The Lazarus Rumba (23 page)

The twins Héctor and Juanito never felt the heat. When their father welcomed into his house the dwarf and his friend the photographer, the house was still so replete with white-winged horseflies that they served as an armor against the rogue heatwave. On the outside, they shielded the house from the sun, entwined by their spindly legs, covering the exterior walls like live shingles, and many died there, and their dried corpses sticking to the house walls served as the most poignant memory of the hot spell for many summers after and those that didn't remember would pass by the house and see the great mass of fossils scorched and bent into the walls in attitudes of torment and would break into an intolerable sweat as if their bodies were suddenly reliving that dreadful summer. On the inside of the house, the white-winged horseflies served as colorful overflowing curtains and puffy canopies against the midday, the great multitude of their delicate wings creating unimagined gestalts; and even on the worst days, when the temperature jumped so far above the thermometer's range that the orange groves to the east of the city whispered their agony as all the fruit sizzled from inside the rind and the sea was placid as a pond, too fatigued to pound the shore, inside the house and even in the cobblestone patio, horsefly breezes blew gauzy as an autumn dusk and señor Sariel was most comfortable in his sackcloth burnoose and señor Daluz even once donned his only wool sweater, whose collar was beginning to fray.

In the cobblestone patio, the giant fig tree grew wild with fruit and even at high day the sun gazed through the horsefly canopies as adoringly on the twins as their two visitors did, undaring to unleash on them all its frenzy. Héctor and Juanito jumped on the trampoline and picked fruit and with these señor Sariel taught them how to juggle.
Es fácil, facilísimo
, though the amethyst-eyed boy had trouble at first because of his lack of depth perception; but once he learned that what was there was not there but here and what was here was not here but there, he could juggle five and even six figs at once. The real task though, or at least the reason señor Sariel had been let into the cobblestone patio, was to teach the boys how to fly, and to this señor Sariel set his mind and Armando Quiñón set on them his Leica to record it for posterity, or as señor Sariel put it, for his later self,
porque coño, ya te dije: I am my own posterity!

“Ahora, quítense todo,” he said to the twins one day while playing them a rumba. “It's too hot for clothes. Los hacemos como los griegos.” And the boys immediately obeyed and took off their tattered T-shirts and their knee-length shorts and Héctor continued shaking his hips to señor Sariel's drums but the amethyst-eyed boy stopped and crossed his hands over his bare chest and looked at his brother. “¡Todo, coño!” señor Sariel said from his wheelchair. “Do you want to learn how to be acrobats or not? La ropa will weigh you down, keep you from flying.”

So Héctor pulled down his briefs and he kicked them up so that they hung from a branch of the fig tree and then he helped his brother out of his and when they were completely nude, they jumped up on the trampoline and hopped onto a branch of the fig tree and held on to each other.

“Muy bien,” señor Sariel said and forced his eyes off the boys, off their prune-brown genitals and glanced at Armando Quiñón who just stood there with his mouth half-open and was not doing what he had been paid to do, not using his wrapped-in-black-tape camarita. “Oye animal, se te sale la baba,” he said to him and Armando Quiñón recovered his senses and began to take pictures of the boys on the fig tree. Señor Sariel shook his head and chuckled and then he pulled down his hood and wriggled his way out of his burnoose and put aside his drums and with his teeth unwrapped the bandages around his hands. Armando Quiñón helped him up on the trampoline and señor Sariel warmed up, landing alternately on his back and on his chest and all he was wearing was his black performing trunks.

“You too, like the Greeks,” Héctor urged from the fig tree.

Señor Sariel smiled. His teeth were tiny yellow squares and they had huge gaps between them. He pulled off his trunks and threw them at Armando Quiñón who was still looking through his Leica at the boys and did not get out of the way so that the trunks landed on his head. Héctor laughed but the amethyst-eyed boy couldn't and he pressed his groin to his brother's thigh.

Señor Sariel worked up a sweat on the trampoline. He moved in the air with the grace of a winged thing and when he tired he attached himself to one of the stronger branches of the fig tree and hung upside down by his legs. Héctor picked a ripe fig and tossed it to him. Señor Sariel had his eyes closed, but he reached out and snatched the fig. The thing in between his legs also hung upside down and it reached his belly button and it was fleshy and folded in layers of painted skin that drooped over the head and gathered at the end, pursed like a spinster's kiss. Héctor had to tilt his head to know the story that was etched there and he whispered it in his brother's ear for his brother would not look.

Once there was a jealous man with a wife whose beauty was the envy of all. Her hair was like a silky midnight, her eyes like violet pools, her lips like nectar, her cheeks like the twin halves of the pomegranate and her breast like twin fawns. The man was a merchant, pues mira, mira, those are the beautiful Persian carpets that he sells.
Héctor leaned over to the branch where señor Sariel was hanging and pointed at them, almost touched them, and at the sense of his nearness the story unfolded for him, the carpets unweaving themselves and exposing their hidden images.
But this man dared not travel lest his wife take another man and he sold carpets only from his home so that he could always keep an eye on her. The wife spent her husband's money as fast as he could make it, on herself and on all her twelve maids, whom she lavished with expensive perfumes and embroidered dresses.

“Why do you treat the servants as if they were royalty!” the husband demanded.

“Because they are good to me.”

Eventually, the merchant found that he must journey to other towns if he was to make enough money to keep her satisfied. So he went to the bazaar and bought a parrot that spoke all the world's languages and was said to have been cross-bred with a falcon a few generations back so that his sight was infallible, and this parrot he set loose in his house before he went on his journey. When he came back, he asked the parrot: “How has my beautiful wife kept busy?” And the parrot told him all, todo todito, how those twelve maids that were always with her were not maids at all, but young boys in wigs and dresses and how before the merchant's carriage was less than a mile out of his estate, the boys had taken off their wigs and their dresses and they were more beautiful as boys than as girls, dark and lean and armed with such unmelting purposes that they formed a circle around her in the garden and had her one by one, and then again and a third and fourth time, and when she was too weak with joy, sprawled and useless, they had each other, keeping their circle around her, so that none was undone and none was undoing.

Héctor leaned further towards señor Sariel and traced the circle of boys with his index finger and the painted boys were warm with rushing blood and Héctor wanted to linger there with them. But the story continued.

At hearing this, the merchant began to pluck the hairs from his thick beard in clumps and scream in such rage that the parrot found the nearest window and flew out of the house. That night, the merchant hired some thugs and the twelve maids were tied up and made into true maids and the removed parts were ground and fed to the goats and the merchant beat his wife across her lovely round nalgas with the flat end of his scimitar. This way it was painful but she would not be scarred.

So that the parrot wouldn't fly away again, the merchant had a fantastic gilded cage made and he hung it high on the inside terrace so that from there the bird could still watch every spot of his property. And when he journeyed again he commanded: “Watch all and tell all.”

The parrot agreed, though he was insulted at being imprisoned when all he had done was tell the truth.

When the beautiful wife found out it was the parrot who had blabbed on her, she rounded up her maids that were now truly maids and she ordered them: “You four, take your grinding stones and grind under the parrot's cage all night; you four, take your flowering pitchers and from the roof water the cage till dawn; and you four, ay que pena, my strongest, my rock-built, how I dread to know that you'll soon grow soft as I, take the shields you once used as warriors and shine them in the moonlight and wave them back and forth around the cage till your limbs are weak.” And since they still loved her, though they could not have her, they planted kisses on her cheeks and obeyed her.

So when the merchant returned and he asked the parrot: “How has my beautiful wife kept busy?” The parrot answered: “My good lord, pardon me, but last night I was able to see or hear nothing, for the driving rain and the thunder and the lightning distracted me all night.”

“¡Mentira!” the merchant bellowed. “We're smack in the middle of the dry season.”

“No, no, my lord, I swear, rain and thunder and lightning all night long.”

The merchant, concluding that it was this damnable bird who had had his wife this time, grabbed the parrot by the scruff of the neck and drove a tent pike through his heart and drove it deep into the ground so that his soul would never flee its rightful torture and the parrot's blood tainted all his plumage.

When the wife heard, she was delighted and now every time the merchant traveled there were enough lovers from the king's army not only for her but for all her maids that were now truly maids. They had plucked twelve crimson feathers from the corpse of the honest parrot and they used them to tickle each other in their injured parts before their lovers arrived.

There were other stories, for every time señor Sariel revealed himself, a new one was painted on and the older one had vanished, as if the folds of his foreskin panted for the colored images like the brittle North African earth for rain. On the branch of the fig tree, Héctor whispered all the stories in his brother's ear and his brother understood only through him. Though after the stories, after señor Sariel meditated upside down from the fig tree and he began to teach them the art of flying, it was Héctor who had to keep up with his brother and at times even contend with him for their teacher's attention.

“An acrobat is like a ballet dancer with wings,” señor Sariel said falling from his branch onto the trampoline. “He walks on his tiptoes first and then he walks on air. Así.” After two light hops, señor Sariel threw himself to the air and he pressed his head to his knees and he was a wind-wheel and he pushed himself higher and rolled in on himself faster so that his painted thing shot out like a loose spoke or like the squiggle of a runamok “Q.” Whatever he taught Héctor and Juanito, he taught them while hovering in the air or hanging upside down from the fig tree.

“The word literally means to walk on tiptoes,” he said, hanging again from the branch. “In Greek.” At this last word the boys remembered their nakedness and they remembered their teacher's nakedness and the amethyst-eyed boy stood behind his brother.

To put them again at ease, señor Sariel undid himself from the fig tree and landed on the trampoline on his globular head and bounced on it a while, balancing himself perfectly with his four outstretched limbs. Héctor laughed and his brother tried to mimic him, though still holding his cover behind him and now putting his arms around Héctor's shoulders; and even Armando Quiñón, whom they had mostly forgotten about, put down his Leica and broke the mold of his melancholy with an uncontrollable fit of carcajadas.

“Bueno, ya de boberías,” señor Sariel said and he bounced on the trampoline so that a rumble passed from one side to the other and the twins were soon in the air. Señor Sariel hovered near them and he touched lightly the back of Héctor's head and Héctor went head over heels for the first time and señor Sariel did the same with the amethyst-eyed boy.

“¡Ahora, miren, miren!” he screamed in the air. “Press your head in between your knees as if you want to know yourself worse than you ever wanted to know anybody.” He grabbed his knees and tucked his head in so deep that his thin lips were grazing the stories of his painted thing and he began to twist and twirl in the air with such speed that soon the only thing the twins could see was the color of his python-tattoos, orange and red and black swirled into each other like a hypnotist's tool. When he straightened himself, he looked at them: “¿Bueno, qué esperan?” The twins did as he had done and that night when they had finished—their frames clung to some lower branches of the fig tree like galleon wrecks on a reef—they could not wash, so señor Sariel had to wash them. He dressed them in their linen pajamas and put them to sleep, blowing in their ears with his fig breath so that they would dream about the circus and about flying together to some faraway island, as alone as they had been in the womb and as they will be again in a later larger solitude and there entwined they would know each other's love as the only worthy thing on this earth.

Señor Sariel slept in a windowless square-box room to the side of the patio with a thin tin door that he never latched shut. The room had been used by the laundress Perdita. It was furnished only with a thin foam mattress thrown on the floor and a wobbly chair, which Perdita used more than the mattress because she suffered from insomnia. On the wall was attached a gas lamp, which Perdita also made much use of at night. When doña Edith fled she had taken Perdita with her under the tacit threat that if she did not accompany her she would never work again for any mistress in all of Cuba. Perdita cried when she said good-bye to the twins and white-winged horseflies stuck to the globby tears on her charcoal cheeks and left their imprint there. Perhaps this is why señor Sariel was sure he had once known the previous occupant of his room and was sure she had died of longing, for he felt the fingers of her spirits graze the back of his neck just after he shut off the gaslamp towards the early hours of the morning. He slept for an hour, or at most two, till he welcomed Armando Quiñón back through the side door and readied himself for his students again. One night, he heard the tin door creak open and since he was sure it was the wandering ghost of Perdita, having lost track of living time and come a bit too early, he did not look up and continued seated on the foam mattress, naked, his legs spread wide, the folds of his foreskin spread out before him like a wide canvas, to his left, a half-full uncapped bottle of bourbon and a pile of ripe figs, to his right, laid out in a fan, needles of various shapes and sharpnesses, which he dipped into three different ink jars of turquoise blue, magenta, and yellow ink and pierced into the under-hull of his skin, etching there, point by point, a new tale from his faraway land.