By nine, Papa Lorenzo still hadn’t returned, and then he thought he had killed him with his supplications. Deep down, he understood that he did not want to kill his father.
“You can leave him an invalid, okay,” he pleaded, “but let him live!”
Deep down, he didn’t really understand himself. He saw Papa Lorenzo look up at the peeling ceiling and write names in the air with his finger, and he thought he loved him.
“I was raised by the whip,” Papa Lorenzo said that time, looking at the walls stupefied. “My father went to get me on the ball field and ran after me around all the bases with a belt raised high.
“You have to work!” he would say.
Papa Lorenzo smiled faintly and continued: “I would have been a good Major League player. If it hadn’t been for how malnourished I was, God knows where I would be now! Tom Casey saw me playing once and liked me. ‘What a shame!’ Tom Casey said. ‘If he had another twenty pounds on him, I would hire him for Cincinnati.’”
And Papa Lorenzo nodded along to his words vehemently and said later: “Ha! . . . I was a good center fielder.”
So it was. Agar loved him sometimes.
Nonetheless, the night of the cigarettes, Papa Lorenzo arrived at last at eleven. Safe and sound.
“This is the brand you smoke, you addict?” Papa Lorenzo wanted to know.
“No,” Agar said. He now regretted his moment of weakness. He understood that Imaginary Fate was now punishing his indecision.
“Dead or alive,” Fate insinuated, “but not in between.”
“Open your mouth!” Papa Lorenzo ordered, waving the pack of cigarettes in front of his face. “Open it! Open! Open it!”
“You’re acting like a savage!” Mama Pepita shrilled from the sofa.
“It’s this neighborhood . . . ,” she muttered, “it’s this country, this life.”
Papa Lorenzo squeezed Agar’s jaw and opened his mouth at last.
The cigarettes went in all the way to his throat.
“Swallow them!” Papa Lorenzo yelled. “Swallow them, you addict! You are the very face of Heresy . . .”
Agar was choking.
Mama Pepita took him to the toilet between hiccups. He vomited a yellowish juice and ground tobacco. As he leaned against the wall, he remembered the “salt episode.” Another time when Mama Pepita had ripped into him with her litany about his vices.
“This boy eats too much salt,” Mama Pepita said.
“Let him explode,” Papa Lorenzo recommended, looking over the comic pages.
“Don’t you know that salt waters down your blood?” Mama Pepita scolded Agar him. “You’re going to turn yellow.”
Papa Lorenzo paged through the newspaper absentmindedly. He seemed very tired.
“I bet you don’t care, right?” Mama Pepita suddenly spat at him. “The boy spends his whole day eating salt and you don’t care if he explodes.”
“What do you want me to do?” Papa Lorenzo yelled, sitting up. “Kill him?”
And at the same time, he jumped out of his seat and tried to look Agar in the eye.
“So the boy eats salt!” he said, as if repeating lines he’d learned by heart.
“He’s addicted,” Mama Pepita assured him calmly.
“Addicted? I know a way to get rid of his addiction.”
Papa Lorenzo went to the pantry and came back with his fist full of salt.
“Have salt!” he yelled. “So you die of pleasure.”
And he threw the fistful of salt into Agar’s mouth.
“Animal!” Mama Pepita yelled. She ran over to Agar and thumped his back helpfully.
And Agar still didn’t understand. It had happened just like the event with the toilet. Mama Pepita had also taken on two roles then: the Witch, and Pinocchio’s fairy godmother.
“Pinocchio doesn’t flush the toilet,” Agar said.
Papa Lorenzo Stromboli jumped up again, tired of yelling.
“Why don’t you flush the toilet, knucklehead?”
“I don’t know . . . ,” Agar tried to explain. “Sometimes I forget . . . I don’t know!”
“In your rush to go join your friends, huh? And now you’re going to leave without flushing again, huh?”
And he pulled Agar by the ears.
“Get your ass over here!” Papa Lorenzo said. And Agar remembered the West Side Boys’ voices, playing with his name: “Get your ass here, Agar. Get your ass a cigar!”
Papa Lorenzo led him forcefully to the toilet. Agar kicked furiously in front of the bowl. Papa Lorenzo said: “From today on, you will never forget.”
And then he ordered Agar to stick his hand into the yellow bottom.
“Go!” Papa Lorenzo ordered.
When will you learn to flush the toilet? When will you learn not to smoke? When will you learn to not say filthy words? When will you learn to respect your mother? To wash your hands, brush your teeth, not to tell lies?
Agar hated Papa Lorenzo. He would have driven a wooden stake into him. Deep inside. The rest would be easy. Run away, run away, and come back at the age of thirty, when the crime had been forgotten.
“Hey, dudes . . . anyone here ever dreamed of getting lost and then coming back years later, suddenly someone important?” Tin Marbán had once asked.
“You know, I have a plan for that,” he said later. “Change my hairstyle. Whoever changes his hairstyle changes his life. People even forget your name. You’re somebody without a past.”
Mama Pepita grumbled from the sofa without any specific reason. Papa Lorenzo was watching a clown show on the TV.
Agar was alone in the bathroom and when he looked at himself in the mirror, he admitted he was an ugly boy.
He hated himself. He hated his body and his face. And he hated himself inside.
You should die, he thought. And he took a razor. It’s just as easy as moving this blade across these veins.
He swiped the razor gently against his skin, then pressed down until he cut himself a little below his wrist. He stopped there. Watching his blood drip slowly down his arm. But he immediately imagined that the blood was volcano lava and that the hairs on his arm were a legion of frightened Hair-Men.
“WE’RE SINKING!” the Hair-Men yelled.
The blood reached his elbow. The Hair-Men sunk. The clowns laughed on the TV.
“Change the channel, hon,” Mama Pepita’s indifferent voice said. “Put on Gaspar Pumariega. Maybe they’ll give away some Philips blenders.”
“That miserable fat man disgusts me,” Papa Lorenzo said. “He’s the classic exploiter of monkey brains, like you.”
Agar cleaned the cut with toilet paper. He turned his eyes back to the mirror and made a terrible grimace. Finally, he went to a corner of his room and laid down.
He closed his eyes.
From the living room, the clowns laughed. But he didn’t hear them. He was now piloting a plane loaded with atomic bombs that he would later drop over the city of Havana.
At Eight, I’ll Beat You Straight
The mare changed colors. She turned purplish under the sun’s rays.
They were still lying in a circle around her, used to the unbearable stench.
“The one they’re the strictest with is Agar,” Tin Marbán said.
“They always beat me,” you said. You laid back and added: “It’s good for me. That way I get used to life’s hard knocks.”
But you were lying. You were trying to find some advantage to your disgrace.
“I wouldn’t want to learn like that,” Kiko Ribs said. “No, no. If my father beat me like that, I’d kill him.”
“My father beats me when he’s had a fucked-up day,” Speedy said.
And the West Side Boys laughed.
“And he almost always has a fucked-up day,” Speedy added, and the laughter continued.
“Here, all of us are fucked up,” Tin Marbán opined. “It’s the law. My father was fucked up by his grandfather. And my grandfather was fucked up by my great-grandfath
er. And my great by my great-great. And now my father fucks me up. And I’ll fuck up whoever comes next.”
“Hey, dudes . . . has anyone here ever thought of killing his father?”
Silence.
You kept looking at the rosemary. One day, in the garden, you had thought it. You thought that Mama Pepita was an oleander and your father a vicar. Mechanically, you started pulling up the flowers. Decapitating, dismembering, pulling the leaves off. Mama Pepita showed up at the door and yelled in horror.
“Murderer!”
The garden was ruined. It was a cemetery of petals and uprooted heads. At night, Papa Lorenzo pulled you aside.
“Come here, kid. You’re quite a case. Would you like to tell me what you got out of breaking apart those flowers? What pushes you to destroy everything? What? What? What?”
Suddenly, he started to beat you. You moved back toward the wall, trying to cover yourself, without responding.
“Why did you pull up the flowers?”
“I don’t know!” you yelled at last. “Don’t ask me!”
“Fucking kid,” Papa Lorenzo grumbled, tired of beating him. “Prison fodder.”
And he stayed like that for a while, looking at Agar bitterly, but then later it seemed as if he were remembering something similar, from many years before. And he looked at Agar again, surprised.
And he smelled himself under his arms. And he slowly went back to his newspaper, scratching the back of his head.
At Nine, You’ll Be Fine
The sun was beating down hard.
The mare’s skin was stretched under the rays. Tin Marbán commented on it, looking at her: “She can’t complain. She has a well-attended wake.”
Figure out this riddle: it’s not a cow, but it gives milk. It’s not a submarine but it’s down below. It’s not a communist, but it leans to the left. And it’s brave because it lives among pricks.
Who is it?
Laughter.
Everyone knew who it was. The joke was old.
“Well, dudes,” Liborio said. “I’m going to make an announcement: I’ve been letting out the sweet stuff since last Saturday. I, Liborio!”
In chorus: Prove it! Prove it! It’s so easy to talk the talk.
Liborio hushed the voices with his hands.
“Take a look at Mandrake the Magician,” he said. “Nothing there and suddenly . . . plop!”
And he took out his penis.
Agar looked at it, and was relieved to confirm that it was more or less like his.
“Hit it hard, dude!” The chorus said. “Henry will entertain you by reading something.”
“Chased to her Bed,” Bones said, offering up a small, wrinkled book. “One shot!” he assured. “The dude’s name is Quasimodo. And his instrument comes down to his knees.”
Laughter.
Liborio rolled his eyes and lay down on the grass.
When there was silence, Henry started reading.
“In the town of Quivicán, where sin flourished, Quasimodo Pomarrosa was a women’s masseuse. How many buttocks had passed through his hands! How many sighs of pleasure! How many lives . . . !”
Liborio stopped rubbing himself and Henry stopped reading.
“What’s wrong, dude?” the chorus said.
“Dudes . . . ,” Liborio confessed, annoyed. “I don’t want you to see my thing. That’s what’s wrong.”
The West Side Boys let out a sigh of disappointment.
“It’s better if you leave me alone.” Liborio proposed. “I’ll let you know right away.”
So they left Liborio masturbating alone amid the pines and went back to the House of Broken Windows. To sit in a circle on the grass. In the middle of the rosemary. Under the sun’s rays.
“Bones is giving it to Tubby.” Kiko Palacios commented.
“How’s that?” Speedy wanted to know.
“Easy!” Bones said. And then he explained, “You wait until the mother is sleeping. Around two. Then you go and, as if you didn’t care, you say, Tubby, would you change two hooks for me? That’s the password. He made it up himself.”
“Two hooks . . . ,” Speedy murmured.
“Two. And then, you end up getting it on with him easy.”
Agar knew Tubby. He was the son of a family of silent Spaniards who walked around in espadrilles. He had a nine-year-old sister who spent her days sucking lollipops: Little Lulu.
He remembered the day that Tin Marbán came by telling one of his stories. He said he had found Tubby playing with dolls at the Cobas’ house. But he said he had long suspected as much, because he could smell it.
“I have a nose for fairies,” he explained.
So they all went to Tubby’s house that afternoon. And his mother came out to welcome them and said, surprised: “Oh . . . but today isn’t his birthday!”
She seemed happy about the sudden friendship between the West Side Boys and her son.
“I didn’t know Tubby had so many friends,” she commented, smiling.
“We’ve always loved him!” Bones said, hiding a lightning conductor in his hands behind his back.
Fine. Tubby had gone out. Mrs. Cobas lent out her garage and the West Side Boys pretended to play at being a music band.
“Noise,” Bones directed them. “Lots of noise, dudes . . .”
Fine. After they drew sticks the ones who were lucky went in. Agar was happy enough to watch Tubby’s white buttocks and to be making a ruckus to throw off Mrs. Cobas.
Fine. Fat Tubby knocked on Little Lulu’s door. The West Side Boys knocked louder on some cardboard boxes.
“What do you want me for?” Lulu wanted to know, once in the circle.
“You know why,” Tubby said. “Let’s go.”
“It’s done . . . ,” Bones said afterwards. “When she started to cry it was already over.”
Laughter.
From the pines, they heard Liborio’s voice.
“Hey dudes . . . you can come.” He was smug.
The West Side Boys went one by one to confirm the news.
“But, you can barely see it,” Agar complained.
“Well, old man, I’m not a factory . . .”
Laughter.
“So what did you feel, dude?” Agar asked. He knew he was giving himself away, making his curiosity known. Tin Marbán had once come around saying he felt a great tickle, and Agar wanted to trick them, saying he had felt that. But the West Side Boys’ chorus was implacable again: “Prove it! Prove it!”
And he couldn’t prove what couldn’t be proven.
“A huge tickling feeling, man,” Liborio said, buttoning his fly. “And then you’re just a ragdoll. All loose, like this . . .”
And he fell down on the grass dramatically.
“The first time, I passed out for an hour,” Tin Marbán said, with a certain air of superiority. “It really hit me hard. Although in any event, I was already a man,” he added, putting a hand on Liborio’s shoulder.
The West Side Boys smiled, satisfied. They patted Liborio’s wet back and yelled and cheered into the air, howling wildly. Agar envied them deeply.
The sun beat down on his skull and he wiped the sweat away from his brow with his hand.
Amid the ruckus, Kiko Ribs had the idea of hunting spiders and making them fight each other. They immediately looked for lizards. Alex hunted one down and then tied it to a spinning top. Then he looked for a hole in the earth and put the animal in it with a pine stick. Agar seconded it with a stake, that he would have to bury at the exactly right moment to cut off the spider’s retreat. It was like fishing in the earth.
The spider bit, and Alex expertly started to bring it in. At the designated moment, Agar fit in the stake and the spider flowered amid the dry earth.
“Grab it!” Bones said. “Dare to grab it, come on . . .”
Agar looked at it, undecided.
“Like this!” Bones said. He put his finger on its hairy abdomen and grabbed its back legs. “Okay?” And made as if he were going t
o throw it at the group.
The day was very clear. The grass was extraordinarily green and the spiders were intensely black on the grass. The West Side Boys were making a coliseum out of paving stones. At last, they threw the spiders inside.
The two beasts tried to escape from the stone circle, but it was useless. Bones put them back in the middle just when they’d almost made it out.
“Fight, bitches,” Bones said.
“I think it’s a male and a female,” Kiko Ribs pointed out.
“They should fuck then!” Bones decreed.
They all laughed.
The small spider began attacking and soon the two were in a furious embrace. The West Side Boys screamed loudly trying to cheer on the scrawniest one. Agar wanted the little one to win. After all, he felt like a sort of small spider in the middle of another grand coliseum surrounded by water on all sides.
“Bite!” Agar yelled in solidarity.
Just then Hubert’s wife showed up, making her way through the rosemary. Apparently, she happened to be going by Hunchback Alley and the screams got her attention. She made a gesture of disgust and, noticing the mare, covered her nose.
“Animals!” She screamed. “Is this how you spend your time?”
Silence. The West Side Boys stood up and tried to act respectful. Later, amid the silence, Bones let out a noisy burp.
A chorus of laughter.
Hubert’s wife tried to say something, but the laughter drowned her out. She turned red. Above the laughter, she managed to make an insult heard, and then she left, breathless.
The larger spider had won. With difficulty, it pulled itself away from the dead one and embarked upon a shaky withdrawal toward the stones. Bones let it climb up and then, he slowly crushed it with his foot.
They all fell down on the grass again.
They were happy. They were sweating like wild horses under the tropical sun and they were perfectly happy. Like the times they crucified lizards on the trunks of trees, hammering their legs in with pins.
“A high-level operation . . . ,” Bones would say, slicing open their abdomens with a razor. And then, one by one, he would take out the animal’s organs and put them on the grass.
“Hey, dudes,” he suggested. “Let’s transplant a lizard brain into a spider . . .”
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