The Lazarus Rumba (13 page)

Berta His Beloved

Now, huddled with his tomcat under five fourteen-pound sacks of raw coffee beans in the makeshift cellar where the girl Teresita used to hide, he thought back to the first time he saw the milk twirled with red. It happened seven days before, very early on a Friday morning, almost two weeks to the day after the forbidden hunting expedition. As he squeezed left and right, left and right, left and right on the monumentally swollen nipples of Niña, his most productive cow, he became, as usual, entranced by the perfect whiteness rising in the tin bucket. After Niña had filled one bucket and was halfway up the second bucket, she emitted a jet of crimson milk from her left nipple that whirled and sunk into that unforgiving whiteness. Mingo stopped. His first thought was that his hand was bleeding and he cursed himself for ruining half a bucket of good milk. But his hand was fine. His second thought was that he had been hallucinating; so he took a wooden stick and stirred the milk in the bucket and it turned the rosy color of a newborn calf's bottom. “Te mato,” he grumbled to his most productive cow. He put aside the bucket with the pink milk and put under her an empty bucket and began anew. Again, Niña filled it about halfway, and again she ruined it by the nineteenth or twentieth squeeze of her left nipple that squirted blood. Mingo slapped his cow on the side. Niña responded with a flip of her tail that knocked off Mingo's frayedbrim straw hat and brushed the bristles of his unshaven face. “Puta barata,” Mingo said, standing from his stool and backing off, suddenly afraid of his most productive cow. He turned to his other cows. And one by one they all disappointed him in the same way: the young and small Berta staining her milk on the fourteenth squeeze, María on the twenty-second, Isabela on the ninth, and Carmela on the twelfth. When he milked them again, he felt that they were conspiring against him for they shuffled the order of their transgression: this time Carmela ruining her milk on the fourteenth squirt, Berta on the twenty-second, María on the ninth, and Isabela on the twelfth. Mingo hurried away from the barn as if fleeing from a bad dream. When he stepped outside, he fully expected the skies to be gathering with thunderclouds as if the day of justice were at hand. But it was a pleasant morning like any other—only in the late afternoons did the spring become torrential—and whoever resided in the placid skies had no idea (it would seem) that Mingo's cows were producing milk stained with blood.

On the next four mornings, he awoke an hour or so earlier than usual, before the hazy ruddiness of dawn, as if somehow he could fool his cows back to health, catch them in the innocent moments after waking, when perhaps whatever beast was churning inside them and making their milk bloody was still asleep. But morning after morning, even as he awoke progressively earlier and earlier, so that at one point, he was barely asleep for an hour, his cows gave him buckets and buckets of useless pink milk. After a few days, the store owner in town and the milkman who delivered to the elite military families and to the yanquis in the naval base became impatient, threatening to find another source if the matter was not taken care of soon. Mingo offered weak excuses for his lack of produce and promised that soon, very soon he would have the finest, richest-tasting milk in the Western world again available. He called the famous Jewish doctor, Sara Zimmerman, who treated both humans and animals with the miraculous juice of papaya leaves. Doctora Zimmerman tasted the milk (something Mingo had not dared do). She grimaced and spit it back out. She told Mingo she would treat his cows if he wanted her to, but if she were the farmer and these were her cows she would sell them right away for whatever paltry sum anyone would offer, for though they might live, never again would they produce clean milk. These cows were doomed. Doctora Sara Zimmerman rarely gave such a dire prognosis, even when the patient was already dead.

Mingo walked down into town to visit Father Gonzalo, for he was beginning to suspect the meddling, dropsical saints had something to do with all of this. On the first morning, Father Gonzalo did not answer Mingo's call, though Mingo banged tirelessly on the rectory door, went around back and pressed his face against the grimy kitchen window, which Anita refused to clean because a devout parishioner once swore she saw in the grime the headless torso of the Baptist, and even tried to speak to Anita, who was weeding the garden and assured him that
no, no, the Father is not in, and will not be in, not for now, not for a while and will you please go then, please go, señor Mingo.
With this, chased away like a demon, Mingo returned up the mountain to his finca, his farm. When he got there, he fashioned a rattan from the stem of a palm frond and savagely rattled and whipped his five useless cows. Afterwards, stained with the blood that had splattered from their backs in penance for the blood that had stolen into their milk, Mingo sat in a rocking chair in the living room of his six-room bohío, staring at the yellowy discolored photographic portrait of Lydia, his escaped wife, letting his monumental black tomcat Luis el Catorce climb on him and lick the vestiges of his rage from his cheeks. He leafed through his unreadable French edition of
Du côté de chez Swann
and waited for the following dawn. By then, his next-to-smallest cow Carmela had died from her wounds, one eye open, one shut by a plumlike bruise. Mingo did not milk his cows that morning; rather he dug a wide hole in the soft soil not far from the cabbage patch and there he dragged Carmela by her horns and buried her. As he pushed her into her resting hole, Carmela simultaneously let out a long hiss from her relaxed sphincter and pissed wine-dark blood from her enlarged and welted glands.

During the next few days, the cabbages turned brown, mangoes dropped half-grown and contaminated the air with an effluvial sourness, avocados too dropped, exploding in midair like ill-fashioned grenades, watermelons broke open at their own will to reveal flesh darker than Carmela's wine-dark nipplepiss, with worms disappearing and reappearing into each other, and even the pigs grew earth-shy, cowering by the wooden fences of their pens, afraid to wallow in the mud. Only the guava grove at the far end of the finca remained unscathed. Mingo went to visit Father Gonzalo again. This time he caught a peep of him sneaking out of the side door and headed towards the chapel. “Wait, coño! Wait!” Mingo yelled. Father Gonzalo stopped. He looked back. When Mingo reached him, Father Gonzalo summoned all his angels of pity, put a gentle hand on Mingo's shoulder and smiled. “What troubles are you drowning in?” the priest offered, knowing well the gist of the story he was about to hear. Mingo recounted everything up to that morning, when after bathing in the river, he had sliced a giant water scorpion in half with his machete and was sure to have seen both parts scurrying away, one growing a head, the other a tail. Father Gonzalo shook his head all the meanwhile: “That hunt. That hunt … it was said—”

“Ay, por favor, padre, I'll not hear anything about
the forbidden
hunt,” Mingo said, “as if we were living in the days of the witches; that's water under the bridge, done for. Those birds were threatening my crops. They were interfering with my planting. I got rid of them. It's what any farmer would have done. Something else is at work here.”

“Yet, those people warned you.”

“Those people who? … los santeros de Alicia. Father, you and I know very well that those people are religious and political fanatics. Blind as the moon at high day!”

“Pero con respeto, Alicia Lucientes and her family are no such—”

“She's the worst! íEsa viuda está jodía de la cabeza! But she's wily. ¡La espuela del diablo! It's a shame that she's taking the whole town for a ride—
even you!
… unless …” Mingo stared beyond Father Gonzalo searching everywhere for the agents of the widow-bitchwitch's wicked jealousies. And there they were, sprinkling seeds of sanguineous poison into the fodder pit and blowing hot breath over the cabbage heads and injecting the mango trees with the yellow virus and spreading on the avocado trees with flat wooden ladles, like butter on toast, the germs of the bloating disease and poking stiff zombied worms into each and every watermelon and even tainting the pigs' mud with the smell of the sea! He left Father Gonzalo. That evening he locked Luis el Catorce in the makeshift cellar, stripped, and with only a shotgun as dress gear, four shells full, strapped on by a musky leather band, he buried himself head-deep in the fodder pit, crushing his way under until only the muzzle and the left side of his face were protruding. He waited for the intruders. At one o'clock that morning, he blew to feathery puffs a white chicken that had the misfortune to stray into the edge of the pit while fleeing from an overeager insomniac rooster. At three-thirty the same fate befell the rooster, still awake and goatish, and wondering, just wondering if his love had not staged her dramatic disappearance and was now hiding in the pit. And just before milking time, when light was barely beginning to divide the shadows, Mingo saw the demon of his troubles. First the horns, inching ever so slowly into his firing range, as if the demon had been warned that a trap might be set, slowly, slowly, into firing range. Mingo could not see its face, but the harsh self-propagating morning light, now directly behind it, created a halo that with its very brightness darkened the demonface. Slowly, slowly, into firing range, lazy, as if without its inimical purpose, till it noticed something twitching in the pit (maybe the left side of Mingo's face that was rebelling against the long night stillness). Something twitching—and the demon, curious, raised its head, extended its neck, and moved directly into pointblank firing range. Then Mingo, realizing that his hand had wandered off the trigger, worked his way down the barrel, through coarse fodder, down, down and squeezed it, blowing away the right side of the demon's face. The demon groaned like an earthly beast, doubled over and fell into the pit. It was a heavy demon, so heavy that when it landed on the left side of Mingo's face, the left side of Mingo's face did not twitch anymore. Soon, Mingo could not breathe; and he was sure he was destined to die a twin death with the demon of his last days. But he wasn't so sure that he didn't struggle to get out, straining his neck and pushing out with his no longer twitching cheek as if it were not a minor face muscle destined only to control the delicate subtlety of face gestures, but a power muscle like the thighs or the pectorals, pushed and pushed against the demon's breathless ribcage to no avail, for it was forcing him down on its death journey to join with the likes of it. So he blew his last shell, muffled by the downpouring, already rotting demon-guts, so that after its stilled blood and its not quite yet ripe shit and its not aged enough piss streamed down Mingo's cheek and what felt like the demon's liver or kidney or whatever dangled on his forehead like a twisted beret, Mingo spotted through the demon hole, beyond a splintered protruding rib, a gibbous piece of the blue-white sky. He reached for the rib and used it to pull himself up through the tunnel the blast had created, till he was out, naked, except for a gummy variegated placental coat, birthed of a demon. Except it wasn't a demon at all. He could tell by the wide peachy rump that many a tortuous dawn after his wife had fled (and some
indeed
before she had fled) had been his only solace, that with the furry end of its tail reached back and tickled his inflamed sac and later grew a body and a face and a mouth that groaned for
all of it, coño por favor, todo todo digo, even those monstrous tennis balls.
That rump Mingo would know anywhere. He had murdered and been born of Berta, his second most productive and by far his most gorgeous cow. Pobre Berta, who, forgetting her beauty, he had beaten like a dog a few days back. Pobre Berta, who had wandered early out of the barn.

Flummoxed somewhat by his misdeed—but more so by the urges that were sneaking up on him as he relished in the memory of having been once and for all, all inside her—Mingo ran to the river. He washed himself of her liquid flesh and, when clean, relieved himself of his sordid memories. He then walked back through the finca to his cottage, as he was, in newborn undressed flesh, pulled out a bottle of moonshine rum from a hidden stash in the closet under the stairway and sat by the fodder pit till evening, singing hymns of mourning for his beloved Berta, till the bottle was finished and he wished that he and all his lands would vanish forever from the face of the earth.
¡Maldita la Revolución!
he had always said. But now he found no comfort in that. So he added some curses:
¡Maldita la viuda de mierda! ¡Maldita esa bruja! Damn the widow-bitchwitch and all the shadows of her offspring!
And he passed out by the death-stunk fodder pit, reciting his favorite phrase from his favorite writer, that he at once understood and did not understand …
à contre coeur … à contre coeur
… a soul stripped of allegiance.

He would fix it. He would not go broke. He still had three cows; welted, hobbling, and terrified, but still alive, still producing milk, which had always been the finest milk in the province, not the thin bitter goat's milk of the mountains and not the compromising pap you could drain from a mother's tit, long ago, in the days of innocence. This was heaven's milk, what they served to the legions of angels before dawn to give them strength to lift the sun and hurl it through its diurnal path. And it still would be so! Even if it had lost its chasteness, if it could no longer be gowned in white and was now dressed for the honeymoon, the color of a blushing mango.
For Mingo was thinking about mangoes when he awoke the following dawn in the fodder pit that was now the grave of his beloved Berta, thinking about mangoes because the sky was streaked like a horny ripe-for-fun mango—the pinks and reds of expectation below, from where the perilous, hot-for-a-little-morning-joy ball broke the curled night, jolting it into poses more receptive, into moods more seductive, and then espaliering from the reds bands of yellow on a latticework of greens and blue-grays, till there, far beyond, across the arc of the oyster-shell sky, the night remained the night, dull-gray, dormant and frigid.