The Lazarus Rumba (75 page)

Three things happened after the fevers, after the amethyst eye in his chest became like an eye that sees, that scar-lining around it rosy like lids, the hair above from Héctor's nipple like eyelashes. One, he could not sleep. Later he became proud of his talent for insomnia, but at first it frightened him and he kept me up at night, pressing wet tobacco leaves against the eye on his chest because it would not shut and kept him from sleeping. When he gave this up he would get up and wander the fields and then return to my room in my abuelita's bohío and sneak under the covers of my bed, waking me by nestling in with his back to me and pressing the cold muddy soles of his long feet up against my thighs. Two, he could not get drunk; which doesn't mean that he did not drink—al contrario. He never stopped drinking his bourbon now. He drank two or three bottles a day (switching to rum when he could not find a yanqui to sell him bourbon) and was always sober as a surgeon, alert as an owl. And three, he was never satisfied sexually.

That winter it started, bad enough so that sometimes I would not see him for five or six nights straight; and when other performers—acrobats and strongmen and even clowns—would give me the smug look, I knew Héctor had come to their cart the night before. But Héctor cared for none of them and eventually he would come back to my cart, knock timidly on the door to wake me, bottle of bourbon in hand, and sneak under the covers and press his soiled bare feet up against my thighs. The longest he spent with anyone was the three long weeks he went to the luxurious sleeping quarters of Georgina the Manwoman. Georgina was a prima donna and a yanqui—from New Orleans, though I think she might have been born in the Middle East and was once a confidant of Héctor's maestro, señor Sariel. She was a big draw and demanded the finest accommodations. (Georgina, as she proved during her no-children-admitted show was both man
and
woman, but he preferred to be addressed as
she.
) Her sleeping quarters were like a powerful sheik's traveling tent, with wooden platforms covered with serapi carpets that established four different levels—her bedroom of course on the highest, the bed the size of a small pond, covered in white linen and surrounded by a silk mosquitero. It took ten hours and sixteen men to put up and dismantle her tent as we moved from town to town. The yellow-bearded gypsy who raped Héctor with his finger was on Georgina's crew, and I can imagine how happy he was during those three weeks, cutting an eyehole in her tent so that he could return at night and watch Héctor's ass bouncing in the candle shadows of Georgina's fourth platform, or his long feet fluttering in the air and getting tangled in the silk mosquitero like a giant pigeon trapped in a thick cloud-sheet.
That
vision—the yellow-bearded gypsy watching from outside and loving Héctor from there—hurts me more than Héctor being there in that bed, with that freak of nature who had the face of a wounded angel and the organs of a man covering the organs of a woman. Y que Dios me perdone otra vez, I was glad when the guards cracked the old gypsy's skull.

After Georgina, none of the other circus performers could satisfy Héctor. He was hurt, for this time he had not left. She had thrown him out one night and told him it was time she find herself un hombre de verdad.

“Ya estoy cansada de maricas,” she said to him on the last night, and handed him his bundle of clothes and led him out of her tent, naked as he was. “I need a
man.
Adios entonces, mi bellísimo, mi mariconcito.” She kissed him on the cheek and patted him on the ass and drew shut the tent folds. Héctor cried as he cuddled in next to me that night, but I did not have the strength to console him or to make love with him, even though he was aroused all night and kept pushing his ass into me. I just held him.

By then it was the late summer of 1957. When we got back to my abuelita's bohío near Baracoa to rest for the upcoming winter tour, Héctor escaped to the mountains, where the bearded liberators were hiding. Héctor scribbled a note and left it on my grandmother's kitchen table under an empty bottle of bourbon, saying he was going to become a “revoluciónario.” Without him, attendance was cut in half at the gypsy circus and the few who attended spent most of their time at Georgina's show, or heckled Jorge the Ringmaster when he announced the substitute for the acrobat with three eyes, a dwarfish Chinese—Puerto Rican tightrope walker named Cundas with a round kind face and feet
bigger
than Héctor's. Which is how Jorge answered the hecklers.

“Miren coño, how can you not be impressed! Look at those magnificent feet!”

Cundas would then balance himself on one foot and lift his other foot from the rope and wiggle the six-jointed toes, and the strip-muscles on the balls of his foot vibrated like the strings of a piano during a violent symphony. Still, the people were not impressed and they renewed their shouts for the three-eyed acrobat.

When Héctor returned to my abuelita's late in the spring of the following year and snuck into my room, and under the covers of my bed cuddled beside me and pressed his feet to my thighs, I thought for a second it might have been someone else. His feet had grown a few inches—as if in envy of Cundas—and were crocodile callused and when I went to rub his cheeks I found whiskers.

“How is the revolution, mi barbudito?” I whispered into the nest of the back of his head.

“Llena de mariconerías,” he answered and began to push his ass into me. This time I did find the strength to forgive him and to please him.

Gracias. Gracias. I will have a bath if you have drawn one. It will be an honor. This tub is almost holy. Un rélico de tipo. The bath is good. Warm. It heals the wounds of last night's rum, yesterday's swim.

He had served under your husband's brigade. This your husband may have never told you, how he first came to know your cousin Héctor. But it wasn't at the circus. Your husband became a big supporter of the circus
after
la Revolución triumphed. He knew Héctor in the mountains. Héctor penetrated the jungles of the Sierra in less than a week and made it to the rebel headquarters, high at La Plata. No offense to the memory of your fine husband, señora Alicia, but Héctor told me that once he had made it into their midst and they saw how beautiful and harmless he was, all the guerrilleros took to him, even Fidel. And your husband filled up this very same tub that I'm in, that we stole, that one was murdered in (sí, sí, that tale will come), and after he had filled it and made the water warm as you have done for me, your husband bathed Héctor, washed his limbs with coconut soap, for Héctor had not eaten much since he fled from my abuelita's bohío and he was too weak to wash himself. They fed him banana bread and goat's milk and dressed him in a campesino's smock and let him rest for two days, even if he could not sleep. When they roused him, they gave him cups and cups of cafecito and more bread and goat's milk. Héctor became so joyous and wired that he danced for the rebels and did somersaults in the air. They gave him a guerrillero's uniform and boots and a rifle (by then the rebels had raided many of the government's armories); but he gave them back the rifle and the boots and the uniform—keeping only the faded-olive wool beret.

“The jagged rocks will make picadillo of your feet, muchachón,” your husband said to him.

“No, comandante,” Héctor said, affixing his beret and saluting your husband. “I can walk on the edge of una navajita without getting cut. It is my art. I am a ballerino with wings!” He did another somersault and your husband's men applauded and your husband's mute blue-feathered rooster tried to crow but his vocal chords were as untuned and useless as those of a sea-buried piano. The men demanded that both Héctor and the rooster come with them when they moved east on the mountain range. But your husband feared more for the lives of this monkey-boy and his rooster than he did for his own.

“This is a war, not a circus,” he grumbled to his men.

“War
is
a circus!” one of the men answered. He was an aging, weak-kneed guerrillero who grew gray whiskers no thicker than Héctor's and had once been a well-off tenured history professor at the LaSalle boys preparatory school in the Oriente province. Your husband did not feel like debating the merits of war with him and he reluctantly agreed to bring Héctor and his rooster along.

Because he could move so much faster than the other guerrilleros along the rugged terrain, Héctor soon began to lead. It was humid and warm. Winter only visited them at night when the long rains were chilly and misty and slow-falling, like shavings from a frozen heaven. Héctor tore his guerrillero's smock at the collar and pulled it down below the shoulders and tied the sleeves around his waist so that it hung on him like a long wide skirt. The guerrilleros behind him whistled and your husband reprimanded them as if they were schoolboys. Héctor moved on. He wrapped his feet tightly around the jagged rocks—perhaps this is why they grew so much in eight months—he willfully stretched them on those rocks to better handle the sierra-terrain. And that is why he so easily fled from them when he decided it was time, why your husband knew better than to chase him.

But at first he was fine, a vowed revoluciónario. It was the third and last indulgence Fidel allowed your husband. The first was the mute blue-feathered rooster, which your husband carried with him everywhere perched on his shoulder. Then it was
this
, the falcon-legged tub. It took four men to carry the thing with them. Fidel had a fit when, a few weeks after they had landed on their victorious and promised return from Mexico on a leaky boat named
Granma
, your husband disappeared with six men and went to Bayamo, to the finca where he had lived after his university days to claim his bathtub and his rooster. Your husband was clever though. The first night he met up with Fidel he had water boiled in a rusty cast-iron pot and let Fidel be the first one to bathe, the other comandantes, even Che, washing him and then drying him off as if he were already the emperor and they his slaves.

“It's still a danger,” Fidel said after an hour-long bath. “But we'll keep it. It'll lift our spirits.”

Fidel's brother Raúl berated him. “¿Somos guerrilleros o niñitas de baño?”

Fidel took the towel from your husband and wrapped his index finger with it and stuck it in his ears to dry it off, then he scrubbed dry his beard. He felt drowsy and he knew how to end the argument right away. He wrinkled his nose.

“Bueno hermanito, from the smell of you, if there's anyone who needs a bath around here it's
you
!” He motioned for his cigar and lit it. “Fill the bath for Raul.”

“¡Nunca!” Raúl said. Fidel shrugged his shoulders and sent Che after him. “We'll keep the bathtub, compadre,” he said to your husband. “But Raúl is right, it might prove dangerous to carry it along with us. So we'll hide it somewhere till we have established a permanent camp; then we'll come and get it. ¿De acuerdo?”

“¿Cómo no, comandante? De acuerdo.”

Fidel winked at him and suggested he take a bath if Raúl was not willing. He combed his hair with his hands and stroked his beard, which had grown to cover his Adam's apple, and put back on his dirty military garb.

Eight weeks later they established camp at the high point of La Plata. The falcon-legged bathtub was retrieved and installed there. They built a wall of palm fronds around it and called the room a chapel. Fidel himself made ration cards out of palm bark for his men, entitling each of them to four baths a month. Fidel carved the cards with his own bowie knife, marked them with a star as each man bathed.

“I am now teaching you the way so that you may later teach others,” he spoke from the other side of the palm-frond wall as he fashioned a crooked star on the palm-bark card, while his guerrillero, submerged in the falcon-legged tub, reached down under the water and scrubbed his groin, then lifted his ass and washed down there too, “that luxuries are not to be hoarded, that riches are to be shared equally. It's as simple as the seventh chapter of Matthew. I don't know why los curitas can't plainly see that, why they are not screaming their support for us from the pulpits at
every
morning Mass.”

Your husband disagreed with all this ration business but he said nothing. Vaya no era bobo. His only protest was to demand that he too be issued a bath card, even though he knew that Fidel himself bathed in the tub every day (and that
that
was the real reason he did not want your husband taking it with him in his campaign eastward), with the excuse that soaking his joints in the hot waters eased his toothache and Celia had not yet sent a maldito dentista. Your husband knew otherwise, that at times—and this you won't read in any of the government's history books—in the middle of leading the rebellion against Batista's regime, Fidel was engaged in re-reading all of the works of Dostoevski, and the chapel was the only place where no one dared to bother him. But your husband did take the tub. It was his.

Your husband recounted all this to Héctor after they had set camp on a woody ridge east of La Plata, the first night of the campaign that would eventually capture Santiago de Cuba and establish it as temporary capital of the Island. They set up the tub and built a fire under a wigwam fashioned with moist palm and banana fronds—to protect the fire from the misty rain and so as not to give away their position—and heated water and Héctor bathed first and then most of the forty-nine guerrilleros and then your husband, all in the same water, heated after every three or four men with a fresh boiling pot. Héctor asked your husband who Dostoevski was, if he was some famous general like Napoleon, and if that was why Fidel was so interested in him and your husband pulled out from one of his bags a beat-up copy of
Crime and Punishment
with a cracking fake-leather cover and on whose title page Fidel had scribbled:
Fidel Castro ‘53.
That is, it was dated from the time that he too was a prisoner on this island that's the eye of the Island. He gave it to Héctor. Héctor brought it back with him to my abuelita's bohío and I helped him to read it sentence by sentence, one or two a day—ves, his formal schooling had mostly stopped after his mother had fled the first time when he was thirteen, so he read at an elementary level. Over five years later, when we were arrested and taken from the circus, he was still reading
Crime and Punishment
and had made it near the end, to the beginning of the sixth part. Later, while hidden in the cane fields near the labor camp in Camagüey, I asked him if he remembered the last sentence he had read.