“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 viewi
ng 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.