Free The Infinite Plan by Isabel Allende Page B

chaos.
    My father left early that morning and with Pedro Morales returned carrying a good-sized willow tree in the pickup truck. It took both of them to drag it out and plant it in the hole. For several days I watched the tree and my father, expecting that at any moment the former would wither and die or the latter would be struck dead, but as neither occurred I decided that the philosophers of old were not worth a nickel. I was haunted by the fear of being orphaned. In my dreams I saw my father as a creaking skeleton in a dark suit, with a huge snake coiled around his ankles, and awake I remembered him shrunken to skin and bones, as I had seen him in the hospital. The idea of death terrified me. Ever since we had come to live in the city, I had felt a presentiment of danger. The standards I had known were out of kilter; even words had lost their accustomed meaning, and I was forced to learn new codes, different behaviors, and a strange language of rolled r ’s and rasping h sounds. Endless roads and vast landscapes were replaced by a warren of noisy, filthy, foul-smelling—but fascinating—alleys where a new adventure lay around every corner. It was impossible to resist the lure of the streets; life was lived there: the streets were the setting for fights, love, and commerce. I was entranced by Latin music and storytelling. People talked about their lives in tones of legend. My favorite place was Inmaculada Morales’s kitchen, surrounded by family activity and the smell of cooking. I never tired of the eternal circus of that life, but I also felt a need to recapture the silence of nature I had known as a boy; I searched out trees, I walked hours to climb a small hill where for a few minutes I felt again the pleasure of being inside my own skin. The rest of the time my body was a handicap; I had to protect it constantly against external threats; my light hair, the color of my skin and eyes, my birdlike skeleton, weighed on me like rocks. Inmaculada Morales says that I was a happy child, full of vigor and energy, with a tremendous appetite for life, but I do not remember myself that way. In that Latin ghetto I experienced the unpleasantness of being different, I did not fit in; I wanted to be like everyone else, to blend into the crowd, to be invisible, so I could walk through the streets or play in the schoolyard unharmed by the gangs of dark-skinned boys who vented on me the aggression they themselves received from whites the minute they stepped outside the barrio.
    When my father left the hospital, we had resumed the appearance of normality, but the equilibrium of our family life was destroyed. Olga’s absence hung in the air; I missed her trunkload of treasures, her magician’s trappings, her bizarre clothes, her unrestrained laugh, her stories, her indefatigable energy—without her, the house was like a table with a wobbly leg. My parents drew a curtain of silence over her absence, and I did not dare ask what had happened. My mother was becoming more silent and reserved by the day, and my father, who had always been very self-controlled, became irascible, unpredictable, and violent. It’s because of the operation; the chemistry of his Physical Body has been altered, that’s why his aura has grown dark, but he’ll be all right soon. My mother’s justification was couched in the jargon of The Infinite Plan, but her voice lacked conviction. I had never felt comfortable with my mother; that pale, polite woman was very different from other children’s mothers. Decisions, permissions, and punishment always came from my father, consolation and laughter from Olga, and my confidences were with Judy. All that tied me to my mother were literature and school notebooks, music, and love for observing the stars. She never touched me; I had grown accustomed to her physical remoteness and reserved temperament.
    The day I lost Judy, I felt a panic of absolute solitude I did not recover from