The Lazarus Rumba (91 page)

So it was wallowing in so much relative success, to the surprise of her father, who now made it a point not to show his face when prospective clients came over, to even tidy up the living-room coop and box all the gallinas in the kitchen, her hair now past the lift in her buttocks, that Benicia San Martín headed to the house on the corner of Maceo and Narciso López Streets. Her client, a boyish girl, named Teresa Cruz, had failed to show up for her preliminary makeup and photo session. Perhaps, Benicia thought, her mad abuelita, the once respected and respectable doña Adela, widow of the libertine Teodoro, mother of the most famous dissident on the Island (though Benicia thought her father better deserved that honor), had not finished the dress, for she had insisted on not renting one of Benicia's newly purchased dresses for her granddaughter.

“I will make her my own from the moth-eaten shreds of her mother's wedding dress,” she had said on her visit to Benicia's patio. “That at least I can do for the poor girl. It is said that madwomen make the finest dressmakers!” And she smiled wickedly and pressed a bundle of pesos, mingled with dollars (to give it heft), into Benicia's palm and shuffled off on her two canes.

Roque San Martín, who had been peeping through a lifted drape in the living room, prophesied to his daughter that soon, much too soon, the Island would be full of people like him and the mad old Adela, too weak to walk but too proud to die. This, he shouted to his daughter, was the glory and future of la Revolución, a nation of immortal invalids.

“Por favor, papacito,” Benicia said, not looking at him, separating the dollars from the pesos, “if the vigilantes hear you saying such things they'll throw you right back in jail.”

“No, no, mijita, we are the tamed, the cured, the undead. We are no good to them in their jails, better to have us raising gallinas and knitting shut holes in moth-eaten dresses. Let them cast their sad nets elsewhere. Hacia usted, mijita … hacia usted, and all your illegal affairs.”

“¡Sshhh, sumuso, papacito, por favor! Los vigilantes have ears cupped to every wall!”

And such she feared was the reason the girl Teresita Cruz had not shown up for her appointment. Someone had found something out and whispered it to someone who whispered it to someone else who whispered it in a wrong ear. Such were the perils of running a private business not sanctioned by the government, and Benicia had coursed through them many times before (greasing the greasable palm, tickling the ticklish hand—a full quarter of her profits she reserved in her coffers for bribes), but she had never been challenged by the return of the piteous wail known as el llanto de los quince. She, like the many, had thought it had died forever with the death of el Rubio and his grotesque bullmastiff. But on the porchsteps of señora Adela's house, as she arrived to investigate why the girl Teresa had not shown up for her preliminary makeup and photo session, she heard it again. And she asked herself if hounds too have more than one life. And even as she pleaded with the angels of womanhood not to abandon her side, she resisted the temptation to cup her ears, for she knew others heard it too, and she knew that the girl inside that house would never turn fifteen, her life never rightfully and ceremonially steered into womanhood, and that this, this again would be the fate of all the not-yet-women of Guantánamo, for they too heard it, even the unborn, all infected by this song that was not quite a song, not quite anything but the high-pitched noise of mourning, like the squeals of a violin tuned to the echoes of Inferno's steepest canyons, they too heard it and mimicked it, and so Benicia knew, right then and there, on the front porchsteps of the house in the corner of Maceo and Narciso López Streets that she was ruined, ruined till the day they would bring home the lamenting mother (to whom the banished angels of womanhood had now turned), in a pine box, on the six o'clock from Santiago, for not till then would any girl in Guantánamo become a woman again.

So resigned, Benicia San Martín made some quick calculations in her head. She figured that for her ever-blooming camellia and gardenia bushes, for her faux-brick well, for her fifteen finely tailored Irish linen dresses, for her Rolleiflex, for her battered tocadisco and collection of Strauss waltzes, through la bolsa, she could procure enough yanqui dollars to sustain her ailing family for about a year. “After that, papacito's gallinas better start laying golden eggs!”

To make sure Roque San Martín would see that day, she went home, and with a kitchen knife, butchered off her gray-threaded brown locks. When he saw her, Roque San Martín shook his head and said only that it was very unfit for a young woman to live so long with the incontinent ghosts of her parents. Then, just as matter-of-factly, with a most dignified patience, he set out to teach his gallinas how to cackle
el llanto de los quince.

“Who knows, it may one day serve as our national anthem,” he said to them, “for what right-minded girl would want to reach the age when she would need to bear children on this godforgotten futureless Island!”

Lamentations

How, mi niña? How have we arrived where we were not going? Whose star led us here? I have come here to this song-infested valley one last time, to this kingdom of forgetfulness to prepare myself. This time I mounted Charo's leaky trawler with an almost-joy. I took off my chancletas and danced around in the puddles of his deck as if drums were playing inside me. I danced till Joshua and Triste restrained me, afraid that I would punch holes in the rotted wood, or that I would fall overboard and drown, or even that I would throw off my shawl and throw off my dress.

“Coño, la vieja Alicia has finally gone mad,” Charo said. He started the engine and it coughed and hacked and gargled like an old smoker waking at dawn. He warned us, as he always does, of the dangers of crossing the Gulf of Batabanó. “This puke-green sea quells forever the fire of memory. He who crosses it will find, on reaching the other shore, that he has not yet lived. Bueno, ahí está, forewarned is forearmed, though you will not remember what I have said. Qué pena, coño. We always forget what we should most remember.”

How does Charo himself always remember if he's crossed this sea so many times? When asked this, he shouts over the old-man rumble of the engine that some impossible fires burn like forgotten gold in air pockets of the darkest canyons of the sea, that they persist by breathing in the very breath that they breathe out. And he is right, for it is with one of these impossible fires that I borrow from him, the Crosser, that I can see you now, here where I have come, followed by the Newer Man's black-garbed soldiers, who laugh at me through the telescopes of their rifles, followed by the Newer Man himself, his wingless horse patient, trotting, not even breaking a sweat, to the openings of the caverns in the valley's eastern walls, where, in their nests, the wild giant jutías nurse their young with more talent than I nursed you, my only daughter, their hairless fallow bodies wrestling for every available teat, the mother still, but for a brush of her hind leg to unglue one and make room for another that has been left out, and in her forepaws she holds one more that will go hungry, that she cannot make room for, and licks shut its unopened eyes—¿no ves? less than a mother-rat I was for you, and yet, not ever a woman, your only child's tongue sticks to the roof of your mouth, mi pobre niñita, mi santa, as your abuelita calls you. Where can I run to in this isle of pains where my shame does not usurp my shadow? In what hole can I bury these shriveled tits? For even in the narrow deadend tunnels of these walls, where breezes dare not travel, where the mother rats burrow to bury their hungry, where the world's acid light has never cut, there it is, in the shape of your eyes, in the sharpness of yellow needles. Here lives the perpetual fire that feeds on itself.

Mi santa, as your abuelita calls you, once you were the picture of beauty, an icon to make all angels envious, in your lacy dresses that she so diligently made for you (even as her sight failed and she was forced to count each stitch out loud lest she forget), and your flowing coffee-black locks (which she braided also counting out loud):

and your eyes whose marbled depths tempted even the men of God to whisper
if only.
Sí, mi vida, así mismo es, even the men of God. For who did your abuelita not tempt with her santa, her niñita? You were the daughter she never had, for papa stole me from her the second I was born, even though your abuelita knew he had another daughter out there somewhere, in his lives lived apart from her. She let him steal me, perhaps with the thought that with me, one day she could steal
him
back. Poor papa. There
was
another daughter, your tía Marta, who, thanks to your abuelita, you hardly knew. She is happy now. As happy as any Cuban can be in Miami. Papa loved her too. His happiest moments were spent offstage; and then one day, just like that, after we had retrieved him from the olive house, he dropped in front of the bathroom mirror, in the wings of our lives, his heart stopped before he even had a chance to finish shaving the left side of his face, to perfume his neck, to wipe himself. Wickedly … wi-cked-ly … your abuelita refused to perfume his corpse, for she said it would attract all his whores to the funeral house like flies to carcass.
Qué bueno, they will never see him again
, she said with an awful satisfaction, standing over him.

And before she called for Father Gonzalo, she made me shave the rest of his face, right there on the bathroom floor, as if she could not stand, at the end, the thought of touching him, even with the shaving blade. Imagínate, I was about your age, maybe a bit younger. Sí, hasta más jovencita.
I am only a girl
, I said pleading with my eyes.
Do not tell me you are only a girl
, was her answer, standing above, reaching me the blade, which she had simply picked up from the floor and not even rinsed.
Finish shaving your father, it will be an embarrassment if Gonzalo finds him like this.
(Gonzalo who knew intimately of our thousand little embarrassments, but who kept his well hidden from us.)
Defachatado vivió y defachatado murió.
I took the blade from mamá. I rinsed it with hot, hot water. I knelt on the cold floor. I steadied my one hand with my other hand, held it by the wrist. I shaved the foamy side of papá's contorted face. ¡Qué mala!

Y al final, she failed, for the flowers that bloom on your abuelito's grave in Campo Santo were not brought there by her. The chinese orchids, the naked-lady lilies, the begonias, the turkish roses, the bougainvillea that creeps over the tombstone like a lover's thousand fingers. What a marvel! Though you have never seen it (she would never permit me to take you there), papa's grave shames all others in Campo Santo. There are so many that remember him. Yet not one bush was planted by his wife. ¡Qué mala!

She saved all her compassion for you. The second you were born, no mejor digo, mucho antes, in the days after you were conceived, she consecrated you with all the bitter reserves of her unused love. She made you her santica. And you were hers. I too let another steal my only daughter. And who did she not dare tempt with you, with her prize? Me. The butcher and the baker (your abuelita, with you in hand, never made colas). The servants of God (how many times did Father Gonzalo's vision stray from the theme of his homily to dwell unchastely on your face?). Even papa's barefoot ghost, who would not be so easily tempted, who taunted your abuelita by wandering our house too cheerful for a ghost, by failing to fall in love with you as so many had fallen for you. Papá's barefoot ghost, who came and went from our house as rashly as when he had not been a ghost, whom your abuelita blamed for every single domestic disturbance from the very afternoon of his burial. When we returned from the cemetery, fruitflies had infested our kitchen, and their tiny darting almost invisible lives drove your abuelita into a frenzy. She chased after them, armed with the lace handkerchief she had not used, twisting her body and swinging her arms about as if she were possessed by an angry orisha. Not bothering to change, to remove her widow's veil, she single-handedly slid out both refrigerators and the stove to find the source of their numbers. But there was no spilt syrup, no rotting mango, so naturally your abuelita blamed papá. It was the stink of his cologne that was attracting the flies. Some whore must have snuck into the funeral parlor and doused him with it!

“Desgraciado, ya salió,” she proclaimed. “I smell him. He cannot stay put! Even in his grave!”

In the weeks to come papá's ghost was to be blamed for the milk turning sour three days before its date, for the chicken pot pie burning to a crisp, even though it had been in the oven for less than half an hour, for lost pieces of mail, and for the dark stains on the brick floor of the patio, caused your abuelita said by the ghost's escupitajos, for not even in the hereafter had he learned his manners. Poor papá, though none of it was his fault at all. The fruitflies nested in the rotting apples pierced with cloves that your abuelita hung with cheesecloth in the kitchen, like shrunken heads, to ward off evil spirits. The milk turned sour early because it had not come directly from the farm (la Revolución's labyrinth agrarian bylaws assured that), the chicken pot pie burned because our stove was so ancient that the dial settings for the oven had been rubbed off by wear, our mail was lost because our mailman was a drunk, and the stains on the patio floor were from the rotting fruit that dropped from the plum tree because papá was the only one that ever cared to pick them.