The Lazarus Rumba (69 page)

At the sound of her wheezy voice, as if in choreographed moves, Joshua's body slowed its floor dance, and his limbs lost all spring again and his hips all rhythm and his jaw loosened and he rested, the eyelids still, as if in a deep slumber. The trapped insect had escaped. The india slowly pulled her hands out of Joshua's mouth and wiped them on the folds of her black dress. Joshua was at peace, and in his trance, his absence, as if with eyes and ears that did not belong to him, he saw and heard the woman and her master arguing.

The india shouted at the man she worked for.

“¿Idiota me dices? You could have killed this poor boy. ¡ldiota eres tú!”

El Rubio sighed. He rubbed a spot on his thigh where Joshua had kicked him. He shrugged. “It is your cooking woman, not mine.” He shrugged again. “Is the bath ready?”

“You are not touching
this
boy! Are you blind to such an obvious omen?”

“Woman, el joven had a bad reaction to your food. If it is any omen at all, it is that the gods don't give a shit for your food. But who cares? Fortunately for you,
I
love your food. Now do as you're told. A bath will help purge him.”

The india picked up Joshua's head and put it to her breast. “I said that you are not touching
this
boy. It is enough with what you, what we, have already put him through. He rebels against our spell. The gods are with him.”

“Woman, you know I don't believe in your magic.”

“No you don't, though you are the benefactor of it, though you have seen my spells and implorations work a thousand times, witnessed how they cursed the blood that runs through the veins of your enemies and brought unhappiness to their homes. What else but my
magic
would have brought down such a mighty hero like Julio César Cruz? What else but my
magic
would have delivered so many shorn-headed mujercitas and so many more innocent muchachitos to a disgusting beast such as you?”

“Woman, please, the neighbors like to listen. You too have had your pleasure in this.”

“Let them listen. Yes, I have had my pleasure. Let them listen. What do you care? You don't believe. I'll tell them all. I'll tell this very boy here what we did, see if he doesn't wring both our necks.” She pushed Joshua's head back away from her chest and held it in both hands and spoke to it abjectly, sotto voce, with a rueful seriousness, as if she were addressing the skull of a long-lost loved one, or the shadow of a confessor through a screen. “Last night, after I had told him about you, this ogre here swallowed 104 kernels of white corn. One hundred and a-four that's eight times thirteen, the numbers of the two wiliest orishas. One hundred and a-four—we have tried other numbers, other combinations, but only this one works—”

“Woman! ¡Cállese!”

“One hundred and a-four, swallowed the kernels whole without chewing. (He knows how to do it by now.) Without chewing, like pills, for we must pick them out of his shit the following morning. All one hundred and a-four, for if one is missing the spell is ruined—”

“¿Pero estás loca? What if the boy is hearing this? Woman!”

“Where do you think I was this morning when you dropped by for a visit?” She leaned closer and whispered into his ear, “… under a gaslamp in the henhouse, picking white kernels out of his morning shit! Found only eighty-two, so I made him drink two cupfuls of seawater. Eighteen more came out as he crouched down and the watery shit splattered over the terrified hens. The last four I had to go in there with my little fingers and find myself.”

El Rubio flexed back his leg and extended it, landing the point of his boot square on the india's sternum, separating her from Joshua. Tomás de Aquino howled in the kitchen. “¡Loca, te has vuelto loca pal carajo!” Joshua's head dropped and bounced on the brick-paved floor. He stirred. He brought one knee up. El Rubio crouched and wrapped his hand around Joshua's waist and lifted him onto one shoulder, holding him tight, one arm wrapped around his thighs, one hand pressed on his buttocks.

“That's right,” the india tried to scream but her pierced lungs would not let her. She clutched her chest where el Rubio had kicked her. She spoke in a gurgly low voice, as if a flood, summoned by her master, were rising to drown her voice. “You are all his, the spell is simple but powerful. The gods cannot save you. You ate the kernels, in that last dish, that touched all his insides. He is in you and dwelling in your softest parts and you are his forever.” She coughed and her mouth filled with blood. Her body was twisted with convulsions and the veins in her neck thickened and she struggled in vain for one more breath. And then, like a spent swimmer, she gave one last jolt upward and let go, as if something had been ripped from her insides.

Joshua came to his senses. A lightness tickled the insides of his head, as in the dreams where the invisible black birds captured him, their claws sunk into his back, or when he drank the rum Marcos made in the tin tub of his outhouse. He struggled and el Rubio tightened his hold. He closed his fists and slammed them into the small of el Rubio's back where he imagined the kidneys hid, buried under all the fat. El Rubio laughed, as if a woman were attacking him with her small clumsy fists. Joshua grabbed the back of el Rubio's jacket belt and pulled himself downward. He tumbled off el Rubio's shoulder. El Rubio toppled backwards with him and held on to the hem of Joshua's pants. “No, no, mí cielo, qué haces? Don't listen to that witch. Stay, stay and I will bathe you.” His blue eyes had gone gray, and for a moment Joshua imagined the spell of the white corn was working, for he felt no scorn, no loathing for this fat marica with his hand on his leg. “Stay, mi cielo.”

Joshua jerked his foot away and hurdled over the folded lifeless body of the india. Her head rested on its side, with one cheek in a pool of blood. Her eyes remained open. Josefa had once told Joshua that those who die with their eyes open die wisely, for the spirit has no use for eyes. It is better to leave them here on this earth, where others may find use for them. He remembered this as he ran out of the courtyard without looking back, without further lending an ear to el Rubio's shameless supplications, or the bullmastiff's piercing howls.

High in the Banyan

Joshua ran past the town of desolate small streets of Caimanera till he saw the skeletal shadows of the towers near the frontier. He turned west towards the river and crawled on all fours through the bushes and the high grass. The mines were easy to avoid, hidden in little pine boxes, clunky and evident even in the thickening darkness, like a scattering of disinterred child-sized coffins. He circled around them. When he came upon the fiend, the companion of his childhood who had so often inhabited his body, who was a scorpion egg that hatched in his left eye and grew to inhabit all of him, he was amazed and a bit frightened to see that he was as black as the invisible birds that lived in the pinetops of the valley. But he wore no uniform and carried no weapon and lived in the water and not the trees. He was naked, knee-deep in the river near the yanqui base. The blinking lights of the yanqui airport were within sight, they beckoned and teased with all the promise of a giant Christmas tree. The top of the fiend's bald skull, the bones of his wide shoulders, the ripples on his chest and in his belly caught the moonlight, caught the flickering yanqui lights. He let himself be visible. He was turning in circles urinating, and the steamy stream was his whirling tail. The river was infested with crocodiles and they surrounded him and snapped their jaws as the tail of the fiend slapped off their snouts. They too seemed to fall into a trance, paralyzed by the same little illness. And for all their sinister crackling, they knew better than to come any closer.

“Hey!” Joshua screamed, struggling against the mesmerizing effects of the fiend's circling tail. “Hey! ¿Qué haces aquí? Are you too abandoning us? Fleeing into the stolen yanqui land?”

The black fiend was startled at the sound of a voice. His sparkly tail disappeared and the crocodiles snapped out of their trance and came at him.

“Coño, coño, me cago en tí,” the black fiend screamed, as he high-stepped over the snapping jaws onto the shore. He came at Joshua and tackled him. And then suddenly they were surrounded by flashes of green light that seemed to emit from the bushes and the grass, as if the very earth and its progeny were burning from inside and alerting the guards in the towers that there were traitors amidst. No, Joshua thought, I have not come to cross the frontier. The earth is wrong. I am no traitor.

The crackle of the hungry alligators was joined by the crackle of machine-gun fire. The bullets pierced the air and slashed into the riverwater. Sirens wailed. The black fiend grabbed Joshua by the hand and they ran, hurdling over the wooden-box mines, deep into the wilderness and away from the spray of machine guns, away from the ghostly green flames, and away from the blinking stars of the yanqui airport. They climbed a banyan and settled on one of the higher branches, one that shot no roots earthward. They heard the barking of dogs beneath them and they heard more machine-gun fire and when they grew tired of hanging on to the branch, the black fiend threaded a thick vine through his legs and arms and he lay stretched like a hammock. He told Joshua to lie on top of him, for if the guards shone their lights up into the tree, they would surely pick out his pale white-ass torso and shower it with bullets. Joshua obeyed only after the frontier guards began to randomly spray nearby treetops with bullets, only after the fiend had told him his name. He lay belly up on the human hammock whose name was Triste and the hammock threw up his legs and wrapped close his arms and shut in around him like a cocoon. Triste assured him they were safe, that not even with the eery green light that for some reason Triste called
inferior
red could they be seen. He would not let them be seen. His skin would grow cold and dark and colder and darker till it absorbed
all
light, even the green light that makes heat visible, and the giant banyan itself would be consumed in the utter blackness and disappear with them. Joshua wanted to believe him. Wrapped in the hammock of flesh, he felt untouchable. They were as invisible as the black birds of the valley.

High in the banyan, invisible from the ground as they were, the white one inside the black one, the warm one inside the cold one, hanging pouchlike from a thick vine like the leathery roost of some winged branch-hopping lizard, they talked in whispers.

Tell me.

Tell you what? I am hot. I can barely breathe. I don't like this.

That's too bad; I don't like it either. I am cold. I can catch pneumonia. But if we switch positions, they'll marry us with their bullets.

Marry us? Óyeme, you're not a marica are you? Is this whole mierdero town full of maricas?

This whole Island is. Ya casi no quedan hombres en Cuba. What's the point? … Marry us—I meant the bullet that kills one of us, kills the other, we are one when the bullet comes, married.

You
are
a marica. ¡Oye!

Tranquilo, muchacho, don't toss around like that, the vine will rip. Tranquilo, I don't go for boys with bleached hides. You are much too white.

I am white. I am proud to be white. Sin pena ninguna. My mother is of Castillian blood. My father is the whitest man on the Island. But I am no marica, keep that in mind if you get any urges. Respeten a los machos, coño. That is where all your troubles stem from, maricas don't respect men when they are true men. You think all men are, at heart, maricas and pájaros and bugarrones.

Al contrario, we go far beyond respect, we treat the true macho with the sort of adoration that only the Virgin Mother deserves. … Who is your father?

El comandante Fidel Castro.

¿No me diga? Bueno verdad, the whitest man on the Island. Why were you fleeing from your father's house then?

I wasn't fleeing. I was looking for you.

For me?

I thought you had left for Miami a long time ago. That's what the doctors at the Communist Youth League said when the seizures disappeared, that my faith in la Revolución had driven the fiend, the possessor away, sent him packing with the gusanos to Miami.

The possessor? ¿Estás loco, muchacho?

But they lied. You were here. You had not left. You were hiding in Guantánamo the whole time and you possessed others. You drove the heroic comandante to suicide, you drove the widow Alicia to murder, you drove the old woman to madness. My mother knew it. That's why she sent me on this mission, to face you one last time. But you won. You grew in me again, you won the last battle and you were crossing the frontier at last, a victor, against me, against el Rubio, against the india who summoned you with her implorations, even against the poor crocodiles in the river.

Save your breath, muchacho, we may be up here a long time. I wish you were making sense so that I could defend myself, but you are talking like one who has just awoken and is not sure whether he is still trapped in the worlds of his dreams.

Joshua did not heed the warning to ration his breath. He went on talking for the entire two days and nights they spent atop the banyan, his ramble interrupted only by short naps or when Triste, annoyed with the endless tale, closed in the cocoon so tightly, sealing the cracks where flesh joined flesh, so that there was no air to support speech. But even then, once the cracks reopened a little bit, Joshua did not heed the warning to shut up and ration his breath. He told Triste of the apartment on Cardenas Street where he spent his days alone as a child. He told him of sitting on the rusty iron-grill balcony and letting the little illness descend on him, a relief from the sweltering heat and the babble of the vendors and passersby on the street below. It was like being asleep and being awake at the same time, the only discomfort a blunt pain in the hollow of the nape. He did not notice the day turn to dusk, turn to evening and came to only when his mother shook him and told him it was time for his lessons, his geometry problems, his Bible reading and his daily memorization of a Milton couplet, not in translation, but in the original. English would serve him well, his mother said (when his time came). Joshua shivered, his eyelids trembled, the pain had moved up into deep inside his head, but he had not noticed. The day had passed unnoticingly and his mother was back. It was time for his lessons. He had mastered the nature of spheres and cylinders, he could feel them orbiting in his mind. He had reached the section in the Bible where the Lord commanded his namesake to cross the Jordan. He could recite the fall of the rebellious angels in the wishy-washy language of the enemy. It was time for his lessons and the little illness ebbed.