The Lazarus Rumba (84 page)

Joshua takes off his poncho and waves it like a scarf over his head, and twists it around his torso, and rubs it on his hips and on the back of his legs. He closes his eyes, throws his head back. His knees buckle as if he is about to fall, though he does not fall, just at the last moment, he recovers and comes up and buckles again and recovers and comes up and again and again.

The women abandon their men, they crowd as close as they can near the lip of the stage, and reach out their hands and graze the inside of his thighs with their long fingernails. They are foreigners. They are ignorant of the art of this dance. They do not understand the words. They do not know that it is the man who is supposed to do the chasing. The woman who resists. If the woman gives in, there is no dance, no motive for the art. Joshua frowns and slaps their hands away with his poncho and tries to restore the proper order, thrusts his hips forward with the force of a kettle drumbeat. For a moment, as he watches him from the corner of his eye, as he wets the head of the microphone with his spittle, Luisito Cuzco thinks that the boy has lost himself in the dance, become a conduit for the holier spirits and thus exorcised of his baser purpose, and is (for a moment) truly beautiful, nothing more than un rumberito bello. He repeats the chorus again and again in succession, till the words come unglued from their meaning and are nothing but servants to the dance.

Joshua dances and dances till one of the foreign women leaps on to the stage and tackles him. She is wearing a dress two or three sizes too small. Her stomach is folded into three separate rolls. She straddles Joshua and bounces on him, wailing her own incomprehensible lyrics in her tongue, her fat arms in the air, the plentiful flesh slapping to and fro like a pelican's pouch.

After this night, Joshua dances no more with Los Rumberos Incas. He works with Luisito Cuzco at the hotel during the days, and stays in his tenement at nights, cross-legged on the twin cot. He remains in the small room each night as if he were already a prisoner, though Luisito Cuzco urges him to go to the malecón and spend time with others his own age, to dangle his legs over the seawall and let the Caribbean mist baptize him, the salty sea air blow loose the cobwebs in his mind. Joshua does not listen. Each night before the apagón comes, he has drunk all the Havana Club that was left over from the night before and he is passed out facing the wall. When Luisito Cuzco arrives he calls out to the boy to make sure that he is asleep, then he flicks on his silver lighter and goes through the sugar sack where Joshua keeps his meager belongings, the little treasures he has collected during his short stay in the capital, a Russian watch stuck at 2:30, a worn leather wallet carved with indian figurines that he found in a garbage bin at the hotel, his güiro (which Luisito wouldn't take back), a silver necklace with no medallion and two separate bundles of bills secured with rubber bands, one of the pesos he has made from the hotel, a thicker one of dollars, his cut from the band. Luisito Cuzco touches the pockets of the dirty shorts Joshua wears even in his sleep. He rattles the wooden-soled chancletas to assure himself they have not been carved with a hidden chamber. Night after night, he finds nothing—no pistol, no dagger, no small bomb—to confirm the dire prophesies of the men in the Russian jeeps, the uniformed barbudos who accompany el Jefe.

Why don't they just arrest him and charge him with all their prophesied crimes? It's not like they need proof or solid evidence. They have never needed such things before.

Why have they put
him
in such a spot? He is just a bartender, an amateur rumbero, a foreigner in this Island that once belonged to his ancestors.

Luisito Cuzco thinks of fleeing the capital, fleeing the country as many have done, but he does not, he is not of that class, he stays at the Hotel Habana Libre and he daily serves el Jefe his milkshake and he does not dare subtract or add a word to the prophesies of the bearded men.

On Sunday, December 31, 1972, thirteen weeks and five days after Joshua had arrived at the capital, the bar-and-grill at the Hotel Habana Libre was unusually crowded, there were no seats available at the bar, and it was two deep with early celebration. All the formica-top tables were full of diners. It was past two in the afternoon, and Luisito Cuzco was shuffling from one end of the half-parabola bar to the other. Joshua kept him supplied with a constant stock of clean glasses from the kitchen, and near past one was forced to jump behind the bar to help him serve drinks to the thirsty Europeans who had never known such a muggy and warm New Year's Eve. The Europeans paid with dollars and Luisito Cuzco did not let Joshua handle the money.

“Just serve the drinks,” he said. He quickly showed him how to make a daiquiri, the most common order. “I'll take the money from them.” Joshua grew distracted, ignored the patrons who shouted their drink orders at him. He watched the pale green bills change hands. There were none left in his sack at home.

He had lied to Luisito Cuzco one last time. He needed more dollars than were in his bundle. He had told him that whores do not deal in pesos. Luisito Cuzco had said what he always said when he caught Joshua in a lie.

“Óyeme, no jodas a un jodedor.”

At first, he tried to get Joshua to rejoin the band, luring him with the promise of plenty of more dollars. But Joshua would not consider it. He said he did not want to get trampled by European elephants. He said he would find the dollars somewhere else. So Luisito Cuzco gave him the dollars anyway, enough to purchase the powdery content of the glass vial, which he had had for over a week and kept on him at all times, now hidden in his pocket and at nights, because he knew Luisito Cuzco went through his belongings, wetted with Havana Club (to disinfect it) and then with globs of saliva (to lubricate it), inserted into his rectum.

The apothecary was an old surgeon in one of the government hospitals, he was also a sometime photographer, a sometime gardener, and a sometime santero … and a long time ago, it was rumored, had stolen organs and sold them to rich ailing yanquis. He ran a pharmacy from his apartment where he sold relics to the faithful, and from where he sold his poisons to anyone who had the dollars to pay for them. The apothecary, like the whore, did not deal in pesos.

Joshua remembered his name, he remembered exactly where he lived, remembered exactly that you had to enter through a garden in the back, with creeping vines hiding the walls and the ground carpeted with marigolds and touch-me-nots and begonias. And after he came to in the hospital bed, when the bloated scar-cheeked comandante with the greasy mustache began his endless sessions of interrogations, it was the first thing he wanted to know:
Who sold you the vial? Where does the traitor live? What does he look like?
Joshua was disoriented, but he remembered exactly, feature by feature, the globular bald head, the gaunt gray cheeks unhidden by a base of ruddy makeup, the thin painted mustache like Clark Gable, the absent lips and bad teeth and yellow eyes, the pale green surgeon scrubs and yanqui cloth sneakers with no socks.

PÍO
GORRAS
36
CALLE
DE
LOS
POSEÍDOS
,
APARTAMENTO
16
(
POR
FAVOR
DE
PASAR
POR
EL
JARDÍN
ATRÁS
.)

He remembered exactly, the sofa with a threadbare blue cover, the apothecary's great-granddaughter in a stained pajama skirt, her tangled hair and pink blotches on her forehead, sucking her fingers and watching the transaction from the doorway to the kitchen.

“For the rats, huh?” Pío Gorras said louder than necessary, as he siphoned the crystalline powder into the small vial. His fingers were long and thin and the nails faultlessly manicured. (His hands were his only decent feature.) “Sí, sí, coño, es la tristísima verdad, this city is infested with giant rats. This will do it. Make sure you use
all
of it. Some of these rats are very powerful.”

Out of spite, or a growing sense of conviction in the properness of his bungled attempt, Joshua said nothing. He rubbed the back of his head. He played the amnesiac. There were many in this city who could do much good with poison, bought with dollars, from Dr. Pío Gorras.

“Okay, así va a ser, bien,” the bloated interrogator said. His cheeks were mushy, pitted and carved with the characters of a severe boyhood acne. He scrubbed the palm of his hands on them as if to smooth them. “We have men who will help you remember what we already know too well, réquetebien.”

Joshua closed his eyes and rested his head on the mound of pillows. He wondered if he had been drugged or if the haziness he felt was a hangover from the fit he had suffered.

Ask any fool on the street
, he wanted to shout.
He will tell you where the apothecary lives. They will write it out for you on a little sheet of paper, with a note in parentheses warning that you must enter only through the garden in the back. They will tell you this entire story like
a
fairy tale their mothers once whispered to them. He is one of you, a loyal member of the Party, a renowned surgeon, perhaps on the payroll at this very hospital. Check your drug inventories! Count your poisons!

But he said nothing. He rubbed the back of his head again.

“No me acuerdo. I don't remember anything.”

Your name is Joshua. You are the son of a whore. You have no father. You were arrested more than a year ago trying to break into the Palace of the Revolution. El Líder consented to seeing you and graciously pardoned you and sent you back to your whore of a mother. And it could have stayed at that, a foolish guajirito, who makes a judgment in error, who has the fortune of meeting el Líder and chatting pleasantly with him. It could have stayed at that, something, someday you might have recounted to your grandchildren.

But now, you will never live so long. Did you think that we would not keep our eyes on you? Did you think we would so easily forget? ¿Eres bobo? El Líder is full of mercy and grace, especially for the young, but it is up to us, el pueblo, to protect him like he cares not to protect himself He is our voice in the world, but here, we are his eyes, we are his ears, we are his shield, without us he is a lamb in the field.

From the moment you set foot in this province we had our eye on you. ¿ Qué piensas, niño? La Revolución has ten thousand eyes! Every family that you stayed with on the road to the capital, every wife who kicked her husband out to let you rest in her bed, every abuelita who cooked you arroz con pollo and kissed the back of your head, every schoolchild who let you into their hopscotch games, all of them, one by one, reported your actions to their local vigilantes, who reported immediately to us.

Do you think us blind? Do you think us morons? Do you confuse the Christian grace of el Líder for stupidity?

Your name is Joshua. You are the son of a whore. Y ahora, it is rumored, the fucker of a traitor, the fucker of the widow of a greater traitor, herself a murderer and as much a whore as your mother. Una put a y media. You have no father. And we watched you fatherless as the devil come to do the devil's work. We fell asleep with you under the same almond tree, in the bench where your whore of a mother once sat and stalked our Líder. We awoke you with our song. Yes
, our
song. For even when el Líder is ridiculed, the shameful words become ours as they must become ours so we can tear them to pieces till they no longer make sense. We entrusted you to one of ours. For the indian Luisito Cuzco, que en paz descanse, was a man true to his ancestors, true to his land, he was one of us, a devoted member of the Party, and he detested singing the song that lured you into his trap, but he sang it anyway, he sang the shameful words of ridicule for the greater good. And later, he let
you
sing them for the tourists at the nightclubs. The foreigners haven't changed. Wherever they come from, all they want is to use our land, to get drunk on our rum, and toasted on our beaches, to fuck our daughters and piss on our fields. So Luisito Cuzco had no heart to sing these words to them. So he let you sing. He let you dance. ¡Más propio, no? For you are a greater scoundrel than they, this is not their land and they should have no love for it.

He hoped you would forget. And we, we also hoped. Though we could have arrested you the minute we heard you had returned to the mainland as you had been forbidden to do, taken you and thrown you in el Morro for a thousand years, for the crimes that were already full-born in your heart. Yet, we hoped. El Líder hoped. He said you would not dare. He said, in the end, you would not want to. He said it knowing that you are the son of a great whore, spawned in disgust and birthed in bitterness and raised in iniquity. As if there are angels that dare do battle with such demons as you. ¡Como sí hubiera remedio! Still, we hoped.

And for what? For you to attempt your wicked deed in our holy day of commemoration. ¡Le ronca! How could you not know how closely you were being watched? How could you not guess that Luisito Cuzco called you behind that bar on purpose. He is the capital's fastest bartender and could have easily handled twice the crowd that was there. He knew what was hidden in your pocket. He stuck his finger into your hairy ass every night and felt it. How does it feel? ¿Le ronca, no? You think full bottles of Havana Club were left behind by chance?

We have defeated many devils. We know exactly how careless the wicked are. And there you are, Joshua, son of a whore, night after night your culito fingered by a half-sized indian, fingered and fingered like a new whore's cunt. There you are, Joshua.

But still the act had to be attempted, it was written, and you were condemned long before you acted. For how was he to miss your face, though you turned it away as you reached into your pocket, as you fumbled with the vial, as you dug the tumbler glass into the ice and reached it out to Luisito Cuzco … and after he poured the whisky, after the foreigners cheered and toasted and gathered around el Líder, after he complained that he still had no drink to toast with, you had already started, you had emptied half the poison powder into the tumbler of whisky, you had tossed the vial aside and it was then that the avenging angels found enough courage to descend upon you, to twist you into all sorts of shapes, and pull the tongue out of your head and set your eyes a-twirling and toss the poisoned whisky on your cheeks and throw you back against the rack of bottles and deliver you unto us, unto the hands of him you wanted dead.