The Lazarus Rumba (33 page)

For more than a year, while they were building his stone temple at Bayamo, Atila and his madre-mistress visited every month and watched over construction—all done with volunteer hands. Atila, closer to a deity than anyone in that part of the world then (with the possible exception of Jose Martí—though he was a dead deity), was still forced to ride the train in his ludicrous cane reed cage, which Yolanda had her husband rebuild, since she had shattered it to bits the morning Atila had swallowed her deadborn child, though she would have nothing to do with the builders of the temple and was conspicuously absent on the afternoon of its destruction. The temple walls were made of limestone, and the stained-glass windows, designed by Elena Mulé and executed by a craftsman from Trinidad, depicted the great cockfights of many of Atila's greatest ancestors, the roof was red tile and atop the steeple was placed, of course, a blue weather vane. And who paid for all this? The people, claro, the same who volunteered their hands and their backs to build, who got to the cane fields a bit earlier, just as the still submerged sun began to hint at the shadows of things, so they could leave a few hours before quitting time and put in labor at the temple. Out of the back walls of brick ovens, the lining of workboots, and from behind the rims of Sunday straw hats, taped to the underside of cabinets and even out of the hem of abuelita's yellowed moth-chewed wedding dress, boxed up and forgotten so long ago in a miasma of dust under her bed, came paper money, not pesos, for those were not really ever worth saving, but green yanqui dollars, all into the coffers to build a temple for the resurrector. When it was finished, Elena Mulé had a separate cane reed cage made for Paco Fortunato and moved into the chapel with her last two living roosters.

At the first ceremony in the temple of San Atila el Milagroso, the honored rooster, perched on the pulpit, sang all the roles of Puccini's three-part
Il Trittico
(it was said that Marioneta Alonso, who had been impressed with tales of the singing cock, might make an appearance, but the bald, blind soprano never showed—perhaps if she had, things might not have turned out for the worst), a performance that lasted five hours and wearied all the congregation, most of whom had come with their recent dead, and had left them piled outside in the noonday sun. (No one in Bayamo had been buried in over a year, for everyone knew that once the temple was finished, and the resurrector within it, the resurrector would do what resurrectors are wont to do—bring back the dead. Thus, to avoid a pestilence, the mayor issued an ordinance that prohibited anyone from keeping their dead at home; instead the city bought a giant freezer, a block long and six stories high, from a yanqui company that manufactured snow for ski resorts—and was investigating the possibility of establishing tropical ski resorts in the highest peaks of the Sierra Maestra—and fashioned it with over a thousand coffin-sized compartments. There, for over a year, for a certain monthly fee, it stored all its dead, along with those of nearby towns for a higher fee. On the morning of the first ceremony there was a mad rush to get the dead out and bring them to the temple. Dear grandmothers and cancer-stricken uncles and the father who died of a coronary while lifting a limestone for the temple's eastern wall and the boy who fell into the wild hog trap and was mauled by the beast who had fallen in the previous day and his mother who died of sorrow—in those days, as doctora Sara Zimmerman would assert much later, it was still possible to die of such things—and the six teenagers of the suicide pact who hopped a wired fence and took turns inhaling nitrous oxide hooked to a tractor of the United Fruit Company and many many others, including pets too beloved to ever be thought of as beasts, starved kittens and ancient flatulent hounds and defeated roosters, all were taken out of the giant refrigerator and hauled to the temple of San Atila el Milagroso, in wheelbarrows and buggy carts and pine coffins affixed with baby carriages under each end. When they arrived a rubicund-faced man said in a hissy Spaniard accent that he was a papal nuncio and told them that they could not bring the bodies inside the wicked temple, for these were baptized souls and if they were to be raised from the dead, it was to be done in the living light of God, that he would watch them meanwhile.) So while the congregation restlessly listened to Atila's rendition of Puccini, its dear dead began to thaw and warm and rot. When they stepped out of the temple, half expecting to see their beloved up and around (wasn't it with his voice that the wondrous blue rooster woke the dead?), it was midnight dark though it was only four in the afternoon, and the papal nuncio had his robe tied around his head like an Arab virgin, covering everything but his steely eyes, and was waving away a horde of flies and mosquitoes and cicadas, that not content with feasting on the excremental dead had taken a liking to his sacramental odor.

There are differing versions of what happened after the people saw their dead mamás and papás, their abuelos and abuelitas, their mijitos and mijitas covered with suits of cicadas and helmets of black flies and veils of mosquitoes. Some blame the destruction of the first and only temple of San Atila el Milagroso on the papal nuncio who, without even consulting the monsignor of the local parish, had taken it upon himself to expose Atila as a fake and a charlatan, as he had recited prayers in Greek (written by Pope Pius XII, as inspired by the songs of Moses) to summon the seventeen-year locust a few years early, and thus it is said that the plague of locusts that descended from the heavens that afternoon was so monumental that it covered the town of Bayamo and made it night and it was not until four mornings later that the north wind blew the plague into the Caribbean Sea and anyone saw the sun again. All the dead were missing and the trees had no fruit or leaves and the palms were all bald so that they seemed like giant ridged gray phalluses shooting out of the earth.

Others, in a more rational attempt to explain the destruction of the temple, say that the locusts were right on time, that it was a larger swarm than usual—though not so large as to snuff out the sun! although, sure, it was overcast for a few days—and that, yes, some fruit was lost and a few palm fronds eaten, but this had nothing to do with what happened at the temple. Outside, the people found their dear dead and shooed away the humming insects and paid no attention to the nuncio and his twisted prayer chants, waiting for Atila to come out and do his thing, bring back the dead. But the blue rooster did not show.
That was the problem!
After his Puccini performance, he was taken down from the pulpit and locked into his cane reed cage in the chapel. Elena Mulé bolted the entrance to the temple and would not let Atila out to meet the congregation, nor it inside to meet him. Discomfited by the growing carrion smell of their beloved, irritated by the persistent drone of the settling-in locusts and their being locked out of the temple, which they had sacrificed a year of their lives and a lifetime of savings to build, the people grew restless. Someone threw a rock through one of the stained-glass windows. There were cheers. And more rocks were thrown till all of Atila's glass-painted ancestors were shattered. Elena Mulé, in an attempt to appease the mob, hoping that the locust-darkness would confuse it, sent out to them Paco Fortunato. The poor luckless handsome rooster wet and stained his limp seven-seas tail and forgot his greater voice and cackled shamelessly on the temple's front steps. Immediately, he was recognized as an impostor. Someone grabbed him by the neck and twirled his body till something snapped and Paco Fortunato cackled no more, then they plucked his seven-seas feathers and bashed him and crushed his body over the limestone walls and with his blood and with the luridness of his insides they smeared obscene words on the temple's iron doors. The nuncio stopped chanting and raised both his open palms as if in thanksgiving and proclaimed another victory against the pagans. “Down with the pagan temple,” he yelled. “For the Lord our Jesus is great and He will reign forever!”

So the people went home and brought back picks and broadaxes and garden shovels, and with the same hands, with the same backs, with the same conviction that they had built the temple of San Atila el Milagroso, they began to destroy it, pulverizing it stone by stone; except that in fear of hurricanes from the Atlantic, they had built the eastern wall far too sturdy, and they could not take it down (though they brought in teams of Holstein oxen and tied heavy ropes to the base of the wall and the Holsteins pulled and pulled, digging into the earth with their wide hooves till they were almost buried alive); the following morning, the eastern wall still stood among the rubble-ruins of the house of San Atila el Milagroso. And the reason the dead were missing after the locusts were swept to the sea was not because the locusts ate them—locusts eat plants, not flesh!—but because afterward, the people of Bayamo, pledging never again to devote their lives to false resurrectors, reopened the town cemetery and laid their dead to rest. The papal nuncio said a brief prayer over every single grave and then led them in a procession to a funeral Mass at the town's Roman Catholic cathedral, proclaiming in the homily that the miracle of resurrection had been patented long ago by Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.

In all the commotion, all the high talk about the true Savior, Yolanda and her drunk baby-thieving husband and their child, who had been born dead but was now living, were entirely forgotten.

While they were busy murdering his lover, scribbling obscenities with his blood and the stuff of his lower intestines on the temple walls, Atila and his madre-mistress fled from a side door of the chapel, and once again rolled up into a ball and stuffed between her legs so that she limped and sang like a prima donna—and looked like one, since she was in her Sunday best, in a rose-colored loose-fitting silk dress with a blue-thread smocking at the collar and simple pearl necklace—they escaped from Bayamo, not back home to the finca near Holguín, but to hide in the Sierra Maestra, the rugged and prodigious massif in the southwestern hem of their tail-end province. From that day on, and for the next eleven years, Atila was convinced that one or another member of that first congregation of San Atila el Milagroso was stalking him down to murder him in the same fashion Paco Fortunato had been murdered.

They disembarked from the train at Santiago de Cuba and headed west along the Caribbean coastline by foot, Atila leading and stopping the campesinos in their buggy carts with his voice, hitching rides and eating whatever was offered to them for his song. They did not stop moving till they came to a village called Agua Fina, after a nearby creek whose waters were so transparent, so silky, that the villagers swore it was the tears of the gods and to drink from the creek day in and day out would promise immortality. And indeed many of the villagers seemed to have lived past a century already. But Atila and Elena Mulé were so distraught with any notion of resurrection or immortality, that though they were thirsty and had drunk little water in six days, subsisting mostly on coconut juice and the syrup of cane stalks, they refused to drink from the stream, but accepted from a Catalán storeowner named Miguel, who at eighty-six was one of the youngsters of the village, a meal of chorizo and crackers.

The Sierra Maestra is a wet, junglelike region that then, as now, was sparsely inhabited by farmers and campesinos who grew sugarcane and coffee and were for the most part isolated from the rest of the Island, iconoclasts who, from the early days of the Spanish colonization until Castro's Revolución many years later, have considered themselves at odds with the political goings-on of the capital on the other side of the Island. Thus, Elena Mulé wisely told the anciano villagers of Agua Fina, located on the foothills of the Sierra Maestra, that she and her rooster were fleeing from the reach of the despot then in power in Havana, one Gerardo Machado y Morales. Immediately the villagers took in Elena Mulé and her rooster as one of their own. They spent a week in the village feasting on suckling pigs and cask-aged rum. They danced and Atila sang his favorite arias from
Carmen
and all was joyful till Atila and his madre-mistress began—well, how else to say this without causing offense—to stink, for not only would they not drink the water from the tears-of-the-gods stream, but they would not bathe in it as the villagers bathed in it three times a day, and after a week they could not tolerate the scent of their persecuted visitors, so they sent them out with a young guide into the mountains, packing for them canteens full of rum, instead of stream water, and more chorizo and crackers.

The guide's name was Tati Hijuelos. He was ninety-seven years old. His hair was white and sparse and the muscles hung on his bones limp as a furled sail, but when it came to hiking and hurdling over the sharp jagged rocks the natives named after the fangs of wolves he was an expert. Not even Atila, who was seventy-five years his junior, spreading his blue wings and flying at times, could keep up with him. On occasion Tati Hijuelos would forget about them and move so fast up the side of the mountain that they would lose sight of him and he would have to trace his way back down and get behind Elena Mulé, and with his bony shoulder give her a shove on her graveolent rump and Atila a kick in his Varadero-blues tail, which sunk deeper the needles of his migraine. After three days, deep into the jungle, they came to the purlieus of a village called Sinsol. Tati Hijuelos said good-bye and pointed the way with his crooked finger.