Butterfly Winter (10 page)

“Julio had no such spiritual inclinations. In that way we have always had of communicating, telepathy some would call it, we simply read each other’s thoughts. I did not always understand Julio’s thoughts, though I could read them clearly. He joked with me about sexual things that I would not comprehend for many years, and even then would not find them essential to my life.

“I must have been five the first time I wandered down the hill to the compound where two or three moth-eaten priests were caged like old bears in a dilapidated zoo.

“ ‘What do you believe in?’ I asked the priest who approached the fence, where I clung to the chain-link with my small, dirty fingers.

“ ‘I believe in the salvation of the soul,’ he answered, as if the question had come from a literate adult and not a peasant child with no religious experience.

“ ‘Do you read?’ the priest asked.

“ ‘No one in my family has ever learned to read,’ I replied honestly.

“ ‘Come here, my child,’ the priest said, himself moving closer to the fence, taking from under his ratty cassock a flat, floppy bible, worn with age, the edges of the pages curled with use.

“ ‘I will teach you the two most important words in the mortal world. Hereafter you will always be able to say you are capable of reading.’ ”

“The words I learned that day were
Jesus wept
.

“Later on that same priest, Father Leopold, taught me to read, and I taught Julio, sometimes with the help of the Bible, but mostly by what I would call transplants of knowledge. I would think of the knowledge I had acquired and Julio would learn. Julio would do the same for me, pass telepathically to me the word and stories and rumors and gossip he picked up on the streets of San Barnabas. They were not always stories I wanted to hear. Nevertheless, they helped me understand and accept my brother.

“I remember the first time I held a book in my hands. I remember it the way someone else might recall the first breast they touched, their first kiss.

“Father Leopold had taken nothing in the way of personal effects with him when he was about to be interned in the compound. He was allowed only one bag, and he chose instead of clothing or food or religious accouterments, to carry a dozen books into exile.

“ ‘Oh, dear, some of these books are in Latin,’ Father Leopold said, glancing distractedly as them. ‘Well, I will teach you Latin, after you master English, and Spanish.’ Father Leopold was from a place called Poland, where he says the hills and forests are often covered in a kind of frozen rain he calls snow. I knew Father Leopold dealt in miracles, and I left myself open to such things, but waist-high drifts of frozen water were too strange for me to comprehend.

“ ‘You may take this one home,’ the priest said to me, ‘you must however keep it a secret from everyone, for we are not allowed such freedoms.’ The book was small, inside plain blue hardcovers. I dug like a puppy with my hands, sending dirt flying back between my legs, until there was room for the priest to slip the book under the fence. I placed it against my heart, under my ragged shirt, it was cool and solid, and I felt I was holding a piece of the priest’s heart. The book, of which I was unable to understand much, though I could read the words, was Aristotle’s
Poetics
.”

J
ulio and Esteban’s great-grandmother, Fernandella’s grandmother, had been stoned by duppies, the malevolent shadows of the Courteguayan cane fields and jungles. The dead, as everyone knew, went to live in the jungle as hunting spirits. Duppies, everyone also knew, were responsible for the rustling of leaves on a windless day. Duppies breathed on the back of your neck. And though never visible to the living eye, duppies, if angered by the actions of mortals, threw stones to let their displeasure be felt.

Fernandella’s grandmother, a foolish girl of sixteen, with velveteen skin the color of a blue-black narcissus petal, deliberately picked an argument with her husband-to-be and stalked off swelling with feigned anger, wanting secretly for him to chase her and subdue her, in order to prove his love.

The man who would eventually be Fernandella’s grandfather did not chase after the willful girl, for it was only an hour until the baseball match, and he was the star pitcher for the San Cristobel Heartbreakers.

While the girl sulked, her fiancé pitched badly, searching the crowd for her beautiful face rather than watching his catcher’s signs and the
stance of the opposing batter. San Cristobel was humiliated. It was a known fact that duppies often altered the outcome of baseball games. If an outfielder got a late start on a fly ball it was because a duppie held his belt, it was a duppie who kicked the ball from a second baseman’s glove as he tagged a sliding base runner. And duppies who covered the eyes of umpires so that they had to guess at the outcome of easy plays, and, as everyone knows, when an umpire guesses, he always guesses wrong.

That evening as Fernandella’s foolish grandmother walked barefoot through the quiet cane fields, the duppies unleashed a barrage of coin-sized stones at her. When she went to scream at the sting of the small rocks her mouth made no sound and as she tried to run away her legs suddenly felt as if they weighed two hundred pounds each. The stones seemed to come from all angles, and as the girl couldn’t tell where the next stone was coming from, she curled on the ground like a snail and hoped that the duppies were not angry enough to kill her.

As it happened, other than bruises she received only one wound, an inch-long cut just above her left eyebrow.

“I hurt myself climbing to reach some ripe mangos,” she lied, when her mother remarked on the congealed blood over her eye, and her generally disheveled appearance.

No more was said. But the girl vowed not to anger the duppies again. She married her fiancé and was a good wife, though her first girl-child, Fernandella’s mother, was born with the same purplish worm of a scar above her eye. And, years later, Fernandella was born with the same duppie scar.

FERNANDELLA ACQUIRED A DOG
, a two-pound, skeletal-looking, hairless Chihuahua, or rather the dog acquired Fernandella. It appeared at her door on a diamond-bright summer morning just as the last of the ground fog that hovered over the sloping acres of lawn which might have been made of the finest carpet, was evaporating.

The dog pawed at the heavily timbered front door, yapping like a flock of starlings. The servant who opened the door stopped the dog
as it attempted a mad dash into the foyer, and, not being fond of small, ugly, yapping dogs, was about to punt it to a spot near the edge of the property line when Fernandella appeared and rescued it.

The small, squirming mass licked Fernandella’s face, while one scrawny paw massaged a nipple, moving in small counterclockwise motions.

Fernandella stilled the paw with one hand while holding the dog tightly against her body. The dog’s coat was like worn carpet; his eyes were a muddy almost-blue. Like the Wizard’s, thought Fernandella. The dog lapped at her cheeks with a raspberry tongue, he smelled of fog and fresh grass, and antiseptic, like a veterinary clinic.

Fernandella waved the servant away.

“I’ll keep him,” she said, for the dog was obviously a him, his tiny testicles, like unshelled peanuts, clearly visible. “Uhhh,” said Fernandella, once again stilling the active paw. “I’ll call him Juan,” she said, “I once had a suitor who touched me in much the same way. He too, was called Juan.”

The servant blushed and went about his business.

Hector and Juan hated each other on sight. When Hector returned from the baseball matches he found Fernandella curled on the chaise lounge in the green room, the dog cuddled to her breast.

Juan bared his tiny teeth and emitted a low, humming growl.

What Hector saw were needle fangs in an insane, badger-like face, a Tasmanian devil the size of a bloated hamster.

“What’s that?” asked Hector.

“A little lost dog,” replied Fernandella.

“A rat, you mean.”

The dog’s fur stiffened. It growled again.

“Get rid of it,” said Hector Alvarez Pimental.

THE FIGHT WAS THE RESULT
of Hector’s gambling. And the fact that Fernandella seemed to keep the nasty little dog at her breast twenty-four hours a day. In spite of his monthly allowance from his sons of 100 guilermos (the annual income in Courteguay at the time was
78 guilermos), Hector Alvarez Pimental gambled away every centavo, betting on the baseball matches. The Wizard was his private bookie.

When his allowance ran out, Hector often appropriated Fernandella’s household money. When that failed he would borrow from local merchants, who knew that Fernandella, or certainly her famous sons would honor his debt, out of embarrassment if not honor.

On a particularly bad day, Julio, who was 20-7, was pitching against the cellar-dwelling Cleveland Indians, against a pitcher with control problems that went far beyond finding the plate with his pitches and into the realm of alcohol and illegal drugs. The pitcher had a 6.49
ERA
for the season. Hector bet 400 guilermos on Julio’s team.

Julio pitched superbly, giving up only three hits and an unearned run in a complete game. But that evening the drunken pitcher had a curve ball that dipped like a Ping-Pong ball in a wind tunnel. He scattered seven hits and pitched a shutout.

Hector Alvarez Pimental smiled weakly when the televised game ended, and said, “I have left my wallet at home. How careless of me. I will gladly pay you tomorrow.”

The Wizard replied, “You know I deal only in cash,” then paused for a long time before adding, “and certain merchandise.”

The word certain was spoken in underlined italics.

They struck a deal. The debt would be canceled in return for Leroy Nieman’s portrait of Julio in full wind-up, his left foot a full eight inches above his head. It was when Fernandella discovered that the portrait, which belonged to Julio, was missing, that the terrible fight ensued. The fight when Hector beat his wife about the head and face with her evil little dog, doing neither of them any harm. It was many years before Fernandella entirely forgave Hector.

I
t is a very frightening thing to be a poor man with a family. Sometimes I wish that the Old Dictator had not consigned the priests to the scrap yard, had not fenced them in behind chain-link where they pace like tigers, hands clasped behind their backs, eye burrowing into the ground. I liked the quiet of the church interiors, the smell of earth, varnish, incense. I liked being forgiven. In the years since the churches were outlawed, since they sit unattended, inching deeper into the earth, my heart grows heavier, my conscience dark and bulky within me, a metallic cancer without cure.

I remember the Old Dictator’s speech. Fernandella and I, still courting in those days, walked into San Barnabas, stood barefoot on the rain-washed cobblestones in front of the Presidential Palace on a cool, sunny day, splashes of bougainvillea covering the adobe walls of the palace. The Old Dictator stood on the largest balcony, his white uniform emblazoned with many medals, his officers flanking him wore scarlet sashes, blue ribbons slashed diagonally across their chests like bandoleers.

“There is no need for God in a warm climate,” the Old Dictator said. “We have been restrained by the church for centuries, could life
be any worse without religious influence than it is now? It is time we found out.” He went on to issue a proclamation that officially closed the churches, turning the buildings over to the people who were to put them to whatever use they saw fit. The military at that very moment were building compounds that would house the priests. All religious personnel were free to leave Courteguay at any time.

When we got back that night a compound was being built at the foot of the hill below the monastery, a fourteen-foot chain-link fence surrounding a vacant lot that was sometimes used as a baseball field. Canvas sheets, sticks, and cooking utensils were supplied. There was a great outcry from the devout. The priests all vowed to remain prisoner as long as it took. The devout came to the compounds all over Courteguay, and the priests blessed them through the wire fence.

But time was on the Old Dictator’s side. Time and the weather. The devout disliked kneeling on gravel and being blessed through a chain-link fence in a downpour. The priests found that living in makeshift tents and, though the Old Dictator provided them with adequate food, cooking over open fires, and having limited bathing and toilet facilities, and no replacements for worn out cassocks, was not to their liking. One by one they allowed as how a visit to their native land was not a bad idea. The few native-born Courteguayan priests were allowed to choose a country of their liking, and all chose the United States, a country that while niggardly with humanitarian aid, is always a sucker for a religious refugee, fake or genuine.

C
ourteguay from the air: centuries-old baseball diamonds visible. The Wizard crammed them all into the gondola of the balloon, Julio and Esteban, Hector and Fernandella, the dwarf Aguirre home for a short visit, and a woman who claimed to be a psychic artist able to draw pictures of the future. The balloon, striped like a candy cane, hissed into the air over San Barnabas, the sky was turquoise blue, the wind soft as a rabbit’s nose. What they saw below them as they swung out over Lake Verde and the jungle-like land in the direction of the Dominican Republic were baseball diamonds, not active ones where the Courteguayan boys of endless summer played ball from dawn to dusk, but baseball diamonds centuries old, appearing from the sky to be covered with layers and layers of gentle, verdant moss. They were unmistakable.

“Look!” cried the Wizard. “Look!” He pointed down at the mossy land where the ancient baseball diamonds were clearly visible.

“How do you explain it?” asked Fernandella. “You … that is Sandor Boatly brought baseball to Courteguay. We all know that. Who played on those diamonds?”