The Lazarus Rumba (20 page)

Doña Edith Oregón, a light-skinned mulata with roily blue lapis-dense eyes, attended the exhibit at Armando Quiñón's studio on Narciso López Street and bought three of his photographs. She said it was the work of a true artist. It was hot inside the studio and the two metal fans Armando Quiñón had whirring on opposite corners did little and doña Edith was heavy with child, but she stayed for three-quarters of an hour, surveying each photo, waddling from here to there, returning to one she had already examined, and wiping the sweat off her brow with a lace handkerchief till it dripped from her hand and left dark blood-brown spots on the studio's dusty wooden floor. When she wanted a picture, she pointed to it and wagged her swollen finger and Armando Quiñón took it off the wall and wrapped it in brown paper for her. She bought the hailstone picture and two pictures of the blond prepubescent daughter of the colonel in charge of the base. “Joven,” she said, “de veras que eres un artistazo, un monstruo. I want you to be the photographer at our child's baptism. My husband will pay anything!”

Doña Edith had twins. The first had odd-colored eyes, one opaque blue like his mother, the other chocolate-brown like his father señor Juanito Daluz, the renowned hatmaker. This one they named after his father. The other had eyes like toasted almonds. Him they called Héctor. They were both born with a head of shoeshine-black tight-curled hair and skin the color of their mother's, de cafe con bastante leche. Señor Daluz cried when he held them and kissed their heads, calling them “mis ositos pardo.” The boys held tight to each other's hands and when the mother tried to separate them to put them each in his bassinet they wailed and wailed till they were joined again. Señor Daluz bought two cribs and dismantled them and refashioned it as one large crib so that his boys could sleep together.

Only a handful were invited to the baptism at St. Catalina de Ricis Church: doña Edith's half sister doña Adela, and her husband Teodoro, and their daughter Alicia, and a few other close friends and respected clients of the hat shop. Armando Quiñón, hidden behind a torrent of lilies from the week before's Easter service, made sure to take a few shots of each group as they entered the church. By the baptismal font, Father Gonzalo called forth the parents and the children. Señor Daluz held the son that was his namesake and doña Edith held Héctor and both of the children held on to each other's hands. When Father Gonzalo trickled the waters of the Spirit on the first, both children giggled, and when he did it to the second, both broke out in tears, and when the parents tore their grasp trying to console them, they wept louder. The child Alicia had made her way under the baptismal font to Father Gonzalo's side to get a priest's-eye view of the ceremony and was grasping the edge of the baptismal font and standing on the tip of her toes, the ends of her fingers grazing the surface of the holy water. When the children started to weep, she suddenly pulled her hands from the font as if the water were boiling and lost her balance and fell back and might have hurt herself had Father Gonzalo not caught her. After untangling herself from his robe, she snuck under the font and went to the child Héctor and passed her hand over his forehead, still wet with the Spirit: “No llores mi nenito bello.” Héctor stopped crying and at once so did his brother and the waters of the Spirit dried unto their brows. They were now children of Christ. So proclaimed Father Gonzalo and everyone cheered.

Armando Quiñón was delighted. They had mostly forgotten about him even though he had been among them almost as a celebrant, close enough for portraits that would certainly be deemed priceless by doña Edith and her generous husband. That very evening he went into his darkroom to develop the pictures, though first he spent some time sipping spicy rum and admiring some of the pictures locked away in his oak chest, till he had to force himself away from his reveries for he had promised doña Edith that the very next morning he would have some samples. He developed the shots of the celebrants entering the church first and they were exquisite. Doña Edith's pride showed in the shadows that darkened everything around her, even the child Héctor cradled in her arms, but would not dare obscure her face. She had known where Armando Quiñón was and had turned to the lilies and beamed a smile. Armando Quiñón tried different methods of development, shielding her face so that the background and the bundle in her arms would be equally lit with life, but still her face and smile were the only resplendent orb of the photograph, like an early autumn moon on a dark horizon; and so Armando Quiñón let it be. Señor Daluz, carrying the other child, was overcome with an excruciating joy, because he was old and had wanted children all his life and this was almost a miracle, since doña Edith was nearing forty and the doctors had assured him, less than a year before, that there would be no children, that his wife's ovaries had shrunk to the size of a ciruela, and all this you could read in the photograph, in his defiant dark eyes, in the stooped posture with which he held his son, his arms fully wrapped around him like the European war pictures of village women carrying their babies away during the air raids; then doña Adela in an overflowing silk crepe dress and her husband in his customary over-wrinkled ash-colored linen suit and in between them, holding to each of their hands, their daughter Alicia, her face and her shiny black hair, tailed on each side, the center of the photograph; and Father Gonzalo, vested white-on-white, his arms outspread, welcoming the celebrants, behind him the serpentine marble altar and the crossed legs and half torso of the porcelain Crucified, right up to the pierce on His left side. Although he was still young, Father Gonzalo's deep brow was outlined with fissures of doubt, marks that gave him a precocious dignity and inspired in others an ultimate faith in the Faith. This last one is the only known photograph to have survived Armando Quiñón's days. Doña Adela kept it handsomely framed in mahogany and on her death, many years later, bequeathed it to her granddaughter.

All the other photographs from that day, Armando Quiñón would never show anyone. He did not take doña Edith's calls for two weeks, and when she sent her housemaid to his studio to see if ese loco está vivo o muerto, Armando Quiñón shook his head and said that he must see la señora in person.

“Pero bueno, que defachate es esto. It's been two weeks. Where are my pictures?”

“Señora, con mucha pena, but there are no pictures.”

“¿Cómo?”

“The camera was faulty. It leaked fluid into the film.”

“On all the film?”

“All.”

“¡Qué desastre! My husband will not be happy.”

“No, señora, he won't.”

“Joven, I said not long ago that you were a great artist, but I was sadly mistaken. En la hora de los mameyes, you are nothing. Un miserable. You have ruined one of the happiest moments of our lives.”

The following morning Armando Quiñón found the three photographs that doña Edith had bought wrapped in a paper garbage bag and leaning against the front door of his studio. An angry charcoal script proclaimed:
basura
de
basura
. He sat on the curb and pulled out his Leica from behind his belt and photographed each passerby who stopped to inquire about the package. He answered only one thing, that the Spirit is invisible and will always be invisible, that man will never know It through his primitive means, and this cryptoanswer enticed a young seminarian to ask the price of this “garbage from garbage” trinity of photographs and Armando Quiñón said he could have them for nothing, for it would be wrong to charge twice for the same pictures.

As doña Edith's twins grew they remained inseparable. Sleep could not break them apart for their dreams seemed to be shared, and in the morning when they recounted them to señor Daluz, one would correct the other one on a certain detail and the other one would remember: “Sí, sí, verdad, así fué,” and go on. And even their necessities were done together, for they had been potty trained side by side, and now when one had to go he would nudge the other one who knew that he also had to go, and they urinated crossways, and that was the Cross of the Savior, and when the streams touched each other and splashed on them, that was the Blood of the Savior, so they said a Padre Nuestro before they buttoned up. Before they got too big, they sat on the same toilet and defecated together and after they got too big, one would just sit on the edge of the bathtub and watch the other and, if they were sure doña Edith wasn't going to interrupt them, they wiped each other. These times they would say no prayers.

When they were six, doña Edith threw a large feast for her husband's sixtieth birthday and she invited family and many friends and many other acquaintances. The only person of notability that was not invited was the photographer Armando Quiñón, although many are sure that he must have been there for they saw the gruesome photographs that he took that night. Since there was so much beer and rum drunk, it is entirely possible that he snuck in unnoticed after the festivities were well under way, and doña Edith was either too busy playing hostess or, vaya, ya un poco jumada, for she was known now and then to indulge, to behave too much like a chusma, the surest sign (aside from the shade of her skin) that the man that had been her father had not been her sister's father.

The twins were sent to bed early, after they sang and their father blew out the sixty candles on the coconut meringue cake. They were not heard from for three hours, when doña Adela silenced all the merriment with her miraculous keen-pitched wails. She had gone to check on the twins and taken her daughter, because Alicia wanted to kiss her cousins good night, and found Juanito with his head on a pillow on Héctor's lap and the pillow was soaked with blood and Héctor's pajama bottom was soaked with blood and it was patiently dripping on the floor, and his pajama top was wrapped around his brother's head, also sopped in blood.

“No pasó nada, ti-íta,” Héctor said. “He's going to be fine. The blood is stopping. No pasó nada, ti-íta.”

Doña Adela screamed till the room was filled with people and they had taken the injured boy from his brother and then she took the soaked pillow and pressed it to her face to muffle her screams and her face was the color of the child's blood and when they took her out to the cobblestone patio to get some fresh air she got on her knees under the giant fig tree and screamed some more, like a great diva whose breath seems to be spiraling through her from the center of the earth, and it was late and those who had not been invited to the fiesta were well asleep and they awoke from dreams of tortures and stake burnings only to find that the screams were as real as the sweat on their sheets and doña Adela screamed till her voice had gone and she could not as much as whisper for two weeks and her voice lost its gauzy delicacy forever.

The boy Juanito lost his blue eye. The two surgeons in town had been at the party and were too inebriated, so an intern had to operate and could not stop the hemorrhaging and could not save the eye. While they made the boy a glass eye, he wore a black eyepatch and his father told him that he was now a pirate named Zorro, and he bought him a cape with a white “Z” emblazoned on it and made him a droopy-brimmed black hat to match; though when the boy asked for a play sword so that he could duel with his brother, doña Edith forbade it. In fact, she had not allowed her two sons a moment alone since the accident, and she would always blame Héctor for this and other misfortunes in the other boy's life. They had just been playing, as Héctor was forced to recount again and again, just for a while, because they had been sent to bed muy tempranito. The twins' ornate iron beds were a fanciful work of art that señor Daluz had shipped from Macy's in Nueva York as part of a deal that had given that famous store exclusive rights to many of his straw hat designs. They were set perpendicular to each other (though most nights the twins used only one bed, sleeping head to toe and tickling each other to sleep) and their frames were exquisite examples of the human will to bend and twist what would seem unbendable and untwistable, thick beams of iron crossed and intersected and wove around each other, and everywhere they touched they were strapped and braced by delicately looped laces of thinner iron, knots unknottable, its loose ends twisted downward. “A masterpiece,” señor Daluz had proclaimed when he finished assembling the boxed parts, after hours of botched attempts. “Es verdad, that when it comes to this, no one knows better than the maldito yanquis.”

Doña Edith had stared hard at the finished product and answered that it looked more like the bed of a whore than the bed of a child. She did not notice her husband's error, in her contempt she did not see that he had mistakenly assembled one of the headboards (the one on Héctor's bed) downside up and outside in, so that the ends of the looped knots pointed dangerously heavenward, like the horns of a demon, whose shadows the boys expertly used in the stories they told each other after the lights had been turned off.

The night of the accident the lights remained on (or rather were turned on after they had been turned off). Héctor began doing somersaults on his bed. It was hot and he began to sweat, so he took off his pajama top. Soon his brother joined him; but Juanito was not as good yet, so Héctor taught him, and Juanito also began to sweat and took his top off. Héctor grabbed him by his belly and by his back and flipped him this way and that as if he were a giant puppet.

“Sí, mamacita, como un titeresón; but then I lost him. I don't know what happened, pero se me fue. Maybe it was the sweat, maybe I was just getting sleepy, but when I lost him, his face went right into one of the horns of the demons that grow out of the bed. And I thought that he was dead, porque at first he did not move. But then he started to cry and I told him that it would be all right porque I didn't want to scare him. I told him that the blood would stop, but it didn't mamacita (I used his pajama, the pillow, my leg, but it didn't stop mamacita), it didn't stop and that's when ti-íta came in and that's when they took him from me.”