Papa Lorenzo leapt from the sofa and returned to his speech, directed at the silent walls: “A deficient superstructure has a corresponding deficient economic base. The poverty of this society must be sought in the social and material roots of these miserable people. This is an island of cork that floats thanks to the magical illusion of all its components. Ahhhh! But Moctezuma’s troops are already dispersed. The flags of the Communist Party are already old. The promised land will not come, nor will the dynamite train. Not hide nor hair of it. Comrades! The revolution needs new vitality! New blood! New faces! This is the truth never revealed. This is the reason of all reasons. ”
Applause, Agar thought. He peeked through a gap in the door and saw Papa Lorenzo with his arm raised and his finger pointing at the ceiling lamp.
His arm dropped. His finger returned to its natural arrogance. Papa Lorenzo let himself fall down on the sofa again.
“I’m a piece of shit,” he said from there. He didn’t seem to say it bitterly. He said it with conviction and a bit of resigned indifference. “We are all pieces of shit! You!” he said, turning toward the room where Mama Pepita was going through the old photos. “Me!” he said. “And even that exasperating little kid you gave birth to!”
Agar hid his head under the pillow.
Papa Lorenzo lounged on the sofa and sighed deeply.
“In short.,” he sighed, “all shit.”
And he remained quiet, with his gaze lost on the ceiling.
“Aren’t you going to keep yelling?” Mama Pepita was pretending not to care: “Keep yelling, you idiot. So the neighbors hear you. Come on, keep yelling!”
“I’ll yell whenever I want!” Papa Lorenzo yelled. “I pay for this house with my money!”
Mama Pepita slammed the pictures down and went out to the living room. Agar foresaw the storm and quickly closed the door of his room.
“That boy is listening to all of this,” Mama Pepita said. “And outside, they can hear everything as if you were being broadcast on the radio.”
Agar closed his eyes slowly. He was returning to absolute darkness and going over his life — his memories came to him in a rush.
“Your father is a very strange communist,” Grandma Hazel said. “First, he went around getting votes and organizing strikes and even made me vote for the Popular candidate. And now he became an accountant, and he wants to put you in an elite school, and to hell with strikes, and votes, and I’m still affiliated with that Popular candidacy. Now it turns out he’s a Rotary! Communist and International Rotary. I don’t understand. It’s a matter of strategy, he says. Strategy? I don’t understand anything about strategy. I want him to give me my voting card back! That’s what I want!”
And she stuck her head in the cauldron and scraped the bottom of it with a spatula. She took it out again to say:
“Do you think I don’t know that the Communists are going to do away with the home food delivery business if they come to power? Your own father told me so! With Lenin and Stalin’s star, they will do away with my food delivery business. No! I am voting against myself! I want him to give me my voting card back! I want to vote for the Authentic Party. And remember this, my son:
“Long live communism, long live friendship, and if you have two dollars, give me one.”
And she laughed, surrounded by the smoke from her cauldrons. Like that witch in “Macabre Stories” who flew toward the belfry on a broomstick.
Communist! Agar thought. I don’t want my father to be a communist. “The Cobra King” is also a communist and flies in a communist-propelled airplane, and has his base on Red Island, from where he attacks the Black Falcons. Chuck, Olaf, Endrickson, Stanislaus, André the Frenchman, and Chop Chop the Chinaman.
Holy moly! I’d liked to be in that group. And I’d pass through the circle of West Side Boys with the falcon engraved on my shirt. And Papa Lorenzo would come, without whistling at me, and would ask me in all humility to come back home.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“It will weigh on you,” Papa Lorenzo said.
And later he returned in “The Infernal Circle” and tried to pass over us.
“Die, capitalist pigs!” Papa Lorenzo would shout, and our bullets would crash against the tracks of his wheels.
He opened his eyes. Sergeant York appeared on the bathroom wall again. He remembered that he had also fought in the “War Fronts.” Like that day on which the two of them were wrapped up in combat smoke.
“Giddy up, kid!” Sergeant York said. He was sweating copiously and crushing a piece of paper in his hand.
“Once and for all, kid — jump! It’s the Chinese people who are asking for your help against the Reds.”
Agar got ready to jump.
“Wait!” York said. He held onto his shoulder, holding something out to him.
“Take this, kid. It’s a five dollar bill. It’s a little wrinkled, but still good. When this hell is over, son. have yourself a tall beer and toast to the health of your old Sergeant York. Will you do it?”
“York!” Agar yelled.”Sergeant York!”
York had died.
Agar looked at the battlefield and understood that the battle was being decided there, at that exact moment. And, without thinking about it, he threw himself furiously on the enemy. On the red Chinese and the yellow men from Korea.
No. He definitely did not like Communists.
The falcon, Sergeant York and all the others were handsome, and the Communists are bald and toothless.
“All of them with their asses patched up,” Grandma Hazel would say. “All of them smelling like a bike shop.”
At Fifteen, I’ll Get Your Spleen
The afternoon went by. In his room, he felt the heavy air, weighed down with drowsiness.
The afternoon went by and he had spent almost the whole day punished. Summer vacation was going by and he had spent almost his entire vacation being punished.
He would have given his right hand to go outside. He would have placed it on Odin’s pyre and would have said to the God of the Vikings:
“Burn! But let me out.”
He peeked through the door jamb. On the sofa, Papa Lorenzo was writing a long speech in the air. He thought he could ask for his permission. Although later he thought that if he asked him, Papa Lorenzo could turn his back to him and pretend he was asleep. Or he may just say:
“Go ask your mother!”
And then he’d go to Mama Pepita and she’d say:
“Me? Go ask your father!”
And so he would go in circles from one side to the other until he burst out crying in rage.
Nonetheless, his Interior Voice suggested this time:
“Ask him for it. what do you have to lose?”
“I could end up with a mule kick,” he reconsidered.
So he decided to appeal to Imaginary Fate and conceived of the formula to make a decision once and for all.
Papa Lorenzo was writing in the air with his back to him. If he turned around, he would give him what he asked for.
He waited.
He waited.
He waited.
Papa Lorenzo started turning around slowly. Agar’s heart beat quickly.
He reached the sofa. Papa Lorenzo picked the newspaper off the floor and opened it again to the comic pages.
“I’m going to the movies,” Agar stammered.
Papa Lorenzo commented:
“Did Little Orphan Annie die after all?”
“I’m going to the movies. ”
“What’s that?” Papa Lorenzo pretended to listen for the first time.
“I’m going to the movies,” Agar repeated.
“If you have the money, I’m not opposed,” Papa Lorenzo said.