Guillermo Rosales - Leapfrog and Other Stories

And Papa Lorenzo nodded along to his words vehemently and said later: “Ha!. I was a good center fielder.”

So it was. Agar loved him sometimes.

Nonetheless, the night of the cigarettes, Papa Lorenzo arrived at last at eleven. Safe and sound.

“This is the brand you smoke, you addict?” Papa Lorenzo wanted to know.

“No,” Agar said. He now regretted his moment of weakness. He understood that Imaginary Fate was now punishing his indecision.

“Dead or alive,” Fate insinuated, “but not in between.”

“Open your mouth!” Papa Lorenzo ordered, waving the pack of cigarettes in front of his face. “Open it! Open! Open it!”

“You’re acting like a savage!” Mama Pepita shrilled from the sofa.

“It’s this neighborhood.,” she muttered, “it’s this country, this life.”

Papa Lorenzo squeezed Agar’s jaw and opened his mouth at last.

The cigarettes went in all the way to his throat.

“Swallow them!” Papa Lorenzo yelled. “Swallow them, you addict! You are the very face of Heresy. ”

Agar was choking.

Mama Pepita took him to the toilet between hiccups. He vomited a yellowish juice and ground tobacco. As he leaned against the wall, he remembered the “salt episode.” Another time when Mama Pepita had ripped into him with her litany about his vices.

“This boy eats too much salt,” Mama Pepita said.

“Let him explode,” Papa Lorenzo recommended, looking over the comic pages.

“Don’t you know that salt waters down your blood?” Mama Pepita scolded Agar him. “You’re going to turn yellow.”

Papa Lorenzo paged through the newspaper absentmindedly. He seemed very tired.

“I bet you don’t care, right?” Mama Pepita suddenly spat at him. “The boy spends his whole day eating salt and you don’t care if he explodes.”

“What do you want me to do?” Papa Lorenzo yelled, sitting up. “Kill him?”

And at the same time, he jumped out of his seat and tried to look Agar in the eye.

“So the boy eats salt!” he said, as if repeating lines he’d learned by heart.

“He’s addicted,” Mama Pepita assured him calmly.

“Addicted? I know a way to get rid of his addiction.”

Papa Lorenzo went to the pantry and came back with his fist full of salt.

“Have salt!” he yelled. “So you die of pleasure.”

And he threw the fistful of salt into Agar’s mouth.

“Animal!” Mama Pepita yelled. She ran over to Agar and thumped his back helpfully.

And Agar still didn’t understand. It had happened just like the event with the toilet. Mama Pepita had also taken on two roles then: the Witch, and Pinocchio’s fairy godmother.

“Pinocchio doesn’t flush the toilet,” Agar said.

Papa Lorenzo Stromboli jumped up again, tired of yelling.

“Why don’t you flush the toilet, knucklehead?”

“I don’t know.,” Agar tried to explain. “Sometimes I forget. I don’t know!”

“In your rush to go join your friends, huh? And now you’re going to leave without flushing again, huh?”

And he pulled Agar by the ears.

“Get your ass over here!” Papa Lorenzo said. And Agar remembered the West Side Boys’ voices, playing with his name: “Get your ass here, Agar. Get your ass a cigar!”

Papa Lorenzo led him forcefully to the toilet. Agar kicked furiously in front of the bowl. Papa Lorenzo said: “From today on, you will never forget.”

And then he ordered Agar to stick his hand into the yellow bottom.

“Go!” Papa Lorenzo ordered.

When will you learn to flush the toilet? When will you learn not to smoke? When will you learn to not say filthy words? When will you learn to respect your mother? To wash your hands, brush your teeth, not to tell lies?

Agar hated Papa Lorenzo. He would have driven a wooden stake into him. Deep inside. The rest would be easy. Run away, run away, and come back at the age of thirty, when the crime had been forgotten.

“Hey, dudes. anyone here ever dreamed of getting lost and then coming back years later, suddenly someone important?” Tin Marbán had once asked.

“You know, I have a plan for that,” he said later. “Change my hairstyle. Whoever changes his hairstyle changes his life. People even forget your name. You’re somebody without a past.”

Mama Pepita grumbled from the sofa without any specific reason. Papa Lorenzo was watching a clown show on the TV.

Agar was alone in the bathroom and when he looked at himself in the mirror, he admitted he was an ugly boy.

He hated himself. He hated his body and his face. And he hated himself inside.

You should die , he thought. And he took a razor. It’s just as easy as moving this blade across these veins.

He swiped the razor gently against his skin, then pressed down until he cut himself a little below his wrist. He stopped there. Watching his blood drip slowly down his arm. But he immediately imagined that the blood was volcano lava and that the hairs on his arm were a legion of frightened Hair-Men.

“WE’RE SINKING!” the Hair-Men yelled.

The blood reached his elbow. The Hair-Men sunk. The clowns laughed on the TV.

“Change the channel, hon,” Mama Pepita’s indifferent voice said. “Put on Gaspar Pumariega. Maybe they’ll give away some Philips blenders.”

“That miserable fat man disgusts me,” Papa Lorenzo said. “He’s the classic exploiter of monkey brains, like you.”

Agar cleaned the cut with toilet paper. He turned his eyes back to the mirror and made a terrible grimace. Finally, he went to a corner of his room and laid down.

He closed his eyes.

From the living room, the clowns laughed. But he didn’t hear them. He was now piloting a plane loaded with atomic bombs that he would later drop over the city of Havana.

At Eight, I’ll Beat You Straight

The mare changed colors. She turned purplish under the sun’s rays.

They were still lying in a circle around her, used to the unbearable stench.

“The one they’re the strictest with is Agar,” Tin Marbán said.

“They always beat me,” you said. You laid back and added: “It’s good for me. That way I get used to life’s hard knocks.”

But you were lying. You were trying to find some advantage to your disgrace.

“I wouldn’t want to learn like that,” Kiko Ribs said. “No, no. If my father beat me like that, I’d kill him.”

“My father beats me when he’s had a fucked-up day,” Speedy said.

And the West Side Boys laughed.

“And he almost always has a fucked-up day,” Speedy added, and the laughter continued.

“Here, all of us are fucked up,” Tin Marbán opined. “It’s the law. My father was fucked up by his grandfather. And my grandfather was fucked up by my great-grandfather. And my great by my great-great. And now my father fucks me up. And I’ll fuck up whoever comes next.”

“Hey, dudes. has anyone here ever thought of killing his father?”

Silence.

You kept looking at the rosemary. One day, in the garden, you had thought it. You thought that Mama Pepita was an oleander and your father a vicar. Mechanically, you started pulling up the flowers. Decapitating, dismembering, pulling the leaves off. Mama Pepita showed up at the door and yelled in horror.

“Murderer!”

The garden was ruined. It was a cemetery of petals and uprooted heads. At night, Papa Lorenzo pulled you aside.

“Come here, kid. You’re quite a case. Would you like to tell me what you got out of breaking apart those flowers? What pushes you to destroy everything? What? What? What?”

Suddenly, he started to beat you. You moved back toward the wall, trying to cover yourself, without responding.

“Why did you pull up the flowers?”