The Lazarus Rumba (29 page)

“¡Qué polio!” doña Ana said. “I can't wait to pass on and shake my hips with that young thing.”

“Mamá, no seas bruta!”

“Bruta no. I hope you'll be there, hope you'll all be there. Then you'll see how well this dead mamacita can rumba!”

A Shroud of Papaya Leaves

At dusk, when the bonfire was its most intense, the flames stretching their blue-nailed orange fingers twelve feet in the air, Barba Roja stood at the front door of Armando Quiñón's studio, shoulder to shoulder with comandante Julio César Cruz, their telescopic rifles cocked in front of them and the mute blue rooster Atila perched between them, one talon on each separate shoulder, digging in with his nails like the two comandantes had dug themselves in with their boots. The mob wanted more. It wanted the body. That, Barba Roja could not permit. They had taken all the black and white photographs and the antique oak chest (trampled it to pieces) and the countless wooden frames and even the suicide's trademark linen baggy suits and fed them all to the fire. Bare-torsoed children ran around the perimeter of the flames and sang, and they used emptied upturned rum barrels as drums:

A redheaded yanqui woman, who had been a supporter of la Revolución and abandoned her husband and deserted the naval base a few days prior, when a rebel victory seemed imminent, watched with her wide-eyed freckle-faced children as if looking on at a primitive ritual.

One of the children had a bottle of rum and he drank from it and passed it on to the others. Some drank the rum, some spit it back out at the fire and the flames jumped and hissed at the squirt of liquor. The adults around them laughed and they too spit at the fire.

Barba Roja was disturbed. Even some of his own men were now joining in. But he had a plan. He would wait till the fire died out and then disperse the mob. He would let them enjoy themselves. This gross excitement was the normal process of victory. He would not, however, relinquish Armando Quiñón's body, nor let any harm come to Ñaña the Halfwit, who was now also trapped inside with the cleansed corpse, not even if he had to fight off his own men or use force against the rum-tipsy children.

Things had gotten out of control too easily. Just a few hours before, he had been in the cellar room alone with comandante Cruz. He had sent word to Carmen Canastas with one of his men and she was going to come identify the body and then they were going to take it down and give it a proper burial. As the commander in charge of the victorious rebel troops Barba Roja was now interim mayor, police captain, and fire marshall of Guantánamo. (Although he would appoint someone else to each of these positions soon.) They waited. They sifted through the pictures of the photographer's beloved Héctor, in many poses and at many ages, here hanging by his legs from a tree branch beside the gross creature that was their maestro, naked, his lips parted into an almost audible sigh and his eyes closed and his hair much longer then, dangling below his head in thick curls like an indian headdress woven from the coarse wool ringlets of black sheep, and other pictures as he grew older and his upper body began to broaden and take on the contours of a man, and almost always in the pictures, Héctor wore nothing, as if in this life he had never known such displeasures as the toe-clamp of wrong-sized shoes or the hangrope of a shirt's top button, or the thousand-mosquito-bite itchiness of a wool sweater and had simply gone about as he was made, never embarrassed by a moment of it. And there were just as many pictures of the amethyst-eyed boy, though he was obviously more hesitant about discarding his clothes and more wary of the shadow of their maestro, which was cast in every picture, obvious as the light, even the ones where he was not there, outside the frame, or further even, outside of their lives, before he had turned up and after he had vanished. As in the scoop of the boy's eye—the picture that Armando Quiñón somehow took in the hospital, the one where it looks as if the eye had been dug out by a spoon with fangs—in the shadows of that wound, Barba Roja clearly saw the puffy-chin profile of their maestro, the great melonball head and the bulbous nose etched in the gray and black and blacker of the boy's eye socket; and in the blood the boy had left behind, Barba Roja saw the shape of the white-winged horseflies that would infest the house many years later, as if their maestro had not come from the outside world at all, but had always been in them and at a certain point in their lives had been given the freedom to exist.

Both men saw the obvious worth of the photographs, not just as records of lives lived, but as telling pieces of art. Even prophecy, Barba Roja insisted as he began to arrange the pictures and realized how the shadowlands of these black and white frozen images told time backwards and forwards and his esteem for the gaunt naked man hanging behind him grew by the minute. He looked at the last picture Armando Quiñón had taken of the rebels descending from the mountains that morning, and he stared hard and squinted his eyes with the picture at arm's length and flipped it slowly all the way around, though he remained blind to the script of time to come. The events that were forecoming that night would tell him more than any picture could.

There was a boot-knock at the trapdoor. Barba Roja climbed the wobbly wooden stairs slowly and threw the door upward with a push of his left arm, his right hand on the butt of his pistol. It was the town's deposed chief of police. He backed away, both his hands sticking out to show that he was unarmed as he had been when he surrendered to the rebels that morning. Except now, he wore a crisp uniform, the kind officers wear to parades or before they shoot themselves in the temple, and his mustache was waxed and shaped and his hair slicked back. A few of the townspeople stood behind him, having made their way into the front of the studio.

“With all respects, comandante,” the former chief of police said to Barba Roja, “the people want to see el muerto. There is a whole crowd outside.”

“Is Carmen Canastas out there? Tell her I need to see her.”

“I do not see your … la señorita cañastas. But there's a whole mess of other curious folks outside, comandante, and they want to see the body, o mejor dicho, they actually want the body. You see the man hanging down there was a devotee of Satan, one of the women folk in our town actually saw him conversing with one of the fallen angels, and ritual says his body must be burned to dust so that we may rid ourselves of his sins. With all respect, comandante, for you are an intelligent man, and you well know how revoluciones, no matter how worthy, as yours, sin duda ninguna, is worthy, can never, o mejor dicho, should never change the holy rites of the people. They have started a bonfire. They demand the body of the photographer, so that his devil-flesh will never infect the earth that feeds us.”

“And
you
were the chief of police in this town?” Barba Roja said. “Pobre gente.” He heard the drums and the chanting outside. He stepped back down the stairs and without saying a word motioned with his hand for comandante Cruz to take down Armando Quiñón's body. The former chief of police got down on his knees and poked his head into the cellar room, the blood running down to his head and expanding the veins that stretched on his brow, thick as tentacles.

“It's a suicide, comandante,
and
the man was denounced as a pederast. His body must not contaminate the earth, else we all be poisoned with the filth of his sins.”

“¿¡No me digas? You have sins of your own to worry about. And I am afraid that your penance has been much too brief. For your sake, I hope that this man's death was a suicide. There will be an investigation. So go out and tell the people that they cannot and that they will not have the body. Clear the way for us. We are removing it from here. And pray on your head, viejo, that no harm comes to any of us or to this body as we are taking it out, lest you suffer the same fate as this wretched soul.”

“Comandante, por el amor de Dios, you cannot hold me responsible for the actions of that mob out there. Están revueltos, nothing and no one will sway them for their purpose.”

“Come dije ya, viejo, pray that you can. … And take off that silly costume.”

Barba Roja slammed shut the trapdoor.

Comandante Julio César Cruz had taken off his olive jacket and tied it around the body of the suicide, or alleged suicide, as Barba Roja told him to refer to the corpse. The blue rooster Atila was perched on the corpse's sunken chest, attempting again to crow, but all he could manage was a gurgly wheeze. Comandante Cruz consoled him and threw the body of the photographer over his right shoulder and perched the rooster on his left, where the flesh was uncallused (the rooster always traveled on the right shoulder, where Armando Quiñón's body now hung, it seeming disrespectful to the comandante to carry a dead man on his left) so he was uncomfortable at first, shifting and digging in with his talons till he cut past the undershirt and into flesh and blood drooled down his master's back and down his master's arm and stained the band of his Swiss watch and climbed on one of the veins in the back of his hand and rode it down to his ring finger and split at the nail and met again at the tip and dripped on the concrete floor and continued to drip in measured time all that day, for the corpse stayed on the right shoulder and the rooster on the left digging into an unfamiliar roost, so that many years later, after comandante Julio César Cruz's own death, after Barba Roja had forgotten that he was once a rebel and had once loved Carmen Canastas and fled in his own air force jet to Miami, any one in the town who was not blind could show you, step by step, where the two men had gone that day with the body of the photographer. The blood of comandante Julio César Cruz, falling with the rhythm of an English poem from his ring finger, every five or six steps, marked the trail of their journey. And after his death, when this or that revolutionary committee tried to wipe out all the traces of his rebel existence, and they repaved all of Perdido Street (because that was the longest part of the journey with the body, to the cemetery and to Sara Zimmerman's garden), covering the blood spots with rocky sand and cement and fresh tar, only to find less than a week later that spots had reappeared, spreading open like ink on tissue paper, they accused his widow and her group of painting the spots on the street. They repaved again with heavier sand and two more layers of cement and the blackest coal tar from Wales and left guards at every corner from the house with the white-winged horsefly shingles to the above-ground cemetery near the Jaibo river, to no avail, for the spots reappeared again, grown to the size and shape of sunburst medallions, as if the spots had splashed down from many miles above the earth. This time they could not blame the widow, so they blamed the guards and had them all arrested and charged with counterrevolutionary activities. They repaved Perdido Street again and again with so many layers of sand and cement and tar that eventually passersby had to climb
up
on Perdido Street from the sidewalk and mockers of the revolutionary committees began to refer to the street as Perdido Hill. All again to no avail, for the blood that dripped from comandante Julio César Cruz's ring finger as he carried the body of Armando Quiñón on the day of his alleged suicide, the same day the rebels had proclaimed their victory to the world, is still seen there, and so many pilgrims still follow the path up and down Perdido Hill that it has become famous for its outlaw vendors at every corner (where the guards had once stood), selling everything from black market sugar and coffee beans to clusters of the small white flowers called baby's breath that the pilgrims scatter on the street because they were said to be a favorite of the photographer and a small cluster of them in a hand-blown vase was the only living thing found in his studio on the day of his alleged suicide.

Barba Roja took the flowers as he led the way out of Armando Quiñón's studio and held them pressed to his solar plexus and that's why Ñaña the Halfwit later told them her story. She caught up with the two rebel comandantes and the corpse and the rooster after they had made it unharmed past the mob outside, after they had passed by the house of Carmen Canastas, whose mother had been suddenly struck by a fever in whose shadows she saw the three-eyed acrobat, and she became enamored with the long bones of his feet and the shape of his hips and the curves of his shoulders and the breath of his dream in the flutter of his eyes, as he danced around her and with his hips summoned her from this earth. Together, they said a prayer for doña Ana and carried the photographer's body away from there to the house with the white-winged horsefly shingles on Perdido Street.

Ñaña the Halfwit was waiting for them there. Her cheeks were painted deep cherry, like a ceramic doll, her eyelids morning blue and she wore a papier maché wedding dress she had constructed for herself out of old newspapers soaked in cane juice. She liked it because it was different, not white but gray and yellow and runny black. Her slippers were made from old tin cans. She had polished them and they glittered. When she saw the cluster of baby's breath and the suicide with the olive skirt hanging on comandante Julio César Cruz's right shoulder, she broke into her story, following the two men and the corpse and the rooster towards the cemetery.

“You will not bury him!” she called to them, the hem of her paper dress splitting and revealing the lesions on her patchy-haired leg. “Don't bother going to Campo Santo. His bones will sing till the end of time. It is written. His father was a poor laborer in the fields, un machetero. His mother was devout. ¡Pero coño!, she could not do without it for one night. So soon they had eighteen children, and no matter how hard the man worked, he could not feed his family. His wife blamed him and screamed at him when he got home, so tired from swinging his machete that he could not lift his arms; though later at night she made up with him and kissed his swollen feet and got what she needed. The man cried with his sons and daughters for he was as hungry and as weary as they were. One day, he came home from the cane fields and there was a roast at the table and it smelled like lamb. The man screamed at his wife. He asked her where she had gotten the money for such an expensive meal and he spit at her and called her putísima and desgraciada. She assured him all this was not so and said she would prove it was not so later in the bedroom. And she did. Meanwhile, the man sat and ate with his children. The meat was sweet and melted in their mouths, though when they offered the mother some, she said she had already eaten. Every so often, from then on, there was meat on the table that smelled like lamb and melted in their mouths.”