The Lazarus Rumba (45 page)

“What is in that bottle?”

“The Virgin's urine.”

“The Virgin's urine?”

“The Virgin's urine.”

“
The
Virgin?”

“Exacto.”

“That's what you rubbed on my forehead this morning?”

“And what I just rubbed into this animal's forehead.”

He patted the animal on the neck and stroked its balding mane.

“Why?”

“On you, to sanctify. On the horse, so that he does not lose his way and in turn lose us.”

“The horse is dying.”

“I know. So am I and so are you.”

He spoke with the assurance of a madman. As we moved along the side of the road I was able to examine him fully for the first time. He was strait-backed with wide shoulders and so devoid of flesh that I could make out the angles of his skeleton through his robe. He had unlaced the front of his robe halfway down his chest and patches of creamy white hair poked out of his chest cage. His face was desperate, the features sharpened by a certain hunger that seemed to have fed even on the pulp of his lips so that they now hung one over the other like dried petals. His skin was almost colorless and single white hairs grew few and wide apart (like grass on stony ground) on his cheeks and on his chin. Only his dark cinnamon eyes were serene, floating in the cave of his skull. Their stubborn buoyancy lifted his chin and like two precisely calibrated weights balanced his unsteady frame on the skeletal horse and gave him the overall demeanor that enabled him to proclaim with absolute and blessed authority that he was carrying around a bottle full of the Holy Virgin's urine.

“May I see?”

He handed me the bottle. It was a fine crystal container with a round glass top corked at the end. The liquid inside was the consistency and color of sooty riverwater. I shook it.

“It doesn't look like urine.” I uncapped it and smelled it. The fecundity of old rain. “It doesn't smell like urine.”

Brother Joaquín extended his hand and wiggled his bony fingers in unison at me. I returned the bottle. He tightened the cap and returned it to the inner folds of his robe.

“Many years ago, near the end of the last century, there was a young girl named Delfina from a very aristocratic family in the capital who went by the surname of Gutiérrez. Delfina Gutiérrez was engaged to a young man named Israel. Israel was also of aristocratic lineage, but there was more color in his skin and from certain angles it was evident he was of mixed bloods. This concerned her parents more than it concerned Delfina Gutiérrez for she was a devotee of la Virgencita (like I am, like I have heard that you are) and had it not been that she was an only daughter and that her father was desperate for a
son
, she would not have married at all. She promised the Virgin that when her husband took her on the wedding night she would feel no joy. There was a grand celebration and Delfina Gutiérrez found that she could drink champagne and rum head-to-head with the most notorious of her parents' highbrow, world-traveling friends and after the ceremony that night, when Israel took Delfina Gutiérrez, she was so levitated with champagne bubbles and so overwhelmed with his liquor smell and with his sweaty belly-warmth and with the vein (thick as the stem of a sunflower) that ran up his forearm and through his biceps into the hairy thickness of his chest that she forgot completely about her promise and imagined the vein coursing through his innards down to where it reappeared, thick as before, in the skin of his thick organ and she gave in to the many joys of her man. The following morning she was so burdened with guilt that she told Israel that she was leaving him and that she would have the marriage annulled. To which Israel answered that considering the many times they had done it that night they had no more claim to have their marriage annulled than his grandparents who had brought sixteen children into this world. Delfina slapped him and condemned him for having made her feel so wickedly good on her most sacred night and left him. Heart-torn and unable to forget his new wife's unimaginable talents for passion, Israel went to live in his parents' house, where he would die in a most horrible fashion, still sick with love.”

“Does this have anything to do with the holy urine?”

“I didn't say it was
holy.
”

“You said you used it to sanctify.”

“Mira, are you going to argue or are you going to listen? Shall I remain quiet as before?”

“Perdóname … go on.”

Brother Joaquín threw his cinnamon eyes upward as if at once reading the script of his tale in the sky and troubling the deaf heavens as to why he was assigned this burden of guiding this traitor home. Then he lowered his eyes and everything was as before.

“Así fue, from that morning on, Delfina Gutiérrez's life began to disintegrate. Her parents, embarrassed by her situation and angered by her stubborn insistence to have the marriage annulled, told her she had to go and make a life of her own. And she did, taking odd jobs as a maid and in the tobacco factory and living in a one-room tenement in the old city in a neighborhood facetiously named by its poverty-stricken residents Las Palmas Blancas, for the cheap white paint peeled off the buildings' outer walls in great sheets that for a while hung from the walls like albinal palm fronds. Above her lived a strongman who trained with heavy weights all day and dropped them so that Delfina Gutiérrez's ceiling rumbled and plaster dust rained down on her. Three months after her wedding night, Delfina Gutiérrez, long unbathed and so covered in plaster dust that she had to lift the strap of her bra to see the real tint of her skin, peeled seven of these poisonous lead-laden fronds from her building, and stuffed her insides to kill the new life growing there. The fetus came out wrapped head to toe in fronds, like a fish ready to roast. After this, her mind began to deteriorate and she placed all the blame for her misfortune not on the sacred Virgin but on the maldito sacrament of marriage and she set out to rid the world of matrimony. She tried various tactics. She searched the societal pages in the paper for the weddings that her parents were likely to attend and during the service she stood up on one of the back pews and screamed that she was a ghost from the shameful past (which many believed due to the coat of white dust that covered every inch of her), that the groom had been her lover for many years, or when her anger was more pure, that the
bride
had shared her bed! Eventually barred from all wedding ceremonies, she set out following the mailman and stealing invitations from people's mailboxes, leaving white footprints so obvious that it was a minor miracle that this tactic was so successful (a miracle she attributed to the Virgin) that on one or two occasions couples of well-known families were married with only a handful present. Her most successful ruse, however, occurred to her the morning she received a package from her mother accompanied with a note:

It was her silk embroidered wedding dress, which she put on before she knelt in front of her makeshift altar to the Virgin and whispered prayers of repentance and then took off the dress and set it afire in the alleyway, a fire that burned with such rage that it seared many of the white palm fronds of her building. What better way, she thought, to undo weddings than to undress the bride? For isn't the white bridal gown the central piece, the one unique and ornate symbol that proclaims and holds aloft for all the world the luxury of virginity?

“Delfina Gutiérrez stole bridal gowns. She bribed servants, snuck into gardens and cautiously climbed up trellises, dug into cellars and hid behind stacks of aged rum casks and even once seduced the gardener and drank with him shot for shot of black rum (a skill she was learning to master late nights in her tenement room after her novenas) till he passed out, and wobbly as she was, lifted his heavy jangly key ring, anything at all on the eve of a much heralded wedding to sneak into the bride's dressing chamber and make off with the bridal gown stuffed into a fifty-pound burlap sugar sack. She stole twenty-eight bridal gowns in all and twenty-seven weddings were postponed the following morning. Only one bride decided, against the advice of her parents, that she would get married anyway, that she would walk the aisle naked if she had to, but that she could wait no longer to ride on the seat of her beloved and have him slay the ugly dragon of her virginity. The parents, not knowing their child was such a poet, politely assented, and let her wear her mother's most modest white silk dress.

“Delfina Gutiérrez stole bridal gowns and stored them, burlap sack beside bundled burlap sack, under the untuned steel frame of her narrow bed. One by one, their whiteness began to blanch her dreams and after the first ten were stored under her bed, it was as if a London-style fog, like the one that opens that great Dickens novel, had settled in her dreamworld and the poor souls that peopled her dreams, her mother and her father, her beloved betrayer and even the figure of the Holy Virgin, were only themselves after they disturbed the fog, existing, that is, a few paces behind themselves. When she stored ten more gowns under her bed, the only dream she could dream was of a white child floating on a bark of white palm fronds in a white sea under a white sky. This is the dream that drove her to murder.”

“Murder? I thought you said she was hanged for theft.”

“I never said she was hanged.”

“Bueno, the way the story is heard, how she was hanged for stealing bridal gowns and then after death pulled her greatest trick by stealing the Virgin's gown. ¿Así fue no? Isn't that why the Virgin is naked?”

Brother Joaquín said nothing for a while, and we kept a steady pace eastward on the rocky untraveled road. When I tired and began to complain about it, he invited me to jump up on the horse with him.

“¿Estás loco?—His poor legs will fold if I jump up there with you.”

“Bien, then we'll stop soon, and then maybe I'll finish my tale.”

We moved on. We filled his canteen at a brook that flowed near the road. The horse drank from the stream. When I complained that I was hungry, Brother Joaquín answered me that the horse must also be hungry. It was well after dusk when our rocky path wandered into the streets of a small town. Brother Joaquín rode up the main street and turned and circled the block (the side streets were unpaved and uneven and the black horse stumbled) and then he went farther up and circled again and kept on doing this every other block, past the solid square buildings of the main street, a bank still flying the national flag although the sun no longer graced it and a post office still flying a more tattered version of the flag and a bodega with its own flag hiding its colors like a coy virgin, limp on a hook over the empty outside stalls, and past a small brick church, its heavy wooden doors padlocked, its flag entangled on the iron cross above its humble steeple. When we came to the end of town, Brother Joaquín mumbled something that sounded like a curse and he pulled on the reins and turned the tired black horse around and we went through the town again in a reverse fashion, passing through some of the side streets on the opposite part of town, stopping at the town's movie theater to squint, in the darkness, at the shiny stills of an American movie starring Joan Crawford. Most of the tenement windows were darkened and those that weren't flickered with solitary candles. This was less common then than it would eventually become, just one of the endless
sacrificios
Fidel asked his people to suffer for the good of the twin sacred cows, Socialismo and la Revolución. To save on the precious imported fuel, entire sections of the Island would be blacked out on an assigned day of the week, sometimes for a few hours, sometimes from dusk to dawn. I often imagined the Soviet cosmonauts watching from their orbits in space as an entire province went black and I imagined the cosmonauts laughing at our crocodile-Island, which seemed to have been split in two or had its head chopped off or its wide tail hacked and this is how they conquered their astral boredom: wagering shots of vodka on how our homeland would be mangled.

“Ni un maldito drunk to be seen wandering the streets,” Brother Joaquín said. “What's wrong with this town! Where's the cantina? Where is the whorehouse?” He looked down at me and smiled, a common man proud of his put-on worldliness. I hunched my shoulders. He turned his horse again and we headed back west past the bank and the post office and the bodega and the church and out of the light-deprived town. About a mile out, near a cane field, we saw a bonfire in the distance and as we approached we saw the shadow of a tilted structure that must have once served as a barn or as a storage house; gas lamp flames danced within the glassless windows and the beat of tambourines and maracas and drums swelled as we approached. A cadre of shirtless men, some young some older, some thin, some paunchy, were dancing around the bonfire. They stopped when they saw us near. The music rushed out of the barn and it no longer plunged into their bodies and passed by them and scattered.

“Buenas,” Brother Joaquín said when we were close enough.

“Buenas,” one of the men said, raising his hand and saluting in a friendly fashion. He was young, still more a boy than a man, and in the undulating shadows he was so full of bones he seemed a crustacean. His hair was long and black and hung thick over his ears and his brow, and his beltless pants, which fell below his sharp hips and exposed a patch of his pubic hairs, seemed to be held up by nothing but an urgent modesty.

“Venimos de allá,” Brother Joaquín said pointing back towards the town.

“Es nuestro pueblo.”

“What's your pueblo called?”

“It used to be called Ascención, now it is called Los Baños.”

“I like Ascención better. Don't you? What's the whole town doing way out here?”