Heart of Scorpio Read online

  Joseph Avski

  Heart of

  Scorpio

  Translated from the Spanish

  by Mark David McGraw

  Tiny TOE Press

  Books handpressed with love.

  HEART OF SCORPIO

  © Joseph Avski y Cámara de Comercio de Medellín para Antioquia-2009

  English translation copyright © 2012 by Mark David McGraw

  First Edition

  Published by TINY TOE PRESS

  Austin, Texas

  www.theopenend.com

  Publisher’s Note: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-9858228-0-4

  ISBN-10: 0985822805

  Cover design by Bridget Gamber

  All rights reserved.

  Contents

  Foreword by J. Lawrence Mitchell

  Translator’s Introduction

  Heart of Scorpio

  Author & Translator Biographies

  Foreword

  What does it take to make a world champion and what does it take to break him? These are the questions that frame this powerful and gripping fictionalized account of the tempestuous career of Antonio Cervantes Reyes who fought under the ring name of Kid Pambelé. At the height of his fame he was the pride of Colombia and hailed as a national hero when he became the first world boxing champion in Colombia’s history by winning the World Boxing Association (WBA) light-welterweight crown from the Panamanian Alfonso “Peppermint” Frazer in 1972. Under the management of Ramiro Machado, the Afro-Colombian kid from San Basilio de Palenque compiled an impressive 91-12-3 record, with 44 of his wins by knockout. The majority of his fights took place in Colombia or Venezuela, so his countrymen got plenty of opportunity to see him in action—something that only enhanced his popularity. Yet he was by no means a stay-at-home fighter: he also took fights in Argentina, Japan, Puerto Rico, South Africa, South Korea, and Thailand. And fans in the United States could have witnessed his ring exploits in Los Angeles, Miami, and New York.

  In Heart of Scorpio, Joseph Avski has magically transformed life into art and in so doing cunningly refashioned his protagonist, Milton Olivella, into something more than a champion fighter. The quotidian struggles of this distinctly flawed hero are at the heart of this multi-voiced novella. Though he has thrilled the crowds with his courage and his boxing skills in the ring, outside the ring the vicissitudes of fortune loom large. Thus while Olivella’s pugilistic triumphs are duly celebrated, they are overshadowed by his chaotic domestic life. He abuses his long-suffering wife, Ángela; he fails his only son, Julián, and drags them both down with him into his increasingly dysfunctional world. Meanwhile, for Olivella, fleeting memories of his glory days help blunt painful reality. Not surprisingly, drugs are the precipitating cause of most of his problems and he even sells his wedding ring to buy drugs. Readers are clearly invited to see the boxer as a kind of everyman, even as the embodiment of Colombia—a proud nation-state that has struggled so long with “la violencia” and with a corrosive drug ‘culture.’ This identification is rendered more pointed by the political friendship between World Champion Olivella and the real-life President of Colombia, Andrés Pastrana who was himself once kidnapped by the Medellin drug cartel, and whose father had been President while Olivella / Pambelé had been champion.

  The clever interweaving of fact and fiction will be evident to those who have followed Kid Pambelé’s remarkable career—he was inducted into the International Boxing Hall of Fame in 1998 and honored as his nation’s Fighter of the Century by the Colombian Boxing Federation in 2000. For boxing aficionados, then, reference to Milton Olivella’s losing title bid against “the Argentine Marturet” in Luna Park in 1971, will conjure up Kid Palembé’s heart-rending points loss to the elusive champion Nicolino Locche—he was dubbed “intocable” (untouchable) for his defensive skills—in Buenos Aires in that very location. And the date on which Olivella actually wins his title (October 28, 1972) corresponds to the date of Kid Pambelé’s sensational knockout win over reigning champion Alfonso “Peppermint” Frazer.

  Offering a fictional account of a real champion boxer’s life-story is not, of course, without precedent. Budd Schulberg’s The Harder They Fall (1947) used the career of the Italian heavyweight Primo Carnera, aka “The Ambling Alp,” as the basis for his novel about El Toro Molina, the gentle giant from the Andes who is taken advantage of by all those around him; and Howard Sackler’s The Great White Hope (1968) dramatized the tumultuous times of Jack Johnson, the first black world heavyweight champion, who was thinly disguised as Jack Jefferson in the play. To be sure, The Heart of Scorpio is not the story of a heavyweight champion, but it is a powerfully told story that carries a knockout punch.

  -J. Lawrence Mitchell, Ph.D.

  Prof. of English Language and Linguistics

  Texas A&M University

  Translator’s Introduction

  This introduction to Heart of Scorpio serves two purposes: an orientation to the Republic of Colombia where I occasionally worked and traveled during my career as a US Marine Corps officer and an explanation of the genesis of this translation. Colombia, a country with a rich and complicated history, is nearly twice the size of Texas and is broken into swaths of Amazon jungle, grassy plains, and Atlantic and Pacific coasts by three Andean ridges with peaks just shy of 19,000 feet in elevation. Colombia governs from Bogotá, a city of over eight million people at over 8,600 feet above sea level. A country of paradoxes, Colombia is home to opulent wealth and heartbreaking poverty, natural beauty and decades-long armed conflict, attractive and hospitable people and an astronomical level of kidnapping and violence.

  The novel takes place mostly in the Colombian cities of Cartagena and Palenque on the Caribbean coast. Cartagena, a walled Spanish colonial city founded in the 16th century, was a key port for shipping extracted riches to the mother country and also served as a principal point of slave trading. The village of Palenque, established by runaway slaves in the 1600’s and the birthplace of the novel’s protagonist, is today a bend in the road about an hour south of Cartagena. It is my unscientific observation that the food, the weather, and the ethnic profile of the coastal Colombian are more akin to Caribbean societies than to those of their countrymen in Bogotá or Medellín. To me, Colombians along the coast are more Caribbean in nature than Colombian.

  My opportunity to translate this novel came through very personal circumstances. Joseph Avski arrived to the Ph.D. program in Hispanic Studies at Texas A&M University as my new classmate in the fall of 2009. We made fast friends and I asked to read his new novel. I was impressed by the depth of the characters and ambitious interweaving of narrators and I found that my friend was also a great storyteller. My first impulse to translate the book grew chiefly out of a desire to share it with my English-speaking family and friends. Like Joseph, I grew up at a cultural crossroads. Mine was that of Cajun and redneck, Catholic and Protestant, black and white small-town Louisiana. In the Spanish-speaking voices of Joseph’s characters I heard the same rhythm and musicality as the English-speaking voices I heard growing up, which didn’t surprise me when I realized that Cartagena is closer to New Orleans than New Orleans is to Los Angeles, California.

  This translation was a joint project. More than once Joseph and I, the Colombian and North American sons of European immigrants, would distill a phrase or a sentence down to just the right word in English that would convey not only the meaning but the feel of the Spanish text. It was a process of shared discovery that would reach a word sometimes Latin-based and sometimes Germanic in origin. W
e would share a look and I could not help but wonder if a linguistic and metaphysical circle opened by ancestors from another epoch was not completed in that moment.

  If you, dear reader, prefer books with fairy-tale endings you would do well to not read this novel. Even in English, the Colombian characters and places will sit very close to you. Heart of Scorpio reveals the best and worst in you and me; both the divine and the despicable parts of ourselves. This story shows all the pathos of the human condition at the height of brilliant success and in the deepest, most disastrous failure and examines the very brittle, delicate wall between these two constructs.

  -Mark David McGraw

  College Station, Texas

  The fighter, now old,

  tells his wife about the fight

  he shouldn’t have lost.

  -Taniguchi Busón

  * * *

  “Want me to tell ya ‘bout it?” said Milton Olivella moving his fists of steel with the weight of fifty-seven hard lived years. He moved a few inches from the table to make space between two chairs and bumped against another table, almost knocking over a beer bottle. “Careful,” said Joseph Avski when he saw the bottle dance on the tabletop. “Don't worry, brotha,” soothed Milton, ”They know me here in this bar. You're with a world champion, anyway, ya know?” It was the first time Avski had laid eyes on him after two years of investigation. Until then Milton had stayed one step ahead. If he went to his house to look for him, Ángela Iguarán, his wife, would tell him that it was too bad but if by the grace of God he had arrived five minutes earlier he would have caught him at home. If he dropped by his friend Johnny Pitalúa's gym, Johnny would tell him that Milton had just gone out to buy some new gloves for a fighter, a kid, man, who's gonna be a world champ, like Milton. If he went to Bazurto's market in Cartagena some would assure him Olivella had just left and others would swear he hadn’t been in there in months. It didn't matter where or in what city Avski looked, Milton Olivella was always one step ahead. When he sat down to write the story he remembered finally seeing Olivella standing in front of a table with his hands up, smiling as if he were not really there, but present in a past many years distant. Up until that day Milton Olivella gave the impression that he was everywhere and nowhere, that he existed in other times but never in the present. He appeared and disappeared as if he had mastered some secret of tribal African magic. And he would transform into different personalities of himself: one minute he was the sports car collector who could hold forth about the design advantages of Porsche over Ferrari and the next minute he’d be a maniac threatening a waitress with a butter knife for having confused him with an ex-soccer star from Unión Magdalena. One night he was charged with assault and battery in Montería, Manizales, Tunja and Armenia; four different cities in Colombia. In all four cases he was proven to be present but declared innocent. When a national news reporter interviewed one of the judges and asked him about the apparent contradiction of the charges against Olivella in four distinct places separated by over six hundred miles at the same time, he responded, “The facts are the facts.”

  One night Avski received a call informing him that Olivella had been admitted to the university hospital with a knife wound in the buttocks, but when he arrived at the hospital Olivella had already left after stealing sheets, bottles of anesthetic and syringes. Avski interviewed one of the nurses and suggested that Olivella might be crazy. “Crazy?” answered the nurse. “I’ve known Olivella for more than twenty years and to tell you the truth, I’m crazier than he is.”

  Years of Avski’s investigation had produced all kinds of stories. One afternoon he appeared nude in a photo that was reproduced by all the tabloids, and the photo turned out to have been photo-shopped. Avski saw all kinds of home videos about Olivella. In one of them he was imitating the chirp of the parakeets in the Ecce Homo barrio in Valledupar; there was another that started showing the bout where he defeated Martinez and finished punching and grabbing at a cameraman; while a third one showed him dancing the champeta in a neighborhood on the outskirts of Cartagena. A man in Cali related that he had heard Olivella imitating Héctor Lavoe around one of the places in town where you can buy drugs. A young man in Cúcuta remembered him recommending sex with animals. An Italian tourist reported that he had argued with Olivella about the quality of French wines. A taxi driver from Barranquilla remembered that he heard Olivella come up with a game-day lineup for the Colombian national soccer team that was a mix of live and dead players as well as a Spanish bullfighter. A student at the University of Antioquia in Medellín heard him accuse the President of the United States of having hatched a plan for Olivella to lose his World Junior Welterweight title. The same day a student at the University of Córdoba who was on vacation in Santa Marta said they had played beach football and smoked marijuana together afterwards. A lawyer from Pasto swore to Avski that Olivella had invited him to lunch and ended up making a huge scene because the waiter didn’t know the correct etiquette for serving the wine.

  Thousands, maybe millions of people all over Colombia claimed to have felt the force of Olivella’s punches and the ravages of his unpredictability in unexpected situations. A lawyer in a disco, a nun at the door of a supermarket, a bus driver waiting in line at the movie, a whore in a beauty shop, a reporter on a dark street. Olivella had assaulted people and committed petty crimes all over Colombia, and still Avski couldn’t find him. He would disappear like the smoke of a crack pipe until that night in a neighborhood bar with plastic chairs when, wide-eyed and with blood on his shirt, Olivella told him about his last fight against Ernie King, the black junior welterweight from the United States.

  “Everybody was there to see me fight, brotha,” Joseph Avski heard him say as he panned around the bar. “Ya know, it ain’t every day that a champion of my stature comes out of retirement and puts the gloves back on, you know how it is.” Avski didn’t know how to take him; not sure if he was in the stamp of the English gentleman with the Caribbean accent that they all described as temperate, or like the hurricane that destroyed and humiliated everything in its path when he was on something. Avski wasn’t sure either if he was sober and just excited about the interview or if he was high. When he asked Milton what had happened to his lip and why he had a blood stain on his shirt he got a little flustered and replied that he had run into a glass door that he hadn’t seen.

  “That’s what I get, bro, for walking around with my head in the clouds.” But Avski knew it was something different.

  “Ya want me to tell ya?” repeated Milton Olivella while he remembered how he had come out of the locker room like a man from another world. He came out of the dressing room at the bullring in Cartagena that had been set up especially for this fight. Behind him were the seconds that saw the crowd explode in a downpour of applause. Milton raised his hands and let the noise shower down on him. He reached the ring at an ambling walk and said hello one-by-one to the reporters at the press table.

  “Everybody was there to see me fight,” said Milton, taking a look around to make sure that he had the attention of the people at the other tables. “You know, to see a world champion come out of retirement and put the gloves back on, that ain’t an everyday thing, you know how it is. There were people there from all the newspapers and magazines: Cromos, Semana, El Espectador, El Tiempo, El Universal, El Heraldo, not even counting the foreigners, you understand, there were lots of them: gringos, Europeans, Japanese . . . the craziness, just unbelievable.” Milton paused his performance to find the right words. “It was incredible, man, the event of the year.” King entered the other side of the ring snapping jabs in the air to get the audience’s attention, his dark skin contrasting with the white robe he was wearing. Milton took comfort in the idea of King wasting his energy jabbing the air before the fight started. The audience responded to King with whistles and catcalls. “Those people loved me, man.” said Olivella with a slight tremor in his voice. “Nobody had come to see that gringo fight, you know. Everybody was there for me.”


  For a moment Joseph Avski saw him just like he remembered him in the ring: touched by the grace of a divine light. Those were the days when Milton seemed to have been born under Orion’s tutelage, but no, his guiding star was Antares, named by the Arabs Kalb al-Akrab: The Heart of Scorpio.

  Olivella looked around at the unexpected attention from the surrounding tables and the theatricality of his movements increased. “I just danced him in the first round. Just a game of footwork, just feints and hip movement. You know, brotha, how Muhammad Ali danced the first round with Floyd Patterson, you remember in 1975. I got close to him without throwing a single punch just to see what he would throw me to keep me away, or I’d fake him with an overhand right or a hook just to see where he’d defend. That stuff tells ya how to fight him. When ol’ King figured out I wasn’t punching he really got on me but I kept to the plan, you know how it is, bro, beating him with footwork, making space, walking, moving the waist, dancing. That’s the stuff you learn with experience, you know. You don’t win fights by just throwing haymakers. So I figured out how he would attack. That stuff is important, you know why, because when a guy attacks he leaves holes and that’s where you stick the best punches, man. In those holes. He got to me a couple of times, but I was OK, he never hit me hard. But by that point I had him figured out, bro, I already knew what he was gonna do, how he was gonna attack. That right there is the secret to how to win a fight. But the fight didn’t really start until the second round.”

  Julián