The Lazarus Rumba (61 page)

As the two jeeps arrived and the four men dismounted, all at once turned their heads and looked towards the park, and then, as if they had seen nothing, cast their looks away from her and entered the hotel as usual. The doorman waited fifteen minutes, glancing at his watch continuously, and finally waved for Maruja to come to him. As she stood and reached the curb on the opposite side of “L” Street, she felt, in the watery weakness at her bare knees, the first misgivings about the entire enterprise. What if he had her arrested on the spot? What would happen to Joshua? Doubly a bastard and now orphaned for her impertinence. She struggled against these thoughts and pictured her son in a hand-colored photograph, his eyes closed, his cheeks rosy, his arms spread open, his light birdlike body lifted aloft by his smiling father, the palm-haired crown of a green mountain and the blue-on-blue sky as background, as in the so many other photographs she had seen of his father with so many other strange children. This image strengthened her as she continued across “L” Street, not looking one way or the other for oncoming cars, abandoning her baser sense.

“Cuidado, muchacha, por el amor de Dios,” the doorman said as she approached him. “Do you want to get killed on such a glorious day as this? Vamos, vamos, I have timed it perfectly. He is a busy man. Es hora o nunca.” He held her by the arm and led her to the sealed entrance of the bar. The door opened and one of the bearded comandantes came out and said he had to search her and he was about to put his hands on her when the door opened again and there he was standing in front of her, the man she had last seen in person as a bull, or a cock, or a goat, o lo que sea. He wore horn-rimmed glasses and his manner, though somewhat agitated, was so refined that it seemed improbable he could transform himself into
any
beast.

“No te atrevas, comandante.” He wagged his long index finger. “Don't you dare put your hands on my visitor.” He turned then to Maruja. “Perdóname, señorita, but my men are more paranoid for my life than I myself am. ¿Pero justamente, no? I have been at the head of our government less than five years and I am already on the verge of setting an Olympic record for survived assassination attempts. The pharisees in Washington, those bunglers who long ago abandoned the ideals of their Founding Fathers, want me hanging from a cross, but they are not good enough carpenters to build one that will hold my weight.” He caressed his paunch and smiled. “But still, if it were solely up to me I would sit with my bare feet dangling off the malecón wall every evening at sunset, shirtless, letting the mist of the crashing waves baptize me as it nightly baptizes our land. ¡Pero no me dejan los muy cabrónes!—protecting me as if I were a child. Is a man to be forbidden such simple pleasures for fear of death?”

Maruja stood silent and still before him. She did not remove her scarf or her sunglasses, so there was no way he could yet tell who his visitor was.

“Pero está muda mi bella visitante. You say nothing, but of course you say nothing. What can you say to such absurd ravings? Of course, a man is not to be forbidden such simple pleasures, else he is no longer a man. Who are we to guess at the calamities that will befall us, and befall us they will, so it is vanity to try to circumvent them—hence my creed for the good and honorable life is derived from the only worthwhile book in the whole damn Bible, to seek pleasure in toil (as well as seek pleasure in pleasure). All my speeches, my endless endeavors to please our people with pleasing words, ever have been, and ever will be, anchored by that theme. Coño, perhaps I
will
go to the malecon this very night! If I can have such a one as you accompany me. I will be safe, for the wicked are frightened of such tremendous beauty.”

Maruja removed her sunglasses and lowered her scarf, but it had not the intended effect on the speaker. Instead of retreating from her in fearful recognition, he moved closer to her with his sorrowful hazel eyes and his lips parted in both fascination and a mounting curiosity. She returned his look and countered his snappy amiability with a witless enmity. He then performed a gesture she had often seen him perform during his speeches, in the long pauses, when he cast his eyes heavenward and shaped his lips in a puckish pout and brought his arched hands together so that they touched only fingertip to fingertip, forming like the skeleton of a dome, and ruffled through the text in his head (for rarely was it scripted on paper), skipping over paragraphs that for the moment had no relevance. He did this now, making it clear to her that all his previous (seemingly unstudied) rambling had also been (like all his speeches) a very carefully wrought text of which he now saw fit (perhaps because of the look she had returned) to skip a few paragraphs.

He returned his eyes to her and examined her whole person less dis-simulatively, scanning up and down. He then shifted his eyes to his comandante: “Y dónde carajo was she going to hide a weapon wearing a dress like that?” He put his hand on the comandante's shoulder and laughed out loud. “No te digo, que Dios me proteja. It is quite clear that those souls whom I hold dearest to me, pressed up against my chest, as if by sheer will I could push them into the chambers of my heart, are the greatest of fools, and will sooner or later infect me with their folly.”

He turned and went back into the bar without signaling for Maruja to follow.

“A veces se levanta así,” the comandante said to Maruja. “And he keeps that level of energy going all day, till he falls down exhausted wherever he has ended up, for he refuses to establish a permanent residence. Tiene su toque de gitano.”

When Maruja and the comandante entered the room, Fidel was already seated at the round mahogany bar, leaning forward on his seat and chatting in whispers with the impish indian bartender. A veil of smoke from his long Cohiba blurred their features. The room was full of people, Europeans, over-dressed in cotton sweaters and woollen scarfs for a laggard late summer afternoon (but perhaps properly bundled-up for the air-conditioned chilliness typical of all Cuban hotel bars, for even after the triumph of la Revolución, hotel managers did not relinquish their fears that the pale foreigners would be offended by the muggy tropical airs), seated at tables set near the walls covered with ceramic murals of Amazonish women in improbable coy sexual stances and war-painted indian warriors in frozen snarly belligerence, but Fidel and the other two comandantes were the only ones at the bar. The Europeans and the waiters that were serving them, except for momentary glances in their direction, seemed to ignore Fidel and his retinue too well, as if they had been practiced.

The bartender glanced in the direction of the newcomers and leaned closer to Fidel to whisper something. “Otro, otro batido, entonces,” Fidel said so that everyone in the room could hear him, “my visitor is here.” Now, everyone in the room, without exception, stopped their business and looked towards the bar. The bartender scooped some ice in a towel and wrapped the ends together and handed the makeshift icebag to Fidel, who set it on the bar and held it in place by holding down the tied-up ends, his Cohiba in the corner of his mouth, its ashes sprinkling down on the coat of his olive uniform. The bartender then hopped up on the bar and raised his arms and began a flamenco-style dance, clapping his hands over his head and stomping alternately on the cloth icebag with one foot, then the other. As he danced he sang, in a voice that was half his and half-borrowed from the spirit of his extinct ancestors:

“Así, así, Luisito,” Fidel encouraged him and let go of the icebag lest his fingers be crushed and clapped along.

When Luisito was finished the patrons all broke into an orchestrated applause. Fidel opened the icebag and examined the texture of the crushed ice and declared it perfect as always. “Luisito, make me another one, for I will need two today. I have a visitor.”

When her milkshake was ready, Maruja was led to the bar by her accompanying comandante. The patrons could not help but to sneak a few extra glances towards the bar.

“Qué maleducado soy,” Fidel said, looking at her for the first time since he had examined her body so brazenly at the entrance of the bar, “but I have not asked you your name.”

“No,” Maruja said. She did look at him and kept her gaze fixed on the sunlight rushing in through one of the high windows behind the bar as if there were no glass there at all. “But I am sure you know anyway.” She pushed aside her milkshake. “For though you might have forgotten it from the night when you first saw me, your men must have refreshed your memory.”

“Sí, they told me that you work in the National Library, but that is all I know.”

“… it was the Saturday night after Batista's
golpe de estado
, and you cried some because your first attempt at getting elected to a national office was not to be, you cried like a child who is not let out to play, you cried like a child in my arms before you set out to prove yourself el machón, to reestablish your lost glory by having your way with a defenseless girl.” Maruja noticed that the chattering of the European patrons had all but ceased and that her voice bounced from wall to wall, doubling and redoubling, so that it seemed that the painted figures of the murals had been blessed with speech.

Fidel stood from his bar stool. The comandantes aped him. Luisito took a step back and his mien was instantly transformed from that of a cheerful performer to that of a person who is witnessing some horrible natural disaster and is frozen in helplessness. One of the comandantes put his hand on the Walther pistol in his holster and spoke: “What are you saying, señorita?” Fidel raised his hand, lit cigar nudged in place between index and middle finger, to signal he would take care of this on his own, then he brought it down hard on the mahogany bar, which prompted a blizzard of ashes on the backside of his hand and the sleeve of his uniform and an audible synchronized gasp from the Europeans and a cringe from Luisito. He spoke loud enough so that even the painted figures on the ceramic murals could hear. “I have shown you all the kindness I can afford to show a stranger. Pero es una gran pena, when the most beautiful women of our Island are hired to the enemy's work.” He now turned and faced the Europeans, who looked at him not in apparent fear but in that unique type of delighted and unconcerned awe typical of a theatre audience at a first-rate performance. He pointed at her with his cigar hand as if she were a specimen at a lecture. “Aquí está el perfecto caso, señoras y señores: this is why the yanqui dog will never succeed in his attempts to obliterate me—his agents are not fanatics willing to perish for a cause, but our own natives, paid with dollars, like whores.” He turned back to Maruja. “You will leave my sight now, for this, as your
friend
must have told you, is my time of peace; but I will see you again, bella, and you will repeat your traitorous calumnies.”

“¿Pero estaba loca esa mujer?” Alicia said. “Así mismito, in a room full of strangers and armed comandantes, she accused him of rape?”

“Así mismito,” Marcos went on. “And as she went out, she told him that she was no whore and that no yanqui dog had paid her any dollars, but that she did what she did for the sake of his son, who was healthy, but in dire need of a father to play with. Fidel spoke at her trial, not as a defendant (for remember she had been accused of moral perversion for the invented incident in the bathroom of the Library) but as judge over the judges of the tribunal, to whom he told that if the court failed to find the defendant guilty, history and the native gods of the Island's black soil would unleash a thousand plagues upon them. Maruja was sentenced to fifteen years at el Morro prison (a harsher underworld than el Boniato where I served my time, pues vaya, a prison and worse). Joshua was put in an orphanage where his
little illness
worsened and he began to suffer fullblown epileptic fits. He once described them to me as a demon in the shape of a scorpion that grows within him, till neither his body nor his soul belong to him. The revolutionary doctors, convinced that the seizures were a symptom of a greater illness, the plague of idleness, prescribed the rigor of daily discipline as a cure. Joshua was forced to join the Communist Youth League. He never wore his linen suits again. In time, the seizures were spread out over longer and longer intervals and became less and less severe, till they disappeared altogether. The scorpion had been squashed by the miracle of la Revolución. And Joshua became that truest and most foolhardy kind of convert, one whose faith has cured him.

“As for the poor old doorman, he never held Maruja in his arms as he had dreamed, and when he learned of what had happened inside the bar, he resigned his post without prompting. It wasn't until she was released from prison some five years later that Maruja was reunited with her son and finally revealed to him the prodigious identity of his father.”

“¿Pero y eso?” Alicia said. “It isn't like Fidel to forget those who have offended him.”

“Bueno, let's just say she came to some sort of agreement with Fidel. It is said by those who fabricate and refabricate these tales, that Fidel went to visit her at el Morro on the first Sunday of every month, disguised as a blind and old campesino, barefoot and in a frayed-brim straw hat and dark spectacles, his beard so caked with talcum-powder that little puff-clouds rose from it with his every move and his head seemed to be suspended in a low fog. He was accompanied by a just as ridiculously costumed Celia Sanchez. Thus they became Maruja's estranged father and sister from the fishing village of Cojímar. They talked for an hour during each of these visits and after five years they came to the agreement that if the alleged rape was never again mentioned by Maruja, she would be released and sent with her son to live in this secluded valley (famous before us because in the eighteenth century escaped Negro slaves made their first homes as free men behind the huge limestone walls) and help establish a colony for the purpose of rehabilating couterrevolutionaries like you and me. In return for her pains, the State would make sure that once Joshua turned eighteen he would be sent back to the capital to meet his father and from thereon be treated just as if he had indeed issued from the loins of el Líder.