“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.
PART THREE
Chapter Three
People. War is people. The first word that comes to mind when I think about the war is people: us, my friends, my brothers, all united in the same desperate fraternity. My comrades. And the others, those tiny men and women with indecipherable faces whom I should hate but can’t, because in these last weeks I have begun to know them. Here everything is black and white; there are no halftones or ambiguities; the manipulation is behind us, the hypocrisy, the deceit. Life or death. Kill or be killed. We’re the good guys and they’re the bad guys; without that conviction you’re fucked for sure, and in a certain way such insane simplification is refreshing, it’s one of the virtues of war. All kinds end up in this hole: blacks escaping poverty, poor farmers who still believe in the American Way of Life, a few Latins fired by the rage of centuries and aspiring to be heroes, psychopaths, and some like myself, running away from failure or guilt; in combat we’re all equal, the past is irrelevant, a bullet is the great democratic experience. We must prove each day that we’re not men, we’re soldiers: endure, bear the pain and discomfort, never complain, kill, grit your teeth and don’t think, don’t ask questions, obey—that’s why they broke us like horses, trained us with kicks, insults, and humiliation. We’re not individuals, in this tragic theater of violence we’re machines at the service of the motherfucking nation. You do anything to survive. I feel good when I’ve killed, because at least for now I’m still alive. I accept the lunacy and don’t try to explain it; I simply hold on to my weapon and fire. Don’t think, or you’ll get confused and hesitate. If you think, you’re dead—that is the one unequivocal law of war. The enemy has no face, he’s not human, he’s an animal, a monster, a demon: if I could believe that in the bottom of my heart, things would be easier, but Cyrus taught me to question everything, he forced me to call things by their names—kill, murder. I came here to shake off my indifference and to throw myself into something exhilarating, I came with a cynical attitude, ready to live recklessly, to give meaning to my life. I came because of Hemingway, in search of my manhood, the myth of the macho, the definition of masculinity, pride in the muscles and endurance I acquired during training, wanting to prove my valor because at heart I have always suspected I am a coward and to prove my fortitude because I was sick of being betrayed by my feelings. A late rite of passage. Who comes to such hell at twenty-eight? The first four months were like a life-and-death game, like placing bets against myself. I observed myself from a distance and with heavy irony sat in judgment of myself; I was haunted by the past, and pushed myself to the limits of risk and pain and exhaustion and brutality, and, when I reached those limits, found I couldn’t take it. Drugs help. And then one day I woke up feeling alive, quintessentially alive, more alive than I had ever been, in love with this conflagration we call life. At that moment I faced my own mortality: I am an eggshell, a nothing that in an instant can turn to dust, leaving not so much as a memory. When the new contingents arrive I look the men over, I inspect them carefully; I have developed a sixth sense about reading the signs, I know which ones will die and which ones won’t. The most courageous and daring will die first, because they believe they are invincible; these men are killed by pride. The most terrified will also die, because they are paralyzed or crazed by fear, they shoot blindly and sometimes hit a comrade; these you don’t want near you, they’re bad luck, you don’t want them in your platoon. The best men keep their cool, they don’t take unnecessary risks, they try not to attract or deserve attention, they have a strong will to live. I like the Latinos, they are surly and uncommunicative outside but dynamite inside: explosive, lethal, cool in the face of death. Not only are they brave; they’re good buddies.
I carry amphetamines by the fistful, all mixed together, a kick in the stomach, a bitter taste in the mouth; I talk so fast I don’t know what I’m saying, after a minute or two I can’t talk at all, I chew gum to keep from biting my tongue, then I stupefy myself with alcohol and sleeping pills in order to get a little rest. I dream of rivers of blood, seas of flaming gasoline, gaping wounds—women’s lips, vulvas—the dead stacked in piles, severed heads, children aflame in napalm, all those repugnant snapshots soldiers collect: red, nothing but red. I have learned to sleep in catnaps, five or ten minutes whenever I can, wherever I am, wrapped in my plastic poncho, always with my senses on alert. My hearing has grown sharper: I can hear an insect moving across the ground; my sense of smell is keener: I can smell the guerrillas from several yards away—they eat marinated fish, and when they’re afraid and sweating, you can smell them. What do we smell of? Shaving lotion, probably, because we drink it like whiskey, it’s forty percent alcohol. When I can sleep a couple of hours without nightmares I’m like new, but I can’t always do that. If I’m not sending out the guard or on patrol, I spend the night in camp, shivering beneath a rain-soaked tarp in a tent stinking of urine, boots, mold, rotting rations, and sweat, and listening to the gnawing of busy rats and men on routine shitwork, with mosquitoes so thick they’re even in my mouth. Sometimes I wake up crying like an idiot; how Juan José would laugh at me. I wonder how many times he led me to a corner of the schoolyard so the others wouldn’t see me cry: Shut up, you gringo fairy, men don’t cry. He would shake me, mad as hell, and as his threats didn’t solve the problem but only made things worse, he finally would beg me please to shut up—For all you hold holy, mano, before they take us both for sissies and kick the shit out of us. To get going in the morning I take aspirins with coffee—cold, of course—smoke the first joint of the day, and before I go out gulp down the amphetamines. What I miss is a warm meal, a shower, a cold beer; I’m up to here with the rations they drop from the air in blue-and-yellow packets—ham and beans, and fruit salad. It’s like being a kid again, being here; it’s a strange sensation: there are no personal responsibilities, no questions, only obeying, although in fact that’s hard for me; I’m better at giving orders, not blindly obeying them. I will never make a good soldier. It’s easy to get by unnoticed, to fade into the shadows. Unless you do something really stupid, the days tick by one after the other, your only goal to survive; the terrible, invincible machine takes over everything, your superiors make the decisions, and you have to hope they know what they’re doing; I have no worries, I can be invisible in the ranks, I’m like everyone else, a number without a face, a past, or a future. It’s like going crazy: you float in the limbo of eternal time and warped space, and no one can hold you accountable for anything; all I have to do is my job, and as for the rest, I do whatever I damn well please. Nothing is more dangerous, though, than to feel you’re superior; you’re on your own, as lonely as your belly button, Juan José warned me that day on the beach, peering through the smoke of a reefer moistened in opium. The only thing that saves us is the obstinate brotherhood of the grunts. I feel overwhelming compassion, I want to weep for all the accumulated pain, mine and everyone else’s, I want to grab a machine gun and go out and kill, howl until the whole universe shatters, I will have a wail stuck in my throat as long as I live. You’re crazy, mano; you can’t feel sorry about things during a war. Juan José and I ran into each other on the beach during a couple of days’ leave, a miracle that among half a million servicemen we were in the same place at the same time. We hugged each other, unable to believe in such a coincidence: what fantastic luck to run into you, mano, and we clapped each other on the back and laughed, happy, for a minute forgetting where we were, and why. We tried to catch up on what had
happened, an impossible task because we hadn’t seen each other for ten years, ever since Juan José joined the army and was strutting around in his uniform while I was working for a buck and a half an hour. We had gone our own ways, he toward his destiny as a soldier and I to work for wetback’s wages for a year, until Cyrus convinced me to leave the barrio. I don’t intend to work forever in my papa’s craphole of a garage, mano, Juan José had told me, my old man’s a slave driver, the army’s the best I can do; I’ll serve in that fucker until I’m thirty-eight or forty and then retire with a good pension—and the world’s mine, mano. What else am I gonna do with this Mexican skin and face? Besides, women love uniforms. We laughed like idiots on that beach. You remember the time we stole old Purple Pecker’s cigarettes and Padre Larraguibel’s wine? And the fights with horse dung? And when we shaved Oliver and painted him with Mercurochrome and took him to school and told everyone he had the bubonic plague?—Hey, mano, what the shit is the bubonic plague?—all with the old joking, offhanded affection, the rough language and good feelings we shared since we were boys. He told me he’d fallen in love with a Vietnamese girl, and when he showed me the photograph he kept in a plastic case in his wallet, he became serious, and his voice changed. It was an overexposed Polaroid snapshot, in which the woman’s face looked like a pale moon framed by the shadows of her hair. I particularly noticed the eyes, but everything else looked like all the Asiatic faces I’d been seeing in recent months.