by Dick Cluster
I think I see you, but I think I don’t. I think you’re coming, or you will be, after the “bloodless revolution” of Balaguer (big fish in a small pond, stocked by the Marines), I think I see you going out into the yard, under the almond tree, in your cap made of a nylon stocking and your coke bottle glasses that lend credibility to all the statistics and records you recite.
I see you there, a guava branch in your left hand to serve as a microphone for your impeccable play by play, as you segue with millimetric precision from the commercials of the Gillette Cavalcade of Sports to the games of the Leones de Escogido, the Red Network of the Leones, red for their uniforms, that’s all. You were a sight to be seen, a voice to be heard, how you harmonized time and space with incomparable grace. Cities and stadiums, the golden age and the modern game, players and fans. It never ceased to amaze me, how you could jump from New York to Santo Domingo, from the World Series to the city championships, blending the incidents of the game with the news off the teletype, the world on your table, turning turning turning. “In Liverpool, England, a shaggy-haired quartet is changing the world,” turn turn, “No water, no power, Balaguer thinks he’s the man of the hour,” turn, “Martin Luther King assassinated, Che Guevara falls in Bolivia,” turn, “and is reborn on all the T-shirts of summer, internationalizing his redemptive revolution.” After that, other names pushed their way into the lineup, uniforms changed, so did sympathies and fanatics and fans, or maybe what happened was just that a new franchise got hold of all the dreams. We changed, too, our hairstyles and cosmetics, the country changed, it was transformed, and came the day when you added your repertoire to the programming of Radio Universal, number one on the dial. At noon, the comedian Tres Patines; at 12:30, Sports on the March with Tomás Troncoso; and at 1:00, the Democratic Tribune with its infallible signoff, “Till tomorrow, Dominicanos—God willing.” Yes, you changed because it was a different country. Juan Bosch offered us three square meals, as the saying went, but he brought us Tres Patines. Still and all, he was the best we ever had. We could hear him on our way home from school, from radio to radio, house to house, never losing the thread of his direct and simple speech. This was a curfew worthy of the name, an obligatory hour in which I was no longer just the son of Gracita but a son of Machepa, as he called the common people, sweaty and sipping my lemonade as I listened to his words. Then, after that, you’d go out into the yard again, under the almond tree, and “Jim Lonborg winds up on the mound, here comes the pitch, Javier punches a short line drive between right and center, moving the runners up to second and third.” I remember how old Chilito loved seeing your imagination take wing on the rolls of teletype you suffused with new life. From the big leagues, your team from New York: “Horace Clarke, second base, Clarke en la segunda base; Rubén Amaro, siore stop, Amaro en el campo corto; Joe Pepitone, center field, Pepitone en el prado central; Mickey Mantle, first base, Mickey Mantle en la primera almohadilla; Charley Smith, third base, Smith en la esquina caliente; Tom Tresh, left field, patrullando el jardín izquierdo, Tom Tresh; Jake Gibbs, catcher, Gibbs en la receptoría; y lanzando los bultos postales, hurling the bales of mail, the golden lefthander, el zurdo de oro, Whitey Ford, with his record of eleven wins, four losses, and an ERA of 2.52.” You were like Jorgito Bournigal, the encyclopedia of baseball, as they used to say.
By 1970 life had changed from a phenomenal thing to a phenomenon, and a sinister one. To stick your head out the window or door was to risk getting tagged out, a tag out of nowhere, no way of knowing whose gloved hand fired the shot. Doors and windows closed. Eyes closed, mouths closed, nocturnal writing on the walls, these are scars, knife cuts, cries that no one utters out loud. Mangá was killed last night, did you hear? They killed Sergio Boca de Rueda, they killed Homero. Sergio, who used to play with us on the pley in Pidoca. A great second baseman, Sergio Big Mouth, with those lips like the cuff of your pants. Now he’s a mound of dirt in the cemetery of Los Mina, pissed on by passersby. In a Dantesque spectacle, they took the leash off La Banda. In Los Mina, with its early morning shoppers, its butcher shops that open at dawn, they let La Banda loose in their jeeps to make themselves masters of the night and the town.
The day dawned red. The news piled up in letters, a bloody background blare of lamentation and despair. It was all I could do to make myself open the mailbox or pick up the phone. I knew that every piece of news I received was coating me in a plaster of horror and depression, a terrible quota of death. I’d recently left the country (you know?) with its dark burden of days and flowers, of returning to funeral parlors as soon as one left. Those were the days when I decided to hop across the Gulf, after the death of René del Risco, the poet of our era, December 1972. Though I was living in New York, my habits didn’t change. I’d still peek out on the balcony after eating, without Tres Patines, Tomás Trancoso, or the Tribuna Democratica but with those voices still in my head, and they took me into the yard below the almond tree. “What brand of battery, Johnny?” to which Johnny replied, “Ray-O-Vac es la pila, pídala,” and this pitch for Rayovac was the overture to the game from the big leagues, Billy Berroa at the mike, Juan Marichal, the Creature from the Black Lagoon, on the mound, and Maury Wills at the plate, his bat never leaving his shoulder, “strike cantado, strike called, struck him auuuttt!”
But from a distance, a new tune was being sung, a new country unfolding within the old, an immense cornucopia made of smaller bounties in smaller hands. Here a sergeant served as regent, there a priest grew fat off his fief, over there a politician—mythic and mimetic—handed out the goods. You, on the other hand, opted for the taming of the word, for giving it polish by freeing it from its impoverished literal meaning, from its single-minded intent to communicate. This was the other side of the coin, or of life, and you devoted yourself to literature, to avant-garde verses that would never win you a girlfriend, poems sad as the last pastry on the tray. Even so, you went off to work on a path parallel with poetry. Mornings saw you depart in your khaki pants, your white shirt with epaulettes that made you look like an air force officer, your bottomless glasses and, in your right hand, the book of your conscience, the one that held the arsenal of quotations you deployed in the studio, “from Santo Domingo to the world,” to protect yourself from the world, because there’s nothing better than a pair of good quotations to wield against intolerance and abuse. Or so you thought. Some were drawn from Nietzsche or Cioran, others from the catechism of the nearsighted left. And amidst one or the other, more and more your radio reports cited José Martí, who unified them all. And Rodó and Henríquez Ureña, the late Latin American humanists who opened and closed your daily broadcast on the day of Crowley’s kidnapping, when the gringo military attaché was snatched while his head was in the clouds of his polo game. Minutes before, from the mobile unit of Radio 1000 on Your Dial, I heard you report that the United Anti-Reelectionist Commando had claimed credit for the kidnapping, demanding the freedom of twenty political prisoners and a plane bound for Cuba. The way you ended, the rollercoaster tone of your paragraph, brought you close to the mastery of Pedro Pérez Vargas, with his grave intonation and guttural closing on the dot of the hour. The comparison didn’t sit well with you, but you let me babble on a little. This was not like the parody of Balaguer we did the famous day in the previous year when he wiped the floor with Elías Wessin, calling the general an “impenitent conspirator,” the same man who’d paved his way to power back in ’65. Oh, how your voice rose and fell with the inflections typical of the president, floating into the rough, nasal tones of a repentant bachata singer. Everyone marveled and laughed, enjoyed and applauded, ensuring you entrance into the Broadcasting Hall of Fame in the heart of the barrio of Ciudad Nueva.
Unblemished admiration, it could be said, if it weren’t for the grudge that Lieutenant Cepeda began to bear you, because he had taken note of your parodies and hit the roof. “For a lot less than this, some morning they’ll go look for him and find his mouth full of flies,” he sputtered once. After that, ou
r sessions grew less frequent, farther apart in time and space until your body, practically unrecognizable, made the microphones of the island orbit around you, the editorials and headlines of the country’s papers proclaim your name to the four winds, fulfilling your destiny. As it was written, because he who finds himself among the famous becomes famous too. Your track record, your pedigree, your file of commendations grew as you fed it through your pilgrimage from boulevard to plaza, back street to barracks—here, “live from the scene,” was found the body of a burly dark-skinned man with three bullets in his chest. To see and report (because you saw everything) was a single act of indignation and pain, as if wringing out the news of your own misfortune. The corpse was in front of you, but you didn’t realize that your own blood had just mingled with that of the dead body in a fateful outpouring of grievances. After that, the news stopped being news. The studio filled with shadows, and other voices imposed their cadences and vagaries on the willing microphones. Little by little, a silence of chloroform and antibiotics overcame you, driving you back into your childhood niche of Vaseline and nylon stockings, my man.
You had nobody left to protect you. Mama was gone, signed by the Dodgers as we used to say, or the Cubs or Cards, depending on the era. Chilito signed by the Dodgers as well. But no sooner had you died than I was compelled to revisit your outsized hits and the meteoric pitches that froze the batter in place. Like the legendary character that would suddenly slide into a corner or make sensational plays up against the vehicles, you became player, narrator, and commentator all at once. Without a doubt, you made the era. You branded it with your voice in a continuous, uninterrupted play by play. But back, back, way back your figure was still there, behind the big box of an old Telefunken, compulsively repeating, “Good evening, fans, a very good evening. The Gillette Cavalcade of Sports, from Yankee Stadium, home of the Manhattan Mules, offers you its most cordial greetings.” And also back, back, way back, from inside the house with the yard and the almond tree, a high-pitched, dry voice can be heard. “That’s all for today,” it says in a tone of annoyance. “Time’s up. That’s all for today, dammit. Turn the radio off.”
THE WALL
Leonardo Padura Fuentes
(Cuba)
Leonardo Padura (born Havana, 1955) worked as a screenwriter, journalist, and literary critic before gaining international renown for his series of detective novels featuring Havana homicide detective Lt. Mario Conde, winners of the Dashiell Hammett prize and other awards. His novel El hombre que amaba a los perros, a reconstruction of the lives of Leon Trotsky and his assassin, Ramón Mercader, has been translated into ten languages, including English, and has received prizes in Cuba, Italy, and France. He once told an interviewer, “Baseball is a sport in which, when nothing is going on, that’s when the most important things are happening—and the same is often true of literature.”
The boy looked to be about seven, maybe eight years old—and left-handed, just like the man. He caught the ball, trotted back to his right, threw it against the wall again at just the right angle to run after the rebound and snag it with an outstretched arm, almost at the last moment, like a shortstop pursuing an impossible roletazo headed straight through the gap. Again and again, with great seriousness, putting the ball in the same spot or sometimes farther away, making it even harder to grab on the final bound.
The man watched the boy, no longer thinking about how this was going to wear out his sneakers. Sometimes the man made mental bets (that one’ll get by him!) or commended a skillful catch (that kid is good!). After more than half an hour of this routine, the boy was bathed in sweat but still looked strong and agile and ready to throw the rubber ball hard enough to knock over the brick wall. Now his throws made him run faster, stretch farther, and snag the ball just on the outer edge of the webbing of his glove, just before it got through for the hit that would keep rolling to the outer limits of his imagination.
The boy’s cap was on the ground in the shade of a laurel tree, next to which his dog lay splayed out on the sidewalk, a black and white mutt with a short tail, stiff ears, and tired-looking eyes through which it regarded its owner, without lifting its head, only when the boy tried for an especially difficult catch or when the ball came close to the dog. The pair of them had all the time in the world. Their lack of concern about the clock was something the man had almost forgotten. This was what kept him glued to the window, a sense that the monotonous game engendered an emotion shared only among the three of them—the boy, the dog, and himself—with no need for any other players or spectators. The wall, the ball, the glove, and the three of them all knew what mattered about every play. They knew that an effort to catch the most distant grounder was as decisive as the final play of a championship game. Then it occurred to him that the boy must imagine himself another Germán Mesa, a player of today, while twenty years ago it would have been Tony González, the shortstop of the Havana Industriales squad of his own dreams and nightmares, when he, too, used to throw a ball against a wall like that one, catch it that way on the edge of the webbing, and dream that his catches won championships and his future would unfold on the baseball diamond, the be-all and end-all of life’s aspirations. Fuck that, he thought. Over the last two seasons he hadn’t even gone to a game.
When he realized how much time had passed since he’d last been to the stadium, he glanced at his watch and, without meaning to, stated the time out loud: ten after three. An hour and fifty minutes of the workday left, and his desk full of papers. Again he watched the boy, the path of the ball—this kid never gets tired!—the dog’s eyes alert to danger, and another good grab. He walked away from the window. He quickly swept up the pricing charts, the forms to fill in, the accounts and balances of the Department, the Management, the Municipality, the Firm, the Committee of State, and the Council of Ministers. In contrast to his usually meticulous organization, he shoved them all into the desk drawer along with calculator, paperweights, pencils, pens, erasers, telephone directory, and the newest book on Economic Planning and Work Organization. He turned the key in the lock of the drawer and studied the empty desktop of his accounting aide, Jiménez, who at this moment was on his way to the bank. He felt a vague desire to write Jiménez a note that would tell him, once and for all, “You’re the most abject”—was “abject” the best word to use?—“and conspiratorial person I’ve ever met, and from now on I forbid you come near me and speak in your gossipy old lady whisper, because your breath is so bad it makes me nauseous and because I don’t want to know what the head of personnel has let slip about her latest romance, I don’t want to know about the director’s extra coffee ration, and I don’t want to know the newly appointed economic director’s secret pastimes either.” There was always a newly appointed economic director. But this was not the way to write the note, he thought. Better to just say, “Jiménez, you bad-breathed, brown-nosing, gossipy, dumbass sonofabitch, I shit on your mother’s memory. Don’t ever speak to me again.” Signed, Z for Zorro.
In the hallway he picked up his time card alongside the receptionist’s desk. He gave it a glance but did not feel any pride in the entry times that varied only between 7:40 and 7:56 and the departures always after 5:30. A model worker, he thought, as he stuffed the card into his pants pocket.
“Going to the main office, huh?” Martha asked with a smile. The receptionist had turned down the volume of her radio so as to concentrate on the unusual move he was making with the time card.
“No,” he answered, heading for the exit.
“What if somebody calls you, Chino?” she yelled after him.
He paused in the doorway. “Tell them I went to play ball.” And out he stepped.
When he reached the sidewalk, he felt different, felt like breaking into a run, but he had learned to tame his best impulses, so he walked. When he reached the corner he felt himself breathing easier. There was the boy, still competing with the wall. So as not to frighten him, he approached slowly, as if noticing the game only now. The boy reali
zed he had a spectator, and at first he made two or three easy throws, but as the intruder persisted in watching, having stopped walking to do nothing but watch, the boy began to make more and more difficult plays. The man stood alongside the dog under the laurel tree and watched from there.
One rebound turned out to be uncatchable. It escaped the boy’s reach but the man managed to grab it. He threw it back with a smile. The boy’s “thank you” was barely audible.
“Hey,” he said. “Is this your dog?”
The boy looked him full in the face for the first time and nodded, confused.
“What’s his name?”
“Nerón Fernández.”
He managed to suppress a smile.
“Nerón Fernández, I like that name. Does he bite?”
He knelt down alongside the animal, which was still flat on the ground, panting with tranquil regularity.
“Well, when he’s eating, yes, and also . . .” the boy started to explain, but he had already leaned closer to Fernández and, using the dog’s whole name, was scratching its head. After a brief look, the dog rolled over and offered him its belly.
The boy had stopped playing and watched the scene while bouncing the ball on the ground. There was a thirty-year-old man dressed in a short-sleeved guayabera with three ballpoint pens and the earpiece of a pair of glasses sticking out of the pocket. Wearing well-ironed blue slacks and shiny dark loafers, kneeling on the sidewalk and stroking Nerón Fernández’s dirty belly.
“I’ve been watching you play for a while,” he said then. “Look, I work in that office, the one with the closed window, and I think you’re going to be a very good ballplayer. You’d be great at siort, except how can you play infield if you’re left-handed?”