The Lazarus Rumba (59 page)

Marcos nodded his head in silent concurrence, but he did not look at Alicia.

“Pero chico, so much wonderful talk, and you did not address the issue at hand. Qué es esto, is no one going to follow protocol? What will our new resident think of us? The tub. The tub, carajo. Can we get it? Should we fulfill this odd request? But first, tell us more Alicia, tell us what this bathtub is like, tell us why you want such a simple thing.”

“It is heavy and long and deep and its legs are the carved talons of a falcon; it belonged to my husband, and I have bathed in it since the night of our marriage, and after my husband was murdered, it was my only solace. When I was submerged in it, I saw him and I spoke to him.”

“His ghost?” One of the elderly women spoke and leaned forward on her chair. She looked at Alicia with her wide milky eyes. They were so advanced with cataract that it looked as if the pupils were hidden within a glob of lard. Unlike the other old women, her gray hair was not tied back in a bun and fell loose over her shoulders; all this and her loose-fitting white frock gave her the appearance of a halfwit in an asylum. “Did he speak back to you?”

“Don't be silly, Josefa. You are too in love with witchery. It will be the fall of you.”

Josefa leaned back on her chair. She muttered that one does not fall from the same cliff twice.

“His ghost,” Alicia said. “Yes, his ghost, if you like. Although he did not speak back, he had not the will nor the strength.”

“We have not yet had any ghosts, mute or not, visit anyone in the valley,” Maruja said. “Yours would be the first.”

Josefa grunted and Marcos, across the paper-littered table from her, smiled.

“But, if it is that important to you, and if we can ascertain that it does not violate any regulations, and ghost or not, your husband remains to this day unpardoned for his sins against la Revolución. We are sorry that you lost him, but we are more sorry that he saw it fit to turn his back on his honor … so that his death was more a suicide than a murder.” Alicia began to protest in a loud voice and Maruja raised her hands in front of her, palms out, as if to shield herself from Alicia's barrage of words, and she spoke over her, begging her not to take offense, proclaiming that neither Alicia nor her husband had any enemies at that table, that she was merely presenting the facts of a personal history as had been presented to her, that on the contrary, as was evident from Marcos's tale, her husband still had more than a few admirers in the folds of la Revolución, “… but we should not dwell on that, for the poor wandering soul of your husband has nothing to do with this. It is
your
bathtub now, and you need it for your peace of mind; for we all well know that ghosts are nothing but the emanations of troubles in our own mind.”

Josefa grunted again, though Maruja ignored her and continued speaking to Alicia: “And it is, after all, nothing less than your peace of mind that all of us here at el Comité are interested in. Thank you for coming today and introducing yourself to us. I am sure, that though you may feel a bit awkward amongst us now, as the days pass and as your routine becomes more regimented by your duties, you will feel as welcome here in our valley as if it had been your home for years. And, indeed, with that purpose in mind, we will do all we can to find your bathtub with the legs like the talons of a falcon and bring it to you. Now, if you'll excuse us, we have other business to attend to.”

“I have one other small request,” Alicia said as she stood, “(aside from the bathtub), that my husband and his heroic deeds never be conjured up again in my presence.”

“You are quite right,” Maruja said in a conciliatory tone, sifting through some of the papers on the table, not looking at Alicia. “Perhaps it would be best if none of us mention your husband again. I too know how it hurts to lose the father of one's child.”

She tapped her son on the shoulder and Joshua stood and helped Alicia with her chair and led her out of his mother's bohío. Marcos and Josefa and two of the other neighborhood chiefs mumbled their farewells. The others were silent.

A Repeated Tale

“Who was your father?” Alicia asked Joshua at the door of her bohío. “If he was a rebel, he must have known my husband, or at least known of him.”

“My mother said to me, last night after I brought you your food, not to speak to you of my father again.”

“You told her we talked.”

“She gets things out of me; she knows how, she's been getting things out of people for so many years. Una experta. Some even say she got me out of my father against his will. Don't laugh. She got the story of the bathtub out of you.”

“Do you think she has any intention of honoring my request?”

“I never know her intentions, and it is dangerous to guess at them.” Joshua put the chair down. “I have to go back to watch my muñequitos and then see to my friends. But don't worry, the story of my mother and my father is the favorite one of the people in the valley, it is so often told that even the nightingales know it by memory, and if you listen closely to their song you'll hear them telling it. Y claro, the invisible night birds know it as well as anybody else, but you won't hear it in their song—they are too well trained, they know better.”

“Who was your father?” Alicia repeated, but Joshua turned and disappeared into the brush. The blackened sole of his right foot was the last Alicia saw of him for over eight weeks.

She entered her bohío. She pushed open the wooden window shutters whose hinges were so rust-eaten that they creaked and trembled like palsied limbs. The noon light streamed into the bohío like water down a cataract. She sat at the dining table and poured herself some coffee from the thermos Joshua had left behind. She watched the clouds of dust celebrate the light and decided to put the buckets and rag Joshua had brought her to good use. She followed the song of a finch to the stream, which was no more than thirty paces behind her bohío, and drank from it with her cupped hands and knelt in it, soaking the lower half of her dress, and relished in the coolness and the sweetness the stream borrowed from the earth. She sunk her right hand deep into the water till the soreness washed away. She loaded up the buckets with fresh water, making two trips for she could not carry both. She thought of the first inhabitants of this island that is the eye of the other crocodile-Island and conjectured that they probably lived not much different than how she was living now, in the first days of her enforced exile, following the song of birds and setting their simple houses near running water. As she scrubbed the floors and the walls and in the crevices of the two windowsills and the doorway using her left hand, she tried to follow the tribunal's logic in sentencing her to this valley penal colony, this return to the beginning, to an innocence both she and her husband before her had long abandoned. But how can one remain innocent while trapped inside the guts of a rotting crocodile? And how can one pretend to so easily wash off the bile that has crusted into every available nook of the body, trapped under any fold of skin and buried into every cuticle? Only a serpent can so easily slough off its weathered self, only a serpent is so well found for the journey backward into innocence.

The finch whose song she had followed perched on the windowsill and interrupted her thoughts. It chirped insistently and flapped its wings as if demanding recompense for its assistance. Alicia gathered some of the grains of rice leftover from the previous night's meal and cupped them in her palm and tossed them out the window. Other birds, robins and thrushes, came to join the grateful finch and soon muscled it out of its prize. Alicia said out loud to her defeated bird not to be disheartened for the rice was old and over-salted and that she would pay it its due with much better rice in days to come. The finch flew away, ostensibly unconvinced with this promise. It too, apparently had lived through many of the unkept promises of la Revolución and its Líder. As she watched the other birds fighting for the last of Maruja's poison rice, she saw her husband's comrade appear from out of the same brush Joshua had disappeared into. He was wearing the rough-canvas pants and faded blue guayabera that he had worn at the meeting, but now he also donned a wide-brimmed campesino straw hat, which he laced down under his chin with a piece of thin rope. He carried with him a paper bag. He waved when he noticed Alicia had seen him and continued approaching.

“Maruja sent me with some more of your necessaries,” he said, coming to the window where Alicia was and not the door. “Fruit and vegetables and stuff … no meat: Joshua told us that it did not agree with you.” He smiled now and Alicia felt a blush and moved away from the window to open the door for him. “Believe me, her food doesn't agree with any of us.”

“Does Joshua tell his mother
everything.
”

“Joshua is a boy, señora, a boy with body of a man. …”

“Please, call me Alicia.”

He set the bag down on the table and began to remove its contents, yuccas and boniatos and plantains and cloth coffee filters and a jar of ground coffee beans, “… A boy who dreams he is the son of an emperor.”

Alicia sat on the bed, which she had fitted with the one set of sheets she had brought, discarding the old ones and bundling them aside. “Who was his father?”

“No one knows. All we know here in the valley are the stories his mother invents and has others at her beck and call repeat and repeat.”

“What is the story?”

“Ay señora … digo, Alicia, I, for one, I'm not in the habit of repeating her lies.”

Alicia was silent for a moment and then she said that she was only interested in the lies of the mother in how they affected her son, and that to him these stories certainly weren't lies.

Marcos threw his hat back so that it hung by the thin rope around his neck, neatly wedged under the Adam's apple, like a garrote. He shook his head and chuckled, as if in pity of an ignorant. “Do not grow too fond of Joshua, querida Alicia. That is exactly what his mother wants. He is her best source of information.”

“What is the story?”

“It is a simple one really: Maruja tells Joshua, and tells others so that they may tell others more, that her one and only son is the rightful heir to the throne in La Habana, that one afternoon back in the days while she was still a staggering girl of the country, el Líder, while in the outskirts of La Habana, after having been defeated in his first election, seduced her and raped her and her son is the fruit of that night”—Marcos could not hold back a hacking spastic laugh, dislodged from his innards like a tickling hairball—”pero perdóname, I do not have much of a knack for storytelling. Others do the lie much better service, adding their own fantasies, and sometimes our deified emperor takes the shape of a massive bull, sometimes a strutting rooster, sometimes a horny he-goat, sometimes even a delicate swan, although, I, for one, have never seen a swan on the Island, except at the zoo, which is where I think Fidel belongs, with the monkeys not the lions.”

Alicia did not join in with Marcos's second fit of laughter, now set to chords of loosened phlegm. He passed his tongue over his upper lip and the back of his hand over his mouth. He swallowed and collected himself before he spoke again. “It's all right, no need to fear my talk. Maruja and her cronies are too inefficient to be feared. Her reputation as the finest doctrine rehabilitator on the Island is a sham … bah, Joshua, the heir to the throne.”

Alicia thought that his mocking counterrevolutionary talk masked much more fear than he was aware of and that Maruja seemed much more competent than he thought, but she did not give voice to her thoughts, instead she steered the conversation in a more absurd direction: “But just as a matter of logistics, Fidelito is older, and a legitimate son. Would he not indeed be the heir if there were any heir at all?”

“Bueno sí, but in this version of history Fidelito does not exist, he is a traitor by the simple fact that his bitch-mother and all her family were traitors. … He has
unfit
blood, is the way the text of the story goes.”

“And does everyone here believe all of this?”

“The boy believes it. The rest of us pretend to believe it and give the story its due reverence by repeating it as often as we can.”

“I thought you said that you, for one, did not repeat her lies.”

“I did say that. And then I went ahead and told you the story. I have lived in the world of la Revolución too long. I have become a master in compromising what I say with what I do.”

“And you have come here to suggest I do the same.”

“I came here to bring you some fresh vegetables and home-grown coffee from our side of the valley. Our land is the most productive in the valley, y claro, we share the wealth as we ought. As I said, Joshua told us of how you were ill last night.” Marcos finished removing the contents from the bag and sat on the chair and rubbed his lower lip with his index finger. “You will act as you see fit to act; you are famous for that, no? My campesinos here tell stories of how you bewitched a poor old farmer and drowned him, vengeance for having turned against you. They say you and your people are strong and true to each other, and like locusts, who, though without a king, all swarm as one.”

“I am a mother and a daughter and a sister, and was once a wife and am now a widow, nothing more.” Alicia rubbed her wrist again. “I fell last night. It's bruising.”

Marcos stood and came and knelt by her and took her hand to examine her wrist. He said he only meant to relay what others were saying, that surely there was no foundation for any of it, that the campesinos were only to be heard for the spirit of their speech and not for its content. He said that perhaps they were hungry for a new savior, some Joan of Arc this time instead of a fabled Christ-like figure descending from the mountainous wilderness.

“The campesinos are much better off now than they have ever been,” Alicia said. “If anyone has benefited from la Revolución, it is they. They need no Juana de Arc, especially one so old and devoid of innocence as la que está sentada aquí.”