Guadalajara 2
They had set up a boxing ring, with the canvas elevated about chin high to the average person in the crowd that was growing and spreading up the steps of the fountain. The men had chosen their spot and time well, Juanito noticed, even as he turned his attention to what was going on in the ring. The boxers were young, some even younger than himself. They fought with eight ounce gloves, without science or method. The crowd was getting pure slugging matches, toe-to-toe gundowns in miniature. They ate it up and threw coins onto the canvas. The fire inside Juanito leaped as he saw the money laying there, bouncing as the shoes of the fighters danced around it. He paid less attention to the fight itself, but a great deal of attention to the bleeding winner, who gathered up the money off the canvas and kept it all. “Winner take all,” Juanito growled to himself, “Winner take all.”
Watching the winner climb down and dress he felt a much greater thrill, realizing that these were not club fighters or government amateurs, but street kids like himself. He pushed forward in a kind of trance. A stocky guy in his late forties was in charge, stripped to shirtsleeves with tie loosened, but still elegant, hard, and prosperous-looking. He had a box full of gloves and was choosing the next fighters from many enthusiastic applicants. Juanito bullied through the crowd of gamines, using the metal corners of his shine box to good advantage. He ignored the other boys, but looked the man right in the eye, fired by his newfound craving, and asked for a pair of gloves. The man looked at him thoughtfully, then nodded towards an older boy who was wearing one glove and tussling with the laces of another, and told Juanito he was a little small for this match. Juanito felt his inner urgings go quiet, steely and cool. He walked up to the larger boy and set his shine box at his feet. The boy watched him step up on the box, look him straight in the face, then drive a fist right into his nose.
Caught by surprise, the older boy fell back and counterpunched with the gloved hand. The cushioned blow rocked Juanito a little, but not like the blows he had taken from grown men all his life. In a wild surmise he realized that this was the game he’d been raised to play. He punched a hard little fist into the other boy’s nose, blocked a half-hearted jab and swarmed all over the boy, knocking him off his feet. Juanito knew instinctively that it was already over. He stood coolly, fists cocked, as the older boy waved a protective hand in front of his bleeding nose, backing off in a crab-walk. He walked over to the cowering boy, unlaced the glove, and jerked it off him. He walked back to the man and asked for the other glove. The man laced it on him without a word.
When they hoisted him through the ropes, Juanito felt very exposed and alone. The cold fire in his belly had gone away, leaving him eleven years old and standing high on a canvas platform, shirtless in the spring breeze, looking out at hundreds of hungry faces. He stared across the ring at another older, larger boy and knew that this time there would be no surprise, no bareknuckle advantage, no quarter. Not with the money on the line. At the thought of the money, the hunger roared back into him. He almost heard a click as he realized what he wanted, and how badly–and that he would do anything to get it. He regarded the larger boy the way a hawk looks at a chicken.
When they touched gloves in center ring, he spit on the other boy’s chest. The crowd chortled and the first coins flew spinning and shining onto the canvas. Walking to his corner, Juanito bent and picked one up between his gloves and held it overhead. The crowd catcalled and tittered. Then the bell rang and everything went very quiet and slow. In the smooth, chilly slipstream of adrenalin, Juanito moved in for the kill. The bigger boy was waiting and easily knocked him flat. The crowd howled and tossed coins. Juanito looked at a coin that had landed near his face. It seemed as big as the moon, of pure soft gold. He rolled to his knees and savored the taste of his own blood. He started to stand up but the man in his corner yelled at him in a voice that cut through both the crowd’s roar and his odd inner silence, telling him, “Stay down until eight!” Juanito grinned at him and called, “What time is it now?” The crowd knew who their boy was then and they showed it in true coin. Juanito got to his feet, thinking he’d be damned it he was just pimping up a bigger payday for the other guy. He moved over to the bigger kid and waded in.
The older boy hit him hard in the head twice, then knocked him into the ropes. Juanito winked at the crowd, which was good for another shower of metal, and went back in. He was only knocked down twice more, but took terrible punishment for two rounds. The crowd was going crazy. There is nothing dearer to the Mexican heart than a little guy piling into a bigger guy with nothing going but guts. It’s a natural heritage, if not their national history. The fight was taking place in view of old capitals of Spain and France, among streets named after dead martyrs and crushing defeats, but Mexico is independent. Whenever Juanito landed a punch the crowd whooped like idiots.
The bigger boy was starting to get tired, and to realize it–and to know he wasn’t going to put Juanito down with sheer force. He started getting tricky, trying street moves to set the little slugger up for another good head punch. Juanito was protecting his head, giving his body away. The big kid made the mistake of thinking. He slowed his attack, circled and feinted. The crowd booed. Juanito sensed a turn of the tide and bored in swinging with all he had. The crowd hooted and slavered. The big kid backed off a step under the onslaught but wasn’t worried. It was what the little kids did when they were desperate and he’d dealt with it before. He kept a glove in Juanito’s face and turned a little to set up a roundhouse right. Juanito ducked the punch and gave the big kid a vicious right hook directly in the groin.
The boy slumped to the canvas, rump humped up in the classic position of the recently ruptured. He screamed and spasmed, then vomited. Juanito planted a foot on the rump and held both hands over his head, smiling through the blood and bruises.
The crowd went absolutely out of control. They were in love, and money was falling like hailstones. There was no doubt in the referee’s mind that if he called a foul instead of hoisting Juanito’s hand he was going to taste some blood and bruises himself. He counted the gagging loser out, then turned to find Juanito standing ready, arm already raised. He cried him the winner at the top of his lungs, and a cheating little bastard under his breath. Juanito smiled at him, knowing that the referee liked him, too. He walked to the edge of the ring and stomped the fingers of an urchin who was reaching for a coin. This drew laughs and more coins as Juanito did a victory lap, then forgot his new fans as he started gathering up several hundred times more money than he’d ever seen in his life.
He staggered out of the ring with loaded pockets and handkerchief, still getting bravos and olés. The man who’d given him the gloves took them off, and put his money in a plastic bag for him. Then he took Juanito over to a late model American car, and told him to get in and listen very carefully.
Juanito was so distracted by being inside an automobile, especially a big luxurious one full of new smells and chrome and soft upholstery, that he was a little slow following what the man was saying. Which was that the game was not quite as simple and altruistic as it looked. The ring and trucks were furnished by the government sports promotion program. The organizer worked for the government, but was also involved with a group of men to whom sports was more than a game, and games more than sport. They had boys that traveled with them who won most of their fights (an idea Juanito found breathtaking) and split their take with the managers (an idea that struck Juanito as repulsive.)
The man went on, smiling at the changing expressions on the battered young face, to say that the young fighters would be trained and the best would become professionals, with unlimited earning potential. Earnings to be shared, of course, with their benefactors. At this point Juanito wished the man would shut up and let him say that yes, he’d do whatever they wanted if they’d let him pick up money and ride in this car. The man said he thought Juanito could be good in the ring, that he was tough, smart and a crowd-pleaser. He was willing to back him as far as Juanito could go. All Juanito had to do was put his life in the man’s hands. The man assumed they had a deal, and asked Juanito if he had any questions. Juanito asked what the car was called. The man said it was a Buick.
They took Juanito to their hotel to clean him up and doctor his cuts. The hotel room, though far from luxurious, would have dazzled him had he not just been in the Buick. They had the hotel kitchen send him up the largest and finest meal he’d ever had, full of wonders like flour tortillas and yellow cheese. Then they called a cab to take him home, reminding him that a walk through streets full of people that had just seen him scoop up a sackful of pesos might not be very healthy or enjoyable for him. They told him to come back to the hotel the next morning and start his amazing new life of fighting for money. They assured him it was not a dream, though he hadn’t come right out and asked.
Juanito scorned the taxi, preferring to hail a calandria, as would anyone in Guadalajara on such a special day. Riding home in the antique Cinderella coach, his heart skylarked ahead of the horse. He would ride like this in triumph someday, to cheers. With a beautiful woman beside him on the seat, a woman like Lucia Mendez on “Amor de Nadie”; tall, slim, European, beautiful…and with a voice that curled his toes with pleasure when she sang “Amor Imposible” and “Corazon de Piedra”. Or maybe even…a blonde.
Since they’d assured him that he was still living in the real world, Juanito got the carriage to drop him a few blocks up Mina, where he walked into a shop and bought the best-looking gravity knife they had. He didn’t even think about stealing it. He had money now, would have more money, and immediately started to think like the man of substance he had always wanted to be.
He tried the knife a few dozen times before leaving the store, flicking it out until the proprietor nodded judiciously, indicating that he was indeed very quick and smooth. The knife was a totem of something more than the fact that he now had enough money to attract the attention of larger predators than himself, and that it was hardly a secret he had it. He was recalling the few words of advice he’d ever gotten from an adult.
An old cowboy who had a booth by the underpass selling dried rattlesnakes for various medical, superstitious and virility purposes, had once told him that a boy becomes a man when he will kill to keep what he has, that a man becomes a beast when he’ll kill to take something from someone else. His hard dry skin, his age, and his profound knowledge of rattlesnakes had commended this advice to Juanito and he fingered the knife in his pocket as he sauntered down Mina towards the church and underpass. He had nothing to come back for, and already knew where he would spend the night–in a hotel with clean sheets and a color television. Boy, man, or beast; he was coming back to San Juan del Dios for the last time and God help anyone who tried to block his way out.
He passed his tunnel, noticing with a tight grin that it already had a new occupant, a stringy boy about six with a tubercular cough. He stopped at the steps to the underpass and did a long, slow survey of his former neighborhood. The people and goods were gone, but there was a skeleton shopping center of sticks supporting strings that held cardboard signs and prices. He slogged through rubble, kicking idly at fruit crates and pallets that would become shelves and counters tomorrow morning. One pile of crates held a sign that Juanito knew, though he couldn’t read it. It said, “Everything here is cheap”. He stared at it, then laughed a racing mariachi laugh and punched it to pieces.
He staggered through the block, demolishing pallets with karate-style kicks, crushing crates and boxes, slashing strings and slapping down poles–a little tornado of heartfelt revulsion. At the mouth of the walkway he paused, panting, to look up at the windowless walls of the old church. Then he took a deep breath and started gathering up rubble from the walk and tossing it over the low stone railing into the church courtyard. He was very thorough. Someone had fastened a wooden stool to the rail by their stall, assuming that nobody would take the trouble to break a bicycle lock for a broken-down old stool. Juanito took the trouble. In a mounting frenzy, he grabbed a worn old broom and used it to sweep the sidewalk clean, then to shove all the debris in the churchyard into a pile around a four by four that held a bronze plaque. He knew what the plaque said, too: “Any impure word or act in this courtyard is a mortal sin”. Hell, he had probably been conceived in this courtyard, right up against the wall of the church. And those sons of whores wanted to threaten him with hellfire?
He slipped the shine kit from his shoulder and swung it against the old paving stones, then stomped it flat and kicked the pieces on the pile of paper, wood and string around the base of the signpost. Then he bit the top off the can of lighter fluid and raised it in an ironic toast to the eroding stone statue of San Juan high on the church facade. He took a deep pull off the can, poured the rest over his pyre, then flicked the lighter and spewed a hissing fireball over the whole thing. He stood watching, his sweaty face flickering from the fast-spreading flames. Then, as the fire started attracting attention, he vaulted the wall, turned to scream out “Adios, San Juan”, and disappeared up the arched gallery of the Plazuela de Mariachis.