The Lazarus Rumba (21 page)

Doña Edith looked at her second-born as if he had never been inside her womb: “From now on when I turn the lights off, they will remain off.” Héctor could not bear to look back at her, and he mumbled with his chin pressed to his chest: “Sí, mamacita.”

When the glass eye arrived, doña Edith would not allow the surgeons to put it in. It was not the right color. They had made it the color of the boy's other eye and not its original color.

“Look very closely,” doña Edith said to the surgeon and she opened her eyes wide, pressing down with her fingers underneath, so that the surgeon could not mistake their color. “
That
was the color of my boy's eye. That's the color I want the glass eye to be.”

“Señora, this is a very expensive process.”

“Mi esposo paga lo que sea, carajo. Just do it right this time!”

The eye came back and the pupil was made of amethyst and it was still not the right color, but doña Edith accepted it because she was tired of seeing her son with a black patch. When he returned from the hospital the boy was more striking than ever, because now one of his eyes was the color of violets and the other one had turned almost black.

“Una belleza,” his mother said, holding Juanito's face in both her hands, and his father agreed and his brother agreed also. Though when the boy reached for something, it wasn't there. He was still not used to his eye that did not work.

That winter, señor Daluz abandoned his marriage bed. He slept in a pallet out in the cobblestone patio, wrapped head-to-toe in a thick woollen blanket to hide his flesh from the mosquitoes, cuddled up between the pulpy row of banana trees and the brick wall to shield himself from the north wind. One morning he awoke with his head poking out of his woollen cocoon, fresh droppings covering his eyes from the pigeons that roosted up on the wall. That afternoon he ran high fevers and flaky scales grew on his eyelashes and by the following morning the lashes had fallen off altogether and by the fourth day señor Daluz said that he could not see. Specialists came from Santiago de Cuba and they put patches soaked in sulfonamide ointment on his eyes and they said it was only temporary, a common infection, though usually occurring in children. They quelled his fevers with cool baths and when his eyelids healed, they shone their little instruments into his eyes and found no corneal damage, no invisible ulcers, pupils that reacted normally, and they shrugged their shoulders and adopted that half-glazed look (that far-gone expression that seems a concentrated effort at forgetting a lifetime of little defeats), common to poets but rare in scientists (except when the nature of a thing has utterly eluded them), and they admitted they could not understand why the old man still could not see. Doña Edith said that she understood and sent the doctors away.

Señor Daluz sold his hat shop for an extravagant price, and the rights to all his most precious hat designs he auctioned off to the fancy stores of la Quinta Avenida in Nueva York, and set his wife in charge of the family's finances and assured her he would spend the remainder of his life caring for his sons. He said he could see things now, but not as he had seen them before, but in their true nature. He saw only halos of light, the flame burning in each animate and inanimate thing. And so he set to work with his new life's sole task. So that the twins could play together, he took apart the iron beds with the aid of giant vice-grip pliers, he undid the iron knots and pounded flat the demons' horns and stretched and molded the iron beams in brickoven flames and stitched together straps of leather that would never become hats and gathered powerful springs from abandoned yanqui cars and forgotten Swiss grandfather clocks and built for them a trampoline all around the majestic fig tree in the cobblestone patio. And the trampoline was good, and it was wide and spacious as the earth itself.

“¿Qué carajo has hecho con mi patio?” doña Edith said when she saw it.

“Now, no one will get hurt,” señor Daluz answered his wife and hopped up on the trampoline and began to bounce on it head over heels like a happy child. The banana trees that encircled the cobblestone patio now encircled the trampoline and their languid leaves hung over its edges and they warned señor Daluz when he brushed up against them that he was near falling off so he would hop back towards the aroma of the heavy figs and propel himself so high up above the red-brick patio wall that, with his halo-vision, he saw the bluish glow of the mountains on one side of the city and the olive glimmer of the sea on the other.

Since the invention of the camera some have believed that it is a soul-stealer, an instrument of sorcery, that the lenses and mirrors that magnify and reflect one off the other like glass lovers demand a price for their concession to the vanity of the photographed; that is, they will leave you this, the picture, the record of what was and will never be more, but also take that, a morsel of the spirit that should know that what is is on its own and that those odious glass lovers
can
never, and
will
never, change that. This is one superstition. Another one is that what the camera cannot see and capture, the camera is simply too weak to know, vampires and ghosts and so on; or if it does capture them at all, it captures them in the manner that señor Daluz got used to seeing the world, as fuzzy halos of light. And one more superstition (this one arising from the scientific fact that the camera is useless in pitch darkness, that the glass lovers need some meager or fragile thread of light before they can even begin to show affection for each other; and thus follows): that something so unfeeling in the darkness must be unholy indeed.

So how can there have been pictures of the night of the accident, when only a high gibbous moon shone? What light struck doña Edith's patio to make her sister's twisted face of screams visible to Armando Quiñón's black-taped Leica? For certainly some swore they saw those pictures … and of the boy being carried into Ñico's station-wagon ambulance, which was late because Ñico also doubled as a cab driver and had to hurry back from a faraway fare to the yanqui naval base, and even of the socket where the eye had been,
after
the operation and before the pirate's patch. No puede ser. They would have never let Armando Quiñón into the operating room, for even his parents were forbidden to enter there and only saw the child the morning after …
with the eyepatch!

Whatever the truth of the existence of these pictures, and as mentioned already, some swear to have seen them and can describe in detail the shape of the bloodstains on the viscose dress doña Adela wore, one like a lizard and another like a giant horsefly … and how the tinted goose feathers from the torn pillow stuck to her necklace of pearls … and more ghoulishly, the shape and depth of the scoop in the boy's right eye, as if dug by a spoon with teeth.

But whatever the truth of
any
of this, it is clear that Armando Quiñón's interest in photographing the twins was renewed for some also swear that they saw the pictures of the baptism, and they saw why Armando Quiñón had had to lie to doña Edith, for there it all was: the resplendent orb of doña Edith's face, señor Daluz's defiant stooped gait, the stubborn joy with which the child Alicia joined her elegantly dressed parents, and Father Gonzalo, always appearing the most handsome, the most inspiring when he was vested white-on-white; only one thing was missing from
every
photograph, the children, the children of Christ: doña Edith and her husband held bundles of darkness as they entered the church, the child Alicia smiled over twin shimmering hazes of gray smudged light, Father Gonzalo dribbled the waters of the Spirit over … over no child, no thing, nothing but a bundle of swaddling cloth; Armando Quiñón's mounted Rolleiflex, hidden behind the lilies, his black-taped Leica held expertly behind the wrist, had both failed to
see
the children … sí, sí, how right had he been with his cryptoanswer,
that the Spirit is invisible and will always be invisible, that man will never know It through his primitive means:
the twins, on that day, lent not a morsel of their spirit to the camera; though this was to change—they appeared in many photographs later, beginning with the accident, which dates from this period; there are rumored pictures (among all those that were destroyed at the end), of the boy Juanito, of the boy Héctor, of their proud and blind father and of their monumentally misshapen instructor (whose tale is forthcoming), all taken atop the trampoline, under the giant fig tree (certainly while doña Edith was away—there are no words of any pictures of her—which she was often because the new owner of the hat shop had hired her as day-to-day manager of the store to insure continued profits). Thus, there was a rather well-documented record of Héctor and Juanito's rise to fame, all found on the third day after the triumph of la Revolución, when they blew open the twin locks of Armando Quiñón's cellar room and oak chest. In the name of decency though, the record was destroyed, burned in a public bonfire on Narciso López Street, along with everything else in that studio except for the body of the artist himself.

Señor Sariel

He had not been a boy for a long time. He had lost both his parents many years before and had also lost a few brothers and sisters and lost a son and lost six wives. Very few people addressed him as anything but señor Sariel. He was just under five feet tall, was shiny-bald, and his face was round and puffy, like one of Da Vinci's scowling infants. His eyes were black and bulbous and his eyebrows were white and shaped like the cap of a seawave; and though his skin was brown, his nose was crisscrossed with so many burst capillaries that it was the color of a fresh bruise. He could shape his hands into claws by dislocating his fat thumb so that a short flat tarsal from the inner hand became the smaller pincer, and the other four digits curled and fused together the larger pincer. He limped and sometimes used a wheelchair for he had fallen from a high trapeze during a tour of the southern states of los estádos Unidos and had shattered most of the right side of his pelvis, so that it was now held together with pins and screws. He said that his ancestry line could be traced all the way back to the last great Moor of Spain and that he himself was born in Granada, under the shadows of the Alhambra, over a hundred years ago, and that as a boy he had lived and performed as an acrobat in Algiers. Some believed him. Some didn't. He
did
look like a moro, but aside from his limp, he was too nimble-bodied to be any older than forty.

When the gypsy circus came to the city of Guantánamo in the winter of 1955, señor Sariel was at the height of his second career. Before anyone saw the clowns or the acrobats or the caged animals, or even Georgina the Manwoman (in front of whose tent there was a sign in red paint proclaiming that mothers and children under thirteen were not allowed in), they lined up to watch señor Sariel perform his awesome feats of strength with his fantastic claws and work miracles with his carnivorous white-winged horseflies. He performed almost in the nude, in a tiny pair of black trunks, and his torso was tattooed with orange and red and black eyeless pythons that wrapped around him, so that it seemed that his skin was a shell and that his great round head belonged to someone else entirely. His back was rounded and bulky and ridged down the spine. His shoulders were so wide that his clavicles seemed two misplaced bones (of the thighs perhaps) and his chest was monumental, textured with twisted ropes of muscles. There was a long rosy zipper-scar down his right thigh, and his calves were like twin baseballs. His toenails were painted black and, aside from his eyebrows and the cotton puff on the point of his chin, not a strand of hair grew on him. Those that dared look as he rocked on his round back to do his tricks said that the package inside his briefs was as impressive as any other thing about the man.

Héctor and his brother told their blind father what they saw. His hands were like mittens of missculpted flesh and they were so mighty that he could crush stones to bits and open giant oysters with great pearls inside them the size of iguana eggs and, lying on his back, he could bend two steel rods at once, yet his hands were also so delicate that he could handle his white-winged horseflies by their antennae. At one point, he pulled from out of his ear a yellow butterfly, and from out his other ear another one, and from out of his nose a third, and the butterflies danced in a fluttery circle around him. He proclaimed that these were the sugary butterflies of sappy romance novels.
They always appear
, he said,
when some character has fallen tragically in love with another. They surround the lovers, inhabit their lives in ways that they themselves cannot do with each other. They usually come by the hundreds, but alas, I have only three. But three is a good number, you know, you look like a well-schooled group … your holy trinity and all that.
Señor Sariel let the yellow butterflies dance, and seemed even to draw joy from their circle. Then he picked up his bongo drums and rapped on them, softly at first, almost inaudibly, as if not to swallow the lightness of the butterfly dance. But as the rapping became louder, his white-winged horseflies emerged, from the folds of the tent, from under the platform stage, from the very drums he was using to summon them, and even, it seemed, from the noses and ears of the audience members. Señor Sariel laughed. “Here they come,” he chanted. “Here they come.” And the tent grew dense with them, and their tireless opaque wings swallowed light and spit it back out in pieces, so that señor Sariel's hands, rapping on the drums, seemed to be moving with the jittery gestures of a silent film character, and the butterfly dance lost all its grace, as the white-winged horseflies surrounded the trio and tightened and tightened their circle, till it was a yellow knot, and just like that the butterflies disappeared into the mouth of the buzzing white cloud.

“Love gone wrong!” señor Sariel screamed and laughed, his drums culminating a crescendo. “Love in the ruins!” He grabbed his crotch. “There to your clever poet! There to your fancy symbols! There to your
RO-mance
! There to your fairy tale!”