The Infinite Plan (13 page)

“If we earned that much here, imagine what we could do in Pershing Square. We'd be millionaires! Hundreds of people go there to listen to the hotheads, and there are all those rich people going in and out of hotels,” Carmen proposed.

Such a bold move would never have entered Gregory's mind. He believed there was an invisible frontier that people of his status never crossed; the world was different on the other side: men strode along purposefully with work to do and urgent errands, gloved women strolled at a more leisurely pace, the stores were luxurious and the automobiles shiny. He had been there once or twice with his mother, when she had legal matters to attend to, but he would never in the world have thought of going there alone. In one instant, Carmen revealed the possibilities of the market: for three years he had been shining shoes for a dime among the poorest of the poor, without a glimmer of how only a few blocks away he could find customers more easily and charge triple the amount. The idea intimidated him, however, and he immediately rejected it.

“You're crazy.”

“Why are you so chicken, Gregory? I bet you don't even know the hotel.”

“The hotel? You've been in the hotel?”

“Of course. It's like a palace: it has paintings on the ceilings and the doors; there are pom-poms on the curtains, and I can't even describe the lamps: they look like ships strung with lights. Your feet sink into the rugs like sand at the beach, and everyone looks elegant—and they serve tea and cakes.”

“You had tea in the hotel?”

“Well, not exactly, but I've seen the trays. You have to walk in without looking at anyone, as if your mama was waiting for you at a table, you understand?”

“And what if they catch you?”

“The first rule is, you never admit anything. If someone says something to you, you act like a rich kid, you turn up your nose and say something rude. I'll take you one day. At any rate, that's the best place to work.”

“We can't take Oliver on the streetcar,” Gregory argued weakly.

“We'll walk,” she replied.

From then on they went to Pershing Square every time Carmen Morales could escape her mother's vigilant eye. They attracted more people than the soapbox speakers expounding with futile passion on subjects no one cared to hear about. Without the juggling their act was too flat, so if Carmen was unable to go, Gregory resumed his shoeshine routine—although now he worked the streets of the business district. The two children were united by mutual want and their shared secret, in addition to many other complicities.

At sixteen, Gregory was attending high school with Juan José Morales. Carmen was one year behind them, and Martínez had dropped out of school and joined the Carniceros gang. Reeves tried never to go anywhere near him and as long as he could avoid him felt safe. By that time the rebelliousness that formerly kept him on the move had diminished, but he was tortured by other, silent agonies. In high school most of the students were white; he no longer felt people were pointing a finger at him or that he had to run home the minute the bell rang in order to elude his enemies. Mandatory education was not always a fact among the poor, and even less among Latins, who often had to take a job as soon as they were out of grade school. Gregory's father had implanted in him an ambition to obtain an education, a desire that he himself had never satisfied because by the time he was thirteen he was traveling across Australia shearing sheep. Gregory's mother, too, encouraged him to learn a profession, so he would not have to break his back doing hard labor: Figure it out, son—a third of your life is spent sleeping, a third in daily routines, and the most interesting third will be spent working; that's why it's best to do something you like. The one time Gregory had mentioned leaving school to look for a job, Olga read his fortune in the tarot cards and he turned up the card for Law.

“Not a chance. You'll be a thief or a policeman, and in either case, your studies will stand you in good stead,” she pronounced.

“I don't want to be either one of those things.”

“This card says very clearly that you'll have something to do with the law.”

“Doesn't it say I'll be rich?”

“Sometimes rich and sometimes poor.”

“But I'll get to be someone important, won't I?”

“You don't
get to
anywhere in life, Gregory! You just live it.”

Carmen Morales taught Gregory to dance to North American rhythms, and they became so expert that people would form a circle around them and applaud their exhibitions of jitterbug and rock 'n' roll. Gregory would fling Carmen above his head in a kind of headstand and before she tumbled to the floor toss her over his shoulder in a breathtaking maneuver, sweep her back between his legs, just grazing the floor, and pull her to her feet safe and sound—all without losing the beat or her teeth. Gregory saved for months to buy a black leather jacket and tried to train a curl to flip over his forehead, but as no amount of hair ointment could conquer the limp bangs that resulted, he opted for short hair combed straight back, more comfortable but less suitable for the rebel image that made girls tremble with apprehension and pleasure. Carmen herself was very different from the teenage movie star image—blonde, virtuous, and slightly silly—that boys sighed over and plump brunette Mexican girls tried vainly to imitate by peroxiding their hair. Carmen was pure dynamite. On weekends the two friends dressed in the latest version of what was “in”—he in his black leather jacket, even if it was hellishly hot, she in tight pants she hid in her purse and changed into in the ladies' room, because if her father had seen her he would have ripped them off her—and went off to dance halls where they were known and not charged an entrance fee because they were the main attraction for the night. They danced without pause, not stopping even to drink a Coke, because they had no money to pay for it. Carmen had developed into an intrepid young girl with a black mane of hair and an attractive face with thick eyebrows and lips; she had an easy laugh and impressive curves, with breasts too large for her height and age, protuberances she detested as grotesque but that Gregory swore grew larger by the day. When they danced, he swung her about only to enjoy the sight of those calendar girl's breasts defying the laws of gravity and decency, but when he saw anyone who was equally admiring, he felt a blind rage. He was not consciously attracted to his friend; the mere idea would have horrified him as a sin of incest. Carmen was as much his sister as Judy, yet at times all his good intentions faltered before the treachery of his hormones, which were at constant fever pitch. Padre Larraguibel tried to fill his young charges' heads with apocalyptic predictions about the consequences of sinful thoughts about women and about touching themselves. He threatened lightning bolts as punishment for lechery, vowed that hair would grow in the palms of their hands, that they would break out with running sores, that gangrene would rot their penises, and that finally the sinner would die after atrocious suffering, plus, should he die without confession, he would plummet headfirst into hell. Gregory doubted the divine lightning bolt and the hair on the palms of his hands, but he was sure the other inflictions were true because he had seen his father, he remembered how he had been covered with pustules and that he died for abusing himself. Gregory never dreamed of finding solace with any of the girls in his school or the barrio—they seemed off limits—nor did he want to visit the prostitutes, who seemed almost as terrifying as Martínez. He was desperate for love, inflamed by a brutal and incomprehensible ardor, frightened by the drumming of his heart, by the sticky honey in his sleeping bag, by turbulent dreams, and by the surprises dealt him by his body; his bones lengthened, he developed muscles, hair grew on new parts of his body, and his blood boiled with inextinguishable fire. At the most insignificant stimulus he exploded into a sudden gratification that left him dismayed and half faint. A woman brushing by him in the street, the glimpse of a shapely leg, a scene in the movies, a phrase in a book, even the vibration of the streetcar—everything excited him. In addition to studying, he had to work; even exhaustion, however, did not neutralize his unfathomable desire to sink into the swamp, to lose himself in sin, to suffer that wild delight, that always-too-brief death, yet once more. Sports and dancing helped burn his energy, but only a more drastic remedy could cool his raging instincts. Just as in his childhood he had fallen madly in love with Miss June, in adolescence he suffered sudden passionate crushes on inaccessible girls, usually older than he, whom he never approached but resigned himself to adoring from afar. A year later, after a sudden spurt, he would reach his full height and weight, but at sixteen he was still a slim adolescent with too large knees and ears, slightly pathetic, although there were indications of the good temperament to come. “If you can escape being a thief or a policeman, you'll be a movie star, and women will fall all over you,” Olga promised, trying to console him when she saw him suffering inside the hair shirt of his own skin.

It was Olga, finally, who rescued him from the incandescent torment of chastity. Ever since Martínez had cornered him in the grade school broom closet, Gregory had been besieged by unconfessable doubts concerning his virility. He had not explored Ernestina Pereda again—or any other girl—under the guise of playing doctor, and his knowledge about that mysterious side of existence was vague and inconsistent. The crumbs of information garnered on the sly in the library merely confused him further, because they contradicted the experience of the street, the jokes the Morales brothers and other friends told, the preachments of the Padre, the revelations of the movies, and the alarms of his fantasies. He wrapped himself in solitude, denying with stubborn determination the perturbation of his heart and the restlessness of his body, attempting to imitate the chaste knights of the Round Table or the heroes of the Far West, but at any moment he could be betrayed by an upsurge of nature. That dull pain and nameless confusion weighed on him for an eternity, until it was more than he could live with, and had Olga not come to his aid he would have been half mad. Olga had seen him born, she had been present at every important moment of his childhood, she knew him like a son; nothing about him escaped her eye, and what she could not deduce through simple common sense she divined through her gifts as a seer, which at best consisted of knowledge of another's heart, an observant eye, and boldness in improvising counsel and visions of the future. She had no need to call on her gift of clairvoyance to recognize Gregory's helpless state. Olga was in the fourth decade of her life; the curves of her youth had turned to fat, and the reversals of her gypsy vocation had aged her skin, but she had not lost her grace and style, the lush foliage of her red hair, the swish of her skirts, or her boisterous laugh. She lived in the same house but no longer in one room; she had bought the property and made it into her private temple. In one room she dispensed medicines, magnetized water, and all manner of herbs; in another, therapeutic massages and abortions; and in the large living room she held spiritualist, magic, and divination sessions. She always received Gregory in the room above the garage. One day he seemed especially pale, and she was moved by the primitive compassion that recently had been her essential feeling for him.

“Who are you in love with now?” she said, laughing.

“I've got to get out of this fucking place,” he muttered, his head in his hands, defeated by the enemy below his waist.

“Where do you plan to go?”

“Anywhere, straight to hell, I don't care. Nothing happens here, I can't breathe, I'm suffocating.”

“It isn't the barrio; it's you. You're drowning inside your own hide.”

The soothsayer took a bottle of whiskey from the cupboard, splashed a stout drink into one glass and another for herself, waited for Gregory to drink it, then poured another. He was not accustomed to strong liquor, and it went to his head; the windows were closed, and the aroma of incense, medicinal herbs, and patchouli was heavy in the air. With a shudder, he caught Olga's scent. In a flash of loving inspiration, the heavyset woman walked up behind him and wrapped her arms around him; her drooping breasts pressed against his back, her beringed fingers blindly unbuttoned his shirt while he turned to stone, paralyzed by surprise and fear, but then she began to nuzzle his neck, trace his ear with her tongue, whisper words in Russian, explore his body with her expert hands, touch him there where no one had touched him, ever, until with a sob, plunging down a steep precipice, shaken with terror and anticipated joy, and without knowing what he was doing, or why, he turned to her, desperate, tearing at her clothes in his urgency, throwing himself on her like an animal in rut, rolling with her across the floor, kicking his pants down, groping his way into her skirts, penetrating her in a burst of desolation, and immediately collapsing with a scream, as his being gushed from him as if an artery had exploded in his groin. Olga allowed him to rest a moment on her bosom, scratching his back as she had so often when he was a boy, but as soon as she calculated that he was feeling remorse, she got up and went to close the curtains. Calmly, she removed her torn blouse and wrinkled skirt.

“Now I am going to teach you what we women like,” she said with a new smile. “The first thing, my son, is never to hurry. . . .”

“I have to know something, Olga; swear that you'll tell me the truth.”

“What is it you want to know?”

“My father and you . . . I mean, the two of you. . . .”

“That's none of your business; it has nothing to do with you.”

“I have to know . . . you were lovers, weren't you?”

“No, Gregory. I will say this only once: no, we were not lovers. Don't bring up the subject again, because if you do, that will be the last time I ever see you. Is that clear?”