The Infinite Plan (8 page)

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.

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.