Kill the Ámpaya!

by Dick Cluster

  “A scout who’d had his eyes on Reba for years took advantage of the conflict in Rwanda to get him out of there at the cheapest price. Did the scout know this fucking African was a killer?” the first baseman asked. “They say that when the Hutu soldiers got to the school where Reba worked, they asked him, since he was a ranking Hutu, to tell who were Tutsi. Reba didn’t know how to answer, so they put a machete in his hand and made him choose, out of all his pupils, which ones he thought they were.” I listened to the first baseman and continued edging off the bag until a glance from the pitcher made me think he was going to try a pickoff throw. But Greg Maddux threw another pitch and Reba grazed the ball by mistake. I say by mistake because he didn’t make any attempt to run or even to see where the ball had landed. The umpire pulled another one out of his impossible pockets and handed it to the catcher. I went back to first.

  With two strikes on Reba, I tried to find a little calm. I thought about my mother, who was a big baseball fan and had a boyfriend who taught me to love the game when I was still a kid who knew he could win every impossible war and the greatest invisible championships. My mother wanted me to fall in love with reading, too, because she was a professor of humanities in several universities back home in our country. I must have been seven or eight when I realized she’d gotten tired of looking for heroes. I found an old baseball card covered with kisses, crimson imprints from what seemed like centuries ago. She used baseball to get me started reading. For years she talked to me about Homer and the sports of the Achaeans and Trojans. My mother had a theory: in baseball, as in Greek literature, a mistake could add dignity. Much later, just before she died, I would pray for a losing game, even make a few errors toward that end, just to conjure a call from her. I’d lift the receiver and after an affectionate greeting and tender silence, my mother would read me passages from the Iliad where the gods look at mortals with understanding and disdain, because they know better than anyone how war is a game that serves to provoke the best errors of all. Often she told me about the wrath of Achilles, about hubris—as my mother said, with her intellectual tone—as if that were his best error, his style of winning immortality. It was the same in baseball: heroes make mistakes, she said, but what matters is their style. Strike out, fail to catch a ball, dive for it in vain—that’s like the moment when Zeus transforms himself into a swan, into a rain shower, to make love to the woman he fancies and provoke the anger of another god.

  But Reba, it seemed, had no intention of redeeming his glorious errors. Now we had to trust to luck. Not any old luck but the kind that’s left after intelligence is of no more use. All the better—what we had left was the kind of faith you have in the wind, the heat, the cold. Or in lightness when there’s nothing to do but float.

  I expected Maddux’s next pitch to be out of the zone. That was the best way to ring someone up after two strikes. A bad pitch that looked good ought to drive the hitter to a desperation swing, with high chances of a foul, a pop-up, or a strikeout, the way Achilles would grow impatient in his wrath. I had heard the story the first baseman told me, but in a different version. Kigali couldn’t choose any of his pupils, so he chose them all. But he asked the Hutu soldiers, in honor of his father, to let the children play the last game of their lives. The last one. Kigali called them all together in the yard and almost forced them to take the field. He put the smallest in the outfield—center, right, and left—and whispered something in their ears. The kids laid out the bases, shards of zinc painted white that threatened to inflict tetanus on the first runner to slide. The kids found the only bat they had, and they didn’t look at the dry mud of the field, so they could imagine the impossible green of a true baseball field. In this game all his pupils would play against him. The soldiers sat in the truck that had brought them, impassively smoking their cigarettes. Reba pointed his bat toward the woods on the edge of the field like Kevin Costner in Field of Dreams, pointing to the cornfield, the paradise of washed-up baseball men. But the first baseman insisted that my version was false, that the notion of Kigali placing his pupils in the field so that on his first hit they’d take off and hide in the woods was a terrible lie. “The next out you’re going to see,” he told me, “will be made by a killer who put them in the field maliciously so he could see his vengeance come true: his first home run was going to be greeted by the applause of machetes and bullets.”

  Kigali watched the pitch approach, a bit low and outside, a perfect home run ball, but he didn’t swing. Our Caribbean style of turning bad pitches into homers had not found any echo in him. I’m sure that, before the umpire signaled it had been off the plate, Kigali wanted it to be the strike that would end his career. But that’s not how it went. What none of us expected was that Kigali would slug the next pitch straight to center and out of the park. The dull sound of the bat still echoes in my memory, a noise like that of clinking two mugs full of beer, the way I never did with Reba, barhopping in search of women. That swing unleashed an orgy of happiness in the stadium, a roar it would be sacrilege to call jubilation. What no one yet knew was that we were still on the point of losing the championship, but now due to a notorious home run. My only thoughts were about crossing the plate, the photos in Sports Illustrated, the glorious hugs and slaps of victory in counterpoint to the dying dreams of the other team.

  But when I reached the plate, I saw that Kigali was still rounding second, looking sluggish, as if we were playing on Jupiter and forced into slow motion by the massive gravity there. Was he overcome with emotion? Was it a heart attack, or would he fall to the ground like Josh Gibson, suffering from a brain tumor he had no inkling of? Could he have hit a home run in that game in front of the Hutu soldiers? Whatever my guess, I couldn’t have imagined what happened next. I ran toward third to urge him on. But he’d already sat down, like a child chastised by a parent, his head between his legs and rocking from side to side. Had he bet against his own team? When I got close to him, I didn’t know what to think. Underneath my laughter what I felt was pity. There was no god accompanying that desolate condition, so I knew he wasn’t praying. He was sitting and crying like I’d never seen before, sitting in the dirt of the base path a few inches from third, still far from home. Was he saying, It was all I could do, I told them to run as fast as they could, I yelled for them to run, to get into the woods? The umpire declared that if Reba didn’t touch home plate, the game would be tied and go into extra innings. Everyone, me among them, was urging him to get moving, but Kigali just shook his head. He didn’t want to move. Whoever heard of a ballplayer refusing to run the bases after his own home run? Nobody in the world has that kind of freedom. I knew that if I laid even a finger on Reba the umpire would call one of us out for interference and that would be that. But when I tried yelling at him again, Reba got up and hit me with a right cross that split my lip. I’m no Hutu, I said—or thought—and no Tutsi either, friend. All I want is to win the Series.

  Everyone fell silent, the umpires too. Kigali made threatening gestures to anyone who came near him. He was crying to beat the band, and cursing, screaming insults, possessed by gods or saints unknown. While I was recovering from his punch, I made out a strange phrase that I recognized from a story I had read in junior high, a story I hadn’t been able to make sense of at all. “I would prefer not to.” Could anyone refuse to circle the bases after a four-bagger? Could Kigali refuse to choose? Was it better to die? Was it worse to be the witness who prevented anyone from forgetting what happened? I remembered an article I read about a schoolmaster in the Rwandan capital who survived a massacre, and when the conflict was over he gathered all the bodies he found on his route home and put them in his living room, so no one could claim that the genocide never occurred. The reporter wrote that you had to wear a mask to go in there, because of the stench, and you had to carry a handful of lime to aid in the decomposition, as if the visitors to that improvised museum were pitchers or gymnasts, weightlifters or sluggers, any athletes who have to dust their hands for a grip that helps them
overcome gravity, inertia, or wind.

  The umpire and the manager went over to him, but Kigali threw dirt in their eyes and then tossed his helmet at them. We’d moved from baseball to boxing to hardcore wrestling and then to—literature? What could this be but literature in action, as my mother used to say in her effort to help me understand the times when reason and logic no long apply, but metaphors come into play: the moments in life when tragedy and comedy merge to explain pointlessness. I thought that maybe if I pulled off one of Reba’s shoes and carried it to the plate, then the run would score and we’d win the Series after all, but the umpire rejected my crazy idea without so much as a reason for his call. And how was I going to get the shoe off a giant a foot taller than me?

  That was when, in spite of the umps yelling at us, we pickup up Kigali and carried him home against his will. Almost the whole team piled in, hoisting him to our shoulders and running like we were carrying a wounded soldier on the point of being incinerated by our own napalm. Then we put him down on the plate. In all the history of baseball I’ve never known anyone who had the privilege or notoriety of touching the plate against his will. Later on we’d invent excuses: Kigali had hurt his knee and couldn’t walk, he’d had a panic attack, whatever. Meanwhile, the homer could not be denied. As soon as we stopped running he resumed cursing and insulting us from the bottom of his heart, flailing out with every part of his body, and then shouting names—the names of his pupils, so that they’d run. There were fourteen or fifteen names, and Kigali never knew how many got away. Was there any point in knowing that now? How many perverted men have committed acts of justice? How many just men have committed perverse acts?

  A nurse came out to sedate him with a dose of Demerol so he could be carried off the field in a stretcher. Before the paramedics took him away, Reba looked at me asking for my pardon. I thought that was just for having split my lip, but then I understood it went way beyond that. Was it absolution that Kigali was after? Yes, but the kind for someone who couldn’t do any more, forgiveness without understanding, details, or recrimination, an absolution very close to forgetting, like the pitch we’re inclined to let go by for fear of success and failure. Was it better to die and not be a witness, or to survive so as to tell, to save whatever still seemed salvageable by then? I remembered what Reba had said about Mantle and DiMaggio running after the fly ball. The injury Mantle needed for his career, the injury that would bring him immortality. Had Reba achieved the injury we all seek for the time when everything turns out wrong? Did such a thing exist? I didn’t say a word. I stood there looking at him until they carried him away, just before the sounds of celebration invaded that companionable silence. I smiled at him, but without compassion. The crowd began to cheer, though still afraid that Kigali might be a traitor who had bet against his team, or other such theories that didn’t make much sense. Self-assured or not, the applause came, and Kigali raised his hand from the stretcher in a gesture of farewell. He said goodbye to his career and to his pupils whom he had managed to save or not. He said goodbye to his career with a notorious home run that almost cost us the championship.

  THE PITCHER

  Marcial Gala

  (Cuba)

  Marcial Gala was born in Havana in 1963 and now lives in the city of Cienfuegos. He is the author of the novels Sentada en su verde limón (2004), La catedral de los negros (2012), and Monasterio (2013), published in Cuba and Spain, as well as five books of stories and two of poetry. La catedral de los negros won both of Cuba’s most important national awards, Premio Carpentier and Premio de la Crítica. His stories have been anthologized in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Argentina. Before beginning his literary career, he studied both psychiatric ergotherapy and architecture.

  Sixty feet away from me, the catcher calls for a strike. The players are ready. I feel the weight of the whole stadium on my shoulders. The batter grips the bat, fiercely seeking eye contact, and now he’s waiting, too. He’s a good hitter. I can sense his nose more than I can see it—like a bloodhound’s nose, the nostrils dilating in expectation of my delivery. The delivery that I’m not going to begin. I could turn toward first and throw the ball over there, toward the carefree runner who thinks the game is only a game. Maybe he’s right, since all he has to do is run to second, oblivious of anything else, and slide in quickly, ahead of the ball. I’m the one who throws the ball, and as I said, the crowd is on my shoulders. I don’t know how long I can hold out. The batter waits, waving his bat in a circle, watching me. This isn’t the first time we’ve faced each other. It’s never the first time.

  “Pónchalo! Strike him out!” the fans scream, their minds fixed on the game, incapable of understanding me. I can’t make them out; to me they’re just a maddening swath of color. And what am I to them? Less than that. To them I’m something simple, just an arm, a catapult ready to unload, that’s what it all comes down to, they think. In the radio and television booths the announcers must be saying, “The pitcher is taking his time.” That tautological sentence defines me as the proverbial tortoise, dragging out the game, while in other multiple and infinitesimal worlds, brief lives begin and end. A drop of sweat slides along the dark skin of my hand until it reaches the leather of the ball. In that drop, I can see myself. If I looked at it, I could understand this game, this stadium, and this crowd. If I could understand the drop of sweat, but I can’t, no way. The sweat falls into the dirt. Now my teammates are getting nervous. “Nothing to worry about, go for it!” one of them yells. “No batter, no batter,” another one chips in. The batter is a cornered animal, and so am I. If only they knew I’m not going to throw, I’m going to wait until the afternoon ends or someone calls the game. The umpires won’t do it. They don’t understand any better than me. The fans could do it, but the fans are screaming, they want me to throw this leather sphere in the shortest possible arc into the glove of the man crouching behind home.

  “A strike!” the multitude demands, while the runner on first advances slowly, carefully, like a hungry deer approaching a river in spite of sensing the leopard nearby. He abandons the security of the base, keeping an eye on my back; I know that that’s what he’s doing even though I can’t see him. If I turned, it would be easy to trap him and get the third out. But wouldn’t that just prolong my agony? Sooner or later, wouldn’t another inning begin, another game with its terrible, heavy weight? I’m the leopard, but I’m the tortoise, too. This is no game; I’ve learned enough to know that. The game starts when the lights go off, when the losers and the winners and the delirious fans go home. Then we play at being cooks, mechanics, doctors, politicians, slackers, husbands, mothers, and children. Then the game seems to have stopped, but then the next one starts the endless nightmare all over. What would it be like to play at being dead, I wonder, and I know that’s a metaphor, because death is surely a surprise, and that’s why I’m so afraid to throw the ball. What would I be without this round, white certainty in my hands? Now I’m the hunter, the leopard, the pitcher, but then, when my defenseless eyes watch the umpire’s hands, watch his face chiseled in stone, watch his fallible mouth and await his judgment? Then, in those seconds, the terrible sensation of being just a ghost under my uniform will come over me, a specter imagined by the devious crowd, and what can I do then . . .?

  Now the manager of our team is worried, too. I see him walking from one end of the dogao to the other, watching me. He’s worried about more than the delay, I can tell; it’s as if he knew I’d decided not to pitch anymore. He has an uncanny ability to guess what I’m thinking, but that’s encouraging, it shows that all is not lost, that through my agony and immobility I can communicate something, at least. It’s not that I think I’m better than anyone. If I don’t pitch, that won’t disturb the universe, I know. They’ll just bring in another pitcher, and some fans, not so many, will leave the stadium, turn off the TV, say the game is lost without me, say that not even baseball is like it used to be. But can the game be lost? That’s such a well-worn word, lost. The only ones lost are us,
insignificant pebbles rolling along and thinking we’re immortal. I won’t be the pitcher anymore, that’s all. I won’t have that dark responsibility on my shoulders. All I have to do is close my eyes, and the delirious crowd, the anguished multitude demanding something unknown and unacceptable to me, will disappear. All I have to do is close my eyes, cover my ears, maybe, and then what will be left of the game, or of us? Will I have the courage to do that, to escape from their expectations? Can I cease to be the pitcher just because I say so? Then, without that identity, what will I be? Nothing, or almost nothing. I’ll walk off slowly, very slowly, toward the showers underneath the stands, while the absurd mass of spectators follows me with their eyes and screams, “Yellow!” Yellow means coward. Will I have the courage to confront my defeat? Can I see myself as a coward, I, who so often have beaten the best our opponents have to offer? I can picture the headlines in tomorrow’s papers: Pitcher self-destructs. Pitcher blows up, unable to hold opponents in check. But that explosion is not real. It’s just that I, the pitcher, am in deadly pain.

  Now the umpire, that crow in human form, despairs. I can almost see the slight rictus of bitterness in his mouth, only partly hidden by the leather and iron of his mask. His eyes lock onto the ball, more than onto me. He still expects that one second or another, like a harlequin puppet, I’ll lift my right leg, raise it almost to my chest, and then bring my left arm back and bring it forward as fast as I can in a convoluted motion, fingers gripping the sphere and then letting it go. Will it be a ball or a strike? Who can say? Time passes, that’s all we know. Ten years I’ve devoted to the rude pastime of throwing a simple leather sphere into a padded leather glove. I confess it, I’ve aged, and my body that looks so robust has been eaten away by secret ills. Last night, in the bus on the way to the hotel, I fell asleep and dreamed of a beautiful morning in a stadium where I was the batter and the pitcher was You who are listening to me. How could I guess what pitch You were going to throw? Which of Your orbs, You who are master of so many worlds, was destined for me? Could I expect benevolence? Could I expect forgiveness for my absolute inability to hit off of such as You? But I had a modicum of confidence, because if Jacob wrestled with You, why couldn’t I? So I gripped the bat even though You are so big and I am the feeblest of dwarfs. I almost went blind gazing on Your splendor so as to guess the moment when You would deign to pitch to me. I was sure the umpire was on Your side, the fans too, and all the players in the world and all those who aren’t players as well, all of them one way or another were You, and I could even feel the part of You that dwells in me. Me alone against You, trembling, but with a tiny, remote, almost nonexistent shard of hope. I thought You could understand the hunger in my heart. But You never threw the pitch, and we stood there for an eternity, face to face, while the umpire prepared for his inevitable cry of “Out!” Now here I am, I’m the pitcher, and the players and fans are waiting for me, but I’m never going to throw. Do You know that? I’m going to let the batter agonize in wait. I want to believe that this batter is You. If so, how will the crowd react when they see a player with eyes so tender making his way to the batter’s box with the innocence of a lamb? The multitude will hush when they see You, Lord, or their shouts will grow even more delirious, or maybe they will sense at last that this is not a game. I imagine that slender player choosing a bat the way he might choose a chalice. I imagine him holding it clumsily, the wrong end in his grip, smiling at the crowd as they cry “Yellow!” Smiling at me, Your enemy, and against my will I’m going to hit You in the head with a projectile thrown at a speed never before seen. I know this, and I know Your son will die, but no, Lord, forgive me, I am Your son, now I understand, You created this stadium around me so that I can convince this restive multitude that is so intent on the game and expecting so much of me. But what can I say to them or what can I do, if You created me able to throw a ball and nothing more? Shall I raise my arms and plead for silence so I can present Your message to them? But what is Your message, Lord, what?