Antonio dealt him a sharp blow in the chest, then another and another in front of the shocked guests. Antonio had pushed Aaron to the grass beyond the terrace when he felt his own arms being pinioned behind him and heard people shouting at him to stop. He flailed out against the arms and threw Aaron to the ground. Looking down at that olive-ashy face, at the Negroid nose, the lips twisted in fear and anger, the shut eyes, the faintly stubbled skin, he wanted to kill him.
Again his arms were pulled behind him, this time with considerably more force. Although he could once again have wrenched himself away, he did not. He refrained from kicking Aaron.
Donald and Joseph, on either side of him, were puny men. He could easily knock them down, beat Aaron to a pulp. What was the point? He had destroyed it all.
Fallen. Fallen. Like leaves. Home, comfort, love, work, all fallen. Because of Aaron. Aaron hated him because of the damned Eleanor. Rosa was like a heavy albatross around his neck. She lit the fuse. Always she lit fuses; she sparked enormous blazes of fire.
He was not clearly conscious of what happened next. He heard Rosa sobbing, heard the murmuring of voices. He allowed himself to be led into the house, to an armchair in the living room. He heard footsteps on the gravel driveway, heard cars drive away.
Rosa’s head touched his knee. She was kneeling on the carpet beside him. The albatross.
“I love you,” she said.
“I’m leaving tonight.”
“Where will you go?”
He was silent.
“We can go to a motel. Can I come with you?”
He shrugged.
“I’m your wife. I can’t stay here without you.”
He wanted to vanish, take a freighter to Japan or Madagascar, Spain, or Le Hâvre. Return to Paris. But Isabel needed him. A man belonged with his wife and child. Isabel needed him these first few years of her life. Rosa was not capable of raising her alone. If he abandoned them, Rosa and the baby would both be foutues.
By taxi they took two suitcases as well as Isabel’s diapers and baby things to a motel. After Isabel had gone to sleep on the carpet, swaddled in a thin blanket, they made love with more abandon than ever before. It was as though they had been given a few hours before their old shackles bound them up again. They licked and bit and caressed and writhed against each other, mysteriously free for that night only.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Rosa took Antonio by the hand. “Let’s look at some apartments,” she said. “You can study English at Columbia if we rent an apartment nearby. They’ve got an intensive course for foreigners during the summer.”
“It costs too much.”
“It costs more not to know English properly. It’s only eight hundred dollars. That’s not so much.”
“We’ll see.”
They looked at a place for rent high up on the tenth floor of a building on Amsterdam Avenue. He stood in the bare apartment with its walls that echoed because there was no furniture. Wooden floors. Cream colored walls. No drapes. Venetian blinds, half drawn up. He looked down from a living room window. All asphalt and concrete. Children were playing, weaving in and out among taxis, cars, and trucks. Horns honked. A few spindly trees, their leaves covered with dust, were boxed in dirt squares bordered by concrete.
So many people.
So much traffic.
So many buildings.
He would go crazy here. One cell among billions. One cell in a diseased organism.
In this apartment he would lose what shred of sanity remained. He could see himself catapulting from this window through the air. Curious bystanders would gather around his twisted body, while Rosa threw herself upon him weeping.
Rosa alone all day with the baby here. . . . It was not an intimate building like the one they lived in in Paris, with its cobblestoned courtyard, its walls thick and resonant with vibrations of people going back nine hundred years to the Middle Ages, where the people who lived in the building all knew each other, gossiped about each other, and sometimes met in the tiny café in a corner of the building where you could stop for a glass of cassis and a bit of conversation.
This building had a tiny yard, visible from the back bedroom, which was littered with trash: a bicycle with tires missing, a rusted baby carriage, cardboard boxes. On all sides of the narrow yard loomed apartment buildings.
These people were all in such a hurry, except for the children on the street below. The adults were caught in the bloodless rhythms of efficiency which were dictated by American life. . . . These people worshipped the clock, did things by rote, and the seconds became lifeless.
Here the streets were filled with old people, beggars, students, housewives, working men and women—all in a rush. Petty criminals and thieves, pickpockets and rapists. Young blacks and Puerto Ricans from Harlem. The sordidness of the city, its impersonality, the rush oppressed him unbearably.
He could not endure three days in such an atmosphere, let alone three months. He needed green grass, trees, sunlight, and if possible the ocean—the ocean renewed life—not this dustladen choking air through which a thin light filtered.
Rosa touched his shoulder. “It’s fairly cheap,” she said. “One fifty a month is cheap in Manhattan. It’s got a big bedroom, and it’s close enough to Columbia so that you could walk there for your English class. Maybe I could find a babysitter and get a part-time job.”
“No,” he said. “I don’t want you to work yet. Isabel is still too little. No . . . not now . . . I don’t need to study English. I’ll pick it up.”
“I wish you would.”
“I can’t, Petite. Don’t you understand? I’ve got to earn money in this fucking country.”
A class would be too slow for his quick mind. Grammatical details exasperated him. He would feel too restless, too confined. He had to earn money. To respect himself, to feel himself a man, to meet Aaron’s angry, contemptuous condemnation, he had to earn money.
“You can’t get a decent job without speaking English well. You sound terrible when you speak. Immigrants who’ve been here for years still speak broken English. You don’t just pick it up.”
“Who do you think I am?” he asked in the voice that frightened her. Involuntarily she cringed.
They left the apartment and handed back the keys to the manager.
Rosa sighed with frustration and wiped sweat from her forehead. It was strange that Antonio hardly sweated at all.
He lurched into a bar on the corner and ordered a bottle of Heineken’s beer. She sat next to him at the counter. He ignored her, downed what was in the bottle, paid, and went back onto the street. He walked so rapidly that she had to run to keep up.
He would die of the sacrifice he was making for Rosa and the baby, he thought. Yes, he would die of it.
He kept going very fast. “Antonio!” She tugged at his shirt sleeve. He pulled away. Two blocks further on he went into another bar and sat down at a stool. When she sat next to him the bartender said, “Miss, you can’t sit at the bar without an escort.”
“He’s my husband.”
Antonio stared straight ahead.
“What’ll you have?” the bartender asked Antonio.
“Heineken’s.”
“Miss, you gotta leave.”
She waited outside.
When Antonio got on a bus, she followed. The heat made her faint.
“Penn Station is on 34th Street,” she said. “We’ve got to get back, because Isabel has been alone too long.”
Fear rose up in her chest. They were unfit parents. That Isabel had survived at all was a sign of Divine Protection. At eight in the morning they had left her alone on the floor, barricaded by pillows, on her blanket with a full bottle. Poor creature! Perhaps she’d crept over the pillows and electrocuted herself by sticking a tiny finger into a socket. May she had suffocated. Thank God she couldn’t crawl far yet. Maybe that would save her.
It was noon.
“I’m going back to the motel,” she said.
Antonio recalled the name of the little town on the West Coast where an old friend from Chile lived.
At Penn Station he went into a phone booth and called Information for Juan Figueroa’s number. He talked excitedly in Spanish with Juan. When Antonio hung up, he said, “Petite, I’m going to California.”
“Can I go with you? I’ve got to!”
He shrugged as he had last night in her parents’ living room before they went off to the motel. “If you like.”
The ride back on the train seemed to last forever, and Rosa could hardly bear it. She shut her eyes, held her breath, and prayed for Isabel’s safety.
They found Isabel crumpled around her bottle, breathing in the rapid, shallow way infants do, her face scarlet from sobbing and from the heat. Her light cotton pajamas were wet with perspiration. She had worn herself out crying before she fell asleep.
PART THREE
California
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Antonio, Rosa, and the baby arrived in San Francisco in early July. They took a helicopter the short distance from the San Francisco Airport to Sausalito.
The town was by San Francisco Bay, sheltered by rugged hills. The grass on the hills was dried to a dull dun color and would not be green again until the rainy season.
While Rosa fed Isabel and settled her down for a nap in Juan’s cottage, Antonio walked with Juan along the town’s tiny beach and along the main street, which ran beside the water. He was pleased by the sight of the masts rising up in the yacht harbor. On the other side of the Golden Gate Bridge with its dark orange girders there were the tall, pale buildings of San Francisco. Seen from afar, it had the quality of a fairy tale city. The fresh salt air filled Antonio’s lungs. Waves lapped against the sand.
How good it was, Antonio thought, to be by the sea again as he had been all during his childhood. Something harmonious and strong that he had left behind on the Chilean coast many years ago seemed restored to him. Perhaps here he and Rosa would begin a new life.
Blue sky. Water. A special quality of golden light in the air, which reminded him, too, of Chile. The Bay was almost too cold to swim in. Juan said it was as cold as the ocean at Puerto Montt, where Antonio had grown up.
The town was full of bars and cafés. There were many artists and writers. Bohemians with some money and education. A number of foreigners. Rents were moderate—certainly no higher than on Long Island.
Rosa, Antonio, and the baby slept in Juan’s spare room. His house was up a flight of stone steps behind the main street. From his windows they could see the Bay, half hidden by trees.
Juan Figueroa was a photographer whom Antonio had known in Santiago. He was stocky, of medium height, had dark brown hair, fair skin, blue eyes, and clean-cut Northern European features. Like Antonio, he was partly of German descent.
Juan had never felt entirely at home in Latin cultures. The United States appealed to him. He spoke English with a slight accent, but fluently. He had acquired a reputation for his photography, and he made a good living at it. Bettina, a tall, dark-haired girl from California, lived with him.
“Antonio, you’ve been coming in so late that you wake us up,” said Juan.
“At the bars I meet people,” said Antonio. “I learn American ways.”
“Antonio never used to drink in Santiago,” said Juan with disapproval. They were all sitting around the kitchen table after dinner.
Antonio said, “I drink only a little beer and wine to calm my nerves. In the bars I learn English.”
Juan said, “You didn’t drink at all when I knew you in Santiago.”
“I’m in a new country,” said Antonio. “The customs and the people are strange. I do things with my own rhythm.”
“You were different in Chile. Rosa, Antonio interviewed me on his radio program. He helped me become established.”
“I didn’t know you had a radio program in Chile,” said Rosa, ashamed. She’d heard Antonio talk about interviewing artists on the radio, but she had not listened closely enough. It was difficult to understand everything he said in French. He talked so much about the past that it all melted for her into a blur.
She flushed.
“Petite, so many things you do not know about me.”
His intestines churned. His hands fumbled as he poured himself more wine. Borracho. Eh bien, perhaps he would die borracho.
They had eaten a good dinner of fried fish, corn, salad, with white wine from the Napa vineyards to wash it down. Juan and Bettina were congenial. The house reminded Antonio of the Jesuit fathers’ cells in the boarding school he attended as a boy. These cells were bare of ornamentation except for a crucifix. In such surroundings, he could think more tranquilly. Juan’s floors were of polished wood. There were only a few pieces of furniture, several enlarged photographs on the white walls, and the huge windows that looked out.
Still, he felt in surging flashes as if he were living out a bad dream. Soon, with the help of God, he would wake up.
He could not block the image that came to him—as it did in nightmares, as well as waking moments—of Aaron as he lay on the grass, twisted with fear and panic, rage in his yellow cats’ eyes, the thick lips pressed together, the thick nose that he wanted to smash.
The man had so much power, and he used it to destroy people. So damned protected by wealth. Little did Aaron know of men who drank to ease the pain in their swollen limbs, who had nowhere to sleep but in a ditch.
What did Aaron know of the sacrifice that he, Antonio, was making for Rosa and the baby by merely continuing to live with them? Aaron had fucked up Rosa and her mother. Aaron was responsible.
“What are you going to do for a living?” asked Juan, as Aaron had asked months ago, as if echoing Aaron, as if picking up Antonio’s threads of thought. But Juan spoke more gently than Aaron ever had.
“I’ll become a carpenter or a plumber,” said Antonio in Spanish. “They make better money than professors.”
“It’s almost impossible to join those unions,” said Juan. “You’re too old, and you don’t have any connections. Those trade unions are very hard to get into.”
“Well, I’ll work without joining a union.”
Bettina and Rosa listened, half understanding the Spanish words.
In the No Name Bar and in the Seven Seas he had met well-educated men as well as those from working-class backgrounds who worked with their hands and bodies for a living. With his quick wit and manual dexterity, he could be taken on informally as an apprentice.
Why was it difficult to get into the unions, he wondered? Wasn’t this the land of opportunity? He didn’t understand this country at all. The slang expression “oh boy”—how indicative it seemed. A country of boys and girls. They had not been hardened yet by suffering. They did not want to acknowledge their maturity but wished to remain adolescent forever. There was something wrong about those values.
He pulled out his cigarettes and lit one. His hands trembled as if they were not attached to him as he held the cigarette between his lips while he poured himself the rest of the chenin blanc.
“No more, my friend,” Juan said.
“I have no drinking problem. I drink to calm the nerves.”
“What has happened to you?”
“Many things have happened, amigo. I wish you’d mind your own business. Let me go to the Devil if I want.”
Their voices were harsh against the women’s silence.
Through the walls they could hear the wind blowing.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Antonio bought a dark green ‘53 Ford pick-up with four hundred of the thousand dollars that Aaron had given him.
In these first few days as he walked through the town and up in the hills, breathing the fresh salt air, looking at the clear hues of sky, trees, hills, and houses, all seemed possible.
Perhaps Rosa’s wealthy grandparents, or even her parents, would give them money to buy a house like Juan’s, for the baby’s sake.
Juan and Bettina were gettin
g restive with their company. They would need to find a place of their own.
He would set up a business. Perhaps he could haul with his truck, learn the carpentry and plumbing trades. He might even open a photography shop, as he had once thought of doing.
He and Rosa would have a son. He would finish Vanidades. The New York publisher to whom Eleanor had given his work—Antonio had heard nothing from him yet—would reprint El Sueño de Manuel in English. His articles would be collected into a volume and published in Santiago. His work would become known in this country, as it was in Chile, and he would be famous here. All those who despised him would regret it. His family in Chile would once again claim him as their own. They would be proud of him. The troubles between him and Rosa would vanish. Rosa was changing—she was beautiful now, better groomed, more sure of herself—and it was his doing.
Perhaps here he would find roots.
What tension Rosa and the baby had produced in him! A searing poisonous energy beneath the skin, which he could not get rid of except by drinking, by drugging his consciousness.
Often when Rosa was walking along the street, blackness and fear swirled around her, filling her with nausea. Yet how beautiful the town was. Rosa loved it as much as Antonio. She had always wanted to live within view of the ocean.
She and Antonio made love more often than they had since they first met in Paris.
However, often he stayed out until early the next morning. She would wonder what girl he had gone off with. Anxiety about whether he would stay with her plagued her, aroused in her a dull, never-ending fear.
They moved into a pink stucco house half a mile from Juan’s. The rent was one hundred and twenty-five dollars a month. The house sloped beneath the street and was dank with mildew. It was surrounded by tall trees and got only a moderate amount of sunlight. A hideous red lacquer trim had been applied haphazardly in the kitchen, and they intended to paint over it once they got settled. They chose the house hurriedly, unwilling to impose any longer on Juan and Bettina, and because there was nothing else for rent they could afford.
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