The Lazarus Rumba (65 page)

Joshua was watching them through the half-cracked door of the adjoining bathroom. He made a noise and stepped into the room with the towel wrapped around his waist. His hair was loose and fell over his ears and on his shoulders. Doña Adela told her granddaughter to leave the room. Teresita asked doña Adela why she was giving away her father's uniform. She said her mother would not approve.

“Sal niña, I am not giving it away. I am letting him borrow it. I'm letting him take it to your mother on his back. Sal niña, go to the kitchen, can't you see that this boy is almost naked.”

“I have not looked at him, abuela,” Teresita said and turned her chin up and left the room.

Joshua glared at the fatigues with unabashed fascination. “I cannot wear that, señora. It should have been buried with him.”

“Well, it wasn't. In fact, from stories we hear, we're pretty sure he wasn't buried at all, left out for the vultures to peck at his bullet holes. All we know is that they gave us a number that marked a grave, and that that same number they have given to many other grieving widows … y por favor, don't repeat any of this to Alicia, she is still under the fantasy that that empty piece of earth, number 687 at el Campo Santo, holds the dear bones of her Julio … and stop staring at these old pieces of war-cloth as if it were Santa Teresa's hand!”

“Have respect, señora. If you yourself didn't consider it a relic you wouldn't have stored it away so carefully.”

“I stored it away so carefully because I suspected some day we might have use for it. Y da el caso que ese día ha llegado. For all your comuñanga talk, I see in your eyes that you care about my daughter, and she would be glad these old rags were put to use on your person. If you're going to do battle against el Rubio, you might as well be dressed like a warrior, a noble warrior who loved liberty enough to die for it.”

Joshua put up his hands, closed his eyes, and turned his head to one side and shook it. “Con mucho respeto to the memory of your daughter's beloved, but I am not planning to do battle here against anyone, much less a comandante of the revolutionary police force. I will show him my mother's letter, and he will give me what I came for.”

“Ay, qué inocente eres muchacho, this Island is a conglomeration of little tyrannies, and no little tyrant pays attention to any other one. Sometimes, when they are inebriated enough by their little swig of authority, they don't even pay attention to the Papa Tyrant.” She picked up the olive drab shirt-jacket and cargo pants, and held one above the other in front of her. Joshua walked towards the crooked old woman and towards the flaccid ghost in the uniform. His towel dropped from his waist, but he did not notice.

“¡Muchacho!” doña Adela threw the fatigues towards him. Joshua caught them and covered his nakedness with them. When doña Adela walked out of the room, he stepped into the pants and buttoned on the shirt. Except for the expanse of the waist and the length of the sleeves, the fatigues fit him fine. He remembered his mother once describing comandante Julio César Cruz as a thin man, and she said that Fidel should have known from Caesar how dangerous it was to surround oneself with thin men, and Joshua now wondered how much weight he had lost during his journey if a thin man's pants were baggy on him. He rolled the sleeves and put the boots on without socks. They were near the right size, but he could not tell for sure for he was, by now, unused to footwear. He squinted into the small vanity mirror above the dresser. It was stained with so many tiny white spots that it hardly served its purpose. Joshua saluted himself in the military fashion and looked away. He turned his head and smelled at his shoulder, and bounced inside his boots and shifted inside the shirt-jacket, all as he tried to feel for the other presence inside the guerrilla suit, but felt only the weight of the clothes. He looked back into the damaged mirror, coming closer to lessen the disorienting effects of the stains and scratches, and could not decide whether to tie his hair back or let it loose. He remembered pictures he had seen of Che and of his father, after their descent from the mountains. He wondered if there was a cap or a black beret stored somewhere inside the old lady's closet. He thought of the last time he had worn clothes similar to these, the olive drab short-sleeve shirts and knee-length shorts of the Communist Youth League. He remembered the care with which he washed and starched and ironed his three uniforms on Sunday afternoons, the eagerness with which he dressed the following morning, pretending the stiff cloth was a suit of armor. He was still a boy then. When they arrived to their exile in the Valley of the Nightingales, his mother forbid him from wearing
los trajecitos de los comunistas.
He adopted the garments of the native campesinos, the straw hat and poncho and canvas pants to protect against the sun in the fields. Eventually, because of the intolerable heat, he had ripped his pants into shorts, and because he could run faster without them, he had no use for the heavy boots. His mother cried at nights as she massaged whitening cream into his legs, which were turning, despite her great efforts, the color of
un negro cualquiera.

Joshua leaned closer and peered into a clear corner of the ruined mirror. He ruffled the meager patches of hair on his chin and on his jaw. He did not look like a rebel. He took the long black hair from both sides of his head and spread it over his cheeks and above his lips and under them in the shape of a beard. He grimaced. He groaned in dismay, for he looked like a child in a costume; or perhaps worse, like a woman disguised as a man. Doña Adela knocked and he let his false beard fall. He straightened himself and gave her permission to enter. She clapped once and put her prayer-folded hands to her lips. “Ahí estás, you look as valiant as Julio ever did!”

“I look like an imbecile, an impostor.”

“No, no, muchacho, believe me, I know, I have known plenty of men who have worn this costume over the past fifteen years, and you look as good, as valiant, como te dije, as any of them, even Julio. It is a sad fact of our country, that too many of our people like to dress in uniform.”

“Valiant? I don't need to look valiant—”

“You will, muchacho, you will if you're going to lock horns with el Rubio. Ves, when my daughter was arrested, he took possession of her house, her furniture, even most of her wardrobe. (I don't want to think what he does with her dresses, for his servant certainly doesn't wear them.) And yes, even Alicia's prized bathtub, which was bequeathed to her by her husband and had been bequeathed to him by a man of God, so that now a devil washes where once a minister of the Lord did. así son las cosas de la vida.”

Doña Adela sat on the bed. She pressed the butt of her palms into her eyes and said she was glad that he had come for she had been crying for two months straight, but she would not cry now for she could not cry in front of strangers. She was glad that he had come, and that the news that he bore of Alicia's safety was like news from a messenger of God, and that she had never been sure what the angel Gabriel had looked like to Mary. Now she knew. He was not blond and he did not have pearl white wings and he did not wear velvet robes. The master painters had been wrong, equivocado completamente. Now, after all these years of hearing the story, she knew exactly what Gabriel had looked like to Mary, a lissom man not yet a man, with long black hair, wearing the garments of a fieldworker, a beggar, and wings, wings like a grimy Havana pigeon. Sí verdad, equivocado, though in some details, she had to admit, the master painters had been right: the bare feet of the angel, the way the Virgin holds her hand aloft, protecting herself, arresting his advances. She pressed the bones of her hands farther into her eyes and could not help but weep in front of this stranger. As he moved to console her, she got up and made her way with unsure shuffling steps out of the room. She warned him through her tears not to waste any pity on her, for she was beyond implacable, and that not even the pillars of her faith were of any use against the weight of her desolation. It was late. She must busy and prepare dinner for her granddaughter and her guest. “There is not much meat on you. I am afraid you need a much better meal than I can give you.”

Joshua remained in doña Adela's house till the following morning. After dinner, a pale arroz con pollo, made only with wing bones and stale pitipuá, they drank coffee and sat on the two chairs in the living room. Teresita sat on her grandmother's lap and tasted the coffee by sticking her tongue into her grandmother's cup. She grimaced at its bitterness and wiped her tongue with the palm of her hand and sank her head back into her grandmother's breast. Doña Adela told Joshua much more of her life than she imagined she could tell anyone except Father Gonzalo. She said she had just taken her white pills and they made her chattery before making her sleepy. She spoke to this son of a Comité jefa, this likely informant, as if he were indeed a heavenly messenger, a confessor come to unburden her. She told him of the shameful manner in which her late husband, que en paz descanse, had left this world. She made a damnatory gesture towards the heavens. She told him how she had first been against her daughter marrying a guerrilla, for she had never been taken in by the sham that was and always would be this mock-revolution. Many, though, had been enthusiastic at first, even the parish priest, her close friend Father Gonzalo. But even before her son-in-law's murder, Father Gonzalo had seen the lies for what they were and turned bitterly against the revolution. Now, to save his church, he makes certain compromises, and attends Comité meetings, and knows more about the secret goings-on in this town than all the informants put together. Though in his heart of hearts she knew he had surrendered: in private, he said that even prayers were fair game for the regime, the words of the faithful flew up but were trapped in the thousand revolutionary snares set up all over the Cuban sky. The only hope now, he admitted, was exile, which was a fate more noble than one incommunicado to God. He helped many fill their permission-to-leave forms, and had contact with the yanquis in the base and helped others in ways that put his person, and the very future of the parish, in danger. “Of course, I should not be telling you any of this, God knows if you're not a demon disguised as an angel and have already destroyed my daughter and now come to destroy the rest of us.”

But, convinced that such a demon would rouse to defend himself against such accusations and Joshua did not, she continued. She told him of her daughter's first arrest and unfortunately of her experimentation with santería, that primitive religion practiced by the uneducated. She told him of Mingo's death. A drunk farmer who drowned in a river during one of his binges. She told him of Alicia's return from the mountain, a changed woman, distant and disrespectful, not only with the authorities but with her own mother and daughter. She told him of the mob that had gathered outside her house one afternoon and forced her daughter to eat the regurgitated cuds that were once the copy of her sermon and the English children's story. She told him of her daughter's sister and the women who had banded together in vengeance with Alicia, and of their assault, in turn, on the words of la Revolución, and of the death of Paca Córtez, and placed her hand over her granddaughter's ear and, in an undervoice, told him of the recent murder, in the lower circles of the tower prison in Santiago de Cuba, of the town's former alderman, as he slept, stripped and knifed a hundred times in the back by men he had helped send there, cursed as a marica and a fiend with two faces, his delicate white skin cut open and peeled back so that it mimicked the petals of his most garish ruby orchids. She told him of the fate of Marta, who, poor girl, so traumatized, so young when her father had died, so crazy a mother, had never matured emotionally, had never desired a husband and children and a family. She had been sentenced to a rehabilitation camp near the yanqui naval base, the same camp where Alicia had once, long ago, spent some days. She told him of what he knew, of the confession of murder Alicia had been forced to sign to avoid a mass accusation of her sister and all the other women involved. And finally she told him about el Rubio, the massive effeminate gold-maned black-minded police captain.

After Alicia had disappeared, her fate a secret, he had moved into her house. He had tried before to move into the alderman's stone mansion, but learned the lesson many petty tyrants sooner or later learn, that their power is not as absolute, nor their domain as far and wide, as they imagine. The 83rd Neighborhood Committee for the Defense of the Revolution wanted the mansion for itself, and even though el Rubio had hand-picked its current chief and many of its leading members, el Comité took him to civil court and won their claim, on the punitive damage charge that it was they who had suffered the most harm from the alderman's treachery and from the ravage of the wordeaters and thus should be compensated in fashion. El Rubio retorted that it was he who had rid the town of the plague of wordeaters, he who should be rewarded. The judge, who perhaps had lost some previous power struggle with el Rubio, and apparently unthankful at having survived the latest purge, agreed with el Comité. El Rubio moved out of the alderman's stone house and reestablished a specious peace with the young man chief of el Comité, for they needed each other as bread needs butter. He moved into Alicia's house. And from there since the day of the trial, he has tried to undermine the young man chief of el Comité, who had proved, by his manly drooly hunger for a chunk of the power pork, that he was no marionette, that his appetite was as real as el Rubio's taste for the innards of beasts and fowl.

There were many in el Comité still loyal to el Rubio, still willing to do his bidding, generating rumors and turning brother against brother and son against father in the name not of la Revolución, but of the blond hog who is the police captain.

“So if you want to dupe him, go to him not as one ready to die for la Revolución, go to him as one willing to die for el Rubio … a Rubioista.”