Chapter Two

The story of the duel of the train was repeated so many times, and embroidered to such fantastic proportions, that Gregory Reeves became a hero among his classmates. Something fundamental changed at that point: he shot up overnight and lost his naiveté, the source of so many misadventures and fistfights; he was more assured and for the first time in years felt good about himself and finally stopped wishing he were dark-skinned like everyone else in the barrio—in fact, he began to evaluate the advantages of not being like them. There were nearly four thousand students, from different sectors of the city, in his high school—almost all middle-class whites. Girls wore their hair in a ponytail, never said bad words or painted their fingernails, went to church, and some already had the immutable matronly air of their mothers. They lost no opportunity to neck with the latest boyfriend in the last row of the movie theater or back seat of a car, but they preferred not to talk about it. They dreamed of a diamond on their ring finger, and in the meantime their boyfriends took as much liberty as they were allowed before being domesticated by the blinding flash of love. They were living their last chance for fun, for games and contact sports, for drinking themselves blind, for drag racing—a time of boyish mischief, some of it innocent, such as stealing the bust of Lincoln from the principal’s office, some not so innocent, such as trapping a black or a Mexican or a homosexual and smearing him with excrement. They made fun of romance but used it when they wanted to get a girl. Among themselves they spoke of little but sex, but very few had the opportunity to practice it. Gregory Reeves was too discreet to mention Olga among his friends. He felt entirely at ease in school; he was not segregated by color anymore, and no one knew anything about his home or his family, especially that his mother was on relief. He was one of the poorest students, but he always had money in his pocket because he worked; he could invite a girl to the movies, he had enough to buy a round of beers or make a bet, and during his senior year his earnings stretched far enough to buy a car that looked like a rattletrap but had a good motor. That he was poor was noticeable only in his shiny pants, threadbare shirts, and lack of free time. He looked older than he was, and was slim, agile, and as strong as his father before him; he thought he was handsome and acted as if he was. For the next few years he took advantage of the Martínez legend and of his knowledge of the two cultures in which he had grown up. The intellectual oddities of his family and his friendship with the library elevator operator had stimulated his curiosity; in an atmosphere where men barely read the sports page and women preferred gossip magazines about Hollywood stars, he had read, in alphabetical order, the world’s major thinkers from Aristotle to Zoroaster. He had a skewed vision of the world, but in any case it was broader than that of the other students, even of some teachers. He was dazzled by each new idea, believing he had discovered something unique, and felt duty bound to reveal it to the rest of humanity; he quickly learned, however, that a display of knowledge was about as welcome among his friends as a kick in the ass. As a result, he was cautious before them, but with the girls he could not avoid the temptation to show off his act: walking the high wire of words. Endless discussions with Cyrus had taught him to defend his ideas with passion, although his teacher had frustrated any attempt to dizzy him with his eloquence. More foundation and less rhetoric, son, he would say, but Gregory found that his oratorical bombast impressed other people. He knew how to work his way to the head of any group, and his classmates grew accustomed to deferring to him. As modesty was not one of his virtues, he naturally imagined himself on his way to a political career.

“That’s not a bad idea. In a few years, socialism will have triumphed in the world, and you can be the first Communist senator in the nation.” This was but one of Cyrus’s enthusiastic ideas, expressed during their whispered conferences in the basement of the library, where for years he had tried, without great success, to sow in his disciple’s mind the seeds of his burning passion for Marx and Lenin. Gregory found his theories inarguable from the point of view of justice and logic, but intuitively he knew they had no chance of succeeding, at least in his half of the planet. Besides, he found the idea of making a fortune more seductive than owning an equal share of poverty, though he never dared confess such mean thoughts.

“I’m not sure I want to be a Communist,” was always his prudent rejoinder.

“Well, what will you be, then?”

“Maybe a Democrat. . . .”

“There’s no difference between Democrats and Republicans—how many times do I have to tell you? At any rate, if you’re going to make it to the Senate, you need to start right now. The early bird catches the worm. You need to be elected student body president.”

“You’re crazy, Cyrus. I’m the poorest boy in the class, and I speak English like a Chicano. Who’d vote for me? I’m not a gringo and not a Latino; I don’t represent anyone.”

“That’s the very reason you can represent everyone,” and his aged friend lent him a copy of The Prince, along with other works by Niccolò Machiavelli, so he could learn about human nature. After three weeks of superficial reading, Gregory Reeves returned, confused.

“This isn’t any help, Cyrus. What do fifteenth-century Italians have to do with the loafers in my school?”

“Is that all you have to say about Machiavelli? You’ve missed the whole point; you’re a dunce. You don’t deserve to be secretary at a preschool, much less president of the student body.”

So Gregory put his nose in the books again, this time with greater dedication, and gradually the illumination of the Florentine statesman shone through five centuries of history, the distance of half the globe, cultural barriers, and the fog of a youthful brain, to reveal the art of power. Gregory took notes in a notebook he modestly titled “President Reeves,” which turned out to be prophetic because, using the strategies of Machiavelli, the advice of his mentor, and manipulations of his own inspiration, he was elected president by a crushing majority. It was the first year the school was free of racial problems, because students and teachers worked together, convinced by Reeves that they were all in the same boat and nothing was to be gained by rowing in opposite directions. He also organized the first sock hop—to the scandalized dismay of the school board, which considered the dance a definitive step toward a Roman orgy. Nothing sinful occurred, however; it was an innocent party at which shoes were all the celebrants removed. The new president was determined to leave a spotless record behind him and thus start himself down the road to the White House, but the task was more arduous than he had calculated. Not only was he saddled by the responsibilities of his office; he worked in the kitchen of a taco stand until late at night, on weekends he repaired tires in Pedro Morales’s garage, and summers he worked as a bracero, picking fruit. He kept himself so busy that he was spared the vices of the alcohol, drugs, betting, and drag races in which several of his friends lost a large part of their innocence, when not their health or even their lives.

Girls became Gregory’s obsession, manifested sometimes as a euphoric bemusement capable of making him forget his own name but usually as a martyrdom of molten metal in his veins and well-worn obscenities in his mind. Delicately, because she was very fond of him, but with unyielding determination, Olga exiled him from her bed, using the pretext that it was time for him to find consolation from a different source. I’m too old for this, she told him, but the truth was that she had fallen in love with a truckdriver ten years her junior, who liked to visit her between runs. So for several years that once independent woman darned the socks and put up with the chicanery of a low-down lover—until on one of his long hauls he turned down a new road, to follow another love, and never returned. It was true, anyway, that Olga and Gregory’s encounters had lost the allure of novelty and the thrill of secrecy and had degenerated into discreet gymnastics between a grandmother and grandson. Olga was replaced by Ernestina Pereda, Gregory’s grade school classmate, who now worked in a restaurant. For a moment he imagined himself smitten with her, an illusion that dissipated almost immediately, leaving the bad taste of guilt. Of all Ernestina’s lovers, he may have been the only one with such scruples, and to banish them he had to betray his romantic nature and the chivalry he had absorbed from his mother and his reading; he did not want to take advantage of Ernestina, as so many others had done, but neither could he lie about his feelings for her. The social climate that would view sex as a healthful exercise without risk of pregnancy or obstacle of guilt had not yet appeared on the horizon. Ernestina Pereda was one of those beings destined to explore the abyss of the senses, and it was her fate to have been born fifteen years too soon, at a time when women had to choose between decency and pleasure—and Ernestina lacked the courage to renounce either. As long as she could remember, she had lived in wonder of the potential of her body; at seven she had converted the school bathroom into her first laboratory and her schoolmates into guinea pigs with whom she conducted research, performed experiments, and reached astounding conclusions. Gregory had not escaped her scientific zeal; they sneaked off with high enthusiasm to the sordid intimacy of the bathroom for mutual exploration, a game that would have continued indefinitely had the brutish Martínez and his band not cut it short. At recess, the boys had climbed onto a large box to spy on the pair, had discovered them playing doctor, and had stirred up such a storm that Gregory was sick with shame for a week and never again attempted such diversions until the day Olga rescued him from his adolescent befuddlement. By the time Gregory returned to her, Ernestina Pereda was a veteran; there was scarcely a boy in the barrio who hadn’t bragged about having her—some justifiably, many merely to boast. Gregory tried not to think about her promiscuity; their times together were free of any pretense of sentiment, and if love was never mentioned, kindness was never absent. Gregory’s infatuations usually took the form of ephemeral passions for girls from better parts of town, with whom he could not practice the forbidden pirouettes from Olga’s repertoire or Ernestina Pereda’s frenetic caracoles. He had no difficulty finding sweethearts, but he never felt sufficiently loved: the affection he received was but a pale reflection of his consuming desire. He liked tall, slim girls but yielded to any temptress of the opposite sex, even the plumpest girls from the barrio. Only Carmen was exempt from his erotic delirium; he considered her his best friend, and their pure friendship was impervious to her feminine charms. They were, nonetheless, very different in temperament, and gradually an intellectual gap opened between them. Gregory shared confidences with Carmen, took her dancing and to the movies, but there was no point in discussing anything he had read with her, or any of the social and metaphysical questions Cyrus had sowed in his consciousness. When he journeyed down those paths, his friend did not even attempt to flatter him by feigning interest; she froze him with an icy stare and told him to cut the shit. He had no better intellectual communication with other girls; they were initially attracted because of his reputation for being wild and a good dancer, but they had little tolerance for his insistent urging and soon went their way, complaining that he was a conceited bookworm who could not keep his hands to himself. Watch out if he asks you to take a ride alone in that junk heap of his; first he’ll bore you to death with some political jazz and then try to get you out of your bra. Even so, Reeves did not lack for amorous adventures. Juan José Morales thought it was not worth the effort to try to understand women; as the old Spanish song said—and Padre Larraguibel when he was inflamed with Catholic ardor—they were creatures of lust and damnation. For the machos of the barrio there were only two kinds of girls: those like Ernestina Pereda and the others, the ones who were untouchable, destined for motherhood and hearth. But a man should not fall in love with either of them; love made a man a slave or, worse, a poor deceived fool. Gregory never accepted those standards and for the next thirty years relentlessly pursued the chimera of perfect love, stumbling more times than he could count, falling and picking himself up, running an interminable obstacle course, until he gave up the search and learned to live in solitude. Then, in one of life’s ironic surprises, he found love when he least expected it. But that is another story.

Gregory Reeves’s senatorial aspirations ended abruptly the day after his high school graduation, when Judy asked him what he meant to do with his life and told him it was time for him to move out of his mother’s house because it was too crowded for the three of them.

“It’s long past time for you to live somewhere else. There’s no room here; it’s terribly uncomfortable.”

“All right, I’ll look for a place,” Gregory replied, with a blend of sadness for this brusque manner of being expelled from the family and relief for leaving a home where he had never felt loved.

“We need to have Mama’s teeth fixed; we can’t put it off any longer.”

“Do you have anything saved?”

“Not enough. We need three hundred dollars. And besides, there’s the television we promised her for Christmas.”

Judy had suffered an unhappy adolescence, to become a woman soured by unspoken indignation. Her face was still surprisingly beautiful, and her hair, even slashed by scissors, was the gold of her childhood. Pernicious layers of fat had settled over her bones, but because she was still very young she was not totally misshapen; despite her obesity, the original contours of her figure were discernible, and on the rare occasions that she forgot her self-loathing and laughed, she regained her earlier charm. She had had several love affairs with the Anglo men she met at work or in other neighborhoods; her Hispanic neighbors had long ago abandoned the chase, convinced that she was unattainable. She made it her business to frighten off her most diligent pretenders with fits of arrogance or cool silences.

“That poor girl will never marry; you can see she hates men,” Olga predicted.

“Unless she loses some weight, she’s had it,” Gregory added.

“Weight has nothing to do with it, Gregory. She won’t end up an old maid because she’s fat but because she’s so mad at the world that she wants to be fat.”

For once, Olga’s clairvoyance failed her. Regardless of appearance, Judy married three times and had countless lovers, some of whom lost their peace of mind pursuing a love she could not or would not give. She had several children by different husbands and adopted others, all of whom she raised with great affection. The natural tenderness that had left its mark on the first years of Gregory’s life, something he tried many times to recapture throughout his stormy relationship with his sister, had lain dormant in Judy’s soul until it could be channeled toward the responsibilities of motherhood. Her own and her adopted children helped her overcome the emotional paralysis of her youth and to bear with fortitude the tragic secret hidden in her past. She eventually dropped out of school and went to work in a garment factory; the family situation was precarious and the money that she and Gregory brought home insufficient for their needs. After a year of cleaning houses after school, with work-reddened hands and the conviction that she was going nowhere down that road, she decided on a full-time job at the factory. Sitting beside other badly paid and badly treated women, she stitched away in a dark, airless room where cockroaches paraded unmolested. In that industry, laws were violated with impunity and workers exploited by unscrupulous bosses. She brought home bundles of cloth and sat at her mother’s sewing machine far into the night. She was not paid overtime for her piecework, but she needed the money: at the first complaint, her employers would turn her out into the street—there were many desperate people waiting in line.

As for Gregory, he, too, was used to hard work; he had contributed to the household income since he was seven. Several improvements were made from his earnings: the old icebox was exchanged for a modern refrigerator, the kerosene camp stove for a gas range, and the wind-up gramophone for an electric record player on which his mother could listen to her beloved music. Gregory was not daunted by the idea of living alone. Both his friend Cyrus and Olga tried to convince him that instead of toiling for subsistence wages he should try to work his way through college; that alternative, however, was not one often considered among young people from his surroundings, who were forced by an invisible ceiling to keep their eyes on the ground. Once he finished high school, Gregory found himself again limited by the low horizons of the barrio. For eleven years he had done everything possible to be accepted and, despite his color, had nearly succeeded. Although he could not have put it into words, the real reason he became a laborer may have been his desire to remain part of the world in which he had grown up: the idea of using education to rise above the others seemed a betrayal. During the happy years of high school he had deceived himself briefly, believing he could escape his fate; deep down, however, he had accepted his social marginality and at the moment of confronting his future had been crushed by reality. He rented a room, furnishing it with crates containing his few belongings and books lent to him by Cyrus, with Oliver as his only company. The dog was old and half blind, had lost several teeth and large patches of his coat, could barely drag his heavy mongrel bones around, but he was still a discreet and faithful friend. A few weeks of working at a wetback’s wages were enough to teach Reeves that the American dream was not within everyone’s reach. He would return to his room at night, exhausted, throw himself on his bed, stare at the ceiling, and review the extent of his despair; he felt trapped in a bottomless pit. He worked all summer in a freight warehouse, lifting and carrying heavy loads; he developed muscles where he hadn’t known he had them and was beginning to look like a gladiator, when an accident forced a change in his life. He and another man were carrying a refrigerator, strapped between them, up a narrow stairwell; it was suffocatingly hot, and on each step Gregory bore all the weight on one side of his body. Suddenly he felt a burning electric charge in his right leg; he had to call on all his strength not to drop the load, which would have crushed his mate. A terrible bellow escaped him, followed by a string of curses, and when he could set down the refrigerator and examine his leg, he saw a purple tree with thick trunk and branching limbs; he had ruptured the veins, and in a matter of minutes his leg was grossly deformed. He was taken to a hospital, where he was told that absolute rest was required and that only surgery would repair the varicose veins. His employer gave him a week’s pay, and Reeves spent his convalescence in his room, sweating beneath the ceiling fan, sustained by the faithful companionship of Oliver, therapeutic massages by Olga, and Mexican dishes prepared by Inmaculada Morales. Cyrus’s books, classical music, and visits from friends were his entertainment. Carmen came often to tell in detail the plots of the latest movies; she had a gift for narrating, and listening to her, he felt he was watching the screen. Juan José Morales, who like Gregory had reached his eighteenth birthday, came to say goodbye before enlisting in the armed forces. As a remembrance he left a photograph album of naked women, which Gregory put aside to spare himself additional torture; he had enough with the scorching heat, his immobility, and boredom. Cyrus came to see him every day and reported the latest news in a sepulchral tone: humanity was on the verge of catastrophe, the cold war was endangering the planet, there were far too many atomic bombs ready to be activated and far too many arrogant generals willing to use them—at any moment someone would press the fatal button, the world would go up in a final blaze of light, and that would be the fucking end of everything.

“We’ve lost our sense of ethics; we live in a world of small-mindedness, of gratification without happiness and actions without meaning.”

“Come on, Cyrus. How many times have you warned me about the dangers of bourgeois pessimism?” his disciple replied mockingly.

From time to time Nora would materialize, discreet and tenuous. She would bring cookies for Gregory and a bone for Oliver, sit near the door on the edge of her chair, and discuss with greatest formality her perennial topics: history, recollections of his father, and music. With each visit, she seemed more ethereal, less substantial. On Saturdays they listened to the opera on the radio, and Nora, with teary eyes, would comment that those were surely the voices of supernatural beings, for humans could not achieve such perfection. With habitual good manners, she looked at the stack of books from her chair and courteously inquired what he was reading.

“Philosophy, Mama.”

“I don’t care for philosophers, Greg; they are against God. They try to rationalize Creation, which is an act of love and magic. To understand life, faith is more useful than philosophy.”

“You would like these books, Mama.”

“Yes, perhaps I would. We have to read a lot, Greg. With knowledge and wisdom, evil could be vanquished on this earth.”

“These books say with different words what you taught me: that all men and women are one in the eyes of God, that no one should possess the earth, because it belongs to everyone, and that one day there will be justice and equality for all.”

“And those are not religious books?”

“Just the opposite; they’re about men, not gods. They’re about economics, politics, history—”

“I pray, son, that those are not Communist books.”

As she left, she would hand him a pamphlet on Bahaism or some new spiritual guide among the many to be found everywhere and leave with a quiet wave of her hand, without having touched her son. Her presence in the room would have been so faint that Gregory wondered whether she had really been there or whether that lady with the mist-colored hair and old-fashioned dress was only a trick of his imagination. He felt a painful affection for her; she seemed seraphic, untouched by evil, as fine and delicate as a ghost in a tale. At times he was devoured by his anger toward her; he wanted to shake her out of her persistent haze, shout at her to open her eyes, just once, and look at him—Look at me, Mother, here I am, can’t you see me?—but usually he wanted only to be near her, to touch her, laugh with her, tell her his secrets.

One evening Pedro Morales closed the garage early to come see him. Following the death of Charles Reeves, he had tacitly assumed the task of watching over his Maestro’s family.

“You were injured on the job. They should pay you compensation,” he explained to Gregory.

“They told me they don’t owe me anything, Don Pedro.”

“Your boss has insurance, doesn’t he?”

“The boss said that he’s not the boss and that we’re not his employees, that we’re independent contractors. They pay us in cash, fire us at will, and there’s no insurance. You know how that goes.”

“But that’s illegal. You need a lawyer, son.”

Reeves had no money for lawyers, however, and he was discouraged by the idea of slogging through years of tangled negotiations. The minute he was back on his feet he found a less demanding but no more agreeable job in a furniture factory, where the workers were always half dazed from the fine sawdust in the air and fumes from glue, varnish, and solvent. For several months he made chair legs, all exactly alike. The accident to his own leg had put him on his guard, and he confronted the foreman so many times, demanding rights written in the contract but ignored in practice, that he was branded an incorrigible troublemaker and fired. After that he bounced from job to job, dismissed from each after only a few weeks.

“Why do you raise such a ruckus, Greg? You’re not in high school now, you’re not the president of anything. As long as they pay you, keep your mouth shut and don’t complain,” Olga counseled, with little hope of being heard.

“That’s the way, son; we have to have class solidarity. In union there is strength,” Cyrus exclaimed, pointing a trembling forefinger at an invisible red banner. “Work is elevating; all labor is equally worthy and should receive equal pay. All men do not have the same abilities, however. This isn’t for you, Greg, this is wasted effort; you’re not getting anywhere; it’s like shoveling sand into the sea.”

“Why don’t you be a painter?” Carmen asked. “Your father was an artist, wasn’t he?”

“And he died a pauper, leaving us on public welfare. No, thanks. I’m up to here with being poor. Poverty is a piss-poor way to live.”

“No one gets rich working in a factory. Besides, you don’t know how to take orders, and you get bored too fast. The only thing you’re good for is to be your own boss,” insisted his friend, who had applied the same principles to herself.

Carmen was too old now to go out in bright clothes and juggle on some street corner, but she had no desire to earn a conventional living; the idea of spending the day locked up in an office or sitting at a sewing machine appalled her. She earned a little money from crafts she sold in gift shops and traveling fairs. Like Judy and many other girls in the barrio, she had never finished high school and had no skills, but she had imagination to spare, and secretly she counted on her father to help her escape the torture of a routine job. Pedro Morales’s resolve weakened before the blandishments of his untraditional daughter, and he allowed her liberties he would not tolerate in his other children.

The work was simple in the plant for manufacturing tin cans, but a moment’s inattention could cost a worker a couple of fingers. The machine Gregory was in charge of sealed cans on the endless rows passing before him on a conveyor belt. The noise was earsplitting: the ring of levers and sheet metal, grinding presses and gears, squeals from badly oiled machinery, hammering, screeching blades. Gregory, even with wax earplugs, was nearly crazed by the din in his head; he felt as if he were inside a clanging bell tower. The noise left him drained; once outside, he was so dazed he was not even aware of the roar of traffic but felt as if he were at the bottom of a silent sea. All that mattered was productivity; each worker was forced to the limit of his strength, and often past that limit if he wanted to keep his job. On Monday the men reported for work limp from weekend hangovers and could barely stay awake. When the five o’clock whistle blew and the racket abruptly ceased, Gregory was always disoriented for a few minutes, suspended above a void. The workers washed up at faucets in the factory yard, changed clothes, and poured out toward the bars. At first Gregory hung around with the other men, swimming in smoke, saturated with cheap tequila and dark beer; he laughed at their dirty jokes and sang their raucous rancheras, more bored than enjoying himself. For a few minutes he could pretend he had friends, but as soon as he was outside and the vapors of the bar cleared from his head, he realized he had been fooling himself. He had nothing in common with the men he worked with; they distrusted him as much as any other gringo. He soon renounced that false camaraderie and went straight from the factory to his room, where he locked the door and read and listened to music. To gain the men’s confidence, he organized protests; he was the first to declare war when someone was injured or had an accident, but in practical terms it was difficult to disseminate Cyrus’s ideas on social justice when he could not count on the support of the intended beneficiaries.

“They want security, Cyrus. They’re afraid. Everyone’s looking after himself; no one cares about anyone else.”

“Fear can be overcome, Gregory. You must teach them to sacrifice self-interest for the common good.”

“In real life it seems that every person defends his stake. We live in a very selfish society.”

“You must talk to them, Greg.” The tireless socialist’s lectures never slowed. “Man is the only animal governed by ethics, that can progress beyond his instincts. If that were not so, we would still be in the Stone Age. This is a crucial moment in history; if we escape from an atomic cataclysm, all the elements are ripe for the birth of the New Man.”

“I hope you’re right, but I’m afraid that the New Man will be born somewhere else, Cyrus, not here. In this barrio no one thinks about leaps in evolution, only survival.”

And that was how it was; no one wanted to attract attention. The Hispanics, most of them illegal aliens, had overcome countless obstacles to come north and had no intention of provoking new misfortunes through political agitation that could attract the feared agents of the “Migra.” The factory foreman, a huge man with a red beard, had observed Reeves for months, but because he was one of Judy’s patient admirers had not fired him. This man dreamed of the day he would remove Judy’s clothes and sink into her generous flesh, and hoped to worm his way into Judy’s heart through her brother. He missed no opportunity to have a few drinks with Gregory, always hoping for an invitation to the Reeves house in return. I don’t want him around here, Judy groaned when her brother suggested inviting him, and Gregory never dreamed that the redhead would win the round through sheer tenacity and in time become his sister’s first husband.

Once he had caught Gregory distributing fliers in badly written Spanish and wanted to know what the hell they were about.

“These are articles of the Work Law,” he replied defiantly.

“What the fuck is that?”

“Conditions in this workplace are unhealthy, and we’re owed a lot of money in overtime.”

“Come to the office, Reeves.”

Once they were alone, the foreman offered him a seat and a drink from the bottle of gin he kept in the first-aid cabinet. For a long moment, he observed Gregory in silence, looking for a way to express what was on his mind. He was a man of few words and would never have gone to such trouble had Judy not been involved.

“You can go a long way here, man. The way I see it, in less than five years’ time you could be foreman. You’re educated, and you’re a natural leader.”

“And I’m also white, right?” Reeves returned.

“That too. Even in that you’re lucky.”

“Apparently, none of my comrades will ever get any farther than the conveyor belt. . . .”

“Those lousy indios are no good, Reeves. They fight and steal; you can’t trust them. They’re stupid, besides; they can’t understand anything, and they’re too lazy even to learn English.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about. They have more ability and sense of honor than either of us. You’ve lived in this barrio all your life and you don’t know a single word of Spanish, but any one of them learns English in a few weeks. And they’re not lazy either; they work harder than any white, for half the pay.”

“What do you care about a few stupid Mexicans? They’re nothing to you; you’re different. Believe me, you’ll be foreman; who knows, one day you could own your own factory. You got the stuff, and you should be thinking of your future. I’ll help you, but I don’t want any hassle; it’s not in your best interests. Besides, these Mexicans never complain; they’re perfectly happy.”

“Ask them and see what they say. . . .”

“If they don’t like it, let them go back home; no one asked them to come here.”

Reeves had heard that line too many times, and he angrily stalked out of the office. In the yard where the workers were washing up, he saw the trash barrel overflowing with his pamphlets; he kicked it over and walked away cursing. To work off his bad mood, he went to see two horror movies; then he stood at a counter and ate a hamburger and at midnight returned to his room. His rage, meanwhile, had turned to an agonizing sense of impotence. When he got home, he found a message on his door: Cyrus was in the hospital.

For two days his aged friend lay dying, his only companion Gregory Reeves. Cyrus had no family, and he had not wanted to advise any other of his friends because he considered death to be a private matter. He detested sentimentality and warned Gregory that at the first tear he would have to go, because Cyrus was not going to spend his last moments on earth consoling a blubberer. He had asked him to come, he explained, because there were still a few things he wanted to teach him, and he did not want to leave with remorse for a job unfinished. During those two days his heart was rapidly failing; he passed hour after hour concentrating on the exhausting process of withdrawing from life and drawing away from his body. At certain moments he found strength to speak and was sufficiently lucid to warn his disciple one last time about the dangers of individualism and to dictate a list of books, with instructions to read them in the order indicated. Then he gave Gregory the key to a locker in the train station and, pausing frequently to catch his breath, outlined his last instructions.

“You will find eight hundred dollars there, in bills. No one knows I have them, so the hospital won’t be able to claim them to pay my bill. Public charity or the library will take care of my funeral—they won’t throw me onto the dump, I’m sure of that. That money’s for you, son, for you to go to the university. A man can begin at the bottom, but it’s much easier to begin at the top, and without a diploma you’ll have a hard time getting out of this hole. The higher you are, the more you’ll be able to change things in this damned capitalistic society, you understand?”

“Cyrus—”

“Don’t interrupt; I’m getting weaker. Why do you think I filled your head with reading all these years? So you’ll use it! When a man’s earning his living doing things he doesn’t like, he feels like a slave; when he’s doing what he loves, he feels like a prince. Take the money and go somewhere far away from this town, you hear? You had good grades in school, you won’t have any trouble being admitted into a university. Swear you’ll do it.”

“But—”

“Swear it!”

“I swear I’ll try. . . .”

“That’s not enough. Swear you’ll do it.”

“All right, I’ll do it,” and Gregory Reeves had to step out in the corridor so his friend would not see the tears. He had suddenly been gripped in the claws of an ancient fear. After he had seen Martínez’s body strewn across the track, he thought he had overcome his phobia about death and in fact had not thought about it for years, but with the faint scent of almonds in Cyrus’s room the terror had returned with all the intensity of his childhood years. He wondered why that particular odor nauseated him, but could not remember. That night Cyrus died, quietly and with dignity, as he had lived, in the company of the man he had thought of as his son. Shortly before the end, the dying man had been removed from the ward and taken to a private room. Notified by Carmen Morales, Padre Larraguibel arrived to offer the consolation of his faith; Cyrus was already unconscious, and Gregory thought it disrespectful to disturb his friend, an unreconstructed agnostic, with holy water and a spate of Latin.

“It can’t do him any harm, and who knows, it might help,” the priest argued.

“I’m sorry, Padre; Cyrus wouldn’t like it, begging your pardon.”

“It isn’t up to you to decide, boy,” the priest replied emphatically, and with no further discussion pushed Gregory aside, extracted his stole and the oils for extreme unction from his kit, and performed his moral obligation, capitalizing on the dying man’s inability to defend himself.

Death came calmly, and it was several minutes before Gregory realized what had happened. He sat a long while beside the body of his friend, speaking with him for the last time, thanking him for all the things he owed him, asking him never to leave him and to watch over him from the heaven of nonbelievers. . . . Look what a fool I am, Cyrus, to ask that of you of all people, because if you don’t believe in God, you sure as hell aren’t going to believe in guardian angels. The next morning Reeves collected the modest treasure from the locker and to it added savings of his own to pay for a solemn funeral with organ music and a profusion of gardenias; he invited all the library personnel and others who had never known Cyrus existed but attended only because they were invited, like his mother, Judy, and the Morales tribe—including the grandmother, who was close to a hundred but still capable of enjoying a funeral, happy it was not she in the coffin. A brilliant sun shone the day of the burial; it was hot, and Gregory sweated profusely in his dark rented suit. Walking behind the casket down the cemetery path, he silently said goodbye to his teacher, the first stage of his life, the city, and his friends. One week later he caught a train to Berkeley. He had ninety dollars in his pocket and very few good memories.

I leapt from the train with the anticipation of a person opening a blank notebook; I was beginning a new life. I had heard so much about that profane, subversive, and visionary city where lunatics lived elbow-to-elbow with Nobel laureates that it seemed I could feel the energy in the air, the buffeting of an infectious wind that stripped me of twenty years of routine, fatigue, and asphyxia. Enough was enough; Cyrus was right: my soul was rotting within me. I saw a string of yellow lights in the moonlit mist, a scarred platform, shadows of silent travelers with their suitcases and bundles, and I heard a dog barking. There was an impalpable, cold dankness in the air and a strange odor, a blend of the metal of the locomotive and of coffee vapors. It was a drab station, no different from many others, but nothing could dampen my enthusiasm; I slung my canvas bag over my shoulder and set off, skipping like a kid and shouting at the top of my lungs that this was the first night of all the remaining stupendous days of my fantastic life! No one turned to stare at me, as if that fit of sudden madness were absolutely normal; in fact it was, as I confirmed the next morning almost as soon as I left the hostel and stepped into the street to undertake the adventure of enrolling in the university, looking for a job, and finding a place to live. It was another planet. To someone like me who had grown up in a kind of ghetto, the cosmopolitan and libertarian atmosphere of Berkeley made me feel drunk. On a wall, in bold green letters, I saw ANYTHING IS TOLERATED EXCEPT INTOLERANCE. The years I spent in Berkeley were intense and splendid years; still today when I visit, something I often do, I feel I belong to that city. When I went there at the beginning of the decade of the sixties, it was not a shadow of the indescribable circus it would become after I moved to the other side of the bay, but it was already an unconventional place, the cradle of radical movements and audacious forms of rebellion. It was my luck to be present at the transformation of the caterpillar into the large-winged, brilliantly colored butterfly that animated an entire generation. Young people came from the four corners of the nation in search of new ideas that still had no name but could be felt in the air, throbbing like muted drums. Berkeley was the Mecca of godless pilgrims, the far extreme of the continent, where people came to escape old delusions or to find a utopia, the very essence of California, the soul of these vast reaches, enlightened and without memory, a Tower of Babel of whites, Asians, blacks, a few Latinos, children, old people, and the young—especially the young: Never trust anyone over thirty. It was in vogue to be poor, or at least to appear to be so, and would continue to be fashionable in future decades, even after the entire nation had abandoned itself to the intoxication of greed and success. The residents all gave the impression of being ragged, and often the beggar on the corner looked as prosperous as the generous passerby who dropped a few coins into his cup. I observed all this with provincial curiosity. In my barrio in Los Angeles there was not a single hippie—the Mexican machos would have destroyed him—and even though I had seen a few on the beach and in the city center and on television, nothing compared to this spectacle. Around the university, heirs to the Beatniks had taken over the streets with their wild hair, beards, and sideburns, their flowers, necklaces, Indian tunics, patched jeans, and monks’ sandals. The fragrance of marijuana blended with traffic fumes, incense, coffee, and waves of spices from Eastern restaurants. In the university itself, people still wore their hair short and dressed conventionally, but you could already see signs of the changes that a couple of years later would put an end to all such prudent monotony. In the gardens, students took off their shoes and shirts and soaked up the sun in a foreshadowing of the time soon to come when men and women would remove all their clothes and celebrate the revolution of communal love. YOUNG FOREVER, said the graffiti on a wall, while every hour the merciless carillon of the campanile reminded us of the inexorable passage of time.

I had seen close at hand the several faces of racism; I am one of few whites who has lived it. When the older daughter of the Moraleses was lamenting her Indian cheekbones and cinnamon skin, her father seized her by the arm, dragged her to a mirror, and commanded her to take a good look and thank the blessed Virgin of Guadalupe that she was not a “filthy black.” On that occasion, I could only think how little good had resulted from the diploma of The Infinite Plan hanging on the wall as evidence of the superiority of Morales’s soul; at heart, he shared the prejudices of other Latins who despised blacks and Asians. No Hispanic attended the university in those days, everyone was white, with the exception of a few descendants of Chinese immigrants. And you never saw a black in the classroom, only on the sports teams. There were almost no people of color to be found in offices, stores, or restaurants; in contrast, the hospitals and jails were filled. While blacks were segregated, they were not treated like foreigners, the humiliation suffered by my Latin friends; at least they were walking on their own soil—and many were beginning to take great, noisy strides.

I made the circuit of the offices, trying to find my way through the labyrinth of the campus, calculating how much money I would need to survive and how I was going to find a job. I was sent from window to window in a round of form-filling, like the proverbial serpent biting its own tail. The bureaucracy was crushing; no one knew anything, we newcomers were considered an inevitable nuisance, to be got rid of as quickly as possible. I didn’t know whether they treated us like garbage to toughen us up or whether I was the only one who was so lost; I came to believe they were discriminating against me because of my Chicano accent. Occasionally some good-natured student, a survivor of earlier obstacles, passed on information that set me on the right track; without such help I would have spent a month circling around like a slug. No rooms were available in the dormitories, and I wasn’t interested in fraternities—they were strongholds of conservatism and class consciousness, with no room for a person like myself. One fellow I ran into several times during the madhouse of those first days told me he had found a room to rent and would share it with me. His name was Timothy Duane, and as I would later find out, girls thought he was the handsomest man in the university. When Carmen met him many years later, she said he looked like a Greek statue. There is nothing Greek about him; he’s a typical blue-eyed, dark-haired Irishman. His grandfather, he told me, escaped from Dublin at the beginning of the century, just ahead of the arm of English justice; he arrived in New York with one hand out and another behind him, and after a few years in some questionable business dealings, had made a fortune. In his old age he became a benefactor of the arts, and everyone forgot his somewhat murky past; when he died, he left his heirs a pile of money and a good name. Timothy had grown up in Catholic boarding schools for sons of the wealthy, where he learned various sports and cultivated an overwhelming sense of guilt that must have been with him from the cradle. In his heart of hearts, he wanted to be an actor, but his father believed there were only two respectable professions, medicine and law, everything else was a great stew of crooks and incompetents—especially the theater, which in his eyes was a hotbed of homosexuals and perverts. Half his income was diverted into the arts foundation his grandfather Duane had established, a beneficence that had not made the father any more sympathetic to artists. He remained a healthy autocrat for nearly a century, depriving humanity of the pleasure of viewing the fine figure of his son on stage or screen. Tim became a doctor who hated his profession and told me that he chose pathology as a specialty because at least when your patients were dead you didn’t have to listen to their complaints or pat their hands. When he renounced his dream of being an actor and exchanged the boards of the theater for the icy slabs of dissecting theaters, he became a recluse, tormented by unrelenting demons. Many women pursued him, but all those affairs had foundered by the wayside, leaving behind misgivings, regret, and insecurity—until late in his life, after he had lost laughter, hope, and a large part of his charm, when someone came along to save him from himself. But I’m getting ahead of my story; that happened much later. At the time I met him, he was deceiving his father, promising to study law or medicine while secretly devoting himself to acting, his one passion. He had just arrived in town that week and was still in an exploratory phase, but unlike myself he had had experience in the world of education for whites; he had a rich father behind him and a manner that opened every door. To see his self-assurance, you would think he owned the university. You don’t have to study much here, but you learn a lot, he told me; keep your eyes open and your mouth shut. I was still walking around on a different plane. His room turned out to be the attic of an old house, a single room with a cathedral ceiling and two skylights that offered a view of the campanile. Tim showed me how you could see other things too; if we climbed on a chair, we could see into the girls’ dormitory bathroom, where every morning girls trooped to the showers in their underwear. When they discovered we were watching, several discarded the underwear. There was almost no furniture in the room: two beds, a large table, and a bookshelf. We attached a length of pipe between two beams to hang our clothes, and everything else ended up in cardboard boxes on the floor. The house itself was occupied by two delightful women, Joan and Susan, who in time became my good friends. They had a big kitchen, where they tried out recipes for a book they were planning to write; the rising aroma of those dishes made my mouth water, and thanks to them, I learned to cook. They would soon become famous, not for their culinary talents or the book they never published, but because they originated the idea of bra-burning at public protests. That gesture, the result of a fit of inspiration when they had been denied entrance to a bar for men only, was accidentally captured by the camera of a tourist, shown on the television news, imitated by other women, and adopted as the trademark of feminists around the world. The house was ideal; it was only a stone’s throw from the university and very comfortable. I also appreciated the air of graciousness; compared to other places I had lived in, it was a palace. Some years later it would house one of the most famous hippie communities in the city, twenty-some people living in happy promiscuity under the same roof, and the garden would become an overgrown marijuana plantation—but by then I had moved elsewhere.

Tim told me I had to get rid of my shirts because that southern California style made me look like a tropical bird; no one dressed like that in Berkeley, he said, and there was no way I could go out and protest in that garb. He explained that if we didn’t join protests, we’d be nobodies and would never get any girls. I had seen the signs and banners for various causes and catastrophes: famines, dictatorships, and revolutions at points on the globe impossible to locate on a map, minority and women’s rights, endangered forests and animals, peace and brotherhood. You couldn’t walk a block without signing a manifesto or drink a cup of coffee without donating a quarter to some goal as altruistic as it was remote. Time spent studying was minimal compared to the hours dedicated to demanding redress for wrongs against the downtrodden, denouncing the government, the military, foreign policy, racial abuses, ecological crimes—all the eternal injustices. That obsessive preoccupation with world affairs, however extreme, was a revelation. For years Cyrus had filled my mind with questions, but until then I had primarily thought of them as material for books and intellectual exercises with little practical application in everyday life, things I could discuss only with him because the rest of humanity was indifferent to such topics. Now I shared this revolutionary zeal with friends; we felt part of a complex network in which every action reverberated with unpredictable consequences for the future of humankind. According to my friends in the cafés, there was a revolution in progress that no one could halt, and our theories and customs would soon be universally adopted; we had a historic responsibility to stand on the side of the good—and the good were, of course, the extremists. Nothing could be left intact, everything must be leveled to make way for the new society. I had first heard the word “politics” whispered in a library elevator, and I knew that to be called “liberal” or “radical” was an insult only slightly less offensive than “Communist.” Now I found myself in the one city in the United States in which this norm was reversed; here the only thing worse than being conservative was to be neutral or indifferent. One week after coming to Berkeley, I was living in the attic with my friend Duane; I was regularly attending classes and had found two jobs to keep my head above water. Studying presented no difficulty: the university was not yet the terrible brain factory it would later become; it was like high school, only less orderly. I was required to attend ROTC courses for two years. I liked the exercises and the summer camp so much, and was so taken with the uniform, that I signed for all four years and reached officer’s rank. When I enlisted, I had to sign a sworn declaration that I was not a Communist. As I was writing my signature at the bottom of the page, I felt Cyrus’s ironic gaze on the back of my neck, so strong that I turned around to speak to him.

The foreman of the plant for manufacturing tin cans dreamed every night of Judy Reeves, and in his waking hours relentlessly pursued a vision of her. He was not obsessed with corpulent women; he had simply never noticed that she was fat. In his eyes Judy was perfect, neither too little nor too much, and if anyone had told him she was carrying nearly double her normal weight, he would have been truly amazed. He did not focus on the extent of her defects but on the worth of her virtues; he loved the spheres of her breasts and her voluminous buttocks and was thrilled her flesh was so plentiful—all the more to hold. He was dazzled by her baby-fine skin, by her hands, roughened by sewing and housework but nobly formed, by the radiant smile he had glimpsed only twice, and by her hair, fine and pale as strands of silver. The girl’s determination to reject him merely fed his desire. He looked for opportunities to be near her, despite the arrogant indifference that met every overture. Fresh from the shower, wearing a clean shirt and splashed with cologne to dissipate the acrid odor of the plant, he stationed himself every evening at the bus stop to await his beloved’s return from work; he would reach for her hand to help her from the bus, knowing that she would choose to lurch down the steps rather than accept his help. Then he walked her home, speaking in a conversational tone as if they were the closest of friends; undiscouraged by Judy’s stubborn silence, he would tell her details of his day, the baseball scores, news about people she had never met. He would walk her as far as her door, invite her out to dinner—sure of her silent refusal—and say goodbye with the promise to meet her the next day at the same place. This patient siege was maintained for two months, without variation.

“Who is that man who comes here every day?” Nora Reeves finally asked.

“No one, Mama.”

“What is his name?”

“I’ve never asked him. I’m not interested.”

The next day Nora was waiting at the window, and before Judy could close the door in the gigantic redhead’s nose she stepped out to greet him and invite him in for a beer, ignoring her daughter’s murderous gaze. Sitting in the tiny living room, on a chair too fragile for his enormous body, the suitor sat tongue-tied, cracking his knuckles while Nora observed him with interest from her wicker chair. Judy had disappeared into the bedroom, where her furious snorting could be heard through the paper-thin walls.

“Allow me to express my appreciation for your courteous attentions to my daughter,” said Nora Reeves.

“Unh-huh,” the man replied, unaccustomed to such formal language and unable to offer a more articulate response.

“You appear to be a decent person.”

“Unh-huh. . . .”

“Are you?”

“Am I what?”

“I asked whether you are a decent person.”

“I don’t know, ma’am.”

“What is your name?”

“Jim Morgan.”

“My name is Nora, and my husband is Charles Reeves, Master Functionary in Divine Sciences: Surely you have heard of him; he is very well known. . . .”

Judy, listening in the next room, had heard all she could bear; she swept into the room like a typhoon, facing her timid admirer with arms akimbo.

“What the hell do you want of me? Why don’t you stop bugging me?”

“I can’t. . . . I think I’m in love; I’m really sorry . . .,” her miserable caller stammered, his face flushing red as his hair.

“All right, if the only way I can get rid of this nightmare is to go to bed with you, let’s get it over with!”

Nora Reeves uttered a horrified exclamation and jumped up so quickly she overturned her chair; her daughter had never spoken such words in her presence. Morgan also stood up, made a slight bow to Nora, and clamped his cap on his head; at the door, he turned.

“I see I was mistaken about you. What I have in mind is marriage,” he said succinctly.

As she descended from the bus the next day, Judy found no one waiting to take her hand to help her. She heaved a sigh of relief and started majestically homeward, swaying like a slow freighter, observing the activity in the street: people going about their errands, cats pawing through garbage pails, dark-skinned children playing cowboys and Indians. It was a long walk, and by the time she reached home her happiness had faded, replaced by acute dejection. That night, desolate, she could not sleep but tossed and turned like a beached whale. At dawn she arose, drank a cup of chocolate, and ate two bananas, three fried eggs with bacon, and eight pieces of toast slathered with butter and marmalade. Her mother found her on the porch, chocolate mustache and egg yolk still on her upper lip, with two rivulets of tears running down her cheeks.

“Your father came again last night. He told me to have you bury chicken livers at the foot of the willow tree.”

“Don’t talk to me about him, Mama.”

“It’s for the ants. He says that will get them out of the house.” Judy did not go to work that day; instead, she visited Olga. The divine looked her over from top to bottom, evaluating the rolls of fat, the swollen legs, the labored breathing, the unbecoming dress hurriedly stitched from cheap cloth, the terrible desolation in the girl’s definitively blue eyes, and she did not have to gaze into her crystal ball to suggest advice.

“What do you want more than anything else, Judy?”

“Children,” she replied unhesitatingly.

“For that you need a man. And while you’re at it, it’s best if the man’s a husband.”

Judy went straight to the pastry shop on the corner and devoured three millefeuille pastries and two glasses of apple cider; from there she went to the beauty shop, a place she had never visited before, and in the next three hours a short, sympathetic Mexican woman gave her a permanent, painted her fingernails and toenails a bright pink, and used a wax depilatory on her legs, while Judy patiently and methodically ate her way through two pounds of chocolates. Then she took the bus into the city to buy a new dress at the only store for fat women in the entire state of California. She found a blue skirt and a flowered blouse that slightly minimized her bulk and brought out the childlike freshness of her skin and eyes. Thus arrayed, at five o’clock she was standing with crossed arms and a fierce expression at the door of the factory where her lovesick admirer worked. The whistle blew, and she watched the herd of Latino workers troop by; twenty minutes later the foreman appeared, unshaven, sweaty, and wearing a grease-stained shirt. When he saw her, he stopped dead, dumbfounded.

“What did you say your name was?” To hide her embarrassment, Judy spoke in a loud, rather unfriendly voice.

“Jim. Jim Morgan. . . . You look really pretty.”

“Do you still want to marry me?”

“Do I!”

Padre Larraguibel celebrated the mass in Our Lady of Lourdes parish church, even though Judy was Bahai like her mother and Jim belonged to the Church of the Holy Apostles; all her friends were Catholics, and in the barrio the only valid marriage was one that followed the ritual of the Vatican. Gregory made a special trip in order to escort his sister to the altar. Pedro Morales shouldered expenses for the party, while Inmaculada and her daughters and friends spent two days cooking Mexican dishes and baking wedding cookies. The bridegroom provided the liquor and the music. The result was an uproarious affair held in the middle of the street with the best mariachis in the barrio and more than a hundred guests dancing the night through to Latin rhythms. Nora Reeves made her daughter an exquisite wedding gown, with so many organdy ruffles that from a distance Judy looked like a pirate ship and at closer range the cradle of the heir to a throne. Jim Morgan had saved a little money and so was able to install his wife in a small but comfortable house and to buy a new bedroom suite with a special-sized bed big enough for the two of them and strong enough to withstand the rhinoceros charges with which, in all good faith, they made love that first week. The following Friday, the husband did not come home. His wife waited for him until Sunday, when he finally appeared, so drunk he could not remember where or with whom he had been. Judy picked up a milk bottle and broke it over his head. The blow would have killed a weaker man, but it barely split Jim Morgan’s brow and, far from deterring him, stirred him to a frenetic state of arousal. He swiped the blood from his eyes with his shirt sleeve, threw himself on his wife, and despite her furious kicking, that night they conceived their first son, a beautiful boy who weighed ten pounds at birth. Judy Reeves, illuminated by a happiness she had never believed possible, offered the baby her breast, determined to give this infant the love she had never received. She had discovered her calling as a mother.

For Carmen Morales, Gregory’s departure was a personal affront. In the depths of her heart, she had always known that he would not stay in the barrio and that sooner or later he would search for new horizons; she had thought, however, that when that moment came they would leave together, perhaps live a life of adventure with a traveling circus, as they had so often planned. She could not imagine an existence without him. For as long as she could remember she had seen him nearly every day; nothing great or small had happened to her that she had not shared with him. It was he who had unveiled the childhood myths: that there is no Santa Claus and that babies don’t grow under cabbages to be delivered from Paris by the stork, and he was the first to know when at eleven she discovered a red stain on her underpants. He was closer to her than her own mother or her brothers and sister; they had grown up together, they told each other even those things forbidden by the norms of propriety their parents had taught them. Like Gregory, Carmen had fallen in love at the drop of a hat, always with breathtaking passion, but unlike him she was bound by the patriarchal traditions of her family and her society. Her fiery nature was at odds with the double standard that made prisoners of women but granted a hunting license to men. She knew she had to protect her reputation because the least shadow could unleash a tragedy: her father and her brothers watched her like hawks, ready to defend the honor of the house while they themselves tried to do to other girls what they never allowed women of their own blood. Carmen was ungovernable by nature, but at that stage in her life she was still enmeshed in the cobwebs of “what will people say.” She feared her father most of all, then the explosive Padre Larraguibel, and then God, in that order—and, last, the evil tongues that could destroy her future. Like so many girls of her generation, she had been raised by the axiom that marriage and motherhood were the perfect destiny—“They got married and had a lot of children and lived happily ever after”—but she could not find a single example of wedded bliss around her, not even her parents; they stayed together because they could not imagine any alternative, but they were light-years from the image of romantic couples in the movies. She had never seen them embrace, and it was rumored that Pedro Morales had a son by another woman. No, that was not what she wanted for herself. She continued to dream, as she had in her childhood, of a different life, a life filled with adventure, but she lacked the courage to make the break and leave home. She knew that people were gossiping behind her back: What is that youngest Morales girl up to? She doesn’t have a steady job, she goes out alone at night, she wears too much eye makeup, and isn’t that a bracelet she wears on her ankle? And she runs around with Gregory Reeves too much—after all, they’re not related. The Moraleses should keep a closer eye on that girl; she’s old enough to get married, but it won’t be easy to find her a husband when she acts like one of those easy gringas. Carmen had not, nevertheless, lacked for enthusiastic candidates for her hand in marriage. She was barely fifteen when she received her first proposal, and by the time she was nineteen, five young men had desperately wanted to marry her; she loved all of them with a chimerical passion, and after a few weeks, at the first hint of predictable routine, she became bored. About the time Reeves went away she was involved with her first American boyfriend, Tom Clayton—all the others had been Latinos from the neighborhood. Clayton was an ironic, intense newspaperman who dazzled her with his knowledge of the world and his exciting theories about free love and the equality of the sexes, subjects she had never dared broach at home but had discussed extensively with Gregory.

“Empty words! All he wants is to get you to bed and then cut out,” her friend reproved her.

“Screw you, Greg, you’re nuts! You’re farther behind the times than Papa!”

“Has he mentioned marriage?”

“Marriage kills love.”

“What doesn’t kill it, Carmen, for God’s sake!”

“I’m not interested in a church wedding, all in white, Greg. I’m different.”

“Just say it: you’ve already gone to bed with him. . . .”

“No, not yet.” Then, after a pause filled with sighs, “How does it feel? Tell me what it feels like.”

“Oh, like an electric shock, I guess. The truth is that sex is overrated; all that dreaming about it, and when it’s over, you’re only half satisfied.”

“Liar! If that was how it is, you wouldn’t keep panting after every girl you see.”

“But, Carmen, that’s the trap. You always think it will be better with the next one.”

Gregory left in September; the following January, Tom Clayton went to Washington to join the press corps of the most charismatic President of the century, drawn by fascination for his ringing political pronouncements. He wanted to feel the aura of power and play a part in historic events; as he explained it to Carmen, there was no future for an ambitious newsman in the West; it was too far from the heart of empire. He left behind a tearful Carmen, because by then she was in love for the first time; compared to the emotion she was feeling, all her other affairs had been insignificant flirtations. By telephone and in notes spotted with grammatical blunders, she related the day-by-day details of her romantic martyrdom to Gregory, reproaching him not only for having gone away at such a crucial moment but also for having lied about the electric current; had she known, she said, what it was really like, she would not have waited so long.

“It’s sad you’re so far away, Greg. I don’t have anyone to talk to.”

“People are more up-to-date here; everyone goes to bed with everyone, and then they discuss it.”

“If my parents find out, they’ll kill me.”

The Moraleses did find out, three months later, when police came to their house to question them.

Tom Clayton had not answered Carmen’s letters, and she had no sign he was even alive until some weeks later, when she finally reached him by telephone at an ungodly hour and announced, in a voice choked with panic, that she was pregnant. Clayton was pleasant but unmoved. It wasn’t his problem; he was devoting his life to political journalism, and he had to think about his career; there was no way he could come back just then—and besides, he had never uttered the word “matrimony.” He believed in spontaneous relationships, and he had supposed that she shared his beliefs. Hadn’t they discussed that very subject many times? In any case, he didn’t want to see her hurt, he would accept his responsibility; the very next day he would put a check in the mail, and she could resolve that minor inconvenience in the usual manner. Carmen stumbled from the telephone booth and walked in a daze to the nearest café, where she slumped into a chair, at a loss to know what to do. She sat there with her eyes on her cup until they announced closing time. Later, lying on her bed with a mute throbbing in her temples, she decided that her first priority was to keep her condition secret, or her life would be ruined forever. Several times she was at the point of dialing Gregory’s number, but she did not want to confess her disgrace even to him. This was her hour of truth, and she must face it alone; it was one thing to talk a big game, making vaguely feminist statements, but something quite different to be an unmarried mother in her corner of the world. She knew that her family would never speak to her again; they would throw her out of the house, out of her clan, even out of the barrio. Her father and her brothers would die of shame; she would have to bring up the baby all by herself, support it and look after it alone, and find some kind of work to survive. Women would repudiate her, and men would treat her like a prostitute. She knew that the child, too, would bear a terrible stigma. She did not have the courage to fight such a long battle—or the courage to make a decision. She argued back and forth for what seemed forever, unable to make up her mind, masking the incapacitating nausea every morning and the drowsiness that paralyzed her every evening, avoiding her family and barely communicating with Gregory, until the day came when she could not button her skirt and she realized the need for urgent action. She called Tom Clayton once again but was told that he was away on a trip and no one knew when he would return. She immediately went to Our Lady of Lourdes, praying the Basque priest would not see her; she knelt at the altar, as she had so many times in her life, but for the first time spoke to the Virgin as woman to woman. For years she had had silent doubts about religion; Sunday mass had become a mere social ritual, but being so frightened, she longed for a renewal of the solace of faith. The statue of the Madonna, robed in silk and crowned with a halo of pearls, did not meet her halfway; the colored-glass eyes in the plaster face stared into empty space. Carmen explained her reasons for the sin she planned to commit, asked the Virgin’s mercy and blessing, and from there went directly to Olga.

“You shouldn’t have waited so long,” said Olga, palpating Carmen with expert hands. “It’s no problem during the first weeks, but now. . . .”

“And it’s not a problem now. You have to do it.”

“It’s very risky.”

“I don’t care. Please help me,” and she burst out weeping hopelessly in Olga’s arms.

Olga had known Carmen since she was a child, and the Moraleses were like her own family; she had also lived in the barrio long enough to know what awaited the girl from the minute someone noticed her burgeoning belly. She set an appointment for the next night, prepared her instruments and medicinal herbs, and vigorously rubbed her Buddha, because both she and Carmen were going to need a great deal of luck. Carmen told her parents that she was going to the beach with a friend and would be gone a couple of days, and she moved in with Olga. Nothing remained of the girl’s cheerful self-assurance; fear of imminent pain overshadowed any other fears, and she could not consider the possible risks or consequences; all she wanted was to sink into a deep sleep and wake liberated from her nightmare. Despite Olga’s potions, however, and the half bottle of whiskey she drank straight down, she did not lose consciousness, and no merciful dream floated her through this crisis. Bound by wrists and ankles to the kitchen table, a rag stuffed in her mouth to prevent her screams from being heard outside, she bore the pain until she could stand no more and made signs that she would prefer anything to this torture. Olga’s response was that it was too late for second thoughts; they must follow the brutal procedure to the end. After it was over, Carmen, with an ice pack on her belly, lay weeping uncontrollably, curled in a ball like a baby until she was overcome by exhaustion, the calming herbs, and the alcohol, and fell asleep. Thirty hours later, when she still had not awakened but seemed to be wandering in the delirium of a different world, while a thread of blood, thin but constant, was staining the sheets red, Olga knew that for once her lucky star had failed her. She struggled to lower Carmen’s fever and stop the hemorrhaging, but the girl was growing steadily weaker; it was clear her life was draining away. Olga realized she was trapped. Carmen could die beneath her roof, which would mean her ruin; on the other hand, she could not put her out in the street, nor could she advise the family. As she held Carmen’s head to force some water down her throat, she thought Carmen murmured Gregory’s name, and immediately she realized that he was the only person she could turn to for help. Her call waked him from his sleep. Come this minute, was all she said, but from the tone of her voice Gregory grasped her urgency and asked no questions; he took the first morning plane and within hours was holding Carmen in his arms. He took her by taxi to the nearest hospital, cursing because through all those horrible weeks she had not confided in him. Why did you shut me out? I should have been with you. I told you, Carmen, Tom Clayton is a selfish sonofabitch, but all men aren’t like that; not every man wants to bed you and then dump you, the way your father always warned you they would. I swear there are better men than Clayton. Why didn’t you let me help you earlier? Maybe the baby would have lived. You shouldn’t have gone through this alone. What are friends for? Why are we brother and sister if it isn’t to help each other? Life can get so fucked up, Carmen; don’t die, please don’t die.

While the surgeons were operating, the police, notified by the hospital of the condition in which the patient had arrived, were trying to extract information from Gregory Reeves.

“Let’s make a deal,” the exasperated officer proposed after three hours of fruitless interrogation. “You tell me who performed the abortion, and I’ll let you walk out of here a free man; you won’t even be booked. No more questions. Nothing. You’ll be free and clear.”

“I don’t know who did it, I’ve told you a hundred times. I don’t even live here; I came on the morning plane—here’s my ticket. My friend called me, and I brought her to the hospital. That’s all I know.”

“Are you the father?”

“No. I haven’t seen Carmen Morales in more than eight months.”

“Where did you pick her up?”

“She was waiting at the airport.”

“No way! She can’t even walk! Tell me where you picked her up, and I’ll let you go. Otherwise I’ll book you as an accomplice and accessory after the fact.”

“That’s something you’ll have to prove.”

And once again the same cycle of questions, answers, threats, and evasions. Finally the police released Gregory and went to the Morales home to question the family. That was how Pedro and Inmaculada found out what had happened, and though they suspected Olga they did not say so, partly because they knew her intentions were good and partly because in the Mexican barrio informing was an unthinkable crime.

“God has punished her, so I won’t have to,” said Pedro Morales, his voice thickening when he learned of the gravity of his daughter’s condition.

Gregory Reeves stayed with his friend until she was out of danger. For three nights he slept upright in a chair at her bedside, waking frequently to be sure she was still breathing. On the fourth morning, Carmen awakened without fever.

“I’m hungry,” she announced.

“Thank God!” Gregory smiled and pulled a tin of condensed milk from a bag. Together they slowly drank the thickly sweet liquid, holding hands, as they had so often done as children.

Olga, meantime, had packed her suitcase and flown to Puerto Rico, the farthest place she could think of, telling everyone in the barrio that she was going to try her luck at the Las Vegas casinos because the ghost of an Indian had come and whispered in her ear a system for beating the house at faro. Pedro Morales put on a black armband. Publicly he said a relative had died, at home he made it known that his daughter had never been born and that it was forbidden to mention her name. Inmaculada promised the Virgin she would say a rosary every day for the rest of her life if She would forgive Carmen’s sin; she collected the money she kept hidden beneath a floorboard and, behind her husband’s back, went to visit her daughter. She found her in a coarse green hospital gown, sitting in a chair and staring out the window toward the brick wall of the building across the street. She looked so miserable that Inmaculada swallowed her reproaches and her tears and simply put her arms around her daughter. Carmen hid her face in her mother’s bosom and, as she was hugged and rocked, breathed in the scent of clean clothes and cooking that always recalled her childhood.

“Take these savings, daughter. It would be best for you to go away for a while, until your father misses you so much that his heart softens. Write me—not at the house but through Nora Reeves. She is the most discreet person I know. Take good care of yourself, and may God be with you. . . .”

“God has forgotten I exist, Mama.”

Inmaculada cut her off. “Don’t say that, even as a joke! Whatever happens, God loves you . . . and so do I. We will always be beside you, do you understand?”

“Yes, Mama.”

When Gregory Reeves first saw Samantha Ernst she was on the tennis court; she was playing, and he was trimming the shrubbery. One of his jobs was supervising the dining room in a women’s dormitory across from where he lived. Two cooks prepared the food, and Gregory oversaw a crew of five students who served the meals and washed dishes, a position much to be envied since it gave him free access to the building and to the girls. In his off-hours, he worked as a gardener. Except for cutting grass and pulling weeds, he knew nothing at all about plants when he began, but he had a good teacher, a ferocious-looking but tender-hearted Romanian named Balcescu, who shaved his head and then rubbed his scalp to a rosy glow with a scrap of felt. He spoke a dizzying mélange of languages and loved flowers as he loved himself. In his country he had been a border guard, but the moment the opportunity presented itself, he capitalized on his knowledge of the terrain and escaped; after wandering a long while he had entered the United States from Canada, on foot, with no money, no papers, and two words in English: “money” and “freedom.” Convinced that that was what America was all about, he made little effort to enlarge his vocabulary and got along principally through mime. He taught Gregory how to battle worms, whiteflies, slugs, ants, and other enemies of vegetation, and to fertilize, graft, and transplant. More than work, those hours in the open air were a pleasant pastime, and Gregory learned to decipher his boss’s instructions by constant exercise of intuition. The day he was trimming the hedge, one of the tennis players caught his eye; he stood watching a few minutes, not so much because of the girl’s looks, which off the court might not have warranted a second glance, as for her precision as an athlete. She had firm muscles, quick legs, a long face with aristocratic bones, short hair, and the slightly earth-colored tan of people who are always in the sun. Gregory was attracted by her animal health and agility; he waited until she finished the match and then stationed himself at the gate to the court to wait for her. He could not think what to say, however, and when she walked by with her racket over her shoulder and her skin glistening with sweat, he still could think of nothing clever to say. He followed her far enough to see her get into an expensive sports car. That night, in a tone of studied indifference, he told Timothy Duane about her.

“You wouldn’t be so stupid as to fall in love, Greg.”

“Of course not. I like her, that’s all.”

“She doesn’t live in the dormitory?”

“I don’t think so. I’ve never seen her there.”

“Too bad. For once, the key would have been of some use.”

“She doesn’t look like a student; she has a red convertible.”

“She may be the wife of some executive.”

“I don’t think she’s married.”

“Then she’s a whore.”

“When have you seen whores playing tennis, Tim? They work at night and sleep during the daytime. I don’t know how to talk to a girl like that—she’s very different from the girls I’ve known.”

“Well, don’t talk. Invite her to play tennis.”

“I’ve never had a racket in my hand.”

“I can’t believe that! What have you been doing all your life?”

“Working.”

“What the hell do you know how to do, Greg?”

“Dance.”

“Then take her out dancing.”

“I wouldn’t dare.”

“Do you want me to talk to her?”

“You stay away from her!” Gregory exclaimed, not wishing to compete with his friend for anyone’s favor, especially this woman’s.

The next day he spied on her while pretending to work on the shrubs and when she walked by made a move to stop her but again was overcome by shyness. That scene was repeated until finally Balcescu noticed that the shrubs had been trimmed to the nub and decided to intervene before the rest of the landscaping suffered the same fate. His solution was to walk onto the court, interrupt the game with a torrent of words in his Transylvanian tongue, and, when the terrified girl did not obey his urgent gesticulating in the direction of her admirer, who was watching with stupefaction from the other side of the fencing, take her by the arm and, muttering something about money and freedom, lead the greatly confused woman to his assistant. That was how Gregory Reeves found himself face-to-face with Samantha Ernst, who, to escape Balcescu, turned to Gregory with relief; with the approval of the colorful master gardener, they went off together to have a cup of coffee. They took a wobbly table in the most popular café in the city, an overcrowded hole-in-the-wall in a state of constant disrepair where several generations of students had written volumes of poetry and argued every theory known and where many couples, like themselves, had cautiously begun the process of getting to know one another. Gregory had thought he would impress Samantha with his knowledge of literature, but when she seemed distracted he quickly abandoned that tactic and began casting about for common ground. She exhibited no enthusiasm for civil rights or the Cuban revolution; in fact, she seemed to have no opinions about anything, but Gregory confused her passivity with depth of spirit and tightened his clutch on his prey.

Outside of tennis, Samantha Ernst had few interests—although more than the girls in Gregory’s high school or the barrio had evidenced. She had thought of becoming an archaeologist; she liked the idea of working in the fresh air in her shorts and exploring exotic places in search of ancient civilizations, but when exposed to the discipline that was required, she had renounced that career. She was not cut out for meticulous classification of crumbling bones and shards of unserviceable pitchers. Then came a few unsettled years that affected many aspects of her life. The daughter of a Hollywood producer, she had grown up in a beautiful house with two swimming pools; her father married four times and lived surrounded by nymphs just out of the cocoon, to whom he promised instant stardom in exchange for small personal favors. Her mother, a Virginia aristocrat with the hauteur of a queen and the prim manners of a governess, stoically endured her husband’s philandering with the help of an arsenal of drugs and a variety of credit cards—until the day she looked into the mirror and could not see her own face; it had been eroded by loneliness. They found her floating in the rosy foam of the marble bathtub where she had slit her wrists. Samantha, who by then was sixteen, managed to pass unnoticed in the paternal mansion among the tumult of stepbrothers and stepsisters, ex-wives, current girlfriends, servants, friends, and pedigreed dogs. She continued to swim and play tennis with her usual tenacity, without indulging in useless nostalgia and without ever judging her mother. She did not miss her; they had never been close, and she might have forgotten her completely had it not been for recurrent nightmares of rosy foam. Like so many others, Samantha had come to Berkeley because of its reputation for liberalism; she had had her fill of both the bourgeois etiquette imposed by her mother and her father’s revels with ephebes and maidens. Her car stood out among the wrecks driven by other students, and her house—provided by her father—was a bohemian refuge hidden among trees and gigantic ferns and commanding a superb view of the bay. Gregory Reeves was intimidated by Samantha’s refinement; he had never known anyone who could master the intricacies of a six-course dinner or determine the authenticity of a cashmere jacket or Persian rug at a glance—except Timothy Duane. Duane, however, made fun of everything, especially cashmere jackets and Persian rugs. The first time Gregory invited Samantha to go dancing, she looked radiant in a low-cut yellow dress and pearl necklace. Feeling ridiculous in the suit Duane had lent him, he knew he would have to take her to a much more expensive place than his budget could afford. Samantha danced badly, listening carefully to the music and counting steps, two, one, two, one, stiff as a broom in her partner’s arms. She drank fruit juice, had very little to say, and had a cold and distant air that to Gregory seemed laden with mystery. He clung to his love obstinately and convinced himself that shared tastes and passion were not indispensable requisites for forming a family. For that was exactly his intention, even though he had not yet admitted it in his heart of hearts—much less put it in words. All his life he had wanted to be part of a real family, like the Moraleses, and he was so in love with that dream of domesticity that he was determined to carry it out with the first available woman, without bothering to ask whether she shared the same plans.

Reeves graduated with an honorable mention in literature—his mentor, Cyrus, must have been celebrating in the other world—and then entered law school in San Francisco. The idea of becoming a lawyer had occurred to him first as a form of rebuttal to Timothy Duane’s opinion that the nearest thing to a lawyer is a privateer; gradually he was seduced by the idea. As soon as he made up his mind, he called Olga to tell her that she had been wrong in her prediction and, if he had anything to do with it, he was not going to be either a criminal or a policeman. Olga, who had returned from Puerto Rico some time earlier with a new store of divining and medicinal lore, told him that as always she was at least half right, because he would be working with the law—and besides, lawyers were nothing but thieves with a license. Gregory had another reason for continuing his studies: to avoid military service as long as possible. The Vietnam war, which at first seemed an insignificant conflict in a far-off corner of the globe, had taken an alarming turn, and now he took no pleasure in wearing his officer’s reserve uniform or participating in war games on weekends. A delay of three or four years, as he worked for his degree, would save him from shipping overseas.

“How do you explain the fierce resistance of those little Oriental runts?” Timothy Duane’s tone was bantering. “They can’t seem to understand that we are the most crushing military power in history. A blind man could see we’re winning. According to our official counts, their losses are so high there can’t be any enemies left; any fire from the other side has to be coming from ghosts.”

What for Duane was sarcasm, many others held as truth; they were convinced that all that was needed was one final push, and the deceitful enemy would be vanquished once and for all, if not wiped off the face of the planet. That was what the generals kept assuring the public on television while, behind them, cameras panned the rows of body bags containing American soldiers lined up on the landing fields. Hymns, flags, and parades in every city in America. Noise, ash, and confusion in Southeast Asia. A silent list of the names of the dead; no list of those mutilated in body or mind. In street protests, young pacifists burned flags and draft cards. Traitors, Commie fairies, their opponents yelled. Love it or leave it—we don’t want you. Police broke up demonstrations with nightsticks and occasional gunfire. Peace and love, man, the hippies crooned, meanwhile handing flowers to uniformed men who aimed rifles at them and dancing in circles, their eyes blurred in a paradise of marijuana, forever smiling with that shocking happiness no one could forgive. Gregory vacillated. He was drawn by the adventure of the war, but he felt an instinctive mistrust of such fervent war fever. Crazy, they’re all crazy, Timothy Duane sighed, exempted from military service by a dozen questionable medical certificates detailing a multitude of childhood infirmities.

After a long period of friendship, Gregory’s initial passion for Samantha grew into love; her suspicion dissipated, and their relationship settled into the age-old routines and rituals of courtship. They went to the movies and on long rides in the evening air, to concerts and theater; they sat together beneath the trees to study; sometimes they met after Gregory’s classes in San Francisco and strolled through Chinatown like two tourists. Reeves’s plans were so bourgeois that he dared not reveal them even to Samantha: they would build a house with a rose garden, and while he earned a living as a lawyer she would bake pies and raise the children—all proper and decent. The memory of his family’s home-on-wheels during the days his father was still healthy had lingered in his mind as the only happy time of his life. He was convinced that if he was able to reproduce that little tribe he would feel safe and tranquil once again; he dreamed of sitting at the head of a long table with his children and friends, a scene he had witnessed so many times at the Moraleses’ home. He thought about them often, because despite poverty and the limitations of the barrio where they lived, they were the best example of family in his experience. In those days of hippie communities and fast food, his secret hope for a patriarchal existence was suspect and better not mentioned aloud. Reality was changing with frightening speed; every day there was less time for the family table; the world was whirling, traditions were being turned upside down, life had become one long hassle, and even the movies—once Gregory’s only secure terrain—offered less and less consolation. Cowboys, Indians, chaste lovers, and brave soldiers in spotless uniforms were to be found only in old TV movies interrupted every ten minutes by commercials for deodorant and beer; in the sanctuary of the movie theaters themselves, once a refuge, an oasis of fleeting tranquillity, the greater likelihood now was a blow to the solar plexus. John Wayne, the hardfisted, brave, and solitary hero he had tried unsuccessfully to emulate, had retreated before an onslaught of avant-garde films. Captive in his seat in the audience, he endured Japanese warriors committing hara-kiri on a giant screen, Swedish lesbians in full flower, and extraterrestrial sadists taking over the planet. He could not even enjoy melodramas, because instead of kisses and violins, they ended in depression or suicide.

During the summer vacation, the couple was separated. Samantha went to visit her father, and Gregory divided his time between obligatory military summer camp and politics, working with other students for the advancement of civil rights. Two more diverse realities could not be imagined: rough military training in which blacks and whites were equally subject to the sergeant’s orders, and the dangerous assignments in southern states where he worked in black communities, practically going underground to elude groups of white thugs prepared to prevent any thought of racial justice. Those were the days when Black Panthers, with berets, inflammatory rhetoric, and militant marches, were eliciting both fear and fascination. Blacks arrogant about their blackness, blacks dressed in black, with black sunglasses and I-dare-you expressions, occupied the width of the sidewalk; walking elbow-to-elbow with their women—black women with bold, jutting breasts—they no longer stepped aside for white pedestrians, no longer cast their eyes to the ground, no longer lowered their voices. Defiance had replaced timidity and humility. At the end of the summer, the sweethearts came together again, without urgency but with sincere joy, like two good friends. They rarely argued or discussed controversial topics, but neither were they bored; they were comfortable with their silence. Gregory never asked Samantha’s opinion or told her about his activities because she seemed not to hear; the effort of communicating his ideas was too great a strain. She was not excited by anything except sports or an occasional innovation introduced from the Orient, such as whirling dervishes or the techniques of Transcendental Meditation. In that area there was much to choose from, because the city offered an infinity of marathon courses for people who wanted to acquire in the space of an easy weekend the hard-won wisdom of the great mystics of India. Reeves had been raised among the Logi and Master Functionaries, he had seen his mother divorce herself from reality and disappear down spiritual paths, and he knew Olga’s sorcery: it was not strange that he should mock such disciplines. Samantha lamented his lack of sensitivity but was not offended, nor did she attempt to change him—the task would have been too exhausting. Her energy was very limited, perhaps she was simply lazy, like her cats; in that place and that time it was easy to confuse her abulic temperament with the vogue for Buddhist serenity. She lacked vigor even in lovemaking, but Gregory persisted in calling her coldness timidity and invested all his imagination in their lukewarm courtship, inventing virtues where few existed. He learned to play tennis in order to join his sweetheart in her one passion, even though he detested the game; he never won, and as the match was between only two players, there was no way to dilute defeat by sharing it equally among members of a team. She, on the other hand, made no attempt to pursue any of his interests. On the one occasion when they went to the opera, she fell asleep in the second act, and every time they went dancing they ended up in a bad mood, because she was unable to relax and feel the beat of the music. The same thing happened when they made love; they moved in different tempos and were left with a sensation of emptiness. Neither of the two, however, saw any warnings for the future in those misencounters; instead, they placed the blame on their fear of a pregnancy. Samantha objected to any form of contraception, some for being unaesthetic or uncomfortable and others because she was not inclined to interfere with the delicate balance of her hormones. She cared for her body obsessively; she worked out for hours, drank two liters of water a day, and took nude sunbaths. While Gregory was learning to cook with his friends Joan and Susan, and reading the Kamasutra and any erotic manual he could get his hands on, she was nibbling raw vegetables and defending chastity as therapeutic hygiene for the body and discipline for the soul.

Reeves’s initial enchantment with the university diminished at the same rate as his Chicano accent. By the time he graduated, he had concluded, like many others, that he had learned more in the street than in the classroom. A university education attempted to prepare students for a productive and docile existence, a project at odds with their increasing rebelliousness. Professors considered themselves more or less exempt from that earthquake; blinded by their petty rivalries and their bureaucracy, they did not perceive the gravity of what was taking place. In four years of study, Gregory had no memorable teachers, despite the fact that many were celebrated scientists and humanists; no one but Cyrus had ever forced him to examine his ideas and to spread his wings in intellectual exploration. He had spent his time looking up pointless information, memorizing facts, and writing papers that no one analyzed. His romantic ideas about student life had been buried under meaningless routine. Even so, he did not want to leave that incredible city, although for practical reasons it would have been easier to live in San Francisco. The People’s Republic of Berkeley was by now under his skin; he liked losing himself in streets swarming with swamis in cotton tunics, women with the air of Renaissance ghosts, sages with no ties to this earth, revolutionaries without a revolution, street musicians, preachers, lunatics, peddlers, craftsmen, police, and criminals. A vogue for Indian fashion predominated among the young, who wanted to distance themselves as much as possible from their bourgeois parents. Everything was for sale in the streets and squares: drugs, shirts, records, used books, cheap jewelry. The traffic was a pandemonium of graffiti-covered buses, bicycles, ancient lime-green and watermelon-pink Cadillacs, and the decrepit conveyances of a fleet of taxis that were cheap for ordinary people and free for special people like bums and protesters.

To earn more money, Gregory began baby-sitting; he collected the children after school and entertained them until their parents returned home. He started with five children, but soon the number grew and he was able to resign his jobs as waiter in the girls’ dormitory and gardener with Balcescu; he bought a small bus and hired a couple of assistants. He earned more money than any of his classmates, but although the work looked easy from a distance, it was extremely demanding. The children were like sand—from a distance they were identical, when he tried to collect them they escaped through his fingers, and when he wanted to be free of them he could not brush them off—but he was fond of them and actually missed them on weekends. One of the smallest boys had a talent for disappearing; he made such an effort to go unnoticed that he became the one Gregory would never forget. One afternoon he did in fact vanish. Before starting home, Gregory always counted the children, but that day he was late and failed to do so. He followed his usual route, and as he reached the shy child’s house he realized in horror that the boy was not on the bus. He turned around and rushed back to the playground, arriving just as it was growing dark. He ran through the park, calling the child at the top of his lungs, while the remaining children, tired and out of sorts, sat sobbing in the bus. Finally Gregory ran to a telephone to ask for help. Fifteen minutes later there was a gathering of several policemen with flashlights and dogs, volunteer searchers, a waiting ambulance—should it be needed—two reporters and a photographer, and fifty or so neighbors and bystanders, watching from beyond ropes.

“You better notify the parents,” the officer decided.

“My God! How am I going to tell them?”

“Come on, I’ll go with you. These things happen; I’ve seen everything in my time. The bodies turn up later—I wouldn’t describe that—some raped . . . tortured. . . . Too many perverts on the loose. If I had my way, I’d send them all to the gas chamber.”

Reeves’s knees were like water, and he was on the verge of throwing up. When he reached the house the second time, the door opened and the little cherub stood in the doorway, his face smeared with peanut butter. He said he had been bored and decided to go home and watch television. His mother was not back from work yet and never suspected that her son had been reported missing. From that day on, Gregory’s slippery charge was restrained by a rope tied around his waist, just like the cord that bound Inmaculada Morales’s daft mother-in-law, to both prevent a repetition of the problem and quash any flowering of independence among the other children. Great idea! So what does it matter if they have to pay a psychiatrist later to treat them for a puppy-dog complex, Carmen commented when Gregory called to report his solution.

Joan and Susan moved to an old, run-down, but still structurally sound mansion, where they opened a vegetarian and macrobiotic restaurant that came to be considered the best in the city. A colony of hippies moved into their former house. First there were two couples and their children, but that number rapidly multiplied; the doors were open to welcome anyone who wanted to find refuge in their oasis of drugs, crafts, yoga, Eastern music, free love, and communal kitchen. Timothy Duane could not tolerate the disruption, confusion, and filth, and he rented an apartment in San Francisco, where he was studying medicine. He offered to share it, but Reeves was still reluctant to leave the attic, even though he, too, was attending classes in the city across the bay and was fed up with the hippies. It annoyed him to come home and find strangers in his room, he detested the monotonous music of drums, whistles, and flutes, and his hackles rose every time his personal belongings disappeared. The flower children would smile benignly when he came raging downstairs to reclaim his shirts: Peace and love, man. He almost always retreated with his tail between his legs to the last private corner of his room, without his possession and with a feeling of being a rotten capitalist. Berkeley had become a center for drugs and rebellion; every day new nomads poured in, searching for paradise. They came riding roaring motorcycles, driving broken-down cars, and in buses fitted out as temporary homes; they camped in the public parks, gently made love in the streets, and lived on air, music, and grass. The odor of marijuana predominated over any other. There were two revolutions in progress: one of hippies, who wanted to change the laws of the universe with Sanskrit prayers, flowers, and kisses, and a second of iconoclasts who meant to change the laws of the nation with protests, yelling, and rocks. The second was more in line with Gregory’s nature, but he did not have time to participate and he lost his enthusiasm for street skirmishes when he realized they had become a way of life, a common pastime. He stopped feeling guilty to be studying instead of bedeviling the police, he believed that his unsung efforts during the summer, going house to house to register southern blacks to vote, were more valuable. When there were no civil rights protests, there were marches against the war in Vietnam; it was a rare day without some public altercation. The police used military tactics and combat units to maintain an illusion of order. Among those horrified by the promiscuity, chaos, and contempt for private property, a counteroffensive was organized to preserve the values of the Founding Fathers. A chorus of voices rose in defense of the sacred American Way of Life: They are tearing down the pillars of Western Christian civilization! This nation will end up a Communist and psychedelic Sodom and Gomorrah, that’s all these misfits want! Blacks and hippies are ripping the guts out of our system! Timothy Duane parodied perfectly his father and other gentlemen at the club. They were not the only ones to place all the dissidents in one package: the press tended to fall into the same trap of oversimplification, even though the most superficial examination revealed significant differences. The cause of civil rights was growing stronger in direct ratio to the disintegration of the hippie movement. The revolution against racism advanced powerfully and inexorably, while the flower revolution was a pipe dream. The hippies, tripped out on hallucinogenic mushrooms, grass, sex, and rock, gave little heed to their own weaknesses and to the strength of their detractors; they believed that humanity had moved onto a higher plane and that nothing would ever be the same again. We should never underestimate human stupidity, Duane said with conviction. A few loonies may run around kissing each other and tattooing doves on their chests, but I can assure you no trace will remain of them; they will be swallowed up by history. In the friends’ late-night conversations, he always sounded the skeptical note, convinced that mediocrity would in the end defeat the great ideals and that therefore no one should consume any energy getting excited about the Age of Aquarius, or any other age. He maintained that it was a waste of Gregory’s time to spend his summer registering blacks, because they would not bother to vote or else would vote Republican. Every time, however, there was an effort to raise funds for civil rights campaigns, Duane managed to wheedle a four-figure check from his mother. He defended feminism as a magnificent concept that released him from paying the woman’s share on a date—and incidentally might lead to a cost-free evening in bed—but in fact he never took advantage of such opportunities. He had a cynicism that both shocked and amused Gregory.

Freedom and money, money and freedom, was Balcescu’s continuing enigmatic preachment. By then he had acquired a slightly more extensive vocabulary in English, had added a mandarin’s pigtail to his shaved skull, dressed like a feudal Russian peasant, and among his plants taught his brand of philosophy to a small clique of followers. Duane attributed Balcescu’s success to the fact that no one understood anything he was saying and to his extraordinary skill in cultivating bathtubs of marijuana and flowerpots of magic mushrooms. The Romanian had a small LSD laboratory in his garage, a flourishing business that in a relatively short time made him a rich man. Although Gregory had not worked with him for years, they had remained good friends, a relationship based on love of roses and the pleasures of the table. Balcescu had a natural instinct for inventing garlic-based dishes to which he gave unpronounceable names, presenting them as the typical cuisine of his country. He taught Gregory to cultivate roses in wine barrels so he could take them with him in case he moved or left the country.

“I’m not thinking of leaving.” Gregory laughed.

“You never know. Without freedom, without money, what’s to do? Emigrate.” Balcescu sighed with a pathetic expression of nostalgia.

Samantha Ernst studied literature in her spare time, after her workouts and her sports. She had never held a job and never would. Her father had recently been ruined financially by producing a high-budget film on the Byzantine Empire that was such a monumental fiasco it destroyed his own empire in less time than it takes to tell. Like all her stepbrothers, stepsisters, and stepmothers, who until then had profited from the producer’s generosity, Samantha was forced for the first time to provide for herself; she never suffered any real want, however, because Gregory Reeves was there. They had planned to be married after he completed law school and found a good job, but the magnate’s ruin precipitated events and they had to set the wedding forward a couple of years. They were married in a ceremony so private it seemed secret, with Timothy Duane and Samantha’s tennis instructor as the only witnesses; after the wedding they called relatives and friends with the news. Gregory visited Nora and Judy Reeves once a year, at Thanksgiving time; they were semiestranged, and the mother and sister were not surprised not to be invited to the wedding, but the Moraleses were deeply offended and for a while stopped speaking to their “gringo son,” as they called him—-until Margaret’s birth softened their hearts and they forgave him. Gregory moved his belongings into Samantha’s house, including the wine barrels of roses, prepared to begin his dream of the perfect family. Married life was not as idyllic as he had imagined; marriage resolved none of the problems of courtship, it merely added new ones, but he did not lose hope and looked forward to better times once he received his law degree, found a normal job, and had fewer pressures. His baby-sitting enterprise provided enough money for his wife’s comfort, although he could not share any of the benefits. His schedule had deteriorated into a veritable marathon. He rose at dawn to do his chores, then traveled one hour to class. In the afternoon he took his charges to museums, parks, and entertainments, keeping one eye on them and another on his books. Once a week he went to the laundromat and the market; many nights he earned a few dollars helping Joan and Susan in their restaurant. By the end of the day he arrived home exhausted; he usually put some meat on the grill and ate while he continued to study. Samantha was revolted by the sight of raw meat and nauseated by the smell of it cooking, so she preferred not to be around at dinnertime. Their schedules never meshed anyway; she slept till noon, began her activities in the afternoon, and always had some class at night: African drums, yoga, Cambodian dance. While her husband outdid himself to meet all his obligations, she seemed perpetually confused, as if mere existence were a major challenge to her elusive nature. Conjugal life did nothing to increase her interest in games of love, and she continued to be as indifferent as ever in bed—with the added aggravation that now they had more opportunities to be together and fewer excuses for her coldness. Gregory tried to follow the advice in his manuals, even though he felt ridiculous performing the erotic gymnastics Samantha seemed not to appreciate anyway. Mulling over the meager results of his efforts, Gregory came to the conclusion that with the happy exception of Ernestina Pereda, women had no great enthusiasm for lovemaking. He was ignoring countless publications that proved the contrary, and as the Western world acknowledged an outburst of female libidos, he substituted patience for passion, although he never completely abandoned the hope that gradually he could lead Samantha into the sinful gardens of lust, which was how Duane, with his tormented Catholic conscience, referred to pure and simple sexual diligence.

When Samantha discovered she was pregnant, she was totally demoralized. She felt that her tanned body, which had never known a gram of excess fat, had become a loathsome receptacle housing a rapidly growing, gluttonous tadpole that she could not imagine had any connection with her. During those first weeks she wore herself out doing the most violent exercises in her repertory, subsconsciously hoping to be liberated from pernicious servitude, but then she was felled by exhaustion and did nothing but lie in bed staring at the ceiling, devoid of hope and furious with Gregory, who seemed enchanted by the idea of a child and responded to her complaints with sentimental platitudes—absolutely inappropriate behavior, as Samantha never failed to tell him, given the circumstances. It’s your fault, all your fault, she reproached him. I don’t want children, at least not yet. You’re the one who’s always talking about having a family—God knows where you got such a stupid idea—and from talking so much about it, now it’s happened. Damn you! She could not believe her bad luck; she had assumed she was barren, because in years of not taking precautions she had never been caught. She kept repeating to herself, like a spoiled child who always got her own way, If I don’t want it, it won’t happen. She suffered attacks of nausea brought on more by her revulsion toward herself and rejection of the baby than by her pregnancy. Gregory bought a natural foods cookbook and asked Joan and Susan to advise him how to prepare healthful meals, an empty exercise since Samantha seemed barely able to tolerate a stalk of celery or a slice of apple. Three months later, when she could see the changes in her waistline and breasts, she abandoned herself to her fate with a kind of rabid dedication. Her lack of appetite turned to voraciousness, and contrary to all her vegetarian principles, she methodically devoured greasy pork chops and sausages that Gregory cooked at night and she nibbled cold all day long. One night while eating with a group of friends at a Spanish restaurant, she discovered the special of the day, callos a la madrileña, a concoction of tripe with the consistency of a wet towel soaked in tomato sauce. She went so often at odd hours to order the same dish that the chef took a liking to her and gifted her with plastic containers running over with his insalubrious stew. She gained weight and broke out in welts, she suffered severe depression, she felt ill and guilty, poisoned by putrid food and animal cadavers, but as if accepting some form of punishment, she could not stop eating. She slept too much and the rest of the time watched television from her bed, surrounded by her cats. Reeves, who was allergic to cat hair, moved to a different room, without ever losing his good humor or his patience. He would smile to himself and say, She’ll get over it; she gets these whims because she’s pregnant. Even though Samantha despised housework, her house had once been presentable; now relative order had turned to chaos. Gregory tried to do some cleaning, but however much he tried, the odor of cat urine and Spanish tripe permeated the house.

That was the year the aquatic childbirth technique came into vogue, an original combination of breathing exercises, balms, Eastern meditation, and common, everyday water. Some training was necessary if one was to accomplish a delivery in a bathtub, supported by the baby’s father and accompanied by friends and anyone else who wanted to participate; the baby was ushered into the world without the trauma of being ejected from the warm, silent, liquid ambience of the maternal womb into the horror of a delivery room blazing with lights and bristling with surgical instruments. It was not a bad concept but in practice was rather complicated. Samantha had refused even to discuss the subject of the birth, faithful to her theory that if she did not want something it would not happen, but toward the seventh month she had no choice but to face reality because within a finite period of time the baby would be born and she, inevitably, would play a role in the event. To give birth in a warm tub under soft light, assisted by a pair of beatific midwives, seemed less threatening than the same process carried out on a hospital table, given into the hands of an aproned and masked man no one could recognize; she was not agreeable, however, to turning the moment into a social event—despite the midwives’ promises that she needn’t worry about anything and the price included drinks, marijuana, music, and photographs. We were married in private, so why would I have the baby in public? And I certainly don’t want anyone taking my picture with my legs spread apart. Samantha’s mind was made up, putting an end to the dilemma of her nonparticipation. She got up from her bed and began attending the classes with Gregory; there she saw other women in the same condition and discovered that pregnancy is not necessarily a disgrace. She noticed with surprise that other women seemed content and even exhibited their bellies with pride. That had a healthy effect; she partially regained respect for her body and determined to take care of herself; she did not forgo the tripe a la madrileña, but she did add vegetables and fruit to her diet, take long walks, and rub almond oil and sage-and-mint lotion into her skin. She bought clothes for the baby and for a few weeks seemed her old self. The extensive preparations for the delivery included installation of an enormous wood tub in the living room; in principle it could be rented, but they were persuaded to buy it. After the baby was born it could be used in other ways, they were told; this was also the time when friends were beginning to sit naked in large tubs to enjoy a communal soak in steaming hot water. The purchase turned out to have been for naught, however, because five weeks before the baby was due, Samantha gave birth to a girl; they named her Margaret, after the maternal grandmother who died in the rosy foam. Gregory had come home one evening to find his wife sitting in a puddle of amniotic fluid, so befuddled it had not occurred to her to call for help, to say nothing of practicing the seal breathing she had learned in the childbirth courses. Gregory helped her into the bus he used for his work and sped to the hospital, where a caesarean was performed to save the baby. Margaret did not enter the world in a wood tub, lulled by soporific chants and clouds of incense, but prematurely began life in an incubator, a pitiable, solitary fish in an aquarium. It was two days later, as Samantha was taking her first tentative steps down the hospital corridor, that Gregory remembered to call the spiritual midwives, relatives, and friends to tell them the news. He regretted that Carmen had not been by his side, the only person with whom he would have wanted to share the trials of those moments.

For Samantha Ernst, the wind of disaster had begun to blow on the very day of her birth, when her aristocratic mother had placed her in the hands of a nurse and forever renounced responsibility for her, and the moment her own daughter was born, that wind had turned into a hurricane that swept Samantha beyond the bounds of reality. Much later she would confess to her analyst, with absolute sincerity, that the only feeling she had for the tiny creature gasping for breath in the glass cage was denial. Secretly she was grateful she did not have milk to nurse the infant and was not obliged to hold her in her arms. Nothing she had learned during the courses was of any use to her; she was never able to accept her daughter, dismissing her as one more baby girl among the thousands born on the planet at that hour of that day. Nor could she absorb the idea that she had the basic care of that tiny wormlike creature. She looked at herself in the mirror and saw a long incision across her belly, once smooth and tanned and now flabby and covered with stretch marks, and she wept inconsolably for her lost beauty. Her husband tried to comfort her, but every time he came near she repulsed him with undisguised venom. She’ll get used to it, it’s all very new, she’s upset, Gregory thought, but after three weeks, when they were ready to release the infant from the hospital and the mother had not stopped examining herself in the mirror and sobbing, he had to ask his sister for help. Perhaps his mother would have been the logical person in a crisis of that nature, but Samantha could not bear her mother-in-law; she had never perceived any of her virtues and thought of her as a weird old woman who would drive a turtle out of its mind. Gregory also thought of Olga, who truly enjoyed babies and bringing them into the world, but he knew that if his wife could not tolerate Nora, she would have even less patience with Olga.

Gregory called Judy and pleaded with her. “I need your help. Samantha is depressed and ill, and I don’t know anything about babies. Please come.”

“I’ll ask for the day off Friday and spend the weekend with you, but that’s all I can do,” she replied.

Weary of the drunken sprees of the gigantic redhead Jim Morgan, by whom she had two children, Judy had divorced him and gone back to live with her mother in the old cottage. Nora looked after the two grandchildren, one of whom was still a babe in arms, while Judy supported the family. Jim Morgan loved his wife and would love her till the day he died, regardless of the fact that she had become a harpy who chased him screaming through the house, stood at the door of the factory to insult him before his workers, and prowled the bars looking for him in order to create a scene. When she threw him out of the house once and for all and filed for divorce, he felt as if his life were over; he had gone on a monumental bender from which he awakened behind bars. He could not explain how the tragedy had occurred; he did not even remember the person he had killed. Some witnesses said it was an accident, that Morgan had not meant to kill the man—he had polished off his hapless victim with one punch—but the circumstances did not favor the accused. The victim was, by all lights, a sober, mild-mannered featherweight who when the altercation began was standing on a corner ringing a bell for the Salvation Army. Once in prison, Jim Morgan could not contribute to the children’s support, but Judy was happy with that, convinced that the less contact her children had with a criminal father, the better it would be for them. Since she did not make enough money to live in her own house, she went back to live with her mother.

When Gregory met his sister at the airport, he was shocked to see how much weight she had gained. He could not hide his feelings, and she noticed immediately.

“Don’t say anything. I know what you’re thinking.”

“You need to go on a diet, Judy!”

“That’s easy to say; and the proof of that is how often I’ve done it. I must have lost two thousand pounds in all.”

With difficulty she climbed into Gregory’s bus, and they drove to the hospital to pick up Margaret. They were handed a small bundle wrapped in a shawl, so light they looked inside to be sure she was there. Among the folds of wool they found a tiny infant, calmly sleeping. Judy bent down to her niece and began to kiss and nuzzle her like a bitch with her whelp, transfigured by a tenderness Gregory had not seen in decades but had not forgotten. All the way home, she talked to Margaret and petted her, while Gregory observed from the corner of his eye, amazed at Judy’s transfiguration: the unsightly layers of fat disappeared, revealing the radiant hidden beauty below. At home they found the cats sleeping in the cradle and Samantha in her room standing on her head, seeking relief from her emotional anxiety in a fakir’s acrobatics. Gregory shook the cat hair from the baby’s bedding while Judy, short-tempered from the trip and from hours on her feet, jolted her sister-in-law from nirvana with one shove, turning her right side up and returning her to the hard facts of reality.

“Come let me show you how to sterilize the bottles and change the baby’s diapers,” she commanded.

“You’ll have to explain it to Greg. I’m not any good at those things,” Samantha stammered, retreating.

“It’s better if he doesn’t spend too much time with the baby; you don’t want the same shit from him I got from my father,” Judy grumbled testily.

“What are you talking about?” asked Gregory, who was holding the child.

“You know damn well what I’m talking about. I’m not a cretin; do you think I haven’t noticed that you always have kids around?”

“Kids are my job!”

“Your job, sure. Of all possible jobs, you had to choose that one. I wonder why. I bet you look after little girls too, don’t you? All men are perverts!”

Gregory deposited Margaret on the bed, took his sister roughly by one arm, and dragged her into the kitchen, closing the door behind them.

“Now you’re going to explain what the fuck you mean!”

“You have an amazing ability to play dumb, Gregory. I can’t believe you don’t know. . . .”

“I don’t know!”

And then the venom spilled from Judy, all that she had borne in silence from that night over twenty years before when she had not let Gregory crawl into her sleeping bag, the secret zealously guarded with the fear it was not a mystery and that everyone knew, the hidden theme of all her bad dreams and rancor, the unspeakable shame that she was exposing now only to protect her niece—an innocent baby, she said—to prevent the sin of incest from happening again in the family, because those things are in the blood, they’re genetic curses, what a black day it was when that piece of garbage brought us into the world, he was a filthy, sinful lecher, and if you need more details I can give them to you, because I remember everything, it’s burned into my memory, if you want me to I’ll tell you how he got me into the shed with a hundred excuses and made me open his fly and he put it in my hands and told me it was my doll baby, my sugar candy, to do it like that, like that, more, until—”.

“That’s enough!” screamed Gregory, clapping his hands over his ears.

• • •

Every Monday morning Gregory Reeves called Carmen Morales, something they do to this day. After the abortion that nearly cost her her life, Carmen had told her mother goodbye and disappeared without a trace. Her name was never spoken in the Morales house, but no one forgot her, least of all her father, who quietly dreamed about her but was too proud to admit he was dying of pain for his absent daughter. She did not communicate again with her family, but two months later Gregory received a postcard from Mexico with a telephone number and the drawing of a small flower, Carmen’s unmistakable signature. He was the only one to have news of her during that period, and through him Inmaculada Morales learned what her daughter was doing. In their brief Monday conversations, the two friends kept up-to-date about their lives and plans. Their voices were distorted by static and by the strain of talking long-distance; it was difficult to communicate in interrupted sentences, and their memories of each other began to dim: they were as if blind, with their hands outstretched in the darkness. Carmen had rented a sordid room on the outskirts of Mexico City and was working in a silver workshop. She spent so many hours traveling by bus across that huge accursed city that she had no time for anything else. She had no friends or lovers. The disillusion she had experienced at the hands of Tom Clayton had destroyed her ingenuous tendency to fall in love at first sight, and besides, being where she was, it was nearly impossible to find someone who would understand and accept her natural independence. Her father’s and her brothers’ machismo was pale compared to what she was encountering, and, prudently, she settled for solitude as the lesser evil. Because of Olga’s unfortunate procedure and the subsequent operation, she would never be able to have children; she was freer than before, but also sadder. She lived on the implicit boundary where the official city ended and the inadmissible world of the marginal began. The building she occupied consisted of a narrow passageway with a row of rooms on either side, a couple of water taps, a trough for laundry in the center, and communal bathrooms in the rear—always so filthy she tried to avoid using them. It was a more violent place than the ghetto where she had grown up: people had to fight for their minuscule space, and there were many quarrels and few hopes; she was in a nightmare world, unknown to tourists, a terrible labyrinth ringing the beautiful city founded by the Aztecs, an enormous conglomerate of wretched shacks and unpaved and unlighted streets suffocating in garbage that stretched toward an endless horizon. She walked among downtrodden Indians and indigent mestizos, naked children and starving dogs, women bowed by the weight of pregnancies and drudgery, idle men resigned to their fate but with a hand on the grip of a dagger, ready to defend their eternally threatened dignity and manhood. Now she could not count on the protection of her family and soon realized that as a young woman living alone she was a rabbit surrounded by a pack of hounds. She never went out at night; she slept with a bar across her door, another over the window, and a butcher knife beneath her pillow. When she went out to wash her clothes, the other women stared at her with distrust because she was different. They called her “gringa,” in spite of her having explained a thousand times that her family was from Zacatecas. Men she never spoke to at all. Sometimes she bought candy and sat in the alley, waiting for children to gather around her; those were her few happy moments. In the workshop she sat beside silent Indians with magic hands, who rarely spoke to her but taught her the secret of their art. The hours raced by unnoticed; she was absorbed in the laborious process of modeling the wax, pouring the metals, engraving, polishing, mounting the stones, and assembling each minute piece. At night she designed earrings, rings, and bracelets in her room; first she practiced with tin and pieces of glass; later, when she had saved a little money, she used silver and semiprecious stones. In her free hours she sold the pieces door-to-door, taking care that her employers never learned of their modest competition.

The birth of her daughter had launched Samantha Ernst into a quiet but fierce depression; there were no scandalous rages or dramatic changes in behavior, but she was not the same. She continued to get up at noon, watch television, and lie in the sun like a lizard, without resisting reality but also without participating in it. She ate very little, was always sleepy, and came to life only on the tennis court, while Margaret vegetated in a carriage in the shade, so forsaken that at eight months she still could not sit up and hardly ever smiled. The only time her mother touched her was to change her diapers and put the bottle in her mouth. At night Gregory bathed her and sometimes rocked her, trying always to do it in Samantha’s presence. He loved the baby very much and when he held her in his arms felt a painful tenderness, an overpowering desire to protect her, but he did not feel free to cuddle her as he would have liked. His sister’s confession had raised a Wall of China between his daughter and himself. He felt equally uncomfortable with the children in his charge and found that he was examining everything he did in the light of a possible licentiousness inherited from his father. When he compared Margaret to other babies her age, he saw she was slow in developing; something was obviously wrong, but he did not want to share his doubts with his wife for fear of frightening her and distancing her even more from her daughter. He performed little tests to see whether Margaret could hear; he thought she might be deaf, which would explain why she seemed so quiet, but when he clapped his hands near the cradle, she jumped. He thought Samantha had not noticed anything, but one day she asked him how you know when an infant is retarded; for the first time, he could speak of his fears. After a thorough examination, Margaret was diagnosed as being healthy but in definite need of stimulation; she was like an animal in a cage, suffering from sensory deprivation. The parents took a course in which they learned how to express affection toward their daughter, how to gurgle at her, how little by little to focus her attention on the world around her, and other elemental skills any orangutan is born knowing but they had to learn from an instruction manual. The results were evident within a few weeks, when the child began to crawl, and a year later she spoke her first two words—not “papa” and “mama” but “cat” and “tennis.”

Gregory was studying for final examinations, hours, days, months spent buried in his books and thanking his lucky stars for his good memory, the only thing left functioning while around him everything else seemed rapidly to be falling apart. Far from being over, as he had calculated it would be, the war in Vietnam was reaching the proportions of catastrophe. Along with relief at finally passing the bar came the inevitable nightmare of going overseas, for he could not continue to postpone his obligatory service with the army. His family was his principal worry; his relationship with Samantha was stumbling along, and a separation would undoubtedly mean the end to it; in addition, he was afraid to leave Margaret, who was developing into a very strange child. She was so quiet and secretive that sometimes Samantha forgot about her and when Gregory came home at night he found she had not eaten since breakfast. She did not play with other children but entertained herself for hours watching soap operas on television; she was never hungry, and she washed herself obsessively, pulling a footstool up to the basin to soap her hands over and over, saying, Dirty, dirty. She wet her bed and wept disconsolately when she waked to the clammy sheets. She was very pretty and would stay pretty even after the offenses she later committed against her body: she had the grace of her Virginia grandmother and the exotic Slavic face of Nora Reeves, as she looked in a photograph taken on the refugee ship that brought her from Odessa. While Margaret hovered in the shadow of the furniture and in dark corners, her parents, busy with their own affairs and deceived by the good-little-girl facade, failed to see the demons gestating in her soul.

It was a time of great changes and continuing surprises. The novelty of free love, for so many years kept under lock and key, spread rapidly, and what had begun as another hippie fantasy became the favorite parlor game of the bourgeoisie. Astonished, Gregory observed people who only shortly before had defended the most puritanical ideas now practicing libertinism in homey, private orgies. In his bachelor days, it had been almost impossible to find a girl who wanted to make love without a promise of marriage: pleasure without sin or fear was unthinkable before the pill. He seemed to remember devoting the first ten years of his youth to finding women; all his determination and inventiveness had gone into that exhausting chase—and often in vain. Suddenly things had turned around, and in a matter of a year or two chastity ceased to be a virtue and became a defect demanding treatment before the neighbors found out. It was such an abrupt reversal that Gregory, enveloped in his problems, did not have time to adapt and was not touched by the revolution until much later. Despite his failure with Samantha, it never occurred to him to capitalize on the hints boldly thrown his way by some of the girls he studied with and by mothers of his charges.

One Saturday in spring the Reeveses were invited to dinner at the home of some friends. Sit-down dinners were no longer in style; the meal was waiting in the kitchen, and the guests served themselves on paper plates and tried to find a place to sit while balancing a full glass, a dripping plate, bread, napkin, and sometimes a cigarette. Everyone was drinking too much, and some were smoking marijuana. Gregory had had a hard day; he was tired and wondered whether he would not have been better off at home than trying to cut a piece of chicken on his knees without throwing it all over himself. After dessert there was a general move to shed clothes and step into a large hot tub in the moonlit garden. The vogue for the Laboyer birth method had passed without much flurry, and many families had been left with an outsize tub as a remembrance. The Reeveses still had theirs in the living room and used it as a playpen for Margaret and as a place to throw the odds and ends that collected on the floor. More daring tub owners had converted these artifacts into a conversation piece inspired by communal baths in Japan, until an industry sprang up in manufacturing large tubs specifically for that purpose. Gregory was not tempted to go outside to freeze on the patio just after eating, but it seemed bad manners to remain dressed when everyone else was in the buff, and furthermore he did not want to give the impression he had something to be ashamed of. So he took off his clothes, all the while watching Samantha from the corner of his eye, amazed at his wife’s naturalness in exposing herself. She was not a prudish woman, she was proud of her body and often went about naked at home, but this public exhibition made him a little nervous; on the other hand, everyone else seemed as comfortable as any aborigine from the Amazon basin. The women generally tried to stay submerged, but the men seized every opportunity to show off; the most arrogant offered the spectacle of their nakedness while they served drinks, lighted cigarettes, or changed records; some even knelt at tubside inches from the face of someone else’s wife. Gregory realized this was not the first time his friends had practiced the sport, and he felt betrayed, as if everyone were sharing a secret he had purposely been excluded from. He also suspected that Samantha had attended such parties previously and not felt it necessary to tell him. He tried not to stare at the women, but his eyes kept drifting to the perfect breasts of the host’s mother, a sixtyish matron he had not noticed before the watery revelation of attributes unexpected in a woman her age. In a restless lifetime, Reeves would travel the maps of so many female geographies that it would be impossible to remember them all, but he never forgot that grandmother’s breasts. Meanwhile, Samantha, with her eyes closed and her head thrown back, more relaxed and content than her husband had ever seen her, was humming happily, a glass of white wine in one hand and the other beneath the water, suspiciously close to Timothy Duane’s leg. On the way home, Gregory wanted to talk about the evening, but she fell asleep in the car. The next morning, as they sat before a cup of steaming coffee in the sunlit kitchen, the nudist party seemed like a distant dream, and neither of them mentioned it. After that night, Samantha took advantage of any opportunity to enjoy new group experiences; in contrast, in the privacy of the marriage bed she was as cold as ever. Why deprive ourselves? the evangelists of open marriage were preaching. We should add experiences to life, not subtract them; we emerge the richer from every encounter and therefore have more to offer to our spouse; love is big enough to go around; pleasure is a bottomless well from which we may drink our fill. Gregory suspected there was a flaw in this reasoning but did not dare to manifest his doubts for fear of sounding like a cave dweller. He felt as if he were in a foreign country; he was not convinced of the benefits of promiscuity, and as he watched his friends’ enthusiastic acceptance he told himself that he was held back by his background in the barrio, and that was why he could not adapt. He did not like to admit how much it bothered him to see other men touching Samantha’s body under a variety of excuses: detoxifying massages, activation of holistic points, and stimulation of spiritual growth through bodily communication. Samantha mystified him; she must be concealing certain aspects of her personality from him and living a secret life. She never showed him her true face but, rather, assumed a succession of masks. He thought it was perverse to fondle another woman in the presence of one’s wife, but, again, he did not want to be left behind. Every week trendy sexologists discovered new erogenous zones, and apparently they must all be explored if one was not to be thought ignorant; manuals piled up on Gregory’s night table, awaiting their turn to be studied. Once, he dared object to a method for exploring the Self and awakening Consciousness through collective masturbation, and Samantha accused him of being a barbarian, an unawakened and primitive soul.

“I don’t know what the quality of my soul has to do with the perfectly natural fact that I don’t like to see other men’s hands between your legs!”

“A typical remark of an underdeveloped foreign culture,” Samantha retorted, impassively sipping her celery juice.

“How is that?” he asked, nonplussed.

“You’re like those Latinos you grew up with. You should have stayed in the barrio.”

Gregory thought of Pedro and Inmaculada Morales and tried to imagine them naked in a hot tub with their neighbors, mutually groping for Self and Consciousness. The mere idea vented his rage, and he burst out laughing. The next Monday he told Carmen, and across two thousand miles heard his friend’s uncontrollable laughter; no, no such modern innovations had reached the ghetto in Los Angeles, much less Mexico, where she was living.

“Crazy, they’re all crazy,” was Carmen’s assessment. “There’s no way you would catch me parading naked in front of someone else’s husband. I wouldn’t know where to look, Greg. Besides, if men try things when I have my clothes on, imagine what would happen without them!”

“Don’t be too optimistic, Carmen. No one would give you a second glance.”

“Then why do they do it?”

I did not feel at home anywhere; the barrio where I had grown up belonged to the past, and I had never put down roots anywhere else. There was very little left of my family; my wife and daughter were as cool to me as my mother and sister had been. And I missed my friends. Carmen was on another planet; I couldn’t really count on Timothy, because Samantha bored him, and I think he tried to avoid us; even Balcescu—always so close to being a caricature that he was nearly impervious to change—had done a turnabout and evolved into a kind of holy man. He lived in the midst of acolytes who worshiped the air he breathed, and from seeing himself reflected in the mirror of those adoring eyes, my bizarre Romanian had come to take himself seriously. Along with his sense of humor, he seemed to have lost interest in inventing exotic dishes and cultivating roses; we had very little in common anymore. Joan and Susan were as delightful as ever, with the delicious scent of herbs and spices still clinging to their skin, but all their time was devoted to their causes: the feminist struggle and the culinary chemistry of their vegetarian recipes—they were expert in disguising tofu so that it tasted like kidney pie. I hadn’t made any friends in law school. We were fiercely competitive, all of us absorbed in our own plans and ambitions, our eyes glued to our books. I had lost my taste for meetings and had even shoved my political and intellectual interests into the background. It would have been difficult to explain to Cyrus that where I was, the only problem that confronted the left was that no one wanted to occupy the right. When I went home at night I was bone tired; on the way I would toy with the possibility of taking a detour and wandering off toward the horizon, like my father when we were traveling the country without a fixed itinerary or destination. The chaos of the house got on my nerves—and I’m not a fanatic for order, to say the least. I suppose I was drained by studying and work; I have little doubt I was not acting like a good husband and that was why Samantha put forth so little effort. At times we seemed more like adversaries than allies. In such circumstances you become blind, you don’t see any way to get out of the dead-end street you’re on, you think you’re stuck forever in the same meat grinder and that there’s no escape. When you get your degree, it’ll be different, Carmen would console me long-distance, but I knew the degree alone would not cure my problems. I faithfully watched a television serial about a clever lawyer who regularly gambled his reputation, and sometimes his life, to save an innocent man from jail or to punish a guilty one. I never missed a program, hoping that the protagonist would restore my enthusiasm for the law and rescue me from the terrible boredom it inspired. I had not begun to practice, and I was already disillusioned. The future looked very different from the adventure I had imagined in my youth; the last push to finish the race was so tedious that I began to talk about giving up law school and devoting myself to something different. Boredom, Timothy Duane assured me, is nothing more than anger without passion. According to him, I was angry with the world and with myself, and not without reason: my life had not been a bed of roses. He advised me to get rid of complications—beginning with my marriage to Samantha, which he considered an obvious mistake. I refused to admit it, but nonetheless a moment came when at least in that regard I had to admit he was right. It was at a party like so many we went to during those days, in a house like any other house—broken-down furniture, Indian rugs covering the stains on the sofa, posters of Ho Chi Minh and Che Guevara alongside embroidered mandalas from India, the same couples, the men not wearing socks and the women not wearing bras, cold food and pieces of cheese growing more rancid as the hours went by, too much to drink, cigarettes and such poor-grade marijuana that the smoke drove away mosquitoes. The same interminable conversations as well: the latest seminars on the primal scream, in which people yelled to rid themselves of aggression; or the return to the womb, in which the naked participants assumed the fetal position and sucked their thumb. I never understood those therapies and never tried them; I was sick of the subject, sick of hearing about the multiple transcendental changes in the life of everyone I knew. I walked out to the terrace to drink alone. I admit I was drinking more every day. I had given up liquor because it triggered my allergies and, between swollen mucous membranes and a terrible tightness in my chest, I could scarcely breathe. I soon discovered that wine produced the same symptoms but that I could consume more of it before I felt really sick. Some hours before, I had had a shouting match with Samantha, and I was beginning to admit to myself that our marriage was rolling toward the edge of a precipice. I had been driving into the garage when I saw a neighbor walking toward me, leading Margaret by the hand—my daughter was barely two. I think this is your child, he said, not bothering to veil his censure or his contempt. I found her wandering a couple of miles from here; to have got that far she must have been walking since morning. I picked her up in my arms, trembling. My temples were throbbing and I could scarcely speak when I confronted my wife to ask her where she had been when Margaret got out of the house and why she hadn’t realized the child had been gone so long. She planted herself with her hands on her hips, as furious as I, alleging that the neighbor was a bastard who hated her because her cats had eaten his canary, that she didn’t owe me any explanations, that after all she didn’t ask me where I had been all day, that Margaret was very independent for her age and that she didn’t choose to watch her like a jailer or tie her up with a rope the way I did with the children I looked after, and she kept yelling until I couldn’t stand any more and left the room, slamming the door. I took a long cold shower to try to stop imagining the many accidents that could have befallen Margaret in those terrible two miles, but it hadn’t done the trick, because at the party I was still extremely angry with Samantha. I carried my wine out on the terrace and fell into a chair, in a foul humor, a little drunk, and sick of the deadly dull music from Katmandu I could still hear from the living room. I was thinking how much time I was wasting at that boring party; my bar exams were coming up in a week, and every minute was precious. About then Timothy Duane came outside and when he saw me pulled up a chair beside me. We didn’t have many opportunities to be alone. I noticed he had lost weight in recent years and his features had become deeply chiseled; he had lost that air of innocence that despite his posturing had been a large part of his charm when we first met. He took a glass vial from his pocket, sprinkled cocaine on the back of his hand, and noisily inhaled. He offered me some, but I can’t use it: it kills me; the only time I tried it, I felt as if an icy dagger were buried between my eyes—the headache lasted three days, and the promised paradise was nowhere in my memory. Tim told me we’d better go inside because they were organizing a game; I told him I wasn’t interested in seeing everyone bareassed again.

“This is different. We’re going to trade spouses,” and he insisted we go inside.

“You don’t have a spouse, as far as I know.”

“I brought a friend.”

“She looks like a whore to me, your friend.”

“She is.” He laughed and dragged me back into the living room.

The men were gathered around the dining room table; I asked where the women were and was told they were waiting outside in the cars. Everyone was a little tense, slapping each other on the back and making double entendre remarks that were rewarded with great guffaws. Someone explained the operating principles: no turning back, no regrets, and no switches. They turned out the lights, dumped all our car keys on a tray, someone stirred them around, and each player chose a set at random. I was foggy from all the wine and too stunned to rush toward the tray like everyone else but not, after the lights came on, too blurry-eyed to see my key chain in the hand of a rather portly and pedantic dentist who was something of a minor celebrity because he pulled teeth with Chinese acupuncture needles in the feet as the only anesthesia. I picked up the last set of keys, wanting instead to grab the dentist by the shirt and flatten his nose with one of the never-fail punches Padre Larraguibel had taught me in the patio of Our Lady of Lourdes Church, but I was deterred by the fear of looking a fool. Everyone headed toward the cars, laughing and joking, but I went into the kitchen to clear my head under the cold-water faucet. I poured the dregs of some coffee from a thermos and sat on a kitchen stool to think back on times when life was simple and everyone understood the rules. After a while I became aware that my partner from the draw was standing before me, a pleasant freckle-faced blonde, the mother of three children and an elementary school arithmetic teacher, the last person with whom I would ever have thought of committing adultery. I’ve been waiting a long time, she said with a timid smile. I tried to explain that I didn’t feel very well, but she thought I was avoiding her because I didn’t find her attractive; she seemed to shrink against the door-jamb like a little girl caught doing something she shouldn’t. I smiled the best smile I could, and she came to me, took my hand, helped me stand up, and led me to the car with a blend of delicacy, modesty, and determination that disarmed me. She drove us to her house. We found her children asleep in front of the television and carried them to their beds. She put on their pajamas, kissed their foreheads, pulled up the covers, and stayed with them till they fell back asleep. Then we went to her bedroom, where the photograph of her husband, dressed in his graduation gown, presided over the chest of drawers. She said she was going to slip into something more comfortable and disappeared into the bathroom while I turned back the bed, feeling like an imbecile because I couldn’t stop thinking of Samantha and the dentist or wondering why the hell I couldn’t relax and play these games like everyone else and why they made me so angry. The blonde returned without her makeup and brushing her hair; she was wearing a strawberry-colored quilted robe that was perfect for a mother who gets up early to prepare breakfast for her family but less than appropriate for the circumstances. There was nothing seductive in her behavior; it was as if we were an old married couple getting ready for bed after a hard day at work. She sat on my knees and began to unbutton my shirt. She had a friendly smile, a turned-up nose, and a fresh aroma of soap and toothpaste; I was not even slightly aroused. I told her she would have to forgive me, but I had drunk too much and felt ill from my allergies.

Finally I said, “The truth is that I don’t know why I came. I don’t like these games—I don’t like them at all, and I don’t think Samantha likes them either.”

“What do you mean?” and she burst out laughing, obviously amused. “Your wife goes to bed with several of your friends, so why don’t you have a little fun too?”

Those were bad days for me. My life has been a series of stumbling blocks, but now, at fifty, when I look back and weigh various struggles and mishaps, I believe that period was the worst; something fundamental in my soul was forever twisted, and I was never again the same. I suppose sooner or later we all lose our naïveté. That may be for the best; I know we can’t go through the world as complete innocents, defenseless, with our nerves exposed. I grew up as a street fighter. I should have been tough from the beginning, but it wasn’t that way. Now that I have circled around sorrow, time and again, and can read my life as a map drawn with wrong turnings, now when I haven’t a trace of self-pity and can review my life without emotion because I have found a certain peace, all I regret is the loss of innocence. I miss the idealism of youth, the time when there was still a clear dividing line between good and evil and I believed it was possible to act in accord with immutable principles. It wasn’t a practical or realistic posture, I know that, but there was a pure passion in that intransigence that still moves me when I find it in others. I can’t say at what moment I began to change and become the hard man I am today. It would be easy to attribute everything to the war, but in fact the deterioration began earlier than that. Or I could say that it takes a stout dose of cynicism to be a lawyer; I don’t know a lawyer who isn’t cynical to some degree, but that, too, is only half an answer. Carmen says I shouldn’t worry, that no matter how skeptical I am, it will never be enough to get along in this world, and that I am just trying to be difficult, that despite appearances I am still the same rough and bellicose, if softhearted, animal she adopted for her brother many years ago. I know myself, however, and know what I am like inside.

Colleagues, women, friends, and clients have betrayed me, but no betrayal ever hurt as much as Samantha’s, because I had not expected it. I have been suspicious ever since and am never surprised when someone disappoints me. I did not go home that night. I removed the arithmetic teacher’s strawberry-colored robe, and we grappled awhile in her marital bed. She must not hold a very fond memory of me; I’m sure she expected an imaginative and expert lover, but she found herself with someone eager to get the thing over with as quickly as possible. Afterward I put on my clothes and walked to Joan and Susan’s house, where I arrived at three in the morning, on my last legs and with obvious signs of being drunk. I kept my finger on the buzzer for several minutes, until they both answered, barefoot and in their nightgowns. They took me in without a question, as if they were used to receiving visitors at such an hour. While one fixed me a cup of herb tea, the other improvised a bed on the living room sofa. They must have put something in the tea, because I awoke twelve hours later with the sun on my face and my friends’ dog on my feet. I think my youth ended during the hours I was asleep.

When I awoke I had in my mind and my heart the resolutions that would determine my life in future years, although I didn’t know it at the time. Now that I can look at the past from a certain perspective, I realize that in that instant I began to be the person I was for a long time, an arrogant, frivolous, and greedy man I always detested—a person it has cost me a lot to leave behind.

I stayed with my friends five days, without communicating with Samantha. They took turns sitting with me and patiently listening to me retell a thousand times the story of my nostalgia, despair, and grievances. On Friday I went to take my bar examination; I was free of anxiety because I had no illusions. I didn’t care about the test and was, in fact, totally indifferent in regard to my future. Several months later, when I was on the opposite side of the globe, I was notified I had passed the bar on my first try, something that rarely happens in my tortuous profession. From the exam I had reported directly to the army. I should have trained for sixteen weeks, but the war was at its peak and the course had been reduced to twelve. In some ways, those three months were worse than the war itself, but I came out of it with a hundred and ninety-eight pounds of muscle and the endurance of a camel, a brute willing to destroy my own shadow had I been ordered to do so. Two days before I shipped out, the computer selected me for the Language Institute in Monterey. I suppose that having grown up in the Mexican barrio and having heard my mother’s Russian and listened to her Italian operas had trained my ear. I was almost two months in a paradise of Victorian houses, picture-postcard sunsets, and sheer cliffs overlooking rocky shores where seals lazed in the sun; I studied Vietnamese round the clock with professors who rotated on the hour and threatened that if I didn’t learn quickly I would be branded a traitor to my country. At the end of the course I spoke the language better than most of the other students. I left for Vietnam harboring the secret fantasy of dying so I would not have to face the drudgery and pain of living. But dying is much more difficult than staying alive.