Guillermo Rosales - Leapfrog and Other Stories

One day, I wanted to make the sign of the cross to see what was going on with me. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, I went around saying it, when Papa Lorenzo came out from behind the oleanders with his belt off and coiled to strike.

“Amen!” he said, and at the same time he got me on the back with the belt.

“I don’t want to see you doing that again,” he warned me later. “Get that into your head.”

He hates God. He often tells God to go to hell.

“When you see him, let me know!” he says. “I’d like to meet the son-of-a-bitch who invented all of this.”

“Forgive him, Lord!” Grandma Hazel shouts from her steaming cauldron.

No. I cannot swear to God. Although I can’t swear by my mother either. It’s easy to swear by your mother and not really mean it.

“May my mother fall down dead, it wasn’t me, Mrs. Caritina,” I said the day I broke the hardware store windows. And then I ran back home and Mama Pepita was behind the pots and pans, alive and kicking, as always.

“Where were you, you little devil?”

Swearing is stupid. Nothing ever happens. Although Papa Lorenzo has a system for swearing. It has to do with Stalin.

“Come here; did you take money from the dresser?”

“No.”

“Would you dare swear to it on Father Stalin?”

And then he goes to the Closet of Souvenirs and brings out Stalin’s picture and puts it on the bed.

You cannot swear by me in vain , Stalin seems to be saying.

“Swear!” Papa Lorenzo commands.

At first I would confess. But now the West Side Boys laugh when I tell them the story.

“Dude, your father is so ridiculous!”

So it doesn’t matter to me anymore. I swear by Stalin in vain, although at times I discover him staring at me hatefully from his frame.

“Last night I dreamed I was falling from a cliff,” Agar said.

Papa Lorenzo looked at him from over his breakfast mug without speaking. Mama Pepita went to get the crackers. Agar would have wanted Papa to say: Really? So how did it happen? Tell me. Tell me all about it. Detail by detail.

But Papa Lorenzo said: “Everyone dreams. That doesn’t mean anything. Hand me the sugar.”

Holy moly. I have to get away from this house. One day I made an escape map. The bedroom, living room, kitchen and the bathroom hallway. Someone left a window open. So I got away. I got lost in a wealthy neighborhood, and in the end, was taken in by a rich family. They wanted to adopt me. They named me “Friday,” because the day I went on the lam was a Friday. They loved me so much! They had a pool and everything. Like in that movie with. (what’s that guy with the big nose called?) David Niven! My Man Godfrey. And Niven ends up marrying June Allyson.

Damnit! Would anyone take me in? Although in the end, it was horrible: Papa Lorenzo found the map with the warning signs. He laughed for a long time, the map in his hands.

“An escape map! Ha, ha, ha!” His belly shook. He turned red with laughter. Then suddenly, he got very serious and said: “There’s no need. ”

He went to the front door and opened it.

“Go!” he said. “You want to leave, right? Go!”

I was shaking at the table. Papa Lorenzo was pointing at the horizon with his finger and Mama Pepita was grumbling in the kitchen. In the end, Mama went over to the door and shut it.

“Leave him alone!” she said, tired. “Leave the damned kid alone. ”

“Don’t get involved in this!” Papa Lorenzo roared: “You’re the one who has ruined him.”

They exchanged insults loudly for a long time. Finally, Mama Pepita turned her hunched back and left sobbing for the Trunk of Photos of her Youth. There, she started going through the old photos.

“This was me at fifteen,” she murmured, “or was I sixteen?”

She held the photos, looking at them for a long time, until she seemed to forget her troubles. Then she got up: “What a house, my God!” she exclaimed. And with that she went back to the kitchen.

Agar watched Mama Pepita go through the Photos of her Youth and listened to Papa Lorenzo searching through his Closet of Souvenirs.

“You’d be wise to burn everything in that closet,” Grandma Hazel advised. “One day they’ll come, search the house, and then we’ll have to take your clean clothes to the prison at Castillo del Principe.”

But Papa Lorenzo didn’t answer. He shot her a hateful glance from his Closet of Souvenirs and brusquely took out a book from the bottom of a trunk.

“And you, Madam. do you know who this is?” He showed her a book with an owl on the cover.

“I don’t care,” Grandma Hazel said, pushing it away with her hand.

“It’s Prince Kropotkin!” Papa Lorenzo said in a tired, irritated voice. “What about this one?” “Less still,” Grandma Hazel answered, slightly nervous.

“Bukharin! The Benjamin of the October Revolution!”

“They’re very well known in their own way,” Grandma Hazel pointed out, with dignity, “but Jehovah is much larger than all of them.”

“Madam.,” Papa Lorenzo then said in a serious tone of voice, “I don’t want to see what happens to you when the train of the Revolution blazes across this island.”

“I’ll be sure not to stop until I get to Australia!” Grandma Hazel laughed.

“A great train full of dynamite, with Lenin and Stalin’s star on it ready to crack down on the old home food delivery vendors. ”

“Don’t forget that my home food deliveries pay for your food.,” Grandma Hazel reminded him, while slowly wagging her witch’s finger.

“Bah!” Papa Lorenzo exclaimed, picking up Bukharin and company and putting them back in place in the Closet of Souvenirs. “Humanity is a bitch!”

Agar rushed his cup of café con leche. Papa Lorenzo flipped through the newspaper, saving the comic strips for last. Seeing his belly flow abundantly over his belt, Agar remembered Flattop, Dick Tracy’s fattest enemy, who had died devoured by a barracuda in a Chicago pool.

Later, he remembered Grandma Hazel, wrapped up in the steam of her cauldrons, always repeating the same refrain: Strange. Your father is strange. First he picked up votes, organized strikes and went around to meetings that always ended in gunshots. He even convinced me to vote for the Popular candidate! But now it turns out he’s a Rotarian! He’s a communist and he belongs to Rotary International! It’s a strategic matter, he says. Strategic? I don’t understand anything!

Papa Lorenzo stuck his nose in the National Daily News stories.

“This country really likes its comic strips,” he said in a low voice.

From the kitchen, Mama Pepita let the pots fall thunderously.

At Three, My Coffee

“What’s up, Doc?” Bugs Bunny said. He popped his head out of the hole and patted Elmer Fudd’s shoulder, who replied: “We’re going to the land of giant carrots!”

Mama Pepita arrived with the hot food containers.

“Go to your grandmother’s house,” she said. “Have her tell you what she has for lunch. And here, give her this money. But hang on to it! Don’t come to me later with an oh, I dropped it !”

“You come straight back here,” Papa Lorenzo said. He was chewing a piece of bread with his healthy molars.

Straight. You come straight back. You go straight there. You go straight. Everything is straight. Straight to the point. What do they care if I stay in the park with the West Side Boys! Playing leapfrog, throwing stones or making up stories. What do they care! Then they say because you’re too thin, and they smoke there and talk dirty. But what dirty things could they say that I don’t know? I know them all! And I smoke, too. All the brands. Anyone who doesn’t smoke is a fag. Anyone who doesn’t curse is one, too. That’s the law. That’s the law and they’ll never understand!