Guillermo Rosales - Leapfrog and Other Stories

“I knew it was worth coming to this house!” Ciriaco Sardinas exclaimed, euphoric.

“Your credit is good here,” Papa Lorenzo said.

They drank. Agar watched them through the blinds, exploring their faces and figures and entertaining himself looking for similarities with the characters from all the stories.

“Listen, old man,” Ciriaco said. “Yesterday, I was offered a 1954 Studebaker. A gem. A real gem! You know how much?”

“How much?” Papa Lorenzo wanted to know, feigning interest.

Agar watched him pretend and asked himself if the old Rotarians also noticed that his show of interest was all a lie.

“Two and a half!” Ciriaco Sardinas said. “Two and a half, old man.”

“I don’t believe it,” the very fat Jeff de la Vega opined. “Gentlemen, a 1954 Studebaker is, here and in the Belgian Congo, a 1954 Studebaker!”

“Well. well.,” Ambrosio Choraliza interrupted. “Here comes the sentimental part of the matter.” And he pointed at Mama Pepita who was arriving with the tray full of new glasses.

“Ahhh!”

“The anchovies are eavesdropping!” Mingo, the barber, pointed out. “Gentlemen, there’s nothing like having a very cold beer and a lot of anchovies to see Warren Span pitch. Gentlemen, it’s quite something!”

Agar threw himself down on the bed. He knew that the conversation would now be about baseball for half an hour. And afterwards, Ambrosio Choraliza would talk about something like “the future repairs of the Santa Fe beach gutters.” And then things would move on to Ciriaco Sardinas’ agenda, who would take that under consideration for the following Monday, at the weekly meeting. He closed his eyes. He knew what would happen afterward. The Rotarians would leave. And Papa Lorenzo and Mama Pepita would go all the way to the gate with them to say goodbye, sending regards to their respective families and kisses to all.

And afterward, Mama Pepita would pick up the bottles, load the tray and take everything to the kitchen. And Papa Lorenzo would stay at the gate for a little while longer, until the Rotarians’ truck turned down 12th Street and got lost forever. Then his smile would disappear and he wouldn’t let his shoulders slump in defeat.

“Cretins.,” he would later say. With an old, deep exhaustion.

And Agar would listen from his room to Mama Pepita going through the Trunk of Photos of her Youth, and would hear her say: “this picture was taken when I was fifteen. was I fifteen or sixteen? Well, in any event, it’s all the same.”

At Fourteen, an Old Man Is Clean

The Rotarians had left.

From his room, Agar saw Papa Lorenzo come in and drop down on the sofa, in defeat.

The afternoon was clear and suffocating and a dusty drowsiness hung in the air. Papa Lorenzo flipped through the stories in the National Daily News and after a while, gave a moribund smile.

Papa Lorenzo is full of mystery. He has two faces, like the bicephalous man from Finstown. Ha, ha, he laughs, and with his other face, he’s saying: May a thunderbolt strike you all dead!

Mama Pepita passes on the way to her room.

“Get that look off your face,” she said, when she passed by her husband.

He looked at her and said sharply, “I’m very happy! Surely, I have reason to be. ”

“In this house,” Mama Pepita said, “it always feels like a funeral.”

And she went to her room and Agar heard her shuffling the old photos around.

Silence.

Papa Lorenzo dropped the newspapers and sat staring at a point on the wall. Stunned.

“I know I’m a beast,” he admitted then, without addressing anyone. “I can’t be any other way. I can’t.”

He smelled himself under his arms and fell backward on the sofa.

Agar knew what would come now. He knew that Papa Lorenzo would collapse across the sofa, looking vacantly at a point on the wall. Now Papa Lorenzo would write in the air with the tip of his finger. He wrote:

STALIN

“The Man of Steel.,” Papa Lorenzo then murmured. He seemed extremely worn out.

His face, marked with lines, was bitter when he said, “ Comrades! Everyone already knows the story of productive forces and the social relations of production. Everyone knows the law of quantitative and qualitative changes. And everyone knows about the insoluble alliance between the peasants and the proletariat .”

His voice was dramatic. Theatrical. Agar heard him echoing in the stillness of the living room and thought that if he were Papa Lorenzo’s audience, he wouldn’t have liked his style of delivering speeches.

Papa Lorenzo leapt from the sofa and returned to his speech, directed at the silent walls: “A deficient superstructure has a corresponding deficient economic base. The poverty of this society must be sought in the social and material roots of these miserable people. This is an island of cork that floats thanks to the magical illusion of all its components. Ahhhh! But Moctezuma’s troops are already dispersed. The flags of the Communist Party are already old. The promised land will not come, nor will the dynamite train. Not hide nor hair of it. Comrades! The revolution needs new vitality! New blood! New faces! This is the truth never revealed. This is the reason of all reasons. ”

Applause, Agar thought. He peeked through a gap in the door and saw Papa Lorenzo with his arm raised and his finger pointing at the ceiling lamp.

His arm dropped. His finger returned to its natural arrogance. Papa Lorenzo let himself fall down on the sofa again.

“I’m a piece of shit,” he said from there. He didn’t seem to say it bitterly. He said it with conviction and a bit of resigned indifference. “We are all pieces of shit! You!” he said, turning toward the room where Mama Pepita was going through the old photos. “Me!” he said. “And even that exasperating little kid you gave birth to!”

Agar hid his head under the pillow.

Papa Lorenzo lounged on the sofa and sighed deeply.

“In short.,” he sighed, “all shit.”

And he remained quiet, with his gaze lost on the ceiling.

“Aren’t you going to keep yelling?” Mama Pepita was pretending not to care: “Keep yelling, you idiot. So the neighbors hear you. Come on, keep yelling!”

“I’ll yell whenever I want!” Papa Lorenzo yelled. “I pay for this house with my money!”

Mama Pepita slammed the pictures down and went out to the living room. Agar foresaw the storm and quickly closed the door of his room.

“That boy is listening to all of this,” Mama Pepita said. “And outside, they can hear everything as if you were being broadcast on the radio.”

Agar closed his eyes slowly. He was returning to absolute darkness and going over his life — his memories came to him in a rush.

“Your father is a very strange communist,” Grandma Hazel said. “First, he went around getting votes and organizing strikes and even made me vote for the Popular candidate. And now he became an accountant, and he wants to put you in an elite school, and to hell with strikes, and votes, and I’m still affiliated with that Popular candidacy. Now it turns out he’s a Rotary! Communist and International Rotary. I don’t understand. It’s a matter of strategy , he says. Strategy? I don’t understand anything about strategy. I want him to give me my voting card back! That’s what I want!”

And she stuck her head in the cauldron and scraped the bottom of it with a spatula. She took it out again to say:

“Do you think I don’t know that the Communists are going to do away with the home food delivery business if they come to power? Your own father told me so! With Lenin and Stalin’s star, they will do away with my food delivery business. No! I am voting against myself! I want him to give me my voting card back! I want to vote for the Authentic Party. And remember this, my son: