The Lazarus Rumba (38 page)

He saw that it was the rooster that sang, standing over a mound where the boy had been digging. Had he killed him and was now paying homage? this the boy's requiem from a chivalrous murderous rooster? ¿un gallo devoto también? Father Jacinto maneuvered his way back down the cave side with some trouble (it had been much easier on the way up and he thought this a peculiar symbolism). The soles of his feet were cut and the cuts on his shins were still bleeding, so he limped back to the river and waded in knee-deep till the cool waters, though they stung at first, had washed away most of the pain. He went back to the front entrance of the cave. The rooster was still singing and the timbre of his voice became more and more precise as the rapture of the chords darkened. Father Jacinto was far too curious. He walked back into the cave, crouching a bit, his fingers curled, ready to do battle with the rooster if necessary. The rooster paid no attention to him this time and continued with his mourning. The boy, who had indeed been buried under the mound, had pushed his head back out of the earth and he listened, enthralled by his own death song, no longer terrorized. The rooster continued his memorial service for over two hours, improvising the whole thing, for at times he paused and stared away at the empty air as a composer might in the middle of knitting together a symphony.

Father Jacinto sat near the mound and crossed his legs, wishing someone as talented as this blue cock would compose a hymn for all of the dead at the hand of Franco's fascists. When it was over, Father Jacinto stood and clapped and clapped and yelled bravo and bravo as if he were at la Scala still, and the boy, bringing his hands out of his grave with some trouble, also clapped and spoke for the first time, mimicking Father Jacinto with bravo and bravo, and encore and encore. Atila did not bow, did not blow kisses to them, did not take seventeen curtain calls, did not clasp any bouquets. He had not performed—or so it seemed from his demeanor, as he stepped down from the mound and began picking at bugs from his wing-pits—for anyone but himself.

Father Jacinto spoke to the boy: “¿De dónde eres? ¿Y este pájaro es tuyo?”

“I come from under the earth. And no the bird is not mine. I found him … o mejor dicho, he found
me
; a week ago he awoke me from my earth dream with his demon song, and last night he caught me while I was fucking three viejas!”

Father Jacinto crossed himself. Atila continued to pick bugs off himself and chewed and swallowed them, and the one-eyed Jesuit imagined for a second that he was still in the rebel hospital in Granada, and that this was another morphine-induced hallucination. Still, even in visions, he had his duties. “You lie and you are sinful with women. Do you want to confess?”

“Yes,” the boy said. He dug himself further out of his grave. “How do you play?”

“¿Cómo te llamas?”

“Julio César. ¿Tú?”

“Do you know who Julio César is?”

“This is a stupid game:
confess!
I just told you.
I
am Julio César. Now who are you?”

“I am Father Jacinto de la Serna.”

“Whose father are you?”

The rooster stopped cleaning himself and he walked over to Father Jacinto. The one-eyed Jesuit stood up and backed away. The rooster folded his legs under him and sat by the priest peacefully as if he were sitting on the nest of a wayward hen. Father Jacinto crouched down like a catcher instead of sitting again.

“Do you want to play this stupid game of confess or not?” the boy said. “Whose father are you?” He dug himself completely out of the earth and Father Jacinto was embarrassed by the boy's nakedness and he could not help to stare at his genitalia, the dark droopy fruit fallen on a pair of large, round bagged riverstones. He offered the boy his robe.

“No, it will itch too much. But whose father are you?”

“Do you ever go to church? I am a father of the church. I teach at a school in the capital. Maybe you would like to come with me.”

“You're not playing right.”

The sun moved over the side of the cave and a beam of light, fluid as a tentacle, seeped through a crack in the roof and licked Julio César's bare feet. The boy jumped back and his breath quickened and he began to dig himself back in. Father Jacinto went to the boy and grabbed him by the shoulder. His body was feverish. As he struggled with him, all the time darting his one eye back to the rooster, who remained as before, still and meditative, Father Jacinto noticed a long fresh scar on the boy's left side that ran from the side of his belly, under the rib cage and up the sternum and the near his throat dipped downward again towards his nipple so that it looked like a palm twisted and cut in half by a thunderbolt had been etched on his chest. Father Jacinto hugged the boy close and traced the scar with his finger and asked the boy what had happened in a soothing voice that he used only when talking to younger children at the Belén school.

The boy pressed his face to Father Jacinto's chest. “That's how the surgeon from the capital stole my lung,” he said. “That's how he killed me. He sells organs to rich yanquis. My mamacita told me stories about him. … I thought they were just stories.”

Because he knew the boy was still playing confess, because he so much despised yanquis, rich or poor, Father Jacinto believed him. But the love growing in his heart forbade him from listening any further.

“I don't want to go to the capital,” the boy said, “that's where the surgeon was from.”

A Jesuit in love with a resurrected boy? Not so unbelievable. A doctor who steals from his own people to sell to rich foreigners? Not so unlikely. But organs? stolen organs packed in ice and covered with straw? for what? This is the late 1930s, the only transplant that has been attempted from one human to another is of the cornea. (And it is the Jesuit, not the boy, who has lost an eye!) Christiaan Barnard is a pubescent lad in West Beaufort, South Africa, decades away from conceiving his life's work, obsessed now with only one organ, which he hopes will never be transplanted from his body, though it is now growing heavy on its bough, and the lad has nightmares that it will one day ripen and fall off.

Human organs? from breathing unwilling donors? what fairy tales does a mother invent?

Through our simplest stories are woven the invisible threads of our unmentionable fears. Under the forests of our most fantastic narratives runs, like a serpent under the brush, the most realistic record of our history—just ask Jakob and Wilhelm. A mother who has once lost a child whispers till her dying day, to anyone who will listen, fragmented tales of lost children.

… Once there was a blue cock who was said to raise the dead with his wondrous voice.

… Once there was an old mother who gave birth to a hanged winking child, and the mother wanted to keep him but the father wanted to fill him with stones and throw him in the river, so the blue cock came and swallowed the winking child, and rescinded the sentence of the umbilical cord, and the child appeared as if fresh from a womb.

… Once there was a people so hungry for a savior that they believed all this and were deaf to the cries of a guajiro mother who had had her liveborn stolen from right under her crotch, and sacrificed a year of their lives and a lifetime of savings to build a limestone temple for this blue cock, and they called him saint, and their dead went unburied to wait for the savior's return, and thus fashioned out of one fairy tale a fairy tale of their own.

… Once there was a blue cock who was said to raise the dead with his wondrous voice, and he had a hunk-of-a-lover and a rotund mistress, and they came with him to reside in his limestone temple, and the blue cock did have a wondrous voice, but like most wonders in our world it did not impress the dead at all, and this limitation, this failure in translation (for certainly the dead speak and hear with other noises, other notes), cost him the life of his hunk-of-a-lover.

… Once there was a limestone temple that in one brief locust-dark afternoon was, but for one hardy wall, destroyed.

… Once there was a saint returned as demon, and he finished the job.

… Once there was a winking child who lived in a second life.

… Once there was the case of disappeared children that police captains put at the bottom of their work files, children from the tin-shack towns west of the capital and from small pueblos throughout the length of the Island, even as far east as Oriente, children who would sometimes reappear, as if awakened from a dream, with delicate palms sketched into their chests, their bellies, the small of the back, the left side of their sacs.

… Once there was a thief-surgeon from the capital who was ahead of his time, he stole organs for a living, and sold them to rich ailing yanquis, whose own organs they had poisoned with their dissolute lives, and they also believed too much in fairy tales, as if the tropical heat had melted their cold logical minds, and were told that for their poisoned organs to heal they must eat the fresh healthy organs of others, and so they unpacked their pine boxes of straw and unmelted ice, and quickly sauteed kidneys with garlic and peppercorn and port wine, broiled liver with Spanish seasoning, stuffed hearts with minced onion and marjoram leaves, and wrapped tiny huevitos, no bigger than olives, in strips of bacon, and swallowed slices of lung raw, letting the little globules of air expand in their mouth and pop, each according to his malady, and all as shamelessly as if they were feasting on the innards of beast or fowl, and though they never knew the thief-surgeon's name, while their unhealing organs let them live, they considered him their savior.

… Once there was a winking boy who would need a third life, whose lung would be an appetizer to some decrepit yanqui in the capital (though the thief-surgeon consoled himself in that he had not killed him but stitched him up and left him to live after the drugs wore off; it was only when he needed a heart or a liver that he was forced to kill, when no delicate half-palm need be carved, just a blow to the head and a slit from the base of the neck to the pit of the groin).

… Once there was a thief-surgeon who drew half-palms with the genius of a court calligrapher, and on the chest, the bellies, the backs, the sacs, of the Island's children would forever grow these half-trees, the mark of their fortune, for they had reappeared, they had lived.

Once begun a fairy tale must needs continue. Just ask Wilhelm and Jakob. Just ask any in the ghostly drunken march of the capital's toppled tyrants. Or better yet, as Father Jacinto would have it, just ask the yanquis.

Father Jacinto lost the boy Julio César twice on the train trip from his mother's house in Manzanillo to the Alturas de Belén hillside where the college was located in the capital. The first time, at a stop in a town called Las Tunas, he thought the boy had run back home. Father Jacinto had stepped off the train to buy him a cola and a piece of candy at a market down the street from the station. When he came back the boy was gone. Father Jacinto had picked up a new habit since he met Julio César and his blue rooster, he would lift up the black patch on his left eye to make sure he wasn't dreaming, for in his dreams he could still see with both eyes. He did this now and looked around the coach, and the few passengers that paid any attention at all to Father Jacinto when he shook them and asked them where the boy had gone looked away from the stitch scars in his left eye socket and said the boy had walked out almost right behind him. He undid the pierced sackcloth tied over the tin bucket under his seat. The blue rooster was asleep. He took the tin bucket outside and turned it over and the rooster came tumbling out, rudely awakened.

“I've lost Julio César,” Father Jacinto said to the rooster. The people who had not boarded yet, and those who were still waiting in line at the ticket counter and were too riddled with impatience to notice anything (cubanos back then had not yet mastered the art of waiting in la cola), turned and watched this scene, forgetting about their hurries.

“I've lost Julio César,” the Jesuit repeated. This time the rooster seemed to comprehend, because it opened wide its wings and began to lead the priest out of the station in marching steps.

“Please wait for us, negro,” Father Jacinto screamed to the conductor, trying not to lose sight of the rooster. “We won't be long. I need to find the boy.”

“¿Sí, sí, cómo no?” the conductor said. “Not te preocupes, padrecito, we'll wait for you.” He was going to call the local police, but he thought better of it, and told the engineer to ease the engines a bit. They were going to wait, and he crossed himself three times as if to prove it to Father Jacinto, who waved his mil gracias.

They were gone for two and half days. They followed a dirt highway that crossed through cane fields and headed northeasterly towards the ocean. They passed the finca of a certain don Piño who chased them with his hounds for twelve hours, and intermittently fired his shotgun into the air and announced his hatred of all comepinga sodomite priests. They came to a swamp region near Puerto Carupano, where the mangroves grew so prolifically that the entwining roots knit a landmass of their own; the blue rooster stopped and began to circle and look for the boy Julio César. They found him buried in the soft mud near the firm land of a nearby village; a cloud of mosquitoes had begun to devour him. The rooster sang its requiem again and the boy awoke, slapping his face and his arms to kill the bloodsuckers. Father Jacinto picked him up (he had shed his clothes again) and washed him in a lagoon near Puerto Carupano and tore off the lower part of his robe and fashioned for the boy a dress. On the way back they stopped at a young peasant couple's bohío and were fed boiled yucca and bread and the peasant's wife told them of a different road back to Las Tunas so that they would not have to cross don Piño's finca, and she told them she could not say why he hated priests so much for it would not be proper, but she did say that don Piño had been raised in a Franciscan orphanage and perhaps they had mistreated him. She gave the boy Julio César a pair of torn work pants that belonged to her husband and a blouse that belonged to her. Father Jacinto thanked them and blessed their thatch-roofed hut.