Boys from Dolores T/C

Miami Springs "This has been a difficult year for the Sad Ones," Pedro Haber said, but before he could continue, there was a metallic purr, which grew quickly into a feedback loop. The sound squawked over the ballroom, a room full of wrinkled men in brown suits and ageless women in immovable bouffants. Pedro tried to continue. He said, "Four who regularly attend these reunions have fallen, God has them in all his glor" But he was cut off now, fatally. The screech made even a busboy put down his bread rolls and cover his ears. A devilishskeeeeeeeTWAAAAAAAAAweeeeeeSKEEEEErefracted off the rented glassware and the golf club plates, a piercing white noise like a fax machine in your head. Old, trembling hands rose reaching for hearing aids. Pedro, class of '59, stood calmly and stared at the microphone. One more betrayal in a lifetime of disappointments. SKWEEEEEEEEEE-BWAAAAAAAAAA-SOOOOOOOOOO. Pedro ran the reunions because he was the most stalwart, reliable, and capable of the men from the old days. But this was exactly why he disliked being called on to manage things, yet again. He was a friend to everyone. He did nothing to deserve this. Stress was bad for a man his age. But duty was duty: at sixty-two years of age, he was one of the younger men in the room. Unplug. Fiddle with knobs. Move cables. Start over. Forget to replug. Replug. Readjust knobs. Tap tap. "Can everyone hear me?" He was back in business. But nobody, all night, could handle the microphone. Not even the singer. Pedro Haber didn't actually start by saying that it was "a difficult year for the Sad Ones." He had said that it was a difficult year for theDolorinos. The word is rooted indolor, meaning "pain, ache; sadness, grief." When Pedro saidLos Dolorinosit sounded like all of those things, a world of aching and grieving, the ones who suffer. But it had another meaning, for these were the men who, as boys, came from a happy place. Dolores was their old school, the Catholic academy, run by Jesuits. The Colegio de Dolores where they had all met had been a boarding school in eastern Cuba, once upon a time. The sadness had come later. Everyone in the room, from the busboys on up, spoke the twin languages of this nation-within-a-nation. But not everyone is equally ambidextrous, and thought and speech leapt between Cuba and the United States. At the far right of the room, near the entrance, was a special table reserved for VIPs and the guests of honor. Pedro Haber and I were sitting there, and the accents and vocabulary at this table were a mixture of proper upper-crust Castilian Spanish and plain American English. Two spots over to my right was Pedro Roig, a Dolores alumnus and Bay of Pigs veteran, who was now head of TV Marti in Washington. Immediately on my left was Lundy Aguilar, retired from his professorship at Georgetown University. And directly across the table was the Reverend Father Juan Manuel Dorta-Duque, one of the last surviving teachers from the old school in Cuba. He was a Jesuit, or more properly, a member of the Society of Jesus, perhaps the most influential of all Catholic orders. Dorta-Duque was eighty-four years old now, but that wasn't old enough to have known Fidel Castro. Dorta-Duque told me that he didn't arrive at Dolores until 1951. But he had known all the Jesuits who had taught Fidel, as well as some of the younger boys from those days, or the younger brothers of the boys who had studied with Fidel. Dorta-Duque lived in a Jesuit home now, retired from all work but that of joining his fellow Jesuits in their duties of worship and contemplation. "Yes, I remember them," Dorta-Duque said, leaning forward. He meant that he remembered the students and teachers from long befSymmes, Patrick is the author of 'Boys from Dolores T/C', published 2007 under ISBN 9780375422836 and ISBN 0375422838.