The Infinite Plan

  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, Jud
y?”

  “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.