The Lazarus Rumba (28 page)

“Coño, it's a good thing that we finished eating a while ago,” Barba Roja said. “More wine, for this story is running longer and gorier than expected.”

“Así es,” doña Ana said, nodding her head, “her stories go on for days. Y olvídate, you can't miss a thing, for they are more tangled than Ñaña the Halfwit's hair!”

Barba Roja brought more rum and more wine. Carmen Canastas cut and served the guava cobblers that had been cooling all this time, and as she walked around the table, scooping a piece of dessert to each, she continued: “Anyway, who knows the truth of all of this, who knows if doña Edith simply suffered a stillbirth like so many other women and in her grief began inventing stories about the poor circus master, stories that Armando Quiñón, in his own kind of grief, was eager to pass on. But when their mother lost it, that's when the twins fled to Baracoa, that's when they joined the circus. They brought nothing with them except the clothes on their back, but with their master's spirit guiding them they soon became great trapeze stars, so that when I joined the circus as a tutor a year and a half later, they were the lead act. Armando Quiñón followed them to Baracoa and became their self-proclaimed protector and guardian, and as he toured the countryside with the circus, he picked up on the discontent of the masses and a true revolutionary zeal began to grow in him. I never learned anything else about the plot against Batista or where it originated. During the next days after we spoke events overcame my curiosity. The plot was apparently disclosed to the tyrant. That same weekend, during the Sunday afternoon performances, the tyrant showed up with his entourage of thugs and whores, and even a few priests and a bishop, catered to by four nuns, followed him (they must have come from Mass) and the first five aisles were all cleared, the people holding tickets simply escorted out so that the tyrant and his entourage could sit.

“The ogre sat on the tyrant's right and the bishop on his left and the tyrant leaned over to one side and then the other and talked to them in hushes as if they were paramours. The whole party seemed bored with the animal acts and with the clowns and with the freaks, and the bishop even shook his mitered head at some of the more raunchy shenanigans of the brothers Adolfo and Claudio, the Italian clown duo who portrayed the bedroom lives of the more famous opera characters, the bearded Adolfo the tenor and the androgynous Claudio the soprano, and closed his eyes and joined his hands at his pursed lips as if in rageful prayer during the performance of Triste the Contortionist, el negro, who twisted himself into an upside-down wooden cross, so that his arms were his legs and vice-versa and his head wasn't sitting on his shoulders but grew out from under his groin, then his own twenty nails, shiny white and long as spikes pierced his flesh and bit into the cross, which prevented him not a bit from further unshaping himself till he was free and arms were arms and legs were legs and his head above and his feet below, and the tyrant put his hand on the bishop's thigh and tapped it lightly as if to assure him that it was all right, just games and tricks, though I am sure the tyrant knows nothing of opera or of Triste's black magic, and their interest only piqued when Jorge the Ringmaster announced the twins.

“They appeared from the tunnels leading out of one of the bleachers, holding hands and prancing in unison like forgetful gazelles. The people broke into instantaneous applause. The twins wore only a pair of close-fitting dancer tights that stretched down to their knees. They were barefoot. Their torsos were sunburned and smooth except for the tuft of hair around their belly buttons. They each wore a strip of sackcloth as a headband. (Armando Quiñón had told me once that it was part of the fabric of the burnoose their master always wore.) As they reached the center ring and bowed in unison, a gleam of reddish violet light shot out like a beam from inside one of the boy's heads. The tyrant rubbed his eyes with his thumb and index finger and turned to look at the bishop. The bishop pretended to have seen nothing and acknowledged the tyrant's inquisitive look only by returning his own previous gesture. He put his heavy-ringed hand on the tyrant's knee and drummed it placatingly with his long skeleton fingers. The twins took a while before they let go of each other, and when they did separate they bowed to each other like gallant enemies about to do combat. This was the most marvelous thing in their act, why people came (I suspect—no mejor digo, I know, lo sé clarísimo), beyond their obvious talent, the heart-skipping leaps from one trapeze to the other that wasn't there and then it was, caught by a brother's upside-down knee-hanging grip at the last segundito (a collected gasp from the bleachers) and in the same instant let go again, thrown upward into somersaults and twists and twirls, so that now the beam of amethyst light was a spinning halo, because one boy, the glass-eyed one was lighter than the other one and he was usually the one thrown, but beyond all this, the one thing that made them marvellous, lo milagroso that caused them to come from all over to witness, even the tyrant, even the bishop and his four nuns, was their obvious and terrible affection for each other, which manifested its wonderful peccancy in every over-brotherly gaze, every touch, every grip that almost wasn't, every knee interlocked with an elbow or a bare foot clenching another bare foot, handlike as an ape's. That is what they all came to see, that great sin that hung like a blush-colored mist about them, as visible almost as the ring of light around the airborne amethyst-eyed boy's head.”

“¿Incesto?” comandante Cruz said. “Between brothers? Did Alicia know?”

“Yes,” Carmen said. “She must have known, for at the beginning of that summer she had met with Héctor and their illusive wedding was forever called off, a great relief to doña Adela, Alicia's mother (though she wasn't supposed to know, pero esa vieja lo sabe todo), though her daughter's heart was broken. She made me accompany her that summer (that's really why I too became a tutor) and confided in me about many things. She has never told me what she spoke about with Héctor, and I doubt she will ever tell you, comandante, no matter how close you get.”

“They have been close enough to rub bellies already,” Barba Roja said nudging his friend.

Comandante Cruz dismissed him: “No hables tonterías.”

“That's hardly any of our business anyway,” doña Ana said. “No sean metíos, this is a new age of freedom, in politics
and
in love. Down with the old hipócrita morality of the eunuchs of Christ!” She raised both her oak canes and brandished them like swords. The guerrilleros cheered her with their drinks. “Al diablo, if two brothers want to love each other and make love to each other with their eyes, their looks, then so be it. Isn't that why you got rid of the tyrant? Isn't that kind of freedom the purpose of all revolutions?”

Some guerrilleros cheered, some put their drinks down. Carmen grabbed her mother's arms and made her lower her canes. “Mamita, por favor, you shouldn't be getting so excited.”

“Digo lo que creo. That is one of the few advantages of being as old and as sick as I am. That I can speak my mind and no one is going to put my head in a guillotine.”

“This revolución will never have any use for the guillotine, señora Ana,” comandante Cruz said solemnly.

“I hope not, comandante, but even if it does, I will not live to see it. So I am worried for you and for my daughter, not for me. I will not live much longer.”

“¡Mamá!”

“I repeat: no need to worry for us, señora Ana.”

Barba Roja put his hand on his comrade's empty shoulder. “Basta,” he said.

“Tomorrow is the sage of history,” doña Ana said.

“Mamá, por favor, enough.”

“Go on, Carmen. Go on with your story. Es verdad, I have said enough. And please, comandante, do not pay much attention to me. Soy una vieja loca pal carajo.”

“The tyrant had the rope nets pulled out from under the twins,” Carmen said. “When they came out for their second performance later that afternoon and they climbed the rope ladders, the rope net was never spread under them. When they jumped on the trapeze an old campesina stood up and cupped her hands to her lips and screamed at them: ‘¡No! ¡No! ¡Que no hay malla!' Then Jorge the Ringmaster announced in his booming voice, as the twins swung above him, that that's the way the twins wanted it, without a net, for never had they fallen onto a net except to dismount, so what was the use of it. They began their act, hurling themselves from one trapeze to the other, the little puffs of cloud from the chalk in their hands now more visible each time they clasped the bar or each other and their little grunts of effort as they peeled off into the air or as they landed, audible even in the furthest bleachers.”

“Where was Armando Quiñón?” doña Ana asked. “Why did he permit it?”

“Because Jorge had not been lying. The twins had asked for the net to be removed.”

“Why? To impress the tyrant?”

“No, but to keep him and the ogre glued to their seats, to give Armando Quiñón plenty of time to flee.”

“Sí, sí, the tyrant knew,” doña Ana said, banging her cane for emphasis.

“Then the drums began to beat,” Carmen Canastas said, “and this signaled the finale of their act, what had then become known as the air rumba. I did not think they would dare try it without a net. It involved four trapezes, all swinging in and out into a common point directly above the center ring, the two acrobats crossing each other as they kept the opposite trapeze moving. They met in the middle, in the air, letting go and hurling themselves upward as high as the canvas ceiling, then open-armed, at the zenith of their leap, they approached each other and on the way down they listened to the drums and shook and twisted around each other with such force and speed that before they fell onto the returning trapeze and separated, you could not tell them apart or say who was what, for all you saw was a blurry ball of amethyst light, and for those few seconds (maybe less than seconds) this ball of light seemed to shake to the sounds of the drums, as if it had hips, as if it borrowed its rhythm from the deepest folds of the mountainous earth, then the twins separated and the drums stopped and their act was over. They listened to the applause from their opposite perches and saluted and bowed to each other across the way and you could feel their affection course through the vacant air like an electrical storm. It was the first time they had done the air rumba without a net. They never used a net again that summer.

“That year, after the summer tour, the amethyst-eyed boy disappeared. They were living near Baracoa, in the one-hut bohío of Triste the Contortionist's grandmother. One dawn, in December, Héctor awoke and found his brother gone. He went out with Triste and searched the guava groves where the amethyst-eyed boy liked to sit under the aromatic trees and indulge in his new pastime of smoking Romeo y Julietas, which Triste's abuelita had taught him how to suck.

“No sign of him. They searched the coffee fields, the giant mango trees where he liked to climb and leap from branch to branch, under the white sheets of the tobacco fields where sometimes he went off to snooze. After two days, they called the local sheriff and he chuckled at these gypsies worried that one of their own had gone wandering and disappeared. ‘Isn't that what you do best,' he said. ‘Roam away from here, away from there, unnoticed? Isn't that your famous curse? Your roaming?' But he promised he would have the Rural Guard alerted. Héctor came to Guantánamo and told Alicia and me of his brother's disappearance, and we accompanied him to Santiago de Cuba to see his mother. She had been checked into an asylum by her own mother. We visited doña Edith there, a freshly painted white turn-of-the-century monastery with many rooms, sparsely furnished. Doña Edith did not recognize Héctor and we did not tell her of the disappearance of her other son. As we were leaving, Héctor kissed her on both cheeks, as she massaged her engorged belly: ‘Pues carajo, why haven't you congratulated me. I'm due again any day now. Twins, the doctors say. ¡Hijos del gran diablo!' She laughed. Héctor kissed her again. She was not expecting, but every year, the doctors said, her belly grew for nine months as if she were, then one day she let out whatever phantoms were breeding in there and her belly shrank. She had given birth to three invisible sets of twins, which she cared for and breast-fed as if they really existed. We left her there with all her invisible brood and returned to Guantánamo.

“We went to visit Armando Quiñón the following morning. His cheeks were sunken and his dark eyes pressed into their sockets and he grew a gray unkempt beard, thick as Spanish moss. He wore his baggy suit, but the top was unbuttoned and he wore no belt, so his pants slipped down his hips. He squinted when he opened the door to his studio. At first he looked at us as if he did not recognize any of us, but then he stared hard at Héctor and life seemed to return to him for a mere moment. His eyes shot forward like the lens of a camera. ‘Querido,' he said, and caressed the back of Héctor's head. He welcomed us into his studio. The shutters were drawn in the front room and whatever light broke through did so in slats of trembling dust. There were empty tin cans thrown all around and it smelled of rancid pork. When we told him about Héctor's brother, Armando Quiñón broke into a fit of tears. He sat on the floor in one corner of the room and bowed his head and put both his slender hands over his face and continued to sob until we left. He blubbered to Héctor that in the days nearest his destruction, Satan's crimes become the most heinous. ‘Salvation must be at hand.' He sounded like Ñaña the Halfwit. He then asked if we had found a body, as if he knew for a fact that the amethyst-eyed boy had been murdered.

“No body was ever found. That Christmas, at the beginning of the circus's winter tour, a gift arrived for Héctor in a small leather pouch—the amethyst eye, washed and polished. Héctor cut a slit into the flesh above his left nipple and stitched the glass eye into the wound, the amethyst facing out. When it became infected, and pus poured out from all around the sewn-in gem like milky tears, he refused to have it removed and suffered through three weeks of fevers and vomiting till his body adopted to his third eye and the pink flesh grew around the edges like a newborn's eyes, and thick black hair around it like lashes. That year, in the latter shows of the winter tour, when the circus reached the outskirts of La Habana again, Jorge the Ringmaster began introducing Héctor as the acrobat with three eyes, and no one knew what he was talking about till they saw the shimmering halo of amethyst light when he was performing the air rumba by himself, using all four trapezes and keeping them all going as if there were two acrobats still and his amethyst-eyed brother had never disappeared. From then on they began to call his act the Lazarus Rumba, because for those few moments he was in the air he showed not just his brother—who was inside him now, his amethyst eye peeking out of Héctor's heart-hole—but all the dead how to come back. In that trembling halo the people in the bleachers would see the mother who died at childbirth just last month, or the husband who was trampled by one of his oxen while working the fields, or the pretty brown-eyed girl who went blind and was taken by the meningitis epidemic, and even the sweetheart who had died long ago during the Spanish Civil War and whose photograph had obstinately sat by the bed slept in by three different husbands, all the dead shaking their hips side by side with the half-naked Héctor as he leaped and twirled from trapeze to trapeze and summoned the dead with his beacon of amethyst light from the fields that border forgetfulness. And to this day, those who know how to best long for a lost loved one go not to the cemetery to kneel by a marble tomb, or to the cathedral to play with beads, but to the gypsy circus, to munch on cotton candy and watch Héctor perform his air dance with the dead, his Lazarus Rumba.”