The Infinite Plan (29 page)

The enemy are all around us, they know our every thought, they hear our whispers, they smell us, follow us, watch us . . . wait. They have no choice: win or die. They're not the ones asking themselves what the shit they're doing here; they've been born on this soil for thousands of years and have been fighting for at least a hundred. The little kid who sells us fruit, the woman without ears who leads us to the whorehouses, the old man who burns the garbage, they're all enemies. Or maybe none of them is. During the three months in the village I was a human being, not a grunt, a man, but now I'm a hunted animal again. What if all this was just a nightmare? A nightmare . . . Soon I'll wake up in a clean desert, holding my father's hand and watching the sunset. The skies here are magnificent; it's the only thing the war hasn't devastated. The dawns are long, and the sun rises so slowly: orange, purple, yellow, an enormous disk of pure gold.

I never thought they'd send me back to this hell; I only have a month—less than a month, exactly twenty-five days. I don't want to die now; that would be a stupid way to go. It's not possible to have survived the beatings of the barrio gangs, a race against a moving train, the massacre on the mountain, and three months of firefights, only to end up with no fame and no pain in a body bag, wiped out at the last minute like some damn moron. That can't happen. Maybe Olga's right, maybe I am different from the rest and that's why I'll come down safe and sound from the mountain: I'm invincible, I'm immortal. That's what everyone believes; if we didn't, we couldn't keep fighting. Juan José thought he was immortal. Fate, karma, destiny. . . . Careful with those words; I've been using them too often. There's no such thing; that's just bullshit my father and Olga used to cheat the ignorant. You shape your own destiny, you take your hard knocks. I will make what I want of my life—that is, as long as I get out alive and make it home. And
that's
not fate? Going home's not up to me; nothing I do or don't do can guarantee I won't lose my arms or my legs or my life during the next twenty-five days.

Inmaculada Morales realized that her husband was sick before he had his first attack; she knew him so well she noticed changes he had not perceived. Pedro had always enjoyed splendid health; the only medicine he trusted was the eucalyptus oil he rubbed on his back after overworking, and the only time he had ever been anesthetized was when his sound teeth were replaced with gold ones. He did not know his exact age; he had obtained his birth certificate from a forger in Tijuana when he had to provide one for his immigration papers and had chosen a date at random. His wife calculated that he was about fifty-five at the time Carmen left home. After that, Pedro Morales had never been the same. He became a taciturn man with a solemn expression, a man not easy to live with. His family never questioned his authority; they would not have dreamed of defying him or asking for explanations. Some time later, when the older children married and had children of their own, he mellowed a little; when he watched his grandbabies babbling and crawling around his feet like cockroaches, he would smile as he had in the good times. Inmaculada could not mention Carmen's name. She had tried once, and he had nearly struck her. Look what you're making me do, woman! he roared when he found himself with his arm raised against her. Unlike many men in the barrio, Morales thought it cowardly to strike a wife; it's different with daughters, he said: they have to learn. Despite his old-fashioned severity, Inmaculada could guess how much he missed Carmen and devised a way to keep him informed. She began a sporadic correspondence with Gregory Reeves, in which the main topic was the absent girl. She sent Reeves postcards with pictures of flowers and doves, recounting the news of the family, and her “gringo son” wrote back about his most recent telephone conversation with Carmen. This was how Inmaculada followed the details of her daughter's life: her stay in Mexico, her trip to Europe, her love affairs, her work. Inmaculada left the cards lying around, where her husband could read them without damaging his injured pride. Customs were changing drastically during those years, and mistakes like Carmen's became a daily occurrence; it seemed senseless to continue to punish her as if she were the spawn of Satan. Pregnancies outside marriage were a common theme in films, television serials, and novels, and in real life famous actresses were having children without identifying the father, feminists were advocating women's right to an abortion, and hippies were coupling in public parks in full view of anyone who wanted to watch, so that not even the hard-shelled Padre Larraguibel could understand Pedro Morales's intransigence.

Then came the bitter Wednesday when two young officers called at the Morales home, a pair of frightened young men who attempted to hide their discomfort behind absurd military rigor and the formality of a too often repeated speech. They brought the news of Juan José's death. There would be a religious service if the family agreed, and the body would be buried within the week in a military cemetery, they said, and then they presented the parents with the decorations their son had won for heroic actions beyond the call of duty. That night Pedro Morales suffered his third attack. He felt a sudden weakness in his bones, as if his body had turned to wax, and collapsed at the feet of his wife, who could not lift him into bed and was afraid to leave him alone to seek help. When Inmaculada saw he was not breathing, she threw cold water in his face, but without effect. Then she remembered a television program she had seen and began to administer mouth-to-mouth resuscitation and to shock his heart by pounding his chest. A minute later, her husband, streaming water like a duck, regained consciousness, and as soon as the dizziness had passed drank two glasses of tequila and devoured half an apple pie. He refused to go to the hospital, convinced that his attack was nothing but nerves and that he would feel fine after a little sleep—which in fact he did. The next morning he got up early, as usual, opened the garage, and after giving orders to the mechanics, left to buy a black suit for his son's funeral. There was no aftermath from his attack other than aching ribs where his wife had beaten on his chest. Faced with the impossibility of getting her husband to the doctor, Inmaculada decided to consult Olga, with whom she had reconciled following Carmen's tragic incident because she realized she had only wanted to help. She knew Olga was experienced and would never have risked performing such a late abortion if it had been someone other than Carmen, whom she loved as if she were her own niece. That things had worked out badly was not Olga's fault but the will of God. Olga had heard about Juan José's death and, like everyone in the barrio, was getting ready to attend Padre Larraguibel's mass. The two women hugged and patted each other and then sat down to drink a cup of coffee and discuss Pedro Morales's fainting spells.

“He just isn't the same. He's getting thin. He drinks quarts of lemonade; he must have holes in his belly from all the lemonade he's swallowed. He doesn't even have the energy to grumble at me when I tell him some days he shouldn't go to the shop.”

“Anything else?”

“He cries in his sleep.”

“Don Pedro is so macho he can't cry when he's awake. His heart is filled with tears over his son's death; it's normal he should shed them when he's asleep.”

“But the tears began before Juan José died—may God shelter him in His Loving Bosom.”

“One of two things: either his blood is bad or he is sick with grief.”

“I think he's really sick. That's how my mother was—you remember her?”

Olga remembered very well; she had made history when she appeared on television to celebrate her hundred and fifth birthday. She was normally a happy person, if more than a little unbalanced, but she awoke one morning bathed in tears and no one could console her; she knew she was going to die, and it made her sad to be going alone—she liked her family's company. She thought she was still in her village in Zacatecas; she had never realized she had lived thirty years in the United States, that her grandchildren were called Chicanos, and that beyond the boundaries of the barrio everyone spoke English. She ironed her best dress, because she meant to be buried decently, and asked to be taken to the cemetery to locate the grave of her ancestors. The Morales boys had hastily ordered a stone with the names of their great-grandparents and placed it in a strategic spot where their grandmother would be able to see it with her own eyes. My, how the dead multiply! was her only comment when she saw the size of the county cemetery. In the next weeks she continued to weep for herself, in anticipation, until she was consumed like a candle and her flame was snuffed out.

“I'm going to send him some La Magdalena syrup; it's very effective in these cases. And if Don Pedro doesn't get better, you must take him to a doctor,” Olga recommended. “And forgive me,
doñita,
but making love is good for the body and good for the soul. I'd recommend you be affectionate with him.”

Inmaculada blushed. That was a subject she had never been able to discuss with anyone.

“If I were in your shoes, I'd also call Carmen to come home. It's been a long time, and her father needs her. It's time they made their peace.”

“My husband would never forgive me, Doña Olga.”

“Don Pedro has just lost a son. Don't you think it would be a consolation for him to have the girl he thought of as dead brought back to life? Carmen was always his favorite.”

Inmaculada took the syrup with her, not to seem ungrateful. She did not have much confidence in the healer's potions, but she trusted her blindly when it came to advice. When she got home she threw the bottle into the trash and searched through the tin box where she kept Gregory Reeves's postcards until she found her daughter's most recent address.

Carmen Morales lived in Mexico City for four years. The first two had been so lonely and filled with poverty that she had begun to enjoy reading, something she'd never imagined possible. At first Gregory sent her novels in English, but eventually she registered at a public library and began reading in Spanish. That was where she met an anthropologist, twenty years her senior, who initiated her into the study of other cultures and of her own heritage. He was as fascinated with the girl's cleavage as she was with his erudition. At the beginning, Carmen was horrified by the violent and bloody past of the continent—she could find nothing to admire in priests caked with dried blood who engaged in ripping hearts from their sacrificial victims—but when the anthropologist explained the significance of those rituals, told her the ancient legends, taught her to decipher hieroglyphics, took her to museums, and introduced her to a myriad of books on art, feather mantles, weavings, bas-reliefs, and sculptures, she came to appreciate that ferocious aesthetic. Her greatest interest lay in the designs and colors of cloth, paintings, ceramics, and ornaments; she entertained herself for hours making sketches to use in her jewelry. The anthropologist and his pupil spent so much time together observing mummies and blood-curdling Aztec statuary that they became lovers. He suggested they live together and share ecstasy and expenses; she left the pestilent hovel where she had been existing marginally and moved into his apartment in the very center of the city. The air pollution was so bad that sometimes birds dropped from the sky, but at least she had a bathroom with hot water and a sunny room where she could set up her workshop. She believed she had found happiness and imagined she would acquire wisdom through osmosis. She was eager to learn and lived in a constant state of amazed admiration for her lover; every crumb of knowledge he scattered fell onto fertile soil. In exchange for the first-rate education she was acquiring from the anthropologist, she was willing to serve him, to wash his clothes, clean the house, prepare the meals, and even cut his fingernails and his mane of hair—besides turning over to him everything she earned selling her silver pieces to tourists. He not only knew about phantasmagoric Indians and cemeteries of friable pots, he was also informed about film, books, and restaurants; he decided how she should dress, speak, make love, even think. Carmen's submissiveness lasted much longer than could have been expected in a person of her temperament; for almost two years she reverently obeyed him. She even put up with his having other women and telling her about it in salacious detail, “because there should be no secrets between us,” and quietly endured being slapped around when he had had too much to drink. After every violent incident her erudite companion brought home flowers and put his head in her lap, weeping, begging her to understand—the devil in him had got the upper hand—and swearing he would never do it again. Carmen forgave him, but she did not forget, and in the meanwhile she was absorbing information like a sponge. She was embarrassed about being roughed up; she felt humiliated and sometimes thought she must deserve it. Maybe that was normal treatment; hadn't her father often beat her? Finally one day she dared mention it to Gregory Reeves in one of their secret Monday telephone conversations; her friend screamed to high heaven, called her stupid, terrified her with statistics of his own invention, and convinced her that the anthropologist would never change—just the opposite, his abuse would increase until it reached extremes she could not even imagine. Ten days later Carmen received a bank draft for a plane ticket and a letter offering to help and begging her to return to the United States. Gregory's gift arrived the day after a skirmish in which with one sweep of his hand the anthropologist had emptied a soup pot over Carmen. It was an accident, they both knew that, but even so she spent two days dousing her chest with milk and olive oil. As soon as she could bear to wear a blouse she went to a travel agency, meaning to buy a ticket home, but as she was leafing through some brochures she remembered her father's fury and decided she lacked the strength to confront him. In a fit of inspiration, she spun the needle and bought a ticket for Amsterdam. She traveled light and did not even say goodbye to her lover; she had meant to leave a letter but in the haste of packing forgot. She carried her jeweler's tools and supplies in a tote bag, along with two tins of condensed milk to ease the distress of the journey.