The Lazarus Rumba (30 page)

Ñaña the Halfwit's feet hurt and she fell behind the two comandantes and their corpse and their rooster, all who seemed untouched by her story: “Aguanten, carajo. Listen! Pues soon the machetero noticed some of his children were missing. He questioned his wife. She said they were gone to visit their grandmother in the capital and the man believed her because he wanted to believe her. More meat was served. More children were missing. The wife glared at the husband when he ate and said she had already eaten and sent more of his children to the capital. One night, while crossing a field of flowers after sixteen hours of cane cutting, the man heard a song in the cluster of the flowers that were colored like doves and shaped like miniscule suns. Florecitas como ésas, comandante. He recognized the voices of his missing children chanting all at once:

He ran home and beat his wife with the blunt end of his machete in front of his remaining offspring, beat her till she was dead, and cut her up and fed her flesh to the wild hogs and charred her remains at the pit. And for the sins of the mother and the father all the remaining children were cursed and they must never lie on holy ground. So don't bother. Put him down and let the birds of death feast. It is his fate. Wait! Wait! ¡Espérenme, coño!”

The inside of her tin slippers now cut at the side of her feet and the two comandantes with the corpse and the rooster far outpaced her, out of hearing range, so she murmured the last part of the story to no one. She could not take off her shoes; they were essential to the beauty of the outfit; but she stopped talking and concentrated hard on catching up with them, clanking along bow-legged to ease the bite of her slippers. By the time she caught up, the two comandantes with the corpse and the rooster were on their way back from the front gate of the cemetery, having been forbidden entrance by Plácido Flores, the undertaker with skin like a workhorse's hide.

“Pero, comandante,” Ñaña the Halfwit said to Barba Roja, not meaning to mock, “you conquered this town, it is yours to rule.”

“Muchachona,” Barba Roja spoke to her for the first time, “I cannot kill one man for the sake of burying another, and that is what I would be forced to do.”

“Then you understand. It was written that you would. Pero vengan, I will bring you to someone who will help you.”

Tired and unwilling to return to Armando Quiñón's studio and face the mob, the two comandantes followed Ñaña the Halfwit back past the house with the white-winged horsefly shingles, all the way to the opposite end of Perdido Street to the papaya gardens of the Jewess doctor, Sara Zimmerman. She came out to greet them, her hands smeared with the blood juice from the pomegranate she was picking at. She was a dwarfish woman, a whole head shorter than Ñaña the Halfwit, with fair skin stained all over with mud-colored spots shaped like amoebas. Her hair was faded red and it was short, unkempt, and receded halfway back her skull. She wore no jewelry except for a band of seven gold rings on her marriage finger, extending past her knuckle all the way up to her fingernail so that the finger stuck out and she could not bend it. She wore a white doctor's smock and rope-soled sandals. The nails of her feet were discolored and eaten away with fungus. She kissed Ñaña the Halfwit on the crown of her head and commended her on her beautiful dress that was now coming apart at the top, revealing her bone-marked breasts. Sara Zimmerman then approached comandante Julio César Cruz and grabbed the cross of the ebony rosary that was hanging around his neck and tugged at it slightly and then kissed the crucifix and kissed the comandante on the ball of his right shoulder and the corpse on the sole of its bare left foot and Barba Roja on the palm of his hand. Only the rooster she did not kiss.

“Buenas,” she said. “I have been expecting you. Ñaña said that she would bring you.” The two comandantes stared in surprise at Ñaña the Halfwit and Sara Zimmerman broke into a fit of laughter and because she wore quality dentures she looked much younger, though she seemed disturbed by her merriment and covered her mouth and apologized, and is if in conciliation, offered them some of her pomegranate. When the two comandantes declined she laughed again, covering her glamorous teeth with her stained hands and apologizing all the while. “I don't mean to disrespect el muerto,” she said between chortles. “Bring him in. I will prepare him.”

“Prepare him for what?”

“For his flight from this world. Vengan.” She opened the wrought-iron gates to her gardens and pinched herself on both cheeks as if to suppress any further attacks of laughter.

“She looks ill,” Barba Roja whispered to Ñaña the Halfwit.

“En la casa del herrero,” Ñaña the Halfwit answered, loud enough for Sara Zimmerman to hear, “cuchillos de palo.”

Within grew papaya trees in every season, and of every type, as if her gardens were a little world unto itself: in the larger south end, three-story stalks with giant loose-wristed seven-fingered leaves and fruit like elephant testicles; in the north section tinier parasol trees with fruit like grapes; in the west side trees with leaves gold and red and orange as if they had filched the light of many a dusk; and in the east a field of black mountain soil with spindle shoots just breaking to the surface in groups of six, like the legs of buried grasshoppers. In the center of the gardens was a mossy fountain, at whose edge Sara Zimmerman asked comandante Julio César Cruz to lay down the body of Armando Quiñón, though when he put it down the corpse remained frozen in the position it had been drooped over the comandantes shoulder, so it sat with his arms and his torso stretching down to his toes like a yogi. Sara Zimmerman undid his olive skirt and returned with a basket of leaves from the south end of the gardens and a pail of milky fluid. With the juice, she washed the body and then dunked the giant leaves in the pail and, beginning with the feet, wrapped Armando Quiñón's body in them. Like an expert masseur, the green-fingered leaves took hold of the stiff toes and immediately loosened them, so that they went slack and it seemed that the blood had begun to course again. Patiently, she wrapped Armando Quiñón's entire body and while doing it told them about the sadness of her relentless laughter.

She was a Pole. She had had six brothers, all who perished in concentration camps along with her parents and most of her family. She recited her brother's names by counting the six gold rings of her wedding finger. Luckily, a prescient and politically zealous aunt smuggled Sara Zimmerman to a kibbutz in Palestine before the Nazi monsters began the work of undoing their world. She became a woman in the holy land. She fell in love and married a poet named Emu. She touched the last gold ring on her finger when she said his name. It was her wedding band. They had been happy. Emu's great-great-grandmother taught her the art of healing. She was a holy woman and had lived in the land for more than a century and a half, a descendant of the rabbis driven from Spain. In her room, she carried on long conversations with the prophet Eli¡Ah that would last till dawn. She drank plum wine with him. Then, it was said, the prophet made love to the old woman and whispered in her ear the secrets of nature and disappeared. From her room, passing her hand over Emu's back, Sara Zimmerman could hear the torrential horse-hose gush of the prophet Eli¡Ah's urine in the outhouse. He was a vulgar and mean old man, Sara had heard, who had once set a bear on two boys who made fun of his baldness. “Qué va, I am not a real doctor,” Sara Zimmerman said, “my skills are from a more ancient science.”

At about the same time she became pregnant, Sara Zimmerman was struck with malaria. She was ill for many weeks. The girl was born with only one leg and three eyes—though none of them could see— and she could barely breathe for she had lungs the size of a bird's. They named her Rachel and she only lived into her third week. Emu died that same month of grief.

“In our time it is said you cannot die of such things.” Sara Zimmerman touched her last ring again and could not help but laugh. “He had bought wedding rings for all my dead brothers, because he was sure that one day I would find them and they would marry his sisters and his cousins. The day we buried Emu I became infected with the laughing sickness. The doctors in Jerusalem said it was from a lesion I had suffered in the right part of my brain during the highest fevers of the malaria. The holy woman said it was the spirit of her great-great-grandson fighting against my sorrow and forcing me to laugh. I believe
her.
I am still infected with the laughing sickness … but don't worry I don't think it is contagious.”

Sara Zimmerman then laughed. As she finished wrapping Armando Quiñón's body, she said that she had fled to Cuba because after the state of Israel was finally established, there was too much joy in the streets, and she could not stand the noise of the rejoicing and the noise of her laughter. It made her grief intolerable. Cuba was far away and it was romantic and she had read in a story once that Cubans were the most skilled laughers in the world, so maybe someone there would show her how to master her laughter. She began to grow papayas to sustain herself, but found that in the milky juice of their stems lay hidden many of the secrets that the prophet Elijah had discussed with the old holy woman. Sara Zimmerman said that the juice was so rich with the life-giving minerals of the land that it cured everything from hepatitis to baldness—though apparently not her own, nor the prophet Elijah's. Armando Quiñón's body had softened and it was now completely wrapped in the giant wet papaya leaves so that it looked like a fish ready to roast.

“My garden has also provided many a joy for the children of this town.” She pointed out the holes in many of the chameleon-horny but soft-stemmed papaya trunks. “When they are finding out about being men, they hop the gate after midnight (when they think I am asleep) and cut holes into the trees and make them the receptacles of all their desires. At first I tried to stop them, but I found that far from being damaged, the violated trees seemed to prosper and deliver sweeter fruit. Now rarely a night goes by when I don't hear the caterwauling of the neighborhood's not-yet-men.” Sara Zimmerman laughed—but not it seemed from her laughing sickness. She knew some of the holes were too high up on the stem and too thick and deep to have been made by any boy.

“I knew him,” Sara Zimmerman said. “I have seen him in this garden before. Sometimes … mostly … he just came to watch, to take pictures with his little camarita. Now take him back to his home and the angels of Tobias will guide him away from all our ills.”

They thanked Sara Zimmerman—although they weren't sure exactly what it was she had done— and comandante Julio César Cruz carefully placed the softened and warmed body over his shoulder and held to it, for it was slippery and felt alive. Atila opened his blue wings and balanced himself on the other shoulder, again drawing blood, but this time on purpose, as if in revenge, for his master had not asked Sara Zimmerman to cure his muteness.

Ñaña the Halfwit led them back to Armando Quiñón's studio and through the growing mob, acting as a shield for the two comandantes with the corpse and the rooster, taking on the mob's first insults. Two sparks from the bonfire on Narciso López Street, willful as hungry fleas, hopped onto the tail of her papier maché wedding dress and set it afire. As Barba Roja stomped out the flames, and Ñaña the Halfwit, her head turned, watched—more amazed than frightened, as if her predictions of the apocalypse, of the earth catching fire from underneath, had come to be—the bottom half of the disintegrating dress tore off, completely exposing her hairy violet-lesioned legs and the thick tangled mound of her sex from where she had hung seven tiny red Christmas tree ornaments.

“She has balls,” the boys in the mob screamed, reaching for her. “¡Naña la loca tiene siete cojonecitos rojos!” These same boys grew scared when they saw that she was willing to give herself to them, thrusting her hips forward and back so that the Christmas tree ornaments clinked against each other, signaling like wedding bells to other joys, till Barba Roja grabbed her and carried her—also over his shoulder—into Armando Quiñón's studio.

The studio and the cellar had been emptied of everything—even the artist's expensive cameras had been used as fire food—and, with the developing chemicals, the bonfire thrived. Barba Roja felt a wave of grief quickly gel into anger at losing the picture of him and his men descending from the mountains, but he could not reprimand the guerrilleros that he had left in charge (they were celebrating, it was their day of victory). For three hours he and comandante Julio César Cruz and Atila stood on guard at the front door of the studio on Narciso López Street. It was long past dark and most of the mob, along with the children and many of Barba Roja's own men, was drunk. So perhaps it wasn't a north wind (as many later recounted) that began to whirl and arouse the flames, not the wind at all that picked up the child—a heavy boy of thirteen or more, who had fought and survived in the mountains (as if the wind had more arms and was more wicked than Batista's Rural Guard), who was for a moment a kid again and was prancing and singing of Ñaña the Halfwit's seven red balls—and threw him into the bonfire. The flames ceased their twirl dances and seized the boy with their thousand tongues that changed colors as they tasted him. What was orange was now sharp crimson and what was blue a fierce violet.

The two comandantes jumped at once from their post at the door, Atila the rooster stitching them together by their shoulders, and ran in unison towards the commotion. Barba Roja put down his rifle and broke free from Atila's left talon and threw himself into the fire, bringing out the burning boy in a bearhug and smothering him on the ground with his own body. For a moment the revelries continued, the singing, the banging on the rum-barrel drums, and the dancing and the drinking, as if this accident was in no way going to deter the mob from its purpose, from burning him that deserved to be burned, the pederast, the suicide, to whose long tally of sins would later be added (seeing you could not very well blame the wind) the death of this boy. Once the fire on the boy was out, Barba Roja stood up and backed away. He could not feel his own burns, many of which were serious, for he saw the child's bald black skull. The eyelids were missing and the lips were melted together in a flat pout. Barba Roja picked up his rifle and fired it in the air, once, twice, and again till there was silence, and the bonfire, as if in penance (or satiated), began to quiver and undo itself. It was then that they heard the glass break. Though it wasn't the usual noise of glass breaking, no intimation of violence in the sound. It was the melody, they imagined later, of a heavy snowfall, of the clumpy crystally flakes crumbling one on top of the other.