career. They paid out her contract, which made her a very wealthy woman.
Her mother was certain that an evil wizard had put a spell on Fernandella.
And, as if to confirm his mother-in-law’s worst fears, on the day Fernandella first told Hector she was pregnant he took her to see a wizard who lived in a tent near the baseball grounds.
‘If he is such a wizard why isn’t he rich, or President of the Republic, or both?’ Fernandella cried.
‘A true wizard never uses his gifts for his own benefit.’
‘Who told you that? The wizard?’
Hector busied himself brushing dust off the cuffs of his pants.
The Wizard, who called himself Jorge Blanco, existed by predicting the outcome of baseball matches …
‘You said Jorge Blanco was one of your names,’ said the Gringo Journalist.
‘If I said that then it must be true,’ replied the Wizard, anxious to get on with his story.
In the mornings, a steady stream of gamblers made their way to the Wizard’s tent, paying five centavos for each prophecy. The Wizard seldom gambled himself, and hedged his prognostications. Unless a game seemed a sure thing, he advised half the gamblers to bet one side, half to bet the other, swearing each side to secrecy.
The Wizard claimed that he had once been to America, had spent two whole days in Miami, where he had seen a hot air balloon. The moment he had seen it rise in the air, hissing like a million snakes, he knew the feel of magic, and realized his role in life was to be a wizard. It was the first time he had ever experienced wonder. His second exposure to wonder occurred the same afternoon when he stumbled on a Major League baseball team engaged in spring training, and by asking a few questions discovered that professional baseball players were well paid, well fed, and overly respected, considering that what they did for a living was play a child’s game.
‘There are inconsistencies here …’ the Gringo Journalist began.
The Wizard glared at the Gringo Journalist.
‘So, sue me,’ he said. ‘This is Courteguay. Sometimes two and two equal five.’
‘Twins,’ the Wizard proclaimed proudly, pressing the newly taut skin on Fernandella’s belly. ‘Twin sons!’
The inside of the Wizard’s tent was stifling, and smelled of fruit rinds and stale clothing.
Hector beamed; Fernandella scowled at the wizard.
‘How much is this going to cost?’ she demanded.
Fernandella was not used to being so poor. Her own family had little, but their adobe home was whitewashed, had mats on the floor, and food had never been a concern. Since her marriage, Fernandella stole fruit from the tiny orchards of family friends. The hovel in which she and Hector lived had been abandoned by a family of ten, and their goats, when it became too filthy even for them, a group of people only one step removed from the animals with whom they shared everything.
Fernandella whirled about the hut like a Fury, making it livable. In a matter of weeks she was shrilling at her husband in a manner she had vowed she would never do, imploring, threatening, cursing, invoking saints that he might take a real job in the cane fields and provide for her properly. Still, in the night, when she slipped her hand inside the cool black shirt, when the sweetness of Hector’s hair pomade was close at hand, she shivered with ecstasy and forgave him his indolence and lack of ambition, praying that the baseball teams he had bet on might win.
‘The Wizard,’ scoffed Fernandella, ‘what does he call himself? Jorge Blanco? He is a scoundrel fallen on hard times who still wants to be the bride at every wedding, the corpse at every funeral. I’ve heard rumors that he was once known by the name Boatly, a Gypsy from Europe, an immigrant, a foreigner. I have heard that in another life he walked up out of the ocean like a fish learning to be a man. Some say he was deposited on earth full grown, that he arrived from outer space, emerged from a glowing, ball-shaped object that whined like an ominous wind and vanished the moment he stepped clear. He does nothing to dispel such rumors.’
This was not the last time Fernandella railed about the ancestry and shiftlessness of the Wizard.
‘He could not possibly be Boatly,’ said her studious son, Esteban, many years later. ‘Sandor Boatly brought baseball to Courteguay. Sandor Boatly, if he were alive, would be over a hundred years old.’
‘Never marry a handsome man,’ Fernandella would tell her own daughters, when they became teenagers. But none paid the slightest attention, and all of them did marry handsome men, with varying degrees of success, except for her third daughter, the dwarf Aguirre, who joined a touring circus and fled to Europe, supposing rightly that her handicap would be more acceptable there. She sent postcards that often took years to arrive.
‘Twin sons!’ boomed the Wizard, ‘who will be great, no, not just great, but the two greatest baseball players ever to originate in the Republic of Courteguay.’
The Wizard lived in poverty in a tent made of stolen canvas, saving the profits of his predictions in order to someday acquire a hot air balloon.
‘I will fly like an angel over Courteguay,’ he proclaimed, ‘sizzling down out of the sky as a wizard ought to. My costume will be made of parrot-bright silks and will contrast favorably with the sleek brilliance of the balloon.’
Removing his hand from Fernandella’s belly, he said to her husband, ‘That will be fifteen centavos, please.’
‘Thief!’ cried Fernandella, watching her husband digging in the pocket of his ragged trousers. It was at that moment she felt the first painful stirrings in her belly, though she could not comprehend the nature of the pain, and had no idea it was caused by a miniscule pitcher gouging out dirt in front of the pitcher’s rubber, making a place for his forward foot to land comfortably.
‘Eyyya,’ groaned Fernandella, grasping her belly with one hand.
‘To be completely fair,’ said the Wizard to Fernandella’s husband, ‘I will prophesy the outcome of three baseball games of your choice, for the same ridiculously low fee.’
Excuse me, please. There are inconsistencies here. I am the wizard described in the preceding pages. I am at the moment staring over the shoulder of the author, a gringo journalist who is conducting interviews with me. He sits at a large oak table writing my story, the results of his interviews with me, on a pad of yellow lined paper. He was a guest in my own home. I allowed him to visit me when I was briefly confined to the General Omar Bravura wing of the National
