Butterfly Winter

No one on the mainland ever heard from Sandor Boatly again.

He has become a legend, of course. You newsmen, journalists, writers, or whatever you call yourselves, must know all about that. By the time he departed America, Sandor Boatly was already a folk hero, tales were told, songs were sung about his spreading the gospel of baseball across the continent. But because of his mysterious disappearance the legends grew, multiplied and prospered out of proportion to his actual deeds. Several books were written about him, the most famous, which I am told is still in print, titled The Evangelist and the Ball. In it is recounted how, when he stepped off the train in San Barnabas, the capital of Courteguay, he was met by two hyenas. They had been washed and perfumed and dressed in formal porter’s uniforms. They walked upright and spoke enough Spanish to conduct their business.

‘May we carry your bags, sir,’ the tallest hyena said, bowing slightly. Sandor Boatly stared around. The station was bustling. No one seemed upset by the domesticated, talking hyenas.

‘Certainly,’ he replied. One hyena carried his suitcases, the second managed a trunk and his mysterious bag full of bats, balls and magic.

‘You will have to help us with the station door,’ the tallest hyena said, ‘while we have evolved considerably we still have not mastered the doorknob.’

As a famous missing person Sandor Boatly was a favorite subject for journalists. His followers organized expeditions to Hispaniola, though for some reason they concentrated on Haiti, where, one persistent rumor had it, he was buried under two baseball bats joined in the shape of a cross, while a dozen vanda orchids danced in a circle on his grave.

But as you must know, in Haiti they do not play baseball. They speak French in Haiti, a language not conducive to baseball. There they play soccer. I spit! Soccer is slower than watching stagnant water find its own level. A game for those totally devoid of imagination. Next to Ambrose Bierce and Amelia Earhart, Sandor Boatly is America’s most popular and mysterious folk hero.

How do I know so much about him? I am Courteguayan. That is a sufficient answer.

Later that day, more of the interview finished, if not satisfactorily (at least the Gringo Journalist had extracted enough information to continue to pique his curiosity and was alternately amazed, baffled and annoyed with the elderly and capricious Wizard), something happened that made the Gringo Journalist a believer. After being given a drink from the hospital water glass with its crimped straw, the Wizard raised his head from the pillow and sniffed like an animal, a scavenger testing the air for carrion.

‘I need your help,’ croaked the Wizard, reaching for the Gringo Journalist with a skeletal hand. ‘Help me out of bed.’ The Gringo Journalist aided the old man, who was light as a kite, from the bed, assisted him into a threadbare hospital robe and terrycloth slippers. The Wizard’s talon hands fastened like intravenous needles to the young reporter’s arm as he led the way down the hall of the hospital to the emergency ward.

There, even the reporter could smell blood, the coppery, electric odor of liquid death. Doctors were just turning away from, drawing a sheet over the face of an auto accident victim they had been unable to save. The Wizard detached himself from the young reporter, slipped both hands under the sheet and gripped the still warm chest of the deceased. The Wizard stood stock still in that position for several minutes. The reporter expected to be rousted by doctors or nurses or orderlies, but it was as if he and the Wizard were invisible.

Eventually, the Wizard produced his hands from under the sheet, and as he turned toward him the Gringo Journalist could see an amazing change had taken place. For one thing, the Wizard had gained probably ten pounds, his hands that had been the claws of the very old, were younger, healthier looking, as was the Wizard in general. On the way back to his room he walked unaided, keeping up a steady one-sided conversation.

‘A delightful twenty-two years,’ said the Wizard, smiling with both warmth and cunning, as he climbed, with a good deal of agility, back into his bed. ‘I expect I’ll leave this hospital in a day or two. We’ll continue this interview at my home.’

FOUR (#ulink_736fa133-4c74-5ac7-8914-136ca008a6b4)

The Wizard (#ulink_736fa133-4c74-5ac7-8914-136ca008a6b4)

‘You ask too many questions,’ says the Wizard to the Gringo Journalist. ‘Make up your mind. Do you want to hear about the old days politically, or the birth of the twins, or about Milan Garza, or the nefarious Dr Noir?’

They are in an ice cream parlor in San Cristóbel, the Wizard eating a concoction he has dictated to the wide-eyed boy in a white trough-like hat, who appears to be the only employee. It contains many kinds of ice cream and syrups, but also hibiscus blossoms.

‘You’re right, I have been asking too many questions at once,’ says the Gringo Journalist. ‘Tell me about the birth of the twins.’

‘El Presidente!’ rasps the Wizard, ‘now there was a name that used to mean something in the old days.’

‘Did you hear my question …?’

‘The good times are all gone. The civil wars, the guerrillas, the government soldiers. The insurgents! I always liked being referred to as the Insurgent Leader. The tabloid newspapers manned by the only true journalists in the world, used to write about Courteguay’s civil war. The tabloids have a feel for Courteguay; they understand the shifting time and space, and no matter how outrageous their claims, those claims never approach reality. For instance, they claimed that both sides in our ongoing civil war practised cannibalism, and that both sides had pygmy warriors who fired poisoned darts from blowguns.’

‘Did you?’

‘Which? What?’

‘Were you cannibals? Were there pygmies?’

‘Of course not.’ The Wizard pauses. ‘Did you know that roast soldier tastes a little like chicken? Or maybe frog. No, rabbit, I think rabbit.’

‘You just said …’

‘Being government wasn’t bad either. The poison from the pygmies’ blow guns paralyzed their victims, turned them to granite. If you were to hack your way through the jungle today you would find statues. Some anthropologist uncovered one a few years ago. They claimed the statue was from some ancient civilization, and they shipped him off to Great Britain. The anthropologist’s name was Mordechi Cruz and he grew up in San Cristóbel, and he was no older than you are now.

‘Revolution gets in the blood. General Bravura and I would trade places every few months.’

‘Excuse me,’ cries the Gringo Journalist. ‘None of this makes any sense. If what you say is true you are the Old Dictator, but from what I have researched you did not become El Presidente until after the passing of Dr Noir. Which is it?’

‘There is nothing like an unstable government to keep people on their toes,’ the Wizard goes on as if he didn’t hear the question. ‘General Bravura was not without access to what some would call magic. I remember once, I was leading perhaps a thousand men and we were creeping up on General Bravura’s camp at dawn. As we stood on a hill looking down on the small encampment, readying for the attack, at least twenty thousand soldiers rose from the banana grass like tule fog. We stared at them for a moment. General Bravura’s army was supposed to be smaller than my own. There had to be some illusion involved. But what if there wasn’t? If they were real and we attacked we faced certain defeat. In prudence we retreated quietly and waited for the sunrise.

‘And a government, any government, must take good care of its own. In politics one rewards one’s friends and punishes one’s enemies. For instance, I know that a retired President of the United States receives a tidy pension, the Secret Service, CIA, FBI, and the Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders guard him constantly. In his retirement, he becomes President of a college where he has his choice of concubines from each year’s freshman class.

‘Where did you ever hear such things?’

‘The infallible tabloids of course. The fearless press who publish what the people want to hear.’

‘They also tend to exaggerate.’

‘There is no such thing as exaggeration.’

‘I might disagree with that.’

‘Today’s El Presidente! I spit! Today’s El Presidente has an image consultant. When he visits the United States he is brown. There are senators and congressmen with darker tans. When he speaks to the guava plantation workers here in Courteguay he is black as onyx, his skin glistens. His consultants spray his face with black dye. They have to burn his black-collared shirts after every appearance.

‘The magic of leadership is gone. The public need to see coins pulled from ears, snakes curled from every orifice, they want to see beautiful girls disappear from before their very eyes. And can I help it if the beautiful girls always reappear in my bed?’ The Wizard shrugs and smiles.

The Gringo Journalist throws up his hands.

‘I’m not sure this is very valuable for the book I’m writing. I want to write a true history of Courteguay.’

‘Nothing is true. The concept is unknown in Courteguay.’ The Wizard frowns, take a bite of vanilla ice cream and hibiscus flowers. He chews thoughtfully.

FIVE (#ulink_e10b76c8-1c14-571a-92f3-53877192bba8)

The Wizard (#ulink_e10b76c8-1c14-571a-92f3-53877192bba8)

It was during the sixth month of his mother’s pregnancy, that, inside her belly, Julio Pimental began to throw the sidearm curve, says the Wizard.

He glances surreptitiously at the Gringo Journalist to be certain he has his full attention.

‘Yi! Yi!’ screamed Fernandella Pimental, as Julio went into the stretch, hiding the ball carefully in his glove so the batter could not glimpse the way he gripped it.

‘Yii!’ shrilled Fernandella, as Julio’s arm snaked like a whip in the direction of third base, while the ball, traveling the path of a question mark, jug-hooked its way to the plate, and smacked into the catcher’s mitt held by Julio’s twin brother, Esteban. The Wizard tips back on his cushioned rattan chair. The boy with the starched white hat brings them refills for their iced tea.

Many years later, on her deathbed, Fernandella Pimental, wizened and grey with age, attended by servants, small as a child in the queen-sized bed in the marble-pillared mansion her sons built for her, recalled the time of her pregnancy. She was residing on the outskirts of San Cristobel, which, though scarcely more than a village, was the second largest city in Courteguay. She and her husband lived in a cardboard hut with a precariously balanced slab of corrugated tin for a roof. The hovel was located on an arid hillside, surrounded by a few prickly vines, always in full view of the frying sun. Her husband, Hector, a sly young man with slicked-down hair, drooping eyelids and a face thin as a ferret’s, spent his life at the baseball grounds, winning or losing a few centavos on the outcome of each day’s games.

Hector was proud of Fernandella’s belly, which by only the fourth month was big as a washtub, forcing her to walk splay-legged as she trekked out each morning in search of fresh water and fresh fruit.

Fernandella had been the beauty of the San Cristobel, Queen of the annual festival at St Ann, Mother of Mary Church, (though there was never such a church) fine-boned and light of foot, not at all like the peasant girls Hector Pimental was used to, who were heavy-thighed with faces like frying pans. Fernandella had courage as well as beauty; she could have done much better for herself. But the final evening of the festival she had walked the boisterous streets by herself, a yellow scarf twined in her long straight hair. A summer storm hung on the horizon like a rumor; heat lightning peppered the distant sky.