The Stallone Canticle

Sunday’ Stories

(Una aparición americana)

Nota hallada en reverso de Pedro Páramo

transcrita sin corrección ni comentario editorial

Lo que sigue apareció escrito a lápiz, con trazo grueso y desesperado, en el reverso de una edición deteriorada de Pedro Páramo.

El libro fue encontrado por un estudiante en Polish Hill, dentro de una bolsa plástica que también contenía un guante de boxeo zurdo, una cajetilla de Camel vacía y una nota que decía simplemente:

“You don’t need to win. Just finish the round.”

No se han podido verificar ni la autoría ni la fecha exacta del texto. Algunos afirman que es parte del diario inédito de Ismar Arias. Otros dicen que es una visión inducida por fiebre o falta de hierro.

Su título, escrito a mano en la primera línea, es:

STALLÓNIDAS

Woke up again on the floor, third day without eggs. The room’s breath smelled like metal and unspoken prayers. There were coins on the windowsill, fifteen cents, a button, and a fly that never left. He stared at the ceiling. It stared back.

Mouth dry. Body part stone. Part meat. Part idea.

Write it. Or die.

He had said it the night before to the lamp. The lamp didn’t blink.

He was born a slur, a knot in the mouth, a vowel too long. Sylvester Gardenzio Stallone. No one said it right, not even the mother who brought him into the world in a New York hospital that smelled like bleach and spaghetti. The forceps that crushed his face, the slurred mouth that followed him like a curse. Kids called him “Stallionface.” Girls didn’t.

He sold his dog. That was real. Sold it for fifty bucks outside a liquor store.

He cried that night, like a boxer who forgot to swing.

But the thing was in him. The story. Not a man. A myth:

A southpaw. Philadelphia. Meat locker. Bell rings. Gets hit. Doesn’t fall.

The movie was America. The real America. Not the generals, not the news, not the senators with suits and CIA ties. No. The busboy. The nobody. The one who gets up.

That’s the twist, right? The plot twist they don’t teach in screenwriting class: he doesn’t win. But he finishes.

He wrote it with twenty-five dollars in the bank. By hand. In long, sloppy loops. No Final Draft. No script doctor. Just sweat and knuckles. 84 hours. One draft. Then another. Then forty pages in one night and then a rewrite on a sandwich wrapper.

He shopped it. They liked it. The story.

They said: “We’ll buy it. We’ll cast a real actor.”

He said: “No. You get me, or you don’t get Rocky.”

They laughed. Then they didn’t.

He got two hundred grand. He got the dog back.

Cut to: training montage.

Cut to: steps.

Cut to: the anthem in the background, not the national one, the other one:

Gonna fly now, flyin’ high now…

He wasn’t a writer. He became one. By necessity. Like Christ becoming carpenter. Like Bolívar becoming legend.

No plot without pain. No fist without fall. No film without failure.

He never said it out loud, but the voice in him, the slow one, the thick, impossible voice, whispered one thing the night he typed FADE OUT:

The underdog is the American god.

And god got gloves.