Butterfly Winter Read Online Free Page B

congressmen with darker tans. When he speaks to the guava plantation workers here in Courteguay he is black as onyx, his skin glistens. His consultants spray his face with black dye. They have to burn his black-collared shirts after every appearance.
    “The magic of leadership is gone. The public need to see coins pulled from ears, snakes curled from every orifice, they want to see beautiful girls disappear from before their very eyes. And can I help it if the beautiful girls always reappear in my bed?” The Wizard shrugs and smiles.
    The Gringo Journalist throws up his hands.
    “I’m not sure this is very valuable for the book I’m writing. I want to write a true history of Courteguay.”
    “Nothing is true. The concept is unknown in Courteguay.” The Wizard frowns, takes a bite of vanilla ice cream and hibiscus flowers. He chews thoughtfully.

FIVE
THE WIZARD
    I t was during the sixth month of his mother’s pregnancy, that, inside her belly, Julio Pimental began to throw the sidearm curve, says the Wizard.
    He glances surreptitiously at the Gringo Journalist to be certain he has his full attention.
    “Yi! Yi!” screamed Fernandella Pimental, as Julio went into the stretch, hiding the ball carefully in his glove so the batter could not glimpse the way he gripped it.
    “Yii!” shrilled Fernandella, as Julio’s arm snaked like a whip in the direction of third base, while the ball, traveling the path of a question mark, jug-hooked its way to the plate, and smacked into the catcher’s mitt held by Julio’s twin brother, Esteban. The Wizard tips back on his cushioned rattan chair. The boy with the starched white hat brings them refills for their iced tea.
    Many years later, on her deathbed, Fernandella Pimental, wizened and grey with age, attended by servants, small as a child in the queen-sized bed in the marble-pillared mansion her sons built for her, recalled the time of her pregnancy. She was residing on the outskirtsof San Cristobel, which, though scarcely more than a village, was the second largest city in Courteguay. She and her husband lived in a cardboard hut with a precariously balanced slab of corrugated tin for a roof. The hovel was located on an arid hillside, surrounded by a few prickly vines, always in full view of the frying sun. Her husband, Hector, a sly young man with slicked-down hair, drooping eyelids, and a face thin as a ferret’s, spent his life at the baseball grounds, winning or losing a few centavos on the outcome of each day’s games.
    Hector was proud of Fernandella’s belly, which by only the fourth month was big as a washtub, forcing her to walk splay-legged as she trekked out each morning in search of fresh water and fresh fruit.
    Fernandella had been the beauty of San Cristobel, Queen of the annual festival at St. Ann, Mother of Mary Church, (though there was never such a church), fine-boned and light of foot, not at all like the peasant girls Hector Pimental was used to, who were heavy-thighed with faces like frying pans. Fernandella had courage as well as beauty; she could have done much better for herself. But the final evening of the festival she had walked the boisterous streets by herself, a yellow scarf twined in her long, straight hair. A summer storm hung on the horizon like a rumor; heat lightning peppered the distant sky.
    As she walked she saw Hector leaning against the front of a booth that sold tortillas, and, as her clear, ironic eyes touched his, she trembled, as much from the night and the excitement of the festival as from the actual vision of the dark young man with hooded eyes who wore a black silk shirt open to the waist. She was enthralled as much by what he stood for as the man himself. For Hector Pimental had an aura of danger about him, a sexuality that widened Fernandella’s nostrils as she breathed the tainted air.
    They exchanged a few words. Hector feigned indifference, something Fernandella could not understand, or tolerate, for as the most