The Lazarus Rumba (83 page)

So here is the Newer Man in the service of the enemy. This is the best
Granma
and the Party factkeepers can do. This is the information they feed to the yanqui biographers (most of whom would be much better suited for writing coarse fiction), this is their finest insult. This cliché of working for
la CIA
, long after
la CIA
had realized that it was useless to try to murder a man so smeared with a tyrant's luck.

But should not this yanqui biographer have been better-versed in the march of history, the history of revolutions (since he was writing about one)? Should he not have known that threats from the outside are followed on the heels by threats from the inside, that rebels rise against revolutionaries, that once a New Man sheds his skin he can metamorphose into nothing else but a Newer Man? In revolutions, there is no retracing of steps. (Someone should grab all these incompetent yanqui historians by the ear and force them to read their Carlyle!)

So, perhaps this story can be better told.

By October of 1972, nearing the decade anniversary of the missile crisis,
la CIA
had most of its energies directed eastward, towards Laos and Saigon, and inward, burrowing, along with its notorious cousin the FBI, into every tavern, every meeting hall, every dormitory room of every yanqui college campus. Fidel Castro, though certainly not forgotten, was more certainly no longer the main obsession. So a young man with no surname, sleeping on a bench under the shade of an almond tree, would not
have been approached by sunglassed men in dark suits and offered a sackful of dollars and one single cyanide capsule. We ought to be more imaginative than that. We ought not to accept such unoriginal stories from such official sources.

Perhaps this story can be better told in the tongue of the people, since the yanquis, incompetent as they are, are in control of the publishing empires, and respected journalists like Gianni Denti have taken to hiding in the antechambers of Silence.

A young man without a surname, sleeping on a bench under the shade of an almond tree, weary from a hazardous crossing over the Gulf of Batabanó on a raft of live rats, perhaps suffering from sunstroke … one late afternoon awakes. He is well rested. He has slept four-and-a-half scores of siestas. His vision is clear, no need for cafecito, no need to recall dreams. It is near dusk. The harvest sun behind him is reflected a hundred times on the windows of the hotel across the street. The windows are frosty with dew, with the Europeans' air-conditioned homesickness. The droplets glimmer like old gold. Except for a few passing cars on “L” street, it is desolate. The jeeps that he has never noticed are not parked in the front driveway of the hotel. He hears music, and he knows it is this music that has awakened him. He sits up and tries to guess where the music is coming from, tries to follow its rhythm with the wooden soles of his chancletas. The song backed by drums and
tres
guitars is a call to a party.

He looks at his dirty poncho, at his ragged shorts, at the soot under his toenails and he knows he will not be let in. Many come and are welcomed.

Suddenly the gatekeeper has a change of heart. He says he has new orders.

The guest, dressed in a most elegant Italian suit, is annoyed.

The gatekeeper, unafraid to insult the guest, unafraid to be blunt, explains himself.

Joshua laughs. He has stood and has captured the rhythm of the song with the soles of his chancletas. The current moves up his brown hairy legs into his hips. He has not danced since he was a child and listened to the street musicians from the iron-grill balcony of the apartment on Cardenas Street before he fell into his trances. He feels for the first time a part of his world. Dancing is the talent of the Islanders. There is only one Cuban who never dances. Joshua continues to dance and laughs again.

The poor guest in the fine-cut Italian suit has not been let in, for, as the gatekeeper has put it, the party is not for ugly people. Though the song is old, he knows why it is sung now.

El Líder had made a State visit to Paris. He was welcomed in the presidential palace, he toured the Louvre, he was photographed in front of the Mona Lisa. And all throughout his visit he forsook his usual military garb for a custom-made midnight-blue Italian suit.
Granma
, for a moment forgetting its respectability as the Party's Word, printed a short caption under one of the photographs:
¡Coño! ¡Qué guapo!
But the picture told a truer story that a hundred flattering captions would not alter. In his custom-cut Italian suit, el Líder looked like a petulant itchy child forced to dress up for his First Communion in hand-me-down ill-fitting clothes.

Did the three Italian tailors who were summoned from Milan to the Palace of the Revolution, these card-carrying members of the Italian Communist Party, do this on purpose? Did they intentionally cut the shoulders so high and bunch the cloth in the upper back so that el Líder looked hunchbacked? Did they infuse the lapels with a wish to fly so that they constantly flapped and waggled like the wings of a heavy pelican? Did they sew the hem of the pants just high enough so that in a full-length photo, with his large leather moccasins, el Líder looked like a clown,
un payasón
, as one of the underground mimeographed quarterlies put it? Did they snicker as they mistaught him how to tie a Windsor knot so that it was thick as a fist pressed up under his Adam's apple? Did not anyone have the heart to tell el Líder that these three Italian tailors were most certainly traitors to the Party, agents of
la CIA
, or worse, of the
banished Sicilian mob that once ruled the capital, that they set out, from the first cut of cloth, to make him look like a barbarian at a ball, the Philistine among the Civilized, the Untutored among the Sophisticated, and the Ugly among the Beautified? Who could have guessed looking at him so misdressed, so uneasy, tugging at his collar, straightening his fat-fisted tie, holding down his lapels, that he too was an heir of Rousseau and Danton and Marat? How great the skill of three demonic Italian scissors, three traitorous Italian needles that made the exalted look so lowly.

And so the song that Joshua hears, whose rhythm he captures in the rattle of his chancletas, in the turbulence of his hips, was heard all over the capital in those days.

And those that sing it embrace this young man with no surname. The bartender at the Hotel Habana Libre is named Luisito Cuzco. He is no taller than five feet and has brown smooth cheeks and large brown eyes punctuated by almost hairless triangular eyebrows. He is a Siboney indian. There are few of these left on the Island. The Spaniards, with the blessing of Rome, were of two minds: conversion or genocide. Luisito Cuzco is a survivor of an extinct race. So he lies. He invents a home. He claims he is from Ecuador. After reading Che Guevara's journal of his travels through South America, he borrows the name of a mythical city and makes it his own. People do not question him, so he invents a lineage. He is Inca royalty. His many friends hence call him
la princesa.
He plays the
tres
guitar and calls his band Los Rumberos Incas. He welcomes the young man with no surname. For one, this is the type that attracts him, for another he knows what it is like to be a man without a place, knows how to endure in the harshest climes, like the weeds that thrive in the sea. Joshua divulges his real name before he realizes that this may be a capital mistake. He tries often to lie to Luisito Cuzco but finds it difficult. In every conversation the indian is always a few steps ahead.
No jodas a un jodedor:
that is his favorite phrase. Luisito Cuzco gives Joshua a job, lets him sleep in a cot in his tenement, shows him how to play the güiro and lets him sit in with Los Rumberos Inca. He cannot guess, as no man can, what awaits him, how he will be repaid for these generosities, how soon he will join his murdered ancestors.

El Líder was back in his military garb. He seemed himself again, boisterous and chatty, tarde tras tarde, as he drank his milkshake. (He either had been shielded from the heavy ridicule over his Milanese wardrobe or purposefully ignored it.) He bragged that Paris was the second most beautiful city in the world, more illustrious than Moscow, more provocative than New York.

“Pero vaya, somewhat … cómo te digo … illusory, like a beautiful woman without a heart, a phantom princess, no match for the fiery living soul of nuestra Habana.”

Luisito Cuzco leaned into the bar. He took back the empty milkshake glass and washed it in the sink underneath him. He placed it aside, for el Jefe and el Jefe alone drank from this glass. “Eso va sin decirlo, comandante.” He looked for Joshua to ask him to bring more glasses from the kitchen; but Joshua, as usual when the Comandante-en-Jefe was present, was not to be found.

“Why are you afraid of him,” Luisito Cuzco asked Joshua after a session at a nightclub in the Vedado district. “He is just a man like you and me.”

“I am not afraid of anyone.”

“Entonces, why do you always hide when he comes to the bar?”

“Mira, no te confundas. I am not a communist. I am an orphan. I have told you the story. I came to the capital because someday I am going to go to the university. Y que importa, whether I see him or not. Like he cares about anybody but himself. Like he cares about us, the people. Why aren't Cubans allowed in that club we played tonight? What's this tourists and Russians only? Is that the triumph of our Revolución? Mierda, they don't even know how to dance! Why do we even
play
there!”

“Sabes bien why we play there, they pay us in dollars.”

“Yeah okay, just don't let
him
see your dollars while you are fawning over him and crushing the ice for his milkshake.”

“Coño, I have been good to you. I am not a communist either.”

“No, claro que no, you are a princess. An Inca princess.”

Luisito Cuzco laughed, he put his arm around Joshua's waist. He had about him the uncomplicated ease of a commoner and was almost a foot shorter than Joshua so that in no way could the latter interpret this gesture as threatening. They walked in silence. And Joshua eventually put his arm around Luisito Cuzco's shoulder, so that they walked entwined like a father and son walking home from a
béisbol
game. They had walked less than a block when the streetlamps went out all at once.

“Otro apagón,” Joshua said. “Can't we ever go a whole night without one in this
maldita ciudad?
Can't you speak to
him
about it?”

In the incipient darkness, Luisito Cuzco tightened his grip around Joshua's waist. “You played well tonight. La gente te quiere. Maybe you can stay with us for a while.”

Joshua loosened from his embrace and crossed the desolate street and walked ahead.

“Oye,” Luisito Cuzco shouted after him. “No te pongas bravo. Just a thought. I know you came here to do other things.” But he had lost
Joshua in the shadows of the unlit street. He quickened his pace lest for some reason the boy should decide to leave him. He cursed himself. He had let his feelings intrude. He had wandered from the script. He had said the wrong thing. It might prove costly. But when he reached his tenement building, Joshua was sitting on the steps out front, his head between his knees. Luisito pulled a flask of Havana Club out of his back pocket. This was another of the advantages. The manager nightly slipped him a flask of rum. Joshua, for the first time since Luisito Cuzco had known, accepted the offer of the flask and tilted his head back and took a long gulp.

“Maybe we ought to get you some new clothes, now that you have become so popular. A real dancer's outfit. Vaya, prestao, you can give it back to us when you leave.”

The days go on. Good, Luisito Cuzco, thinks. Let the days go on. Joshua has not worked up the nerve. And the more the days pass, the more his resolve is likely to weaken. He is caught in more lies. Like an unskilled storyteller, Joshua cannot remember what came before and what should naturally follow thereafter. But Luisito Cuzco does not correct him. He lets him invent as many past lives as he cares. Joshua does, however, prove a skilled barback, and a more skilled musician and performer. The people really do love him. Fat-cheeked Russian women with smeared-on lipstick and platinum hair throw themselves at him in the nightclubs. Russian soldiers and European bankers on the dance floor mimic the furious zapateo of his wooden-soled chancletas, the churn within his ragged shorts. But they are not Cuban, and you cannot fake such things. There are no dancers on the dance floor. Near the end of each show, Joshua puts down his güiro and moves center stage, next to the microphone, next to Luisito Cuzco, who croons into it: