Kill the Ámpaya!

by Dick Cluster

  If at first the stadium authorities thought they were victims of mischance, by this point they were convinced that some group, no doubt for political reasons, was trying to sabotage the national sport. Knowing this full well, the old man was able to escape the notice of the plainclothes agents whose embroidered dress shirts made them stand out, in his eyes, just as much as his grandson’s red uniform.

  We must give him his due. The night of the bus accident, he lingered in the lobby of the hospital until he was sure the driver and five passengers were out of danger. Remorse made him wait three games (two of them home-team losses, but a prior lead allowed him that luxury) before placing a banana peel on the bathroom steps for the pitching coach to slip on. The stairs were steep, the coach was not young, and the broken thighbone would leave him with a limp for the rest of his days.

  “Am I God?” the man asked himself each time he arrived at the still-empty stadium. “Am I what people expect a god to be?” he asked again as he observed the green grass of the field, the newly smoothed base paths, the overwhelming emptiness that made his responsibility weigh so heavily. “Only partly,” he answered on the night the stadium gave him an unconditional order: “The team will win if your grandson sits out the final game.” Nothing could be so easy for him to accomplish, or so unfair. The only way to escape the order was to prevent the game from happening at all, but action on that scale was beyond his power. He might as well try to stop the rain, or wars, or other catastrophes that dwarf by far what unfolds inside a stadium.

  He forgot that what he was about to do went against his intuition (but we have already pointed out that intuition has its limits) and against the very laws he had discovered and learned to employ. The result was that the game began after the brief delay required to separate the man’s corpse from the same wires that, months before, had carbonized a cat. Only the following day, at the funeral parlor, did the grandson learn that he belonged to a championship team. At that moment he had no taste for glory.

  BRACES

  Yolanda Arroyo Pizarro

  (Puerto Rico)

  Yolanda Arroyo Pizarro (Guaynabo, 1970) is a novelist, short story writer, essayist, and member of the Bogotá 39, “Latin America’s 39 Most Exciting Authors Under 39,” selected at the 2007 Hay Festival, Bogotá. Her stories and novels have been translated into English, Italian, French, German, and Hungarian. Her 2007 story collection Ojos de luna was named a book of the year by the magazine El nuevo día and won the national prize of the Instituto de Literatura Puertorriqueña. She is a founder of the interdisciplinary and interuniversity Department of Afro–Puerto Rican Studies and the Women of African Ancestry Project, and she writes frequently in the Puerto Rican press and her blog Boreales.

  “Go to the park and get your brother. It’s time for him to do his homework.”

  You listen to the statement that brooks no opposition. This is the tone your mother uses when she’s giving orders. It’s her defense against any trace of disagreement. You hate it most of all because at the age of ten you can’t use that tone with anyone.

  You hate going to the local baseball field, too. You hate it because the place is so rundown, practically abandoned, and because it seems more like a swamp of filthy, clinging mud than a real park for playing baseball. And you know the difference, because you’ve seen real ballparks on television. This one is nothing like those. Besides, there’s no place to get out of the rain, and rain is almost constant. The kids at school say that’s due to the song, “Because in Bayamón, man, it does nothin’ but rain.” This isn’t Bayamón, you tell them all the time. The refrain doesn’t say anything about Barrio Amelia, the crowded and steamy place where you live with your mother and your younger brother, Viti, between Bayamón and San Juan.

  But, since you have to go to the park whether you like it or not, you take Viti’s bike, which he left on the porch when he set out on foot. It’s got shiny chrome and it’s spotlessly clean. You figure he left it there to keep it from getting splattered with mud, so you smile and pedal off. You go by the vegetable stand that also sells squeeze tubes of sherbet and cups of limbers, creamy frozen treats in many flavors that help to keep the coastal heat at bay. The attendant, Antonio, always gives you special treatment, hiding your favorite flavor—coconut—from the other kids. Nobody calls him Antonio, but rather Trifinguers because he was born without two of the fingers on his right hand, or maybe he lost them in an accident. Antonio Trifinguers is very likeable. Sometimes he’ll sing you the song that goes “eternamente, Yolanda,” by Pablo Milanés.

  Soon you’re at the park. As soon as your brother sees it’s you on his bike, he starts to make signs that you shouldn’t pedal past the critical point where the swamp begins. You play dumb and plow the front wheel right into the first mound of mud, where you bring the no-longer-so-shiny vehicle to a stop. From second base, your brother makes some new gestures that mean you’ll get what’s coming to you as soon as the game is over. You yell that mama sent you to come get him. And that’s when you see her for the first time.

  Or for the second or third time, actually, because you realize that you’ve seen her before, passing your house with her grab bag of shoeshine equipment. She gives you an intense stare. Then she slams the next pitch for a home run.

  Viti trots around to home plate, and she follows, two runs in. That ends the game, and your brother comes over and grabs the bike out of your hands. He tries to clean it off with the wet rag that his sweaty t-shirt has become, but no way. So he jumps on and rides away, leaving you in the park. The rest of the players gather up bats and gloves, laughing and making conversation about Roberto Clemente and other players in the big leagues. She’s joking around with the boys who haven’t left yet, and you notice that they call her Alex. At one point the freckled kid with the reddish Afro who is tying his shoes calls her Alexia, but she corrects him. “Alex,” she insists, and she smiles at you. You smile back, showing just your upper teeth, because by now you’ve learned how to smile without showing the lower ones, hiding your braces and the gap. You cover all that with your lower lip, which is thicker to begin with. Now it sticks out even more, and you look like you’re biting it.

  “I’ve got my kit right here,” she tells the freckled boy, who’s now the only one left. “Those shoes are going to get ruined if you leave them all muddy like that.” When she crouches down and starts to work, that’s when it happens.

  It happens, and it’s the most confusing moment of your life. Because Alex or Alexia, in bending down, exposes part of her behind. Her pants give way and expose a little of her butt. Over her butt and the crack between its cheeks, which you can just see the very top of, she is wearing boy’s underpants.

  You’ve seen them on your brother when Mama lets you both play in the rain without shirts and pants, you in your panties with the embroidered hems and Viti in his Fruit of the Looms like in the TV commercial where the men dance dressed up as fruits. You’re troubled. You’ve seen this same kind of underwear on Antonio Trifinguers, when he wriggles around and his pants slide down, or when he’s left his fly undone and he asks you, politely and apologetically, to help him zip it, which he can’t do by himself because of the two missing fingers.

  The redhead thanks her, reminds her that the gang will play ball again tomorrow at nine, and takes off. Now it’s just the two of you in the middle of a baseball field that’s nothing but mud. Though a drizzle starts to fall, nobody moves. Then there’s a flash of lightning, followed by a clap of thunder.

  “Will you come to the barber shop with me?”

  You nod in agreement and follow her. Before you get to the shop with its red and white spiral pole, she looks at your feet and asks whether your sneakers are Converse. You tell her they are, but add right away that they’re used, that your neighbor gave them to you when her daughter outgrew them.

  In the barber shop the girl with the boy’s underpants sits down in the big chair. She pays her dollar and gets a trim of her short hair while you wait on the steps,
playing with some fallen strands of hair and beard from previous customers. When she’s done, she springs up from the chair and tickles your neck to announce that it’s time to go. You jump up too. After a block the drizzle turns to heavy drops and then into transparent balls that burst against each indulgent face, hers and yours. The rain comes harder, and you feel the globes of water striking your body—head, arms, chest, thighs—like strange twinges in your heart, like uncertain musical notes bouncing off the puddles on the ground. The rain on your cheeks and forehead, rolling toward your mouth, makes your heart beat faster, suggesting bigger storms to come. A raindrop, an invitation. A raindrop, a shock. A raindrop, and this cloud spilling over is now blessed among all the creations of the planet. You find a corner where a tiny bit of zinc roofing extends just far enough to shelter two. While you wait for the deluge to pass, she sings “I drink rum and beer to ease the pain, ’cause in Bayamón, man, it does nothin’ but rain.”

  The downpour intensifies. The drops lengthen, turn oblong. A gray curtain takes shape around you, like a wall of drenched flowers. Alexia takes a long look at you. “You’re gap-toothed,” she says, and you hurry to close your mouth, which means you stop drinking in the rain.

  “Are you a girl or a boy?” you ask. She smiles while she puts down her box of shoeshine stuff.

  “I’m a girl.”

  You touch her hair and exclaim, “But you keep it cut so short, and you wear boys’ underwear.”

  Alex shrugs. “My aunt says I’m a very special girl.”

  “Don’t you have a mother?” you ask. She says she doesn’t. “Or a father?”

  “He’s in jail. People say he killed her, and that’s why.”

  Without asking permission, you lift up her shirt and open her fly. There are the underpants again, white ones with the unmistakable band of elastic around the waist. She looks at the kinky curls of your hair gathered into two unruly braids.

  “I want to kiss you,” she announces against the din of another thunderclap. You’re about to ask why when Alex answers the question. “To see what your braces taste like.”

  When you say yes, it’s already after the fact. The girl in Fruit of the Looms has brought her mouth to rest on your lower lip, the thicker one. Then it moves to your upper teeth, the ones that stick out. Instinctively you want to hide them, but her tongue seeks them. She lingers over the spaces of your gap-toothed gums, the irregular surfaces that your braces seek to corral, and you find yourself returning the motion, your jaw working up and down as if nothing else in the world matters. You drink in the elixir of her juicy saliva. Your lips open and close as the neighborhood seems to turn its sodden back. The two of you press your mouths together in a new way of moving, the newest in the world.

  Finally the rain slackens and you pull apart, suddenly visible, the weather no longer a willing accomplice. You resume your walk and, reaching your house, you open the door that creaks on its rusty hinges. She’ll keep going, you know this because she’s holding tight to her shoeshine box. From inside, without looking, your mother yells, “It’s about time! Get in here!”

  One last drop falls on your nose. The two of you smile.

  “I’ll see you tomorrow, Alex,” you declare. You don’t wait for an answer. You’ve used that tone, the particular inflection that forestalls any contradiction, the tone that brooks no opposition. The one that works for giving orders. You no longer detest it. You laugh heartily, gap-teeth exposed.

  THE REAL THING

  Alexis Gómez Rosa

  (Dominican Republic)

  Alexis Gómez Rosa, born in 1950, is the author of such emblematic works of contemporary Latin American poetry as Adagio cornuto (2000) and La tregua de los mamíferos (2005). He has published more than fifteen books of poetry, winning the poetry prizes of both the Casa de Teatro arts center in Santo Domingo and the Dominican Ministry of Culture. He has been a pioneer in bringing together eastern and western influences in the Dominican Republic, both through his 1977 exhibit of concrete or pattern poetry in the Casa de Teatro and through his 1985 book High Quality, Ltd, which made use of the Japanese haiku and tanka forms.

  Like much Dominican fiction, this story is built around political personalities and events well known to Dominicans: the repressive dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo (1930–61); its replacement after Trujillo’s assassination by a new constitution and the popularly elected reform administration of President Juan Bosch; the overthrow of the Bosch government in 1963 by a military junta led by Colonel Elías Wessin; the ejection of the junta in 1965 by a constitutionalist uprising with support from some left-leaning military officers who demanded Bosch’s restoration; and the subsequent military intervention by the United States. What followed was a United States–organized election that propelled into power Trujillo’s former puppet president, Joaquín Balaguer, who then dominated Dominican politics, with varying programs, from 1966 until 1978 and again in later years. The story makes reference to a period of abortive revolutionary activity and government repression in the early years of Balaguer’s regime, followed by a period of economic boom and corruption.

  Empty baseball field

  —A robin,

  Hops along the bench

  —JACK KEROUAC

  You’re the real thing, man, you made it. You’ve got a million dollar voice, you’re the archetype, the example of a pro behind the mike. Side by side, in center field, the amazing Willie Mays. What a game—adjusting your intonation just the right amount, on you go—the second game, 1962 World Series, Marichal on the mound, he delivers, strike one. One and one now on Roger Maris, evening the count.

  We were still in high school, the Boys’ Normal School, caught between algebraic equations and the pressing slogans of politics. Mama called you “my precious,” which was a sign of the protective shield she wove around you, but we were never jealous because in truth you were always the most vulnerable, your nose running day in and day out, your body offering shelter to every cold and flu. That’s why she rocked you in her arms, coddled you in her lap, called you “precious,” which made you grumble and pout, which only got you another batch of nicknames added to that. Being the last of the litter was both good and bad for you. You got butter on the bread, ice cream on a stick, popcorn in your pocket. But on the other hand you were the first to get called out if you wandered off first base. Mama didn’t like to see you getting soaked in the rain like the rest, much less tagging along with us chasing pussy, lining up for a go at Lucrecia’s honeycomb. I won’t broadcast this, don’t worry, but you grew up a virgin with your peepee uninitiated while you hoped someday to get beyond the hankie with which you cleaned up your poor substitute. Those were difficult times for our elders, with their heads full of dreams and worries, and in our world, too, things began to go downhill; the sweet turned sour for men and women and those who hoped to grow into that state.

  Nobody paid much attention, but you had left the earth behind, with your six feet five inches that made kids ask, “How’s the weather up there?” You laughed, but what you really wanted was to be the cleanup hitter for one of the local sugar mill teams, for the Central Río Haina or the Ingenio Porvenir. That was wishful thinking, nothing more, rubbing salt in your wounds because you knew full well you were in hock to a heart condition, my man, and where you could compete was in the elocution contests (“To be or not to be”) organized by the National Sugar Council.

  Microphone in hand, you could mimic the best of them, you could make Buck Canel, that gaucho from Argentina, sound like the Dominican street, so that nobody stirred from their seat, because “don’t go away, this is just getting good.” You could do Rafael Rubí, those magical swings of his narrative bat, a tomar cidra, mi hermano; “ain’t the beer cold!”; special, mamita, special; a sizzling line drive to el jardín derecho, off the right field wall. How you could memorize so many baseball expressions and inflections, I don’t know, but I do know how it happened, my man. All those years under Mama’s thumb didn’t go for nothing, years wh
en you had no better escape from solitude than the play-by-play over the radio, without the fits and starts and shocks imposed by female company, always on the make but scared of their own shadows, women who were like, “If I met you before, I don’t remember it,” or like, “I want to know if you mean business,” and meaning business meant shelling out for a wish list that was as long as Mama’s string of rosary beads. I mean it, my man, I’m offering serious counsel. Better to keep on jerking off, that’s a ticket to heaven, or at least it’s putting on the television and putting hands to the task in front of EXXXtreme: free adult channel. But you were a good boy, dedicated to your homework, knowing credit comes where it’s due, poised at the brink of surprise and astonishment, a back-country boy who didn’t know that life is a stillbirth of passions that won’t always lead to a pool of peaceful repose. Force X goes up against force Y, tossing men onto battlefields, bleeding, mutilated, in the name of fierce ideologies. And war broke out within the house. On one side the certainties of the elders, anchored in their religion, and on the other you raised the demands of the needy and the banner of utopia. And I watched. A difficult moment. Blood ran in the streets, and we saw drops staining the newspaper—because newspapers don’t lie, do they?—to the south of the barbed wire and the crossroads of anonymous Dominican corpses. First came the dust storm, the leaf storm that was brewing. First the dust, the leaf-storm of the days, and then the North American fleet, and in the mouths of the retreating rebels the songs of Fernando Valadez, composed in his wheelchair, the monsters and monstrosities of his hyperbolic imagination.

  The end approached, foreseeably. Those who shuddered under the bombs came back to the barrio if they were spared by God and the National Guard. If the war was a paragraph, what followed were sentences. The highest fly ball is just an out if it’s caught. I mean, start over, but it’s never over. I mean, make peace with the world, or call the game a tie, but it’s not a game. I mean, facing bunts and pitchouts and ninety-six-mile-an hour heaters. I mean, waking up every morning on the knife edge of the Cold War and swallowing, every morning, a mouthful of fear.