In the grotesquely comic world of Cuban writer Guillermo Rosales’ collection, Leapfrog and Other Stories, children are the original criminals and counter-culture outlaws. Agar’s Tia Dorita asks despairingly, “Have you ever seen a being more diabolic than a child?”
Agar is Leapfrog’s scrappy protagonist, a sensitive and picked-on young boy growing up with his parents, Mama Pepita and Papa Lorenzo, and his friends, the infamous West Side Boys, in revolutionary Cuba.
The year is 1957, and it’s hard to tell the difference between revolution and regime: Tommy Tomorrow’s spaceship is propelling toward some new calamity in space, somewhere in the far-off West, Wild Bill Hickok is polishing his six-shooter for the next duel, Che Guevara and Fidel Castro are swatting mosquitoes in the Sierra Maestra mountains, Scrooge McDuck is counting his gold coins, The West Side Boys are crucifying lizards, and Papa Lorenzo is in his Closet of Souvenirs, dusting off Father Stalin’s picture and dreaming of the revolution.
The titular novella takes place over the summer when Agar is a pre-teen—old enough to be frightened by and curious of the world of sex, identity, and power, but young enough to lack much agency. When he can escape the torment of Papa’s Lorenzo’s beatings and Mama Pepita’s tongue lashings, he joins the West Side Boys in the rosemary field behind the park, where there is at least the possibility of freedom and belonging. “To be like us,” they challenge, “You have to burn down houses, climb trees, piss far and wide and read the Count of Eros and see what you can get away with.” But acceptance by the group comes at a cost. When Agar and the West Side Boys come across a dead pregnant mare, Agar takes part in its symbolic rape, exploring the uneasy relationship between evil and knowledge:
[Agar] took the rosemary and sunk it in forcefully, digging into the orfice, until a trickle of whitish liquid came out.
‘She came, dude,’ Henry whispered. And Agar felt the boy’s hand trembling on his shoulder. ‘That’s it! That’s it!’ The sun was beating down on the rosemary bush and a halo spiraled around their heads.
Agar felt two urges. One was tugging at his body, pushing him to run away from there forever. The other directed his arm, making him sink it in up to the hilt.
He felt disgusted, but strangely satisfied.
With knowledge, Agar realizes, comes power. And it is power that gives Agar the choice of whether to belong or not. A recognition of one always leads to a need to explore the other.
This theme of belonging and power via sexual knowledge is repeated in most of the other five short stories in the collection. In “The Phantom Bunker,” Danilo Castenallos, who could be a grown Agar, becomes a murderer in a Raskolnikov-like blundered attempt to pay for his escape from a country in which the revolution has become the regime.
However, instead of helping him to flee, his actions, like his Russian predecessor’s, take him further into the darkness of an anti-government criminal underworld where he meets a gang of sinister revolutionaries. To secure his life and his position in the group (the two are the same), Danilo is urged to fight a man far stronger than himself. Coro, the group’s iconic leader, assures Danilo, “Sex and courage go together.” Indeed, it’s only when Danilo is threatened with rape that he is able to conquer his opponent, and Coro tells him:
‘Do you see, Mr. Castellanos? You’re capable of defending your ass like a tiger, and yet you’re not capable of reacting the same way to the daily rape which Corenelio Rojas subjects you. Don’t you live like a dog? Isn’t enough that the tyrant violates your most basic rights daily? You can’t speak freely, you can’t read whatever you like, you can’t travel around the world, you have to go to the agricultural fields without complaint as the tyrant commands […] You have already been raped, my dear friend. Your only redemption is to participate in this conspiracy to execute Corenelio Rojas.’
For each of Rosales’ protagonists, freedom is the bitter fruit of evil that, once tasted, compels the eater to an awareness that can only lead to a rejection of oppression and a lifetime of exile.
Rosales was, of course, well aware of such choices. A double exile, having fled Castro’s regime in 1979, he was then rejected by Cuban-Americans in Florida where he settled, existing in the isolating conditions he often ascribed to his characters.
Along with Halfway House, a novel informed by Rosales’ harrowing experiences, Leapfrog and Other Stories comprises the sum total of the author’s work. The rest was destroyed by Rosales before his death by suicide in 1993. Both are translated by Anna Kushner. Though Leapfrog first gained recognition in Cuba as a finalist for the prestigious Casa de las Americas award in 1968, it was never actually published in Rosales’ own country or in his own time. According to the New Directions website, years after his death his sister is reported to have told The Miami Herald that
Rosales felt he hadn’t won the prize because his book lacked sufficient leftist fervor, and that subtle critiques of cruel children and hypocritical adults throughout his playful recollections had clearly “rankled” state officials.
The novel was published as El Juego de la Viola in Spain in 1994, a year after Rosales’ death. In the novel’s introduction, novelist and journalist Norberto Fuentes mourns the loss of Rosales and his works:
Can you imagine what American literature would be without a Poe or a Wolfe, or French literature without Baudelaire or Camus, or Russian literature without Artsybashev or Akhmatova, just to name the most secretive and hidden writers? Well, then we Cubans have to accept our own national literature without Guillermo Rosales.
I think you’ll agree with my wish that Rosales had caught a ride with Tommy Tomorrow or rode off into the sunset with Wild Bill Hickock instead of committing himself to the ultimate exile. But, as we know, freedom and belonging are complicated. I have only have to think back to my own childhood (the one I wince to remember) to be reminded how my need to belong is entangled with sex and violence. When he’s giving it—whether it’s his ultra-real portraits of despair and cruelty, his rejection of broken and disabused dreams, or his desperate longing for the sublime pleasure that makes us human—Rosales gives it to us good.
