But I forgot about Olivia pretty quickly: Suddenly, it was as if the entire stadium had entered another dimension, as if we’d been completely covered by a veil of silence. The arm with which El Torpedo was pitching seemed to belong to God. Inning after inning, the zeros were adding up on the electric scoreboard. In the fifth, Orestes Kindelán hit a high one, and the ball fell among fans way up in the highest stands of the central gardens. Among us, there was much applause, hats in the air, and high-fives. After Orestes Kindelán was congratulated by his teammates and the scoreboard reflected the run, the only (and miraculous) score by Santiago, the silence returned, even deeper now.
Luis taunted Azúcar, who wasn’t spared from the muteness that had fallen over the spectators. Whoever might be strolling by outside the Latino could never have imagined that there were forty thousand people in there, their hearts in their throats, entranced. What mattered now wasn’t the score, but the spectacle offered by El Torpedo, his super fastball doing arabesques, lines breaking on the inside, on the outside, balls that dropped in flight as if fleeing from the batter, who was left dumbfounded, looking ridiculous on the third strike and forced to make that walk to the bench behind third base with his head down, the bat landing uselessly on the red sand.
In the seventh inning (they call it the lucky inning, because that’s when pitchers start getting tired or the batters start figuring out pitches that had defied them before), El Torpedo opened with a walk, the only one of the game. The guy on first was a fast runner and, on the pitch, he sprinted toward second. In the meantime, the batter hit into the infield, where the defender had abandoned his position, and the play ended with men on third and first, with no outs. About two-thirds of the stadium awoke from its stupor. The other third debated the play. The batter had been right-handed, so the infield players should have never left their posts. Just one run ahead, the team on the field could screw up one of the best games of El Torpedo’s year.
I looked at the clock: It was just 10 o’clock at night. I thought about the pitcher’s fatigue, about the beers from this afternoon.
“This is getting good,” said Luis, who only really cares about the stakes and the beauty of the game, not about any one team.
“I’ll be right back,” said Azúcar, and then we saw him in the aisles behind home plate.
A gasp (of surprise? admiration? reproach?) went through the stands when El Torpedo decided to release the next pitch facing home, and not from the side, as the unwritten rules of baseball demand. The man on first took off immediately, stealing second. The next batter was a power hitter (“This guy could do some damage,” said Luis, not to me, but to a little guy devouring a pizza next to him) and I thought the pitcher was going to go for an intentional walk. But the three consecutive outs that El Torpedo managed were humiliating for Las Ratas and their fans: a silly fly ball to first base, a strikeout, a ground ball caught with his own hands, each one cheered on by the five or six thousand spectators around us (I was on my feet, clapping wildly for each of those outs).
Later, after the danger had passed, it wasn’t El Torpedo’s pitches that caught our attention, but his composure, the dignity with which he took the pitcher’s mound, serene, smiling. Azúcar returned to his seat at the beginning of the eighth inning.
“My condolences,” Luis said, and Azúcar told him to go to hell. Chewing on his cigar, eyeing his friend sideways, Luis was having as great a time as me, and he made fun of my earlier apprehensions. “I told you, Artur, those guys drink beer the way you and I drink water.”
My greatest happiness occurred on the way out of the stadium, when I heard Las Ratas fans praising El Torpedo.
“He’s a genius,” Luis declared.
“He’s a motherfucker,” Azúcar responded.
It was a great game, though it lacked any real significance for either team. Sometimes glory is wasted. I remember it now for other reasons.
At dawn the next day, it was my mother-in-law who first opened the front door. I was in the kitchen preparing coffee. She called me to come look: Two squad cars were parked in front of Pupy’s parents’ house and various cops and neighbors were standing on the porch, their faces worried. My mother-in-law crossed the street. I remained at the front door, waiting for her. I saw her put her hands on her head, then hug and kiss Pupy’s sister and go into the house. When she came back, she looked like she’d been crying: Pupy had been found murdered in the women’s bathroom at the Latino. Guillermo was a suspect.
All day, news kept coming in waves that were often contradictory: The body had been found during the eighth inning and not at the end of the game; no, it was found during the ninth; actually, it was two hours before the lights were turned off at the stadium; she’d been strangled; she was stabbed; it’d been a devastating poison; the body was stuffed in a closet; it was left in the parking lot; it was found sitting in the bleachers and she looked like she’d fallen asleep; they’d found her because Guillermo had called the police; Guillermo had left the Latino without the slightest concern about his missing wife (“Were they actually married?” my mother-in-law asked, astonished).
Shortly after lunch, we saw the new widower arrive. I asked my mother-in-law to go back and get more information (she could always take some fresh coffee over, since the flow of visitors had not ceased all day long). But she was embarrassed. She thought I wasn’t dealing with Pupy’s death the way I should. She mentioned the newly motherless children, the pain her parents must be experiencing.
They released the body that night (that’s how they said it in cop speak, and that’s how the neighbors repeated it: Her possessions had been retained, examined, and now they were free — to satisfy the rituals of death? So as to actually have peace in death?) and though my mother-in-law insisted we go to the funeral home right away, I refused to go until the next day. The burial was slated for 3 in the afternoon and there would be plenty of time to offer condolences.
There wasn’t room for one more soul at the funeral home. There were two squad cars outside (the cops inside sweating through their heavy gray shirts, were they her husband’s old colleagues? Or were they still investigating the murder?). As soon as we went in, my mother-in-law made her way, as expected, to the viewing room where she found Pupy’s parents, children, and sister. She distributed kisses and approached the casket, peering at Pupy’s face, which I imagined pale and dark around the eyes (as if she hadn’t gotten sleep in the morgue). She strolled among the other neighbors huddled throughout the funeral home. I did not see her greet the widower, who was talking nonstop, surrounded by about a dozen people.
The haze in the funeral home caused by the smokers drove me outside, far from all the chattering, where I engaged in monosyllabic exchanges with acquaintances who went in and out. My mother-in-law came out now and then to share what she was hearing inside: It looked like it was true about the closet and the knifing, though the stab count varied between one and five (the theories about strangulation and poisoning, which had struck me as crazy, had disappeared). The issue of the time also appeared to be resolved: A little before 10, Pupy had left her seat to go to the bathroom. The game had ended at 10:40 and Guillermo didn’t think it was particularly strange at first that his wife hadn’t come back before the game’s last out. On nights like that, with the stadium full, the lines in the women’s bathrooms were long, interrupted now and again by employees in charge of flushing the toilets by forcing buckets of water into them.