Cubop City Blues by Pablo Medina

Author:Pablo Medina
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Published: 2012-04-29T16:00:00+00:00

RAINING

BASEBALLS

Just as you fix your sight on a ball leaving your father’s bat, another reaches the apogee of its arc and begins to descend a few feet away. You run to that, hoping you’ll have enough time to catch it and come back to get the other. Then a whack sounds and there is a third and almost immediately a fourth coming out of the sun, then several more in quick succession, followed by an old typewriter, a twirling pig, three flapping chickens, a statuette of the Virgin Mary and a flügelhorn, a coffeepot, dozens of books, a machete glinting in the sunlight, an automobile tire, a tricycle, a wife, many lovers, one infant enjoying the ride, a grandmother playing solitaire, another grandmother stuffing sausages, thousands of pages darkened by a language that isn’t yours, a black panther, a school of yellow fish, a telescope for looking out, a microscope for looking in, fishhooks and harpoons and Captain Ahab and Emma Bovary and Maritornes the wench, no Don Quixote but a Humbert Humbert, an Úrsula Iguarán, a Père Goriot, a duck, an inkwell, a feast of cannibals, a pot of beans, angels and demons fighting for your soul, a boy building sand castles in the make-believe beach of his wanting, where an island boomerangs around his head.

When it is all done, the field is steaming from all the objects, the names, the melting memories. You wind your way to where your father was standing. Now only the bat is left next to home plate. You feel defrauded. Who could ever catch so much in a lifetime, let alone fifteen minutes? You pick up the bat and go in search of him. He has his back to you, urinating in some bushes behind the dugout. He turns, but he is not your father. His face the indeterminate face of Don Nadie, a nobody. You ask him the meaning of this. You were simply fun-going at first, catching balls he batted out to you, and suddenly the world rained down. His answer comes slowly, as if he were searching for the right words. You wanted to play, he says. Baseball, you say, not life. What’s the difference? he asks. Where’s my father? you ask. You have no father, there never was any father. You made him up in order to play the game. How about my mother? She’s out in the field, in triplicate.

You ask him who he is and all you get in response is a half smile. He walks out of the bushes and into a car that vanishes down the road. Now you look over the mess on the field and wonder if you should clean it up. You decide that while it may be your life, it is not your responsibility. You step down into the dugout and put the glove into the bag. Somehow you missed your mother coming at you. You look back at the field one last time and there she is, as the man

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