From their first meeting, when the Reeveses’ truck had disgorged its contents onto the Moraleses’ patio, Gregory and Carmen, the Moraleses’ youngest daughter, had been fast friends. One look was enough to establish the complicity that was to last throughout their lifetimes. The girl was a year younger, but in practical matters she was much better informed; it was she who would reveal to him the tricks to surviving in the barrio. Gregory was tall, thin, and very blond, and she was small, plump, and the color of golden brown sugar. The boy’s knowledge was out of the ordinary: he could recount the plots of operas, describe landscapes from the National Geographic, and recite Byron’s verses; he knew how to bag a duck, gut a fish, and in an instant could calculate how far a truck would travel in forty-five minutes if it was moving at thirty miles per hour—none of which had much application in his new situation. He knew how to get the boa into a sack but could not go to the corner to buy bread; he had never lived among other children or been inside a classroom; he knew nothing of children’s cruelty or of impassable racial barriers, because Nora had drummed into him that people are good—anything else was an abomination of nature—and all people are equal. Until he went to school, Gregory believed her. The color of his skin and his absolute lack of malice irritated the other boys, who jumped him whenever they could, usually in the bathroom, and pummeled him until he was half stupefied. Not always the innocent one, he often provoked confrontations. With Juan José and Carmen Morales, he invented gross practical jokes, such as using a syringe to remove the mint from chocolate bonbons and then to fill them with the hottest salsa from Inmaculada’s kitchen; they then offered these treats to the Martínez gang: Let’s smoke the peace pipe and be friends, OK? After that trick, they had to hide for a week.
Every day, as soon as the last bell rang, Gregory ran home like a streak, chased by a pack of boys ready to slaughter him. He was so fast that he often stopped in midcourse to yell insults at his enemies. As long as his family was camping in the Morales patio, he had no fear, because the house was close to the school; Juan José ran with him, and no one could catch him in such a short distance. When they moved to their new house, however, the distance was ten times greater, and the possibilities of reaching his goal in safety were diminished by alarming proportions. He changed his route, learned different shortcuts, and found hiding places where he could crouch and wait until his pursuers tired of hunting for him. Once, he slipped into the parish church, because in the Padre’s religion class he had been told that since the Middle Ages the church had traditionally served as a place of asylum; the Martínez gang nonetheless followed him inside and after a horrendous chase across the pews caught him before the main altar and kicked and beat him beneath the indifferent gaze of plaster saints wearing gilt brass halos. The energetic priest had come running at Gregory’s cries and lifted his enemies off him by the hair of their heads.
“God didn’t save me!” the boy yelped, more humiliated than hurt, pointing to the bloodied Christ presiding over the altar.
“What do you mean, he didn’t save you?” roared the priest. “Didn’t I come help you, you ingrate?”
“Too late! Look what they did to me,” Gregory howled, displaying his bruises.
“God has no time for such harebrained feuds. Get up and blow your nose,” the Padre commanded.
“You said it was safe here….”
“It is, if the enemy knows it’s a holy place; those blockheads don’t even realize the sacrilege they committed.”
“Your lousy church isn’t worth a damn!”
“You watch what you say, or you’ll be missing your teeth, you young runt!” The Padre’s uplifted hand underlined the threat.
“Sacrilege! Sacrilege!” Gregory remembered just in time, a ploy that had the virtue of cooling the Basque blood of the priest, who took a deep breath to compose himself and attempted to speak in tones more appropriate to his holy vestments.
“Look here, son, you need to learn to defend yourself. God helps those who help themselves, as the old saying goes.”
That very day, the priest, who in his youth had been a belligerent peasant boy, shut himself in the courtyard of the sacristy with Gregory and began teaching him to box—without regard for the Marquis of Queensberry. The first lesson consisted of three inviolable principles: the only thing that matters is to win; the one who strikes first strikes twice; and go straight for the balls, son, and may God forgive us. In any case, Gregory decided that the house of God was less secure than the firm bosom of Inmaculada Morales; his confidence in his fists grew in direct proportion to his flagging faith in divine intervention. From then on, if he was in trouble he ran to his friends’ home, leapt over the patio wall, and ran into the kitchen, where he waited for Judy to come to his rescue. He was safe with his sister because she was the prettiest girl in the school; all the boys were in love with her, and none would have been so stupid as to do anything to Gregory in her presence. Carmen and Juan José Morales tried to serve as liaison between their new friend and the rest of their schoolmates, but they did not always succeed; it was not only Gregory’s coloring that made him stand out: he was also proud, stubborn, and crafty. His head was filled with stories of Indians, wild animals, characters in operas, theories of souls in floating oranges, Logi, and Master Functionaries, none of which either the Padre or his teachers wanted to learn more about. In addition, he lost his head at the least provocation and lashed out with eyes closed and fists flailing; he fought blindly, and he almost always lost: he was the whipping boy for the entire school. Everyone laughed at him and at his dog—a mongrel with short legs and an ugly head—and even at how his mother looked: she wore old-fashioned dresses and was always handing out brochures on the Bahai religion or The Infinite Plan. They saved their greatest scorn for his sentimentality. All the other boys had absorbed the macho teachings of their world: men should be merciless, brave, dominant, loners, fast with a weapon, and superior to women in every sense. The two basic rules, learned by boys in the cradle, were never to trust anyone and never to cry—whatever the reason. Gregory, however, would listen to the teacher telling how seals in Canada were clubbed by fur hunters, or to the Padre recounting the woes of lepers in Calcutta, and with tears in his eyes determine to go north immediately to defend the baby seals or to the Far East to be a missionary. On the other hand, they could beat him silly and he would never shed a tear; his pride was so fierce they could have skinned him alive before he would ask for mercy. That was the only reason the other boys did not consider him a hopeless pansy. Despite everything, he was a happy young boy, with an infallible memory for jokes and the ability to coax music from any instrument—the favorite of the girls at recess time.
In exchange for the boxing lessons, the Padre required Gregory to assist him at Sunday masses. When Gregory told that to the Moraleses, he suffered a barrage of jokes from Juan José and his brothers—until Inmaculada intervened and said that because they were making fun, Juan José must serve as altar boy himself, and be proud of the honor, praise our blessed Lord. The two friends spent grudging hours in the church, swinging incense, tinkling the altar bells, and reciting parts of the Latin mass under the attentive eye of the priest, who even in his most intense moments watched them with his famed third eye—the one people said he had in the back of his head to see his parishioners’ sins. The priest liked it that one of his assistants was dark-haired and the other blond; he thought such racial integration must please the Creator. Before mass the boys prepared the altar and afterward they cleaned the sacristy; when they left they received an anise bun as a reward, but the true prize was a surreptitious swig of ceremonial wine, aged, sweet, and strong as sherry. One morning their enthusiasm got out of hand and they polished off the bottle, leaving them short of wine for the last mass. Gregory, inspired, suggested that they pilfer a few coins from the collection plate and rush out and buy some Coca-Cola. They shook the bottle to kill the fizz and then poured the liquid into the cruet. During the mass they cut up like clowns, and not
even murderous looks from the priest could affect the whispering, giggling, stumbling, and bells rung in the wrong sequence. When the Padre raised the goblet to consecrate the Coca-Cola, the boys collapsed on the altar steps, laughing so hard they could not stand up. Minutes later the priest reverently touched the liquid to his lips, absorbed in the words of the liturgy, but with the first sip realized that the devil had had his hand in the chalice—unless consecration had produced a verifiable change in the molecules of the wine, a possibility his practical mind immediately rejected. The Padre had undergone a long training in life’s vicissitudes, and he continued the mass serenely; nothing in his demeanor hinted that anything was amiss. Unhurried, he completed the ritual and left the altar with great dignity, followed by his two staggering altar boys, but once in the sacristy he removed one of his heavy leather sandals and gave them a thrashing they would not soon forget.
That was the first of many difficult years for Gregory Reeves; it was a time of insecurity and fears, during which many things changed, but it was also a time of mischief, friendship, surprises, and discoveries.
As soon as my family settled into the new routine and my father started feeling stronger, we began improving the cottage. Because of the efforts of the Moraleses and their friends, it was no longer falling down, but it still lacked essential comforts. My father installed basic wiring, built a privy, and between us we cleared the yard of stones and weeds so my mother could plant the vegetable and flower gardens she had always wanted. He also constructed a small shed at the very edge of the ravine that bordered our property, to store his tools and gear for traveling: he still hoped someday to get a new truck and go back on the road. Then he told me to dig a hole; he said that he agreed with a Greek philosopher who had said that before he died every man should father a child, write a book, build a house, and plant a tree, and that he had done the first three. I dug where he told me, not very enthusiastically, since I had no wish to contribute to his death, but I would not have dreamed of refusing him or of leaving the job half done. “Once when I was traveling on the astral plane, I was led to a very large room, like a room in a factory,” Charles Reeves would expound to his listeners. “There I saw many interesting machines. Some were unfinished and others absurd; the mechanical principles were incorrect; it was clear they would never work. I asked a Logo whom they belonged to. ‘These are your unfinished works,’ he explained. I remembered that in my youth my ambition had been to be an inventor. Those grotesque machines were products of that stage of my life and ever since had been there waiting for me to dispose of them. Thoughts take form—the more defined the idea, the more concrete the form. You must not leave ideas or projects unfinished; they must be terminated. If not, energy is wasted that could be better employed in other matters. You must think in a constructive way, but be careful of what you think.” I had heard that story many times and was highly irritated by the obsession to complete every act and to give each object and each thought its precise place, because to judge by what I saw around me, the world was pure chaos.
My father left early that morning and with Pedro Morales returned carrying a good-sized willow tree in the pickup truck. It took both of them to drag it out and plant it in the hole. For several days I watched the tree and my father, expecting that at any moment the former would wither and die or the latter would be struck dead, but as neither occurred I decided that the philosophers of old were not worth a nickel. I was haunted by the fear of being orphaned. In my dreams I saw my father as a creaking skeleton in a dark suit, with a huge snake coiled around his ankles, and awake I remembered him shrunken to skin and bones, as I had seen him in the hospital. The idea of death terrified me. Ever since we had come to live in the city, I had felt a presentiment of danger. The standards I had known were out of kilter; even words had lost their accustomed meaning, and I was forced to learn new codes, different behaviors, and a strange language of rolled r’s and rasping h sounds. Endless roads and vast landscapes were replaced by a warren of noisy, filthy, foul-smelling—but fascinating—alleys where a new adventure lay around every corner. It was impossible to resist the lure of the streets; life was lived there: the streets were the setting for fights, love, and commerce. I was entranced by Latin music and storytelling. People talked about their lives in tones of legend. My favorite place was Inmaculada Morales’s kitchen, surrounded by family activity and the smell of cooking. I never tired of the eternal circus of that life, but I also felt a need to recapture the silence of nature I had known as a boy; I searched out trees, I walked hours to climb a small hill where for a few minutes I felt again the pleasure of being inside my own skin. The rest of the time my body was a handicap; I had to protect it constantly against external threats; my light hair, the color of my skin and eyes, my birdlike skeleton, weighed on me like rocks. Inmaculada Morales says that I was a happy child, full of vigor and energy, with a tremendous appetite for life, but I do not remember myself that way. In that Latin ghetto I experienced the unpleasantness of being different, I did not fit in; I wanted to be like everyone else, to blend into the crowd, to be invisible, so I could walk through the streets or play in the schoolyard unharmed by the gangs of dark-skinned boys who vented on me the aggression they themselves received from whites the minute they stepped outside the barrio.
When my father left the hospital, we had resumed the appearance of normality, but the equilibrium of our family life was destroyed. Olga’s absence hung in the air; I missed her trunkload of treasures, her magician’s trappings, her bizarre clothes, her unrestrained laugh, her stories, her indefatigable energy—without her, the house was like a table with a wobbly leg. My parents drew a curtain of silence over her absence, and I did not dare ask what had happened. My mother was becoming more silent and reserved by the day, and my father, who had always been very self-controlled, became irascible, unpredictable, and violent. It’s because of the operation; the chemistry of his Physical Body has been altered, that’s why his aura has grown dark, but he’ll be all right soon. My mother’s justification was couched in the jargon of The Infinite Plan, but her voice lacked conviction. I had never felt comfortable with my mother; that pale, polite woman was very different from other children’s mothers. Decisions, permissions, and punishment always came from my father, consolation and laughter from Olga, and my confidences were with Judy. All that tied me to my mother were literature and school notebooks, music, and love for observing the stars. She never touched me; I had grown accustomed to her physical remoteness and reserved temperament.
The day I lost Judy, I felt a panic of absolute solitude I did not recover from until decades later, when an unexpected love annulled that curse. Judy had been the candid and sympathetic young girl who protected me, ordered me around, and went everywhere with me clinging to her skirts. At night I slipped into her bed and she told me stories or invented dreams, with precise instructions as to how to dream them. The sight of my sleeping sister, her warmth, and the rhythm of her breathing filled the first years of my childhood; nestled close to her, I knew no fear. When I was beside her, nothing could hurt me. One April night, when Judy was nearly nine and I was seven, I waited for everything to grow quiet, then crawled from my sleeping bag to climb into hers as I always did; that night, however, I met fierce resistance. With the covers pulled up to her chin and clawlike hands clutching the bag to her, she raged that she didn’t love me, that I could never sleep with her again, that the stories, the dreams, and all the rest were over, and that I was too big for such nonsense.
“What’s the matter, Judy?” I asked, frightened not so much by her words as by the rancor in her voice.
“You go to hell, and don’t you ever touch me as long as you live!” and she burst out crying and turned her face to the wall.
I sat beside her on the floor, not knowing what to say, saddened more by her weeping than by the rejection. After a while, I tiptoed to the door and let Oliver in, and from that day on I slept with my arms around my dog. In the following months I had the sensation
that there was a mystery in my house from which I was excluded, a secret between my father and my sister, or maybe between them and my mother, or between all of them and Olga. I sensed it was better not to know the truth, and I did not attempt to find out. The atmosphere was so charged that I tried to stay away from home as much as possible. I visited Olga or the Moraleses, I took long hikes through the nearby fields, I walked for miles, returning only at nightfall, I hid in the small shed among the tools and bundles and wept for hours without knowing why. No one asked me anything.
The image of my father began to fade and was replaced by that of a stranger, an unfair and irascible man who pampered Judy and beat me at the least pretext and thrust me aside: Go play outside; boys need to toughen up in the street, he would growl. There was no resemblance between the neat and charismatic preacher of earlier days and that revolting old man who spent the day in an armchair listening to the radio, half dressed and unshaven. He had stopped painting and seemed unable to spend any energy in disseminating The Infinite Plan. The situation in the house deteriorated before our eyes, and once again Inmaculada Morales showed up with her assorted spicy dishes, her generous smile, and her sharp eye for perceiving the needs of others. Olga handed me money, with instructions to slip it into my mother’s purse surreptitiously. That uncommon income continued for many years, without my mother’s ever mentioning it, as if she had never noticed the mysterious multiplication of the bank notes.
Olga had a gift for imposing her extravagant stamp on everything around her. She was an adventurous migratory bird, but wherever she came to roost, even for only a few hours, she created the illusion of a permanent nest. She had few belongings, but she knew how to arrange them so that if the space was small she kept them in the trunk and if it was large they expanded to fill it. In a tent at some bend in the road, in a hut, or in jail—where she would later spend some time—she was queen in her palace. When she moved away from the Reeveses, she found a cheap room in a slightly sordid dwelling that had taken on the melancholy patina of the rest of the barrio, but she livened it up with her characteristic colors, and before long the place had become a point of reference when people were looking for an address: three blocks straight ahead, take a right, and where you see a house painted like a rainbow, turn to the left and you’re there. She decorated the outside stairway and two windows in her personal style: clicking curtains of shells and beads beckoned to passersby, strings of colored lights suggested a never-ending Christmas, and her name in cursive letters crowned that strange pagoda. Her landlords tired of requesting her to use a little more restraint and finally resigned themselves to the strange embellishment of their property. Soon everyone for miles around knew where Olga lived. Inside, her quarters were equally bizarre. A curtain divided the room into two sections: in one she attended her clientele; the other contained her bed and her clothes, which she hung from nails in the wall. Calling upon her artistic gifts and her oil paints from the time of her venture with Charles Reeves, she covered the walls with the signs of the zodiac and words in Cyrillic, an effect that deeply impressed her visitors. She bought a set of secondhand furniture and with a flash of imagination turned it into Oriental divans; she filled shelves with statues of saints and magicians, pots with her potions, candles, and amulets; bunches of dried herbs hung from the ceiling, and it was nearly impossible to walk among the midget tables covered with braziers that hoarded dubious incense from shops run by Pakistanis. The sweetish fragrance was at war with the scent of Olga’s medicinal plants and elixirs, essences for love, and wax candles for incantatory healing. She covered lamps with fringed shawls, threw a moth-eaten zebra skin on the floor, and near the window provided an altar for a large potbellied Buddha of gilded plaster. In that cave, calling on all her ingenuity, she cooked, lived, and plied her trade, all in a minimal space fitted to her needs and whims by the twist of fantasy. Once she had decorated, she spread the word that there are women who can deflect the course of misfortune and see into the depths of the soul, and that she was one of those women. Then she sat down to wait—but not for long, because many people already knew of her success with the bearded grocerywoman, and soon clients were standing in line for her services.