The Lazarus Rumba (18 page)

“I am not staying. I am taking Martica and we are going home.”

“Lo que quieras. I'm just telling you for your own welfare.”

Alicia turned away from Pucha. She took off her leather moccasins, pulled the light dress off over her head, and went to the river to wash vomit and mud off it. When she came back, wearing only her satin slip, with the wrung-out dress drooped over her arm, Pucha jumped off the flat boulder. “Put it here.”

Alicia spread the dress over the boulder.

“Eres una muchacha muy hermosa.”

Alicia ignored this and pretended to concentrate on spreading out her dress so it would dry quickly. Then Pucha moved towards her and Alicia clumsily moved away.

“Very pretty dress,” Pucha said, feeling the wet fabric of Alicia's dress. “I do not mean to make you uncomfortable, señorita.”

“You do not make me uncomfortable; and it's señora not señorita.”

“Sí, verdad.”

There was a moment of silence as if Pucha meant to pay homage to the husband she had a second ago forgotten had existed. Alicia wiped the mud off her feet and put on the leather moccasins. Then she went to the riverbank and picked up the stiletto and canteen she had left there. She filled the canteen with riverwater.

“Did it bother you when I called you beautiful?”

“As soon as my dress dries I want to go find my sister.”

“She is also a beauty. Were you twins?”

“¿Cómo te atreves?”

“Call your sister beautiful …”

“Call her so in such tones.”

“Señora
Alicia, have you ever thought of la Revolución as anything else besides the process that ended your husband's life?”

“That murdered my husband … no, that is exactly how I have always thought of it.”

“… since his death?”

“His murder.”

“And before that?”

“Before that I was happily married.”

“Yes, that beautiful daughter would prove it.”

Alicia stared hard at Pucha for the first time and said nothing.

“You're too bright to have been forever the lovely wife of comandante Julio César Cruz, the old soldier who wanted nothing else to do with la Revolución. In a queer way his death gave you a chance to become your own woman, a chance of which I may say you took full advantage.”

“I really don't know what you're talking about. And whatever insults you intend are missing their mark.”

“No, al contrario, I mean no offense. I think you are precious, no matter how much no jodes y no jodes a nosotros, el Comité, the folks of la Revolución. … See, it's what la Revolución has done for all women, lifted us out of centuries de vivir en las sombras, beside husbands and fathers and sons. It is the legacy of the Spaniard, a repugnant legacy, but at least the Spaniard had a noble heart, no matter how wrongheaded his ideas may have been he would bleed and die for them. The Spaniard is never an opportunist like the yanqui, who takes this idea and borrows that one and steals another, whatever suits him; as long as the balance of power is never tilted against him, he is happy. And the only thing these two cultures have in common, these two people—the Catholic and the Protestant—who had dominated our land for centuries before la Revolución, stained into the fabric of each society like blood, is the out-in-the-open oppression of women. La Revolución promised to change that. And it has. What was I under yanqui rule? A lavandera in Santiago. I washed clothes for the rich families of that town, not because I couldn't do anything else, but because I couldn't aspire to anything else. Luckily I had the strength to run away from that. I ran to the mountain. I fought in the war alongside other women. Never in the history of warfare have women played such an integral part in the gritty process of victory, in the bloodrivers of the battlefield.”

“What battlefields?” Alicia said, regretting instantly that she had been drawn into a conversation. “You had a cockroach tyrant in the capital who fled after his Rural Guard had lost a few skirmishes! Battlefields? Do you not think husbands whisper stories to their wives? Do you not think I know what a sham the great Cuban revolutionary war was? Or (and now it's my turn to insult you) have you never been in bed with a man, do you not know the many shameful truths told through a pillow at the end of the day?”

“Regardless … la Revolución
has
rewarded us, and we have cast off the shame of the Spaniard and the shallowness of the yanqui forever. Is this not something we should prize? A thing so worthy it will inspire poets to invent a thousand battlefields that never existed.”

Alicia walked away from her to the riverbank. She sat there peering through the clear unhurried current into the riverbed, the afternoon light turning the pebbly bottom yellow. She felt calm for the first time since she had arrived on the mountain. She was glad she had insulted Pucha, glad she had not dishonored the memory of her husband and she yearned for him as she had not since receiving the news of Héctor's death, to be prickled by his beard and giddied by the tracing of his long violet scar with her index finger and drenched in his sweat and even suffocated by the gaminess in between his legs when he came to her unwashed from these very mountains. She saw the sun sculpt with its jointless gilded fingers a figure in the pebbles of the riverbottom, and she was both horrified and exhilarated when she noticed that the figure was of the other one, not her husband. She stirred the waters with her hand, blurring the image.

“Here, you're going to need strength. We still have some climbing to do.”

She felt Pucha's fingers on her bare thigh. She moved her leg away. Pucha reached her one of the two remaining liters of guava milk.

“No quiero,” Alicia said, though she was very hungry.

Pucha cracked open the seal and offered her the liter bottle again. Alicia ignored her.

“Do you always work so hard to alienate people trying to help you?”

“Please, I just want to find my sister.”

“We'll go as soon as the sun begins to fade.” She pushed the liter of milk under Alicia's nose. Alicia took it and waited till she had stepped away before she took a sip and another sip.

When her dress had dried, she put it on. It felt gauzy and warm as if woven from the thin rays of the late afternoon light. She went to find Pucha, who had gone back across the river and was resting on Mingo's rope hammock, again having discarded her tunic, caressing Mingo's tomcat who was napping on her belly.

“The sun is almost set,” Alicia yelled.

“Soon,” Pucha yelled back. She did not move from the hammock till night began to fall. Alicia wondered if Pucha was waiting for Mingo and she paced restlessly on the opposite rivershore, every once in a while glancing across towards the darkening shape of Mingo's finca cottage and listening to the drawn plaintive moan of his hungry cows. When Pucha recrossed the river, she held her white tunic aloft like a banner; and though at one point her body sunk under the dark surface, the tunic remained above in her outstretched hand, swaying in the breeze. When she emerged in front of Alicia, her dark skin was bumpy and her nipples enlarged.

“Qué rápido se enfría el río.”

She wrung the water out of her hair and threw on her dry tunic.

Alicia followed Pucha three steps behind, the first mile or so climbing close to the riverbank and then veering towards a forest where Alicia pulled closer because it got so dark she could just barely make out the shapes in front of her, till it became so impossibly dark and the ground so covered with overgrowth that she had to grab hold of Pucha's tunic so as not to lose her, and she dropped her ivory-handled stiletto, not even pausing to look for it; and the strap of her canteen got caught by the reach of a branch and it was stripped from her, water spilling like urine down her leg. She could not tell for sure whether her eyes were opened or closed though they must have been closed for the brilliance broke in front of her at first in a flash of orange and red, like predawn desert lightning, and she found herself in an oasis of light. Alicia stopped and breathed like a diver who has found a pocket of air in an undersea cave and she let go of Pucha's tunic though Pucha was motioning her to follow her further.

“Come, come see the beauty of your hermanita.”

As she moved further, into a clearing just beyond, Alicia saw that the light was coming from twenty-five torches set in groups of five, spaced like the points of a pentagon and each pentagon then becoming a point in a larger pentagon around a gigantic statue of a dark-faced lady in regal robes. Figures danced around each smaller pentagon, barefoot and dressed in unsashed caftans (much like Pucha's) and draped with yellow shawls that became wings when they spread their arms out in unison. On their necks were many strands of glass-bead necklaces that flickered golden in the torchlight and clinked and clinked. Each group chanted its own music and danced at its own pace. But all kept the beat of one god. In the background, at the fraying of the light, a drummer, black-skinned and gleaming like polished stone, with arms thick as boas provided rhythm for all five groups, his head thrown back so that it was engulfed by the woody darkness and his neck and torso streaming with sweat so that it looked as if he were headless. His bare torso and legs had the contours of a man but his breasts and nipples were enlarged like a pregnant woman's. As Alicia looked for her sister among the dancers, her foot began to tap to a song she had heard many times and among all the chanting she could listen to it above all else:

The group that sang it was the one farthest from her, across the way from the statue, and because she could not make out the faces of the dancers, she moved away from Pucha, going counterclockwise around the perimeter of the larger pentagon. She saw her sister smiling and dancing like a coquette, spreading her yellow wings as if threatening to fly away. Her smile reminded Alicia of Héctor's smile when she had seen him in the labor camp, and she was troubled at the thought that joy could be found in the wrongest places. But the instinct to protect her sister, to take her home, had disappeared and Alicia gave in to the song and began to chant along, at first meekly, but soon clapping her hands and stomping her feet.

Her sister held out her hand to her and somebody threw on her back the parrot-wing shawl and glass-bead necklaces fell on her as if having dropped from the moonless sky and before she could protest she was inside the pentagon of torches dancing on a bed of rotted bark around half a giant coconut shell filled with honey and with pebbles from the riverbed. She danced till sweat made her gauzy dress stick to her skin. And when she felt the rhythm of the headless drummer as real as the very beat her blood obeyed, she opened her parrot wings and danced alone as the drummer played on and her limbs began to find a range of motion that had been previously unknown. She thought of herself as one of the circus contortionists Héctor used to perform with and she found joy in this and she shook and twisted some more as if this could lull him (the beloved cousin) somehow back to her and when his presence brushed her cheeks and then fled from her she began to hop violently on one foot and then the other and she imagined she grew a tail, long and hairless like an opossum's, coiled at the end and stiff enough to bounce on, and she swung her arms about, still moving as one with the pounding of the headless negro. When she fell exhausted to the ground, she heard someone say that this new initiate definitely belonged to one of the warrior gods, to the god of mischief: “She belongs to Elegua.”

“Like Fidel,” someone answered.

Pucha reappeared, carrying a wicker basket full of the fruit she had warned Alicia against eating, behind her three other women, dragging in Mingo's old mulecart a gigantic birdcage with spires and domes and swings made of shaved cane reeds, so thin that it seemed impossible that the cage could serve its purpose, that the three rose-chested pigeons flying around in circles inside could not at any time they desired burst through the fragile skeleton and free themselves. But why flee from such a beautiful home? They did not come out until Pucha had the cage lowered to the ground and entered through its gate, so wide and so high that all she had to do was slightly lower her head, and as she danced the pigeons descended on her, one on each shoulder, the other on her outstretched hand. She came out of the cage. She began to juggle the pigeons so that they folded in on themselves and became rosy blurs of feather. The other women approached Alicia, carrying the basket of fruit to where she was crouching and they rained the fruit on her head and it did not hurt for the fruit was soft and overripe and then they smashed the fruit over her body and spread the sticky pulp on her face and in her hair and using mango pits they scrubbed her legs and under her dress and Alicia stood and again began to move with the rhythm of the drummer and the possessed women danced around her and then converged on her and licked the fruit pulp off her skin. When they spread out again, Pucha approached Alicia, still juggling her feather balls, and she threw one around Alicia so that it circled her head and the other and the other; the pigeons began to go around her so fast that all Alicia could see was the blur of their colors and all she could hear was the whirr of their wings, till she saw Pucha's bony hands again, and in one quick flip of her wrists the three pigeons hung headless on her forearm, three rivers of blood becoming one, as she caught the flow in the cup of her other hand and drank from it and fed the other women, then poured the river over Alicia's head and the women ripped her dress down to her waist and spread the blood over her body, falling on her and rubbing against her with their slick torsos, their smiles lined with strings of blood. Her sister plucked feathers off the pigeons and stuck them to Alicia's face and arms and legs, so that it was then, in those moments when she knew she would not be conscious for too much longer, that she felt Héctor plant kisses all over her, and sing their childhood song in a quivery voice, as if he were going from this earth forever.