Leapfrog

by Guillermo Rosales

  Leapfrog

  and Other Stories

  GUILLERMO ROSALES

  Introduction by Norberto Fuentes

  Translated from the Spanish by Anna Kushner

  A NEW DIRECTIONS BOOK

  Contents

  Introduction by Norberto Fuentes

  LEAPFROG

  THE MAGIC STILL

  The Devil and The Nun

  An Axe to the Sideburns

  The Illustrated Woman

  O Pythagoras!

  The Phantom Bunker

  INTRODUCTION

  The author of the two books that make up Leapfrog & Other Stories did everything he could so that none of this would make it into the reader’s hands. His favorite method was fire. I know of at least two great novels and an epic poem totaling over one hundred pages that he threw into the flames. I think it was, above all, an act of courage and not of madness. And I don’t think there’s anyone else in the world, beside his sister Leyma, who can speak with authority about Guillermo. After having written the last word of each of each creation, he seemed to give them a certain life span, and if in a given period of time his editor (or anyone else) didn’t show any interest, then he condemned them, without hesitation, to the flames. It could also have been a reflection of the visceral disdain he felt for the world around him. Destruction at the end of the torturous path to creation seemed a relief to him. But no one knows about the books I am referring to because no one read them. I had had before me the novel Socrates and his epic poem The Hero of Yaguajay, about Commander Camilo Cienfuegos (I can still hear his evil, mocking laughter when he said, “If they only knew I’m doing an imitation of Quasimodo!”). And I had read his novel about the origins of Cuban rum and the wars of independence, with that amusing episode about General Shafter’s landing on Daiquiri Beach, to the east of Santiago de Cuba. And I’d read the story, “Colonel, it’s Puny Speaking,” and another novel no one talks about but that concerns a battle against Batista on an imaginary mountain in the Sierra Maestra — la Taguara — with Camilo Cienfuegos again as the main character. I can’t believe none of them exist now. Worse still, these stunning and unique literary works did exist and not even their ashes remain. Can you imagine what American literature would be without a Poe or a Wolfe, or French literature without Baudelaire or Camus, or Russian literature without Artsybashev or Akhmatova, just to name the most secretive and hidden writers? Well, then we Cubans have to accept our own national literature without Guillermo Rosales.

  Our friendship began on his first day of work as a journalist for the magazine Mella, in the summer of 1961. He was 15 years old and hadn’t read Hemingway, much less Faulkner, but he gave me a run for my money with his encyclopedic knowledge of the great Will Eisner’s The Spirit. It was our shared culture as Cuban kids who grew up in the 1950s. This is tangible on the pages of Leapfrog, a book written by Guillermo very early in the 1960s and which he ended up naming very differently from how we first knew it in its initial Spanish edition. It was originally called Holy Saturday, Resurrection Sunday. It escaped the bonfire because Delia, his loving mother, went around picking up the pieces of paper and wrinkled sheets that her son left lying around as he was writing. The stories in The Magic Still have a different history. Guillermo was already living in Miami when he sent them to a friend in Washington so she could organize them and make a clean copy. In the editing process, Rosa Berra, the friend he’d known since the 1960s in Havana, made a digital transcription (computers were beginning to take over the market) and that is how the book was saved. We can assume that in 1993, when Guillermo made the decision to destroy himself, he wasn’t going to leave his unpublished books at the mercy of unknown hands rummaging about.* So he proceeded, with as much disdain as meticulousness, to burn the thick bundle of his novel about rum and Cuba’s liberators and any papers he had left in his drawers. Later, he put the barrel of a gun to his temple, metal that was cold to the touch. A Cuban exile community which doesn’t understand him and which distorts him (and in the end, can’t stand him) has yielded few readers. Perhaps he did well to throw it all to the flames.

  NORBERTO FUENTES

  * He committed suicide on July 9, 1993

  LEAPFROG

  At one, leapfrog,

  At two, my shoe,

  At three, go for coffee,

  At four, hit the floor,

  At five, I’ll dive,

  At six, breadsticks,

  At seven, the razor’s edge,

  At eight, I’ll beat you straight,

  At nine, you’ll be fine,

  At ten, start again,

  At eleven, get in on the action,

  At twelve, an old lady snivels,

  At thirteen, a midget can be seen,

  At fourteen, an old man is clean,

  At fifteen, I’ll get your spleen,

  At sixteen, run from that ox so lean!

  LEAPFROG

  April 12, 1957

  It was the big night: the infamous Luthor had made a pact with the Men of Clay. Pat Patton was calling Dick Tracy urgently on his wrist radio to confidentially communicate Breathless Mahoney’s secret: Darling O’Shea, the richest and most spoiled child in the world, was having fun on Black Island removing The Blank’s masks. The Spirit was dying, pecked at by that vulture Mr. Carrion, but he reappeared in the next story chasing after Splinter Weevil, “The Meanest Man in the World.” Everything was like that. The island was made of cork and would never sink. The West Side Boys raped fat Tubby and crucified Little Lulu in Hunchback Alley.

  Tapón was living in his mountain house at the time and Denny Dimwit insisted on trying to launch himself to the moon in a barrel. Mama Pepita was withering away amid her childhood photos and Papa Lorenzo was dreaming of the dynamite train full of Stalin’s Cossacks and meanwhile ran his finger over the cartoon page of the National Daily News and said, “This country really likes its comic strips.”

  In any event, Felix the Cat had taken flight dangling from a question mark. Mr. Hubert strolled through the park with his dogs, and Aunt Dorita was complaining that boys in the tropics were spawns of criminality.

  “I’m a .45 pistol,” the story from Paquín magazine read. “I’m made of hate. Hate. HATE.”

  Gaspar Pumariega had just then put up a giant television tower that deeply disturbed Don Mestre, the Channel Six magnate, and he appeared on the screen at night wolfing down chorizos with bread and raffling off Philips blenders.

  Grandma Hazel, like the witch in “Macabre Stories,” was stirring her cauldron with a slotted spoon and terrified Agar with Jehovah’s finger. She believed in God but in the meantime, voted for the Communist Party even though she knew that if they won, the communists would put an end to her door-to-door food delivery business.

  Meanwhile, in the far-off West, Wild Bill Hickock was having his definitive duel with Wyatt Earp, and Dean Martin was recovering his lost honor on the banks of the Rio Bravo.

  The neighbors were sleeping at Santa Fe beach. The television sets and radios weren’t on, and the pressure cookers had cooled off on the kitchen tiles. Manuel Castillo, the night watchman, gave a lazy yawn on one of the park benches and then let his gaze fall over the dimmed houses. In one of them a boy was dreaming of monsters from outer space; and on the other side of the world, a mongoloid child was masturbating alone amid lotus flowers.

  At One, Leapfrog

  There was the fall; Tommy Tomorrow’s spaceship had broken down in space and they were all falling into the void. It was always like that. Falling, falling, and then the abrupt awakening. Waking up terrified in a pool of sweat, with the sheets stuck to his body.

  “Grandma Hazel, why do I always fall when I’m sleeping?”

  “It’s Jehovah letting go of your hand,” Grandma Hazel would say.


  “Papa Lorenzo, why do people fall when they’re asleep?”

  “That has to do with what they’ve eaten,” Papa Lorenzo would say. “Chickpeas are bad for you.”

  But now Agar was falling just the same. He had eaten lentils that night and was falling just the same into the void, kicking at nothing, trying to grasp at invisible branches.

  “Wood, Wood!” Tommy Tomorrow’s voice carried across 6,000 miles.

  “Wood here.”

  “Wood, I think we’re crashing. We’ve fallen into a bottomless abyss and we’re being dragged by a meteorite belt — ”

  It was always like that: falling, falling, and then the abrupt awakening. Sometimes he saw the beach’s lights from afar and heard the roaring of the sea and fell from the Coney Island Ferris wheel.

  He fell toward the white floor of the amusement park and he could see the operator’s stupefied mouth opening like an immense red O and the frightened eyes of the children in the bumper cars. He would fall and never reach the floor. When there were just a few inches to go he’d awake abruptly, in the darkness of his room bathed in sweat. Outside, stray dogs barked. In the distance, he could hear the noise of waves breaking and then dragging over the sharp rocks: splashhh!

  He saw a shadow move on the other side of the door. Then steps and the red light: click!

  It was Papa Lorenzo. He was asleep, dragging his hands along the bathroom wall tiles for balance. He walked naked in his sleep, and now he was going to urinate asleep over the toilet. Agar half saw him and turned his head away. It shamed him to see his father urinate and then shudder with the last drop.

  Papa Lorenzo urinated for a long while, leaning on the wall, and Agar thought he would never finish. Then he shuddered, turned off the lights, and staggered on in the darkness. At last, Agar heard him fall like a dead weight on the bed and kick furiously against the sheets. Then all was absolutely dark again.

  Behind the window, out came the old witch from “The Black Cat” to look at Agar, smiling sadistically. Twin vampires waited in the yard for their wooden stakes. A large spider web came down, like a fisherman’s net, from the ceiling. Around his bed jumped the bug-eyed imps from the Cantarranas River. A donkey with a man’s head galloped through the park.

  He felt someone touching the sole of his foot with long yellow fingers, and he covered himself completely with the sheet. He must have looked like a dead man in a London morgue.

  The old night watchman turned his head to better hear Big Ben’s bells: clang, clang, clang!

  “It’s twelve,” Count Dracula said, touching Agar’s back with a long nail. The count’s claw. The count’s fang.

  Agar was shaking. The witches surrounded him from all the corners of his room. Every crack in the wall became a monster skinned alive by a uranium bath: “If I open my eyes, I’ll see them, I’ll see them, I’ll see them. My God, when will the night end!”

  The night was crushing him. Full of visions — white like a ghost’s sheet.

  Then silence.

  “Your cousin Genovevo was a terrible boy,” Grandma Hazel said, suddenly appearing in his memory. “Spoiled like you, he even raised his hand to his mother. May God forgive him!”

  Mama Pepita stared at him coldly from the sofa. Aunt Dorita and Hubert’s wife also stared.

  “The last time Genovevo raised his hand to his mother, do you know what happened?”

  Agar was trembling. He didn’t want to hear Genovevo’s story.

  “Genovevo was a shithead!” he screamed inside his head.

  “His whole arm froze,” Grandma Hazel said seriously: “Frozen like a stick. And when he died, they had to saw it off to bury him in a box as God decrees.”

  That was the story of Genovevo. Although it was also the story of Basilio, the boy from Tia Dorita’s town whose tongue reached his navel. All because one day he yelled at his sick mother. Mama Pepita nodded her head.

  “Sick,” she reiterated bitterly. “And tell him, too, that whoever says filthy things, his tongue will also turn purple for the rest of his life. Purple and long.”

  Agar touched his tongue in the darkness.

  It was there.

  It seemed harder and longer than usual. He tried to speak and a hoarse sound came out. He would have cried for help — women and children first — but Papa Lorenzo would have gotten up, staggering, and said, “What in the hell is wrong with the damned kid? Can’t I even sleep in this house?”

  Agar held back his scream and felt himself sweating under the blanket. He knew that if he uncovered himself, Genovevo would be there, with his sawed-off arm, right next to Count Dracula, the Creature from the Black Lagoon, and the Spider Queen.

  At Two, My Shoe

  “Get up!”

  Mama Pepita woke him up abruptly. He greeted the day without any covers, legs spread wide, and everything coming out of his underwear.

  He felt embarrassed.

  Before, he didn’t care and was even a bit of an exhibitionist, but now, with that hair there, he had left innocence behind. He knew it.

  “You urinated again on the toilet seat last night, huh?” Mama Pepita reproached him. “Then I sit down and get myself all wet, huh? But the boy doesn’t care about that, huh? He just cares” — she shook him by the shoulder — “about him, him, him!”

  It wasn’t me. It wasn’t me. “Oh! My God, what an idiot! Yes, it was me.”

  She looked at him severely.

  “Get up already,” she said, and turned her hunched back to him.

  Now the day begins. Get up and look for your shoes. You have a terrible urge to spit. Dry tongue, but pasty around the mouth like horse’s drool. As if you had spent all night running around.

  “Get up. Put your pants on.”

  I don’t want wide-legged pants. My clothes move around me like I’m wearing a barrel. I like them really tight, like Red Ryder or The Headless Horseman.

  I like the Headless Horseman. But I like Bat Masterson more. Although I think I would also like to be Bat’s son with a big dog to defend me. And pity anyone who tried to . . .

  “Now Rin Tin . . . !”

  “What are you saying?” Mama Pepita yelled from the kitchen. “Get up already, I told you. You have to take the food to your grandmother’s house. And then, you’re going to get me Sensat cooking oil. And then . . .”

  They will be so jealous of me. My God, how jealous they will be! Papa Lorenzo popped his head out the bathroom door.

  “I’m in here,” he warned. “So no one come in.”

  It was very different when Agar was inside, sitting on the toilet or under the shower. If anyone came in he had to curl into a ball and feel as if he were being pricked by a thousand pins.

  Papa Lorenzo is full of mystery. He has false teeth, but takes great care so no one knows. Now he’s fat and bald, but before he was thin.

  Before, Grandma Hazel says, your father used to dream about Russia.

  He went to jail because of Russia. He got shot in the shin because of Russia. He was obsessed. I have a picture around here of the 1940 strike. Thin and well-groomed. Wrapped in a red flag, with his eyes looking up to the heavens and his finger raised: Saint Gregory, announcing the gospels. Russia is there, in the Heavens!

  From behind the door, Agar could hear Papa Lorenzo gargling.

  “He’s a monster,” Agar thought. “Like that, when he’s just gotten up, he’s horrible. But he’s more horrible when he hits me. Then I’d like to kill him. Although one day he’ll pay for it all.”

  “Hey, dude,” the West Side Boys say at the park, “Who here hasn’t thought about killing his father, even if just once?”

  I’ll kill him. I’ll kill him! I swear to . . . (to whom would he swear?) I can’t swear to God. I don’t believe in Him.

  One day, I wanted to make the sign of the cross to see what was going on with me. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, I went around saying it, when Papa Lorenzo came out from behind the oleanders with his belt
off and coiled to strike.

  “Amen!” he said, and at the same time he got me on the back with the belt.

  “I don’t want to see you doing that again,” he warned me later. “Get that into your head.”

  He hates God. He often tells God to go to hell.

  “When you see him, let me know!” he says. “I’d like to meet the son-of-a-bitch who invented all of this.”

  “Forgive him, Lord!” Grandma Hazel shouts from her steaming cauldron.

  No. I cannot swear to God. Although I can’t swear by my mother either. It’s easy to swear by your mother and not really mean it.

  “May my mother fall down dead, it wasn’t me, Mrs. Caritina,” I said the day I broke the hardware store windows. And then I ran back home and Mama Pepita was behind the pots and pans, alive and kicking, as always.

  “Where were you, you little devil?”

  Swearing is stupid. Nothing ever happens. Although Papa Lorenzo has a system for swearing. It has to do with Stalin.

  “Come here; did you take money from the dresser?”

  “No.”

  “Would you dare swear to it on Father Stalin?”

  And then he goes to the Closet of Souvenirs and brings out Stalin’s picture and puts it on the bed.

  You cannot swear by me in vain, Stalin seems to be saying.

  “Swear!” Papa Lorenzo commands.

  At first I would confess. But now the West Side Boys laugh when I tell them the story.

  “Dude, your father is so ridiculous!”

  So it doesn’t matter to me anymore. I swear by Stalin in vain, although at times I discover him staring at me hatefully from his frame.

  “Last night I dreamed I was falling from a cliff,” Agar said.

  Papa Lorenzo looked at him from over his breakfast mug without speaking. Mama Pepita went to get the crackers. Agar would have wanted Papa to say: Really? So how did it happen? Tell me. Tell me all about it. Detail by detail.

  But Papa Lorenzo said: “Everyone dreams. That doesn’t mean anything. Hand me the sugar.”