Hands of Stone - Christian Giudice [8]
Duran hooked up with Chaflan. He was already a restless child, always on the move. “He hardly had any friends,” said Clara. “Only Chaflan was his friend. He put him to sell the newspaper and to clean shoes. Chaflan used to tell him, ‘Roberto, from the money you make working you have to give some to your mother.’” He always did.
Roberto was something of a prankster and liked to play jokes. When he was ten years old, he was watching a TV that his grandmother had won in a raffle. Trying to grab the seat from her grandson, she offered young Roberto five cents to chop some wood. “I knew her trick to get the seat,” said Duran to a reporter. “So I said to her, ‘The program is very good, here is ten cents, you chop the wood!’”
His warmth could quickly turn to fire, however. Anyone who disrespected Chaflan or any of Duran’s friends would take a punch, thrown with such venom that they would be left gasping. And wherever Chaflan went, the children followed, with Duran leading the pack. To Duran, the man without a home was heroic. He refused to abandon them when others had. Chaflan couldn’t replace Duran’s father, but he showed him he could accomplish anything he put his mind to.
On first sight, Chaflan resembled the many other throwaways roaming Panama City trying to get by without taking the same risks that everyone else had. Nobody had ever seen him with a job or any stability. But nobody ever saw him dealing with drugs or alcohol. He wasn’t a bum. Despite his lifestyle, he was not necessarily a bad influence. Nobody recalled seeing him drunk and many people knew him by name. He had no home but a ready grin, and would share whatever food he had with his posse of children. To people who had made it without having to stick out their hand for a nickel, Chaflan was a hopeless, lazy figure whose charming nature belied inner weaknesses. To Duran, the man making funny faces was more than a street clown; he was the one man who wouldn’t abandon him. “If Duran was selling shoes today, his only friend would be Chaflan,” read a newspaper headline at the height of the boxer’s fame.
Like all clowns, there was a sad side to Chaflan. Panamanian journalist Emilio Sinclair called him “the man whose heart was broken by deception,” and said he “cried in silence in the dark and stink alleys of the poor neighborhood.” He could often be found sleeping in dumpsters or parks. He and young Roberto would be seen together before dawn, waiting as the sun lifted to get a heap of the morning papers to sell. Yet both were always smiling and they worked as a team.
“I remember getting up at five a.m., or sleeping under a tree in the park to get the papers,” said Duran. “We would leave with Chaflan and would wake up in a newspaper factory. We were seven or eight kids who wouldn’t go back home and would stay with Chaflan. There was a little window, they would give us a ticket, the first one would get the papers and would sell the papers fast. But most of the time the older kids got them first. Since we were so young, we couldn’t keep up with the bigger kids and we couldn’t sell the papers fast enough.
“There was a kid who could not talk and was very hunched over. Chaflan would put him to sell papers. Chaflan would stand in a busy street. I would stand where few people came and the hunched boy would be put in the street with no pedestrians by a building where lots of people lived,” said Duran.
“Each had their one song. Roberto would sing, ‘La Critica-a-a!’ Chaflan would shout, ‘La Estrella de Panama!’ The hunched boy who couldn’t talk would scream, and people would wake at 6 a.m. to buy a paper just to make him stop. The boys would sleep in the market, in the stands where they sold fruits and vegetables, or under a tree in the park. Their money went to their mothers.”
It was survival of the fittest. “There were many criminals around there, and we were small children standing in the line to get the newspapers,” said