Gil closed the week by taking a break with himself. Among the books that the pandemic disappeared, Gamés found this one: Water everywhere by Leonardo Padura (Tusquets Editores, 2019), a volume of personal essays, reports, stories, chronicles of his life, of Cuba, of the novel. Among them, Gilga stopped at a text: “Dreaming in Cuban: chronicle in nine innings”, a memory of his love for baseball, the ball game. Gil proposes some narrative capsules. Here we go.
***
That Havana of 1860 was the one to which, after a few years of American student stay, a group of young people who in New York, Philadelphia and Boston had become fond of the practice of a new sport called baseball, that was sweeping the Yankees of the new northern cities. It was a sport with complicated regulations, in which, together with physical skill, mental agility and depth were necessary, and which, unlike other ball games in vogue at the time or created later, was not considered as a fight between two armies in a combat field with the objective of taking the enemy square. Baseball assumed its triumphs with a different philosophy: the hero was the player who managed to return the most times to the house from which he had left (the home), and the winning team which, together, with the collaboration and skill of all its sportmen, sometimes achieved that triumphant return.
***
Baseball, music, culture and politics coincided on a sports field in one of the richest and most dynamic civilizations in the process of definitive formation of the Cuban identity.
***
Baseball, ball, is a sport, but it is also a way of understanding life (a philosophy?). And even to live it. In my case I can assure you that I am a writer thanks to the fact that I am not a baseball player. A good ballplayer.
***
When I discovered that I would never be a fast pitcher or a power hitter and had to recognize that elite baseball was not a category I could get into, I decided very rationally that if I was not going to be a player, then I would be a sportscaster. But that dream was also truncated because, even though I had the required high qualifications, when I finished my pre-university studies, they informed me that that year there would be no enrollment in the University School of Journalism, since someone had considered that there were enough journalists in the country . With my dreams lost, I ended up at the School of the University of Havana, where what was going to be my dream destination was waiting for me, although now I think it was written in my chromosomes. Because it was there when I realized that other classmates were writing stories and poems where my latent competitive spirit as a baseball player pushed me in that direction. If others wrote, why not me? Thus, out of pure competitive spirit, I began to write and entered the definitive path of what my life has been: that of a frustrated baseball player turned writer.
***
Although I couldn’t be a star in the fields of baseball, and I couldn’t even work as a sportswriter specializing in baseball, my passion for that tangled and too cerebral sport never disappeared (nor has it disappeared). I was never cured of the “vice of the ball”.
***
After that Almendares baseball uniform my father bought me before I was a year old, I didn’t have a full suit again until 1968, when my uncle Min emigrated to the United States and gave me the one I used to wear. That revolutionary decade of the 1960s, in which even the character of baseball on the island changed, was so lacking that it became impossible to even get a baseball suit.
***
Like every omicron week, Gil has a drink with three true friends. As Gilga let flow a modest cascade of amber brought from Glenfiddich, he circulated this phrase from Padura: “And now, is the game over? Let’s hope not. Because it hurts a lot to lose pride, not to have a good dream”.
Gil leaves
Gil GBesides
