Butterfly Winter (12 page)

Had I only known. Had I only had some expertise in baseball. I would have fed him and his brother candies as if they were royalty. To think of the money he earns, the luxuries he can afford. Do you
think my story is worth a small donation? I have an Indian passport, I need to first get out of Courteguay, make my way to Santo Domingo, where with any luck I will take the short flight to Miami where I will pretend to visit briefly but will disappear into the great American melting pot to seek my fortune.

But do not hasten away, you being a writer, a journalist, I’m certain my story would be of interest to you. A magazine article, a book perhaps? I would ask from you only as my share from the immense profits you would make from this entertaining story, a plane ticket to Miami, a few dollars on which to begin my new life.

It is a sad lesson to learn that wealth is not everything. Though, I suppose it was better to come early in my life than late. But I was a poor man in a rich family. In spite of being included in their wealth, I was an outsider, I was laughed at in private, whispered about behind my back. Here was someone, reluctantly accepted as an in-law, but ridiculed because I gave up my integrity for wealth. The woman Bhartee had no redeeming features, as you know sometimes someone without physically attractive features makes up for that loss by being brilliant in some other way, an artistic talent, business acumen, or displays an inner beauty that more than makes up for their physical unattractiveness. The woman Bhartee, while the size of three women, had the intellect of a child, the temperament of a hyena, the charity of a piranha, and the sexual appetite of three hundred mink in heat.

I lived with despair as my soulmate.

Then, one day in the hallway I passed the sister, Chandra, the beautiful one with whose photograph I was originally duped. A look passed between us, one of those about which there is no mistaking. Deep in the night, my feet in flannel slippers, I slid down the hall and, as I knew I would, found Chandra’s door unlatched. Ah, the passion of my life, of several lives both before and after. Passion rules all, and though we knew our illicit love was self-defeating, and could only bring tragedy, agreed to carry on for as long as our luck held, which was only a few weeks. Chandra was engaged to a very wealthy and much older man who had agreed to a magnificent dowry, plus a
million-dollar investment to enlarge the family business. They were due to marry in a few months.

Oh, the hullabaloo when we were discovered. I will not go into the painful details. Chandra was shipped back to India, there to repent and regain her virginity, in order she might be married on schedule. Many meetings were held while the family tried to decide what to do with me. Ironically, the woman Bhartee voted to forgive and take me back. The betrayed family, however, had other ideas. I was taken from Santo Domingo to the nearest border with Courteguay, where I was unceremoniously pushed across that very same border into exile, accompanied by only the clothes on my back and a few hundred guilermos, not nearly enough to buy a ticket out of Courteguay, and threats of certain death should I ever return to the Dominican Republic.

I used my few guilermos to set up this pitiful confectionery and fruit stand where I have lived in abject poverty ever since, my one hope being that I might somehow earn enough profit to obtain a ticket to Miami.

Now, has my story perhaps touched you enough, my information about the Pimental twins been colorful enough that you might make a small contribution to my future? You could not imagine the joy that an American twenty-dollar bill would bring to my lusterless life.

I see. Journalists do not pay for information. How sad. Could I interest you in a lottery ticket or two?

Did I know Quita Garza? Of course. Beautiful in a nymph-like way, fawn-like, skittish. Very difficult to describe. She had sepia-colored skin and pale blue eyes that looked as if they had fought and triumphed over a century of genes demanding brown eyes. She radiated sexuality. Unconscious sexuality for she had eyes only for Julio. She had no idea the mayhem she caused in the blood of other men who looked at her. She was the Garzas’ only child. It is rumored she is the child of an American fan of Milan Garza. A groupie, yes, that might be the word. The Garzas accepted her as their own. Hence the blue eyes. This is important information, yes. Though you try to hide I can see the dollar signs in your eyes. That information will be worth
many articles and many magazine stories. A small donation toward my future, toward America, toward
ALIMART
, the business I intend to open. Let me hint of what else I know, oh, I can tell you tales of Dr. Noir and Quita Garza that would curl your hair.

“M
arry in haste, repent in leisure,” the Wizard has said to me a number of times when I complain about the way Hector treats me. It is not a Courteguayan expression. The Wizard has been around so long that everyone assumes he is Courteguayan, but I have my doubts. He is a charlatan, that is for certain. He used to cheat my poor, gullible Hector out of what few centavos he earned, by having him bet on baseball games in both America and Courteguay. I think the Wizard makes up the final scores. I suspect he falsifies the voice that comes out of the radio box down at the palm wine shop. Now that our babies are rich and successful the Wizard cheats Hector out of his allowance. The more things change, the more they stay the same. Another non-Courteguayan expression.

“
DON
’
T YOU WANT
to do something else,” I asked, after watching the four-year-old battery fire the ball back and forth all morning.

“There is nothing else, Mama,” Julio said, smiling slowly, staring at me with his heavy-lidded eyes. He looked as though he were a miniature of his father, the same cool, innocent-insolent stare, the sensual mouth.

“
POOR ALI
,” says the Gringo Journalist, interrupting his interview with me, “I feel sorry for him. He’s a bit of a whiner, but a charming whiner. I gave him ten American dollars toward his plane fare out of here.”

I laughed. “I’m sure the coconut wine vendor did a brisk business until the money was exhausted. What kind of a sob story can I tell you that you will give me many American dollars.”

“He’s not trying to get back to India?”

“His family have lived in San Barnabas for several generations. They are merchants. Ali is a sorry swine. He has a weakness for coconut wine and theft.”

“He was not brought here as a groom for a wealthy family’s ugly daughter?”

I laughed again. “No woman would have him. He has never been off the island. His only skill is the ability to lie.”

“I’m not usually so easily conned,” said the Gringo Journalist.

“You’ve been indulging the lies of the Wizard. What he has is catching.”

“Who can I trust?”

“Certainly not me,” I said. “I am Courteguayan.”

“T
hey will believe anything, these gringo journalists,” the Wizard said to Julio. “Who started this rumor, anyway?”

“What rumor?” said Julio.

“That part of my duties as a wizard is to perform psychic surgery.”

“You started that rumor,” said Julio.

“I start so many,” replied the Wizard. “I thought I might have. Well, what do I do?”

“I’m only a baseball player,” said Julio. “But the operating room has been reserved at San Barnabas General Hospital, complete with a gallery for all the foreign journalists to observe your skill as a psychic surgeon.”

“Ah, yes, I remember making those arrangements. Very good for tourism though. Dying people everywhere, if you will forgive the play on words, are dying to believe in psychic surgery. Why should charlatans in South East Asia reap all the rewards? I am as much a charlatan as they are.”

“Indeed you are,” said Julio.

The Wizard wore his trademark midnight-blue caftan covered in mysterious silver symbols into the operating room. The patient, a middle-aged Caucasian, had been prepared. The Wizard turned toward the gallery where two dozen foreign journalists sat on the benches eating a lunch provided by the hospital cafeteria.

“After your lunch I will personally provide whatever medical treatment may be necessary.” There were a few dry laughs from the gallery. One journalist choked on his turkey hash.

“I use no scalpels,” said the Wizard. “My magical hands are my scalpels.” The Wizard moved to the far side of the patient. He waved his hands above the unconscious patient as though he were playing an invisible piano.

Suddenly, the Wizard appeared to thrust his hands into the abdomen of the patient. The gesture elicited a few cries of surprise from the gallery, and even one from an attending nurse. The Wizard dug around as if he were searching for an egg in a pillow. “Ah, I have found the trouble, at least part of the trouble.” He pulled a bloody hand out of the patient, gore dripped from a large slimy object in his hand.

Whispers of
tumor
passed through the gallery.

The journalist with the weakest stomach ran for the door.

The Wizard held the object higher.

“It’s a baseball,” said Julio, his wonder shining like an aura.

“Indeed.”

The psychic surgery complete, the Wizard bows to the applauding gallery. He turns and walks not to the door but to a completely blank wall where with his bloody fingers he draws the outline of a door. He draws a doorknob. He seizes the doorknob, pulls the door open, and exits, closing the door behind him. What remains is the totally blank wall of a moment before. But the Wizard has vanished.

“That good old boy gets my vote for tour operator of the year,” says a member of the gallery.

T
he twins told Fernandella they wanted to buy her a villa on Lake Verde, in the richest section of San Barnabas. Unfortunately in their rookie years they made so little that they couldn’t afford the materials for such a house, most of which had to be imported from America. They could have afforded something less grand, but decided to wait for the right moment.

Hector Alvarez Pimental wanted to take up the offer immediately. He was already mentally constructing exotic villas along the turquoise lake; he was counting the rooms, estimating how many he could rent, and to how many people and for how many guilermos. One of his fantasies was to acquire a telephone, which he could see sitting, black as a rat, on an end table in his living room. But whom would he call? His cronies were all too poor to even use pay telephones, of which there were rumored to be three in San Barnabas, though none in San Cristobel.

The Wizard on the other hand, who had absorbed, or somehow been blessed with the best of political sensibilities, decided to wait and see what would be most profitable for him.

“I will never leave this place,” huffed Fernandella, over a full-term belly, her cheeks blotched, her loose maternity smock sweat-stained. “The bounties of the hillside: fresh, cool water; tasty fish and succulent fowl, meet all my needs. What if we move to an expensive villa, and my boys disappear into the bowels of America, never to return? What if you die?” she said to her husband. “With my bounties, what do I need you for? To satisfy my lusts,” she went on, answering her own question. “As I grow older my lusts grow less frequent while my appetite for fish, fowl, and clear water become more voracious.”

Fernandella refused to leave her stream of plenty; she still killed pheasants for each family meal. It was the endless supply of fish and the pheasants that all but leapt into her frying pan, that saved the day for the only Major League Baseball Club in the True South.

AFTER WINNING THE CY YOUNG AWARD
and being named Most Valuable Player, Julio, and Esteban because he was his twin brother, were invited to the White House to meet the President. After viewing the White House, Julio and Esteban decided that they wanted their mother to live there, in fact they made it a condition of their playing another season for the only Major League Baseball Club in the True South. It did not concern them when the owner waved signed contracts under their noses, and threatened to suspend them and let them rot in San Cristobal, and never play another Major League game. The twins pointed out through their interpreter, a cousin of the Wizard, though Esteban often had to correct the interpreter, whose English seldom surpassed a McDonald’s menu, that the baseball stadium was full for every home game, though the team continued to finish dead last. They pointed out that the previous year Julio had won twenty-seven of the team’s sixty-two victories.

The President of the United States agreed that Fernandella Pimental and her children, who now numbered eight, five of the final six unexceptional, except for Aguirre the dwarf, could visit the White House, even stay for a few days, two weeks at maximum, as guests of the State Department. The Pimental brothers found a Spanish-speaking travel
agent and booked first-class seats to San Barnabas. “We already have enough money to live comfortably forever in Courteguay,” they told the only Major League Baseball Club in the True South.

Julio and Esteban were exceptionally generous with their father. They bestowed on him a large allowance which he gambled away. The Wizard was now the biggest bookmaker in all Courteguay. The only client he dealt with personally was the father of the twins. For one hundred and one consecutive days Julio and Esteban’s father bet on losing teams. The Wizard, who never asked directly for anything from the twins, became a very wealthy man. He became interested in overthrowing the government. He acquired a fleet of hot air balloons.

T
he first time the battery returned home they paraded their money like military medals. They bought their mother silk dresses of iridescent greens and silvers; they bought her scarves and jewelry. On that first visit the brothers discovered that many of their neighbors, at the instigation of the Wizard, were worshipping the furnace in the basement of Fernandella’s renovated house. It was the only furnace in all of Courteguay. The local priest refused to bless it, even from a distance, claiming it was an instrument of the devil; the Wizard conversed with it. Fernandella’s children, and Fernandella herself, felt comforted by the way it hummed like a sleeping pet in the black hours before dawn.