The Infinite Plan (37 page)

“What happened?”

“Everything was horrible and very expensive. Women are flat now. I can't fit these cantaloupes of mine in any of the dresses,” she groaned, pointing to her breasts.

“That's good news.” Galupi laughed, and he drove her to the Hindu district, where they bought a magnificent watermelon-colored sari embroidered in gold, in which Carmen wrapped herself with supreme assurance, feeling much more at peace with herself than in the close-fitting French dresses for emaciated women.

That night when she walked into the reception room of the embassy, she saw among the many guests the man she often thought of but had never expected to see again. There in a handsome dinner jacket, deep in conversation, a glass of whiskey in one hand, his hair gray but his face unchanged, stood Tom Clayton. He had taken a leave from his political column and come to Vietnam to write a book about the war. He spent more time at parties and in clubs than in the thick of combat, faithful to his theory that wars actually are waged in salons. He had access to places where no correspondent was welcome and knew the right people in the high command, the diplomatic corps, the government, and the small social world of the city; he was, therefore, well aware he had not seen this bewitching woman before. Judging by the olive tones of her skin, the heavy eye makeup, and the dazzling sari, he supposed she came from India. He noticed that she was observing him as well and watched for an opportunity to drift toward her. Shaking his hand, Carmen introduced herself as Tamar, the name she always used. A thousand times she had planned what she would do if she ever saw her lover again, the man who had been so decisive in her life, and the only thing she never imagined was that she would have nothing to say. The years had dissipated her rancor; she discovered, to her surprise, that all she felt for that arrogant man whose naked image she could no longer conjure up was indifference. She listened to him chatting with Galupi as he examined her from the corner of his eye, obviously interested in her, and was amazed that she could ever have loved him so deeply. She did not ask herself, as she had so often in lonely moments, what their child would have been like, because now she could not imagine any child of hers that wasn't Dai. She sighed with a blend of relief that he hadn't recognized her and profound regret for time wasted in the pangs of love.

“I haven't seen you around. Where are you from?” Clayton asked.

“From the past,” Carmen replied, and turned and walked to the balcony to look out over a city glittering at her feet as if the war were in another part of the world.

Once they were back home in the warehouse, Carmen and Leo Galupi sat for a while beneath the ceiling fan to comment on the gala; they did not turn on the lights but sat in shadows filtering in from the streetlamps. He offered her a drink, but she asked whether by any chance he had a tin of condensed milk. With the tip of a knife, she punched two holes in the top of the can and settled on some cushions on the floor to sip the sweet milk, her consolation during so many moments of crisis. Galupi felt finally that he could ask Carmen about Clayton; he had noticed something odd in her behavior when they were introduced, he said. In reply, Carmen told Galupi everything, not omitting a single detail; it was the first time she had told anyone what happened in Olga's kitchen, about her pain and fear, about her near escape in the hospital, and about the long purgatory expiating a sin that was not hers alone but that Clayton had refused to share. One thing led to another, and Carmen found herself telling Galupi her life story. Dawn came, and she was still talking, in a kind of catharsis; the dam holding back her secrets and lonely tears had burst as she discovered the pleasure of baring her soul to a sympathetic confidant. With the last sip of the condensed milk she stretched, yawning with fatigue, then leaned over to Galupi and brushed his forehead with a light kiss. Galupi caught her by the wrist and drew her toward him, but Carmen pulled away, and his kiss was lost on the air.

“I can't,” she said.

“Why not?”

“Because it's not just me now; I have a son.”

The next morning Carmen Morales waked just before dawn and thought she saw Leo Galupi standing beside the Coromandel screen, watching her, but in the pale light he might have been part of her dream. She had been dreaming the same nightmare that had tormented her for years, but this time Tom Clayton was not in it and the head of the child who held its arms out to her was not covered by a paper bag; this time she could see clearly, and the face was Dai's face.

Carmen and Galupi adjusted comfortably to sharing their living space, like an old married couple. Carmen was easing into motherhood; every day she took Dai out for a slightly longer time. She learned a few words in Vietnamese and taught Dai others in English, she learned what he liked, what he feared, the stories of his family. Thui took Carmen with her on a two-day visit in the country to give her relatives an opportunity to say goodbye to Dai. They wanted to keep the boy, horrified at the idea of sending one of their family across the ocean, but Thui was aware that in Vietnam her son would always be a bastard half-breed, a second-class citizen, poor, and with no hopes for making his way out of that poverty. The challenge of adapting in America would not be easy, but at least there Dai would have opportunities for something better than working the family's small plot of land. Leo Galupi insisted on going with them, because those were not times for two women and a baby to be traveling without protection. For Carmen this was yet one more instance of something she had known since childhood and that Joan and Susan had hammered home so often: that men and women live in the same time and space but in different dimensions. She lived looking back over her shoulder, watching for real and imagined dangers, always on the defensive, working twice as hard as any man, for half the reward. What for men was a trivial matter that did not warrant a second thought was for her a risk requiring careful calculations and strategies. Something as simple as a trip to the country could be considered a provocation on a woman's part, an invitation to disaster. She mentioned this to Galupi, who was amazed that he had never considered such differences before. Dai's relatives were poor, suspicious farmers who received the strangers with hatred in their eyes, even after Thui Nguyen's long explanations. The sick woman was failing very rapidly; it was as if she had held the cancer at bay until she met Carmen and when she felt comfortable that her child was in good hands had yielded to its ravages. She was leaving life without the slightest commotion. She was gently fading into the background so Dai would begin to forget her before she died, forget she had ever existed, making the separation more bearable. Thui explained this to Carmen with great delicacy, and Carmen could not go against her wishes. Thui often asked Carmen to keep Dai for the night: I'm not feeling well and am better alone, she said, but as Carmen and Dai left she would turn her head to hide her tears, and her eyes came alive when they returned. She could scarcely walk and was in constant pain, but she did not complain. She stopped taking the prescribed medications, which left her exhausted and nauseated without offering relief, and consulted an elderly acupuncturist. Carmen went with her several times to those strange sessions in the dark, cinnamon-scented room where the man treated his patients. Thui, lying on a narrow cot with needles bristling from various parts of her wasted body, would close her eyes and drowse. Back in her room, Carmen would help Thui into bed, prepare her a pipe of opium, and, as she saw her sinking into the oblivion of the drug, take Dai to get ice cream. Toward the end, when Thui could not get out of bed, Dai moved into the warehouse, where he shared the large Chinese bed with his new mother. Galupi hired a woman to look after the dying Thui and drove the acupuncturist to her each day for treatment. With growing impatience Thui Nguyen asked about progress on the adoption papers; she wanted to be sure that Dai would reach his father's homeland safely, and every delay was a new torment.

One Sunday Carmen and Galupi took the boy to say goodbye to his mother. The last obstacles had been surmounted; Dai was now legally the son of Carmen Morales. He had a passport with the proper visa, and on Monday they were to begin their journey to America, where Dai would put down new roots. They left Thui alone with the boy for a few moments. He sat on the bed with the sense, even then, that this was a turning point in his life; many years later, when he was a prodigy in mathematics and being interviewed by scientific journals, he told me that his only real memory of childhood in Vietnam was of a pale woman with burning eyes who kissed him and handed him a yellow package. He showed me what had been in it, a faded photograph album wrapped in a silk muffler. Carmen and Galupi waited outside the door until the dying woman called them. They found her lying back on her pillow, peaceful and smiling. She kissed her son for the last time and gestured Galupi to take him away. Carmen sat beside her and took her hand, hot tears coursing down her cheeks.

“Thank you, Thui. You are giving me what I have wanted all my life. You mustn't worry; I will be as good a mother to Dai as you, I promise you.”

“We do what we can,” Thui said softly.

A few days later, while the Morales family was celebrating Dai's arrival in America, Leo Galupi was attending a simple funeral service for Thui Nguyen. Those eleven weeks had changed the destinies of several people, including the hustler from Chicago, who for days had been feeling a dull pain in his breast where once there had been fickleness and bluster.

Dai was a gale-force wind that revitalized the life of Carmen Morales, who forgot earlier rejections in love, penury, loneliness, and uncertainty. The future was as clear before her eyes as if she were viewing it on a screen: she would devote herself to Dai, help him grow up, hold his hand to keep him from stumbling, and protect him from any suffering she could, including homesickness and sadness.

“I suppose the first thing we should do is christen this little Chinese heathen, so he'll be one of ours,” the aged Padre Larraguibel commented at the welcome-home party, cuddling the child with all the tenderness that had lain hidden in his huge Basque peasant's body but as a young priest he had not dared express. Carmen, nevertheless, postponed the ceremony; she did not want to torment Dai with so many new things at once, and besides, she thought Buddhism was a respectable enough religion, maybe even more tolerable than Christianity.

The new mother fulfilled the obligatory family ceremonies: she introduced her son to relatives and friends in the barrio, one by one, and patiently attempted to teach him the unpronounceable names of his new grandparents and throngs of cousins, but Dai seemed frightened and did not try to speak; he merely observed everything with those black eyes, never letting go of Carmen's hand. Carmen also took Dai to the jail to visit Olga, who was charged with practicing black magic, to see whether she had any ideas about getting the child to eat. Dai's only nourishment since leaving Vietnam had been fruit juices; he was losing weight and looked as if he might vanish on the air like a sigh. Carmen and Inmaculada were beside themselves; they had taken Dai to a doctor, who gave him a meticulous examination, declared him in good health, and prescribed vitamins. The adoptive grandmother went to great pains to prepare Mexican dishes with an Asian flavor and insisted in making Dai swallow the same cod-liver oil with which she had tortured her own six infants—but none of this had any results.

“He misses his mother,” said Olga the minute she saw him through the bars in the visitors' room.

“I was notified yesterday: his mother is dead.”

“Tell the little thing that she is beside him, even though he can't see her.”

“He's so small he wouldn't understand that; children can't capture abstract concepts at this age. Besides, I don't want to put any superstitious ideas in his head.”

“Ah, child, child, you don't know anything about anything.” The healer sighed. “The dead go hand in hand with the living.”

Olga had made a nest in her jail cell as easily as she had years before every time their home-on-wheels had stopped for the night—as if she were going to be there forever. Imprisonment did not affect her good spirits in any way; it was merely a minor inconvenience, and the only thing that stirred her ire was that the charges against her were false. She had never dabbled in black magic, because it was not good business; she earned much more helping her clients than she did putting curses on their enemies. She was not worried about her reputation—to the contrary, this unjust imprisonment would undoubtedly increase her fame—she was worried about her cats, which she had entrusted to a neighbor. Gregory Reeves assured her that no jury would believe that a few witchcraft rituals could do harm but that she must at any cost prevent the true nature of her business from coming to light: if that happens, he said, the law is intractable. Olga resigned herself to serving her sentence discreetly, without any uproar, but restraint was not her principal virtue, and in less than a week she had turned her cell into an extension of her extraordinary home consulting room. She did not lack for clients. The other prisoners paid her for messages of hope, therapeutic massages, calming hypnosis, powerful talismans, and for telling fortunes, and soon the guards were consulting her as well. She made arrangements to have her medicinal herbs brought to her a few at a time, her flasks of magnetized water, her tarot cards, and the Buddha of gilded plaster. From her cell, now converted into a bazaar, she practiced her beneficial sorcery and extended the subtle tentacles of her power. She not only became the most respected person in the jail; she also had the most visitors: the entire Mexican barrio filed through to consult her.

Fearing that Dai would die from lack of nourishment, Carmen decided she must try Olga's advice, and so in a mixture of English, Vietnamese, and pantomime, she told the child that his mother had gone to a different plane where her body was no longer useful to her; now she had the form of a tiny translucent fairy, constantly fluttering above his head to watch over him. Carmen was borrowing a page from Padre Larraguibel, who had always described angels in that way. According to him, each person has a devil to his left and an angel to his right, and the latter measures exactly thirty-three centimeters, the number of Christ's years on earth; the angel is naked, and it is absolutely false that it has wings: it flies by a kind of jet propulsion, a divine system of navigation less elegant but much more logical than the birds' wings described in sacred texts. This splendid man had become more eccentric with age, and the vision of his famous third eye had grown sharper; there was irrefutable proof that he could see in the dark as well as see what went on behind his back—which was why no one whispered during his mass. With inarguable moral authority he described devils and angels in precise detail, and no one, not even Inmaculada Morales, who was very conservative in religious matters, dared question his word. To compensate for the limitations of language, Carmen drew a picture in which Dai appeared in the foreground, while around him circled a small figure—preceded by a helix and trailed by a cloud of smoke—that had the unmistakable black almond-shaped eyes of Thui Nguyen. The child looked at it for a long time, then carefully folded it and placed it in the photo album containing the snapshots Leo Galupi had falsified of his parents, arm in arm in places where they had never been. Immediately thereupon, he ate his first American hamburger.