The Polish Boxer Read online

  I had a cheese omelette for breakfast with a few cups of coffee—really terrible coffee—and managed to squeeze in a last cigarette, freezing outside with the golfers and the other outcast smokers, before the talks started.

  The first session of the conference was about the opening chapters of Huckleberry Finn, and on the whole the contributions weren’t very interesting. That’s what multidisciplinary conferences are like: they have little or no discipline. Each person wrestles the discussion toward their own discipline, including me. Feeling a bit bored, I told them it was years since I’d looked at Twain’s work. Not since I was a kid. But I can no longer just think of him like that, I said, I mean, like a writer of adventure stories for children. Deep down, he’s quixotic. Silence. Right from the first paragraph, I went on, the book is absolutely quixotic or Cervantine. The narrator, in this case Huckleberry Finn, mentions a previous work called The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. And I read aloud: That book was made by Mr. Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly. That’s a Cervantine trick, ladies and gentlemen, a self-referential mention of the author. Silence. Some pages later, I continued, while they looked for the page despite my not having said which one it was, Tom Sawyer tells the narrator, Huck Finn, that if he wasn’t so ignorant and had read a book called Don Quixote, he’d know that everything is done by enchantment. Think about the fact that Twain himself quotes Cervantes, I said, and waited in vain for some kind of reaction. Now, why do I think this is so important? I paused like a good professor, until I could feel all fifteen pairs of eyes on me. The relationship between these two characters, between Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, is very similar to the relationship between Sancho Panza and Don Quixote, a fact proved as the book continues, especially by Tom’s treatment of his friend Huck, and by the ending, and by the attitude that Tom adopts after reading heroic tales. He’s quixotted, I said, and took a sip of tepid water for the pure theatrics of it. Nothing. Silence. Whether it was because they’d never read Don Quixote or because such a heterogeneous group weren’t interested in narrative or even because they hadn’t understood a fucking thing I’d said, my point of view was of little interest to them. In the hours that followed, they continued to talk about slavery and politics and a load of other deeply sterile and not very literary ideas.

  They served us pasta and vegetables for lunch. Next to me sat a history professor from a small university in Idaho, or Washington, or one of those other states on the Pacific coast, a man fat as a bear, whose only interest was practicing his awful Spanish. After the meal I needed a cigarette. I tried to get up but felt a hand on my shoulder, and heard a slow, hoarse voice asking me where I was going. It was Joe Krupp. I then realized he’d been the only one not to speak at all during the morning session. You in a hurry, kid? he asked. I said I wasn’t, that I was just going to smoke a cigarette. He stood there without speaking, looking through the huge windowpane out into the void. Ah, you smoke, he remarked. I said nothing. But quitting smoking is the easiest thing in the world, my friend. And then he added, very seriously: I’ve done it thousands of times. His hand was still on my shoulder. I like walking after I eat. What do you say we walk for a while, kid? he said, indicating the golf course with his sky blue eyes.

  The path curled over the man-made prairie. Every now and then we had to stand to one side, to make way for a few golfers dressed up like clowns and chasing white balls in their charming little mechanized carts. Joe Krupp walked like he spoke: slowly, serenely, as though his feet and his words were in no hurry to get where they were going, or as though they weren’t going anywhere at all. How wonderful life would be if we were born in old age, I thought as I listened to him talk of his childhood in Missouri, of his experiences in the war, of how he had met his wife. Kruppowsky. Polish, originally. I thought of my grandfather and the bottle of whiskey we’d drunk together while he told me about Sachsenhausen and Auschwitz and the Polish boxer. Do you like living in Guatemala, kid? he asked, and then allowed me to speak for a long time without interrupting, one hand behind his back and the other resting on my shoulder. I don’t know whether this was to steady himself or out of affection. Both, I’d like to think. I lit another cigarette and we walked for a while in silence until he told me that he’d found the comparison between Tom Sawyer and Don Quixote interesting. Very interesting, kid, but you should know that in Thomas A. Tenney’s book, Mark Twain: A Reference Guide, there are more than ten essays on the relationship between Miguel de Cervantes and Mark Twain, one of them in Spanish, if I remember rightly. I kept quiet. And I should tell you, he continued after another quartet of golfers had passed, that that book only lists works published up to 1975, and I’m sure there are other papers you could look up that have been written since then. We sat down on a bench next to an enormous cypress tree. For some reason I’d assumed Joe Krupp was an economist or perhaps a historian, and I told him this, a little ashamed. No, far from it, he said, laughing, I was a professor of literature for nearly fifty years, kid, here at Duke University most of the time, and I’ve been studying Mr. Twain for nearly as long. (I’d learn later, browsing in the library, that Joe Krupp was one of the most important academics specializing in Twain’s work.) I stuttered that I was sorry, that I didn’t know. And I bet you also didn’t know that Mr. Twain spent some time in Central America. What do you think of that? he said, and let out a sharp laugh. That’s right kid, in Nicaragua, around the corner from your own country, in 1866. I hadn’t known that either. Mr. Twain, he called him, with that almost sacred respect you can only develop over long years of literary veneration, and it occurred to me that, in a quite unusual way, Joe Krupp spoke like Mark Twain himself must have spoken. Suddenly a cat came up to us, rubbed up against my legs and then, when I bent down to stroke it, ran away. I noticed the old man give a strange smile. Like a man in love, I thought, and then corrected myself: like a man in sadness. Mr. Twain wrote that one of the most notable differences between a cat and a lie, he said, is that a cat only has nine lives. He smiled and got up with a little difficulty. So, my friend, you can never believe what Mr. Twain says about anything, even his own name. We walked back in silence, his hand on my shoulder. I remember him telling me in all seriousness that he was tired and needed to rest for a while so he could go out dancing later with his wife. Tangos, he said.

  There was another session that afternoon. I didn’t say much. I drank cup after cup of an almost transparent coffee in order not to fall asleep during the tedious intellectual debate on conscience and morality in Twain’s characters. They focused on Jim and Huck. Joe Krupp remained silent again, listening and appraising with an enigmatic look that seemed to me like the mixture of pity and mockery that you see on the face of a mime. When we’d finished, they took us all by minibus to a Greek restaurant. I ate roast lamb and drank enough wine to endure the moronic conversation about terrorism and the war in Iraq that, according to everyone there, the United States was winning. Idiots, I whispered, already half-drunk. I was tired when I got back but didn’t feel like sleeping. Stretched out on my bed and looking at the images on the muted television without really seeing them, I smoked for a while in silence. I went out onto the balcony, hoping to see the woman next door crying. There was nobody there. I looked for my coat.

  The lobby was all but deserted. I went into the bar and asked the waiter if they sold cigarettes. There’s a machine over there, sir, he replied and he took me over to show me. Nice people, southerners. I was just about to ask for a beer at the bar when I heard my name. It was Harold Lewis, the Mormon, sitting alone in a corner, and I suppose he saw the confusion on my face because he raised his glass straight away. Don’t worry, it’s apple juice. He explained that sometimes he found it very difficult to sleep, especially in hotels, and told me to join him for a while. I mumbled some poor excuse about being tired or having reading to do or whatever it was. And see you tomorrow.

  I needed a bit of fresh air and went out to the golf course. I walked a few holes, smoking, shivering from the cold but happy to be outside. Th
e full moon cast a gray light on everything. It was a bland, tasteless gray that for some reason reminded me of old neorealist Italian films. A little way off, a strange shape caught my eye. I thought some golfer must have left his bag of clubs on the grass, but when I got closer I realized that the large mass was moving, just slightly. A deer, I thought, and carried on walking toward it. I was perhaps ten or fifteen yards away when I heard a squeal and ran to hide behind the nearest tree. She had her shirt open. She was on top of him, thrusting rhythmically and moaning as if she were alone in the universe. Without being able to make out what he was saying, I could hear him whispering, his voice getting louder while his hands grabbed desperately at her stomach and breasts. I stayed where I was, in spite of the cold, watching them copulate on the fairway like two wild animals, until after a while I decided to withdraw in silence. I don’t know why. Maybe out of embarrassment, or maybe because I’m an average man and my three minutes were up. Who knows.

  I didn’t sleep much. For breakfast, I had a roll with cream cheese, and arrived late and dozy to the last session.

  I poured myself a coffee while everyone discussed Life on the Mississippi, a fairly fragmented, semiautobiographical work, which recounts the vicissitudes of Twain’s life on the steamboats of the Mississippi. For nearly three hours they debated the author’s economic ideas, his conception of identity, his criticism of the fake southern aristocracy, and his notion of liberty. At one inopportune moment, I pointed out that here again Twain mentioned his admiration for Don Quixote. What an idiot, I thought, and I’m sure everyone else thought the same. But while I talked about Tom and Huck and Sancho and that Sad-Faced Knight, I thought I sensed some kind of stylistic correlation between the two authors, or no, rather than stylistic it was philosophical, cosmological, but it vanished again just as quickly as I’d found it, and right in the middle of my argument, as though I’d simply run out of gas, I stopped talking.

  Smiling strangely again, for the first time in two days Joe Krupp asked to speak, said that humor is everything, that humor is our salvation, that humor is mankind’s greatest blessing—which sounded to me like a quote, but I didn’t want to interrupt him—and then, with his languid Mark Twain voice, he started telling jokes. All kinds of jokes. For nearly half an hour. I think I might have been the only person who understood straight away where he was heading, or maybe I didn’t understand at all.

  And as we’re in a golf club, said Joe Krupp to the group of confused intellectuals, well, that’s where I’ll finish. All right. One day a man walks into the women’s bathroom at a private golf club, accidentally, of course, and when he gets out of the shower he realizes that all his clothes are gone. Quite a fix, Joe Krupp said slowly, as though he himself were trying to remember or invent the punch line. Then, he continued after a pause, the man hears some women’s voices and puts a towel round his head to hide his face, but remaining otherwise completely naked. I could have sworn that while he was talking, the sky blue gaze of the old man settled on me, as though there were no one else in that huge cold conference room. And so when the man tries to run out of the bathroom, he bumps into the three women, who are shocked at first but then start looking him over closely, examining him, as it were. Joe Krupp laughed a devilish little laugh, with that mischievousness that only old age can absolve. That man isn’t my husband, says the first. That man isn’t my husband either, says the second. That man, says the third, isn’t even a member of this club.

  Epistrophy

  The first time I heard Milan Rakić play was a few years ago in the ruins of San José el Viejo. A pigeon had landed in its nest way up in the vaulted roof, directly above the Serbian pianist, who played on as though the rejoicing of the hungry chicks and the courageous flapping of the pigeon’s wings were notes that had been set down in the score by Rachmaninoff himself.

  I’d arrived in Antigua a little late, and there was Lía, waiting for me in the Café del Conde, ripping the cellophane off of a pack of cigarettes with her teeth, and an ice-cold beer on the table. As if afraid to sit down, I stood there explaining that a truckload of chickens had overturned on the highway, holding up traffic in both directions for hours, and she just kept looking at me with as much incredulity as she could muster, which was a lot. Well, we’ve missed the talk on neo-baroque Italian architecture, she said in a silky voice, looking at her watch. I know. And the Irish children’s choir, she added. I thought about telling her I wasn’t in the mood to listen to some pretentious guy talk about neo-baroque Italian architecture, or to witness the alleluias of a chorus of pale Irish kids, or to watch the spasmodic strutting of some Far Eastern dance company, or to submit myself to the cheap melodramas of Salvadorean theater, or to partake—begging the pardon of any hooligans in the stands—in any of the activities at the biannual festival of culture in Antigua, Guatemala. I just let out a sigh. Oh well, Lía said suddenly, maybe it’s for the best. And she half smiled. Come on, give me a kiss, she said, yanking down on my shirt. Her mouth tasted like a desert island.

  It was dark already and we drank our beer in silence. There was a strange stone fish next to us, spitting water vertically, halfheartedly, as if gargling. Every now and then Lía would lift up her hand so I could take a drag on her cigarette. Oxygen administered by the loveliest of nurses. She said she’d already checked us into our room. The same one? I asked, and she smiled uneasily. The same one, Dudú. She’d been calling me Dudú ever since she’d spent some time in Salvador de Bahía, doing Capoeira, sunbathing naked or half-naked, and of course learning Portuguese. She came back with a nickname for me like I was some midfielder on the Brazilian soccer team, as well as with her pubis shaved smooth. It seems impossible to me, inconceivable even, to resist falling in love with someone whose name was Lía and who had come back from vacation with her pubis shaved smooth.

  Over another beer, we talked about the decadence of youth, about counts who walled up their adversaries, about superstring theory (Lía might have been studying medicine, but she had a thing for quantum physics), about oral sex according to Tibetan Tantra and oral sex according to a Cortázar story. Seeing the time, she said there was a marimba concert at Panza Verde. I kissed her neck. Come on, Dudú, just for a bit, she said as she closed her eyes and lifted her chin slightly, offering me still more of her neck. I paid for the beers.

  We walked over to Panza Verde, or Green Belly, a restaurant that flaunts that questionably noble nickname for the people of Antigua—for their growing as well as eating so many greens, I’d been told. The men were in jackets and ties, the women all dressed up in furs and jewels and magnificent evening gowns, almost all of them black (for our part, we were looking particularly swanky in leather sandals and old T-shirts). Someone, somewhere, was playing the marimba. Several ambassadors, with champagne and chortling potbellies, were chatting at the back. The members of an Austrian quartet, who Lía told me had been playing Mozart that morning, were sticking together around a table, fearful, I suppose, of getting separated and having to face alone the dangers of the Third World. The Venezuelan baritone could be heard bawling about politics and, like any good Venezuelan, clucking incessantly about Chávez. There were some Guatemalan poets, drunk already, telling jokes about queers and about Rigoberta Menchú. Charming, I whispered as we dodged perfumes and waved hello and made our way straight to the bar in search of two tequilas and a little privacy.

  A dark-skinned girl asked us what kind of tequila. We’ve got all sorts, she concluded, smiling conspiratorially, as if to say comrades, we’ll die here together. Ándele, cried Lía, white tequila, the best you’ve got. And we toasted the dark-skinned girl. Another? she said, wiping down the bar with a filthy cloth. Her hands looked too small to me. Then they looked like two muddy starfish. Then like two sad, puffed-up tarantulas locked in a territorial contest neither was ever going to win. And raising our glasses once more, we toasted Lee Marvin (we’d seen The Killers recently, the second film to be based on the story by Hemingway, shot in 1964 and directed by Don Siegel, duri
ng the entire filming of which Mr. Marvin was utterly, beatifically drunk). Someone left a tray of canapés in front of us.

  Look, over there, said Lía, and I followed her gaze. A guy with long hair was drinking red wine at the far end of the bar. On his own. As if forgotten amid all the chaos. Hold this, she said, giving me the lit cigarette as she stood up. Lía was like that. She loved rescuing frail little birds and stray dogs. Once, when she was a girl, for her kindheartedness, she’d gotten a bite taken out of her left thigh by a huge, dirty English sheepdog.

  May I introduce Milan Rakić? Pleased to meet you, he said in impeccable Spanish, albeit with an unabashedly Argentinian lilt. I asked if he was Argentinian. Serbian, he said, but my girlfriend’s from Buenos Aires. Gde si bre čoveče, I declaimed. Hey, you know Serbian? he cried, giving me a slap on the back. Lía smiled. As if, I said—too many Kusturica films. Then I said I remembered having read something about a Serbian pianist in the festival program. Yours truly, he exclaimed, smiling and jerking his thumb at his chest. And have you already played? Lía asked. He lit a cigarette. Tomorrow, at midday, he said, sighing a nervous or possibly desperate lungful of smoke.