Nevada Days

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Nevada Days Page 11

by Bernardo Atxaga


  The dogs round about were barking gaily, the sun was filling everything with light. He set off uphill, just as the stranger had after the fight. He remembered how quickly the man had climbed the hill, with not a hint of tiredness. Yes, a wild cat, he muttered. Yesterday’s sombre thoughts returned. He was not as strong as he once had been. The best days of his life were over. He would no longer enter any bar in Guipúzcoa like a champion.

  The last stretch of the hill was a real effort, because the pain in his knee meant that he couldn’t bend it properly. Once at the top, he thought of going to the mine to eat something in the hut along with the miners. However, although his stomach was aching with hunger, he walked straight past and headed down the hill to his house.

  In a shady corner of the path there was a fountain and a drinking trough. When he took off his shirt and bent over to wash himself, he saw a snake swimming through the water. He made to grab it, but missed. When he missed again, he left the snake in peace and began scrubbing himself clean. His ribs no longer hurt quite as much, but his lip did, a lot. He would have to eat on the other side of his mouth.

  He took off his trousers and rested one foot on the edge of the drinking trough so that he could wash the bloody scab on his right knee in the water flowing from the pipe. Then he got dressed again and continued on his way. He was already very close to his house.

  When he went into the kitchen, he found nearly all the family waiting for him, his wife, his five sons and two of his daughters. His other two daughters worked as servants in San Sebastián.

  “Where have you been?” his wife asked. She was standing up, as were all his children.

  Uzcudun saw five axes on the table.

  “Haven’t you been to work yet?” he asked.

  “I told them to wait until you got back,” answered his wife. She was tall and very thin.

  “Fry some eggs for everyone,” he said. Then he spoke to his sons: “Take your axes off the table and sit down. And you,” he spoke this time to his daughters, “outside.”

  “What happened, Pa?” his oldest son asked.

  “Can’t you see? He’s been in a fight,” his mother said. She had put the frying pan on the stove and had the basket of eggs beside her.

  “First, let’s eat,” he said, sitting down at the table.

  “How are you going to eat with your lip all swollen like that, Pa? Who did it? He must have punched you right in the mouth!” said the youngest and boldest of his sons.

  “Be quiet, and fetch a loaf from the chest!” ordered his mother. “And the rest of you, set the table!”

  They were big lads, with muscular arms and shoulders from working in the woods felling trees, but they obeyed their mother like meek little boys. The table was soon ready: plates, knives, forks, wine, glasses and a large loaf of bread. His wife set the dish of eggs down in front of her husband. He helped himself to three, dipped a piece of bread in one of the yolks and raised it to his mouth.

  “You’re not as bad as I thought, Pa,” his youngest son said. “I thought you wouldn’t even be able to open your mouth. I would have bet on it.”

  “Be quiet and pour him some wine,” his mother said from the stove. She had finished frying the eggs and had started on the bacon.

  The narrow kitchen windows barely let in the morning light. Once the meal was over, the five boys picked up the plates, forks, knives and bread, leaving only the wine and the glasses. When they returned to the table, their mother sat down with them. They were all waiting. He leaned back in his chair and turned to look at the fire.

  “Tell us what happened, Pa. Something bad?” his eldest son asked.

  “Couldn’t be much worse. Today, I stopped being number one,” he said.

  His youngest son protested, laughing:

  “What are you saying? If I’m not mistaken you’ve just eaten seven eggs and three rashers of bacon. And you drank more wine than anyone else too. How can you say you’re no longer number one?”

  “He’s right there,” his eldest son said, and the other three nodded their agreement.

  He got up from the table and, pacing up and down, started telling them what had happened. He had gone to spend the evening in Mugats, but no-one had wanted to fight. Afterwards, when he was walking back in the dark, a man had appeared. A man with his face covered by a black hood.

  “Do you remember the masked man we saw at the wrestling match? Well, he was just like that.”

  His sons and his wife were listening attentively.

  He gave them a detailed description of the fight. The stranger was as agile as a wild cat and very quick with his left hand. He had kept delivering low jabs with his left fist, then flung a right at his face, fortunately with less success, because he didn’t keep his arm close enough in to his body. That was why he hadn’t come off worse really, because most of the time the other man had missed.

  “That left fist of his, though, was really something. I lost count of the number of times he got me in the ribs. He knocked the breath out of me. If his right had been as good as his left, I wouldn’t have made it home.”

  “But you gave as good as you got, didn’t you, Pa?” his oldest son asked.

  Uzcudun stood with his hands on his hips and looked up at the ceiling. He was not far off six foot five.

  “For a long time, the strongest man in Guipúzcoa has lived in this house,” he said. “But that’s all over now. From now on, that wild cat will be the champion.”

  The youngest son had stood up, his arms flung wide.

  “Don’t be sad, Pa! The strongest man in Guipúzcoa still lives in this house!”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’m the wild cat, Pa. I was the one who beat you last night!”

  Everyone else had now sprung to their feet too.

  “Is that true?” he said.

  “Yes, Pa,” his son said, going over to the cupboard and taking out a black scarf. “Here’s my mask!”

  Uzcudun also flung his arms wide.

  “Let me give you a hug, my boy!”

  They exchanged a long embrace.

  “So the strongest man in Guipúzcoa does still live in this house!” another of his sons cried.

  “That’s all fine and good, but now you’ve got to take up your axes and go off to the woods,” their mother said, silencing the hubbub filling the kitchen. “It’s time to do some work.”

  “Not the wild cat, though,” Uzcudun said. “He can stay with me. I need to teach him to improve his right hand. If he can do that, then one day, with that strong left hand of his, he’ll be world champion.”

  THE BOXER MEETS THE PRESS

  In June 1931, Paulino Uzcudun gave a press conference at the Steamboat Springs training camp, where he was preparing for his fight with Max Baer. It was attended by journalists from the most important newspapers and magazines in the American West: Ring Magazine, Sporting News, Nevada State Journal, Reno Evening Gazette, Los Angeles Daily, Sacramento Bee, Sacramento Union and Las Vegas Evening Review-Journal. Sitting next to Paulino Uzcudun was the ex-boxer, Jack Dempsey, who would be refereeing the fight as well as promoting it, along with the owners of various local casinos.

  The first question came from a reporter from the Sacramento Union, the only female journalist.

  “How should we spell your name – ‘Paolino’ or ‘Paulino’?”

  When he first arrived in America, the press tended to Italianise Uzcudun’s first name, calling him “Paolino”.

  “Primo Carnera is Italian. I am not,” he said in fluent but heavily accented English.

  The journalists from Ring Magazine and Sporting News asked him what he thought about his major fights, at the same time congratulating him on his knockout victory over Les Kennedy in Los Angeles three months before. Uzcudun talked about that fight in jovial tones, but frowned angrily when he spoke of his defeat by Primo Carnera. In his view, the only reason the Italian had won was because he had been able to take advantage of his greater height – Uzcudun was nearl
y six foot five – which meant Carnera had merely used him as a punchbag. The fight should have been declared a draw.

  The talk turned to the matter of referees, and a discussion ensued among the journalists about certain controversial decisions made in recent years.

  Dempsey waited for them to finish talking, then said:

  “All I can say is that I couldn’t think who to pick as the best referee for this fight. In the end, I was asked to take it on, and I accepted. I just hope that wasn’t a wrong decision.”

  Dempsey laughed when he said this, and most of the journalists present laughed too. They knew he would go down in history as one of the greatest boxers of the twentieth century, and they were just glad to be there, sitting only a few feet away from him in that warm, friendly atmosphere. The only ones not to laugh were the journalist from the Sacramento Union and a young man sent by the Reno Evening Gazette.

  “I get what you’re saying, Jack,” the young man from the Reno Evening Gazette said, “but what are people going to think? Forgive my frankness, but aren’t you afraid they might think you don’t trust the boxing associations in Nevada?”

  “That’s a fair enough question,” Dempsey said. “Nevada is a place very dear to my heart, so I wouldn’t want there to be any misunderstandings. The fact is that, before taking the decision, I got together with the representatives from the Reno race track and with the city’s mayor, Mr Roberts. They were the ones who asked me to referee the match. Actually, the mayor didn’t ask me, he ordered me.”

  The young man gave Dempsey the thumbs-up.

  “That’s a great answer, Jack. Thank you.”

  “Mr Roberts is clearly an intelligent man. If he manages the city’s affairs as well as he manages boxing, Reno should do just fine,” the journalist from Ring Magazine said.

  The woman from the Sacramento Union was holding up her pencil again. Her question was once more directed at Uzcudun:

  “In boxing circles, you’re often referred to as ‘the woodcutter’ or ‘the Basque woodchopper’. Were you really a woodchopper? Do you know how to handle an axe?”

  Uzcudun smiled and revealed a mouthful of gold teeth.

  “The men in my family in the Basque Country have always worked in the woods,” he said. “My father worked in the woods; my four brothers worked in the woods; and I worked in the woods. I once counted how many axes there were in the house. There were twenty-nine. Does that answer your question, ma’am?”

  “And what about fighters? Were there any fighters in your family?” she asked.

  “My father wanted to be a catch wrestler, but there weren’t that many opportunities for people living in small villages then. He fought at fiestas and other such events, and he was the best in our province. Until I started fighting, of course!”

  His gold teeth made another appearance.

  “What has been the most important day in your life so far?” the young man from the Reno Evening Gazette asked.

  Dempsey got in first:

  “Paulino can say what he likes, but he’s not going to fool me. The most important day in his life was when he met a certain pretty young lady in Hollywood.”

  Everyone immediately thought of Clara Bow, although her days as a movie starlet were long gone. There was a rumour in Hollywood that they had been seen together after his fight with Les Kennedy.

  “No, Jack’s confusing me with another boxer,” Uzcudun said. This time it was the journalists’ turn to laugh. Uzcudun’s rival, Max Baer, had a reputation as a Don Juan.

  A New York newspaper had just published a photograph showing Paulino Uzcudun holding up three girls, one on each arm, with a third sitting on his shoulders, her bare thighs wrapped around his neck. He had confessed in the past to the fun he’d had the length and breadth of the United States with women who enjoyed “the horizontal position”, and the unforgettable moments he’d spent driving along “the lovely Florida highways with some beautiful blonde, blue-eyed girl, of which there seems to be an inexhaustible supply”.

  But that wasn’t the image he wanted to promote just then. Among the fans who would come to Reno on 4 July, the day of the fight, there would be a lot of Basque shepherds, resident on the West Coast. His fellow countrymen saw him as an equal, a sober, honest Basque woodcutter, and he didn’t want to disillusion them.

  “The most important day of my life was July 13, 1927, when I beat Harry Wills in Madison Square Garden,” he told the young man from the Reno Evening Gazette. “There’s never been a better one.”

  The journalists waited, without asking any further questions.

  “I was paid eight thousand dollars for the Harry Wills fight,” he went on. “For the next one, thirty thousand. How’s that for progress?”

  “How much are you being paid for your next fight with Max Baer?”

  The question again came from the young man from the Reno Evening Gazette.

  “Quite a lot,” Uzcudun said, with a broad grin. As the Argentinian writer Roberto Arlt wrote, his smile was like an orang-utan’s.

  “Which has been your highest-paying fight?” the woman from the Sacramento Union asked. Dempsey reached out one arm and put his hand over Paulino Uzcudun’s mouth. There was some laughter among the assembled journalists.

  “If you don’t let him answer, Jack, I’m going to tell everyone right now what you pocketed for your fight with Tunney,” the man from the Ring Magazine said. He was a veteran reporter who spent long periods at training camps like Steamboat Springs, sending in two or three reports a week about upcoming fights. He knew all the secrets.

  Dempsey put his hands together in a pleading gesture. Again there was laughter in the room.

  “The fight I got paid most for was the one with Max Schmeling in the Yankee Stadium. I earned a hundred thousand dollars,” Uzcudun said. There was a silence, followed by that orang-utan smile. “In other words, seven times less than Dempsey earned for his fight against Tunney.”

  Dempsey again made as if to cover Uzcudun’s mouth. The journalist from the Sacramento Union raised her eyebrows.

  “Those are astronomical sums of money. I’m not surprised Thomas Mann is so appalled,” she said.

  For almost a hundred years, since the days of Jess Willard up until Muhammad Ali, no sport has paid better than boxing, and Thomas Mann, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1929, had, on more than one occasion, expressed his repugnance at this fact. It seemed completely unacceptable that famous boxers could earn more for a single fight than a German university lecturer could earn in a whole lifetime of work. This, however, was not the general opinion. Even among writers, the opposite point of view seemed to prevail. George Bernard Shaw boasted about his friendship with Tunney; Ernest Hemingway chose to write about boxing and had himself photographed as a prize-fighter; in Thomas Mann’s Germany, Vladimir Nabokov had given a lecture about the fight between Uzcudun and Breitensträter in Berlin.

  Jack Dempsey’s business partner, Leonard Sacks, declared the press conference over. He thanked the mayor of Reno and other local institutions, as well as the Nevada casinos, who had helped organise the fight.

  The journalists had already got up to leave, as had Dempsey, when the reporter from the Sacramento Union pointed at Uzcudun with her pencil.

  “Aren’t you afraid of Max Baer? They say he’s a hard hitter.”

  Uzcudun laughed. She went on:

  “Two years ago, he killed Frankie Campbell with just one punch. Remember?”

  Leonard Sacks took it upon himself to answer.

  “Ma’am, we all remember that unfortunate accident. Max Baer didn’t fight for more than a year afterwards, and the only reason he came back into the ring was because he wanted to help Frankie Campbell’s family. But this isn’t the moment to remember such a sad event. We’re on the eve of a really great fight, the best you could possibly get in the United States today.”

  “So far, no-one has knocked me out, and that’s how it’s going to stay,” Uzcudun said.

  Dempsey p
laced one hand on his shoulder.

  “The risk of death is never far from heavyweight fights,” he said, “and it will be there in this next fight too. For my part, I will try, as referee, to do things properly. What happened with Campbell and Baer was wrong, and should never have happened.”

  The press conference was over.

  A REFLECTION ON THE IMAGE LEFT BEHIND BY PAULINO UZCUDUN

  No-one lingers in the memory in all his or her complex biographical detail, and there are very few who become emblematic figures worthy of affection or admiration. Normally, the opposite happens. Most human beings leave behind them only a name and a few facts (“Humberto Alba. San Juan de Puerto Rico, 1951 – Mekong Delta, 1973”) or else disappear completely, like the Congolese children slaughtered by King Leopold II’s mercenaries as if they were chimpanzees. There is, however, a third fate, that of those who, when they die, leave a two-sided emblem. This is what happened in the case of Paulino Uzcudun, the most admired boxer in the Basque Country and in all of Spain.

  On the day Paulino Uzcudun fought the Italian Erminio Spalla for the European Heavyweight Championship on 26 May 1926, loudspeakers were installed in the streets of San Sebastián, so that people could listen to the radio broadcast. According to one local reporter, as soon as he was declared the winner, the fireworks that followed woke up the handful of people who had already gone to bed. Shortly afterwards, the new champion travelled to San Sebastián in a convertible Hispano-Suiza and was welcomed by more than a hundred thousand people cheering him on, shouting “Gora Uzcudun,” “Long live Uzcudun.” The reporter rounded off his report by saying that joy was universal and that everyone came out to greet Uzcudun: “the bourgeoisie and the workers, left-wingers and right-wingers, the ladies from the Yacht Club and the country girls who work as servants in the city”. To judge from the photographs, Paulino Uzcudun never once stopped smiling, and his smile did not yet resemble that of an orang-utan.

 

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