“It’s better you stay here.” He smiled at me, showing his jumbled teeth. Cuco added, nodding in the direction of the kitchen, “He’s hard-headed.”
I was amused. Hard-headed was a favorite comment of my grandmother’s, what she used to say when caving in to a demand she didn’t approve of — my third Coca-Cola of the day, allowing me to swim less than an hour following a meal; or, permitting a more dangerous act, letting my hair dry in the air after a shower, rather than insisting she towel it. “You’re so hard-headed,” she would say and pretend to rap me on the skull with her knuckles. Once, she got into a fierce squabble with my father and I was thrilled when she said it about him too. “We’re both hard-headed,” I called out cheerfully. Francisco and Jacinta stopped their fight. They looked at me, puzzled for a moment, and then their grim faces broke into smiles. “He’s proud of it,” Grandma said, and laughed so deeply, she held her belly. Francisco took my head in his arms and squeezed out the world. When he released me, although my ears were ringing, I could hear him say, “He’s right. Hard-headed people get things done.”
What have we gotten done, Father?
“How about you, Cuco?” I asked. “Are you hard-headed too?”
“Me?” He touched his chest with the palm of his hand, astonished. “No.” He smiled at Diane. “I’m soft-headed,” he said and laughed pleasantly.
I sat opposite them, in the armchair where my father used to hold court on cool nights, explaining the world to his family. “Tell me about yourself, Cuco. Do you mind? We’re brothers and I don’t know anything about you.”
“No?” He shook his head as if this were a sad and astonishing fact. “You said. On the phone. That you were not told about me.”
“It’s my fault, too,” I said. “I could have asked.”
“Yes?” He seemed skeptical.
“Do you live in Havana?”
The answer was, some of the time. He was a coach for the Cuban Olympic baseball team. He had been a player — a first baseman, he said. But he’d hurt his back a year ago. He stood up to illustrate the problem. I was surprised when he got into a left-hander’s batting stance.
“You’re a southpaw?” I said, pleased and proud, for some odd reason. We had no lefties in the family: the novelty somehow made me feel he really was my brother. I could almost hear myself boring someone sometime in the future with anecdotes of Cuco’s left-handed feats.
“I throw right,” he said.
“No kidding. Did you always bat left-handed?”
“No,” he said, eager to explain, breaking out of his batting stance into the pose of a frozen runner. “You know it’s faster to first base if you’re a lefty.” He pointed to the bedroom. “And there’s the hole at first and second when there is, you know …?”
“A runner on first,” I finished for him.
“You know baseball!” he said and actually clapped.
Diane laughed. “Rafe’s a big baseball fan.”
That was something of an exaggeration, but it was the one sport I kept track of, and I even attended a couple of games each season. I asked, “You played first base for the Cuban team?”
“For the national team. You’re a fan, but you don’t know me?” He wasn’t petulant, merely curious.
“They don’t cover Cuban baseball here,” I explained.
“We know all your players.” He nodded to himself. “They censor news about us, that’s what they say. Many of our boys are as good as the major leaguers. Linares is better than most of your players.”
“We know your players are good,” I assured him. “They tell us that much.”
“It’s a pity they can’t come here and play for our teams,” Diane said.
“Yes?” Cuco asked, again with that mild tone of surprise. “Why?” he added.
“Why?” Diane repeated. “Well, you know, so they could be in the big games.” She knew she had gotten herself into an awkward spot. She pressed on anyway, “So they could become famous and play in the World Series.”
“It would be good for a Cuban team to play in your so-called World Series, but not so good for the Cuban players to become toys for the owners.”
Diane didn’t blink. She insisted, “The players here have a lot of power, almost as much as the owners.”
“No,” Cuco said, confidently.
“Yes.” Diane was just as confident about the life of a professional ballplayer, and, I suspect, just as ignorant. “Anyway,” she added. “It’s wrong that you can’t play here. It’s a shame when people aren’t free to do their work wherever they want.”
“Yes, you’re right,” Cuco said. Diane cocked her head at him, surprised. I wasn’t.
“You agree?”
“Yes, of course.”
“But you can’t say that in Cuba,” she commented, not provocatively, with sympathy.
Cuco sat down sideways on the couch, angled to her, his massive legs as big as a coffee table. “Why not?” he asked.
I laughed. Diane and Cuco looked at me. “The embargo, Diane. We’re the ones who stopped American baseball teams from having spring training games in Cuba. We’re the ones who first made it illegal for a Cuban citizen to play professionally in the United States.”
“But,” Diane stopped herself. She glanced at Cuco and then shrugged. “Forget it.”
“But what?” I asked. “It’s okay,” I assured her. “But Castro wouldn’t allow it anyway.”
“Fidel has asked for it!” Cuco gestured to the ceiling, his reedy voice squeaking, strained by passion. “He has called for a stop to the embargo since 1961. He has—” Cuco shut up, to stare at something behind me.
I looked. My grandfather had emerged from his bedroom, wrestling with a red pajama top. He had no bottoms on. His face, chest and legs had the leathered brown of people who are always in the sun, in contrast to his waist, where a bleached triangle was spoiled only by the prunish darkness of his genitals. “Coño,” he mumbled sleepily. The pajama shirt was on backwards, his right arm through the left sleeve, the other empty. He jerked his shoulders back and forth; each time the empty sleeve whipped around, slapping him in the face, like a misbehaving tail.
“Abuelo!” Embarrassed for Pepín, Cuco rushed into the bedroom and came out with his pajama bottoms. He didn’t notice they were wet at the groin.
Grandpa pushed them away, saying in Spanish they were no good. Cuco returned to the bedroom. I helped Grandpa with the top. “It’s on backwards,” I explained, as I eased it off.
“Rafael?” he asked.
I slipped the top onto his arms and began to button it in front. “Yes, it’s me,” I said. I smelled the faint odor of urine.
“You just got here?”
His body was almost hairless from head to toe, except for his groin. Even there, the hairs were all gray and the hair tended to fade away. Pepín was six feet tall and wiry — the outlines of muscle and bone were visible, as if his skin were a size too small. “Yes, Diane and I just got here,” I said, shielding his nakedness from her as I indicated her presence.
“Your girlfriend?” he asked, peering around me.
“Diane. I told you about her, remember?”
Pepín squinted at her.
“Hello,” she called.
Cuco emerged, carrying bright yellow pajamas in his arms. Pepín ignored him in favor of properly greeting Diane. He stepped around me and walked over to the couch, extending his hand and politely bending over so she could easily reach it. He remembered his Spanish manners, but forgot, however, that he was naked from the waist down. “Hello,” he said. “I’m Rafael’s grandfather.” The offered hand was in line with, and no more than a foot from, his privates.
“Abuelo!” Cuco complained, bounding over. His huge body made the floorboards quake. He unfurled the yellow bottoms, holding them against Pepín’s stomach. The yellow top fell.