The Lazarus Rumba (3 page)

She offered him something to eat. Father Gonzalo shook his head. He was not hungry. “Un cafecito nada más, por favor, Adela. Then I'll go see her. Maybe she'll talk to me today. Maybe the fasting has awakened her spirit.”

“She talks to no one except her cousin. He returned to town as soon as he heard what had happened. He spends hours with her. Pero no sé … how much good can he do when he is as faithless as a gypsy, behaves more like a child than she does.”

“Adela, she is not a child. She is twenty-six.”

“She is behaving like a child. She is not the first woman to lose a husband.”

“Sí, verdad, Adela,” Father Gonzalo shook the letter in his hand, “but the manner in which she lost him—”

“What about the manner in which I lost mine! You of all people know too well. It was enough to have buried myself with him, wrapped in a shroud of shame! But I endured (pues gracias a tí y a la Virgencita) and I will not have my daughter go mad. She too will endure. ¿No es así, Gonzalo? Won't she? Ay, no sé Cuánto más puedo. Estoy completamente desesperada.” She tried to hide her tears as she set the coffee down for her guest. Her hands had grown bonier and the veins were thick, bulging out like termite trails. Her fingernails were dull and bitten.

Father Gonzalo reached out and held her damp hands. He felt the sting of the cured mosquito bites on his back. “No seas boba, coño, you have to take care of yourself. Without you what will become of her? These days of doubt will nurture her faith when it grows again. La duda es pura mierda, Adela, but no other fertilizer can so richly nurture our faith.”

Music came from Adela's room. Father Gonzalo recognized it and went silent and lowered his eyes and held a tight smile.

“Ay, esa música,” doña Adela said, snatching her hands from his. “Como si esto fuera un manicomio. All day long with the same music and the stupid puzzles in that dark room where she can't even see at high day. I'm going to lose her, tan jovencita, mi única hija, and I'm going to lose. … No! No! Coño, I won't lose her. I'll take that old shawl and the phonograph and all the scratched records and every piece of her silly jigsaws and build a bonfire in the patio, see what she does then!”

Father Gonzalo had his eyes closed and was listening with pleasure to the intruding melody. “You'd burn Beethoven?” he said, unable to sweeten the harsh tone of sanctimony.

“Que Dios me perdone, Gonzalo, but I'd burn Santa Victoria's handkerchief and Santa Teresa's heart a million times if it meant saving my daughter! What is it with her? I too have known sorrow. ¡Perdóname, Virgencita, perdóname!”

Father Gonzalo opened his eyes.

She now wept openly and folded her hands over her belly and finally her floating suffering face seemed to fuse into her body and her torso curled inward like the stalk of a rainstruck infant flower. From Adela's room, Beethoven's violin concerto reached a swollen pause. Father Gonzalo told Adela she had not done anything to deserve any of this. He told her that the Lord does not act like a scripted judge, meeting out specific judgment for each sin.

“She is not the first,” doña Adela said between sob-breaths. “The well of my patience is running dry, Gonzalo. Bien sabes, I too lost a husband.”

A few days before the death of her husband, doña Adela had spoken the same words to Father Gonzalo. A director in a sugar mill, and then a renowned diplomat for the three elected governments before the 1952 coup d'état directed by the handsome indian sergeant Fulgencio Batista, Teodoro Lucientes had been, in the eyes of the townsfolk in Guantánamo, a devoted father and a loving husband most of his life. Yet fate, as Father Gonzalo liked to say in his homilies, lives in a hovel near the foothills of tragedy. On the third week of his retired life (a career choice enforced by the new military regime that had many favors to dole out to those who helped undermine the elected governments) Teodoro suffered a coronary, and faced with such drastic evidence of his mortality, decided to turn his life inside-out, upside-down, blowing into the chasm of death, that is, ass-backwards, so that he could face for the first time, in those few moments left, all those days, months, and years of shrouded desires. So Teodoro Lucientes' public life became his secret one, and his secret life his public one. (Indeed, his life had been no secret at all, for every thing that the eyes of the townsfolk of Guantánamo knew, their tongues, their blind tongues, knew two or three things better—and what tongue has never been stained with the ruby dye of gossip?) To put it plainly, sin pena ninguna, with the bluntness of the blindest rubiest tongue, his wife and daughter became his mistress and bastard and his mistress and bastard became his wife and daughter.

After he returned from the hospital, he shuffled through the house wearing only a nightgown, his feet like giant eggplants. The doctors had prescribed that he move around the house and even take walks outside, but his ankles felt as if arrows were lodged there and he could not make it up and down the porch steps unless he had had a few drinks, which doña Adela (and the doctors) strictly forbade. One madrugada, after breaking the glass in the liquor cabinet and drinking half a bottle of rum, he discarded his nightgown and went out to the porch and swung on the blue porchswing, keeping rhythm as he stroked his semierect penis. The tender skin became chafed and bloody and he grew so tired that his forearms burned. He broke into tears, yearning for his other life. Shaken from her dream, in which she heard the screeches of the porchswing as the cries of a horde of hungry seagulls, doña Adela hurried outside and wrapped her husband in a colcha and cured him and guided him to bed, taping his penis to his stomach so that it would not stain the bedsheets. Teodoro, groggy with rum, looked at his organs distended with serous fluids. “Qué pena,” he said, “so huge and so useless.”

Doña Adela resisted the urge to slap him.

Two days later, after his siesta, Teodoro untaped his penis and dis carded the nightgown again, but this time he threw on a wrinkled gray linen suit, and stuffed a blue-tongued bird-of-paradise freshly plucked from his wife's garden into the breast pocket and covered his rumpled mane of gray with a stylish Panama and stiffened his sagging mustache with labored curling motions and shuffled out to the terrace barefoot. He glanced only for a second at his wife sitting there, enjoying the afternoon breezes while rocking herself on the rickety porchswing, in and out of her own siesta.

“I am going to the sea,” Teodoro said, his left eye flickering, “to walk in the sands of my youth.”

Doña Adela could not muster up the strength to stop him, though she knew he was not going anywhere near the sea; and the first few times he did this, she regarded him with an understanding and scrupulous pity, bemoaning to anyone who might listen how her poor man had gone soft in the head, loco loquito de la cabeza. Yet with each tiny embarrassment of each afternoon departure, and with each further humiliation on his return, sometimes way past dinnertime, six or seven hours later, sometimes way past the following dinnertime, and the following, two or three days later, rosy-faced and drunk with a long-deferred joy, proclaiming how wonderful and soothing the sea air was, her pity began to break down like sugar in a still and ferment into a harsh intolerance. At early Mass on Sundays, she heard the ruby whispering behind her, and from the pulpit Father Gonzalo noticed the tightening of her jaw muscles as she whispered the Prayer of Contrition. One Sunday, she approached Father Gonzalo outside the church, amidst the entire congregation, and pressed her lips so close to his ears that they tickled him, and she whispered: “The well of my patience is running dry, Gonzalo. My husband is very ill. ¿A quién le rezo ahora? What kind of God listens to our prayers, anyway? What kind of God takes a man from his wife and lets him die in the bed of his whore?”

Because he had no answer to any of these questions, Father Gonzalo assured doña Adela that when the time came, Teodoro would die in her hands, but he warned her that it was a sin to so bluntly judge God by the manner in which He lets us stray from Him. Much better to judge Him, Father Gonzalo said, by the manner in which He guides us back towards His Bosom. Many years later, seated at her kitchen table, attempting to console her for the reclusive rebelliousness of her recently widowed daughter, he would use this very same logic, almost these very same words, though they had not proved very useful then and he doubted whether they would prove very useful this time. But it was the only way Father Gonzalo knew how to apply his faith, through a tenacious adherence to dictums that seemed to fly in the face of all common sense. But isn't that what faith is, the most uncommon sense?

And like all men of such uncommon sense, he had heavy doubts.

Why not judge God by the manner in which He lets us stray from Him? Would not any other father be judged by the way he turns from a wayward child, the rashness with which he shuts the front door of the house, then the kitchen door, then the servants' entrance, the conceit with which he stiffens his neck and covers his ears and sews tight his lips and draws the window shutters, so there is no passage through which grief can escape or the vanquished child can call to him, no passage through which he (the father) can answer? Isn't the manner in which He lets us stray, in fact, one and the same manner in which He calls us back? Is not His well-known silence God's greatest sin against His children? Sí, coño, for even the most benevolent father sins.

Why not Him?

Father Gonzalo knew that if Teodoro died in doña Adela's arms it would be mere chance, and completely against his will, such was the course of his madness, his inside-out last days, and the shameful details of these days that doña Adela whispered to Father Gonzalo and his servant Anita in the rectory kitchen after Mass on Sundays, they already knew. For who, even among the holy, can resist the ticklish prodding caresses of blind rubied tongues? How does a confessor interrupt a confession that has become a litany of another's sins?

Things were known.

On the eve of his retirement, Teodoro had bought for his mistress-that-was-now-like-his-wife a black Ford convertible, a thing so shiny with darkness that its too obviously symbolic color could be discerned better in the soft moonlight than in the garish sunlight. (It was the shame of the moon to be so enamored of this horrid machine that proved where no proof was needed Teodoro's infidelity—silky rays caressing its shiny coat, its leather seats, its buffed chrome, its glassy orbs, its dormant gauges. Le ronca, does the moon have nothing better on this earth to caress?) The thing—the yanqui machine—was conspicuously parked on the gravel, atop the hill, in front of the two-tiered olive house near the Bano River, the house that belonged to his mistress-that-was-now-like-his-wife's mother.

And her name? Or must the rubied tongues, out of sheer cowardice (for heaven forbid that their names ever be attached to their tongues), always speak this hyphen-happy slashy-sure anti-brevity margin-hugging speak? Her name for the soul of wit? (And these questions themselves asked without words, with the pursing of lips that first touch the hot cafecito, with a disquieting shift behind the confessional screen.)

Está bien … la Blanquita. That was her name, or at least that is what she was called.

That is all the rubied tongues offer for now; and with that, pursed lips and disquieting shifts are answered and they make do, and that they call her, as she was called: la Blanquita—she whose skin was veined and translucent as a yanqui's. Like rare Italian marble, some would say, or the face of the moon on a crisp blueblack night (in the ruby tales the moon is a crucial symbol, of light purloined, nature half-hidden). Like a varicose ankle, others claimed, or a rat fetus (dead, or better yet, unborn animals are also crucial symbols in these tales). Fine marble, a pretty moon. A tattooed ankle, a womb-plucked rat. A question of taste, or of situation.

Teodoro loved la Blanquita, and had loved her for many years, and had known her before he knew the woman he married, and about a year after impregnating his wife, impregnated her, so that his daughters numbered two, one aged fourteen, the other one almost thirteen, one named and called Alicia, the other one named one thing and called another—these two sisters almost strangers to each other,
almost
because Father Gonzalo knew that they sometimes—no, not sometimes, once a week exactly, on Tuesday afternoons—unknown to doña Adela, saw each other.

Things un-known were, claro (as is the nature of these tales), over-known.

Long before he had bought the black Ford convertible for la Blanquita, Teodoro had been extravagant in other ways, in ways the sun knew better than the moon. Under the pretext that a sister and a sister must know each other, every Tuesday afternoon he left early from his post at the mill and picked up his daughters at their separate schools and walked them hand in hand to the olive house on a hill near the Bano River. There, on the breezy veranda, they would enjoy the afternoon merienda with la Blanquita and her mother, who, when her daughter and her daughter's lover retired upstairs, entertained the sisters with wicked tales of demons and witches that lived among them. As time passed, Teodoro grew bolder and he would wander into town hand in hand with la Blanquita, flanked by his two daughters, and to those he ran into, at the barbershop, in the gardens of Parque Martí, at the movie theater, on the front steps of the yellow church, he would remain the gentleman he always was and lower his head and lift his Panama and greet with a simple “Pues buenas,” and move on.

On Tuesday afternoons doña Adela had no husband, and for many years she let that be, taking her longest siestas on that day, and warning the servants, on pain of dismissal, that no one, for no reason, should raise his voice above a whisper, and much less disturb her, till her husband returned with her daughter from the beach, where they went each Tuesday afternoon. Only once was her long Tuesday siesta interrupted, and once proved enough. A young indian girl, the daughter of one of the cooks, had snuck into the kitchen and, playing with the butcher knives, had sliced her hand open betwixt thumb and index finger and at the sight of her gushing blood began to wail, and neither her father nor the other servants, with cupped hands over her mouth and whispery consolations into her ears and kitchen rags around her hand, could get her to stop. Doña Adela appeared at the kitchen doorway, a long leather belt at her side, like a whip. The cook stepped away from his whimpering daughter as doña Adela approached, and he did nothing as he watched his employer beat his injured child with such venom that the rags came loose from her wounded hand and spread her blood in splashes all over, on the yellow walls, on the refrigerator doors, on the shiny countertops, on her father's apron, and on the dress and face of the woman who was so mercilessly administering uncounted lashes on his daughter's legs. When the beating was done, doña Adela, gasping for air, the drops of blood commingling with the sweat on her brow, told her cook that there was no need to worry, that he still had his job, and that he should get his poor daughter to a hospital. When Teodoro came home that evening, he diligently washed every drop of blood from the kitchen, and that night did not sleep, re-covering the stained walls with a shiny coat of yellow. He never asked what had happened, and when the old cook tried to relate to him the story, he silenced him, assuring him that his gentle wife had never once laid a violent hand on her own daughter, much less on anybody else's daughter. And from then on, on the cook's daughter's birthday, year after year, Teodoro secretly gave her gifts as lavish and extravagant as the ones he gave Alicia on her own birthday.