Kill the Ámpaya!

by Dick Cluster

  At first, when I saw her approaching the waterline, I tried to rid myself of deceptions. I told myself that what I felt was a symptom of my incurable belief that nothing in life is an accident and that first encounters are really the repetitions of earlier contacts that pass unrecognized.

  I remember that her feet had just entered the water, that she did not recoil, and that at this moment she let down her hair. With this image going right to my heart, I decided to send all my reasonable arguments back to Caracas without me. I felt that I knew her and that our meeting was no accident, or that accidental meetings are really dates made in dreams that we forget when we awake.

  Late in the afternoon, when the group she came with began to pack up their things, I gathered the nerve to speak to her. Taking advantage of her last plunge into the warm waters of Buchuaco, I approached her just as she was emerging from the sea. In the gentle breakers, I pretended to be washing the sand from my feet.

  “I recognize you,” I said.

  She stopped in her tracks, a bit surprised. She gathered some locks of hair and secured them behind her ear.

  “Where from?” She showed no sign of being offended.

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t?”

  “No. But I’m sure I know you. Are you from around here?”

  “From Buchuaco? No, I’m not. I’m from Judibana.”

  I found her precise answer both amusing and admirable. As if she were saying that being born on the same peninsula was a pointless abstraction, a generalization that did no justice to her home town.

  “And your name?” I asked.

  She hesitated a few seconds. I think my interrogation was starting to strike her as strange. I looked her directly in the eyes, without blinking, as if a break in eye contact would snap the slender thread of our communication.

  “Irene,” she said at last.

  “Irene from Judibana,” I whispered. “A lovely name.”

  Irene seemed to like this. She asked whether I still couldn’t remember where we met.

  “Still a blank. Probably I’ll remember too late, when I’m on my way home.”

  “Aha, you’re from Caracas?”

  “No,” I said, and this answer was heartfelt. “I’m from La Guaira.” And then, without knowing why, I added, “It’s too bad I know I’ll never see you again.”

  “I don’t get it. You remember me, but you don’t know where from. You meet me now and you’re sure we’ll never see each other again. Are you dreaming?” She ended with a smile and stepped forward out of the water.

  “Maybe we’re both dreaming.”

  Irene shrugged expressively. She seemed amused by the idea.

  “I tell you what,” I said. “In a few years, I’ll write a book about you. A novel. If you read it and we see each other again, we’ll know it wasn’t a dream.”

  “And how will I recognize the book?” she asked. She raised one hand to her forehead to shade her eyes from the sun sinking behind me.

  “By the title. It will be called The Man Who Talked About Irene from Judibana. How does that sound?

  “Strange,” she said. “But I like it.” And she left.

  When I reached La Sociedad, I felt so downcast that I got a really pathetic idea. I would drink steadily the rest of the morning and all afternoon. With any luck my boss would find me there and fire me on the spot for being completely drunk on a workday. That idea faded when I saw Juan Pedro at one of the tables near the back.

  I didn’t know him very well. We’d conversed only once, in a superficial way, although about subjects of some depth. This was at the German embassy on the way out of a talk about Thomas Mann that I’d attended more out of snobbery than true interest. I knew Juan Pedro worked in the literary section, and he knew that I was a newcomer assigned to sports. I still had that conversation fresh in my mind. I remembered that he said reading Mann had been the second most important moment of his spiritual life. Although he had no biblical beard, nor did he dress in black or wear a yarmulke, Juan Pedro told me he considered himself deeply Jewish. As far as I understood, there really was a far-off Jewish ancestor on his mother’s side of the family, but the heritage had been abandoned for generations until he, as a teenager, started to turn the pages of the Old Testament and found himself trapped in the Book of Job. Job’s story amazed him because of the way it took the most demanding human experience of all—faith—to its outer limits.

  “Faith only makes any real sense,” he said, “when you have nothing left to believe in.”

  This conviction, which like the universe stemmed from the creative force of the word, acquired new dimensions from the hypnotizing power of other words, other reading. When Juan Pedro read Joseph and His Brothers, he started to feel a deep antipathy toward his own name. The four volumes of Mann’s monumental work made him regard his apostolic name as an error committed in excess. He told this to his father, who heaved an exasperated sigh and told him to stop reading so much, to look for some distraction that would take him away from books.

  “Books are for reading, son,” he said. “Not for acting out.”

  Juan Pedro answered, with encyclopedic precision, that he was sure he’d read that same statement in a Mafalda comic. His father told him to go to hell.

  If you ask me, Juan Pedro’s father was right. Juan Pedro’s Judaism was an accident of reading converted to destiny. Soon after I sat down at his table in La Sociedad, he provided further evidence. Out of courtesy he asked me how I was. I told him that I was feeling sufficiently sad, nostalgic, and spiteful to get drunk at eleven in the morning in the bar closest to my job. Juan Pedro took this seriously and, making a gesture of disgust, told me that on the contrary he would not touch a drop of alcohol for years to come.

  “I was up all night reading a book of stories called The Invincibles, and believe me, by this morning I was plastered. I’ve never seen so much drinking in a single book in my life. So let’s just have coffee or juice, okay?”

  We ordered two big mugs of coffee with milk and two bottles of mineral water, and then we continued talking. Out of both politeness and curiosity, I asked him about the state of his faith. He gave me a stiff look, the coffee mug suspended in his hand. Then he dropped his eyes to the floor in silence, as if my question were a confirmation of something he’d been thinking.

  “Stronger than ever, it seems today,” he said with complete seriousness and a grimace suggesting distaste.

  “Why? What’s happened?”

  “What’s happened?” he said opening his eyes wide. “Does everything that’s happened seem like nothing to you?”

  When I answered, half confused and half embarrassed, that I didn’t know what specifically he meant, he recalled that aside from that conversation in the German embassy, we had never talked.

  “Strange,” he said suddenly, unable to hide a sudden blush. “For a moment I had the feeling we were good friends. Old acquaintances, from long ago.”

  Then, as if trying to make up for the slip, he told me his life story, the crucial turning points in his personal pilgrimage that the morning’s news of the death of Leonel Arcaya had thrown into stark relief.

  The last thing I would have expected from someone like Juan Pedro was for him to be a baseball fan—much less an inveterate follower of La Guaira’s Sharks. Only then, when he began to sketch the outline of his story, did I remember my “accidental” encounter with Carlos, whose cruel joke about the Sharks, Juan Pedro, and me flashed in my memory like a forgotten jewel in the bottom of a bag, the symbol of a bond that already linked Juan Pedro and me long before we met.

  After telling his son to go to hell, Juan Pedro’s father feared that his offspring could end up plunging his head into the toilet bowl or, worse, into the polluted currents of the Guaira River. Deciding to put his own advice into practice, one day in October of 1986 he took the boy to the University Stadium to see a game between the Caracas Lions and the Mariners of Magallanes. The experience proved disappointing—a smal
l, unenthusiastic crowd and not much in the way of passion on the field. This was because, at least in the ’80s, the true rivalry in Venezuelan baseball, the most heated and infectious, was between the Lions and the Sharks. Despite Juan Pedro’s lack of enthusiasm, the father persevered in taking him back to the stadium, this time to watch a game between Caracas and La Guaira.

  After that, everything changed.

  “In those days,” Juan Pedro recalled, “every spectator who entered the stadium got a small lottery ticket. You scraped the card and the name of a player appeared. If the player on your card scored the first run of the game, you automatically won a prize. A prize that equally automatically, at least for me, became a physical and unforgettable reminder of that game.”

  Juan Pedro’s card bore the name of Leonel Arcaya, a player unknown either to him or to his father, an expert on the Venezuelan League. A player about whom it is almost impossible to find any information today. Arcaya was a backup second baseman for the Sharks in the era of the famous “Guerrillas,” a nickname proclaiming their refusal to ever give up.

  “The first run of the game,” Juan Pedro said, “was scored by Arcaya. Between the halves of the seventh inning I went to the booth to get my prize.” So saying, he put a hand into one of his outside jacket pockets, pulled out an old baseball, and rolled it across the table into my hands. I could just make out a scribble in blue and black ink, nearly lost in the yellowed leather. I assumed it must be Arcaya’s autograph.

  But this was not the end of Juan Pedro’s connection to Arcaya. Years later, in the 1990–91 season, or maybe it was ’91–92, a second magical event linked Arcaya, the history of our storied team, and Juan Pedro’s own fate as a Sharks fan and a Jew.

  It was a game against the Eagles of Zulia in which La Guaira was fighting for a spot in the playoffs. From the outset, things began to come apart. Eight runs by the opposing team in the first inning seemed to have sentenced the Sharks’ dreams to death, a death already foreshadowed by the black bands around the right arms of all the La Guaira players in a sign of mourning for Leonel Arcaya’s father, who had died a few days before.

  In spite of the lopsided beginning, the game grew tense, with the atmosphere of a storm that has gathered but not yet broken out. The Eagles did not score any more runs, while the Sharks, as in a dream with multiple segments, began to close the gap little by little.

  “In the bottom of the ninth,” Juan Pedro said, “the miracle occurred.”

  With the score tied eight to eight, the inning began well, but then, in one of the unexpected shifts common in baseball, the going got rough. The Sharks opened the frame with a pair of singles, putting men on first and second with none out. As might be expected, the next batter was told to bunt. He bunted too hard, and the pitcher got the force at second. That left runners at the corners and the awful possibility of a double play that would keep the Eagles in the game. The next batter struck out on three pitches. All seemed lost.

  Then came Leonel Arcaya’s turn at bat.

  Ignoring a take sign, Arcaya swung at the first pitch, a changeup. He grounded weakly to second, evidently a routine play. Then at the last second, as in a story from the Arabian Nights, the impossible occurred.

  “Just before the ball went into the fielder’s glove,” Juan Pedro recounted, “it took a sudden hop. It shot up like a firecracker and handcuffed the second baseman. It kept going into right field, and the Sharks were in the playoffs.”

  “On the way out,” he added, “people talked about that lucky hop, how it must have glanced off a pebble, but I saw how Arcaya raised his arms to heaven, thanking his father for his decisive influence on the game.”

  Time went by, and the figure of Leonel Arcaya disappeared peacefully in the unfolding of new games and days and other names that far surpassed his. In the years that followed, Juan Pedro’s attention shifted from the individual magic of Arcaya, which only he could see, to the new shadow that gathered around the team.

  The 1993–94 season marked the beginning of the end. La Guaira plunged into an unthinkable losing streak of fourteen straight games, a new record. At the end of the season, Luis Salazar announced his retirement, which was the confirmation that the fearful Guerrillas of the ’80s had surrendered their arms. The next year there were casualties both on the field and in the stands. On April 28, shortstop Gustavo Polidor died under a hail of bullets in a robbery attempt. In October, José Ignacio Cabrujas, the country’s most incisive intellectual, died of a heart attack while his final article was still ringing in readers’ ears. The article was in the form of a letter addressed “Dear Padrón Panza,” in which Cabrujas apologized for having tried to shift his loyalty to other teams and requested—in what turned out to be his last wish—to be readmitted to the files of the Sharks.

  Juan Pedro felt that this string of events was not just a run of bad luck. The team’s drop into the cellar of the standings, its years without making the playoffs, the deaths that depleted the history of the franchise—these were all indications of a greater collapse. What happened on the field proved to be a prefiguration of the debacle that would engulf the state of Vargas at the end the decade. To Juan Pedro it was evident that the Sharks and La Guaira, the team and the city, the fans and the inhabitants, had been chosen for this suffering by God or fate. What happened in December 1999 was the full reverberation, in the sphere of reality, of what had been building up in the baseball league.

  This equation led Juan Pedro, in turn, to a bizarre theory about the relationship between devotion to La Guaira’s Sharks and to Judaism, or at least the arbitrary version of Judaism that he had minted for himself. He was sure that a follower of La Guaira, especially one who lived or wanted to continue living in what remained of the state of Vargas, constituted the tropical, Venezuelan incarnation of a Jew—a Jew, he said “in the true sense of the word.” I never quite understood this true sense, but I can cite the strange example that Juan Pedro himself put forward that afternoon over coffee in La Sociedad.

  “Imagine Job, on the edge of madness, when he had used up all his rage and despair, trying to soften the bitterness of his defeat by getting roaring drunk and dancing the samba on the stage of his own destroyed life.”

  The famous samba dancers of La Guaira, who still today enliven the right field stands of the stadium, became, for Juan Pedro, the celebrants of a macabre spectacle. Their festive and militant rhythm, which persists imperturbably in the face of what happens year after year on the playing field, fascinated him in an uncanny way.

  “The samba has become our emblem,” he said. “No one can understand how the worst team in the league has the most enthusiastic fans. They don’t understand this irrational joy, resistant to failure and death. They don’t understand that this is all the team has left.”

  During our conversation in La Sociedad, I couldn’t grasp the full reach of Juan Pedro’s outlandish theories. However, as the years have gone by I’ve seen the abysses that his words anticipated. In November of 2004 our Sharks—managed by the former Caracas infielder Jesús Alfaro—broke their infamous 1994 record by suffering fifteen consecutive defeats. In January 2006 we were hit by the death, from a mysterious illness, of Carlos “Café” Martínez, the most beloved, problematic, and inimitable player the team ever had. Our past was now dead, and our future as shriveled as a dried-up riverbed. Today, January 1, 2007, the date on which I am composing this chronicle of despair, that baseball drought persists like the negative image of the deluge and slides.

  Off the field, the reality is not very different. Years after the tragedy, the state of Vargas remains devastated. During the Carnival of 2005, a new flood drowned the scarce hopes that had flowered, more from inertia than activity, in the ruined areas. In March 2006 the viaduct connecting Caracas and La Guaira collapsed, rendering the state of Vargas a forgotten peninsula. The inhabitants’ response has been resignation. The majority have adapted to living among mud, rocks, and the vestiges of what they once were. As a people, they have turned th
eir territory into a great edifice of grandstands, where they get drunk and sing, with crazy abandon, the song that relieves their distress.

  Toward the end of our conversation, Juan Pedro remembered that I still had the baseball in my hands. He asked for it, and I rolled it gently across the table. He held the ball tightly, as if in proof of the solidity of memory.

  The news had come to him that morning on the radio, and it had left him hurt and perplexed. Like everyone, he had already known of other similar cases reported in the previous days. The dimensions of the tragedy were reflected in the enormous distances that many bodies had traveled because of the force of the landslides. Corpses of people who were pushed into the sea along the coast of La Guaira appeared weeks later, hundreds of kilometers away, on the beaches of Morrocoy.

  To learn that Leonel Arcaya had met a similar fate broke Juan Pedro’s heart. Arcaya’s body had been tossed indifferently by nature, the way a hopeless shipwreck victim tosses a bottle into the sea.

  However, Juan Pedro said, his face twisted in confusion, Arcaya’s death had a peculiarity that neither religion nor fandom could explain. Unlike the other bodies, Arcaya’s corpse had not come to rest on the Morrocoy coast. Instead, like a solitary fish, it had continued its journey westward to the warm shores of Paraguaná.

  “No one can explain how his corpse managed to get that far,” Jean Pedro said, squeezing the baseball between his hands.

  “Where did they find it?”

  “In Buchuaco. I think that’s just before Adícora,” Jean Pedro said.