Then came the bitter Wednesday when two young officers called at the Morales home, a pair of frightened young men who attempted to hide their discomfort behind absurd military rigor and the formality of a too often repeated speech. They brought the news of Juan José’s death. There would be a religious service if the family agreed, and the body would be buried within the week in a military cemetery, they said, and then they presented the parents with the decorations their son had won for heroic actions beyond the call of duty. That night Pedro Morales suffered his third attack. He felt a sudden weakness in his bones, as if his body had turned to wax, and collapsed at the feet of his wife, who could not lift him into bed and was afraid to leave him alone to seek help. When Inmaculada saw he was not breathing, she threw cold water in his face, but without effect. Then she remembered a television program she had seen and began to administer mouth-to-mouth resuscitation and to shock his heart by pounding his chest. A minute later, her husband, streaming water like a duck, regained consciousness, and as soon as the dizziness had passed drank two glasses of tequila and devoured half an apple pie. He refused to go to the hospital, convinced that his attack was nothing but nerves and that he would feel fine after a little sleep—which in fact he did. The next morning he got up early, as usual, opened the garage, and after giving orders to the mechanics, left to buy a black suit for his son’s funeral. There was no aftermath from his attack other than aching ribs where his wife had beaten on his chest. Faced with the impossibility of getting her husband to the doctor, Inmaculada decided to consult Olga, with whom she had reconciled following Carmen’s tragic incident because she realized she had only wanted to help. She knew Olga was experienced and would never have risked performing such a late abortion if it had been someone other than Carmen, whom she loved as if she were her own niece. That things had worked out badly was not Olga’s fault but the will of God. Olga had heard about Juan José’s death and, like everyone in the barrio, was getting ready to attend Padre Larraguibel’s mass. The two women hugged and patted each other and then sat down to drink a cup of coffee and discuss Pedro Morales’s fainting spells.
“He just isn’t the same. He’s getting thin. He drinks quarts of lemonade; he must have holes in his belly from all the lemonade he’s swallowed. He doesn’t even have the energy to grumble at me when I tell him some days he shouldn’t go to the shop.”
“Anything else?”
“He cries in his sleep.”
“Don Pedro is so macho he can’t cry when he’s awake. His heart is filled with tears over his son’s death; it’s normal he should shed them when he’s asleep.”
“But the tears began before Juan José died—may God shelter him in His Loving Bosom.”
“One of two things: either his blood is bad or he is sick with grief.”
“I think he’s really sick. That’s how my mother was—you remember her?”
Olga remembered very well; she had made history when she appeared on television to celebrate her hundred and fifth birthday. She was normally a happy person, if more than a little unbalanced, but she awoke one morning bathed in tears and no one could console her; she knew she was going to die, and it made her sad to be going alone—she liked her family’s company. She thought she was still in her village in Zacatecas; she had never realized she had lived thirty years in the United States, that her grandchildren were called Chicanos, and that beyond the boundaries of the barrio everyone spoke English. She ironed her best dress, because she meant to be buried decently, and asked to be taken to the cemetery to locate the grave of her ancestors. The Morales boys had hastily ordered a stone with the names of their great-grandparents and placed it in a strategic spot where their grandmother would be able to see it with her own eyes. My, how the dead multiply! was her only comment when she saw the size of the county cemetery. In the next weeks she continued to weep for herself, in anticipation, until she was consumed like a candle and her flame was snuffed out.
“I’m going to send him some La Magdalena syrup; it’s very effective in these cases. And if Don Pedro doesn’t get better, you must take him to a doctor,” Olga recommended. “And forgive me, doñita, but making love is good for the body and good for the soul. I’d recommend you be affectionate with him.”
Inmaculada blushed. That was a subject she had never been able to discuss with anyone.
“If I were in your shoes, I’d also call Carmen to come home. It’s been a long time, and her father needs her. It’s time they made their peace.”
“My husband would never forgive me, Doña Olga.”
“Don Pedro has just lost a son. Don’t you think it would be a consolation for him to have the girl he thought of as dead brought back to life? Carmen was always his favorite.”
Inmaculada took the syrup with her, not to seem ungrateful. She did not have much confidence in the healer’s potions, but she trusted her blindly when it came to advice. When she got home she threw the bottle into the trash and searched through the tin box where she kept Gregory Reeves’s postcards until she found her daughter’s most recent address.
Carmen Morales lived in Mexico City for four years. The first two had been so lonely and filled with poverty that she had begun to enjoy reading, something she’d never imagined possible. At first Gregory sent her novels in English, but eventually she registered at a public library and began reading in Spanish. That was where she met an anthropologist, twenty years her senior, who initiated her into the study of other cultures and of her own heritage. He was as fascinated with the girl’s cleavage as she was with his erudition. At the beginning, Carmen was horrified by the violent and bloody past of the continent—she could find nothing to admire in priests caked with dried blood who engaged in ripping hearts from their sacrificial victims—but when the anthropologist explained the significance of those rituals, told her the ancient legends, taught her to decipher hieroglyphics, took her to museums, and introduced her to a myriad of books on art, feather mantles, weavings, bas-reliefs, and sculptures, she came to appreciate that ferocious aesthetic. Her greatest interest lay in the designs and colors of cloth, paintings, ceramics, and ornaments; she entertained herself for hours making sketches to use in her jewelry. The anthropologist and his pupil spent so much time together observing mummies and blood-curdling Aztec statuary that they became lovers. He suggested they live together and share ecstasy and expenses; she left the pestilent hovel where she had been existing marginally and moved into his apartment in the very center of the city. The air pollution was so bad that sometimes birds dropped from the sky, but at least she had a bathroom with hot water and a sunny room where she could set up her workshop. She believed she had found happiness and imagined she would acquire wisdom through osmosis. She was eager to learn and lived in a constant state of amazed admiration for her lover; every crumb of knowledge he scattered fell onto fertile soil. In exchange for the first-rate education she was acquiring from the anthropologist, she was willing to serve him, to wash his clothes, clean the house, prepare the meals, and even cut his fingernails and his mane of hair—besides turning over to him everything she earned selling her silver pieces to tourists. He not only knew about phantasmagoric Indians and cemeteries of friable pots, he was also informed about film, books, and restaurants; he decided how she should dress, speak, make love, even think. Carmen’s submissiveness lasted much longer than could have been expected in a person of her temperament; for almost two years she reverently obeyed him. She even put up with his having other women and telling her about it in salacious detail, “because there should be no secrets between us,” and quietly endured being slapped around when he had had too much to drink. After every violent incident her erudite companion brought home flowers and put his head in her lap, weeping, begging her to understand—the devil in him had got the upper hand—and swearing he would never do it again. Carmen forgave him, but she did not forget, and in the meanwhile she was absorbing information like a sponge. She was embarrassed about being roughed up; she felt humiliated and som
etimes thought she must deserve it. Maybe that was normal treatment; hadn’t her father often beat her? Finally one day she dared mention it to Gregory Reeves in one of their secret Monday telephone conversations; her friend screamed to high heaven, called her stupid, terrified her with statistics of his own invention, and convinced her that the anthropologist would never change—just the opposite, his abuse would increase until it reached extremes she could not even imagine. Ten days later Carmen received a bank draft for a plane ticket and a letter offering to help and begging her to return to the United States. Gregory’s gift arrived the day after a skirmish in which with one sweep of his hand the anthropologist had emptied a soup pot over Carmen. It was an accident, they both knew that, but even so she spent two days dousing her chest with milk and olive oil. As soon as she could bear to wear a blouse she went to a travel agency, meaning to buy a ticket home, but as she was leafing through some brochures she remembered her father’s fury and decided she lacked the strength to confront him. In a fit of inspiration, she spun the needle and bought a ticket for Amsterdam. She traveled light and did not even say goodbye to her lover; she had meant to leave a letter but in the haste of packing forgot. She carried her jeweler’s tools and supplies in a tote bag, along with two tins of condensed milk to ease the distress of the journey.
She was dazzled by Europe, which she toured from end to end with a pack on her back, earning her living with no great difficulty, teaching English, selling her jewelry when she had time to make some, and knowing that if she was threatened by hunger she could call on Gregory for help. No cathedral, castle, or museum escaped her, until she reached the saturation point and swore never again to set foot in a temple of tourism; she would stroll through the streets and enjoy life. One summer she got off the train in Barcelona and was immediately surrounded by a group of noisy gypsies, who insisted on telling her fortune and selling her amulets. She thought they were stunning and decided on the spot that this style was made for her, not only for her jewelry design but for her personal life. Later she discovered the Moorish influence in the south of Spain and the color of North Africa, all of which she adopted in a happy mélange. She moved into a pension in the Gothic barrio, notable for its uninterrupted clanking and moaning of pipes and absence of natural light, but her room was large, with coffered ceilings, and contained an enormous worktable. Within a few days she had stitched up a number of ruffled skirts that reminded her of Olga in her younger years and of the costumes she herself had worn for her juggling act in Pershing Square. That look would be her style for the rest of her life; in years to come she refined it to perfection for her personal pleasure, never knowing that in a future time it would make her wealthy and famous.
After wandering from Oslo to Athens with her belongings on her back, and nearly penniless, she decided she had had enough of the vagabond life and that the time had come to settle down. She was convinced that the only occupation she was suited for was jewelry making, but there was merciless competition in that field. To excel, it was not enough to have original designs; before she went any further she must discover the secrets of her craft. Barcelona was an ideal place for that. She enrolled in several courses, where she learned centuries-old techniques and gradually developed her unique style, a blend of solid traditional craft with a bold gypsy flavor, touches of Africa, Latin America, and even a hint of India, so popular during that decade. She was always the most original student in the class, and her creations sold so quickly she could not keep up with the orders. Everything was going better than she could have hoped, until her path crossed that of a fellow student, a Japanese craftsman slightly younger than herself. Carmen had succeeded in placing her work in exclusive shops; he, on the other hand, was peddling his with little success along the Ramblas, a contrast he found humiliating. As consolation, Carmen went back to selling in the street, using the excuse that the soul of the city was to be found there. The young Japanese moved into Carmen’s crepuscular pension. Very quickly, their cultural differences outweighed their mutual attraction, but Carmen’s need for companionship was so great that she ignored the symptoms. Her lover would not renounce his ancestral customs: he came first, and he expected to be served. He lay for hours in a steaming tub and then yielded it to her when the water was cold. It was the same with food, bed, supplies, and work tools; in the street he walked ahead of her, and she had to follow two paces behind. If there was sun, he went out to sell and Carmen stayed behind in the dark, sunless room, working, but if they awoke to rain, it became her turn to peddle their wares, because her lover would be suffering an opportune rheumatic pain related to the damp weather. At first she found his behavior amusing—strange Oriental customs, she told herself good-naturedly—but after a while she grew impatient, and the arguments began. He never lost his composure and met her recriminations with long, glacial silences; she felt his withdrawal pressing in around her but did not complain because at least this man refrained from striking her or scalding her with boiling soup. Finally she would give in, tired of being lonely, and also yielding to her fascination for him; she was attracted by his long black hair, his small, extremely muscular body, his strange accent, and the precision of his movements. She would circle around him timidly, purr in his ear like a cat, and usually succeed in breaching his shell; their reconciliation was accomplished in bed, where he was expert. They would have stayed together out of inertia had a telegram from Inmaculada not intervened. It announced Pedro Morales’s illness and asked Carmen for the love of God to come home because she was the only one who could save her father from being consumed by sadness. Carmen realized then how much she loved the headstrong old man, how much she wanted to bury her head in her mother’s welcoming bosom and again be, if only for an instant, the indulged girl she had been as a child. Thinking that the trip would be for only a couple of weeks, she took nothing with her but the minimum of clothing she hurriedly stuffed into a bag. Her lover accompanied her to the airport, wished her luck, and, because they never touched in public, bade her farewell with a slight bow.
From looking death in the face so often, I learned the value of living. Life is all we have, and no life is more valuable than another. Juan José Morales’s life was worth no more than the lives of the men I killed, yet their deaths don’t weigh on me: those men are always with me; they are my comrades. Kill or be killed, it’s that simple. For me, it isn’t a moral question; my doubts and confusions are of a different nature. I’m one of the lucky ones who came out of the war unharmed.
When I arrived home, I went directly from the airport to a motel; I didn’t call anyone. San Francisco was cloudy, and a wintry wind was blowing, the way it does in summer, and I decided to wait for the sun to come out before I called Samantha. I don’t know why I thought the weather might make our meeting more amicable. The truth is that when I went away we were prepared to get a divorce; we never wrote to each other, and the day I called her from Hawaii it was obvious we had nothing to say to each other. I was tired, with no appetite for arguments or reproaches, much less for telling her or anyone else my war experiences. I wanted to see Margaret, of course, but my daughter might not recognize me; at that age children forget in a few days, and she hadn’t seen me for months. I left my things in the room and went out to look for a café. I was longing for a cup of San Francisco coffee; it’s the best in the world. I walked through that urban delirium where the ocean can rarely be seen, straight lines rising and falling, laid out in accord with a geometric design indifferent to the topography of the city’s hills. I looked for familiar landmarks, but everything was deformed by the fog. It was a place I didn’t know; I couldn’t identify the buildings and began to wander disoriented in that city of contradictions and smells, depraved like all ports, and as full of tricks as a frivolous girl. I can’t explain San Francisco’s air of elegance, seeing that it was founded by prostitutes and outlaws and bands of adventurers flushed with easy gold. A Chinese man brushed my arm, and I jumped as if I had been stung by a scorpion, fists clenched, reaching f
or the sidearm I no longer carried. The man smiled. Have a good day, he said, as he walked on. I stood there paralyzed, feeling strange eyes on me, although actually no one was paying attention to me, while the cable cars clanged by, students, secretaries, the ubiquitous tourists, Hispanic laborers, Asian businessmen, hippies, black prostitutes with platinum-blond wigs, homosexuals hand in hand, all like actors in a movie set illuminated by klieg lights, while I stood watching on this side of the screen, uncomprehending, totally outside everything, thousands of years away. I walked through the Italian district, through Chinatown, through streets frequented by sailors, where liquor, drugs, and pornography were the major commerce—inflatable sheep were the latest novelty—along with Saint Christopher medals as protection against the perils of the sea. I returned to the motel, took several sleeping pills, and was out for twenty hours; I was awakened by sun streaming through the window. I picked up the telephone to call Samantha but couldn’t remember my own number and decided to wait a while longer, to give myself a couple of days alone to compose body and soul; I needed to cleanse myself, inside and out, of scores of sins and terrible memories. I felt contaminated, dirty, dead tired. I also waited to call the Moraleses; I would have had to leave immediately for Los Angeles, and I didn’t have the courage to do it. I wasn’t ready yet to talk about Juan José, to look Inmaculada and Pedro in the eye and assure them their son had died for his country, a hero, fully confessed and without pain, almost without realizing, when in fact he died in agony, and only half of his body was left to bury. I couldn’t tell them his last words were not a message for them; he had clung to the chaplain’s hand and said, Hold me, Padre, I’m falling . . . it’s so deep down there. Nothing happens the way it does in the movies, not even death; we don’t die cleanly, we die stricken with terror in a pool of blood and shit. In the movies no one really dies; in war no one really lives. In Vietnam I used to imagine that soon someone would turn on the lights and I would walk out of the theater and get a cup of coffee and before long forget everything. Now that I’ve learned to live with the canker of a good memory, I no longer make believe that life is like fiction; I accept it with all the pain it carries with it.