The Lazarus Rumba (31 page)

Still ignoring his burns, Barba Roja traced the sound to the cellar of Armando Quiñón's studio. He reappeared cradling the half-dressed Ñaña the Halfwit as she played with her Christmas ornaments and told him how Armando Quiñón's papaya-leaf embalmed body had turned into a flock of green butterflies and with their many winged caresses seduced the black glass of the window near the ceiling to give way and escaped.

“Where is the body?” Barba Roja kept repeating, his right cheek already blistering.

“Gone, gone now with the angels of Tobias!” Ñaña the Halfwit answered.

As they cured his burns later that night, Barba Roja assured himself that during the disturbance someone had snuck into Armando Quiñón's studio, perhaps the same men that had murdered him, stolen the body, and threatened Ñaña the Halfwit, who concocted the ludicrous tale of the butterflies in order to appease her fears. Such things only happen in stories, a cliche of unimaginative novelists. That's where she got it from. (Ñaña the Halfwit was known to be an avid reader, and she collected torn discarded books and put different works together, one story seamlessly ending another.) They murdered the photographer, Barba Roja said. They murdered the boy. He firmly held to this version, even after comandante Julio César Cruz recounted to him, while visiting him at the hospital, how some days after they had buried the scorched boy in a pauper's cemetery outside the city and placed a heavy boulder as a tombstone over the grave, a flock of butterflies in all shades of green—like the olive and the avocado, like a meadow or a sea, like hope and envy—descended on the boulder and covered it, trying to lift it. Atila, inspired by their effort, regained his magnificent operatic voice, and forced his master to take him to that far-away cemetery every Wednesday at dawn, to fuel his inner strength from watching those butterflies that might or might not have been the spirit of Armando Quiñón, relentlessly attempt to do the undoable, to lift the set-in boulder and take the sacrificed boy with them, and in failing day in and day out became enamored with failure, and the sunlight scorched their wings into the boulder and blended them one into the other till no movement was discernible and it seemed that the boulder was covered merely by moss.

And though through his bandaged lips Barba Roja called him a dreamer, and warned him that such dreams and their dreamers are dangerous to la Revolución, comandante Julio César Cruz said that the suicidal butterflies had reminded his rooster, who would soon be sixty, of the fairy tale days of his youth.

Atila and His Resurrected

As the deer pants for streams of water, as the saint for rectitude, as the drunk for wine, as the demon for tortuousness … as the cock for hens (or, as we shall see, for its own like), so we yearn for the grace of a savior. And here comes he, his coral comb long as a horse's mane, rested to the left, strutting and posing beyond his own will, but no pansy-nancy he, no, for the dames quiver.

Who? Who will be chosen today?

“¡Atila!”—a voice resounding in its clammy and guttural nakedness. “¡Atila! ¡Venga! ¡Venga! It's not what you think.”

What does a cock think? For one, that the time has come again to please the madre-mistress. For another, that he's not in the mood. Wasn't it just yesterday? Or the day before? Has she grown that love-hungry? I must be good.

How good? To this lover friction often proves a primitive, outmoded form of arousal. Melody, music, chico. Es la honda del futuro. Orgies in concert halls!

So, Atila, you, once the bluest-feathered of all cocks, with a tail of rainbow blues, like the beaches in Varadero, mount the rosy dimply belly of your amorphously reclined madre-mistress and you crow, timidly at first, for it is late afternoon and cocks, even one as infidel as you, have a dogmatic sense of time and the habits it enforces; but the mound on which you are poised flutters with minute delight, so you crow a bit louder, challenging the dying sun, though it will pay no attention to heretics like you and continue to die; still you crow louder, longer, enthused by the conviction that east is now west and west east, your song makes it so; and the belly underneath you begins to tremble with pleasure—what can explain these rumbling folds of flushed flesh? what does your song do? where does it go? is it that you now see your song, Atila, as if in a painting, stretching forth in airy skydyed banners from your beak? featherlike, they tickle the roundness of your madre-mistress, floating in the air, no, swimming rather, for they have a purpose, however slowly, they are heading to that somewhere where their tickle is even better received, that unique pleasure vessel bound to break and break, there to that eternally inchoate wee-wee whose very raison d'etre is to be tickled, there, the aeolian banners of your song head; but now you sue for privacy, your gossamer banners cover the entire painting and as they thicken, one behind the other, we are left only with shadows of shadows; still, even in our adumbral ignorance we can guess what's going on (taking an old fool's advice we see with our ears), and your song puffs us with a giddy enlightenment, bringing us, like your madre-mistress, under your spell; we too are now round-bellied and supine, and … and … cosquillitas, ay Sí, ay Atila Sí, ay mi querido trumpetero, now we too have rose petals strewn in our hair like the girls from Andalusia, qué bárbaro, qué monstruo, qué rico, sícoño, síasíacoño, sísísí!

“Atila, no, not that, not now. ¡Salga de aquí! I just bathed! Get off me you dirty elf!” Elfish in all things but in his will to please, Atila does not get off his freshly-bathed, starchily dressed, perfume-laden mistress. “Now look what you've done, you've torn my dress, you horny weather vane. Get off me! Save your energy. For today you will test the true power of your art. But not on me! Off! Vaya, vaya, off! It must be so simple for you to arouse the living, for we the living are fraught with ticklish parts, even the most somber one of us is full of funny bones, delighted with cosquillitas. But can you stir the dead, Atila? Does your magic go that far?”

What does a cock now think? One, she has lost it. Se jodió la vieja. My madre-mistress has gone cuckoo. In fact, I can hear her marbles spilling one by one from the hole in her temple; and I can see the bats entering, through that same hole, into her belfry.

What else does a cock think? What if she's serious? What does she know? What if she's sane as death itself?

“Can you quicken the dead, Atila? Is your song that good?” But hasn't Atila already quickened the dead? Is the madre-mistress playing dumb? Or do animals not count?

Elena Mulé, an Egyptian with chartreuse eyes and skin clay-tinted by the artless light of her birthland, owned a finca (a tiny acre-and-a-half rectangle of rock and sand and dirt actually, willed to her by the old woman who had adopted her) near the town of Holguín, in the province of Oriente. There, she raised her infamous flock of blue-feather fighting roosters, which she sold to gamblers for prices so outrageous that it would take them two or three years of heavy betting to recoup, for prices that, had the soil of her land been mountain-rich, so full of minerals and spirits that it would have been harmless to eat it (as she had once done as a girl after the voyage from her land), it would have taken the sale of a whole year's harvest (coffee beans and zapotes and mangoes and nísperos and cabbages) to equal it. Though it was worth it, for Elena Mulé's blue roosters were the best fighters on the Island. So much so, that when by chance two of them were pitted against each other, no one laid down apuestos. No one had the patience or the strength to watch the entire match. The blue roosters would fight for hours, sometimes into dawn and through the almuerzo and the siesta hours and into the following night. It got to be that in order to speed things up, when two of Elena Mulé's cocks happened to meet, the owners had to tie them up by their puffed-out breasts to a wooden stake, which they would drive into the ground so that the roosters would be beak to beak and unable to duck away from each other's talon-swipes. This still didn't speed things up enough, so owners got to adjusting tiny unseen blades—navajitas—on their rooster's talons; but Elena Mulé had raised them under such a strict code of chivalry that the blue cock would as soon bite off whatever appendage the blade was fixed to as swing it at an opponent. Eventually the board of regulations for the Island's cockfights outlawed any match involving two or more of Elena Mulé's blue roosters. The gamblers, being what they are, then took to dying their prized roosters, partly to avoid this regulation, but also to hustle other owners, who soon grew so fearful of any of Elena Mulé's cocks that they refused to schedule matches against them. The chemicals in the dye killed hundreds of roosters from toxicosis. When Elena Mulé found out about this she shut down her business, and she had plenty of money left over from her sales, neatly ordered in a boxy leather suitcase, to live out the rest of her days.

At about this time, a few years after the turn of the twentieth century, what proved to be her longest-living rooster was hatched. She named the puff of blue smoke chickball Atila, after the king of the Huns, the scourge of the gods, for she felt that the coming hundred years would need such a character. Atila did not live up to his barbarous namesake until his twentieth year. Careful not to plant ever again in her roosters' hearts the seed of violence, Elena Mulé raised them as aesthetes. As chicks, she set them on the pianola and sang them arias from all the great operas, avoiding the more furious works, especially the one that was all the rage in Europe then,
Tosca.
As youngsters, she read to them from the lyric poets, emphasizing the most tender verses of José Martí. And she taught them how to peck at corn and gargle water in such a manner that they would not seem like animals at all, and they dined at the kitchen table with her, each rooster with his own hand-painted china. She even taught them how to properly seduce the white-feathered ladies of the henhouse (who indeed suffered from the prejudice of the times and were taught no manners, thus remaining hens, animals), so that even at the time of coupling there would not be a hint of aggression (except that some of the more cackle-free white-feathered ladies made up with their noise what the blue roosters lacked in brute force).

This all worked well enough till Paco Fortunato was hatched. He was a distant cousin of Atila, and Elena Mulé named him so because the luck of the genes had furnished him with an unrenowned beauty. Whereas the feathers on Atila's tail were the five different hues of the waters at Varadero Beach, the feathers on Paco Fortunato's tail were seven-colored, of all the seas on the earth; whereas the down on Atila's belly was soft as cotton, the down on Paco Fortunato's underside seemed to have been recently woven by a battalion of silkworms; whereas Atila was broad-breasted and the way his coral comb hung to the left gave him a princely playboyish air, when Paco Fortunato passed by, gorgeous even to the nails in his talons, which Elena Mulé trimmed and polished every other day, Atila stooped like a beggar; and whereas Atila could wake the whole town of Holguín, many miles away, with his sublime crow, Paco Fortunato, when he was in the mood (for the beautiful hunk of a cock was by nature a vagabond and would often not awake till two or three in the afternoon), could be heard hundreds of miles away, by the yanquis at the naval base in Guantánamo and by the Virgin herself at El Cobre. So what happened was fated to happen, for Atila had been king of the finca for too long and certainly someone named after the scourge of the gods would not be usurped so easily.

After Paco Fortunato came of age to perform sexually, the white-feathered ladies of the henhouse paid little attention to anybody else. And why should they be blamed for desiring Paco Fortunato only and utmost (even if his performance wasn't all that his looks promised)? Who has never been blinded by the glare of the beautiful? Dare anyone cast away the first glance? It was too much for Atila to bear. Or was he too lured by the ruffle of the seven-seas tail? Was he … dare we say it? Was the scourge of the gods a bugarrón? It had been over six weeks since the white-feathered ladies had even allowed Atila entrance into the henhouse, much longer since any of them had allowed him anything more than a cordial,
Buenas. S
o named after a barbarian, Atila became one. One evening after having dined at Elena Mulé's table and having sat through a recording of his favorite Verdi opera, which Elena Mulé played in her brand-new Edison cylinder, Atila, goatish beyond reason and inspired by the monstrous music he had just heard (an overwrought early Verdi work based on—you guessed it!), hid in the hole of the spearback rat not far from the henhouse and waited for Paco Fortunato to exit, as usual haggard from pleasing so many. When he did, Atila opened wide his once-bluest wings and darted from the spearback rat's hole and leaped on Paco Fortunato's back, doing to him what he had not done to any of the white-feathered ladies in over a year. Not surprisingly, Paco Fortunato did not put up much of a fight. He almost seemed to enjoy the whole business, now and then fanning his seven-seas tail as if asking for more. As he went into him a fourth time, Atila knew why Paco Fortunato's performances with the white-feathered ladies were never top-notch.
This
was his forte. Paco Fortunato, señores y señoras, was a marica!