The Lazarus Rumba (82 page)

“That I just gave him,” Joshua whispered to me, “was bitter chocolate souffle made with creole eggs from a hermaphrodite rooster. It was the only dish I did not get to taste the other night. It is nice that the old dog will have a sumptuous last meal. He deserves it. He has been a good beast to a bad master.”

A pair of flies shuffled in circles on Joshua's brow like thoughts restless for flight and it was then I knew for sure the unnamed purpose of our visit to your old house, why there had been no time to go see your mother. Our deed must be swift as the furies, invisible as breath, silent as the falling sun. “Petty tyrants have no use in the process of la Revolución,” Joshua had said to me atop the banyan. I thought of my uncle who is only three years older. I thought of Father. I thought of Federico Sánchez. And thus we were bonded in our purpose.

I went to move towards the corpse of la india and her indecisive soul, but Joshua held me. He said that there was nothing that could be done, except what we should do. He moved again through the swarm of flies, like his namesake parting the Jordan. This time I followed him. We moved through a hallway into the inner house. Joshua opened one door to a bedroom furnished only with a sewing machine and a wooden chair and a straw pallet; he opened another door to a room with an unmade empty bed covered with a mosquitero. We moved on down the hallway. Joshua put his ear to the last door and tried to open it but it was locked. He lunged at it with his shoulder till it flew open. Tomás de Aquino growled from the kitchen.

El Rubio was soaking in your falcon-legged bathtub in the center of the blue-tiled bathroom. He roused from his slumber and looked at us with blurry eyes and asked Joshua who was this negrón that he had brought into his dream. He fished unsuccessfully with one hand for a porcelain pipe and a lighter on one side of the tub. Joshua walked over and handed the pipe to him and lit it for him. El Rubio thanked him and reached out with his free hand and touched Joshua's leg and muttered that it was strange that after three days of dreaming of
you, mi niño bello, you have become almost real. I have been waiting for this.
Joshua nodded and said that he knew and lit the pipe again till all the opium extract had burned. He motioned me to come towards them. El Rubio became agitated. He took the curvy porcelain pipe from his mouth and sat up in the tub. He said the pipe had once belonged to a man of the cloth, the same man who originally owned the bathtub, that it was now State property, that he used it but did not own it. “… and who is this black demon you have brought with you, mi vida?”

Joshua knelt by the side of the tub and took the pipe from him and took el Rubio's hand and caressed it and put it to his bare chest so that el Rubio closed his eyes and sighed. Joshua motioned me to stand behind them. He kissed el Rubios hand and then nodded at me.

Without being told I knew what was expected of me. I cupped both my hands over his thick crown of golden hair and pushed his head underwater. Joshua continued to caress and kiss el Rubio's hand and suck on the end of his fingers and not until the very last moment did el Rubio realize that he was an accomplice to his own murder. His hand withdrew from Joshua's lips as if from a rabid flame and curled into a palsy fist and just as suddenly drooped and splashed into the water. I kept both my hands on the crown of golden hair for many long minutes till Joshua laughed with a delirious joy. At almost the exact moment Tomás de Aquino drowned, unable to lift his snout, heavy with flies, from the sop of the bitter chocolate souffle.

Before dawn we buried all three bodies under the bed of poppies and yellow roses in the inner courtyard, unmoored the falcon-legged bathtub from the tile floor and loaded it into the powder-blue Studebaker and abandoned Guantánamo forever. Joshua had plucked a white poppy and he wore it behind his ear, his legs hanging out of the passenger seat, innocent as a schoolgirl. Up the Central Highway, I sat him in between my legs and taught him how to drive, so that when he left me near Playa Girón, he managed, in jumps and starts, to control the Studebaker.

“That's all right,” he assured me, “there's no way I can harm myself. This thing is like a tank … a boat—maybe I'll drive it right across the gulf of forgetfulness.”

I promised him that I would come and see you in my own time. I swam. The longest stretch was over thirty miles. Me crees, señora Alicia. Ahora sí me crees.

Assassination as Birth

The second time Joshua sailed to the bigger Island from the rocky shores near Nueva Gerona, on the smaller island, he did not call on Charo the Crosser, the owner of the leaky trawler. And for all the stories that were later invented to support the myth of the Newer Man—of how he crossed the bay on a raft of 432 live shorn-headed
jutías
(more rats by far than all the books in the Bible to name them, so that many rats were christened by names with numerals as suffixes, such as Daniel 2, or, more oddly, Second Corinthians 3), a live raft 18 feet by 24 feet of giant rats strapped together by a hemp net woven by the Newer Man's mother, fashioned with 432 miniature harnesses, a live raft with 432 little hearts, 432 whip-propeller tails, and 1,728 skinny long-nailed unwebbed paws that kicked and kicked and took two and a half days to cross the Gulf of Batabanó, kicked and kicked till the 432 little hearts, one by one, burst, till the 432 whip-propellers, one by one, limped, and the raft (no longer a live raft) sunk some three miles off the coast of the bigger Island and forced our already wearied and dehydrated Newer Man to swim the rest of the way—no one knows for sure what the historical truth is. The facts are, as reported by
Granma
and kept in the file cabinets of the Party factkeepers, that the prisoner Joshua, a young man with no last name, the son of a mad old prostitute in exile in a remote nightingale-infested valley of the Isle of Youth (as the Isle of Pines has been renamed) arrived for the second time in the capital city on Tuesday, September 26th, 1972, three days after his nineteenth birthday.

A year before, he had come to the capital disguised in an outdated guerrilla uniform from the days of the Sierra and was captured trying to sneak into the Palace of the Revolution. El Líder was in the middle of a marathon interview with the renowned Italian journalist Gianni Denti, and during one of the breaks (requested by the journalist and not by el Líder, for el Líder can talk longer than most journalists can listen) he was told of the young man who had been captured and of his outlandish claim. El Líder cut short his interview and allowed for a private audience with the prisoner. Gianni Denti asked if he might watch, to get a feel for el Líder at work. At first, el Líder said it was out of the question.
Redondamente no.
But Signor Denti persisted (with his polished wooden grin, his obeisant half-bows, as if he were in the court of some feared Veetian count), till el Líder agreed, on the condition that the encounter with the young man would be considered off the record. And so Gianni Denti, all teeth and spittle, stayed and was told to hide in an antechamber of el Líder's office, the door cracked open, so that he might listen if not watch. He waited, pen and pad in hand, for the young man to be brought in.

“I thought I said off the record,” Fidel demanded.

“Sí, sí Signor Presidente, this is for my own use. No se preocupe.”

The young man was brought in and forced to sit in one of the untanned leather chairs in front of the well-ordered mahogany desk. Fidel had his back to him, perusing the bookshelves on the other side of the room. Before he acknowledged the prisoner, he went to his desk and clicked Signor Denti's tape recorder on. He glanced towards the half-cracked door of the antechamber and caught the one wide peering eye of the obsequious Italian. He suppressed a smile. He dismissed the guards. He looked at the prisoner. They held on to each other's stare as he sat in his own chair and poured himself a whisky and crossed his hands behind his head.

Gianni Denti has kept the conversation that ensued, as promised, off the record … for the most part. Now and then, he has lent the rights (for a substantial fee) to this or that part of the transcript to certain respected
European
journalists and writers (never to a yanqui) working on articles about, stories on, el Líder and/or the state of the Island. It is known for instance, from an article in
Le Monde
, that Fidel spoke with the young prisoner for over two hours (twice interrupting the discussion to fetch a blank tape from somewhere in the antechamber), at one point offering the youth a whisky to soothe his nerves, that he had asked the young man his name and that the young man had said Joshua. “Ah, like the prophet,” Fidel had said and asked him his surname, and the young man had said he had none; and that indeed, when the records were checked, the young man's surname had been blotted from his birth certificate, and under the heading of Father the word
ninguno
was typed. It is further known, from a lengthy story in
El País
, that the young prisoner was of extraordinary beauty, with dark eyes and long black hair tied back in a tail and fine European features and a chin almost beardless, and that Fidel twice complimented him on it. Also known, from a mostly inflammatory article in the pages of the German weekly
Die Zeit
, was that the young man professed to be heir to Fidel Castro, a charge twice dismissed by el Líder, at first with:
Even if it were so, even if I had known your mother, even if I had the genes in me to father such a buen mozo (in all humility, less possible, unless all your looks come from your mother, and then I am sorry I did not know your mother better than you charge I knew her), but even so, if all the fruit of my loins should, by law, be considered my heirs, there would be a thousand poppy-eyed princes holding poisonous spoonfuls at my table. Could the Virgin charge the Lord with patrimony?
And secondly with: All
the children of the Island are children of Fidel Castro! The laws of heredity are the laws la Revolución overthrew forever. Can you call the Christ a bastard?
From another article in
Le Monde
, this one confirmed by a footnote in a review of a thick biography of el Líder in
The Times Literary Supplement
, it was known that after the lengthy interview all charges against the young prisoner were dropped (as Fidel is wont to do with most political charges, even when it means great danger to his own person) and he was released to return to the Isle of Pines, back to his dejected mother and his dreams of finding his lost father.

A year later he had returned, this time washing up on the shores of the southern swamps of the Island, not in the ceremonial guerrilla costume, but in a dirty poncho and ragged shorts and a pair of wooden-soled chancletas that clicked and clacked with a murderous beat,
un tremendo zapateo
, as he made his way inland, through cane fields and forest to the town of San Antonio de los Baños, then to Lourdes, towards the capital. Many helped him, sons and daughters of la Revolución who fed him at their tables and let him, unbathed as he was, sleep between them in their beds. He moved inland, till he had reached the Vedado district, and came onto “L” Street, to a small park across “L” Street from the Hotel Habana Libre, to a bench under the shade of an almond tree, where he slept round the clock, knitting together siesta after siesta, for three straight days. In his half-slumbers, when he raised his head and squinted his eyes and looked around to make sure that the world around him had not disappeared or that someone had not mistaken him for a corpse and buried him, he did not see the two Russian jeeps that daily came and went to the front entrance of the Hotel Habana Libre, did not notice the three men in olive garb dismount and hurry in, nor the shadow of a hunchbacked old doorman, his stature melted by servitude, struggle to open the door for them, as they all did in the stories of his mother's days, when she sat on that same bench, under the shade of that same almond tree, eating an egg-salad sandwich.

And there, in his marathon of siestas under the shade of that almond tree, we must, for now, leave this Newer Man, this hero with no surname, for the rest of the story is told to us by
Granma
and by the yellowed files in the cabinets of the Party factkeepers. Joshua disappears forever from the pages of
Le Monde, El País, Die Zeit
, from the footnotes of
The Times Literary Supplement.
On page 586 of el Líder's biography by a libelous yanqui journalist, he loses his first name as well as his last name, he is an innominate boy from the country, one of the many luckless characters snared in the web of Operation Mongoose, the failed yanqui mission to rid the world of Fidel Castro. The story is told in one paragraph: