Heart of Scorpio Page 5

  When I get home I hear my mother praying.

  . . . when almost all hope is lost. Come and help me in this great need, so that I can receive counsel and heavenly help in all my needs, tribulations, and suffering, particularly for my husband Milton so that you can free him from the demon of vice that torments him . . .

  I leave my things in the living room and go to the dining room where I see my mother kneeling in front of a little statue of Saint Jude and a little framed picture stuck on the wall. That Saint Jude looks a little too good to be an apostle, it seems to me. Although, of course, a guy like that with money would make all the women religious and then he could hit the sheets with them all. In real life he never looked like in that painting, it seems to me. If he had looked like that he wouldn’t have been an apostle, unless he was poor.

  Is lunch ready, I ask.

  Just a minute, son, she says without turning around to see me and she keeps praying . . . and so that he can praise God with you and with all the elect forever.

  I light a cigarette and I sit behind her to wait for lunch. From where I sit I can see Mama and Saint Jude. If somebody looks like that and has money he can get a lot of women to hit the sheets with him, it seems to me.

  I give thanks to you, glorious Saint Jude, Mama continues, and I promise to never forget this great favor, to honor you forever as my powerful patron saint, and with thanks, I will do all I can to encourage others to be devoted to you. Amen.

  My mother gets up and cleans off her knees. Before coming over to give me a kiss on the cheek she opens the window and puts out the lighted candle in front of the statue of the saint.

  I’ll bring you your lunch, son, she says to me and she disappears into the kitchen. I sit there smoking and thinking about all the women I’d hit the sheets with if I had money and looked like Saint Jude. Lucero wouldn’t have quit answering the phone and she wouldn’t have said that “it’s just that sometimes you scare me.”

  It seems like Mama had all the lunch ready beforehand because it doesn’t take long to come out. She says she was waiting for me and that I should go wash my hands while she sets the table. At least I don’t have to wait as long as I did for breakfast. I come back with my hands washed and I sit down to eat. How did it go with the lawyer, Mama asks.

  He says we all three have to sign the document, I say.

  And your papa agrees, asks Mama.

  He agreed the last time we talked about it, I say.

  When I saw him he was just being released from the San Pablo Psychiatric Hospital. He looked a little skinny but younger, and of course, not high. That’s not going to last long, it seems to me. There’s no doubt he’s already lost.

  I think we should leave at least a little bit for your father, says Mama.

  That pension is pitifully small, I say.

  We continue eating in silence for a while.

  You like the food, son, asks Mama.

  It’s not bad, I say, and we keep eating until Mama interrupts.

  When are you going to meet with Papa, she asks.

  This afternoon, I say.

  Don’t be hard on him, says Mother.

  Is there more meat, I ask.

  Mama gets up and takes my plate to the kitchen. She comes back a moment later with my plate and sits down.

  We have to pray, says Mama. Prayer is the only way to defeat the demon that torments your father, remember the time when Papa worked in the gymnasium with Johnny Pitalúa.

  Of course I remember that time. Mama spent all day giving thanks out loud: Thank you, Sacred Heart, for anointing a miracle with your holy blood, thank you. Most Holy Virgin, thank you for hearing my prayers and intervening, thank you Saint Jude, cousin of Jesus, patron saint of lost causes, for touching my husband with your power.

  Johnny is the only friend Milton’s had, says my mother, the only one who tried to cure him instead of taking him down. He’s a good man, touched by the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ. We should invite him to come over and pray with us for Milton.

  There’s no cure for Papa, I say, not prayer, not anything else is going to cure him.

  Don’t talk like that son, says Mama, her voice breaking, don’t judge him like that. What he needs is our love and a lot of prayer. Only God can save your father, only Him, and she looks like she’s going to cry. I don’t look at her and keep eating.

  That’s what the doctor said, I say, when she stops crying. That what Papa has is a hereditary mental illness.

  The drugs . . . the dru . . . says Mama and she goes to crying.

  He said the drugs magnified the sickness and made the episodes stronger and closer together, but that doesn’t mean . . . , I say, but Mama interrupts me.

  But without the drugs the sickness can be controlled, says Mama sobbing, the enemy is the drugs, the . . . the . . . the . . . the demon, says Mama. If Milton would have gone to that hospital in Cuba it all would have been different.

  I don’t say anything for fear of throwing her off and I keep eating. After a little while she keeps talking.

  All this pain is because the Lord has a mission for Milton, says mother, a very important mission to be an example and a testimony. God’s plans are unknowable, but perfect.

  I don’t think Papa has a mission, I say.

  I’m going to pray for you, Julián, says Mama, for the Lord to give you faith.

  I’m not going to put up with you talking to me like that, like you think you’re better than me. So faith was going to enable us to keep our house and keep them from throwing us out in the street like dogs, I say.

  It wasn’t the Lord Jesus’ fault they took our house away, said Mama.

  No, but he didn’t do anything to keep them from taking it, I said.

  And why didn’t you do anything, Julián, Mama asks me as if it’s my fault.

  And what the fuck was I going to do, you never let me take care of Papa’s money and you didn’t want to clean people’s houses, I say.

  You could have taken advantage of a chance to not depend on anyone, says Mama.

  What opportunities, I ask. When it came time for me to go to the university there was already no money left to send me to study in the United States.

  And why didn’t you study here, like I offered you, says Mama. That’s why I cleaned people’s houses and I put up with all the humiliation that those ladies put me through because they hated me because I was black and used to have more money than they did. I had already known a different life and I didn’t want the same misery for you. By now you would have finished school and you’d have a good job.

  I didn’t want to study here, I said.

  It’s better to go through life feeling sorry for yourself, says Mama.

  I raise my hand to her and she leans away to avoid the slap but she looks at me without fear.

  Stop blaming others for your mediocrity, Julián, because there’s nobody else to blame, says Mama.

  I won’t put up with you talking to me like you’re better than me. I take a step forward but I hold back and I walk out of the apartment.

  * * *

  Avski writes,

  “Milton Olivella was born on October 27, 1945 in the Caribbean village of San Basilio de Palenque, years before it was declared a Patrimonial Heritage Site. Back then, just like when I visited with my wife, Palenque was a deathtrap of houses made of bitter palm, tied up with reeds and walls pasted over with a mix of sand and burro dung. Laid out on four streets that came together on an esplanade on the other side of the cemetery and an arroyo named El Caballito, it looks the same as when it was founded by slaves escaped from Cartegena in the 17th century.

  Of the Patrimonial Heritage there’s little left: the African dialects that were supposedly still spoken, are deader than Aramaic, replaced by an illiteracy that spans across all languages. The only thing the inhabitants know anymore is that Milton Olivella was born here. Anybody can tell you with their eyes closed where he lived, where his grandparents lived, where he played and everybody without
exception points out the remains of the water pipes and the powerlines that looked like the ruins of the Roman Coliseum once they took off the cables to do maintenance and then never came back. They remember the time when they were the center of the western world. If it weren’t for Milton, they say, we’d have never had running water and electricity. You know, García Márquez tried to get electricity to Aracataca and he couldn’t.

  In 1953, when Milton was eight years old, Mrs. Adelina Cassiani made the decision to move with her family to Cartagena. Miguel de Jesús Olivella, Milton’s father, had gone to Venezuela to find a better tomorrow, but after two years without hearing from him Adelina decided not to wait any longer.

  In Cartagena, Adelina’s family was taken in by her cousin, Rosalinda Cassiani. The first impressions that she had of the city were negative, remembers the fighter’s mother. The only option for a poor black family in the racist Cartagena of those years was to live in Chambacú, a squatter neighborhood built with what was at hand out of leaves, sheet metal, plastic, and cardboard, at the mercy of the stinking vapors of the Chambacú and El Cabrero lagoons, and with the streets covered with the excrement of whatever animals could coexist with people. There was no electricity, no water, no sewerage, no paved streets, no streetlights, no sanitary services, no health services, not anything. The first thing Adelina thought was that they had been better off in Palenque, where at least the rain or the tide would keep the crap out of your living room.

  From the time Milton arrived in Cartagena he went to work. He started with his Aunt Rosalinda selling fish in the market, after with his aunt’s friend selling fruit to the tourists on the beach, later washing cars, carrying packages, in construction, doing household chores for rich families, or whatever else presented came up. ‘He was always a good boy,’ says Adelina. The whole country knew that, when all the newspapers showed Adelina in front of a new house with a freezer and a washing machine in a well-to-do neighborhood in Cartagena. Milton had repeatedly expressed since his first interview that his life’s dream was to buy his mother her own house. Now he was even saying that he wanted to give her a house in the best neighborhood in the city but his mother refused, arguing that she’d continue to be poor even if her son had money.”

  Johnny Pitalúa

  Then the kid Miguel said while jumping rope, “Four fights, oofff, Ol’ Johnny, fffoo, oofff, all wins.”

  And I, “Knockouts?”

  And the kid Miguel, “Three and one unanimous, ffffooo, decision, ffffoo.”

  And I, “Good, huh?”

  And the kid Miguel, “They got money, fffoo, you know, fffoo, the gym, fffoo, ffffoo, has equipment, fffoo, for everything, ooffff, to run, fffffoo, to climb stairs, oofffff, they measure, ffffoo, the heartrate, ooff, ooffff, and show stuff, oofff, on the computer.”

  And I, “Time. Rest for ten minutes and then ten sets of twenty-five sit-ups.”

  And the kid Miguel, “Oofff, fffoo, ffooo. Has Milton been back around here?”

  And I, “No, he hasn’t been back here in a year. He was in the San Pablo Mental Hospital.”

  And the kid Miguel, “Yeah, ooff, I saw when they put him in there, fffoo, fffoo, They showed him on TV, ffffoo, he had punched out some reporter.”

  And I, “Poor Milton. You know, at the start, cuz, I remember when he’d climb up in those buses to sell snacks and gum and when people asked him if he was Milton Olivella, he’d say, how in the world could you think that? Olivella lives in a big-ass house in Bocagrande and rides around in a big-ass car, and with all the money he’s got what would he be doing selling snacks on a bus?”

  And the kid Miguel, “Poor Milton, Ol’ Johnny.”

  Miguel kept looking at me like he wanted to tell me something but just couldn’t. He was still breathing hard.

  Then the kid Miguel said, “He was in my house, oofffffff.”

  And I, “What?”

  And the kid Miguel, “Milton, he was in my house, oofffffff.”

  And I, “Visiting?”

  And the kid Miguel, “No, Ol’ Johnny, ooffffff. It was like this, I went to a bar in Getsemaní with a few friends and some girls, no big deal, a few beers, grab some leg under the table. Oooooffffff, after a while I got up to go to the bathroom ‘cause I needed to take a leak. I get to the bathroom and when I opened the door I see Milton laid out on the floor in there, just smashed up. Oooffffff. I helped him stand up and I brought him home. My mama put some stuff on his cuts and gave him something to eat because he looked like he hadn’t eaten in a week. After that we put him in a bed and left him there. When we woke up the next morning Milton was gone and my mama was really mad because he had stolen the china from the dining room, you understand me, the only thing left from the old days when my old man had money and he bought my mama those things. Ooofffffffff. After that a cousin that worked in the bar told me that Milton paid twenty thousand pesos to a boxer friend of his to fight him in the street, right next to the entrance of the bar, and to let him win, so people would realize that Colombia has a real champion and all that stuff that Olivella would go to saying when he’s drunk. But my cousin said that Milton fooled around the whole fight, and then Milton hit his friend with a haymaker and his friend got mad and hit Milton back with a slobberknocker that nobody had ever been able to hit Milton with in the ring. People started to make fun of Milton, you ain’t shit, Olivella, you ain’t nothin’, even your shadow can beat you, and Milton started throwing punches at people left and right and fortunately didn’t hit anybody. After that my cousin said he cleared out and nobody knew where he had gone until I found him in the bathroom.”

  I didn’t know what to say.

  There was silence until I finally found the words, “OK, cuz, ten sets of twenty-five sit-ups.”

  And the kid Miguel, “It was a shame, Ol’ Johnny, a real shame.”

  And I, “A shame. You know something, cuz, it would have all been different if Milton would have gone to the hospital in Cuba.”

  And the kid Miguel, “Oh, no doubt, Ol’ Johnny, no doubt.”

  * * *

  Initially the dead prostitute had gotten the attention of the police and the local yellow press, but according to the curious few who left the bar and came back with information, the subject involved someone famous, and it was sure to hit the front page in all the national papers. It seemed that the prostitute had asked the client how he got a black eye and he responded by unleashing a torrent of punches on her while yelling at her not to think she was better than him.

  After all the excitement passed everybody waited for Milton to continue his fight story. Milton, satisfied to have regained everyone’s attention, looked up and walked to the table. He served himself a drink and looked around as if to ask for someone to remind him where he left off.

  “King came out looking to kill me, he knew he had me there, you know, bro, you know those things when you’re fighting, he threw me two straight punches and an uppercut, but he didn’t hit me and I got a little breathing room by walking backwards. I got to the ropes and I went by him on the side looking for time to recover. He had hit me hard in the face and everything was still moving. He worked me into the corner. I covered my face and threw a couple of useless punches to try to get out, but nothing, he knew what he was doing and he punished me in the ribs, the bad ones, brotha, and it hurt like a son of a bitch. Plus, those punches are bad, bro, they wear you down, they take the wind out of you, you can’t get any distance, you lose strength when they hit you like that. King knew that he had me, that it was his chance. I think he believed that the fight would be easier, that he was hurting and at that point he knew he could end it, that he could take that money home, you understand. But you know what, you know what I thought right then, I thought what’s fit for a dog to eat ain’t for a cat, because right then the bell rang.”

  “I need the handkerchief,” thought Olivella seated on the stool in his corner but he knew his seconds wouldn’t let him have it any more. Milton was tired and he felt that his strength was just
about to leave him. He hadn’t trained like before in his best days, he didn’t have the patience for the workouts, didn’t have money for the right food and he was ashamed to ask for it from his friend Johnny Pitalúa. A week without meat is a long time for a boxer, he thought. “You know something?” says Milton, “The physical discipline will wear your ass out, you hear me? It’s not so much the being tired from when you’re done working out. It’s the going every day to the gym and not being able to do anything different, watch the fat, cut out sugar, a thousand sit-ups a day, four hours in the gym every day, you understand. It just winds up being boring. It’s like they’re stealing your life.”

  In the tenth round King came out determined to finish the fight or at least that’s what Milton noticed in his attitude. He attacked without respite. Milton slipped to his sides and clinched him while keeping his head back. Fortunately the cut on Milton’s eyebrow had stopped bleeding. Near the end of the round Milton took a right hook to the chin from King that had him seeing black for a second. He felt his knees buckle a little bit and his arms went to his sides involuntarily. He heard a gasp from the bullring’s crowd. When he recovered his senses he realized that he hadn’t fallen and he tucked his chin behind his shoulder and got his guard up.

  Julián

  I walk to the back where my desk is. Haeckermann is sitting in his office and he turns around to see who arrived. He turns back around without saying hello. If I still lived in Bocagrande, if Papa still had his collection of sports cars . . . Haeckermann would always say hello to me, it seems to me. I start to make all the arrangements for the delegation that’s coming for the national games. It’s a shitty job, although, I’ve had worse, it seems. I can do Haeckermann’s job better than he can. But he’s a Jew and I’m black and he has money and I don’t and he went to college and I didn’t. That’s the difference, it seems to me. They promised me I could go to school in the United States, the best, the most expensive. I had toys nobody else had, I had more clothes than any kid in Bocagrande, I had a chauffeur just for myself. Until one day the chauffer and car were gone, and we went from Bocagrande to an apartment, then they kicked us out of that and Mama started working as a maid during the days for all the rich women in Cartagena. They hired her so they could say that Milton Olivella’s wife was the woman sweeping their floors. Mama took me with her and she told me to work in the garden and cut the grass and later, the rich ladies would come and pay me and they’d say, Poor kid, they never thought about him, and they said between themselves that it was a tragedy every time somebody poor got rich, they didn’t know how to manage the money and it always turned out bad. And later Mama would tell me, Go to that lady whose garden you worked in and give her these fish and they would pay me and say, Look how he turned out. After that, Mama took me to a shop where they would pay me to wash cars and at night I would walk the streets in Getsemaní or Bazurto looking for Papa, and Mama at home wondering where he had gone, crying all night wondering if someone had done something to him, the people who believed that he still had money and could do him harm . . . There never was money for me to go to college. Papa preferred to give it way, share it with the prostitutes. After that, I wanted to fight, but Papa wouldn’t let me. It was fine for him, but he always told me it wasn’t for me. And it turns out it wasn’t good for me to go to the university or work for one of his rich friends like the son that he had with Rocío that worked for the ex-President. But they’re different because when they realized that everything was going to fall, they left and they took what they could. That’s what we should have done, left him and gone far away.