“With all due respect, I will leave it. I am necessary because I have complete access to the remarkable and marketable twins. Their father is a close friend and confidant. Their mother is like a sister to me. Thirty percent, not a guilermo less.”
“If I were not an honorable man I would send Dr. Noir and his secret police to pick up the twins and deliver them to me. I assure you that Dr. Noir, who is more of a toady than you will ever be, would be certain there would be no survivors, that the parents, and anyone associated with the family, I assume that would include you, would disappear forever. As a benevolent head of state I would personally adopt the orphaned twins. Now, I’m sure you wouldn’t want that to happen. Fortunately, I am able to keep Dr. Noir’s basest instincts under control. Ten percent.”
They eventually settled on a fifteen percent share for the Wizard, of whatever might develop. After many hours of tossing ideas about it was agreed that the whole family would be moved to San Barnabas and set up in a fine home where tours would be held at least twice a day, possibly three, maybe even four times. The babies would be observed playing catch, and as their skills increased they would put on longer and longer displays. In return their family would be cut in for a percentage of the take, they would be fed, housed, and supplied with nurses and a personal physician.
Fernandella refused outright.
“I will raise my own children without the help of the state. How come a state that never helped me or even knew of my existence now wants to shower me with treasures all because my sons are unique?”
Hector Pimental lurked by the stream. A massive home in San Barnabas, good clothes, perhaps a car. His mouth watered at the prospect.
“We must work slowly,” he told the Wizard. “We will make changes so gradually that Fernandella will hardly notice, and when she does, the changes will be so beneficial she will not reject them. My influence will cost you 10 guilermos per day.”
The Wizard delivered the 10 guilermos which Hector immediately bet with him on losing baseball teams.
So as not to make Fernandella suspicious, Hector claimed to have been been wildly successful with his betting.
“With my winnings I am going to show my love of family by replacing the tin roof which attracts heat for a much cooler wooden one. Also the walls, and I will fill them with insulation to keep out the heat.”
Though mistrustful, Fernandella allowed the remodeling.
“Next a nursery for the twins,” proclaimed Hector, a few weeks later, flashing a wad of guilermos such as Fernandella had never seen.
The nursery was built, then a couple more rooms were added. Finally the grounds were landscaped, the brush and refuse cleared away, a low chain-link fence created a large front yard, with a sidewalk where passers-by could stare at the twins as they played by the miniature plate and pitcher’s rubber that had been surreptitiously installed.
“The ticket booth will be at the foot of the hill where Fernandella will not even notice it,” Hector told the Wizard who passed the information to the Old Dictator.
By the time Fernandella realized that people were paying for the privilege of watching her babies play catch, she was lulled by the comfort of her home, the fine clothes that had been provided, the abundance and variety of food, the new furniture.
“How are we being compensated?” she demanded of the Wizard, who now lived in a small home at the bottom of the hill, where from his window he could watch the tickets being sold and calculate his percentage of the take. He hired a housekeeper for himself, one who had formerly worked as a dancer at Miss Kitty’s Bar and Pleasure Palace on the seamier side of San Cristobel.
“The profits are mainly being held in trust for the twins,” replied the Wizard. “They will be very rich young men when they come of age. In the meantime your needs are being taken care of, are they not? You have to do nothing but put the twins on display three times per day. I myself receive a small fee for inaugurating the idea. The Old Dictator takes a percentage, for it is the Government of Courteguay that advertises the unique and stupendous Baseball Playing Babies, live and in color without commercial interruption. The Old Dictator also oversees the fees paid by foreign media for the privilege of photographing your beautiful sons.”
Fernandella was suspicious but she was dealing with powers far beyond her.
JULIO WAS WALKING by seven months, however Esteban remained stable in the catcher’s crouch until he was nearly three. Esteban stared straight ahead apparently concentrating on his pitching twin. He paid no attention to the throngs of people, many from the United States (the baseball playing twins increased tourism to Courteguay by nearly a thousand percent) who pushed against the fence, their cameras snapping photos constantly, clicking like cicadas. Julio often dazzled the tourists with a smile. The women immediately fell in love with him. He would stare arrogantly at the prettiest female in the audience, tug suggestively at his diaper, then unleash a wild pitch into the crowd, aimed, usually with great accuracy, at the stuffiest looking male present.
TWELVE
THE GRINGO JOURNALIST
I have more in common with the Wizard than I ever suspected. I often feel like the Wizard skulking in the underbrush witnessing events I was not meant to see. I am collecting material for my book on the history of Courteguay, incorporating my series of articles and features; to my knowledge no such compilation has ever been published. But I am coming to realize there is good reason for that because the history of Courteguay, such as it is, is so ephemeral as to crumble like pastry when put to any kind of test, to turn from a dew-studded spiderweb sparkling in the dawn to a useless daub of wet, black nothingness, only to reappear as a mysterious bright object visible only to certain birds.…
AS HE GREW OLDER, Julio was able to remember the batters he had faced in the womb. He recalled them as being grey and spectral, faceless as fog.
When Julio began pitching in the Major Leagues, he treated all batters as if seen in the translucent memory of his mother’s womb. When reporters inquired as to how he pitched to a certain batter, he replied that he did not know one hitter from another. When the press asked Esteban what pitches he called, he would shrug and say, “Julio knows the pitches he should throw.” When pressed further, to mollify the questioners he would admit, “by reading Julio’s mind, I always know what pitch is coming.”
HECTOR PIMENTAL studied his children as his calculating heart expanded in the throes of love. The ultimate battery, he thought. The perfect pitcher, the immaculate catcher, not shaped by fathers and coaches and practice, but created by the universe. Hector Alvarez Pimental was poor enough to know that God was a rich man’s device for theoretically keeping the poor happy, but always for keeping them subservient.
As a father, Hector allowed his imagination to fall in on itself, bringing him visions and memories of events in other men’s lives, as well as his own, for which he would forever claim credit.
He saw hot air balloons, exotic as jungle birds, hissing like a dragon’s breath, gliding across the sky like wondrous, garish melons. Hector Alvarez Pimental would wake in the night yowling, sweat-soaked, his mind like a box of photographs scattered callously on a floor.
He saw the Wizard dressed in harlequin-bright silks, in a flying basket, swishing over San Barnabas, the presidential machete held high in triumph. He was witness to his son, Julio, standing like a general in front of a row of pregnant women, fresh as cherry blossoms. A contest of some kind? He was unsure.
He also dreamed that he saw Julio pitch the final delivery of a no-hit, no-run game, then be mobbed by players and fans alike. He saw Julio in a business suit, older than Hector Alvarez Pimental was now, the sleek black hair on each side of his head tinged with grey, being inducted into the American Baseball Hall of Fame.
But the visions were not all pleasant, for he saw his Fernandella in mourning. He saw her dressed in clingy black crepe like the elderly crones who creaked into what few priestless churches were left standing, on her knees clawing at an elaborate
coffin. Hector Alvarez Pimental peered with trepidation over Fernandella’s shoulder, his chest tight, afraid he was about to see himself in the coffin. What he saw, though not his own body, was equally shocking, for there lay his perfect son, Esteban, sturdy arms folded in death, called away at what appeared to be the prime of his life.
SOON AFTER THE BASEBALL-PLAYING TWINS were born, a clear brook, four inches wide, with water the cold blue of ice, began flowing downhill, passing only yards from the tin-roofed shack. The stream plashed softly and the cool waters held a plentiful supply of iridescent parrotfish, their larkspur-blue bodies darting like shadows. A guava tree in full fruition manifested itself among the bone-dry scrub on the hillside behind the shack where the Wizard had skulked. A dozen lemon-crested cockatoos appeared in a row on the tin roof and kept the area free of insects, while the yard filled with pheasants and game hens, tame and docile, anxious to lay down their lives to provide food for Fernandella and her family.
The babies slept at the opposite ends of their crib, each in their accustomed positions: Julio as if he had just delivered a sidearm curve, Esteban as if he had just caught one.
By six months of age the twins were playing catch with passion fruit. Julio was long and lean with an oval face and forehead, while Esteban was stocky and wide-faced with a low hairline and teacup ears.
“IF THEY ARE GOING TO BE FAMOUS, they will require some education,” said Hector Alvarez Pimental.
“They must be able to do sums,” nodded Fernandella, who sometimes was drawn in by the bombast of the Wizard, and the furtiveness of her husband. She changed her tone and immediately became jocular.
“They will need adding and subtraction in order to count all the guilermos they will earn. You might give them practice carrying sugarcane so they will bear up well under the weight of their wealth.”
The Wizard agreed to become tutor to the twins.
“In America,” the Wizard pronounced, calling up distant memories, like a long arm reaching deep into a rain barrel, “in America baseball players are more powerful than Bishops, more popular than the slyest politician, more revered than the greatest inventors.
“Every October, the best player in the American League is carried to the President of the United States. There is a monstrous golden scale in the White House palace of the President. The player is seated on the scale, and his weight—he is allowed to eat a huge breakfast first—is matched in golden coins and priceless gems. When the player and his booty are equally balanced, the president takes off his diamond ring and tosses it in among the coins and gems, sending the delicate balance …” at that point the Wizard lost his train of thought and had to change marvels.
“At least so the tabloid press tells me. I am also told the water faucets in the hotels where the baseball players are accommodated, are made of gold,” he went on.
The only faucet Hector and Fernandella had ever seen was the single water pipe in San Cristobel town square with its rough, hexagonal head that screwed up and down.
“Tell us about the food,” said Hector Alvarez Pimental.
“Ah, the food. Everything tastes as you wish it to. It doesn’t matter what you eat, it tastes exactly like what you crave at that moment.”
“My cornmeal would taste like chocolate?” said Hector.
“Indeed,” said the Wizard. “It is the American way.”
THIRTEEN
THE WIZARD
At two years of age Julio struck out his father, using two curve balls and a sinking slider. Almost immediately after their birth, Salvador Geraldo Alfredo Jorge Blanco, as the Wizard now called himself, had a special pitcher’s mound installed beside the stream where the blue fish darted like needles, the rubber stolen in the dead of night from Jesus, Joseph, and Mary Celestial Baseball Palace.
Hector Alvarez Pimental saw to it that Fernandella became pregnant again as quickly as possible, in fact she produced four more children at ten-month intervals, two boys and two girls. The Wizard made no further predictions over Fernandella’s belly, though her husband beseeched him to; the Wizard even declined to predict the sex of the unborn. To the great disappointment of Hector Alvarez Pimental all the children but one were born without abnormalities. The dwarf, Agurrie, might have had some magical appeal if she were male, but a female dwarf was merely bad luck in Courteguay, though even as a baby she had an ice-pick stare that was said to be able to spin the mobile that hung in the listless air above her crib. There was not a hint of magic about any of the others.
As the twins grew older Fernandella’s vigilance slackened. Overwhelmed with newer babies and perpetual pregnancy she eventually became relieved to see the twins troop off with their father and the Wizard in the direction of the baseball fields. By the time they were five they were playing in a league for teenagers and winning regularly. Their father became almost prosperous by betting on them, until bookmakers, especially the Wizard, refused to accept any more bets on the battery of Julio and Esteban.
Years later, at the height of their career, shortly before his untimely murder, Esteban Pimental would look on his major league career with mild amusement. Esteban was the more passive of the brothers. Stocky and round faced, he was slow to anger, slower to smile, while Julio on the other hand, was taller, with his father’s hooded eyes and sly smile, and a dangerous energy accompanied by a propensity to take chances.
Esteban even as a child in Courteguay was serious and studious, wanting to discuss with the Wizard questions of philosophical magnitude. Rather than discussing how to pick a runner off first base he was interested in questions of religious significance. Esteban often went to view the priests. Years earlier, the Old Dictator had, at great expense, imprisoned the priests by installing fourteen-foot chain-link fencing around every manse in Courteguay. When General Bravura overthrew the government and took power, he did nothing to remove the fences. Esteban would stand outside the frosty-bright metal fence, watching the old priests walk, hands behind backs, black cassocks sweeping the ground, their strides ungainly, lumbering like tall, mangy bears. The priests occasionally blessed a goat or a peasant who came too close to the fence. Esteban noted that the priest’s eyes were rheumy and their teeth bad.
“Why doesn’t God melt down the fence?” Esteban asked the Wizard.
“Why should he?” asked the Wizard.
“Because the priest is God’s representative. He does God’s work.”
“What can the priests do on the outside that they cannot do inside the fence, except graveside services? If they wished to they could lead prayers, perform marriages, administer the Eucharist, hear confessions; the sick could be brought to visit them. Because these priests choose to decay before your eyes, to choose as their only duties the blessing of goats and lottery tickets, is not the fault of God. If I were God I would turn the fence to stone so the priests might disintegrate in private.”
“I have decided to be a priest,” said Esteban. “And I will do the same work no matter which side of the fence I am on.”
“You will go far,” said the Wizard. “I will see that you are allowed to bless each new balloon that I add to my fleet.” The Wizard, at the time, did not own even one balloon.
Word of the miraculous Baseball Playing Babies spread outward from Courteguay. In nearby Haiti, Papa Doc Duvalier, when he heard of the astonishing children, sent an emissary with golf-ball-sized diamonds on his ebony fingers, who offered to buy the babies from their father in return for a twenty-pound bar of gold and six virgins.
“In Haiti, women who have had sex only with Papa Doc Duvalier or a member of his cabinet are still considered virgins. The gold bar has a leaden center and the virgins have the pox,” said the Wizard, who had bigger plans for the battery. Hector Alvarez Pimental reluctantly turned down the offer. In America, he knew, baseball players were rich and worshipped. They were idolized more than generals, bullfighters, plantation owners, rock stars, or even Papa Doc Duvalier. Besides, what would Duvalier do with them, turn them into soccer players?
“They play soccer in Haiti,” said the Wizard, “soccer is for rowdies who are not yet smart enough to tie their own shoes. When I become President of the Republic of Courteguay I will have a baseball installed on our flag.” The Courteguayan flag was a solid green rectangle with a white cube at its center. The small square had no significance whatever, and the rumor was that the material for the first flag had had a flaw in its center that the flag-maker interpreted as a design.
FOURTEEN
THE GRINGO JOURNALIST
By the time the boys were seven years old they were playing in the best league in Courteguay, and were virtually unbeatable. General Bravura, who was now El Presidente, disagreed with the Wizard about possibly negotiating to send the boys to America. The Wizard went ahead and laboriously wrote a letter that he addressed to: El Presidente, American State of Miami, United States of America, The World. Or so the Wizard claims.
Since he mistrusted the Courteguayan Postal Service, a very small operation because sixty percent of Courteguayans were illiterate, the Wizard sent the letter to America by Dominican rumrunner, which would drop it off somewhere in the Florida Keys. He signed the letter Umberto Salvador Geraldo Alfredo Jorge Blanco, wizard, El Presidente of Courteguay in Waiting.
The letter, by a highly circuitous route, found its way to the Governor of Florida who, having ambitions to become at least a senator, if not President, forwarded it to the owner of the only Major League Baseball Club in the True South. If he was going to be a senator or President of the United States from the South he decided that the South should have a competitive baseball team in the National League. The only Major League Baseball Club in the True South had always had a reputation for mediocrity, even though the owner probably knew something about television stations, of which he owned hundreds, though he apparently knew little about Major League baseball.
Butterfly Winter Page 5