The Lazarus Rumba (9 page)

She laid her head back on the wedding mattress and shut her eyes and tried to conjure him as he had been in those brief moments. The morning bay breeze stiffened and whirled about the porch, drying the sweat on her unshaven legs and causing the faded flowery dress to flop about and blow up like a sail so that all her body was exposed to the fresh eddies of sea air. Her skin bristled, but not with the memory of him, her husband, nor with the sounds of a long-ago faded concerto, nor with the memory of that scar like a thunderstruck half-palm, nor with the silver tears of a gaunt Lithuanian, but with the soft steps of a more recent memory, with the sweep of a naked foot, with a more lovely voice than any Lithuanian could tease out of horsehair and taut string:
primita, mi pobre primita bella.
He, the last visitor, even after the father, had also been barefoot. He too hated shoes. “What good are shoes in the air, primita?”

“Primito, thank you for coming again. I know they must be very disappointed that you abandoned them so early in the autumn tour. Mi pobre primito bello, how
is
the circus?”

“You already asked me that. I told you the circus is nothing without me. But for you, for you, I would abandon the world.”

With this, his voice, which he had used to take from her the musty old shawl, to lift her into the bed behind her, to tease her into unbuttoning his shirt and showing him (poking him) where they had shot her husband, aquí y aquí y aquí, she was pleased and pleased herself, not summoning that moment when she went to kiss him, as he eased her mourning in a manner the mother and the priest, the sister and the ghost, could not, and he too turned his face, even as he, the cousin (who could be nothing else to her
but
cousin), cemented their love.

What sin when so many others have done it?

“Alicia. Alicia, mi amor,” a soft unalarmed voice shook her from her lost worlds.

The hand she brought out from under the old housedress had such a tight grip on the ebony rosary that when she released the pressure the stony beads laced around the three middle fingers left deep livid notches on the lowest knuckles. Alicia sat up and hid her legs under the flow of her dress. She did not look at Father Gonzalo, who stood under the porchsteps, when she told him to go, to come back in a few hours with the members of the book club, for she had been up all night reading the novel and she needed some time to collect herself.

Father Gonzalo left without saying a word.

There had not been running hot water in the abandoned house since after the hurricane, so Alicia went into the kitchen and began to boil water in two large tin pots over four flames. She then went to the bathroom, fished the flaky serpent of shit from the antique tub with a pair of rusty tongs she had found in the kitchen and, finally removing the faded flowery housedress and the old perfumy scarf, submerged herself in the cold tainted water, remaining under as long as her lungs could stand it. When she came up for air her panting turned naturally into a relentless outflow of tears. It was the first time she had been strong enough to weep since her husband's death, and she continued to weep as she pulled the drainplug and felt the foul water sliding off and away from her, like a mantle of drool, clinging for a moment longer to her softer parts and she tasted the water's pungency as it dripped on her lips. Then, as she was, she returned to the kitchen and added five teaspoons of lye powder to the first pot of boiled water and pail by pail carried it to the bathroom to disinfect and scour and whiten the antique tub. Then she filled the tub, again bringing the hot water pail by pail, running some cold water from the faucet. On her last trip she grabbed a sharp ivory-handle stiletto she had once claimed from her husband and many times used to gut chickens and suckling pigs. In the bathroom, she opened a cabinet that had miraculously been left untouched by the vandals, six separate shelves of jars and vials of countless shapes and sizes full of salts and powders and extracts of over fifty varieties of flowers, herbs and fruitseeds, some imported all the way from the mountains of Nepal, some acquired in the fruit market not far from her mother's house. To this morning's bath she added some Dead Sea salts, two pinches of the gummy pollen from the fuchsia flower, which was said to promote tolerance of mankind's vainglory, four drops of the clear viscous liquid from the leaves of the nettle weed, which jolted one from morning drowsiness as forcefully as four cups of cafecito cubano, a gush of coconut oil, and two handfuls of the dried ragged pink strips of the cuckooflower, because these were said to open your senses to the least obvious side of beauty. Alicia stepped in slowly, the skin on her feet and lower legs stunned by the immediate heat but soon adapting to the soothing warmth so that her whole body yearned to drown in the same gratification. She realized she had not yet stopped crying, although her whimpers were now more in delicate staccato instead of the arioso lamentations of moments before. The bath she knew would ease her sorrow further. She lowered herself in. With a soap bar made with almond flesh she washed her hair and her face and right at the surface of the water her breasts and under her arms and then she reached under the water and washed her unseen parts and her lower extremities. When she put the bar down and reached for the stiletto sitting on the soapdish her crying had stopped and she felt an easiness in her actions she had not felt in many months. She guided the knife underneath the lip of her navel. Her husband had always doted on the chestnut down that trickled up from her pubes to her navel like wisps of smoke from a smoldering bonfire, found them bewitching. She thought them repulsive, but to please him she had let them grow during the year of their marriage. Now they would go. She lifted her hip up and slicked her lower belly with the soap bar and pushed the stiletto through. The hair readily gave way to the blade and scattered on the surface of the water, some clinging, like insect legs, to the twisted petals of the cuckooflower. Alicia continued to shave until her lower body was as smooth as it had been on her wedding night. She then guided the knife again under her navel and repeatedly rubbed the blade against her skin, up and down and up and down in dexterous flicks, like a sculptor detailing stone. When she nicked herself and saw the red patiently thread out of the cut and retain its shape against the bathwater, she accepted what she had known. It was the first time she had seen any blood since her sister Marta had tried to change the soiled bandages on her husband. Alarmed, as if in fear she might now hurt a better part of herself, she dropped the knife. The ivory handle created a dull compressed thud as it landed on the porcelain of the filled tub.

“Dios mío,” she said, as if speaking to one that was there with her. “What have we done?”

She tied her hair back in a tail, wrapped herself in a white unsoiled sheet and, cross-legged on the serapi carpet in the living room, waited for the members of the book club. Father Gonzalo arrived first. When he saw Alicia, recently bathed and calmly seated on the carpet, he waved the others in.

“Perdónenme,” Alicia said, “but they took all the furniture.”

They sat cross-legged like her, in a circle on the serapi carpet. There were fewer of them than there had been at the church, although Mingo, the finca owner, had returned, apparently having rethought his position, or having been promised Proust, sin fallo, next. They were also joined by doña Paca, the town's old postmaster, who because of her age had great trouble crouching down on the carpet, Plácido Flores, the undertaker with leathery brown skin, Mercedes and Beba, the brainy bespectacled twins who between them many supposed had read all of this world's great literature from the ancient Greeks to the latest South American novel, the handsome young Rafael, one of Father Gonzalo's altar boys, and Marta, who sat by her sister Alicia and kissed her softly on the lips and held her hand. The others remained distantly cordial until they were just about to begin the discussion. The members were leafing through the novel, some rereading notes they had scribbled in the margins, when Alicia dropped from her shoulders the sheet she was wearing to reveal her surprise. Plácido Flores smiled with his eyes, Mingo stared with his, Rafael blushed and like the ladies quickly averted his glance. Marta was fumbling with the sheet in an effort to cover her sister when Alicia spoke firmly: “Look, are you blind?” Her hands were caressing the yet unpronounced fullness of her belly. “It will be born in the torrid days of June. I shall name him Julio César.”

“What if it's a girl?” Rafael said, his eyes now fixed each to each on the chocolate nipples of the half-naked widow.

“How can it be a girl,” doña Paca said, “when it will be named Julio César!”

The child was a girl. She was born on a hot rainy afternoon in mid-June, exactly nine months and fourteen days after comandante Julio César Cruz's death. Alicia named her Teresa Julia. She would have to live up to the comandante's tenacious noblesse and to the unrotted idealism of the Spanish saint.

Swimming Without Getting Wet

The skies were uncooperative with the official demands for mourning. The heroic guerrillero Che Guevara was dead, his body mutilated by Bolivian government rangers, but the skies paid no respects, summer lingered festively into the second week of October and warmed the sands and the waters as if it were still August. The most important eulogy had begun, grated its way into a Strauss waltz during the Sunday classical hour. Fidel's voice was raspy as he reminisced about his revolutionary companion, and it would get raspier hour after get-on-with-it hour, at times stooping to sotto voce and near the end, two or three hours past dinnertime, peaking with a frothy fury.

Father Gonzalo shut off the battery-powered radio at his side. It would be useless to search through other stations, el Comandante-en-Jefe commanded the airwaves. Lately, attendance had been plummeting at the early afternoon Sunday Mass. Fidel's radio speeches were certainly to blame. Father Gonzalo could not compete with such tireless sermonizing.

The Jesuits should have nabbed Fidel, kept him, made him a bishop or something. Sent him to Rome even.

Every Sunday as soon as the Speech began, Father Gonzalo shut off the radio. He did not want the coming sunset ruined. He did not want the girl's mind polluted. Although it would be eventually, if not this year then the next or the next, whenever it was she started school. They would tie a flag-colored hanky around her neck and don her with a star-pinched tilted beret and call her “pionera,” a five-year-old a pioneer for the principles of la Revolución. Still, now she was innocent and Father Gonzalo enjoyed spending the late afternoons with her after her grandmother doña Adela had dropped her off at late Mass.

“Teresita,” he called to the girl. “What are you making, mi vida?”

“Castillos, bobo,” the girl at the edge of the shore answered, dumping yellow plastic bucketfuls of moist sand upside down, surrounded by makeshift towers and flooded moats.

“Who lives in the castles?”

“The king and the queen, claro.” Of course. “And the princess,” she added. She spoke into the sea and Father Gonzalo could just barely make out her tiny precious voice.

“Claro,” he assured her. He sat back in the canvas beach chair, tilted his head to the light and dug his bare feet deeper into the sand.

He had met the heroic guerrillero once, had received him at the rectory some months after the rebel landing. Che was sneaking into towns asking for help from the pulpit.

“Simpático, simpatiquísimo,” Father Gonzalo had always said. “Say what you will, the man was a charmer, almost convinced me to help. Almost … to help
again
, but by then I had already grown disillusioned.”

People had always confused the girl's father with Che. Same look. The only physical trait the girl had inherited from her father was her curled and cigar-dark hair (though darker, almost black). The burnt caramel eyes were not his, the round face not his, the light cinnamon skin not his.

Father Gonzalo eyed her again before he tilted his head back to the sunlight and dug his right foot deeper into the sand. He wished she would turn around and face him instead of the sea. But she was too busy chattering to herself, creating stories to support her ever-crumbling towers, and it was the sea and not him that demanded her attention as it began to surround her and soak her sundress and with each touch of its foamy slippery fingers steal layer upon layer of the castle walls.

Father Gonzalo read a bit and dozed off and watched the girl and read some more, phrase by phrase from a smuggled fraying copy of William James's
The Varieties of Religious Experience
in the original English; tediously and methodically over three months, he had made his way to the last chapter, James's “Conclusions.” It would be the first book in English he would read from cover to cover. Though he would never dare speak the twisted tongue, except sometimes, alone in his room, after he was sure that Anita had retired to her sleeping quarters, when he would recite portions of the King James Bible out loud, especially the more apocalyptic parts of the Old Testament—Daniel or Isaiah. Now he came upon a phrase in this text that stopped him and forced him to stare at the girl as he mouthed it—
“a preponderance of loving affections”
—as he watched her glistening, slightly reddening back protected by the aloe lotion he had so inattentively put on her, rubbed into her tiny shoulders and dashed quickly across her breast that would not be breasts for ages yet, before he strapped on the lace-adorned swimsuit her grandmother had knit for her and rubbed the lotion on her still baby puffy legs and on her rosy feet and in between her stubby toes—
“a preponderance of loving affections”
—even as he swiped her longish dark curls behind her wee round ears just to dab them a bit on the inside and on the ridges, though she pulled away laughing, mouth agape, because it tickled her so, even as she pulled away laughing. And then the dismay of putting the lotion on himself, rolling up his pants above the knees and covering his bald legs and taking off his shoes and socks to expose the monstrosity of his swollen right big toe (this dropping disease was his heaviest cross), so tender his heart beat down there with more vigor than anywhere else, its heavy measure now buried in the sand above the ankle (for though it was painful at first, as if he had stuck his foot into a nest of scorpions, eventually, if he did not weaken, the pain subsided—or it so much crossed the threshold that it came full circle—and the stinging sand became an anodyne, so it felt as if his feet were sunk in a pail of ice water; and having conquered for a moment his debility he could read or nap peacefully).