Straight. You come straight back. You go straight there. You go straight. Everything is straight. Straight to the point. What do they care if I stay in the park with the West Side Boys! Playing leapfrog, throwing stones or making up stories. What do they care! Then they say because you’re too thin, and they smoke there and talk dirty. But what dirty things could they say that I don’t know? I know them all! And I smoke, too. All the brands. Anyone who doesn’t smoke is a fag. Anyone who doesn’t curse is one, too. That’s the law. That’s the law and they’ll never understand!
He took the containers of hot food and left. He made the trip to his grandmother’s house kicking a stone the whole way. Three blocks to the right lived Mr. Hubert. “The one who always takes his dog out to piss,” Papa Lorenzo would say, seeing him pull the leash. “If I were like that, I’d shoot myself.” At the end of the block, between the pine trees, lived “The Abominable Man from Eighth Street.”
“That miserable specimen spends his whole life watering his garden.”
“Leave the man alone!” Mama Pepita would scream. “You spend your whole life hating humanity.”
Amid the pine trees, lived Aunt Dorita, always seated at the piano.
“I never had any parties,” Aunt Dorita would say as if she were telling a funny story. “My first party I was 22. I spent all week saving money to buy myself some crêpe paper ruffles that you added to the dress and looked like silk. I saved six pesos. I bought them. Grandma watched everything from her rocking chair and pressed her lips together.
“Hmmm,” Grandma said, “so you’re going to a party, huh?”
“Yes, grandma.”
“And who gave you permission? Come on, come on?”
And then I said to her: “But it was you yourself, grandma! Don’t you remember?”
To which she responded: “I don’t remember anything.”
“Grandma, grandma, how could you not remember now! I already told the boy yes and he’s coming to get me this evening.”
“Well he’ll leave exactly as he came,” grandma said. “You wasted all of your money buying nonsense and now we won’t be able to pay the electric bill this week!”
“He told me he would lend me the money,” I said. And grandma leapt indignantly from her rocking chair and insulted me as she slapped me.
“Who does he think I am? Huh? The madam of a brothel? Let’s see. Give me that dress! You’ll see what I do with the parties at the Liceo.”
“And that was my first party!” Aunt Dorita summed up, trying to laugh. “Isn’t it funny?”
“Of course, dear!” said Mama Pepita, adding more sugar to her coffee.
“That’s how grandma was,” Aunt Dorita said. “Poor thing. ”
And she bit her lower lip, and her eyes shone strangely, and Agar thought that he wanted to jump up and down, and scream: Son of a bitch, son of a bitch, son of a bitch!
“Poor Aunt Dorita!” Mama Pepita said when she left. “She was a prodigious girl, but she peaked.”
“She’s an unbearable loon,” Papa Lorenzo said from behind his newspaper. “They say she has a thing with Poupett, the manager of Novo.”
“Slander!” Mama said. And then, remembering, she added: “She had a divine right hand. At the age of five, she would get up at night to play Bach. Do you know who Bach is?”
“It’s all the same to me,” Papa Lorenzo said. “For me, Bach or front, it doesn’t matter. ”
One night, the West Side Boys covered Aunt Dorita’s house with chickpeas and eggs. They made long peashooters with TV antennas and shot the chickpeas from far away. Aunt Dorita went to Agar’s house the next day to tell the story.
“You suffer so much in this country!” she commented. “It’s so different than Europe. Everything here is so embarrassing. Have you ever seen a more diabolic being than a child? The children of the tropics are juvenile deliquents,” she said, and fanned her face, suffocating.
He walked. He remembered this story and later remembered the West Side Boys sitting in a circle on the grass in the park, talking bitterly about people.
“Your aunt is a lesbo, dude,” Bones said that time. “She goes everywhere with Poupett. The other day, they went into the Society together and both had their pant zippers down. They were munching carpets!”
Laughter.
He remembered all of this as he walked. He spent his whole day remembering stories, words, faces, situations. When he passed in front of Hubert’s house, an old lady yelled from the gate: “Lift your head up! Why are you walking with your head bent down?”
Why? Why did Agar always walk watching his own steps? Why did he get tongue-tied in conversations with his friends? Why didn’t he have a girlfriend and why did everything make him feel tremendously ashamed? Why, why, why?
One day you spoke, said the Voice of Memory. One day, you went up to them and spoke for a long time. You were talking and laughing. You were laughing a lot and they made room for you. Oh, how you were laughing! I could swear myself to you right now, Marta. And I could dance with you for hours and hours, Elaine, Blue Moon.
“Hey, dudes. do you know the story about the parrot who saw a scar?”
You were laughing. Your laughter could be heard all over the beach.
And the wave behind you: “SPLASHHH!”
Then came the whistle. Papa Lorenzo’s unmistakable whistle.
“They’re whistling for you, dude. ”
“Like a dog, dude. ”
Papa Lorenzo welcomed you with his eyes narrowed. He had discovered the half empty bottle of cognac.
“So you drank it, didn’t you? I buy it and it’s the boy who drinks it, isn’t that so?”
“Drunk,” Mama Pepita said.
And you laughed. You took a beating, but you kept on laughing. And your tears ran down your cheeks, until your eyes clouded over.
Agar kicked the rock like you kick rugby balls. They said he had good hands to play rugby. But he had barely any weight.
“That boy is sick,” Grandma Hazel said. “He’s greenish yellow.”
“He doesn’t eat,” Mama Pepita would say. “He doesn’t like chickpeas, he doesn’t like beans. He doesn’t eat.”
I don’t eat, I thought. Not chickpeas, not beans. The smell of that food disgusts me. I throw it out when I can. It disgusts me. It turns my stomach. God damn! But you guys force it on me.
“GIVE HIM THE WHIP!” Papa Lorenzo yelled from the sofa. “THE WHIP, THE WHIP, THE WHIP. That’s purifying.” And later, while he still had his newspaper between his hands, he confessed: “I was raised fast, as fast as a train. And then I was a man and I worked in a pineapple field. I had to take my entire salary to my father: nine pesos. Nine pesos! Of which my father took eight and left me one. And that one.!” Papa Lorenzo said raising his finger, “he gave it to me, saying: Save it, in case I need it!”
Grandma Hazel laughed at the story. Mama Pepita said: “What a beast!”
“That’s how it was,” Papa Lorenzo said. “Raised as fast as a train — and I haven’t died. Nor am I missing an arm — or anything else.”
At Four, Hit the Floor
Grandma Hazel was working surrounded by the steam of her pots. She always smelled like cod and spices, and as she stirred the bubbling pot, she hummed incomprehensible songs.
She turned around.
“Did you bring the containers?”
“Yessiree. And the money.”
“Tell your father not to worry about the money. I know you’re a little short with that whole business about your school. Although I still can’t explain it all to myself. A whole life spent on strike! Always against the rich! And then it turns out that he wants to put you in a rich kids school. So he rubs elbows with them, he says. Rubs elbows with the rich? I don’t understand. I don’t understand. I don’t understand.”