Laughter.
Agar felt he was being mocked.
“Hand me a smoke, dude,” Kiko Ribs said. And then he lit the cigarette, cupping his hand around it wisely. As he smoked, Agar recalled Mama Pepita the day she smelled his mouth.
“This boy smokes,” she discovered, shocked. “He smells like an opium den.”
He remembered previous episodes in a row. Like the day they found cigarettes in his shirt and Mama Pepita saved the box to show it to Papa Lorenzo when he got back from work.
That time he spent the whole afternoon shaking like a leaf in his room. And he had wished that someone would arrive that night with the news that Papa Lorenzo had been in a car accident.
By nine, Papa Lorenzo still hadn’t returned, and then he thought he had killed him with his supplications. Deep down, he understood that he did not want to kill his father.
“You can leave him an invalid, okay,” he pleaded, “but let him live!”
Deep down, he didn’t really understand himself. He saw Papa Lorenzo look up at the peeling ceiling and write names in the air with his finger, and he thought he loved him.
“I was raised by the whip,” Papa Lorenzo said that time, looking at the walls stupefied. “My father went to get me on the ball field and ran after me around all the bases with a belt raised high.
“You have to work!” he would say.
Papa Lorenzo smiled faintly and continued: “I would have been a good Major League player. If it hadn’t been for how malnourished I was, God knows where I would be now! Tom Casey saw me playing once and liked me. ‘What a shame!’ Tom Casey said. ‘If he had another twenty pounds on him, I would hire him for Cincinnati.’”
And Papa Lorenzo nodded along to his words vehemently and said later: “Ha!. I was a good center fielder.”
So it was. Agar loved him sometimes.
Nonetheless, the night of the cigarettes, Papa Lorenzo arrived at last at eleven. Safe and sound.
“This is the brand you smoke, you addict?” Papa Lorenzo wanted to know.
“No,” Agar said. He now regretted his moment of weakness. He understood that Imaginary Fate was now punishing his indecision.
“Dead or alive,” Fate insinuated, “but not in between.”
“Open your mouth!” Papa Lorenzo ordered, waving the pack of cigarettes in front of his face. “Open it! Open! Open it!”
“You’re acting like a savage!” Mama Pepita shrilled from the sofa.
“It’s this neighborhood.,” she muttered, “it’s this country, this life.”
Papa Lorenzo squeezed Agar’s jaw and opened his mouth at last.
The cigarettes went in all the way to his throat.
“Swallow them!” Papa Lorenzo yelled. “Swallow them, you addict! You are the very face of Heresy. ”
Agar was choking.
Mama Pepita took him to the toilet between hiccups. He vomited a yellowish juice and ground tobacco. As he leaned against the wall, he remembered the “salt episode.” Another time when Mama Pepita had ripped into him with her litany about his vices.
“This boy eats too much salt,” Mama Pepita said.
“Let him explode,” Papa Lorenzo recommended, looking over the comic pages.
“Don’t you know that salt waters down your blood?” Mama Pepita scolded Agar him. “You’re going to turn yellow.”
Papa Lorenzo paged through the newspaper absentmindedly. He seemed very tired.
“I bet you don’t care, right?” Mama Pepita suddenly spat at him. “The boy spends his whole day eating salt and you don’t care if he explodes.”
“What do you want me to do?” Papa Lorenzo yelled, sitting up. “Kill him?”
And at the same time, he jumped out of his seat and tried to look Agar in the eye.
“So the boy eats salt!” he said, as if repeating lines he’d learned by heart.
“He’s addicted,” Mama Pepita assured him calmly.
“Addicted? I know a way to get rid of his addiction.”
Papa Lorenzo went to the pantry and came back with his fist full of salt.
“Have salt!” he yelled. “So you die of pleasure.”
And he threw the fistful of salt into Agar’s mouth.
“Animal!” Mama Pepita yelled. She ran over to Agar and thumped his back helpfully.
And Agar still didn’t understand. It had happened just like the event with the toilet. Mama Pepita had also taken on two roles then: the Witch, and Pinocchio’s fairy godmother.
“Pinocchio doesn’t flush the toilet,” Agar said.
Papa Lorenzo Stromboli jumped up again, tired of yelling.
“Why don’t you flush the toilet, knucklehead?”
“I don’t know.,” Agar tried to explain. “Sometimes I forget. I don’t know!”
“In your rush to go join your friends, huh? And now you’re going to leave without flushing again, huh?”
And he pulled Agar by the ears.
“Get your ass over here!” Papa Lorenzo said. And Agar remembered the West Side Boys’ voices, playing with his name: “Get your ass here, Agar. Get your ass a cigar!”
Papa Lorenzo led him forcefully to the toilet. Agar kicked furiously in front of the bowl. Papa Lorenzo said: “From today on, you will never forget.”
And then he ordered Agar to stick his hand into the yellow bottom.
“Go!” Papa Lorenzo ordered.
When will you learn to flush the toilet? When will you learn not to smoke? When will you learn to not say filthy words? When will you learn to respect your mother? To wash your hands, brush your teeth, not to tell lies?
Agar hated Papa Lorenzo. He would have driven a wooden stake into him. Deep inside. The rest would be easy. Run away, run away, and come back at the age of thirty, when the crime had been forgotten.
“Hey, dudes. anyone here ever dreamed of getting lost and then coming back years later, suddenly someone important?” Tin Marbán had once asked.
“You know, I have a plan for that,” he said later. “Change my hairstyle. Whoever changes his hairstyle changes his life. People even forget your name. You’re somebody without a past.”
Mama Pepita grumbled from the sofa without any specific reason. Papa Lorenzo was watching a clown show on the TV.
Agar was alone in the bathroom and when he looked at himself in the mirror, he admitted he was an ugly boy.
He hated himself. He hated his body and his face. And he hated himself inside.
You should die, he thought. And he took a razor. It’s just as easy as moving this blade across these veins.
He swiped the razor gently against his skin, then pressed down until he cut himself a little below his wrist. He stopped there. Watching his blood drip slowly down his arm. But he immediately imagined that the blood was volcano lava and that the hairs on his arm were a legion of frightened Hair-Men.
“WE’RE SINKING!” the Hair-Men yelled.
The blood reached his elbow. The Hair-Men sunk. The clowns laughed on the TV.
“Change the channel, hon,” Mama Pepita’s indifferent voice said. “Put on Gaspar Pumariega. Maybe they’ll give away some Philips blenders.”
“That miserable fat man disgusts me,” Papa Lorenzo said. “He’s the classic exploiter of monkey brains, like you.”
Agar cleaned the cut with toilet paper. He turned his eyes back to the mirror and made a terrible grimace. Finally, he went to a corner of his room and laid down.
He closed his eyes.
From the living room, the clowns laughed. But he didn’t hear them. He was now piloting a plane loaded with atomic bombs that he would later drop over the city of Havana.
At Eight, I’ll Beat You Straight
The mare changed colors. She turned purplish under the sun’s rays.
They were still lying in a circle around her, used to the unbearable stench.