The Lazarus Rumba (16 page)

A band of seven of the most desperate women went up to the finca that very night and broke into Mingo's cottage through an unshuttered window on a rooftop gallery. They found Mingo in the makeshift basement. He was wearing only an old peasant smock stained with the pink juices of the guava pulp. He stirred the contents of the large wooden cask with a long oarlike stick. His tomcat expertly balanced his hefty frame on the edge of the cask and curled his nose at the mixture. One of the women giggled at the sight of Mingo's muscle-bound hairy legs and at his crooked toes grasping the dirt floor, firmly dug in by the long-hook toenails, so as not to lose leverage while stirring; the others were too hungry to giggle or find any comedy in him who was at once both their savior, because he had invented the guava milk, and their tormentor, because from now on he could never make enough to satisfy all of them. When Mingo saw them peering in through the trapdoor, scratching over each other for position, he pulled out the wooden oar from the guava milk and waved it over his head like a scimitar as he chased them out, up the creaky pine staircase to the gallery window from which they flew to the ground. As the last one jumped out, Mingo caught her on the bottom with a swing of the oar and when she fell to the ground, the others began to lick her where the oar had left traces of sticky guava cream on her skin and she yelped and begged to let her taste their mouths after they had licked her ass-skin sore. Then they fled like thieves towards the guava grove on the other side of the mountain.

Two days later, when Mingo sold his guava milk to Margaret, meeting her halfway down the mountain as had become the habit, he did not see the seven who had broken into his cottage. He told Margaret about it and made her promise to exclude these seven hounds from any future distribution list. Margaret handed him a roll of yanqui money, more fifties and hundreds than ever before, and promised Mingo she would take care of it, punish the greedy ones who could not wait the required two days for their ration of guava milk. That night, some women broke into Mingo's cottage again, this time busting in through one of the downstairs windows and making off with some twelve liters and the guava-milk-dipped oar that one of the braver ones grabbed from Mingo as he swung it at her. Their group had grown to more than twenty. By now, they had shed most of their clothing, and were caked with the black mountain earth. Before they fled, they surrounded the captured oar and danced around it and then licked it dry and let it drop and fled singing:

Mingo went to retrieve the oar and decided he had made enough money from the red-headed yanqui, decided to stop production of guava milk after this last batch.

The Meat of Castrated Goats

The morning after she was released, Alicia took a long bath in dissolved Dead Sea salts and later rode up the mountain in a horse-pulled coach to Mingo's finca, accompanied by Father Gonzalo, Teresita, and Marta. Mingo was out back by the leaning barn milking one of the cows when he saw the group approaching, Teresita in the lead running towards him; he tugged out one of the cow's nipples, aimed it at the girl, and squeezed out a long squirt that flew in a low arc some thirty feet through the air and landed on the girl's face. Teresita stopped, her eyes closed, unsure of what had just hit her. Mingo spattered her again. The girl shivered, though the liquid that had just hit her face again was warm as the sea on a late summer afternoon.

“Mingo, no jodas,” her mother called, “le vas a manchar su ropita.” Mingo laughed. Teresita wiped her face and opened her eyes just as he was readying to shoot her again. This time she ducked out of the way and ran in a frenzy towards him, her arms dancing in front of her, scooting this way and that as to avoid the enemy milk-fire. Later that day, Mingo would show her how to milk the cow and how to squirt anybody who dared approach her. And Teresita got each of them before they left that afternoon, her mother, her aunt, Father Gonzalo and Mingo himself, right on the butt while he was bent over inside the chicken coop feeding the gray hens. Each time her mother returned to the finca during the next few weeks, Teresita insisted on accompanying her—she needed to practice milking.

“You stain your mother's or your aunt's dress one more time, señorita,” doña Adela told her one morning as they left, “and I'll make you scrub it yourself. It's a waste, a terrible waste!”

“Up there in the mountain,” Teresita said to her mother, “la leche es buena, and everybody laughs when I spray it around. Down here it makes abuela mad because it stains our dresses and because the woman at the bodega only gives her so much.”

Part of the deal Mingo had agreed to with el Rubio for the immediate release of Alicia was the further communization of his little-remaining lands and their produce, less than a third of which he was now allowed to keep for sustenance and black market profit, the rest going to the revolutionary government; or more likely to el Rubio and his cohorts. Alicia learned the details of the agreement through Father Gonzalo, though he made her promise never to thank Mingo or even to let on that she knew anything about it. It was the way Mingo had wanted it. “It was a true act of charity,” Father Gonzalo said. “Of kindness, which is a greater thing.” So when Teresita laughed and sprayed milk around, Mingo let her, imagining it was el Rubio's portion of the milk she was wasting.

Mingo's finca became the place for them to gather as a group. D
issidents with their hearts buried en la mierda de vacas
, Pucha said of them. Doña Adela rarely went up to the finca, complaining to Mingo that the ride up the mountain was too grueling, though the truth was that Alicia simply would not allow it, would not risk having the entire family gathered up and charged with conspiracy to disrupt la Revolución. At first, it was just the five of them—Mingo, Alicia, Marta, Father Gonzalo, and the girl. Every morning, they would arrive about eleven and help Mingo finish his morning chores and prepare el almuerzo—usually chicken with rice and fried plantains, or white-peppered quinbombo with a side of corn frituritas—then Mingo and Father Gonzalo would take their siestas in the rope hammocks hanging from the dead trunks of royal palms. Alicia and her sister would talk through the early afternoon and before nightfall Ernesto, the coach driver, was back to give them a ride home. It went like this till Father Gonzalo decided to hold the Maundy Thursday services of that year by the river near Mingo's cottage. That morning Alicia heard from her relatives in Camagüey that her cousin Héctor had died in the labor camp from a serious case of hepatitis. His mother had been contacted at the asylum in Santiago and she had refused to accept his remains. During the Maundy Thursday service, as they stood in line to have Father Gonzalo wash their feet in the river, Alicia asked Mingo if she could bury Héctor in his lands.

“That boy ate the meat of castrated goats,” Mingo said.

“What?” Alicia nearly shouted, and many with their feet dunked in the cool whispering river glared at her.

“That's how it happens, the meat of castrated goats, one has to be very careful not to feed it to the young.”

“That's how
what
happens?”

“His problem, why he was put away—his lust for other men.”

“Does that mean I can't use your land?”

“Pues no, of course you can bury him here. He has to be buried somewhere, no? His flesh can't be left out there for the birds to pick at. I meant no offense. That's just how it happens, the meat of castrated goats.”

When Alicia asked the revolutionary authorities for Héctor's body to be sent her, they said it had been cremated for fear of spreading the hepatitis. She went to Santiago and waited for the six o'clock train nicknamed the Death Express. It was the train on which each day the remains of the dead were brought home to the province from other parts of the Island. An old crooked man exited the last coach and handed her a glass jar full of gray dust labeled with a small neat script:
Héctor Daluz.
The jar was heavy but to Alicia it still seemed such a paltry thing. “This is it?” she said. “This is all of him?” He said, “I am sorry,” and it sounded more like an apology than a condolence. Alicia spread the ashes by the river shore in Mingo's finca and asked Father Gonzalo to hold a service there for Héctor on each of the seven Fridays following. On the first Friday, a rose-chested pigeon descended from the heavens as they were reciting el Padre Nuestro, resting on Father Gonzalo's makeshift dried palm-frond altar, picking at the already parted and consecrated Host. Luis el Catorce climbed up on the altar and leapt at it, but the bird had made off with the wafer. The following Friday there were six of them, this time distracting Father Gonzalo enough, and taunting Luis el Catorce till he was hopping up and down with his paws outstretched so that it looked as if he had been possessed by a vulgar saint, so that they got away with most of the Communion wafers. The following Friday, Mingo brought his shotgun.

“No,” Marta said to him. “You must not shoot them. They are Héctor's spirits come to celebrate his own Mass, come to enjoy the body of Christ.”

“¡Mierda! They're hungry vermin is what they are!” Mingo pointed his shotgun to the empty skies. “I
will
shoot them. They are desecrating the Mass and they'll eat all my crops.”

“You must not harm them!”

That Friday they came late, after Communion, perhaps because they were gathering in such massive numbers, because somehow they knew this time they would need the protection of the many. A rosy wind that snuffed the morning light blew them in; Father Gonzalo had returned to the altar and was brushing the few crumbs of the Host from a silver plate into the chalice—a mile-wide mantle of birds approaching almost without noise. Father Gonzalo lifted the golden chalice skyward with both hands as if consecrating its contents again. The birds swooped, and in a moment the flutter of the wings was deafening and Father Gonzalo could not see his congregation and could not call out for help, hypnotized by their eurhythmic attack song that now could be heard and felt beyond the ceaseless beatings of their wings, stilled by the vibrant color-spin of salmon-melon torsos and gray-white bellies and fire-marble eyes, in front of him and to the side of him and below him and above him as if drowning in a fathomless warm sea of feathers.

When the birds finally lifted, Father Gonzalo's hands were empty. He crouched down on the ground below the altar and began to search frantically, like a man who has lost his spectacles. He must have dropped it; he simply would not believe that the birds had taken the chalice with the blood-wine and the Corpus Christi crumbs.

In her dreams, Marta saw the birds transformed into bare-chested barely winged angel boys and when they descended around her, she would grab this one or that one (they were not that much different from each other) and peck light kisses on their soft necks—joyful that all of them were secretly hers—and release them as soon as they began to wriggle. Later, after the hunt, she had other dreams, that they returned to earth louder than a plague of locusts, their beaks agape, their thin tongues lashing at her, wailing their untimely deaths.

When Mingo insisted on hunting the birds for the sake of his crops, Marta convinced Alicia and Father Gonzalo to dissociate themselves from him, and holy services up in the finca were canceled by Father Gonzalo (as much due to the great scare the pigeons gave him as to please Marta), though the birds kept returning in larger and larger numbers to the site where Héctor's ashes had been sprinkled by the river. At first, Mingo was dissuaded enough from the hunt that he tried to frighten the birds away. He fashioned a drum made from the single-piece skin of a giant castrated mountain goat, soaked for three days and then spread just loose enough over the mouth of an oak cask and fastened to its side. He let the skin dry for another three days, till the morning he saw the cloud of birds gathering in the horizon. He strapped the large drum to his back and carried it out to the riverside. He played with the sureness of a practiced tribesman, in a rhythm so seductive that the rushing water listened to it and the flow of the river seemed to slow down to keep pace with it, rolling by two steps forward and one back with the forgetfulness and ease of a salsa dancer. The first day, when the birds heard the drum music, the whole flock changed course, veering southerly towards the sea and Mingo kept on beating on the goatskin drum till long after they had disappeared and his palms were raw and his finger joints pulsed and the river was tired of dancing. The day after, the same; but the day after that, a few birds wandered away from the flock and hovered in the air above Mingo for a while before they rejoined their brethren. And so it was that more and more of the birds joined in the primitive drum dance by the river. (Pigeon gossip.) In a week's time, the drum beckoned the flock more than frightened them and Mingo played on, under the noon darkness of their feathery mantle, the bird's waste matter falling on him like rain, making slick the goatskin, his arms numb to his elbows. He played on, he played on, till he made sure that the call of the drum was ingrained in each and every one of the birds, that they were so bewitched by the goatskin-music that he could command them forth at any time and to any place, even to their deaths. He fantasized about leading the vermin to the sea like a latter-day Cuban San Patricio and tossing the drum into the firm grip of the waves and watching the crests reach up like silver fingers and grab each and all of the bedeviled flock. But these were fantasies. He knew the truth of their deaths lay in the pellets of his shotgun; and the more he played his drums, the more the birds trusted him, their masses lowering down closer and closer, till their rainstorm of waste matter muffled the cry of Mingo's goatskin drum. And as he played on, as the pungent mushy yellow and gray shit splattered from the drowning goatskin onto his face and into his wide-open snarl of a mouth, rapt and yelling like a rabid dog, he tasted them and he knew they were his unto death.