by Carlos Eire
“Oh, no, I couldn’t do that. I wouldn’t impose on you and your family that way.”
“Sure, no problem. Go on. It’s fine.”
“Oh no. No. No. No way, I couldn’t do that. I’m too shy.”
That should have made some alarm go off, but it didn’t.
“Well, we have a bathroom in the back of the house. It’s our maid’s bathroom. You can go around the side of the house to the rear patio and use that. You won’t even have to enter our house.”
“Oh no. No. No, that won’t do either. No way, I couldn’t do that. I couldn’t impose; I’m too shy. What I’m looking for is just a place where I can pee outdoors, out of sight.”
Why didn’t the bells go off? I thought his self-professed shyness was weird, but I had no clue that he had crossed some line.
So Jorge offered him an alternative.
“Well, there’s a vacant lot around the corner. Someone started to build a clinic there, but they never finished.”
“Yeah, that’s it! Could you kids show me how to get there? I don’t know this neighborhood at all.”
“It’s very easy to find,” I said. “You just walk to that corner over there, and turn right. You can’t miss the vacant lot. It’s three houses down from that corner, right there. And it’s big, and it has an empty-looking building next to it.”
“Oh, but I’m afraid I’ll get lost. Could you please show me how to get there?”
“Sure,” said Jorge.
The bells were ringing faintly, very faintly. How could he get lost on the way to the vacant lot? Even the dumbest kid could find it. Something was fishy. But Jorge had spoken up and agreed to show him the way. Now we had to do it.
So we walked him there. He walked with the dog tailing him. He didn’t have a leash; the dog simply kept pace with us, staying close to him. I thought he was a little strange, and too childish, but it never crossed my mind that he meant harm in any way. He was just goofy, I thought.
When we reached the empty building and the vacant lot he had another request.
“Looks great, kids. But what will the neighbors around here think if they see me going back there? I’m a stranger here. And it looks kind of scary back there. Could one of you please come with me, so I can pee behind the building, out of sight. Please? I’m scared to go back there. Those trees back there are so big and the shade is so dark. Do you know what it’s like to be scared? Haven’t you ever been scared? Huh?”
I certainly knew what it was like to be scared to go into dark, strange places, but something didn’t seem right. Why was this older guy so scared?
“What about your dog?” I asked. “Can’t your dog keep you company?”
“Oh, no. He’s a good dog, but I need human company. How about it? Please? Won’t one of you come back with me?”
I looked at Jorge and he looked at me. He looked a little puzzled too. The guy with the cap and the dog looked at me.”
“How about it, huh? How about you? You’re older and bigger, and would help keep me company much better. Yeah. Please? Come on, please, I’m about to pee in my pants. I really have to go, now. Please?”
I felt sorry for the guy and annoyed by him all at once. Grow up, I thought.
“Okay,” I said.
“And you,” he said to Jorge, “stay here and keep an eye out. Make sure no one else comes back there. I’m so shy.”
He pulled a knife on me the instant we stepped into the passageway. Since the passageway was L-shaped, we turned a corner and went out of sight. Jorge had no clue. It was a switchblade, with a white pearled handle and a long blade. It had a button on it that made the blade pop out. He opened and closed it, opened and closed it, and when we reached the rear of the building, past the shade of the trees he had claimed to fear so much, he kept it open for good.
The sunlight hit the blade and bounced off with all the ferocious indifference stored up in the universe. It blinded me. The light hit the blade and turned it into a flaming sword.
He grabbed me with the arm he wasn’t using to hold the knife, roughly, and pulled me up against him. He held me tightly.
“Help me pee.”
The dog, who had been calm until then, began to leap around. Was he all too familiar with this? He was leaping up to the knife, and the guy told him to calm down. He called the dog by name for the first time. It seemed like a very dumb name, but I can’t remember it. My mind was on other details.
Like the knife. And the way he was holding me so tightly, so as to make it hard for me to get away. And the sight of his knife hand pulling down the zipper. It must be hard to pull down a zipper while holding a knife, but he managed to do it. It seemed as if he’d had a lot of practice.
I don’t think he really needed to pee. He was much too excited. I’d never seen anyone so excited in all my life.
“Here, help me pee. Put your hand right here.”
Jesus, no.
And he pulled the knife up to my face, tightened his grip on me, and he told me how I should help him. He was very strong for a skinny guy. The blade felt cold, despite the sunlight it reflected.
My choices were painfully simple: do his bidding or get knifed.
Then, as I was being dragged down to hell, came that voice from heaven, shouting obscenities nearby. “Coño, carajo, hijo de puta, cabrón, qué mierda, puñetera madre que te parió, mal rayo te parta, mojón del diablo…”
El Loco. The neighborhood wino we had tormented so often, screaming at the top of his lungs, stringing unconnected swear words together like beads in a rosary. He screamed as he always did, but this time he sounded like an entire choir of angels.
The pervert jumped at the sound of El Loco’s voice, and his grip on me loosened a little. Just then Jorge started yelling, “El Loco, it’s El Loco, he’s here, El Loco!” We were all scared of the guy, especially because we teased him so much and had been chased by him so many times. Jorge, especially, was terrified by him, and ran away screaming.
Jorge’s cries startled the pervert enough to make him loosen his grip a little more. Enough to allow me to wriggle free and run like the wind. The dog barked and jumped up at me, but I couldn’t have cared less. I sprinted out of the passageway. I ran down the block, and around the corner, and down my block, and into my house without looking back. I ran past the blood red hibiscus blossoms, oblivious to them and their desires. I never even caught a glimpse of El Loco, even though his shouting rang in my ears nearly all the way home. Maybe he even chased me and I didn’t know it.
But I wasn’t worried about El Loco. He’d saved me from shame, maybe even saved my life. I had another crazy guy to worry about, one with a knife.
On the porch, at my house, there was the rest of the gang. Why hadn’t they been there a few minutes before?
I ran back to the bathroom. I felt like vomiting, but nothing came up. I was shaking and sweating and cold all at once. My hands trembled. I started worrying about the pervert. What if he came after me? He knew where I lived. What if he was out there at that very moment, waiting for me, his switchblade in his pocket? What about tomorrow or the next day? Or the day after that? Or next month?
I stayed inside the house for the rest of the day.
Jorge came by and asked me why it had taken that guy so long to pee.
“I don’t know. He was such a goofy guy. I don’t know…”
“Hey, El Loco got really close to us. He just kind of snuck up. That was scary, wasn’t it?”
“Yeah, really scary,” I lied.
I didn’t tell my parents or anyone else about what had happened. It was all too embarrassing. I felt stupid for having fallen for the guy’s deception, especially since I’d been warned many times not to talk to strangers or go places with them. I’ve been really stupid, I thought. I can’t tell anyone. And I certainly can’t tell anyone that the guy asked me to help him pee. No way.
I did tell my mom several months later, but by then it was too late to chase down the guy. I told her because I couldn�
�t stop worrying that he would show up at our front door again. I was staying indoors as much as possible, trapped in my house by fear of him.
Then I had an even worse thought. What if Ernesto had sent him? After all, why had the guy come to our house? He admitted that it was the first time he’d been in our neighborhood. Why was he there then? Why had he insisted that I, and I alone, follow him to the back of that abandoned building? I couldn’t ask Ernesto, because that would have meant revealing the incident to him. Besides, I knew he’d lie if he’d really put the guy up to it.
I became as paranoid as my uncle Filo. I even began to fear that I’d run into the guy in the United States. The thought of being alone in the States, with no one to protect me from that creep, was more than I could bear.
So I told my mom. And she hugged me and said all the things a mom should say and scolded me mildly for not having told her sooner.
“Your father is a judge, don’t forget. If you’d told me earlier we could have found the guy and your dad could have put him in prison, where he deserves to be. Maybe he’s still out there, hurting other little boys.”
So now it was also my fault that he was still out there, somewhere, being himself, excited in the presence of little boys. But she was right, and I knew it. If I had blurted out the awful truth the minute I set foot in my house that day, we could have probably chased him down. I know that because two or three days later, when I finally ventured beyond my house, I ran into his dog.
There he was, the leaping pervert of a dog. Reminding me.
One of our neighbors now owned him. After he tried to knife me, the bastard had gone door to door and sold the dog to the Basque family whose backyard was adjacent to ours.
I had to hear that demon hound barking every day. I had to see the accursed dog all the time, too. I told my mom about the dog when I told her about the pervert, but when she asked the neighbors about it, they said they didn’t know the name or address of the guy who had sold them the dog.
Too late, too bad.
Glorious Revolution. We were all supposed to be transformed overnight, saved from self-love. And were we transfigured yet?
Yeah, sure. We had changed as much as the lizards had.
The lizards stared, as always, indifferent to what humans did, back in the Garden of Eden and back behind that abandoned building.
Lucky bastards.
33
Treinta Y Tres
If you’ve never seen a ripe breadfruit, you haven’t really lived.
They are so unbelievably spongy when ripe. Years later, when I saw the film Mutiny on the Bounty, I immediately understood why the good ship H.M.S. Bounty was so full of breadfruit, and why the British were so determined to spread breadfruit to all tropical corners of their empire, including the Caribbean. Ripe breadfruit explodes so nicely on impact. So thoroughly. So messily. What is an empire without breadfruit? A sham.
The giant breadfruit tree in the yard next to my house stood as tall as the monument to the U.S.S. Maine on the Malecón. And it was always loaded with huge green round breadfruits, each about the size of a small melon. So round, so pocked, their surface covered with little square mounds, each blessed in its center with the slightest hint of a nipple. Hundreds of little breasts, arranged in beautiful intricate whorls: little teats, which, when pricked or shot with BBs, would ooze a white milky liquid. Those huge green balls of soft milky pulp with a firm brown stem on their crown, a stem you could grab like the handle and use so well for throwing. They were just like the German grenades the Nazis used in war movies, only round instead of tubular.
We had heard that breadfruit was edible. We knew this because we had often seen the Jamaican man collect the breadfruits and go home with a burlap bag full of them. He told us it was delicious, in a very strange accent. We laughed at him and thought him crazy. Breadfruit was not for eating. It was for shooting at with BB guns or for throwing.
Years later, after Tony and I had left, and after my mother had left, and our uncle Filo had gone loco, my father and Ernesto would eat breadfruit. That’s what can happen after a Revolution, especially one with a capital R.
But years before Louis XVI ate breadfruit, during one of our days in Limbo, we suddenly woke up to the fact that the crop next door was bountiful. The huge tree groaned under the weight. The ground was covered with them. The shade under the tree, so dark, so cool, must have preserved the fallen fruit. Our neighbor’s gardener had even started to pile up some of the fruit in the corner of the yard nearest the entrance to our house. One hop over the iron fence, taking care not to impale yourself, and you were in breadfruit paradise. We didn’t worry about damaging the hibiscus bushes right under the fence. They were expendable.
We had tossed breadfruit before that day. We knew its potential. But we had never before been inspired to throw more than a few. How we got started, I can’t remember. All I know is that we threw one or two and then couldn’t stop.
These breadfruit were absolutely perfect.
Such beautiful detonations when they hit something, anything. Such a splat, such a reverberating, satisfying concussion. A faint yet true echo that touched each of us deep in our souls. And what a feast for the eyes as well: all that gooey pulp hurtling through space, adhering to whatever stood in its way or falling to the ground in perfect arcs, so obedient to the law of gravity. And that smell, that primal scent, that musk, that fifth dimension. It spoke of swamps, ooze, eggs and sperm, and infinite reproduction. We didn’t know about that stuff yet, at least some of us didn’t. All we knew was that it was a fine smell, as fine as they come, giddily perched on that elusive boundary that stands between right and wrong.
We hopped over that spear-point fence, raided the pile of breadfruit the neighbor’s gardener had left for us, and threw and threw and threw. Most of our shots missed their intended targets, but some were bull’s-eyes. The sound of ripe breadfruit exploding on the chest of a ten-year-old boy is like nothing else in the world. Except for maybe the sound of ripe breadfruit exploding on the head of a ten-year-old boy. The sight of it, too. The pulp smeared on the shirt, the forearms, and especially the chin and neck. The strands of pulp falling off someone else’s chin, as you laugh so hard that you think you’ll lose your mind. The strands on the eyelashes, and those up the nostrils. Even funnier. Especially when the target is your own brother.
We didn’t break up into teams as we usually did, the older guys against the younger—always a guaranteed loss for Rafa and me. This was the ultimate free-for-all. Each for himself and God against all. This was our own World War, which we knew so well from movies. It was the fall of Berlin, the fall of Rome, the fall of Havana. It was the beginning and the end rolled into one. The Alpha and Omega. Emanation and Remanation. The Big Bang, coming and going. The Big Whimper, too.
The five of us knew our world had come to an end. The Apocalypse had arrived. We all knew that our parents were making plans to send us to the United States. We knew our days under the breadfruit tree were numbered.
So we threw those smelly, gooey breadfruits, hurled them with absolute abandon, with fury. We tried to inflict as much damage as possible. We laughed our heads off, even when we got hit. Those breadfruit hurt, but we didn’t feel pain. We laughed and kept throwing, more and more.
I think it was El Alocado Eugenio, as always, who found a way to open the gate that led from the neighbor’s yard to the street. It doesn’t matter who opened the gate, really. What matters is that the breadfruit war, at first safely contained, spilled out onto the street. This being a free-for-all, each of us had to gather ammunition and throw on our own. Raiding the breadfruit pile, or gathering fruit from the ground once the pile vanished, while keeping an eye on four opponents wasn’t easy. Carrying an armload of mushy fruit out onto the street while being pelted from four directions was even harder. But somehow we managed to do this, each of us fighting against the other.
Then the rules of war changed. Many of the houses on my street had masonry or cement walls r
ight up against the sidewalk, most of them about four feet tall, and we quickly figured out that these barriers could serve as fortresses. Someone called a time-out, and we each gathered a pile of ammunition to bring behind our respective ramparts.
I don’t know how long the truce lasted. But each of us gathered enough breadfruit to cover one entire suburban street in the tropics with breadfruit slime. And that’s what we did. We were five boys throwing breadfruit from one side of the street to the other, with a no-man’s land in between, just like soldiers in their trenches at Verdun. Five boys seeking shelter from gooey projectiles behind five walls on opposite sides of the street, lobbing, hurling, tossing, seeking to maim one another, or at least to smother their world with sticky, stinky pulp. We couldn’t throw to anyone on our own side of the street due to shrubbery. So it was three on one side of the street, two on the other side, and the breadfruit flying across.
This is what it must be like to have a snowball fight, I thought.
The breadfruit flew that day as never before or since. Never, ever, anywhere on this earth, I’m sure, will breadfruit be hurled with such rage, delight, and courage. And as happens in any war, or any game, there came one moment of blinding, awe-inspiring bravery, of grace, brilliance, and heroism.
As our ammunition piles dwindled, Manuel made a daring raid on my brother Tony’s bunker. Armed with a single breadfruit, Manuel dashed out from behind his wall and entered no-man’s land, opening himself up to fire from all sides. Then, summoning all of his strength, Manuel launched his green missile at Tony the instant he saw his crew-cut head peering over the edge of the wall. The trajectory of that breadfruit was a perfectly straight line: good and beautiful, but not exactly true. Instead of hitting my brother’s head, the breadfruit hit the wall. And it hit it with such force as to make the entire wall move. I know it moved. I saw it move. The sound made by that impact was by far the most sublime of the day. This was no mere splat, it was a peal of thunder, an earthquake’s rumble. I can still hear it and feel it. I think I shall always hear it and feel it shake. Such a beautiful sound, so much like the pounding of a human heart. I shall always see that wall move, too. Such a miracle, a wall shaken by fruit, fruit thrown by a child about to be expelled from paradise.