“You and I don’t need words, Dai, but if you’re going to get along in the world you have to communicate. Drawings aren’t enough. Try to talk a little so we can go on vacation; otherwise we’ll both be screwed.”
“I didn’t like that doctor, Mama; he smelled of soy sauce,” the boy replied in perfect English. He would never be garrulous, but any question of his being mute had been settled.
Free time came to be Carmen’s greatest luxury. She stopped seeing her friends and refused invitations from the very suitors she had only recently found so attractive. Until then, love had produced more suffering than good memories; according to Gregory, she chose terrible candidates, as if she could fall in love only with men who mistreated her. She was convinced that her run of bad luck had ended, but to be on the safe side decided to be cautious. For years Inmaculada Morales had been making vows to San Antonio de Padua, hoping that the patron saint of unmarried women would take charge of finding a husband for her outlandish daughter, who was over thirty and still showed no sign of settling down. Finding the perfect companion had also been an unspoken obsession of Carmen’s in the past. When she was without a man her dreams were peopled with ghosts of sexually appealing men: she needed a strong arm, a warm body close to hers, manly hands at her waist, a hoarse voice whispering in her ear. Now, however, companionship was not the only consideration; her lover would also need to be the perfect father for Dai. She thought about the men she had had, and for the first time realized the extent of her rage against them. She wondered whether she would have allowed herself to be battered in front of the boy, or resigned herself to bathing Dai in someone’s left-over cold bathwater, and was frightened by her own submissiveness. She reviewed recent lovers, but none passed her severe scrutiny; she and Dai were better off alone. Maternity was calming for her soul, and for the demands of the flesh she decided to follow Gregory’s example and be satisfied with interim lovers. She also questioned why she had lacked the courage to have her baby ten years ago, why she allowed herself to be defeated by fear and the pressure of meaningless traditions; it was not so difficult to be an unmarried mother, after all. Her new responsibilities kept her energy at the boiling point: her desire to work intensified, and more and more original ideas flowed from her hands; ideas and exotic materials from remote regions of the world came to life beneath her jeweler’s scriber, torch, and pliers. She would wake up early in the morning with the detailed vision of a design in mind and lie in bed a few minutes, wrapped in the warmth and scent of her son; then she would get out of bed, don the embroidered robe Leo Galupi had given her, boil water for mango tea, turn on the Victorian lamps over her worktable, and pick up her tools with happy determination. From time to time she glanced at her sleeping child and smiled. My life is complete, she thought. I have never been so happy.
PART FOUR
Chapter Four
Be careful what you ask of Heaven; it might be granted, was one of Inmaculada Morales’s sayings, and in the case of Gregory Reeves it came true in deadly earnest. In the following years he carried out the plans he had so enthusiastically proposed for himself, but all the while his dissatisfaction was building like steam in a pressure cooker. He could not stay still for a minute; as long as he was busy he could ignore the demands of his soul, but if he had a few quiet minutes to himself he felt a fire consuming him, a fire so powerful he was sure it did not originate with him but had been fed by his tempestuous father and, before him, his grandfather the horse thief, and before that who knows how many greatgrandfathers branded by the same stigma of restlessness. It was his fate to roast on embers fanned by a thousand generations. That heat drove him forward; he assumed his victorious image just as the bucolic detachment and eternal innocence of the hippies were being ground to bits in the gears of the system’s implacable machinery. No one could censure his ambition, because an impending era of unbridled greed was already gestating throughout the nation. The unsuccessful war had left a feeling of shame in the air, a collective desire to find vindication in other ways. No one spoke of the war; more than ten years would go by before history and art could begin to exorcise the demons unleashed by the disaster. Carmen watched the street where she and her best friends had earned their living slowly decay; she bid farewell to many craftsmen displaced by competition from dealers in tawdry products from Taiwan, and one by one she saw harmless mental incompetents disappear, having either died or drifted elsewhere when they were no longer fed. Other disturbed people, much worse off, took their place, war veterans who had succumbed to the horrors of their memories. Revolution in the streets was replaced by the plague of conformism, infecting even the student population. Criminals and the poor multiplied; beggars, drunks, whores, drug dealers, thieves were everywhere. The world is coming apart at the seams, Carmen lamented. Gregory Reeves, who had never at any time shared the ingenuous dreams of those trumpeting the Age of Aquarius, that era of supposed brotherhood and peace, had offered in response the time-honored figure of the pendulum swinging from one extreme to the other. He was unaffected by the change because he had thrown himself into his wild pursuit of the good life well in advance of the explosion of materialism that would mark the decade of the eighties. He boasted of his triumphs, while his colleagues wondered how he obtained the best cases and where he found the money to party constantly, spend a week whirling around the Mediterranean, and wear custom-made silk shirts. No one knew about the exorbitant bank loans or the bold juggling of credit cards. Reeves preferred not to dwell on the fact that sooner or later he would have to pay his bills; when his funds ran out he asked his banker for another loan, arguing that if he were bankrupt or in jail he certainly could not meet his payments, and that money attracts money like a magnet. He never worried about the future; he was too busy trying to shape the present. He said he was without scruple and had never felt so strong or so liberated; he could not, then, understand the urge to escape that plagued him night and day. He was a bachelor again and had no cross to bear but that of his own heart. He lived a half hour from his daughter but saw her only the two times a year he came to pick her up in his sporty car and take her out, as if he could give her in four hours what had been lacking for six months. At the end of each visit she was returned, sick from a surfeit of ice cream and cake and with a carload of gifts more appropriate for a seductive woman than for a schoolgirl. He had never succeeded in convincing Margaret to call him Daddy; she had decided that “Gregory” was more fitting for that almost unknown man who sped through her life twice a year like a Santa Claus on the loose. Nor did she call Samantha Mother. Margaret’s teacher made an appointment with Samantha to ask whether it was true that they had adopted Margaret after her real parents had been brutally murdered by a gang of thrill killers. She recommended consultation with a child psychologist, but they went to only one session because the time interfered with Samantha’s yoga class. I don’t need anyone to tell me who you are, I know that perfectly well, but it’s fun to confuse that stupid teacher of mine, Margaret explained with characteristic calm and composure. Her parents concluded that she had a prodigious imagination and a remarkable sense of humor. They were similarly undisturbed that she wet her bed at night like a baby but insisted on dressing like a grown woman, that she wore lipstick and painted her fingernails, or that instead of playing with other little girls she postured like a practiced tart. Aside from the inconvenience of diapering her at night at an age when she was old enough to begin her first classes in sex education, she gave them no headaches; she was mysterious, an almost incorporeal creature whose most appreciated virtue was that of passing unnoticed. It was so easy to forget she existed that more than once her father joked about Olga’s necklaces for invisibility being just the thing for his daughter.
During the first seven years Gregory Reeves practiced law, he acquired the tools and the vices of his profession. His boss favored him among the other attorneys in the firm and personally took charge of teaching Gregory the tricks of the trade. He was one of those meticulous and obsessi
ve persons who need to control every last detail, an unbearable man but a magnificent lawyer. Nothing escaped his scrutiny; he had a nose like a bloodhound for sniffing out the key to every legal problem and a mesmerizing eloquence when it came to swaying a jury. He taught Gregory to study cases in minute detail, search out apparently insignificant cracks in the structure, and plan his strategy like a general.
“It’s a chess game, and the person who anticipates the most moves wins. You have to have the pugnaciousness of a pit bull but at the same time keep a cool head. If you get rattled, it’s all over; you must learn to control your emotions, or you will never be one of the best, Reeves,” he would say. “You have a good disposition, but in a fight you’re too prone to throw punches blindly.”
“That’s exactly what Padre Larraguibel used to tell me in the courtyard of Our Lady of Lourdes.”
“Who?”
“My boxing teacher.”
Reeves was tenacious, untiring, difficult to bend, impossible to break, and ferocious in confrontations, but he was undermined by his own passions. The old man liked his energy; he himself had had energy to spare in his youth and still had a good reserve and could therefore appreciate it in others. He also celebrated Reeves’s ambition because it was a good motivator: you put a carrot in front of Reeves’s nose, and he ran like a rabbit. If at any moment he was aware of the younger man’s maneuvering to appropriate his knowledge and use it as a trampoline to leapfrog over others in the firm, he should not have been surprised. He had done the same when he was beginning, with the difference that for him there had been no astute employer to hold him in check. He considered himself a good judge of character; he was sure he could keep Reeves bottled up and exploit him for his own benefit for an indefinite period. It was like breaking a horse: you had to give him his head, let him run, wear him down, and the minute he began to take the bit between his teeth rein him in so he would know who was in charge. This was not the first time he had tried it, and he had always had good results. In rare moments of weakness he was tempted to lean on the arm of that young lawyer so like himself; Reeves could be the son he never had. He had built a small empire, and now, approaching eighty, he wondered who would inherit it. He had few pleasures left; his body no longer responded to the spur of imagination, and he could not savor a fine meal without paying the consequences with a bellyache—to say nothing of women, a subject too painful to contemplate. He observed Reeves with a mixture of envy and paternal understanding, but he was neither a sentimental old fool nor inclined to relinquish the least shred of power to him. He was proud of having been born with a hard heart, as he was fond of telling anyone who came to him for a favor. The long habit of selfishness and the invincible armor of his avarice were strong enough to quell any glimmer of sympathy. He was the perfect master for a laborious apprenticeship in greed.
Timothy Duane never forgave his father for having brought him into the world, nor for continuing to thwart his heart’s desires with his good health and bad humor. To defy him, Duane committed every known atrocity, always making sure his father knew about it, and so wasted fifty years in a festering hatred that cost him his peace and well-being. Sometimes his contrariness worked to his advantage, as when he decided to avoid military service because his father supported the war—not so much out of patriotism as because of financial interests in armaments—but usually his rebellion circled back to blow up in his face. He decided not to marry or have children, even on the few occasions when he was in love, in order to destroy his father’s ambition to establish a dynasty. The family name he so detested would die with him—except for a branch of the Duanes in Ireland no one wanted to acknowledge because they reminded them of their humble origins. Cultured and refined, with the natural elegance of one born between monogrammed sheets, Timothy had a passionate interest in the arts and a congeniality that won him droves of friends, but before his father he somehow managed to hide these virtues and behave like a clod, for the sole purpose of annoying him. If the Duane patriarch was entertaining at a dinner for the cream of society, Timothy would appear without being invited and with a slut on his arm, eager to violate all rules of civility. While his father fumed that he never wanted to see his son again as long as he lived, Timothy’s mother openly defended him, even when it meant a confrontation with her husband. You must see a psychiatrist, son, she often suggested, and get help with your problems; you can overcome the flaws in your character; but Timothy’s response was that without the flaws he would not have any character left. In the meantime, he lived a miserable life, not for lack of means but because of his bent for self-torture. He had an apartment in the most expensive section of the city, an entire floor in an old building, decorated with modern furniture and strategically placed mirrors, and an income for the remainder of his lifetime, his grandfather’s ultimate gift. Since he had never wanted for anything, he placed no importance on money and ridiculed the many foundations his father had invented, less to evade taxes than to deprive Timothy of his inheritance. His demons harassed him relentlessly, pushing him to vices he found repellent but indulged in to torment his father, even if it meant killing himself in the process. He spent his days in his pathology laboratory, sickened by human frailty and the infinite permutations of pain and putrefaction but also awed by the possibilities of science. He never admitted it, but the laboratory was the only place where he found a certain peace. He could lose himself in the painstaking analysis of a diseased cell, and when he emerged from among X-rays, test tubes, and laser beams, generally very late at night, the muscles of his neck and back might ache, but he was content. That sensation would last until he reached the street and started his car, but when he realized he had nowhere to go and no one waiting for him, he would sink back into self-hatred. He patronized the sleaziest bars, where he drank until he forgot even his name; he got into brawls with sailors and ended up in hospital emergency rooms; he spewed insults in homosexual bathhouses and only by a hair escaped the violence he detested; he picked up whores to buy an unwholesome gratification seasoned by the danger of lethal contagion. He would hurtle down a precipitous slope, experiencing a mixture of fear and pleasure, cursing God and invoking death, but, after a week or two of such defilement, suffer a crisis of guilt and stop short, shivering at the brink of the chasm opening at his feet. He would swear never again to swallow a drop of alcohol, shut himself in his apartment like an anchorite to read his favorite authors and listen to jazz into the early hours, and have his blood tested for evidence of the curse that in his heart he desired as punishment for his sins. A period of tranquillity would begin, during which he attended concerts and plays, visited his mother like a good son, and asked out girls who patiently waited with the everlasting hope of reforming him. He went on long solitary excursions into the mountains to listen to the voice of God calling to him on the wind. The only person he saw in both good and bad times was his friend Gregory Reeves, who rescued him from assorted predicaments and helped him get back on his feet. Duane made no mystery of his wastrel existence; on the contrary, he enjoyed exaggerating his infamy in order to cultivate his reputation as a lost soul. There was a side of his character, nevertheless, jealously hidden, that few suspected. While sneering with defiant cynicism at the mention of any high-minded cause, he surreptitiously contributed to those same projects, taking great care that his name be kept in strictest secrecy. He set aside part of his income for helping the needy within his sphere and for sustaining good works in distant lands—from starving children to political prisoners. Contrary to what he had expected when he chose his field of specialization, his work among cadavers increased his compassion for the living; all human suffering concerned him, but he had little emotional reserve to expend on endangered animals, vanishing forests, or polluted waters. He made fierce jokes about those campaigns, just as he railed on the subject of race, religion, and women—in part because such causes were in vogue and his greatest delight lay in creating a scandal. He was intolerant of the false virtue of people who were horrifi
ed by the thought of a dolphin trapped in a tuna net but indifferently passed homeless beggars on the street, pretending not to see them. His favorite expression was What a shitty world we live in!