The Lazarus Rumba (41 page)

“La luna is like us,” Fidel said, “like our sad little Island, living on borrowed means, its every step dictated by the light of the tyrannous sun, even though you would never guess it. It looks brilliant and beautiful all on its own.” Then he would sing to his friend and sing to the moon.

He was good-willed and malicious, at times he cared for Julio César like a brother, and visited him every week, and eased the jolts of his loneliness, but just as easy, he would make a cutting remark or pull some prank to remind him who was still the jock and the bully and who was still the queer abused kid. One dawn, while Julio César was still buried in his falcon-legged bathtub, he heard Fidel's voice as he came out of the fourth door in the garden. He was drunk. He was mad because the alcohol had not let him perform. He kicked the falcon-legged tub and called Julio César a priest-lover and a marica. Then he stood over the tub and urinated on the packed soil, laughing all the while, and promised that when he ruled the Island he would hang all the curitas and all the mariconcitos by their cojonecitos.

“Ese los curas le metieron complejo de rey,” doña Álvara often said.

The liquid felt warm and soothing as it seeped through the soil and spread over Julio César's arched back and buttocks. He was not insulted or outraged as Fidel had expected him to be. During his next visit Fidel apologized, but Julio César pretended he had no idea of what he was talking about and convinced Fidel that in his drunken haze he must have dreamt whatever he was apologizing for. They laughed and then played the saint or demon game. It ended as always.

“… demon one day, saint the other.”

Julio César could not imagine that the crude and vulgar fowl that belonged to doña Álvara was the same mythic blue-feathered cock—descendant of a long line of fighting roosters back to the era of the great Turkish empire—that his mother told him about in the stories of his soil dreams. (Julio César could sleep anywhere. In fact, more than once, while playing canastas and chatting and drinking straight rum in doña Álvara's room, he had fallen asleep in her narrow bed—which she insisted on sleeping in, under the illusion that her mountain of flesh fit comfortably in—and she, on the pretext that she did not want to awake him, slid him over and most precisely balanced her behemoth rump on the edge of the bed, so that he would awake buried under her, gasping with his one lung for air, for soil is much more porous and oxygen-rich than grease. Sleep anywhere—but Julio César could dream only while buried in the earth.) The rooster of his dreams could sing Puccini and Verdi, the rooster of his dreams woke him from his one-lung death with the same magnificent high-low note that crumbled the eastern wall, and summoned, with another kind of song, a caring one-eyed Jesuit, and made possible for him this life he now enjoyed,
that
rooster was fried and eaten long ago, by the thugs who chased him into Richard Hadley's trawler.
This
roosters highest achieved melody was the jammed-propeller prelude of his farts, followed by the visceral cantata of his diarrhea. Doña Álvara, nevertheless, started calling her rooster Atila, as Julio César said the rooster of his mother's dream stories was called.

During his visits, Fidel Castro mostly ignored Atila, recognizing his existence only when he stepped on one of his piles of green and gray mierda. Then he would search him out and give him a good kick on the side, which would send the rooster cackling away like a hen. “Marica!” Fidel would call after him, as if the fact that Atila was suffering from terrible intestinal diseases somehow cast a shadow of doubt on his masculinity.

When he had had too much rum, though, and the woman of the fourth door had already pleased him, Fidel would take to liking the blue-feathered rooster and, inspired by the stories that he had once sung Puccini arias, Fidel would try to teach him the national hymn, becoming very serious as he sang it, his back straightening, and his eyebrows, which were too hairy for such a youth, bending inward, as if the weight of his thoughts were too much of a load:

Atila tilted his head like a curious dog and his heavy coral comb dangled over his left eye as Fidel became even more stiff.

It was impossible to believe that Atila could understand these words, so perhaps it was from the tone of Fidel's voice, which grew more and more impassioned as he worked his way into the song, accenting each phrase not by the rhythm of the language nor the meter in the music, but by their patriotic poundage, that Atila took his cue, for just as Fidel hit the part of how dying for the fatherland was to live, Atila, his head still cocked and motionless, betraying nothing, as if he had no idea that a putrid air was passing through him and was about to find a point of exit, let out a glorious fart, like the cymbals that clash in all great anthems, a rumbling that resonated within the cavity from whence it came so that a minor quake seemed to shake the bird and his wattle trembled like a furled sail on the point of waking to a cold northern gust. At these moments, bent with laughter, Julio César had no doubt that this incontinent diarrhetic unpatriotic mute rooster was the fabulous blue-feathered cock of his dream-mother's stories.

If he could resurrect others, why not himself?

In an attempt to revive his (Atila's) lost talent, Julio César snuck him into a performance of
La Bohème
at the Havana City Opera. As Marioneta Alonso—who was now an ancient diva of eighty-three (though, since she had been bald since her youth, and had always refused to don a wig, she looked not that much older than she had forty years prior)—insisted, as always, on performing on a bare stage, for obvious reasons, though she pretended all of them to be aesthetic, expressing fear that her delicate voice, its timbre almost unchanged for half a century (as if the Maker had decided that taking the woman's sight and her hair was enough punishment for a lifetime and could not persuade Himself to take her voice), would be swallowed by the hollows of the scenery, and removed any lingering doubt that she could pass as a bohemian virgin by her tingling rendition of
“Sì, mi chiamano Mimì,”
Atila was wholly uninspired. By the middle of the second act, Julio César had to get up and leave. He had hidden Atila in a bundle under the oversized dark wool suit that Fidel had lent him, and the bird had so lost control of his excretory faculties that Julio César smelled just like that famous vagrant in Havana's Central Park (who daily stripped down to his undergarments and sat on a stone bench under the tamarind trees and took a pose and did not twitch a muscle, till the pigeons thought that he was a statue and perched on him and relieved themselves; at this, the man would become aroused and the pigeons then perched and relieved themselves on this most convenient roost).

Julio César buried himself in his falcon-legged tub for an entire week to rid himself of the smell. Fidel then got back at him for laughing during the most solemn moments of the national hymn. He taught Atila how to caca on the topsoil of the tub, feeding him rotted corn soaked in spicy rum so his condition would worsen. When Julio César emerged from underneath on the seventh day there was a white crust an inch thick, cold as an ice cap, over his topsoil.

“I just missed you, mi socio,” Fidel said. “I figured the fertilizer would make you sprout sooner. Y de todos modos, you owe me for a suit, so maybe you can go to your one-eyed Jesuit and let him caress you in exchange for some cash from his coffers.”

Julio César wiped the feces crust out of his brown curls, which he had let grow too long for Fidel's taste, and out of his whiskers, which grew in patches, like a child in a school play who has glued not enough tufts of wool on his cheeks. Fidel, holding Atila and petting him as if they were now the finest of friends, threw the rooster up in the air when it began to relieve itself on him.

“Qué gracioso estás, mi vida,” Julio César said, and naked as he was, covered with earth and frosty shit went inside the third door. The woman in there would care for him and wash him with a warm damp cloth.

The demon-saint would be alone, for it was Monday and all the other of doña Álvara's women were off.

Seven Against Him

The only time I left our house during that first week back was to find the flat malletlike stone I used to crush the coffee beans. El Rubio's vandals had raided the house after the storm and stolen the coffee grinder. I was careful with each morning's batch, crushed just enough beans and pressed them tight into the end of the stained cloth filter so that the brew was dark but not inky. Afterwards, using a torn paper bag as underliner, I spread the grounds out on the windowsill to dry, then saved them in the goods closet. (When I run out of beans I will use the used grounds, then I will dry them again and use them again and again till I have wrung from them all the flavor and all the darkness.) At first, the pigeons picked at the grounds, but I found a sack of rice and I spread the grains on another windowsill. They came in great numbers and when their wings grazed my hand I could not feel them. They were hungry and they pecked at the rice and at each other but they left the grounds alone. Myself, I was not hungry. Coffee was all I craved.

I returned four days after I had left, four days after I had kissed Alicia lightly on the lips and promised her that I would see her again soon, maybe in Madrid, maybe in Miami. These were the only words of love I could offer her then: “Te veré pronto … donde sea.” Aside from the two who came with me, and Mingo the finquero who helped us, she was the only one who knew. Perhaps it was too hurried, too soon after the trial in which Fidel personally advised the tribunal that sentenced me to death, al paredón, only so he could show me his Savior-face later by forgiving me, completely, not even a prison term. (
Granma
called the total amnesty he granted the
traitorous comandantecito
an act that shows Fidel at his finest,
towering over his enemies with the grace and nobility of a god.
) I was sent back home stripped of all honor and rank, no longer a comandante, not even a compañero, but a mere ciudadano, the lowest rung in revolutionary society, but
alive, alive, mi vida
, as Alicia always reminded me, grabbing me by the shoulders and shaking me as if to wake me from my proud stupor. Less than two months later I left. October 3rd, a Wednesday. (That same day, the revolutionary government made law its draconian Second Agrarian Reform Act. Now all the land, all of Cuba, truly
belonged
to Fidel as he had always dreamed.) We filled the falcon-legged bathtub with fresh water. We tied the window shutters close with wire. The storm was on its way. Four days later, I returned. October 7th, a Sunday. Alicia had left our home. Another consoled her. The storm had passed. And though the eye swept through towns and villages further up north in the province, Guantánamo got it pretty good, the winds and rains of the outer circle lashing into us like a wheel of giant back-handed slaps, stirring the sea, who is our touchy mistress, to do us wrong. The bay rose and its waters made canals of our narrow streets, and a torrential river out of La Avenida, our only boulevard. Later, on the front steps of the National Revolutionary Police Commissar, as if our sea-mistress was out to show us that even at her vengeful worst she did not abandon the art of laughter (eso es muy cubano,
la risa hasta la tumba
), there on the front steps of the commissar laid out like a gift from the enemy were found a set of plastic machine guns and pistols stolen from the naked rosy yanqui boys on the beach at the naval base. Camilo Suarez, the police chief, the one with hair so golden, on his head and on his cheeks and on his arms and on his chest, and some maricas who gossiped about him said everywhere else as well, held the guns at arm's length till all the water drained out, and he put them up to the resurrected sun and inspected them and pulled on the plastic triggers and buffed with his sleeve the plastic barrels and from one of the toys he read out loud and then laughed: “
Ma the een da Oo Ese Aaa.
¡Qué gran mierda!”

So how do I know this? I heard him. I was on the second floor of the hospital across the street. A window shattered during the storm so that the bedsheets and my bandages were soaked. Even though he was told I would not be able to speak, el Rubio questioned me three times, once before the storm hit, twice after. The last time I saw him, I heard him tell the surgeon in charge of me, after he (the surgeon) had said I might require surgery again, not to sacrifice too much of his time on me, for other, truer ciudadanos of la Revolución were now in greater need. “If he dies, he dies. ¿Así es, no, compadre? El Líder graced him with mercy enough and he dared not embrace it.”

It seems natural. There was too much to worry about, too many injured by the storm to allocate any overdue importance to a traitorous comandantecito caught trying to escape, nabbed right in front of la Cerca de Peerless (the short fence put up by the revolutionary government), that was both barricade and gateway to the yanqui's land, the paradise of the tin roofs.