The Empanada Brotherhood Read online

  THE EMPANADA BROTHERHOOD

  Also by John Nichols

  Fiction

  The Sterile Cuckoo

  The Wizard of Loneliness

  The Milagro Beanfield War

  The Magic Journey

  A Ghost in the Music

  The Nirvana Blues

  American Blood

  An Elegy for September

  Conjugal Bliss

  The Voice of the Butterfly

  Nonfiction

  If Mountains Die (with William Davis)

  The Last Beautiful Days of Autumn

  On the Mesa

  A Fragile Beauty

  The Sky’s the Limit

  Keep It Simple

  Dancing on the Stones

  An American Child Supreme

  THE EMPANADA BROTHERHOOD

  A NOVEL

  JOHN NICHOLS

  Copyright © 2007 by John Nichols.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

  eISBN: 978-0-8118-7066-5

  This is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictionally. Any resemblance to actual people, places, or events is entirely coincidental.

  SOME NOTES ON LANGUAGE AND PRONUNCIATION

  Argentines commonly use vos instead of tú as the second-person pronoun. Their singular present tense and imperative verb endings correspond roughly to the plural vosotros of European Spanish. This changes “normal” spelling and placement of accents, confusing people outside of Argentina.

  The command dale—“come on,” “let’s go”—is pronounced “dah-lay.” The bitter tea yerba mate is “yerba mah-tay.” A piba is a lovely young woman. And che is a vocative used to call attention, loosely meaning “hey,” or “you,” or “hey, you.”

  Lyrics to the tangos that appear in this book were translated by the author. Page 9, “Anclao en París,” lyrics by Enrique Cadicamo, music by Guillermo Barbieri. Page 52, “Ríe payaso,” lyrics by Emilio Falero, music by Virgilio Carmona. Page 100, “Cuando tú no estás,” lyrics by Alfredo Le Pera and Mario Zoppi Battistella, music by Carlos Gardel and Marcel Lattes. Page 195, “Adiós muchachos,” lyrics by Cesar Vedani, music by Julio César Sanders.

  Designed by Adam Machacek

  Chronicle Books LLC

  680 Second Street

  San Francisco, California 94107

  www.chroniclebooks.com

  To Áureo Roldán

  Oh how I yearn for your gentle caress!

  Here I am stranded without money or friends.

  Who knows but one night I’ll be captured by death …

  Then it’s ‘Ciao,’ Buenos Aires, I’ll never see you again.

  —From a tango sung by Carlos Gardel

  Contents

  1. A Woman Scorned

  2. Rich Gigolo

  3. Humiliation

  4. Horns for Eduardo

  5. Smitten

  6. La Petisa

  7. Apologies

  8. A Desperate Request

  9. Cathy Escudero

  10. Carlos the Artist

  11. Ambition

  12. Shaken

  13. Death of a Crooner

  14. Moth to a Flame

  15. Spaghetti for Jesus

  16. Eskimos

  17. Santa, Baby

  18. Big Tits, Blue Hair

  19. Men Without Women

  20. I Am Beautiful

  21. Party Poopers

  22. Greta Garbo

  23. Inside, Outside

  24. Cops and Sobbers

  25. An Impromptu Diatribe

  26. C Rations

  27. Rude People

  28. Tiny Brains

  29. Intellectuals

  30. No Illusions

  31. The Man from Uruguay

  32. Death of El Coco

  33. Duende

  34. Handsome Anthony

  35. See You Later, Alligator

  36. Say “Cheese”

  37. Thanks for Listening

  38. Escape from Freedom

  39. Coffee with Jorge

  40. Cataclysms

  41. A Brand-New Hand

  42. Epiphany

  43. Six Roses

  44. Cherry Pie

  45. Why So Glum?

  46. Cheating

  47. ¿Qué Hora Es?

  48. Off to Mexico

  49. You Scared Me!

  50. The Gift

  51. Rock of Gibraltar

  52. Counting Sheep

  53. Insults

  54. A Ticket Out of the Ghetto

  55. Guitar Lessons

  56. Grief

  57. Flying to Morocco

  58. ¡Qué Quilombo!

  59. Balmy Weather

  60. Face-to-Face

  61. Adiós, Cocinero

  62. Last Words and Despedidas

  63. Memory Lane

  EPILOGUE: How to Eat an Empanada

  Cast of Characters

  Adriana

  Eduardo’s ex, who “hates” him.

  Alfonso

  A math genius with two fiancées.

  Aurelio Porta

  The man from Uruguay.

  Áureo Roldán

  Boss of the empanada stand.

  Blondie

  The narrator, a shy gringo.

  Carlos the Artist

  A Dadaist painter.

  Cathy Escudero

  A beautiful flamenco dancer.

  Chuy

  An obnoxious gigolo with just one hand.

  El Coco

  Luigi’s bizarre pal.

  Eddie Ortega

  Bagman for the Puerto Rican mob.

  Eduardo

  Adriana’s ex, an imaginary cuckold.

  Esther

  Wife of Carlos the Artist.

  Gino

  Tall, handsome, Roldán’s part-time helper.

  Greta Garbo

  Chuy’s “accountant.”

  Irene Dupree

  A waitress at the Downtown Café.

  Jorge

  Just a kid, but a great guitarist.

  Luigi

  The little guy with a burnt face.

  Martha

  She has blue hair and big tits.

  Molly

  Eduardo’s second wife.

  La Petisa

  Petite, bold, everybody’s girlfriend.

  Popeye

  The tattooed sailor with no teeth.

  Renata

  Alfonso’s passionate, crazy fiancée.

  Santiago Chávez

  A baker (who appears only once).

  Sofía

  Alfonso’s boring, pragmatic fiancée.

  1. A Woman Scorned

  Around ten P.M. one evening in early October a taxi veered to the MacDougal Street curb and a woman got out. Adriana, Eduardo’s ex-wife, stumbled on her way over to the empanada stand but a college kid wearing a CCNY sweatshirt caught her. Adriana shook him off irately. She was almost thirty, a few years older than Eduardo, and wore red high heels and a raincoat. Her hair was fetchingly tousled. She had a thin erotic face that was twisted in anger.

  “I’m looking for Eduardo,” she said in Spanish. “Where is that bastard?” Her words were slurred from drinking and she delivered them with a phony Castilian accent.

  “He hasn’t been around tonight,” Áureo Roldán explained politely. He was the cook at the stand, a fat man from Buenos Aires. In fact he owned the business, which was right in the middle of Greenwich Village between the Hip Bagel and the Figaro coffeehouse. “I haven’t seen Eduardo for a coupl
e of days,” he said.

  “You’re lying, jefe. I know he comes here all the time. He’s a prick and I want to kill him. He ruined my life, he brought me to this stinking country, and now I’m all alone and I can’t function because I’m so upset and I hate him.”

  Adriana burst into tears. She put her elbows on the stand’s window ledge facing the sidewalk, buried her face in her hands, and really sobbed, all the while excoriating Eduardo in language unbecoming to a female. Luigi slipped out of the narrow alley inside the smoky cubicle and put his arm around Adriana for comfort. But when he touched her she reacted as if a lightning bolt had struck, and, lurching away abruptly, she lost her balance, pitching onto the pavement.

  Alfonso and Popeye raced from the kiosk to help Adriana. But she got up quickly, shaking her finger at Luigi, who was a little guy with cauliflower ears and terribly burnt features. She yelled, “Stay away from me you ugly jerk!”

  Her face was already streaked with mascara. Alfonso said, “Calmate, vos. Nobody here wants to hurt you. We’re sorry about the divorce.”

  “No you’re not,” she hissed back at him. “You men are all alike. You enjoy hurting women.”

  Then she turned around and teetered into the street, waving for a taxi.

  Her sudden arrival and departure provoked a philosophical discussion among us about suffering: Who hurts more in a relationship, the man or the woman? Alfonso said, “The man does, but you don’t see it. We hide our emotions. Women yell and scream a lot, releasing all the tension. That’s why they live longer.”

  “But we treat them like dirt,” Roldán said, scooping an empanada from the grease bin and putting it on a paper plate set on a skinny counter between the alley and his cooking area, which was barely five feet square. The entire kiosk was only eight feet wide and seven deep. The empanadas Roldán sold were small fried pies filled with beef or cheese or pork, or quince and raisins. You could also buy soft drinks, pastelitos, and thimble cups of dulce de leche.

  “Women deserve what they get,” Gino said. “That’s their role in life.” Gino sometimes worked at the kiosk on Roldán’s night off. “Except for American chicks,” he added. “They are so spoiled. I think American men are hopeless.”

  Popeye was prematurely bald and had tattoos of big-breasted pinup girls on his biceps. He said, “I love the minas, and if they want to play I’m their guy. I’ve spent all my money wenching and I don’t regret a penny. But if they start to cry? It’s sayonara. I love pussy but I won’t tolerate sorrow.”

  Luigi remained silent, steaming in his own juices.

  “What do you think, blondie?” Alfonso asked me, wiping his horn-rimmed glasses clean. He was a mathematics genius getting a doctorate at NYU.

  I smiled. But what could I say to my new friends about this topic? At twenty-one and just out of college, I was very shy and still a virgin. It was the early 1960s, with no sexual revolution yet. Women to me were half demons, half angels, pitiless and exquisite, utterly mysterious and unapproachable.

  2. Rich Gigolo

  Popeye double-parked a diaper truck nearby and came over to the kiosk accompanied by another guy I hadn’t met before. The sliding window facing the sidewalk was open and Popeye put a dollar on the ledge. Inside the kiosk, in the cramped alley, Alfonso, Carlos the Artist, and I were watching a movie starring Jane Russell and Clark Gable on Roldán’s portable TV lodged on a shelf above the coffee machine. Carlos had straggly hair and a handlebar mustache. He fancied himself an existential Dadaist and worshiped Jean Cocteau.

  Popeye ordered a yerba mate for himself and a hot chocolate for his sidekick.

  “I have a new job,” he proclaimed. “Who wants to buy my nylons?” The boys pronounced his name “Po-PAY-shea.” Popeye pronounced his own name with a lisp because he lacked his four most prominent front teeth. He had once been a sailor in Argentina’s merchant marine.

  Alfonso pointed out, “The sign on that truck says ‘Diapers.’”

  “I sell nylons very cheaply, that’s why I drive a diaper truck. This is my friend Chuy.”

  Chuy greeted everyone and immediately began to talk about himself. He had an effeminate face, and his blond hair was cut in a pageboy. He had arrived stateside to have surgery done on his arm after losing his hand in a car accident. His own true love had been killed in the crash that robbed him of his hand, so naturally he was a sad man. When he felt really morose he took it out on other ladies. Chuy had a quality the pibas adored, he couldn’t explain exactly. But they fell hopelessly in love with him at first sight. To relieve his personal sorrow Chuy fucked these women until he felt happier again. If the minas were plentiful he only remained sad for short periods. Right now he had a half dozen girls on a weekly rotation taking care of his blues. The reason so many miserable men lived on this planet was that very few of them had balls the caliber of Chuy’s. “Tanto cojo las minas que tengo orquitis.”

  Alfonso said, “Che, get out of here, you’re stinking up the kiosk with your ego.”

  Chuy bristled. “Wait a minute, profe. You’re stinking up the kiosk with your envidia.”

  Carlos the Artist said, “Leave us alone you miserable buffoon. We’re watching television.”

  “I can see that,” Chuy said. “Jane Russell? This must be a circle jerk.”

  At that moment a pretty girl wearing Bermuda shorts strutted by walking a miniature poodle. Chuy whistled and dashed from the stand, following her.

  “Carajo,” Alfonso grumbled to Popeye. “Where did you pick up that bag of manure?”

  “He’s very rich,” Popeye said. “He has millions. He doesn’t even have to work. And what he says about his success with women is true. He has a book filled with their photographs. He can get you introductions for free. They’re all good girls and friends of his. I think we should be nice to him even if he’s a creep and that missing hand gives us the willies.”

  Just then a person the size of a mouse arrived at the sidewalk window wearing a black leather jacket, baggy jeans with rolled-up cuffs, and red Converse All-Stars. Eddie Ortega was an errand boy for some local shady characters. He had a crew cut and a little mustache. Roldán punched the NO SALE key on his register, removed a few bills from the drawer, and gave them to the Puerto Rican gofer who made a cryptic entry in his pocket notebook.

  After Eddie slithered off Alfonso said, “I think all the Chuys in the world should be locked in iron cages and hung from gibbets. I have no tolerance for that type of parasite.”

  Roldán immediately poured us free coffee refills in honor of gibbeting those bad Chuys.

  3. Humiliation

  The muchachos disliked Chuy for poking his book of girls in front of their noses, but nobody could refuse to look. Chuy commented salaciously about this piba or that chica—girls, girls, and more girls. How could a man as oily as Chuy be that successful with them?

  According to Alfonso, “It’s his filthy money. Also they feel sorry for him because of that hand.”

  Carlos the Artist agreed. “You always see beautiful women with cripples.”

  Luigi said, “The more you’re a louse the more they spread their legs.”

  Carlos said, “With your face, Luigi, you should have a dozen muchachas crawling all over you.”

  “My burned skin is too much for them.” Luigi took a small bottle from his pocket and squeezed drops into his eyes. “It strikes fear instead of sympathy.”

  Speak of the devil. Chuy arrived at the kiosk with a statuesque snob on his arm who acted like Greta Garbo. She wore a black pants suit, sunglasses despite the night darkness, and was smoking an English cigarette. They stayed at the sidewalk window because the rest of us had filled up the narrow alley for patrons inside the cubicle. It would have been polite to move out of the alley for Greta Garbo, and normally Alfonso would have initiated the gesture. But the snob had put him in a petulant mood so he didn’t budge.

  Roldán said, “Caballeros, there is a lady outside on cold pavement in the wind.”

  The lady was f
rom Venezuela. She barked at the cocinero: “I can handle it, tubby. Give me a chicken empanada.”

  “Make that two,” Chuy said, taking out his wallet and filtering through a bunch of twenties before he procured a ten and slapped it down expansively. We couldn’t take our eyes off this crisp bill which had emerged from such a fat stack of cash.

  “Wait a minute,” Alfonso said. “Your money’s no good here. Take it back. I’m buying.”

  Chuy said, “Don’t patronize me, profe. You’re always broke.”

  From his own billfold Alfonso removed the only piece of foliage, a ten-dollar bill. He set it on the counter between the alley and the grease bin.

  “I insist,” he announced grandly. “Nothing is too good for my friend Chuy and his novia.”

  “I’m not his fiancée,” said Greta Garbo. “I’m his accountant.”

  “Order two empanadas apiece,” Alfonso said derisively. “Live it up while you’re still young.”

  The cook wrapped the empanadas in napkins, put them on paper plates, and placed the plates before Chuy and the accountant.

  Chuy caught Alfonso by surprise by saying, “Thank you, we accept your gift with pleasure.”

  Now there was nothing for Roldán to do but scoop in Alfonso’s sawbuck. He rang it up on the till and delivered the change, carefully counting pennies into the professor’s palm. You could tell he was sorry to see a man as broke as Alfonso being one-upped by a braggart like Chuy.

  The rich gigolo said, “You think you can insult me but you can’t.” He bit off the top of his empanada, shook in Tabasco, and took a hefty bite. “Mmm, this is good.”

  Then he fetched the book of photographs from his briefcase and leaned through the window, extending the album over the grease bin toward Alfonso.

  “Anybody you want, profe. Just tell me. I’ll make the introductions.”

  In English, Alfonso said, “When snowballs melt in hell, you punk.”