Gregory visited Olga almost every day. As soon as classes were out, he escaped from school pursued by the loutish Martínez, a slightly older boy who was in second grade but had not learned to read, who could not master English but already had the physique and mentality of a bully. Oliver would wait, barking, near the newspaper stand in a valiant effort to hold Gregory’s enemies at bay and give his master a head start, then would race after him like an arrow to their final destination. To throw Martínez off the track, Gregory used to stop by Olga’s house. His visits to the crystal gazer were a lark. Once, unbeknownst to her, he scooted under her bed and from his hiding place witnessed one of her extraordinary consultations. The owner of Los Tres Amigos bar, a conceited womanizer with a movie star mustache and an elastic waist-trimmer to hold in his belly, came to Olga, deeply perturbed, to seek a remedy for a secret malady. She received him in her astrologer’s robe in the incense-perfumed room, dimly lit by red light bulbs. He sat down at the round table where she consulted with her clients and with stammering preambles and appeals for absolute secrecy told her he was tormented by constant burning in his genitals.
“Let’s see; show me,” Olga commanded, and with the aid of a flashlight proceeded to examine him inch by inch with a magnifying glass, while beneath the bed Gregory bit his hands to keep from exploding with laughter.
“I’ve used the remedies they prescribed at the hospital, but they didn’t help. It’s four months now, doña, and I’m dying!”
“There’s sickness of the body and sickness of the soul,” the healer intoned, returning to her throne at the head of the table. “This is a sickness of the soul; that is why ordinary medicines won’t cure it. If you’re going to dance, you must pay the piper.”
“Huh?”
“You have mistreated your organ. Sometimes the price is a noxious disease, and sometimes an unbearable moral itch,” explained Olga, who was up on all the latest gossip in the barrio; she was aware of her client’s reputation and just the week before had sold powders to ensure faithfulness to the bar owner’s inconsolable wife. “I can help you, but I warn you that each consultation will cost you five dollars, and I can tell you that the treatment is not going to be very pleasant. Just offhand I calculate you will need at least five sessions.”
“If it will make me better . . .”
“You must pay fifteen dollars in advance. That way we’ll be sure you don’t change your mind in midstream; you see, once you begin the treatment you have to finish it—if you don’t, your member will dry up like a prune. You understand what I’m saying?”
“Oh, yes, doñita, anything you say,” the cocksman agreed, docile with terror.
“Take off everything below the waist; you can leave your shirt on,” she ordered before disappearing behind the screen to prepare the ingredients for the treatment.
She made the man stand in the middle of the room inside a circle of lighted candles; she sprinkled white powders on his head as she recited a litany in an unknown tongue; then she rubbed the affected area with something that Gregory could not see but that was undoubtedly very effective, because in two seconds the feckless fellow was hopping like a monkey and screaming at the top of his lungs.
“Stay inside the circle!” Olga commanded, waiting calmly for the fire to subside.
“Oh, shit, oh, Christ, madrecita! It’s worse than raw chili pepper,” he howled when he had his breath back.
“If it doesn’t hurt, it isn’t doing its work,” she asserted, well aware of the efficaciousness of punishment for removing guilt, cleansing the conscience, and alleviating nervous ailments. “Now I’m going to put on something cooling,” she said, and she painted his penis with tincture of methylene blue, then tied on a pink ribbon and ordered him to return the following week; he was to apply the tincture every morning and not remove the ribbon for any reason.
“But how am I going to . . . well, you know what I mean . . . tied like this?”
“You’ll just have to live like a saint. All this happened because you were flitting around like a hummingbird. Why not be content with your wife? That poor woman has earned her ticket to heaven; you don’t deserve her,” and with that final recommendation for good behavior, she dismissed him.
Gregory bet Juan José and Carmen Morales a dollar that the owner of the bar had a blue dingdong tied up like a birthday present. The three spent the morning on the roof of Los Tres Amigos watching through a peephole into the bathroom until they saw the proof with their own eyes. It was not long until the whole barrio knew the story, and the bar owner was followed to his grave by the nickname Purple Pecker.
As Olga’s door was not open if she was busy with some client, Gregory used to sit on the stairs and examine the newest decorations on the front of the house, amazed at the woman’s talent for revitalizing herself with each new day. From time to time she would peer out, her robe barely covering her nakedness, hair like a tangle of red seaweed, and hand him a cookie or a dime: I can’t see you today, Greg, I have work to do, come back tomorrow, she would say, and give him a quick kiss on the cheek. He would go home, frustrated, but understanding that she had inescapable obligations. Olga had clients of every station: desperate persons hoping to improve their luck, pregnant women ready to resort to any recourse that would thwart nature, patients disillusioned with traditional medicine, spiteful lovers eager for revenge, lonely souls tormented by silence, and ordinary people who wanted nothing more than a massage, a charm, a palm reading, or some jasmine tea for a headache. To each, Olga dispensed a dose of magic and hope, never giving a thought to the legality of her actions because in the barrio no one understood or cared about the law of the gringos.
Olga had no children of her own and in her heart had adopted Charles Reeves’s son and daughter. She was not offended by Judy’s rebuffs, because she knew the girl would come back when she needed her, but she was quietly grateful for Gregory’s loyalty and rewarded him with affection and gifts. Through him, she kept up with the fortunes of the Reeves family. Gregory often asked why she never came to visit, but obtained only vague answers. One of the times the fortune-teller had not invited him in, he thought he heard his father’s voice through the door, and his heart nearly burst from his chest; he felt he was standing at the edge of a bottomless abyss, on the verge of opening a Pandora’s box of horrors. He ran away as fast as he could, not wanting to affirm what he feared, but his curiosity was stronger than his fear, and halfway home he turned back and hid outside to wait for Olga’s client to come out. Night fell, and the door did not open; finally he had to go home. When he got there he found Charles Reeves sitting in his wicker chair, reading the newspaper.
How long was my father really alive? When did he begin to die? In the final months he was not himself; his physical appearance changed so greatly that it was difficult to recognize him, and his mind was similarly altered. A breath of evil animated that old man; he still called himself Charles Reeves, but he was not my father. That is why I have no bad memories of him. Judy, on the other hand, is filled with hatred. We have talked about this and do not agree about either events or people, as if we had been protagonists in different stories. We lived together in the same house at the same time; her memory, nevertheless, did not register what mine did. My sister cannot understand why I cling to the image of a wise father, of happy days of camping in the open air beneath the fathomless dome of a star-filled sky, of hiding in reeds at dawn to shoot ducks. She swears that things were never like that, that the violence in our family was always there, that Charles Reeves was a two-bit charlatan, a merchant of lies, a degenerate who died from pure perversion and left nothing good behind him. She accuses me of having blocked out the past; she says I prefer to ignore our father’s vices, and that must be true, because I did not know him as an alcoholic and an evil man, which she maintains he was. Don’t you remember how he beat you with his leather belt for the least little thing you did? Judy asks me. I do, but I don’t harbor any hard feelings over that; in those days all boys got wh
ippings, it was part of their education. He treated Judy better; I guess it wasn’t the thing to whip girls that much. Besides, I was feisty and stubborn; my mother could never break me, which was why more than once she tried to get rid of me. But before she died, on one of those rare occasions when we were able to talk without hurting each other, she assured me she did not act the way she did out of lack of affection and that she always loved me very much. She could not look after two children, she said, so naturally she had preferred to keep my sister, who was docile, whereas I was beyond her power to control. Sometimes I dream of the courtyard of the orphan asylum. Judy was much nicer than I was, there is no doubt of that, a composed and appealing little girl, always obedient and with the natural flirtatiousness of pretty girls. She was like that until she was thirteen or fourteen, when she changed.
At first it was the smell of almonds. It came back subtly, almost imperceptibly, in the beginning, a breath that left no trace, so faint I could not decide whether I had actually smelled it or whether it was a memory from visiting the hospital when my father had his operation. Later it was the noise. The noise was the most notable change. Before, in the days when we were on the road, silence was a part of that life, each sound had its precise space. The only sounds came from the motor, and sometimes my mother’s voice, reading; when we camped, it was the crackling of wood on the fire, the spoon scraping the pot, the recitation of our school lessons, brief conversations, my sister’s laughter as she played with Olga, Oliver’s barking. At night the silence was so heavy that the hooting of an owl or the howl of a coyote seemed thunderous. As my father said, each thing had its own place, each sound its moment. He was indignant when anyone interrupted a conversation; during his sermons we had to hold our breath, because even an involuntary cough provoked an icy stare. At the end, though, everything became a jumble in Charles Reeves’s mind. In his astral pilgrimages he must have come across more than the hangar filled with unfinished machines and demented inventions: rooms bulging with smells, tastes, gestures, and senseless words; other rooms would have been filled to bursting with good intentions and there would have been one where lunacy rumbled like the bonging of a monstrous iron bell. I don’t mean the noises of the barrio—traffic, loud voices, construction workers building the filling station—but the derangement that marked my father’s last months. The radio, which once he had turned on only to listen to news of the war and classical music, now roared day and night with deafening information, ball games, and country music. In addition to this uproar, my father raved over trifles, shouted contradictory orders, summoned us every minute, read his sermons or passages from the Bible at the top of his lungs, coughed, spit constantly, and blew his nose with unimaginable snortings; he hammered nails in the walls and fiddled with his tools as if repairing major damage, but in fact those frenetic tinkerings served no purpose at all. Even asleep he made noise. This man, once so neat in his ways and his habits, would abruptly fall asleep at the table, his mouth still filled with food, shaken by deep snores, panting and mumbling, lost in the labyrinth of who knows what lecherous delirium. That’s enough, Charles, my bewildered mother would say, and wake my father when he was fondling himself in his dreams. It’s the fever, children, she would add to soothe us. My father was delirious, no doubt of it; fever ambushed him at any moment of the day, but it was particularly at night he found no rest, and dawn would find him soaked with perspiration. My mother changed his sheets every morning, to wash away not only the sweat of agony but bloodstains as well, and pus from his boils. Purulent abscesses opened on his legs, which he treated with arnica and compresses of warm water. From the first day of his final illness, my mother never again slept in his bed; she spent the night in an armchair, covered with a shawl.
Toward the end, when my father could not even get out of bed, Judy refused to enter his room; she did not want to see him, and no threat or reward could get her near the sick man. I was able to approach in stages, first observing him from the doorway and finally sitting on the edge of the bed. He was nothing but skin and bones, his complexion was greenish, his eyes were sunken in their sockets—only the asthmatic wheezing indicated he was still alive. When I touched his hand he would open his eyes, but he did not recognize me. Sometimes his fever receded and he seemed to return from a long death; he would drink a little tea, ask someone to turn on the radio, get out of bed and take a few faltering steps. One morning, half naked, he went out in the yard to look at the willow. He showed me the tender shoots: It’s growing, he said; it will live to weep over me. That day after school, as Judy and I neared the house, we saw an ambulance in the lane. I ran on, but my sister sank to the sidewalk, clutching her book bag. A few people were already standing around in the yard. Inmaculada Morales was on the porch, trying to help two attendants roll a stretcher through the too narrow doorway. I ran into the house and caught hold of my mother’s dress, but she pushed me away impatiently, as if she felt nauseated. At that moment I was struck by a strong blast of the odor of almonds, and a squalid old man appeared in the doorway of the room; he was standing very straight, clad only in an undershirt, and was barefoot; his remaining hair was ruffled, his eyes burning with the madness of fever, and a thread of saliva trickled from the corner of his mouth. With his left hand, he supported himself against the wall; with his right he was masturbating.
“That’s enough, Charles, stop that!” my mother called to him. “That’s enough, please, that’s enough,” she pleaded, hiding her face in her hands.
Inmaculada Morales put her arms around my mother as the attendants seized my father’s arms and led him outside to the porch, where they laid him on the stretcher, covered with a sheet and secured by two straps. My father yelled terrible curses, using words that until that minute I had never heard from his mouth. I walked beside him to the ambulance, but my mother would not allow me to come with them; the ambulance pulled away, siren shrieking, amid billowing dust. Inmaculada Morales locked the door, took my hand, whistled for Oliver, and started off toward her house. Down the street we found Judy, still in the same spot, with a strange smile on her face.
“You come with me, children. I will buy you some cotton candy,” said Inmaculada Morales, struggling to hold back her tears.
That was the last time I saw my father alive; a few hours later he died in the hospital, the victim of uncontainable internal hemorrhages. I spent that night, with Judy, in the home of our Mexican friends. Pedro Morales was absent; he was with my mother, attending to the details of the death. Before we sat down to dinner, Inmaculada took my sister and me aside and explained, as well as she could, that we should not worry now; our father’s Physical Body had ceased to suffer and his Mental Body had flown to the astral plane; there, surely, it was reunited with the Logi and the Master Functionaries, where it belonged.
“That is, he is in heaven with the angels,” she added softly, much more comfortable with the terms of her Catholic faith than with those of The Infinite Plan.
Judy and I slept with the Morales children, two or three to a bed, all in the same room. Inmaculada let Oliver stay with us; he was not used to being outside and if left there moaned and whined. I was beginning to nod, exhausted by conflicting emotions, when in the dark I heard Carmen’s voice whispering to make a place for her, and I felt her small warm body slip in beside me. Open your mouth and close your eyes, she said, and I felt her finger on my lips, a finger coated with something thick and sweet that I sucked like a caramel. It was condensed milk. I sat up a little and put my finger in the jar to offer to her, and we finished the treat, licking and sucking each other’s fingers until it was gone. Then I went right to sleep, sated with sugar, my face and hands sticky, my arms around Carmen, Oliver at my feet, accompanied by the breathing and warmth of the other children and the snoring of the addlepated grandmother in the next room, tied by a long rope to Inmaculada’s waist.