The Infinite Plan (9 page)

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 whippings, 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.

The father's death disrupted the family; they lost direction and within a very brief time were going their separate ways. For Nora, widowhood was a betrayal; she felt she had been abandoned in a cruel world with two children and no resources, but at the same time she felt inexpressible relief, because in the last years her companion had not been the man she once loved, and living with him had become a martyrdom. Even so, shortly after the funeral she began to forget Reeves's final decrepitude and to cherish earlier memories. She imagined they were joined by an invisible thread, like the one her husband had used to suspend the orange of
The Infinite Plan;
that image restored her earlier security drawn from the years he had ruled the family's fate with the firm hand of a Master. Nora yielded to her languorous nature; the lethargy born of the horror of the war was accentuated, a deterioration of will that once she was widowed subtly grew and manifested itself in all its magnitude. She never spoke of her late husband in the past tense; she alluded to his absence in vague terms, as if he had undertaken a long astral voyage, and later, when she began to communicate with him in her dreams, she would speak of it in the tone of someone repeating a telephone conversation. Her embarrassed children did not like to hear about her delusions, fearing they would lead to madness. She was alone. She was a stranger in that environment; she spoke only a few words of Spanish and saw herself as being very different from the other women. Her friendship with Olga had ended, she had little relationship to her children, she was not friendly with Inmaculada Morales or any other person in the barrio. She was amiable, but people avoided her because she was strange; no one wanted to listen to her ravings about opera or
The Infinite Plan.
The habit of dependence was so deeply rooted that when she lost Charles Reeves it was as if she began to live in a daze. She made a few attempts to earn a living as a typist or a seamstress, but nothing came of it; neither was she able to get a job translating Hebrew or Russian, as she claimed she could, because no one needed those services in the barrio and the prospect of venturing into the center of the city to look for work terrified her. She was not overly concerned about supporting her children, because she did not consider them exclusively hers; it was her theory that children belonged to society in general and no one in particular. She would sit on the porch of her house and stare at the willow for hours on end, with a placid, vacant expression on the beautiful Slavic face that even then had begun to pale. In the years that followed, her freckles disappeared, her features faded—her whole being seemed slowly to vanish. In old age she became so insubstantial that it was difficult to remember her, and as no one thought to take her photograph, Gregory feared after she died that perhaps his mother had never existed. Pedro Morales tried to convince Nora to busy herself with something; he clipped want ads for different jobs and accompanied her to several interviews, until he was convinced of her inability to face reality. Three months later, when the situation was becoming intolerable, he took her to the welfare office to sign up for payments as an indigent, grateful that his Maestro, Charles Reeves, was not alive to witness such humiliation. The check, barely sufficient to cover the most basic expenses, was the family's only regular source of income for many years; the rest came from the children's jobs, the bills Olga managed to slip into Nora's pocketbook, and the discreet support of the Moraleses. A buyer appeared for the boa, and the poor creature ended its days exposed to the eyes of the curious in a burlesque house, alongside scantily clad chorus girls, an obscene ventriloquist, and various acts intended to amuse the besotted spectators. It lived on for several years, feeding on live mice and squirrels and the scraps thrown into its cage for the thrill of watching the bored creature open its jaws; it continued to grow and fatten until it was truly awe-inspiring, though it was lethargic until the day it died.