The Infinite Plan

  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, s
aw 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 di
fferences. 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.