I
I dream that I am writing this story. Images arrive and spin about me in a vertiginous tornado. Within this dream I watch myself writing in a notebook as though encased in parenthesis, in the motionless center of a vortex of figures emerging from a fog, at once familiar and strange, manifesting in an instant, circling, speaking, gesturing, yet still, as photographs not yet lost in night’s abyss, not yet lost beneath an avalanche of forgetting, sinking into the unquiet quiet of the lake’s waters. As I dream I hear the words I’m writing and they seem to arrive from a distance, from a vigil remote in time and space, possessing a clarity I cannot comprehend, as though they were spoken in a vestigial language, one long forgotten. All of it is inscribed on the far mists of forgetting; beings and objects appear enfolded in a slowness from which they’ve only just begun to be recalled, in which just now they awaken to a life renewed by memory. On the page in the notebook in which I set this diffuse and imprecise dream-projection, images hold the slow carelessness of their own forgotten dreams. The images first came to me in the company of my father in that city of streets and people with whom he is so at ease. The airport swarmed with soldiers and marines, the healthy and the wounded. The WACs and the wounded came and went busily through the enormous waiting room. The walls were papered over with notices and propagandistic pamphlets; from among them, due to its profusion and prominence, my attention was drawn to one that depicted a fierce and pallid little man, clear-eyed, wearing tortoise shell frames. From his livid, tightly pressed lips a small amber mouthpiece protruded, holding a freshly lit cigarette, the cherry of which nearly touched the brim of the falling wave of his hat. His trench coat collar was pulled up around his ears. I don’t recall if behind him one glimpsed a Golden Gate trolley with its rear pointed toward the bottom of San Francisco, or the skyline of New York, with the Statue of Liberty’s face. The little man struck a pose of intent listening, yet, in a manner both sly and cavalier, he spoke to all those around him. BE CAREFUL!… the notice read in giant letters on the upper portion; below, HE MIGHT BE LISTENING. Who’s this under the hat? I asked my dad. Göebbels, he replied with a snarl. We were to spend a few days together before I went to my aunt and uncle’s and readied myself to enroll in school. We stayed in the Biltmore. Officers on leave from the war in the Pacific were lodging there, their canvas bags piled high in the lobby. When we opened ours, my father realized we didn’t have our bandanas. It looks like we don’t know how to pack our bags, I thought. It was early. We went down to the Gus S. May shop on the hotel’s ground floor, on Olive Street just outside the main door. My father bought twelve of their finest handkerchiefs and, for me, a pigskin leather wallet with silver corners and a secret compartment. Within the secret compartment he secured a bill, folded eight times. For when you’re in dire need of money, he said, yet it was so well-hid and so difficult to remove that, after several months, I would forget about it. In the dream, I see again the restaurants and stores we visited, the people who stand out: the acromegalic mass of big shot Primo Canera, seated at a table adjacent to ours at Mike Liman’s, which was very near the famous stars who danced, sang, or told jokes on a stage the USO had erected in the center of Pershing Square, which we could see from our hotel room. A day before my dad left, I accompanied him during his business affairs in Hollywood. At Lawry’s we dined with his friends. After paying we went to a newsreel theater for a little while. Night falls late that time of year. Returning downtown, we saw scores of the wounded laying in repose on the sidewalks, convalescing, stretched out on their gurneys to face the afternoon sun; or motionless in their wheelchairs, concealed by horrific casts and medical accessories; or on the grass of the front lawn, wheeled by their parents, their women, their small children, or their nurses. Many wares were displayed in the show window by the front entrance; in some of the façade windows were hung white silk banners, star-flecked and golden; stars silver-plated for men at the front; gold stars for those who had fallen. They formed all the combinations up to five… one gold and three silvers, one silver and one gold, two silvers, three golds and two silvers, one lucky silver star… three horrific golds. We ate chili con carne at the Biltmore cafeteria and then I got into bed, thinking about what I’d seen, saying to myself that for the first time I truly lived in a country at war. The following day on his way to the airport, my father deposited me at my aunt and uncle’s house. It stood at the top of the hill where Quinta Street ends. On the main door, behind the glass window, hung a banner with a single gold star. To stave off a painful encounter, my aunt, my mother’s older sister, came out to receive me on the porch steps. My dad got out of the car; they greeted each other affably but with a certain coldness. She was, despite her age and her grief, a beautiful and jovial woman. Quite tall and well-defined; very white, with large black eyes and brown hair greying slightly at the temples. She had a body at once sensual and ideal. Years later, I heard it said of her in English… really fit for the wares she sells! For a long time, she’d been Head of Ladies’ Fine Lingerie at a very elegant downtown shop. Mourning settled on her divinely, as with nearly all women. She’d taken a few days off to help me prepare to enroll in school. I was to occupy one of the downstairs rooms. One day she gave me permission to go up to see my cousin’s room. It was in the attic and had an inclined roof. Though the room was in perfect order it felt to me as if its owner had just left. On the walls were photographs, some group shots, others of parents, one of a girl in a Love, Laverne sweater, a Westlake High sports pennant; a scale model of a Jenny biplane hung from a beam. There was a window at the far end. I gazed out. The window faced east and offered a complete panorama of downtown and when I turned my gaze slightly north, the great white tower of City Hall with its bright green copper spire. Beside the window sat a desk; on top of its blue velvet covering was a picture frame with the photograph of my cousin in uniform, his medals and trophies, German emblems, an SS dagger. I had then for the first time a sensation that has repeated itself throughout my life; I don’t know if it’s an ability common to all people or if it owes to an effect of photographic magic; that of having seen only a photograph and knowing, knowing whether its subject was alive or dead. It seemed to me that the Laverne girl was living and that my cousin was dead. My aunt and uncle had obtained some extra coupons for gasoline, which was strictly rationed, just like cigarettes, and, with the car they never used, my aunt was going to drive me to school. We departed early that Sunday. The highway rolled eastward like a dream within a dream. It ran alongside immense oil tanks, factories, railroad yards, interminable border villages, and the shantytowns that display the unmistakable signs of a miserable and abject Mexicanness. Little by little the fruit growing dreams of Luther Burbank gained prominence in the landscape, supplanting flimsy, urban, light-frame architecture. Around noon we reached Knott’s Berry Farm, an immense fried chicken restaurant, and stopped to eat. I consider it now as a moment of considerable foreshadowing. After a quick visit to the Way Out West Village, with its gallows, its bank, its jail, and its saloon, we made our way through vegetable rows cared for by blonde men bronzed by the California sun and sheathed in gray jerseys whose big black letters declared POW; further along, other men, brown, and wearing the same shirts but outfitted with Mexican palm hats, worked the vineyards. Germans and Italians who had traversed the war’s great passage from the desert of Tobruk to the Mojave. Around three in the afternoon we arrived at our destination, the final stop of a long and tortuous county road: Lake Elsinore. Beyond the mountains that ring the lake, they claim—not with complete certainty, of course—that there is nothing save desert and mystery. It was then that a paradisiacal vision entered my imagination, and this dream, stretching out over months and years inside another dream, which in turn would mix with others and so on, until my entire life was surrounded by dreams, captured at its core a singular dream that now I dream again so as to set them all in writing, confounding them within a single image: that of Desire. Beyond the dream, on the map, Lake Elsinore extended from East to West at a length of some six or seven miles, but its greatest width was no more than a mile. These proportions were ideal ones for a max velocity speedboat racecourse. By the close of the Twenties, the place had reached its apogee. Newsreels of the day abound with beautiful bathers who attended the boat races. Elsinore was the summer headquarters of Aimée Sample McPhearson, founder of a zealous cult, and ads depict her swimming across the lake from the beach alongside her church to the marina of the Southern California Automobile Club on the opposite shore. Above all recollections was the legendary, hazy myth of the Olympic Gardens, situated in another spot, behind the mountains and running to the lake’s southern shore, a place possessing a secret and mischievous fame for those adapted to its lifestyle, natural, to put it one way, or, as in the surreptitious nudy magazines, al natural. The Naval and Military School of Elsinore, better known to my memory by its ENMS sign, situated on the lake’s middle shore closest to its eastern extreme, was nothing less than the nerve center of Colonel Hunter’s vast empire. Its fluttering banners demarcated a hacienda whose radius encompassed everything for miles: walnut groves, orange groves, pig farms, stables, stocks, poultry farms, enormous henhouses of egg-laying hens—the largest of its kind west of the Rocky Mountains—and the lake, too—over which the Colonel determined right of passage, symbolically, of course—was his property. The building the school occupied was a likeness adapted from what had been the SCAC, Aimée Sample’ swimming hole, which Colonel Hunter had managed to acquire, along with the adjacent lands and shoreline, under advantageous conditions following the ’29 earthquake. Financially perspicacious, the Colonel experienced little difficulty in making fruitful these holdings which had been desolated by the Depression, converting the abandoned cave into a touristic farming emporium and, at the same time, satisfying a military calling frustrated by his intermediate age, which had prevented him from participating in either the First nor the Second, with a pedagogical façade for the transformation of youth destined for a military career, sending them hence to the Army or the Navy. The naval character of the school really came down almost entirely to the proximity of the lake and the existence of a rickety pier, its pylons having detached from the adjacent ground long ago. Not once had a sailing vessel traversed the lake’s tranquil waters. Colonel Hunter’s perspicacity had also allowed him to establish the most prestigious, most photogenic and most exclusive military school west of the Rocky Mountains, a school as highly regarded as its triple-breasted turkeys. To top it all off, it was the most safeguarded. Never, from the time the school was founded in 1930, had any cadet managed to escape. Geographically and topologically, once entered it was impossible to leave. The empire was administered admirably. It was more or less all in the family. While Colonel Hunter presided over everything, Mrs. Hunter oversaw social activities, dances, parties, things like that. They had a daughter, Diana, enrolled in a school, the Larue School for Girls, in a town near Elsinore. Mrs. Hunter’s sisters and their husbands also took part in the administration of the school and the house. Mrs. Lang had command of the youngest section and ran the Sunday school sessions. Her husband, Capt. Lang, was something like the general superintendent of the farm. One sister I don’t recall, but her husband, Capt. Murchison, was the Senior Commander of the Student Body, in charge of order and discipline; his daughter Margie prepared milkshakes in Kadets’ Korner, the canteen. There were many women; some of them had cadets for sons. This was the case for Mrs. Hunters’ other sisters, Mrs. Congrave, the history teacher, mother of Lt. Congrave, nephew of Colonel Hunter, head of the armory. Mrs. Sakall, too, the dietician, white, livid, and dressed always in white from head to toe. She spoke with a sweet, almost inaudible voice, but with a strong Slavic accent. She was a war widow. Her son was among the youngest. She shared a bungalow with one of the kitchen helpers: Grandma Boren, a deaf old woman who knew only a few words of English. Her grandson was already a sergeant. And Mrs. Reed, the secretary, had a son in the Junior Yard, same as Mrs. Dubois, a Southerner who spoke with an accent indicative of her region and worked in linens, and had a child in with the youngsters… One woman, Ma Dowson, worked in the clinic and emergency unit. She was a registered nurse, always took her coffee black, and invariably used the first-person plural for everyone… Did our bowels move today? The typing teacher was a war widow. On hot days she taught class in shorts. Because I never took typing, I don’t recall her name, just her legs. She shared a large bungalow with Mr. Stockwell, the effeminate literature teacher. Once, with much reticence and several grimaces of disgust, he read Poe to us; he read “The Raven,” though Whitman was clearly his favorite; he carried on and on about “O Captain, My Captain…!” There were many more men and women. They all showed signs of some vital, indefinable irregularity of age, of nationality, of condition. An immense German known as Swede, who was missing part of his brain, all his teeth, and his left hand; with the help of some complicated straps, he operated an enormous bulldozer with astonishing skill. Another, a fat and shiny German in a white cap, was head chef; Karl, the janitor, was identical in all ways to the spy from the posters, from cigarette to thick frame glasses. Bent over his bucket and squeeze-roller as he mopped the school’s hallways, he seemed to listen surreptitiously to anything he could; I never heard his voice… Lt. Kennedy, the accountant, who dispersed our weekly allowance, and who, despite having a countenance more severe than Colonel Hunter and upholding the integrity of the Volstead Act in all domains, drank from a pocket flask he kept in the bottom drawer of his desk, in secret—though it could always be detected in the flush of his nostrils, and was, in any case, needed… Fat Gene did a little bit of everything. By day he supervised the stores, drove the school bus, serviced trucks and other vehicles; after the workday he turned into a barber. He suffered from chronic explosive gas and did not repress himself in front of the cadets, producing hilarity amongst us as we waited our turn, though he always appeared congested, which made us somewhat sympathetic. The number of Mexicans employed by Colonel Hunter varied with the years and the seasons. They lived in barracks along the lakeshore and at the far end of the henhouses to the west, but beyond the perimeter of the guardhouse that included only the bungalows of the professors and the chicken coops, and so, with the exception of a select few who worked in the school, were rarely seen. I formed a friendship with a singular man named Porfirio Díaz. He grew up in Portrero de Llano and was missing the index finger of his right hand, which he had lost, he said, in the sinking of his boat. He was the groundskeeper, employed in the mowing of lawns, trimming rose bushes and in the sweeping of dry leaves from the flagpole platform in the garden that bordered the front of the school where each day the changing of the guard took place. Although he was a reserved and serious character, I gained his confidence by making small talk with him. In my free moments, while he pushed his lawnmower back and forth, he told me about his adventures at sea and relayed to me a version of the shipwreck in which he’d lost his finger. He was also the conduit through which passed vague news of the farmworkers’ life in the barracks, among whom the incongruous pair of Diosdado and The Yuc stood out notably as an effusive compendium of Mexican ethnography. Diosdado was a Northerner of impressive stature, stocky, a little slow in his movements and sparing with his words. He was very fair skinned, and in the middle of his face, bearing only the affectation of a trimmed mustachio, shone eyes as small and black as two beads of jet. He was always clad in dungaree overalls and suspenders crossed on his back, and he wore ruddy work boots, which made him look larger still. When it was cold, he donned a parka with brightly colored patches. The Yuca, his constant companion, did not reach Diosdado’s elbow despite sporting some Texas boots with high heels and tight cowboy pants, which, he claimed, made him seem a little less small than he was, especially when next to Diosdado. His skin was clear although he had the characteristic olive tone of the people of his land. He had a big nose in the shape of a bird’s beak but owned a pair of green eyes below arched brows, a trait that secretly puffed him up and with which he consoled himself for his deficient stature. He was jaunty and daft but sociable; later on, I understood he liked to play the jarana and possessed a tropical temperament. In the afternoons when it was cold, he would put on one of those sheepskin-lined leather jackets called a bomber. They were a very odd couple in whom the serpent of our nationality bit its tail; they were in charge of collecting the Buff Orpingtons’ eggs that rolled smoothly across the inclined floor of their cage into the exterior canal where they accumulated. It should be noted in passing, and in homage to the facilities of Colonel Hunter, that just as every orange tree had its own oil heater that automatically burned on winter nights, so too each hen had in its cage a little bath that on scalding days spouted, automatically, a refreshing sprinkle. From time to time, I would have long talks with Porfirio Díaz. Mixed in with some of his marine adventures were additional commentaries taken from incidents in the life of the farmworkers’ barracks. This social history reached even the most rudimentary layers of their lives. As I noted previously, alcohol was strictly prohibited throughout Colonel Hunter’s domain. Porfirio, who was abstemious, told me how Diosdado and The Yuca were the only occupants of the barracks who managed occasionally to obtain a bottle. Without a doubt, there were days when the jarana could be heard from far away. At that age, one of the most popular topics was women. In this respect, Porfirio was rather reserved. He told me he was married and that his woman and his son lived in Tampico. Women were also prohibited, but, Porfirio hinted, sometimes they were snuck into the barracks. Whores? He shook his head with a mixture of incredulity and disdain. Who knows; at this very hour… where did they come from? From Riverside? Who knows; at this very hour… What did it cost to get one? who knows; at this very hour not a thing… and he continued moving back and forth with his mower. I have attempted to describe the beings and matters of greatest interest from the western part of the school grounds, properly speaking. To the east, a narrow tree-lined road, with eucalyptuses on one side and walnut trees on the other, ran beside the school and down from the highway to the lakeshore. At the far end, next to the highway, was the clinic and Ma Dowson’s infirmary. At the other end of the road, right next to the shore, there was a small cottage covered in ivy and shaded by twisted walnut and ancient orange trees. It appeared to have been abandoned, but, for reasons both singular and unforgettable, a neighbor lived nearby: Bela Lugosi, Count Dracula. Back then, he was suffering in obscurity, but near the end of his struggle, television became widespread and his old movies were brought back to life. His son (of the same name) was boarding a few meters from the house, and it was he who introduced us to the life of military order, the terrifying and mysterious element, leading to jokes in bad taste about his father… Does he sleep in a coffin, the old bloodsucker? etcetera… From boarding life I relay only what’s most memorable. I followed Gracián’s rule. I spoke first with the living and, during the first six weeks of my station there, I learned the language and from then on English became my second tongue. Through the many intervening years, in certain circumstances, in moments glorious or difficult, it was my first. During the first year, I dedicated myself to business. With the bill my father had left in the secret compartment of the billfold, and with my roommate for a partner, a certain Friedman, we founded a lending agency that held markers, and via the well-known IOU we charged 25% weekly interest with increases to unspent balances up to the total marker of pre-determined collateral. Military honor obliged prompt payment. But in the end our operation was seized and expropriated. Friedman was moved to another room and there it ended. We broke even, more or less. During the first summer vacation, which I spent in Mexico, I commenced the carnal arts with Irene, the housekeeper, and when I returned to Los Angeles for the second semester in the fall, I stopped in at the bookstore in Pershing Square. I purchased Van Nostrand’s Scientific and Technical Encyclopedia as well as an English edition of Psychopathia Sexualis. I hungered to know it all… The celebrated manual of Professor Krafft-Ebing went night-by-night from room-to-room and hand-to-hand at the rate of two bits per evening with rights to a translation of the Latin locutions, which were provided for me in Spanish secretis vaginae suae ad membrum viri so that the dog, attracted by the smell, membrum quoque lambebat. Until it was discovered, confiscated, and made to disappear like a magic act, I turned a tidy profit and my clients never betrayed me. Three years went by and the martial calling had yet to stir in me with any force. I resigned myself to the order and discipline that, despite what most people think, frees one from individual effort. Forced marches, formal parades, equestrian exercises, night watches, and mandatory sports, far from tempering the spirit, dissolve it in an automatic and drab routine. I was a good marksman and had a certain affection for my rifle, which I could disassemble, clean, and reassemble blindfolded. Even now I can recall the serial number that was registered at the National Armory in Springfield like it was last year: 1005740013075. From my life at ENMS, I relay what’s most memorable, the majority of which occurred during my final year. Shortly after I’d started the school year—it must have been in September or October—something extraordinary happened that won me my first promotion; if things hadn’t fallen right into my lap, I would have remained at the lowly rank of cadet, never ascending from the lowest rung on the ladder: PFC, Soldier First Class. Standing guard one night while making the rounds behind the classroom wing, proceeding toward the chicken coops right alongside the Mexican barracks, the sound of a guitar accompanied by a falsetto voice singing a slow, sad, Mexican song, caught my notice… Yo sé que nunca… The barracks lights were on but nothing seemed amiss. It must have been around midnight when I made counterrounds. The singing voice had grown quiet, and the barracks lights had been turned off. I heard a crackle, like splitting wood, and in less time than it takes to write this, one end of the chicken coop was enveloped in flames. The fire grew, advancing with great speed. For a few seconds, I didn’t know what to do first, ring the bell or sound the alarm with my voice. I rang the bell and ran all the way to the professors’ bungalows. Fire! Fire! I shouted, running from there to the workers’ barracks, shouting in Spanish ¡Fuego! ¡Fuego! I rang the bell again. Like one passing his own reflection in a shop window, I saw a silhouette slip by, but I didn’t stop to investigate. I went running to the main building across the field still shouting Fire! Fire! and sounded the alarm with my whistle. Chickens are a highly flammable and combustible material. Two hours more and there would’ve been nothing left of the most wonderous chickens west of the Rocky Mountains. We were given the following day off and were able to sleep until mid-morning. In the afternoon, during retreat, my ascension to PFC was announced. Happily, we were served corned beef for dinner because the smell of burnt feathers and broiler chicken, which I had registered at Knott’s Berry Farm, permeated the Valley of Elsinore for quite some time. As a matter of fact, it remained until the Thanksgiving holiday, the last Thursday of November, which I was going to spend in Pasadena at my friend Fred’s house.
Translated by Nick Rattner
