The Lazarus Rumba (10 page)

When he dozed off he dreamt of a gargantuan forest-green elephant mounted by the girl's father, comandante Julio César Cruz, riding into some unknown village and scaring the natives away. The comandante's laughter, sweet as a child's, as he trampled and trampled over villagers awoke Father Gonzalo. He stared away at the empty shore for lidless moments before he noticed the sea had taken the girl, her fortress of towers and moats washed to an inconsequential lump. How long had he slept? He turned on the radio. Fidel was still raving. He ran into the sea and saw her sundress riding on the sheen of some distant wave. He waded in knee-deep and then waist-deep and then chest-deep, though he could not find her and in every foamy spurt of this or that or that-one-there wave was her lacy swimsuit spit out by the fussy sea and he would not be able to chase her into the deep for he could not swim, or had not swum in years, since the rivers of his youth—had never swum in the sea—though he kept on going in till he was up to the last point of his bulging toe, stretching like some desperately out-of-shape ballerino yearning to fly, on his toe that no longer ached for his heart was now beating prominently behind his ears, and though he leapt, he failed to clear the cusp of the bigger waves that seemed to have forgotten about the swallowed girl and shifted their onslaught to him. With every try at breath he gulped in briny hot seablood, till he felt the so-often promised peace of the last seconds; though just as he gave in to it, as his limbs ceased their entangling epilepsies that if anything had helped to tighten the chords of the sea current around him, just as his marrow longed no more for air, as his heartbeat escaped him and headed for the surface, his tingling toe brushed the sea bottom and he regained footing and the peace abandoned him and his struggles began anew and he forgot about the girl until he had made it to the shore. There, he heard the comandante's girlish laughter again and followed it, dragged himself to a shady spot underneath a royal palm where one of Neptune's unfathomed beauties slept, naked, her upper body face down, her legs on their side, wriggled into a semipose, her dry locks spread out on the sand like a coronet of kelp, as if she had fallen asleep waiting for a portraitist. Beside her was the lacy swimsuit partly stained with urine the sand had already drunk. Father Gonzalo crawled towards the sleeping child.

“Carajo, mi cielo,” he said. “How you remind me of your father. Already you swim without getting wet!” He pressed his pallid cheeks to hers and waited for the kiss of life.

Invisible Butterflies

On the way out to the terminal, Alicia felt so grungy she yearned to drown in one of her morning baths. She wondered how she had gone so many days without them. The taxi rumbled past a rusty iron bridge and turned into a dusty road. The windows were only partly cracked and it was stuffy inside the car. Summer had gone on for too long, she thought, and made the mistake of looking at her watch, as if there the seasons instead of the hours were kept. It was one-thirty in the afternoon.

“Casi, casi,” the driver said, catching her in the rearview mirror. “We'll be there in no time, señora Alicia.”

“Sí, gracias,” she said. She had no idea who he was or how he knew her name, although she supposed he did not really drive a taxi for a living. She twisted the watch on her wrist so that it rested face down on her lap and promised herself not to please the driver by looking at it again. To soothe her skittishness, she took a piece of homemade rock candy from a paper bag in her purse and sucked on it. Soon, she was calmer. The candies made her think of home. She thought of her daughter's late-night neckpecks, light and lighter with her guppy lips, cuddled beside her belly to breast, still kissing even as she breathed sleep. Alicia shifted in her seat and rolled her window down a bit.

“Just up ahead a few miles. Soon. No se preocupe, you'll make the train!”

She was getting sick of his head of unwashed hair, of the cigarette dangling in his ear, and especially of the strip of his face visible in the rearview mirror, his bushy eyebrows and reddened eyes and grooved, barklike forehead twisting into masks of mock kindness. She lowered her eyes and pulled out from her handbag a leatherbound notebook she had once used as a marriage diary. There had been six entries, one on each page, some long and some short, all joyous from what she remembered, for now the notebook was blank, the remnants of the six pages poking out of the binding like shorn weed-flowers. She brought it with her to record what she saw. But seeing, she had been too nervous to pull out the notebook and write, or perhaps she was just able to trust her memory more than she had imagined she would. As astounding as it might sound, her cousin Héctor seemed happy. How could she write that down! For over three years she had been trying to visit him, imagining the most dire conditions. Why else would they be stalling her visit? And now she had seen him; yes, he was upset that his mother had condemned his behavior publicly and taken to writing demeaning letters about him to
Granma
from her asylum in Santiago de Cuba, letters that the paper published and signed with “La madre desconsolada,”
but not you, mi primita bella, I knew you would never abandon me, and some day they'll let us out, after they are finished with all their cruel games, after all, they must know we are not criminals.
He spoke to her through a chainlink fence as he took a break from a soccer match with the other prisoners. They had shaved off his shock of black curled woolly hair. He only wore a pair of shorts so Alicia could see that he was field-burned and thinner, but not as thin as she had feared. In fact, aside from the thick slit of a scar underneath his left nipple, which looked like a rosy worm trying to push its way out of his breast (and reminded Alicia of her husband's darker longer scar), Héctor was still very much himself; though sinewy, he had always been thin—how else to perform those heretofore unseen acrobatic feats, how else to outwit death every time he braved the Lazarus rumba.

“Do you miss the circus?”

“Claro, como no, I miss it. But there are some pleasures here.” And he smiled. Alicia felt a blush and lowered her eyes and loved him again as when she had been a child.

“Mira, Héctor, I am not going to let them keep you in here!”

“Tranquila, primita, no promises,” he said and smiled again. “There is very little you or anyone can do. Now let me kiss that beautiful face.”

She pressed her cheek to the fence that in the unrelenting heat somehow retained the night-before chill and Héctor planted seven quick kisses on her.

He kisses like our daughter
, Alicia wrote in the notebook as the taxi rumbled into a main road. She breathed easier a few minutes later when she saw the main building of the train terminal. When they arrived she tried to pay the driver with two crumbled pesos but he refused, almost shouting at her: “¡En nombre de la Revolución!” He helped her with her luggage all the way up to the ticket counter and then disappeared without the slightest farewell. Alicia fumbled with the two bills and the notebook she still held in her hand as she pulled out more money to buy her ticket home. She had been gone for almost a week, a day up and five days of waiting before the authorities at the labor camp had let her meet with Héctor. She had stayed with distant kin of her father, a second or third cousin and his wife and children who lived in the province of Camagüey not far from the labor camp. They had been cordial but forced her to sleep and tidy up in a moldy three-wall lean-to in the back of the house, that from the smell ingrained in the wood, Alicia figured, had once served as an outhouse. Her father's kin thus made it clear to her that though they would never deny family lodging, they were in no way in support of gusanos or counterrevolutionaries. Alicia had been arrested twice since the death of her husband for meeting with intent to defame la Revolución. Twice they had to let her go without pressing charges, for after all, it was just a book club. Every morning Alicia had a silent breakfast with the family and walked over to the labor camp about four miles away, or to the Military Unit for Aid to Production as it was officially called. On the fifth morning one of the daughters broke the silence at breakfast.

“Why don't they let you see him, so you can go?” she asked.

Alicia honored the silence and the girl was frightened away from the table by the father's castigating looks. That morning Alicia finally saw Héctor. Their meeting lasted less than five minutes, a cold fence between them. A guard came by and dragged Héctor back to the soccer game.

“Vamos, cabrón,” he said, grabbing him by the arm. “I've got some good money on you maricas today. We gotta finish this game before evening call.” Héctor resisted a bit, kissing his hand and waving it Alicia's way. The guard pulled him again and his rifle slid off his shoulder and to the ground as they were turning. Héctor went for it and hesitated and waited for the guard to signal his approval with a nod of his head. He then picked up the rifle and handed it back to him. “Tus cojones son míos,” the guard said. Héctor laughed and looked away from Alicia. The other guards, sitting up against one of the barracks, their weapons lying unmenacingly beside them or bouncing in between their legs, watched this scene without interest. One last time, Héctor turned, planted a kiss on his hand and sent it Alicia's way.

“¡Te quiero, primita! Come again soon.”

“I will,” Alicia said, pretending to catch the fluttering gift and waved as if she were saying good-bye to a child at a recreational camp.

That was Saturday, conscript relaxation day. Sunday she was told the camp was off-limits: conscript education day. Weekdays the conscripts were out in the fields dawn to dusk. Fidel had promised the world the largest sugar harvest in history and because of the heat, harvesting had begun a few weeks early and every hand available was put to the task.

When she made it back to the house, the taxi was waiting for her, the driver napping on the hood, momentarily lifting his head and grumbling that he had been called to go to the train station. There was no one inside the house, the parents and even the children were volunteering in the field that day. Alicia wrote a note of gratitude and she realized when addressing it that she had never learned any of the children's names. Before leaving, she pulled out three pieces of rock candy from her purse and left them on top of the note, one for each of the nameless children.

On the train she passed the cane fields and looked for the children among the hundreds of volunteers inexpertly swinging their machetes, just barely having worked their way into an interminable field, even as the afternoon sun dipped so low that their wide-brimmed straw hats proved useless and heat gleamed off their sweat-masked faces. At what age would they force her daughter to come out and work in these fields? How long before they would teach her the basics:
Slash it down-and-close to the ground, compañerita, for all of the sweetness sits low on the stalk, like sugar that sinks to the bottom of the coffee cup, like love that sticks to the underbelly of a little girl's heart.
How long? Lazy, sharp-beaked birds treaded behind the army of macheteros, pecking bugs and caterpillars from the exposed part of the field.
The harvest is theirs
, Alicia wrote on the second page of her leather notebook.
These fortunate birds are the only ones who should thank Fidel.

And she continued to write, looking up suspiciously every now and then at the tilted heads of the few other passengers in the coach, and shutting the notebook when the conductor came along, because she knew how gallingly she was defaming la Revolución in those just-written pages. Though at one point during the ride, in the province of Oriente, at about the time the train traversed the northern foothills of the mountains that had nurtured the rebels not long ago, her river of words, like the many twisty streams in those mountains, meandered away from its bilious fountainhead. She called for her daughter.
Teresita, ven, besa a mamá, s
he scribbled horizontally and diagonally and in the shapes of kisses themselves, which she had always told her daughter were invisible butterflies. So on the page Alicia fashioned inky butterflies—like wet kisses, she thought, not
so
invisible—with enormous wings that she hoped would hasten her journey home, all beckoning in their flight with the same phrase: come Teresita, kiss your mamá.

In Santiago de Cuba the train was delayed overnight. Alicia put away her notebook and slept in her seat. Near dawn a few Fidelista soldiers mounted the train and walked down the aisles from end to end, making a lot of noise with their boots so that most of the passengers woke up. Alicia did not look into their faces. She thought of what Fidel had said once when an American journalist asked him why trains never ran on time in Cuba, insinuating that this could be considered a sign of failure in the process of the revolution. Fidel answered that trains always ran on time in Nazi Germany—there was never a delay—that trains running on time are no measure of the moral and historical stature of a nation. Alicia went out to the station and bought coffee. She had not eaten in over a day but she was not hungry. The train finally departed in the afternoon. The Fidelistas stayed on and paced the aisles. When she arrived in Guantánamo late that evening, she began to make her way on foot from the station to her mother's house, lugging her bags. No one offered to help, no one even greeted her, not the few passersby on the street, not the driver of the horse carriage that served as one of the three cabs in town and not the young folk loitering on the porchsteps of her mother's house, unlucky ones with nowhere to go and nothing to do, who had not yet been summoned to the cane fields and who had not figured out where the rum was that evening. Alicia left her belongings on the porch and hurried inside, barely acknowledging doña Adela when she opened the door, who went to hug her but was left waiting for the embrace, her arms outspread.

“Where is she?” Alicia asked wild-eyed, dashing past her mother.