Sergio De La Pava - A Naked Singularity

But then came the doctors. Later that year, Wilfred slipped into a coma while lying on his bed and was taken to a San Juan hospital. Doctors looked at Wilfred and ran tests on the contents of his skull. They used words like pugilistic dementia and post-traumatic encephalitis , terms that Wilfred, with his junior-high education, would’ve had trouble understanding even were he conscious. They could have just said too much Boxing really even though others had fought more, certainly been hit more, and remained relatively healthy. He could have easily died then, he spent days in critical condition, but he didn’t. Instead he recovered and was released.

Now he needed constant care but this Man, who had let his very blood to earn millions for himself and others, had no money left. Years later, immediately after attending a benefit dinner held in his honor at Tito Puente’s restaurant nightclub in the Bronx, near where he was born, Benitez suffered a stroke and ended up in the intensive care unit of nearby Jacobi Hospital. He again survived but this stroke led to some paralysis and greater speech difficulties.

Today Wilfred lives in Saint Just, Puerto Rico; the barrio where his boxing career began in that makeshift backyard ring. The father who in those days put his arm around his seven-year-old son and showed him what to do is now dead. The wife he had when he was one of the strongest men in the world has abandoned him. He has few friends and fewer fans and his name is rarely mentioned anymore outside his own house.

And in that house Wilfred trembles and shakes and can’t walk so great. His speech has deteriorated greatly and he sometimes can’t say the simplest words. His memory is severely damaged.

He cannot, if alone, find his way home.

He is not, however, alone. Clara Benitez is with him, feeding and cleaning her son, keeping him steady as he stands and whispering in his ear when needed, promising everything will be all right mijo like she did the days Wilfred was her baby and she a far stronger woman.

The morning the blackout lifted and the lights in Times Square were so bright you couldn’t properly see, the first person I saw after I climbed in through the window was my mother looking very tired and sufficiently aged that I quickly tried to mentally calculate her number but realized I lacked even a clue because she guarded that secret zealously. And my face was stinging because it wasn’t just warm inside it was hot with the fireplace blaring and the baseboard’s heat actually visible so that the room seemed almost foggy. I stood in the middle of that steam and looked at them silently until Alana saw me and spoke:

“Casi,” she said. “We assumed you were dead.”

My mother looked at me and smiled, said I was underdressed. She hugged me and I dropped just about all my weight into her as she laughed. Then she went into the kitchen to look for food because I looked espantoso .

I took off my jacket and fell on the sofa. Alana was asking me where I had been and I was rubbing my face and looking up when Mary came into the room and jumped on the sofa.

“Casi, Casi! I have a baby brother!” she said.

“I know baby.”

“And he’s cute and chubby but can’t open his eyes yet.” The sound of her voice after so long was strange but sweet. “Do you want to see him?”

“I do Mary.”

“Good because he’s coooming,” she sang and skipped away.

“The hell?” I said looking at Alana, meaning how did we go from stone silence to that.

“That’s not the half of it either,” she said and before I could ask what she meant Buela and Buelo were coming down the noisy stairs in the deliberate way they did everything. I stood up and walked over to meet them. I gave them hugs and kisses and didn’t want to let go of my grandmother. When they sat down I went to the floor. “Help Alana, I’m being roasted alive in my own juice,” I said and took off a shirt.

Buela had a list of things Buelo had to do to help my mother get the house ready for the baby. She said that the baby was un regalo de Dios and that it was a miracle that all three — the baby, Marcela, and my mother — were healthy. She gave Buelo more orders and said she gave light to all five of her children in her home in Colombia armed with just a midwife. She talked about how as a young girl she watched her mother do the same, how some lived and were entrusted to her in varying degrees and could be referred to as later adults and how others didn’t so couldn’t. She started crying a little and my mother came in with food that mostly I devoured.

That night Marcela lay on that same sofa, yellow-faced and too tired to move. Beneath her was a red yarn slipcover Buela had sewn by hand. The house was full of those kinds of things. Tons of knick knacks everywhere and all of them covered by or sitting atop hand-sewn, by my mother or Buela, pieces of frilly material. My mother in particular felt she could make anything that consisted of cloth-type material. She bought nothing in that area and so great was her confidence that we knew from experience to lie about the cost of any new clothing she asked us about else she gasp and declare she could’ve made the item for us at a tenth of that then chide us for being wasteful.

Three feet from Marcela, in the same modest bassinet Alana slept in two decades earlier, lay my new nephew. Alana knelt before the oval, absently running her fingers along its border then looking in and gurgling. She looked at Marcela.

“My God,” she said. “Three. You’re like a baby machine. I doubt seriously I could ever have even one. Did it hurt like crazy?”

“Not like Timmy my God. And less than Mary too. By now I guess I’m so loose down there that they just slip right out.”

“That’s far more detail than I need,” I said. “Or want. Or can bear”

“He’s gorgeous Marcela,” Alana said. “I don’t mean cute either like all babies. I mean he’s actually good-looking, like handsome. Who has a handsome infant?”

I went over to see for myself and it was true. The squirt had like this tiny chiseled jaw and everything. I leaned over, put my hand on the back of Marcela’s neck and kissed her on the forehead.

“What do you see when you look at him Marcela?” Alana asked. “What do you feel?”

“Love. I feel love.”

“Don’t give me that. What do you feel ?”

“That’s what I feel, I’m sorry.”

“What is it though?”

“It’s Love. That thing that takes all these different forms. I feel it strongly when I look at him, the way your body feels cold.”

“Not now it doesn’t, it’s like a sauna in here.”

“Sorry, I made the mistake of telling ma that the baby needs a few days to adjust to the loss of the womb’s warmth.”

“Ah,” Alana said. “It all falls into place.”

“My fault.”

“ Love you say, hmm.”

“What?” I said.

“Nothing, just that love is an inarguably good thing it seems.”

“And?”

“Well there didn’t have to be Love you know. Love didn’t have to exist, right Mar?”

“I don’t know if it had to exist or not but I’m not sure it’s all you’re cracking it up to be,” she said.

“Huh?”

“I know this is going to sound weird but this kind of love is almost too intense. It hurts a bit. It feels almost like loss.”

“Well you’ve lost me.”

“What’s so hard to understand Alana?” I said. “This little sucker came out of her very body. What’s Bill for example? Some fat guy she met in a bar?”