MANA: Rocco

Shown: Upper- "Rocco Zarate", Lower- Santa "The Saint" Castillo-Reyes and Martin StLouis

The Mana Farms story line frequently contains mature language, topics, and situations. The characters within are fictional beings with weaknesses and faults, and I cannot promise you that you will like them for what they believe, say and do.

New readers, it is strongly recommended you begin this series from the very first story...which can be found here: [link] Thanks!


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It made no sense to follow her. Maria had always allowed herself to be vilified even as a small girl when she was just a brown twig that had followed the neighborhood boys along pestering them to belong to their gang. Her father had just moved the family from Cali to Cartagena on the Caribbean coast where the man who had been educated in America, and was perfectly fluent in English and who had a wife from Puerto Rico felt more comfortable. His eldest, however, a small girl who had taken great pride living in the sports capital of her country was not. It didn’t matter to her that crime had been a serious problem for her family in Cali, Maria missed the green mountains encircling her in its heavily forested arms and the familiar skyscrapers interrupting her view of heaven and the roar of the stands from the dozens of arenas and fields where men in jerseys entertained the people.

In Cartagena, there were boats sloshing in their slips, and tourists in the streets, and large hotels with American sounding names and perfectly manicured gardens and fountains, and music tumbling out of alleys and underneath the awnings of café’s. There were a hundred little bays, full of a hundred little ships, on their way in or out of the Panama Canal and they were populated by hungry passengers always looking for food and pleasure. The city of Cartagena was the last stop before the Pacific, or the first stop into the Atlantic and it was a city full of celebration and costume and flavour. She was a dancer of a city, in a bright red dress, sweeping you up into her arms before pushing you back out to sea in the morning. Her mother, an educated woman herself once, had said that Cartagena was like an opera; you would not understand what was being spoken half of the time, but at least the music of the city was beautiful.

And this was how Maria came to be away from her home and sitting on a bench on Carrera 3 every evening for months, watching the tourists as they milled about the city, or sat in restaurants and chirped to one another like birds in the rainforest singing away in the treetops. Sometimes she would practice whistling back, and the birds would smile at her and give her some paper money or a few coins for taking their pictures, or helping with directions, or helping them explain to the waiters what it is that they wanted. It was here that she earned her first few American dollars and spent it on a little freedom in a glass bottle of Coca-cola. And it was here, avoiding the monotony of chores at her own family’s business, that she learned all of the most important words in German, and in Portuguese, and in Chinese, and practiced her English until the tourists were so impressed they began to think she worked for the ships. And it was here, fleeing her mother’s insistence that she learn to cook, and sew, and raise her sisters, that she first came across the boys of Boca Grande; a ragtag collection of pickpockets, cons, and dragracers. They were mostly over fourteen and she was two years their junior; still bright faced and innocent about the woman that was Cartagena, still oblivious to the whore that had been Cali. “We don’t want hens clucking around here,” they had told her when she first began following them around. Fourteen year old boys had no use for an anorexic, flat chested, tom boy.

Rocco, however, had disagreed. He himself was fourteen and recognized that the little brown girl from the school he barely attended could do things they could not and could do more once she grew up and realized what Cartagena was. For one, she could read and speak english; the fact that she often sat there reading their books suggested as much. For two, she still had enough naivete that tourists trusted her. And for three, they really shouldn’t have. Her large brown eyes were wide and sincere, but no one ever forgot the day Camilo Nunoz grabbed her between the legs and she pulled out a knife from her pocket and cut him across the forearm, his blood spurting in an arc over his head. The rest of the boys had jumped back, but Rocco had laughed out loud and taken her to a little corner store and bought her a small ceramic rooster with a colourful glazed tail that he fit into the palm of her hand telling her that “she had more cock than Camilo Nunoz” and if she could make her way up their ranks he’d buy her another one. Rocco already knew that even though she barely ate or drank, there was a sort of inner strength embroidered into the borders of her so that she seemed to glow and buzz around the edges like an electric fence and the hum of her, the hum of those dangerous barbed edges was almost as intoxicating as winning a race.

Almost.

He should have felt bad, he realized later, for leaving the girl behind when he made his way to the race track, trading steering wheels for stirrups, and the spray of ocean in his eyes for the spray of dirt flying up from behind the hooves of horses. It made no sense for her to follow him to where he was going, but he should have known better. She had lost her virginity to him, and girls never forgot that the way young men did. Seeing her tear streaked face at the rail that morning he rode by on his horse and saw her standing there took him aback. She must have loved him to come all that way, and it was his fault for making her believe that she should. As it was, he couldn’t help but dismount and pull her from the rail, and into his arms, and take her to a hayshed where he knew a few of the grooms would probably watch them through the slats.

“Teach me to ride,” was what she’d said as soon as he’d rolled off of her.

Still high off the smooth colombian cocaine that was her warm little body against his, he sighed and agreed. After all, he figured, there would be something electric about putting this little girl rooster on a great big stallion. She would probably fall, and probably get hurt, and Rocco knew that her eyes would light up in anger over the failure and the muscles in her forearms would get hard, and then he himself would get hard, and he’d have to light another cigarette just to steady the urgent maddening twitch in his scrotum. And it had almost worked out that way.

Almost.

Four years later, Maria Valencia had a collection of porcelain and ceramic roosters to rival the most popular gift shops on the coast and she’d earned every single one of them. The one that was small and silver with a jeweled emerald tail was the latest. She was getting good and Rocco was beginning to feel...envious. The grooms began to joke and tease that Maria Valencia had cut off Rocco Zarate’s penis and begun wearing it herself. Rocco’s fists clenched and unclenched at their abuse, and when he realized that their abuse was the result of hers, he kicked her dog to death and then lied when she asked him about it.

“You’ll have to stop her,” his agent had said.

“How?”

The agent grinned, a large cigar poking out long and erect from between his teeth. “Well,” he began, “how else do you end a woman’s career?”

Rocco had turned and stared out at the track for a long while after that and when he proposed to her a week later he’d breathed a sigh of relief when she said “yes.”

And now his wife was in America. And six years ago she had left him. And Rocco remembered it well. Remembered finding the little multicolored pills in a round small flat disk inside her gear bag, and rage had consumed him. “Honor and obey was the vow you took,” he had shouted to her, seeing her curled up into the bookshelf of their bedroom where he had finally cornered her. “And you to love and cherish,” she’d shot back. And it had stung, because Rocco did love her. Had always loved her. And what had she done for the last five years now than humiliate and betray him? If she had loved him as he loved her she would have seen the pain her success caused him and would have retreated into the home. In his anger he had struck the bookshelf and it had fallen down on top of her with a great shudder and a thud, and then he had gotten a machete and began hacking away at it while it still lied on top of her and he had frightened her until she began screaming and the neighbors had called the police.

When he emerged from jail the next morning, Maria Valencia and all of her ceramic roosters were gone. Years later he would hear tales of a Maria Castillo-Reyes riding up a storm in Hollywood, breaking records and breaking hearts, and Rocco would say to himself, I loved a woman like that once, but she died and was sainted and left me to what? At first, he figured she might have gone to Puerto Rico, to her mother’s family, to ride the horses there. But when he arrived he discovered only a pack of a wild dogs recalling the scent of a bitch in heat none of them had ever managed to mount, and a series of shattered track records. He sat down on the bench and lit another cigarette marveling again at the little brown twig of a girl with no breasts and no period that had followed him around Cartagena, and now he was following her.

It was one thing for her to ride better than him, to leave him, and to leave a trail of success in her wake. He had read the papers about the horse “Omen” and the turf-winning grinder, “Xanthippus” owned by some very wealthy Argentines who wanted to try their luck in the United States, where purses were fat and the women fatter. He’d read the now famous article by that Maxwell Turner, the one that had first coined her the “Saint” and suspected the man who had written it loved her too. And when he saw the very first “L” flashing under the wire in February, his heart had fallen down to the floor, humiliated and crushed yet again, especially when the other jockey had flashed it himself in reply a week or two later.

There was a part of him ready now, to compromise. He wanted to meet this Laurence. He wanted to see her again. He realized now he had something she probably desperately wanted. A divorce. And only he could allow it. Surely, she’d remembered what she learned in Cartagena about blackmail. She could agree to a little compensation after all she’d put him through. He was still her husband and that miserable little girl had left him empty handed, with nothing but a shitty career she’d publicly bested him at and publicly cuckolded him through. Six years of impotence on the track and in the bed since. So many women scoffing at him, gathering up their clothes from the floor when he couldn’t finish. She’d have to compensate him, she’d have to, said the little blonde girl from America who had met him for lunch outside the track in Puerto Rico, and she already had a sum in mind that might help him ease his pain.


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