Hands of Stone - Christian Giudice [9]
“My mother, who was very strict, always said there were two ways a person could go in that neighborhood – bad or good,” said Chorrillo neighbor Nora Mendoza. “Roberto was a good kid, very humble. When my mother fed him rice, he was so hungry he would eat the concolon [crust] at the bottom of the pan. He often went to Central Avenue with Chaflan, who was very influential at the time and good for Duran.” Central Avenue was the city’s main shopping district, a place where money could be made from the tourists and office workers of Panama City.
Young Roberto was a constant in the Mendoza household. With his charming smile and cute looks, he often traveled from house to house to fill his empty stomach. It was impossible to turn the young child away, and many families would snatch him from their doorstep straight to the dinner table. Nora Mendoza remembered El Chorrillo as a place where “most of the men worked at the Canal and didn’t have much money, so they built their houses out of wood. Roberto lived in La Casa de Piedra, which was named that because it was made of concrete. Roberto used to come over and my mother would feed him. Everyone was poor in El Chorrillo, so he would come over and eat whatever we gave him. He’d always want more but we didn’t have enough for him. I didn’t like Roberto very much because I was just a young girl. But he was always at our home.”
When not invited to eat at a neighbor’s home, Roberto would go behind La Casa de Piedra to see what Nina, a local woman who had turned her home into a small restaurant, had cooking. Nina’s became a haven for Duran and friends. There was also a small market in the town of Caledonia where they could order their favorite dishes. A Number Three was rice with beans and meat, a Number Four was a combo platter of rice, meat, beans and macaroni, and a Number Five was everything and a bowl of soup. Almost fifty years later, Duran would still remember the numbers of those orders, the smell of the food leaving an indelible impression on a ravenous boy.
He seemed to thrive on din and chaos. “The country was too quiet, too much peace,” recalled Duran. “I was born in the middle of noise. I remember my mother’s bedroom, it had a high door where the buses would go by. Next door there was a canteen, and we were used to the noises there, the buses, the quarrels at the canteen. When I would go to the country, where the people were so quiet, I used to feel badly.”
Everywhere in Panama someone has an anecdote about Roberto, many of them about the deprivation of his youth. “We all came up fighting,” said fellow boxer and childhood friend Alfonso “Peppermint” Frazer. “It helped make us men. We all had it tough, but we didn’t have it like Duran. He would finish our meals after we left the table and come up and take a piece of bread. That’s how bad he had it.”
Chaflan taught him how to fill his belly. Maybe he would have made it without the gypsy’s lessons, but many believe he would eventually have fallen in and out of bars, living day to day. Duran learned from Chaflan that he didn’t have to live like that.
“They would put up a show together to collect some reales, which they would later share,” said Nestor Quinones, Duran’s his first boxing trainer. “That is why, since age six, he would seldom be in Chorrillo; most of the time he would be hanging out all over in the city. There were five children in all going around with Chaflan, Duran and four more. Duran told me himself that they would not return to their homes after the shows. They would stay at Casco Viejo [the old compound] to buy newspapers to sell. Once they had finished they would get together again and put on their shows with Chaflan.”
However,