The fury of not belonging made him deliver outsized punches, real “Here I am!” punches that broke ribs. He was eager to enter the country by breaking the bodies of its neighbors, winning recognition by destruction. He loved to challenge the audience. When their favorites fell with broken jaws or with their kidneys or liver smashed, or knocked cold and on the verge of death, he received the jeers holding his testicles with one glove while he made the gestures of a phallus penetrating them with the other. That hatred was his food. Money aside, he fought not for the pleasure of winning but to exacerbate rejection and to turn that into his homeland. To be a negative hero was a thousand times better than living anonymously and separately.
The illegal bouts, which always came after dogfights, were bloodier than those of the animals. There was no boxing; the fighters simply beat each other without stopping until one fell over. The matches were held in improvised rings in bars, slaughter yards, garages, vacant lots. The high betting made people thirsty, and barrels of wine, beer, and brandy were consumed. Jaime did not win easily. Since no one bothered to make sure the boxers were of equal weight, sometimes he was up against tanks. In those difficult cases, he would use the tricks of the trade the Horse had taught him: elbowing, low blows, head butts to the cheeks, scratches with the inside of the gloves, blows to the nape, suffocating clinches, foot stomping, sarcastic remarks that made the adversary lose control. No matter what, he always came out with a swollen eye, his ribs bruised, and his nerves a wreck. The aftereffects would last two weeks; he would sleep badly, dreaming about cats eating his penis, and wake up screaming. In June of this dark year, González the Horse came to see him and say in his nasal voice:
“Enough with these illegal bouts. We’ve been offered a nice contract for the National Championship, in a real ring. You’ll have your picture in the newspaper. If you win, they’ll pay us very well, and the good life will begin. If you accept — you’d be nuts to play hard to get and turn down the opportunity — I’d have to prepare you using my methods, because there’s no time to perfect your technique. You’ve got more than enough strength, your hooks are like mule kicks, and you’ve got winning in your heart, but you’re missing something. Maybe it’s something you’ve got too much of: rage. You put too much into it, then you lose control, waste energy, drop your guard, and have the bad habit of charging with your head exposed, risking a split eyebrow and being blinded by blood. All that is from an excess of hatred. I want you to be capable of reaching indifference. In a month, you’ll face the Baby, a colossus who weighs 265 pounds. Before turning professional, he killed three in the illegal bouts. If you learn to control yourself, you’ll win.”
“You want me to change my nature in a month? You’re batty, Horse. It can’t be done so quickly, and besides it’s impossible.”
“If you’re a man, we can give it a try.”
“You doubt my virility? I’m no fag.”
“Maybe a coward.”
“Me? Let’s see.”
“We will see. First, it will be easy. I’ll tickle you with a feather, and you’ll have to hold in your laughter. When you get past the tickles, I’ll move on to the second test, and that’s when you can begin to break down. To console you, I’ll tell you that my secret method has only four steps. Few but decisive.”
“Go get your feather. If I decide not to laugh, I won’t laugh. With will power you can achieve anything.”
Things weren’t that easy. The feather was hard, an eagle feather. Bearable in the armpits and the back but annoying on the soles of the feet and a torture in the nostrils and the interior of the ears. It took Jaime a day to dominate those feelings and make himself feel nothing. Only once did Horse catch him off guard and make him jump up — by scratching his anus. Finally, he could touch the feather to Jaime’s open eyes and he wouldn’t even blink.
Then the pricking began. He had to let himself be pricked with a needle without reacting. That took a week. His teacher showed no mercy. He sunk the tiny point in everywhere, including the genitals. Jaime put up with the pain, overcame his reflexes, and became as passive as a corpse.
Horse gave him four days of rest while he went north to find an important ingredient for the third test. He returned with a carefully sealed cigar box with tiny holes in the lid.
“What I’ve got here is a dozen tarantulas. I had to go all the way to the Andes to hunt them down. They’re big and very poisonous. Luckily they walk more slowly than turtles. Look.”
He opened the box. There were the hairy animals with their long legs and the orange stripe on their bulging bellies. Horse took a twig and flipped one over.
“Take a good look, my Russian friend. Here underneath the thorax they have two black teeth. Those they will use to bite and kill you. They aren’t aggressive, but they have a very bad character. The slightest unexpected movement makes them snuffle, trying to inject their venom. And just so you see I’m not lying…”
With some tweezers he picked up a tarantula and tossed it on a mangy dog that had wandered into the slum to sniff around the garbage. The dog jumped three times, howled, tossed the spider off, but after a few minutes began to wheeze, fell to the ground shaking, and died. Jaime swallowed hard.
“Go to bed early because tomorrow we’ll get up at dawn.”
Before sunup, they left with the cigar box and a cask for San Cristóbal Hill. Horse poured the tarantulas into the cask and turned it over next to Jaime, who was lying on the ground trying to turn himself into stone. They waited a couple of hours until the sun warmed the ground. The spiders lost their torpor and tried to get out of the cask. To do that, they had to walk along Jaime’s legs, stomach, sex, chest, and face. He was naked. His body temperature seemed agreeable to them, so they stayed on top of him for half an hour, which to my father seemed like an eternity. But it wasn’t disagreeable because, distanced from his body, he fell into a beatitude that united him to the entire Universe. He realized that beneath the terror of existence, that life threatened by hunger, catastrophes, illness, human beasts, there extended an infinite peace. A sentence came to his mind and for the time he had the tarantulas on top of him he repeated it again and again: “I without the world, no; the world without me, better.” Finally they left. González the Horse, pale, handed him a heavily sugared cup of coffee he poured from a thermos.
“You are an extraordinary boy. You’ll be the champ because you’re not afraid to die. Now all you have to do is learn to become invisible. You’ll move on to the final test, the hardest.”
When Horse explained what he wanted him to do, Jaime became furious and called him a mad man. Then that state of cosmic peace he’d acquired with the tarantulas invaded him, and he accepted with indifference.
At six o’clock in the afternoon, when the zoo was closing, they visited, with four bottles of red wine in hand, Don Gumercindo, the old watchman, a friend and former admirer of Horse. He received them with open arms. The business of spending nights alone amid roars, crowing, and erotic whistles, had made him thirsty, not only for wine but also for human company. The boxer had him swallow glass after glass until most of the four bottles was in his stomach. He collapsed onto his military cot, snoring so loudly that the three-year-old calendar on the wall went flying.
Horse checked through some drawers and found a ring of keys. They walked to the big cage of the Bengal tigers. There were four adult tigers, one male and three female, along with half a dozen pups, each no larger than a cat. Night was falling. The tigers, emerging from their daytime torpor, suffocated in that space — which, even if it was big, was limited by bars — paced back and forth with a regularity that seemed insane.