by Dick Cluster
Still, Tomboy María could not hide her sadness when she got home. She came in with her head hanging. Her mother had been waiting for something like this to happen. It was to be expected. But she asked, putting down the broom, “What’s going on?”
“They won’t let me go play in a game between provinces because I’m a girl,” María said between sobs.
“Don’t worry, baby, I’ll go talk with the coach.”
Josefina sat her daughter down in the rocking chair and told her not to move from the spot, that she’d be back soon. She went out the door with a determined air and disappeared among the curves of the road.
“I can’t do anything for your daughter,” the coach said. “It makes me feel bad too. She’s a good player, but she’s a girl. Anyway, we can get by without her.”
That annoyed Josefina all the more.
“My daughter’s the best player,” she said with swelling anger. “Why don’t you pick out your best boy player and this afternoon we’ll pit them against each other, so you can see.” Josefina had a dark kerchief tied around her head, hiding the gray of her hair. She wore a cream-colored housedress, immaculately clean. On her feet were a pair of yellowed samurai sandals, dry and cracked. This challenge would show that she was right. The coach accepted. But first he warned, “It won’t win her permission to go on the trip.” He punctuated the statement with a jab of his index finger, trying to hold his own.
“But it will give her back her dignity,” Josefina whispered into the air while turning her back to hide her impotence. She remained proud of her determination.
Hours later, Tomboy María was drawing a pair of wings on her shoulder. This, from her point of view, conferred even more talent on her arms, so she could swing harder and fulfill her dreams.
“Those who believe in you, Lord, will never be ashamed, Amen.” And she headed for the challenge, fulfilling her duty.
In spite of her great accomplishments as a player, Tomboy María never found a place in her town or her society. The years went by, doing what they do, inscribing lines on her face and, even more so, putting her physical attributes on display, turning her into a blossoming teenage girl. When she was eighteen she met Miguel Luí, an elegant and well-mannered plowman whose strong biceps guided oxen through the endless fields of cane. He was tall and dark with flashing eyes. They fell deeply in love. They conceived a boy whom they named Miguel Ángel Luí Paúl.
“He’s going to be a ballplayer,” said the new mother in a wisp of a voice, with tears in her eyes as she beheld the gasping baby in her lap.
After a moment of complete silence, while the baby gathered breath to erupt into cries, Miguel said, “María, I have to go the capital to find work.” He said it baldly, without beating around the bush. She looked him in the eyes while she rocked and tried to calm the baby. It was obvious that he was leaving for good. A man who flees from such situations is worthless and a coward, she thought. He was in debt even for the candles he lit to the Virgin and his prayers to the saints, which was to say that if indulgences were still for sale he’d buy them with borrowed money, and if Jesus came back and found him in such a state, He would leave him to his tears here on earth.
For extended periods, mother and baby had to live on meat that was on the edge of spoiling for lack of electricity. People called it fishy meat because of its unique and penetrating smell, like that of a stinking sea. It took no great powers of analysis to see that Miguel Luí wasn’t coming back. He was a weak-willed man, the neighbors told María del Carmen, but she received these comments with an unseeing and complacent smile. Miguel Luí did not want to live in such a degrading situation anymore. That’s why he wasn’t coming back.
It has been argued that time does not exist, that for lack of legs it can neither stand still nor run. So, let’s just say that Miguel Ángel’s age increased, Miguel Ángel the son of Tomboy María—that now he was no longer a child in diapers but a strapping youth who helped his mother with the chores. He gathered wood for the fire and charcoal for the stove, he carried heavy sacks of provisions from the small plot of land to the small house. The village of San Luis, despite its backward condition, is only an hour from the capital by bus. So María del Carmen could travel to work in the city during the day.
Later, after Tomboy María’s death, a villager named Fernando would tell how he drove a National Brewery truck there in the capital and how he came to meet her at a certain place on the road, pointing vaguely with his fingers. “So I was driving, you know,” he said with some pride, “and I was always horny as a young man. I’d stopped by the monument that’s famous for these things, you know, to look for a ‘social worker,’ the girls that sold a good time. One day the pimp told me that, since I was a special customer, he had something new for me. Into the passenger seat climbed a black girl who was something to write home about. I was hung over like you wouldn’t believe, and anyway it was pretty dark for recognizing faces. But she recognized me.”
“Fernando?” she asked, surprised.
“If you say so,” he answered, not understanding what this was about. When he turned on the light in the cabin of the truck, he saw a sorrowful face swollen with tears. Even in the dim light he could tell she was ashamed.
“Don’t tell anybody, Fernando, I beg you,” she said. “I’ll do whatever you want.” Shocked, he pulled some coins out of his pocket and gave them to her. “Go,” he said. “Tell the pimp I chickened out. Tomorrow come by my place and I’ll get you an honest job at the brewery.”
The next day she did. Fernando took her to the brewery and managed to get her a cleaning job. Weekends she worked extra hours. But later he discovered that she had met another trucker there, and she went to bed for money—with him and others who would pay.
When Fernando learned what she was doing, he arranged to see her alone and advise her against this behavior. She told him she needed the money to send her son to Puerto Rico, where there were important big league representatives scouting the young players. When she finished washing Fernando’s clothes, she said to him, “I live for my son now. We went through a lot together, and what I want for him now is to be what I could never be.”
She was not well, you could tell it from her yellowish eyes and darkened skin. Fernando advised her to go the hospital for a checkup, but she wouldn’t do it, not until later, when they discovered the illness that would take her life.
“Mama, I need a pair of cleats. They lent me these so I could run faster, and they work, but I want a pair of my own. And I need a metal bat for practicing on my own, and some yellow baseballs. An equipment bag and a helmet. . . .” Miguel Ángel went on asking for things as if he were reading a speech.
Tomboy María’s head was spinning. A dull, internal throbbing punctuated her thoughts. She was getting weaker every day, with less strength to go on, but she had to be there for her son, to see him fulfill his dreams and those she’d been unable to achieve as a child. She had gotten together the money for his travel and accommodation in Puerto Rico, where the best contracts could be signed. This was Miguel Ángel’s and Tomboy María’s dream. They couldn’t wait for the day to arrive.
“Don’t worry, Mama, I’m going to shine. I’m going to do it. I’m going to stand out, to fly the way you used to do. Your efforts won’t be in vain. Look.” And his lifted up his t-shirt, showing his bare chest. “I had two wings tattooed, and your name, Mama, look at it, the guy in the grocery did it in honor of you. When I come back here signed, with all those dollars, I’ll pay you back for everything you’ve done for me.” When he didn’t get the response he’d expected, he quickly pulled the shirt down again.
“Son, all I want is to see you alive and healthy. If God grants that I get to see you signed, I won’t complain.”
They both smiled, neither meeting the other’s eyes. She set the table and he spoke with feeling, as if savoring that moment. Tomboy María was lying, but her son didn’t believe her anyway. Everyone in the neighborhood knew that she’d give her life to
see her son signed. Word of his tryout circulated after she let it slip to one of the truckers. Everybody knew what was afoot.
Amid all the sacrifices she was compelled to make, María remembered the old saying that life was lived by fire and blood, and she understood. Miguel Ángel went to Puerto Rico and came back with a contract, but he had to give the news to his mother in the morgue. She died from a venereal disease caught from one of the truckers. They say that he did what she had done when she wasn’t allowed to go and play in the interprovincial game, that he painted wings on his bat and prayed. They say that when he saw his mother in the coffin he told her this story as if she could hear it. He sat next to the corpse, sitting and swaying like a man under a spell. And he repeated. “Mama grew wings, she grew wings.”
In the stadium, the charged voice spoke into the microphone. “On the mound is the much-feared pitcher of the Puerto Rican team, Carlos Ortiz, while at the plate, hitting for the Dominicans, is Miguel Luí Paúl. And here it comes”—the Puerto Rican announcer said—“Blew it by him. Fast ball. Strike called! The crowd is going crazy.”
Miguel Luí touched his chest and then stretched his arm out straight, pointing into the distance.
“That’s an unspoken threat,” the Dominican announcer said. “Miguel Luí, alias El Chu, has the most stratospheric average of the team.” It was a tense moment, and the announcer barely had time to finish his sentence before he cried out, “Will you look at that! It’s going, going, going, gone! That ball took wings and flew!”
As he ran, he could make out words in the exclamation of the human wave in the stands. He took his time, touching the bases, crossing himself and looking toward the sky. He acknowledged his fans with two fingers, touching them to his lips, to his chest, and then toward the crowd.
The Dominican flag waved from right to left, and tears could be seen from afar in the eyes of his countrymen, triumphal pride felt in every heart.
Moments before, in the dugout, his manager had heard him reciting, “The ball that grows wings is the one that goes astray.” He repeated it maniacally to himself.
And then the loudspeakers announced, “Now batting for the Dominican team, Miguel Luí Paúl.”
And the crowd screamed.
THE GLORY OF MAMPORAL
Andrés Eloy Blanco
(Venezuela)
This Venezuelan classic was first published in 1935. Andrés Eloy Blanco (1897–1955) was a poet, playwright, satirist, lawyer, and politician—a political prisoner because of his underground publishing activities in the 1920s, later congressman in the 1930s, president of the constitutional convention and then foreign minister in the 1940s, and finally a political exile in Mexico at the time of his death. All told, he published more than twenty books of poetry, plays, short stories, biography, and essays. Municipalities in three different Venezuelan states are named after him. So is the utility infielder Andrés Eloy Blanco (no relation), most recently of the Philadelphia Phillies and, in winter ball, the Navegantes de Magallanes.
“Come visit. Come and see a bit of my busy life in Mamporal. Please don’t tell me that village life is tiresome while the rhythm of the city is exciting. That won’t impress me at all.” So I wrote yesterday in a letter to my friend Adriana, who is usually open to adventure. Then I added, “Mamporal is the capital of the world, if you will. For me, these days, it is the center of the solar system.”
In the nation’s capital they know nothing about the active, stormy, dizzying life of Mamporal. They have their cosmopolitan kaleidoscope, their automobiles, social divisions, and everything else that prevails in great urban centers. The result is that people are buried in new problems, so they forget the fever of the daily dramas, the hustle and bustle of domestic affairs, the small but sensational novelties and recurring conflicts that make village life as exhausting as that of any metropolis. To believe otherwise is to deny that the microscope reveals a universe as febrile as that of the telescope. Mamporal is the most lively city I know. Believe me, by knowing Mamporal I know all the world and taste all its delights.
Over the past thirty days truly sensational things have happened in this town. Many kinds of things, but each has affected the entire social body and impelled it to action. That does not happen in big cities: no totalization of an occurrence in the collective heart, no unanimity of emotion. But all of Mamporal is contained in every event.
The sensations of the past thirty days could be classified according to their intensity or other characteristics. But all of them, even the most transitory and banal, shake up the village—from house to house, all up and down the dusty street. Genuinely political events in Mamporalese life have nothing to do with national politics. Viewed from here, national politics seem a distant, nearly supernatural science. The high powers of the nation are of a weighty character far removed from local emotions. Our village, by contrast, is most aroused by commentary on our great local episodes. The Town Registrar, his Secretary, the Judge, and the Policeman make up the hamlet-as-nation. If a high official should happen to pay a visit, then the nation-as-hamlet comes into play.
The latest event of a political character, therefore, was a heated dispute between the Judge and the Secretary. The Secretary “went for his revolver,” as we like to say. Men poured into the street, women summoned their husbands and children, and the sliding of door bolts echoed through the town. But the Registrar appeared and said the Judge was in the right. The Secretary walked slowly away, gathering admiring glances from the young ladies who watched him go by.
The social scandal, however, was the abuse of a girl on the Garambunda farm, revealed when her torn and bloody underwear was found. This was followed by my unexplained arrival. No one had explained why I’d come, or what I was searching for. For a week everyone eyed me with suspicion. Finally, I made a public statement that I was here to look into the case of assault. After six days of investigation, I arrested Francisco Sierra and sent him to the state capital. Now the people of Mamporal love me, and I’ve had the wit to declare that this place is my second home. Everyone tells me their secrets. I’m the consulting attorney here.
But the key event of the past month has been the encounter between the Mamporal Athletic Club and Nine Stars of Manatí. No one can remember comparable excitement since the days of the civil wars. And there is good reason for this, as anybody who knows Mamporal and Manatí will understand very well.
Mamporal and Manatí are neighbors, six leagues apart. But that is a deep and irreconcilable distance. Manatí is to Mamporal what Mr. Mussolini is to Mr. Modigliani, or Mr. Frías to Mr. Juan Ramos. Manatí is Guelph; Mamporal, Ghibelline. Manatí is Carthage; Mamporal, Rome. Manatí is the devil; Mamporal, the envoy of the Pope.
It is not uncommon to find such hatred between two neighboring towns. In fact, what’s uncommon is not to find it. Borders make for hatred, proximity makes for resentment. This, of course, depends on the relative importance of the towns. El Valle can’t hate Caracas, because Caracas is so much more important. Arganda can hate Chinchón, but Chinchón can’t hate Madrid. Mamporal and Manatí can hate each other, but neither one can hate Calabozo, which was the state capital once. Mamporal and Manatí hate each other like Dr. Paul’s chauffeur and the Swiss ambassador’s doorman, or the Swiss ambassador himself and the wife of Dr. Paul.
This enmity between Manatí and Mamporal is longstanding, but it has had its spontaneous peaks and crises. Often this is due to competition, to a given stimulus being exacerbated and poorly managed. At one time Manatí’s local priest was a delightful old man, sweeter than a baby goat. Mamporal, however, was assigned a new, young priest—gallant, smelling of rosewater, a crooner of ballads and bits of opera. He could recite romantic poems from the past century in Mexico, he chewed on perfumed pills that sweetened his breath, and he led the mass with the air of a matador showing off his skills against bulls retired from the ring. Manatí wailed in protest until they had driven out their poor, old, peaceful priest and obtained a dandy who recited ditties fro
m no less a land than Spain.
On another occasion the government decided to build a new highway through Manatí. In response, the Mamporalese refused to travel by land. They all went via the Apure River, prolonging their journeys by a good five days.
One day a player piano was unloaded in Manatí. The Manatíans sat down, row upon row of them, before the automatic device, and then each had a chance to make it play a song. The volume they coaxed out of the device seemed intended to be heard in Mamporal. Within a fortnight, Don Damián Robles of Mamporal had two player pianos in his house.
Things rose to such a pitch that on a certain unfortunate day, when a lightning bolt hit Mamporal and burned three houses to the ground, there was cheering in Manatí. “Mamporal is finished!” the Manatíans crowed.
But a few days later a serious problem arose, because Mamporal achieved a certain notoriety in the national press. The stories appeared in the papers of Calabozo and San Fernando and even in the two great dailies of the capital of the republic: “Catastrophe in Mamporal” . . . “In Aid of the Victims of Mamporal” . . . “Committee in Support of Mamporal.” Manatí was alarmed, and soon four philanthropists offered their houses to be burned on the next available stormy night.
One day, the two towns each received a notice from the governor of the state. In lengthy and ponderous sentences, that official asserted a need for the more isolated villages to demonstrate self-reliance through their own deeds. “God helps those who help themselves,” the document seemed to advise, and it instructed small communities not to expect all blessings to flow from state or national largesse. Rather, they were to stimulate their own efforts to achieve the modest conquests that Sanitation, Adornment, and Education allow only to the hardest-working communities. The circular concluded by recommending that local authorities and populations should create development councils “to serve as a permanent incentive, a wide-open valve for the initiation of dignifying activities” to meet “the urgent needs” of each locale.
