And she brought her finger thoughtfully to her chin. “God is more constant,” she said. “And it would do you good to put yourself in God’s hands. How long has it been since you went to church?”
Church, Agar thought. Papa Lorenzo doesn’t want me to go into churches. He boasts that he has never entered a church and hasn’t died because of it. Although Grandma Hazel secretly takes me to the Jehovah’s Witness Hall. She grabbed the back of my neck and said to me: “This, young man, stays between you and me. okay?” And inside, the pastor gave me a warm welcome and even placed me by the pulpit. And later he opened his arms and started to yelclass="underline" “FORGIVE HIM, LORD!”
“Grandma Hazel, why does he have to forgive me?”
“Don’t pretend you’re a saint.” she says. “You know very well why. You have to shout loudly: FORGIVE ME LORD, until you feel Jehovah. Do you understand? Until Jehovah enters you and you feel that your vices have left. Is that clear?”
So he shouted: FORGIVE ME LORD! FORGIVE ME LORD! FORGIVE ME LORD!
But then a fit of laughter came over him.
“I couldn’t avoid laughing,” he said later, surrounded by the West Side Boys. “The laughter came with a vengeance.”
“I don’t play around with that,” Kiko Ribs said. “With God and the saints, everything is different.”
“An old woman appeared to Tony Pando one night and showed him an ID card that said she was ‘Our Lady of Mercy,” Tin Marbán said.
“And I know a priest who rolls up his soutane when he plays soccer,” Fat-Headed Jorge pointed out. “Although I also know Father Gasoline, who says mass while drunk.”
“And they say that the crazy monk who lives in Choricera,” Pipo Páez said, “bangs his own daughter.”
“FORGIVE HIM, LORD!” Grandma Hazel said.
She made Agar kneel down in the first row, near the pastor’s dais.
“I tell you that HERE is Jehovah TODAY,” the pastor said with his arms spread open.
Agar was getting bored. He thought that around then the West Side Boys would be in the park playing leapfrog and crucifying spiders.
Agar pretended to pray, leaning his hands on the rail. The pastor passed next to him squeezing the heads of the faithful and shouting his slogans. The old ladies in the second row moaned and furiously blew their noses.
He furtively took out his knife and leaned on the wood. Now or Never, said his Interior Voice. His heart beat strongly, and he remembered then all of that about there being a Heaven, Hell, Purgatory, and Limbo.
Where would he go?
“I’ll take Limbo,” Kiko Ribs had once said. “It’s neither good nor bad, and you spend your whole life sleeping.”
Now! the Voice said.
So he scratched “COCK” on the wood and quickly put his knife away. No one had seen him.
The pastor turned toward the front row and grabbed him by the neck with his sweaty hand.
“FORGIVE HIM, LORD!” he shouted, and Agar felt saliva splash his eyes.
Later, when he’d let him go, they started to sing “Jehovah, I am your slave.” And Agar imagined that Papa Lorenzo would have felt proud of him.
Grandma Hazel’s head emerged again from the steaming pots.
“Today I’ve got tamal en cazuela and chickpeas,” she said. “Come to get them at eleven.”
“Well, I’m outta here.”
“What’s this about being ‘outta here’? Keep an eye on the company you keep! The other day they came to tell me that you were going around saying you were broken. Do you know what someone who is broken is? A useless man. Who can’t have women, or children, or anything. Your uncle Quirilio was broken. Poor wretch!”
Agar remembered Quirilio. He would arrive at the house wringing his hands and Mama Pepita would treat him like a sick man.
“I’m in love with a blonde,” he would say. He always had a new love.
“That’s great, Quirilio! You don’t say, Quirilio? Congratulations, Quirilio!”
And he nodded with his head one, two, three times.
“Yes, yes, yes. I’m in love with a blonde.”
“He ended up hanging himself,” she said, somberly. Grandma Hazel. With her skimmer, she reminded Agar of the witch in “Macabre Stories.”
“Didn’t you read the news in the papers? In big headlines: “Man frustrated by love puts an end to his life.”
That really was broken! Truly broken.
“Well, I’m leaving.”
“Take it easy. And come straight back.”
Agar went back to thinking about the broken ones. Being broken was a big thing for him. In school they talked about broken ones, but it was different.
“Dudes; the guy who breaks has two balls as big as this,” Tin Marbán was saying that day. And everyone wanted to break then. Because everyone wanted to have two big balls between his legs.
“In this country the most important thing is to have very big balls,” Tin Marbán said.
And he had tried to break himself in the gym on Gago street, lifting weights with cement bags. But he soon got tired and couldn’t go on.
I’m going to have to accept what I have, Agar thought. Although afterward, Tin Marbán came back tired from the gym, and changed his story, explaining that they grew until the age of twenty-one.
He patted his sac. No. They certainly hadn’t grown very much. Although he weighed them with his hands every morning he never found much improvement.
That was when the news started to spread, and he could see it spreading and spreading until it came face to face with Grandma Hazel herself. Like when gonorrhea starts spreading.
“Everyone wants to catch gonorrhea in this country,” Tin Marbán went back to saying. “Because, in this country having gonorrhea means that you’re getting some.”
He remembered Pacheco, Ictericia’s son. That day, he arrived tripping over himself at the circle of boys and then smiled enigmatically.
“Gentlemen. three shots in three days. My prick is on fire.”
“What, dude?” several anxious voices said. “Penicillin?”
“Cirilo Villaverde, dudes. I’ve gotten gonococo, it’s raging, raging, raging.”
From the ground, Agar watched Pacheco speak and turned green with envy.
He wanted to get it! But, how?
Later, Tin Marbán again explained that everything came from the Pajarito neighborhood, full of sailors and Chinamen, where a woman named Julia Cacharro measured one’s business beforehand to the inch.
He wanted to get it! He wanted a good case of gonorrhea with all his might. But. he hadn’t even seen one of those women!
So what if he went? So what if Julia Cacharro measured his business?
“Scram!” Julia Cacharro would say. “You’re disqualified.”
So that was when he decided it was better to roll the ball. Because rolling and rolling.
“Rolling and rolling, I rolled near a hole. I stuck in my finger and it came out all red. What is it?”
“Your mama, dude.”
Laughter.
“Yours on the floor.”
More laughter.
“Your motherfucking mama.”
More laughter. The laughter of boys under the sun. Agar crossed the park. The kids still hadn’t arrived. The lizards were moving restlessly on the trees, taking out their red ties. The sun beat down hard on his shaved head.
The day was still beginning.
At Five, I’ll Dive