The Lazarus Rumba (81 page)

That's where they were headed and after one last night of
la gran bach at a de los pájaros
, as Cuco la Loca referred to our romp through the towns in northern Oriente, I parted from them. The night before, I made love to everyone in the group who would let me, even the pellejosa Cuco la Loca, and then I left never to see one of them again.

I headed for my granduncle's finca, or rather the government's finca run by my granduncle, to say good-bye to abuelita. She had promised me, in a rare lucid moment in one of her letters, that the padrino had taught her certain ways to keep Death at bay. One was to fry seventeen scorpions in corn oil with slivers of boneset root, and leave it on the doorstep—this was Death's favorite meal and Death would eat the scorpions one by one and break into a great sweat of satisfaction and forget altogether his purpose in visiting that house. Another was to paint a live turtle blue and make it circle the house seven times then let it wander around the yard without getting lost. Death would get on all fours and follow the creature around like a fool, amazed that such a being existed, and tormented that it was unknown in Death's kingdom, Death again forgetting the purpose of his visitation. My abuelita wrote that she was in great pain but that she would use these and other stratagems and that she would not die until she saw me. I imagined Death might grow a bit wrathful when he found out how often he had been duped.

I hurried home. I knew I was near when I saw the patches of white sea. My granduncle had owned one of the few tobacco farms in the province of Oriente (most of the crop best suited to the other side of the Island, where the nights are longer and cooler). Now the government owned it; and blind as my granduncle was, he still ran it, unwilling to abandon the land that had been taken from him by the progressive agrarian reform acts.

When I reached my abuelita's cottage it was near dusk. A menagerie of blue turtles roamed all about the yard so that from far away the cottage seemed to be sitting in the center of a small pond. I squinted to see if I could make out Death on its haunches trying to sniff out the secret of these immortal creatures. I saw instead my abuelita come to the doorway. She wore no clothing and the rags of her white hair fell on her bony shoulders down to her shriveled tits. Her skin hung loose on her bones and her sex was completely bald and pushed inside out so that her folds swung like a pouch in between her legs. The only flesh in all her body was bunched up into a ball in her belly, so that she seemed like a skeleton on the fourth month of its pregnancy. She leaned on two white canes, which lent her the balance her fleshless bones could not. Her arms, her legs, the skin draped over her ribcage and even the bones of her feet were all stained with splotches of blue paint. There was a faraway dilated look in her crusty eyes that may have been caused by the fumes from the paint, but more likely a sign that my abuelita had lingered with the help of the blue turtles way beyond the point of her allotted time.

I tiptoed over the turtles, careful not to crush any, and approached her. She let go of the canes and made a gesture to hug me but instead fell in my arms. She was light as a bird.

“Coño, Triste, por fin,” she wheezed into my chest, “I am sick of painting these monstrous long-necked critters. What do you call them?”

“Turtles, abuelita, turtles.”

“Eso mismo. … Perdóname, mi amor, I would cry if I could, but there are no tears left in me, the worms in my belly have drunk them all.”

Later, when I questioned my granduncle about abuelita, he assured me his sister had died nine months prior. His son confirmed this and made a move to put his arm around me, as if in condolence, but I ran from them. That night, after the workers had abandoned the fields, I buried abuelita under one of the patches of white sea, so that she may live forever in the breath of her beloved cigars.

I rushed to Santiago to find Cuco la Loca and the others from the camp. I had imagined it would be easy to find them, just listen for the raucous shrieks of all those mad queens, their shouts of
¡Libertad! ¡Libertad!
as their grizzled-chin married lovers topped them. But Santiago de Cuba was a changed town from the last time I had visited in the mid-60s during el carnaval. It was now a town beset by an unholy silence, a silence trapped in by the surrounding mountains like a fog, a silence that may have been confused by the tone-deaf for the warm silken stillness of the siesta hour, but that in its un-Cuban coldness bespoke of a failure from which there was no rebounding. Perhaps it was the lame conclusion of the much-heralded ten million ton sugar harvest the year before, perhaps the many other empty promises and calls to sacrifice coming from the capital, perhaps a realization that the gods they had welcomed into their city from the Sierra a decade before no longer deserved to be prayed or sung to.

I walked the city streets. The townsfolk who during that carnaval years before were all smiles and camaraderie, sharing rum and kisses with perfect strangers, now walked past me with their eyes averted. A schoolgirl with a red pionera handkerchief noosed tightly around her neck screamed at me that I should put some clothes on, that it was indecent to go around so naked. (I was still wearing the shorts and mismatched moccasins I had snatched up at the labor camp.) Her mother tried to hush her but she continued to scream, the veins in her neck rushing with indignation, her mouth twisted in revulsion, her dark eyes lit with righteousness. I heard others join her and I walked on, not looking back. I followed the streetcar tracks uphill on the main boulevard. The side streets became as shady and noiseless as a graveyard of heroes.

Then, as I neared the top of the hill, a great confusion of tongues erupted, like the wails of animals trapped in a burning barn. It grew louder and louder as I climbed. It was the only memorable sound I heard in that city on that day. It was a primitive inchoate song like none I had heard at even the wildest carnival, a chorus of fury entangled with a chorus of yearning, like two champion roosters in a pit. I turned into Padre Rico Street and followed the wild song up a series of steps to a three-story high peeling pink courtyard wall. Beyond the wall, atop the twin domes of the main structure, were visible a pair of lanterns with round arched windows. From there the voices emanated like steam surging from a hot spring.

It is Héctor's ghost that I follow from place to place as I pass through the rest of my life from nothing to nothing more; and here it had wandered, to the place he had dared come only once as a man, here to the asylum his mother had been committed to after her countless phantom pregnancies. Was she still alive? Still giving birth to invisible twins, year after year? I tried to discern her voice among the tormented many, tried to discern the cries of her brood of invisible twins, and even, sure that his ghost
had
ventured here, tried to discern the call of the one that I once loved that you once loved. All for nought. I heard instead the voice of my abuelita, I heard her lucid and wise as she had been before the blue turtles, I heard her say that a soul condemned becomes indiscernible from any other.

I waited till the last glint of light had vanished from the sharp points of the broken cola bottles and I fled Santiago de Cuba. I roamed the Island from end to end living on the natural generosity of our people, till I too decided, like your husband, that to save any shred of my dignity I must flee from this my land, must make like a worm and burrow out.

I decided to go through the yanqui naval base in Guantánamo.

Perhaps Héctor's ghost was leading me by the nose towards you, señora Alicia. But by the time I reached Guantánamo, you had already been taken away. I went to the monsignor of the parish to try to get in touch with your mother, but she was accepting no visitors. She had suffered a breakdown and her heart was weak, the monsignor said. He asked me if I needed help with anything else, if there was another reason why I had come to Guantánamo. I lied.

I stayed in a tenement of workers in the red light district on the east side of the railroad tracks, not far from your old home (inhabited by the blond police chief) on the other side of the tracks. I traded favors with the men in exchange for a worker's costume and leftovers of their meals of congrí and ropa vieja. I slept on the rickety wooden floors of whatever room I was let into and waited for Héctor to come to me in my dreams, like the angels of the Lord come to sleepers in the Bible, and lend me the courage to take the bus to Caimanera, the gateway town to the west end of the yanqui naval base. But the Lord held his angel back, Héctor never came into my sleep, though the workers did, stumbling with rum, kicking me and dropping their trousers (this no more than three feet from their slumbering wives and children) and pleading,
vaya, otro favorcito más, mi negrónson.

When I tired of this, I left the tenement and went on my own to Caimanera, without Héctor's spiritual lead. Him too, it seemed, I would abandon in my foolhardy quest to retain my dignity. I waited in Caimanera for two more days, sleeping in another tenement, but now posing as a worker so that I owed favors to no one. Then I moved west, staying in the barns of two State ranches, moving towards the Caribbean, towards the Aeropuerto Tres Piedras in the yanqui base. I had been told by someone I had met in the shrine of El Cobre, a young thin poet from the capital, that this was the least protected section of the frontier, that the revolutionary militia suffered from a severe phobia of the roar of yanqui warplanes. The boy was right. The watchtowers on the Cuban side were scattered so far apart that anyone, if careful with the billows of concertina wire and the conspicuous boxed mines, could have crossed the border under the cover of darkness. A shallow river infested with crocodiles, running parallel to the Cerca Peerless, posed a much more serious threat than the guards in the watchtowers. I buried my campesino costume near the river and hypnotized the animals in the river with the stream of my urine as I had done with serpents in the time of the gypsy circus and was ready to abandon Cuba and abandon the spirit of the one that I once loved that you once loved, when I heard the voice of the messenger that
you
had sent.

Sí, señora Alicia, for I believe that without knowing it, the Lord, through you, had sent Joshua to me in place of your cousin to keep me here in this godforgotten land where I belong, and where the spirit of Héctor is condemned to its purgatorial penance.

A boy in a pair of guerrilla fatigues. At first, because of the fairness of his torso, I thought he was some wayward yanqui marine, but when he spoke I knew he was a soul of this Island. And he was as beautiful in his fairness as your cousin had been in his swarthiness. (I should have known, the Lord always sends angels unforeseen.) When the guards heard us and shone their infra-red lights on us and opened fire we ran and hid atop a giant banyan. Throughout the two days we spent there I heard Joshua's story and heard of you and heard of the horrible fair-haired man they called el Rubio who had stolen from you your home, your husband, your freedom and ruled Guantánamo like a petty tyrant.

When the border guards had tired of looking for us, we flew down from the banyan and went to meet with this tyrant. I had somewhat convinced Joshua while up on the banyan (although indeed he had done most of the talking and in a way convinced himself more than anything) that the only way to save Cuba, to save la Revolución, was to get rid of the tyrants one by one, beginning with the little ones. I dug up my campesino costume and washed it in the river. The crocodiles stared at us through their periscopic eyes like the guards had stared at us through the lenses of their rifles at the labor camp, half in hunger and longing, half in fear and revulsion. We waited for dusk of the third day, and in Caimanera hopped on a workers' bus to Guantánamo.

I wanted to try again and see your mother, to tell her who I was, to perhaps relate to her the story I have related to you, so somebody would know, so that it would not be so easily erased from the history, but Joshua insisted that there was no time and led me directly to the open courtyard gate of your old house on B. Street. There was a powder-blue Studebaker in near mint condition parked in front of the garage door. Its coat shone back the winking streetlamps and the dying moonlight as if ridiculing their meagerness. Joshua moved in, treading softly on his tiptoes. He signaled me to follow him. I heard the growling of a dog within the courtyard and froze. Joshua continued to move in. When I reached him he grabbed me by the arm and whispered to me that el Rubio's bullmastiff Tomás de Aquino was at least nine hundred years old, and could barely walk, not to mention that the poor beast was terminally ill with laziness. I held on to his arm and we moved in together. It stunk like a swamp and I heard the buzz of hungry insects, loud and menacing as live wires in a rainstorm. A light was on in the kitchen beyond the haze of the fly-infested courtyard. Tomás de Aquino was huddled in a corner of the kitchen and growled at us again but did not move, did not even have the will to lift the huge bulk of his gray head or to defend himself against the swarm of flies prodding into his ears and his enlarged nostrils.

The courtyard was still set with the remains of the feast of three nights before. A dark cloud of large flies with gossamer wings buzzed over the long table and coated the white porcelain bowls crusty with leftovers; they circled the lip of the empty bottle of burgundy and empty glass at one end of the table and many had drowned in the half-full glass at the other end. The denser swarm of flies converged on the far end of the courtyard and hovered, blacker than the very night, like a guilty soul unwilling to leave this world and meet its judgment, but just as unwilling to rot in its old house, over the little corpse, the shorn-headed indian servant.

Joshua loosened himself from my grip and waved his arms in front of him to open a pathway through the swarm of flies to the table, but no sooner had he walked through it than it enveloped him, dense as a single creature. But Joshua seemed unafraid, familiar with this phenomenon. I thought of Héctor. I thought of his maestro, the famed old moor señor Sariel, who knew the mind of flies and performed his own act during his days in the gypsy circus with a swarm of white-winged horseflies. Joshua too seemed a man who knew the mind of flies. He moved at ease among them. He lifted the porcelain bowls to his nose to make out their contents. He chose one and took it to the kitchen and put it under the head of Tomás de Aquino. The old bullmastiff let his long tongue fall from his jaw and lapped up the soupy contents, drowned flies and all. Joshua returned to me. He told me that Tomás de Aquino, like his master, loved chocolate.