The Lazarus Rumba (27 page)

“Es verdad,” Barba Roja said, interrupting Carmen Canastas, “you would be beautiful, even as a boy.” Every one at the table agreed, even the three guerrille
ras
who looked more like boys than Carmen Canastas ever could, but when they raised their bottles to toast there was no wine left in them. Carmen Canastas apologized and quickly disappeared into the house. She returned with three bottles of red wine in each hand; she was followed by her aging ill mother who was dressed in a faded houserobe and shuffled operosely with the aid of two oak canes, but refused any help when Barba Roja and two other guerrilleros stood up to lend her support.

“Déjenme coño,” she grumbled. “Llego sola.” Carmen Canastas smiled and Barba Roja persisted and guided the old woman to her rocking chair, which he slid near the head of the table, without touching her. She sat and smoothed her tangled hair with her twisted hands and breathed deeply. “These are they, hi¡A? These are the liberators then? I can already tell which one is yours. El grandón, the one with the red beard.”

“Sí, mamá.”

“A rowdy bunch … eso es bueno.” She looked at comandante Cruz and at his rooster and then at the barbudos and then at the three guerrilleras, who from the grime on their faces seemed as if they too were barbu
das
, all still smelling of their long months in the mountains.

“Maybe after they bathe,” the old woman said, “I can pick mine.”

Everyone laughed.

“No estoy jugando,” she said and they laughed harder, a few of the men offering their services.

“Mucho gusto. I am doña Ana. Pero ahora creo que voy a tener que dejar eso de doña and simply be Ana, or señora Anita. Good. Good. Pues mijita, forgive me. Go on with your story. I was straining to hear from my room. I know this man, this photographer, and I once knew the twins' mother, an arrogant woman. There is someone who will never give up her petty bourgeois title. She is in an asylum in Santiago now. And even there, they say, she must be addressed as doña. Go on, mijita, sin pena.”

“You were going inside the tent,” comandante Cruz reminded Carmen Canastas. He leaned back and petted his rooster. Atila leaned his head into his master's hand like a loyal hound.

“Inside the tent,” Carmen Canastas said, “there were three minirings and some bleachers set up. It was warm and it smelled of torch fumes. There were many boys aged early to late adolescence, mostly mulatos, whom I recognized as sons of the laborers and minor performers in the circus, some of whom were performers in their own right, though I could not know them for these children were offered no tutoring, no formal education at all, and there were three or four yanqui-looking rubios whom I had never seen, milling about, wearing either nothing or thin white trunks that revealed everything. Some were sprawled on the bald dirt ground, breathing heavily and covered with sweat and sometimes blood. One boy came up to Armando Quiñón and kissed him on the cheek. ‘I'm on next,' he said proudly. Armando Quiñón returned the kiss and told him he would watch. The boy glared at me as he passed. I held on to Armando Quiñón now as he made his way to the shadows sitting up on the bleachers. Other boys also saluted him on the way. Up four rows in the bleachers was a stout bearded man in military garb. The torchlight shone off the medals on the breast of his open coat and off the golden medallion of the Virgin hanging from his neck and shadows deepened the pockmarks on his cheeks. In his lap he held the youngest boy in the group, no older than nine or ten, wearing nothing, who had fallen asleep, or had been drugged más probable, and rested his head on the man's meaty thigh. He stroked the boy's hair. ‘Armandito,' he said, ‘you come at a good time as always, the late late show, el hombre tarántula is about to appear. You know him, sometimes he works with that bitch Georgina inside her tent. Pero carajo, Armandito, where are the twins?' Armando Quiñón went up and sat on the bleachers next to the man and gestured for me to join them. He also stroked the nude boy's long hair. He put his other hand on my knee. ‘This here is Guillermo,' he said to the ogre. ‘I bring him straight from the mountains. He will help us do it.' Do what, I thought, and it was then that I looked closely at the ogre's face and recognized him immediately. He was one of the indio tyrant's top generals, rumored to be his main henchman and in control of the secret police. ‘Mucho gusto, Guillermito,' the ogre said, extending his left hand faceup to me. ‘But why do you wear so many clothes? I can see nothing of you.' Armando Quiñón stood and brushed his hand away from me. ‘Mi general, con mil perdones, but this boy is not a whore. ¡Es un revolucionario! You promised you would deliver Batista to us if we gave you what you asked. And here we have given you all, staged your vilest fantasies in the flesh and still nothing from you!' The ogre was silent for a moment and when he spoke it was with the utmost serenity: ‘Not all, Armandito. The twins, Armandito, remember them. That was part of the deal. Give me those lovely twins and I will give you el idiota Fulgencio with a pear in his mouth and a stake up his ass, ready for roasting!'”

“A plot to assassinate Batista while we were still in Méjico?” Comandante Cruz stood up suddenly as he spoke and Atila opened wide his wings to maintain balance on his master's shoulders. “Where is this photographer? Can we go see him?”

“Wait, Julio. No, this was the early summer of ‘57. You were already well entrenched in the mountains. But listen me out, then we'll go see him. Colorín sin colorado, este cuento no se ha acabado.”

“There's much more,” doña Ana said and motioned with her palsied hand for comandante Cruz to sit.

“Torches came on all around the middle ring and the boy who had greeted Armando Quiñón appeared, led by the circus medicine man (a quack with potions was all this man was really). The medicine man examined the boy's eyes and the boy's throat then stripped him and fondled the boy's genitals, as if this was merely the process of the examination, until the boy became aroused. The ogre chuckled beside us. Finally, the medicine man fastened a rubber band on the boy's genitals near the base and took a small glass container from his coat pocket and with a dropper under the boy's tongue gave him whatever potion he saw fit for the upcoming match. He then gave the boy a pat on the ass and pushed him into the center ring. The boy, now evidently more aroused, crouched into a wrestling stance and started shuffling in circles and looking wildly about. From the shadows there emerged to meet him a tiny-headed man that looked like a giant virus, with four disfigured arms growing out of his shoulders and the stump of a third leg growing out of his right hip and a short tail out of his coccyx. He too was naked, though his genitals were hardly visible, and bristly hairs, tinted orange and yellow twirling in concentric circles, covered all his body, even the extremities. The opponents circled each other, the boy growing more and more aroused and his eyes assuming the distant look of a battler. The young boy in the ogre's lap opened his eyes and looked up. The ogre lowered his head and whispered into the boy's ear: ‘Es el hombre tarántula. He was once a beautiful young man, but the gods turned him into that for disobeying his grown-ups.' The boy's eyes widened. In the ring, the opponents still circled each other, the boy undaring to make a move. The tarantula, who was one of the touring circus's most popular freaks, emitted a tiny spittle from the center of his tiny head but the boy ducked and it missed him. The second one too missed, but the third hit the boy on his right shoulder and he dropped. When he stood he could not move his right arm and as he continued circling his opponent, trying to avoid any further hits, it flopped beside him like a dying fish. When he slowed, another spittle hit him above the knee and again he dropped as if struck by a blow. When he tried to stand his leg gave out from under him and, now frightened, he pushed himself away with his other leg. Then this one too was hit and the other arm, so the boy was soon helpless and almost completely paralyzed. The tarantula approached his opponent and clumsily turned him over and picked him up and folded him over and huddled him close and surrounded him with all his limbs and pressed his tiny head into the boy's nape and began to rock against him till one's groan of pleasure was indistinguishable from the other's whine of pain.

“The ogre too now was rocking on his hips against the drugged child, whispering gnarled obscenities and cupping his thick hand over the child's groin and when I caught Armando Quiñón's eyes, he gestured me with his head to move away. I headed from the bleachers to the entrance flap, for the first time afraid, repentant that I had left my sleeping cart that night. When the tarantula was finished with the boy he dropped him with a thud and shuffled over to the medicine man at the other end of the ring, his
cosita
now visible all wet and skinny and fleshy pink like a goat's. He patted the medicine man on the shoulder. The medicine man grumbled something back and went over to the boy and turned him over and checked his pupils and unwrapped the band from the base of his crotch and again placed the dropper under the boy's tongue and gave him whatever poison he saw fit.

“Armando Quiñón walked into the ring and I think I saw him take his black taped camarita from under the flap of his belt and click a couple of quick pictures at waist level, his instrument hidden from the ogre, of the sodomized boy and the kneeling medicine man. He stood by them and turned to face the shadow of the ogre. ‘You'll never see my twins, you gran mariconsón,' he said. ‘Armandito, no seas bobo,' was the quiet answer, ‘a man does not go back on his word. We had a deal, un acuerdo entre hombres: the twins for the tyrant.' Then the voice descended back into its filthy murmurs. Armando Quiñón joined me and led me outside. A few of the ogre's bodyguards were taunting the tiger tied to the banyan tree. They dangled from a branch just out of the beast's reach a barely alive pigeon tied to the end of a leather thong. The tiger too seemed drugged and its heavy paws inexpertly swiped the air and tripped on the falling roots of the banyan branches as if he were a cub just learning how to move. Armando Quiñón grabbed me and took me away from there.

“Then, as if to avoid any questions I might pose about what we had just seen, he repeated the question he had left his story dangling on a few days earlier. ‘Fled from what? you ask,' he said as we moved into the woody path. ‘He never told me, though from the condition I saw him in on the last night and from what I heard later from the twins, it seems doña Edith tried to murder him. She prepared for him a whole basket of poisoned sweet figs—made it seem she had picked them right from the tree. It was his weakness. He ate them all. But señor Sariel was strong as an ox; and vengeful as a wronged woman (as you will see). I found him that last night curled up in an alleyway near my studio on Narciso López Street, puking on himself. He was wearing only his black performing trunks and had all his belongings wrapped in his sackcloth burnoose and tied to the handle of his machete like a beggar's luggage. His winged sandals had been stolen. His drums he told me had been pierced open by a kitchen knife and he buried them in a plot of earth inside the cobblestone patio as if they had once lived and were now dead. ‘I'm going,' were his last words to me, a grainy drool easing its way down his chin to the cotton-puff goatee at the point. ‘Maldita vieja, me voy pal carajo.' Though the streetlight was dim, I took out my Leica and snapped a couple of quick pictures. He gave me a look of disgust, which he reserved for special occasions such as when he had not wanted me to photograph the twins, but he said nothing; then he grabbed his machete with one hand and rested the other hand on my shoulder for support. As he stood, a hot dry wind, as if from a fresh fire, stung my cheeks and I smelled his reeking insides and everything darkened. I dropped my Leica. For a moment I was blind and my blood cooled, as when something unknown and unseen passes right behind you. And then, though I knew he was already far away, I heard him speak to me as if he were still right beside me, whispering in my ear: ‘Don't let anyone add to the life I have given them, and don't let anyone take it away else monstrous woes damn them and their own.' I now was dreaming, and I remained so convinced till I heard Ñaña the Halfwit, who also must have been spending the night in the alleyway, scream: ‘Mira, mira pa eso, the angel with nine wings. ¡Ahí va!' She pointed into the night sky with her draggled trembling paper-wrapped hands. I looked up and saw the shadows of the beast fleeing from us, nine featherless reptile wings, two sets of four as wide as three times himself and flapping in unison, and one long thin one running down the ridge of his back, not a wing really, but taut skin on a bow-bent bone, which caught the breezes and seemed to function as a jib. This is the last I saw of our señor Sariel.

“'Ñaña the Halfwit was wise enough to pick up my camarita and hand it to me. But I was wise enough to simply tuck it behind my belt, there was no light and there would be no pictures. Ñaña the Halfwit crossed herself and went back to her bundle of papers muttering that the time of judgment was at hand for she had slept in the same sheets as the angel with nine wings and that blessed are those invited to do so.' Armando Quiñón paused, as if to let me absorb all this or to give me a chance to express my disbelief. We were already making our way out of the wood and heading towards the burnt fields. ‘As if I had been dreaming,' he said, ‘that's how I felt about it later, how else to feel about such events. Though whenever I saw Ñaña the Halfwit at the plaza, she stared at me until I looked back into her eyes, and in that brief look we shared our secret and she would smile.'

“We veered off the road and crossed diagonally across one of the burnt fields. When Armando Quiñón spoke again, it was almost morning. ‘Two days later, doña Edith suffered a stillbirth. She went mad, blaming and beating her two sons, screaming at them how señor Sariel had stolen into her womb and with his twisted hands grabbed their sister by the neck and choked her to death before any life was given to her, and if this weren't enough, el maldito diablo, he crunches all her not-yet-hardened bones, even the tiny nailless toes, and tears her open from the slit of her sex to the base of her neck so that your sister is born inside out and in several pieces. This she screams at them as she beats them with their dead father's belts, wielding five or six at a time, so that it seemed to the twins that she was a fiend with many arms.'”