The Empanada Brotherhood

by John Nichols

  Molly said, “I love him, I’m sorry.”

  The professor could not resist. “Love?” he teased her, and then quoted Cervantes in full: “‘Love and War are the same thing, and stratagems and policy are as allowable in the one as in the other.’”

  Molly gave him the finger.

  59. Balmy Weather

  “It’s a fact the patrón is heading for Spain,” Alfonso said. “He wasn’t just kidding around. He told me yesterday that he bought a ticket a month ago. The boat leaves in five days.”

  A month ago? What next? We were strolling across Washington Square enjoying toasted almond Good Humors and the balmy weather. Gorgeous women were everywhere. A jug band was playing by the fountain.

  When I asked Alfonso why the cook was leaving, he gave me the bad news: “He screwed up, he’s in hock too deep. The loan sharks are pissed off. Some checks bounced at the bank. He even has gambling debts and hasn’t paid the rent for two months. Roldán is a terrible businessman. He’ll wind up incarcerated or at the bottom of the East River if he doesn’t get out of here soon.”

  “That’s terrible,” I said.

  Alfonso gestured almost cavalierly. “It’s not too bad, blondie. He’s been there before. It’s his modus operandi. Yet he always escapes.”

  “But what will we do when he leaves?” I asked. “All the guys in our patota. The kiosk is where we meet.”

  Alfonso sat down on a bench and I took my place beside him. A curly-haired tot sped by us furiously pedaling her tricycle. Suddenly I knew that more sad facts were about to be revealed.

  The professor said, “Look, I’ve been meaning to tell you, blondie. I’m going home to Buenos Aires soon. I really miss my country. I’ll finish my doctorate there. I plan to marry Sofía, the boring old friend, and stop talking to idiots before I become one myself.”

  Removing his glasses he wiped them clean on his shirttail while I frowned and studied my fingernails.

  “Of course you are not an idiot,” Alfonso added. “But you know what I mean. Gino and Popeye and Chuy are not exactly Einsteins.”

  When I could speak I said, “Sofía will be good for you. She’ll be an anchor in the storm.”

  “Yes, Sofía is wonderful. She’s intelligent and polite and extremely loyal. I could cheat on her with a dozen Renatas and she’d still love me. Renata would castrate me if she learned I was unfaithful.”

  “Is that your plan, to marry Sofía so you can cheat on her with a hundred Renatas?”

  “Don’t be a dumbbell, che.” Alfonso was embarrassed and a little angry. He flicked his wooden ice-cream stick toward a nearby trash basket. “Melodrama aside, blondie, the truth is I am a funny little man with glasses who hasn’t been laid in a year and I’m so horny I could die. Too bad, tough luck. Yes, Renata is the one big adventure of my life, but I’m also a mathematical genius. And this way, if I marry the calm pragmatic Sofía instead of the wild and crazy Renata, I can do a lot for math. Also, we’ll have a family and, as I’ve said before, I will learn to love her.”

  “You don’t sound very happy about your decision, profe.”

  “Of course I’m not happy. I’m human, aren’t I? I adore Renata. I lust for Renata. I jerk off every night thinking about Renata.”

  He paused, wondering if he should have admitted that. Then he said quietly, with intense feeling, “But I also want to survive.”

  I considered this statement for a moment. Then I said, “Let’s do something to give Roldán a royal send-off. He’s probably broke because of us. It doesn’t seem we ever gave much to him. Why not a big going-away party? We’ll gather everybody and take him to Chinatown for dinner. He loves sweet-and-sour pork—”

  “Stop.” Alfonso shook his head. “We can’t tell anybody else that he’s leaving. Roldán is skipping out on the gangsters, and if they learn about it beforehand who knows what might happen?”

  We sat there a few moments longer touched by the afternoon shadows. It seemed impossible to me how things that were so precious could be dismantled so quickly. Squirrels were having a field day in the branches overhead and pigeons swooped against the blue sky. Members of the jug band were on a cigarette break.

  At length Alfonso said, “Don’t be sad. Things always change. The patota is just a figment of our imaginations.”

  Then he added, “One day I’ll come back with my wife and kids to visit you, blondie, wherever you are. Perhaps we’ll be grown-ups by then.”

  60. Face-to-Face

  The night before he headed to Spain, Roldán closed the empanada stand early. A few of us in on the secret stayed behind to dismantle the operation before his landlord or a loan shark could tip that the cook was taking a powder. Popeye double-parked the diaper truck nearby and brought over some cardboard boxes. Chuy paid off a cop to ignore our vehicle. Alfonso and I carried cartons of stuff to the truck. Leftover empanadas and pastelitos, salt shakers, Tabasco bottles, coffee cans and packs of napkins, dish soap, bags of yerba mate, a crate of Cokes, and so forth. We lugged over the coffee machine. There were little saucers and a few mate drinking straws, called bombillas, and various cooking utensils.

  The boss had made a deal with Chuy for the entire lot. Chuy had a Mexican pal from Guanajuato who was setting up a café in Brooklyn. So he purchased Roldán’s meager inventory for a hundred dollars and change.

  We cleaned out the kiosk in half an hour like piranhas attacking an unfortunate tapir that had fallen into their river.

  Next, we raced upstairs and did the same thing to his apartment. Popeye had string for bundling the old newspapers before we carted them down to the garbage cans. Luigi and Alfonso packed up Roldán’s books, which were destined for Santiago Chávez, his baker. I emptied the refrigerator of what little remained, fodder for my larder.

  On the spot Chuy bought the TV set for twenty dollars, then gave it to Luigi.

  The naked Christmas tree had a couple of bulbs still blinking so we didn’t touch it. Three large flimsy suitcases reinforced by knotted twine stood ready near the door. After we had swept clean the floors and washed the final dishes, Popeye and Luigi went to move the diaper truck since the cop was getting nervous. Chuy tagged after them because he had a date with his accountant, Greta Garbo.

  And Alfonso took off, dog tired, leaving me alone with the cocinero.

  There would be no brass bands or birthday hats; no last commemoration by his friends. Roldán was leaving New York by the back door, just one step ahead of the mob. The collapse had come about so quickly. I wanted to apologize but resisted the temptation. How could I deal with all that had occurred of late?

  We sat at the kitchen table sharing a last two copas of wine. For all his heft the cook seemed fragile and tired. He had on a white guayabera shirt, baggy blue trousers, and sandals. His watch had a corroded golden stretch band. As always, his cheeks and his neck glistened from sweat and he wheezed while breathing. We clinked rims—“Salud!”—and began drinking the wine.

  The fat man said, “Well, blondie, this is the end of the road in America. Thank you for helping me out tonight.”

  “I’m going to miss you, Roldán.”

  Embarrassed, he brushed that aside with his hand. “No importa. You’re young,” he said. “Your whole life is in front of you. You will be married, you’ll have kids, you’ll own a car someday, I bet. Maybe you’ll even be rich.”

  “I’m going to miss you, Roldán,” I said again, taking a sip of wine.

  My corpulent friend poured himself a refill and flicked imaginary crumbs off his shirt.

  “I think you will be a good writer one day,” he said. “I’ve been watching you. You listen to everything that people say and you never interrupt. You know all our secrets, but refuse to reveal any of your own.”

  The cook dipped a finger in his glass; he licked it. He thought for a moment. Then he reached across the table and clasped my hand. “Listen. No matter how hard you try you can’t make people love you in spite of themselves. And you can’t stop them from commit
ting suicide, either. That’s just the way it is.”

  “I’m really going to miss you,” I said once more.

  The life drained from his features leaving him ashen, obviously exhausted.

  “I’m tired, blondie. Go home to sleep.” And in English he said, “Don’t let the bedbugs bite.”

  That, too, I had taught him.

  61. Adiós, Cocinero

  Come morning, Alfonso, Luigi, and I took Roldán in a taxi over to the pier. For me it was very painful. At the boat we carried the fat man’s suitcases to his cabin and then located a ballroom bar and drank a bottle of champagne. Alfonso gave the cook a box with two going-away presents: a cap pistol and a battered canteen. Both these objects he had found on the street recently.

  “The canteen is so that you will not thirst on the road ahead,” he explained. “And the pistol is to take care of your enemies, if ever you have any, which I sincerely doubt.”

  Each of us gave him a large and long abrazo. Many “goodbyes” were said, and numerous “go with Gods.” Luigi and Alfonso linked arms to serenade Roldán with “Adiós, Muchachos,” the most famous tango ever sung by Carlos Gardel:

  So long, boys, I’m off, I’m all

  worn out, I’m sorry,

  But against my fate there is no

  point in crying;

  Those great parties for me now

  they are all over,

  Because my body is so tired and

  I am dying.

  After leaving Roldán we waited around on the pier until the embarkation. We waved, and were showered by streamers and confetti as the ship pulled away heading for Spain. We kept blowing kisses.

  “He will never plant that tree,” Alfonso remarked sadly. “Or write a book.”

  I asked, “Why do you say that?”

  “It’s the way he is. It’s in his genes.”

  We stopped at a bucket of blood on Eleventh Avenue for a final shot to the maestro’s bon voyage. Afterward, we rode the subway downtown, getting off at Sheridan Square. And then something happened: All three of us felt bereft. We wanted to stick together a while longer and so we started walking.

  Of course, when you are young and healthy and poor in New York City you do a lot of walking. Much of it is aimless, and all the while you are looking at people and thinking about things, excited to be alive even when you are miserable. Or occasionally you are so muddled by despair that everything passes before your eyes dispassionately and you don’t care about anything or anybody.

  The day that Roldán sailed for Spain I walked all over Manhattan with Alfonso and Luigi. It was a marathon. We left Greenwich Village, traveling down through the Financial District to Battery Park, then turned around and went all the way uptown to Columbus Circle. We crossed Central Park to the Metropolitan but did not enter the museum. We headed south after that on Fifth Avenue to Washington Square Park, then east across the alphabet avenues and through the Jacob Riis projects to the river. From there we descended to the Manhattan Bridge, bore west on Canal to West Broadway, and hiked back up to Washington Square. We began at noon on a Monday and finished up at six the next morning.

  What did we talk about? Life and death and centuries of history and the politics of the United States and Latin America and the Soviet Union. We discussed existentialism and the transcendentalists and the atomic bomb and love. We analyzed movies: Il Bell’Antonio, The Seventh Seal, Rocco and His Brothers. Alfonso went on at great length about his Argentine lovers—Renata, the unstable psychotic paramour, and Sofía, the steadfast practical pal. Luigi regaled us with tales of Montreal and Adriana. But I shied away from Cathy Escudero. We had a heated give-and-take about artists who self-destruct, like Dylan Thomas and Baudelaire. Alfonso sang a few tangos and a couple of songs by Violeta Parra of Chile. Luigi performed an aria from Rigoletto. I sang tunes by Elvis Presley and Chuck Berry and Little Richard.

  When we stopped to eat—at an Automat, a Greek gyro joint, a delicatessen—we never tarried for long indoors. We wanted to stay in motion.

  When we began our journey we did not know it would last so long or cover that much ground. None of us wanted to stop and look at things, we were too engrossed in our conversation. I do not remember many of the particulars, only that we never quit speaking to one another. At the end we were exhausted. When it came time to split up, go home, and sleep, Alfonso framed my face between his hands and kissed me on the lips with fervor, man to man.

  He said, “I am sorry for all the sorrows on this planet, blondie. Thank God we can still rejoice.”

  Then we three tottered off to our little apartments.

  And a week later the professor caught a plane to Argentina where he married practical Sofía, whom he did not love, instead of the glamorous and unstable Renata, whom he adored.

  62. Last Words and Despedidas

  Áureo Roldán had pulled the plug on our patota when he closed the empanada stand and went to Spain. Abruptly we were all scattered about the city with no place to meet. Around the middle of June, however, I ran into Popeye and Luigi at the Eighth Avenue subway’s Spring Street station. I greeted them like water at a desert oasis. They had old suitcases in hand and were heading for the Port Authority where they planned to catch a bus to Acapulco. Their papers were in order, yet the U.S. Army had been nosing around and they did not want to be drafted. I rode with them to the Port Authority, but there was a last-minute rush so we had no time for a farewell copa. Just before he stepped onto the bus, though, Luigi gripped both my shoulders and said, “You’re going to be a star, blondie. I bet you publish a book next year. And then they will make it into a popular movie, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  I did not tell them that my college romance had now been rejected six times.

  “In Acapulco we’re going to start a restaurant,” Popeye called out a window as the Greyhound left its dock, “and in one year we’ll return to New York as millionaires!”

  After that I saw nobody until I bumped into Eduardo on the boardwalk at Coney Island in July. He was with a new woman, not Molly nor Adriana, and had grown a full beard. Soon after the divorce from Molly all excitement from the affair with his first wife had vanished. “I have been to Las Vegas making movies,” he said. “Next week I’m flying to Los Angeles. I think I will stay there for good. I am twice an adulterer in New York state now, and after three times don’t they make you stay married for good?”

  He then pulled a surprise on me. “My car is parked in a lot behind the Ferris wheel. Come on with me, I have something for you. Stay here, Berta, I’ll be right back.”

  I followed him to the car, a Ford Fairlane. He opened the trunk, removed a briefcase, and took his wallet from the briefcase. “At the beach I’m afraid of pickpockets.” He handed over ten dollars.

  “After Roldán left I started feeling guilty,” he explained. “I don’t know why. One morning I woke up asking myself, Whatever happened to that quiet gringo? I never went to your apartment, I didn’t have an address or a phone number, and I don’t even know your real name. But I said, Maybe one day I’ll see him. So look—here we are. A miracle. At last my conscience can rest. Isn’t this a wonderful conclusion to our friendship?”

  “Yes,” I said. Then we embraced warmly and disappeared forever from each other’s lives.

  Occasionally I spied Chuy on the Greenwich Village streets, but without a connection through the empanada stand we had little to say to each other. Once, when I asked him about Cathy Escudero, he replied, “Who?” So I explained. He said, “Oh, that cute girl went to Uruguay, but they never got married. He ditched her for an aristocrat. Who knows what happened next?”

  I saw Carlos the Artist a final time, seated at an outdoor table in front of the Village Gate with his wife, sipping a planter’s punch. Esther looked delicious in a low-cut peasant blouse and a tight skirt. Carlos had on a sport coat and tie, his hair was in a crew cut, and he’d shaved off the handlebar mustache. “I decided to look really weird, blondie.” They were headed for
Paris, then Bonn, Germany. In each city he would have a one-man show. I said congratulations, we embraced fondly, and he was gone with the rest.

  For a while the old gang seemed out of my life forever. Yet on a busy late-summer afternoon I met Gino on Sullivan Street. He was impeccably attired as always and asked immediately, “Have you got a girlfriend?”

  “No, not yet I’m afraid.”

  He laughed. “Jesus, I don’t understand you, kid. This city is like a rain forest full of beautiful pibas out there for the choosing. There’s quetzal birds and cockatoos, pericos and oropéndolas, and magnificent birds of paradise. All you have to do is whistle.”

  But he was in a hurry with many things to do and people to meet so we didn’t chat for long. Gino tipped his Borsalino, we shook hands and embraced, and then off he went in an important slither of silk, bound for the money, I’m sure.

  63. Memory Lane

  I couldn’t hang on in New York any longer. I was too broke and still unpublished after a year of trying. I was very discouraged. Time to find a real job in a smaller pond among friends and family members. Sayonara, Broadway. So long, Herald Square.

  My last act before I quit the city was a trip up memory lane to Fourteenth Street and then west to Eighth Avenue. It was a sunny September afternoon when all the girls of Manhattan were still dressed in tight jerseys and short skirts and they looked like cotton candy. People were gathered around Sabrett hot-dog wagons buying wieners and soda pop. A few men in shirtsleeves listened to the Yankees on transistor radios.

  First I stood on the sidewalk outside the old building staring up at the studio windows, all of which were open. Then I went in the foyer and climbed to the fourth floor instead of taking the elevator. I went down the corridor to the right door and tried the handle—it was unlocked. So I pushed it open, entering the empty studio. I shut the door behind me and remained still for a minute facing myself in a mirror. Then I sat down at my old spot far from where Jorge and Cathy Escudero used to practice and I waited for a while. Jorge’s chair was gone. It was warm and cheerful street noises came through the open windows. I heard a faint tapping of Cathy’s flamenco shoes in rhythm to whispery arpeggios from a guitar. Ghostly and beautiful, Cathy swished her skirt back and forth, frowning like a fierce little bird of prey with tragic joy and arrogance. Jorge remained an adolescent boy under the porkpie hat, but oh what a marvelous player he was. They had worked so hard to be wonderful.