The Gringo Champion

by Aura Xilonen

  “Thanks, Mrs. Marshall,” I reply, calling her by her name.

  “Well,” she says, surprised, “I see I’m not the only person with an eidetic memory around here. Or have we met before?” She laughs.

  “What’s eidetic?” Naomi asks suddenly.

  “It’s a photographic memory,” I tell her, recalling the example from the dictionary of a man with an incredible memory that I had to read several times to understand it. I quickly dart my dark eyes over to the blue eyes of Mrs. Marshall. “With a photographic memory, you remember everything that passes through your senses and never forget it.”

  “Goodness, you continue to surprise me.” Mrs. Marshall smiles again. “Exuberant, darling, prodigial. If someone told me about it, I wouldn’t believe them, especially not coming from a boxer.” She takes a step backward. “Well, my dears, we’ll see each other some other time—duty calls.”

  She turns around and starts walking alongside the ring, waving and blowing kisses and smiling left and right to a bunch of dappers with pipes and gloves. Mr. Abacuc turns to look after her as if he were hyptonized.

  Suddenly, Dermont the dapper pulls me toward him and tucks a wad of bills into my hand, closing my fist around it.

  “This is from us,” he says swiftly, his forehead practically pressing against mine, “so you can replace those pants and because you shut those big talkers up.” He winks at me and hurries after Mrs. Marshall, who’s already reached the other side of the room. He catches up to her and they go out through one of the side doors that leads to where the tables are set up for the big charity dinner.

  “Well, shoot!” exclaims Mr. Abacuc, still absorbed in his thoughts. “Now I understand why she never forgets anything.”

  I quickly enter the changing room to collect our things. I don’t look at anybody. I head toward the corner where our bags and the crate are piled up. Naomi’s waiting for me outside with the gaggle of little kids. We arrange them by height so we don’t lose them on the way. Naomi counted them one by one after the last fight ended and, like a good captain, assigned them a section of her wheelchair to hang on to, and that’s how we led them around, a cluster of boisterous children clinging to the chair. Mr. Abacuc, in the meantime, was over with some acquaintances, trying to find somebody to drive Coach Truddy’s car.

  “I put your gloves in your crate,” says Mr. Bald, who’s sitting in the shadows, almost behind the table with the unlit lamp and the pen with the metal chain. I hadn’t noticed him. It seems like he’s not looking at anything specific—it’s dark on this side of the room, and all I can hear is him playing with his fingers, occasionally drumming on the Formica tabletop. “I also tossed your mouthguard in there.”

  “Thanks,” I say. I unwrap my knuckles and drop the bandages to one side. I take the keys to the Fairmont out of the crate, then look for my belt and try to cram the wad of bills in it, but it doesn’t fit. So I stuff it in one of the gloves and start getting ready. I take off the shirt and set it aside; I put on mine. Since my pants are torn, I stay like that, all bedraggled, one leg longer than the other.

  “You know something?” he says like he’s musing to himself. “In all the years I’ve been in this goddamn business, they’ve never ripped us to shreds the way you just did.” He drums his fingers on the table more slowly. “Never. And I don’t know what to think. Sergi’s going crazy. We just lost the circuit contract for the rest of the year because we have three young men laid out in bed. Sergi rushed down to the hospital like a goddamn mother of ailing triplets to take care of them.”

  I just listen. I don’t say anything. I keep cramming the bags down because I want everything to fit in the crate so I don’t have to carry the bags on my back.

  “It was all a mistake. A goddamn mistake. Sergi’s always been stubborn, a goddamn mule. And he always ends up screwing everything up.”

  “Why don’t you split up with him?” I ask when I’m almost done packing everything up and about to close the crate.

  “Oh, kid.” He lets out a lazy, tertulian, vinegary laugh. “Splitting up with family is a mission impossible, especially when your brother’s your twin and your best bud.”

  I lift the crate up to my shoulder, like I used to do with the boxes of cotton I brought to El Pepe and the boxes of books I carried back and forth with Jefe, and start walking toward the exit.

  “Hey,” I say before opening the door, “how much money does a boxer make?”

  Mr. Bald stops drumming his fingers.

  “Millions if he’s good, but if he’s not he’ll end up like me.”

  “What do you mean?” Just then Mr. Bald turns on the table lamp. His left eye is swollen almost shut and it’s protemical, inflamed, purple from the irrepressible hematous lump that’s practically split his eyebrow open. He sees me look at him carefully and I think he must feel bad because he tries to apologize.

  “Sergi’s my brother and I’ve never wanted to hurt him . . . Because I helped you, he . . .” He pauses and touches his black eye.

  “Listen,” I say, like that, suddenly, like the blow that purpled the rims of his socket—crude, like me, not like how Mrs. Marshall would say it, with her serene, assertive voice, never hesitating. “Do you want to work for me?”

  “What?” He takes off his cap and I see the three hairs on his head.

  “At the moment I don’t have a pot to piss in,” I say steadily, “but I want to be something more so I can do something good with myself and other people. And I need a trainer. What do you say?”

  “And why me?”

  I look at his cap for a second; he’s twisting it in his fingers. It’s clear he’s utterly defeated by everything, everywhere—like me, by motherfucking life itself, Jefe would say. The light reflects off his cheeks, his bloodstained mouth, and his swollen eye, which is swelling larger all the time.

  “And why not?” I reply.

  I open the door and the kids start cheering for me again out in the hall:

  “Li-bu-rio, Li-bu-rio, Li-bu-rio.”

  When we get back to the shelter, it’s late at night. The kids are sleeping in the van like peeled chayote fruits. A trusted friend of Mr. Abacuc has brought the Fairmont back to Coach Truddy’s house so it wouldn’t be left parked outside the shelter and Coach wouldn’t end up with his wheels being stolen or, worse, the whole damn car. Mr. Abacuc gets out of the van and heads up the walk to the house.

  Naomi’s slumbering. She fell asleep before we were even through the first intersection. She laid her head down on my shoulder and stayed like that the whole way home. Drooling.

  “Naomi, we’re here,” I say, but she’s out like a light. Mr. Abacuc has opened the front door, and suddenly I hear a little shriek.

  “Oh, you startled me, sir,” Mrs. Merche’s voice says.

  “Come help me with the children,” he answers.

  Mrs. Merche appears in a nightgown and sleeping bonnet.

  “Take two of them,” she tells me when I get out of the van. “Like this.”

  And she drapes them over her shoulders like sacks of flour.

  I pick up a couple of kids around their middles like pigs and carry them to the bedrooms behind Mrs. Merche.

  “This one goes here . . . this one goes there . . . this one here . . . this one there.” We deal them like playing cards onto their bunks. I go out for two more little boys, and Mrs. Merche grabs two little girls. We deal again and go back out. She picks up the last two. Mr. Abacuc’s trying to lift down Naomi’s wheelchair. I help him, and between the two of us we manage to get it down to the sidewalk.

  “Let’s get Naomi into her chair,” Mr. Abacuc says.

  I stand on the running board of the van and lift Naomi in my arms. I pick her up by the armpits and carry her to the chair. I bend over to put her down, but she won’t let go.

  “Naomi, let go.”

  “No,” she says drow
sily. “Arry me inside.”

  Mrs. Merche comes back.

  “Pass her to me,” she tells me.

  I place the girl in her arms, and she takes her inside.

  Mr. Abacuc is already opening the back of the van. I take Naomi’s wheelchair and load it up with the crate and the kids’ bags. I push it to the gym and unload it there, grab my things, and then take the wheelchair to Naomi’s room, where Mrs. Merche is already putting her in her nightclothes under the covers. I leave the chair next to her dresser and go out again. Mr. Abacuc closes the rear doors and locks the van.

  “Are you tired, Liborio?” he asks, tucking the keys into his coat pocket.

  “Not really,” I say truthfully.

  “I’m pooped,” he says. “Let’s go inside.”

  “I’ll be there in a minute.”

  Mr. Abacuc stops and turns to me. He pauses for a moment before speaking.

  “Liborio,” he says to me. “I’m really sorry, son. I never intended . . . you know . . . I think we’re all here on this earth to serve others, not to take advantage of them.”

  “You’ve always been very kind to me, Mr. Abacuc. Don’t worry . . . Do you remember when you prescribed me those ointments for my bruises?”

  “Ha!” He gives a sigh of relief, as if the memory has somehow alleviated the present. “How could I forget! They really clobbered you that time, son.”

  “See here, do you know other stuff about medicine?”

  “Not as much as I’d like.”

  “Do you know what Clopidogrel is used for?”

  “What-grel?”

  “Clopidogrel.”

  Mr. Abacuc lowers his chin and strokes his gray beard.

  “They prescribe that to old people to prevent heart attacks. It’s a blood thinner, kid. Why?”

  “Do you think Coach Truddy will need that?”

  “I don’t know, son. By the way, I’m going to try to get in touch with Ms. Webber to see how he’s doing. I hope it’s not too late at night. Don’t be too long, Liborio!” He goes inside the shelter. I hear him open his office door and walk across the room.

  I breathe hard, deep, scourging all my alveoli, sweeping a gale toward my internal roots. The oxygen revives me inside, like a homeric rhapsode. The air tastes different on this side of the city. I leaf through the street one last time and disappear through the door.

  It’s almost noon and it’s raining again. The sky is gray but the rain is light, drenchative only on the surface. I turn toward the chickadee’s building and discover they’ve demolished the front wall of the fucking bookstore. And the entrance is nowhere to be found. It looks like an old, dismembered shell. There’s only a metal mesh containing it, like a straitjacket, from one side to the other. There are also a few wooden boards nailed up at the edges. I wait for a car to pass by, its wipers going, and cross the street to get a closer look. There isn’t anything or anyone inside the bookstore. No bookcases, no books, no counter, just damp dust and some mountains of rubble piled up in the corners. The electrical cables seem to have been ripped out by the roots. The light fixtures have no bulbs, and the loft staircase is splintered. The shadows of the now-absent bookcases are traced on the walls, as if a nuclear bomb had vaporized everything in the joint. The tile floor has been pulled up, and the storeroom door has been yanked off its hinges and tossed aside. In the right-hand corner, where the shelves of American novels translated into Spanish used to be, there is now a metal structure that resembles a scaffold, or a tower, or a square ladder. On it are a few boards with some buckets perched on top of them.

  “Jefeeee?” I shout loudly, the veins in my neck popping out. But its naked walls return only my echo, lacquered with dust. “Booooss!” I repeat.

  “Duuuudee!” I hear Aireen’s voice far off. Among the clouds, like an accordion of raindrops.

  I quickly turn around.

  I look all over for her, look toward one street corner, then the other, but I can’t find her.

  “Up here!”

  Aireen is hanging out the window of her apartment.

  “I’m coming up!” I yell to her from the sidewalk across the street.

  “No, I’m coming down. Hang on a minute.”

  I cross the street again to wait for her on the stone steps. From there, the bookstore looks like a big cranium, a skull in the middle of the street. The upstairs windows have been removed too, and their empty holes gape out, staring at nothing.

  “Did you find a job?” is the first thing the chickadee says when she comes out of the building. I look at her; she’s wearing a little purple jacket and boots. We start walking toward the corner.

  “Why?”

  “Because you’re wearing new clothes. And that sweater looks nice on you.”

  “It’s a hand-me-down,” I say without thinking.

  “Oh.” She’s quiet. We turn toward the park.

  “I brought you something,” I say to break that silence that forms when a person has so much to say that he just keeps quiet. “I don’t know what it is, but I think you need it. It’s not much, but it’s a present for you.”

  Aireen wrinkles her forehead. I think she probably doesn’t like surprises. I take out a paper bag and hand it to her.

  “What is it?”

  “It’s not chocolates, I can tell you that—they wouldn’t fit in there. And it’s not balloons or flowers either,” I say, watching her profile as she bends over the bag. “Go on, open it.”

  Aireen rips open the bag and finds a box of Clopidogrel. She stops short.

  I don’t know if it’s the rain, I don’t know, but Aireen’s face starts trickling too.

  “Did you steal it?” she says without looking at me, staring at the little box of medicine.

  “I got money.”

  “How? This stuff’s really expensive.”

  I’m tempted to tell her they gave it to me for hitting some guys, but I don’t.

  “I got some work at the shelter where I’m staying.”

  “I used to be able to buy it,” she says, downcast, pensive, as if seared by something intangible. “Now all I’ve got is Candy, and that’s not enough.”

  “Did you lose your job?”

  She looks at me. There are little droplets at the tips of her eyelashes.

  “My grandfather thinks I’m still going to work. He doesn’t know they fired all of us and took off, I don’t know, to China or Russia or something.”

  We start walking again till we reach the traffic light. We cross the street and enter Wells Park.

  There are hardly any people out. The rain is going chop, chop in the fountain water. The grass gleams with waterlogged clarity.

  “Do you want to start a business?” I say as we walk down the gravel path toward the little palms and other trees.

  “What kind of business?”

  “I don’t know, something you like.”

  “I wouldn’t know how. Do you have any ideas?”

  “I don’t know.” Truth is, nothing occurs to me. “What do you want to do?”

  We reach a stone bench. It’s wet, but Aireen sits down anyway. I do too. The water soaks through my pants and I feel a huge shiver.

  “I want to travel!” she says.

  She rests her hand on the stone.

  I slowly

  very slowly

  put my hand on top of hers.

  She doesn’t pull it away.

  The rain falls.

  At this moment the grass must be blooming inside.

  I hear it rustling.

  Growing up around my feet.

  “You know something?” Aireen says, asail in her own world, still not moving her hand. “Before my mom died last year, she made me promise to take care of my grandfather for as long as he has left on this earth. And I’ve tried, I swear—I’ve
tried every way I can. Three jobs, because Mom’s illness wiped out everything—our old house, our furniture, our dreams. I’m not complaining—my grandfather’s a wonderful person, and I love him loads. He never made much money, but many years back when Mom was starting to get sick, he taught me to ride a bike. He would still leave the house back then and used to wander through the streets with his cane, and he’d take Mom and me to museums and concerts and art galleries. He’d take us swimming, and sometimes we’d go to the beach. Once, we went to Europe—yes, a marvelous trip with Big Ben, the Eiffel Tower, the Brandenburg Gate, the Colosseum, the Parthenon. I still remember it. He used to sell his paintings all over the place until he started losing his eyesight. I don’t know . . .” She trails off. The rain wets her face. She doesn’t blink. At that moment she looks fragile, crumpled under the raindrops. “If I die I want it to be fast, yeah, really fast, so I don’t cause so much pain for so long to the people I love and who love me. It should be just like that, out of the blue, tumbling down like a little bird that’s been struck by a bolt of lightning and lying there, lifeless, and that’s it.”

  I don’t know how to respond. The world seems so brand-new to me in this moment. At Jefe’s bookstore I surreptitiously read Virgil and Dante, and I don’t know what to do now because life isn’t the way they describe it in books. I also read Catullus and Bécquer, and I don’t know what to say. I read Boccaccio and Balzac, Homer and Tolstoy, in the park, and I don’t know what to do. I read Cervantes and Dickens, Austen and Borges. Pylorus and Aesop. I read the Bible in an attempt to figure out what the hell Father Terán was going on about when he talked about hell, and here, in this moment, I don’t know where to find an answer. I used to read because I didn’t have any other life to build there in the bookstore, and now I don’t know what I can draw on in order to say something, anything, that has any meaning. Life, fucking chingada madre, is not how they portray it in books. So all I can come up is this: