The Eastern Stars - Mark Kurlansky [82]
Three Chances at Shortstop
Along one side of Ingenio Porvenir was a swayback one-story neighborhood on an unpaved street. It was referred to as a batey, which it had once been, but it was no longer surrounded by cane fields, only housing. Still, it was where sugar workers who labored long hours inside the mill were housed, in order to be next to their workplace. Most of the residents were cocolo and still spoke a West Indian English-Spanglish.
The neighborhood was within walking distance of the sea, although it was a serious hike. There the locals set nets, which they called fish bags. They left them for a few days, then salted down their catch to make salt fish, a West Indian staple. In the fall the local cocolos raised pigs in the urban neighborhood to eat at Christmastime. They made a strong but smooth distilled corn alcohol and aged it by burying it in the ground, and for Christmas they made strong guavaberry.
“Everybody gets drunk for Christmas,” declared a man known in the neighborhood as Ñato. His favorite recipe was a dish he called English steamed fish. (When cocolos used the term English, they meant the English-speaking Caribbean.) This was his recipe, in his own words:
You take a fish, any fish, cover with salt for two hours with garlic inside. Mash onions and potatoes and put it in a pan with this much water boiling [he puts about a quarter-inch of water in a pot], cover it, let it boil, put in the fish, twenty seconds on one side, twenty seconds on other side ¡Ayi! ¡Bueno bueno!
The best-known house in the batey was a turquoise-painted part-wood-and-part-concrete shack with a corrugated metal roof belonging to Ñato, whose real name was Felito James Guerrero. His mother was from San Pedro and his father from Antigua. Ñato’s father had come to San Pedro to cut cane at the age of seventeen but managed to get a better job inside the mill as a mechanic; when he died in San Pedro, an elderly man, he had been back to visit his family in his native Antigua only once. It was a typical San Pedro cocolo story.
The dark three-room shack where Ñato lived smelled of liniment. A steady stream of teenage baseball players, one with a strained thigh, one hit by a ball on the elbow, lined up there. This was where coaches and managers sent players with physical problems. Sammy Sosa came to him when he was just starting. In 2008, while playing for the Estrellas Orientales, Robinson Canó came by with a problem.
Most of the people in the neighborhood worked for Porvenir half of the year and sold fruit on the street or did whatever else they could to earn money during the dead season. Ñato had seen baseball as his way out and struggled as a second baseman and a catcher. But no one signed him. As a boy a boxer had taught him to work on injuries and give massages, and he started doing that for boxers in the off-season. Then he started helping the cocolo cricket players of the neighborhood and even some basketball players. But it was inevitable that Ñato’s business, being located in San Pedro, would mostly involve working with baseball players. In 2000 he stopped working for Porvenir to do his therapy full-time. He charged about ten dollars for a two-visit treatment.
Around the corner from Ñato’s home, on a street whose pavement was so crumbly that it, too, would soon be unpaved—stood a small yellow concrete house with white wrought-iron gates. It was in the shadow of the tall smokestacks of Porvenir, and facing the sign thanking the president for the new zafra. The Corporáns lived there. There was no need for Alcadio to thank the president because—after working most of his life for Porvenir and reaching the level of supervisor—he no longer had the strength for a new zafra or anything else. A sinewy but frail man who seldom spoke, he stumbled around the house’s cramped rooms with his heart condition: a warm, friendly man but exhausted, worked nearly