The Lazarus Rumba (25 page)

“¿Qué es eso, mamacita?”

'Pan con queso.” She shooed them away with an upside-down wave of her hand.

It was early evening. Héctor and Juanito had disobeyed their mother, they had each eaten a bit of the parasol off the frizzly dressed mushrooms. They began to feel light as the crisp dusk breeze. They wanted to practice and they were sure, in their gathering euphoria, that their master would forgive them. They went through the cobblestone patio to señor Sariel's windowless room. The tin door was unlatched and in the darkness of the room they could only make out shadows though they heard something fluttering like a wounded bird attempting flight. Héctor lit the gas lantern on the wall. Señor Sariel was naked and belly-down on the foam mattress, the muscles underneath his turtle-shell back quivering as if on the brink of convulsions, a tipped empty bottle of bourbon on one side of the mattress, his arms used as pillows underneath his great bald head. On his feet he wore a pair of brown leather talaria that strapped all the way up to his twin baseball calves. The wings of these marvelous sandals were colored, like the leather, in variegated shades of worn brown, attached down near the Achilles tendon, and as they beat the air they succeeded only in lifting señor Sariel's legs so that his knees barely rose off the surface of the mattress, and when the wings tired and folded his legs flopped down. In these moments, when the tiny wings rested, Héctor began to undo the talaria, strap by strap, from señor Sariel's feet. They were on so tight that after he removed the first one there were roundabout welts on the skin around his ankles. Héctor kissed his hand and passed it over the marks. The sandal took off and batted itself against the ceiling and against the walls as if searching for a window. Héctor grabbed one of its hanging straps and wrapped it around his brother's hand while he undid the other sandal. This one he grabbed himself and forced down with his bare foot, crushing one wing a bit, and strapped around his foot and lower leg as tightly as señor Sariel had worn it. Then he grabbed the other one from his brother and did the same on his other foot and leg. At first, the wings dragged on the floor and nothing happened. Héctor paced from end to end of the narrow room, stomping hard as if to awaken them. Señor Sariel grunted and Héctor stopped. A moment later, the wings began to beat and Héctor was casually lifted off the floor so that his head brushed against the ceiling. He reached his hand down to his older brother and pulled him up. The amethyst-eyed boy, crazy with joy, wrapped his legs around his brother's waist and his arms around his neck, the force of his leap twirling them round and round.

“¡Volamos! ¡Volamos!” the amethyst-eyed boy screamed.

“Ssshhh. You'll wake him.”

The wings soon tired and they could only support the weight of the brothers a few inches above the ground. They left señor Sariel's room and snuck past their busy mother in the kitchen. Héctor threw his brother up on his shoulders and they left the house towards Parque Martí. They were flying so close to the ground that those who saw them in the early evening shadows thought nothing unusual of it, merely that the boy was on fast skates. In the park, there were lovers snuggling by the dry fountain who ignored them, and there were bachelors out for a walk after having dined alone, too consumed with solitude to pay any mind, and there were mujeres who lived in the green house by the bayshore, who were just awaking and whistled at them from their breakfast tables and called them pollitos ricos. They took La Calle Doce Norte out of the park and went to where the railroad tracks crossed over the Bano River. Héctor took the talaria off his feet and strapped them to his waist, buckling one with the other, and they went underneath the track and counted the cars on the trains that passed. They jumped into the river. The wings of the sandals around Héctor's waist beat the waters and acted as fins. The amethyst-eyed boy found the water was so shallow that if he stood on his tiptoes his head would bob just above the surface of the slow-moving river. Héctor swam in circles around him and poked him in the belly. The amethyst-eyed boy laughed and swallowed water. It tasted like the railroad track smelled, of old iron and rust. When the current picked up, Héctor swam to the opposite shore and took off his drenched shorts and his pullover shirt and his briefs and spread them on the round pebbles to dry, leaving only the talaria around his waist, and then he jumped back into the river. The amethyst-eyed boy did as his brother had done, and when Héctor swam towards him the water swirled as the wings beat about his waist. They searched for each other's warmth in the cold water, Héctor's hips pushing back and forth against his brother as if obeying the beat of a feverish rumba, and soon his brother pushing back as if moving also with the earth's heartbeat. Héctor pulled him close, and with one hand on the back of his head, and with his mouth half-opened, kissed him. The amethyst-eyed boy had never tasted his brother's tongue: it was tender and wet like the flesh of a freshly picked mango and it tasted of plums and oranges. All that they did they did under the cold dark water and before they were finished three trains had roared by, though they had not counted the cars and they had not noticed that the current had taken them about two hundred meters downriver. They swam back to search for their clothes. It had been so long that the moon had disappeared, so at first they could not find them and they were sure that somebody had stolen them, that someone had watched them play, for they found their clothes neatly folded and laid out under the knurly trunk of a chestnut tree whose overreaching branches hung over the dark river and grazed the sides of the trains as they passed. Héctor strapped the talaria back on his feet. When the amethyst-eyed boy climbed on Héctor's shoulders, Héctor could feel the bulge of him squashed against his neck. As they flew home, the amethyst-eyed boy pulled out his penis and rested it on the upper ridge of his brother's ear and shot out an impressive stream—powerful as that of any incontinent fountain-boy, as if the river itself had lent him its infinite waters—part of which splashed against Héctor's temple and ran down his cheek, salty like tears. They fell into a fit of carca¡Adas when they sprayed Ñaña the Halfwit as she laid curled under newspapers and torn books underneath a store awning on the corner of Jose Martí and Narciso López Streets.

“¡Lluvia! ¡Huracán!” they screamed between the ebb and flow of their laughter.

Ñaña the Halfwit cursed them and waved her rag-wrapped fists at them and before she fell asleep again murmured prayers to her gods that both those mariconcitos die young, prayers that were almost answered that very night, for after they turned the corner, the talaria's wings got beating so fervently (as if fleeing from the madwoman's curses) that they carried the boys away with a horse's fury and as they approached the brick wall of the cobblestone patio they were headed straight for it and the amethyst-eyed boy's piss-manic thing went limp on Héctor's ear and dribbled on his shoulder and they both covered their heads with their arms and screamed for their lives, so that they never knew if they went straight through the wall or at the last minute veered over it, just missing the sharp edges of the broken-off cola bottles. They ended up hung by their limbs on one of the larger branches of the fig tree, both the talaria's wings cracked on Héctor's ankles, struck with a fatal susurration. Below them, sitting on the trampoline, his back resting on the trunk of the giant fig tree, his belly blown out like a starving child's, his hands wrapped around his painted thing, was señor Sariel. He had been hungover and had eaten the whole basket of fresh figs he had thought the twins had left for him as a conciliatory gesture, twice-giant figs like he had never seen on the giant tree before, that tasted of rain and earth and dung. He was passed out again and the twins dropped from the tree and snuck past him. They buried the talaria in a small plot of earth where the banana trees grew on the outskirts of the cobblestone patio and they bathed each other in the laundry pail and slept early that night, without their pajamas.

They never saw their master again.

In the Room Lit with a Red Bulb

On the evening of January 3rd, 1959, when the rebel Barba Roja and his men, already staggering from two whole days of celebration (the country was theirs), broke into Armando Quiñón's studio and found him hanged in the cellar room with one of his own wide black leather belts, blood-dark drool still slipping from his chin and puddling on the dusty floor beneath him, he (Barba Roja) immediately sealed the room, placed two drunk guards at front door of the main studio, and let only one other man examine the evidence with him.

“¡Coño,” his companion said, looking around, “qué puta ha pasao aquí!”

The room was lit by a single red bulb. There were black and white, 20-by-26 centimeter pictures spilling from an oak chest in the corner of the room and spread all over the floor beneath the suicide, as if when he had opened the chest the innumerable pictures had been packed in so tight that the chest spewed its contents all over the room. There was one slit rectangular window near the ceiling (at street level) whose panes had been covered with black paint. There was a long wooden table running along the right wall. The three developing trays sitting on it were still filled with developing chemicals. Pinned to the wall above them was perhaps the last picture Armando Quiñón had developed, of the rebels that very morning, descending like gods from the mountains, Barba Roja in front and directly to his left, his half-naked companion, wet curls down to his shoulders and clamped down by a pushed-back beret, a full dark beard, around his neck a black ebony rosary whose cross dangled around his belly button, a Belgian rifle thrown over one shoulder and a magnificent broad-chested rooster perched on the other, its neck craned, crowing in the glory of a new age, behind them a defocused army of other half-naked deified barbudos.

“Qué pena,” comandante Julio César Cruz said, examining the picture, caressing the mute blue rooster on his shoulder. “How pictures lie.”

“No te preocupes, compadre,” Barba Roja said. “Atila is mute but he is as brave as a lion.” He too caressed the silent rooster and Atila, suddenly moved by so much affection, stretched his neck out as if to crow and the muscles in his chest tightened and his beak opened but he produced no sound. Both men cast their looks away from him as not to embarrass him.

They found a shadeless lamp and plugged it in and switched it on. The bulb was bright and it annihilated the red light. They examined the pictures spilled all over the room and Barba Roja shook his head and looked at the suicide. He had meager limbs with long skeletal fingers and toes whose untrimmed nails had now turned purplish. His ribs were countable and his long dank hair and clumps of his beard stuck to the leather loop around his neck. The only sign of health was the tenacious dignity that he maintained, even now, in the arch of his eyebrows, the outer ends tilted minutely upward, as one who is sorrowfully watching what he already knows too well. Barba Roja was suspicious. A chair had been kicked away too far from the hanged man. Barba Roja picked up one facedown picture that seemed out of sync with the big-bang explosion of the oak chest, placed exactly as if it had floated to the other side of the room from the hands of the dying man. It was a picture of a naked boy in his late adolescence, getting out of a pail-tub where he had been bathing, reaching for something, a towel perhaps, outside of the scope of the picture. He's in some sort of house … no, no, a tent, for the walls have folds. The boy's arms and shoulders and back are those of a man, and so is the half-aroused thing hanging from the cross of his thighs. Barba Roja handed the picture to Julio César.

“That's him? That's Héctor, the famous acrobat?”

“Sí, creo … his face is a bit out of focus.”

“Bueno, it's not the face the artist was after.”

Barba Roja moved the chair under the suicide and climbed on it and examined the noose around the neck, then he stepped down and examined the hands and the genitals, carefully pulling the skin of the engorged penis back and feeling it for moisture. He took the picture back from Julio César and raised it to the drooling chin of the suicide and let it go. It landed almost exactly on the spot where he had picked it up from, but this time face up.

“Pobre,” he said, as he took out a handkerchief and wiped the dead man's chin, “it must have taken him quite a while to die. … And the traitors who murdered him would have us believe that he died, well, jerking off to a picture of his beloved.” He felt again the dead man's genitals. “But they did not have the gall to fake that.”

“Murder?”

“Sí, exactly like Carmencita told us. They caught up with him.” He pointed to the picture. “And now that boy has one more of the dead in love with him.”

Carmen Cañastan's Tangled New Year's Tale

It was said that Carmen Canastas was not Barba Roja's mistress, that she was not his girlfriend, and that she was certainly not his wife, that she was rather his
querida
, his beloved. It was also said in meaner and lower tones that he shared her, that when she snuck out to the foothills of the Sierra Mountains to meet him at an abandoned schoolhouse every Friday at dusk, he had her right there, smearing the fallen unerased blackboards with their sweat, that then he took her up to La Plata, the rebels' headquarters in the Sierra, and let other comandantes enjoy her. And in an almost inaudible whisper it was said moreover that once, while drunk, el Comandante-en-Jefe had had her and proclaimed her más dulce que el jugo de caña, for which
his
lover Celia had Carmen Canastas banished from La Plata. She in turn, it was said, had told her mother doña Ana, in whom she confided like a sister, that while el Líder was having her, she reached down there to tug on his huevos, because that's the way Barba Roja himself liked it, and grabbed one, bigger than a hen's egg, and searched and searched for the other one that wasn't there until he asked her: “¡Qué buscas?” And she answered: “Nothing, mi vida,” and tugged hard on the single one to which he yelped with joy and pushed into her anew. But of course, el chisme, the pastime of rubied tongues, grows out of envy, and Carmen Canastas was a creature that inspired envy with the innocence that water and light inspire weeds.