The Lazarus Rumba (80 page)

I stood on my hands on the lowest step and stretched my legs upward and back to the highest step so that my body was like a bridge into the holy temple. Héctor approached me and stood on his tiptoes over me, reaching up and grabbing my shins, so that he was a canopy over my bridge, and I felt the warmth of the sun off me and on him.

“More, more,” I commanded him. “Your body will stretch more, mi nenito.”

He stood higher on his tiptoes and grabbed lower on my shins and I felt his muscles stretch like when a drumskin first dries, wanting to tear away from his bones and I felt him hard against my belly.

“¡No, no, sin toquar!”

“I'm trying, coño.”

“No. You are not clearing your mind.” I felt my voice leave me through the top of my head and bounce off the stone step. “You are thinking of other things.”

“I am thinking of that man's tears, mi amorcito.” I felt Héctor's voice cut into my body through the muscles in the floor of my pelvis. “I am thinking of snakes. I am thinking, what if I never taste you again and have to spend the rest of my life tasting them inside that truck.”

“Forget everything. You are here now. You are with me. You are a twisted angel. Close your eyes and forget everything.”

“Sí, sí, mi amorcito. I will forget.”

For this to work, our bodies (with the exception of where he was grabbing my shins) could not touch, so that his flesh and my flesh would know each other not by contact or penetration, which is the common way, the way of man and all the animals, but by nearness, which is the way of faith, the way man knows Changó and all the saints, and the way Héctor knew his brother and the many other dead when he performed his Lazarus Rumba.

“I don't remember the Lazarus Rumba, mi amorcito,” he had told me a few days before. “I don't remember being famous and adored.”

Sí, sí, mi amorcito. I will forget.
Héctor's voice was all inside me now, like a breeze caught in a cavern. It rippled the pools of my blood. He let go of my shins.

I closed my eyes. I waited till I too had forgotten.

¡Ahora! ¡Ahora! ¡Mi nenito!
My voice bounced again off the smooth stone and it caught under Héctors heels and pushed him off the tips of his long toes. Héctor floated above me for a moment and I knew him as I will know him for the rest of my life. I knew him by the marvelous cosquillitas of his nearness. Then he fell on me and I tasted the sea-water sweat on his inner thighs and, twisted as we were, we made love on the smooth church steps.

“¡Maricones y brujos tambien! ¡No jodan!” Their rifle butts wedged us apart. “¿Cómo se atreven? This is sacred ground!” A blunt blow to the side of my head knocked me out.

When I came to I was sprawled on the church steps. I smelled and tasted bourbon on my face. They had woken me up so I could watch. Héctor was still naked, sitting on the ground, his arms resting on his knees, his pinga still half-hard. There was blood on his face and on his arms. A cowboy pistol was pointed at his face. Héctor, his eyes squinting because his face was to the dying afternoon sun, glared at the guard. “Go ahead, hi jo de puta!” he taunted him. It was the first time I heard him raise his voice to any of the guards. “Do it if you dare. See what doña Federica la Marica does with you! Do it if you dare! Do it, hijo de la gran puta!”

Héctor lunged for his machete. The guard lowered his pistol and fired into Héctor's back, then he kicked him over and fired into Héctor's chest and into Héctor's belly. I don't remember how many shots. I don't remember screaming. I don't remember Héctor's body bouncing on the ground like an epileptic. I don't remember Héctor's blood splattering on his murderer's boots turning there into black oil-slick globules. I do remember after he was dead seeing his beautiful long toes quiver in unison, like the wings of a pigeon who will never fly again. My twisted angel had been taken from me. I had no strength to remain conscious.

Nunca gozaré otra vez.

Of what happened later, all that I know now I learned from that poor old queen Cuco la Loca.

“I know this boy tried to escape,” Federico Sánchez told the guards on the front steps of his cottage, Héctors body lying underneath them, still naked, its face uncovered, its eyes unshut. “I know that you had no choice but to use force. You will forget that this happened. This boy died of hepatitis. In order not to spread the disease, his body will be burned and the ashes sent to whatever relatives you can find.
If
you find any. Many of these degenerates, in shame, have abandoned and forgotten about their families.”

The murderers moved to pick up Héctor's body.

“Un momento,” Federico Sánchez said raising his left hand. He looked at Héctor's face for the first time. It had been spared.

“The eyes will not close, mi comandante,” one of the murderers said as if apologizing for a mistake.

“Go wash up. All of you. Leave the body here. I will have my servants carry it in the house and have Dr. Domínguez from the infirmary conduct an autopsy.”

“An autopsy, mi comandante?”

“¡Pero coño, están sordos! Leave the body!”

There was complete silence except for the sound of the river current, which Cuco la Loca often said always passed by that house with the whispery rumble of freshly pumped blood. Federico Sánchez stretched his tongue. The murderers, all of them, turned and walked away from the cottage by the river. Federico Sánchez waited for an hour, standing over Héctor's body, staring at his face. Watching from one of the upstairs windows, Cuco la Loca thought he heard him speak to the corpse.
Puñetero, tan bonito y tan malagradecido que eres.
Cuco la Loca was horrified at the thought of having to carry Héctor's body into the house. But he was upstairs waiting for the order. The order never came. Federico Sánchez knelt by the corpse and cradled it as the Virgin did with her Son and picked it up himself and washed it in the river by scrubbing a smooth round sun-bleached stone on the wounds and then he carried it into the house. The body was not burned till almost four days later. Federico Sánchez took one of his mother's linen bedsheets and used it as a shroud and laid the body on the mahogany table and kept a vigil over it, drinking bourbon and talking to it. And when the sheet became stained with the darkening blood he wrapped it in another one and another one, so that by the fourth day he had used almost all of the linen sheets his mother had given him to take with him. Cuco la Loca was in charge of bringing Federico Sánchez the fresh linen and the bourbon twice a day. He brought him pork sandwiches and tamales and black bean soup also, but Federico Sánchez did not eat. By the second evening Cuco la Loca had to hold his breath when he walked into the study. On the third evening he became ill and vomited right outside the door. Federico Sánchez went out to him and patted him on his hunched back and told him that
these were the wages for our abominable Sin.
On the fourth day Federico Sánchez opened the seven linen sheets, one by one, and with his bowie knife cut into Héctor's bloated body under the left nipple and dug in under the ribcage and pulled out Héctor's brittling heart, which but for a scrape, the bullets had spared. That night, a group of guards, led by the one who had warned Héctor on the afternoon of his death, broke into Federico Sánchez's cottage and in a quickly assembled tribunal in the parlor just beyond the study where Héctor's body lay, charged him and convicted him with treason to the principles of la Revolución. That same evening, in the backyard of the cottage by the river, Federico Sánchez was executed. The order, we heard later, had come directly from La Habana. It was still said that Héctor died the way Federico Sánchez had said he died, and that his body was burned to avoid the spread of hepatitis. Federico Sánchez's own body was transported to his mother's yellow villa near the capital, where it was said his mother sicked all her mangy German shepherds on the coroners, who fled, leaving the starved dogs to tear with their untrimmed paws at the thin-paneled pine coffin.

Monologue of Triste the Contortionist: The Tale of the Tub

Señora Alicia, this world is strange. It is said that certain survivors of the Nazi death camps at times look back on those days with an eerie nostalgia, for not only was it a time of the most unimaginable horrors, but it was also the time of their youth. And who does not find a glint of joy even in the most wretched youth, and who does not, in the later years, yearn for that glint of joy. That is what your cousin is for me. He is my lost joy, my lost youth, my everything that I will not ever feel again. And I surprise myself, at times I too feel this perverse nostalgia. Héctor is with me again in the telling of all these horrors. It is Héctor's ghost I follow from place to place as I pass through the rest of my life, from nothing to nothing more.

When pressure from international humanitarian groups and European intellectuals became too great, Fidel forced his brother to shut down the homosexual labor camps. One day, the gates were opened and our uniforms and our work boots were taken from us and naked we remained inside the barracks. Father came and inspected us one last time. He no longer seemed deserving of that nickname. He had grown bitter and cynical. The room with the pianito had been shut down in the time of Federico Sánchez's death. His beard had grown longer and grayer and he played with it incessantly, twirling the pointy end around his forefinger. He no longer wore the cross whittled from a coconut shell. His eyes had darkened to a brownish yellow, the hue of bile. He inspected our groin areas and our backsides, making sure all the old wounds had healed, snickering and shaking his head and muttering to himself that he had never seen such healthy packages in all his life, that now all his work would be for nought and things would surely go to ruins. Some of the men became aroused during his examination and Father grew disgusted and spit at his side and examined these men no further. He prophesied that due to the shutting of the labor camps, los maricones would roam rampant on the Island, unpunished for their perversions, doing great damage not only to innocent others but to their ignorant selves. When he was finished with his examination, he pulled out a wrinkled piece of paper from his coat pocket and read out loud to us in an affected and sonorous voice (so unlike his former tones of kindness) a passage from Paul's first letter to the lust-struck Corinthians, a passage punctuated by the second shortest verse in the Bible:
Shun fornication!

Afterwards, naked as we were, we were forced to sort through a pile of old rags and a separate pile of old shoes. This would be the costumes of our exodus, the discarded tatters of the meekest guajiros. I found only a pair of shorts and someone else found me a mismatched pair of worn leather moccasins that fit me. Then the gates were opened and we were evicted from our prison-home. The new comandante in charge of the camp, the one that had warned Héctor on the day of his death, watched from the porch of the cottage by the river, smoking a long Montecristo. He had joked in his farewell speech to us a few days before that now that the camp was closing he was going to have to become a proper man and find himself a fleshy-hipped cubanita for a wife. I waved at him as I passed the gate. I will always remember him not as the man who daily raped the one that I once loved that you once loved, but as the man who with a few courageous selfless words had tried to save him. The cottage was far away from us and I don't know if he saw me, but he did not wave back. I wonder what they all did after the last one of us had left the camp. I wonder if they stripped and made love to each other like we had shown them in the cab of the conscript transport truck. I wonder what happened to the old guard who was in charge of the showers. I wonder if he still lives. I wonder if he thinks about Héctor now as often as I do.

I joined a group of about ten of us that included Cuco la Loca and some others whose homes were in Oriente. Most of the freed conscripts, no matter where they were from, headed west, for the capital; there, right under the tyrant's nose, they were sure their brand of love would be freer and easier to find. (Many maricas still thought of Fidel as their protector, and blamed the persecutions and the labor camps on the evil influences of his brother!) Pero sea lo que sea, I wanted nothing to do with the capital. I wanted to see my abuelita before she passed into the other world. From the few letters I had received from her, it was clear—from the trembling of the script, the loss of reason in all matters except for the meticulous detailing of all her countless pains and discomforts and the exact herb that a padrino had prescribed for each one—that she was on the brink of death. Our group separated from the larger group and headed east.

We did just as Father had feared we would do. We were like a gang of tigers freed from a 200. Through each small town or large city that we passed we roamed the night and seduced young men (the more recently married, the greater the catch) who were more than eager to escape their boxed existences and join us. They too had been imprisoned. They too had now been freed. We did just as Father had feared we would do. We ran rampant and infected the innocents with our newfound freedom. This, we proclaimed, was a new era for la Revolución. The ‘70s would be ours,
la década de los maricas.
Our group had grown to over thirty by the time we crossed into Oriente, headed for Santiago, there to establish the new capital of a freer Island. We were biased. We knew that the eastern side of the Island, specifically the easternmost province of Oriente, was the hotbed of everything that is worthy in our history. Our many rebellions and revolutions against colonialists and imperialists, the most sensual and native dances like el son, the most renowned padrinos of santería, the remains of José Martí, el Comandante-en-Jefe himself and even Our Blessed Mother, all called Oriente home. Oriente was the
real
Cuba, and Santiago therefore the
real
capital.