My sister and I had grown apart; we hadn’t seen each other since Margaret was born. I didn’t want to call her, or my mother. What would we have said? My mother was opposed to the war; she thought it was more honorable to desert than to kill. Any form of violence is shameful and perverse; remember Gandhi, she always told me; we cannot support a culture based on armaments; we are in this world to celebrate life and to promote compassion and justice. Poor woman; innocent of reality, she wandered through the planes of The Infinite Plan after my father, half out of her head but with an unquestionable lucidity in her digressions. I left for Vietnam without saying goodbye because I didn’t want to hurt her; for her, the war was a matter of principle, it had nothing to do with my personal safety. I suppose she loved me in her way, but there was always a chasm between us. What would my father have advised me? He would never have told me to go to jail or leave the country; he would have invited me to go hunting, and in the frozen silence of dawn, waiting for the ducks, would have clapped me on the back, and we would have understood each other without need for words, as men sometimes understand each other.
I spent my first three days home shut up in the motel, sitting before the television with cartons of beer and bottles of whiskey; then I took my sleeping bag down to the beach and spent two weeks staring at the sea, smoking pot, and conversing with the ghost of Juan José. The water was cold, but I swam just the same, until I felt my blood congealing in my veins and my brain growing numb and free of memories—blank. The ocean over there is warm; soldiers swarmed over the sand like ants: three days of play, beer, and rock to compensate for months of fighting. For two weeks I did not exchange a complete sentence with anyone, merely mumbling a word or two to ask for pizza or a hamburger. I think deep down I wanted to go back to Vietnam. At least there I had comrades and something to do; here I had no friends, I was alone, I didn’t belong anywhere. In civilian life no one spoke the language of war; there was no vocabulary to describe the experience of the firefights, and even had there been one, nobody would have wanted to hear my story; nobody likes bad news. Only among veterans could I feel at ease and talk about the things I would never discuss with a civilian. Only grunts would understand why you harden yourself to affection and are afraid to get close to anyone; they know that physical courage comes much easier than emotional courage, because they, too, lost friends they loved like brothers and made up their minds that in the future they would spare themselves that unbearable pain: it’s best not to love anyone too much. Without realizing it, I had begun to slip down into that abyss where so many are lost; I began to see the glamorous side of violence, to think that nothing so exhilarating would ever happen to me again, that the rest of my life would be a gray desert by comparison.
I believed I had discovered the secret that explains why we keep on fighting wars. Joan and Susan maintain that war is a way for old machos to eliminate young men; they hate them and fear them and don’t want to share anything with them, not women or power or money, because they know that sooner or later the younger men will depose them. That’s the reason they send the young to their deaths, even if it’s their own sons. That may be a logical rationale for the old men, but why do the young men go? Why throughout so many millennia have they not rebelled against these ritual massacres? I have an answer. It’s something more than the primordial instinct to do battle, more than blood lust: pleasure. I discovered that on the mountain. I don’t dare say the word aloud, it would bring bad luck, but I repeat it over and over to myself: pleasure, pleasure. The most intense pleasure you can experience, much more intense than sex: thirst satiated, first love requited, divine revelation, say those who know what it is.
That night on the mountain I was within a fraction of a second of death. A bullet grazed my cheek and struck the forehead of the soldier behind me. Panic paralyzed me for an instant; I was suspended in the fascination of my own fear, but then consciousness was blacked out and I began to fire in a frenzy, screaming and cursing, unable to stop or to reason, while bullets sped past me and the world exploded in a cataclysmic roaring. I was blanketed in heat and smoke, trapped in the airless void that followed each flash of fire. I have no idea how long all that lasted or what I did or why I did it; I remember only the miracle of finding myself alive, the rush of adrenaline and the pain over every inch of my body, sensual pain, an atrocious pleasure unlike anything I had known, deeper than the most prolonged orgasm, a pleasure that invaded every pore, turning my blood to caramel and my bones to sand, submerging me finally in nothingness.
After nearly two weeks in the motel on the beach, I woke up one night screaming. In my nightmare I was alone on the mountain at dawn; bodies were strewn below me, and the shadows of guerrillas were climbing toward me in the mist. They were coming closer. Everything was very slow and very quiet, a silent movie. I fired my weapon, felt the recoil, my hands ached, I saw the sparks, but there was no sound. The bullets passed through the enemy without stopping them; the guerrillas were transparent, as if sketched on glass; they moved forward inexorably, encircling me. I opened my mouth to scream but was so filled with horror that no voice came out, only shards of ice. After waking, the pounding of my heart kept me from falling asleep again. I got out of bed, took my jacket, and went to walk on the beach. All right, enough moaning, I announced to the gulls at dawn.
Carmen Morales did not dare go straight home to her family, because she did not know what welcome she might expect from her father, whom she had not seen for seven years. From the airport she took a taxi to the Reeveses’ house. As they drove through the streets of the barrio she was surprised by the transformations; it looked more prosperous, cleaner, more orderly, and much smaller than she remembered. Besides the actual changes, she was influenced by comparisons to the enormous squatters’ cities that ring the Mexican capital. She smiled when she thought how this complex of streets had been her universe for so many years and how she had fled from it as an exile, weeping for her lost family and home. Now she felt like a foreigner. The taxi driver observed her with curiosity in the rearview mirror and could not resist the temptation to ask where she was from. He had never seen anyone like that woman in the brightly colored skirts and clinking bracelets; she was different from those sleepwalking hippies, who wore similar garb: this one had the determined air of a woman of business.
“I’m a gypsy,” Carmen told him, with absolute aplomb.
“Where is that?”
“We gypsies don’t have a country; we’re from everywhere.”
“You speak very good English,” was his comment.
Carmen had difficulty locating the Reeves cottage; over the years, weeds had swallowed up the garden, and the willow tree blocked the house from view. She walked down the path toward the front yard. She recognized the place where she had buried Oliver, following the instructions of Gregory, who wanted his childhood companion’s remains to rest near the family home and not on the garbage dump like some stray. She found Nora Reeves sitting on the porch in the same rickety wicker chair, a worn old woman with a meringue-white bun and an apron as faded as the rest of her. She was much smaller and wore a sweet and slightly addled expression, as if her soul had already left her body. She stood up unsteadily and greeted Carmen politely, without recognizing her.
“It’s me, Doña Nora, I’m Carmen, Pedro and Inmaculada Morales’s daughter.”
It took Nora Reeves a minute to situate the visitor in the confused map of her memory; she stood looking at Carmen with her mouth agape, unable to relate the image of the dark-haired girl who used to play with her son to this apparition escaped from a sheik’s harem. Finally she held out her arms and embraced Carmen, trembling. Nora Reeves made hot tea, served in glasses, and they sat down to catch up on news of the past. They were interrupted by Judy’s noisy brood, back from school, four children of indeterminate age, two flaming redheads and two with Latin features. Nora explained that the first two were Judy’s own and that the other two also lived with her although they were her second husband’s ch
ildren by a previous marriage. Their grandmother served them milk and bread and jam.
“Do they all live here?” Carmen asked, surprised.
“No. I watch them after school until their mother comes to pick them up in the evening.”
Judy appeared about seven, and she, too, failed to recognize her friend. Carmen remembered her as being large, but she could not have imagined that Judy could continue to add so much weight; she was too huge for any of the chairs, so she lowered herself gingerly to the porch steps, giving the impression that it would take a crane to get her up again. She looked radiant, nevertheless.
“Not all of this is fat,” she announced with pride. “I’m pregnant again.”
Both her own and her foster children ran to clamber over the amiable mountain of their mother, who hugged them, laughing, and accommodated them among her rolls of flesh with a skill born of practice and affection, at the same time handing each a sugar bun and in passing eating several herself. When Carmen saw Judy playing with the children, she understood that motherhood was her friend’s natural state and could not avoid the prick of envy.
“After dinner I’ll take you home, but first let’s call Doña Inmaculada, so she can prepare your father. Don’t you have anything a little less colorful to wear? That old man disapproves of any wild stuff in women. Is that the style in Europe?” Judy asked without a hint of irony.
Pedro Morales was waiting for his daughter dressed in his funeral suit enlivened with a red necktie and a carnation in his buttonhole. Inmaculada had announced the news with extreme caution, expecting a violent reaction, and was amazed when her husband’s face lighted up as if he had shed twenty years. “Brush off my suit, woman,” was all he could manage as he blew his nose to hide his emotion.
“I expect she’s changed a lot—with God’s blessing,” Inmaculada warned him.
“Don’t worry, woman. Even if she shows up with blue hair, I’ll recognize her.”
Still, like Nora and Judy, he was not fully prepared for the woman who walked into his house a half hour later, and his jaw hung slack for several seconds before he closed his mouth. Carmen seemed taller to him, but then he noticed the high-heeled sandals and measured the cloud of curly, tangled hair that added inches to her height. She was festooned with necklaces like an idol, her eyes were painted with black lines, and she resembled something he had seen in a Moroccan tourism poster hanging in Los Tres Amigos bar. Even so, his daughter looked beautiful to him. They hugged each other for a long time and wept together for Juan José and for the seven years she’d been away. Then she curled up beside him to tell him some of her adventures, omitting certain portions to avoid scandalizing him. In the meantime, Inmaculada busied herself in the kitchen, repeating, gracias, bendito Dios, gracias, bendito Dios, and Judy, glued to the telephone, called all the Morales children and friends to announce that Carmen had come home turned into an outlandish, wild-haired gypsy, but that she was still the same girl: bring beer and your guitars, because Inmaculada is making tacos to celebrate.
His daughter’s presence restored Pedro Morales’s good humor. At the insistence of Carmen and the other members of his family, he agreed to see a doctor, who told him he had advanced diabetes. None of my ancestors ever had any such thing, this is some newfangled American disease; I have no intention of sticking myself every time I turn around, like some stinking addict, the offended patient grumbled; that doctor doesn’t know what he’s talking about, they mixed up the tests in the laboratory, they’re always making stupid errors. Once again, however, Inmaculada gained the upper hand and forced Pedro to stay on a diet and herself took charge of administering his medication at the proper times. I’d rather argue with you every day of the week than end up a widow, she said; it would be hard work to break in another husband. It had never entered Pedro’s mind that he could be replaced in what he had thought was his wife’s unconditional love, and the knowledge made a considerable dent in his stubbornness. He refused to admit he was ill but resigned himself to the treatment, “just to please that crazy woman,” as he liked to say.
The barrio quickly seemed too small for Carmen Morales; after a few weeks with her parents, she felt she was suffocating. In the years she was away, she had idealized the past; in moments of greatest loneliness she longed for her mother’s tenderness, for her father’s protection, and for the companionship of family, but she had forgotten the narrow-mindedness of the barrio. She had changed during those years; the dust of much of the world was on her shoes. She paced through the house like a caged leopard, filling the house and disturbing its peace with her whirling skirts, her tinkling bracelets, and her impatience. In the street, people turned to stare at her, and children came up to touch her. It was impossible to ignore the criticism and whispering going on behind her back: Just look how the younger Morales girl has got herself up; that hair hasn’t seen a comb for centuries; she’s got to be either a hippie or a whore, they said. Nor could she find a job; she was not willing to work in a factory like Judy Reeves, and there was no market for her jewelry in the barrio—women wore false gold and rhinestones; no one would be caught dead in her aboriginal earrings. She imagined it would be reasonably easy to place her pieces in shops in the city, where actresses and sophisticated shoppers and tourists would buy them, but in the claustrophobia of her parents’ house she had no stimulus for creativity; her ideas dried up along with her desire to work. She wandered around the rooms, depressed by the porcelain figurines, the silk flowers, the family portraits, the red plush furniture encased in plastic covers, all the symbols of the Moraleses’ new opulence. The bric-a-brac that was her mother’s pride and joy gave her nightmares; she preferred a thousand times over the more modest house of her childhood. She could not bear the radio and television programs blaring night and day with stories of romance and tragedy, or the earsplitting commercials touting various brands of soap and automobiles and lotteries. Worst of all was the widespread pursuit of gossip: everyone lived on what everyone else did; not a hair stirred in the neighborhood that escaped comment. Carmen felt like a visiting Martian and consoled herself with her mother’s cooking. Inmaculada had adapted her recipes to her husband’s strict diet without losing any of their flavor and spent hours among her pots and pans, bathed in delicious odors of salsas and spices. Carmen was bored. Apart from playing checkers with her father, helping do household chores, and seeing relatives when the family got together for Sunday dinner, she had nothing to do. She had intended to return to Spain but realized she did not belong there either, and besides, at this distance she was far less attracted to her Japanese lover. She had written to him and talked by telephone, but his responses were gelid. Away from the influence of warm hazelnut muscles and thick black hair, she shuddered as she remembered the cold baths and other humiliations, and found the idea of returning to him repellent. It was Olga who suggested she explore Berkeley, because with a little luck Gregory Reeves would be home in the not-too-distant future and could help her; to judge by the newspapers, where a new scandal on the university campus was reported every week, it was the perfect spot for a person as unconventional as she. Carmen agreed that she had nothing to lose by trying. She called her lover and asked him to send her savings and jeweler’s tools to her; he promised he would send them when he had time, but after several weeks and another five telephone calls had gone by without a response from him, she understood just how busy he was and did not try again. She decided she would leap into the adventure anyway and start from nothing, as she had done so many times before. Pedro Morales did not oppose her plans in any way; in fact, he handed her a check to pay for her ticket. He was happy to have his daughter back, but he was not blind to her needs, and it pained him to see her bumping into walls like a bird with clipped wings.
Carmen Morales flourished in Berkeley as if the city had been established to serve as her personal showcase. In those crowded streets her attire did not rate a second glance, and the bounteous charms beneath her blouse did not provoke the insolent whistles t
hat followed her through the Latin barrio. In Berkeley she found challenges similar to those that had fascinated her in Europe, and a freedom she had never known. And there was something about the bay and the hills that seemed made just for her. She calculated that if she was very careful she could get by for a few months thanks to her father’s help, but decided to look for a job because if she was to continue to make jewelry she must buy tools and materials. Had Gregory Reeves been home, he would obviously have offered her a sofa in his house for a while, but she had no illusions about Samantha’s generosity. She did not know Gregory’s wife, but guessed she would be coldly received by her, especially now that Samantha was divorcing her friend. Carmen called and made an appointment to see little Margaret, whom she had seen only in snapshots Gregory had sent, but when she arrived Samantha was not home. The door was opened by a small girl so delicate and fragile it was difficult to imagine her as the daughter of Gregory Reeves and his athletic wife. When Carmen compared her to her own nieces and nephews of the same age, Margaret seemed a strange child indeed, a perfect miniature of a beautiful but sad woman. Margaret asked Carmen to come in, announcing in affected tones that her mother was playing tennis and would be home soon. For a moment, she was vaguely interested in Carmen’s bracelets, but then she sat in total silence, with her ankles crossed and her hands folded in her lap. It was impossible to get a word out of her, and the two of them ended up sitting facing but not looking at each other, like strangers in a waiting room. Finally Samantha came in, carrying her racket in one hand and a loaf of French bread in the other, and, as Carmen had foreseen, greeted her coldly. They looked one another over quite openly; each had an image of the other derived from Gregory’s descriptions, and each was relieved to find that her fantasies were different from the reality. Carmen had expected a much more beautiful woman, not this vigorous boyish creature with skin weathered by too much sun. Imagine how she’ll look in a few years; gringas age badly, Carmen said to herself. As for Samantha, she was gratified to see the other woman dressed in horrible, loose-fitting clothes; she was obviously hiding plenty of extra pounds around her ribs; besides, it was clear she had never exercised in her life, and at that rate she would soon be a middle-aged roll of fat. Latinas age badly, Samantha thought with satisfaction. Both knew instantly they could never be friends, and they kept the visit brief. Carmen rejoiced that her best friend was being divorced from that champion of the courts, and Samantha asked herself whether when Gregory came home—if he came home—he would become that plump bitch’s lover, an idea that must have been in the back of their minds for years. Let them make the most of it, she muttered, unsure why the prospect should make her so angry.