Kill the Ámpaya!

by Dick Cluster

  “I’m a big fish. I’m swimming against a cold current.”

  “A salmon?”

  “No, a manjuarí.”

  “The Cuban pike? But pike don’t migrate.”

  “How should I know that? I’m just a fish, I do what my instinct tells me. If you want to discuss ichthyology . . .”

  “All right, you’re a pike and you’re migrating. What’s happening now?”

  “I’m in the sea. On shore there’s a group of boys playing baseball.”

  “The manjuarí lives in fresh water.”

  Nicanor shook his head and shrugged his shoulders.

  “So hypnosis isn’t going to work. Give it up.”

  The part of the doctor that disliked the patient now hated him intensely, and that part had become much larger. He checked his watch again.

  “Look, your case isn’t as unusual as you think. It’s true that a Cuban who doesn’t like baseball is an aberration, but on a deeper level, what are we dealing with here? Rejection and fascination, desire and taboo. It’s a clear case of what we could call . . .”

  “Turn on the television.”

  “What?”

  “Obviously you don’t believe me. I came here today for a reason. Everybody—even me—knows the championship series just got under way and the first game is being played right now, here in Havana, against Pinar del Río. You’ve already looked at your watch several times. I know you’re dying to know the score, to watch. Turn on the TV.”

  The doctor did as he was told.

  The Industriales were about to lose. It was the bottom of the ninth, and they were three runs down, but they had the bases loaded. A sinewy light-skinned black man stood in the batter’s box.

  “Watch,” Nicanor said, and fainted.

  A subtle change seemed to come over the batter. He glanced around as if disoriented. The way he was gripping the bat didn’t even look right.

  So what, the doctor thought. Naturally the batter is nervous. It’ll take more than this, Nicanor O’Donnell, to get me to fall for the act you’re putting on.

  The pitcher delivered a wide, lazy curve.

  Thwack.

  The doctor had never seen such a stupendous blast. The ball was still gaining altitude when it cleared the scoreboard. All four players trotted home as the stands went wild. When the batter reached the plate, he leaned over, stared triumphantly at the camera, and drew something in the dirt next to the batter’s box.

  A fish.

  That was all. Nicanor woke up.

  “Now do you believe me?”

  It took the doctor almost a full minute to unclench his jaw.

  “That was . . . wow, I have to admit . . .”

  “Impressive, right?”

  “And you want these . . . episodes . . . to cease?”

  “Of course not, doctor. What are you talking about? I want you to back me up scientifically. I’m planning a conversation with the Industriales management about charging them for my interventions. The fact is, whatever they’ve accomplished, it’s thanks to me.”

  “But you hate sports.”

  “I detest them. But it would be stupid not to take advantage of this phenomenon.”

  A faint smile appeared on the doctor’s face.

  “Agreed. Come back tomorrow.”

  As soon as Nicanor left the room, the doctor pressed a button on his intercom.

  “The patient who just left my office is dangerous. He must be committed at once. Keep him isolated, make sure he can’t listen to the radio or watch television. Above all, make sure he doesn’t fall asleep, even for a minute, until I say so. If he looks like he’s losing consciousness, give him a good jolt of electricity.”

  The doctor cut off the intercom and stared into space.

  He whispered, “Pinar del Río, go team, all the way.”

  SACRIFICE

  Sandra Tavárez

  (Dominican Republic)

  Sandra Tavárez was born in Santiago de los Caballeros and is a graduate of that city’s Universidad Tecnológica in accounting. Her story collections Matemos a Laura, Límite invisible, and En tiempos de vino blanco were published in 2010, 2012, and 2016, and her work has appeared in periodicals and anthologies in the Dominican Republic and Spain. She has won honorable mention in five short story competitions, including the two national Concursos de Cuentos Sobre Béisbol (2008 and 2009).

  “If you love me, you’ve got to promise you’ll forget this damn game forever, or else I’m calling off the wedding and accepting my father’s plan to go live in Morocco, and you won’t be there when the baby is born.”

  When you see his eyes drop, a hint of triumph shows on your face. Holding your hands, he says, “But honey, we’re in the finals. We have to support the team. Why don’t we go with the boys and watch today’s game and then you can decide. . . .”

  You look at him and think about it. The boys . . . those two shiftless adolescents whose speech seems limited to batting averages, earned runs, RBIs, and who’s on the disabled list . . . that pair who monopolize the television and, by the time they leave, have turned Arturo’s apartment into a disaster zone. The same ones who call you selfish and manipulative, without considering that you’re turning your back on the comfort of diplomatic life in Casablanca with your family to stay by your boyfriend’s side. Still, as a sign of empathy—or, really, of sacrifice—you accede to the invitation.

  It took some ball-busting on his part to get an extra ticket. His friends are surprised to see you show up in the grandstand wearing the team colors. You feign interest in learning the basic rules of the sport. Arturo goes on at length to satisfy your newfound curiosity while he tries to forget that his team is being held scoreless in what could be their last game of the season.

  Suddenly all the fans are on their feet, singing and dancing for no apparent reason. In the midst of the uproar you ask why they’re doing this.

  “It’s the Lucky-seven,” one of Arturo’s friends says.

  The jargon means nothing to you.

  “The seventh inning is the fortunate one,” Arturo explains. “You’ll see, we’re going to get something going.”

  Indeed, the first player to stand in the batter’s box sends the ball rolling toward the shortstop, who can’t handle it, so the runner is now standing on base. The next batter draws a walk and slowly trots toward first. Since the teams are separated by only two runs and the next batter is the most dangerous one in the lineup, the pitching coach of the opposing team calls for time, comes to the mound, holds a small meeting with the players gathered from around the diamond. When the conversation is over, the pitcher gets ready and then throws a curve ball whose descent is interrupted by contact with the bat of the powerful hitter. Automatically your eyes follow the path of the ball. You see it bang against the fence beyond the outfield. You see the center fielder run after it, grab it, and quickly get rid of it. You watch the runners who were on first and second reach home, the first on his feet and the second diving in head first.

  You’re surprised to find yourself on your feet, screaming and dancing in time to the music blasting from the loudspeakers.

  With the score tied at two runs each, the opposing team decides to replace their pitcher. You take advantage of the break to drink some water and catch your breath. The following batters are retired one, two, three, unable to score the runner from second base.

  The cacophony of the crowd does not abate, and you are not immune. You let yourself float in the human wave that washes over you. You get up along with everybody else and lift your hands in the air and then let them float down, again and again.

  Now, in the bottom of the ninth, the home team has runners at the corners with one out and the next batter standing in the box. There’s tension in the air. You turn your cap so the brim is in the back; you clasp your hands tightly as if requesting divine intervention. The pitcher gets ready and, when he lets go of the ball, it’s as if the runner on third were impelled by the same spring, taking him toward home.
The batter makes contact. In a desperate effort, the first baseman gets to the ball and fires it toward the catcher. The umpire, crouching behind the plate, crosses his arms and then extends them to the sides.

  Everybody leaps from their seats. Over the loudspeaker, for the first time, tomorrow’s game is announced.

  You feel Arturo’s arms around you, tightening, and then lifting you in the air. Holding you up, he kisses you, and then he exults, “We won, we won, we won!”

  You look at him. His eyes are gleaming in a way you’ve never seen, with an indefinable excitement. You could swear you’ve never seen him so happy before. You don’t tell him yet, but you’ve made your decision. If he wants to marry you and watch his son grow up, he’ll have to promise to forget about baseball forevermore.

  APPARITION IN THE BRICK FACTORY

  Sergio Ramírez

  (Nicaragua)

  Sergio Ramírez (Masatepe, 1942) has published the novels Castigo divino (1988, winner of the Dashiell Hammett Prize), Un baile de máscaras (1998, Prix Laure Bataillon, France), Margarita, está linda la mar (1998, Premio Alfaguara, Spain, and Premio Latinoamericano, Casa de las Américas, Cuba), La fugitiva (2011, Premio Metropolis Azul, Canada), and others. For his lifetime literary career he was awarded the Premio Iberoamericano de Letras José Donoso (Chile, 2011) and the Premio Internacional Carlos Fuentes (Mexico, 2014). His collected stories were published by the Fondo de Cultura Económica, Mexico, in 2014. He served as vice president of Nicaragua from 1984 to 1990.

  The night of the apparition that changed my life keeps coming back to me now, as I sit here without a wheelchair that would at least let me move around within the confines of the church the way I would like, because the Red Cross keeps promising one to Doña Carmen, but they never come through. Doña Carmen is getting on in years, but she’s the one among my parishioners who is most attentive to me, bringing me something to eat when she can, washing me, stuck the way I am in this wooden chair, not because of any accident that left me paralyzed, nothing like that, but because my sheer obesity has made it harder and harder for me to move and now I’ve gotten to a point where I can’t stand up, just trying to get to my feet makes my heart race like crazy in my bloated body, my ravaged face, a sick, overweight man like Babe Ruth when he got old, because he had heart trouble just like me, cleanup hitters tend to end this way, it’s well known that a slugger’s ability to power the ball four hundred feet over the fence into the night’s darkness depends on getting the right food, which is why in my glory days I had more than enough to eat, I mean the people in charge of our national team had cases of food delivered to my house along with dietary supplements like Ovamaltina and Sustagén.

  But all that’s long gone now, all gone in the whirlwind, swept up like litter from the street, and what I’ve got left is the fat, just the fat because my muscles went slack and soft and I’m saddled with this useless reservoir that’s slowly wearing me down. Once, back when I could still walk, though clumsily, I went to the Eastern Market with my string shopping bag to bargain my way through the stalls, and a butcher woman who was selling pigs’ heads on the sidewalk saw me go by, stuck her nose out between the heads hanging on their hooks, grabbed hold of the haunches of a whole pig carcass and shouted happily at the top of her lungs, “That fatso would be good for more than one can of lard!” And then another one chimes in, an older woman who’s got a knife in her hand, peeling yuccas under the shade of a big colored umbrella, “Don’t you know that tub of lard was a great hitter in his day?” to which the one with the pigs’ heads answers, “What the hell is that to me?” and the two of them double over in mirth.

  The apparition came in 1956, when I was fourteen. In those days I lived for baseball, I’d bat rocks I picked up in yards and streets, or green oranges I stole from orchards that exploded right on contact, I was the proud owner of a canvas glove I’d stitched together myself, and I was never far away from the radio that belonged to Don Nicolás, the coffee grower who lived in the corner house there in Jinotepe, across from the Santiago brick factory where I worked, and it didn’t matter what game was on, I’d listen. It might be Sucre Frech calling the pro games here in Nicaragua, or it might be the Gillette Cavalcade of Sports bringing us the World Series between the New York Yankees and the Brooklyn Dodgers, narrated by Buck Canel, his voice filled with that immense calm even in the most dramatic moments, that voice coming and going like a pendulum because the local stations got it from the short wave, so when the pendulum swung the other way only Don Nicolás could hear what the voice said because he’d put his ear right up against the radio in his living room and then he’d repeat everything to the crowd of shirtless boys gathered on the walk outside.

  But I confess that my worst addiction was to the pictures of Big League players that came in the wrappers of peppermint and cinnamon gum. If they were Mickey Mantle or Yogi Berra they had stratospheric value in the trades we made, but there were some others nobody cared about, you could even find them thrown away in the gutter, like maybe a Carl Furillo or a Salvatore Maglie, which was unfair, I don’t know why they were so despised, maybe because they played for the Dodgers and in our neighborhood around the brick factory we were all Yankees fans, but another injustice was to undervalue the pictures of Casey Stengel, even though he was the Yankees’ manager, maybe that was because he looked so sour, sometimes even comical, doing nothing but sitting in the dugout watching the game, giving orders and taking notes in his little book, so no matter how many times I explained that he was a real baseball sage who had led the Yankees to straight world championships, there was no way to change anybody’s opinion, pigheaded the way they were, which is all the proof you need to show that in baseball wisdom doesn’t always bring admiration, that the pathway to fame is to bang the ball out of the park, steal bases, and come up with spectacular catches, you know.

  But Casey Stengel, I’ll never forget what the old man said to a group of reporters before the fifth game of the World Series in 1956, the year I’m talking about. He said, “I’m starting Don Larsen and I’m not changing pitchers, shit, I’m not going to dirty my shoes walking to the mound to ask him for the ball, because he’s going to throw a complete game and, listen up, you assholes, Don has got balls the size of ostrich eggs and if he doesn’t win this game, I’ll cut off my own.” And he was right. In the second game of that series, Larsen couldn’t get through two innings, he got chased by the Dodgers’ artillery, but then in the fifth one he came out of nowhere to throw his historic perfect game, and as soon as he got that final out, Don Nicolás, who knew baseball better than anyone, he kept his own scorebook and had all these records inside his head, he came out on the sidewalk and we could see he was really moved, and he told us, “Look at that, boys, the most imperfect of pitchers is the one who throws a perfect game.”

  The apparition came on a night in November, the month after that World Series which brought the Yankees yet another championship. I’d gone out to the factory yard to take a leak, the way I always did, letting my stream water the cactus fence, stark naked except for some shoes without any laces because the heat in the storeroom was stifling so I always went to bed without anything on, with no choice but to breathe the cloud of gray dust that hung in the air because this was the room where they stored the bags of Canal brand cement that went into the brick mix. So, naked like that I was pissing like I’d never stop, with the same heavy noise that horses make, when I turned my head and that’s when I saw him. Casey Stengel. Lit up by the full moon just like the light towers of Yankee Stadium.

  His pinstriped flannel uniform looked impeccable, and his spiked shoes were well shined, I already told you how he didn’t like to get them dirty. There in the yard, among the piles of finished bricks, I turned toward him even though I was embarrassed that he’d see me naked and scold me for being shameless, but as I thought it over I decided that I didn’t have anything to blush about, because indecency was really more about ugliness, and I wasn’t skinny and I wasn’t bloated like now,
a bag full of fat with the fluids erupting out of me, no, I was a kid with good muscles shaped by the labor of hauling bags of cement to the mixer, pouring the mix into the molds, and working the handle of the brick press.

  His blue eyes regarded me from under his bushy eyebrows as he turned his hooked nose and sharp chin toward me, bent by his years, nodding like a night bird hunting for seeds in the dark. He kept his hands in the pockets of his blue nylon jacket and his Yankees cap pulled down to his ears, big pink ones bent double because of their size. “Baseball is your destiny, boy, a great destiny,” he said by way of introduction, with a friendly smile that I didn’t expect. Then he came a few steps closer and threw his arm around my shoulders, naked as I was. I felt his cold, bony hand on my sweating skin covered with the same cement dust that was caught all the time in my hair. “Why? Don’t ask me, that’s just how it is. But if you really want to know, I’ll tell you you’ve got long arms that make for a good swing, you’ve got eyes like a cat, and you’ve got hidden power that can clear fences, that’ll show itself if you eat well, if you eat eggs, milk, oats, and red meat. You want to know something? When Yogi Berra asked me why I was so sure he’d be a great catcher, I told him to stop asking me dumb questions, anyone could tell his body was made for handling pitches, like some crouching idol you might see.”

  Once Casey Stengel appeared to me, I knew my destiny was to bring glory to Nicaragua with a bat in my hands, that people would remember me, that they’d remember how every time I stood in the batter’s box, dreams would take flight in the stands like doves popping from a magician’s hat, fans would be on their feet by the thousands, hoarse from cheering me as I circled the diamond after each cuadrangular. A great reporter, Edgard Tijerino Mantilla, wrote that my name belongs to history. My feats are told in all the files full of clippings, photos, and certificates that I’ve got piled right here, next to the altar, because when I lost my house in the barrio of Altagracia the only things I could save were my papers and two of my trophies, the ones right next to the boxes of files. The gilded trophy that looks like a Greek temple held up by four columns, that’s for winning the batting championship in the World Series of December 1972, played here in Managua, the series when I hit the jonrón that hung the Cuban team, invincible up till then, right out to dry.