The Lazarus Rumba (68 page)

Joshua stood unmoved by the entrance to the courtyard, shifting on the mud and slush that had penetrated the cracked leather of his borrowed boots. He remembered he had loosened his hair as he walked in the storm and now he searched in vain in his pockets for the band to retie it. He took the thick strands from each side and wrapped them around each other in the back and tucked the tail in to hold it in place. El Rubio watched him and ate another mouthful and banged the table with his fisted hand. His goblet of wine teetered and regained its balance. “Me cago en mi misma madre,” he said. “Did she conceive such a monster that no human will eat with me?—not the woman, not the beautiful compañero, only this beast!” He stood and walked towards Joshua, sauntering, fork still in hand. He did not look as obese in his wide-fitting uniform, the wide black belt of his jacket pressing his monumental belly in.

“You came because you were hungry, no?” He took Joshua by the hand and led him towards the long table. Halfway there, Joshua snapped his hand away and said he could make it to the table on his own.

“Está bien, está bien, mi cielo,” el Rubio said, returning to the table and bending forward, sticking his nose over the other dishes, “no need to get upset. I was just going to point out some of the other marvellous things the woman made.”

“Don't call me that. Don't call me
mi cielo.
It sounds stupid. You are a comandante.”

El Rubio straightened and came back to Joshua, his movements now angled and military. He poked Joshua in the chest with his fork. “That's right, a comandante, I fought in the Sierra, and fought in the Escambray and continue my fight, daily in this town, against countless counterrevolutionaries.” He poked Joshua again and held the fork in his chest, as if he were about to press it in. “And when you, mi compañerito, have fought in one-tenth of the battles that I have fought in, then perhaps you can tell me how a comandante is
supposed to behave.
” He pulled the fork away and threw up his hands in a womanly fashion. “¿Pero qué hago? Carajo, I don't want to quarrel. I want to eat, before everything gets cold. I want
you
to eat! Ay mira, mira, this is a masterpiece, veal hearts stuffed with coconut shavings. The woman is a genius! ¡Un monstruo! We'll open a restaurant in Varadero when I retire, she as chef, me as host. Wouldn't I make a congenial maitre d'.” He caressed his paunch. “Vaya, I'd have to lose a little of this.” The woman grumbled from the steps in response. El Rubio sank his fork into the praised dish and brought a tasting for Joshua. He dangled it under Joshua's nose but Joshua kept his lips pressed tight. El Rubio waited. The indian servant dropped her mop and came from the steps. She stood beside them. She folded her arms and glared up at Joshua. The dog came over and sat by them.

“Whoever does not eat my cooking is a traitor to la Revolución!”

El Rubio giggled and shook his head vigorously and said that
claro, claro, a traitor and a half, even his dog knew better
, the woman was more than correct. He began to rock the loaded fork and said that this was the heart of yanqui veal stolen from the base, a blond veal with blue eyes, and that any true compañero would not pass up the chance to chew on the heart of a yanqui anything. The india abandoned all her previous crabbiness and giggled along.

Joshua stepped in between them and sat by his setting on one end of the table. He reached for the veal heart dish and ate forkful by forkful directly from it. The meat was packed with flavors, like a very rich liver, augmented by the familiar and frightening tang of one's own blood on the lower lip. The coconut stuffing complemented it just right, changing its slippery texture and making it swallowable. He finished the entire dish, letting the bloody gravy slide down his chin, before he looked back at his hosts, who were staring back at him, their hands clasped in front of them, their heads nodding in approval, like proud parents. The india slapped el Rubio on the shoulder. “Te lo dije,” she said, before returning to her mopping chores. “Certainly the boy is no traitor. We are safe. Aunque sea el hijo del mismo diablo, he is no traitor.”

Joshua, an old hunger now stirring inside him (he had refused breakfast from doña Adela that morning and eaten nothing all day), reached for other dishes. El Rubio, back at his place at the opposite end of the table, described them as the young man ate in silence, and the bullmastiff came and sat pleadingly by him.

“Ay, sí, sí, that one is exquisite, cow's tongue stuffed with goose liver; imagine, close your eyes and imagine as you chew it all the tongues that have ever lengthened in slander against you—jay, qué placer! Give me, give me, coño, don't eat it all.” He stood and reached across the table for the dish. “No ves, in its form, in its texture it is exactly like a human tongue. You have eaten the tip, which is the tastiest part, because it is the most versatile, it knows both the salty and the sweet, and it is where thoughts often get stuck and cannot be made into the words. You have eaten all the sugary and briny unsaid words.” He fit the pieces of the sliced tongue together and traced, with his knife, the cleft that divided it in two. “And this line here a chinaman once told me is the central line of our energies, it runs down the body and comes out our assholes into our holiest organs. ¿Ves?—from one versatile tip to the other! And that is why the tastiest parts of the beast are the organs deep within, for they are the keepers and transmitters of the energy, from one opening to the other. The flesh, the common flesh enjoyed by so many, is repulsive to my tastes. It is a suit of armor strapped and plaited over the skeleton to protect the tastier organs. It is as absurd to eat this armor-flesh as it is to eat the bones that hold it in place. Only animals relish the flesh, though my poor Tomás de Aquino will eat
anything.
The outside is common and bland (and remember this not only as a rule for developing a more sophisticated cuisine, but as a dictum for life in general), you have to dig, strip the armature away and dive into those cavities full of blood and urine and shit pools, to find the tastiest pieces of the beast.”

El Rubio stood again and passed two dishes to Joshua, one, the brains au beurre noir, the other as of yet unidentified. He kicked his animal away. “Vamos, vamos try the first, but don't chew, don't chew, remember what I said about brainmeat. Let it melt in your mouth like a Communion wafer. Don't chew, you'll ruin the experience! Here, have a little burgundy, it'll go well with that other dish. Go ahead, taste it, see if you can tell me what it is.”

Joshua was working hard on not chewing the chunks of pork brains, letting the pieces turn to jelly in his mouth before he swallowed. For all he had eaten, his hunger had not much dissipated. Perhaps, he thought, el Rubio had such a belly on him, Tomás de Aquino had such a belly on
him
, because this sort of food did not perform the natural role of food, to sate hunger. He washed down the last bit of brains, before it had fully melted, with a mouthful of burgundy. He sunk his fork into the other dish, some honeycomb-shaped organ cut into small pieces and floating in a mushroom sauce, and sprinkled liberally with kernels of white corn, sparkling like unburied jewels. Its aroma was stronger than the other dishes, and as he bit into the first forkful, Joshua realized what el Rubio meant, for in both the burgundy and this dish (which along with a honey sweetness that was consistent with its shape) there lingered a smack of some substance that made Joshua's cheeks blush at tasting it.

El Rubio's demeanor brightened. “¡Ahá! ¡Qué bravo! Already you have guessed, already, by the expression on your face, I see that you have guessed. Sí, sí, joven, you are enjoying the most delectable delicacy of them all. That is why I saved it for last. Magnificent and glorious goat tripe!—the beehive mouth of Hades, the sinkhole to the shit-canals! You have passed my test with flying colors joven! It is only the transformed soul, the true New Man of la Revolución, who is ballsy enough to chew on the spongy mouth of Hell with such relish, who has enough guts, yes guts (there is no other word), to venture into this most inner sanctum. Here, here, don't eat it all. It is too much for one person.”

Joshua's impulses forsook him. He would have liked to throw the remaining contents of the dish on el Rubio, and on his shorn-headed servant, turned again from her mopping chore and clapping inaudible little claps with her tiny hands, prayerlike in front of her face, and on Tomás de Aquino, his tongue hanging out like a trembling limb; but he continued to eat the goat tripe with mushrooms and corn, each forkful becoming more and more gratifying, and the next more and more craved, as if he were eating backwards in time, and the more he chewed and swallowed the honeycomb tissue, the more he wanted more, till el Rubio stopped complaining that there wasn't going to be any left for him and sat back on his chair and clasped his hands behind his head and watched with a bemused and satisfied smile, moving only to refill Joshua's wineglass each time he emptied it.

As he was running in the darkness, barefoot and shirtless, away from el Rubio's house, Joshua tried to piece together the events following dinner that forced him to flee, without his borrowed boots and shirt-jacket. He ran parallel to the railroad tracks towards the hills north of the alfalfa fields in Caimanera, searching not for the paradise of tin roofs, but for the familiar (though long absent) fiend that had for a moment possessed him. The old woman Josefa had often told him that demons were wont to haunt the purlieus of paradise.

After he had finished the goat tripe, Joshua leaned back on his chair, extended his legs and let his arms drop to his sides. El Rubio continued to refill his wineglass, trickle by trickle from the burgundy bottle, till it spattered on the tablecloth and threatened to overflow, for Joshua made no move to have any more. He (el Rubio) said something of a dessert, a souffle made from bitter cocoa and creole eggs from a hermaphrodite rooster. Joshua let his head fall back. He was going to pat his stomach and say he could not eat another thing for days, but he could not lift his arms and his tongue felt numb and leaden, as if some fat soft creature had invaded his mouth and died there. El Rubio had moved behind him and he put his hands on Joshua's shoulder. “I told you,” he whispered. “It was too much for one person. You should learn to listen to me. It is not good to overindulge in tripe. It can prove downright toxic. But look at you, you are all wet. You'll catch pneumonia if I let you sit here like this in the evening chill.”

With the heel of his palm, he wiped beads of sweat from Joshua's brow and pushed Joshua's flaccid body forward and removed his shirt-jacket. He threw it towards the india and commanded her to wash it. He circled in front of him, squatted, and removed Joshua's boots and wiped the mud from his feet and in between the toes with the tail of the tablecloth.

“What you need is a warm bath to shake you from this stupor. Woman, a bath, run a bath for el joven. He has proven quite a hero! Let him feel the pleasures of the falcon-legged bathtub and so that he may know why it is so difficult to part with it, why the murderess wants it back!”

El Rubio slid one arm under Joshua's legs and the other under Joshua's back and lifted him from the chair. He stumbled backwards and came down on one knee.

“Coño, you are heavier than you look. … Or is it the wine?” He tried to get up but could not muster the strength. He shouted to the indian woman, directing at her the rage for his evident weakness. “A bath, woman, a bath I say, why are you standing there like an idiot!”

He rocked Joshua's body up and down and Joshua burped and tasted the fluids of his stomach inside his mouth and felt a ticklish string of drool seep out.

“Good, good, it will pass,” el Rubio said in a lullaby voice. He adjusted the bulk of the limp body so that Joshua's back rested across the thighbone of his raised leg. Joshua's head fell back and hung from his neck with the urgent pendulousness of a ripened papaya. His hair came loose and grazed the brick-paved floor. El Rubio wiped Joshua's mouth with his shirtsleeve and passed the edge of his thumb over Joshua's lips, then he cupped his palm on the back of the head and lifted it. “Let it pass, mí cielo. You have proved a Hercules in your appetite for the tastier tissues. Pero acuérdate, it is true that many, gods and mortals alike, have ventured into the underworld; but he who while in that land tastes the fruit, belongs there.”

Joshua could not make any sense of the words that were spoken so softly to him. He figured, by their tone, that they were meant in kindness and condolence. He burped again and gurgled out bits of the honeycomb tissue coated with burgundy-flavored phlegm. He closed his eyes (the only voluntary motion of which he was presently capable) and felt the nausea ebb for a moment, but in a snap it returned and his left eyelid began to quiver, as if some tiny insect were trapped in its folds.

“Woman,” el Rubio screamed, as he readjusted his hold on Joshua. Thrusting his belly forward and leaning Joshua's body back on it and locking his arms to form a bottomless cradle, he heaved himself up with a great grunting effort. “Woman, I say, why don't I hear water running? The situation is getting ugly here, coño. Woman!”

At this, perhaps disturbed by el Rubio's voice, the trapped insect in Joshua's left eyelid began to grow. First, it extended a loosened leg past the bridge of the nose into the other eye, so that it quivered even more violently than the left one, then it burrowed with its mandibles downward into the centerpoint of the head, so that Joshua felt a buried throb as if someone were stabbing him from the inside out, then the growing critter began to unfold and whip its pointy tail, stinging first the cheeks, and down to the lips and the jaw and into the throat, snapping the vocal chords, so that Joshua's head began to rattle from inside like a live maraca, and his whole body fell into the rhythm of the infernal noise.

“Woman!” El Rubio grew nervous. Joshua's possessed hand boxed him in the ear. His heels buckled into his thighs. El Rubio extended the spastic body away from him and cautiously set it down as if it were a live wire. Tomás de Aquino whimpered and hobbled into the kitchen. “Woman, I say!” The india ran towards Joshua and gently pressed one knee into Joshua's chest. She forced open his mouth and pressed four tiny fingers down on Joshua's tongue. “Don't bite me,” she admonished Joshua, holding his jaw open with her other hand as if he were a crocodile. “I know you can hear me. Por favor, don't bite my little fingers off.”