The Infinite Plan (30 page)

She was dazzled by Europe, which she toured from end to end with a pack on her back, earning her living with no great difficulty, teaching English, selling her jewelry when she had time to make some, and knowing that if she was threatened by hunger she could call on Gregory for help. No cathedral, castle, or museum escaped her, until she reached the saturation point and swore never again to set foot in a temple of tourism; she would stroll through the streets and enjoy life. One summer she got off the train in Barcelona and was immediately surrounded by a group of noisy gypsies, who insisted on telling her fortune and selling her amulets. She thought they were stunning and decided on the spot that this style was made for her, not only for her jewelry design but for her personal life. Later she discovered the Moorish influence in the south of Spain and the color of North Africa, all of which she adopted in a happy mélange. She moved into a
pension
in the Gothic barrio, notable for its uninterrupted clanking and moaning of pipes and absence of natural light, but her room was large, with coffered ceilings, and contained an enormous worktable. Within a few days she had stitched up a number of ruffled skirts that reminded her of Olga in her younger years and of the costumes she herself had worn for her juggling act in Pershing Square. That look would be her style for the rest of her life; in years to come she refined it to perfection for her personal pleasure, never knowing that in a future time it would make her wealthy and famous.

After wandering from Oslo to Athens with her belongings on her back, and nearly penniless, she decided she had had enough of the vagabond life and that the time had come to settle down. She was convinced that the only occupation she was suited for was jewelry making, but there was merciless competition in that field. To excel, it was not enough to have original designs; before she went any further she must discover the secrets of her craft. Barcelona was an ideal place for that. She enrolled in several courses, where she learned centuries-old techniques and gradually developed her unique style, a blend of solid traditional craft with a bold gypsy flavor, touches of Africa, Latin America, and even a hint of India, so popular during that decade. She was always the most original student in the class, and her creations sold so quickly she could not keep up with the orders. Everything was going better than she could have hoped, until her path crossed that of a fellow student, a Japanese craftsman slightly younger than herself. Carmen had succeeded in placing her work in exclusive shops; he, on the other hand, was peddling his with little success along the Ramblas, a contrast he found humiliating. As consolation, Carmen went back to selling in the street, using the excuse that the soul of the city was to be found there. The young Japanese moved into Carmen's crepuscular
pension.
Very quickly, their cultural differences outweighed their mutual attraction, but Carmen's need for companionship was so great that she ignored the symptoms. Her lover would not renounce his ancestral customs: he came first, and he expected to be served. He lay for hours in a steaming tub and then yielded it to her when the water was cold. It was the same with food, bed, supplies, and work tools; in the street he walked ahead of her, and she had to follow two paces behind. If there was sun, he went out to sell and Carmen stayed behind in the dark, sunless room, working, but if they awoke to rain, it became her turn to peddle their wares, because her lover would be suffering an opportune rheumatic pain related to the damp weather. At first she found his behavior amusing—strange Oriental customs, she told herself good-naturedly—but after a while she grew impatient, and the arguments began. He never lost his composure and met her recriminations with long, glacial silences; she felt his withdrawal pressing in around her but did not complain because at least this man refrained from striking her or scalding her with boiling soup. Finally she would give in, tired of being lonely, and also yielding to her fascination for him; she was attracted by his long black hair, his small, extremely muscular body, his strange accent, and the precision of his movements. She would circle around him timidly, purr in his ear like a cat, and usually succeed in breaching his shell; their reconciliation was accomplished in bed, where he was expert. They would have stayed together out of inertia had a telegram from Inmaculada not intervened. It announced Pedro Morales's illness and asked Carmen for the love of God to come home because she was the only one who could save her father from being consumed by sadness. Carmen realized then how much she loved the headstrong old man, how much she wanted to bury her head in her mother's welcoming bosom and again be, if only for an instant, the indulged girl she had been as a child. Thinking that the trip would be for only a couple of weeks, she took nothing with her but the minimum of clothing she hurriedly stuffed into a bag. Her lover accompanied her to the airport, wished her luck, and, because they never touched in public, bade her farewell with a slight bow.

From looking death in the face so often, I learned the value of living. Life is all we have, and no life is more valuable than another. Juan José Morales's life was worth no more than the lives of the men I killed, yet their deaths don't weigh on me: those men are always with me; they are my comrades. Kill or be killed, it's that simple. For me, it isn't a moral question; my doubts and confusions are of a different nature. I'm one of the lucky ones who came out of the war unharmed.

When I arrived home, I went directly from the airport to a motel; I didn't call anyone. San Francisco was cloudy, and a wintry wind was blowing, the way it does in summer, and I decided to wait for the sun to come out before I called Samantha. I don't know why I thought the weather might make our meeting more amicable. The truth is that when I went away we were prepared to get a divorce; we never wrote to each other, and the day I called her from Hawaii it was obvious we had nothing to say to each other. I was tired, with no appetite for arguments or reproaches, much less for telling her or anyone else my war experiences. I wanted to see Margaret, of course, but my daughter might not recognize me; at that age children forget in a few days, and she hadn't seen me for months. I left my things in the room and went out to look for a café. I was longing for a cup of San Francisco coffee; it's the best in the world. I walked through that urban delirium where the ocean can rarely be seen, straight lines rising and falling, laid out in accord with a geometric design indifferent to the topography of the city's hills. I looked for familiar landmarks, but everything was deformed by the fog. It was a place I didn't know; I couldn't identify the buildings and began to wander disoriented in that city of contradictions and smells, depraved like all ports, and as full of tricks as a frivolous girl. I can't explain San Francisco's air of elegance, seeing that it was founded by prostitutes and outlaws and bands of adventurers flushed with easy gold. A Chinese man brushed my arm, and I jumped as if I had been stung by a scorpion, fists clenched, reaching for the sidearm I no longer carried. The man smiled. Have a good day, he said, as he walked on. I stood there paralyzed, feeling strange eyes on me, although actually no one was paying attention to me, while the cable cars clanged by, students, secretaries, the ubiquitous tourists, Hispanic laborers, Asian businessmen, hippies, black prostitutes with platinum-blond wigs, homosexuals hand in hand, all like actors in a movie set illuminated by klieg lights, while I stood watching on this side of the screen, uncomprehending, totally outside everything, thousands of years away. I walked through the Italian district, through Chinatown, through streets frequented by sailors, where liquor, drugs, and pornography were the major commerce—inflatable sheep were the latest novelty—along with Saint Christopher medals as protection against the perils of the sea. I returned to the motel, took several sleeping pills, and was out for twenty hours; I was awakened by sun streaming through the window. I picked up the telephone to call Samantha but couldn't remember my own number and decided to wait a while longer, to give myself a couple of days alone to compose body and soul; I needed to cleanse myself, inside and out, of scores of sins and terrible memories. I felt contaminated, dirty, dead tired. I also waited to call the Moraleses; I would have had to leave immediately for Los Angeles, and I didn't have the courage to do it. I wasn't ready yet to talk about Juan José, to look Inmaculada and Pedro in the eye and assure them their son had died for his country, a hero, fully confessed and without pain, almost without realizing, when in fact he died in agony, and only half of his body was left to bury. I couldn't tell them his last words were not a message for them; he had clung to the chaplain's hand and said, Hold me, Padre, I'm falling . . . it's so deep down there. Nothing happens the way it does in the movies, not even death; we don't die cleanly, we die stricken with terror in a pool of blood and shit. In the movies no one really dies; in war no one really lives. In Vietnam I used to imagine that soon someone would turn on the lights and I would walk out of the theater and get a cup of coffee and before long forget everything. Now that I've learned to live with the canker of a good memory, I no longer make believe that life is like fiction; I accept it with all the pain it carries with it.

My sister and I had grown apart; we hadn't seen each other since Margaret was born. I didn't want to call her, or my mother. What would we have said? My mother was opposed to the war; she thought it was more honorable to desert than to kill. Any form of violence is shameful and perverse; remember Gandhi, she always told me; we cannot support a culture based on armaments; we are in this world to celebrate life and to promote compassion and justice. Poor woman; innocent of reality, she wandered through the planes of
The Infinite Plan
after my father, half out of her head but with an unquestionable lucidity in her digressions. I left for Vietnam without saying goodbye because I didn't want to hurt her; for her, the war was a matter of principle, it had nothing to do with my personal safety. I suppose she loved me in her way, but there was always a chasm between us. What would my father have advised me? He would never have told me to go to jail or leave the country; he would have invited me to go hunting, and in the frozen silence of dawn, waiting for the ducks, would have clapped me on the back, and we would have understood each other without need for words, as men sometimes understand each other.

I spent my first three days home shut up in the motel, sitting before the television with cartons of beer and bottles of whiskey; then I took my sleeping bag down to the beach and spent two weeks staring at the sea, smoking pot, and conversing with the ghost of Juan José. The water was cold, but I swam just the same, until I felt my blood congealing in my veins and my brain growing numb and free of memories—blank. The ocean over there is warm; soldiers swarmed over the sand like ants: three days of play, beer, and rock to compensate for months of fighting. For two weeks I did not exchange a complete sentence with anyone, merely mumbling a word or two to ask for pizza or a hamburger. I think deep down I wanted to go back to Vietnam. At least there I had comrades and something to do; here I had no friends, I was alone, I didn't belong anywhere. In civilian life no one spoke the language of war; there was no vocabulary to describe the experience of the firefights, and even had there been one, nobody would have wanted to hear my story; nobody likes bad news. Only among veterans could I feel at ease and talk about the things I would never discuss with a civilian. Only grunts would understand why you harden yourself to affection and are afraid to get close to anyone; they know that physical courage comes much easier than emotional courage, because they, too, lost friends they loved like brothers and made up their minds that in the future they would spare themselves that unbearable pain: it's best not to love anyone too much. Without realizing it, I had begun to slip down into that abyss where so many are lost; I began to see the glamorous side of violence, to think that nothing so exhilarating would ever happen to me again, that the rest of my life would be a gray desert by comparison.

I believed I had discovered the secret that explains why we keep on fighting wars. Joan and Susan maintain that war is a way for old machos to eliminate young men; they hate them and fear them and don't want to share anything with them, not women or power or money, because they know that sooner or later the younger men will depose them. That's the reason they send the young to their deaths, even if it's their own sons. That may be a logical rationale for the old men, but why do the young men go? Why throughout so many millennia have they not rebelled against these ritual massacres? I have an answer. It's something more than the primordial instinct to do battle, more than blood lust: pleasure. I discovered that on the mountain. I don't dare say the word aloud, it would bring bad luck, but I repeat it over and over to myself:
pleasure, pleasure.
The most intense pleasure you can experience, much more intense than sex: thirst satiated, first love requited, divine revelation, say those who know what it is.

That night on the mountain I was within a fraction of a second of death. A bullet grazed my cheek and struck the forehead of the soldier behind me. Panic paralyzed me for an instant; I was suspended in the fascination of my own fear, but then consciousness was blacked out and I began to fire in a frenzy, screaming and cursing, unable to stop or to reason, while bullets sped past me and the world exploded in a cataclysmic roaring. I was blanketed in heat and smoke, trapped in the airless void that followed each flash of fire. I have no idea how long all that lasted or what I did or why I did it; I remember only the miracle of finding myself alive, the rush of adrenaline and the pain over every inch of my body, sensual pain, an atrocious pleasure unlike anything I had known, deeper than the most prolonged orgasm, a pleasure that invaded every pore, turning my blood to caramel and my bones to sand, submerging me finally in nothingness.