by Dick Cluster
That series, our Nicaraguan all-star team is staying in the Gran Hotel, and I’m already in bed because we’ve got practice early the next morning, but someone starts banging very assertively on the door to my room, the night after we beat Cuba, and my heart is in my mouth but I go open up and there’s General Somoza in person, with all his entourage, I can see men in suits and officers in military caps behind him, so I rush back to wrap myself in the sheet because just like with Casey Stengel, the time he appeared to me, I’m naked as the day I was born, and in stomps Somoza and behind him the television crew with all their lights, and he sits down on my bed, tells me to get comfortable at his side, the cameras focus on just the two of us, me wrapped in the sheet like the statue of Rubén Darío in Central Park, him in a linen dress shirt and smoking a big cigar, and in front of the cameras he says, “What would you like? Ask me for anything.” So after a lot of hard thinking and dry swallows, while he waits patiently, a smile on his face, I say, “General Somoza, I’d like a house.”
That prefab house, two stories, a living and a porche, it was just about ready, only waiting for them to run the electric lines in one of those new neighborhoods that didn’t collapse in the earthquake that practically leveled Managua that December. I went to look at it a bunch of times, the house of my dreams, and they promised me I’d get it right away, but it all dissolved with the excuse that the earthquake had left a lot people homeless, people needier than me. A whole year went by, a lot of petitions and pleas that got me nowhere, but then the fans, still so grateful even though they were busted flat because of the earthquake, made contributions to a fund set up by La Prensa to give me my house. Some of them gave money, some came up with zinc panels for the roof, others with cement blocks, and in my files I’ve got the picture from the paper where the publisher, Dr. Pedro Joaquín Chamorro, is giving me the keys. But that’s the house I lost because a half-sister on my father’s side, a loan shark by trade, whom I left in charge of it when I had to go live in Honduras because after the earthquake nobody could devote their attention to baseball, she sold it without my permission, claiming that she’d lent me money. She swindled me, and I was back with no roof over my head again.
About two years ago I went to the Sports Institute to try and get work, and after I haunted the place for quite a while they finally agreed to my idea of letting me work with little league teams, because even if I couldn’t get out of my chair I could still coach the kids, tell them how to grip the bat the right way, how to get set on your legs while you wait for the pitch, how to extend your arms when you swing, but then what they paid me was a joke, the checks always came late, they made me come in person to cash them, and with all those humiliations, I quit. Anyway what good was a meager salary that wouldn’t even cover the cost of my medicines? I’m a walking drugstore, remember, and Doña Carmen, Lord Jesus bless her, has a terrible time getting me the medications I need the most from the charity hospitals, pastor as I am of a very poor church in a barrio where the people live in puny shacks under the blinding sun between garbage dumps and ditches of dirty water, shacks made mostly of scrap, using rocks to hold down the zinc roofs because they don’t have nails, making walls out of black plastic on one side because they don’t have wood, and a cardboard refrigerator carton on the other. So how are my flock going to have money for my medicines if they have to struggle just to get enough to eat, and it’s not just that, because as their pastor I hear all the problems they bring to me, shut in here the way I am, I hear about drug addicts who beat their mothers without pity, girls drawn into prostitution at thirteen, liquor stores that open at dawn, and I offer them divine solace, but I know that it takes a lot more than preaching the Word to tamp down evil when there’s so much crime and so many needs—and yet they keep saying we had a revolution here.
My house in Altagracia was worth everything to me because it was a gift from my nation of fans. I had the uniforms I wore on my different teams in a special glass display case, along with the one from the national team with “Nicaragua” in blue letters and number 37 on the back, a number that if we really respected national treasures would have been retired so no one else could use it, and my bats, including the one that hit the home run off of Cuba, my glove, my medals, relics that one day should go into a hall of fame. But my sister the usurer wasn’t satisfied just to sell the house to a pool hall owner, she also took my mementos for herself, or she destroyed them, I never found out which. If I still have the boxes of files and the two trophies, that’s only thanks to a brother of mine—one who later lost his legs in an auto accident—who sneaked into the house before that leper sold it, and he rescued them.
When the war to get rid of Somoza broke out in 1979, I was a truck driver. It hadn’t been easy, but I had managed to buy a truck on credit, and I was doing all right hauling watermelons and tomatoes to Costa Rica, but when the fighting got roughest by the southern border I hid my truck for a few weeks hoping that the situation would improve. Then on the day of the triumph I got caught up in the explosion of joy and I put the truck at the service of the guerrillas pouring into Managua, to bring their troops to the plaza for the celebration. I made at least five trips, buying the fuel out of my own pocket, and look what happened next, some troublemaker from my neighborhood accuses me of being a Somoza paramilitary and right there in the plaza they confiscate my truck, and all my appeals to get it back are in vain, they can’t prove I was a paramilitary, which is ridiculous, but they tell me look, we found this photo of you with Somoza, and it’s the picture of the night he surprised me in my room at the Gran Hotel to give me whatever I wanted as a reward, a false promise, as I said, but that’s it, case closed, so I try to go to the truck dealership to explain but they won’t back down, a debt is a debt they say, they unleash their pack of lawyers on me, if you don’t pay you’re going to jail for fraud, so suddenly I find myself a fugitive, first my truck is stolen in broad daylight, then the mockery of having to flee from the law, that’s the prize the revolution gave me for hitting in fifteen straight games in the World Series of ’72, a record that nobody has been able to take from me, this is the comandantes’ praise for the four triple crowns in my untarnished career. You can see that the fame Casey Stengel promised me that moonlit night was no guarantee against injustice.
If I hadn’t been a ballplayer I would have liked to be doctor, a surgeon, but poverty buried that dream, and instead I had to do all kinds of jobs from the time I was a kid—baker’s helper, auto shop worker, machine operator in the Santiago brick factory. “Don’t worry about it,” Casey Stengel told me when he appeared, “Back in Kansas City, I wanted to be a dentist but my family was as poor as yours and I could never achieve that goal, and anyway I wouldn’t have been any good at pulling rotten teeth.” I struggled to study at night and graduate from elementary school, at least, while I worked days in the brick factory and they gave me a place to sleep, and after the apparition, though I wasn’t earning much, I took charge of my fate and saved part of my pay to buy my equipment, the spikes, the bat, the glove, though it meant I had only one Sunday shirt, not to mention a lot of other sacrifices I made. “Baseball is something sacred,” Casey Stengel told me, “and it’s a lot like a hermit’s life. Look, your neighbor Don Nicolás was right, my boy Don Larsen threw a perfect game though he was far from perfect, because he thinks he’s such a pretty boy he’s always been more interested in a wild night on the town than a good day on the mound. Let me tell you this in confidence, my boy: that perfect game of his was a fluke, and my prediction is that in a few years it will be forgotten. True glory is about perseverance, and when you win it, you have to give up the vices: liquor, cigarettes, gambling, and especially women, because all that is a ball of wax that brings you to the brink of poverty. Fame brings money, but there’s nothing worse than becoming famous and then being out on the goddamn street.” And look what a prophecy that was, because everything I earned I spent on women.
Did I already say I’ve got ten children spread around, each
with a different mother, because in my time of fame and glory I had no shortage of women? After a good day at the plate they’d come up to me wherever they caught sight of me and whisper in my ear, like maybe we’d be dancing and the whisper would go, “I’m not wearing a thing under this dress, put your hand here on my miniskirt so you’ll see I’m not lying,” these are memories I try to keep under wraps now, in my role as a pastor, and I regret that I couldn’t ever take Casey Stengel’s advice. However flattering those memories can be when they make themselves at home in my brain without my permission, what good are they now if at almost sixty I suffer from heart inflammation, arthritis, hypertension, and above all obesity, so these visions of women become an awful torment, they must be my form of punishment, these memories of women of all sorts and sizes who offered themselves to me, like the one who owned a Mercedes Benz with seats that smelled of pure leather, or another who invited me to her seaside mansion in Casares, or the one with pale blue eyes who sold beauty products door-to-door out of a suitcase, the one married to a fancy lawyer who took poison on account of me and nearly died, or finally the young student, graduate of a typing school, who asked me to check her out while we danced and sure enough she wasn’t wearing anything underneath.
After they confiscated my truck I was really feeling helpless until some Pentecostal brothers started coming by every day, bringing me illustrated pamphlets with full-color photos of happy families, where the husband in overalls is up on a ladder cutting apples from trees loaded with fruit, the wife and kids in straw hats are in their own garden carrying baskets full of all kinds of other fruits and vegetables, and some white lambs with ribbons on their necks are grazing in a green field, all that under a shining sun that seems never to set, a portrait of the bliss that comes only with the infinite mercy of faith, according to the two brothers preaching in a real torrent of words, one brother from Puerto Rico and the other from Venezuela, the Lord doesn’t care at all about worldly glory, or the traps of fame, they said, and they sat there for hours as if they had nothing else to do in the world but preach the word to me, as if I were the only one among so many suffering souls they had to convince, and then they gave me a Bible, and when they could see the fruit was ripe they told me which Sunday to come and be baptized.
For the ceremony they gave me an outfit like what they always wore, a white shirt with long sleeves, though I couldn’t button the collar because I was too fat, and a black tie, they rented a pickup truck and lifted me into it chair and all, and in the truck bed with me came the preaching brothers and some guys with guitars who sang hymns of joy all the way to a quiet bend in the Tipitapa River shaded by a row of willow trees, out beyond the plywood factory, where the brothers lowered me, chair and all, into the water up to my head like it was the River Jordan, so even though I caught a chest cold with a cough that kept me up all night, I did feel a deep peace inside and was thankful that the Lord Jesus was in me. I have to admit I never thought I’d be a man of the Word, since what I knew how to do was hit jonrones, which doesn’t require any eloquence at all, but the Holy Spirit took charge of my tongue and I learned to preach, which is why the brothers could trust me with the responsibility of this church before they departed for other lands.
If some baseball fan from the old days were to see me here, inside these four unfinished walls, under this zinc roof full of holes that let in both dust and rain, in this little church with its four rows of wooden plank benches and an altar with a red curtain that was once a campaign flag of the Liberal Party, my boxes of folders and my trophies in a corner, and the folding cot that Doña Carmen sets up for me every night, because the church is my home, that fan I’m talking about wouldn’t believe I’m the same guy, especially if he understood the invalid’s state I’ve fallen into, to the extreme that one night I defecated while I was sleeping, in a dream where I felt I was emptying my intestines without meaning to, and I’ve never felt greater pain in my life than to wake up smeared in my own excrement; that fan who once worshipped me would be tremendously disappointed, not to mention those women who took off their underclothes before coming up to me, the king of the cuadrangulares, so I could feel the smooth naked skin underneath their miniskirts.
What good was fame to me? What good did it do me to see the world, to have my picture in papers that are now yellow with age inside my folders in cardboard boxes? I remember the night in January 1970 in the Quisqueya stadium in Santo Domingo, when it was my turn at bat and a band in the grandstand broke into a merengue because we were behind in the seventh inning and the people were dancing, screaming like maniacs, I had two strikes with a runner on second and all night long I hadn’t been able to figure that pitcher out, a big black man, six feet tall, throwing fireballs one after another, but this time he tried to surprise me with an inside curve and I swung with all my might and watched the ball going high and higher out to deep centerfield, beyond the lights, beyond the starry night, dissolving into a cotton speck, a far-off feather, into nothing, and me just watching it go, not starting to run yet, not until it was completely lost to sight and then I let the bat fall like in slow motion and when I did start into my trot I doffed my cap to the stands in the half-light, the opposing fans who now formed a well of silence, so quiet I could hear the murmur of the sea as I circled the bases full of jubilation, down the third base line, now tingling with emotion, and when I crossed home plate dazzled by the glow of the flashbulbs popping, I felt like crying because that swing had turned the game around, and we won it, and now it’s not that night in Santo Domingo but the December afternoon in ’72 when we beat Cuba thanks again to my four-bagger, for which they promised me the house they never gave me, and now the sound of the sea is the voices of fans who stand and scream, on and on, from the seats, rowdier and rowdier as their emotions run high.
The Lord Jesus has set things in front of me: life and death, good and evil, because the Word is very close to me, in my mouth and my heart, for me to fulfill; so I accept that I shouldn’t complain or succumb to regrets. In the solitude of this church over which the wind shakes and shudders, rattling the corrugated zinc roof, I sit on my wooden chair and I know that when the door opens by itself with a creak of its rusty hinges, and the figure of Casey Stengel appears backlit by the noonday glare, with that face like a bird dipping down after seeds, and he says to me, “Are you ready, son?” it will be time to follow him.
THE END OF THE GAME
Carmen Hernández Peña
(Cuba)
Carmen Hernández Peña (Ciego de Ávila, 1953) is a poet, fiction writer, playwright, and literary critic. Besides her twelve book-length works in these genres published in Cuba, her poetry has appeared in anthologies and periodicals in Colombia, Brazil, Puerto Rico, Mexico, Spain, and the United States. In Ciego de Ávila she has been editor of the magazine Fidelia and the publishing house Ediciones Ávila and the organizer of a series of poetry workshops and literary salons. She is also a dealer in rare and used books and spent three years as a street vendor of Styrofoam witches.
Dear Pablo, Claudio left. All of sudden he said he didn’t love me anymore, and he left. Who can I talk to other than you? I’m feeling a very sharp pain inside my chest. Claudio left and I don’t think he’s coming back.
Next day.
Pablo dearest, I think this is turning into a diary. Yesterday I told you I had chest pains, precordial, I thought. But now I think it’s just cartilage.
The son of a bitch did the right thing by leaving before I ended up throwing him out. Don’t tell me this is just sour grapes. Not a bit. I want to go back to living the life I had before, without worries, free as the wind. I’m sick of men in their underwear (and you’ll remember what our professor Rosario said about them).
It’s been a while since a man fell in love with me. Jesus! Men give me a rash, they give me fits, drive me to drink, I don’t know what. They’re like vultures, is what they are.
Two days later. 10:30 at night.
I’ve been a modern Penelope, reviewing
my list of suitors, and there’s only one I like. He’s been after me for some time. I know it. Everybody knows it. I haven’t seen a sign of Claudio. They say he’s going out with some other woman. Strange, no? Maybe he’s a got a nickel-steel prick. To hell with him. I don’t want him around me again. What a chameleon.
The one I like is called Esteban, and he looks like a Visigoth. I never saw a male Visigoth, but they must have looked like him. Maybe we knew each other in a previous life. Any minute, he’ll grow tusks and assault me. Now I’m sleepy, it must be from this psychological vampirism. I hope I dream about him and not that lizard or oyster or whatever.
Next day. 5 p.m.
Pablo dearest, today I’ve worked like a dog. And I’ve made money, enough to buy an umbrella, but what’s the point, better to buy chocolate cookies or a good moisturizing cream—it better be good, for the vampire bite. Everything reminds me of Claudio, even the umbrella. I saw him yesterday. When we started dating we went to a restaurant. It was cold and rainy, and he put on a shirt of mine that was a little tight on him. Me, my only white dress, the only dress I had back then that was good enough to go out in. God, we were happy. What I jerk I was. Yesterday I saw him, and he looked pretty good, although people tell me he’s got a face like a cabbage. That’s not me saying it. I’m out of my mind, a little. But I was talking with the Visigoth, who is quite shy. I don’t like shy men, and it wouldn’t be very elegant to fall in love with him. He asked about Claudio and I said that he split. When I wake up in the middle of the night it takes me a while to accept that Claudio isn’t here. He was a Moby Dick in the bed, took up a ton of space. No way I can sleep in the middle now, I’ve got to squiggle off into a corner, like the whale might suddenly drop from the sky.