The Infinite Plan by Isabel Allende

Author:Isabel Allende [Allende, Isabel]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

PART FOUR

Chapter Four

Be careful what you ask of Heaven; it might be granted, was one of Inmaculada Morales’s sayings, and in the case of Gregory Reeves it came true in deadly earnest. In the following years he carried out the plans he had so enthusiastically proposed for himself, but all the while his dissatisfaction was building like steam in a pressure cooker. He could not stay still for a minute; as long as he was busy he could ignore the demands of his soul, but if he had a few quiet minutes to himself he felt a fire consuming him, a fire so powerful he was sure it did not originate with him but had been fed by his tempestuous father and, before him, his grandfather the horse thief, and before that who knows how many greatgrandfathers branded by the same stigma of restlessness. It was his fate to roast on embers fanned by a thousand generations. That heat drove him forward; he assumed his victorious image just as the bucolic detachment and eternal innocence of the hippies were being ground to bits in the gears of the system’s implacable machinery. No one could censure his ambition, because an impending era of unbridled greed was already gestating throughout the nation. The unsuccessful war had left a feeling of shame in the air, a collective desire to find vindication in other ways. No one spoke of the war; more than ten years would go by before history and art could begin to exorcise the demons unleashed by the disaster. Carmen watched the street where she and her best friends had earned their living slowly decay; she bid farewell to many craftsmen displaced by competition from dealers in tawdry products from Taiwan, and one by one she saw harmless mental incompetents disappear, having either died or drifted elsewhere when they were no longer fed. Other disturbed people, much worse off, took their place, war veterans who had succumbed to the horrors of their memories. Revolution in the streets was replaced by the plague of conformism, infecting even the student population. Criminals and the poor multiplied; beggars, drunks, whores, drug dealers, thieves were everywhere. The world is coming apart at the seams, Carmen lamented. Gregory Reeves, who had never at any time shared the ingenuous dreams of those trumpeting the Age of Aquarius, that era of supposed brotherhood and peace, had offered in response the time-honored figure of the pendulum swinging from one extreme to the other. He was unaffected by the change because he had thrown himself into his wild pursuit of the good life well in advance of the explosion of materialism that would mark the decade of the eighties. He boasted of his triumphs, while his colleagues wondered how he obtained the best cases and where he found the money to party constantly, spend a week whirling around the Mediterranean, and wear custom-made silk shirts. No one knew about the exorbitant bank loans or the bold juggling of credit cards.

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