The Lazarus Rumba (63 page)
Authors: Ernesto Mestre
The silence that followed the recitation of the oracle was interrupted by Marcos, who rushed ahead of the women who were waiting in line and informed Josefa that it was her turn to go listen to the Speech.
“Me cago en ella,” Josefa muttered in her old voice. “Se acabó la fiesta.” She gathered the cowrie shells and put them away in some inner pocket of her frock and stood. The sawdust on which she had drawn the diagram of the oracle she gathered on both hands and blew into the air murmuring a prayer in the old tongue of the Africans. The afternoon breezes challenged her and blew back some of the holy dust into her face so that it stuck there like caked-on make-up and forced her to bat her eyelids like a coquette. The carved tray that held the sawdust, the sacred
opón
, she hid under a mound of polished riverstones behind her, amidst the wild grass.
“Come on, come on, she is waiting,” Marcos said.
“Let her wait, coño,” Josefa said. “My group will not go in without me.”
On the way to Maruja's bohÃo, past the line of women whose concerns would not be addressed that afternoon, Marcos warned Josefa to take off her beads, and she did and put them in the same inner pocket where had put the cowrie shells.
Later, after the Speech was finished, Maruja joined the people outside and the drummers stopped drumming and the dancers stopped dancing and the children voluntarily interrupted their games and all the revelry in general came to a halt as the people gathered around her to receive their instructions for the following week. Maruja assigned Alicia to Marcos's neighborhood, and gave her directions to his bohÃo where she would report the following morning for her work detail. She ended as she did every Sunday, insisting to the people of the valley that only through the drudgery of work and toil would they be able to build the patience and integrity necessary to distill any joy from this harsh world. The people, led by their jefes, cheered, as they always did.
In the following weeks, Alicia worked in the coffee fields and alfalfa plains in the higher lands of the valley where Marcos was in charge. After she was given her work uniform (a pair of workboots, a long-sleeve khaki work-shirt, a heavy blue canvas jumper-dress and a wide-brimmed straw hat that smelled of the labor of those who had worn it before her) and instructed on what to do, she avoided the other workers, and set out on her own and did not join in their field songs. When she returned to her bohÃo near dusk, she shed her clothes and washed them in the cool stream and then waded in till the waters reached her waist and lowered herself in and remained there till the moon had crossed from one end of the sky to the other. She then hung the clothes on nails sticking out from the beams of the outhouse and returned to her bohÃo and ate as much as she could stand. After her first week of work, when Marcos provided her with paper and ink, she wrote three letters nightly by the dim halo of the oil lamp, one to her daughter, one to her mother, and one to her sister. These she handed to Marcos on the following day and he promised that he would personally seal them in an envelope and mail them without letting anyone in the valley break the seal. Some nights she wrote a fourth and fifth letter, but these she did not mail, but folded into a square and hid in the lining of her suitcase. They were addressed to ghosts.
The workers were paid twice a week, on Tuesdays and Fridays, in bags of food and soap and other necessaries and oil for their lamps and wood for their stoves and (if so requested, on Fridays only) half a bottle of rum or outdated newspapers and faded-color magazines from the main Island. At the end of each week, each worker's production was carefully noted in a black leather journal kept by the jefe, the neighborhood chief. Saturday was politics and re-education day. And the workers would gather at the home of the jefe, and the work journal was carefully examined by all. The less productive of the group were made to explain their slackness, and invariably they offered salvos, some commonplace, such as advanced arthritis or sunstroke, some more daring and sublime, such as yanqui sloth syndrome, a condition, cousin to greed, where the mind refused to be ennobled by work and toil unless it was properly recompensed with wealth. Those suffering from yanqui sloth syndrome were tended to and pitied by the other workers as if they were indeed in the grasp of horrible illness.
Every week Alicia was among the top producers, this due not to any feat of endurance or devotion to her task, but mostly to the fact that on Wednesday afternoons when the jefe was away for the weekly Comité meeting in Maruja's bohÃo, the other workers, men and women and children alike, would cease their laboring and abandon the fields and climb to the cataracts of the main river and shed their work clothes and naked wash away their exhaustion under the crystalline falls, rejuvenated for Thursdays, which for no logical reason had been designated the longest workday of the week, when they would arrive in the fields before dawn and not leave till after the stars began to pierce the sky. On Wednesday afternoons Alicia remained in the fields. This stubborn penchant for separateness, this affronting aloofness, did not help ingratiate her with her fellow laborers.
Sunday, of course, was Speech day.
And how casually did the weeks tumble one upon the other, how cleverly were the long seven days disbanded one from the other (so that many in the valley grew to forget the old Roman names and knew the seven days by their more useful, though much clunkier, namesâso that Monday was First-Work day, and Tuesday First-Pay day, and Wednesday Meeting day, and Thursday Long day, and Friday Rum day, and Saturday Journal day, and Sunday, of course, was Speech day; and how easy then to shuffle all the weeks together, as if in an imaginative card trick, not unlike the ones practiced by Josefa to divine the future and retell the past, so that the necessary ligaments that we use to hinge together dense pockets of time and thus make it bearable, the swing from night to day, from spring to summer, from child to man, from work to play, from truth to fantasy, seemed more like the twined tether of memory and regret that holds the beast from its baiters. Thus, it was the law of the valley, only through the drudgery of continuous labor, through the dull devotion of Sisyphus, could the illusion of time be shattered and the wanton gods avenged. “Y que no me digan nada,” Maruja was wont to repeat, “my revolution here in the valley is more cosmic than Fidel's Revolución; he freed you from the imperialists, I will free you from the devils in the clock.” And indeed, throughout her long stay in the valley of the nightingales, Alicia never saw the exacting face of a clock or a wristwatch.
“¿No ves?” Marcos explained to Alicia when she brought up the issue one Sunday night on their way back from the Speech. “Where there are no clocks there are no calendars, where there are no clocks and no calendars there is no history, where there is a continuous present, no history, no progress, no memory, and without any of these, there is no loss. She has gone much further than Dali who set fire under his clocks; in this little valley, she has set fire to the whole course of human history and is out to restart it, with her son as emperor!”
Alicia thought of the melting clocks of the Catalan painter who was a frequent visitor to the capital before la Revolución. She wondered what he would think of this valley without clocks, where time was forced to assert itself through other beings, through the remolded countenance of clouds, the shifting silt-lines of the river and its tributaries, or the shrill virtuous notes of a lewd little bird. (Thus, Alicia's alarum to rise near dawn was no bell from a clock but the abrupt hollow created by the silence of the nightingales.) More cunning than the swine-loving demons in the Book of Luke, the legion of devils cast from the clocks by Maruja's inquisition possessed (without belittling themselves by seeking permission) any other available thing in the valley, living or nonliving.
“For even a devil needs a place to call home,” Marcos added to Alicia's ruminations with a half-smile.
Much later, after Joshua had disappeared for the second time, Alicia thought how easily she might have gotten lost in the shuffled weeks of Maruja's ambush on history, had not Joshua returned on a muggy windless night, after a near two-month absence, bearing an unexpected gift and news of an imminent visit. It was a Friday and she was in the stream washing her work clothes. When she heard his voice calling her from the front of her bohÃo, a bucketful of blood plunged from the cave of her chest to the pit of her belly. She attributed this not to a rush of joy (for though she had often thought of Joshua during his absence, she had never really missed him, not, claro, the way she missed her daughter and her husband and her cousin, but not even in the same manner she missed the flat streets of her hometown, or the most common acquaintance there) but from an embarrassed fear, for she was wont to walk back the thirty-six paces from the stream to the back of her bohÃo in the nude, her washed uniform draped over her arm. She tried to hurry out of the waters to reach her wet uniform on the shore but saw the blaze of yellow and orange light from Joshua's torch making its way around the house and proceeding in a roundabout fashion towards the stream. She waded back deep into the stream and hid her nakedness in the dark waters.
He called out to her again and after the third or fourth time, Alicia abandoned her plan to try and reach the wet uniform and responded: “¡Aquà estoy!” She saw the light change course one last time and head directly towards her. Joshua approached the shoreline with his torch held aloft over his head. His hair was loose and stringy with sweat. He wore only a pair of olive drab pants, like her husband had worn in the Sierra during the war; they were too wide for him and fell low on his hips and the shadows that fell from his heaving chest danced on the pale skin of his belly. He lifted his arms above his shoulders, presenting himself. He was thinner than before and the shadows falling from his ribcage made it seem like a pair of twin narrowing circular staircases. There were rosy welt-marks around both his shoulders and around his waist. A small flame flew off the torch and was heading for his face but it died before it reached its target, as if snuffed by the wet fingers of his guardian orisha. Joshua lowered his arms and crouched and caught his breath and lowered the torch farther to just above the surface of the waters so that it washed out the stream's blackness and made it transparent. Alicia covered her breasts with her arms and took a few steps backward on the slippery riverstones and lowered herself farther in the water, so that her chin was submerged.
Joshua lifted the torch. “Oh, señora Alicia, you are so quiet, so unwelcoming, I just wanted to make sure it was you.” He planted the torch on the shore and walked into the stream up to his ankles. He smoothed his hair back behind his ears. The light that gleamed from behind him now made him into nothing more than a shadow. He lifted his arms again. “I have returned! Pues, aren't you glad to see me? I have returned, and not like a prodigal.”
Alicia said nothing. She thought of the many things she could tell this impertinent young man, but she had been struck mute. Joshua leaned forward and let himself fall into the waters. He remained in the shallow and knelt and drank from the stream with cupped hands and splashed his face and smoothed his hair. “It's too hot,” he said. “You are smart to spend your time in the river.” He walked back to the shoreline and saw the wet clothes. He laughed. “Are you completely naked, señora? Shall I go into the house and get you something?”
Alicia nodded.
Joshua disappeared with the torch and returned bearing one of her white summer dresses and hung it on the branch of a willow that grew aslant over the stream. The dress hung still there, no breeze toyed with it. In the playful deceptive shadows of the torchlight it seemed as if a young girl had hanged herself there, and stoically waited in the air for a more proper rest. Joshua disappeared again and said he would wait for her by the front of the bohÃo with a surprise for her.
Alicia waited till Joshua's torch was well away and let the breath of night return gradually. She trusted it less now than before. She hurried out of the stream, using her arms to push her out of the deep water. The dress was still visible and she reached for it and quickly put it on. It stuck to her skin. She lifted her arms over her head as if beckoning any adventurous breeze to traverse the humid night, but she remained as wet as she had been in the stream. She put her arms over her breasts again and walked to the front of her bohÃo. Joshua was seated by the front door, his arms on his knees, the torch sunk into the ground beside him, his bald friends, Jeremiah and Ezekiel, and two new ones, presumably Daniel and Hosea (although they might not yet have been named for their heads weren't shaved), all across from him, strapped on like teams of horses by two twin harnesses around their torsos to a long closed cart, Joshua's chariot. When he saw Alicia, Joshua smiled and with open hand signaled to the chariot. “Ahà tienes.”
Alicia looked at the long chariot, then back at Joshua, then back at the exhausted giant rats strapped to the chariot, their bodies sprawled on the ground like a napping pride of lions, their long front legs stretched before them, then back at Joshua.
“Have you gone mad, muchacho?” Alicia said. “¿Qué es esto? Where have you been?”
Joshua continued to smile, and signaled again to the chariot. “¿Estás ciega? Has my mother plucked out your eyes?”
“I have asked for you, para que sepas. Your mother said you were away conducting official revolutionary business for the Comité. But others rumored that you had fled from her and gone to the capital to await your eighteenth birthday within striking distance of your father. They said if he did not recognize you as promised that you were going to murder him.”
“I told you you would hear that story. The people of this valley have tongues longer than salamanders and imaginations more twisted than the fallen angels. So ⦠you have asked for me? Aquà estoy, returned from my journey to your land, to your home, with your request to el Comité fulfilled. My mother, on rare occasions, can be very, very kind.” His caramel eyes opened wide and he signaled again to his chariot. “¿Pero coño, sigues ciega, mujer?”