Hands of Stone - Christian Giudice [3]
Roberto Duran has felt pain. And he knows about sorrow. He is a man who has felt every human emotion to excess, and expressed his reactions for the world to see. Not since and maybe never again will there be a boxer quite like him. Duran was an entertainer, a brute, a fighter, a lover, a loyal friend, an artist. In his prime he took the top fighters in the world and stripped them of their pride.
But the one time in New Orleans in 1980, he lost his. Unfortunately for many people, that’s all that counts.
Christian Giudice
1
Hunger
Blessed be the Lord my rock/Who trains my hands for war/And my fingers for battle
Psalm 144:1
DONA CEFERINA GARCIA was looking for her husband – and she had a good idea where to find him. Rumors in the tough barrio of El Chorrillo had him drinking in a bar with another woman. That was bad enough, but their teenage daughter was due to give birth any hour, and Ceferina’s services would be required to deliver the baby. It was hardly the best moment for the new child’s grandfather to disappear with some puta, some whore. Ceferina, eyes blazing, mouth set and fists clenched, was on the warpath.
The bar stood next to a concrete apartment block known as La Casa de Piedra, the House of Stone, on North 27th Street; Apartment A, Room 96, to be precise, was where her daughter Clara lived and was already going into labor. Ceferina entered the bar with fists clenched and there was her husband, Jose “Chavelo” Samaniego, in the corner with a local girl. Ceferina took in the scene with a look of fury. Many women in Panama turned their heads from the Latin games their husbands played but she was not one of them. Both poverty and inclination had made her a fighter; she had once been thrown in jail for punching the local mayor.
With one fast right hand, she left Chavelo lying on the sticky bar floor and headed back to her daughter.
Ceferina would bequeath her power to her grandson, born just hours later when her daughter Clara pushed eight-pound Roberto Duran Samaniego into her hands on June 16, 1951. They rushed the bloody boy to the Santo Tomas Hospital in a taxicab. “He was born in a stone house, and fell right in my mother’s arms at six o’clock in the afternoon,” said Clara years later, squatting to illustrate the trajectory of the baby. She named him Roberto after his uncle, the brother of his father Margarito.
Clara was young, not much more than a girl, but the child was already her fourth. Motherhood started early in Panama. She came not from Chorrillo, a poor area of downtown Panama City, but from Guarare, a small town in the Los Santos province in the interior. It has a central square, a couple of bars, a church, a gas station, a hardware store, a small downtown area with banks and markets, and a field which once held an old bullring. A symbolic guitar greets visitors at the town’s entrance and Guarare is chiefly known for its Feria de la Mejorana, a folk music festival every September that attracts the country’s best dance groups and waves of visitors. The highlight is the simple, classy La Pajarita dance. Women wear pollera, a dress made of linen and lace decorated by flowers, while men in their best suits drink Seco, a pungent liquor produced in the town of Herrera.
Young, curvaceous and willing, the teenage Clara made men look her way. Though not conventionally beautiful, her allure filtered through her eyes. The young Clara flaunted her flowing brown hair and full figure. Her inviting gaze comforted, made men feel wanted. That was her magic. Instead of prodding, Clara caressed; instead of rushing, she glided. She was tender, soft, gentle and generous with the little she had. People who knew her as a teenage mother remember a sweet girl striving for a better life for her children. “She was very pretty and very elegant,