Читать книгу Butterfly Winter - W. Kinsella P. - Страница 19

At two years of age Julio struck out his father, using two curve balls and a sinking slider. Almost immediately after their birth, Salvador Geraldo Alfredo Jorge Blanco, as the Wizard now called himself, had a special pitcher’s mound installed beside the stream where the blue fish darted like needles, the rubber stolen in the dead of night from Jesus, Joseph and Mary Celestial Baseball Palace.

Hector Alvarez Pimental saw to it that Fernandella became pregnant again as quickly as possible, in fact she produced four more children at ten-month intervals, two boys and two girls. The Wizard made no further predictions over Fernandella’s belly, though her husband beseeched him to; the Wizard even declined to predict the sex of the unborn. To the great disappointment of Hector Alvarez Pimental all the children but one were born without abnormalities. The dwarf, Aguirre, might have had some magical appeal if she were male, but a female dwarf was merely bad luck in Courteguay, though even as a baby she had an ice-pick stare that was said to be able to spin the mobile that hung in the listless air above her crib. There was not a hint of magic about any of the others.

As the twins grew older Fernandella’s vigilance slackened. Overwhelmed with newer babies and perpetual pregnancy she eventually became relieved to see the twins troop off with their father and the Wizard in the direction of the baseball fields. By the time they were five they were playing in a league for teenagers and winning regularly. Their father became almost prosperous by betting on them, until bookmakers, especially the Wizard, refused to accept any more bets on the battery of Julio and Esteban.

Years later, at the height of their career, shortly before his untimely murder, Esteban Pimental would look on his major league career with mild amusement. Esteban was the more passive of the brothers. Stocky and round faced, he was slow to anger, slower to smile, while Julio on the other hand, was taller, with his father’s hooded eyes and sly smile, and a dangerous energy accompanied by a propensity to take chances.

Esteban, even as a child in Courteguay, was serious and studious, wanting to discuss with the Wizard questions of philosophical magnitude. Rather than discussing how to pick a runner off first base he was interested in questions of religious significance. Esteban often went to view the priests. Years earlier, the Old Dictator had, at great expense, imprisoned the priests by installing fourteen-foot chain-link fencing around every manse in Courteguay. When General Bravura overthrew the government and took power, he did nothing to remove the fences. Esteban would stand outside the frosty-bright metal fence, watching the old priests walk, hands behind backs, black cassocks sweeping the ground, their strides ungainly, lumbering like tall, mangy bears. The priests occasionally blessed a goat or a peasant who came too close to the fence. Esteban noted that the priests’ eyes were rheumy and their teeth bad.

‘Why doesn’t God melt down the fence?’ Esteban asked the Wizard.

‘Why should he?’ asked the Wizard.

‘Because the priest is God’s representative. He does God’s work.’

‘What can the priests do on the outside that they cannot do inside the fence, except graveside services? If they wished to they could lead prayers, perform marriages, administer the Eucharist, hear confessions; the sick could be brought to visit them. Because these priests choose to decay before your eyes, to choose as their only duties the blessing of goats and lottery tickets, is not the fault of God. If I were God I would turn the fence to stone so the priests might disintegrate in private.’

‘I have decided to be a priest,’ said Esteban. ‘And I will do the same work no matter which side of the fence I am on.’

‘You will go far,’ said the Wizard. ‘I will see that you are allowed to bless each new balloon that I add to my fleet.’ The Wizard, at the time, did not own even one balloon.

Word of the miraculous baseball-playing babies spread outward from Courteguay. In nearby Haiti, Papa Doc Duvalier, when he heard of the astonishing children, sent an emissary with golf ball-sized diamonds on his ebony fingers, who offered to buy the babies from their father in return for a twenty-pound bar of gold and six virgins.

‘In Haiti, women who have had sex only with Papa Doc Duvalier or a member of his cabinet are still considered virgins. The gold bar has a leaden center and the virgins have the pox,’ said the Wizard, who had bigger plans for the battery. Hector Alvarez Pimental reluctantly turned down the offer. In America he knew, baseball players were rich and worshipped. They were idolized more than generals, bullfighters, plantation owners, rock stars or even Papa Doc Duvalier. Besides, what would Duvalier do with them, turn them into soccer players?

‘They play soccer in Haiti,’ said the Wizard, ‘soccer is for rowdies who are not yet smart enough to tie their own shoes. When I become President of the Republic of Courteguay I will have a baseball installed on our flag.’ The Courteguayan flag was a solid green rectangle with a white cube at its center. The small square had no significance whatever, and the rumor was that the material for the first flag had had a flaw in its center that the flag-maker interpreted as a design.