The Lazarus Rumba (17 page)

To the Mountain!

Alicia Lucientes had tried to resist the richness of guava milk, even though every other day when doña Adela came back from Margaret's distribution line on the hills by the yanqui base, her daughter had a glass and her sister—whom doña Adela had slowly allowed to be received at their breakfast table, and relenting, had learned to care for, to hold (as she had wanted to do on that rainy afternoon when she first met her), to treat, as if she were her own—had a glass and her mother herself had a glass and she offered to pour Alicia some, and at first Alicia waved her off but after a moment she said: “Bueno, un poquito, dos deditos nada más.” And her mother poured her un poquito, just a bit, two fingers' worth in her glass and Alicia swirled it as they eyed her and took it all down in one gulp. After she got up and left, straightening her skirt, hiding all outward signs that that one simple tasting, ese poquito, had left her yearning for bucketfuls of more guava milk, her daughter, her mother, and her sister had one more glass, finishing off the first liter. “El resto para mañana.” Doña Adela put away the guava milk in one of the two barren refrigerators, and Marta and Teresita could hardly wait for tomorrow.

Those nights, Alicia stayed over to sleep at her mother's house. Before dawn she went to the refrigerator and carefully pulled apart the tinfoil seal in one of the two remaining liters, pinching it right under the lip of the bottle and lifting it slowly, to have un poquito mas and fill the gap in the liter with cold water and reseal it and shake it, no harm done. Once, her mother caught her putting back the liter in the wrong refrigerator. “¿Qué haces mi vida?”

“Nada. I can't sleep.” Alicia kissed her mother and walked out of the kitchen. After that, doña Adela overpoured when her daughter asked for un poquito, dos deditos nada más. She would pour six or seven fingers' worth, and Alicia would drink it, pretending not to notice.

When production of guava milk stopped in the second week of August, because it was rumored that a band of wild women was threatening Mingo's life, Alicia also pretended not to miss it. And when her mother and Marta came back from the bodega on Mondays with their ration of a half-liter of regular white milk for each adult and the one weekly liter allotted to the child, and she poured Teresita a glass and Marta a glass and herself a glass, Alicia refused.

“¡No, que va, que voy a tomar esa mierda!” Then her daughter began to follow her example and refuse the white milk, so Alicia forced herself to drink half a glass, as they all forced themselves to drink it for its nutritional value, though this stuff was watery and probably nutrient-free and milk would never taste like milk again.

One morning, Marta did not show up for breakfast, and when Alicia arrived with her daughter from her house, fresh from a morning bath, in crispy-ironed summer dresses, doña Adela sat alone at the kitchen table, her head propped up on her hands, her eyes bleary, her ash-colored hair sprouting every which way, like the ghosts of weeds.

“Se ha ido,” she said. “I couldn't stop her. She told me that she doesn't belong in this house anyway. She is right you know … I never should have learned to love her.”

“No hables boberías, mamá. Gone? Gone where?”

“Where all the young women are going, mija, to the mountain, where they can feed themselves.”

“A ver a Mingo,” Teresita chanted, “a ver a Mingo. To the mountain!”

“Don't let this one out of your sight.” Alicia led her daughter by her hand to her grandmother.

“I didn't
let
Marta go … and what power did I have over her anyway. She was never mine. And where are
you
going?”

“To find my sister.”

“Yo quiero ir, mamita!” the girl shouted. “To the mountain. ¡A ver a Mingo!”

“No.” The grandmother put her hand over the child's mouth. “¡No, por el amor de Dios!”

Alicia left that very morning for Mingo's finca, packing only a change of clothes, the ivory-handled stiletto she had once taken from her husband, and an army canteen (also her late husband's) full of fresh water and a dash of sugarcane juice. It was overcast and the hot and the gray-green sky seemed to be slowly descending on the earth. The trek up the mountain on the gravelly dirt road that led directly to Mingo's finca took over three hours. She stopped twice to pick mangoes off the pregnant boughs, salmon- and lavender- and yellow-skinned, tempting as the fruit that never falls in paradise. Easily they were tugged off the branches, as if in a moment their own weight would have detached them. The first time, Alicia peeled the skin off with her teeth and bit into the mango and tasted not the firm fibry sweet pulp that the skin of such fruit promised, but rather an acid mush so strong and foul that it had corroded the pit and crumbled it to small pieces. She spit it out and gargled with water and washed her chin furiously. The second time, about an hour later up the mountain, having spit out the last trace of the first fruit and too hungry to resist, Alicia picked another heavy-with-promise mango, now more careful, peeling the skin back with the ivory-handled stiletto, holding it at arm's reach. This time, the mango's flesh was tender and it was the right hue of orange-yellow and it was sweet. Before moving on up the mountain, Alicia ate three mangoes off the same branch with so much relish that she stained her summer dress with the juices dripping from her chin. The fruits gave her strength and in less than half an hour Mingo's finca cottage was within sight. She waited, resting under the shade of a royal palm and sipping her sweetened water, not knowing yet how to proceed, how to confront Mingo, where to begin looking for her sister. At three in the afternoon, her stomach began to turn. At four, she heaved up chunks of unchewed, undigested mango flesh coated with a grainy crimson gravy. She heaved till her stomach was squeezing on itself like an empty clenched fist. She covered the mess with dirt and she washed her mouth with the sweet water and she napped on a rope hammock that was stretched out not far from Mingo's cottage, lulling herself to sleep with deep breaths that eased her nausea.

When she awoke it was dark and there was a sealed liter bottle full of guava milk resting on her belly. She cracked the seal and drank half of it. It lent her back some strength. She wandered away from the vicinity of the cottage—which was sealed from the inside with plywood shutters—down to the rivershore. She heard water splashing and giggles and when she moved closer, not bothering to hide her approach, she saw shadows in the water, some nearer to her, waist-deep, others beyond these, with only their heads poking out of the silver water, the moonbeams gleaming off their wet hair, and beyond them, on the far shore, there was a shadow wider and heavier than all the others around which the smaller shadows danced like so many happy moons around Jupiter, their legs kicking up above the surface of the water and crashing back down with a fountainlike splattering, around and around the roly-poly gyrating center shadow, a tropical mazurka.

“Marta … Martica,” Alicia called out in a voice just above a whisper. One of the figures on the nearer shore turned its head and then signaled towards the others and swam towards them. “¡Vámonos! ¡Vámonos de aquí!”

All of the lithe figures scattered to the far shore and ran from the river, leaving the heavy shadow with his arms waving, imagining himself a conductor, still turning and turning on its own axis, not ceasing till he noticed his sudden solitude and then he froze and, with his arms still extended, dove in and swam to the near shore of the river. Alicia did not move as the heavy shadow crawled out of the river and approached her. With her right hand behind her she clutched tight the ivory handle of her husband's stiletto. By its walk, she knew who the shadow was. When he got close enough, she saw that Mingo was naked, his legs covered with wet fur, still barrel-chested but his legs grown more monumental since she last saw him, his penis half-blooming, horizontal, his arms thicker knit with muscle than she remembered. Alicia did not move. She could not see the old Mingo's face in the moonlight for it was masked with a classic scowl, like the villain's in yanqui cartoons, the brow furrowed, the eyebrows bent downward towards each other, his lips flat and the whole face pushing outward. “What are you doing on my land?”

Before Alicia could answer, Mingo raised his hand and swung it down, heavy as a bearpaw, and knocked from Alicia's left hand the half-liter of guava milk she had yet to drink. As the milk spilled, Alicia reached for it and Mingo kicked it away with his bare foot, his knee catching Alicia on the left side of the face and knocking her over. When he saw the knife, Mingo leaned down to her and stuck his tongue out, which was long and hoary, and he bleated like a dueling ram and his head trembled and then, backing off, he left her there. After the numbness on her cheeks eased, Alicia went and picked up the glass liter and drank the little bit of guava milk that had not spilled and spit out bits of stone and grass that had fallen into the bottle. She then followed Mingo and watched him enter his cottage through a trapdoor on the west side. When the mountain winds began to blow, Alicia knew it was late and she went into the barn and fashioned a bed of dry hay and slept, hoping she would awake before Mingo.

Morning came without Mingo. Alicia awoke late, her face stinging, shocked to see slats of high morning light slicing through the barn walls. The cows in their stalls were restless. Holding at bay the thought that she was being watched, Alicia changed quickly into her other dress, lifting up her slip and smelling it to make sure it was not too offensive, and she tied her hair back and exited the barn. Outside, on the shadowed side of the building, nestled neatly on tufts of wild grass one by the other as if left there by a very assiduous milkman, were three liters of fresh guava milk. Starved, she sat down in the morning shadows and leaned back against the barn wall and sip by sip finished most of one liter, putting it down only when she heard a rustling on the other side of the barn. She circled the barn once and twice, but she saw no one. The third time around, she saw the barn door had been cracked open. She went inside.

“You slept here? ¿Estás loca? That man wants you dead! He thinks you responsible for everything.” A bony woman, barefoot and in a white linen tunic tied at her waist by a thin, weathered rope stood over her makeshift bed. Alicia reconized her. She crossed over to Alicia with an innate stealth, her bare steps light and low as a cat. She grabbed Alicia by the forearm, and shut the barn door. “Qué bien, I see you've enjoyed some of the breakfast I left for you.”

Alicia thanked her in a low mumble and then took a deep breath.

“No te preocupes,” the woman told her, patting her on the shoulder. “Your sister is with us. She is fine. Here, have some more.” She took from Alicia the second liter of guava milk and broke open the seal and took a small sip and moaned with pleasure and offered it to Alicia, who took two big gulps.

“Can I go see her?”

“She's sleeping. You'll see her tonight.”

“I know you.”

“You should. I recommended to the tribunal your sentence of six months.”

“Coño, Pucha, la del Comité.”

A thin sardonic smile on Pucha's face grew into a chuckling assent. “La misma.”

“What have you done with Martica?”

“Your sister wants to be up here. She came to us, we did not go to her.”

“Who is ‘us'? Why can't I see her?”

“You will see her. You'll see her tonight. I told you that she's asleep now. They're all asleep. Now let's get out of here before this idiota Mingo wakes up. … I see he got you a bit.” She touched the left side of Alicia's face, under where it had begun to bruise. “No, it's nothing.”

Pucha put her arm around her and led her out of the barn. Mingo's massive tomcat came to them and rubbed up against their legs. He was hungry. Pucha found a discarded coconut shell and poured some guava milk for him, but Luis el Catorce wrinkled his nose at it. They waded across the river. Pucha held the two liters of guava milk aloft. The water never reached higher than their breasts. On the far shore they lay in the morning sun and let their clothes dry out. Pucha took off her tunic and spread it on a flat boulder. She wore only a set of frilly panties, which when wet, were as if she wore nothing at all. There was so little flesh on her body that Alicia could see the sharp points of her hip bone protruding on both sides and she could count each and all of her ribs and she had pointy bitch's teats with nipples the color of indian clay.

“It'll dry faster like this.”

Alicia ignored her and remained dressed and soon Pucha had fallen asleep beside her, the dark color of her skin and the infinitesimal rhythm of her belly the only evidence that she was not a wasted corpse. Alicia got up and wandered away from the rivershore, following a dirt road that turned pebbly and soon became no road at all. She crossed the coffee fields, the bean fruits on the vine large and red as cherries. When she came to a small orchard of mamey trees she picked one of the thick-skinned fruits and cut it open with her stiletto, which she now kept slipped in the drawstring of her dress, and she flicked off the large black seed and cut long slices of the ruddy flesh and guided them to her mouth with the blade. She walked on, all the way to a glen crowded with royal palms and still capped with a late morning mist. Then, thinking she must have strayed off Mingo's land, she turned and headed back to the rivershore. Pucha was dressed and awake when she returned, sitting cross-legged on the flat boulder where her tunic had been drying. Alicia moved quickly to the riverbank and bent over and threw up the fruit she had eaten on her journey. She washed her face, stood up and examined herself. There was reddish spittle running down the front of her dress and the hem at the knees was muddied.

“Nothing in this finca is edible,” Pucha said, as if she had known this for many years. “No matter how good it looks or how sweet it tastes, it'll rot your insides. Claro, except for the guava milk that
he
makes. On that we must subsist. Remember that, it'll make your stay here much more pleasant.”