The Lazarus Rumba (66 page)

Joshua returned to Alicia's house on B. Street early the following morning, still wearing the fatigues and the black military boots, his hair tied back in a ponytail. He went around the back where he had seen the indian servant the previous day. The henhouse was locked and no one was around. He went to the wrought-iron door that was the entrance to the courtyard. It was locked. He rattled it once and called for the servant. A dog barked lazily inside, apparently not so interested in the identity of the intruder to come to the gate. Joshua had not learned the servant's name and called for her simply
¡India! ¡India vieja!
A man came to the gate and stood on the other side. He was wearing a long white terry-cloth bathrobe that fell almost down to his ankles. He was barefoot. His toenails were spongy, eaten with fungus. His hands were in the pockets of the robe and seemed to be supporting his basketball belly. His hair was wet and slicked back and his beard trimmed short and, though there were streaks of gold in both, Joshua could not tell for sure how blond they were. His eyes were an iridescent blue, like the wet feathers of certain rare birds. He was chewing on something, though it was hardly noticeable for his jaw was locked shut, pulsing at the hinge. His neck was long and womanly. He examined Joshua, casting his gaze upwards and downwards more than once, and then let it rest on Joshua's face. He smiled without showing his teeth and swallowed. “¿Qué quieres, joven?”

“I want to see the comandante who lives in this house.”

“¿Eres militar, joven?” The man's voice was soft and pleasant.

Joshua remembered doña Adela's advice that the best way to deal with el Rubio was one, not to get lulled by his ingratiating, almost affectionate, manner, that despite his obnoxious breath, was capable of seducing many a soul, and two, never to answer any of his endless questions with something as simple as the plain truth. “Yes, I am in the military. I am visiting from La Habana.”

“And what do you want with the comandante who lives in this house?”

“I have a message for him from my father.”

“And who is your father?”

“An important man in the capital, but I am not allowed to say who … not yet.”

“There are many of those, aren't there? There are many important men scattered throughout this Island.”

“Not many as important as my father.”

“Do you have papers, joven? Or am I to stand here, fresh from my morning bath, out of uniform, and believe every little lie that issues from your pretty mouth?” Joshua was moved to silence both by the ugly accusatory tone that the man had suddenly taken and by the unfitting compliment to his appearance. The man passed his hand through his hair and it had dried somewhat and Joshua could see how blond it truly was, some strands as pale as white gold.

“Don't be afraid, joven, contrary to the vicious rumors that slither like snails from the mouths to the ears of los envidiosos, I am no marica, nor am I the son of yanquis!”

“I had not heard either of those rumors, comandante.”

“There you have it: here in front of you is the comandante who lives in this house. And now you've heard from his own mouth the worst that has been said about him, not that he is a corrupt police chief or a scheming politico, not even that he is so fat that he can't afford to sleep on his belly for his head won't reach the pillow and his ass falls from behind him like twin sacks of lard, but that he is a marica and a yanqui. In 1971, the two worst things one can be on this Island.” He stepped closer to the locked gate. “And do me one favor, won't you?” He waited for a response. “Won't you? ¿Sí o no?”

Joshua hesitated. “Si.”

“Tell la señora Adela, when you next see her, to have a little more respect for her sacred dead, and not give away his old war uniform to any vagrant boy, filled with lies, who knocks at her door.” He produced a key out of his robe pocket and unlocked the gate door and opened it. He came close enough to Joshua so that Joshua smelled his rotted breath. “Now, we'll start again. See if you can let your girlish pink mouth utter something close to the truth this time. What is it that you want, niñito, with the comandante who lives in this house?”

Joshua felt a fountain of tears welling up in his chest. He wrinkled his nose and tightened his cheeks and pressed down against the surge at the back of his throat. He knew this feeling well, knew how to fight it, knew it from when another woman had dressed him, in a fine linen boy-suit with knee-high socks and leather moccasins and left him alone in a dark apartment on Cardenas Street. But he was almost eighteen now, almost, at last, the son of his father, ten times the man of this petty
policitica
, and though he felt his lips tremble and imagined el Rubio tasting them and tasting his cheeks and tasting his brow with the invasive tongue of his breath, he would not cry. He reached in the pocket of his fatigues and produced the letter his mother had written. He handed it to el Rubio. El Rubio handed it back to him without perusing it.

“Al fin, joven, you come out with
some
truth. … I do not need to read your mother's letter. The woman has already told me of its contents, of your odd quest. You forget, you read her the letter yesterday. Liars should not be so forgetful; and neither should you have let la vieja Adela fill you with so much fear. The answer is simple, I cannot let you have your golden fleece, the falcon-legged bathtub. It does not belong to Alicia anymore, it does not belong to me, it belongs to the State. The State has seen fit to let one of its
loyal
servants live here, eso es todo; usufruct: the right to use and enjoy the property of another—it is an ancient Roman legal term that the modern capitalists, the vile yanquis, do not comprehend, they wrongly believe that to use and enjoy something one must own it first, que pena. Pero la cosa es, pertaining to the object of your quest, that I as a mere
user
cannot give away property that is not mine. Pero, I have looked through my old clippings of
Granma
, I once wanted to be a lawyer, so I save all the trial stories. Your mother is one of the redeemed ones! She has risen above her past self, according to these sources, and is now an expert at what she does. I understand she would not ask for things not deemed necessary for the purpose of the revolutionary rehabilitation of said prisoner, Alicia Lucientes. And your father; yes, that story I have heard too—”

“We do not consider our valley a prison,” Joshua spoke with a renewed boldness, even as he tried to shut his nostrils and callous his whole being against the miasmic aura of the police captain, “nor our residents prisoners.”

“What I was going to say was—” el Rubio put his hand on Joshua's shoulder and gave it a light tug towards him—“that I would be willing to help your mother, be willing to give you the due respect as the son of your father, if you in turn were willing to lend me a hand, for as I am sure la vieja Adela has told you (for all her righteousness and saintliness, her tongue is as long as anyone's in this town) I have some problems of my own, with some ingrates trying to reach for power beyond themselves, beyond me, even beyond the scope of la Revolución.”

Joshua nodded his head, and el Rubio took it not to signify that yes Joshua had heard from doña Adela, but as a silent approval of alliance against the young man chief of el Comité. He pressed his hand into Joshua's shoulder till it began to give downward. “Bien coño, your mother has raised a proper revoluciónario. Your
father
will be proud to have sired such a son.” And before Joshua could protest, el Rubio was giving him a tour of Alicia's old house. The long brick-paved center courtyard opened out from a semicircle of four rooms, the atrium, the main parlor, the dining room and the airy kitchen, in which a fat bullmastiff slept, all sparsely furnished, el Rubio explained, because of a disgraceful bonfire the mad widow had set to a pile of fine Cuban mahogany pieces one New Year's Eve after her husband's suicide.

“Suicide? Sí, that's what my mother tells us at el Comité. But wasn't he shot down by border patrol while trying to flee into the American base?”

“Like I said, suicide. Your mother is correct. A man may kill himself in many ways. Suicide.” He led Joshua through the two bedrooms. One furnished only with a sewing machine and a wooden chair, the other only with an unmade bed. El Rubio explained he did not let the woman into his bedroom. Finally they came to a blue-tiled bathroom, more spacious than either of the bedrooms, with a toilet, a bidet and a small sink in a far corner and a narrow shower stall in a near corner, and at whose exact center was placed Joshua's prize, the falcon-legged bathtub. El Rubio said it was not bolted down and could easily be moved out of the house if he saw fit, though outward theft from the State did not sit right in his heart.

“Perhaps,” he suggested, “we can find some sort of loophole in this law of usufruct.”

Out of the bathroom, a sliding door in the hallway led to another smaller courtyard, darker than the main one, the walls and floor and trellis-ceiling carpeted with creeping vine, and bordered by a bed of yellow rose bushes and white poppies, several in full and regal bloom. El Rubio explained that the secret to such beautiful flowers was to line the bed before planting the bushes with a carpet of human hair. This he learned from the man who had once been the town's alderman, something to do with nitrogen. He reached his hand to the side of Joshua's face and caressed a lock of his hair that had come loose from the pony tail and he said that such princely hair would surely lend beauty to the most homely flower. Joshua jerked his head away. El Rubio took no notice of this sudden brash gesture and led Joshua back to the rear entrance of the kitchen. He left Joshua outside, excusing himself to get dressed. He told Joshua that he knew the way out, and asked him to return that evening, for dinner at six, if he liked.

“Your servant, mejor digo, what do you call her, your woman. She said it was well known in this town that you always dine alone.”

“
The
woman, not
my
woman. I am not an owner of land and much less not an owner of other living beings. The woman is clever. Alone? Yes, she is clever. Come then and I won't be alone. Come dine with me and afterwards, I will know your true self.”

El Rubio said that after dinner there would be a test of Joshua's loyalty to la Revolución, and therefore his loyalty to its only proper defender in this far-eastern town, himself. When Joshua asked what kind of test it would be, and expressed mild disapproval at his innuendos, el Rubio laughed openly, for the first time revealing his teeth, some rotted black and brown, some capped in very pale gold, alternating like the keys of a tiny piano box that emitted not sound but an outrageous and irreplicable cadenza of stink so dungy, so like the thing it wasn't, that it seemed to mask the promise of some future sweetness. “Nothing immoral, joven, don't get so nervous,” el Rubio explained, unsuccessful this time at dis-simulatively breaching the distance between himself and Joshua to put any hand on him, “a simple feat that I have recently begun to use to test all my recruits, easy pickings for someone as well schooled in revolutionary mores as you.”

“I
may
return,” Joshua said, heading towards the front of the house.

“Yes, you may,” el Rubio shouted at him, his hand extended, unshaken. “You must.”

Joshua did not go to doña Adela's house, though he was tempted. When doña Adela interrupted their conversation the night previous and put Teresita to sleep, she turned on the television tube, hidden in a scratched and stained console. She said she could not miss a single episode of the nightly serial
novela
for she would lose the string of the story, and it was the only thing, aside from the rosary and the white pills, that made her nights tolerable. Joshua revealed to her that the only two things he was allowed to watch on his own television in the Valley of the Nightingales was Fidel's Sunday speech and the afternoon cartoons. Doña Adela said, keeping her droopy hypnotic gaze fixed on the fuzzy black and white screen, that Fidel's speeches were blacked out in her house, but that her granddaughter was also an avid watcher of cartoons, and that her favorite was el conejito Bugs, who never gets caught by the fat-nosed yanqui hunter Elmer Fudd and dresses up in costumes that fool everyone. Joshua was tempted to return to doña Adela and Teresita. He missed the afternoon cartoons and missed his mother, and even missed Marcos and some of the senile old women of el Comité. He wanted to please them; he wanted to please Alicia. He had decided that if he could not have the falcon-legged bathtub, he would steal it. Perhaps he could convince el Rubio to relinquish it, but if not, he would steal it. He would dupe el Rubio and steal it. For obviously el Rubio was not a man easily affrighted, which had been Joshua's original ploy when he went to see him that morning. He looked behind him to see if he was being followed. He was on one of the main streets and it was improbably deserted, the only human presence certain town women sitting in the shades of their veranda, stretching their blouses at the neck and fanning themselves with fan-shaped pieces of discarded cardboard boxes. The naked sun was directly overhead and Joshua had trouble finding even his own shadow. He could not risk returning to doña Adela's house, for el Rubio would certainly find out. He seemed to know far too much for a nobody police captain in a provincial town so far away from the capital. It made Joshua uneasy to think how flagrantly el Rubio had expressed his affections.

He went to the park and read the front page of
Granma
, which was plastered on the public kiosk. He read the date carefully and used his knuckles to figure out which months were long and which were short and calculated the days till his birthday. He wandered the square city blocks and marvelled at the impossible flatness of this town where no house was higher than any other, and the only thing that looked down on any roof was the yellow steeple of the church. He thought that only the lowest regions of the netherworld could be this flat, that paradise was certainly a progression of mountains and valleys like the island where he lived. He returned to the park and watched the old men playing chess on the benches. They wore ragged clothes and their hands were unwashed and their beards unshaven. They drank from rum flasks hidden within their coats, and their only evident dignity lay in their eyes, and in their furrowed brows and in the silence with which they examined the board and planned three or four moves ahead. In between games, Joshua spoke to them, and asked them which way led to the famous yanqui naval base, but they either laughed uproariously at him, as if he were joking, and told him the yanquis don't look kindly on jóvenes in Fidel's uniform, or they nervously reset their pieces and restarted their games.