Butterfly Winter

The Wizard (#ulink_573dbf48-6223-5b37-b5d1-95e89fffe419)

‘You appear to be a man in your late 60s,’ the Gringo Journalist says. ‘I have always been what I appear to be,’ replies the Wizard. ‘And,’ he adds, the words barely audible under his creaking breath, ‘I always tell people what they want to hear, whether it is truth or fiction.’

‘I am told that you move from place to place as if by magic,’ the Gringo Journalist continues.

‘There is no magic, there are no gods,’ says the Wizard.

‘You are currently referred to as a wizard, even by your enemies.’

‘It takes a wizard to know there are none,’ says the Wizard.

The Wizard lies in a high, white hospital bed. The room is banked with flowers, bouquets made up of various combinations of the eleven national flowers of Courteguay. The Wizard stares up at the Gringo Journalist, who is lean and blond, holding a sleek black tape recorder toward the Wizard as if he were offering a bite from a sandwich.

The Wizard, who has discarded his hospital garb, is wearing a midnight-blue caftan covered in mysterious silver symbols that look like what a comic strip artist might use to intimate curse words, and insists on being paid for the interview, not in Courteguayan guilermos, but in American dollars. He forces a smile for the Gringo Journalist, his gimlet eyes twinkling.

‘Interviews are so tiring. Even wizards die, did you know that?’

The morning air is cool and lustrous, rife with possibilities, silvered with deception, tasty as fresh lime.

‘Here I am. Cool pillows, a clean room, a ceiling fan. And I still have a listener, something terribly important to one who is a storyteller. An excellent way to die. I close my eyes and my long life slides by like a newsreel, like a canoe floating on placid water. The room is liquid with memories. Me, planting baseballs like seed corn, waiting for the stadiums to grow and flourish.

‘My enemies, and they are many, will deny it all. Without me there would have been no Julio or Esteban Pimental; their father was a gambler but I was a better one. It is not something I am exactly proud of. But it is all connected, as everything is. Knee bone connected to the thigh bone. Now hear the word …’

The Gringo Journalist asks another question, watches the Wizard’s eyes, waiting. He wants to know how to find a place, a place important to his research.

‘My friend, it is very difficult to give directions in Courteguay. Objects have minds of their own. In the night houses sometimes slip across a street, or change places with a house a few doors away. One might go to bed in a home on the south bank of a river and wake in that same house but on the north bank, and the basement not even damp.

‘So, you want to know about Julio Pimental? Perhaps the greatest pitcher ever to play in the Major Leagues, certainly the greatest pitcher ever to come out of Courteguay. That is somewhat easier than giving directions. The rumors you have heard are true. Twin boys playing catch in the womb. An unusual event in many parts of the world, but not in Courteguay. Here the unusual is the norm. The sky once rained silken handkerchiefs. There was a woman with three breasts … a man with a square penis.

‘Well, you have come to the right person. The horse’s mouth so to speak. Speaking of the horse’s mouth did you know that there is a jungle spirit called a Loa that rides men like a horse? If you are unlucky enough to have a Loa land on your back it will run you until you collapse, if you are truly unlucky the Loa will ride you until you die.

‘Of course Loas are Haitian. But spirits do not recognize arbitrary boundaries, Haiti, Dominican Republic, Courteguay, they are all the same to a Loa.’

The Wizard takes a deep breath.

‘I’ve seen it all. Not always through my own eyes, of course. I’ve spied on armies through the eyes of a predator, overheard the strategies of the Insurgents while lying comfortably in the undergrowth in the guise of a buzzard munching on a Government soldier. I can smell out conspiracy. Through the ears of an ivory-feathered cockatoo I have overheard young girls’ secrets, eavesdropped on many a whispered plot, changed myself into a dewdrop and cooled a lovers back in the steamy dawn.

‘You look skeptical. You question my veracity? An old fool on his death bed, you think, wizened to half his size. An old fool who has been President of the Republic of Courteguay, several times. I was there when that other El Presidente – it is a travesty that the words El Presidente should be uttered in the same breath as the name Dr Lucius Noir, murderer of Quita Garza’s father. Ah, I thought that would get your attention. But do not jump to rash conclusions. In Courteguay El Presidente is an all encompassing statement. You will, I’m sure want to hear about Quita Garza and Julio Pimental. But before we get too far into the interview, I must warn you that the boundaries here are different. Never forget that. Never be surprised.’

The Gringo Journalist eyes the Wizard suspiciously, trying to find a suitable place to set the tape recorder, a recorder which he had to pay a bribe of three times its value just to bring into Courteguay. He gets no help from the Wizard. He finally swings the brown arborite arm that holds the food tray into position, across the middle of the bed, and places the tape recorder on it. The Wizard smiles again, the wrinkles around his eyes crinkling like crumpled newspaper. The old man coughs wetly.

‘I crouched among the plumeria when the evil deed was done. Oh, yes, I’ve seen it all.

‘It all began with the Wizard. If it wasn’t for the Wizard there wouldn’t be a story. You might say Courteguay began with the Wizard, with the coming of the Wizard, and the coming of baseball.

‘Excuse me? Of course I am the Wizard, at least today. May I not speak of myself in the third person? Is there some new government regulation against speaking of oneself in the third person? My mind, the Wizard’s mind, shifts constantly, my mind is like a record with a scratch, a tape with a flaw. Have you ever heard the name Jorge Blanco? Don’t answer. Of course you have. All politicians have to reinvent themselves occasionally. Ah, for the simplicity of life when I was Jorge Blanco. Before the twins were born, before the dark shadow of Dr Noir passed over Courteguay.

‘But who’s to say what is truth. People tell tales, and as the tales emerge they become as good as truth. In Courteguay, anything that can be imagined exists. The telling is the thing. Truth is spun like silk; truth is manufactured. Unlike you, a journalist, when I need facts I invent them. Here in Courteguay, the world is as it was meant to be, as it used to be everywhere before magic was hunted down, driven to the hinterlands, made extinct, like dazzling birds hunted for their beaks or feathers, or feet. People change, but shadows of their pasts remain behind, often have lives of their own.

‘Yes. Yes. I do tend to ramble. But if you want the whole story, bear with me. You gringo newsmen are too impatient. You want the entire account presented in one minute flat, you want the tale in digest form suitable for Courteguay Today.

‘It is? An imitator? I didn’t know that. So long since I’ve been to America. Well, they say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Besides, Courteguay has no copyright laws. I once published a book by this American fellow Hemingway, under my own name of course. It was very well received. I tried Shakespeare, a play called Othello, but though it has a wonderful plot it didn’t sell at all. The language needed to be modernized. Too bad there are not more people in Courteguay who can read. I might not have had to go into politics.

‘In Courteguay, whoever calls himself El Presidente is the law. A banana republic is how Courteguay is referred to in the international press. An irony. We do not grow bananas in Courteguay. Mangos, guava, passion fruit … A passion fruit republic. You ever hear of such a thing?

‘Yes. Yes. I do tend to ramble. Are you afraid I will die before you finish this interview? You pay your money. You take your chances. Didn’t someone in baseball say that? Leo Durocher? Casey Stengel? Yogi Bear?

‘Berra, of course. You will encounter this rumor eventually, if not already, so it is better you hear it from me. The reason the Wizard lives so long, people will tell you, my enemies, and there are many, possibly also my friends, is that he takes the future of others and appropriates it. He is there when a government soldier breathes his last – maybe that soldier had only four months to live, but the Wizard, his hand on the dying soldier’s chest, adds four months on the end of his own life. The Wizard, some will say, is like an ambulance-chasing lawyer, always there within minutes of the crash, his wizened hands leaving a veronica on the chests of the dying. Wizards live forever some people believe. Not me. You should try being a wizard sometime. Perhaps I could persuade you. As you can tell by my demeanor, I am in the market for a successor.

‘Has anyone told you of Dr Noir’s method of population control? No? Yes, I am getting ahead of myself, but bear with me. The contraceptive was much too slow for Dr Noir.

‘There are more people than there are mangos,’ he is reported to have said. ‘We cannot increase the number of mangos, therefore we must decrease the number of people.’ Consequently, Dr Noir decreed that anyone with the first name Tomas, who lived within a forty-mile radius of San Barnabas, the capital, was to be executed.

‘On the day Dr Lucius Noir seized power in Courteguay for the first time, became El Presidente, he decreed that as long as he was dictator all the mirrors in Courteguay would reflect only his image.

‘Children screamed. Women fainted. Mirrors were thrown into the streets.

‘I’m sorry. Back to Milan Garza for a moment. Milan Garza, a baseball immortal, Quita Garza’s father.’

‘But I was asking about Julio Pimental,’ says the Gringo Journalist.

‘Pay closer attention, please! I was there, lurking in the ferns, like a lion in a Rousseau painting, when the deed was done. Milan Garza overestimated his own importance, felt that being named a Baseball Immortal actually made him immortal. Bad mistake.

‘Later, camouflaged by a thousand funeral wreathes made from the eleven national flowers of Courteguay: bougainvillea, hibiscus, red and white plumeria, bird of paradise, orchids, poinsettias, anthurium, lehua, vanda orchids and ginger – did you get them all down? I forgot that black biscuit absorbs my words like the earth does rainwater. I listened to the evil man who called himself El Presidente, as he eulogized Milan Garza, then had him interred in a crystal-domed coffin at the Hall of Baseball Immortals.

‘But, again I am ahead of myself, it is the Wizard you want to hear about, amigo.’

‘I was asking about Julio Pimental.’

‘Time begins with the Wizard. I am speaking now as El Presidente. The President of Courteguay who began one of his lives as Jorge Blanco. With me you get three interviews for the price of one. Only in Courteguay.

‘To know Julio Pimental, and his twin, Esteban, you must first know the Wizard. Courteguay began with the Wizard, the coming of the Wizard, the coming of baseball. I knew him well. There was nothing mysterious about him originally. His name was Sandor Boatly, the surname having been anglicized on the spot by an immigration official when the threadbare Boatly family arrived in America from Europe, the spot being Ellis Island, the time being 1885. Sandor Boatly was nine years old, spoke only Hungarian, and the word baseball was not in his vocabulary, in any language.’

TWO (#ulink_b2d50e37-63da-526f-8495-58325bfb33dd)

The Wizard (#ulink_b2d50e37-63da-526f-8495-58325bfb33dd)

Sandor Boatly saw his first baseball game in Providence, Rhode Island in 1887, when he was eleven, and his experience that day was more emotional, more magical, more prophetic, more of a grand call to service than that of other boys his age who claimed to have had religious experiences which inspired calls to the priesthood.

His father, Szabo Boatly, a glazer by trade, worked long hours in a crockery factory. Saturday afternoon was his only time off, except for Sunday, a day reserved for pious inactivity. On Sunday the Boatly children were not even allowed to play with their home-made toys.

On a spring afternoon in 1887, the father took Sandor and one of several sisters, Evita, for a walk. A few blocks from their home, outside the Eastern European ghetto, they were attracted by crowd noises, and the clear sharp thwack of bat on ball. The sounds reminded Sandor of his early childhood in Hungary. As he listened he recalled the crack of a woodsman’s ax biting into a strong tree.

Sandor Boatly pleaded with his father to take the little family into the baseball park, and the father, being in a jolly mood, agreed. A man wearing a straw boater with a beautiful red sash collected fifteen cents from the father; the children were admitted free. Once inside the park they made their way down the right field line to a spot where they could see most of what was happening on the field.

The elder Boatly was expecting a soccer game. He had played rather well in the old country, if his accounts could be believed.

‘What is this?’ he kept repeating in Hungarian.