He patted his sac. No. They certainly hadn’t grown very much. Although he weighed them with his hands every morning he never found much improvement.
That was when the news started to spread, and he could see it spreading and spreading until it came face to face with Grandma Hazel herself. Like when gonorrhea starts spreading.
“Everyone wants to catch gonorrhea in this country,” Tin Marbán went back to saying. “Because, in this country having gonorrhea means that you’re getting some.”
He remembered Pacheco, Ictericia’s son. That day, he arrived tripping over himself at the circle of boys and then smiled enigmatically.
“Gentlemen . . . three shots in three days. My prick is on fire.”
“What, dude?” several anxious voices said. “Penicillin?”
“Cirilo Villaverde, dudes. I’ve gotten gonococo, it’s raging, raging, raging.”
From the ground, Agar watched Pacheco speak and turned green with envy.
He wanted to get it! But, how?
Later, Tin Marbán again explained that everything came from the Pajarito neighborhood, full of sailors and Chinamen, where a woman named Julia Cacharro measured one’s business beforehand to the inch.
He wanted to get it! He wanted a good case of gonorrhea with all his might. But . . . he hadn’t even seen one of those women!
So what if he went? So what if Julia Cacharro measured his business?
“Scram!” Julia Cacharro would say. “You’re disqualified.”
So that was when he decided it was better to roll the ball. Because rolling and rolling . . .
“Rolling and rolling, I rolled near a hole. I stuck in my finger and it came out all red. What is it?”
“Your mama, dude.”
Laughter.
“Yours on the floor.”
More laughter.
“Your motherfucking mama.”
More laughter. The laughter of boys under the sun. Agar crossed the park. The kids still hadn’t arrived. The lizards were moving restlessly on the trees, taking out their red ties. The sun beat down hard on his shaved head.
The day was still beginning.
At Five, I’ll Dive
“Let’s travel in the Memory Spaceship,” Woody Woodpecker said.
Wally Walrus and Attila the Hen were also going.
Agar started to to turn the page, but Mama Pepita showed up in the door to his room. Her eyes were sunken, as if she had been crying the whole time. She always looked like she’d been crying. But in reality she’d been in the kitchen. Peeling onions, she said.
“Mama . . . do you always peel onions?”
“Shut up!” she said. And later added, “Go look for Sensat oil at the corner store.” And she handed him the coins and the bottle.
“Afterward, I’m going to the park,” Agar said.
The screams from the park were making him anxious. They cut his breath short. They made him sweat.
“Is the boy so impatient to get to the park?” Mama Pepita sang.
He thought hard about it. If he said yes, Mama would say: Then you have to stay at home.
It was better not to respond.
“Well,” Mama said, “what are you waiting for? Get going!”
Then he had to cross the park with the bottle of oil.
It was hard for him to cross the circle of West Side Boys.
He started to walk, pressing his butt together, holding in his breath.
“The delivery boy, look at him . . . there he goes!”
“Dude, bring me a packet of crackers . . . would you?”
“Dude, in my house they’re looking for a head maid. The pay is good and includes lots of food.”
Laughter.
“Dude, is it true that in your house they tie you to the table leg?”
Something got stuck in his throat. Agar felt his penis shriveling.
“Hey, dude . . . we’re going to swim in the Cantarranas River! Are you coming?”
Laughter.
Agar turned around. He was angry, but he tried to appear calm.
“Okay,” he said. “Okay. I’ll come right back. And then my hands will be empty.”
“Oh what a good-looking dude! With his little bottle and everything.”
Laughter.
“I bet I can break the bottle!”
“I bet you can’t!”
“I bet I can!”
“Bet you can, go, go!”
“I bet you’re not man enough!”
A chorus of angry voices. A drop of sweat slid down Agar’s forehead and hung from his nose. Silence.
“Dude, what you said . . .”
“Men kill each other over lesser things, dude.”
“Holy shiiiiiiit!”
Danger. He knew he had said something serious. Irreparable. He remembered Papa Lorenzo’s order that day he came back with his face smashed up and his eye busted by a punch.
An eye for an eye.
Bones walked over to him. Agar’s legs were shaking and he thought of breaking into a run. But he immediately understood that then he would never look the West Side Boys in the face. If he contradicted himself, he would also have to withstand their mocking laughter forever. Mocking laughter that he would hear at night, wrapped in a sheet in a pool of sweat.
If a fight started, he was going to lose. He knew he was going to lose.
“What did you say, dude?” Bones wanted to know, walking toward him. He spoke calmly, like one who is used to danger.
“I didn’t . . . I didn’t say,” Agar stuttered.
“So now it turns out he didn’t say!” Bones exclaimed. “Come here, dude. Have you ever gotten a good correction?”
And he grabbed the collar of Agar’s shirt.
Just then, Mama Pepita’s voice could be heard from the door.
“What are you doing?” she yelled. “I told you to go straight there!”
“Leave him alone, Bones!” the chorus said. “Leave the boy alone . . .”
“I’ll get you when you come back, boy,” Bones warned. “Get ready.”
“Let go of me.”
Mama Pepita’s voice had saved him. He straightened out his collar.
“You think you’re so hot, don’t you? Because I’m going on an errand, right?”
He continued on his way. The sun was beating down hard on his head. From the park bench, the West Side Boys yelled at him again: “Cinderella!”
“Sons of bitches!” He muttered, swallowing the snot and salty water running down his cheeks.
Hubert’s wife yelled at him from the gate again: “Lift up your head! Do you want to be a hunchback when you’re older?”
Go to hell! He yelled in his head. He kicked a stone hard.
Then he remembered John Wayne’s movie “The Quiet Man.” Everyone mocked him because he was a quiet man. They mocked him. They mocked him. They mocked him. Until one day, John Wayne punched someone, just one punch, and he killed a guy. He had a forbidding right-hand.
Agar got to the corner store and leaned his elbows on the counter.
“A bottle of oil,” he said.
“Look who’s here!” The shopkeeper exclaimed. “The pyromaniac. Is it true that you burned down the Páez house?”
“Sensat,” he said. “Sensat oil.”
The shopkeeper went to get his order. Agar looked at him hatefully.
I hate everyone, he thought. I’m against the Indians, but also against the Cowboys. I don’t have a mother or a father. An Indian named Pocahontas found me in the woods and raised me.
“That’s seventeen cents,” the shopkeeper said.
He paid. He took the bottle of Sensat oil.
For all your meals, Sensat.
But there was also Oliveite oil.
And he remembered the slogan: Oliveite tastes so great.
Tongolele announced it. A television star. With glorious tits.
“My God, those tits! Those tits!”
And they shook.
“They’re not re
al,” Mama Pepita maintained during the shows.
Papa Lorenzo looked at her out of the corner of his eye and said: “Ha!”
There were three cents left. He thought he should buy cigarettes.
“I know you smoke,” Grandma Hazel would say. “I know you smoke with those little devils in the park. And there’s more I know. I know sometimes you steal them from the Mini Max.”
“Whoever doesn’t smoke is a fag,” Agar said.
“You wretch! You’re going to bring your father down even lower than he is. You’re going to send away your paralytic mother with a coronary thrombosis. You’re going to bury us all. And you’re going to end up a gangster. Gangster. Gangster.”
I like the idea. I’d like to be someone like Splinter Weevil. The meanest man in the world. Everyone beat him as a child. He grew up amid blows. And rolling and rolling, he became a man. And one day he was picking apples in his father’s orchard.
“Pick them up!”
“I can’t. I don’t feel well. Ohhh . . .”
“Pick them up!”
“I can’t. I don’t feel well. Ohhh . . .”
“Pick them up!”
And that was the end. Splinter sunk his hoe into his father’s chest and then kicked his mother in the head, and stole the money that was under a bush. Then he got his ticket to Chicago.
Then came what happened with the bank. There was nothing easier for him than a good hold-up! First you disconnect the wires and then you calmly ask them to put everything in the sacks.
“The pigs!” Bones suddenly shouted. “We’re dead!”
Splinter looked at him in disgust. He slowly put out his cigarette with his foot.
“Are you nervous, Bones? You’re a chicken. I don’t want pansies in my group, Bones — ”
“No, Splinter, no!”
“I’m sorry, Bones . . .”
KAPOW! KAPOW! KAPOW! KAPOW!
The sun was beating hard. Bones was dead. The pigs evaporated into thin air.
With the change he bought three Royal cigarettes. He would save them for later, when he was in the park enjoying the scent of the rosemary, looking at the clouds and imagining new ways of revenge.
On the way back he decided on a shortcut through Hunchback Alley to avoid the circle of West Side Boys.
At Six, Breadsticks
“Hey, dude!”
The voice of evil called to him as he passed through Hunchback Alley.
“Over here!” The voice said.
He thought it must be one of those closed circles that the West Side Boys made to read pornographic books.
“What’s up, dudes?”
He saw familiar faces, but they were a little worked up.
“Dude, we have to show you something,” Henry said.
Agar saw some of them smoking and lit up one of his cigarettes. He inhaled the smoke until he felt his lungs fill up. Seeing them smoke, some of them even smoking three cigarettes at a time, reminded him of Mama Pepita’s indignant lamentations.
“It’s not worth your time,” Papa Lorenzo would say. “They are the ‘Very Embodiment of Bad Ideas.’ They all do it to go against the grain. But ahhhh,” he warned, narrowing his eyes, “If I catch you playing that game, forget it. I’ll kill you right then.”
“Let’s go over there,” Agar said, letting the smoke go out through his nose. “I hope it’s not something moronic.”
“Come on, dude,” Henry said, putting aside all bad intentions. “Don’t you smell that, dude?”
“What is it?” Agar asked, intrigued. Though he couldn’t deal with the stench anymore.
They went around the edge of the abandoned house. It had been a beautiful house, but now the West Side Boys had completely destroyed all of its windows.
They arrived at the place at last. The stench was unbearable.
“It’s a dead mare,” Henry said. “And she was about to give birth. Don’t you see the bump, Agar?”
A swarm of flies was circling around the thing in question.
“She was about to give birth.” Henry insisted. “She was tied up in Liborio’s field and got loose.”
“The captain killed her,” Kiko Palacios pointed out, placing his boot on the swollen belly. “Godinez, the sea captain. Denny saw him driving his Buick when the mare got in the way.”
“And he ran over her?”
“No. He got out of the car and shot her twice.”
“I saw it all with my own eyes,” Denny said, coming out from behind the wild rosemary. “Two shots.”
“Son of a bitch,” Agar said.
“I don’t know anything about that, dude.” Denny said. “Politics don’t interest me. What I can tell you is that it was loaded.”
Denny broke off a stick of rosemary and shoved it forcefully into the dead beast’s sex. Agar shuddered in horror when the stick entered, breaking the flesh.
Henry leaned on his shoulders. Suddenly, Agar felt a great desire to hold that stick.
“Give me that stick, dude,” he said, biting his lip. “I’m going to tear her apart.”
He took the rosemary and sunk it in forcefully, digging into the orifice, until a trickle of whitish liquid came out.
“She came, dude,” Henry whispered. “That’s it! That’s it!” And Agar felt the boy’s hand trembling on his shoulder. The sun was beating down on the rosemary bush and a halo spiraled around their heads.
Agar felt two urges. One was tugging at his body, pushing him to run away from there forever. The other directed his arm, making him sink the stick in up to the hilt.
He felt disgusted, but strangely satisfied.
“Don’t be stupid,” he said later, throwing the stick far away. “She’s dead.”
Denny Dimwit sat down on the animal’s swollen belly. He exhaled the smoke from his cigarette and said: “But that’s how women work, more or less.”
“But you have to get them there,” Kiko Palacios assured them. “You have to ‘know’ how to get them there.”
“Is it very deep?” Agar wanted to know. In his mind, he was calculating according to his own resources.
“Eight inches to the end,” Denny said. “Although that varies. Eight, nine . . . that’s where a woman’s weak spot is.”
Agar felt frustrated. It was too much. In the afternoons, he went into the bathroom at home where he’d hidden a geometry ruler in order to measure himself. And he wasn’t any more than five inches.
“What are you doing with a ruler behind the toilet?” a surprised Mama Pepita wanted to know.
“I brought it in by accident,” he replied.
He thought that if Mama Pepita had suspected anything, he would have had to hang himself from a lamp. Then his memories disappeared as Denny continued to explain: “Women, there are two kinds. Wide and narrow. Hot and cold. My mother, for example, is cold.” A thousand needles pricked Agar’s face.
“Why?” Agar asked.
“My old man says so every once in a while,” Denny said, indifferently. “You’re already a man, he says. I can talk to you man-to-man. Right? And then, he says to me: Do you know how long it has been since your mother and I did it? A month! Do you think that’s fair? And then he says: Find yourself a Spanish woman for home; an Englishwoman to go out; and an Indian woman for a good time. What do you think?”
“Listen, dude,” Henry said. “Your old man is really something!”
“He’s a real joker,” Denny said. He searched his nose with one finger and added, “A month ago, when I turned eleven, he talked to me in the living room like a friend. Son, he goes and tells me: you’re already a man. And as a man, I’m going to tell you something. (And during all of this, mom is signing to him to shut his mouth.) He started to laugh and said: What you have there is not just for urinating, do you understand? It’s to be used. Use it well! And at the same time, my old lady goes: Animal! But he kept on going as if nothing happened. He shrugged his shoulders and said: It’s my duty! My father did the same with me. And his father and his.
And so on and so on. And thus . . . to infinity.”
Denny Dimwit took a stick of pine and rolled it around in his closed fist.
“In any event,” he said, returning to the matter at hand. “I’m in no rush. The thing grows until you’re twenty-one. About an inch a year.”
He let out the smoke arrogantly and added: “Mine will be legendary!”
And Agar felt himself being reborn. He turned around, touching himself between the legs. From eleven until he turned twenty-one, there were still ten long years. And Denny was calculating one inch per year. He patted his penis and felt it small beneath his clothes. He felt ashamed of how many times he’d imagined that it would never grow.
Like that day they were urinating on the park benches, and he was so nervous he had to take a good look because he couldn’t get it out, and Bones had asked: “What, dude? Did you lose it?”
He finally ended up taking it out at last. Although he remembered that then the stream hadn’t come and how nonetheless, that night, he had pissed all over himself in bed.
At Seven, the Razor’s Edge
They were lying on the grass. Smoking under the sun facing the mare. The evil rosemary bloomed, and the West Side Boys broke into their space.
“A treasure!” Tin Marbán yelled. “The dudes found a treasure.”
So they all explored the dead beast.
They spent a while jumping over her, until they fell on the grass. Pacheco’s dog had come with them and was barking furiously at the putrefied corpse. Bones called her over and spit in her mouth and she swallowed Bones’ saliva.
“Hey, speaking of, Dude, you know who died?”
“No.”
“Well, someone who was alive.”
Laughter.
Agar felt he was being mocked.
“Hand me a smoke, dude,” Kiko Ribs said. And then he lit the cigarette, cupping his hand around it wisely. As he smoked, Agar recalled Mama Pepita the day she smelled his mouth.
“This boy smokes,” she discovered, shocked. “He smells like an opium den.”
He remembered previous episodes in a row. Like the day they found cigarettes in his shirt and Mama Pepita saved the box to show it to Papa Lorenzo when he got back from work.
That time he spent the whole afternoon shaking like a leaf in his room. And he had wished that someone would arrive that night with the news that Papa Lorenzo had been in a car accident.
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