Malagueta knew their type: light-skinned mulatos, middle-class, without a dime or lineage to brag shit about, but who thought—because they were born in the city under a cement roof and not a zinc one—that they were better than everybody else. They’d come to his childhood beach and look at him and his little friends as though they were dirty pigeons from the plaza. They’d enjoy the sea and sun, avoiding their dark little bodies as if they were dirt balls obscuring the view. That’s why, when he saw Argenis disrupting the picnic with his madness, he couldn’t control himself. Giorgio had planned the event to make Linda feel better, and now Argenis had to come and screw it up. The day had been splendid—little tuna sandwiches, the breeze, and the joy in the face of the blonde, as Malagueta called Linda, dreaming about her future laboratory. Suddenly, the workers, who had started to dig a hole for the foundations ahead of the bulldozer’s arrival, stumbled onto something and called Giorgio over. He went to see, a look of surprise coming over his face, then called everyone over.
Argenis had spent a half hour staring at the checkered tablecloth when he suddenly stood up and pushed Giorgio. “You’re not going to trick me,” he said. “This is a sham, you sonuvabitch, you’re the devil himself, you cheated me, you all know it, you’re part of this, don’t pretend, you all did this together, the stuff you found is mine, it’s my treasure, I made them all, look, don’t do this to me, please, I don’t deserve it.” Argenis whimpered and screamed, his eyes orbiting as he kicked when Malagueta put a headlock on him with just one arm and dragged him away, toward the house. Argenis watched through tears and snot as the two workers pulled the chest out of the dirt with Nenuco’s help.
Malagueta slapped him twice with his baseball glove-sized hand and then, grabbing him by the collar and the seat of his pants, threw him in the shower. “Have you calmed down now, you goddamn freak?” He left him in a fetal position in the tub and picked up what little stuff he had. He threw away the dirty underwear piled up in a corner of the bathroom. He let him keep the same clothes he’d had on for days, which now, because of the water, smelled of pee and chicken shit. He borrowed Giorgio’s van and pushed Argenis inside, driving away and toward the group as it returned from the picnic. The two workers carried a chest turned red from dirt and rust. He honked the horn, pan-para-ran-pán, but without pausing, and got a glimpse of Linda’s face, the only one who expressed any kind of worry or embarrassment for the man in the passenger seat.
When they got to the bus stop, Argenis, head down and disoriented, kept bumping into couples kissing goodbye, old ladies buying orange sweets, and smokers on their last puff before climbing the bus. Malagueta didn’t say a word to him until he’d sat him next to a woman with two dozen eggs on her lap. “Bro,” he said, “they gave you a helluva opportunity and you blew it.” He gave him one hundred pesos so he could take a cab to his mother’s house once he got to the city, a small bottle of water, and a bag of chips.
On the way back, Malagueta felt a certain lightness in his shoulders and neck. He fired up a Marlboro Light, poked his left arm out the car window, and steered with the right. He’d just relieved himself of a burden. No one could stand Argenis anymore, no one wanted to take care of him. The dirty work, of course, had fallen on the black guy. “Black,” he heard himself say as he breathed smoke out of his mouth. A small word swollen over time by other meanings, all of them hateful. Every time somebody said it to mean poor, dirty, inferior, or criminal, the word grew; it must have been about to burst, and when it finally did, it would once again mean what it meant in the beginning: a color. His body was a vessel containing the word, inflated now and again by the odious stares from those others, the ones who thought they were white. He knew Argenis, curiously the darkest of them all after Malagueta, didn’t see it this way, and his condescending look, the same look he used with animals, women, and faggots, hurt him. He imagined Argenis’ mind like a table of colors, the kind he used when he bought acrylics; the darker the color, the more disdain. He’d gotten rid of a cocksucker who’d never be able to look himself in the mirror without fear. “Fucking nigger,” Malagueta said aloud, thinking of Argenis, and a burst of laughter made him shake; he had to stop the vehicle because he was crying from so much laughing.
Back at Playa Bo, all was curiosity and activity. The catering company was putting together a long table for the appetizers and the bar. With the help of a friend who’d come in from the city, Elizabeth was setting up the sound system, which included a tower of speakers seven feet tall. Giorgio was on his cell, talking about the morning’s events, pacing from one side of the terrace to the other, excited, with a nervous rasp in his voice, and trying to pressure whoever was on the other end of the line to come immediately. Inside the house, following Linda’s directions, workers moved the modular walls to enlarge the living room where now, as if by magic, there were two Le Corbusier sofas, retrieved from the warehouse at the rear of the house. Ananí had just finished cleaning what had been Argenis’ studio, filling a trash bag with linens, papers, stiffened socks, dried brushes, and cigarette butts. Nenuco rolled Argenis’ paintings into tubes; apparently, they would not be exhibited during the evening’s activities. When they were ready, they took out the bed and the desk and filled the space with candles, creating a kind of Eden for their guests.
In his room, Malagueta had a mirror he used to look at himself during his exercises and rehearsals. There was a photo of Ana Mendieta blending into the trunk of a tree on the frame; a second showed Pedro Martínez throwing one of the curveballs that won the Boston Red Sox the 1999 playoffs against the Cleveland Indians. Lastly, there was a drawing he’d done when he was nine years old of Goku, from Dragon Ball, with his monkey tail. When he was little, every time somebody called him “monkey,” or “goddamned monkey,” or “the devil’s monkey,” he’d draw Goku kicking something or using one of his special powers. He’d filled whole notebooks trying to survive the words that would sometimes come out even from his mother’s mouth, or his brothers’, dreaming that, someday, after he’d found a teacher like Mr. Miyagi or Yoda, he’d acquire powers to beat the enemy, that big dirty mouth that hurt him and made him weak. Lacking a sensei, Malagueta had come up with another way out: the foul air of the insults would swell his muscles, pumping his arms endlessly with weights and becoming the gorilla no one dared defy—a batting machine. When he got injured and had to set his baseball dreams aside, he had three options: work as a host in a hotel, fuck old European women in exchange for brand-name T-shirts, or both.
The Sosúa Project had saved him. There he’d found his teacher, that skinny Cuban who’d taught him to understand secret voices, use the invisible power of the history of his body, and plan a strategic attack against the repulsive and cruel mouths on everyone. In two months, Iván had broken down Jung, Foucault, Fanon, and Homi Bhabha without once cracking open a book. The multiple directions Iván’s anecdotes took, his jokes, his reflections, his questions, and his reprimands had helped Malagueta discover his body as an instrument with a voice that he could use convincingly and completely, shutting down the repetitive and ignorant shouts of others. For his performance that night, he’d decided to continue using elements from baseball, like Iván had suggested. The accessories of the sport were beautiful and sterile and brought with them a solid current of meaning. For the first time, he’d confront the theme of race and Dominican masculinity head on; he wouldn’t be lacking much in the way of props. And, as Iván liked to say, he’d also apply marketing rules to his “show,” with an aesthetic proposal designed to satisfy the needs and anxieties of a particular audience who would read it as style instead of fashion, and a search instead of a trend. He’d had bleach in his hair for about an hour now. His Afro was too tight and his skin too dark, so that when he washed out the chemical, his hair was an orange, carrot color instead of Goku Super-Sayayín yellow. Elizabeth came to comb it out for him with a tool for punk styles and told him the orange was even stranger and that it would allude to Dragon Ball in a more indirect and interesting way. She was wearing a very tight pair of white pants. Malagueta heard himself say, “If I get my hands on you,” in his head, but kept his mouth shut. He looked at himself in the mirror one last time. He’d stopped drinking water two days ago so his muscles would be more defined. Now his skin was pure plastic.