The Lazarus Rumba (6 page)

“Papá, what did you do with the nice crocodile skin shoes mamá buried you in!”

“Ay chica, I gave them to Ernesto Hemingway,” her father responded. He added a few pieces to the right tower of the white castle, before he stood. “It's been two years since his death and the poor man is still moaning about migraines. It's forcing him to drink again. The wretch still mad and sullied as ever. But at least now he's got a nice pair of shoes to wander the night in, same size and all, imagínate! Bueno, he was a big man and after the swelling in my feet went down they didn't even fit me anymore. I'm glad he came back. This Island is the only place that's ever made him happy. He haunts the Finca Vigía, driving the staff who takes care of it up the wall; he was not very pleased that his pleasant home was made into a museum. And he doesn't write anymore; says its a moot endeavor in this world,
este mundo lleno de pobre sombritas
, just like that, he says it in a perfect unaccented Spanish:
este mundo lleno de pobre sombritas
!”

“Papá, you shouldn't have given your shoes away.”

Teodoro had been loitering in the room with his daughter ever since the death of her husband, and only now with the thick aroma of the pastelitos was he forced out into view. He said their redolence stirred the wild white porpoises of his nostalgia, who rode him back to the white-blossomed orchard where he had first stolen a kiss from Alicia's mother. (
There's not too much color in this first world beyond yours, not many subtleties in the glaring brightness
, he complained to his daughter.
That's a problem. I'm going blind with all the whiteness. No one ever thinks to furnish the dead with a nice pair of sunglasses, but all this glorious light does really get annoying after a while.
) He searched and searched for his wife to kiss her anew, relenting only when the flowers dropped and the fruit ripened and rotted on the branches. Disheartened, he returned to his daughter, no longer willing to hide from her.

“Never mind me and those gaudy shoes, ya te dije, they didn't fit me anymore” he now insisted, and stared at her till Alicia looked back into his eyes “What about you, mijita? I am here now.
I
love you too. I remember how you bathed me when I was ill, cleansed me when my own wife wouldn't. Are you better?”

“No,” Alicia answered, “the same. …”

Father Gonzalo did not dare disturb Alicia. The next day, at confession, she would recount her shoeless father's visit word for word, how since the day of his death he had been searching for a way to apologize to doña Adela, to take her back to the perfumy guava groves of their youth, how she resisted all his advances, barring him from her sleepworld with a dream netting that kept away the spirit of her late husband as one keeps away mosquitoes, how he had been at Alicia's wedding and only a year later mounted the car with her husband on his attempt to flee into the yanqui naval base and been with him as he was shot down near la Cerca Peerless,
y los pendejos yanquis, they saw everything from their jeeps and their flying devils, the mighty marines with their rifles and their Colt pistols shoved up their culos (¡así son los yanquis!)
, how he had watched Hurricane Flora devastate their town, helpless against the uprooting powers of nature that too often reach beyond death, how he had called to the wounded Julio, un-cared for in the revolutionary hospital, left to die, whose only answer had been
that he was thirsty and that he needed to go see his old friend
, and how her father ate and ate the wondrous guava pastelito that kept remaking itself in his very hands, the crumbs under him growing into an irritating pile.

Father Gonzalo allowed for some truth to all this. It was known then that unenlightened spirits do populate the indiscriminate air; and besides, if anything, the old man's ghost, real or not, had helped the widow take the first wary steps back to the bosom of the Lord, though Father Gonzalo knew there were many sins that she could not yet confess.

Time
, the Lord hisses,
give it time.

A Serpent's Spit

Later, after Oscar began to ram his head into the flimsy metal fence in the center ring, after he broke it down and battered his way into the crowd, after he deftly picked up Jorge the Ringmaster and gave him the flight of his life, spared only because he landed on the acrobats' netting in the first ring, after Oscar rushed out of the big top trampling over the fleeing panicstricken mob, Gorgeous Georgina the Manwoman from the fleshy streets of New Orleans still perched on him, after he overturned the four-door Soviet-made jeep with two barbudos and a tribunal consul still in it, after they tried to curb his madness by barring his way with the heavier Felicia, who was on her way from the menagerie to perform and after they saw no choice but to shoot Oscar dead, the blood from his skull spouting over Georgina in her white sequin suit, its gory warmth abolishing forever the delicate side of her nature, many in the know said it was the avenging spirit of comandante Julio César Cruz that made Oscar, the genial Indian elephant, go berserk. The poor beast had been possessed and four members of the crowd never returned home from the winter circus on that balmy Christmas day of 1963.

Except for the appalling presence of the empty convertible, the day had begun well enough. Many heads were pounding from riotous noche buena celebrations, but the preliminary parade proceeded early from Parque Martí in the center of the city, each caravan receiving the customary Christmas blessing from Father Gonzalo in the front courtyard of St. Catalina de Ricis Church. He blessed the flustered lions and the trapped tigers and the trained monkeys, approaching their cages with a crafty calm, and he blessed the troupe of macaws and cockatoos and budgies that as a sideshow had been trained to recite scenes from
Hamlet
in perfectly florid Elizabethan English, and he blessed the sad clowns and the half-naked acrobats (though Héctor, the lead acrobat, would not kneel before him to be sprinkled with holy water), and he blessed all the geeks and all the freaks twice (for these were his favorite performers in the carnival), and he even kissed Rodolfo the Strongman's rough-hewn horns, tugging at them slightly and from then on never doubting the story that his mother had been raped by a moose while visiting the state of Florida in los Estados Unidos. Then they were off, towards the bay, to the big top on the rocky ground of Manatí Point. Some who were there say that Father Gonzalo had gotten too caught up in the festivities, that towards the end of the parade, as the last float with yet more clowns passed by him, he joined the crowd and began to follow the performers towards the bay, forgetting to bless Oscar and Felicia the Indian elephants, and more important, forgetting to bless the old black Ford convertible pulled by two spotted mules that traditionally brought up the end of the parade (yes, the same one that the moon had once so adulterously caressed), a rusty hollow carriage of state, un cacharro, for the previous four years occupied by the town's most powerful circus supporter, this year empty, and with a Cuban flag draped across the hood in honor of his recent death. What could have prompted Father Gonzalo's flagrant oversight in not blessing the cacharro? Was he so fearful of the Fidelistas, the armed soldiers of the regime who had made their presence felt through the parade route, their disapproval graven in their stern guarded faces as if insisting even now, in the middle of this Christmas fiesta:
¡Hay caña que cortar! La Revolución needs you in the fields, not here!
Or worse, was Father Gonzalo in cahoots with them? These were the questions certain factions were asking after the tragedy that Christmas night, not daring to promulgate answers.

On that day of tribulations and extravagance, Alicia was conspicuous in her plainness. Yet only a few noticed her pacing twelve steps behind the empty mule-drawn cacharro. Her sister, Marta, was by her side. They held hands, two women who would be later well remembered on this day, a day marked by all the future tribunals as the birth date of their sorcerous conspiracy against the revolutionary government, but who were, for the moment, mostly ignored.

Two women, who after the stormy afternoon in which they had fallen in love—in the manner of any two people who are forced to see each other on a daily basis, and know that they are supposed to feel some sort of disdain for the other, yet feel nothing but the dull ache of indifference, and tolerate each other, and look forward to the six hours they must spend together each Tuesday afternoon, not with exhilaration nor with dread, but with the patient anticipation that precedes all those collected hours they must simply get through, since the Tuesday afternoons led by their cheerful father are carefree, undaunting, there is nothing special about them, all the same, these placid Tuesday afternoons, for two girls who for years felt nothing, no hate, no jealousy, no fondness, no substance in each other, who one stormy afternoon find themselves alone in a dusty attic, and because they know they must, because they know there is no other thing to do (as they have never in all their Tuesdays together chitchatted, played games, not as much as once looked each other directly in the eyes) sit and hold hands, and with a most natural ease, forced by the moment, begin to realize that all the woes that have befallen one have befallen the other, and if they just sit here in this room and hold hands, no harm will ever come to them through the half-open door on the other side of the dusty attic—behaved as sisters for the first time in their lives.

After Teodoro's death, Alicia went each Tuesday afternoon to the olive house near the Bano River to see her sister, and though the old woman welcomed her visits, Renata was less hospitable. She had lost her voice on the stormy afternoon on which her lover, leaning heavily on his wife, abandoned her, but she had learned to scream in the words she scribbled on the notepad that she carried tied to a leather bracelet on her wrist.

“GET OUT OF HERE! YOU ARE NOT WELCOME IN THIS HOUSE!”

Alicia handed the note back to her and said: “I have come to see my sister, not you.”

“YOU HAVE NO SISTER. DO YOU THINK YOUR BASTARD OF A FATHER IS THE ONLY MAN I EVER LOVED!”

Alicia again handed the note back to Renata and turned her back to her and sat on the sun-bleached porchsteps for the six hours she was accustomed to spending with her sister on Tuesday afternoons. She read no more of the capitalized insults to the memory of her father that blew over her shoulder like a leaf storm. At dusk, she stood and said her good-byes to the old woman on the veranda and walked home. When her mother asked her where she had been, she answered that she had gone to the beach as she had gone with her father every Tuesday afternoon since she was five.

For over fifty weeks, she persisted with her Tuesday love like a most obstinate unrequited lover. The old woman entertained her with stories of her daughter's mounting madness, which were much more interesting, she prologued, than stories of any witch or demon: “You are brave, señorita Alicia. I wish my daughter were so … she has lost it, gone off the deep end, as if there were only one man in this world. Vaya, he was beautiful, romantic … and a great lover (oh, señorita Alicia, the things Renata has told me about your naked father, phrases I had imagined a daughter could never whisper to a mother), pero coño, al fin y al cabo, only a man, what do
they
know of the misery of this world? What dignity is there in going mad over them?”

A window screeched open behind the old woman and a hand reached out and handed her a note; the old woman pushed it off at arm's length, read it and laughed. “She says, in capitals, that I should shut up, that at least she had a man to go mad over. Does she not think I had men too? Does she think some angel came down and made
her
? Well, I won't shut up, carajo. I am her mother. This is my house, which I bought with my own money (I had men, but I did not need them to supply for me), and I am sick of these little notes … do you know what she does? She pastes them all over the house with children's glue, these not capitalized, but in a very tidy, minuscule, whispery script, as if the memory were too fragile to support the weight of the heavy block letters: in the parlor,
here, where the bastard-of-a-father could barely wait to get into the house, where he lifted my ankle-length skirt, wrestled me to the floor, and did not even bother as much as to pull his pants below the beltline
; on the kitchen table,
here, where the bastard-of-a-father, in the middle of his merienda, sticks his hand under my blouse and begins rubbing chocolate frosting on my nipple and spitting warm lemonade in my belly button
; under the dining room table,
here, where the bastard-of-a-father laid out a linen bedsheet and we sat naked and drank straight from a bottle of Bordeaux
; on the toilet seat,
here, where the bastard-of-a-father walked in on me in the middle of my necessities and stood by me with his groin pressed to my face and said he loved no sound better in the world than the gush of my urine
; on the third step of the attic stairways,
here, one afternoon long ago, where the bastard-of-a-father toiled so long, for so many hours, that his head split open and out of it was born a girl
; and of course, in every corner of her bed, so many notes that they would fill a thousand-page manuscript, piled so deep that cockroaches have begun to nest in them, and my mad daughter is forced to sleep on a cot in the attic, the one room in the house where not a note is pasted, for even in the headboard of her own daughter's little bed a most chilling note was pasted (which I quickly removed before Martica saw it),
here, where the bastard-of-a-father forced me to whisper things into his ear pretending I was his own.
(Imagínate, a demon, that's what your father was. He possessed her.) I'm surprised she has not yet caught up with her daughter, mi pobre Martica, and pasted a note on her forehead,
here, the bastard the bastard-of-a-father fathered.
”