• • •
The hospital experience was decisive for Gregory Reeves, because it gave him time to think about his future, a luxury he had never known until then. Only rarely had he had so much free time. He was in a bubble floating in a void; each hour was eternal. The months of fighting had sharpened his senses, so that now in the relative silence of his sickbed he jumped when a thermometer was dropped on a metal tray or when a door blew shut. The smell of a meal made him ill, a whiff of a medicinal odor nauseated him, and the stench of a wound triggered uncontrollable vomiting. The friction of the sheets against his skin was torture, and food tasted like sand. For several days he was fed intravenously, then thanks to a nurse who spooned baby food into his mouth, he slowly recovered his appetite. During the first days he thought of nothing but his body; all his senses were focused on getting well, on monitoring how his organism was reacting to his various ills, but when he felt better he was able to take a look around. Once his system was free of the drugs on which he had operated during the days of combat, a mist lifted from his mind, and a merciless light permitted him to examine his life. Lying flat on his back, his eyes fixed on the ceiling fan, he mulled over his fate, his bad fortune in being born among the poorest of the poor and of having worked hard all his life without reward. He had succeeded in escaping the slums of his youth to become a lawyer, which was more than any of his childhood friends had accomplished, but he had not rid himself of the stigma of being poor. His marriage had done nothing to change that feeling; his wife’s whims and her general lassitude, which once had been a source of puzzlement, were now a matter for concern. Timothy Duane had said that the world is divided into queen bees, destined for pleasure, and drones, whose mission was to provide for the queens. People like Samantha and Timothy had been born with a silver spoon in their mouth; they hadn’t a worry in the world, and there was always someone to pay their bills if their own inheritance was not sufficient. Damn them, he muttered, when he compared his life to theirs. He kept repeating, I swear by all that’s holy, I’ll beat old Lady Luck—trying not to think that his “luck” might be the grave. No, that won’t happen; I have less than two months to go, he would comfort himself; they’ll never send me back into that hell. He felt sorry for the other patients, losers like himself, but he was upset by their moaning, the sound of their slippers shuffling across the linoleum, their wretchedness and misery. He listened to the few words they had to say and their complaints, thinking how they were throwaways, all of them, numbers on a roll—trash. They could disappear tomorrow, and there would be no trace of their passage through the world.
And what about me? Would anyone remember me? No one. My wife and daughter wouldn’t cry over me, or my mother. Carmen? She would be mourning for her brother; she adored Juan José, the only one of the family who kept in touch when all the others turned away from her. Careful, there I go again, getting sentimental. The truth is I don’t give a fuck whether anyone remembers me or not; all I want is to be rich and powerful. My father had power in the proletarian world he lived in; he could hypnotize a hall filled with people and leave them convinced that he was the representative of the Supreme Intelligence; he made us all believe he knew the plans and rules for the universe, but look how he died: tied to a bed coughing up blood and oozing pus through sores over all his body, crazy as a loon. I know what you’re muttering, Cyrus, that the only power that counts is the power of morality. You were a good example of that, but you spent your whole life shut up in an elevator without air or light, reading on the sly, and I’ll bet your soul is still scrabbling around in heavenly tomes. What did you gain from being such a good man? You gave me a lot, I can’t deny that, but you had nothing yourself, you lived a miserable, lonely life. Pedro Morales is another just man. When I was a kid I thought he was powerful; I was afraid of his patriarchal rumble and that stony Indian face sparked with gold teeth. Poor Pedro Morales, he couldn’t hurt a fly, another victim of this shithole society; they say that since Carmen went away he’s failed, grown old, and now there’s Juan José’s death on top of that. I’m going to have true power—money and prestige—something I never saw in the barrio; then no one can look down on me or raise his voice to me. You must be whirling in your grave to hear such cynicism, Cyrus. Try to understand: the world belongs to the strong, and I’m fed up with standing in line with the weak. Well, enough of that. The first thing is to get well. As it is, I can’t lift my arm to comb my hair, I can scarcely breathe, and my brain is at the boiling point, and none of it has anything to do with whatever made me sick, it’s from the past, I’m being eaten alive by my allergies. I’m not going to take any more drugs, I’m killing myself, well, at the most a little marijuana to get through the day, but no more pills or shooting up that shit, I want to get back to the world of the healthy. I won’t be another veteran in a wheelchair, an alcoholic-drug-addict-dregs-of-the-world veteran, there’s enough of them already. Damn it to hell, I’m going to be rich!
Thoughts were hurtling through his mind. When he closed his eyes he saw spiraling images, whirling and whirling; when he opened them he saw his memories projected on the gray ceiling. It was nearly impossible to sleep; he lay awake in the darkness, struggling to suck air into his lungs.
The doctors identified his infection, administered antibiotics, and in three weeks he was back on his feet. He had gained weight, but he would never regain his former strength, and he came to understand that muscles have little to do with manhood. His allergies improved, the headache went away, he no longer bubbled when he breathed or looked at the world through bloodshot eyes, but he still felt weak, and the least expenditure of effort clouded his vision. One day, unbelieving, he heard the doctor say he was releasing him, and his orders were to return to his unit. He could not imagine how he would carry a weapon again; he had expected he would complete his remaining weeks of service in some office assignment or be sent back to the village. Instead, he was flown to Saigon with two days’ leave and incontrovertible orders to use that forty-eight hours to get back in shape. He used the time to look up Thui, Juan José Morales’s sweetheart. Through inquiries made by his friend Leo Galupi, a man from whom the world held no secrets, he located Thui by telephone and made an appointment to meet her at a small restaurant. Gregory awaited her arrival with terrible anxiety; he could not think how to soften the blow of what he had to tell her. Thui had said she would be wearing a blue dress and white bead necklace, so he could recognize her. Reeves watched Thui enter the restaurant and before making a move took a second or two to study her from a distance and to quiet the wild thumping of his heart. She was not beautiful; her skin was dull, as if she had been ill, and she had a flat nose and short legs. Her best feature was her eyes, oblique and set wide apart: two perfect black almonds. She held out a small hand, which was engulfed by his own, and murmured a greeting without meeting his eyes. They sat down at a plastic-covered table; she waited quietly with her hands in her lap and her eyes lowered while he studied the menu with absurd dedication, asking himself why the hell he had ever called her: now he was in this mess, when all he wanted was to get away. The waiter brought them beer and a dish that was difficult to identify but doubtlessly lethal for someone recovering from an intestinal infection. The silence became uncomfortable; Gregory stroked the scapulary of the Virgin of Guadalupe beneath his shirt. Finally Thui looked up at him, her face expressionless.
“I already know,” she said in her halting English.
“Know what?” Reeves immediately regretted having asked.
“About Juan José. I already know.”
“I’m so sorry. I don’t know what to say; I’m not very good at this kind of thing. . . . I know you loved each other very much. I was fond of him too,” Gregory blurted, and his grief cut off his words and filled his heart with tears he could not shed, as he pounded the table with his fist.
“Can I do anything for you?” she asked.
“That’s what I should be asking you. That’s why I called. Forgive me, I don’t wan
t to butt in. Did Juan José speak of me?”
“He told me about his family and his country. You’re his brother, aren’t you?”
“You might say. He told me about you too, Thui. He said he was in love for the first time in his life, and that you were a very sweet person, and that when the war was over you two would be married and he would take you back to America.”
“Yes.”
“Do you need anything? Juan José would want me to . . .”
“Nothing, thank you.”
“Money?”
“No.”
There was nothing more to say. They sat for a while and finally she announced that she must go back to work and stood up. Even though Gregory was still seated, her head was only slightly higher than his. She placed her childlike hand on his shoulder and smiled, a faint, slightly mischievous smile that added to her elfin air.
“Don’t worry. Juan José left me everything I need.”
Fear. Terror. I’m suffocating with fear. It’s not like anything I’ve felt before; this is new. Before, I was programmed for this shit, I knew what to do, my body obeyed me; I was always alert, on edge, a dyed-in-the-wool grunt. Now I’m a weakling, twitching with ineffectiveness, a bag of rags. Lots of men die in their last few days of service because they relax or get scared. I’m afraid of dying in an instant, without time to say goodbye to the light, and even more afraid of dying slowly. I’m afraid of blood, of my own blood pouring from me, of pain, of living as a paraplegic, of going crazy, of the syphilis and other horrors we pick up here, of being taken prisoner and tortured in a cage for monkeys, of being swallowed up by the jungle, of falling asleep and dreaming, of getting used to killing, to violence, drugs, filth, whores, to the mindless obedience, the screams, and afraid that afterward—if there is an afterward—I won’t be able to walk through the streets like a normal person but will rape old ladies in the park and fire a carbine at kids playing in a schoolyard. I’m afraid of everything that lies ahead. Brave is he who is calm in the face of danger. Cyrus underlined that in a book for me; he told me not to be cowardly, that the honorable man does not lose heart or yield to fear, but this is different, these are not fanciful dangers, not the shadows and monsters of my imagination: this is the fire of the end of the world, Cyrus.
And rage. I should feel hatred, but despite the training, the propaganda, and what I see and am told, I can’t feel the hatred I should. That must be my mother’s fault—she filled my head with her Bahai teachings—or maybe the fault of my friends in the village, who taught me to see our similarities and to forget our differences. No hatred but more than enough rage, a simmering anger against everyone, against the enemy, those motherfuckers tunneling through the ground like moles and multiplying as fast as we exterminate them and looking just like the men and women in the village, who invited me to their homes to eat. Rage against every single one of the corrupt bastards getting rich on this war, against the politicians and generals with their maps and their computers, their hot coffee, their deadly mistakes and infinite arrogance, against the bureaucrats and their casualty lists, their long columns of numbers, their body bags in endless rows, against all those who stayed home and burned their draft cards and also against those who wave flags and applaud when we appear on the television screen but don’t know why we’re getting killed. Cannon fodder or heroic defenders of liberty, those sonsofbitches call us both; they can’t pronounce the names of the places where we fall, but they have opinions, they all have their ideas on the subject. Ideas! What we don’t need here is their goddam ideas. And rage against the skies that open to pour buckets of water on us, soaking us through and rotting everything we touch, against this climate from outer space where when we’re not freezing we’re boiling, against this scarred country and its defiant jungle. We’re winning, of course, we’re winning; that’s what Leo Galupi always tells me, the king of the black market, who served his two years and then came back to stay and never intends to leave because he loves the frigging place and because he’s making a mint selling us contraband ivory and selling the Vietnamese our socks and deodorants. We come out on top after every skirmish, at least according to Galupi; I don’t know why, then, we have this sense of defeat. But good always triumphs, the way it does in the movies, and we’re the good guys, aren’t we? We control the sky and sea; we could blast this country to a heap of ashes and leave nothing on the map but a crater, an enormous crematorium where nothing will grow for a million years, all we have to do is press the famous button, it would be easier than Hiroshima—you remember that, Mama, or have you forgotten? You haven’t mentioned Hiroshima in years; what do you talk about these days with my father’s ghost? Those bombs are obsolete, we have others now that kill more people more efficiently. What do you think of that, eh? But wars aren’t won in the air or at sea, they’re won on land, inch by inch, man to man. The extreme in brutality. Why don’t we just launch a nuclear attack and get this over with and get back home? marines say with their second beer. I don’t want to be anywhere around when we do it. I don’t want to think of vanished friends, blown to bits, their homes in flames, the masses of refugees, monks ablaze in gasoline, nor do I want to think of Juan José Morales or the poor kid from Kansas, or think of my daughter every time I see one of these little girls blind or covered with scars and burns. I need to concentrate on getting out of here alive, I can’t spare any room for emotion; get out alive, and that’s it. I can’t look anyone in the eye; we’re marked for death, and I’m frightened by the empty eyes of these eighteen-year-old kids, all with the dark void in their gaze.
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 forg
er 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.