This is the worst thing that ever happened in my life, it’s the very worst thing that rat Martínez ever did to me, worse than the First Communion when he made me bite off a piece of bread before I took communion, so when I swallowed the host I’d be struck by lightning and go straight to hell. But nothing happened; I didn’t feel anything. I guess it was because it wasn’t my sin, it was his, and he’s the one who’ll boil in Satan’s caldrons, not me, for leading me to sin—which is a greater offense than the sin itself, that’s what Padre Larraguibel explained to us when he told us about Adam and Eve. That time I had to write five hundred times I must not blaspheme, because I said that God committed the sin when He put the apple in the Garden of Eden knowing that Adam would eat it one day, anyway, and if that wasn’t leading someone to sin, what was? Oh, this is worse than when Martínez stripped me in the gym and hid my clothes; if the cleaning lady hadn’t come and helped me, I would have had to spend the night in the shower and the next day the whole school would have seen me stark naked. It’s worse than when he shouted to everyone in the schoolyard that he had spied me in the bathroom playing doctor with Ernestina Pereda. I hate him! I hate him from the bottom of my heart! I wish he would die, not just get sick but be killed—but not before someone cuts off his dick. I want that lousy Martínez to pay. I hate him, I hate him!
I’m inside my den now, I whistle to Oliver and listen to him crawling through the tunnel. I put my arms around him, and he lies very still, panting, with his tongue hanging out; he looks at me with his honey-colored eyes, he understands, he’s the only one who knows all my secrets. Oliver is a pretty ugly dog; Judy despises him; he’s a real mutt and has a long fat tail like a baseball bat. He’s bad besides; he eats clothes and rolls in dog shit and then jumps on the beds; he loves fights and sometimes comes home all chewed up, but he’s warm and when he hasn’t been rolling in anything he smells great. I bury my nose in his neck; his outside hair is short and stiff, but next to his skin it’s soft as cotton, and I like to sniff him there—nothing smells better than dog. The sun’s gone down, and shadows are everywhere; it’s cold, one of those rare winter afternoons, and in spite of the fact that I’m afire, my hands and ears are freezing cold—it feels clean. I’ve decided not to slit my throat with my pocketknife as I planned to; I’ll just die of the cold: I’ll slowly freeze through the night, and tomorrow morning I’ll be stiff as a board, a slow death but more peaceful than being hit by a train. That was my first idea, but every time I run in front of the train I’m too big a coward and at the last second jump and save myself by a hair. I don’t know how many times I tried it, but I’ve decided not to die that way, it must hurt a lot, and besides, the idea of all the guts makes me sick; I don’t want to be scraped up with a shovel or have some smartass keep my fingers for souvenirs. I’m going to push Oliver away, because he keeps me warm and I’ll never freeze this way. I’ll scratch this hollow in the dirt to get comfortable and turn over on my back and lie perfectly still—oh, that pain there . . . that damn, miserable Martínez queer! My head is filled with thoughts and visions and words, but then after a very long time I stop crying and begin to breathe normally and then smell the soft, fresh earth gathering me into her arms the way Doña Inmaculada hugs me; I sink, I let go and think about the planet, round, floating free of gravity in the black abyss of the cosmos, spinning and spinning, and I think of the stars in the Milky Way and how it will be at the end of the world, when everything explodes and particles spray out like fireworks on the Fourth of July, and I feel like I’m a part of the earth, made of the same stuff, and when I die I will disintegrate, crumble like a cake, and be part of the soil, and trees will grow from my body. I start thinking how the world doesn’t turn around me, how I’m not anything special—I must be about as important as a hunk of clay—and maybe I don’t have a soul of my own; suddenly I wonder if there isn’t just one big soul for all living creatures, including Oliver, and no heaven or hell or purgatory, maybe they’re just something cooked up by the Padre, who’s so old his mind’s gone soft, and my father’s Logi and Masters don’t exist either, and the only one who’s anywhere close to the truth is my mother with her Bahai religion, although she gets all wound up with shit that may be fine for Persia but doesn’t make much sense here. I like the idea of being a particle, of being a grain of cosmic sand. Miss June says that comets’ tails are formed of stellar dust, thousands of tiny little rocks that reflect the light. I’m feeling really calm now, I’ve forgotten about Martínez, about being afraid, about the pain and the broom closet, I am at peace, I rise up and am flying with my eyes wide open toward the starry void. I’m flying . . . flying with Oliver. . . .
From the time she was a little girl, Carmen Morales had the manual skills that characterized her for the rest of her life; in her hands any object was transformed from its original form. She made necklaces from soup beans, soldiers from toilet paper rolls, toys from spools and matchboxes. One day, playing with three apples, she discovered that she had no trouble at all keeping them in the air at the same time; soon she was juggling five eggs, and from that moved naturally to more exotic objects.
“Shining shoes is a lot of sweat and not much cash, Greg. Learn some trick, and we’ll work together,” Carmen suggested to her friend. “I need a partner.”
Dozens of eggs later, Gregory’s definitive clumsiness was established. He had no interesting talent to offer other than wiggling his ears and eating live flies, although he did have a good ear for the harmonica. Oliver was more gifted; they taught him to walk on his hind legs with a hat clamped in his jaws and how to select small slips of paper from a box. At first he swallowed them, but he eventually learned to deliver them delicately to the client. Carmen and Gregory assiduously perfected a routine for their show and to escape the scrutiny of friends and neighbors planned to perform as far from home as possible, since they knew that if Pedro or Inmaculada Morales knew what they were doing, nothing could save them; they had already earned one spanking for their idea of posing as beggars in their own barrio. Carmen made a skirt from brightly colored scarves and a bonnet trimmed with chicken feathers, and asked to borrow Olga’s yellow boots. Gregory sneaked out the top hat and bow tie his father had worn while preaching, items Nora had preserved as relics. They asked Olga to help them in drafting the slips with fortunes, telling her it was a game for the end-of-school party; she pierced them with one of her looks but without further questions sat down and wrote out a handful of prophecies in the style of Chinese fortune cookies. They rounded out their supplies with eggs, candles, and five kitchen knives, which they hid in a sack because they could not leave their houses carrying such things without raising suspicion. They washed Oliver down with a hose and tied a ribbon around his neck, hoping to make him look a little less like a cur. They chose a street corner far from the barrio, donned their minstrel outfits, and tried out their act. A small crowd soon gathered around the two children and the dog. Carmen, with her petite figure, her eye-catching clothes, and her extraordinary skill in tossing burning candles and sharp knives in the air, was an instant attraction; Gregory devoted himself to playing the harmonica. In pauses between the juggling, he put aside his mouth organ and invited the spectators to buy a fortune. For a small sum, the dog would select a folded slip and carry it to the client—slightly damp with slobber, it is true, but perfectly legible. In an hour or two the children earned as much as a laborer received for a full day’s work in any of the area factories. As it began to grow dark, they removed their costumes, packed up their equipment, divided their earnings, and returned home, after swearing that torture could not make them reveal what they had done. Carmen buried her money in a box in her patio, and Gregory doled his out at home, to avoid prying questions, keeping a small share to go to the movies.
“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.
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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.