The Lazarus Rumba (57 page)

The horses climbed. They saw the flora give way to masses of rock hundreds of feet high that rose like ill-formed fortress walls from the nearby plains. From the summit Alicia could see beyond the fortress walls, beyond the valley they encircled, to the Caribbean. They moved toward the giant rock masses and began to descend. They abandoned the horses and left them in guard of two of the soldiers and continued to descend till all vegetation vanished and the ash-green limestone surrounded them from the sides and from above, and the sunlight was shattered into pieces, peeking in through cracks and clefts in the stone, and soon was absorbed into a dense mist and disappeared altogether. As they traipsed through a tunnel, directly into the heart of one of the rock masses, they left soldiers behind one by one like crumbs of bread, as if to facilitate their return from the netherworld they were journeying into, till their group consisted only of the comandante and Alicia and four other soldiers, and almost without knowing how they got there, they came out on the other side to a world as large and as surfeit with sunlight and vegetation as the world they had left behind, though Alicia noticed that for some reason, perhaps the exuberant birdsong, everything here (even herself and the comandante and the four soldiers) seemed differently alive. They led her through this new land to the front yard of a small bohío with shuttered wooden windows and before she knew it, the comandante and the soldiers had disappeared and Alicia was alone with her small suitcase at her feet. She did not search for them, instead she examined the small hut. She concluded it was a sort of temple, for planted on the thatch roof was a tall iron structure, three times the height of the hut, in the form of a twisted cross. It was secured to the ground with pikes and steel cable. She picked up the suitcase and walked towards the door. There were voices inside in a language that was not Spanish. She knocked. There was no answer and she knocked harder.

“Sí, ya, ya voy.” It was a woman's voice, less crisp than the other voices. The door was pulled half-ajar and Alicia was welcomed into the flickering darkness.

“Vamos, entra,” the woman said, “el niño is watching his muñequitos. The light darkens the glass and the birds are too loud.”

Alicia entered three steps into the room. Before her eyes became adjusted, her suitcase was taken from her. She was told that she may sit and watch the end of the program if she liked. She looked for the source of the flickering lights with her eyes and found it perched on a wooden cabinet in one corner of the front room to her right. It was a small television set, also the source of the foreign voices. Black and white yanqui cartoon characters, a pair of loud-mouthed magpies, were fighting each other, taking turns squashing each other's head into their bodies with tennis rackets as if they were made of pliable clay and not bone and flesh and feathers. The squawky voices seemed to Alicia perfectly suitable for the language they spoke.

A child was crouched on the dirt floor directly opposite the television set. His hair was long and dark and tucked behind his ears and he was naked except for a pair of torn shorts and had his arms wrapped around his legs. His face below his eyes was veiled in shadows. He giggled at the antics of the muñequitos whose every move was reflected in his eyes.

“Ése es Joshua, mi hijo,” the woman spoke from the other side of the room, on Alicia's left. “This is my home.” She was seated at a small wooden dining table, clear but for a wooden cigar box, and wore only a housedress, and like her son was barefoot. She offered Alicia some coffee and again said that she may sit and watch the end of the program if she liked. She tapped the seat of the empty wooden chair next to hers. “We have been waiting for you, Joshua and I. Joshua salude.” The child waved his hand without looking at Alicia.

“Who are you?” Alicia said, remaining still by the entrance to the hut.

The child made a hushing noise and an irritated gesture with his hand. The mother made a cross with her index finger to her lips and whispered to Alicia that she should not be so impatient, that sometimes the gods behaved as if they were creatures without any rhyme or reason, but that she should not be fooled for this was just theatrics, a dance that concealed more than it revealed, for there was purpose inherent in every action and commandments of the gods, even when such purpose cannot be known by us. Alicia asked her if by the gods she meant the criminals who ran the government. The woman answered that she too had once thought exactly in those terms,
bueno hasta diría peor
, but that now she was the chief of the 333rd Committee for the Defense of the Revolution in the Valley of the Nightingales, and was renowned the whole length of the Island, from Pinar del Río to Baracoa, as the most talented rehabilitator of those who have lost sight and sound of the hidden glories of la Revolución.

Alicia picked up her suitcase. “Mire, I am leaving.” She started for the door.

“And where will you go, Alicia Lucientes? Do you think that door opens out, just because it opened in? How long will you and yours test the endless mercy of el Líder?” She reached for the wooden box and opened it. She pulled out a silver lighter and a medium-length cigar and peeled the ring off and bit a small piece off the closed end and lit it.

“Come and sit, Alicia Lucientes, come and watch the end of the program with us. We get wonderful reception, no? The signal comes all the way from Kingston. Come and watch with us, la televisión is a wonderful invention, it soothes his nerves. After the muñequitos my son and I will take you to your new home. He does not care for anything else, just los muñequitos … and, claro, the Sunday speech. We will introduce you to some of the other residents of our valley, all who like myself had at one time or another staked their lives and the lives of their loved ones for the sake of toppling la Revolución, and who have come to see the error of their ways.” She sucked on the cigar and let out a few puffs. “We have seen hundreds like you, Alicia Lucientes; do not think that your thoughts and deeds, no matter how horrible, are the first to be wicked”—she tapped her breast with her free hand—“for wickedness has lived here long before us and will live here long after we are past.”

Joshua made the hushing sound again and his mother scolded him this time, begging him to show a little kindness and hospitality towards the new villager and to put on his poncho, for it was disrespectful to appear so naked in front of a stranger, especially a woman who was not his mother; besides, he knew it was a rule that during the sun hours he may not remove any of his clothes. Joshua spoke for the first time. His voice was deep and throaty and did not belong to a child. He told his mother to stop nagging him, that he was her son not her husband, that he would show kindness and hospitality to the stranger, in time. She knew he always helped her with the new ones. He looked at Alicia for the first time and mumbled a greeting. He told her that she should sit, for it would be another fifteen minutes before he was through watching. He corrected his mother and told her that actually the rule was that he may not remove his poncho while he was
outside
for the sun would color his skin. He was inside now and there was no sun to color him. He pulled down the waist of his shorts at one side to reveal no visible tan line and proclaimed that from his groin up, he was as white as his father had made him.

Alicia sat in the empty chair next to Joshua's mother. Between cigar puffs, she leaned over and whispered to Alicia questions about her journey, to which Alicia made no answers. She then whispered that her name was Maruja and apologized for not having introduced herself sooner. Alicia remained silent, shifting her eyes back and forth from the attentive young man on the floor to the black and white images of belligerent cartoons from Kingston.

That afternoon Joshua and his mother led Alicia to her own bohío. After the yanqui cartoon program transmitted from Jamaica had finished, Joshua's mother had stood and opened all the shutters. Light and birdsong flooded the inside of the bohío. The entire house was one room, with two narrow twin beds at right angles in one corner near the television stand, a kitchen table with two chairs, and a small iron stove and an oversized freezer box. A doorway in the back led to what Alicia presumed was a bathroom. A single portrait of Fidel, while he was still a rebel in the mountains, framed in dark wood, unperturbedly adorned the bare walls.

Joshua stood and shut off the television. He was thin and tall, and broad-shouldered as a man, and his limbs were sinewy and long and his shorts hung low on his small hips. He had a strong face with a Roman nose. A scant fuzz barely darkened his jawline and his chin and the fold above his thick lips. His face and his torso were indeed as white as a yanqui virgin, but his legs below the hem of his shorts and his feet were sunned to a coffee-brown, and looked as if he had borrowed them from a member of another race. His mother told him again to put on some clothes and Joshua grabbed a dirty oversized cotton poncho that was crumbled on top of his bed and threw it on. It fell down to the hem of his shorts and covered his arms to the wrists. He smoothed his long black hair back behind his ears and tied it in a pony tail. He said he was ready.

Maruja put out her cigar and put on a pair of workboots. She was younger than the impression she had given in the darkened room. She wore only a light coat of lipstick as makeup, her eyes and her hair were as black as her son's, her movements as agile, her skin smooth and only a tinge darker, and everything about her, except for the chipped nails on her hands, was of a woman not of the country, a woman still vain enough to care for her looks, but youthful enough not to mournfully dote on them. She picked up Alicia's suitcase and a campesino hat and followed her son out of the bohío. She made her son wear the hat.

They kept up behind the quick-paced barefoot Joshua through a narrow dirt road, across a shallow ford, till they came to another meadow with another bohío on it almost identical to the home of Maruja and her son, except for the absence of the twisted steel antenna.

“This is where you will live,” Maruja said.

Alicia asked them what was going to stop her from fleeing in the middle of the night. Joshua's mother answered that nothing or no one was going to stop her either from leaving or others from visiting.

“The thoughts of your consummate redemption will be your only guards.”

Joshua laughed at this and said there were army soldiers who had made their homes in nests in the pine trees throughout the valley so long that they had sprouted black and gray feathers and that some of them could even fly with their rifles slung over their wings, and that they went mostly unseen because they traveled from pine to pine only after the moon had fallen, and that neither he nor his mother were allowed to leave or receive visitors without their permission.

“These giant black birds, though you cannot see them, will be your guards, señora, for they will always be watching you. They are all over. They even speak to each other like birds and sometimes the songs you hear are the real songs of the nightingales and sometimes they are not. Don't let my mother confuse you too much with her fancy talk.”

Maruja scolded her son, this time more harshly than before, and told him to keep his wild children's fantasies to himself. “La señora Alicia va a pensar que estás loco.”

Joshua paid no mind and continued: “We are all prisoners of the invisible birds.” He pushed away from his mother and touched Alicia on the shoulder, he whispered that he would tell her other things later, that there was no need to upset his mother on this her first day in the valley. He opened the door of the bohío and swept his hand towards the inside in a dramatic gesture of welcome. They left Alicia alone and Maruja said that her son would bring her food and cooking ware later that evening, and that if she wanted to write to her family in Oriente, she would also be provided with ink and paper.

Her new home was furnished more sparsely than the other bohío. There was only one chair by the dining table and only one bed and no television set and no icebox and no portrait of Fidel. Alicia decided she would hang her icon of Santa Bárbara, which she had had her mother hide in the fold of her suitcase along with a wad of pesos. She sat on the bed and listened to the birdsong that might or might not be real. It was the first time she had been alone since the morning she had left the wrestler's house in Soledad. She lay down on the bed, which was improbably comfortable and remained still, in a half-slumber with her eyes open, till it had darkened and she heard a restless scratching at the base outside her door. She heard Joshua's voice calling her to open the door. Then she heard him screaming obscenities and the scratching at the base of the door ceased. She did not stand from the bed. She called back that the door was open. Joshua walked into the bohío with a makeshift torch in hand, a splintered broomstick with a piece of oiled cloth wrapped around one end. Small pieces of flame flew from the cloth like fallen stars and withered on the dirt floor. His breath was short. With fire from the torch, he lit a gaslamp that was hanging above the stove. He placed a cloth sack on top of the dining table and signaled for her to come to him. He waited till his breath settled before he spoke: “Ven, quiero que veas a mis amiguitos.”

Alicia stood from the bed and walked to him. He pointed his torch towards the door. There, a few steps back from the doorway, sitting on their hind legs like obedient pets, were a pair of long-haired brown rats, so big and hirsute that they looked like exotic hounds. The tops of their skulls were shaved in a circle in the manner of monks. They squinted at the light pointed towards them, and lowered their heads and covered their snouts with their front paws, but did not move. Their bald heads shone like twin moons. Alicia stepped back, away from the door.

“Don't be afraid, señora. They're friends. Jeremiah and Ezekiel. Named after prophets. Mamá made me memorize all of the books of the Bible in order and so I have named all my friends, from Genesis on. This time I skipped one. I should have named these two Jeremiah and Lamentations, but I skipped one. It's a bad name for a rat, so I skipped one. Mamá was much more serious about the Bible back when I was child. She still leafs through it now, every so often … ay, pero I shouldn't have told you, her friends at el Comité don't know, so don't tell them when you meet them. I shouldn't have told you. … Jeremiah and Ezekiel—they are brave like prophets. They protect me from the invisible birds.” He stepped outside and sunk the torch into the ground next to them and told the beasts to watch the fire and not to let it go out. When he came back into the bohío, he shut the door and told Alicia again not to be afraid.