There were a few other things she wanted to buy (cooking oil, a can of pimientos for Sunday’s chicken and rice), and so on the way home I took a detour to the Villa Panamericana. Coming down the main avenue, I looked over at what used to be called Plaza de las Banderas (a string of empty flag posts pretends to justify the name) and saw some of the players from my team who were staying at a nearby hotel in that fairly new and somewhat pretentious neighborhood. I thought that if Luis Lorente had been there, I might have gone over to talk to them. But it’s not especially easy for me to approach people I don’t know (or, more precisely, people who don’t know me).
I let my mother-in-law go into the store by herself and asked her to come get me when she was done at the place on the corner, a small glass square, like everything in the Villa, where they sold beer by the liter. There were two people waiting to be served. I did my duty and asked who was the last in line: The mulatto who turned to respond struck me as familiar. He looked back, searching for the table where some folks were waiting for him, and I recognized his features from TV: Orestes Kindelán. I felt my shyness challenged. It was like being next to Babe Ruth, or Pelé, or Michael Jordan. I asked how his team (my team) was doing for the final (though his answer was never in doubt).
“Good,” he said. “We’ve just started training.”
I should have said something else but my mind was too slow. Until that moment, I had supposed that training was a daily routine for all the players. As my glass was being filled, I said something like, “Good luck,” and followed him with my gaze. In his huge hands, he was carrying six glasses spilling foam. There was a table waiting for him on the terrace: two other ballplayers and two women. One of them was Pupy. Next to her was the only white guy who played on the team: tall, reedy, big-nosed. He was a pitcher nicknamed El Torpedo because of his lightning fastball, and he was slated to play that night.
It bothered me that he was drinking beer. Hours later at the Latino, I’d be following each one of his pitches breathlessly while his own breath would still have an alcohol residue. The game, it’s true, really wasn’t that important to Santiago, but to beat Las Ratas at the Latino was a matter of honor.
I told my mother-in-law that I’d seen Pupy with the ballplayers, next to a white guy. This time, my mother-in-law defended her, but in her own unique way: Guillermo, Pupy’s husband, had been inside the store arguing about the price of some product. Perhaps the sixth glass of beer had been meant for him.
My mother-in-law actually placed more significance on the presence of the other woman, Olivia, who was also with the ballplayers. She lived two doors down from Pupy’s parents but we didn’t know they knew each other beyond the natural comings and goings of the neighborhood.
The one who liked Olivia was my wife. When we first met her, she was studying for a degree in geography, which she received with honors. But no sooner had she begun her professional career than she went to work at the Villa Panamericana’s hotel. My wife considered that career change practically an act of treason.
At the hotel, Olivia was in charge of public relations, and according to what my mother-in-law related once I’d told her I’d seen the woman at the table with the ballplayer, she was so good at her job that people in the neighborhood were beginning to feel sorry for her husband. While Pupy was all vulgarity and cockiness, Olivia, whose father was a journalist with a weekly radio program, pretended to be an elegantly plain woman. (I once made the mistake of commenting in front of my wife a bit too enthusiastically about Olivia’s undeniable poise, her graceful walk, the way she moves; my wife has never forgotten the words I used, comparing her to a gazelle...)
However, Javier, Olivia’s husband, was untouchable as far as my mother-in-law was concerned: Shortly after we moved to the neighborhood, my son, who must have been three or four years old, fell, hit his head, and was left dazed, pale, and barely conscious. My mother-in-law was alone in the house. She went out in desperation and practically ran into Javier, who did not hesitate for an instant and pulled his old Pontiac from the garage to drive my son to the hospital.
“I see things as they are,” my mother-in-law said on the way home from shopping, “and if one’s a slut, the other one must be too.”
When I went by Luis’s house to pick him up, he was already outside, waiting impatiently on the sidewalk. Next to him was a tall, thin man, dark with green eyes. Luis introduced him as Azúcar, a friend from the neighborhood, a Ratas fan, and asked if he could come with us to the Latino. The deed was done but it had its upside. Azúcar had two principal occupations: He played basketball (although the gray hairs dotting his clean scalp indicated he was close to my age) and he sold auto parts. “Whatever you need, bro, you know...” His occupations were manifested in a narrow half-block corridor on 23rd Street between B and C, where there’s a state-owned store that deals in auto and motorcycle parts. On the sidewalk right in front, on the corner of B, there’s a basketball court.
The two of them had bought a bottle of rum which, as was required, had been poured into various plastic receptacles so as not to be discovered by the stadium ushers. I told them I’d seen El Torpedo drinking beer.
“Well, Artur,” responded Luis, “what do you want him to do?”
Azúcar’s comment made me sorry I’d accepted his company for the day: “Those hicks are always drunk. I don’t know how they manage to win.”
Like us, thousands of people had also thought it might be the penultimate game of the season, and when we went in we actually had a hard time finding three good seats. Perhaps the Latino’s greatest charm is its cosmopolitanism, the way the city’s demographics are reproduced in the stands. If you sit behind first base, you can be sure that those around you will be fans of the visiting team. The rest of the stadium (the gardens, the third base line, behind the plate) will be jammed with spectators, with small clusters of opponents, but these will be isolated, overwhelmed by the local joy.
It had been a year and a half since Luis and I had set foot in the stadium and we were surprised to see that about half the seats in our area behind the plate (the best, because of their excellent view of the playing field) were empty, and police officers stood in the aisles to close off access.
“They’re for foreigners,” explained Azúcar.
“What a waste,” said Luis, seeing, even as a voice called out “Play ball!” to begin the game, that nearly a hundred seats remained empty.
Azúcar kept eyeing that area. I thought he was looking out for the opportunity to switch seats to that more neutral territory, some distance from the scandalous crowd around us cheering for the boys from Santiago. But just as the first inning was ending, a throng of tourists showed up, the majority dressed as if on safari, or as if we’d gone back a century or so and were attending one of those games that marked Cuba’s belle époque: straw hats, felt hats, baggy white linen pants, huge fans, colored handkerchiefs around the necks, and, as if to indicate contemporary times just a bit, a beret here and there.
The blue that characterizes Las Ratas (and the New York Yankees, their supposed equals) shone brightly on the head of a woman who I thought I recognized. Was that Olivia? It was impossible to tell, the lighting in the stands was tenuous and a brim covered her forehead; my neighbor wore her hair long so I assumed it had to be tucked into the hat. But there was a way of moving when she came down the stairs, just like a gazelle, which certainly resembled hers. If Olivia was at the Latino, if those tourists were guests at the hotel, just like the players from Santiago, then her presence next to Kindelán and El Torpedo made more sense than Pupy’s: Pupy, and not Olivia, was the stranger, the upstart. Was one as much of a slut as the other? I figured I’d ask my mother-in-law over breakfast the next day.