The Lazarus Rumba (48 page)

Afterwards, la Vieja along with Brother Joaquín decided it would be safer if we traveled on the shoulder of the Central Highway, that way in case another storm should threaten we could seek out shelter in one of the many farmhouses. Army jeeps and trucks carrying soldiers and macheteros passed by us and ignored us, as if already we were ghosts, entirely invisible. The days that followed the storm were warm and stunningly beautiful, the sky taking on the deep-toned blue, as if painted on a dome of pure sapphire that made it seem stone-solid, a blue that travelers worldwide say the sky only takes over our Island.

La Vieja took ill. She had taken over the reins again, somewhat shamed that she had listened to me and abandoned the driver's seat during the storm. She bundled up in her shawl, still damp even though she had laid it out to dry after the storm. She covered up the first sneezes and when Brother Joaquín inquired if she was all right she answered that she had never been ill one day in her long life. Brother Joaquín took out his flask and wet his thumb and reached over to her forehead but she snapped his hand away.

“Por favor, yo no soy Católica, ni Apostólica. Save your witchcraft for the mules.” She sneezed again and asked if her other mantle was dry. I took it from the side of the carreta and gave it to her and she threw it on as a hood. That night, we pulled off the shoulder of the road and unhitched the mules and slept under the stars. La Vieja huddled in one corner of our carreta and called her grandchildren to her and held them tight and they asked her why she was burning so. Brother Joaquín sat vigil by her. He tore at his garment and folded the pieces and wet them and applied compresses to her forehead throughout the night. He explained to her grandchildren that God sometimes makes his favorite children suffer the most. He told them of the many vicissitudes visited upon the legion of saints. By dawn, la Vieja had no strength to resist him or his stories.

The following morning, we flagged down one of the military trucks. Brother Joaquín explained to the driver and the comandante in the passenger seat who the ill woman was. He asked me to fetch the
Granma
article for him from la Vieja's cigar box. Guillermo and Felipe stared hard at me when I ripped off the tiny lock; along with her tobacco bag and billfold of rolling papers and a packet of typescript letters and the
Granma
article, there was a rust-spotted pistol inside the box. I quickly reshut the box and handed the article to Brother Joaquín. The comandante perused the story, then eyed me, then perused the story some more. His beard was bushy but kempt and he wore an olive cap low on his brow. He stuck his head out the window and barked an order. The canvas flaps flew open in the back of the truck and two unarmed soldiers emerged. They picked la Vieja up from the carreta, bundled up as she was and took her inside the truck.

“Bien,” the comandante said to Brother Joaquín. “We'll take her to Camagüey.” He eyed me again. Then he cast his eyes away from me and away from Brother Joaquín and spoke to the other old women, the CDR officers, and to their grandchildren. “Ustedes sigan. You'll find her there at the Revolutionary Hospital. She'll be fine. It's just a fever. Sigan. You'll be there by dusk. On my orders, the journey is now yours.”

Brother Joaquín rehitched the mules and set on ahead, our carreta in the lead as always, even though la Vieja was no longer at its helm. No one passed us, no one questioned where we were leading them. We were silent, already mourning her it seemed. We pushed our caravan on towards Camagüey. Other army trucks passed by us, but we had shifted once again into the realm of the unseen. They brushed us with their speed and frightened our animals.

Our stay in Camagüey was the longest of the entire journey and we might have stayed there indeterminately had la Vieja not pulled the tubes out of her nose and her arms one morning and proclaimed that she was well again, that she was sick now not from pneumonia but from lack of oxygen from all the doctors and the nurses and the “little clerks” from the Camagüey Party Headquarters who daily crowded into her room and stole all her air. Her skin had acquired a rosy tone that we had never seen on her and the dirt had been scrubbed from her fingernails and from her toes and a nurse had put lipstick on her while she slept. She latched arms with Brother Joaquín and wiped off her lipstick with the sleeve of her robe and asked him to lead her out of that misnamed hospital. “The only thing revolutionary about this place is its name!”

On her worst night, a few days after we had arrived, when her fever climbed above 104 degrees, the night the young doctors assured us she would die, she asked to be left alone with Brother Joaquín and me. The doctors at first were reluctant. They whispered something in her ear, which she rejected by summoning all her strength and lifting her right arm and shooing them away.

“They think you would murder me on the eve my death! ¡Imbéciles!” Brother Joaquín and I tried to laugh with her. “How are my grandchildren?”

“Bien, bien. They have been very industrious for the Comité here in Camagüey.”

“How is Marenga? How is my old mule?”

“We left her. We left her in Magdalena. ¿No se acuerda?”

“Sí. Sí me acuerdo. We left her.” She signaled for us to come closer. She reached out and grabbed Brother Joaquín's hand and held it tight. “Complace a una vieja ya casi muerta, now that the children aren't here. Start again the story of Delfina Gutiérrez, the young woman who stole bridal gowns. I think there's something in that story. Tell me. Empieza el cuento otra vez.”

Brother Joaquín was reluctant at first, but la Vieja pleaded and pleaded and Brother Joaquín relented and began again the story of Delfina Gutiérrez. This time la Vieja let him go, past the marriage to the mulatto aristocrat Israel, past the wedding night, past her escape and her move into the ghetto of Las Palmas Blancas, where the plaster peeled off the buildings in giant palmlike fronds and where the strongman above her caused storms of plaster dust, past her self-induced abortion and her nights with the drunk gardener, and past her dream of a white child floating on a bark of white palm fronds in a white sea under a white sky, the dream that drove her to murder.

“Murder?”

“Pues, everything in her life, now even her dreams, reminded her of the night that should not have been, of her broken promise to la Virgencita. She went to see her gardener again and drank with him and deceived him with hopes that one day she would become his wife. So together they plotted the death of her husband Israel, who, as I mentioned before, still torn with love, lived secluded in an out-of-the-way bedroom of his parents' home.”

“The death of Israel?” la Vieja grumbled. “Qué bien, I like the allegory … the shameless aristocrats that under the guise of religion murder the heartland of spirituality. ¡Qué bien!”

“The evening of the murder she prayed at the altar she had erected in the corner of her tenement room. Plaster dust covered the statuette of the Virgin of Cobre, coating her dark face with a pale mask, little piles of plaster dust around the wicks snuffed the candle flames as soon as Delfina Gutiérrez had lit them, her ceiling rumbled and more plaster dust rained and Delfina Gutiérrez was sure that this was the Virgin's way of telling her she was listening to her prayers of vengeance. She peeled fourteen of the largest palm fronds off the buildings in her neighborhood and set forth to see her gardener. He would wait outside till she gave him signal.”

La Vieja coughed: “Ay, qué horrible. Pero sigue, sigue.”

“Israel was found by his mother three days later, wrapped in a white sheet so tight that the outline of his limbs and his fingers and toes, the features of his face and even his genitals were detailed like carved stone. His poisonous white palm-frond cocoon had dried and stuck to his skin and the coroners with all their chemicals could not free him from it and so he was buried in it. Six days later, after a brief trial in which no state lawyer dared defend them, Delfina Gutiérrez and her gardener were hanged side by side in a public execution.

“The gardener joined the silent throng of the dead and, as with most of them, was never heard from again, but Delfina Gutiérrez was not finished. A few hours after her body had lost its futile epileptic struggle against the rope, water began seeping down her legs and off the ends of her swollen toes, so that when the time came to take it down a small puddle had formed on the ground beneath the gallows' trapdoor. ‘Oiga miren estos, caballeros,' the executioner called to his colleagues, ‘se meó la muerta, pissed all over herself!' Her body was cleansed and dried and wrapped in a shroud and presented to her parents. The following morning, as the parents were trying to convince a reluctant priest to go ahead with a private church funeral, the shroud was soaked in urine. The parents immediately blamed the Spanish coroner for desecrating their child's corpse, blamed agents of the weakened almost doomed colonialist government, blamed the reluctant priest, blamed the murdered Israel and the hanged gardener, even blamed the cadre of nationalist rebels who were the only ones to speak up in her defense during the trial, blamed everyone except the child herself, who was still seeping warm urine from her four-day cold body. They returned the body to the government and asked them to ‘fix it.' There was an autopsy conducted. The body was opened, the bladder removed, and still when left alone overnight it continued to wet itself! All the other inner organs were removed so that her corpse was now a cave and still Delfina Gutiérrez continued to urinate on herself. The government finally worked out a deal with her parents: they would command a priest to conduct a church funeral if they allowed their daughter's hollow flesh to be cremated. The parents met with the government priest and consented. ‘La pobre,' Delfina Gutiérrez's mother admitted as she watched her daughter burn in a pyre of dried palm fronds, ‘she was afraid to enter the kingdom of the dead.'

“Delfina Gutiérrez's ashes were scattered within the caves of the Virgin's sanctuary in El Cobre, but her crusade against the sacrament of marriage did not close. Her ghost was said to haunt chapels on the eve of weddings and break into the silver-door sanctuary behind the altar and into the monstrance to contaminate the Communion wafers with droplets of urine, so that the following day, during the service, a green mildew tainted the Eucharist and too many marriages could not be sanctified with the body of our Lord, and perhaps worse, she was said to visit this or that unfortunate home after the couple had returned from the honeymoon and leave traces of herself, in the black soil of the potted palms and the woody mulch of the orchid bed, in a mysterious tiny wetmark on the Persian carpet or a larger drenched wetmark on the bedsheets, in the moist washcloths used in the bath and in the sponges used in the kitchen sink, in the discarded coffee grounds or ripening fruits, left so much trace of her old self behind that the bride and groom felt tears well up in their eyes from
la peste
and both got on their hands and knees and sniffed behind furniture and in the corners of closets, blaming the house cats and the neighborhood stray dogs, blaming the rainy season moistness, blaming the grocer for selling them rotten produce, blaming the musty pages of their family albums and finally blaming each other for the insufferable dank stinkness that had settled on their home. And soon both their bloods were so drained that no matter what feats of arousal they invented, his organ remained limp and soft and useless as an empty wine sack and his tongue grew cold and his lips pallid and the only thing dry in the entire house was her vessel. So Delfina Gutiérrez continued her terror against the sacrament of marriage, so that hundreds of new husbands in the capital could only perform with strange women in sweet-perfumed houses, or with unsuspecting goats and dogs and mules (or the liver or pancreas of such beasts), or with young boys and with grown men who are third sex (los perdidos, los maricas), or even with certain species of mushy-trunk plants and certain makes of goose-down pillows, with anyone and anything, that is, except with their chosen wives, who felt as if they were being tongued by rum-drowned lizards when their husbands returned in the early morning hours and begged for forgiveness as they kissed them on the earlobes. And so it was, near the end of the last century, not long before our Island was finally liberated from the dominion of the Spaniards, that almost every new marriage in the capital was doomed to infelicity.”

La Vieja had asked me to prop some pillows behind her and she was sitting up now, listening intently, as if she had stubbornly decided to ward off death until this story was done. “Qué diabla,” she said. “Pero sigue, sigue.” Brother Joaquín glanced at me and in his cinnamon eyes, in the tiny upward curl of his flaccid lips, I saw his strategy painted as evident as the mask of a comic actor. Like a serial novelist, with the promise of continued-next-time, he would help la Vieja ward off death.

“Sigue, coño. Sigue.” She pushed herself farther up on her mound of pillows and adjusted her robe to cover her bony chest.

“Mañana. Sleep for now. Tomorrow I will finish the story.”

“Sleep? How can anyone sleep after hearing such things. ¿Estás loco? I will not sleep again till you have finished this horrible tale.”

“Mañana,” Brother Joaquín repeated and held his hand to her forehead to make sure the fever had not returned and left the room.

“Está loco. ¡Ese cura está loco!”

La Vieja remained alive to hear the end of Brother Joaquín's story. And the story, I think, had served its purpose; for as I watched him relate it to her (watched him and watched her more than listened to the tale) I saw, in his untimely pauses, preceded by almost inaudibles,
pues, deja ver
… and followed by all but unhearables,
ay sí, entonces
, that Brother Joaquín was inventing this tale and with the same ease that a priest transforms wine to blood he had converted dirty riverwater in his fancy flask into the holy Virgin's urine, one of the many props he would use to keep
me
alive on our journey homeward. I chided him the morning we left Camagüey, before la Vieja had mounted our carreta: “You don't know the end of the story; that's why you couldn't finish it. You're making it all up as you go along.”