The Lazarus Rumba (40 page)

The crazy cook with the rusty cleaver grunted.

Father Jacinto, who could now taste his disdain for the whole tribe of thieving yanquis, as if he were swirling sour milk and the yolks of rotted eggs around in his mouth, with a nidorous breath, spoke only three words: “Bien, regreso mañana.”

And he brushed past Theotis Q. ——— punching shoulders with him and almost knocking the surnameless railroad tycoon into the ashen waters of the port of Cienfuegos.

The following morning, hand in hand, standing on the rotting pier, Father Jacinto and Julio César watched Richard Hadley's fishing trawler chug off into the Caribbean. It would be over twenty years, in a whole different world, when Julio César would lay eyes on Richard Hadley again. Father Jacinto could tell that the boy was holding back tears but he said nothing to console him, nothing to reprimand him. He simply led him away from there, and this time accepted Mr. Blank's, or Mr. Dash's, offer to ride in his private two-car train to the capital.

“He said that I wasn't made for the sea,” Julio César said. “He said that I was too in love with earth. He said that I needed it more than it needed me, that what I could not get from the air now, because of my missing lung, I would get from the earth, that I would always be a landcrawler, and to be proud of it, for the earth has as many beauties and mysteries as the sea. He said he would think of me any time he came to a port and got drunk on aguardiente and rolled in the mud. He said he would think of me.”

Father Jacinto did not answer the boy. From that moment on the child was his pupil and he would treat him as such, ignoring any conversation that did not deal directly with his intellectual development. That fall he enrolled Julio César in the second grade at the Colegio Belén, and even though most students were five or six years his junior, he still lagged behind them in grades and achievement. Father Jacinto tutored him privately at night, and because the boy had a habit of escaping from his dormitory room and digging fresh holes in the school's main lawn to sleep there—Father Jacinto could never force the boy to trim his fingernails close enough to incapacitate his digging—Father Jacinto had his antique, falcon-legged bathtub, which his grandfather had bequeathed him, filled weekly with fresh soil from the pineapple fields in Pinar del Río, and he let the boy sleep there at night.

Slowly, Julio César made progress in his classes, and in less than two years, caught up with students of his own age. He made a habit of reading
Don Quijote
while half buried in soil in Father Jacinto's bathtub. When he graduated from Belén, six years after Father Jacinto had enrolled him in the second grade, he had read Cervantes' novel eight times. At the graduation ceremony, only one student got more medals from the faculty and a bigger ovation from his peers. He was a bully, a tall boy who excelled in sports and more than once had arranged practical jokes involving the burial of Julio César, one time in a hillock of cow dung, another in a pile of discarded fish heads at a nearby canning factory.

The bully's name was Fidel Castro.

Father Jacinto liked Fidel Castro and he would often invite him to his room at night and lecture both him and Julio César on the evils of yanqui imperialism. Father Jacinto had visions. He said they were as powerful as the visions of St. John. Though as far as theologians can guess, St. John was not in the habit of smoking from a long curvy porcelain opium pipe as Father Jacinto was (after the tall boy had left, after Julio César had buried himself in his falcon-legged bathtub, which Father Jacinto had moved from the bathroom and placed next to his own bed, like a child's bassinet). He had visions of a war against the many-headed yanqui dogs, the pale wolves that for over a century had been stealing into our lands and feasting on the innards of our innocent people, a gory banquet to which no other tribe was invited thanks to the famous
doctrine.
Yes, yes, Father Jacinto believed the fairy tale of the thief-surgeon. He saw the angels of all the countries of Latin America uniting to slay the pack of yanqui Cerberuses. It would be the Great War of the Americas, greater and costlier than the Old World wars, for there it was brother fighting against brother (a family squabble really), here it would be the angels with the pure wine-dark blood of the Aztecs, the Incas, the Negroes and all other sunburned tribes against the rosy-blooded pale-hide northern hounds.

At this point in the vision, as Father Jacinto recounted it the following evening, or sometimes in the middle of a lecture in his class, Fidel Castro always became a little befuddled, for he noticed that both he and Father Jacinto—and, in fact, nearly a hundred percent of the student body at Belén—were as pale-hided and rosy-blooded as any yanqui dog, and he wondered aloud if they would be fighting alongside the White Wolves of the North in the Great War of the Americas.

“No, no, no seas, bobo,” Father Jacinto assured him. “We will be with the dark tribes. We will be with the victors.”

Fidel nodded unconvincingly and Father Jacinto lifted his eyepatch to get a better look at this doubter and Julio César was impressed because Fidel stared back at the one-eyed Jesuit and did not bat an eye.

Demon or Saint?

At that time, at about the end of the Second Great War in Europe, the University of Havana had seven schools, including law, medicine, and architecture. Although Father Jacinto had pushed Julio César to study archeology, since he had shown such an undisguised interest in, and need for, earth, Julio César decided instead to enroll in the school of philosophy, for no reason at all, except that when wandering the basement offices of that school's main building in the secluded side of the campus, where bearded students sat on stone benches under the shade of the eucalyptus trees discussing the New French School, he had been struck by a placard on one of the office doors that read:

There and then Julio César decided that while at the university he could make no better use of his time than to study the lives of devils and demons alongside the lives of angels and saints.

When he told this to Father Jacinto one evening, Fidel Castro, who had become a hesitant friend to Julio César, due to the many evenings spent together listening to the one-eyed Jesuit and to their common and abiding interest in Cervantes' knight-errant, said it was a good idea, for their Island was full of both demons and saints, and often you could not tell one from the other.

Fidel Castro himself, after abandoning his dream of traveling to the United States to try out for the professional béisbol leagues, enrolled in the law school; and his tenuous, not yet famous, friendship with Julio César continued.

While still at Belén, Julio César, against Father Jacinto's protestations, had taken a job as a cleaning boy at the house of doña Álvara Clarón, also known as la Gallega, although she was not from Galicia but from the outskirts of Madrid. Doña Álvara was in her forties but she looked much older. She had wide, relentless hips so filled in (and filled out) that even though she wrapped herself in countless red and black and yellow mantles, when she walked you could see the voluminous flesh shifting from side to side. She always wore sandals and her feet were flat and puffy and the toenails were untrimmed. Red paint was chipping off them like off the side of an old barn. On the back of her upper arms there hung a mass of fatty tissue that stretched and dimpled the skin and it dangled like a sackful when she pointed at something. Her hair was almost always at once parchment yellow and ratty black and a bruisy red so that it almost matched her mantles. Her face was grandfatherly ugly and grandmotherly kind, her nose bulbous and pocked from persistent acne lesions, her lower teeth stained from her habit of chewing tobacco, and her eyes a warm and soothing sienna from her yearning to accost and speak to perfect strangers.

She met Julio César at the fruit market. His torso was bare and doña Álvara saw the half-palm frond of his scar. She stood behind him in line and tapped him on the shoulder.

“Muchachito,” she said. “I have a blue-feathered rooster that once sang about a boy with a half-palm etched on his chest. Do you want to come hear him?”

Julio César had not forgotten about his blue rooster, for on many nights he had dreams about his other life, before the thief-surgeon from the capital had taken out his lung and left him to die, before he had learned to need the breath of the earth, and he dreamed of his mother and she told him stories about lost children that turned into other dreams about a blue saint of a rooster named Atila. “Is his name Atila?” Julio César said.

“Mira chico, yo no soy loca, how should I know his name? And who goes around naming their fowl anyway? I didn't say my rooster speaks. I said he sang. In Italian, but I understand un poquito. Ven conmigo. I'll show you.”

She paid for his fruit and introduced herself with an intimate hug and led Julio César across town to a brick building redundantly painted orange. They passed through an unlit hallway into a garden courtyard full of azaleas and cannonball flowers and African violets and begonias and many other flowers that Julio César could not name. In doña Álvara's room, which they entered through a door on the east side of the garden, the blue-feathered rooster ignored the young man; as they watched him expectantly, and doña Álvara coaxed him with
vamos, vamos gallito, canta tan bonito
, he shit three gray and green soft lumps and then opened his wings and scuttled across the room and hopped on the kitchen counter and shit again on doña Álvara's sack of guavas and bananas and zapotes.

“¡Maldito!” she screamed and threw one of her sandals at him.

As the rooster continued to leave his markings on the room and Julio César made a gesture for the door, more to get some fresh air than to go from there, doña Álvara mentioned that she needed someone to watch her garden, a man to protect her women. Since the young man was eager to get away from his one-eyed Jesuit guardian, who these days talked of nothing more than that devil Franco (who had wisely stayed out of the Second Great War) and of the evil yanquis, who now would think that since they had saved the world from the fascists they therefore owned it, he eagerly accepted the job. By the time he began classes at the University of Havana—the first to register for Professor Saltos y Brincos's comparative course on two of history's great dissidents, Milton's Satan and Santa Teresa de Avila—Julio César was living with doña Álvara. He had moved from Father Jacinto's living quarters after his graduation from Belén. The Jesuit had reluctantly agreed that it would be improper if he stayed, though he continued to give him the thirty pesos a month allowance, which Julio César spent buying exotic lingerie from a French store in the old city for the ladies who worked in doña Álvara's orange house.

Father Jacinto also bequeathed to Julio César the antique falcon-legged bathtub, which the young student set up in doña Álvara's courtyard and filled with garden soil and at nights, just when the house was beginning to bustle with activity, American and European tourists, in light-colored linen suits splotched with wine, coming in and out of the seven doors of the seven rooms that encircled the courtyard (yes, for even in doña Álvara's fetid room there was activity), Julio César would dig himself in and forget about everyone.

“Some protector you are,” doña Álvara chided him in the mornings. “What am I paying you for. Just to sit around here and look pretty?” And indeed, it was exactly what she was paying him for, to remind her women that masculine beauty existed in the world, though they may never guess at it from the besotted tourists they pleased every night.

His friend Fidel showed up once in a while—Julio César had convinced doña Álvara to offer a discount for the students at the university, assuring her it would make her women much happier to have some young blood
inside
their rooms—and before Fidel left he would crouch by the antique falcon-legged tub and start speaking in amorous whispers till Julio César poked his head out of the soil. He played a game with his old friend, quizzing him to see how much he had learned about demons and saints. He would ask of prominent historical characters:

“Demon or saint?”

He started with easy ones. “José Martí?”

“Fácil. Saint.”

“Adolf Hitler?”

“Más fácil. Demon.”

Then he would progress to more difficult ones. “Roosevelt?”

“Which one?”

“Franklin Delano.”

Pause. “Saint.”

“Theodore.”

Longer pause. “Demon … no?”

Then to almost unguessable ones. “Harry Truman?”

“No sé.”

“Murderer,” Fidel said. “Atomic demon.”

“Juan Perón?”

“Tampoco sé.”

“Yanqui-hater,” Fidel answered himself again, “reformer and a saint!”

Then, not breaking stride, speaking in the same amorous whisper, he would end the game as always. “Julio César?”

“Which one, the emperor or the gatekeeper of the orange whorehouse?”

Silence from the questioner.

“Actually it makes no difference, they are both poor devils.”

“Why?”

“Porque sí, because they are betrayed.”

“Fidel Castro?”

“De dos cabezonas,” Julio César answered assuredly, “demon one day, saint the other.”

Julio César could tell that Fidel liked this answer, that he was a man already comfortable with the multitudinous contradictions in his personality, that he had achieved as a youth that perfect clarity in ambiguity that evades most men all of their lives. He was prudish and fun-loving, he would lecture Julio César for drinking too much rum one day and the next would show up at three in the morning with a bottle of rum in one hand and a bottle of whisky in the other, singing salsa ballads, waking Julio César and dragging him to a nearby cemetery to watch the milky moon.