The Lazarus Rumba (26 page)

She was not stunning of figure, nor angelic of face, a bit plump with acne scars on her cheeks. Her eyes were a common muddy brown and her brow was too deep. Her voice was her only beauty. Her conversations were punctuated here and there with certain immeasurable suspirations, tiny puffs of sorrow, and when she spoke of her beloved, there seemed to be a light drizzle falling at the back of her throat, a curtain of mountain mist that she spoke through. Sometimes her voice, soft and worn and wrinkled, as if someone had used it in a lifetime previous and in it were woven all the lessons of a journey already taken, became her and she wore it as a linen mantle to hide all her defects, for she wore no paint and used no hairspray or talcum powder or perfume and in some humid days she smelled nothing like a woman (for the hair grew moist and bushy in her armpits). She had studied opera. She had gone to the first year of law school at the University of Havana, but her mother became ill and she returned to care for her. When she met Barba Roja, she was near thirty. From the start he called her mi guajirita Guantanamera, she called him mi viquingo.

Almost two years later she welcomed him and his band of rebels as saviors. She prepared a large Año Nuevo feast (two days late) in her mother's house, setting up a long dining table in the patio and using old wooden cola boxes as chairs and starched bedsheets as tablecloths. She slaughtered and roasted twelve suckling pigs and served them with rice and black beans and malanga fritters and fried ripe plantains. They drank rum and burgundy straight from the bottles for there weren't enough glasses and they toasted the new age of hope and the end of tyranny in fifty-nine different ways and in six different languages, including Latin, which Barba Roja had learned as a child in the seminary. He sat at the head of the table, to the left of him comandante Julio César Cruz and his mute rooster and to the right of him Carmen Canastas. When the guerrilleros began to get rowdy, shouting curses at the yanquis who had spent the last two days spreading rolls of concertina wire around the perimeter of their naval base, Barba Roja pointed to the empty rocking chair near the table and asked them to calm down, to have some consideration for Carmen Canastas's mother who was ill and resting in her room. And because he knew her voice would soothe them, he asked Carmen Canastas to tell them some inspiring story of herself, of how she taught the peasant children to read. Carmen Canastas surprised him and told a story he had never heard. It wasn't about the campesino children but about the time she was hired as a tutor for the children performers of the traveling gypsy circus. And that's how she came to tell Barba Roja and his men of the tragedy of the young acrobat Héctor Daluz and his brother, the amethyst-eyed boy, the most popular stars in all that circus's long history.

“Pues mira,” Carmen Canastas said, “it was their cousin who convinced me to do it. You know her, comandante Cruz, esa Alicia Lucientes. We taught together for a year or so. Una muchacha bella, but intelligent also. She taught mathematics; I taught languages. In the summers, she traveled with the circus as a tutor. Two summers ago, I went with her. We toured from Baracoa, where the circus is based, all the way to La Habana, setting up tents in a finca near Bayamo, by the airport in Camagüey, right next to the railroad tracks in Sancti Spíritus, in a forest near Santa Clara, and even on the sands of Varadero along the way. From town to town word spread about the twins, about the mystery of their disappeared master, and about their marvelous and sensual act that made one feel as if anything in this life were possible. The sandwich men that traveled ahead of the circus walking the streets of the westward towns and announcing with their huge placards and monumental voices the day and time the circus would arrive were hardly needed. People already knew. And they traveled miles and miles in buggy carts loaded with entire families (grandmothers and uncles, nieces and bastards, first and second cousins) and gladly paid a week's wages just to see the twins perform. There was never an empty seat in the main tent during their act, which was often performed two and three times a day just to satisfy the horde. So that every morning, when it came time for their lessons, the twins were tired and sleepy-eyed and paid little attention to Alicia or me, except, I found, when I read to them from a tattered book of stories that had, since I was a child, been one of my favorites, the tales of Shahrazad. Héctor's interest always perked, and he would grab the book from me and turn to his brother and read out loud, trepidatiously, for he seemed to have only a child's grasp of the art of reading, then he would tire and close his eyes and lift his head and recite the story as if he were reading from a text inside his head, sticking closely to the plot, but adding here and there such prurient details that I, at first, could only attribute it to the fact that he was fifteen and his hormones were raging.

“'Niño, no seas chusma,' I said to him, feigning shock, although the details were never coarse or vulgar and seemed to sprout very naturally from the deeper layers of the story. ‘No, así es,' he answered, ‘así es como el cuento cuenta.' Then he would shut the book, as if the printed pages were somehow an affront to his version of the story, and continue to recite to his brother. And, by correcting a phrase here and there, and adding my somewhat less flourishing touches to his tales, I was able to open their minds to the beautiful simplicity of our language. Alicia, however, was not so successful, unable to teach them anything at all about Euclid and his dreams. ¿Para qué sirven todas estas figuritas, todos estos numeritos?' they asked her.

“'Because figures and numbers are everywhere,' she answered, reddening somewhat, ‘and because even those little flights you do from the trapeze are controlled by numbers, and by angles (which are the mothers of figures), how many twists you can do around each other, how many seconds you can stay airborne before you start falling, at how many degrees should you let go of the bar, at how many should you grab it on the swing back? So that if it wasn't for numbers and angles you'd be nothing but a couple of snot-nosed kids? Do you think you fly through the air by magic?' It was the wrong way to put it. From then on, the twins learned their mathematics lessons simply because they were scared of her. (Though Héctor suspected that she was angry not about the lessons but because he could never love her like she loved him.)”

At hearing this Julio César stood from the table, took the blue feathered rooster off his shoulder and placed him gently on the seat and walked to a far corner of the patio. Everyone at the table pretended not to hear the gush of his urine against the brick wall.

Barba Roja leaned toward his lover and whispered in her ear: “Cuidadito, mi guajirita. Some things are better left beautifully unsaid.”

“Bueno, the truth is the truth, mi viquingo.”

Julio César returned to the table, sat down, and reperched Atila on his left shoulder. He slapped Barba Roja on the thigh and a thin grim smile crossed his face. “Don't listen to him, Carmencita. Sigue—with the truth, if you are able.”

“Pues así fue, the twins were so in love with the danger and beauty of their act and with the adoration the masses heaped on them, that all our lessons, eventually even the Arabian tales, seemed to them the very core of boredom. They became so distant that I would have learned nothing else about them had it not been for the photographer that was following them around and who, many in the circus had whispered to me, had become their legal guardian, had adopted them when their mother had abandoned them. (Alicia, however, assured me that doña Edith—their mother and her aunt—had never abandoned them, that they had run away from home two years before, when their master disappeared, and joined this circus and that in her grief doña Edith had lost the girl she was carrying and almost died herself.) I began to question the photographer. I brought spicy rum to his sleeping cart at night and he gladly received me. We talked as one talks late at night with an old friend; and from the compartment just beyond we could hear Héctor and Juanito's innocent snores. ‘They sleep together as they always have,' the photographer said. His name was Armando Quiñón. He had known the twins since their birth, had been the hired photographer at their baptism and, from the photographs he showed by the gaslamp light, had kept a detailed record of their youth as if he were a parent. Though I never saw any pictures of the baptism. He claimed that these were locked away in his studio. When I asked him why, he became cryptic: ‘These boys have been marked from the beginning.' I left it at this. He had had too much rum. I bid him good night.

“I saw other pictures. While at Varadero, he walked with me in the first morning hours along a deserted part of the beach. He was dressed as always in a brown linen baggy suit that looked like a set of expensive pajamas and sandals and a wide belt wrapped tight around his narrow waist so that he looked like an emaciated Eastern warrior. He carried under his arm a black leather album. We sat under a royal palm that leaned contortedly into the shore as if yearning for sea travel. He handed me the album and I opened it. ‘This was their master,' he said. ‘I have never showed you these pictures at night for fear of disturbing your dreams.' He said nothing more and as I leafed through the album all I could hear was the click-clack of the seashells as the morning tide aroused them from their sleep.

“¡Qué horror! Let me just be brief enough to say, sin ser muy melodramática, that this man, their master, was so inhuman in shape and feature—with his giant hairless head that seemed to be carved from lard and his rounded back and barrel chest and his disfigured limbs and folds of painted skin that drooped from his groin—that you could not guess whether he crawled out from a nest under the sands of the earth or was dropped here from a distant planet. When I had leafed through the album twice, forgetting for a moment that I was not alone, Armando Quiñón spoke as if reading my mind: ‘His name was señor Sariel. There are two stories of his end.' He paused and let me examine the last few pictures in the album. ‘I believe both of them, no matter how contradictory they may seem. Mira ahí, that's the headless shell of his painted body. It was found washed up on a beach at the American naval base four days after he disappeared. And the yanquis being yanquis made a spectacle of it. They put it on display in the naval base museum, alongside the relics of their predecessors, and said it was the suit of the devil shed before he burrowed back to his home by digging through the bottom of Guantánamo Bay. They opened the base to the natives and for a dollar one could view the exo-skeleton of the devil and for a dollar more step inside the shell and assume this costume of the dark prince. People lined up for days. This was the fall of 1955 and the city government and Batista's Rural Guard feared rumors floating about the populace that it was Fidel returned from his exile in Méjico to brew his rebellion from under the folds of the earth. But the yanquis were right, o mejor digo, half-right, although that shell almost certainly belonged to the disappeared master—see the turtle back, the monstrous barrel chest, the hands twisted into claws— and he might have certainly crawled back to his home from a hole at the bottom of the bay, but señor Sariel was no devil, not in that sense. If he had been, he would not have fled.' Armando Quiñón stopped. He pulled a silver flask from an inside pocket of his suit and took two long swigs, then he stood and brushed the sand from his pants and took the black leather album from me and reached out a hand to help me up. ‘Fled from what?' I asked. ‘It's time for their lessons,' he said. ‘The teacher should never be late.'

“I didn't see him again until we had arrived in La Habana, setting up our tents in an empty lot less than a mile from the presidential palace, close enough so we could see the back windows in the residential floor flicker on and off and make out the tiny shadows of the tyrant's lavandera-whores and pale-skinned henchmen. The first few nights I could not find Armando Quiñón in his sleeping cart or anywhere else. He disappeared after he put the twins to sleep and returned many hours later under the pink haze of the late summer aurora, disheveled, drunk, and one time even with a bruise on his left cheek. When I confronted him he threatened me with having the twins pulled from under my tutelage and telling me nothing more of their disappeared master, a story he knew I was eager to hear:
Fled from what?
So I quickly backed down. That evening, after Alicia had fallen asleep, he came to our cart with a bundle in his arms, which he handed to me. ‘Póntelo,' he said, ‘I'll wait for you out here.' It was one of his linen suits (this one sand-colored) and an oversized straw hat that I had to push back so that it wouldn't sink under my eyes, even with my hair all bundled up under it. There was also a long leather black belt, which I wrapped three times around my waist and knotted instead of buckled, as he himself did with his own. I wore my own sandals, for the ones in the package were four or five sizes too big.

“'You look like a scarecrow,' he said when he saw me. We walked silently for an hour, through the side streets in the old city where no one approached us. I kept pace two or three steps behind him and never during our journey did he look back at me. We hit a main road in the outskirts of the city and walked inland, then veered and followed a winding dirt road through a burnt field. The mountains were black in the horizon and our way soon became steep. I was tiring and I let Armando Quiñón know and his only answer was to quicken his pace. We climbed and descended and climbed and descended and the plant life thickened around us till it seemed we were in the middle of some forest and the wind took voice through the trees and the road narrowed. Finally I saw some torches shining in a distant vale, their light cut a wide tunnel through the misty darkness. As we approached I saw the shadows of figures and heard their raucous voices. A thick canvas circus tent was set up in a clearing and there were two military trucks, a new black Cadillac and a circus truck parked to one side. A Bengal tiger was tied by his neck to the trunk of a banyan tree and it slept amidst all the noise. Armando Quiñón told me to lower my hat a bit and to tuck some strands of hair that had come loose back under my hat and that I was a man now, or a boy at least, and to speak and act like one. We were greeted at the tent flap by a large hairy man whom I recognized as one of the workers that traveled in the circus. He was drunk and welcomed us effusively, hugging Armando Quiñón and grabbing my face with both his thick hands and proclaiming: ‘¡Qué lindo, coño! Te felicito, Armando. … But where are the twins?'”