by Dick Cluster
Panwok, as the director of this symphony of cooks was named, began to congratulate everyone with a solemn speech that included tales of the daring fishermen who had caught the cod in waters off Madagascar and those other travelers who had dug tubers in southern Africa so as to transplant and cultivate them in the area around the magnificent fortress. The stories seemed exaggerated, but the listeners accepted them without protest so as not to interrupt. The emperor’s representative stepped into the kitchen’s entryway, and Panwok began to reprise for his benefit the story of the fishermen’s crusade to the isle of lemurs. For the benefit of all, the representative told him to be quiet and serve the food quickly.
Clock had been treated with care and respect. He had been bathed in a tub full of flowers by three well-dressed ladies but had resisted any temptations because they carried out their task with a degree of brusqueness or coldness. Or perhaps he was just very tired? Now, here he was awaiting the meal in the ample dining hall. A series of delicate metallic poles and crosspieces, perhaps of bronze, kept the area free of ivy, which grew only within spaces defined by thin panels of onyx and ebony. In an upper gallery, as if suspended in air, were a series of bays with tall glass windows that reached to the roof. At the back of the room was a small separate area also protected behind glass.
At the far end of the great hall, seated in a small area set off by a curtain made of flat panes of glass, were some of the participants in the ceremonial game that Clock had witnessed a few hours before. They were having a lively conversation, and the youngest among them seemed the most amused. His exquisite indigo uniform bore streaks and patches of dirt, but this did not seem to bother him. Rather, he wore them like decorations of honor.
At the tables nearest to the time-mechanic, meanwhile, sat men in orange robes, likewise stained with dirt. He realized they were the monks who had also participated in the unusual rite. They ate gratefully and without any breach of etiquette. He approached them and asked the significance of the simulation he had observed.
“It is called Banqiú. This was how the Immortal Souls in the Ts’sai Valley amused themselves,” one of the Buddhist monks explained.
General Huen-wen approached Clock and asked him the questions that courtesy required.
“How did you find the meal?”
“It was excellent. There must be a whole army of slaves behind such ambrosia.”
“An orchestra, better put. A battalion of virtuosos. And yet, you must have found that it contained nothing to excess.”
“Indeed that is so. Lovely flavors, but with no need to show off.”
“Excess kills more efficiently than swords.”
“Some sage must be the author of that phrase.”
“The Emperor.”
“And where is that honorable sovereign?”
“Right there,” the General said, pointing toward the glass curtain through which the group of men in clothing the color of the mid-afternoon sky could be seen. Even though Clock had suspected the supreme ruler might among the group, he displayed surprise.
“Could he be the one bearing the most decorations of soil on his uniform?”
“That is he. One of his watchwords says, “Play as if today were the final day. Fight as if it were the last day. Because in fact, it is.”
BIG LEAGUES
Salvador Fleján
(Venezuela)
Salvador Fleján, (Caracas, 1966), is a graduate in language and literature of the Universidad Central de Venezuela, the winner of several prizes for fiction, and a judge in prestigious literary contests. He is the author of four collections of stories and creative nonfiction—Intriga en el Car Wash (2006), Miniaturas salvajes (2012), Ruedalibre (2014), and Tardes felices (2016)—and has been published widely in newspapers, magazines, and anthologies in Venezuela and abroad. His regular column about events of daily life is featured in the Caracas political weekly Quinto Día. He is working on his first novel.
It ain’t over till it’s over.
—YOGI BERRA
To me, taking pride in a son because he inherits his grandmother’s blue eyes or strings together sentences at eighteen months is as foolish as taking pleasure in a neighbor’s winning the lottery.
Yesterday at my nephew’s birthday party I heard a talented child recite poems and pluck out tunes on the cuatro. That was when I realized something that both surprised and saddened me: behind those kinds of kids there’s always a proud, dimwit parent who takes on undeserved airs. My story is different, as you will see, though you’ll draw your own conclusions.
Just a glance at my Keny’s chest and arms when he turned ten was enough to set anybody to making calculations. To dreaming, at least a little. He looked like a mini-Hercules. It was so striking that his teacher and my wife were worried. But not me. Maybe his size was a bad omen, given my family history, but it wasn’t the “elephantitis” that Rosalía was afraid of.
By then I knew my son was born with the attributes, though, in truth, I had known it for a while. When I say “attributes,” I mean what you need to be somebody in this country: a good arm, power, and speed in the legs. The rest—except for intelligence—can be taught in any rookie league.
Keny, like my uncle and my brother, was born with these aptitudes. In my family, that privilege has exacted a high price.
Calixto, my father’s brother, had an inborn talent for baseball, a talent he was far from knowing he possessed. He never played professionally. His best afternoons of la pelota came in industrial league tournaments, on fields without grass or spectators. My uncle was a swamp orchid, a stray talent. He had opportunity aplenty, but it wasn’t going to happen for Calixto unless the owner of the Baltimore Orioles himself came begging with contract in hand. When someone is born to be a worker, what can you do? I don’t blame Calixto. That was a different time, and my uncle—fine man that he was—preferred the tranquil security of a Water and Sewer Department pension to the dizzying demands of a multiyear contract. At fifty-three, standing in line at the bank to cash his retirement check, he had a heart attack.
With my brother, things were different, though believe me I would have preferred otherwise. In the early 1960s he signed with a professional Venezuelan team, a short-lived franchise, as it turned out. When they signed him he was seventeen, six foot three, and very sure of his prospects. He was a handsome guy, too, and with such natural gifts plus an aversion to school, devoting himself to baseball was one of the few reasonable decisions he ever made.
Eleazar played two seasons in the Venezuelan circuit. The term “tore up the league” was never more appropriate. Don’t ask me for statistics or averages, because numbers don’t interest me, but I can tell you what everyone remembers, which is that he led in several different offensive categories and was a serious threat to break a number of hallowed records.
The smell of fresh blood inevitably attracted the hyenas.
The scouts’ reports indicated that a gem of many carats had been found in a mine with an unpronounceable name. Eleazar had everything he needed. Or almost. What happened to him is still shrouded in mystery, known only within the family, but there’s no reason to keep it secret anymore. Some say he couldn’t handle the pressure. I’d like to see them try! Few could have withstood it. My brother didn’t even finish high school, but he was demolishing the pitches of imported players. My poor brother, just another kid from San Juan parish, was suddenly being pursued by the most important major league teams.
Forty years ago, things were more pastoral, weren’t they, in baseball’s so-called romantic age? Let me tell you something about the romantic age—it never existed. The kids today have it a lot easier. The big teams even have psychologists that help the youngsters survive their millions of dollars. The difference between baseball then and baseball now is not romanticism, but the number of zeroes to the right of the salaries. All the rest is the same business as ever. A business with wolves and sheep.
Our house in La Pastora filled with wolves. There were packs of sc
outs coming and going. Every one of them tried to bribe the old man with amazing offers. My father, who was poor but not stupid, dodged them with evasive responses and inscrutable smiles. The scramble went on until El Loco Torres, a family friend, proposed the solution.
“Listen, Rafael,” he told my father as they sat together in the kitchen. “Horses are no good for barbecue. They’re very pretty, but all they do is eat and shit. If you keep waiting, not even a bush league team is going to make an offer. What we need is an auction, and we need to do it before he’s past his prime.”
El Loco’s solution was neither evil nor misguided. It was logical. Every time Eleazar opened the refrigerator, the family budget tottered. His salary with the local team was nothing to brag about, and Papa’s wages weren’t enough to supply the nutritional needs of a mammoth like him. And he’d turned twenty, the age by which a ballplayer either is on the fast track or never will be.
Things had to be done the American way, El Loco said. That meant staging a trayao.
I remember the tryout, held on a Sunday morning in the University Stadium. The sun bouncing off the stands painted the outfield grass an emerald tone I haven’t seen since—the green of an isolated, melancholy bay, accentuated by the silence of the empty stadium.
El Loco had taken care of all the details: inviting the scouts (or, really, disinviting those we didn’t want), securing the batting cage and other equipment, coming up with some guys to help out on the field. Even a cooler full of beers was waiting for the signing ceremony. And everything would have gone like clockwork except for an event that El Loco didn’t foresee or just couldn’t imagine. I was sitting in the stands, on the right side just behind first base, watching him slowly rubbing a bat. It was a small bat and strangely shaped. I couldn’t tell whether he was wiping it clean or asking it to grant him a wish.
The wish was granted two hours later than the scheduled time. Eleazar showed up after a night on the town, more sleep-deprived than drunk, singing a guaracha. He didn’t offer greetings, and he didn’t apologize. My dad and El Loco were both red-faced with shame. The only scouts remaining were Mr. Mosley of the Yankees and a short guy in a panama hat who represented the White Sox. The rest had refused to tolerate the insult and were long gone. I don’t know how El Loco managed to convince these two to stay and take a look. I think the cold beers in the cooler helped make his words more eloquent and persuasive.
Eleazar ducked into the dogao and came back five minutes later, in uniform and with a bat on his shoulder. Watching him stride to the batting cage, no one would have imagined he had a night of rum and merengue on his back.
When he stood at the plate I thought he was going to melt from one minute to the next. To be out there under the blazing noonday sun was just short of suicide. His grip on the bat looked tentative and his swings lethargic, but the ringing rhythm of bat meeting ball dissolved this false impression. It was a staccato series of dull, concave sounds, like a horse galloping on a concrete floor.
The scouts were more interested in grabbing a last beer out of the cooler than in what was happening on the field, but that music managed to grab their attention.
With each crack of the bat, the expressions on their faces—like those of my father and El Loco—evolved from incredulity to amazement to greed. El Loco knew this was Eleazar’s only chance to show off his talents, so he quickly ordered up another bucket of balls. The ones that didn’t go tamely into the centerfield stands went whistling past the ears of the guy on the mound.
As a counterpoint, or maybe an anticlimax, El Loco sent Eleazar out to third base to take grounders. He looked a little clumsy with the glove, as if he didn’t quite know what he was doing out there. His body needed two quarts of water or eight hours’ sleep or both at once. But he did show off a strong and well-trained arm that sent sand flying off the mitt of the guy on first taking the throws. Testing the speed of Eleazar’s legs was a crime that El Loco didn’t dare commit. Things had gone well enough not to tempt fate any further.
The contest between the scouts was strange.
Or so I thought when Mr. Mosley abandoned ship. The bids were reaching the level of offers for a Ming vase, but then the New York scout said wearily, “Gentlemen, that’s enough.” Maybe the Yankees’ finances were in disrepair just then, though probably not. Maybe, though I didn’t think of this till later, the gringo had a premonition.
But the White Sox rep felt differently. A couple of years in the beginners’ league, he thought, would perform the miracle of turning coal to diamond. As this hope turned to certainty, he offered sixty thousand dollars for a signing bonus—a notorious sum, a record for that day and age. When it was all done, my father beamed as if an invisible hand were stroking his back. El Loco performed like a lawyer with a degree from Yale. The vehemence with which he argued over the bonus, clauses, and perks was something to see.
For reasons that I don’t know how to explain, I had the feeling that things would change forever from that day on. In return for his sweat, Eleazar asked only for a new-model Buick, which he totaled within a month. The old man invested the rest of the money, a sizable sum, in a house on the Avenida Páez and the store he presided over till his death.
In their effort to convert my brother into a true ballplayer, the White Sox assigned him to a Double-A league in the Midwest. The team’s training camp was a former air force base turned sports complex. All around stretched the proverbial amber waves of grain.
My brother quickly revealed himself to be the best of the bunch, with his batting as the principal evidence. In the babel of accents from the varied shores of the Caribbean, his vale and carajo began to stand out. Soon the general manager showed up to follow his tape-measure drives in person, attracted by the idea of a high-yield, low-cost third baseman.
At home we harbored the hope that Eleazar would be called up at any moment. To tell the truth, all our hopes were riding on that idea. Many of the perks that El Loco had negotiated were conditioned on that eventuality. Seeing Eleazar become a big-league player went from being a family dream to a sort of underground raffle in which my brother was the only ticket we had.
But something happened.
One night of monotony and raging hormones, Eleazar escaped from the concentration camp without notifying his manager. The team had returned from a road trip of three games in Omaha, and everybody was tired and bored. All except my brother, who dreamed of a cold beer, or preferably several.
The nearest town was forty-five minutes away at a brisk walk. Eleazar must have been plenty thirsty, because it took him only half an hour to get from the sports complex to the first bar he could find. When he entered, all eyes turned toward him with a blend of surprise and distaste. Eleazar was neither black nor white. He had some Indian features, but his face also preserved the traces of some rough Basque ancestor lost in our twisted family tree. I suppose the local parishioners were just not ready for that confusion of races, for so much collision of worlds.
It took fifteen minutes for the police to arrive. To their surprise, what they found did not match the urgency of the summons. Eleazar was seated on the jukebox, though he seemed more to be levitating above it. His hair was in disarray and his face expressed the peacefulness and fatalism of a vagrant bumming a cigarette. The rest of the picture was more alarming: three plump farmers scattered about the floor, broken chairs, bloodstains, and the bar owner with shotgun in hand.
One of the team’s investors happened to be a senator from the state of North Dakota. This coincidence made it possible for Eleazar to step off a plane the next day in Caracas. Left behind were some one-sided charges of assault and battery and the applause of Comiskey Park.
A few local sportswriters were merciful enough to concoct a story involving homesickness, a longing for Venezuelan food, and a mother who was unwell. I suppose such sophisms were also part of the romantic era.
What happened after that is more or less well known. That journalistic charity allowed my brother to add one more y
ear of Venezuelan professional ball to his career, though I think the word “career” is excessive, because he didn’t even play out the season. Little by little, partying and drink ate away at his batting average and his body.
I don’t know whether the team’s owner got fed up, or whether he took pity on Eleazar, but either way, the firing was private and discreet. The owner summoned Eleazar to his office, and his final words were, “It’s such a shame, buddy. You look more like a boxer than a ballplayer, you know?”
In the blink of an eye, that replica of Greek god turned into a skinny, hunched scarecrow, a cruel nightmare image of what my brother used to be. At home, no one talked about baseball anymore. Eleazar found it harder and harder to stay sober. When he didn’t take off for long periods, he spent hours sitting on the porch, drunk. His eyes had gone bleary and vacant, seemingly in search of some horizon he could never locate again.
The respect and admiration I’d once felt for my brother were gradually transformed into a mix of compassion, disgust, and disappointment. Papa was the only one to watch out for him and protect him as much as he was able. Really, though, there wasn’t much he could do. Toward the end, something would drive Eleazar out of the house every night. Maybe he thought he was fleeing the tedium of that former air force base.
One night he left and never came back.
At first we didn’t realize how long he’d been gone. We’d gotten used to him in the way you get used to an old or useless piece of furniture, or a ghost. But something told my father this last flight from home was different, or, at least, that his return was delayed well past the usual limits. Somebody reported seeing him walking along the shoulder of a highway in dirty, tattered clothes. Somebody else spotted him on the steps of a church, begging. Myself, I thought I saw him peeking in my window one night, but maybe that was a dream. Anyway, it was him, and he looked clean and his clothes were intact. He’d put on some weight, and his eyes had their old liveliness back. What I can remember best is his smile, a strange one, as if he weren’t really smiling, but then again, he was. I told my father, but he didn’t believe me. Maybe it was better that way. Papa went out every day in search of him, armed with those false clues. Though I’m having trouble lately recalling details, I don’t remember ever seeing the old man come back discouraged or defeated. He always had fresh reports of sightings that renewed his hopes.