The Lazarus Rumba (88 page)

“Dios santo, mi hijita.” Alicia had been standing in the hallway. She had removed her yellow scarf. She remained still, her arms heavy at her sides. She stared like one who has been gouged suddenly and irrevocably by the bitter arrowhead of obsessive love. Had she not known her own daughter before this? Had she willed herself to forget, in the vain hope of postponing the pain that now struck her at her side, above the loin, like a fisted cramp, there where the flange of the arrow had lodged, and from where a wine-dark grief suffused all her insides? Had she lacked the courage to foresee the woman her daughter would become?

She was halfway out of the room, her foot jammed against the door, naked, her chin held high, her torso erect as an Ionic column, her fully formed breasts thrust forward as if she wore an invisible corset, the nipples so dark they seemed smudged with black earth, her thin arms unabashedly at her sides, her hands loose, her long legs slightly parted, slightly open, unconcerned with the vulnerability at their apex, all of her, towering over the diminutive confounded monsignor. Her hair was still tucked behind her ears falling behind her. She turned her head to her mother and her eyes filled and overbrimmed and rivulets glistened down her cheeks, but her body remained rigid, her chest did not heave, her belly did not convulse, her torso did not collapse. Only her eyes betrayed her sorrow. Alicia did not rush towards her, for this was not the helpless child,
mijita
, that had once been her daughter. This was a woman,
ya una mujercita
, that but for a feeble-minded grandmother and a well-meaning wearied priest, had made her way alone in the world,
mi vida
, fatherless all her life, motherless half of it.

Alicia memorized the body of the woman so that never again would it be so sinfully absent from her reveries. In every detail she saw the beauty marks, the charcoal streaks of the darkness from whence she had come forth, in the thick black eyebrows that converged on the bridge of her nose and almost touched each other as the Creator almost touches Adam near the dawn of the sixth day, in the marbles of her glittering eyes, as if some mad chef had let sugar sit too long over a fire, in the claret cast of her unpainted lips, droplets of blood mixed in equal parts with droplets of mud, in her mountain soil nipples, in the wisp of black smoke that surrounded her navel and vanished halfway up her belly, in her pubic mound, hidden by a tangle of unearthed roots, in the dusky glow of all her skin, especially the cheeks and the brow, and in the countless dolors that Alicia imagined pierced like black nails into her daughter's sacrificial body. And to all this, Teresita had added her own touch (as if not to be outdone by the cruel cleverness of nature)—she had fashioned a braided shackle around her left foot, from hair that may have been her own (for it was just as black), or may have been one of her lovers', as her grandmother suspected.

“How can you blame the child?” Adela had said in the kitchen in the only brief spurt of conversation while they waited for Father Gonzalo. She addressed Joshua and not Alicia. “How can you blame her for wanting to be loved as she deserves to be loved? I would not blame her even if she turned whore!”

Alicia did not move towards her daughter till Father Gonzalo grabbed her by the wrist and led her there, to the open door of the room, and used the mother as a mantle to cover the daughter's nakedness. As soon as her mother had placed her arms around her, Teresita's rigid body collapsed with all the force it had used to remain still and naked and undaunted in the presence of her mother's unmasked ghost. After she regained her balance, Alicia led her daughter into the room. Father Gonzalo closed the door behind them. In the darkness, they trampled houses and stepped on the citizen-dolls of Teresita's toy city, till they stumbled onto the bed and fell one on top of the other.

Alicia sat up and adjusted herself so that she held her daughter's head on her lap. She cuddled close. She passed her hands through her daughter's long hair. She massaged her temples. She spoke to her, the words muffled by the vasty deep of her indomitable grief.

“Mi vida. Mijita. Ya una mujercita.”

She alternated the tone, cadence, and order of the phrases as she repeated them, till it sounded as if she were softly crooning a rumbero's lullaby.

Sweat slicked Teresita's brow and moistened her hair. She too found the courage to speak. She proclaimed that she was not afraid anymore, that she had become used to ghosts, that there were many in the barrio, that though she could not keep track of them, her abuelita could, peeking through the slats of the closed shutters of the front bedroom, out into Maceo Street.

“No está tan loca como dicen. She beckons them in and they pass through the narrow gaps between the open slats. They visit with her. Feeble as she is, she must stand, for the spirits always insist on sitting in her rocking chair. She lets them. She knows how peevish spirits can get. She leans on her canes as long as she can and listens to their updates of the gossip from the next world. She seldom interrupts, except when she is astonished by something, some sin that passed unheard through this world—'¡No digas!,' she says—or when she has already heard a story—'Ay, ya ese cuento es más viejo que yo,' she says. She repays them by lighting votive candles for their quick passage through purgatory. The room is filled with candles. Gonzalo thinks it's a hazard, but abuelita pays him no mind. Many of the candles are for you, mamácita, even though you never visited with abuelita.”

She asked how many of her houses were trampled, how many of her dolls had been squashed. “They too will become ghosts. ¿No es así, mamacita? Don't some dolls have souls? I know that I am too old to believe that, but I do.”

She expressed doubt, for how could it be that a ghost had such ponderous steps, such rough hands, such a pulpy voice. “How could it be, mamacita? Have I wrongly summoned you back into your rotted body? I could not help it. In school there is una asentada (well, she was still a novice then, but she was desperate to be initiated, to feel the weight of her orisha in her), una mulatica with big green eyes like a crocodile. We call her La Cocodrila. She is the niece of a renowned madrina in Baracoa. It was her idea—after I told her your story one afternoon, after I told her how you had stopped sending letters, how abuelita had received a cable that informed her of your burial in the Isle of Pines. ‘Aha,' she said to me. ‘if she is buried then she can return. Only the unburied are doomed never to return to their loved ones.' She said she would tease the secret of some spell from her aunt, even though she herself was still a novice and had no skill yet to command such power. When she returned from a visit to Baracoa, she was very excited, her green pupils expanded till there was almost no white left in her eyes. This would be her first imploration of the orishas. She said all she needed from me was a lock of your hair and a lock of my own hair. I knew abuelita kept a lock of your hair, which she had saved from your first haircut, in a waxy envelope in her Bible, between the first and the second letter to the Romans. I stole it. One night, we went down, past the railroad tracks, to the river and trapped a bullfrog, which we would use as sacrifice. La Cocodrila slit the bullfrog's throat and caught the blood in a coconut shell. She made me put my finger in it and it was cool like the coolness of the river. She cut a sliver of coconut flesh. It had soaked up the bullfrog's blood like a swab of cotton. She broke the sliver in two as if it were a consecrated Host and ate her half and gave me the other half for me to eat. I handed her the locks of hair, yours and mine, and she dipped them in the shell and chanted to her gods, to the moon, to the stars, to the riverstones. Then she washed the locks in the riverwater and braided them tight, one to the other, and tied the braid to my ankle. She warned me never to take it off, never to wear high heels, never to raise my braided foot above my head, and never to cover the braid with a stocking, else the spell would be broken. The day your mother's hair turns all white in the grave, white like the unstained meat of half this coconut, her heart will bleed again and she will remember that once her hair was black as the midnight. And she will come to see you.' And she was right, mamácita, you waited. How sad it must have been for you, waiting in the mirror of your tomb, till
every
single strand turned white.”

Alicia listened, even as her three-phrase song continued, even as it trilled and grew loud and plaintive, like the wail of an Arab widow. From here till the end of her life, there would be no stopping of that song she had invented in that dark room where she had spent her first days as a widow, where her daughter had been conceived and where she now held her as if only an instant had passed, naked, sweating, chattering of spells and implorations, of how the mother that now held her in her arms was a sad spirit condemned for a brief while, through the magic of a crocodile-girl, to go back into its shrunken white-haired corpse.

Alicia listened, even as her three-phrase song continued long into the night, a piercing ululation sustained by the breath of her calamity, so that soon it surpassed the wail of
twenty
Arab widows, and the many neighbors in the barrio who began to listen heard it. It drowned the love ballads on their tocadiscos, the mambos on their transistor radios, the cries of their own children. And the old remembered a night, many years ago, when Alicia's mother had suffered her first
grito del corazón
, in the patio of her sister's house, under the giant fig tree, when her nephew had lost his left eye. They remembered how the blood-soaked pillow could not muffle her cries, how they awoke from nightmares of tortures and stake burnings to find that the wail was as real as the sweat on their sheets, and thus they assured their young ones: “The old woman is readying for the grave. She has regained that great voice she lost so many years ago.”

But the young ones heard something else. They recognized Alicia's sad song as
el llanto de los quince
, which they had not heard since the trinary deaths of the blond police captain, his shorn-headed indian servant, and the massive bullmastiff Tomás de Aquino.

The Bakery Administrator's Daughter

Once, in Guantánamo, there had been fifteen Studebakers like the powder-blue Studebaker that had belonged to the murdered police captain. Once, before the triumph of la Revolución, before el Rubio had sprouted filaments of old gold under his armpits and on his chin and around his navel, before he had worked for the yanquis inside the naval base, before Colonel MacDougal had expelled him under suspición of spying for the Batista government, before he had ventured to the Sierra, hungry and barefoot, his services at first rejected by a guerrilla comandante because he did not own a gun, before el Rubio had ever dreamed of owning a car, any car, much less a yanqui car, much less a Studebaker, there had been fifteen of them in the small provinciality of Guantánamo.
Imagínense, quince Studebakers en este pueblecito de guajiros.
Actually over half of the Studebakers belonged to soldiers in the yanqui naval base, but in those days passage to and from the paradise of tin roofs was common—many Cubans, like el Rubio, worked inside the base and many soldiers visited the town when on leave—there was no Cerca Peerless, no mines, no river infested with crocodiles, no bay infested with sharks, no watchtowers.

The flaky upper-crust families, the type of families that put ads in the local newspapers looking for “white Spaniard maids,” or those families less aristocratic, less bleached in their lineage, who had connections with the ruling regime, the type whose mothers and daughters, y hasta la anciana abuelita, dyed their hair the color of el Rubio's natural hue, resplendent and ochery as just-sifted riverbed gold, had made a ritual of leasing the fifteen Studebakers from their owners on the fifteenth anniversary of each daughter's birth, the day she was welcomed into womanhood. Fifteen couples would be invited to ride in the fifteen yanqui cars to the feast in the Centro Municipal near Parque Martí, where along with the father and her daughter they would dance to a mamboed version of a Strauss waltz.

After the triumph of la Revolución, some of the families that had not fled had tried to continue this ritual but were thwarted when they found that el Rubio would not lease his Studebaker (which had come into his possession when one of Batista's henchmen, a sergeant in the Rural Guard, had fled with his family on the eve of la Revolución, leaving behind any possessions that could not be stuffed into one of his fourteen suitcases, or hastily sewn into the lining of his evening jackets, worn dutifully as dresses by his four young daughters, or into the virgin crevices of his own body) for the purpose of this outdated bourgeois ritual. Thus the celebrations went on for a few years, marred, misnumbered, truncated, sometimes with seven Studebakers, sometimes with four and finally with as few as two, the fifteen couples crowded into the spacious cars like clowns in a circus. Finally, when el Rubio had amassed enough power and been appointed chief of the revolutionary police, he sabotaged the engines of the two remaining Studebakers and forbid, by decree, the celebration of
las fiestas de los quince.
Never having sired a child, never having known the luxurious joy of doting on a daughter, he had underestimated the will with which Cuban fathers want to please their daughters. The celebrations went on, more outrageous than before. The shells of the two remaining Studebakers were bought and fixed over twin mulecarts, and once more the fifteen privileged couples jammed in, their suits and dresses grown more and more shabby with the passing years, badly tailored, the lining of suits poking out of the hems like hounds' tongues, the seams of the dresses clustered and bulged like the flesh of creeping slugs; and too many of these dresses the señoritas proudly wore, their chins cocked, their faces painted, their hair stiffened like baked meringue, their gazes askant, as if they were attending a ball at Versailles, bore the vestigial traces, in their heaviness, their loud patterns, their patchwork, of drapes and furniture upholstery. It was murmured in the local CDR, after the minute book had been shut, that in less than five years of progress, la Revolución had left every window of Guantánamo naked and every chair or sofa bare as a skinned rabbit. Still, they celebrated. Against the decree, in badly tailored suits and hull-thick dresses they celebrated. Two lame mules hung with cowbells tugged the husks of two Studebakers, their rusty exteriors garlanded with hibiscus and branches of crape myrtle, their hollowed interiors jammed with fifteen couples armed with claves, castanets, and maracas, past the Department of State Security, past the office of the man who had decreed against them, and they aimed their great joyous noise at him, daring him to rejoice along for another
niña
had become
una mujer.