DR. ESCOLÁSTICO GRILLO never played any sport himself, but he recognized the value of athletics in a young man’s development. He had, besides, made an extensive study of games, concluding that they are artificial substitutes for combat and that of all games involving physical movement the most artificial, the most elaborately structured, the most removed from reality, and hence the most human, is baseball.47 Accordingly, as soon as the term of experimental tests was finished—the dry season being well begun by then, he sent León out to the Alameda to play in the pick-up games there, hoping merely that he might learn teamwork and get some exercise and domesticate a portion of his aggressive urges. The result was the creation of an entire and distinct León, a stellar member of the troupe and a most durable performer who strutted his last hour on the stage as late as January, 1964. Then León Fuertes, forty-six years old and President of the Republic, came up as a surprise pinch hitter for the Cerveza Cortes Teutones of the Tinieblan Winter League and, with one down and men on first and second, singled to right field off Clyde Hyde (the future Cy Young Award contender of the Cubs), driving the tying run across and advancing what proved to be the winning run to third.
How different was this León from the artist! He hung around the Alameda for two weeks before he even tried to get in a game, watching the others play, chasing the ball48 when it went foul. Then he had to wait another week until a scarcity of players gave him his chance. Picked last, sneered at by the team captain, exiled to right field and told to stay out of the way, placed ninth in the line-up49, and studiously ignored, he served meekly for the first two and a half innings. One imagines him scuffing his street shoes in the sun-parched, stunted grass, thumping his borrowed mitt, holding his position brave- and uselessly outside the shade of the brown palms that marched along the sidewalk foul line out to the tiny, kid-propelled carrousel. Undoubtedly he watched the play while he was in the field, but when his side came to bat, perhaps his glance wandered across the street to the red-tile-roofed bungalow that he bought for his mother two decades later. Perhaps he mentally installed her in a rocker on that porch and himself in the dugout at Forbes Field, but the several Leóns were, generally, much too adept at realizing their dreams to waste a lot of time composing them. When he got his licks he stepped in calmly, neither twitched the bat nor tapped the plate, and socked the first pitch over the left fielder’s head, beyond the junglegym, past the three backless granite benches near the statue of his grandfather General Feliciano Luna, and out (on two hops) into the Via Venezuela. Rounding the bases, he denied himself even the merest particle of a gloat.
From then on, at the others’ urging, he was a team captain. Acknowledged the best player on the field, he displayed a humility worthy of the mature Gotama. He did not presume to set positions. He hit fourth only at his teammates’ insistence. If another kid wanted to bunt, to bring the infield in or move the outfielders around, he didn’t carp, though any such attempt was likely met with protest and an appeal to León to decide. No amount of adulation could swell his head, and when, late in February, a man who had, been browsing the park for several days offered him five inchados per game to play for a semi-pro team sponsored by Cigarillos Amapola, he first suggested that the fellow draft some older, more experienced kid and accepted only after much persuasion.
León had eyes so sharp that he could watch the ball and bat make contact—something he at first assumed all hitters did but which is rare even in the majors—a strong, unerring arm, speed in the field and on the baselines, quick, steady hands which made him a faultless fielder even on the unkempt, pitted diamonds where he played. He brought to baseball all the jungle cunning and ferocity of the La Cuenca alleys but masked his lust to win behind an earnest, doing-the-best-I-can grimace and allowed his talents to reveal themselves discreetly, in the context of the play. Pitchers scowled down at his unprepossessing figure from the eminence of the mound, then discovered there was no safe pitch to throw him. Batters stopped running out ground balls hit to his section of the infield, and third-base coaches learned that if he was handling a relay it was unwise to send the runner in. His peg was going to come fizzing in, fiat and heavy, smack on the catcher’s mitt. The spectators—sweatsmeared, crotch-gouging loafers who sprawled in little clots about the all-but-empty grandstands of the Estadio Nacional or the Campo Hernán Ladilla, pausing betwcen hitters to screw beaded quart bottles of Cortes Beer into their cocoa-colored faces—adopted him as their favorite, predicting an illustrious career for him with Los Bravos de Boston or Los Tigres de Detroit or Los Gigantes de Nueva York. This opinion was shared by a scout employed by Los Cardenales de San Luis, who saw León at the Central American Games in 1934 and reported that he was ready for the big leagues at sixteen, that he had everything but home-run power and would develop that if he stayed in the game50 and put on weight. Only León seemed unconvinced of León’s excellence. Others made fearsome gestures upon stepping in, waved their bats menacingly, pulled their cap brims in defiance, glared at the pitcher. Others touted themselves, leaned insolently out to glove a throw, gave the ball a contemptuous little flip to the mound on making a third out. León, on the other hand, approached the plate with diffidence, as though banking on luck to put him on, eschewed autoadvertisement, and no matter what feats he performed, allowed himself no more than a shy grin or deprecative shrug—as though all his game-winning hits; all his miraculous back-handed, hit depriving grabs; all his immaculately-timed fall-away slides were merely happy accidents. Fans howled their praise; teammates engulfed him in ebullient, moist embraces; but his modesty never flagged, not even when he became a national hero.
This came on New Year’s Day in 1934. The admiral commanding in the Reservation had noted that the benighted greaseballs of Tinieblas showed some interest in the U.S. National Pastime, and he deemed it in keeping with the Good Neighbor Policy to invite them over and give them a sound thrashing. He offered a silver cup to be presented to the winners of an all-star game between Tinieblas and the United States command; then he set about assembling a congregation of ringers who would insure the cup stayed in the glass case in his office. He got a pitcher transferred to him from Fort Dix, a young member of the Dodgers’ regular rotation who had enlisted in the army while drunk. He knew that U.S.S. Des Moines had a gunnery mate who’d caught two seasons for the Phillies, so he arranged for the cruiser to make a good-will visit. He got the All-Armed Service infield shipped down to him on temporary duty from Fort Ord and Fort Devens and Norfolk and Lejeune, and he sent all the way to Subic Bay in the Philippines for a clean-up hitter, Ensign Dan Hardcock, who’d captained the Annapolis nine and who had standing offers from half the teams in the big leagues to play pro ball when his tour of duty expired. He picked the umpires with equal care: two Marine sergeants and a Navy petty officer, men of probity, well versed in baseball and endowed with twenty-twenty vision, but first and foremost patriots. Like his friend Doug MacArthur, the admiral knew “There is no substitute for victory.” Meantime Tinieblas gathered up the gauntlet he had thrown. Tryouts were held and a national selection chosen, among them León Fuertes, who was placed at second base. And the First Lady of the land, Doña Eneida de Tábano, designed their uniforms: yellow flannels with purple pin stripe and toothy green alligator gamboling across the chest.
I shall forgo description of the pre-game ceremonies, the command chaplain’s invocation, the admiral’s speech of welcome, which extolled fraternal competition as the key to hemispheric bliss, President Juan de Austria Tábano’s unintelligible remarks in what he thought was English, the playing of the two national anthems (“Star-Spangled Banner” first, of course), and the tossing out of the first ball by Marine Lieutenant Victor Steel, who had recently received the Congressional Medal of Honor in regard for the record number of Nicaraguan insurgents he’d exterminated. I shall, in fact, vault past the first seventeen-eighteenths of the game to land in the last half of the ninth inning. The Tinieblans, who had scored three times in the first inning due to U.S. overconfidence, clutched to a one-run lead. The admiral was becoming a bit testy in his pidgin small-talk with President Juan Tábano. The admiral’s wife was grinning in repressed fury as Doña Eneida for the ninth time drew attention to the Tinieblan uniforms and recounted the problems of their design. The Americans in the stands were clapping for a rally. The few Tinieblans—all prominent people, present by invitation—were experiencing mingled embarrassment and fear: Tinieblas was not supposed to beat the United States in anything, certainly not baseball, and while it was legitimate for their team to make a decent showing, they were carrying things too far in menacing so earnestly to win. And the umpires were imagining how little their lives would he worth should the home team, despite all the admiral’s work, end up defeated.
That the first two batters made out was entirely their own fault. Had they but left their bats on their shoulders, they would certainly have walked, no matter where the pitches went, but the fools, caught up in the excitement of the game, insisted on swinging. One dribbled meekly to the box; the other raised a flaccid pop-up to third base. That left it up to Dan Hardcock, who had so far passed a frustrating afternoon. True, he had accounted for both U.S. runs with a colossal homer which cleared not only the left-field fence but the roof of the headquarters building beyond it, yet apart from that he was all goose eggs. In the fourth inning, with two out and a man on third, he drove shot between the pitcher’s legs that damn near gelded him—a sure hit if he ever saw one—but the sour-faced runt at second base went out behind the bag into short center field, snatched the ball with his bare hand, and threw him out. Then, in the sixth, with only one out and the bases loaded, he punched a sinking curve ball toward right field, only to see the same sawed-off, chili-eating greaser launch himself up and out to spear the liner in the webbing of his glove and turn a single with two R.B.I.s into a double play. And as if that wasn’t enough, the punk had made a jackass of him in the seventh. The sneaky spic had singled over the first baseman’s head and making his turn had pulled up lame (or so it looked) and fallen. But when All-American Dan Hardcock took the bait and threw on in to first to pick him off, he bounced up and scooted down to second. Stung by these torments, Hardcock pawed the earth of the batter’s box and snorted fire.
He took two high and tight and then, deciding that he wasn’t going to get a home-run ball, slashed the next pitch up the alley in left center field. A double, maybe more, but as it came off the first hop, the left fielder got a bit of glove on it and ticked it—coño!—to the center fielder. Who, in his dazzlement, let it run up his arm like a pet mouse, then found it near his chin, and pegged it—the best throw of his life, he said for years—in to León. One hundred ninety pounds of Hardcock plunged down the line, but the throw was on the bag ahead of him.
Dan Hardcock had spent forty minutes that morning honing his spikes on an emory wheel and than anointing them with lime from the little threewheeled cart with which the umpires marked the foul lines. He left his feet and stabbed them at León. León put the ball on Hardcock’s right ankle and held it as the spikes went in his legs and he went down, half under Hardcock, both of them on the bag. The umpire squinted closely, remembered the Alamo, the Maine, and the admiral, and hollered, “Safe!”
Play was suspended for a quarter of an hour while the call was (unsuccessfully) protested and León’s wounds attended. Dr. Alonso Gusano Bosquez, who as Minister of Public Health had appointed himself team physician, at first refused to let León continue. Both his legs were badly lacerated and his left shin bone exposed in two spots. Gusano doused the cuts with denatured alcohol and decreed that León be removed to a hospital at once for stitching. León said nothing, knit his brow in meditation, then pointed to his legs. All bleeding ceased and the wounds closed up like tulip folds at sunset. Dr. Gusano rubbed his eyes with the backs of his fingers and relented, insisting, however, that León’s legs be wound with gauze from knee to ankle. Then León pulled up his tattered stockings and limped to his position. A polite ripple of applause spread from the stands. The plate umpire bawled, “Batter up!” The game resumed.51
On the next play León Fuertes was charged with the only error of his baseball career, though considering the outcome, that scoring may be questioned. The hitter bunted down the first-base line-clearly a move called in the yanqui dugout to capitalize on León’s injuries. The first baseman dashed in to field the ball, and León hobbled to his left to cover first. He arrived there just before the runner, took the throw, glanced toward third base, where Hardcock was sliding in, stepped on the bag, noticed the ump begin to make another swindling safe sign, and dropped the ball, kicking it toward the Tinieblan dugout!
Let us now watch the action in slow motion: Hardcock, who has, popped up from his slide and heard the coach’s shout of “Score!” churns dreamlike down the line from third, head dropped, knees lifted. The first baseman, in an effort to recover from his follow-through and so pursue the ball, has tripped on his own feet and floats horizontally to the ground, his right arm and forefinger extended in the attitude of God the Father in Michelangelo’s Sistine fresco “The Creation of Adam.” And León, like Zeno’s Achilles, strides toward the dugout behind the tortoise ball. Observe that he shows no sign of hurt, no limp or stumble. See how he plucks the ball with all five fingers from the lip of the dugout, lifts it, pushing back with his right foot then pivoting on his left, holds it a long instant over his right shoulder, and then wings it—his blurred arm makes one think the film is running at full speed—not to the catcher (who crouches, mask off, straddling the plate) but five yards up the third-base line. Note (from the bow-stringed tendons of his neck) that he has put a pint of mustard on the throw.
The ball bit Hardcock square in the left car. He continued running for a step or so, but he was out cold as a cucumber. He fell head forward, slithered in the dust, and ended with his nose furrowed in the foul line and his left index finger (limp as Adam’s in the fresco mentioned above) three inches from home plate. The ball caromed back toward León, who picked it up and trotted to the plate. There he halted, turned, held the ball out respectfully toward the box where President Juan Tábano was standing, then bent and touched it gently to the back of Hardcocks neck.
That night, at a reception at the Presidential Palace, León Fuertes received the Order of Palmiro Inchado in the degree of Grand Cross and several ladlefuls of presidential praise. Juan de Austria Tábano was not a particularly effective polemicist—he lacked the magnetic lunacy of an Alejandro Sancudo and the cold irony of a Eudemio Lobo—but he was the finest occasional orator to occupy the Tinieblan presidency during this century. His presentation speech assembled in León’s honor an all-time, all-global squad of monstercides. He spoke of Theseus and Beowulf, of dragon-whackers Siegfried and Saint George, of little Juan Belmonte, who’d confronted and destroyed so many great horned beasts, and of young David, who was himself a part-time musician and whose elegant dispatch of hulking Goliath seemed but a first draft of León’s humbling of the gringo bully. León bore it like a scolded child, head bowed, face flushed, feet shuffling. Then he presented Tábano with the ball which made the final out,52 phrasing his brief remarks so modestly one might have thought he’d spent the whole game on the bench. It was the first time the worlds of León, athlete, and León, artist, overlapped, and guests who heretofore had known him only in the latter incarnation were hard put to reconcile the two. Don Plineo Hormiga refused outright to make the connection and taking León aside, urged him to drag his scandalous twin brother to the playing fields and teach him some gentlemanly virtues. León nodded respectfully and backed away. That night León told President Juan Tábano he was unworthy of such honor, yet only four nights later he made his impudent remark and refused the same President the courtesy of waiting dinner for him. He had by then put on another role.
Small-minded frumps who had occasion to observe León Fuertes in more than one manifestation were wont to snort, “Hypocrisy!” and, exhausted by their effort, to smile complacently, believing everything explained. I myself was trapped on the flypaper of oversimplification at the unwary age of eight: Well aware that my father doted on my mother to the point of idiocy, granting her most outlandish whims even as she uttered them and spiking all the canons of good manners by virtually ignoring other women in her presence, and also cognizant (as who was not?) of his almost suicidal loyalty to his friends, I happened by his law office one noon when all the staff were out, entered his private sanctum without knocking, and surprised him in flagrante with the beautiful, long-limbed Irene Hormiga, wife of his old-time buddy Nacho. Years passed before I realized that what I took for an archhypocrite’s double treason was the blameless pleasure of a total stranger to my mother and Don Nacho. One León Fuertes was a faithful husband and a loyal friend, a serious man, in short. Another was a casual rounder who saw the female sex as bonbons offered for his spare-time munching and who cared no more for marriage vows—his own or anybody else’s—than migrant fowl do for the frontiers they sail across. The two chanced to share a body along with many other Leóns, but each was different, each had his own world, and each was true to himself.
Why did he never forge what the psychoanilinguists call an “integrated personality”? He wanted more. He realized that an identity is limiting, while the possibilities of life are infinite. He chose not to deprive himself and had the energy and courage of his choice. Rather than stuff a wardrobe of different attitudes, each suited to a different life, into one groaning personality—which personality gets bulged all out of shape while loose ends dangle messily (an artist’s ego, say, fouling the mesh of teamwork on a ballfield)—he contrived a different personality for each different life and kept each separate. (Cf. Zeus Gynomachos, who chose a feathered tenderness for Leda and for Europa lusty taurine thrusts.) He constructed a number of worlds within this world, and denizens of one learned that they blundered to another only at their peril. Or, if you like, he had no personality, was by nature protean and undefined, felt himself liable to slip from avatar to avatar without control, and hence invented characters (attending to the details of each one so that they would not merge) and played them out, taking what care he could not to get publics and supporting casts mixed up, nor to be caught uncostumed in the dressing room.