Kill the Ámpaya!

by Dick Cluster

  When he said that, my heart sank too.

  By the time we parted, it was already late. Juan Pedro walked out with his gaze lost in space, the mystery surrounding the last voyage of Leonel Arcaya accentuating his pain.

  I couldn’t say a word. I was speechless. I had no way to explain to him that Buchuaco, with its waters warmed by love and courage, is the place where the dreams of a shark go to die.

  THE STADIUM

  Arturo Arango

  (Cuba)

  Arturo Arango (Manzanillo, 1955), is a fiction writer, essayist, screenwriter, and dramatist. His publications include the novels Una lección de anatomía, El libro de la realidad, and Muerte de nadie; the story collections La vida es una semana, La Habana elegante, and Vimos arder un árbol; and the stories “En la hoja de un árbol” and “El cuerno de la abundancia.” Three of his stories have been adapted as feature films, for which he wrote the screenplays. Vagoneros, a film about the underworld of the Mexico City metro system, based on Arango’s original screenplay, is scheduled for release in 2017.

  In the stadium, under the stands, there’s a small counter selling only cigarettes, cigars, and matches. Its glass display case forms a horseshoe in front of the main stairway leading up to the stands, so everybody at the ballpark goes by sometime during the two hours that a baseball game usually lasts. Yet the counter’s limited offerings condemn it to be just that, a place that fans pass by.

  The individual in charge of this tobacco stall was a man a little past fifty who had been there forever. Four days a week during the long series of playoffs, there he would be—friendly to whoever stopped to buy anything, always alone behind the counter, apparently sleeping in his seat while everyone else’s attention was glued to what happened on the field.

  This man liked baseball. More than that, baseball had been the passion of his youth. To baseball he had devoted his most enduring dreams, and he gave up on making it all the way to the major leagues only when he realized that he was smaller and weaker than most of the other boys who, like himself, dedicated their afternoons to knocking the stuffing out of the horsehide in the neighborhood sandlot. Later he understood that he was also not among the speediest, nor did he have anything like the quickest reactions, so little by little as the years went on and he was no longer in his teens, nor even a young man, his aspirations faded away.

  Of all the necessary traits to succeed in baseball, he knew that he possessed only two: persistence and faith. Yet armed with these two, even after the age of twenty, while others gave up their passion for the game to devote themselves to activities closer to their daily lives, he still believed he might come to don a flannel uniform and spikes and play on a real field instead of the stony patch of ground that had left eternal impressions on his knees. This almost came about. He knew the game well enough and his arm was good enough to get him added to the roster of a local team, chosen to play right field. But that was the final dream of his youth. Life proved more recalcitrant than he thought when his father, grown too old for all the responsibilities of his several small businesses, decided that the son needed to take charge of the bodega. This did not require a great effort: the small storeroom and set of shelves that had been his earliest childhood kingdom occupied the corner part of the family’s large wooden house.

  Therefore when—many years after the day on which he had to return the uniform bearing the number 4 (his personal choice) and the spikes he had barely gotten to wear—he was offered the job of running a concession stand at the brand new stadium, he felt he had received a small, late, but still tangible compensation for his unfulfilled dream. In its own way, that niche allowed him to be part of a true ballpark such as he had never imagined, a great monument of steel and concrete capable of holding thirty thousand spectators intent on what was happening on the perfect expanse of grass, gleamingly unreal beneath the mercury lights.

  So now he was a piece of the stadium, a living one, somehow indispensable. Yet he was set apart from the game itself, the tension of the players and the crowd. He remained down below, alone, watching people go up and down the stairs that were his only link to the field. Sure, he got to be friends with ballplayers, managers, and umpires. They stopped to chat with him, to tell him about the game, how well or badly they’d done, the injustices of which they were victims, and he could measure the glory achieved by those men in terms of how many boys gathered admiringly around them, touching the fielders’ gloves, the catcher’s mask, which here, up close, became real.

  But then he’d be plunged back into solitude, a solitude in the midst of thousands. So, alone, leaning on the glass counter, the man discovered that something more, besides the stairway, connected him to the field. A baseball game became, for him, a succession of sounds to discover and identify. He learned to separate one from another and to distinguish infinite variations. For example: a dry, metallic sound of bat meeting ball followed by a brief, explosive cry from the crowd could signify a hit with no men on base. (Although, in fact, only he would be capable of saying whether this is the correct way to put this example. We are only speculating, because there are so many similar sounds of bat meeting ball, and the enormous chorus in the stands has innumerable ways of responding.) At first, to check his impressions, he relied on fans coming down the stairs. “Was that a hit?” he would ask the first to appear after the crack of the bat and the resulting cheer. “Tagged out at second?” he asked the grimacing fan who appeared after a disapproving murmur swept the stadium.

  After two or three years those sounds held few mysteries for him. His impatience at being stuck in the bowels of the stadium, subject to reactions that the luck or skill or willpower of others provoked in the spectators, began to vanish once he found another way to be part of the game. His observations became so subtle that fans on their way to the bathroom or to buy candy for their children were not surprised when this old man, who seemed to be asleep on his stool, would remark to them on events in the game that seemed knowable only by those occupying the grandstand.

  This, however, was only a first step. It’s true that from this beginning he was able to extract more than a few nuggets of advice to offer the oldest of his grandchildren when that boy began to give baseball the attention it deserved, as he liked to put it. But later—one or two years before the youth reached the championship series as a player himself—the man began to realize that he had discovered only a very small part of what the stadium had to offer.

  He found the first correlation almost by accident. Those who complained with unusual aggressiveness about a lack of matches on his shelves were actually upset by something more important: the home team was getting crushed. For two days he stoically bore the indignation of his customers, but on the third day, finding himself more annoyed than was advisable for his age, he decided to navigate his way through a labyrinth of work shifts and delivery trucks and so managed to get his supplies completely in order for the weekend. But his regular customers hardly noticed the difference, so ecstatic were they with the whipping their team was giving the opponent at the top of the standings.

  The old man didn’t really take it seriously. Just for his own entertainment, because he found the succession of cheers and silences that afternoon so uniform, so boring, he began turning over in his mind the idea of a link between the match supply and the fate of the home team.

  After this rather foolish and innocent thought took root, he learned once again that he was only discovering bits and pieces, dispersed signals, because the team soon went through a bad spell, seriously bad, even though his shelves remained impeccable. Therefore what he had at first taken on as a minor entertainment now became a challenge. He felt mocked by having been sent a signal so small and incorrect. Night after night, day after day, the old man devoted himself to observing more deeply just what went on in the closed universe that very few could ponder as he could, from a state of meditative calm.

  First, as might be supposed, he sought exceptional events, visible shortages like the matches,
but he soon noticed that this approach gave him only the broadest-brush sort of evidence. He had to give more credence to other, subtler signs.

  That was when the word “universe” began echoing in his mind. If the stadium was a universe, he thought, none of its parts could be ignored or discarded. Only someone like himself, used to doing his job without the slightest effort (selling, after all, had been his only work for more than thirty years) and master of the sounds that caused the rest to worry or to jump with joy, could listen with enough rigor and passion to the life of the stadium. A blinking of the lights, the illness of an athlete, an unusually long line at the pizza counter, three scraps of paper thrown away by different people that rolled to the same step on the stairs, a noticeable drop in attendance for a particular game—nothing lacked importance, and the old man took all of it in.

  I’ve said this wrong. He did not take in every occurrence, but rather the relationships among them. This old man was an exceptional being. He had an intuition, a sensibility, that could direct his focus to what some might call the primary relationships playing out before his eyes (or in his imagination, for we can’t say yet which was the case). This particular focus was what allowed him to accomplish what he did without being stymied by the vast and ungraspable welter of details. Thus, what the stadium offered the old man were conclusions. He read the stadium, read the universe whose laws he had, for the moment, been able to unveil.

  Being the master of such certainties was not easy. He had to hide his sorrow from those who, during the first half of the game, came down to stretch their legs in full expectation of the sterling performance the euphoric radio announcers had promised for the home team. Yet at times the old man felt that thousands of people already knew what he had discovered. A smile on the face of an out-of-towner, a forced greeting from one of the few friends who visited him—these seemed signs that the language he had mastered was shared.

  Also, game after game, he came to know more and more about the network of gamblers occupying the lower layers of his universe. He discovered their signals, knew which ballplayers were linked to that business—more abhorrent to him than to anyone—and gloated at the frightened eyes of those who thought they’d been found out by someone who was only approaching to ask for the time. Although he was wise to the bets, the money changing hands, and even the faces of the ones controlling the operation versus those who were mere messengers and bodyguards, he decided not to expose them, because he considered it unjust to wield the advantage that chance or nature had given him. At the same time, he often felt haunted by the possibility that one of the gamblers knew his secret, had arrived at it by a path as unexpected as his, and would demand his secret collaboration in that dirty trade.

  When the championship series ended, his team’s hopes for victory had turned to disaster. Perhaps, now that we’ve reached the off-season that follows the finals, this is the moment to explain that the old man’s life outside the one area we’ve been discussing was uneventful, peaceful, and ordinary. He had a hardworking, obedient wife, three children who gave him no special trouble, a house in good condition and secure. The one thing disturbing his domestic peace during these years was the idea that his grandson could soon join the team aspiring to the championship. Then for several months hundreds of thousands of people would be paying close attention to what the young man could do. They would come to the stadium to applaud him or to boo him, they would identify with him while seated in front of their television sets, they would argue on street corners about his successes and his future.

  “He’s the real thing,” the man’s friends declared, and he smiled back to hide the one true disturbance in his life. Because that next season, when his grandson did take the field for the home team, new possibilities loomed. If everything happened in accord with a certain order of relationships, wouldn’t it be possible to govern this order, to bring human will to bear on it, his own will in fact?

  That was much more difficult than everything he’d achieved so far. When the next season came, his first tests were very cautious. The only time he would disrupt the stadium’s order was when he was quite sure an adverse result already awaited the team. Even then, there was always the danger posed by chance, the possibility of making things worse. Later he would have to admit to himself how childish these experiments were: hiding the milder cigarettes for a week, moving the garbage cans around. But sometimes, when the consequences turned out to be negative, they could lead him to regrets. It wasn’t easy for him, when the game was over, to see his grandson go by with hanging head, ashamed of a pair of ridiculous strikeouts that would be the talk of the town tomorrow morning.

  As the grandson’s first championship series neared its end, though, the man was surrounded by the euphoria of those entering the ballpark to watch their team play for the top spot. He could feel a sadness, a sense that things were not going well. “Hopeless,” he concluded after a half hour of close attention to reading the stadium.

  Indeed, the championship series came and went without the home team’s improving what the press took to calling its “modest performance.” The old man’s grandson was no longer one of the “reliable future stars” who would change the club’s often sorry fate. The man passed the following year sunk deeply into himself, which his family members attributed to the ravages of age. “He’s not the same anymore,” his wife would tell close friends who pointed out his prolonged silences and distracted responses, or the averted eyes of a man whose gaze had always been lively and piercing.

  Those silences led him to some undeniable conclusions: the universe he had been allowed to enter could be altered, but although his job had at first helped by giving him space for isolated contemplation, now immobility kept him from doing what needed to be done. The keys to change that he sought did not lie on the shelves under his counter.

  When the next championship began, he used the pretext that a sports stadium should not encourage the tobacco habit and so won a change in his hours: the tobacco counter would close once the game got under way. This left him free to work the grandstand, selling coffee from a thermos in little paper cups carried on his belt, touring the length and breadth of his universe. Only the field itself was off-limits. Some of the first games of the series showed unexpected shifts of momentum that made the authorities suspect that the gambling networks had acquired influence within certain teams. A fifteen-minute blackout caused by a cat interrupting the three-phase electrical current, the home-plate umpire doubling over with sudden cramps, a flood in the men’s bathroom—all these were experiments conducted as steps toward the goal of imposing changes that were not transitory but transformations dictated by his own will.

  Having gotten this far, how can the old man be blamed for the mistakes he made next? He’d achieved much more than he could have imagined in the earliest days when it was all a puzzle of sounds and guesses. Intuition has its limits, and when the man hit these barriers, instead of respecting them, he stopped paying attention to his main gift, stopped letting his intuition guide him. To feel oneself so close to grasping the totality of something tends to lead to impatience. It wore the old man down, and his response was to try to reason everything out, to establish rules that would allow him to see all the strings he aspired to pull.

  Thus, he determined certain dualities of action. The first such polarity had to do with what we might call a functional approach to the stadium: On the one hand there were aspects that did not exist as pure necessities of the game, but rather were imposed by its condition of spectacle. Actions taken to affect these aspects reinforced the tendency a given game had shown so far. If, on the other hand, the changes affected the stadium’s essence as a ball field (extra humidity in the dirt, the breaking open of one of the bases) then the game would take a drastic turn. Later, he found this polarity insufficient. It referred only to generalities, and here the old man could have spotted his error, because, contradictorily, he came up with new pair of principles still more abstract than the first: what was dry,
powered-down, or slow versus what was damp, powered-up, or fast. But by this time the old man was finding it very difficult to feel sure he was in control of bringing adversity or fortune to the team.

  One night the television cameras—and soon, the fifteen thousand people in attendance—spotted an enormous flame that flared up beyond the left field wall. A garbage can was on fire, and just as the firefighters arrived to put out the blaze, a long ball hit by the grandson with two men on base landed in this same zone—a home run when the team had been losing by a difference that seemed insurmountable. But then the wind rose suddenly, giving the fire unexpected strength and sending tongues of flame leaping up a light tower, so the lights had to be turned off until the fire was completely extinguished. Soon after play resumed, an apparently inoffensive roletazo, a double-play ball, in fact, slipped between the young man’s legs. The old man felt that the boos raining down on the field were addressed to him, to his arrogance.

  Would this be his last attempt? On the way home, the boy walked beside him, uniform and spikes hanging heavily about his neck, and the old man was on the point of asking his grandson’s forgiveness and leaving him to his fate. Behind the grandfather and grandson the enormous monument of concrete and steel was sleeping. The old man turned several times to look back at it, as if now that silence could speak to him. His intuition had awoken again.

  During the next game he carried out no experiments at all. While he moved up and down the aisles selling coffee, he tried not to think about what was happening but to feel it, instead. Thus, each of his future actions grew surer and more ambitious. Now the stadium itself commanded him to loosen the lug nuts on the back wheels of a bus in the parking lot, to cut the electrical lines to the radio booth, and to toss two dogs onto the field, stopping the game while the umpires made fools of themselves trying to catch the animals.