They fall back on one of the many all-night taquerias near the Berkeley campus. Carmen takes the wheel and slaloms in and out of the branches and empty trashcans littering the streets, amid clusters of excited, zigzagging students. “You’d think it was Halloween,” she remarks as they enter the restaurant.
During the meal not a single word passes between them. Simon has an idea of what is going through his sister’s head. He remembers all too well Carmen’s Berkeley years. He would come to visit her, sleep on the floor of her co-op room, a squalid cubbyhole she shared with a corpulent girl whose snoring was horrendous; he woke up every hour, afraid of being attacked by a rat. At the outset, Carmen had planned to devote herself to mathematics, but after the first year she opted instead for Women’s Studies. She shaved her head and joined the row of activists who lined the campus’s main road and handed out radical leaflets to passersby on behalf of a small circle that published a monthly titled Queen Sappho. During that same period, Simon enrolled in the police academy and looked on his sister’s new interests with suspicion, especially after she was arrested while taking part in a rally. But he never stopped visiting her, and Carmen never once trotted out for him her anti-patriarchy spiel. Their relationship steered clear of the gender war.
A vagrant with a limp barges into the restaurant waving a battered Bible. Immediately, the kitchen staff arrive to usher him back out.
“The Last Judgment! It’s all written here! The earth has shaken; the time of reckoning has come for the wicked; the righteous shall be rewarded. The earth calls out for the truth!”
A few moments later, he is marshalled out into the shifting darkness of the street.
There is something rank about Carmen’s memories of her university years. Those were heady days, of course, and it was there she understood who she was. But when she thinks about the physical and ideological excesses she committed there, she feels nauseous. Looking at the students around them, she’s no longer able to feel the pulse of their wonderful naiveté and the enthusiasm of their first steps in the world; all she sees is their obnoxious smugness and radicalism.
Her best memories are of running in the Berkeley Hills. Each morning, no matter what had happened the night before, she would plunge into the fickle fragrances of the woods and climb to the highest point in the city, where she could plant her feet in the damp earth and contemplate the San Pablo reservoir on one side, San Francisco Bay on the other and, on clear days, picture the soft roof of San José to the southwest, under which her younger brother still lived.
Thinking back, she realizes the seeds of her future life lay in what she then considered secondary. It wasn’t the group that prevailed but her individuality; she was sustained not by her studies but by her passion for running — the abstract no longer dominated her existence. When her Olympic career ended the jobs she sought were exclusively down-to-earth, as she was incapable of re-immersing herself in the dialectics that she had donned out of the need to define her identity.
She manages to gobble down the last mouthful of her burrito, slightly ashamed of being so hungry while her mother is fighting for her life a few blocks away. The fact is, Frannie long ago imposed this detachment on her children. It would have been impossible for them to survive, to become full-fledged adults, had they let each of her mood swings affect them. Except that by protecting yourself from the bad, you also shield yourself from the good, from what’s essential. Her mother’s condition leaves Carmen in the grip of a strange to-and-fro between compassion and sadness, but she does not feel anxious. Does Simon feel the same detachment? Fidgeting with his empty Styrofoam coffee cup, he looks rather restless.
“Do you think that was the last time we could talk to her?” he asks.
Carmen gives him an I-don’t-know shrug.
“That would be a pity,” Simon continues. “She has things to tell us.”
Suddenly she understands the source of Simon’s agitation.
“That’s true,” she replies, “but even if she rallies, there’s no guarantee she’ll choose to tell us…”
Simon lowers his head. He’s thinking of their father, of course. After all these years, the questions, the investigations, the furtive searches through Frannie’s belongings, the contacts with other relations, this is their last hope. The possibility that at the eleventh hour their mother will finally remove the steel clamp that she’s kept on this secret.
Because of Frannie’s unflagging stubbornness, for a long time Simon held on to the idea that their father was a criminal. Soon after he’d earned his police badge, he began to nose around the prisons in search of a Hispanic who may have lived at one of their mother’s many former addresses. Carmen patiently followed him to the penitentiaries, where they met a dozen inmates with their chin, their eyebrows, a vague family likeness. None of them remembered Francisca Lopez, except one who no doubt was hoping this would get him paroled. That was a few months before Simon’s wedding. He would have liked to invite his father to the ceremony. Had he found him, Carmen tells herself, Simon might have made completely different choices. Perhaps he would not be married to Claire but to a generous woman who would respect him and not cheat on him with low-level management consultants. Perhaps if Simon found the answer to the oldest question of their existence, he would finally put an end to his rotten marriage.
As is always the case when Carmen thinks about her brother’s wife, she gets angry.
“How’s your new girlfriend doing?” Simon asks, as though he were reading her mind.
“It’s over.”
“Already?”
“It wasn’t working.”
“Come on!”
“I’m telling you, we were incompatible! And, just imagine, some people believe that being in an unhappy relationship is actually a legitimate reason to break up!”
“Stop. You don’t have children, so you can’t put yourself in my position.”
“Exactly.”
“What?”
Carmen looks away.
“She wanted a child? You refused? Carmen, how many lovers will you have to lose like this before you change your mind?”
“You know my views on the subject.”
“But you’re wrong! It’s not because we had Frannie for a mother that we’re doomed to repeat her mistakes. I’m very far from being the kind of parent she was for us.”
“Maybe. But you found yourself a woman who’s not so very far.”
“That’s not true. Claire may be cold, but she’s not crazy.”
“She’s incapable of loving.”
“Well, it appears that neither are you! You’re doing everything you can to remain alone.”
The brother gives the sister a foxlike stare, grabs his cup and goes for a refill. Carmen mulls over their conversation. He’s right, of course; her brother is always right, and at the same time always wrong. Because the love she has felt for him, ever since she stood at his side when he took his first steps, proves that she has won out. Children abandoned for days at a time, deprived of food by way of punishment or hit with vinyl records don’t all turn into monsters. Some become long-distance runners.
Outside, the rain is coming down again, blanketing the night in desolation. Couples in a hurry to lose their virginity run from one awning to the next to quickly reach the dormitories, miraculously deserted on this Sunday night. The coffee becomes more acid with every sip, and Simon drinks with no compassion for his stomach, which is about to cry out for mercy. He can’t help admitting his sister is partly right. What does he really know about children, about the science of transforming babies into happy adults? At thirteen, his son Alan never seems to aspire to be anything but a blob addicted to anime and Cheezies. As for his daughter, every inch of freedom she gains serves only to distance her from the values Simon is trying to instill in her, and to drive her ever farther into the fringes. When he decided to marry and start a family, Simon never would have believed you could feel so far removed from those to whom you were supposed to be closest.