Hands of Stone - Christian Giudice [5]
The lovers soon had a son, Alcibiades. He died at two years old from what was reported as an apparent heart attack, though Clara claims it was due to medical negligence. “My older son died when [doctors] let him fall from the cradle,” said Clara. “He was seriously hurt and when I picked him up he was already dead.” According to Roberto, the brother he never knew died after an operation went wrong. “He was born sick,” said Duran. “My mother took care of him because he was born with a heart condition. That was the child my mom loved the most, because his heart was damaged. He slept on the bed and I slept on the floor because my mother loved him the most. My mother took him to the hospital. If it had been now, they would have paid my mom millions because the doctors performed the operation wrongly and killed my little brother, the other Duran. My brother had to undergo a heart examination but he was operated on at the Children’s Hospital and the operation was not done properly. My brother died there. If it had not happened so many years ago, but now, my mother would have been able to start a claim.”
Before Alcibiades died, the union of Clara and Margarito also produced little Roberto, and at first the family lived in their small apartment in Chorrillo, a low-income fishing town west of Panama City, bordering the Canal Zone, and one of the country’s poorest slums. Almost all of the homes were made of wood. Chorrillo was a place to pass through and not look back.
Like the others, Margarito would not stay to see his surviving son grow. He cut out without a word when his tour of duty in Panama ended. Some say the only thing he left his son was his punch. “His father left us and went to live with another woman,” said Clara. “Roberto was a year and five months old. His father was not interested in learning about Roberto. So I worked while Duran grew up. Until he was twelve years old we used to go to work together.”
Duran Senior shipped out to California and then Germany and would go on to serve with an infantry battalion in Vietnam. He married a woman from Guatemala and later settled in Flagstaff, Arizona. There was no apology and little regret, just a man trying to make peace with the decisions he’d made in his immature youth. While some ageing fathers use the remaining years of their life to reconstruct all the missed birthdays and graduations, Margarito didn’t want to rewind anymore. It just so happened that the kid he left abandoned turned out to be one of the greatest boxers ever.
“I didn’t know what he was going to be,” said Margarito from his Flagstaff home years later. “I supported him as well as I could. Clara was fifteen at the time, and when we separated … she went on to have ten or twelve kids, something like that. I just couldn’t do it. I don’t have any regrets. When you are in the Army, you just have to go. No ifs, ands or buts, I just couldn’t come back. My family couldn’t go but I could. I could only bring Roberto with me if I got his rights and adopted him. She didn’t want to give him to me. What could I do? We weren’t married. The thing was, I wanted to take him back to the States, but she wouldn’t give him to me. In Germany, I adopted my daughter … I adopted all my children. If I had gotten Roberto’s permission, it would have been okay.
“Was the life in the States better than the one he had? Better, well, no. Maybe he wouldn’t have become a fighter … He looked exactly like my younger brother Roberto. That’s who I named him after. I baptized him and recognized him. I gave him everything I could. I recognized him in the hospital. That’s what a father is supposed to do.” The words came out as if Margarito needed to absolve himself of guilt.
Clara was left to bring up her children with no money and no prospects. She would rely on her own extended family, in particular Ceferina, her mother and her rock. Mireya recalled entering the apartment to the sight of her mother breast feeding Clara’s children. She took care of the family until she passed years later. “Do you know what she used to do?”