The Active Side of Infinity (40 page)

The fact that he had addressed me as young man had won me over
instantly. "My name is
Carlos Aranha, sir," I said,
"and may I ask in turn what is yours?"

He made a gesture of mock surprise. He opened his eyes wide and jumped
backward as if he
had been attacked. Then he began to laugh
uproariously. At the sound of his laughter, my
grandmother
came out to the patio. When she saw the husky man, she screamed like a small
girl
and threw her arms around him in a most affectionate
embrace. He lifted her up as if she weighed
nothing and
twirled her around. I noticed then that he was very tall. His huskiness hid his
height.
He actually had the body of a professional fighter. He
seemed to notice that I was eyeing him. He
flexed his
biceps.

"I've done some boxing in my day, sir," he said, thoroughly
aware of what I was thinking.

My grandmother introduced him to me. She said that he was her son
Antoine, her baby, the
apple of her eye; she said that he was
a dramatist, a theater director, a writer, a poet.

The fact that he was so athletic was his winning ticket with me. I
didn't understand at first that
he was adopted. I noticed, however,
that he didn't look at all like the rest of the family. While
every
one of the members of my family were corpses that walked, he was alive, vital
from the
inside out. We hit it off marvelously. I liked the fact
that he worked out every day, punching a
bag. I liked
immensely that not only did he punch the bag, he kicked it, too, in the most
astounding
style, a mixture of boxing and kicking. His body was as hard as a rock.

One day Antoine confessed to me that his only fervent desire in life was
to be a writer of note.

"I have everything," he said. "Life has been very
generous to me. The only thing I don't have is the only thing I want: talent.
The muses do not like me. I appreciate what I read, but I cannot
create
anything that I like to read. That's my torment; I lack the discipline or the
charm to entice the muses, so my life is as empty as anything can be."

Antoine went on to tell me that the one reality that he had was his
mother. He called my grandmother his bastion, his support, his twin soul. He
ended up by voicing a very disturbing
thought to me. "If I didn't
have my mother," he said, "I wouldn't live."

I realized then how profoundly tied he was to my grandmother. All the
horror stories that my
aunts had told me about the spoiled
child Antoine became suddenly very vivid for me. My
grandmother
had really spoiled him beyond salvation. Yet they seemed so very happy
together. I saw them sitting for hours on end, his head on her lap as if he
were still a child. I had never heard
my grandmother converse with
anybody for such lengths of time.

Abruptly, one day Antoine started to produce a lot of writing. He began
to direct a play at the
local theater, a play that he had
written himself. When it was staged, it became an instant success.
His
poems were published in the local paper. He seemed to have hit a creative
streak. But only a few months later it all came to an end. The editor of the
town's paper publicly denounced Antoine; he accused him of plagiarism and
published in the paper the proof of Antoine's guilt.

My grandmother, of course, would not hear of her son's misbehavior. She
explained it all as a
case of profound envy. Every one of
those people in that town was envious of the elegance, the
style
of her son. They were envious of his personality, of his wit. Indeed, he was
the
personification of elegance and savoir faire. But he was
a plagiarist for sure; there was no doubt
about it.

Antoine never explained his behavior to anyone. I liked him too much to
ask him anything
about it. Besides, I didn't care. His reasons were
his reasons, as far as I was concerned. But
something was
broken; from then on, our lives moved in leaps and bounds, so to speak. Things
changed
so drastically in the house from one day to the next that I grew accustomed to
expect
anything, the best or the worst. One night my grandmother
walked into Antoine's room in a most dramatic fashion. There was a look of
hardness in her eyes that I had never seen before. Her lips
trembled
as she spoke.

"Something terrible has happened, Antoine," she began.

Antoine interrupted her. He begged her to let him explain.

She cut him off abruptly. "No, Antoine, no," she said firmly.
"This has nothing to do with you. It has to do with me. At this very
difficult time for you, something of greater importance yet has happened.
Antoine, my dear son, I have run out of time.

"I want you to understand that this is inevitable," she went
on. "I have to leave, but you must
remain. You are
the sum total of everything that I have done in this life. Good or bad,
Antoine,
you are all I am. Give life a try. In the end, we will
be together again anyway. Meanwhile,
however, do, Antoine, do.
Whatever, it doesn't matter what, as long as you do."

I saw Antoine's body as it shivered with anguish. I saw how he
contracted his total being, all
the muscles of his body, all his strength.
It was as if he had shifted gears from his problem, which
was
like a river, to the ocean.

"Promise me that you won't die until you die!" she shouted at
him.

Antoine nodded his head.

My grandmother, the next day, on the advice of her sorcerer-counselor,
sold all her holdings,
which were quite sizable, and turned
the money over to her son Antoine. And the following day, very early in the
morning, the strangest scene that I had ever witnessed took place in front of
my ten-year-old eyes: the moment in which Antoine said good-bye to his mother.
It was a scene as unreal as the set of a moving picture; unreal in the sense
that it seemed to have been concocted,
written down
somewhere, created by a series of adjustments that a writer makes and a
director
carries out.

The patio of my grandparents' house was the setting. Antoine was the
main protagonist, his
mother the leading actress. Antoine
was traveling that day. He was going to the port. He was
going
to catch an Italian liner and go over the Atlantic to Europe on a leisurely
cruise. He was as
elegantly dressed as ever. A taxi driver was
waiting for him outside the house, blowing the horn of his taxi impatiently.

I had witnessed Antoine's last feverish night when he tried as
desperately as anyone can try to
write a poem for his mother.

"It is crap," he said to me. "Everything that I write is
crap. I'm a nobody."

I assured him, even though I was nobody to assure him, that whatever he
was writing was
great. At one moment, I got carried away and
stepped over certain boundaries I should never have
crossed.

"Take it from me, Antoine," I yelled. "I am a worse
nobody than you! You have a mother. I
have nothing. Whatever you are
writing is fine."

Very politely, he asked me to leave his room. I had succeeded in making
him feel stupid,
having to listen to advice from a nobody kid. I
bitterly regretted my outburst. I would have liked him to keep on being my
friend.

Antoine had his elegant overcoat neatly folded, draped over his right
shoulder. He was
wearing a most beautiful green suit, English
cashmere.

My grandmother spoke. "You have to hurry up, dear," she said.
"Time is of the essence. You
have to leave. If you don't,
these people will kill you for the money."

She was referring to her daughters, and their husbands, who were beyond
fury when they
found out that their mother had quietly
disinherited them, and that the hideous Antoine, their
archenemy, was
going to get away with everything that was rightfully theirs.

"I'm sorry I have to put you through all this," my grandmother
apologized. "But, as you know,
time is independent of our
wishes."

Antoine spoke with his grave, beautifully modulated voice. He sounded
more than ever like a
stage actor. "It'll take but a
minute, Mother," he said. "I'd like to read something that I have
written
for you."

It was a poem of thanks. When he had finished reading, he paused. There
was such a wealth of feeling in the air, such a tremor.

"It was sheer beauty, Antoine," my grandmother said, sighing.
"It expressed everything that
you wanted to say. Everything
that I wanted to hear." She paused for an instant. Then her lips
broke
into an exquisite smile.

"Plagiarized, Antoine?" she asked.

Antoine's smile in response to his mother was equally beaming. "Of
course, Mother," he said. "Of course."

They embraced, weeping. The horn of the taxi sounded more impatient yet.
Antoine looked at
me where I was hiding under the stairway. He nodded
his head slightly, as if to say, "Good-bye.
Take
care." Then he turned around, and without looking at his mother again, he
ran toward the
door. He was thirty-seven years old, but he looked
like he was sixty, he seemed to carry such a
gigantic
weight on his shoulders. He stopped before he reached the door, when he heard
his
mother's voice admonishing him for the last time.

"Don't turn around to look, Antoine," she said. "Don't
turn around to look, ever. Be happy,
and do. Do! There is the trick.
Do!"

The scene filled me with a strange sadness that lasts to this day-a most
inexplicable melancholy that don Juan explained as my first-time knowledge that
we do run out of time.

The next day my grandmother left with her counselor/manservant/valet on
a journey to a mythical place called Rondonia, where her sorcerer-helper was
going to elicit her cure. My
grandmother was terminally ill,
although I didn't know it. She never returned, and don Juan
explained the selling of
her holdings and giving them to Antoine as a supreme sorcerers'
maneuver executed by her counselor to detach her
from the care of her family. They were so
angry with Mother for her deed that they didn't care whether or not she
returned. I had the feeling
that
they didn't even realize that she had left.

On the top of that flat mountain, I recollected those three events as
if they had happened only
an instant before. When I expressed my
thanks to those three persons, 1 succeeded in bringing
them back to
that mountaintop. At the end of my shouting, my loneliness was something
inexpressible. 1 was weeping uncontrollably.

Don Juan very patiently explained to me that loneliness is inadmissible
in a warrior. He said
that
warrior-travelers
can count
on one being on which they can focus all their love, all their care: this
marvelous Earth, the mother, the matrix, the epicenter of everything we are and
everything we do; the very being to which all of us return; the very
being that allows warrior-
travelers to leave on their
definitive
journey.

Don Genaro proceeded to perform then an act of magical
intent
for
my benefit. Lying on his
stomach, he executed a series of
dazzling movements. He became a blob of luminosity that
seemed
to be swimming, as if the ground were a pool. Don Juan said that it was
Genaro's way of
hugging the immense earth, and that in spite of the
difference in size, the earth acknowledged
Genaro's
gesture. The sight of Genaro's movements and the explanation of them replaced
my
loneliness with sublime joy.

"I can't stand the idea that you are leaving, don Juan," I
heard myself saying. The sound of my
voice and what I had said made
me feel embarrassed. When 1 began to sob, involuntarily, driven by self-pity, I
felt even more chagrined. "What is the matter with me, don Juan?" I
muttered. "I'm not ordinarily like this."

"What's happening to you is that your awareness is on your toes
again," he replied, laughing.
Then I lost any vestige of
control and gave myself fully to my feelings of dejection and
despair.

"I'm going to be left alone," I said in a shrieking voice.
"What's going to happen to me?
What's going to become of
me?"

"Let's put it this way," don Juan said calmly. "In order
for me to leave this world and face the
unknown, I
need all my strength, all my forbearance, all my luck; but above all, I need
every bit
of a warrior-traveler's guts of steel. To remain behind
and fare like a warrior-traveler, you need
everything of
what I myself need. To venture out there, the way we are going to, is no joking
matter, but neither is it to stay behind."