load in the rear. The door opened and the driver jumped out.
“Charles Reeves,” he announced with courtesy, but also with unmistakable authority.
“Benedict, sir . . . King Benedict,” the young man replied, wiping the sweat from his forehead.
“We’re a little crowded, as you can see, but if five can fit, so can six.”
The other passengers had also jumped down. The woman with the red curls started off in the direction of some bushes, followed by a little girl of about six, who to save time was pulling down her underpants as she went, while her younger brother, half hidden behind the second woman, stuck out his tongue at the stranger. Charles Reeves lowered a ladder from the side of the truck, scrambled over the bundles with agility, and untied the dog, who leapt fearlessly from the top and began to run around, sniffing at weeds.
“The children like to ride behind, but it’s dangerous; they can’t stay there alone. Olga and you can go with them. We’ll put Oliver up front so he doesn’t bother you; he’s still a pup, but he’s as snappish as an old dog,” and Charles Reeves signaled the soldier to climb aboard.
King Benedict tossed his knapsack atop the mound of goods and utensils and followed it up, then held out his arms to receive the boy, whom Reeves had lifted above his head, a skinny child with prominent ears and an irresistible smile that made his face seem all teeth. When the woman and the girl returned, they, too, climbed on the back; the man and the other woman got into the cab, and the truck started off again.
“My name is Olga, and these two are Judy and Gregory,” said the woman with the impossible hair, settling her skirts as she divided apples and crackers. “Don’t sit on that box. The boa’s in there, and we don’t want to block the air holes,” she added.
Young Gregory had stopped sticking out his tongue as soon as he realized that the traveler was fresh from the war. A reverent expression replaced the impudent faces, and he besieged the passenger with questions about combat airplanes until he fell victim to drowsiness. The soldier then attempted a conversation with the redhead, but she replied with monosyllables, and he didn’t want to press her. He began to hum an old song, darting glances from the corner of his eye at the mysterious box until everyone else had fallen asleep on the pile of bundles; then he could observe them at will. The children’s hair was so blond it was nearly white, and in profile their pale eyes appeared sightless; in contrast, the woman had the olive complexion of some Mediterranean peoples. The top buttons of her blouse were unfastened; drops of sweat dampened the neckline and then trickled in a slow thread down the crevice between her breasts. She had lifted one arm to cradle her head on a large box, revealing dark hair in her armpit and a wet stain on the cloth. Benedict looked away, fearful of being caught staring and having his curiosity misinterpreted; until now these folks had been friendly, overly friendly, he thought, but you never could be sure with whites. He deduced that the two children belonged to the couple, although, judging from their apparent ages, the Reeveses could as easily be the grandparents. He reinspected the contents of the load and concluded that the strange entourage was not moving, as he had first thought, but lived permanently in this house-on-wheels. He observed that they were carrying one drum containing several gallons of water and another with fuel, and he wondered how they obtained gasoline, which had been rationed for some time now because of the war. Everything was in meticulous order: utensils and tools hung from pegs and hooks; suitcases were contained in precisely dimensioned compartments; nothing was loose, every bundle was marked, and there were several boxes filled with books. Soon the heat and rocking of the journey overcame him, and he fell asleep against the chicken coop. He awakened at midafternoon as he felt the truck come to a stop. The boy’s body across his legs weighed almost nothing, but immobility had cramped his muscles, and his throat felt dry. For a few moments he did not know where he was. He pulled his flask of whiskey from his pocket and took a long pull to clear his mind. The woman and the two children were covered with dust, and sweat carved furrows down their cheeks and neck. Charles Reeves had pulled off the road beneath a grove of trees, the only shade in all this desolation. They would camp there to let the motor cool, he explained to the soldier, who by this time was feeling more at ease, and the next day they would take him home. Benedict was beginning to like this strange family. Reeves and Olga lowered a couple of rolls of canvas from the truck and set up two ragged campaign tents, while the other woman, who introduced herself as Nora Reeves, started a meal on a cumbersome kerosene stove; her daughter, Judy, helped her, while the boy, with the dog at his heels, looked for firewood.
“Are we going to hunt rabbit, Papa?” he asked, tugging at his father’s pants leg.
“There’s no time for that today, Greg,” Charles Reeves replied, pulling a chicken from the coop and breaking its neck with a firm snap.
“You can’t get meat. We keep the chickens for special occasions,” Nora explained, as if apologizing.
“Is this a special day, Mama?” Judy asked.
“Yes, child. Mr. King Benedict is our guest.”
By dusk the campsite was in order: the chicken was boiling in a pot, and each person was following his own interests in the light of carbide lamps and the warmth of the fire. Nora and the children were doing lessons, Charles Reeves was leafing through a worn copy of National Geographic, and Olga was stringing necklaces with colored beads.
“They’re for good luck,” she told their guest.
“And invisibility too,” the little girl added.
“How is that?”
“If you begin to turn invisible, you put on one of these necklaces, and then everyone can see you,” Judy clarified.
“Don’t pay any attention to her; those are children’s tales.” Nora Reeves laughed.
“It’s true, Mama!”
“Don’t contradict your mother,” was Charles Reeves’s sharp reprimand.
The women set the table—a large board—with a cloth, china plates, glasses, and spotless napkins. The soldier felt that such a display was not very practical for camping—in his own home they used tin utensils—but he refrained from comment. He took some canned meat from his pack and timidly offered it to his host; he did not want to appear to be paying for his dinner, but neither did he want to accept their hospitality without contributing something. Charles Reeves placed the can in the center of the table, alongside beans, rice, and the platter with the chicken. They all held hands while the father blessed the earth that gave them shelter and the gift of their food. There was no alcohol to be seen, and King Benedict did not dare show his whiskey flask, thinking that maybe the Reeveses abstained for religious reasons. He had been struck by the fact that in his brief prayer the father had not mentioned God’s name. He noticed how daintily they all ate, holding their silverware in their fingertips, although there was nothing affected about their manners. After they ate they carried the tableware to a water-filled dishpan, to be washed the next morning; they closed up the cook stove and gave the scraps to Oliver. By then the night was so dark it had obscured the light of the lamps, so the family settled around the fire that illuminated the center of the camp. Nora Reeves picked up a book and began reading aloud a tangled tale about Egyptians; apparently the children were already familiar with the story, because Gregory interrupted, saying:
“I don’t want Aïda to die sealed in the tomb, Mama.”
“It’s only an opera, son.”
“I don’t want her to die!”
“She won’t die this time, Greg,” Olga said with conviction.
“How do you know?”
“I saw it in my ball.”
“Are you sure?”
“Absolutely sure.”
Nora Reeves sat staring at the book with vague dismay, as if changing the ending would be more than she could manage.
“What ball is that?” the soldier asked.
“The crystal ball where Olga sees all the things nobody else can see,” Judy explained, in the tone of someone speaking to a retarded person.
“Not everything; just some things,” Olga corrected.
“Can you see my future?” Benedict asked, with such anxiety that even Charles Reeves looked up from his magazine.
“What do you want to know.”
“Will I live to the end of the war? Will I come home all in one piece?”
Olga walked to the truck and in a few moments returned with a glass orb and a faded cloth of cut velvet, which she spread over the table. King Benedict felt a shiver of superstition and wondered whether he had chanced into an evil sect, people who kidnapped babies—especially black babies, according to the old women where he lived—to tear out their hearts in their satanic masses. Judy and Gregory were curious and hovered near, but Nora and Charles Reeves returned to their reading. Olga indicated to the soldier that he should sit facing her; she grasped the ball in fingers tipped with peeling nail polish, stared for a long time into the sphere, then took her client’s hands and intently examined the light palms creased with dark lines.
“You will live twice,” she said finally.
“What do you mean, twice?”
“I don’t know. I only know you will live twice or live two lives.”
“Maybe that means I won’t die in the war.”
“If you die, you’ll surely come back to life,” said Judy.
“Will I die or not!”
“I guess not,” said Olga.
“Thank you, ma’am, thanks a lot.” Benedict’s face lighted up as if she had just handed him a certificate guaranteeing permanent life in this world.
“All right,” Charles Reeves interrupted. “It’s time for bed. We’ll be leaving early tomorrow morning.”
Olga helped the children put on their pajamas and almost immediately retired with them to the smaller tent, followed by Oliver. Shortly thereafter Nora Reeves crouched down at the tent flap for a last look at her children before going to bed. Lying near the fire, King Benedict heard their voices.
“Mama, that man scares me,” Judy whispered.
“Why, daughter?”
“Because he’s as black as my shoe.”
“He isn’t the first black man you’ve seen, Judy. You already know there are people of many colors, and that’s the way it should be. We whites are in the minority.”
“I see more white people than black ones, Mama.”
“This is only one corner of the world, Judy. In Africa there are more blacks than whites. In China people have yellow skin. If we lived farther south, across the border, we would be exotic creatures; people would stop in the street and stare at your white skin.”
“Just the same, he scares me.”
“Skin doesn’t matter. Look into his eyes. He seems to be a good man.”
“He has eyes just like Oliver’s,” Greg noted with a yawn.
Toward the end of the Second World War, life was hard. Men were still leaving for the front with a certain adventurous enthusiasm, but the patriotic propaganda had not made solitude any more bearable for the women; for them, Europe was a distant nightmare. They were tired of rationing, of keeping the house in good repair, and of bringing up the children by themselves. The widespread poverty of the preceding decade was not to be seen, but neither was there prosperity, and farmers were still roaming the highways in search of good land—white trash, as they were called to differentiate them from others who were as poor as they were but even lower on the social scale: blacks, Indians, and Mexican braceros. Although the Reeveses’ only earthly possessions were the truck and its contents, they were better off than many; they seemed more refined, less desperate; their hands were free of calluses, and their skin, although tanned by life in the outdoors, was not, like the farm laborers’, as tough as a boot sole. When they crossed a state line, the police, experienced in distinguishing subtle levels of poverty, treated them respectfully; they detected no trace of humility in these travelers. They did not force them to unload their truck or open their bundles, as they did farmers run off their land by dust storms, droughts, or the machinery of progress, nor did they insult them, looking for a pretext to use force, as they did with Latinos, blacks, and the few Indians who had survived massacres and alcohol; they merely asked questions about where they were headed. Charles Reeves, a man with the face of an ascetic, burning eyes, and an imposing presence, would reply that he was an artist and was taking his paintings to be sold in some nearby city. He did not mention his less tangible merchandise, in order not to create confusion or find himself forced to provide long explanations. Charles Reeves had been born in Australia and had shipped half around the world in boats captained by smugglers and drug dealers. One night he had disembarked in San Francisco. This is as far as I go, he had decided, but his wanderlust would not allow him to stay long in one spot, and as soon as he had exhausted the city’s surprises he began his peregrinations through the rest of the country. His own father, a horse thief who had been shipped to a penal colony in Sydney, had passed on to his son his passion for that animal and for open spaces: the outdoors is in my blood, he had always said. Enamored of the wide-open country and of the heroic legend of the winning of the West, Reeves painted its vast panoramas, its Indians and cowboys. With his small trade in paintings and Olga’s fortune-telling, the family scratched out a living.
Charles Reeves, Doctor in Divine Sciences, as he always introduced himself, had discovered the meaning of life during a mystic revelation. He would tell how he had found himself alone in the desert, like Jesus of Nazareth, when a Master materialized in the form of a snake and bit him on the ankle—look, here’s the scar. For two days he lay in agony, and just when he felt the icy clutch of death rising from his belly toward his heart, his intellect had abruptly expanded: before his feverish eyes appeared the perfect map of the universe, with all its laws and secrets. When he awakened, there was no trace of the venom, and his mind had entered a superior plane from which he never intended to descend. During that radiant delirium, the Master had commanded him to divulge the Unique Truth of The Infinite Plan, and he had done so with discipline and dedication, despite, as he never failed to inform his listeners, the grave impediments that mission entailed. Reeves had repeated the story so many times that in the end he believed it and had completely forgotten that the scar had been acquired in a bicycle accident. His sermons and books brought in very little money, barely enough to pay for renting the meeting sites and for publishing his works in inexpensive pocket-size editions. He did not taint his spiritual labors with gross schemes for financial gain, as was the case with many of the charlatans traveling around the nation in those days, terrorizing people with the threat of God’s wrath in order to swindle them out of their pitiful savings. Nor did he resort to the offensive practice of whipping his audience into a frenzy of hysteria and then exhorting the foaming-mouthed participants rolling on the ground to cast out the Evil One—primarily because he denied the existence of Satan and was repelled by such performances. He charged a dollar to come in to hear his sermons and another two to leave: Nora and Olga stood guard at the door with a pile of his books, and no one dared pass by without purchasing a copy. Three dollars was not an outrageous sum, considering the benefits his listeners received; they went home comforted by the certainty that their misfortunes were part of a divine plan, just as their souls were particles of universal energy; they were not abandoned, nor was the cosmos a black space in which chaos prevailed: there was a Great Unifying Spirit that gave meaning to life. To prepare his sermons, Reeves used any source of information at hand: his experience and his unfailing intuition, things his wife had read, and gems from his own perusal of the Bible and the Reader’s Digest.
During the Great Depression, Reeves earned a living by painting murals in post offices; in that way he had come to know almost the entire country, from the humid, sweltering lands where echoes of weeping slaves still reverberated to icy mountains and tall forests. But he always returned to the West. He had promised his wife that their pilgrimage would end in San Francisco, where one luminous summer day in a hypothetical future they would unload the truck for the last time and settle down forever. Even after the jobs painting post office murals had dried up, he still occasionally painted a commercial sign for a store or an allegorical canvas for a parish church. At those times the travelers would stay in one place for a while and the children would have the opportunity to make friends. They would brag and boast to their playmates, spinning a web of such yarns and fibs that they themselves would tremble at the terrifying visions: bears and coyotes that attacked by night, Indians that chased them to rip off their scalps, and outlaws their father fought off with his shotgun. Scenes flowed from Charles Reeves’s brushes with astounding facility, from curvaceous blondes holding a bottle of beer to an awesome Moses clutching the Tablets of the Law. Such major commissions, however, came infrequently; it was more usual to sell only the smaller canvases Olga helped him paint. Reeves’s own choice was to reproduce the nature he found so enthralling: red cathedrals of living stone, sere desert flats, and abrupt shorelines, but no one bought what they could see with their own eyes, things that reminded them of the harshness of their fate; why hang on the wall the very thing they could see out their window? So from a National Geographic clients would select the landscape closest to their fantasies, or the picture whose colors went with the worn furniture in their living room. Another four dollars bought them an Indian or a cowboy, and the result might be a war-bonneted redskin on the icy peaks of Tibet or a pair of cowboys in ten-gallon hats and cowboy boots shooting it out on the pearly sands of a Polynesian beach. Olga could quickly copy the landscape from the magazine, then, in only a few minutes, Reeves would draw the human figures from memory and the clients would pay their bill and leave, carrying a canvas whose paint was still wet.
Gregory Reeves would have sworn that Olga had been with them always. Much later he would ask what her role in the family had been, but no one could answer, because by that time his father was dead and she was a forbidden subject. Nora and Olga had met on a boatload of refugees from Odessa crossing the Atlantic to North America. They had lost touch with each other for many years but were reunited by chance after Nora was married and Olga’s career as a midwife, healer, and fortune-teller was well established. When the two of them were together they always spoke in Russian. They were totally different, one as introverted and shy as the other was exuberant. Nora, long-boned and deliberate of gesture, had a face like a cat and combed her long, colorless hair back in a bun; she never used makeup or wore jewelry, but always looked freshly groomed. On dusty travels where water for bathing was scarce and it was impossible to iron a dress, she was somehow able to keep herself as neat and tidy as the starched white cloth on her table. Her natural reserve increased with the years; little by little she became detached from the earth and ascended to a dimension no one could reach. Olga, several years younger, was a short, sturdy brunette with full bust and hips, a narrow waist, and short but shapely legs. A wild head of henna-dyed hair, in shades of vermilion, fell over her shoulders like an outlandish wig. She was draped in so many strands of beads that she might have been an idol loaded down with baubles, a look that lent authority when it came time to tell fortunes; the crystal ball and the tarot cards budded like natural extensions of her beringed fingers. She hadn’t a trace of intellectual curiosity; she read nothing but the crime reports in the sensationalist press and an occasional romantic novel. She had never cultivated her gift of clairvoyance through any systemized course of study, because she believed it was a visceral talent. You either have it or you don’t, she always said, it’s no use to try to acquire it from books. She knew nothing about magic, astrology, cabala, or other facets of her calling. She barely knew the names of the signs of the zodiac, but when the moment came to peer into her crystal-gazer’s ball or lay out her marked cards, a prediction was always forthcoming. Hers was not an occult science but an art of fantasy composed principally of intuition and shrewdness. She was genuinely convinced of her supernatural powers; she would have bet her life in defense of one of her predictions, and if they sometimes failed she always had a reasonable explanation on the tip of her tongue—usually that what she had said had been misinterpreted. She charged a dollar to divine the sex of a child in its mother’s womb. She would lay the woman on the floor with her head pointing north, place a coin on her navel, and dangle a lead weight tied to a length of fishing line above her belly. If the improvised pendulum swung clockwise the child would be a boy; if the reverse, it was a girl. The same system could be applied to cows and pregnant mares by swinging the weight above the animal’s hindquarters. She gave her verdict, wrote it on a piece of paper, and kept it as irrefutable proof. Once, they returned to a hamlet they had visited several months before and a woman accompanied by an ill-tempered parade of curious onlookers came out to demand her dollar back.
“You told me I was going to have a boy, and look what I got! Another girl! I have three already!”
“That can’t be. Are you sure I predicted a boy?”
“Of course I’m sure. Don’t you think I know what you told me? That’s what I paid you for.”
“You must have misunderstood me,” Olga replied, unfazed.
She climbed onto the truck, rummaged through her trunk, and produced a slip of paper she showed to everyone present; a single word was written there: girl. An admiring sigh swept through the crowd, including the mother, who scratched her head with perplexity. Olga did not have to return the dollar but in fact reinforced her reputation as a prophetess. There were not enough hours in what was left of the afternoon and part of the night for her to attend to the line of clients waiting to have their fortunes told. Among the amulets and potions she offered, the most requested was her “magnetized water,” a miraculous liquid bottled in crude green-glass vials. She always explained that it was ordinary, everyday water but that it had curative powers because of being infused with psychic fluids. She carried out her bottling operation on nights of the full moon, when, as Judy and Gregory had witnessed, she merely filled the containers, sealed them with a cork, and pasted on labels—but she guaranteed that in the process the water was charged with positive force, and that must have been the case, because her products sold like hotcakes and the users never complained of the results. According to how the water was used, it provided various benefits: drinking it cleansed the kidneys, rubbing it on relieved the pain of arthritis, and massaging it into the scalp improved mental concentration—but it had no effect on affairs of the heart, including jealousy, adultery, and involuntary spinsterhood. On this point the healer was very clear, and she advised every purchaser of that fact. She was as scrupulous about her nostrums as she was in charging for them. She maintained that there is no such thing as a good remedy that is free; she never charged, nonetheless, for assisting at a birth. She enjoyed bringing babies into the world: nothing could compare to the moment when the infant’s head emerged from between its mother’s bloodied legs. She offered her services as midwife on isolated farms and in the poor areas of small towns, especially Negro neighborhoods where the idea of having a baby in a hospital was still a novelty. While she waited beside the mother-to-be, she hemmed diapers and knit booties for the baby; it was only on those infrequent occasions that her boldly painted sorceress’s face grew soft. The tone of her voice changed as she lent support to her patient during the most difficult hours and as she sang the first cradle song heard by the babe she had helped into the world. After a few days, when mother and child were well acquainted, she would rejoin the Reeveses, who were camped nearby. As she said goodbye, she wrote the child’s name in a notebook; it was a long list, but she called them all her godchildren. Births bring good luck, was her brusque explanation for not charging for her services. She was like a sister to Nora and like a grumbling aunt to Judy and Gregory, whom she thought of as her niece and nephew. Charles Reeves she treated like a colleague, with a mixture of petulance and good humor; they never touched, they seemed scarcely to exchange glances, but they acted in tandem not only in the work of the paintings but in everything they did together. It was they who handled the family’s money and resources, they who consulted maps and decided which roads to take; together they went out hunting, disappearing for hours in the deep woods. They respected each other and laughed at the same things. Olga was independent, adventurous, and as resolute as the preacher; she was forged from the same steel. For that very reason she was not impressed by either the man’s charisma or his artistic talent. It was only Charles Reeves’s masculine vigor—which later would also characterize his son, Gregory—that on occasion could subdue her.
Nora, Charles Reeves’s wife, was a being destined to silence. Her parents, Russian Jews, gave her the best education they could afford. She graduated with a teaching certificate, and although she left the profession when she married, she kept up-to-date by studying history, geography, and mathematics in order to teach her children, because the bohemian life they led made it impossible to send them to school. During their travels she read magazines and esoteric books, with no presumption of analyzing what she had read, content to pass on the information to the Doctor in Divine Sciences for his use. She hadn’t the least doubt that her husband was gifted with psychic powers that enabled him to see beyond the veil and discover truth where others saw only shadows. They had met when they were no longer young, and their relationship had always been characterized by a certain decorum and maturity. Nora was not suited for the practicalities of life; her mind floated in otherworldly dreams, more preoccupied with the potential of the spirit than with everyday vicissitudes. She loved music, and the most splendid moments of her uneventful existence had been the few operas she had attended as a girl. She treasured every detail of those spectacles; she could close her eyes and hear the brilliant voices, suffer the tragic passions of the performers, and luxuriate in the color and richness of the sets and costumes. She read the librettos, imagining every scene as part of her own life; the first stories her children heard were of the star-crossed loves and inevitable deaths of the world of opera. She took refuge in this extravagant, romantic atmosphere when she felt weighed down by the vulgarity of real life. For his part, Charles Reeves was a man who had sailed the seven seas, earning a livelihood as a jack-of-all-trades. He had in his seabag more adventures than he could ever tell; he had left behind him a trail of broken love affairs and a few offspring he never heard of again. When Nora had first seen him haranguing a crowd of amazed churchgoers, she was immediately infatuated. She had become resigned to her spinster’s fate, like many women of her generation whom chance had not gifted with a sweetheart and who lacked the courage to go out and look for one. Having been suddenly, and tardily, smitten, however, gave her the courage to overcome her natural shyness. The preacher had rented a hall near the school where Nora taught and was distributing handbills announcing his lecture when Nora caught her first glimpse of him. She was impressed by his noble face and determined air and out of curiosity went to hear him, expecting to find a charlatan like so many that passed through, leaving no trace of their passing but a few faded posters peeling from the walls; she was, however, in for a surprise. Standing before his audience, aided by an orange suspended from the ceiling, Reeves explained man’s place in the universe according to The Infinite Plan. He did not threaten punishment or promise eternal salvation; he limited himself to practical solutions for bettering one’s life, for soothing anguish, and for saving the resources of the planet. All creatures can and must live in harmony, he argued, and to prove it he opened the lid of the boa’s box and let it coil around his body like a fireman’s hose, to the amazement of his listeners, who had never seen a snake so long or so fat. That night Charles Reeves put into words the confused feelings Nora had not known how to express. She had discovered the teachings of Baha Ullah and had adopted the Bahai religion. Those Eastern concepts of loving tolerance, of the unity of mankind, of the search for truth and the rejection of prejudice, had clashed with her rigid Jewish background and the provincialism of her milieu, but listening to Reeves made everything seem simple; now, knowing that this man had the answers and could serve as her guide, she had no need to worry about such fundamental contradictions. Dazzled by the eloquence of the delivery, she overlooked the vagueness of the content. She was so moved that she found the courage to go up to him at a moment when he was alone, with the intention of asking whether he was familiar with the Bahai faith and, in the case that he was not, meaning to offer him the works of Shogi Effendi. The Doctor in Divine Sciences was aware that some of his sermons excited certain women, and never hesitated to seize the advantage of such bonanzas; the schoolteacher, however, attracted him in a different way. There was something pure about her, a transparent quality—true rectitude, not just innocence, a luminosity as cold and uncontaminated as ice. He not only wished to take her in his arms—his first impulse on seeing her strange triangular face and freckled skin—he also longed to penetrate the crystalline surface of this stranger and light the banked fires of her spirit. He proposed that she join him in his travels, and she immediately accepted, with the sensation of having been taken by the hand once and for all time. At that moment, as she envisioned the possibility of surrendering her soul to him, the process of disengagement that would mark her destiny was begun. She left without a single goodbye, with a pouch of books as her only baggage. Months later, when she discovered she was pregnant, they were married. If it was true that a raging fire burned beneath her phlegmatic appearance, only her husband knew. Gregory himself spent his life captivated by the same curiosity that had attracted Charles Reeves in that rented hall in a godforsaken town in the Midwest; a thousand times he attempted to breach the walls that isolated his mother and reach her inner feelings, but as he had never succeeded, he decided that she had none, that she was hollow and incapable of truly loving anyone; at most, she manifested an undefined sympathy toward humanity in general.
Nora grew accustomed to depending on her husband, more and more becoming a passive creature who fulfilled her duties by reflex as her soul escaped worldly concerns. So strong was Reeves’s personality that to make space for him, she herself gradually faded from the world, turning into a shadow. She participated in the routines of their communal life, but she brought little to the energy of the small group; her only contributions were the children’s studies and matters of hygiene and good health. She had come to the United States with a boatload of immigrants, and during her first years in the country—until her family had worked their way out of adversity—she was minimally and poorly nourished. That period of poverty had burned the pangs of hunger into her memory for all time; she had a mania for nutritious food and vitamin pills. She communicated some aspects of Bahaism to her children in the same tone she used for teaching them to read or to name the stars, without the least spirit of conviction. Only when she spoke of music did she grow passionate; those were the only times her voice was vibrant and color lighted her cheeks. Later she would agree to raise her children in the Catholic Church, which was the standard in the Hispanic barrio where they were to live. She understood the need for Judy and Gregory to blend into their surroundings; they had enough to bear with differences of race and custom without being further mortified by unknown beliefs like her Bahai faith. Besides, to Nora all religions were basically the same. She was concerned only with morality, and anyway, God was beyond human comprehension. It was enough to know that heaven and hell are symbols of the soul’s relation to God: proximity to the Creator leads to good and to gentle pleasures, while distance produces evil and suffering. In contrast to her religious tolerance, she would yield not an inch in principles of decency and courtesy; she washed out her children’s mouths with soap if they used profanity, and she curtailed their food if they did not hold their fork properly. All other punishments were the father’s responsibility; she merely identified the offense. One day she caught Gregory stealing a pencil from a store and informed her husband, who made the boy return it with apologies and then, before Nora’s impassive gaze, burned the palm of his hand over a blazing match. For a week Gregory had an open sore. He soon forgot the reason for the lesson and the person who had inflicted it; all that stayed in his mind was his rage against his mother. Many decades later, when he was at peace with his memory of her, he could be quietly grateful to her for the three major gifts she had given him: love for music, tolerance, and a sense of honor.
The heat is unrelenting, the ground is parched; it has not rained since the beginning of time, and the world seems to be covered with a fine reddish powder. A harsh light distorts the outlines of things; the horizon is lost in a haze of dust. It is one of those nameless towns like so many others: one long street, a café, a solitary filling station, a jail, the same wretched shops and wood houses, and a schoolhouse with a sun-faded flag drooping overhead. Dust and more dust. My parents have gone to the general store to buy the week’s supplies; Olga has been left to look after Judy and me. No one is in the street; the shutters are closed: people are waiting for it to cool down before they return to life. My sister and Olga are drowsing on a bench on the porch of the store, dazed by the heat; they have given up brushing away the annoying flies and are letting them crawl over their faces. The unexpected smell of burnt sugar floats on the air. Large blue-and-green lizards lie motionless in the sun, but when I try to catch them they dart away and hide beneath the houses. I am barefoot, and the earth is hot on the soles of my feet. I am playing with Oliver; I throw him a worn rag ball, he fetches it, I throw it again, and in this game I wander away from the store. I turn a corner and find myself in a narrow alley, partly shaded by the unpainted eaves of the houses. I see two men. One is heavyset, with bright pink skin; the other has yellow hair. They are wearing work overalls; they are sweating, their shirts and hair are soaking wet. The fat one has cornered a young black girl; she must be no more than ten or twelve. He is holding her off the ground in the crook of one arm, and he has clamped his free hand over her mouth. She kicks once or twice and then falls limp; her eyes are red from her effort to breathe through the hand that is suffocating her. The second man has his back to me and is struggling with his overalls. Both are very serious, focused, tense, panting. Silence. I hear the men’s puffing and the beating of my own heart. Oliver has disappeared, along with the houses; there is nothing but the threesome suspended in the dust, moving in slow motion, and me, paralyzed in my tracks. The man with the yellow hair spits twice in his hand, moves closer to the girl, and parts her legs, two dark toothpicks, dangling limply. Now I can’t see the girl; she is crushed between the heavy bodies of the rapists. I want to run; I am terrified, but I also want to watch. I know that something fundamental and forbidden is happening, I am a participant in a violent secret. I can’t breathe, I try to call my father, I open my mouth but nothing comes out; I swallow fire, a scream fills me inside, I am choking. I must do something, it is in my hands, the right action will save us both, the black girl and me; I am dying but I can’t think of anything to do, I can’t move a muscle, I have turned to stone. At that instant I hear my name in the distance—Greg, Greg!—and Olga appears at the mouth of the alley. There is a long pause, an eternal minute in which nothing at all happens; all is still. Then the air is vibrating with a long scream, Olga’s hoarse and terrible cry, followed by Oliver’s barking and the voice of my sister, like the shrill of a rat, and finally I am able to draw a breath and I begin to scream too, desperately. Surprised, the men drop the girl, who as her feet touch the ground darts away like a frightened rabbit. We stare at one another; the man with the yellow hair is holding something purple in his hand, something that seems detached from his body, something he is trying to force inside his overalls. Finally they turn and walk away. They are not perturbed; they laugh and make obscene gestures. How would you like a little yourself, you dumb bitch? they yell to Olga. Come here and we’ll give you a sample. The girl’s underpants are lying in the street. Olga grabs Judy and me by the hand, calls the dog, and we hurry, no, we run, toward the truck. The town is waking up, and people are looking at us.
The Doctor in Divine Sciences was resigned to disclosing his ideas to uncouth farmers and poor laborers, who were not always capable of following the thread of his complicated lecture; he did not, nonetheless, lack for followers. Very few attended his sermons for reasons of faith. Most came out of simple curiosity; there were few diversions in those parts, and the arrival of The Infinite Plan did not pass unnoticed. After setting up camp, Reeves would go out to look for a place to speak. It was free only if he knew someone; if not, he had to rent a hall or clean out a place in a tavern or barn. As he had no money, he used Nora’s pearl necklace with the diamond clasp, her only legacy from her mother, as security, with a promise to pay at the end of each meeting. In the meanwhile, his wife would starch her husband’s shirtfront and collar, press out his black suit—shiny from wear—polish his shoes, brush his top hat, and set out the books, while Olga and the children went from house to house distributing handbills inviting everyone to “The Course That Will Change Your Life: Charles Reeves, Doctor in Divine Sciences, Will Help You Find Happiness and Win Prosperity.”
Olga would bathe the children and dress them in their Sunday best, while Nora dressed in her blue dress with the lace collar, severe and out of style, but still decent. War had changed how women dressed; now they wore tight knee-length skirts, jackets with shoulder pads, platform shoes, elaborate pompadours, and hats trimmed with feathers and veils. In her nunnish dress, Nora looked as prim as someone’s grandmother from the first years of the century. Olga, for her part, was not one to follow fashion, but prim is not a word anyone would ever use in regard to her clothes: she was flamboyant as a parrot. In any case, people in those small towns knew nothing about the niceties of fashion; they worked from sunup to sunset, drew pleasure from a drink or two of whiskey—still prohibited in some states—a rodeo, the movies, a dance from time to time, and listening to war reports and baseball games over the radio; it was easy to see why they were attracted by a novelty. Charles Reeves had to compete with revivalists preaching the new awakening of Christianity, a return to the fundamental principles of the twelve apostles and a literal reading of the Bible, evangelists who crisscrossed the country with their tents, bands, fireworks, gigantic illuminated crosses, choirs of brothers and sisters decked out like angels, and loudspeakers that bruited to the four winds the name of the Nazarene, exhorting sinners to repent because Jesus was coming whip in hand to drive the Pharisees from the temple, and calling upon them to combat satanic doctrines such as the theory of evolution, the evil invention of a heretic named Darwin. Sacrilege! Man is made in the image and likeness of God, not monkeys! Buy a bond for Jesus! Hallelujah! Hallelujah! blared the loudspeakers. Churchgoers flocked to the tents, looking for redemption and entertainment, all of them singing, many dancing, and from time to time someone writhing and gasping in ecstasy, while the collection trays filled to overflowing with the gifts of those hoping to buy a ticket to heaven. Charles Reeves offered nothing so grand, but his charisma, the strength of his conviction, and the fire of his discourse were persuasive. It was impossible to ignore him. Occasionally someone would walk forward to the platform, begging to be freed from pain or unbearable remorse; then Reeves, without the least trace of hypocrisy, simply, but with great authority, would lay his hands on the head of the penitent and concentrate on easing his suffering. Many thought they saw sparks shooting from his palms, and those who had benefited from his treatment swore they had been shaken by an electric shock to the brain. For most in the audience, it was enough to hear him once to want to sign up for his classes, to buy his books, and become a follower.
“Creation is governed according to the rules of The Infinite Plan. Nothing happens by chance. We human beings are a fundamental part of that plan because we are located on the scale of evolution between the Masters and the rest of the creatures; we are intermediaries. We must know our place in the cosmos.” So Charles Reeves would begin, galvanizing his audience with his deep voice, standing solemnly beneath the orange strung from the ceiling, garbed from head to toe in black and with the boa curled around his feet like a thick coil of ship’s rope. The creature was totally apathetic and unless directly provoked never moved. “Listen closely, so you can understand the principles of the The Infinite Plan. Even if you don’t understand, it won’t matter; all you have to do is follow my commandments. The entire universe belongs to a Supreme Intelligence; that Intelligence created it and is so immense and perfect that no human being can ever comprehend it. Beneath the Supreme Intelligence are the Logi, representatives of the light who are charged with carrying particles of the Supreme Intelligence to all the galaxies. The Logi communicate with the Master Functionaries, through whom they send the messages and rules of The Infinite Plan to man. The human being is composed of the Physical Body, the Mental Body, and the Soul. Most important is the Soul, which is not present in the earthly atmosphere but operates at some distance from it; it is not within us, but it dominates our lives.”
At this point, when his listeners, somewhat bewildered by his rhetoric, began to exchange glances of fear or mockery, Reeves would electrify his audience anew by pointing to the orange to explain the nature of the Soul floating in the ether like a cloudy ectoplasm that could be seen only by those expert in the occult. To prove it, he would invite several persons from the crowd to study the orange and describe its appearance. Invariably, they would describe a yellow sphere, that is, a common orange, whereas Reeves saw the Soul. Then he would introduce the Logi, which were in the hall in a gaseous state and therefore invisible, and explain that it was they who kept the precise machinery of the universe in working order. In every age and every region the Logi elected Master Functionaries to communicate with man and divulge the plans of the Supreme Intelligence. He, Charles Reeves, Doctor in Divine Sciences, was one of those men. His mission consisted of teaching the guidelines to mere mortals; once he had completed that stage, he would pass on to become part of the privileged contingent of the Logi. He stated that every human act and thought is important because it has weight in the perfect balance of the universe and that therefore each person is responsible for fulfilling the commandments of The Infinite Plan to the letter. He then enumerated the rules of minimal wisdom, through which the monstrous errors capable of derailing the project of the Supreme Intelligence could be avoided. Those who did not capture all this in a single conference could take the course of six sessions, in which they would learn the rules of a good life, including diet, physical and mental exercises, controlled dreams, and several systems for charging the batteries of the Physical Body and the Mental Body, thus assuring themselves of a dignified life and peace of Soul after death.
Charles Reeves was a man ahead of his time. Twenty years later several of his ideas would be predicated by various spiritualists up and down California, the last frontier, the goal of adventurers, desperadoes, nonconformists, fugitives from justice, undiscovered geniuses, impenitent sinners, and hopeless lunatics, a place where even today every possible formula for avoiding the anguish of living proliferates. It is not Charles Reeves, however, who must bear the blame for having initiated bizarre movements. There is something in the air of the place that agitates the spirit. Or maybe those who came to populate the region were in such a hurry to find their fortune—or easy oblivion—that their soul lagged behind, and they are still looking for it. Uncounted charlatans have profited from this phenomenon, offering magic formulas to fill the painful void left by the absent spirit. At the time Reeves was preaching, many in that land had already found a way to get rich by selling intangible benefits for the health of the body and solace of the soul, but he was not among them; he honored austerity and decorum, and thereby earned the respect of his followers. It was Olga who had glimpsed the possibilities for turning the Logi and the Master Functionaries to more commercial ends, perhaps by acquiring a site and starting their own church, but neither Charles nor Nora ever evinced any enthusiasm for that covetous idea; for them, divulging their truth was quite simply a heavy and inescapable moral burden, and never an excuse to peddle cheap merchandise.
Nora Reeves could point to the exact day she lost faith in human goodness, the day her unspoken doubts about the meaning of life had begun. She was one of those people who are able to remember meaningless dates, so with even more reason the event of dropping two cataclysmic bombs, signaling an end to the war with Japan, was burned into her brain. In years to come she dressed in mourning for that anniversary, just when the rest of the country was throwing itself into celebrations. She lost interest even in those closest to her; it is true that maternal affection had never been one of her principal characteristics, but from that moment on she seemed to divorce herself entirely from her two children. She also withdrew from her husband, but so discreetly that he found nothing to reproach her for. She isolated herself in a secret cloister, where she remained untouched by reality until the end of her days; forty-some years later, without ever having participated in life, she died convinced that she was a princess of the Urals. On that fateful day, people celebrated the final defeat of the enemy with slant eyes and yellow skin, as months earlier they had rejoiced at the defeat of the Germans. It was the end of a long combat; the Japanese had been vanquished by the most powerful weapon in history, one that in only a few minutes killed one hundred thirty thousand human beings and condemned that many more to a drawn-out agony. The news of what had happened produced a horrified silence through the world, but the victors blocked out visions of charred bodies and pulverized cities in a tumult of flags, parades, and marching bands, anticipating the return of their fighting men.
“Do you remember that black soldier we picked up on the road? Do you suppose he’s still alive? Will he be coming home too?” Gregory asked his mother before they left to watch the fireworks display.
Nora did not answer. They were in a city like many other cities, and while her family danced in the crowd, Nora sat alone in the cab of the truck. In recent months the news from Europe had strained her nerves, and the devastation of the atom bomb had been the last straw, plunging her into doubt. There was nothing else on the radio, and the newspapers and movies featured Dantesque images of concentration camps. Step by step, she followed every detail of the atrocities and accumulated suffering, obsessed by trains in Europe that made no stops but carried their cargo straight to the ovens, and by the hundreds of thousands cremated in Japan in the name of a different ideology. I should never have brought children into this world, she murmured in her horror. When a euphoric Charles Reeves brought home the news of the bomb, she had thought it obscene to rejoice over a massacre of such dimensions; her husband seemed to have lost his sanity along with everyone else.
“Nothing will ever be the same again, Charles. Humanity has committed something worse than original sin. This is the end of the world,” she lamented, terribly distraught but maintaining the facade of her customary good manners.
“Don’t be silly. We should applaud the progress of science. It’s a good thing the bomb is in our hands, not the enemy’s. No one can stand up to us now.”
“They will use them again and wipe out life on this earth!”
“The war is over, and we’ve been spared even worse. Many more would have died if we hadn’t dropped the bombs.”
“But, Charles, hundreds of thousands did die.”
“They don’t count; they were all Japs.” He laughed.
For the first time, Nora had doubts about the quality of her husband’s soul and asked herself whether he was a true Master, as he claimed. It was late at night when her family returned. Gregory was asleep in his father’s arms, and Judy held a balloon painted with stars and stripes.
“The war is over at last. Now we’ll have butter and meat and gasoline,” Olga announced, radiant, waving a tattered paper flag.
Although nearly a year passed between the time of his mother’s depression over the inhumanity of war and his father’s death, Gregory remembered the events as one; in his memory, they would forever be related: it was the beginning of the end of the happy days of his childhood. A short time later, when Nora seemed to have recovered and was no longer talking about concentration camps and bombs, Charles Reeves fell ill. From the very first, his symptoms were alarming, but he was proud of his strength and refused to believe that his body could betray him. He felt young; he could still change a truck tire in a couple of minutes or spend hours on a ladder painting a mural without getting a cramp in his shoulder. When his mouth filled with blood he attributed it to a fishbone stuck in his throat; the second time it happened he said nothing to anyone but bought a bottle of Milk of Magnesia and took a spoonful whenever he felt his stomach in flames. Soon he lost his appetite and survived on milk toast, broths, and baby food. He lost weight, and his eyes clouded over; he could not see the road clearly, and Olga had to take over the wheel. She realized when he was too tired to travel any farther, and stopped so they could set up camp. As the hours dragged by, the children entertained themselves running around the campsite, because their mother had packed away their books and was not giving them lessons. Nora had not accepted the fact that Charles Reeves might be mortal; she could not understand why his strength was flagging—his energy was hers as well. For years her husband had controlled every aspect of her life and that of her children; the detailed rules of The Infinite Plan, which he administered as he pleased, left no room for doubts. With him she had no freedom, but neither was she besieged by uneasiness or apprehension. There was no reason to be alarmed, she told herself; after all, Charles has never had much hair, and those deep wrinkles aren’t new, they were carved by the sun long ago; he’s thinner, that’s true, but he’ll snap back in a few days, just as soon as he begins to eat like he used to; this is nothing but indigestion. “Don’t you think he’s much better today?” she would say to no one in particular. Olga watched without comment. She did not attempt to treat Reeves with her potions and poultices but limited her care to holding wet cloths to his forehead to lower the fever. As the invalid declined, fear inexorably infected the rest of the family; for the first time they felt they were drifting and realized the extent of their poverty and vulnerability. Nora retreated like a whipped dog, unable to put her mind to finding solutions; she sought consolation in her Bahai faith and left all problems to Olga—including her husband’s care. She could not bring herself to touch that sick old man; he was a stranger: how could she possibly recognize him as the man who had charmed her with his vitality? Her admiration and reliance, the bases for her love, disintegrated, and as she did not know how to construct new ones, respect turned to repugnance. As soon as she found a good excuse, she moved into the children’s tent, and Olga went to sleep with Charles Reeves—to nurse him through the night, she said. Gregory and Judy became accustomed to seeing her half naked in their father’s bed; Nora ignored the situation, preferring to pretend that nothing had changed.
For a while the unveiling of The Infinite Plan was suspended, because the Doctor in Divine Sciences lacked the fortitude to instill hope in others when he was beginning to lose his own and secretly wonder whether the spirit truly transcends or whether it can be dashed to smithereens by a bellyache. He did not even feel like painting. Their travels continued, with tightened purse strings and with no perceptible purpose, as if they were looking for something that was always a little farther down the road. It seemed quite natural for Olga to assume the place of the father, and the others never questioned whether that was the best solution; she set the itinerary, drove the truck, hoisted the heaviest bundles, repaired the engine when it wouldn’t start, hunted rabbits and birds, and with the same note of authority issued orders to Nora and paddled the children when they got out of hand. She avoided large cities because of the merciless competition and the eagle eye of the police, except when they could camp in industrial zones or near the docks, where she could always find a client. She would leave the Reeveses installed in the tents, gather up her necromancer’s trappings, and go out to sell her arts. For traveling she wore rough workman’s pants, an undershirt, and a cap, but to ply her trade as fortune-teller she pulled a gaudy flower-printed skirt from her trunk, a low-cut blouse, jangling necklaces, and yellow boots. She brushed on makeup with a free hand—cheeks like a clown, red mouth, blue eyelids—and the effect of that mask, her clothes, and the fiery hair was so intimidating that few dared turn her away for fear that with a flourish she would turn them into a pillar of salt. When they opened the door and found a grotesque apparition standing before them with a crystal ball in one hand, their jaws dropped, a moment of hesitation that Olga seized upon to get into the house. She could be very charming when the occasion demanded, and often returned to the camp with a piece of pie or some meat, gifts from clients satisfied not only with the future promised in the magical cards but even more with the spark of good humor she had injected into the uninterrupted boredom of their lives. During that period of great uncertainty, the sibyl fine-tuned her talents and, spurred on by circumstances, developed unknown strengths, ripening into the larger-than-life woman who was such an influence in Gregory’s childhood. When she walked into a house she had only to sniff the air for a few seconds to absorb the climate, feel the invisible presences, capture the signs of misfortune, divine the dreams, hear the whispers of the dead, and comprehend the needs of the living. She soon learned that life stories repeat themselves over and over, with very few variations; people are all very much alike, they experience love, hatred, greed, suffering, happiness, and fear in the same ways. Black, white, yellow, as Nora Reeves used to say, we are all the same under the skin; the crystal ball is blind to color, but not to pain. Everyone wanted to hear the same good fortune, not because they thought it was possible but because by merely imagining it they felt better. Olga also discovered that there are only two kinds of illness: those that are fatal and those that heal themselves in their proper time. She would pull out her vials of many-colored sugar pills, her bag of herbs, and her box of amulets to sell health to those who could be cured, convinced that if the patient set his mind to getting well, most likely that was what would happen. People had more confidence in her than in the impersonal surgeons in the hospitals. She was not legally qualified for most of the operations she performed—abortions, tooth extractions, stitching up wounds—but she had a good eye and good hand, so that she never got in serious trouble. One glance was all she needed to see the signs of death, and in that case she never prescribed a treatment, partly because of scruples and partly not to damage her reputation as a healer. Her experience in treating the infirm did not help in the case of Charles Reeves; she was too close to him, and if she saw fatal symptoms, she did not want to admit it.
Whether out of pride or fear, the preacher refused to see a doctor, prepared to overcome his suffering by pure obstinacy; after the day he fainted, however, what little authority he could claim passed into Olga’s hands. They were on the eastern edge of Los Angeles, where there was a large Latin population, and Olga made the decision to drive Reeves to the hospital. In those days the atmosphere of the city already radiated a certain Mexican flavor despite its uniquely American obsession with living in perfect health, beauty, and happiness. Hundreds of thousands of immigrants were putting their stamp on the place: their scorn for pain and death, their poverty, fatalism, and distrust, their violent passions, but also their music, highly spiced food, and exuberant sense of color. Hispanics were banished to a ghetto, but their influence was borne on the air; they did not belong to the country and, superficially at least, seemed not to want to belong, but secretly they hoped their sons and daughters would be integrated. They half-learned English and transformed it into a Spanglish so deeply rooted that with time it became accepted as the Chicano tongue. Bound to their Catholic tradition and cult of the soul, to a musty patriotism and machismo, they did not assimilate; they were doomed for two or three generations to the most humble service jobs. North Americans thought of them as undesirable people, unpredictable and dangerous, and many protested—Why the hell can’t they stop them from crossing the border? What are the damn police for?—but they hired them as cheap labor and kept a sharp eye on them. The immigrants assumed their marginal role in the society with a measure of pride: bowed, yes, but never broken, hermano. Olga had visited the barrio more than once and felt at home there. Brazenly she rattled off Spanish, scarcely aware that half her vocabulary was formed of invented words. She felt the barrio was a place where she could earn a living from her art.
They drove the truck to the door of the hospital, and while Nora and Olga helped the sick man from the cab, the terrified children met the curious gaze of people peering out to observe the bizarre conveyance with all its brightly painted esoteric symbols.
“What in the world is that?” one inquired.
“The Infinite Plan, can’t you see?” Judy replied, pointing to the letters on the top of the truck. That was the end of the questions.
Charles Reeves was admitted to the hospital, where a few days later they removed half his stomach and sutured the holes in the remaining half. While he was there, Nora and Olga, with children, dog, boa, and bundles, moved into temporary quarters in the patio of Pedro Morales, a generous Mexican who years before had completed the entire course of Charles Reeves’s doctrines and to prove it had on his wall a diploma acknowledging him to be a superior soul. Morales was as solid as a brick wall, with strong mestizo features and a proud mask that melted into geniality when he was in a good humor. Several gold teeth sparked from his smile, set in for elegance after his healthy ones had been pulled. He would not think of allowing the family of his Maestro to wander any farther—women need protection, there are bandits everywhere, he said. There was no room in his house for so many guests, because he already had under his roof six children, a slightly mad mother-in-law, and assorted relatives. He helped the women set up the tents and install their kerosene stove in his patio, and set about coming to their rescue without offending their dignity. He always addressed Nora as doña, with great deference, but Olga, whom he considered much closer to his own level, he called señorita. Inmaculada Morales, his wife, was totally impervious to the ways of foreigners and, unlike many of her compatriots in this alien land, who trotted around balancing on stiletto heels, with their faces painted and their hair frizzled by permanents and hydrogen peroxide, was faithful to her native traditions. She was small, slender, and strong, with a placid, unwrinkled face; she wore her hair in a long braid that hung below her waist and dressed in simple aprons and espadrilles, except on days of religious festivals, when she showed off her black dress and gold earrings. Inmaculada was the pillar of the household and the soul of the Morales family. When her patio filled up with guests, she did not blink an eye; she merely stretched the food with the tricks of any hospitable woman—stirring a little more water in the beans, she called it—and then every evening invited the Reeveses to eat with them. “Here, comadre, come, bring the young ones and try these burritos,” she would offer timidly. “We don’t want the chiles to go to waste; just look how much there is, thanks to God’s grace,” and somewhat embarrassed guests would take their seats at the welcoming Morales table.
It took Judy and Gregory several months to learn the rules of a sedentary life. They found themselves surrounded by a warm tribe of dark-skinned children who spoke rapid-fire English and wasted no time teaching the Reeveses their language, beginning with chingada, the most ringing and useful word in their vocabulary, even if not one to say within earshot of Inmaculada. Led by the Morales children, they learned to find their way through the labyrinth of streets, to bargain, to recognize at a glance enemy gangs to be avoided, and to know where to hide and how to escape. With the Moraleses, too, they went to play in the cemetery and observe the prostitutes from afar and victims of fatal accidents at close hand. Juan José, who was the same age as Gregory, had an unfailing nose for tragedy; he always knew where the automobile accidents occurred, the assaults and knife fights and murders. He made it his business to find within a few minutes the exact place where a husband whose wife had run off with a traveling salesman had committed suicide by standing in front of a train because he could not bear the shame of having the world know he wore the horns. Someone saw him smoking calmly, standing between the rails, and shouted at him to jump off the track because the locomotive was coming, but he stood right where he was. Juan José had heard the gossip before the tragedy occurred. The Morales and Reeves children were the first to show up at the death scene, and once they had overcome their initial fear, they helped pick up the pieces—until the police ran them off. Juan José had kept a finger as a souvenir, but when he began to see the dead man everywhere he realized he had to give up his trophy. It was too late to return it to any of the kin, because all the other bits and pieces of the suicide had been buried some days before. The boy, frightened by the soul in pain, did not know how to dispose of the finger: throwing it on the trash heap or feeding it to the Reeveses’ boa did not seem a very respectful way to atone for his affront. Secretly, Gregory consulted Olga, and she suggested the perfect solution: very quietly to leave it on the church altar, a consecrated place where no soul in its right mind could feel offended. Padre Larraguibel, whom everyone simply called “Padre” because of the difficulty of pronouncing his name, found it there. The priest was a Basque with a tormented soul, but he was a practical man and without a word he threw the finger down the toilet. He had too many problems with his numerous parishioners to waste time digging into the origin of a single finger.
Gregory and Judy Reeves attended school for the first time in their lives. They were the only blue-eyed blonds in a population of Latin immigrants in which the rule of survival was to speak Spanish and to run like a deer. Students were forbidden to speak their native language in school; they were to learn English in order to integrate more quickly. When someone let a Spanish word slip out where the teacher could hear, he rated a couple of whacks to his backside. If English was all Jesus needed to write the Bible, the world had no need of any other languages, was the explanation for such strict measures. Out of defiance, the children spoke Spanish whenever they could, and anyone who did not was regarded as a besa-culo—ass-kisser being the worst epithet in the student repertory. Judy and Gregory had been quick to sense racial antagonism and were afraid that if they made the slightest misstep they would be beaten to a pulp. The first day of classes, Gregory was so frightened he could not get a word out, not even to say his name.
“We have two new students,” said the teacher, smiling, enchanted to have two white children among so many dark skins. “I want you to treat them well and help them study and learn the rules of this institution. What are your names, my dears?”
Gregory was mute, clinging to his sister’s dress. Finally Judy rescued him.
“I am Judy Reeves, and this dunce is my brother,” she announced. All the class, including the teacher, burst out laughing. Gregory felt something warm and sticky in his trousers.
“All right, you may sit down,” she told them.
Two minutes later Judy began to hold her nose and glare at her brother with a fierce expression. Gregory fixed his eyes on the floor and tried to imagine he wasn’t there, that he was riding down the road in the truck in the open air, that his father had never got sick and that the damned school didn’t exist, that it was all only a nightmare. Soon the smell reached the other children, who began stamping and hooting.
“Let’s see now, who was it?” the teacher asked, wearing a false smile that looked as if it were pasted to her teeth. “There is nothing to be ashamed of; it was an accident, it could happen to anyone. . . . Who was it?”
“I did not dirty my pants, and my brother didn’t either, I swear it!” Judy shouted defiantly. A chorus of jeers and snickers met her declaration.
The teacher leaned over and whispered in Gregory’s ear that he should leave the classroom, but he held on to the desk with both hands, with his head buried between his shoulders and his eyelids clamped shut, red with shame. The teacher tried to lead him out by one arm, gently at first and then tugging and pulling, but the boy clung to his seat with the strength of desperation.
“Váyate a la chingada!” Judy howled at the teacher in her newly acquired Spanish. “This school is a shitpile!” she added in English.
The teacher was stunned, and the class fell silent. “Chingada, chingada, chinnnngada! Let’s go, Greg,” and the two Reeveses walked from the classroom hand in hand, she with her head high and he with his glued to his chest.
Judy took Gregory to a gas station, hid him among some oil drums, and managed to hose down his trousers without anyone’s seeing them. They walked home in silence.
“Well, how did it go?” Nora Reeves asked, puzzled to see them back so soon.
“The teacher said we don’t have to come back. We’re much more intelligent than the other students. Those runny-nosed little kids don’t even speak like real people, Mama. They don’t know English!”
“What kind of talk is that?” Olga interrupted. “And why are Gregory’s clothes wet?”
The result was that they returned to school the next day, herded by Olga, who marched them into the classroom and made them apologize to the teacher for the insults; for good measure, Olga warned the other children that they had better think twice before bothering the Reeveses. As she left, she faced the compact mass of brown-skinned students, flashing the curse sign: fist closed, with the index and little fingers pointed like horns. Her bizarre appearance, her Russian accent, and her gesture had the effect of calming the beasts, at least for a while.
A week later, Gregory turned seven. No one celebrated; in fact, no one remembered, because the family’s attention was focused on his father. Olga, the only one who went every day to the hospital, brought the news that Charles Reeves was finally out of danger and had been transferred to a ward where they could visit him. Nora and Inmaculada Morales scrubbed the children till they glowed, dressed them in their best clothes, put ribbons in the girls’ hair and slicked down the boys’ with pomade. They set out for the hospital in a procession, carrying small bunches of daisies from the garden and a platter of Inmaculada’s chicken tacos and refried beans with cheese. The room was as big as a hangar, with identical rows of beds on either side and an endless corridor down the center; they tiptoed along until they reached the patient’s bed. The name Charles Reeves written on a card allowed them to identify him; otherwise they would never have recognized him. He was a stranger to them: he had aged a thousand years, his skin was waxen, his eyes had sunk in their sockets, and he smelled of almonds. The children, crushed together, elbow-to-elbow, stood holding their flowers, not knowing where to put them. Flushing, Inmaculada Morales covered the platter of tacos with her shawl, as Nora Reeves began to tremble. Gregory had a presentiment that something irreparable had happened in his life.
“He’s much better, he’ll be able to eat soon,” Olga said, adjusting the intravenous needle in his arm.
Gregory retreated back down the corridor, raced down the stairs two at a time, and ran toward the street. At the hospital gate, he curled up in a ball, head between his knees, arms around his legs, repeating chingada, chingada, like a litany.
As immigrants from Mexico arrived, they descended on friends or relatives, where often several families were already crowded together. The laws of hospitality were inviolable; no one was denied a roof and food during the first days, but after a while each person was to fend for himself. They streamed in from towns south of the border, looking for work, with nothing to their names but the clothes on their backs, a bundle over their shoulders, and the will to get ahead in that Promised Land where, they had been told, money grew on trees and a clever man could become an impresario with his own Cadillac and a blonde on his arm. What they had not been told, however, was that for each success, fifty were left by the wayside and another fifty went back home defeated, nor did they realize that they themselves would not benefit but were destined to open the way to the children and grandchildren born on that hostile soil. They had no idea of the hardships of exile, how they would be abused by their employers and persecuted by authorities, how much effort it would take to reunite their family, to bring their children and old people, or how great would be the pain of telling their friends goodbye and of leaving their dead behind. Neither were they warned that they would quickly lose their traditions, or that recollections would corrode and leave them without memories. There was no way they could have foreseen that they would be the lowest of the low. But even had they known, they might still have undertaken the voyage north. Inmaculada and Pedro Morales called themselves “wire-cuttin’ wetbacks” and, rocking with laughter, liked to tell how many times they had crossed the border, sometimes swimming the Rio Grande and other times cutting wire fences. They had returned to their native land several times on vacation, entering and leaving with children of all ages and even the grandmother, whom they had brought from her village after she was widowed and her mind had begun to fade. After several years they obtained legal papers, and their children were born as American citizens. There was always room at the Morales table for new arrivals, and the second generation grew up hearing stories of poor devils who crossed the border hidden like contraband in the false bottom of a truck, or who jumped from moving trains or crawled underground through old sewer pipes, always with the terror of being caught by the immigration officers, the feared “Migra,” and sent back to their country in fetters after being booked as criminals. Some were shot by the guards or died from hunger and thirst; others smothered to death in the secret compartments of vans run by the “coyotes,” whose business it was to transport desperate people from Mexico to a town on the other side. At the time Pedro Morales made his first trip, Latinos still had the feeling they were reclaiming territory that had always been theirs. For them, slipping across the border was not a crime but a righteous adventure. Pedro Morales had been twenty then; he had just completed his military service, and as he did not want to retrace the footsteps of his father and grandfather, impoverished campesinos on a hacienda in Zacatecas, he decided to make the trip north. He went as far as Tijuana, where he hoped to get a contract as a bracero and work in the fields, because North American agriculturists needed cheap labor. Since he had no money, however, he could not wait for the formalities or bribe officials and police; neither did he like that town of transients, where, in his view, men lacked honor and women respect. He was tired of beating the bushes for work, and he did not want to ask for help or accept charity. Finally he decided to cross the cattle fence marking the border; he cut the wires with pliers and, following the directions of a friend with more experience, started walking straight toward the sun. That was how he had found himself in southern California. The first months were very difficult; it was not as easy to earn a living as he had been told. He went from farm to farm, picking fruit and beans and cotton, sleeping on the road, in train stations, in car graveyards, living on bread and beer, sharing adversity with thousands of men in the same situation. The bosses paid less than they had promised and at the least complaint went to the police, who were always on the lookout for illegal aliens. It was a long time before Pedro could establish himself in one place; the “Migra” was on his heels, but finally he discarded his sombrero and huaraches, adopted blue jeans and a wool cap, and learned to reel off a few phrases in English. As soon as he was situated in the new land, he went back to his village to get his childhood sweetheart. Inmaculada was waiting for him, with her wedding gown starched and ready.
“The gringos are all crazy: they put peaches on meat and jam on fried eggs; they take their dogs to the beauty parlor and don’t believe in the Virgin Mary; men wash the dishes inside the house and women wash the cars outside on the street, wearing a bra and short shorts that show everything. But if we don’t have anything to do with them, we can live the good life,” Pedro reported to his betrothed.
They were married with the customary ceremonies and fiestas; they slept their first night as man and wife in Inmaculada’s parents’ bed—on loan for the occasion—and the next day caught the bus north. Pedro had a little money in his pocket and was already expert at crossing the border; he was in better shape than he had been the first time but just as scared, because he did not want to expose his wife to any danger. People were telling hair-raising stories of thefts and killings by bandits, of corrupt Mexican police and mistreatment by American police, stories to serve as warning to the most macho of men. Inmaculada, in contrast, walked happily one step behind her husband, protected against bad fortune by the scapulary of the Virgin of Guadalupe, with the bundle of her belongings balanced on her head, a prayer on her lips, and her eyes wide open to see the world that lay before her like a magnificent coffer overflowing with surprises. She had never been outside her village and did not have any idea that roads could go on forever. Nothing could dampen her spirits, not humiliation, nor fatigue, nor the snares of nostalgia, and when finally she found herself with her husband in a squalid room in a boardinghouse on the other side, she thought she had crossed the threshold of heaven. A year later their first child was born; Pedro obtained a job in a Los Angeles tire factory and took a night course in mechanics. To help her husband, Inmaculada took work in a garment factory and then worked as a domestic servant until the number of pregnancies and babies forced her to stay home. The Moraleses were orderly people, without vices; they saved their money and learned to take advantage of the benefits of the country where they would always be foreigners but where their children would belong. Their door was open at all times to offer shelter; their house became a kind of stepping-stone for new immigrants. Today, you; tomorrow, me, Inmaculada always said. There’s a time to give and a time to receive, that’s the natural law of life. They learned that generosity is returned in many ways, they did not lack for good fortune or work, their children were healthy and their friendship valued, and with time they worked their way out of the poverty of their origins. Five years after arriving in the city, Pedro set up his own automobile repair shop. At the time the Reeveses came to live in their patio, they were the most respected family in the barrio. Inmaculada had become a universal mother figure, and Pedro was consulted as being the most levelheaded member of the community. In surroundings where no one ever dreamed of going to the police or to court to resolve a conflict, Pedro acted as arbiter in misunderstandings and as judge in disputes.
Olga was at least partly right. A month after the operation, Charles Reeves walked out of the hospital on his own two feet, but his hope of hitting the road again was out of the question; it was obvious that he had a long convalescence ahead of him. The doctor had ordered tranquillity, a special diet, and lifelong self-restraint; he was not even to consider a nomadic life for a very long time, perhaps years. Everything the family had saved had been exhausted long ago, and they owed a sizable sum to the Moraleses. Pedro would not listen to a word about money, because he owed his Maestro a spiritual debt impossible to repay. Charles Reeves, however, was not a man to accept charity, not even from a good friend and disciple, nor could they continue to camp in the patio of someone else’s house, so despite the pleas of his children, who could see their hope of escaping the oppression of school rapidly slipping away, the sign and the loudspeaker were removed and the truck was sold. With the money from the sale and a bit more from loans, the Reeveses were able to buy a run-down cottage on the edge of the Mexican barrio.
The Moraleses mobilized their relatives to help rebuild the shack. For Gregory Reeves, that weekend formed an indelible memory: Latin music and food would be forever linked with the concept of friendship. Early Saturday morning there appeared a caravan of assorted vehicles—from a pickup truck driven by Inmaculada’s brother, a hefty man with a contagious smile, to a column of bicycles carrying cousins, nephews, and friends, all loaded down with tools and construction materials. The women set up temporary tables in the yard and rolled up their sleeves to cook for the crowd. Heads of chickens rolled, cuts of pork and beef rose in a pile, corn, beans, and potatoes bubbled in pots, tortillas toasted, knives danced, chopping, slicing, and peeling, trays of fruit glistened in the sunlight, and in the shade sat more trays, holding chopped tomato and onion, hot salsa, and guacamole. Enticing aromas escaped from the kettles, tequila and beer flowed from carafes and bottles, and guitars sang with the rhythms of the generous land on the far side of the border. Little boys and dogs raced among the tables; little girls, very grown-up, helped set the tables; a retarded cousin with a placid Asiatic face washed dishes; the moonstruck grandmother ensconced beneath a tree added to the chorus with a voice like a song finch. Olga served tacos to the men and kept the children in line. Through the entire weekend, far into the night, everyone worked happily under the direction of Charles Reeves and Pedro Morales, sawing, nailing, and welding. It was a binge of sweat and song, and by Monday the house had reinforced walls, windows on proper hinges, sheets of zinc on the roof, and a new plank floor. The Mexicans took down the tables of their feasting, packed up their tools, guitars, and children, climbed back into or onto their vehicles, and slipped away whence they had come, to avoid being thanked.
When the Reeveses walked into their new home, Gregory, astounded by the steadiness of the walls, wondered how the house could be taken apart. To him and his sister, those modest rooms seemed like a palace; they had never had a solid roof over their heads, only the canvas of a tent—or the sky. Nora installed her kerosene stove, set the old typewriter in her room and, in the living room, in the place of honor, her hand-cranked phonograph for listening to opera and classical music; she was immediately ready to begin a new phase of her life.
Olga, with little or no explanation, decided to live on her own. At first she stayed on in the Moraleses’ patio, using the excuse that the Reeves house was too remote and her clients could not come that far; soon after, she rented a room above a garage on the other side of the barrio, where she hung out a sign advertising her services as fortune-teller, midwife, and healer. Word of her talents spread rapidly, and her reputation was assured when she rid the lady who owned the grocery store of her beard and mustache. In that society where not even men had much hair on their faces, the shopkeeper was the butt of savage jokes until Olga intervened, liberating the lady with a poultice of her own invention, the same she used to cure mange. When at last the bearded woman’s cheeks were exposed to the full light of day, sharp tongues said that at least the beard had made her interesting; without it she was just another woman with a face like a pirate. Rumors spread of how, just as Olga could heal with her salves and ointments, she could do harm with her witchcraft, and she was treated with respect. Judy and Gregory often visited her, and from time to time she showed up for Sunday lunch with the Reeveses, but the visits grew further and further apart and finally were completely suspended. Gradually even her name was no longer mentioned, because to do so filled the air with tension. Judy, distracted by her new life, did not miss her, but Gregory never lost touch.
Charles Reeves went back to earning a living by painting. Working from a photograph, he could produce a quite faithful image of a man; when it came to the ladies, the representation was enhanced: he erased signs of age, modulated Indian or African features, lightened skin and hair tones, and gowned his subjects with elegance. As soon as he had the strength, he also returned to his preaching and to writing books, which he himself printed. Despite the financial strain of keeping The Infinite Plan afloat, he staggered on tenaciously. His audiences were composed principally of laborers and their families, many of whom barely understood English, but he learned several key words in Spanish, and when his vocabulary failed he turned to the blackboard and sketched his ideas. At first only friends and relatives of the Moraleses attended, more interested in getting a close look at the boa than they were in the philosophical aspects of the lecture, but soon they learned that the Doctor in Divine Sciences was very eloquent and that fast as lightning he could draw wonderful cartoons—Imagine, you have to come see how he does it, quick as a wink, almost without looking!—and soon Morales did not have to exert pressure on anyone in order to fill the hall. When Reeves learned of the precarious conditions in which his neighbors lived, he spent weeks in the library studying the laws, and thus in addition to spiritual aid could offer his listeners counsel on how to navigate the unknown seas of the system. Through him, immigrants learned that even though they were illegal aliens they had certain civil rights: they could go to the hospital, bury their dead in the county cemetery—although they preferred to take them back to their home village—and claim countless other privileges they had previously been ignorant of. In that barrio, The Infinite Plan had to compete with the pageantry of the Catholic ceremony, the drums and tambourines of the Salvation Army, the novel polygamy of the Mormons, and the rites of seven Protestant churches, including the Baptists, who submersed their fully clothed converts in the river, the Adventists, who served lemon pie on Sundays, and the Pentecostals, who went about with hands uplifted in order to receive the Holy Spirit. Since Charles Reeves’s course accommodated all doctrines and it was not necessary for followers to renounce their own religion, Padre Larraguibel of the Church of Our Lady of Lourdes and the pastors of the other affiliations could not object—although for once they were in accord, and each from his own pulpit accused the preacher of being an unprincipled charlatan.
From their first meeting, when the Reeveses’ truck had disgorged its contents onto the Moraleses’ patio, Gregory and Carmen, the Moraleses’ youngest daughter, had been fast friends. One look was enough to establish the complicity that was to last throughout their lifetimes. The girl was a year younger, but in practical matters she was much better informed; it was she who would reveal to him the tricks to surviving in the barrio. Gregory was tall, thin, and very blond, and she was small, plump, and the color of golden brown sugar. The boy’s knowledge was out of the ordinary: he could recount the plots of operas, describe landscapes from the National Geographic, and recite Byron’s verses; he knew how to bag a duck, gut a fish, and in an instant could calculate how far a truck would travel in forty-five minutes if it was moving at thirty miles per hour—none of which had much application in his new situation. He knew how to get the boa into a sack but could not go to the corner to buy bread; he had never lived among other children or been inside a classroom; he knew nothing of children’s cruelty or of impassable racial barriers, because Nora had drummed into him that people are good—anything else was an abomination of nature—and all people are equal. Until he went to school, Gregory believed her. The color of his skin and his absolute lack of malice irritated the other boys, who jumped him whenever they could, usually in the bathroom, and pummeled him until he was half stupefied. Not always the innocent one, he often provoked confrontations. With Juan José and Carmen Morales, he invented gross practical jokes, such as using a syringe to remove the mint from chocolate bonbons and then to fill them with the hottest salsa from Inmaculada’s kitchen; they then offered these treats to the Martínez gang: Let’s smoke the peace pipe and be friends, OK? After that trick, they had to hide for a week.
Every day, as soon as the last bell rang, Gregory ran home like a streak, chased by a pack of boys ready to slaughter him. He was so fast that he often stopped in midcourse to yell insults at his enemies. As long as his family was camping in the Morales patio, he had no fear, because the house was close to the school; Juan José ran with him, and no one could catch him in such a short distance. When they moved to their new house, however, the distance was ten times greater, and the possibilities of reaching his goal in safety were diminished by alarming proportions. He changed his route, learned different shortcuts, and found hiding places where he could crouch and wait until his pursuers tired of hunting for him. Once, he slipped into the parish church, because in the Padre’s religion class he had been told that since the Middle Ages the church had traditionally served as a place of asylum; the Martínez gang nonetheless followed him inside and after a horrendous chase across the pews caught him before the main altar and kicked and beat him beneath the indifferent gaze of plaster saints wearing gilt brass halos. The energetic priest had come running at Gregory’s cries and lifted his enemies off him by the hair of their heads.
“God didn’t save me!” the boy yelped, more humiliated than hurt, pointing to the bloodied Christ presiding over the altar.
“What do you mean, he didn’t save you?” roared the priest. “Didn’t I come help you, you ingrate?”
“Too late! Look what they did to me,” Gregory howled, displaying his bruises.
“God has no time for such harebrained feuds. Get up and blow your nose,” the Padre commanded.
“You said it was safe here….”
“It is, if the enemy knows it’s a holy place; those blockheads don’t even realize the sacrilege they committed.”
“Your lousy church isn’t worth a damn!”
“You watch what you say, or you’ll be missing your teeth, you young runt!” The Padre’s uplifted hand underlined the threat.
“Sacrilege! Sacrilege!” Gregory remembered just in time, a ploy that had the virtue of cooling the Basque blood of the priest, who took a deep breath to compose himself and attempted to speak in tones more appropriate to his holy vestments.
“Look here, son, you need to learn to defend yourself. God helps those who help themselves, as the old saying goes.”
That very day, the priest, who in his youth had been a belligerent peasant boy, shut himself in the courtyard of the sacristy with Gregory and began teaching him to box—without regard for the Marquis of Queensberry. The first lesson consisted of three inviolable principles: the only thing that matters is to win; the one who strikes first strikes twice; and go straight for the balls, son, and may God forgive us. In any case, Gregory decided that the house of God was less secure than the firm bosom of Inmaculada Morales; his confidence in his fists grew in direct proportion to his flagging faith in divine intervention. From then on, if he was in trouble he ran to his friends’ home, leapt over the patio wall, and ran into the kitchen, where he waited for Judy to come to his rescue. He was safe with his sister because she was the prettiest girl in the school; all the boys were in love with her, and none would have been so stupid as to do anything to Gregory in her presence. Carmen and Juan José Morales tried to serve as liaison between their new friend and the rest of their schoolmates, but they did not always succeed; it was not only Gregory’s coloring that made him stand out: he was also proud, stubborn, and crafty. His head was filled with stories of Indians, wild animals, characters in operas, theories of souls in floating oranges, Logi, and Master Functionaries, none of which either the Padre or his teachers wanted to learn more about. In addition, he lost his head at the least provocation and lashed out with eyes closed and fists flailing; he fought blindly, and he almost always lost: he was the whipping boy for the entire school. Everyone laughed at him and at his dog—a mongrel with short legs and an ugly head—and even at how his mother looked: she wore old-fashioned dresses and was always handing out brochures on the Bahai religion or The Infinite Plan. They saved their greatest scorn for his sentimentality. All the other boys had absorbed the macho teachings of their world: men should be merciless, brave, dominant, loners, fast with a weapon, and superior to women in every sense. The two basic rules, learned by boys in the cradle, were never to trust anyone and never to cry—whatever the reason. Gregory, however, would listen to the teacher telling how seals in Canada were clubbed by fur hunters, or to the Padre recounting the woes of lepers in Calcutta, and with tears in his eyes determine to go north immediately to defend the baby seals or to the Far East to be a missionary. On the other hand, they could beat him silly and he would never shed a tear; his pride was so fierce they could have skinned him alive before he would ask for mercy. That was the only reason the other boys did not consider him a hopeless pansy. Despite everything, he was a happy young boy, with an infallible memory for jokes and the ability to coax music from any instrument—the favorite of the girls at recess time.
In exchange for the boxing lessons, the Padre required Gregory to assist him at Sunday masses. When Gregory told that to the Moraleses, he suffered a barrage of jokes from Juan José and his brothers—until Inmaculada intervened and said that because they were making fun, Juan José must serve as altar boy himself, and be proud of the honor, praise our blessed Lord. The two friends spent grudging hours in the church, swinging incense, tinkling the altar bells, and reciting parts of the Latin mass under the attentive eye of the priest, who even in his most intense moments watched them with his famed third eye—the one people said he had in the back of his head to see his parishioners’ sins. The priest liked it that one of his assistants was dark-haired and the other blond; he thought such racial integration must please the Creator. Before mass the boys prepared the altar and afterward they cleaned the sacristy; when they left they received an anise bun as a reward, but the true prize was a surreptitious swig of ceremonial wine, aged, sweet, and strong as sherry. One morning their enthusiasm got out of hand and they polished off the bottle, leaving them short of wine for the last mass. Gregory, inspired, suggested that they pilfer a few coins from the collection plate and rush out and buy some Coca-Cola. They shook the bottle to kill the fizz and then poured the liquid into the cruet. During the mass they cut up like clowns, and not even murderous looks from the priest could affect the whispering, giggling, stumbling, and bells rung in the wrong sequence. When the Padre raised the goblet to consecrate the Coca-Cola, the boys collapsed on the altar steps, laughing so hard they could not stand up. Minutes later the priest reverently touched the liquid to his lips, absorbed in the words of the liturgy, but with the first sip realized that the devil had had his hand in the chalice—unless consecration had produced a verifiable change in the molecules of the wine, a possibility his practical mind immediately rejected. The Padre had undergone a long training in life’s vicissitudes, and he continued the mass serenely; nothing in his demeanor hinted that anything was amiss. Unhurried, he completed the ritual and left the altar with great dignity, followed by his two staggering altar boys, but once in the sacristy he removed one of his heavy leather sandals and gave them a thrashing they would not soon forget.
That was the first of many difficult years for Gregory Reeves; it was a time of insecurity and fears, during which many things changed, but it was also a time of mischief, friendship, surprises, and discoveries.
As soon as my family settled into the new routine and my father started feeling stronger, we began improving the cottage. Because of the efforts of the Moraleses and their friends, it was no longer falling down, but it still lacked essential comforts. My father installed basic wiring, built a privy, and between us we cleared the yard of stones and weeds so my mother could plant the vegetable and flower gardens she had always wanted. He also constructed a small shed at the very edge of the ravine that bordered our property, to store his tools and gear for traveling: he still hoped someday to get a new truck and go back on the road. Then he told me to dig a hole; he said that he agreed with a Greek philosopher who had said that before he died every man should father a child, write a book, build a house, and plant a tree, and that he had done the first three. I dug where he told me, not very enthusiastically, since I had no wish to contribute to his death, but I would not have dreamed of refusing him or of leaving the job half done. “Once when I was traveling on the astral plane, I was led to a very large room, like a room in a factory,” Charles Reeves would expound to his listeners. “There I saw many interesting machines. Some were unfinished and others absurd; the mechanical principles were incorrect; it was clear they would never work. I asked a Logo whom they belonged to. ‘These are your unfinished works,’ he explained. I remembered that in my youth my ambition had been to be an inventor. Those grotesque machines were products of that stage of my life and ever since had been there waiting for me to dispose of them. Thoughts take form—the more defined the idea, the more concrete the form. You must not leave ideas or projects unfinished; they must be terminated. If not, energy is wasted that could be better employed in other matters. You must think in a constructive way, but be careful of what you think.” I had heard that story many times and was highly irritated by the obsession to complete every act and to give each object and each thought its precise place, because to judge by what I saw around me, the world was pure chaos.
My father left early that morning and with Pedro Morales returned carrying a good-sized willow tree in the pickup truck. It took both of them to drag it out and plant it in the hole. For several days I watched the tree and my father, expecting that at any moment the former would wither and die or the latter would be struck dead, but as neither occurred I decided that the philosophers of old were not worth a nickel. I was haunted by the fear of being orphaned. In my dreams I saw my father as a creaking skeleton in a dark suit, with a huge snake coiled around his ankles, and awake I remembered him shrunken to skin and bones, as I had seen him in the hospital. The idea of death terrified me. Ever since we had come to live in the city, I had felt a presentiment of danger. The standards I had known were out of kilter; even words had lost their accustomed meaning, and I was forced to learn new codes, different behaviors, and a strange language of rolled r’s and rasping h sounds. Endless roads and vast landscapes were replaced by a warren of noisy, filthy, foul-smelling—but fascinating—alleys where a new adventure lay around every corner. It was impossible to resist the lure of the streets; life was lived there: the streets were the setting for fights, love, and commerce. I was entranced by Latin music and storytelling. People talked about their lives in tones of legend. My favorite place was Inmaculada Morales’s kitchen, surrounded by family activity and the smell of cooking. I never tired of the eternal circus of that life, but I also felt a need to recapture the silence of nature I had known as a boy; I searched out trees, I walked hours to climb a small hill where for a few minutes I felt again the pleasure of being inside my own skin. The rest of the time my body was a handicap; I had to protect it constantly against external threats; my light hair, the color of my skin and eyes, my birdlike skeleton, weighed on me like rocks. Inmaculada Morales says that I was a happy child, full of vigor and energy, with a tremendous appetite for life, but I do not remember myself that way. In that Latin ghetto I experienced the unpleasantness of being different, I did not fit in; I wanted to be like everyone else, to blend into the crowd, to be invisible, so I could walk through the streets or play in the schoolyard unharmed by the gangs of dark-skinned boys who vented on me the aggression they themselves received from whites the minute they stepped outside the barrio.
When my father left the hospital, we had resumed the appearance of normality, but the equilibrium of our family life was destroyed. Olga’s absence hung in the air; I missed her trunkload of treasures, her magician’s trappings, her bizarre clothes, her unrestrained laugh, her stories, her indefatigable energy—without her, the house was like a table with a wobbly leg. My parents drew a curtain of silence over her absence, and I did not dare ask what had happened. My mother was becoming more silent and reserved by the day, and my father, who had always been very self-controlled, became irascible, unpredictable, and violent. It’s because of the operation; the chemistry of his Physical Body has been altered, that’s why his aura has grown dark, but he’ll be all right soon. My mother’s justification was couched in the jargon of The Infinite Plan, but her voice lacked conviction. I had never felt comfortable with my mother; that pale, polite woman was very different from other children’s mothers. Decisions, permissions, and punishment always came from my father, consolation and laughter from Olga, and my confidences were with Judy. All that tied me to my mother were literature and school notebooks, music, and love for observing the stars. She never touched me; I had grown accustomed to her physical remoteness and reserved temperament.
The day I lost Judy, I felt a panic of absolute solitude I did not recover from until decades later, when an unexpected love annulled that curse. Judy had been the candid and sympathetic young girl who protected me, ordered me around, and went everywhere with me clinging to her skirts. At night I slipped into her bed and she told me stories or invented dreams, with precise instructions as to how to dream them. The sight of my sleeping sister, her warmth, and the rhythm of her breathing filled the first years of my childhood; nestled close to her, I knew no fear. When I was beside her, nothing could hurt me. One April night, when Judy was nearly nine and I was seven, I waited for everything to grow quiet, then crawled from my sleeping bag to climb into hers as I always did; that night, however, I met fierce resistance. With the covers pulled up to her chin and clawlike hands clutching the bag to her, she raged that she didn’t love me, that I could never sleep with her again, that the stories, the dreams, and all the rest were over, and that I was too big for such nonsense.
“What’s the matter, Judy?” I asked, frightened not so much by her words as by the rancor in her voice.
“You go to hell, and don’t you ever touch me as long as you live!” and she burst out crying and turned her face to the wall.
I sat beside her on the floor, not knowing what to say, saddened more by her weeping than by the rejection. After a while, I tiptoed to the door and let Oliver in, and from that day on I slept with my arms around my dog. In the following months I had the sensation that there was a mystery in my house from which I was excluded, a secret between my father and my sister, or maybe between them and my mother, or between all of them and Olga. I sensed it was better not to know the truth, and I did not attempt to find out. The atmosphere was so charged that I tried to stay away from home as much as possible. I visited Olga or the Moraleses, I took long hikes through the nearby fields, I walked for miles, returning only at nightfall, I hid in the small shed among the tools and bundles and wept for hours without knowing why. No one asked me anything.
The image of my father began to fade and was replaced by that of a stranger, an unfair and irascible man who pampered Judy and beat me at the least pretext and thrust me aside: Go play outside; boys need to toughen up in the street, he would growl. There was no resemblance between the neat and charismatic preacher of earlier days and that revolting old man who spent the day in an armchair listening to the radio, half dressed and unshaven. He had stopped painting and seemed unable to spend any energy in disseminating The Infinite Plan. The situation in the house deteriorated before our eyes, and once again Inmaculada Morales showed up with her assorted spicy dishes, her generous smile, and her sharp eye for perceiving the needs of others. Olga handed me money, with instructions to slip it into my mother’s purse surreptitiously. That uncommon income continued for many years, without my mother’s ever mentioning it, as if she had never noticed the mysterious multiplication of the bank notes.
Olga had a gift for imposing her extravagant stamp on everything around her. She was an adventurous migratory bird, but wherever she came to roost, even for only a few hours, she created the illusion of a permanent nest. She had few belongings, but she knew how to arrange them so that if the space was small she kept them in the trunk and if it was large they expanded to fill it. In a tent at some bend in the road, in a hut, or in jail—where she would later spend some time—she was queen in her palace. When she moved away from the Reeveses, she found a cheap room in a slightly sordid dwelling that had taken on the melancholy patina of the rest of the barrio, but she livened it up with her characteristic colors, and before long the place had become a point of reference when people were looking for an address: three blocks straight ahead, take a right, and where you see a house painted like a rainbow, turn to the left and you’re there. She decorated the outside stairway and two windows in her personal style: clicking curtains of shells and beads beckoned to passersby, strings of colored lights suggested a never-ending Christmas, and her name in cursive letters crowned that strange pagoda. Her landlords tired of requesting her to use a little more restraint and finally resigned themselves to the strange embellishment of their property. Soon everyone for miles around knew where Olga lived. Inside, her quarters were equally bizarre. A curtain divided the room into two sections: in one she attended her clientele; the other contained her bed and her clothes, which she hung from nails in the wall. Calling upon her artistic gifts and her oil paints from the time of her venture with Charles Reeves, she covered the walls with the signs of the zodiac and words in Cyrillic, an effect that deeply impressed her visitors. She bought a set of secondhand furniture and with a flash of imagination turned it into Oriental divans; she filled shelves with statues of saints and magicians, pots with her potions, candles, and amulets; bunches of dried herbs hung from the ceiling, and it was nearly impossible to walk among the midget tables covered with braziers that hoarded dubious incense from shops run by Pakistanis. The sweetish fragrance was at war with the scent of Olga’s medicinal plants and elixirs, essences for love, and wax candles for incantatory healing. She covered lamps with fringed shawls, threw a moth-eaten zebra skin on the floor, and near the window provided an altar for a large potbellied Buddha of gilded plaster. In that cave, calling on all her ingenuity, she cooked, lived, and plied her trade, all in a minimal space fitted to her needs and whims by the twist of fantasy. Once she had decorated, she spread the word that there are women who can deflect the course of misfortune and see into the depths of the soul, and that she was one of those women. Then she sat down to wait—but not for long, because many people already knew of her success with the bearded grocerywoman, and soon clients were standing in line for her services.
Gregory visited Olga almost every day. As soon as classes were out, he escaped from school pursued by the loutish Martínez, a slightly older boy who was in second grade but had not learned to read, who could not master English but already had the physique and mentality of a bully. Oliver would wait, barking, near the newspaper stand in a valiant effort to hold Gregory’s enemies at bay and give his master a head start, then would race after him like an arrow to their final destination. To throw Martínez off the track, Gregory used to stop by Olga’s house. His visits to the crystal gazer were a lark. Once, unbeknownst to her, he scooted under her bed and from his hiding place witnessed one of her extraordinary consultations. The owner of Los Tres Amigos bar, a conceited womanizer with a movie star mustache and an elastic waist-trimmer to hold in his belly, came to Olga, deeply perturbed, to seek a remedy for a secret malady. She received him in her astrologer’s robe in the incense-perfumed room, dimly lit by red light bulbs. He sat down at the round table where she consulted with her clients and with stammering preambles and appeals for absolute secrecy told her he was tormented by constant burning in his genitals.
“Let’s see; show me,” Olga commanded, and with the aid of a flashlight proceeded to examine him inch by inch with a magnifying glass, while beneath the bed Gregory bit his hands to keep from exploding with laughter.
“I’ve used the remedies they prescribed at the hospital, but they didn’t help. It’s four months now, doña, and I’m dying!”
“There’s sickness of the body and sickness of the soul,” the healer intoned, returning to her throne at the head of the table. “This is a sickness of the soul; that is why ordinary medicines won’t cure it. If you’re going to dance, you must pay the piper.”
“Huh?”
“You have mistreated your organ. Sometimes the price is a noxious disease, and sometimes an unbearable moral itch,” explained Olga, who was up on all the latest gossip in the barrio; she was aware of her client’s reputation and just the week before had sold powders to ensure faithfulness to the bar owner’s inconsolable wife. “I can help you, but I warn you that each consultation will cost you five dollars, and I can tell you that the treatment is not going to be very pleasant. Just offhand I calculate you will need at least five sessions.”
“If it will make me better . . .”
“You must pay fifteen dollars in advance. That way we’ll be sure you don’t change your mind in midstream; you see, once you begin the treatment you have to finish it—if you don’t, your member will dry up like a prune. You understand what I’m saying?”
“Oh, yes, doñita, anything you say,” the cocksman agreed, docile with terror.
“Take off everything below the waist; you can leave your shirt on,” she ordered before disappearing behind the screen to prepare the ingredients for the treatment.
She made the man stand in the middle of the room inside a circle of lighted candles; she sprinkled white powders on his head as she recited a litany in an unknown tongue; then she rubbed the affected area with something that Gregory could not see but that was undoubtedly very effective, because in two seconds the feckless fellow was hopping like a monkey and screaming at the top of his lungs.
“Stay inside the circle!” Olga commanded, waiting calmly for the fire to subside.
“Oh, shit, oh, Christ, madrecita! It’s worse than raw chili pepper,” he howled when he had his breath back.
“If it doesn’t hurt, it isn’t doing its work,” she asserted, well aware of the efficaciousness of punishment for removing guilt, cleansing the conscience, and alleviating nervous ailments. “Now I’m going to put on something cooling,” she said, and she painted his penis with tincture of methylene blue, then tied on a pink ribbon and ordered him to return the following week; he was to apply the tincture every morning and not remove the ribbon for any reason.
“But how am I going to . . . well, you know what I mean . . . tied like this?”
“You’ll just have to live like a saint. All this happened because you were flitting around like a hummingbird. Why not be content with your wife? That poor woman has earned her ticket to heaven; you don’t deserve her,” and with that final recommendation for good behavior, she dismissed him.
Gregory bet Juan José and Carmen Morales a dollar that the owner of the bar had a blue dingdong tied up like a birthday present. The three spent the morning on the roof of Los Tres Amigos watching through a peephole into the bathroom until they saw the proof with their own eyes. It was not long until the whole barrio knew the story, and the bar owner was followed to his grave by the nickname Purple Pecker.
As Olga’s door was not open if she was busy with some client, Gregory used to sit on the stairs and examine the newest decorations on the front of the house, amazed at the woman’s talent for revitalizing herself with each new day. From time to time she would peer out, her robe barely covering her nakedness, hair like a tangle of red seaweed, and hand him a cookie or a dime: I can’t see you today, Greg, I have work to do, come back tomorrow, she would say, and give him a quick kiss on the cheek. He would go home, frustrated, but understanding that she had inescapable obligations. Olga had clients of every station: desperate persons hoping to improve their luck, pregnant women ready to resort to any recourse that would thwart nature, patients disillusioned with traditional medicine, spiteful lovers eager for revenge, lonely souls tormented by silence, and ordinary people who wanted nothing more than a massage, a charm, a palm reading, or some jasmine tea for a headache. To each, Olga dispensed a dose of magic and hope, never giving a thought to the legality of her actions because in the barrio no one understood or cared about the law of the gringos.
Olga had no children of her own and in her heart had adopted Charles Reeves’s son and daughter. She was not offended by Judy’s rebuffs, because she knew the girl would come back when she needed her, but she was quietly grateful for Gregory’s loyalty and rewarded him with affection and gifts. Through him, she kept up with the fortunes of the Reeves family. Gregory often asked why she never came to visit, but obtained only vague answers. One of the times the fortune-teller had not invited him in, he thought he heard his father’s voice through the door, and his heart nearly burst from his chest; he felt he was standing at the edge of a bottomless abyss, on the verge of opening a Pandora’s box of horrors. He ran away as fast as he could, not wanting to affirm what he feared, but his curiosity was stronger than his fear, and halfway home he turned back and hid outside to wait for Olga’s client to come out. Night fell, and the door did not open; finally he had to go home. When he got there he found Charles Reeves sitting in his wicker chair, reading the newspaper.
How long was my father really alive? When did he begin to die? In the final months he was not himself; his physical appearance changed so greatly that it was difficult to recognize him, and his mind was similarly altered. A breath of evil animated that old man; he still called himself Charles Reeves, but he was not my father. That is why I have no bad memories of him. Judy, on the other hand, is filled with hatred. We have talked about this and do not agree about either events or people, as if we had been protagonists in different stories. We lived together in the same house at the same time; her memory, nevertheless, did not register what mine did. My sister cannot understand why I cling to the image of a wise father, of happy days of camping in the open air beneath the fathomless dome of a star-filled sky, of hiding in reeds at dawn to shoot ducks. She swears that things were never like that, that the violence in our family was always there, that Charles Reeves was a two-bit charlatan, a merchant of lies, a degenerate who died from pure perversion and left nothing good behind him. She accuses me of having blocked out the past; she says I prefer to ignore our father’s vices, and that must be true, because I did not know him as an alcoholic and an evil man, which she maintains he was. Don’t you remember how he beat you with his leather belt for the least little thing you did? Judy asks me. I do, but I don’t harbor any hard feelings over that; in those days all boys got whippings, it was part of their education. He treated Judy better; I guess it wasn’t the thing to whip girls that much. Besides, I was feisty and stubborn; my mother could never break me, which was why more than once she tried to get rid of me. But before she died, on one of those rare occasions when we were able to talk without hurting each other, she assured me she did not act the way she did out of lack of affection and that she always loved me very much. She could not look after two children, she said, so naturally she had preferred to keep my sister, who was docile, whereas I was beyond her power to control. Sometimes I dream of the courtyard of the orphan asylum. Judy was much nicer than I was, there is no doubt of that, a composed and appealing little girl, always obedient and with the natural flirtatiousness of pretty girls. She was like that until she was thirteen or fourteen, when she changed.
At first it was the smell of almonds. It came back subtly, almost imperceptibly, in the beginning, a breath that left no trace, so faint I could not decide whether I had actually smelled it or whether it was a memory from visiting the hospital when my father had his operation. Later it was the noise. The noise was the most notable change. Before, in the days when we were on the road, silence was a part of that life, each sound had its precise space. The only sounds came from the motor, and sometimes my mother’s voice, reading; when we camped, it was the crackling of wood on the fire, the spoon scraping the pot, the recitation of our school lessons, brief conversations, my sister’s laughter as she played with Olga, Oliver’s barking. At night the silence was so heavy that the hooting of an owl or the howl of a coyote seemed thunderous. As my father said, each thing had its own place, each sound its moment. He was indignant when anyone interrupted a conversation; during his sermons we had to hold our breath, because even an involuntary cough provoked an icy stare. At the end, though, everything became a jumble in Charles Reeves’s mind. In his astral pilgrimages he must have come across more than the hangar filled with unfinished machines and demented inventions: rooms bulging with smells, tastes, gestures, and senseless words; other rooms would have been filled to bursting with good intentions and there would have been one where lunacy rumbled like the bonging of a monstrous iron bell. I don’t mean the noises of the barrio—traffic, loud voices, construction workers building the filling station—but the derangement that marked my father’s last months. The radio, which once he had turned on only to listen to news of the war and classical music, now roared day and night with deafening information, ball games, and country music. In addition to this uproar, my father raved over trifles, shouted contradictory orders, summoned us every minute, read his sermons or passages from the Bible at the top of his lungs, coughed, spit constantly, and blew his nose with unimaginable snortings; he hammered nails in the walls and fiddled with his tools as if repairing major damage, but in fact those frenetic tinkerings served no purpose at all. Even asleep he made noise. This man, once so neat in his ways and his habits, would abruptly fall asleep at the table, his mouth still filled with food, shaken by deep snores, panting and mumbling, lost in the labyrinth of who knows what lecherous delirium. That’s enough, Charles, my bewildered mother would say, and wake my father when he was fondling himself in his dreams. It’s the fever, children, she would add to soothe us. My father was delirious, no doubt of it; fever ambushed him at any moment of the day, but it was particularly at night he found no rest, and dawn would find him soaked with perspiration. My mother changed his sheets every morning, to wash away not only the sweat of agony but bloodstains as well, and pus from his boils. Purulent abscesses opened on his legs, which he treated with arnica and compresses of warm water. From the first day of his final illness, my mother never again slept in his bed; she spent the night in an armchair, covered with a shawl.
Toward the end, when my father could not even get out of bed, Judy refused to enter his room; she did not want to see him, and no threat or reward could get her near the sick man. I was able to approach in stages, first observing him from the doorway and finally sitting on the edge of the bed. He was nothing but skin and bones, his complexion was greenish, his eyes were sunken in their sockets—only the asthmatic wheezing indicated he was still alive. When I touched his hand he would open his eyes, but he did not recognize me. Sometimes his fever receded and he seemed to return from a long death; he would drink a little tea, ask someone to turn on the radio, get out of bed and take a few faltering steps. One morning, half naked, he went out in the yard to look at the willow. He showed me the tender shoots: It’s growing, he said; it will live to weep over me. That day after school, as Judy and I neared the house, we saw an ambulance in the lane. I ran on, but my sister sank to the sidewalk, clutching her book bag. A few people were already standing around in the yard. Inmaculada Morales was on the porch, trying to help two attendants roll a stretcher through the too narrow doorway. I ran into the house and caught hold of my mother’s dress, but she pushed me away impatiently, as if she felt nauseated. At that moment I was struck by a strong blast of the odor of almonds, and a squalid old man appeared in the doorway of the room; he was standing very straight, clad only in an undershirt, and was barefoot; his remaining hair was ruffled, his eyes burning with the madness of fever, and a thread of saliva trickled from the corner of his mouth. With his left hand, he supported himself against the wall; with his right he was masturbating.
“That’s enough, Charles, stop that!” my mother called to him. “That’s enough, please, that’s enough,” she pleaded, hiding her face in her hands.
Inmaculada Morales put her arms around my mother as the attendants seized my father’s arms and led him outside to the porch, where they laid him on the stretcher, covered with a sheet and secured by two straps. My father yelled terrible curses, using words that until that minute I had never heard from his mouth. I walked beside him to the ambulance, but my mother would not allow me to come with them; the ambulance pulled away, siren shrieking, amid billowing dust. Inmaculada Morales locked the door, took my hand, whistled for Oliver, and started off toward her house. Down the street we found Judy, still in the same spot, with a strange smile on her face.
“You come with me, children. I will buy you some cotton candy,” said Inmaculada Morales, struggling to hold back her tears.
That was the last time I saw my father alive; a few hours later he died in the hospital, the victim of uncontainable internal hemorrhages. I spent that night, with Judy, in the home of our Mexican friends. Pedro Morales was absent; he was with my mother, attending to the details of the death. Before we sat down to dinner, Inmaculada took my sister and me aside and explained, as well as she could, that we should not worry now; our father’s Physical Body had ceased to suffer and his Mental Body had flown to the astral plane; there, surely, it was reunited with the Logi and the Master Functionaries, where it belonged.
“That is, he is in heaven with the angels,” she added softly, much more comfortable with the terms of her Catholic faith than with those of The Infinite Plan.
Judy and I slept with the Morales children, two or three to a bed, all in the same room. Inmaculada let Oliver stay with us; he was not used to being outside and if left there moaned and whined. I was beginning to nod, exhausted by conflicting emotions, when in the dark I heard Carmen’s voice whispering to make a place for her, and I felt her small warm body slip in beside me. Open your mouth and close your eyes, she said, and I felt her finger on my lips, a finger coated with something thick and sweet that I sucked like a caramel. It was condensed milk. I sat up a little and put my finger in the jar to offer to her, and we finished the treat, licking and sucking each other’s fingers until it was gone. Then I went right to sleep, sated with sugar, my face and hands sticky, my arms around Carmen, Oliver at my feet, accompanied by the breathing and warmth of the other children and the snoring of the addlepated grandmother in the next room, tied by a long rope to Inmaculada’s waist.
The father’s death disrupted the family; they lost direction and within a very brief time were going their separate ways. For Nora, widowhood was a betrayal; she felt she had been abandoned in a cruel world with two children and no resources, but at the same time she felt inexpressible relief, because in the last years her companion had not been the man she once loved, and living with him had become a martyrdom. Even so, shortly after the funeral she began to forget Reeves’s final decrepitude and to cherish earlier memories. She imagined they were joined by an invisible thread, like the one her husband had used to suspend the orange of The Infinite Plan; that image restored her earlier security drawn from the years he had ruled the family’s fate with the firm hand of a Master. Nora yielded to her languorous nature; the lethargy born of the horror of the war was accentuated, a deterioration of will that once she was widowed subtly grew and manifested itself in all its magnitude. She never spoke of her late husband in the past tense; she alluded to his absence in vague terms, as if he had undertaken a long astral voyage, and later, when she began to communicate with him in her dreams, she would speak of it in the tone of someone repeating a telephone conversation. Her embarrassed children did not like to hear about her delusions, fearing they would lead to madness. She was alone. She was a stranger in that environment; she spoke only a few words of Spanish and saw herself as being very different from the other women. Her friendship with Olga had ended, she had little relationship to her children, she was not friendly with Inmaculada Morales or any other person in the barrio. She was amiable, but people avoided her because she was strange; no one wanted to listen to her ravings about opera or The Infinite Plan. The habit of dependence was so deeply rooted that when she lost Charles Reeves it was as if she began to live in a daze. She made a few attempts to earn a living as a typist or a seamstress, but nothing came of it; neither was she able to get a job translating Hebrew or Russian, as she claimed she could, because no one needed those services in the barrio and the prospect of venturing into the center of the city to look for work terrified her. She was not overly concerned about supporting her children, because she did not consider them exclusively hers; it was her theory that children belonged to society in general and no one in particular. She would sit on the porch of her house and stare at the willow for hours on end, with a placid, vacant expression on the beautiful Slavic face that even then had begun to pale. In the years that followed, her freckles disappeared, her features faded—her whole being seemed slowly to vanish. In old age she became so insubstantial that it was difficult to remember her, and as no one thought to take her photograph, Gregory feared after she died that perhaps his mother had never existed. Pedro Morales tried to convince Nora to busy herself with something; he clipped want ads for different jobs and accompanied her to several interviews, until he was convinced of her inability to face reality. Three months later, when the situation was becoming intolerable, he took her to the welfare office to sign up for payments as an indigent, grateful that his Maestro, Charles Reeves, was not alive to witness such humiliation. The check, barely sufficient to cover the most basic expenses, was the family’s only regular source of income for many years; the rest came from the children’s jobs, the bills Olga managed to slip into Nora’s pocketbook, and the discreet support of the Moraleses. A buyer appeared for the boa, and the poor creature ended its days exposed to the eyes of the curious in a burlesque house, alongside scantily clad chorus girls, an obscene ventriloquist, and various acts intended to amuse the besotted spectators. It lived on for several years, feeding on live mice and squirrels and the scraps thrown into its cage for the thrill of watching the bored creature open its jaws; it continued to grow and fatten until it was truly awe-inspiring, though it was lethargic until the day it died.
The Reeves children survived on their own, in their individual ways. Judy found a job in a bakery, where she worked four hours every day after school; by night she baby-sat or cleaned offices. She was an excellent student; she learned to imitate any handwriting and for a reasonable sum would do homework for her classmates. She maintained her clandestine trade without ever being caught, all the while enjoying her reputation as a model young girl, always smiling and docile, never revealing the demons in her soul until the first symptoms of puberty transformed her personality. When two firm cherries budded on her breasts, her waistline slimmed, and her baby features became more modeled, everything changed. In that barrio of dark-skinned, rather short people, her golden color and Valkyrie-like stature made it impossible for her to pass unnoticed. She had always been pretty; once she emerged from girlhood, however, and males of all ages and conditions began to hound her, the once sweet child became a raging animal. She felt violated by men’s lustful glances and often came home shouting curses and slamming doors; she sometimes wept impotently because someone had whistled at her in the street or made lewd gestures. She acquired a sailor’s vocabulary to rebuff these advances, and for anyone who tried to touch her she kept a long hatpin at hand, which she would bury like a dagger, without compunction, in her admirer’s most vulnerable parts. In school she got into fights with boys over the look in their eye and with girls over racial differences and the jealousy she inevitably provoked. More than once Gregory saw his sister engaged in the strange wrestling matches females indulge in, rolling, scratching, hair-pulling, insults—so different from the way boys do battle, which is generally brief, silent, and conclusive. Girls look for a way to humiliate their enemy, while boys seem prepared to kill or be killed. Judy did not need any help in defending herself; with practice she became a true champion. While other girls her age were trying out their first makeup, practicing French kisses, and counting the days until they could wear high heels, she cut her hair like a jail-bird, dressed in men’s clothes, and compulsively ate leftover bread and rolls in the bakery. Her face broke out in pimples, and by the time she entered high school she had gained so much weight that no trace remained of the delicate porcelain doll she had been as a child; she looked like a sea lion, a description she used when she wanted to denigrate herself.
When he was seven, Gregory turned to the streets. He was not bound to his mother by any emotion; between them there were only a few shared routines and a tradition of honor drawn from didactic stories about self-sacrificing sons who were rewarded and ungrateful ones who ended up in the witch’s oven. He felt sorry for his mother; he was sure that without Judy and him, Nora would die of attrition, sitting in her wicker chair staring into empty air. Both children thought of their mother’s indolence not as a vice but, rather, as a sickness of the spirit; perhaps her Mental Body had gone in search of their father and had wandered astray in the labyrinth of some cosmic plane, or had fallen behind in one of those vast spaces filled with weird machines or baffled souls. Gregory’s closeness with Judy had vanished, and when he tired of trying to reestablish contact with her, he replaced his sister with Carmen Morales, with whom he shared the unceremonious affection, the spats, and the loyalty of best friends. Gregory was mischievous and restless; he was a problem in school and spent half his time serving out various punishments—whether wearing donkey’s ears and standing with his face to the wall or suffering the principal’s spankings. He lived like a boarder in his own home, staying out as late as possible, coming home only to sleep—he much preferred visiting the Moraleses, or Olga. Most of his time he was to be found in the jungle of the barrio, learning its most secret secrets. Everyone called him El Gringo, and despite racial animosity, many people liked him, because he was cheerful and obliging. He had several friends: the cook at the taco stand, who always had some tasty dish to offer him; the lady at the grocery store, who let him read comic books without buying them; and the usher at the movies, who from time to time let him in the side door to watch the film. Even Purple Pecker, who never suspected Gregory’s role in tagging him with that name, used to treat him to soda pop in Los Tres Amigos bar. Trying to learn Spanish, he lost much of his English and ended up speaking both languages poorly. For a while he stuttered badly, and the principal called Nora Reeves to recommend that she place her son in the nuns’ school for retarded children, but his teacher, Miss June, intervened, promising she would help him with his homework. He was not much interested in school; his world was the streets—where, incidentally, he learned considerably more. The barrio was a citadel within the city, a rough, impoverished ghetto born of spontaneous growth around an industrial zone where illegal immigrants could be employed without anyone’s asking questions. The air was tainted with the stench of the tire factory; added to that on weekdays was smoke from exhausts and streetside grills, which formed thick clouds like a heavy mantle above the houses. On Fridays and Saturdays it was dangerous to venture out after nightfall, when the barrio was crawling with drunks and drug addicts, ready to explode into homicidal combat. At night you could hear couples arguing, women screaming, children crying, men brawling, and sometimes gunshots and police sirens. During the day, the streets boiled with activity, while unemployed men with time on their hands loafed on the street corners, drinking, hassling women, shooting craps, and wishing away the hours with the fatalism of five centuries of Indian forebears. Shops displayed the same low-priced goods seen in any Mexican town, restaurants served typical dishes, the bars tequila and beer, and in the dance hall they played Latin music; during celebrations there was never a shortage of mariachis dressed in enormous sombreros and matador suits and singing of honor and despair. Gregory, who knew them all and never missed a fiesta, became a kind of mascot to the musicians; he would sing along with them, yelling the obligatory ay, ay, ay of Mexican rancheras like a pro, stirring the enthusiasm of the crowd that had never known a gringo with such talent. He called half the barrio by name and had such an angelic expression that he won the confidence of most who knew him. More comfortable in the labyrinth of alleys and passageways, empty lots and abandoned buildings than at home, he played with the Morales brothers and a half-dozen other boys his age, always avoiding confrontation with older gangs. Just as with young blacks, Asians, or poor whites in other parts of the city, for young Hispanics the barrio was more important than family; it was their inviolable territory. Each gang was identified by its language of signs, colors, and wall graffiti. From a distance the gangs all seemed the same, formed of ragged, belligerent boys unable to articulate a thought; seen more closely, they were distinctive, each with individual rites and intricate symbolic language. For Gregory, learning the codes was a prime necessity; he could distinguish members of the different gangs by the jacket or cap they wore or the hand signs they used to flash messages or to challenge a fight; he had only to see the color of a single slogan on the wall to know who had put it there and what it meant. Graffiti marked boundaries, and anyone who ventured into alien territory, whether through ignorance or daring, paid dearly; that is why every time he went out, he had to take long detours. The Martínez boys had the only gang in grade school; they were training to become members of Los Carniceros, who lived up to their name as “Butchers” and were the most feared in the barrio. They could be identified by the color purple and the letter C; their drink was tequila and grape juice—because of the color—and their sign a hand hooked in a C covering mouth and nose. In constant warfare with other groups and the police, they existed solely to provide a sense of identity to the youths, most of whom had dropped out of school, had no job, and lived in the street or in communal pads. The gang members had records—numerous arrests for robbery, dealing marijuana, drunkenness, assault, and car theft. A few were armed with homemade pistols fashioned from a piece of pipe, a wood grip, and a detonator, but more generally they carried knives, chains, razors, and clubs, which did not preclude serious injury: the ambulance carried away two or three after every street battle. The gangs were the greatest threat Gregory faced; he could never join one—that, too, was a matter of race—and to confront them would be an act of madness. He did not attempt to build a reputation for bravery, all he wanted was to survive; neither, however, did he want to be thought of as a coward, because his weakness would be exploited. It took only one or two beatings to demonstrate that lone heroes triumph only in the movies, that he must learn to negotiate with his wits, not attract attention, know his enemies in order to profit from their weaknesses, and avoid fights, because as that pragmatist Padre Larraguibel had told him, God helps the good guys when they outnumber the bad guys.
The Morales house became Gregory’s true home, a place where he was always welcomed as a son. In that family confusion he was merely one child more, and Inmaculada herself used to wonder absently how she could have had a blond son. In the Morales tribe no one complained of loneliness or boredom, everything was shared, from existential anguish to the only bathroom; inconsequential matters were discussed at top pitch, but important problems were held in strict familial secrecy, in accordance with an age-old code of honor. The father’s authority was never questioned: I wear the pants here, Pedro Morales roared whenever anyone trod too near his toes, but in fact Inmaculada was the true head of the family. No one approached the father directly, preferring to be processed through the maternal bureaucracy. Inmaculada never contradicted her husband before witnesses but always managed somehow to get her way. The first time their eldest son came to the house dressed like a zoot-suited pachuco, Pedro Morales thrashed him with a leather strap and threw him out of the house. The boy was fed up with working twice as much as any American for half the pay and was hanging out in pool halls and bars most of the day with his buddies, with no money in his pockets but what he won from bets or what his mother quietly slipped him. To avoid an argument with his wife, Pedro Morales had played blind as long as he could, but when his son appeared gussied up like a pimp and with a tear tattooed on one cheek, he had beat him to a pulp. That night, when everyone else was in bed, the murmur of Inmaculada’s voice could be heard for hours, wearing down her husband’s resistance. The next day Pedro went out to look for his son; when he found him standing on a corner throwing verbal bouquets to every woman who passed by, he took him by the collar and marched him to their garage; he ripped off his son’s outlandish pachuco garb, gave him greasy overalls to put on, and for several years worked him from sunup to sunset, until he became the best mechanic in the entire area, set up in his own shop at his father’s expense. On Pedro Morales’s fiftieth birthday, his married son, now with three children and a house in the suburbs, had the tear removed from his cheek as a birthday present for his father; the scar was all that remained of his fling with rebellion. Inmaculada spent her life slaving for the men of her family. As a girl she had been trained to serve her father and brothers, and now she did the same for her husband and sons. She rose at dawn to cook a huge breakfast for Pedro, who opened his repair shop early in the morning, and she never served leftover tortillas at her table; that would have been an affront to her dignity. The rest of the day went by in a thousand unsung chores, including preparation of three complete meals, as she was convinced that her men had to be nourished with large amounts of constantly varied dishes. It never entered her mind to ask her sons, four young giants of men, to help her sweep the floors, shake out the bedclothes, or wash the rough work clothes, stiff with motor oil—garments she scrubbed by hand. She expected her two girls, on the other hand, to serve the males, because she considered it their duty. It was God’s will—and our misfortune—that we were born women; our fate is hard work and suffering, she used to say in a resigned tone, without a hint of self-pity.
In those years Carmen Morales was already a balm for Gregory Reeves’s hard knocks and a light in his moments of darkness, a role she would always play in his life. The girl scurried around busily, untiring and competent, and she had a strong practical sense that allowed her to escape rigid family traditions without confrontation with her father, who had his own very clear ideas about a woman’s place—silent, and in the home—and who never thought twice about physically punishing an insurgent, including his two daughters. Carmen was his favorite, but his expectations for her were no different from those for the meek young girls from his village in Zacatecas. In contrast, Morales worked unstintingly to educate his four male children, on whom he pinned disproportionate hopes; he wanted to see them rise higher than their humble grandfathers and than himself. With inexhaustible tenacity, through preaching, punishment, and good example, he held his family together, saving his children from alcohol and delinquency, forcing them to finish high school, and guiding them into various trades. With the exception of Juan José, who died in Vietnam, each attained a measure of success. At the end of his days, Pedro Morales, surrounded by grandchildren who spoke no word of Spanish, congratulated himself on his descendants, proud of being the trunk of that family tree, although he would joke that none had made millions or become famous. Carmen very nearly achieved that, but her father never publicly acknowledged her worth; that would have been a surrender of his macho principles. He sent his two daughters to school because that was the law, and although it was not his intention to keep them in ignorance, neither did he expect them to take their studies seriously; instead, they were to learn domestic skills, help their mother, and guard their virginity until the day they were married—the only ambition for a decent girl.
“I don’t intend to get married,” Carmen whispered secretly to Gregory. “I want to work in a circus with trained animals and a high trapeze, where I can swing upside down and show the whole world my britches.”
“My girls will be good mothers and wives, or go to the convent,” Pedro Morales boasted every time someone came to him with the story of a girl who found herself pregnant before she left school.
“Oh, blessed Saint Anthony, find them good husbands!” Inmaculada Morales implored, hanging her statue of the saint upside down to oblige him to hear her modest pleas. It was obvious to her that neither of her girls had the calling to be a nun, and she did not want even to think of the tragedy of watching them turn out like the easy girls who played around before they were married, the ones who left a trail of condoms in the cemetery.
But all that came much later. During the years of primary school, when Carmen and Gregory had sealed their pact of undying friendship, those questions were still to be raised, and no one preached virtue to prevent them from playing together unsupervised. Everyone was so accustomed to seeing them together that later, as they became adolescents, the Moraleses trusted Gregory to look after Carmen more than they did their own sons. When Carmen asked permission to go to a party, they first ascertained that Gregory would go too, in which case the parents felt secure. From the day he first walked into their house, they had welcomed him without reservation, and through the following years, convinced against all logic and experience of the purity of Gregory and Carmen’s sentiments, they turned a deaf ear to the inevitable gossiping of the neighbor women. Thirteen years later, when Gregory left that city forever, he was homesick for only one thing: the Morales household.
Gregory’s shoeshine box contained black, brown, yellow, and oxblood polish, but it lacked neutral saddle soap for the gray and blue leathers that were also in vogue, and black dye to run around the edge of the soles. He always meant to put his earnings toward completing his supplies, but that determination faltered the minute a new movie came to town. Movies were his secret addiction; in the dark he was but one of a horde of noisy kids. He never missed a show in the barrio, where they ran Mexican films, and on Saturdays he went into the city with Juan José and Carmen to see the American serials. The episode seemed always to end with the protagonist bound hand and foot in a shed filled with dynamite and the villain lighting the fuse; at the climactic moment the screen would go black and a voice would invite the audience to come back in a week for the next installment. Sometimes Gregory was so miserable he wanted to die but postponed his suicide until the following week: how could he quit this world without knowing how the devil his hero had escaped the trap? And escape he always did; it was truly amazing how he could drag himself through the flames and emerge unscathed, with his ten-gallon hat in place and his clothes clean as new. The film transported Gregory to another dimension; for an hour or two he became El Zorro or the Lone Ranger and all his dreams were fulfilled. By magic, the hero recovered from contusions and wounds, freed himself from ropes and bonds, triumphed over his enemies by virtue of his superior abilities, and won the girl. To the soft strains of strings and woodwinds, they kissed in the foreground, silhouetted against the sun or the moon. Gregory could relax; the movies were not like his barrio; the only surprises were agreeable ones, and the bad guy was always bested by the hero and paid for his crimes with prison or his life. Sometimes he repented, and following the inevitable humiliation confessed the error of his ways and was led off to music that sounded a warning, usually trumpets and kettledrums. Life was beautiful, and America was truly “the land of the free and the home of the brave,” a land where someone like Gregory could become President; all you had to do was stay pure of heart, love God and your mother, be forever faithful to one girl, respect the law, defend the weak, and scorn money—because heroes never expected to be compensated. Gregory’s uncertainties vanished into the air of that formidable universe of black and white. He walked out of the theater reconciled with life, brimming with admirable intentions that lasted at least a couple of minutes, until the shock of being outside restored his sense of reality. Olga took it upon herself to inform him that the films were made in Hollywood, only a short distance from her house, and that it was all a monumental lie; only the songs and dances of the musical comedies were what they seemed, everything else was a trick of the camera; Gregory, however, did not let that revelation disturb him.
He worked his trade a long way from home in a district of offices, bars, and small businesses. He covered a five-block radius of action, walking back and forth, offering his modest services, eyes to the ground, observing shoes as worn and shapeless as those of his Latin neighbors. As in the barrio, no one wore new footwear except for a few gangsters and drug dealers, who sported patent-leather moccasins, boots with silver studs, and two-tone shoes that were hell to shine. He could guess people’s faces by their way of walking and by their shoes: Hispanics wore red with a stacked heel, blacks and mulattoes preferred sharp-toed yellow, the Chinese had tiny feet, and whites had turned-up toes and rundown heels. The shine was the easy part; what was difficult was finding clients ready to pay a dime and give up five minutes for the sake of their shoes. “A good shine, a good impression!” Gregory shouted at the top of his lungs, but very few listened. With luck he would make fifty cents in an afternoon, the price of one marijuana cigarette. The few times he smoked grass he concluded it was not worth working so many hours only to blow it on crap that turned his stomach and left his head throbbing like a drum, but not to seem a fool, he pretended to be high. The Mexicans who had seen marijuana growing like a weed in fields of their homeland thought it really was like grass, but gringos smoked it as a sign of manhood. To imitate them, and to impress the blondes, the boys in the barrio smoked all they could get. Given his meager success with marijuana, Gregory’s affectation was to dangle a cigarette from the corner of his mouth, movie-villain style. He was so good at it that he could talk and chew gum and never lose his smoke. When he wanted to act the macho before his friends, he would pull out a homemade pipe and fill it with a mixture of his invention: tobacco from salvaged butts, a little sawdust, and powdered aspirin, which according to popular belief got you as high as any drug known. On Saturdays he worked all day, usually earning a little over a dollar; he handed almost all of it to his mother, keeping only a dime for the weekly movie and sometimes a nickel for the collection box for missionaries in China. If he could save five dollars, the priest would give him a certificate of adoption for a Chinese baby girl, but the real trick was to earn ten, which would give him the right to a boy child. May God bless you, the priest said every time Gregory brought his nickel for the collection box, and once God more than blessed him, He rewarded him with a billfold containing fifteen dollars that He had put in the cemetery for Gregory to find. The cemetery was the favorite spot for couples to go after dark; there they hid among the tombs to make love at their ease—although spied on by the children from the barrio, who followed every gambol and gallop of the tempestuous spectacle. Ay, I’m so afraid! I hear a lost soul, the girls would whimper, mistaking the choked laughter of the voyeurs for the moaning of spirits, but at the same time letting their skirts be slipped higher and higher for the roll among the tombstones and crosses. “Our cemetery is the best in the city, much prettier than the one the millionaires and Hollywood actresses have; theirs is nothing but trees and grass and looks more like a golf course than holy ground. Did you ever see a cemetery where the dead hadn’t a single statue to keep them company?” Inmaculada Morales would ask, even though in truth only the wealthy could afford mausoleums and stone angels; immigrants could barely pay for a headstone with a simple inscription. In November, to celebrate the Day of the Dead, Mexicans visited the relatives they had not been able to take back to their villages, bringing offerings of music, paper flowers, and sweets. From early morning the air was filled with ranchera songs, guitars, and toasts, and by nighttime everyone was tipsy, including the souls in purgatory, who were drunk from the tequila liberally sprinkled into the ground. The Reeves children went to the cemetery with Olga, who bought them candy skulls and skeletons to eat at their father’s grave. Nora always stayed home; she said she disliked pagan festivals, that they were merely a pretext for drunkenness and vice, but Gregory suspected that the real reason was her wish to avoid meeting Olga. Or perhaps she was denying that her husband was dead and buried, because for her Charles Reeves was somewhere on a different plane, busily administering The Infinite Plan. The billfold with the fifteen dollars was half hidden beneath some bushes. Gregory was looking for trap-door spiders; at his age, he was still more attracted by the fantastic insect-catching trap the spiders wove and their egg sacs, containing a hundred tiny young, than he was by the clumsy bucking and incomprehensible moans of the couples. He also collected the scattered white rubber balloons that after they were blown up looked like long sausages. It was as he bent down to a spider hole that he saw the billfold and felt a jolt in his heart and temples; he had never found anything valuable and now was unsure whether this was a gift from heaven or the devil’s temptation. He glanced quickly around him to be sure he was alone, snatched up the wallet, and ran to hide behind a mausoleum to examine his treasure. He opened it with trembling hands and extracted three brand-new five-dollar bills, more money than he had ever seen at one time. He thought of Padre Larraguibel, who would tell him God had placed the money there to test him and to observe whether he kept the windfall or deposited it in the missionary box, thereby adopting two children at one stroke. No one in the entire school was rich enough to sponsor a Chinese infant of each sex; that would make him a celebrity. Even so, he decided that a bicycle was much more practical than two babies in far-off China, beneficiaries he would never meet in any case. He had had his eye on a bicycle for months; one of Olga’s neighbors had offered to sell it to him for twenty dollars, an exorbitant price, but Gregory hoped that the man could not refuse the money in hand. The vehicle was primitive and in ruinous condition but still functional. The owner was an Indian debased by a lifetime of unspeakable practices; Gregory was afraid of him because once, under a variety of pretexts, he had taken him to a garage, where he tried to put his hands inside Gregory’s pants—so he asked Olga to go with him.
“Don’t show your money, don’t open your mouth, just let me handle everything,” she told him. She bargained so well that for twelve dollars and an amulet to ward off the evil eye, the bicycle was his. “You give the three dollars you have left to your mother, you hear me?” Olga commanded as they said goodbye.
Gregory set off pedaling down the middle of the street, too happy to see the soft-drink truck coming in the opposite direction. They met head-on. Miraculously, Gregory was not crushed; there was nothing left of the bicycle, however, but a few pieces of twisted steel and the spokes of the wheels. Cursing, the driver jumped from the truck, grabbed Gregory’s shirt, jerked him to his feet, shook him like a feather duster, and sent him home with a dollar as consolation.
“Look, you damned brat!” the man rumbled, more frightened than his victim. “Be glad I don’t have you arrested for not looking where the hell you’re going!”
“I’ve never seen anyone as stupid as you! You should have got two dollars, at least!” Judy scolded when she learned what had happened.
“That’s what you get for being disobedient. I’ve told you a thousand times not to go into that cemetery. Nothing good comes of ill-gotten gains,” was Nora Reeves’s analysis, as she sponged whiskey onto scraped knees and elbows.
“Blessed Jesus, be thankful you’re alive,” said Inmaculada Morales, hugging him.
Earning money became an obsession with Gregory. He was willing to do any job, even shelling the corn for making tortillas, a tedious process that skinned his knuckles and left him nauseated for hours from the smell. Then he decided he would take up stealing, although it never occurred to him to steal money—his was an adventure, a sport, not a way to earn a living. At night he would crawl through a hole in the school fence, climb onto the roof of the ice cream stand, pry up a sheet of zinc, and slip inside to steal ice cream bars; after he ate two or three, he would take one to give to Carmen. Those nocturnal excursions provided a blend of excitement and guilt; the rigid norms of honesty learned from his mother pounded in his head. He felt perverse, not so much for defying her as because the owner of the stand was a nice old lady who favored him among all the boys and was always treating him to ice cream. One night she returned to look for something she had forgotten, opened the door, switched on the light before he could flee, and caught him with evidence of the crime in his hand. He stood frozen in his tracks, while she moaned, How could you do this to me? I’ve been good to you! Gregory burst into tears, begging her to forgive him and swearing to pay back everything he had stolen. What! This isn’t the first time? Gregory had to confess that he owed her more than six dollars’ worth of ice cream bars. From then on, he went near her only to pay back a little of his debt. Even though she forgave him, he never again felt comfortable in her presence. He was less fortunate in the army-navy surplus store, where he shoplifted war castoffs that were of absolutely no use to him: canteens, buttons, caps, even an enormous pair of boots he carried out of the store in his schoolbag, never suspecting that the owner had his eye on him. One afternoon he picked up a flashlight, stuffed it under his shirt, and was going out the door as a police car pulled to a stop. There was no way to escape; he was taken to jail and locked in a cell where he witnessed the ferocious beating of a dark-skinned youth. In terror, he waited his turn; he was well treated, however: the police merely booked him, reprimanded him, and told him to return everything he had hidden at home. They went to talk with Nora Reeves, despite Gregory’s nearly hysterical pleas not to, that it would break her heart. She came to the jail wearing her blue dress with the lace collar, looking like a ghost from an old daguerreotype; she signed for his release, listened to the charges in silence, and, no less silent, departed, followed by her son. Be grateful you’re white, Greg, said Inmaculada Morales when she learned of the incident. If you were the color of my sons, you’d have been in for it. Nora was so embarrassed that for several weeks she did not speak, and when finally she did, it was to tell Gregory to bathe and put on his only suit, the one that he had worn to his father’s funeral and was now too small, because they had an important errand. She took him to the orphanage run by the nuns and begged the mother superior to accept him because she felt she could no longer cope with a son who was such a troublemaker. Standing behind his mother, staring at his shoes, muttering, I won’t cry, I won’t cry, while tears poured down his face, Gregory swore that if she left him there he would climb the church steeple and leap off headfirst. Such dramatic measures were fortunately unnecessary because the nuns refused to take him; they already had too many orphans to house, and he had a family. He lived in his own house, and his mother received welfare payments; he could not qualify as an orphan. Four days later Nora bundled up his things and took him by bus to the house of a farming couple who had agreed to adopt him. She bade her son goodbye with a sad kiss on his forehead, promised him she would write, and left without a backward glance. That night Gregory sat down to eat with his new family, not speaking, not looking up, worried that no one would feed Oliver, that he would never see Carmen Morales again, and that he had left his pocketknife in the shed.
“Our only son died eleven years ago,” the farmer said. “We are God-fearing, hardworking people. There’ll be no time here for play, only school, church, and helping me in the fields. But the food is good, and if you behave we’ll treat you well.”
“Tomorrow I’ll make you a custard,” his wife said. “You must be tired; I’m sure you want to go to bed. I’ll show you your room; it belonged to our son; we haven’t changed a thing since he left us.”
For the first time, Gregory had his own room and a bed; up till then he had used a sleeping bag. It was a small, sparsely furnished room with an open window looking out toward the horizon across cultivated fields. On the walls were pictures of veteran baseball players and old warplanes, not at all like those he had seen in the newsreels. He inspected everything without daring to touch, thinking of his father, the boa, Olga’s necklaces for invisibility, Inmaculada’s kitchen, and Carmen Morales and the sticky-sweet taste of condensed milk, as a painful, icy knot grew in his chest. He sat on the edge of the bed with his modest belongings on his knees; he waited until the house was asleep, then stole out, carefully closing the door. The dogs barked, but he ignored them. He began walking in the direction of the city, returning along the same route he had followed in the bus, which was etched in his mind like a map. He walked all night and early the next morning, totally drained, appeared at his own front door. Oliver welcomed him, barking happily. Nora Reeves came to the door; with one hand she took the bundle of clothes from her son and with the other reached out to pat him, but stopped before the gesture was completed.
“Try to grow up soon,” was all she said.
That afternoon Gregory thought of racing against the train.
I run up the hill with Oliver behind me, looking for the trees, chest heaving; the undergrowth is scratching my legs, I fall and cut my knee, shit, I yell, shit, and let the dog lick the blood; I can scarcely see where to put my feet, but I keep running toward my green refuge, the place where I always hide. I don’t have to see the blazes on the trees to find my way; I’ve been here so many times I could come blindfolded; I know every eucalyptus, every patch of wild blackberries, every boulder. I lift a branch, and the entrance is before me, a narrow tunnel beneath a thorny bush—it must have been a fox’s den—just the width of my body. If I drag myself forward on my elbows, snaking along carefully with my face between my arms and calculating the curve correctly, I can slip through without getting scratched; Oliver is waiting outside; he knows the drill. It has rained during the week, and the ground is soft; it’s cold, but my whole body has been feverish for hours, ever since this morning in the broom closet, a fire that will never die, I know. Something pricks me from behind, and I yell out; it’s only thorns caught in my sweater. That was how Martínez took me, from behind; I still feel the knife blade against my throat, but I don’t think I’m bleeding anymore. If you move I’ll kill you, you fucking sonofabitch gringo, and I had no way to defend myself, all I could do was cry and curse while he was doing it to me. Now run tell Miss June and I’ll cut your sister’s face here on the spot, and you already know what I’ll do to you, he said when he was through, while he was fastening his pants. He walked away laughing. If anyone finds out, I’m fucked; they’ll call me a pansy for the rest of my life. No one must ever find out! But what if Martínez tells? I’d like to kill him! My hands, my clothes, my face, are covered with mud; my mother will be furious; I’d better think up some excuse: I got hit by a car, or the gang worked me over again, but then I remember I don’t have to make up any lie because I’m going to die, and when they find my body the dirt won’t matter. I’ll wait like I am. She’ll be grief-stricken, she won’t think about the bad things I’ve done, only my good side, that I wash the dishes and give her almost everything I make shining shoes, and at last she’ll realize that I’ve been a good son and she’ll be sorry she wasn’t more loving to me, sorry she wanted to give me away to the nuns and the farmers and that she never cooked eggs for my breakfast even once, it’s not even hard, Doña Inmaculada does it with her eyes closed, even a retard can fry a couple of eggs. She’ll be sorry, but it will be too late because I’ll be dead. They’ll have an assembly at school and say nice things about me the way they did for Zarate when he drowned in the ocean; they’ll say I was their best classmate and that I had a great future, and all the students will have to line up and walk past my coffin to kiss me on the forehead. The first graders will be crying, and I’ll bet the girls will faint: women can’t stand to see blood; they’ll all squeal except for Carmen, who will put her arms around my corpse and never even flinch. I hope Miss June doesn’t get the idea to read the letter I wrote her at the funeral, jeez, why did I do that? I can’t ever look her in the face again; she’s so pretty, as pretty as a fairy princess or a movie actress. If she only knew what I’m thinking in class when she’s standing up there at the blackboard going over the arithmetic problems and I’m sitting at my desk staring at her like a moron, with my head in the clouds—who can think about numbers when she’s around! Like, for instance, I dream that she tells me, I’ll help you with your homework, Greg, your grades are a disaster, so I stay after class and all the others are gone and we’re alone in the building, and without me saying a word she goes wild and lies down on the floor, and I peepee between her legs. Never, not in all the days of my life, will I confess to the Padre the dirty things I think up; I’m a pervert, a pig. And I had to go and write that farewell letter to Miss June! What a screwup. Well, at least I won’t have to suffer the shame of seeing her again; I’ll be dead and gone by the time she reads it. And Carmen, poor Carmen . . . The only reason I feel sad about dying is that I won’t ever see her again. If she knew what Martínez did to me she would come here and die with me, but I can’t tell anyone, especially her.
This is the worst thing that ever happened in my life, it’s the very worst thing that rat Martínez ever did to me, worse than the First Communion when he made me bite off a piece of bread before I took communion, so when I swallowed the host I’d be struck by lightning and go straight to hell. But nothing happened; I didn’t feel anything. I guess it was because it wasn’t my sin, it was his, and he’s the one who’ll boil in Satan’s caldrons, not me, for leading me to sin—which is a greater offense than the sin itself, that’s what Padre Larraguibel explained to us when he told us about Adam and Eve. That time I had to write five hundred times I must not blaspheme, because I said that God committed the sin when He put the apple in the Garden of Eden knowing that Adam would eat it one day, anyway, and if that wasn’t leading someone to sin, what was? Oh, this is worse than when Martínez stripped me in the gym and hid my clothes; if the cleaning lady hadn’t come and helped me, I would have had to spend the night in the shower and the next day the whole school would have seen me stark naked. It’s worse than when he shouted to everyone in the schoolyard that he had spied me in the bathroom playing doctor with Ernestina Pereda. I hate him! I hate him from the bottom of my heart! I wish he would die, not just get sick but be killed—but not before someone cuts off his dick. I want that lousy Martínez to pay. I hate him, I hate him!
I’m inside my den now, I whistle to Oliver and listen to him crawling through the tunnel. I put my arms around him, and he lies very still, panting, with his tongue hanging out; he looks at me with his honey-colored eyes, he understands, he’s the only one who knows all my secrets. Oliver is a pretty ugly dog; Judy despises him; he’s a real mutt and has a long fat tail like a baseball bat. He’s bad besides; he eats clothes and rolls in dog shit and then jumps on the beds; he loves fights and sometimes comes home all chewed up, but he’s warm and when he hasn’t been rolling in anything he smells great. I bury my nose in his neck; his outside hair is short and stiff, but next to his skin it’s soft as cotton, and I like to sniff him there—nothing smells better than dog. The sun’s gone down, and shadows are everywhere; it’s cold, one of those rare winter afternoons, and in spite of the fact that I’m afire, my hands and ears are freezing cold—it feels clean. I’ve decided not to slit my throat with my pocketknife as I planned to; I’ll just die of the cold: I’ll slowly freeze through the night, and tomorrow morning I’ll be stiff as a board, a slow death but more peaceful than being hit by a train. That was my first idea, but every time I run in front of the train I’m too big a coward and at the last second jump and save myself by a hair. I don’t know how many times I tried it, but I’ve decided not to die that way, it must hurt a lot, and besides, the idea of all the guts makes me sick; I don’t want to be scraped up with a shovel or have some smartass keep my fingers for souvenirs. I’m going to push Oliver away, because he keeps me warm and I’ll never freeze this way. I’ll scratch this hollow in the dirt to get comfortable and turn over on my back and lie perfectly still—oh, that pain there . . . that damn, miserable Martínez queer! My head is filled with thoughts and visions and words, but then after a very long time I stop crying and begin to breathe normally and then smell the soft, fresh earth gathering me into her arms the way Doña Inmaculada hugs me; I sink, I let go and think about the planet, round, floating free of gravity in the black abyss of the cosmos, spinning and spinning, and I think of the stars in the Milky Way and how it will be at the end of the world, when everything explodes and particles spray out like fireworks on the Fourth of July, and I feel like I’m a part of the earth, made of the same stuff, and when I die I will disintegrate, crumble like a cake, and be part of the soil, and trees will grow from my body. I start thinking how the world doesn’t turn around me, how I’m not anything special—I must be about as important as a hunk of clay—and maybe I don’t have a soul of my own; suddenly I wonder if there isn’t just one big soul for all living creatures, including Oliver, and no heaven or hell or purgatory, maybe they’re just something cooked up by the Padre, who’s so old his mind’s gone soft, and my father’s Logi and Masters don’t exist either, and the only one who’s anywhere close to the truth is my mother with her Bahai religion, although she gets all wound up with shit that may be fine for Persia but doesn’t make much sense here. I like the idea of being a particle, of being a grain of cosmic sand. Miss June says that comets’ tails are formed of stellar dust, thousands of tiny little rocks that reflect the light. I’m feeling really calm now, I’ve forgotten about Martínez, about being afraid, about the pain and the broom closet, I am at peace, I rise up and am flying with my eyes wide open toward the starry void. I’m flying . . . flying with Oliver. . . .
From the time she was a little girl, Carmen Morales had the manual skills that characterized her for the rest of her life; in her hands any object was transformed from its original form. She made necklaces from soup beans, soldiers from toilet paper rolls, toys from spools and matchboxes. One day, playing with three apples, she discovered that she had no trouble at all keeping them in the air at the same time; soon she was juggling five eggs, and from that moved naturally to more exotic objects.
“Shining shoes is a lot of sweat and not much cash, Greg. Learn some trick, and we’ll work together,” Carmen suggested to her friend. “I need a partner.”
Dozens of eggs later, Gregory’s definitive clumsiness was established. He had no interesting talent to offer other than wiggling his ears and eating live flies, although he did have a good ear for the harmonica. Oliver was more gifted; they taught him to walk on his hind legs with a hat clamped in his jaws and how to select small slips of paper from a box. At first he swallowed them, but he eventually learned to deliver them delicately to the client. Carmen and Gregory assiduously perfected a routine for their show and to escape the scrutiny of friends and neighbors planned to perform as far from home as possible, since they knew that if Pedro or Inmaculada Morales knew what they were doing, nothing could save them; they had already earned one spanking for their idea of posing as beggars in their own barrio. Carmen made a skirt from brightly colored scarves and a bonnet trimmed with chicken feathers, and asked to borrow Olga’s yellow boots. Gregory sneaked out the top hat and bow tie his father had worn while preaching, items Nora had preserved as relics. They asked Olga to help them in drafting the slips with fortunes, telling her it was a game for the end-of-school party; she pierced them with one of her looks but without further questions sat down and wrote out a handful of prophecies in the style of Chinese fortune cookies. They rounded out their supplies with eggs, candles, and five kitchen knives, which they hid in a sack because they could not leave their houses carrying such things without raising suspicion. They washed Oliver down with a hose and tied a ribbon around his neck, hoping to make him look a little less like a cur. They chose a street corner far from the barrio, donned their minstrel outfits, and tried out their act. A small crowd soon gathered around the two children and the dog. Carmen, with her petite figure, her eye-catching clothes, and her extraordinary skill in tossing burning candles and sharp knives in the air, was an instant attraction; Gregory devoted himself to playing the harmonica. In pauses between the juggling, he put aside his mouth organ and invited the spectators to buy a fortune. For a small sum, the dog would select a folded slip and carry it to the client—slightly damp with slobber, it is true, but perfectly legible. In an hour or two the children earned as much as a laborer received for a full day’s work in any of the area factories. As it began to grow dark, they removed their costumes, packed up their equipment, divided their earnings, and returned home, after swearing that torture could not make them reveal what they had done. Carmen buried her money in a box in her patio, and Gregory doled his out at home, to avoid prying questions, keeping a small share to go to the movies.
“If we earned that much here, imagine what we could do in Pershing Square. We’d be millionaires! Hundreds of people go there to listen to the hotheads, and there are all those rich people going in and out of hotels,” Carmen proposed.
Such a bold move would never have entered Gregory’s mind. He believed there was an invisible frontier that people of his status never crossed; the world was different on the other side: men strode along purposefully with work to do and urgent errands, gloved women strolled at a more leisurely pace, the stores were luxurious and the automobiles shiny. He had been there once or twice with his mother, when she had legal matters to attend to, but he would never in the world have thought of going there alone. In one instant, Carmen revealed the possibilities of the market: for three years he had been shining shoes for a dime among the poorest of the poor, without a glimmer of how only a few blocks away he could find customers more easily and charge triple the amount. The idea intimidated him, however, and he immediately rejected it.
“You’re crazy.”
“Why are you so chicken, Gregory? I bet you don’t even know the hotel.”
“The hotel? You’ve been in the hotel?”
“Of course. It’s like a palace: it has paintings on the ceilings and the doors; there are pom-poms on the curtains, and I can’t even describe the lamps: they look like ships strung with lights. Your feet sink into the rugs like sand at the beach, and everyone looks elegant—and they serve tea and cakes.”
“You had tea in the hotel?”
“Well, not exactly, but I’ve seen the trays. You have to walk in without looking at anyone, as if your mama was waiting for you at a table, you understand?”
“And what if they catch you?”
“The first rule is, you never admit anything. If someone says something to you, you act like a rich kid, you turn up your nose and say something rude. I’ll take you one day. At any rate, that’s the best place to work.”
“We can’t take Oliver on the streetcar,” Gregory argued weakly.
“We’ll walk,” she replied.
From then on they went to Pershing Square every time Carmen Morales could escape her mother’s vigilant eye. They attracted more people than the soapbox speakers expounding with futile passion on subjects no one cared to hear about. Without the juggling their act was too flat, so if Carmen was unable to go, Gregory resumed his shoeshine routine—although now he worked the streets of the business district. The two children were united by mutual want and their shared secret, in addition to many other complicities.
At sixteen, Gregory was attending high school with Juan José Morales. Carmen was one year behind them, and Martínez had dropped out of school and joined the Carniceros gang. Reeves tried never to go anywhere near him and as long as he could avoid him felt safe. By that time the rebelliousness that formerly kept him on the move had diminished, but he was tortured by other, silent agonies. In high school most of the students were white; he no longer felt people were pointing a finger at him or that he had to run home the minute the bell rang in order to elude his enemies. Mandatory education was not always a fact among the poor, and even less among Latins, who often had to take a job as soon as they were out of grade school. Gregory’s father had implanted in him an ambition to obtain an education, a desire that he himself had never satisfied because by the time he was thirteen he was traveling across Australia shearing sheep. Gregory’s mother, too, encouraged him to learn a profession, so he would not have to break his back doing hard labor: Figure it out, son—a third of your life is spent sleeping, a third in daily routines, and the most interesting third will be spent working; that’s why it’s best to do something you like. The one time Gregory had mentioned leaving school to look for a job, Olga read his fortune in the tarot cards and he turned up the card for Law.
“Not a chance. You’ll be a thief or a policeman, and in either case, your studies will stand you in good stead,” she pronounced.
“I don’t want to be either one of those things.”
“This card says very clearly that you’ll have something to do with the law.”
“Doesn’t it say I’ll be rich?”
“Sometimes rich and sometimes poor.”
“But I’ll get to be someone important, won’t I?”
“You don’t get to anywhere in life, Gregory! You just live it.”
Carmen Morales taught Gregory to dance to North American rhythms, and they became so expert that people would form a circle around them and applaud their exhibitions of jitterbug and rock ’n’ roll. Gregory would fling Carmen above his head in a kind of headstand and before she tumbled to the floor toss her over his shoulder in a breathtaking maneuver, sweep her back between his legs, just grazing the floor, and pull her to her feet safe and sound—all without losing the beat or her teeth. Gregory saved for months to buy a black leather jacket and tried to train a curl to flip over his forehead, but as no amount of hair ointment could conquer the limp bangs that resulted, he opted for short hair combed straight back, more comfortable but less suitable for the rebel image that made girls tremble with apprehension and pleasure. Carmen herself was very different from the teenage movie star image—blonde, virtuous, and slightly silly—that boys sighed over and plump brunette Mexican girls tried vainly to imitate by peroxiding their hair. Carmen was pure dynamite. On weekends the two friends dressed in the latest version of what was “in”—he in his black leather jacket, even if it was hellishly hot, she in tight pants she hid in her purse and changed into in the ladies’ room, because if her father had seen her he would have ripped them off her—and went off to dance halls where they were known and not charged an entrance fee because they were the main attraction for the night. They danced without pause, not stopping even to drink a Coke, because they had no money to pay for it. Carmen had developed into an intrepid young girl with a black mane of hair and an attractive face with thick eyebrows and lips; she had an easy laugh and impressive curves, with breasts too large for her height and age, protuberances she detested as grotesque but that Gregory swore grew larger by the day. When they danced, he swung her about only to enjoy the sight of those calendar girl’s breasts defying the laws of gravity and decency, but when he saw anyone who was equally admiring, he felt a blind rage. He was not consciously attracted to his friend; the mere idea would have horrified him as a sin of incest. Carmen was as much his sister as Judy, yet at times all his good intentions faltered before the treachery of his hormones, which were at constant fever pitch. Padre Larraguibel tried to fill his young charges’ heads with apocalyptic predictions about the consequences of sinful thoughts about women and about touching themselves. He threatened lightning bolts as punishment for lechery, vowed that hair would grow in the palms of their hands, that they would break out with running sores, that gangrene would rot their penises, and that finally the sinner would die after atrocious suffering, plus, should he die without confession, he would plummet headfirst into hell. Gregory doubted the divine lightning bolt and the hair on the palms of his hands, but he was sure the other inflictions were true because he had seen his father, he remembered how he had been covered with pustules and that he died for abusing himself. Gregory never dreamed of finding solace with any of the girls in his school or the barrio—they seemed off limits—nor did he want to visit the prostitutes, who seemed almost as terrifying as Martínez. He was desperate for love, inflamed by a brutal and incomprehensible ardor, frightened by the drumming of his heart, by the sticky honey in his sleeping bag, by turbulent dreams, and by the surprises dealt him by his body; his bones lengthened, he developed muscles, hair grew on new parts of his body, and his blood boiled with inextinguishable fire. At the most insignificant stimulus he exploded into a sudden gratification that left him dismayed and half faint. A woman brushing by him in the street, the glimpse of a shapely leg, a scene in the movies, a phrase in a book, even the vibration of the streetcar—everything excited him. In addition to studying, he had to work; even exhaustion, however, did not neutralize his unfathomable desire to sink into the swamp, to lose himself in sin, to suffer that wild delight, that always-too-brief death, yet once more. Sports and dancing helped burn his energy, but only a more drastic remedy could cool his raging instincts. Just as in his childhood he had fallen madly in love with Miss June, in adolescence he suffered sudden passionate crushes on inaccessible girls, usually older than he, whom he never approached but resigned himself to adoring from afar. A year later, after a sudden spurt, he would reach his full height and weight, but at sixteen he was still a slim adolescent with too large knees and ears, slightly pathetic, although there were indications of the good temperament to come. “If you can escape being a thief or a policeman, you’ll be a movie star, and women will fall all over you,” Olga promised, trying to console him when she saw him suffering inside the hair shirt of his own skin.
It was Olga, finally, who rescued him from the incandescent torment of chastity. Ever since Martínez had cornered him in the grade school broom closet, Gregory had been besieged by unconfessable doubts concerning his virility. He had not explored Ernestina Pereda again—or any other girl—under the guise of playing doctor, and his knowledge about that mysterious side of existence was vague and inconsistent. The crumbs of information garnered on the sly in the library merely confused him further, because they contradicted the experience of the street, the jokes the Morales brothers and other friends told, the preachments of the Padre, the revelations of the movies, and the alarms of his fantasies. He wrapped himself in solitude, denying with stubborn determination the perturbation of his heart and the restlessness of his body, attempting to imitate the chaste knights of the Round Table or the heroes of the Far West, but at any moment he could be betrayed by an upsurge of nature. That dull pain and nameless confusion weighed on him for an eternity, until it was more than he could live with, and had Olga not come to his aid he would have been half mad. Olga had seen him born, she had been present at every important moment of his childhood, she knew him like a son; nothing about him escaped her eye, and what she could not deduce through simple common sense she divined through her gifts as a seer, which at best consisted of knowledge of another’s heart, an observant eye, and boldness in improvising counsel and visions of the future. She had no need to call on her gift of clairvoyance to recognize Gregory’s helpless state. Olga was in the fourth decade of her life; the curves of her youth had turned to fat, and the reversals of her gypsy vocation had aged her skin, but she had not lost her grace and style, the lush foliage of her red hair, the swish of her skirts, or her boisterous laugh. She lived in the same house but no longer in one room; she had bought the property and made it into her private temple. In one room she dispensed medicines, magnetized water, and all manner of herbs; in another, therapeutic massages and abortions; and in the large living room she held spiritualist, magic, and divination sessions. She always received Gregory in the room above the garage. One day he seemed especially pale, and she was moved by the primitive compassion that recently had been her essential feeling for him.
“Who are you in love with now?” she said, laughing.
“I’ve got to get out of this fucking place,” he muttered, his head in his hands, defeated by the enemy below his waist.
“Where do you plan to go?”
“Anywhere, straight to hell, I don’t care. Nothing happens here, I can’t breathe, I’m suffocating.”
“It isn’t the barrio; it’s you. You’re drowning inside your own hide.”
The soothsayer took a bottle of whiskey from the cupboard, splashed a stout drink into one glass and another for herself, waited for Gregory to drink it, then poured another. He was not accustomed to strong liquor, and it went to his head; the windows were closed, and the aroma of incense, medicinal herbs, and patchouli was heavy in the air. With a shudder, he caught Olga’s scent. In a flash of loving inspiration, the heavyset woman walked up behind him and wrapped her arms around him; her drooping breasts pressed against his back, her beringed fingers blindly unbuttoned his shirt while he turned to stone, paralyzed by surprise and fear, but then she began to nuzzle his neck, trace his ear with her tongue, whisper words in Russian, explore his body with her expert hands, touch him there where no one had touched him, ever, until with a sob, plunging down a steep precipice, shaken with terror and anticipated joy, and without knowing what he was doing, or why, he turned to her, desperate, tearing at her clothes in his urgency, throwing himself on her like an animal in rut, rolling with her across the floor, kicking his pants down, groping his way into her skirts, penetrating her in a burst of desolation, and immediately collapsing with a scream, as his being gushed from him as if an artery had exploded in his groin. Olga allowed him to rest a moment on her bosom, scratching his back as she had so often when he was a boy, but as soon as she calculated that he was feeling remorse, she got up and went to close the curtains. Calmly, she removed her torn blouse and wrinkled skirt.
“Now I am going to teach you what we women like,” she said with a new smile. “The first thing, my son, is never to hurry. . . .”
“I have to know something, Olga; swear that you’ll tell me the truth.”
“What is it you want to know?”
“My father and you . . . I mean, the two of you. . . .”
“That’s none of your business; it has nothing to do with you.”
“I have to know . . . you were lovers, weren’t you?”
“No, Gregory. I will say this only once: no, we were not lovers. Don’t bring up the subject again, because if you do, that will be the last time I ever see you. Is that clear?”
Gregory wanted so badly to believe her that he asked no more questions.
Beginning with that afternoon, the world changed color for Gregory. He visited Olga almost every day and like an inspired student learned what she had to reveal; he pried into her every hiding place, boldly whispered every known obscenity to her, and discovered, amazed, that he was not totally alone in the universe and that he wanted to live. As his soul soaked everything in like a sponge, his body developed and within a few weeks he grew out of boyhood and his expression became that of a contented man. When Olga realized that he was falling in love from pure gratitude, she berated him furiously and forced him to look at her naked body and make a meticulous inventory of her pounds, her gray hair, and her wrinkles, of the fatigue that came from being cudgeled so many years by destiny, and then she solemnly threatened to send him away if he persisted in such twisted ideas. She described in very clear terms the limits of their relationship and added that he should be beating his breast because he had a brutal fate in store: he would not find another woman who would provide him with free sex at his whim, iron his shirts, put money in his pockets, and ask nothing in return; furthermore, he was still a runny-nosed kid, and by the time he grew up she would be an old woman, and it was up to him to concentrate on his studies and see whether he could climb out of the hole he’d been born in and make something of himself; after all, he lived in the land of opportunity, and if he failed to take advantage of that good fortune, he was a hopeless idiot.
Gregory’s grades improved, he made new friends, he began working on the school newspaper and soon found himself writing inflammatory articles and chairing student meetings for various causes—some bureaucratic, like the schedules for the sports program, others having to do with principle, such as discrimination against blacks and Latins. You got that from your father, Nora sighed, worried, because she did not want to see him become a preacher. Appeased by Olga, he could enjoy reading and spent every spare minute in the public library, where he struck up a friendship with Cyrus, the elderly bibliophile in charge of the elevator. Cyrus manned the controls with one hand and held a book in the other, so absorbed that the elevator operated itself, like a machine on the loose. He looked up only when Gregory appeared; then for a few seconds his anemic, prophet’s face lighted up and a faint smile flickered across the rictus of his lips, but he would immediately regain control and greet Gregory with a growl—to make it very clear that the only bond between them was a certain intellectual affinity. The boy usually showed up about midafternoon, after school, and stayed only half an hour, because he had to work. The old man waited for him from early morning, and as the hour approached caught himself glancing at his watch, always on guard to rein in any untoward emotion, but if Gregory failed to come it was as if the sun had not risen. They were soon good friends. Reeves liked to spend his Saturdays with the old man; he visited him in his shabby room in the boardinghouse where he lived, and at other times they went to the movies or out for a walk, although as it started to get dark Gregory always left to take Carmen dancing. After they knew each other better, Cyrus made an appointment to meet Gregory in the park, using the pretext of discussing philosophy and sharing a picnic lunch. He waited for Gregory, holding a basket from which French bread and the neck of a wine bottle protruded, and when he arrived led him to an isolated spot where no one could hear and whispered that he wanted to reveal a life-and-death secret. After making Gregory swear he would never betray him, he solemnly confessed that he was a member of the Communist Party. The boy did not entirely understand the significance of such a confidence, even though the country was at the height of a witch hunt unleashed against liberalism, but he imagined Cyrus’s proclivity as something as contagious and disreputable as a venereal disease. He made inquiries that only further muddied the waters. His mother gave him a vague response about Russia and the massacre of a royal family in a Winter Palace, all so remote that it was impossible to relate it to his time and place. When he mentioned communism to the Moraleses, Inmaculada crossed herself in fright; Pedro forbade him to utter obscenities in his house and warned him of the danger of getting involved in affairs that were none of his business. Politics is a vice; honest, hardworking people have no need for it, declared Padre Larraguibel, whose inclination toward the horrific had increased with the years. He accused Communists of being the Antichrist incarnate and the natural enemies of the United States. He assured Gregory that to speak to one of them constituted an automatic betrayal of a Christian culture and nation, since everything that was said was immediately transmitted to Moscow for diabolical ends. Be careful, you’ll find yourself in trouble with the law and end up in the gas chamber—which you’d deserve for being a damn fool. The Reds are atheists, Bolsheviks: plain bad people who have no business in this country; let them go back to Russia if that’s what they want, he concluded, with a thump of his fist that made his coffee-and-brandy leap from the table. Gregory realized that Cyrus had offered him the ultimate proof of friendship in telling his secret, and in return he vowed not to disappoint his friend as he followed the intellectual path he had recently undertaken. Cyrus stirred Gregory’s passion for certain authors and, every time he posed a question, sent him to look up the information for himself—which was how he learned to use encyclopedias, dictionaries, and other library resources. If everything else fails, he counseled, go through old newspapers. A vast horizon opened before Gregory’s eyes; for the first time it seemed possible that he might leave the barrio, that he was not condemned to stay buried there for the rest of his days. The world was enormous, his curiosity was awakened, along with the desire to live adventures that previously he had seen only in the movies. When he was free from school and work, he spent hours with his teacher, riding up and down the elevator until he was dizzy and had to stagger outside for a breath of fresh air.
He had dinner every night with the Moraleses, and in passing helped Carmen, who was a terrible student, with her homework; then he went to visit Olga, arriving home after his mother and Judy were asleep. Occasionally on the weekend he would seek Nora’s company to talk about what he was reading, but their relationship cooled day by day, and they were never again to enjoy conversations like those from their bohemian life, times when she had told him the plots of operas and deciphered the mysteries of the firmament in the starry skies. He had very little in common with his sister and must have been very distracted not to perceive her unyielding hostility. Their cottage had begun to deteriorate—the wood creaked, and there were leaks in the roof—but the land had risen in value as the city advanced in that direction. Pedro Morales suggested they sell the property and move into a small apartment where their expenses would be lower and maintenance more simple, but Nora feared that if they moved she would lose contact with the ghost of her husband.
“The dead need a permanent hearth; they can’t be moving from one place to another. And houses need a death and a birth. One day my grandchildren will be born here,” she said.
Besides Olga, with whom he shared the wondrous intimacy of uninhibited lovers, Carmen Morales was the person Gregory was closest to. Once Olga had mollified his instincts, he could contemplate his friend’s improbable bosom without discomfort. He wished for her a less sordid fate than that of women from the barrio, who were mistreated by their husbands, worn down by their children, and inconsolably poor; he felt that with a little help Carmen could finish school and learn some skill. He tried to initiate her into reading, but the library bored her; she detested school-work and demonstrated no interest whatever in newspapers.
“If I read more than half a page my head hurts. Why don’t you read it and tell me about it,” she would apologize when he cornered her between a book and a wall.
“It’s because she has those large breasts. The more bosom, the less brain, that’s a law of nature; that’s why the poor miserable females are the way they are,” Cyrus explained to Gregory.
“That old poop is a moron!” Carmen erupted when she learned what he had said, and started wearing falsies in her bra out of pure defiance, with such spectacular results that everyone in the neighborhood had some comment on how extremely well developed the younger Morales girl was.
Her breasts were not all that attracted comment. Her busy-as-a-mouse days were far behind; she had become a fiery girl surrounded by a whirlwind of suitors who dared not cross the delicate line of honor, since on the other side, resolute and suspicious, stood Pedro Morales and his four strapping sons. In many ways, Carmen was no different from other girls her age; she loved parties, she wrote her romantic musings and copied verses in her diary, she fell in love with movie stars and batted her eyes at any boy within flirting distance—that is, if she had eluded her family’s vigilance, or Gregory’s, for he had assumed the role of guardian knight. Nevertheless, unlike other girls, she had a seething imagination that later would save her from a banal existence.
One Thursday as they left school, Gregory and Carmen found themselves facing Martínez and three of his gang. The flow of youngsters leaving the building slowed for an instant and then branched off to avoid them, not wanting to provoke trouble. Martínez had seen Carmen the previous Saturday at a dance and was waiting for her with the arrogance of one who knows he is the stronger. She stopped short, like the students around her who could sense the menace in the air but were incapable of reacting. Martínez had grown very large for his age; he was an insolent giant with a Latin lover’s mustache and assorted tattoos; he affected extreme pachuco style: pomaded hair combed into two high pompadours, pleated pants, shoes with metal tips, a leather jacket, a purple shirt.
“Come ’ere, baby, give us a kiss.” He stepped forward and gripped Carmen’s chin.
She slapped his hand away, and his eyes narrowed to two slits. Gregory seized Carmen by the arm and tried to walk away from that unheroic ambush, but the gang blocked their way. There was no one to turn to: the street had emptied, leaving a terrible void; the remaining students had backed away to a prudent distance, forming a large semicircle around Carmen, Greg, and the aggressors.
“Hey, I know you, you little shitass,” Martínez jeered, giving Gregory a slight push, then added for the benefit of his cronies, “This is the fuckin’ gringo pansy I told you about.”
Still holding Carmen’s arm, Gregory tried once more to make an escape, but Martínez stepped forward menacingly, and Gregory realized that the moment he had feared had come, that there was no way to avoid the threat that had stalked him for years. He breathed deeply, trying to control his terror, forcing himself to think, realizing he was on his own and that none of his schoolmates would come to his defense. There were four gang members, and it was a sure bet they carried knives or brass knuckles. Hatred washed over him like a hot tide, rising from the pit of his belly to his throat; memories flooded back, and for a moment his mind went blank and he sank deep into a murky quagmire. Carmen’s voice pulled him back to the street.
“Keep your hands off me, you bastard,” and she fended off Martínez’s aggression as the sidekicks snickered.
Gregory pushed Carmen to one side and confronted his enemy, their faces inches apart, fists balled, eyes filled with animosity, chests heaving.
“Which do you want, you gringo homo? You want me to ream your ass again, or would you rather mix it up with me?” Martínez murmured, his voice soft and slow, as if he were speaking of love.
“Motherfucker! Four of you punks against one unarmed person—you call that a fight?” Gregory spat out.
“Say what! OK, then, this will be between the two of us,” and Martínez signaled the other three to back off.
“I’m not talking about some stupid fistfight. What I want is a duel to the death,” Gregory growled, teeth clenched.
“What the fuck is that?”
“Just what you heard, you stinking greaser,” and Gregory raised his voice so everyone around them could hear. “In three days, behind the tire factory, at seven o’clock at night.”
Martínez glanced uneasily around him, not fully comprehending what this was about, and the other gang members shrugged their shoulders, still mockingly, as the circle of onlookers closed in a little: no one wanted to miss a word of what was happening.
“Knives, clubs, chains, or pistols?” Martínez asked, unbelieving.
“The train,” Gregory replied.
“The fuckin’ train what?”
“We’re going to find out who has the balls,” and Gregory took Carmen’s hand and walked off down the street, turning his back with the feigned contempt of the bullfighter for the beast he has yet to defeat, walking rapidly so no one could hear the pounding of his heart.
• • •
It had been several years since I raced the train, first with the intention of killing myself and later just for the sheer joy of living. It passed four times a day, huffing like a stampeding dragon, convulsing the wind and silence. I always waited at the same spot, a flat, empty lot where for a while junk and garbage would collect but then be cleaned up so kids could play ball. First I would hear the distant whistle and the sound of the engine, and then I would see the train, an awesome, enormous snake of iron and thunder. My challenge was to judge the exact moment I could dart across the track ahead of the locomotive: to wait till the very last instant, until it was almost upon me, then run like crazy and leap to the other side. My life hung on the slightest miscalculation—hesitating too long, tripping over a rail, the spring in my legs, keeping a cool head. I could tell the different trains from the sound of their engines; I knew the first train of the morning was the slowest and the seven-fifteen the fastest. Now I felt confident, but as I had not actually taunted the bull for some time, I practiced with each train that passed during the next few days. Carmen and Juan José went with me to check the results. The first time they watched, Carmen dropped the stopwatch and screamed hysterically; fortunately, I didn’t hear her until the locomotive had passed, because I would probably have wavered and not be here to tell the story. We discovered the best site for the contest, a place where the rails were clearly visible; we removed the loose stones and marked the distance with a line in the dirt, moving it closer to actual impact each time, until we could not cut it any shorter because the last train grazed my back. Evenings were the most dangerous; at that time of day, when it was nearly dark, the light on the locomotive was blinding. I suppose that Martínez was practicing in a different place, so no one could see him and his excessive pride would remain undamaged. He could not evidence the slightest concern about the challenge before any Carnicero; he must show total indifference to danger, be the absolute macho. I was counting on that to give me the edge, because during my years in the jungle of the barrio I had learned to accept fear with humility, a burning in the stomach that sometimes tormented me for days on end.
By the appointed Sunday, the word had spread throughout the school, and by six-thirty there was a string of cars, motorcycles, and bicycles parked at the empty lot and about fifty of my schoolmates sitting on the ground near the track, waiting for the show to begin. The tire factory was closed, but the sickening smell of hot raw latex lingered on the air. There was a party atmosphere; some people had brought snacks, some were downing whiskey or gin disguised in soft-drink bottles, some had even brought cameras. Carmen avoided the general hubbub; she stood apart from the rest, praying. She had begged me not to do it: It’s better to have people think you’re a coward than to lose your life in the blink of an eye; after all, Martínez didn’t do anything to me, this duel of yours is crazy, it’s a sin, God will punish us all. I explained that this had nothing to do with what happened at school, that she wasn’t the cause but only the pretext—this confrontation sprang from old debts too numerous to tell, something about manhood. She hung a small rectangle of embroidered cloth around my neck:
“It’s the scapulary of the Virgin of Guadalupe my mother wore when she came here from Zacatecas. It can work miracles. . . .”
At seven o’clock exactly, four beat-up cars painted the bright purple of Los Carniceros appeared, carrying the gang members who had come to back up Martínez. They drove through the crowd, making the sign of the hooked hand before their faces and grabbing their crotches as an act of provocation. I had a vision of how there would be a battle royal if things did not turn out well and how even though there were more of my friends, they were no match for the Carniceros, who were armed and were experienced in turf wars. I had to look twice to tell which was Martínez; they all looked alike: the same Vaselined hair, leather jackets, studs and chains, and cocky walk. Martínez had not changed one iota of his gang uniform, not even the stacked heels; I, on the other hand, was comfortably dressed—I could only afford clothes I bought in rummage sales at church bazaars—and was wearing gym shoes. I reviewed my advantages: I was lighter, and faster; in fact, in any head-to-head contest he could never defeat me, but this was a duel to the death, and at the moment of truth, daring would count for more than agility. In grade school Martínez had been a good athlete, whereas I was only mediocre in sports—but I tried not to think about that.
“At exactly seven-fifteen the express will go by. We will start at the same time, separated by the width of three paces, so you don’t have a chance to push me, you shit.” I was shouting loud enough for everyone to hear me. “I’ll take the position closest to the train; I’ll give you that on a platter.”
“Don’t do me any favors, you little gringo flit!”
“Choose, then: the position nearer the train or starting farther away.”
“I’ll start farther away.”
With a stick I drew two lines in the dirt, while three gang members and some of my buddies, headed by Juan José Morales, went to the other side of the track to monitor the duel from that vantage.
“So close? You ’fraid, queer?” Martínez sneered.
I had anticipated his reaction; I scuffed out the lines with my foot and drew them farther away. Juan José Morales and one Carnicero measured the distance between us, and at that moment we heard the whistle of the train. The spectators surged forward, the gang to the left in a tight bunch, my friends to the right. Carmen gave me a last encouraging look, but I could tell she was near collapse. We took our places on the marks; surreptitiously I touched the scapular, and then I blocked out everything around me, concentrating on myself and that mass of iron racing toward me, counting the seconds, muscles tensed, attuned to the increasing clamor, alone against the train as I had been so many times before. Three, two, one—now! and with no conscious thought of what I was doing I felt a savage roar rise from my belly, as my legs rocketed forward of their own volition, an electrifying charge shot through my body, my muscles strained, and terror blinded my eyes with a veil of blood. The racketing of the train and my howl sank into my pores, filled my body until I became a single terrible bellow. I saw the gargantuan light bearing down on me, my skin burned from the heat of the engine and the air was riven by that gigantic arrow, sparks from steel wheels against rail showered upon my face. There was an instant that lasted a millennium, a fraction of time congealed for an eternity, and I was suspended above a bottomless abyss, floating in front of the locomotive, a bird petrified in mid-flight, every particle of my body straining in the last leap forward, my mind focused on the certainty of death.
I have no idea what happened next. All I remember is coming to on the far side of the track, nauseated, drained, gasping in the smell of hot metal, dazed by the furious snortings of the enormous beast clacking by, clacking, clacking interminably, and when finally it was gone I heard an abnormal silence, a soundless void, and I was in total darkness. A century later, Carmen and Juan José took my arms to help me to my feet.
“Get up, Gregory. Let’s get out of here before the police come. . . .”
Only then did I have a flash of lucidity; through the darkness I could see people running for the road. The purple cars of the Carniceros were streaking away, and there was no one there but Carmen, Juan José, and myself, splashed with blood. Pieces of Martínez were scattered across the landscape.