LITMIR.BIZ

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know one hitter from another. When the press asked Esteban what pitches he called, he would shrug and say, ‘Julio knows the pitches he should throw.’ When pressed further, to mollify the questioners he would admit, ‘by reading Julio’s mind, I always know what pitch is coming.’

      Hector Pimental studied his children as his calculating heart expanded in the throes of love. The ultimate battery, he thought. The perfect pitcher, the immaculate catcher, not shaped by fathers and coaches and practice, but created by the universe. Hector Alvarez Pimental was poor enough to know that God was a rich man’s device for theoretically keeping the poor happy, but always for keeping them subservient.

      As a father, Hector allowed his imagination to fall in on itself, bringing him visions and memories of events in other men’s lives, as well as his own, for which he would forever claim credit.

      He saw hot air balloons, exotic as jungle birds, hissing like a dragon’s breath, gliding across the sky like wondrous, garish melons. Hector Alvarez Pimental would wake in the night yowling, sweat-soaked, his mind like a box of photographs scattered callously on a floor.

      He saw the Wizard dressed in harlequin-bright silks, in a flying basket, swishing over San Barnabas, the presidential machete held high in triumph. He was witness to his son Julio standing like a general in front of a row of pregnant women, fresh as cherry blossoms. A contest of some kind? He was unsure.

      He also dreamed that he saw Julio pitch the final delivery of a no-hit, no-run game, then be mobbed by players and fans alike. He saw Julio in a business suit, older than Hector Alvarez Pimental was now, the sleek black hair on each side of his head tinged with grey, being inducted into the American Baseball Hall of Fame.

      But the visions were not all pleasant, for he saw his Fernandella in mourning. He saw her dressed in clingy black crepe like the elderly crones who creaked into what few priestless churches were left standing, on her knees clawing at an elaborate coffin. Hector Alvarez Pimental peered with trepidation over Fernandella’s shoulder, his chest tight, afraid he was about to see himself in the coffin. What he saw, though not his own body, was equally shocking, for there lay his perfect son, Esteban, sturdy arms folded in death, called away at what appeared to be the prime of his life.

      Soon after the baseball-playing twins were born, a clear brook, four inches wide, with water the cold blue of ice, began flowing down hill, passing only yards from the tin-roofed shack. The stream plashed softly and the cool waters held a plentiful supply of iridescent parrot-fish, their larkspur-blue bodies darting like shadows. A guava tree in full fruition manifested itself among the bone-dry scrub on the hillside behind the shack where the Wizard had skulked. A dozen lemon-crested cockatoos appeared in a row on the tin roof and kept the area free of insects, while the yard filled with pheasants and game hens, tame and docile, anxious to lay down their lives to provide food for Fernandella and her family.

      The babies slept at the opposite ends of their crib, each in their accustomed positions: Julio as if he had just delivered a sidearm curve, Esteban as if he had just caught one.

      By six months of age the twins were playing catch with passion fruit. Julio was long and lean with an oval face and forehead, while Esteban was stocky and wide-faced with a low hairline and teacup ears.

      ‘If they are going to be famous, they will require some education,’ said Hector Alvarez Pimental.

      ‘They must be able to do sums,’ nodded Fernandella, who sometimes was drawn in by the bombast of the Wizard, and the furtiveness of her husband. She changed her tone and immediately became jocular.

      ‘They will need adding and subtraction in order to count all the guilermos they will earn. You might give them practice carrying sugarcane so they will bear up well under the weight of their wealth.’

      The Wizard agreed to become tutor to the twins.

      ‘In America,’ the Wizard pronounced, calling up distant memories, like a long arm reaching deep into a rain barrel, ‘in America baseball players are more powerful than Bishops, more popular than the slyest politician, more revered than the greatest inventors.

      ‘Every October, the best player in the American League is carried to the President of the United States. There is a monstrous golden scale in the White House palace of the President. The player is seated on the scale, and his weight – he is allowed to eat a huge breakfast first – is matched in golden coins and priceless gems. When the player and his booty are equally balanced, the president takes off his diamond ring and tosses it in among the coins and gems, sending the delicate balance …’ At that point the Wizard lost his train of thought and had to change marvels.

      ‘At least so the tabloid press tells me. I am also told the water faucets in the hotels where the baseball players are accommodated, are made of gold,’ he went on.

      The only faucet Hector and Fernandella had ever seen was the single water pipe in San Cristobel town square with its rough, hexagonal head that screwed up and down.

      ‘Tell us about the food,’ said Hector Alvarez Pimental.

      ‘Ah, the food. Everything tastes as you wish it to. It doesn’t matter what you eat, it tastes exactly like what you crave at that moment.’

      ‘My cornmeal would taste like chocolate?’ said Hector.

      ‘Indeed,’ said the Wizard. ‘It is the American way.’

       THIRTEEN

       The Wizard

      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

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