Juancito’s Magic Stone

I always thought Juancito had been born to suffer. Ever since he was a baby I noticed something odd about him, something unusual in the shape of his little body. That something became apparent when all the children at school, even the malnourished ones, grew taller than him. When he reached adolescence measuring barely two and a half feet, even his mother had to open her eyes and accept what the whole village already knew, and what she had denied for so many years: the poor boy was a dwarf.

The old women of the village gossiped, each according to her own level of ignorance, that it was divine punishment, witchcraft, the devil’s doing, bad seed, or—the most original explanation—the consequence of having fucked from behind, which is a sin according to Saint Augustine, who condones a screw only from the front and between spouses, through a little hole in a sheet, in small doses and with the express purpose of manufacturing more Christians for the parish.

Being the science teacher at the primary school in Caña Brava, and therefore the vicar of reason before that horde, I had to step in and explain to the mother, Manuela, that the defect was not her fault or anyone’s. It was the result of a genetic lottery: Juancito had been born a dwarf by pure chance, and there was nothing to be done about it. There being no cure, the unfortunate boy would go on being a dwarf until the last day of his life. All that remained was to raise him to be happy that way, accepting his limitations.

Juancito finished primary school, pushed along by his mother, patiently enduring the routine mockery of the bullies at recess. But no force on earth could move him to start secondary school. That would have required traveling all the way to El Bijao, where the only high school in the region is, with the resulting encounter with hundreds of new people, strangers who had never seen him and who would therefore stare at him too much the first time, some out of curiosity, others out of morbid fascination, until he cried with shame. The mere prospect, Manuela told me, made Juancito sob at night.

With his primary school diploma hanging on some wall of his mud-and-cane shack, its frame gathering cobwebs and dust, Juancito considered his formal education finished and devoted himself to minding the little shop his mother had next to the house. On my Sunday trips to the beach at Caña Brava, I would stop at Juancito’s shop, which stood by the side of the road. Just to see him and chat with him a while, I would buy green plantains from him to make patacones1, and I would lend him some book, in the hope that between one customer and the next he would educate himself by reading. That is how I watched him become an adult, without gaining an inch in height, in the same routine: listening to cantadera2 on an old radio and selling crackers, with no other prospect in life than minding that shop lost between the sea and the bush.

“So, Juancito, got a girlfriend yet?” I thought to ask him one day.

Juancito, perched on two empty soda crates to reach me a rose-flavored duro3 from the freezer, had no chance to answer me, because a lout who was sitting under the shop’s roof, drinking a malt soda, blurted out with a harsh guffaw:

“Nobody but María Manuela4!”

The reference to Manuela made me think at first that it was a jibe because Juancito still lived with his mother. But then the guy’s hand, clenched and moving like a piston, made me understand that he meant something else.

“Jerk-off maybe, but no mare-fucker,” Juancito fired back at him.

The guy laughed a little, and the dwarf looked at him out of the corner of his eye, with no discernible expression on his face. I was surprised by the calm with which Juancito faced the sneering of remarks like these. I think that, resigned to his lot, he had developed a thick shell that protected him from the venom of mockery. Although he bore the remark stoically, I still regretted having exposed him to such a dart with my question. Deep down, I thought, it must be very sad for him to live alone, without a wife or girlfriend, already grown and still in his mother’s house.

From that day on I often saw him walking down to the beach, on his little goat legs. I imagined he was going to look at the girls from a distance. Sitting on the sand, he would gaze out toward the waves, where two or three of them played ball with their tall boyfriends. The wind would bring him their laughter, perhaps their perfumes, scraps of their flirtatious conversations. It occurred to me, seeing how he squinted his eyes, that the glint of the sun on that wet skin, on the colored bikinis, would dazzle him and give him—perhaps—something to dream about that night.

For Juancito, misshapen and no bigger than a little gas tank, life was a spectator sport at an age when other men are in the thick of the hunt. And that, for a young male, is a tragedy. It tormented me to think that Juancito never rode a horse, threw a steer by the tail, or roped a calf. His knife never gelded a colt, nor did his arm ever grind cane in a sugar mill. His machete never felled any bush, his ax never brought down a single tree. He had never been to a dance, or to a bull-chasing fiesta in the village. His chest never pressed a woman close in a pindín5, nor did his hand feel the warmth of a sweaty breast cradled between his fingers. Even the plain pleasures of a peasant were fruit hanging too high for Juancito. “What a shitty life,” I thought to myself every time I saw him on the beach, or stopped at the shop to chat with him.

So Juancito lived for thirty-some years, on the margins of everything, ignored and rejected, until one night when his life changed completely, by pure chance. I remember it very well, because a great commotion broke out in several nearby villages. I was asleep when the neighbors came knocking at my door. With tremendous shouting, they told me what the fishermen had seen: an enormous light had appeared in the sky, coming in from out at sea, and with a great crash it had fallen on the coast. Peasants on land saw it coming from the beach and plunging toward the pastures. Some said it had fallen in Caña Brava, and they wanted to know the meaning of that event.

I went out with a flashlight and a machete, along with the group of neighbors, ready to look for the place where that object from the sky must have fallen. After a few minutes, guided by some shouts we heard in the darkness, we found a patch of pasture that was in flames. There was a big crowd, surrounding a circle of fire. In the center, there was a dead cow. When I shone the light on the animal, I saw that it was burned, and where the head should have been there was a large hole in the ground, like a small crater. The remains of the bushes around it were flattened outward, like the spokes of a wheel.

Sensing that it was the impact of a meteorite, I went up to the hole and asked a peasant to poke around with a coa6 to see if he could find a stone in that hole. We searched in vain for several hours during the night, and we came back the next day to search some more, but we found nothing. I had already resigned myself to not finding the meteorite, when I heard something that made the hair on the back of my neck stand up:

“Manuela’s Juancito, he got him a rock stuck in the tinaja7. His mama says ’at’s the one fell outta the sky last night.”

I didn’t wait to hear it twice. When I got to Manuela’s house, there was a crowd outside, as at the wake of some big shot. I pushed my way through the onlookers, to the stand where the tinaja was kept. Sure enough, at the bottom of the jar, submerged in the cool water, there was a black, irregular object, the size of a large lemon.

Juancito appeared out of the crowd, with his right hand wrapped in gauze stained with yellow iodine, and told me what had happened. He was sitting on the porch, listening to the broadcast of Ulpiano’s8 dance on Radio Reforma9, when he saw a point of light that appeared among the branches. The light grew big and began to move downward, and suddenly, wham!, as if a bomb had fallen on Manuela’s pasture. Juancito went off with a little machete and a guaricha10, and saw the cow all ‘headless-like.’ With the machete he dug that stone out of the hole. He burned his hand, because the stone was hot. That’s why he threw it in the tinaja.

Over the following days, Manuela’s house became a place of pilgrimage for curious people from all over the region. Juancito appeared on the front page of several newspapers, and received offers from people who wanted to buy that stone from space. He, with a smile, refused to sell it. I think it was a moment of glory for him, to know he was the center of attention of the whole province, after three decades of being universally ignored.

Those were good times for the shop, because the visitors came from far away to look into the tinaja, and they would have a cold soda to refresh themselves before heading back up the road. But the fever passed quickly, and just as it came, it vanished. A new record by Samy and Sandra11, the approach of Carnival, and the political activity for the upcoming elections soon pushed the story of the meteorite out of the local press and even out of the neighbors’ gossip. Overnight, nobody talked about the matter. Juancito stopped being the center of attention, and went back to being nothing, the dwarf who lives with his old mother, now with a stone in the tinaja.

In those days I saw him sadder than ever. The brief taste of other people’s attention had left him greedy for more, and it made going back into the shadows even more painful. Then something occurred to me. I had read in some book that the Museum of Natural History in New York had the largest collection of meteorites in the world. It would be good, I thought, to add one more to that collection. Perhaps Juancito would agree to give his find up to science now that the limelight had abandoned him.

Since I don’t speak English, I thought the bilingual scientists at the Smithsonian could serve as our intermediaries. I wrote to the Institution, describing the fall of the meteorite. I enclosed several photographs of the stone in the tinaja, and gave them the particulars of Juancito’s house. I heard no direct answer from them or from the Museum in New York, so I assumed that my letter must have gotten lost or that they simply weren’t interested in the matter.

Until one afternoon when I received a call. A guy with a strong gringo accent identified himself as Doctor Griggs, a geologist at the Smithsonian, and apologized for not having called me sooner.

“In the letter you didn’t give us your phone number, or we would have called you when we went to Caña Brava,” he told me.

It was true. Doctor Griggs gave me a summary of what had happened since I sent my note. They had contacted the Museum in New York, which immediately sent a representative to fetch the meteorite. They traveled from the capital to Juancito’s house, and analyzed the stone with special equipment. When they saw that it was indeed an object from outer space, they offered him fifteen hundred dollars.

“That friend of yours is quite a character,” he said, laughing.

“Don’t tell me he wouldn’t sell it to you, Doctor…” I exclaimed, thinking of the way I would strangle Juancito when I saw him.

When the gringo had finished laughing on the other end of the line, he went on with the story.

“Yes, he sold it to us, but with conditions,” he said. “He made us jump through several hoops of fire.”

In short, Juancito convinced the gringos that he was willing to sell them the stone, but that his mom, Manuela, was very attached to it. So he asked Griggs to take his mom on an errand to El Bijao, to keep her entertained for a couple of hours, while he went with the museum’s representative to hand over the stone in a hotel room, as they had agreed.

“Hotel?” I asked, knowing that there is no hotel at all in Caña Brava. “What hotel?”

“I think I remember the name,” the gringo told me. “It’s named like a piece by Liszt, Liebestraum, Sueño de Amor.”

I felt a rush of blood flood my face. The Sueño de Amor was not a hotel. Unless people now call a hotel those places where you have to push a button to get in, paying six dollars at a little window to occupy a room for an hour. The idea of Juancito alone with the gringa in that room, while Doctor Griggs drove his mom around, gave me chills. “What has this damned dwarf gone and pulled,” I thought, praying that my name had not been linked to whatever outrage Juancito might have committed. But the gringo sounded jovial.

“Your friend, el Juancito, is just hilarious,” the geologist went on. “Katherine, the Museum’s envoy from New York, told me afterward that he made her laugh a lot. And she doesn’t speak a single word of Spanish! When he took the stone out of the rag, he acted as if it were hot, and he passed it from one hand to the other, shouting. Katherine got scared, but when he passed it to her, after a frightened scream, she saw that it was cold and she laughed a lot. Then, when Juancito was counting the fifteen hundred-dollar bills, he started jumping on the bed, like a kid. He’s so funny! He even invited her to eat fried fish after the sale. That was about two months ago now. The meteorite will soon be on display at the Museum.”

Since the conditions and Juancito’s conduct during the sale seemed suspicious to me, I decided to visit him right away. I hadn’t seen him in a long while, because the rains had begun and the roads were filling with mud. It was a Sunday, I remember, and when I got to the house I was surprised by a large group of people, with one-dollar bills in their hands, standing in line to get into Manuela’s house.

“What’s going on here?” I asked a guy who was in the line.

I recognized him as the same one who, drinking his malt soda, had fired that impertinence at Juancito years before. With a smile of a few black teeth, he answered me:

“I figgered you knowed, teach. Member th’ rock Juancito found? Seems it’s mir’culous. Folks is comin’ from all over t’ ask it for favors.”

I peeked inside the house. I saw Juancito, with the radio at his ear listening to cantadera, and his eye on a batea12 next to the tinaja, overflowing with one-dollar bills. Neither did he see me nor did I speak to him.

I went back to the yard and, like a good man of science, asked the guy with the black teeth what evidence there was that the stone was miraculous. He told me that, about two months before, Juancito had had a dream in which the Virgen del Carmen, patron saint of fishermen, much venerated in Caña Brava, had told him that the stone had the power to grant whatever was asked of it with faith. When Juancito said so, nobody believed him. But that afternoon they saw him go into the Sueño de Amor with a blonde.

“You shoulda seen that broad, teach! I seen her my own self.”

Incredulous at seeing them go in, as was to be expected, one of the discreet and respectful neighbors of Caña Brava managed to put his ear to the door of the room. He heard laughter from both of them, and the creaking of the bed, which erased any doubt about the miracle that was taking place inside that room. To top it all off, my informant told me, that very same day Juancito won the lottery: fifteen hundred bucks. A primitive use of statistics, and pure instinct, told those people that two strokes of luck like those, on the same day, were too much to be a coincidence.

I always thought Juancito had been born to suffer. I still believe it. But now I understand that in everyone’s life, even those in good health, there is always some source of suffering. Pain leads us to look for answers somewhere. I have always looked for them in the laboratory. Others look for them in the cross. That rainy season, in Caña Brava, thousands of simple peasants looked for them in a stone sitting in a tinaja, a stone that two months earlier had been at the bottom of some creek, while another of the same size, after floating in space for millions of years, rested in a glass case in a museum in Manhattan.