The Lazarus Rumba (92 page)

But for his greatest sin perhaps papá's ghost was culpable, most of all your abuelita blamed papá's ghost for his infidelity, for coming and going with as little regard for others as when he had been a man. Not even in his grave, not even for his granddaughter, so many years later, would he stay put. In this your abuelita was not wrong. Many years after his death we were not sure on what day, what week, what season papá's ghost would drop by for a brief visit, on what morning we would notice your abuelita's rocking chair rocking, rocking all by itself for no reason at all. Poor papá. It is his charm, his restlessness that is yours.

Little is lost by any single death, mi vida. Little.

Remember the story I used to tell you when your abuelita would let me have you, the story I used to tell you before bedtime. ¿Te acuerdas, mijita? Your abuelita did not like the story. She said it was too morose for a young girl. My ti-íta Edith used to tell it to me and my cousins when we were children, and we had liked it. And you liked it. Remember. Remember the old willow who lived alone near a wood, the old willow whose branches were tears, misty and yellow, the old willow who had wept so much, so long, that all her eyes had gone blind. ¿Te acuerdas?

“And how many eyes did the blind willow have?” you asked, snuggled against me in that dark room with so many moons.

“As many eyes as she had branches, and branches of branches.”

“And how many eyes is that?”

“Many many eyes … over a hundred, over a hundred hundreds, more eyes than a cloud of flies.”

“And why did she weep?”

“She wept for many reasons. She wept because she was alone. She wept because she had once been one in a family that formed a majestic grove near a brook where poets came for shade and inspiration. But there had been a drought and all had perished but her. She wept because many came from faraway lands to the base of her trunk, maidens and madmen, emperors and fools, to recount the tale of their sad lives, came from faraway lands only because they knew she would weep for them as no one else would. She was a great weeper! But mostly, she wept because it was the thing she knew how to do best. She had no ears so she could not hear. She had no nose so she could not smell. She had no tongue so she could not speak. She had only eyes, eyes brimming with tears.”

“And why did tears make her blind?”

“Because tears are like little fires surrounded by a bubble of seawater.”

“Tears burn,” you said. “I know.”

“But on her death, she was rewarded by God. She was planted by a stream in the gardens of Heaven so that all who saw her may be reminded of the world they had left behind. So that they may never forget. There is no purpose in Heaven without memory of this earth. God needs this earth as much as we need his Heaven.”

“And she wept even then? Even in Heaven she wept?”

“Even in Heaven, for God had asked her not to stop doing what she did best.”

“Poor willow. Even in Heaven.”

And then you snuggled tighter against me and kissed my neck and slept, your breath like a baby dragon.

Even in Heaven, at last, where she was going all along.
Mi vida. Mijita. Ya una mujercita.

You first touched me in the basement of the schoolhouse. If I could now touch you back, my dear Julio, touch you as if my fingers were waking from a long bloodless sleep, as if your warrior's hull were the petals of a pale virgin's cheek. My hand dares not. It is as unsure, as petrified as the hand that did not reach for you as the schoolchildren watched.

“Vamos, señorita,” you said, “por favor, por el amor de Dios, direct me. It will be safer for the children if I do not linger here too long. The Rural Guard is everywhere. I cannot say for sure that they have not followed me here and are surrounding the schoolhouse right now. Vamos, señorita, por favor.”

I saw, and the schoolchildren saw, the rusty pistol tucked into your pants, aimed down at your crotch. But even in the unlikely chance that such a weapon functioned, that it was loaded, I knew, and the schoolchildren knew, that you would never use it. Not on us. I was not afraid and the schoolchildren were not afraid. You were no warrior yet—though on your entrance into our room you had announced that you were a guerrillero, a revolucionario, an enemy to the tyrant. Had I not felt the blood plummet out of my heart, my limbs grow numb, my brow cold from something far more startling than fear, I would have felt pity, a lo mejor even revulsion, for you looked far too feeble, too desperate—barefoot, mud under your toenails, thin as a grave-dweller, the armature of your ribs poking at your oversized grimy campesino smock, your cheeks and your hands soiled, your beard and your shock of hair twisted into intricate knots, as if by some wicked design—to be a proper enemy to anyone, even the impotent indio tyrant.

No child cried out. They seemed in fact to welcome your intrusion into the drudgery of their multiplication lessons. They gladly put down their nubbed pencils and shut their notebooks and rested their faces on their hands and watched you, watched us as if we were playing out a scene in a yanqui movie. The skeletal lunatic prophet comes to the wistaria-covered country schoolhouse. I could have made you vanish. I could have turned back to the chalky dogged logic of the blackboard where 6 times 6 was 36 and 6 times 7 was 42, and click by click, with the end of my pointer, like a hypnotist, I would have taken back their attention, made you less interesting than a lump of melting ice. Strange as you were, armed as you were, they were still far more in awe and fear of me than they were of you. But your hand moved, and I knew, and the schoolchildren knew, it was not moving for the pistol. Your dirty hand moved and it reached for mine.

“Vamos, señorita, por favor. I was told by the Comandante-en-Jefe to ask for no one, to search for the most beautiful woman in the schoolhouse … that she had the key to the trapdoor, that she would direct me to the basement.”

Later you invented stories, you told me you had seen me through a grimy window as you scurried up to the schoolhouse like a sand critter, that you had caught a glimpse of the side of my face, of the slope of my bare milky shoulder, as I wrote out the multiplication tables. Later you invented stories to seduce me, as if you needed to, as if I would love you for the dangers you had passed, and you would love me that I did pity them, as if I indeed were one of those schoolchildren whose multiplication lesson you had so conveniently interrupted and not the woman who held back her hand from you, to the thrall of the schoolchildren, who seemed to know this drama better than we who were playing it.

I went to the bottom drawer of my desk and fetched my key ring and motioned with it, jingling you out of the room. You, as obedient as any of my schoolchildren, followed me to the trapdoor in the back, across the schoolyard. “I know he has come to see you.” Your voice was whispery, sheepish. “I know you have done this, vamos, unwillingly. But you will not live to regret it. I know you have done this more for the safety of your children than for our cause, but it is one and the same. When they are men and women, they will be glad they had such a teacher as you. Many guajiros are joining our ranks … our army is growing, but ten thousand men without weapons are useless in the struggle against the tyrant.”

As usual, you exaggerated, the rebel army then consisted of a few hundred men, if that.

I undid the lock and threw back open one of the trapdoors. The noise frightened you. You crouched down and hunched your back and looked around. But you did not imagine that I had done it on purpose. You helped me open the opposite door and you repeated in my ear that you were not sure you had not been followed. We laid the other heavy wooden door gently on the ground. The planks were spongy from the recent rains. The sharp sweet stink of gunpowder, like aged cheese, wafted up from the basement. This pleased you. You craned your neck and peered into the opening, your shoulder blades poking up like arrow heads under your smock. The cloud of fear and doubt had melted from your face. The gunpowder was very important, you said, it was needed to set booby traps for the Rural Guard.

“You are no warrior,” I said. The strong smell was not a good sign. It meant that some of the ammunition had likely gotten wet.

“How?” you said, growing nervous again, backing off and wrinkling your eyes like a cat who has come across an unnerving odor, again darting looks into the woods that surrounded the schoolhouse.

“It has rained. There are leaks. I warned him. I warned your friend the lawyer. But like most lawyers, he seems to lack any talent for listening. Maybe lawyers and graduate students aren't the best bunch to be leading an army against Batista. Though, bien sabe todo el mundo, he is no warrior himself, no matter how many military titles he attaches before his name. Couldn't you find any professional colonels in Mexico?”

You smiled. You let me mock you. Mock your cause. You were not yet so enamored of la Revolución.

“It has rained?” You pushed your fingers into the moist earth. “Coño, I
know
it has rained, señorita! I have slept under the rains since we arrived from Mexico. Mírame, coño, am I not a creature of these rains? But the comandante said you had put the weapons in a dry place! That is why he brought them here.”

“The earth leaks. I told your friend the lawyer.”

“Sí, the earth leaks … El Comandante-en-Jefe would not know that.”

And you put out your hand again and this time I took it and led you into the basement. The shadows emboldened you. (Were you a ghost even then, at the height of your life?) You pretended to forget why you had come. You grazed against me in a manner that had nothing to do with your duty, your mission. (In this, your friend the lawyer had been different—dry-worded threats, fixed gaze, two paces apart, all business.) You said that I was right, that you were no warrior and that you would not be a warrior again when the tyrant was overthrown. And, as if this promise had been asked of you, you touched me to prove your sincerity. Your hand ticklish as a rain breeze on my bare shoulder. You asked me for permission to return, to return when there were no weapons to gather. You asked me for permission like a schoolboy. I did not answer one way or the other. I could not. But making no answer was too clear an answer, so you touched me again, desperate, with the weightiness of a drowning creature, before you gathered up the sack of rifles and the casks of gunpowder and left me there in that dank hole under our schoolhouse, waiting for your return.

It was only when the schoolchildren asked me that I realized I did not know your name. So they helped me invent stories about you, calling you simply el Esqueleto. And now I know that it was these stories more than anything else that made me unable to forget, that taught me how to touch you back.

Ay, sí pudiera … that I could bring them here to me now with their stories. My children, grown as they are now, proper servants of la Revolución. That they could teach me again not to know your name, your part, your destiny. That they may invent worlds where neither you nor any of the rebels ever existed: an isle where a ragtag band of men whose skeletons grew on the outside like sea-crawlers fought and defeated a large army of ponderous green bulls, and in the waste of the battlefield grabbed each of the slaughtered bulls by the fleshy pouch and sunk in their blades under the throat and slipped it down the belly and peeled off their rough hides and like the savage indians of yanqui lore wore the skin of their enemy as armor for future battles. The men whose skeletons grew on the outside would rule the mountain for many generations, the children said, for they were protected and guided by the skinless ghosts of a thousand enemies. My children, who had trouble with 8 times 9, but somehow knew their world as well as the fates did.

And so they taught me to know you, by peeling you skin by skin. How many visits did you make to our schoolhouse in Ermita? How many skins did you let me peel off in that dank basement, till I touched you, touched you like none of your enemies, none of your compañeros had ever touched you. And as the ends of my fingers, the inside of my lips learned every part of you, guessed at shapes I did not know, you remained still as a fleshless bone, your only movement the breath that passed through you, humming and sighing like a wind through a hollow stump. ¿Qué pasó? What happened to that revolutionary patience with which you let me love you?—which I now mimic (this ferocious torpid mockery my only tribute to you, my lost, lost husband), here, hidden in the walls of this valley, as dark and as dank as that basement, no longer aware of what is night or what is day, the nameless jutías
my
compañeras. Like me they will no longer serve, will no longer sacrifice their children and so are condemned to spend their days here in these holes where runaway slaves once hid, having neither life nor death.

To touch you now, to guess at the shape of the wounds that took you from me a second time, in those moments after you had lived, before you had died.

A kiss, Héctor, a kiss to a square of your cheek pressed against the cold chain-link fence. A kiss knowing I may not ever kiss you again. A kiss with a woman's passion, even though you would not give me your lips. You rarely gave me your lips after we were children. At some point, you started to complain that my lips tickled yours, and each time we tried to kiss, you pulled back and burst out in laughter and wrapped your arms around yourself as if I were torturing you with feathers. Pero, when we were children, te acuerdas, primito bello, when we were children. Te acuerdas, hidden from your mother and your brother, and later hidden from your teacher and from the photographer, sometimes under the nose of your blind father, as he listened to the sordid affairs of his radio
novelas
(berating the out-heroding narrator when unconvinced with the plot, as if it were the poor actor's fault that the writer had failed), te acuerdas, esos besitos, half-dry, half-moist, like a first nibble into a veiny plum we could not eat.