The Lazarus Rumba (44 page)

For a week, no one came to my cell except for the two guards who brought me my food. I had sheets and a pillow (apparently it was now permissible to hang myself). They no longer saluted me. My bucket went unchanged. I pressed in the bruise in my face to make it hurt, to feel
something.
One evening, as I slept curled up against the wall, I heard a commotion outside and then I heard the door open. The wall became crowded with shadows as they brought the lamp into my cell. Then the shadows disappeared and only one remained.

“Pendejo, you have betrayed us and anyone
but you
would pay with his life as the tribunal mandated.” I knew his voice and I did not turn to look at him.

“
You
are the traitor,” I said, “and sooner or later the whole world will know it.”

“You are poisoned with hubris, mi amigo del alma.”

“Blame what you will. It doesn't matter. My part is done with.”

“I came thinking of your wife, of your family—”

“You came thinking of yourself, cabrón!”

“¿Así que así?” he said. “I have disturbed the revolutionary process for your sake and from shame you can't even turn and face me one last time. It ends up with me speaking to your hairy nalgas.”

“Go, go do what you have to do.”

The shadow grew on the wall and I felt a knee pressed into my back and a pistol barrel grazed my cheek with a delicate and sensual attention and then was pushed into my temple and I smelled the scotch on his breath that gave him the courage to come to me.

“I can finish you right here and no one will lift one cry against me.”

I closed my eyes. There was a silence that I supposed naturally precedes the firing of a bullet into your temple.

“Did you conspire against me?” he whispered.

“No.”

“Liar!” He lifted himself off me and left the room.

The guard who removed the floor lamp assured me I had sealed my fate.

Another week passed. The bucket in the corner overbrimmed with my waste and wet my feet and splashed back at me when I crouched over it. I asked the guards who brought me my food and water if they could please change it. They ignored me. One evening, after I finished my supper and I reached back to them the tin plate and the tin cup, they blindfolded me and grabbed me under the armpits (it must have been quite simple for them—I must have lost some fifty pounds during my stay) and led me up some stairs and down a long hallway. Then, to my surprise I felt fresh dirt under my feet and when I breathed, it was the pure mountain air. I was outside. They walked me a bit more and then threw me on the ground. I was out of breath. (I had tried to keep in shape by pacing to and fro in my cell, but there's only so much pacing you can do in a nine-by-twelve room, and so much energy you can draw from three meals of mush beans and plantains.) I was told to remove my blindfold. It was nighttime but the moon was bright. My sight, instead of weakening during my dark incarceration, had become adept at making out the nuances of shadows and I could discern four figures standing over me, three in front and one, much taller and more solid and more still, behind them.

“He already smells like the dead, comandante.” I recognized the voice of my interrogator with the bad teeth. I sat on my knees, and soon I saw that two of the figures were wearing uniforms, another one a dress or a robe and the fourth figure, the tall and solid and still one, had its arms spread at its side, palms facing outward and it seemed to be wearing nothing at all. The middle figure, the tallest but for the one behind them, lit a match and put it to a cigar in his mouth and I immediately recognized the whiskers of my old friend. He had deemed it appropriate to visit me again, as if the memory of speaking to my hairy nalgas had left him un-settled. He sucked on the cigar and when he let out the smoke it trapped the moonlight so that his whiskers and his face up to his eyes were hidden by a soft gauzy veil.

“He'll smell better once he gets out in the open air,” Fidel said. “Brother Joaquín will make sure he bathes before he leaves.” He put his arm on the robed figure to his right. “I have decided you should not die … o mejor dicho, we have
all
decided, Brother Joaquín, here, and myself and this comandante and many other defenders of la Revolución, all of us have decided.”

I sat still and pretended neither gratitude nor joy.

“Does this not make you happy, mi amigo, if not for yourself, then for your wife who will not be a widow?”

I said nothing. Fidel gave Brother Joaquín a gentle shove in the back. The brother walked unsteadily towards me, his hands palms upward in front of him carrying a bundle as if it were an offering. He placed the bundle on my lap.

“Póntelo, mi hijo.” In his sour breath I could smell his many years. He walked back and rejoined the other three figures. I stood up and unfolded the bundle. It was a robe like the one the old brother was wearing. I stepped into it and remained standing.

“Bien,” Fidel said, “we are now face to face.” The two guards came up from behind me and pushed down on my shoulders so I would sit again. “No, no, por favor,” Fidel said, extending his cigar hand towards us. “Let him stand. I did not come here to shame anyone. Al contrario, I came here to do honor to an oath of loyalty that I once took to defend this prisoner's life, in any and all occasions, and which he took to defend mine. Here, under the statue of his devoted Virgencita, which the brothers claim is miraculous and sweats compassion, I have come to honor my oath.” He put his hand on the legs of the figure behind them, which now as he moved out of the way I saw clearly sat on a pedestal and was the famous statue of the naked Virgencita. He wiped his hand on the seat of his pants. “The tribunal's sentence has been overturned, Julio César Cruz will not die! Tomorrow he will begin his ride back to Guantánamo in the company of Brother Joaquín. My oath will not be broken.”

“Bless the heart of el Comandante-en-Jefe,” Brother Joaquín murmured. “I will accompany him well and deliver him to his wife.”

“Will the free man now speak the truth of his crimes?”

“I am tired of speaking and respeaking the truth. I am guilty of none of the crimes I was charged with and I have never broken that oath we took to defend liberty in this Island above all.”

Fidel waved his other hand in front of his face. “No speeches, por favor. It was a question that I did not mean for you to answer. Fear not, I will not change my mind.
You will not die
, punto y final … it would make a liar of me, a traitor.”

“No, no, compadre, lie as much as you can bear it. Your own historians will absolve you.”

“Comandante, por el amor de Dios,” Brother Joaquín blurted, “take care not to offend he who brings with him mercy.”

“It's all right, Joaquín … I will not be moved from my position no matter what the freed man says. And take care not to address him as
comandante
ever again. He is now a
citizen
of la Revolución, a role that of course brings with it its own, no less important, duties.” He walked towards me. I had done all I could to anger him, to embarrass him. But so far he had withstood my taunts with the grace of a proper king and now he wanted to add the final touch. “Que Dios te cuide, compadre,” he said, standing less than a foot away from me, and saluted me theatrically for the last time. I spit at him and though I could not see it I felt the spit run down his cheeks into the fabric of his whiskers. Brother Joaquín gasped and the guards came running towards me, but Fidel held them by calmly raising his cigar. He said nothing and did not wipe my spit off his face and went into the house and I was left out in the courtyard with the naked Virgin and with the shocked Brother Joaquín.

The following morning I was allowed to bathe and shave and given back the same robe to put on, which I saw now was a monk's brown cassock without the sash so that it hung on me like an oversized peasant's dress. They also put on my feet a pair of worn leather sandals that smelled as if they had been worn by a whole generation of hermits. I was then led back to my cell. It had been scrubbed clean and smelled of ammonia. The straw mattress had a clean sheet and the tin bucket had been removed. I waited. Even my desperate yearning for Alicia (to have her now so I could rest my head on her lap and she could pass her hands through my hair as we listened in felicity to Bach's saddest oboe concerto), did not diminish my hope that with my final insult Fidel
had
changed his mind and that this was to be the wait before my execution. When Brother Joaquín came in and told me to follow him, I asked him if he was not going to hear my confession.

“I have no power to absolve you, hijo mío, but there is
always
time to speak of our weaknesses.” He knelt beside me and crossed himself and lowered his head. I spoke arrogantly of all my recent weaknesses and when I had finished and I had not spoken about the one who had brought me mercy, Brother Joaquín seemed pleased and he took out a small flask from under his robe and uncorked it and pressed his thumb to the mouth and tilted the flask. He made a cross on my forehead with his wet thumb. I wiped the cross away with my fingers and smelled the ointment. It was musty like old rain hidden in wet leaves. Brother Joaquín grabbed me by the elbow and said it was time for us to go.

I was not blinded. The guards outside the door, the ones who brought me my food, had abandoned their unkindness and they held me up when I faltered ascending the steep concrete stairways. We moved through a narrow hallway into the main parlor of the house. All four of us then sat on a wooden bench and waited. Heavy drapes were drawn over the arched windows and the only light came from the votive candles in front of a porcelain statue of la Virgencita. It was a smaller version of the one out in the courtyard and no one had stolen its robe so she maintained her majesty as queen of our nation, but her face did not express the well-earned sadness that the naked one is said to possess, a sadness as if her Son had just died.

I heard horses outside and the two guards stood up. The two main doors were pushed open and I saw by the rushing sheets of light that it was already close to high day.

“Vamos,” the guards said. They led me outside and the skin on my face tightened. I had not felt the unabashed warmth of daylight since my trial. We passed through the iron gates and through the underbrush in front of the house. I was squinting because the sunlight was falling directly on us, so at first I thought I was having a vision, as it is often reported the accused do as they are led to the execution site. There, in front of the house, led by two black stallions was a marvellous carriage of many colors, dusk orange and lemonade yellow and the deepest shameless scarlet. The guards pushed me on and I saw that the carriage was like a canopy on a horse-carreta and that it was made of individual feathers stolen from tropical angels and woven in and out of dead tree branches.

“Vamos,” Brother Joaquín said this time, grabbing me under my armpit and parting some of the feathers and helping me get inside my vision. The floor was matted with straw. I sat cross-legged and the carriage was the perfect size, the top just brushing against my pate. The light changed. It passed through the tropical-angel feathers and became emanations of them and tattooed their shapes and their varicolors on my robe and on my palms, which I turned upward so that there these colored shadows were most crisp and my palms were like crystal pools. Then Brother Joaquín said,
¡Arrea!
and I heard the swish of leather against hide and my carriage moved and all the colors ran one into the other. Once I got used to the rocking movement, I pulled one of the feathers and as I examined it I fell out of my trance. It was a leaf not a feather. My marvellous carriage was made out of croton branches folded together like thatch over a precarious skeleton of brittle stalks. I knelt and tried to stick my head out towards the front where I heard the horse's clatter. My face met Brother Joaquín's bony behind.

“Stay in there,” he said. “I'll tell you when you can come up here and sit with me.”

I pushed my head to the side and stuck my head out a bit. The two horses were so gaunt they seemed mere ribcages draped in hide. “Where are we going?”

“Home. ¡Dale gracias a la Virgen! You're going home. You are a free man. I could let you off right here if you want, but I don't really recommend it.”

He said nothing more and pushed the feeble black horses on. Near dusk it drizzled and when the wind blew my carriage began to shed its leaves so that slowly, as patches of the gray landscape became visible and as I looked up and saw a half-moon half hidden by a yellow mist, my carriage began to look more and more like a birdcage. I faced my palms upward as I had done earlier but the sorry moon did not cast enough light for any reflection. Well after it darkened, Brother Joaquín began to speak to me, as if the two-ply mantle of the rain and the darkness would disguise his voice. He said he had disobeyed a command to ride me through the capital past the Palace of the Revolution, so that the gods of la Revolución could examine with dismay one of their fallen ones, paraded by them, as a last embarrassment, in a birdcage made of colorful leaves. Brother Joaquín had veered from the ordered path and taken a rocky and mostly untraveled road south of the city, we might now be considered fugitives and the mercy that had been granted me might well be rescinded.

“A mercy
you
begged for more than I did.”

“O a lo mejor no,” he said. “When they catch up with us, I'll just tell them I got lost.”

Nobody ever did catch up to us. That first night we ate most of the meager helpings they had supplied us with for the entire trip and slept by the side of the road under an almond tree. In the morning, one of the two horses had dropped dead. We abandoned the birdcage carriage and Brother Joaquín unhitched the other horse and fed it the remaining food and hitched a pair of sackcloth bags over its hump and took the flask from his robe and wet his thumb and pressed a long cross in between the horse's eyes. He then mounted him and I walked alongside.