Hunter of Stories Read online

  Papa Goes to the Stadium

  During a soccer match in Seville, Sixto Martínez tells me, “There’s a fan here who always brings his father along.”

  “So it goes,” I say. “Soccer-loving dad, soccer-loving son.”

  Sixto takes off his glasses and fixes me with a glare. “The one I’m telling you about brings his dead father.”

  His eyelids close. “It was his last wish.”

  Week after week, the son carries the ashes of the one who gave him life and sets them down beside him on the terrace. The dying man had begged, “Take me to see my beloved Betis.”

  At first the father came to the stadium in a glass jar.

  One afternoon the security refused to let the jar in, glass being prohibited due to violence in the stadiums.

  Ever since, the father comes in a cardboard box wrapped in plastic.

  Lost Steps

  Every November 2nd, the dead of Mexico visit the living.

  On this sacred date of nonstop partying day and night, the living and the dead meet and eat and drink and dance and sing and talk.

  But many are the dead who get lost along the way, no matter how loudly the bells and prayers summon them, and no matter how simple the route marked out by flowers.

  The lost ones departed long ago, fleeing hunger or bullets, and died far away.

  Now the poor wandering souls roam hither and yon, seeking the land of their birth, hoping against hope to find themselves, even for a day, once again among the family awaiting them: “my people, my loved ones.”

  However, it turns out their people have also changed addresses and everything else. What was no longer is, and neither is it where it was, and there is no telling who is whom, or whether they are from here or from there or from nowhere.

  Absent Without Leave

  Mexico City, Day of the Dead, 2012.

  Dolores Cemetery was thronged. Enough people to fill a town had gathered to await their dead relatives.

  But the most anticipated among the deceased, Diego Rivera the painter, again failed to show.

  It’s said he said, “No way would I go. I’ve got three widows buried right there and I don’t want them ruining my death.”

  The Offering

  I once asked the journalist Fernando Benítez, who knew everything about the living and the dead, why the deceased who return to Mexico every November 2nd are always, or almost always, male, and almost never female.

  He answered without answering, by telling me the sad story of Juana the deceased.

  Fernando had learned of the misfortune in Cihualtepec, from the mouth of one Pafnucio. Pafnucio had been left a widower when Juana died and had married another “because I was not born for living alone.”

  The Day of the Dead was approaching and Pafnucio was working far, but very far, away. So he gave his new wife the task of building an altar and setting out an offering for Juana the deceased.

  The new wife built the little altar and as an offering laid out a stone heated until it was red hot. “This nectar of the gods is what your beloved Pafnucio sends to you.”

  Juana the deceased received that fire on her tongue and her shrieks carried to the farthest reaches imaginable.

  “So, picture this,” Pafnucio recounted. “Here I come galloping back to set things straight. You know I’ve always been a man of peace. So when she confessed her evil deed, all I did was give her a few lashes.”

  The Other Stars

  When the Day of the Dead arrives, some Mayan towns, like Sumpango and Santiago Sacatepéquez, fly the most enormous and colorful kites in the world.

  These kites sow the thirteen heavens with new stars. Everyone makes them, children and grandparents included, and in the firmament they cross paths with the dead on their way down to the world, where good drink and tasty food await them.

  Strong gusts playfully blow the kites about, along with the children clutching the strings. No child screams. They sing as they fly and they refuse to obey the shouts from the ground that would ruin the voyage.

  Kings of the Cemetery

  Enrique Antonio, born in the high mists that rise above Mérida, has seen many people arrive in no shape to depart. He even witnessed a resurrection: in the middle of the wake, a dead man got to his feet when his mourners began arguing about the cost of the funeral. “If that’s the way it is, I’d rather walk,” he said angrily.

  Enrique does not like people to call him the burier or the gravedigger. He is the king of the cemetery, like his colleague Fortunato Martínez, who inters the dead in the town of Arenales.

  Both have reigned for a number of years. “I take care of my dead, and they take care of me,” each says. Every morning, bright and early, he and Fortunato right the crosses knocked over by wind or rain or age, and plant them anew in their proper places. It would be inexcusable to set a cross over the wrong body.

  Last Wish

  On the final morning of the year 1853, Ciriaco Cuitiño, a ranking police officer and feared throat-cutter, paid his due.

  He owed for many deaths.

  Never had his hand trembled, and neither did his voice now when he expressed his last wish: “Needle and thread.”

  Calmly, as such an important occasion demanded, he sewed his pants to his shirt stitch by stitch.

  As a warning, Ciriaco was left hanging for many hours, strung up on the gallows in one of the main squares of Buenos Aires.

  His pants did not fall down.

  Trigger Music

  In Ceará, in Brazil’s Nordeste, a dry land populated by tough people, some are born marked for death.

  When the owners of lands and people decided to do away with the most dangerous one around, they gave the job to an experienced and efficient cangaceiro, who bore the stain of a goodly number of victims.

  They warned him: “It won’t be easy. He’s surrounded by henchmen who owe him favors.”

  And they asked him: “Are you ready to do what it takes? Have you got the nerve?”

  The cangaceiro clarified: “Nerve, I couldn’t say. I have the habit.”

  Colors

  Over a thousand years, the Virgin Mary changed clothes four times.

  In mourning for her murdered son, she dressed in black.

  Later on, she wore blue. Then from blue she turned to gold.

  Since 1854, when Pope Pius IX revealed the creed of the Immaculate Conception, the Virgin Mary has dressed in white. The color symbolizes the purity of the woman who became the mother of God without ever having been touched by the hand of man.

  Bodies That Sing

  In several jungles and along several rivers of the Americas, a custom that frightened the European conquistadors remains alive: Indians display themselves in colorful nudity.

  Arabesques and other symbols adorn their skin from head to foot in red, black, white, or blue.

  The Indians say the godly markings guide their steps and illuminate their ceremonies.

  Their painted bodies are vaccinations of beauty against sadness.

  The Body Is a Sin

  In 1854, after six years of matrimony, the English writer John Ruskin got divorced.

  His wife alleged he had never fulfilled his conjugal duties, and he swore his inaction was justified because “her person was not formed to excite passion; on the contrary, certain circumstances completely checked it.”

  Ruskin was the leading art critic of Victorian England.

  He had seen innumerable women in the nude, painted, drawn, or sculpted, but never had he seen one with pubic hair, not on canvas or in marble and certainly not in bed.

  On his wedding night, the shock of finding hair between her legs ruined his marriage. That “certain circumstance” was an indecent act of nature, not in keeping with a well-bred woman and perhaps only typical of black savages who paraded around the jungle naked, as if their entire bodies were faces.

  Holy Family

  Punishing father,

  self-denying mother,

  submissive daughter,
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  mute wife.

  As God wills, tradition teaches, and the law dictates:

  the child beaten by the father

  who was beaten by the grandfather

  who beat the grandmother

  who was born to obey

  carries on,

  because yesterday is the fate of today and all that was shall continue to be.

  But on some wall, someplace, someone scrawls:

  I don’t want to survive.

  I want to live.

  First Flush of Youth

  One night at a forbidden hour, not long after I started wearing long pants, I went for a stroll by myself past the bars in the port of Montevideo.

  Turning a corner, I heard groans and slaps coming from Yacaré Street.

  I took a deep breath, mustered my courage, and went to investigate. By the light of a streetlamp I saw a woman against a wall, arms outstretched, being smacked around. Timidly, I approached and said, or tried to say, “Listen, sir, that’s not right…”

  The man knocked me flat with one punch.

  As I lay spread-eagled on the ground, he began kicking me in the ribs, while she, the woman who had been slapped, took to driving the heel of her shoe into my head, like someone hammering nails.

  I don’t know how much time went by before they tired of it and ceased punishing me. They moved off, he far ahead, she obediently following.

  And there I lay, crumpled, until someone picked me up.

  I had received a lesson.

  I never managed to learn it.

  Pleasure, a Masculine Privilege

  What is that little button of flesh peeking out from between a woman’s legs? What is it for?

  Science found no answer, until it became accepted wisdom that the clitoris was a mistake of female anatomy.

  In 1857 English scientist William Acton decreed: “As a general rule, a modest woman seldom desires any sexual gratification for herself. She submits to her husband, but only to please him; and, but for the desire of maternity, would far rather be relieved from his attentions.”

  By then it had been proven that the female orgasm was a figment of the imagination, utterly unnecessary for the sacred exercise of motherhood.

  Virtuous Men

  The experts dictating the norms of sexual life were clerics who had made a vow of chastity.

  In the year 1215 Cardinal Robert de Courçon declared: “Feeling pleasure disgusts the devout man, but he endures his disgust in order to conceive healthy children.”

  The Church warned: Children conceived on any of the three hundred days of obligatory abstinence would be born “epileptics or lepers.”

  Punishments

  In 1953 the Lisbon City Council published Bylaw No. 69,035:

  Having verified the increase in acts that threaten public morals and good customs, which are daily occurrences in parks and other public places, it is hereby decided that police officers and forest wardens shall maintain permanent vigilance over those who make use of dense vegetation to practice such acts that threaten public morals and good customs, and the following fines are hereby established:

  1. Hand on hand: $2.50

  2. Hand on that: $15.00

  3. That in hand: $30.00

  4. That in that: $50.00

  5. That behind that: $100.00

  Sole subparagraph: Tongue in that: $150.00 fine, prison, and photograph.

  Bésame Mucho

  Kissologists have discovered that a passionate smooch works thirty-nine muscles in the face and other parts of the body.

  They have also proven that it can transmit the flu, German measles, smallpox, tuberculosis, and other diseases.

  Thanks to these scientists, we now know that a kiss can exhaust an Olympic athlete and make the healthiest of humans hopelessly ill.

  And yet…

  The Disobedient Woman

  According to the most ancient of voices, Eve was not the first woman God offered to Adam.

  There was another before her. Her name was Lilith and she was not bad looking, but she had one serious defect: she was not the least bit interested in spending her life serving Adam.

  Images, all by anonymous male artists, depict her naked, equipped with bat’s wings so she could fly about her kingdom of the night, wrapped in serpents and sporting a devilish smile on her man-hungry face, with fires burning below her belly.

  Lilith is not very popular in the masculine world.

  It’s understandable.

  Gastronomic Chronicle

  Chichevache was one of several characters the French people dreamed up in the Middle Ages.

  The monster fed on women who never contradicted their husbands’ orders.

  Submissive wives were the only dish on his menu.

  But they were rather scarce, despite what some historians claim.

  And poor Chichevache died of hunger.

  Two Guilty Women

  Aglaonike, the first woman astronomer, lived in Greece in the second or first century before Christ. She was accused of witchcraft because she could predict eclipses. People suspected she was the one who made the moon disappear.

  A number of centuries later, in August of the year 1322, Jacqueline Felice de Almania was put on trial in Paris for curing the sick, a talent forbidden to women and legally reserved for doctors who were male and single.

  The Cursed Woman

  The most beautiful woman in Chile, Catalina de los Ríos y Lisperguer, known as La Quintrala, was accused of practicing witchcraft, poisoning her father, knifing her lovers, and torturing her serfs.

  But the most horrendous of her crimes was another: she was born a redhead. Her long tresses grew from the flames of hell and her freckles were the Devil’s brand.

  She died in 1665, long after she used her enormous fortune of inherited lands and slaves to purchase a pardon, and thus elude the stake and bonfire the inquisitors had prepared for her.

  Love Story

  The orchid, beauty queen of the world’s gardens, calls out for love and love appears, swearing his intentions are honest.

  The orchid believes him to be her longed-for butterfly, the fly of her life, the bee of her dreams, and she sighs deeply, for at long last she will be able to start a home and raise pretty little insects who look just like their mama.

  Their eternal love lasts but thirty seconds. The lover, bored with conjugal monotony, realizes the orchid’s nectar is not his favorite and departs, taking her pollen with him. From flower to flower he flies, penetrates, and flees.

  The orchid, no longer so foolish, does not grow discouraged.

  She waits.

  Charles Darwin, lover of orchids, told this sad story in strictly scientific terms, three years before publishing his famous work on the origin of species.

  Fleas

  In Panama I heard it said: “They’re dirty. They have fleas. Indians are dirty.”

  In the archipelago of San Blas, sea of mirrors, islands of white sand, I found that to be true and not true: the Kuna Indians do have fleas, but they bathe so frequently and with such enthusiasm that in the few days I spent among them I was crowned king of the filthy.

  Water never touches their heads. The Indians save the fleas on their scalps for their loved ones to remove.

  As tradition dictates, whoever loves you has to prove their love by rescuing you from the torment of the minuscule demons.

  Spiders

  In the town of Sabaneta they called him Spiderman because he walked the streets selling spiders:

  “Hot spiders for old women with no teeth!”

  “Tasty spiders for pretty girls!”

  The spiders the child was selling had no hairy legs, caught nothing in their webs, and poisoned no one. Neither did the females have the bad habit of swallowing the males after making love.

  Hugo Chávez’s grandmother made the treats from crushed papaya, so that her grandson could contribute to the family budget. How they came to be called “spiders,” nobody knows.

  That
Neck

  In 1967 I spent some time in Guatemala, where death squads were sowing terror. These soldiers without uniforms were waging dirty war, a technique the US Army had tried out in Vietnam and was then teaching in its first Latin American testing ground.

  I met the most despised enemies of those fearmongers, the guerrillas.

  To reach their mountain hideout I traveled in a car driven by a woman who astutely evaded every checkpoint. I never saw her face and never heard her voice. She was covered from head to toe and spoke not a word during the three-hour trip, even when she opened the back door and pointed to the secret path I was to take.

  Years later I discovered her name was Rogelia Cruz Martínez, a guerrilla collaborator and former Miss Guatemala, who was twenty-six when she was found under a bridge after having been raped and mutilated by Colonel Máximo Zepeda and every one of his six thousand troops.

  I only saw her neck.

  I see it still.

  Those Eyes

  Cesare Pavese wrote: “Death is coming and it will have your eyes.”

  He met death in a hotel in Turin one summer evening in 1950.

  He recognized it by its eyes.

  That Blessed Sound

  Every afternoon the factory siren in a town in Alicante would blare at two on the dot. And at two on the dot, Joaquín Manresa would be standing on the corner waiting.