Leapfrog

by Guillermo Rosales

  Holy moly. I have to get away from this house. One day I made an escape map. The bedroom, living room, kitchen and the bathroom hallway. Someone left a window open. So I got away. I got lost in a wealthy neighborhood, and in the end, was taken in by a rich family. They wanted to adopt me. They named me “Friday,” because the day I went on the lam was a Friday. They loved me so much! They had a pool and everything. Like in that movie with . . . (what’s that guy with the big nose called?) David Niven! My Man Godfrey. And Niven ends up marrying June Allyson.

  Damnit! Would anyone take me in? Although in the end, it was horrible: Papa Lorenzo found the map with the warning signs. He laughed for a long time, the map in his hands.

  “An escape map! Ha, ha, ha!” His belly shook. He turned red with laughter. Then suddenly, he got very serious and said: “There’s no need . . .”

  He went to the front door and opened it.

  “Go!” he said. “You want to leave, right? Go!”

  I was shaking at the table. Papa Lorenzo was pointing at the horizon with his finger and Mama Pepita was grumbling in the kitchen. In the end, Mama went over to the door and shut it.

  “Leave him alone!” she said, tired. “Leave the damned kid alone . . .”

  “Don’t get involved in this!” Papa Lorenzo roared: “You’re the one who has ruined him.”

  They exchanged insults loudly for a long time. Finally, Mama Pepita turned her hunched back and left sobbing for the Trunk of Photos of her Youth. There, she started going through the old photos.

  “This was me at fifteen,” she murmured, “or was I sixteen?”

  She held the photos, looking at them for a long time, until she seemed to forget her troubles. Then she got up: “What a house, my God!” she exclaimed. And with that she went back to the kitchen.

  Agar watched Mama Pepita go through the Photos of her Youth and listened to Papa Lorenzo searching through his Closet of Souvenirs.

  “You’d be wise to burn everything in that closet,” Grandma Hazel advised. “One day they’ll come, search the house, and then we’ll have to take your clean clothes to the prison at Castillo del Principe.”

  But Papa Lorenzo didn’t answer. He shot her a hateful glance from his Closet of Souvenirs and brusquely took out a book from the bottom of a trunk.

  “And you, Madam . . . do you know who this is?” He showed her a book with an owl on the cover.

  “I don’t care,” Grandma Hazel said, pushing it away with her hand.

  “It’s Prince Kropotkin!” Papa Lorenzo said in a tired, irritated voice. “What about this one?” “Less still,” Grandma Hazel answered, slightly nervous.

  “Bukharin! The Benjamin of the October Revolution!”

  “They’re very well known in their own way,” Grandma Hazel pointed out, with dignity, “but Jehovah is much larger than all of them.”

  “Madam . . . ,” Papa Lorenzo then said in a serious tone of voice, “I don’t want to see what happens to you when the train of the Revolution blazes across this island.”

  “I’ll be sure not to stop until I get to Australia!” Grandma Hazel laughed.

  “A great train full of dynamite, with Lenin and Stalin’s star on it ready to crack down on the old home food delivery vendors . . .”

  “Don’t forget that my home food deliveries pay for your food . . . ,” Grandma Hazel reminded him, while slowly wagging her witch’s finger.

  “Bah!” Papa Lorenzo exclaimed, picking up Bukharin and company and putting them back in place in the Closet of Souvenirs. “Humanity is a bitch!”

  Agar rushed his cup of café con leche. Papa Lorenzo flipped through the newspaper, saving the comic strips for last. Seeing his belly flow abundantly over his belt, Agar remembered Flattop, Dick Tracy’s fattest enemy, who had died devoured by a barracuda in a Chicago pool.

  Later, he remembered Grandma Hazel, wrapped up in the steam of her cauldrons, always repeating the same refrain: Strange. Your father is strange. First he picked up votes, organized strikes and went around to meetings that always ended in gunshots. He even convinced me to vote for the Popular candidate! But now it turns out he’s a Rotarian! He’s a communist and he belongs to Rotary International! It’s a strategic matter, he says. Strategic? I don’t understand anything!

  Papa Lorenzo stuck his nose in the National Daily News stories.

  “This country really likes its comic strips,” he said in a low voice.

  From the kitchen, Mama Pepita let the pots fall thunderously.

  At Three, My Coffee

  “What’s up, Doc?” Bugs Bunny said. He popped his head out of the hole and patted Elmer Fudd’s shoulder, who replied: “We’re going to the land of giant carrots!”

  Mama Pepita arrived with the hot food containers.

  “Go to your grandmother’s house,” she said. “Have her tell you what she has for lunch. And here, give her this money. But hang on to it! Don’t come to me later with an oh, I dropped it!”

  “You come straight back here,” Papa Lorenzo said. He was chewing a piece of bread with his healthy molars.

  Straight. You come straight back. You go straight there. You go straight. Everything is straight. Straight to the point. What do they care if I stay in the park with the West Side Boys! Playing leapfrog, throwing stones or making up stories. What do they care! Then they say because you’re too thin, and they smoke there and talk dirty. But what dirty things could they say that I don’t know? I know them all! And I smoke, too. All the brands. Anyone who doesn’t smoke is a fag. Anyone who doesn’t curse is one, too. That’s the law. That’s the law and they’ll never understand!

  He took the containers of hot food and left. He made the trip to his grandmother’s house kicking a stone the whole way. Three blocks to the right lived Mr. Hubert. “The one who always takes his dog out to piss,” Papa Lorenzo would say, seeing him pull the leash. “If I were like that, I’d shoot myself.” At the end of the block, between the pine trees, lived “The Abominable Man from Eighth Street.”

  “That miserable specimen spends his whole life watering his garden.”

  “Leave the man alone!” Mama Pepita would scream. “You spend your whole life hating humanity.”

  Amid the pine trees, lived Aunt Dorita, always seated at the piano.

  “I never had any parties,” Aunt Dorita would say as if she were telling a funny story. “My first party I was 22. I spent all week saving money to buy myself some crêpe paper ruffles that you added to the dress and looked like silk. I saved six pesos. I bought them. Grandma watched everything from her rocking chair and pressed her lips together.

  “Hmmm,” Grandma said, “so you’re going to a party, huh?”

  “Yes, grandma.”

  “And who gave you permission? Come on, come on?”

  And then I said to her: “But it was you yourself, grandma! Don’t you remember?”

  To which she responded: “I don’t remember anything.”

  “Grandma, grandma, how could you not remember now! I already told the boy yes and he’s coming to get me this evening.”

  “Well he’ll leave exactly as he came,” grandma said. “You wasted all of your money buying nonsense and now we won’t be able to pay the electric bill this week!”

  “He told me he would lend me the money,” I said. And grandma leapt indignantly from her rocking chair and insulted me as she slapped me.

  “Who does he think I am? Huh? The madam of a brothel? Let’s see. Give me that dress! You’ll see what I do with the parties at the Liceo.”

  “And that was my first party!” Aunt Dorita summed up, trying to laugh. “Isn’t it funny?”

  “Of course, dear!” said Mama Pepita, adding more sugar to her coffee.

  “That’s how grandma was,” Aunt Dorita said. “Poor thing . . .”

  And she bit her lower lip, and her eyes shone strangely, and Agar thought that he wanted to jump up and down, and scream: Son of a bitch, son of a bitch, son of a bitch!

  “Poor Aunt Dorita!
” Mama Pepita said when she left. “She was a prodigious girl, but she peaked.”

  “She’s an unbearable loon,” Papa Lorenzo said from behind his newspaper. “They say she has a thing with Poupett, the manager of Novo.”

  “Slander!” Mama said. And then, remembering, she added: “She had a divine right hand. At the age of five, she would get up at night to play Bach. Do you know who Bach is?”

  “It’s all the same to me,” Papa Lorenzo said. “For me, Bach or front, it doesn’t matter . . .”

  One night, the West Side Boys covered Aunt Dorita’s house with chickpeas and eggs. They made long peashooters with TV antennas and shot the chickpeas from far away. Aunt Dorita went to Agar’s house the next day to tell the story.

  “You suffer so much in this country!” she commented. “It’s so different than Europe. Everything here is so embarrassing. Have you ever seen a more diabolic being than a child? The children of the tropics are juvenile deliquents,” she said, and fanned her face, suffocating.

  He walked. He remembered this story and later remembered the West Side Boys sitting in a circle on the grass in the park, talking bitterly about people.

  “Your aunt is a lesbo, dude,” Bones said that time. “She goes everywhere with Poupett. The other day, they went into the Society together and both had their pant zippers down. They were munching carpets!”

  Laughter.

  He remembered all of this as he walked. He spent his whole day remembering stories, words, faces, situations. When he passed in front of Hubert’s house, an old lady yelled from the gate: “Lift your head up! Why are you walking with your head bent down?”

  Why? Why did Agar always walk watching his own steps? Why did he get tongue-tied in conversations with his friends? Why didn’t he have a girlfriend and why did everything make him feel tremendously ashamed? Why, why, why?

  One day you spoke, said the Voice of Memory. One day, you went up to them and spoke for a long time. You were talking and laughing. You were laughing a lot and they made room for you. Oh, how you were laughing! I could swear myself to you right now, Marta. And I could dance with you for hours and hours, Elaine, Blue Moon.

  “Hey, dudes . . . do you know the story about the parrot who saw a scar?”

  You were laughing. Your laughter could be heard all over the beach.

  And the wave behind you: “SPLASHHH!”

  Then came the whistle. Papa Lorenzo’s unmistakable whistle.

  “They’re whistling for you, dude . . .”

  “Like a dog, dude . . .”

  Papa Lorenzo welcomed you with his eyes narrowed. He had discovered the half empty bottle of cognac.

  “So you drank it, didn’t you? I buy it and it’s the boy who drinks it, isn’t that so?”

  “Drunk,” Mama Pepita said.

  And you laughed. You took a beating, but you kept on laughing. And your tears ran down your cheeks, until your eyes clouded over.

  Agar kicked the rock like you kick rugby balls. They said he had good hands to play rugby. But he had barely any weight.

  “That boy is sick,” Grandma Hazel said. “He’s greenish yellow.”

  “He doesn’t eat,” Mama Pepita would say. “He doesn’t like chickpeas, he doesn’t like beans. He doesn’t eat.”

  I don’t eat, I thought. Not chickpeas, not beans. The smell of that food disgusts me. I throw it out when I can. It disgusts me. It turns my stomach. God damn! But you guys force it on me.

  “GIVE HIM THE WHIP!” Papa Lorenzo yelled from the sofa. “THE WHIP, THE WHIP, THE WHIP. That’s purifying.” And later, while he still had his newspaper between his hands, he confessed: “I was raised fast, as fast as a train. And then I was a man and I worked in a pineapple field. I had to take my entire salary to my father: nine pesos. Nine pesos! Of which my father took eight and left me one. And that one . . . !” Papa Lorenzo said raising his finger, “he gave it to me, saying: Save it, in case I need it!”

  Grandma Hazel laughed at the story. Mama Pepita said: “What a beast!”

  “That’s how it was,” Papa Lorenzo said. “Raised as fast as a train — and I haven’t died. Nor am I missing an arm — or anything else.”

  At Four, Hit the Floor

  Grandma Hazel was working surrounded by the steam of her pots. She always smelled like cod and spices, and as she stirred the bubbling pot, she hummed incomprehensible songs.

  She turned around.

  “Did you bring the containers?”

  “Yessiree. And the money.”

  “Tell your father not to worry about the money. I know you’re a little short with that whole business about your school. Although I still can’t explain it all to myself. A whole life spent on strike! Always against the rich! And then it turns out that he wants to put you in a rich kids school. So he rubs elbows with them, he says. Rubs elbows with the rich? I don’t understand. I don’t understand. I don’t understand.”

  And she brought her finger thoughtfully to her chin. “God is more constant,” she said. “And it would do you good to put yourself in God’s hands. How long has it been since you went to church?”

  Church, Agar thought. Papa Lorenzo doesn’t want me to go into churches. He boasts that he has never entered a church and hasn’t died because of it. Although Grandma Hazel secretly takes me to the Jehovah’s Witness Hall. She grabbed the back of my neck and said to me: “This, young man, stays between you and me . . . okay?” And inside, the pastor gave me a warm welcome and even placed me by the pulpit. And later he opened his arms and started to yell: “FORGIVE HIM, LORD!”

  “Grandma Hazel, why does he have to forgive me?”

  “Don’t pretend you’re a saint.” she says. “You know very well why. You have to shout loudly: FORGIVE ME LORD, until you feel Jehovah. Do you understand? Until Jehovah enters you and you feel that your vices have left. Is that clear?”

  So he shouted: FORGIVE ME LORD! FORGIVE ME LORD! FORGIVE ME LORD!

  But then a fit of laughter came over him.

  “I couldn’t avoid laughing,” he said later, surrounded by the West Side Boys. “The laughter came with a vengeance.”

  “I don’t play around with that,” Kiko Ribs said. “With God and the saints, everything is different.”

  “An old woman appeared to Tony Pando one night and showed him an ID card that said she was ‘Our Lady of Mercy,” Tin Marbán said.

  “And I know a priest who rolls up his soutane when he plays soccer,” Fat-Headed Jorge pointed out. “Although I also know Father Gasoline, who says mass while drunk.”

  “And they say that the crazy monk who lives in Choricera,” Pipo Páez said, “bangs his own daughter.”

  “FORGIVE HIM, LORD!” Grandma Hazel said.

  She made Agar kneel down in the first row, near the pastor’s dais.

  “I tell you that HERE is Jehovah TODAY,” the pastor said with his arms spread open.

  Agar was getting bored. He thought that around then the West Side Boys would be in the park playing leapfrog and crucifying spiders.

  Agar pretended to pray, leaning his hands on the rail. The pastor passed next to him squeezing the heads of the faithful and shouting his slogans. The old ladies in the second row moaned and furiously blew their noses.

  He furtively took out his knife and leaned on the wood. Now or Never, said his Interior Voice. His heart beat strongly, and he remembered then all of that about there being a Heaven, Hell, Purgatory, and Limbo.

  Where would he go?

  “I’ll take Limbo,” Kiko Ribs had once said. “It’s neither good nor bad, and you spend your whole life sleeping.”

  Now! the Voice said.

  So he scratched “COCK” on the wood and quickly put his knife away. No one had seen him.

  The pastor turned toward the front row and grabbed him by the neck with his sweaty hand.

  “FORGIVE HIM, LORD!” he shouted, and Agar felt saliva splash his eyes.

  Later, when he’d let him go, they started to sing “Jehovah, I am yo
ur slave.” And Agar imagined that Papa Lorenzo would have felt proud of him.

  Grandma Hazel’s head emerged again from the steaming pots.

  “Today I’ve got tamal en cazuela and chickpeas,” she said. “Come to get them at eleven.”

  “Well, I’m outta here.”

  “What’s this about being ‘outta here’? Keep an eye on the company you keep! The other day they came to tell me that you were going around saying you were broken. Do you know what someone who is broken is? A useless man. Who can’t have women, or children, or anything. Your uncle Quirilio was broken. Poor wretch!”

  Agar remembered Quirilio. He would arrive at the house wringing his hands and Mama Pepita would treat him like a sick man.

  “I’m in love with a blonde,” he would say. He always had a new love.

  “That’s great, Quirilio! You don’t say, Quirilio? Congratulations, Quirilio!”

  And he nodded with his head one, two, three times.

  “Yes, yes, yes . . . I’m in love with a blonde.”

  “He ended up hanging himself,” she said, somberly. Grandma Hazel. With her skimmer, she reminded Agar of the witch in “Macabre Stories.”

  “Didn’t you read the news in the papers? In big headlines: “Man frustrated by love puts an end to his life.”

  That really was broken! Truly broken.

  “Well, I’m leaving.”

  “Take it easy. And come straight back.”

  Agar went back to thinking about the broken ones. Being broken was a big thing for him. In school they talked about broken ones, but it was different.

  “Dudes; the guy who breaks has two balls as big as this,” Tin Marbán was saying that day. And everyone wanted to break then. Because everyone wanted to have two big balls between his legs.

  “In this country the most important thing is to have very big balls,” Tin Marbán said.

  And he had tried to break himself in the gym on Gago street, lifting weights with cement bags. But he soon got tired and couldn’t go on.

  I’m going to have to accept what I have, Agar thought. Although afterward, Tin Marbán came back tired from the gym, and changed his story, explaining that they grew until the age of twenty-one.