“We’ve come to take whatever we can get from you, you old joker,” Mingo confessed, rubbing his hands with a mischievous expression.
“Order!” Ciriaco Sardinas demanded, hitting the bell. “I won’t accept that bit about being a joker. As the club’s president, I forbid any such references.”
“Damn, people!” Papa Lorenzo said amid the group’s laughter. “It looks like you’re here to really come down on me.”
“Come on, Lorenzo, one day a year, old man . . . !”
Laughter.
Papa Lorenzo entered the house for a minute and went over to Agar.
“Go to Núñez’s house and get him to give you a dozen beers. Get them over here and bring them through the back.”
Mama Pepita came out of the bathroom. She had left her tragic air in the mirror and was now smiling broadly.
“Madame!” Mutt greeted her, bowing like a medieval knight.
“Man, it looks like time stands still around here!” Jeff de la Vega commented, looking at Mama Pepita mischievously.
“Oh!” She pretended to be embarrassed, going along with his joke. “You really are a joker, Jeff, such a flatterer . . .”
“Madame, Jeff de la Vega does not flatter, but rather recognizes virtue. That is my motto.”
Another flattering phrase.
“Don’t bend over too much, old man!” Choraliza warns. “Mind your hinges don’t break.”
Laughter.
“I’m in great shape!” Jeff shouted amid the guffaws.
“You think?” Mutt said. “The other day, playing softball, you almost ended up hunchbacked forever. We’re going to have to drag you along on roller skates, old man!”
Renewed laughter.
“What’s wrong, Jeff?” Papa Lorenzo asked, pretending to be serious. “Are you going to let them shoot you down like that?”
“Just ignore them, old man.” Jeff said, with an air of resignation. “Today’s Sunday.”
Agar arrived with the bottles. Papa Lorenzo saw him come in the back door out of the corner of his eye and told Mama Pepita, “Lady, put some music on for us.”
“I knew it was worth coming to this house!” Ciriaco Sardinas exclaimed, euphoric.
“Your credit is good here,” Papa Lorenzo said.
They drank. Agar watched them through the blinds, exploring their faces and figures and entertaining himself looking for similarities with the characters from all the stories.
“Listen, old man,” Ciriaco said. “Yesterday, I was offered a 1954 Studebaker. A gem. A real gem! You know how much?”
“How much?” Papa Lorenzo wanted to know, feigning interest.
Agar watched him pretend and asked himself if the old Rotarians also noticed that his show of interest was all a lie.
“Two and a half!” Ciriaco Sardinas said. “Two and a half, old man.”
“I don’t believe it,” the very fat Jeff de la Vega opined. “Gentlemen, a 1954 Studebaker is, here and in the Belgian Congo, a 1954 Studebaker!”
“Well . . . well . . . ,” Ambrosio Choraliza interrupted. “Here comes the sentimental part of the matter.” And he pointed at Mama Pepita who was arriving with the tray full of new glasses.
“Ahhh!”
“The anchovies are eavesdropping!” Mingo, the barber, pointed out. “Gentlemen, there’s nothing like having a very cold beer and a lot of anchovies to see Warren Span pitch. Gentlemen, it’s quite something!”
Agar threw himself down on the bed. He knew that the conversation would now be about baseball for half an hour. And afterwards, Ambrosio Choraliza would talk about something like “the future repairs of the Santa Fe beach gutters.” And then things would move on to Ciriaco Sardinas’ agenda, who would take that under consideration for the following Monday, at the weekly meeting. He closed his eyes. He knew what would happen afterward. The Rotarians would leave. And Papa Lorenzo and Mama Pepita would go all the way to the gate with them to say goodbye, sending regards to their respective families and kisses to all.
And afterward, Mama Pepita would pick up the bottles, load the tray and take everything to the kitchen. And Papa Lorenzo would stay at the gate for a little while longer, until the Rotarians’ truck turned down 12th Street and got lost forever. Then his smile would disappear and he wouldn’t let his shoulders slump in defeat.
“Cretins . . . ,” he would later say. With an old, deep exhaustion.
And Agar would listen from his room to Mama Pepita going through the Trunk of Photos of her Youth, and would hear her say: “this picture was taken when I was fifteen . . . was I fifteen or sixteen? Well, in any event, it’s all the same.”
At Fourteen, an Old Man Is Clean
The Rotarians had left.
From his room, Agar saw Papa Lorenzo come in and drop down on the sofa, in defeat.
The afternoon was clear and suffocating and a dusty drowsiness hung in the air. Papa Lorenzo flipped through the stories in the National Daily News and after a while, gave a moribund smile.
Papa Lorenzo is full of mystery. He has two faces, like the bicephalous man from Finstown. Ha, ha, he laughs, and with his other face, he’s saying: May a thunderbolt strike you all dead!
Mama Pepita passes on the way to her room.
“Get that look off your face,” she said, when she passed by her husband.
He looked at her and said sharply, “I’m very happy! Surely, I have reason to be . . .”
“In this house,” Mama Pepita said, “it always feels like a funeral.”
And she went to her room and Agar heard her shuffling the old photos around.
Silence.
Papa Lorenzo dropped the newspapers and sat staring at a point on the wall. Stunned.
“I know I’m a beast,” he admitted then, without addressing anyone. “I can’t be any other way. I can’t.”
He smelled himself under his arms and fell backward on the sofa.
Agar knew what would come now. He knew that Papa Lorenzo would collapse across the sofa, looking vacantly at a point on the wall. Now Papa Lorenzo would write in the air with the tip of his finger. He wrote:
STALIN
“The Man of Steel . . . ,” Papa Lorenzo then murmured. He seemed extremely worn out.
His face, marked with lines, was bitter when he said, “Comrades! Everyone already knows the story of productive forces and the social relations of production. Everyone knows the law of quantitative and qualitative changes. And everyone knows about the insoluble alliance between the peasants and the proletariat.”
His voice was dramatic. Theatrical. Agar heard him echoing in the stillness of the living room and thought that if he were Papa Lorenzo’s audience, he wouldn’t have liked his style of delivering speeches.
Papa Lorenzo leapt from the sofa and returned to his speech, directed at the silent walls: “A deficient superstructure has a corresponding deficient economic base. The poverty of this society must be sought in the social and material roots of these miserable people. This is an island of cork that floats thanks to the magical illusion of all its components. Ahhhh! But Moctezuma’s troops are already dispersed. The flags of the Communist Party are already old. The promised land will not come, nor will the dynamite train. Not hide nor hair of it. Comrades! The revolution needs new vitality! New blood! New faces! This is the truth never revealed. This is the reason of all reasons . . .”
Applause, Agar thought. He peeked through a gap in the door and saw Papa Lorenzo with his arm raised and his finger pointing at the ceiling lamp.
His arm dropped. His finger returned to its natural arrogance. Papa Lorenzo let himself fall down on the sofa again.
“I’m a piece of shit,” he said from there. He didn’t seem to say it bitterly. He said it with conviction and a bit of resigned indifference. “We are all pieces of shit! You!” he said, turning toward the room where Mama Pepita was going through the old photos. “Me!” he said. “And even that exasperating little kid you gave birth to!”
Agar hid his head
under the pillow.
Papa Lorenzo lounged on the sofa and sighed deeply.
“In short . . . ,” he sighed, “all shit.”
And he remained quiet, with his gaze lost on the ceiling.
“Aren’t you going to keep yelling?” Mama Pepita was pretending not to care: “Keep yelling, you idiot. So the neighbors hear you. Come on, keep yelling!”
“I’ll yell whenever I want!” Papa Lorenzo yelled. “I pay for this house with my money!”
Mama Pepita slammed the pictures down and went out to the living room. Agar foresaw the storm and quickly closed the door of his room.
“That boy is listening to all of this,” Mama Pepita said. “And outside, they can hear everything as if you were being broadcast on the radio.”
Agar closed his eyes slowly. He was returning to absolute darkness and going over his life — his memories came to him in a rush.
“Your father is a very strange communist,” Grandma Hazel said. “First, he went around getting votes and organizing strikes and even made me vote for the Popular candidate. And now he became an accountant, and he wants to put you in an elite school, and to hell with strikes, and votes, and I’m still affiliated with that Popular candidacy. Now it turns out he’s a Rotary! Communist and International Rotary. I don’t understand. It’s a matter of strategy, he says. Strategy? I don’t understand anything about strategy. I want him to give me my voting card back! That’s what I want!”
And she stuck her head in the cauldron and scraped the bottom of it with a spatula. She took it out again to say:
“Do you think I don’t know that the Communists are going to do away with the home food delivery business if they come to power? Your own father told me so! With Lenin and Stalin’s star, they will do away with my food delivery business. No! I am voting against myself! I want him to give me my voting card back! I want to vote for the Authentic Party. And remember this, my son:
“Long live communism, long live friendship, and if you have two dollars, give me one.”
And she laughed, surrounded by the smoke from her cauldrons. Like that witch in “Macabre Stories” who flew toward the belfry on a broomstick.
Communist! Agar thought. I don’t want my father to be a communist. “The Cobra King” is also a communist and flies in a communist-propelled airplane, and has his base on Red Island, from where he attacks the Black Falcons. Chuck, Olaf, Endrickson, Stanislaus, André the Frenchman, and Chop Chop the Chinaman.
Holy moly! I’d liked to be in that group. And I’d pass through the circle of West Side Boys with the falcon engraved on my shirt. And Papa Lorenzo would come, without whistling at me, and would ask me in all humility to come back home.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“It will weigh on you,” Papa Lorenzo said.
And later he returned in “The Infernal Circle” and tried to pass over us.
“Die, capitalist pigs!” Papa Lorenzo would shout, and our bullets would crash against the tracks of his wheels.
He opened his eyes. Sergeant York appeared on the bathroom wall again. He remembered that he had also fought in the “War Fronts.” Like that day on which the two of them were wrapped up in combat smoke.
“Giddy up, kid!” Sergeant York said. He was sweating copiously and crushing a piece of paper in his hand.
“Once and for all, kid — jump! It’s the Chinese people who are asking for your help against the Reds.”
Agar got ready to jump.
“Wait!” York said. He held onto his shoulder, holding something out to him.
“Take this, kid. It’s a five dollar bill. It’s a little wrinkled, but still good. When this hell is over, son . . . have yourself a tall beer and toast to the health of your old Sergeant York. Will you do it?”
“York!” Agar yelled.”Sergeant York!”
York had died.
Agar looked at the battlefield and understood that the battle was being decided there, at that exact moment. And, without thinking about it, he threw himself furiously on the enemy. On the red Chinese and the yellow men from Korea.
No. He definitely did not like Communists.
The falcon, Sergeant York and all the others were handsome, and the Communists are bald and toothless.
“All of them with their asses patched up,” Grandma Hazel would say. “All of them smelling like a bike shop.”
At Fifteen, I’ll Get Your Spleen
The afternoon went by. In his room, he felt the heavy air, weighed down with drowsiness.
The afternoon went by and he had spent almost the whole day punished. Summer vacation was going by and he had spent almost his entire vacation being punished.
He would have given his right hand to go outside. He would have placed it on Odin’s pyre and would have said to the God of the Vikings:
“Burn! But let me out.”
He peeked through the door jamb. On the sofa, Papa Lorenzo was writing a long speech in the air. He thought he could ask for his permission. Although later he thought that if he asked him, Papa Lorenzo could turn his back to him and pretend he was asleep. Or he may just say:
“Go ask your mother!”
And then he’d go to Mama Pepita and she’d say:
“Me? Go ask your father!”
And so he would go in circles from one side to the other until he burst out crying in rage.
Nonetheless, his Interior Voice suggested this time:
“Ask him for it . . . what do you have to lose?”
“I could end up with a mule kick,” he reconsidered.
So he decided to appeal to Imaginary Fate and conceived of the formula to make a decision once and for all.
Papa Lorenzo was writing in the air with his back to him. If he turned around, he would give him what he asked for.
He waited.
He waited.
He waited.
Papa Lorenzo started turning around slowly. Agar’s heart beat quickly.
He reached the sofa. Papa Lorenzo picked the newspaper off the floor and opened it again to the comic pages.
“I’m going to the movies,” Agar stammered.
Papa Lorenzo commented:
“Did Little Orphan Annie die after all?”
“I’m going to the movies . . .”
“What’s that?” Papa Lorenzo pretended to listen for the first time.
“I’m going to the movies,” Agar repeated.
“If you have the money, I’m not opposed,” Papa Lorenzo said.
“Papa, everyone is going to the movies today. They’re showing a Red Ryder film.”
“There’s no money,” Papa Lorenzo said without looking up from his newspaper.
Agar knew he was running a risk if he persisted. Nonetheless, he tried again: “Papa . . . don’t you have seventy cents? That’s all a movie costs.”
Papa Lorenzo looked at him, irritated. Then he turned around on the sofa, showing him his back.
“Don’t go . . . ,” he said from there. “The Siboney Indians never went to the movies, and they were happy.”
Mama Pepita dropped the pots and pans and came out of the kitchen.
“You’re a monster!” She yelled. “Your answer to everything is the Indians. I haven’t worn a new dress for five years, simply because the Indians walked around naked — and they were happy! And for six months I’ve been walking around with this horrible rat’s nest on my head, simply because the Indians didn’t get permanents — and they were happy! Everything goes back to the Indians. But the Indians are kaput!”
She was yelling.
Papa Lorenzo, his face buried in the back of the sofa, pretended he was asleep. In the end, he opened his eyes, feigned a TV commercial smile, and said: “There’s no money.”
Mama Pepita grumbled again and began to circle the sofa, looking for Papa Lorenzo’s eyes to throw his indolence in his face. She finally managed to irritate him. So Papa Lorenzo leapt from the sofa and ran around the room and started to turn everything over shrieking:
“THERE ISN’T ANY!”
And then, he pulled the drawers from the closet, and started to empty the Closet of Souvenirs, screaming:
“THERE ISN’T ANY!” and throwing Bukharin and Kropotkin’s books.
“THERE ISN’T ANY!” he said, throwing Stalin’s photos against the walls.
“THERE ISN’T ANY!” he said, tossing up the old communist newspapers.
“THERE ISN’T ANY. THERE ISN’T ANY. THERE ISN’T ANY. THERE ISN’T ANY!”
And at last exhausted, he fell over the mess of clothing and red books, huffing.
“I’m disgusted,” Papa Lorenzo then said. “My life is a real son of a bitch.”
At Sixteen, Run from that Ox So Lean!
Agar took advantage of the confusion and slipped out to the yard; Papa Lorenzo’s screams could still be heard from inside the house. He lay down at last, behind Mama Pepita’s wash tub. From there, he contemplated an incredibly blue sky with some incredibly white clouds.
I’ll play the cloud game, he thought.
It wasn’t hard for him to find Sergeant York, with his helmet and backpack, firing from the sky.
The cloud, in its turtle-pace path, fell apart and later became an angry Apache. And then it became Tonka: the wild horse. And later it was a spider in a circle of rocks. In the end, it took on the shape of a large rabbit. It was Bugs Bunny, “the Lucky Wabbit.”
“So long, folks!” Bugs Bunny said, lifting a hand made of white smoke. “We’re going to the land of giant carrots . . .”
Papa Lorenzo went by too, followed by Agrispina Pérez Pérez and the witch from “Macabre Stories” and the bicephalous man from Finstown.
He caressed his penis. Now he could take it out without any problem. There, at the end of the yard, Mama Pepita would never be able to surprise him and he would be able to put it away before she could see him.
So he took it, definitively, in his hands, and rubbed it like a good Boy Scout rubs a pine stick to make a fire in the dark forest.
He was just playing.
Because he never felt that ticklish sensation that Tin Marbán mentioned.
He was like that for a while, rubbing himself as he reviewed the clouds, absorbed. Discovering in them new faces, objects and characters that took shape in their slow march toward the West. He closed his eyes.
Leapfrog Page 7
