The Lazarus Rumba (19 page)

She tried to follow him, convinced that with all these feathers she could now plumb or surge into any world after him.

Mingo's Dreams Before Dying

In the mountains there are women. They whisper dire curses. They dance to end his life. They know the rhythm of his blood.

His blood beat best in the river, underwater, halo-hearts rippling from the thumps on his chest, which he swam through and swam through with the joy of a circus animal till his shoulders burned and his lungs clenched for air. He slept whenever and wherever he tired, dreamless, hiss-snoring short and loud as if unpracticed with breath, in the hemp-rope hammock that hung between the two stumps of royal palm or on the packed-mud floor of his finca cottage, or, his favorite, on the warm round pebbles of the riverbank, which massaged his every muscle and every limb as he rolled on them and frottaged his figure on his blanket of green fronds. At first, he ate nothing but the petals of cannonball flowers, crouching on all fours and gnawing at the entire bush until only the pistils remained, and when he had gone through the entire patch, he ate with his cows, knocking heads with them and establishing position at the trough, long enough so that they would accept him as one of them, but then he ran from there and jumped into the river and became some other creature. Since he was always naked and since he often fell asleep in the midday sun, his skin soon began to suffer from exposure and he would remain in the riverwater longer and longer to cool the sting (though the waters magnified the light and burned him all the more). He began to peel and shed like a serpent, first behind his neck and on his shoulders and then along his back and his arms and his buttocks and his legs. The skin peeled off in gauzy toast-colored leaves and he layered one skin-leaf over the other and the other and he could still see through it. After the first layer had sloughed off at the palm-side of his fingers and at the back of his feet where the Achilles meets the sole and at the end of his penis (where it dangled like the skin-dress of a shorn banana and obstructed his urine that night), the second layer began to peel off at the back of the neck and at the shoulders. Again it was see-through thin, though rosier, every pockmark and follicle imprinted a bit less clearly, and after the second coat had been carried away by the mountain winds and he jumped in the riverwater he felt its coolness nearer to him.

When he shed a third coat and a fourth coat he searched out for the daggerlike, toothy leaves of the aloe plant and he plucked them and squeezed out their clear jelly insides and covered himself with it, even between his toes and around and around the irritated folds of his anus, which was coming undone. At night, he covered his blankets of palm fronds with the aloe gel and wrapped himself in it head to toe and wriggled within like an unborn lizard in its egg. But his skin sucked up nature's moisture and no sooner had he thicked on aloe gel on one part of his body than it was as dry or drier than before and still peeling, as if something underneath his skin was thirstier than all the desert sands. He shed a fifth coat and his nipples began to blend into his flesh, which was now all the color and the texture of the end of his penis with the skin pulled back. When he touched himself at night with the memory of his most beloved cow, the underskin tore and the whole shaft of his penis bled. And he shed a sixth coat and all his body hair began to fall out and on the seventh the hair on his scalp and his eyebrows and his skin was then all the color and the texture of the inside of his lips. It hurt to swim but it hurt more to walk or to crawl or to lie down to sleep, so he spent all his hours floating in the cool river where his skin came off not in leaves but as slime under his fingernails when he scratched himself, which he did, all over, because down to its nerve layer his skin itched and itched. And when he lost count of how many coats he had shed, when he saw one of his raw testicles bobbing on the surface of the river, free of its sac but still linked to his loins by its thin chord, and he looked for the other one and it too had escaped, though heavier, it had sunk, he dared not move and he knew the women of the mountain had cursed him and he knew that they worshiped the child with the crooked staff and the river goddess and he knew that he was now a creature of their making.

After the current tore off his testicles, and more and more skin shed from his hands, the skin from one finger became entangled with the neighboring finger so that soon his hands were webbed and the same happened with the toes and his eyes bulged out of their sockets and spread nearer to his ears, though these were disappearing with every coat he shed, and he began to hear by wagging his tongue and his lungs longed less and less for air and he became an expert fisherman and darted to catch a minnow or a trout, clenching it in his teeth and then gulping it whole. Down to its core, his skin toughened and it was white with measlelike speckles and the currents of the water encrusted the end of one section over the other so that on certain mornings when he wandered into a quiet pool he heard his own skin and he felt as if he were wearing one of his ex-wife's tight-fitting sequin dresses. He was glad he had stopped shedding and he was happy to be a river thing.

One morning, he saw his gluttonous tomcat Luis el Catorce perched on a thrusting jagged rock on the riverbank, grown much bigger than he knew cats could grow. He was postured for the hunt, his back legs coiled for the leap, his front paws lightly set on the rock, the left one lifted a bit, his neck thrust out, his upper lip curled and his mouth lightly parted so that his fangs were visible and the slits in his eyes thin and sharp as needles. Maybe it was a trick of the water, but Luis el Catorce had grown much too large, larger than a tomcat, larger than his cousins in the jungle. As the river thing surfaced to investigate, the cat waited just till the muzzle of the rose-speckled fish had broken the clear glass of the surface of a pool away from the current and he dashed at it with his left paw, just-just missing it, and the surprised fish disappeared back into the current. His loving Luis el Catorce, who had purred away many a night stretched out on his belly or curled up beside him, his head nuzzled into his armpit, whom he had fed religiously six and seven times a day, anything, mango pits, scorpion's tail, cornhusks, withered bull testicles, turkey gizzards, pigeon breast, and (his favorite) shrimp heads, anything, for there was nothing Luis el Catorce would not eat, had just tried to murder him, to eat
him
, which he could certainly do now, with one swing, for it was no trick of the water, his omnivorous tomcat had grown into a giant.

So the river thing grew fearful of being a river thing, and he dreamed of being a bird so that he could fly away from that river, away from his murderous tomcat. When a pair of sparrow lovers sat on a branch that leaned over the river, the river thing leapt out of the water and at them, not to eat them as they must have feared for they darted off, but to ride on their feathery backs away from there. And he tried this with every bird that approached the water, repulsed by the other things in the river as if he were not one of them, even when he became so hungry that his vision blurred and his arms and legs felt for the first time as if they were missing and he could swim only very short distances with the help of the current. Eventually, he became so weak that he could no longer leap out at birds and he would have died in the river if the current had not maneuvered him into a whirlpool by the riverbank that had him swimming in circles till he saw the snarl of Luis el Catorce under the water and felt his fangs pierce into the small of his back.

He was there and not there at the same time. There, he passed a slimy shoot and was squeezed out into a cave of shallow firewater that melted his flesh and turned it into something else, and not there, he had been gnawed down to his dry bones, right down to the spiny cage in which drummed his heart, and although he could no longer see or hear or feel, he remembered the women of the mountain laughing to the rhythm of its last beats, laughing at the plight of Luis el Catorce, who keeled over and fell into the river, a hooklike fishbone lodged in his wind canal.

BOOK TWO

How the Dead Come Back:
The Tale as Rumba

The Camarita Flirts with Eternity

“Think about la foto before and after,” his French master Henri had told him, “
never
during, for when the moment comes the moment goes, and you must be very quick. But if you miss it … so what? Moments are infinite. Acuérdate, la camarita flirts with eternity.”

At first, Armando Quiñón owned only two cameras, one battered Leica for candid shots and a secondhand Rolleiflex for his studio, and like his master, technique and equipment were less important to him than intuition, knowing the moment and cabining it in the black box to make it eternal. He had been taught to hide his Leica, to cover the chrome with black tape, and he wore a loose, wide black leather belt so that when he needed, he could tuck the camera behind it, because in candid shots the subject must not be aware of the photographer or the pictures will lose their mysterious immediacy. “La foto can be art,” his master had said, “only if it is honest to reality. If you stage a foto, la jodiste ahí mismo. This is true even in the studio. Paintings are made. Fotos are captured. Thus as fotógrafo you must make yourself and your camarita invisible, even, no,
especially
when pursuing the inanimate!”

In 1942 the city of Guantánamo was changing. “Oye sabes, ya casi no metemos a yanquis,” as some Guantanameros put it. In the years between the world wars, the Americans had undertaken a massive expansion of the naval base established there in 1903. They leased new lands from this or that regime on the hilly promontories on both sides of the channel that flows into the uterine Guantánamo Bay. They rebuilt the landing strip and called it Aeropuerto Tres Piedras, because it was said that the day they dug the first dirt, a hailstorm surprised the half-naked penny-hired campesinos, many who had never seen hail of such size, and they screamed that the three thrones of Dios Santo were falling from the heavens. When they finished the landing strip they erected new barracks with tin roofs for the stock and rank and handsome wooden cabins with tropical gardens for the officers and their families, and built an aqueduct near the Yateras River north of the city, whose channels would bypass Guantánamo entirely and feed the naval base exclusively, and they refurbished the hospital and even set aside a new plot of land to serve as a cemetery.

Armando Quiñón's cousin worked as an assistant to a commander in the naval base, and since he dropped her off every morning before walking to the studio, he got to know the young guards at the entrance gates and brought them rum and flattered them and offered to photograph them for they looked like the staunch warriors in American movies, chisel-faced and bright-eyed and broad-shouldered, and he brought them the developed shots handsomely mounted on black cardboard foldouts so they could send their likenesses to their noviecitas back home. Soon, in this manner, he was able to gain admission into the base, wandering freely with the worker's pass the guards had given him. On the way out, after he had clandestinely taken five or six rolls of pictures, they would pull out their billfolds and show him crinkled yellowed pictures of their girlfriends, crude compared to the ones he had taken of them, the women's youth dueling with the wrinkliness of the photographs, and Armando Quiñón promised them he would make new and wonderful portraits of them if he ever made it to Cleveland, Ohio, or to St. Augustine, Florida, or to wherever the other girls were from.

Armando Quiñón took so many pictures inside the naval base that in the spring of 1942 he was able to mount a show in his studio exclusively on this subject. He photographed the campesinos fleeing from the famous hailstorm, their arms wrapped around their heads, their mouths open in ceaseless terror as the sky fell in a blur of stones around them. He photographed the beautiful row of officers' cabins, and even some of the inner gardens. He photographed off-duty sailors with their fishing lines cast in impressive symmetry at el Punto de los Pescadores, and these same men wading nude in the shark-infested bay, their bodies gleamy with youth and lean with labor, splashing water on each other and frolicking like boys. (This last photograph he did not exhibit, but kept locked in an oak chest in the cellar of his studio.)