The Lazarus Rumba (51 page)

La Vieja recounted to me that evening when she visited my cell the whole of the service and, with a jittery ¡Oy, the look on Father Gonzalo's face when she told him she was going to join him in his hunger strike. “Mira chico, he measured me up and down and side to side as if guessing if there was any flesh to sacrifice to the gods of hunger and he tried hard to ignore my persistent wheeze and tried harder, el pobre, to ignore the shame swelling in his chest, that I was the only one, a stranger among all his beloved followers, a comunanga, as I heard his servant call me, that took to heart his command to join him in his hunger strike.

“'No, no señora,' he says, putting his hand on my shoulder, ‘no está usted en condición—'

“I push up from my cane and throw my chin back. ‘¿Cómo dice?' He starts again but as if weary in his effort of commencing to explain to me how I would surely die in a hunger strike of any length, he seems to rearrange his thoughts and like the general of a humble army who is wont to draft the feeblest conscript rather than no conscript at all, takes me into his ranks. ‘We are three now,' I say to him, and I tap my cane on the stone steps, ‘but soon we will be in the millions.' Pero el pobre, fasting has him distracted, he misses the allusion.”

When la Vieja told me of Father Gonzalo's hunger strike (it was the first I heard of it), I convinced her to pass on the word to Brother Joaquín and to the jailed children so that we too may join them. On the second day of our attempt to refuse the food that was offered us, to leave the black bean and meat-scrap mush on the tin plate untouched, el Rubio had us rounded up and manacled and brought to a large holding cell in one of the higher floors of the Department of State Security building. It was a large spare windowless room flooded with artificial white light. There was a gallowslike wooden contraption set up in the center of the room. There was a child hanging from one of the beams by his strapped wrists and strapped ankles. His fingers and his toes wiggled fretfully like the legs of an upturned roach. He must have been one of the children in our party but I did not recognize him. His head was stretched back and down by a makeshift rope harness knotted to a lower parallel beam. His nostrils were pinched shut by a wooden clothespin. He was alternating between sobbing and heavy breathing through his mouth. We were made to line up on opposite walls. Some of the younger imprisoned children also wept and kept their chins glued to their chests and would not look. El Rubio entered and climbed the platform of the wooden contraption. He was wearing a white T-shirt and no weapon. His boots made no sound as he walked. He carried a tin plate in his left hand, a fork in the other. He commanded everyone to raise their heads. He repeated his command once and again till everyone obeyed. He stroked the child's head. He asked him to stop crying and assured him and us that no one would be hurt and forkful by forkful he stuffed all of the contents of the tin plate into the child's mouth till the child had to stop breathing and stop sobbing and chew and swallow.

When el Rubio was finished, scraping the plate of the last bit of mush and putting it in his own mouth, and spitting it back out on the fork and forcing it down the child's throat, he smiled and turned in a full circle so that all of us would see his lip-locked smile. “Pues ven, no one is hurt and this child now will not die of hunger, and none of you, while you are imprisoned under my command, will die of hunger. I will have no deaths on my conscience. Fácil, if I have to I will feed each and every one of you, from the oldest to the youngest, in this same manner.” He stepped down from the platform and said that now he was hungry himself and commanded one of the guards to take the child down and stroked the child's hair again and left the cell with the empty tin plate and the fork still in hand. All further visits from outsiders were suspended. Our own hunger strike had lasted a day and a half and we were shut out from our supporters. What I know now in this place where memory is breath, is what Father Gonzalo and doña Adela recounted to me the day after Che Guevara concluded his brief visit to our town.

La Vieja insisted that their hunger strike be made more an event, that the art of a protest, of rebellion, is to do it in the eye of the public, that without witnesses rebellion is an act of egoism, an endeavor in self-aggrandizement, that in this sense, she went on in more familiar terms, protest is the exact opposite of prayer, whose grace lies in its solitariness and its doom in publicness. She convinced the present head of the Guantánamo CDR to build a small platform outside the Department of State Security jail where we were held. The three of them, la Vieja, Father Gonzalo, and Anita awoke at four every morning and went to sit on the platform, waiting for the government employees and the warden and el Rubio to arrive. La Vieja convinced Father Gonzalo to undo his shirt so that they may see the shape of his ribcage, already too evident, as his orange-brown skin, like dull leaf foil, made a cast of his hidden architecture. She also nailed a placard to a post near the platform and in red paint (which was also supplied by the CDR) marked the days Father Gonzalo had gone hungry and in a smaller red number the days she and Anita had gone hungry. Few spectators were attracted at first, some devout who came and recited a rosary for the Seven Sorrows of Mary with Father Gonzalo and Anita. (La Vieja sat between them, silent and solemn, so that it could be supposed from first looking at them that the rosaries were addressed to her, that she was a vision of a visiting deity, the final and proper answer to so many thousand lamentable susurrations.) And children also came intent on enjoying the last days of their summer, and a handful of field workers also came who had nothing better to do till the sugarcane harvest, sipping rum from old Coca-Cola bottles and offering it to the children and to the devout and even to the hunger strikers. Only the children drank with them and only then did la Vieja abandon her trance. She called each child that had been drinking to her, and took from them the cola bottle and turned the bottle on its head to spill its contents, then she set the bottle beside her and returned to the mold of her solemnity.

When el Rubio found out that the CDR had helped in constructing the platform for
la vieja enana y el curita mártir y su criada tortillera
, he had the old woman who was the leader fired and replaced with his own pariente, Ana Josefa Risientes, known to everyone in Guantánamo as Pucha, a younger revolutionary who he said had fought alongside him in la Sierra (though I don't remember her from there) and was sure not to turn on him. La Vieja was appalled and demanded that such actions were illegal and traitorous, that the CDR was an organ of the people and that only the people had a right to replace one leader with another. Helped down from the unsteady platform by two of the drunk field workers, who only after emptying a few bottles had the nerve to approach her, la Vieja stumbled to el Rubio's powder-blue Studebaker one morning and lifted her cane and began striking the hood and the windshield with all her force and called him an assassin and a child molester and a degenerate. El Rubio smiled, mindful as ever not to show his teeth, and had his men restrain her. As he wet his fingers in his mouth and passed them over the scratches on the new paint job, he casually commanded the arrest of the two field workers. It was la Vieja's last show of outward strength.

Through the newly established leadership in the CDR, el Rubio repossessed the supply of red paint and the brushes, so that after a few days no one was sure just how long the strikers had gone hungry, and he began to spread rumors that the hunger strikers were cheating, that they returned to the parish every evening not to rest as they said but to feast on Communion wafers and milk and pork provided by a certain counterrevolutionary finquero and that they rationalized such fraud on the traditional misericord allowed to monks when fasting became too unbearable. These are not true protesters in the revolutionary sense, el chisme went (so widespread that it even made it to us in our solitary cells), but run-of-the-mill, hocus-pocus papists. La Vieja, it was said, as invention mounted upon invention and bred the most ludicrous tale, was the worst, was actually the Mother Superior of a Matanzas nunnery of such wile and stealth, such a bruja, that she had once even fooled el Comandante-en-Jefe during his victorious ride into the capital. To counter this, la Vieja insisted that they would not abandon their platform at all. She had the floor of the platform spread with hay, and on it the three hunger strikers made their beds. She had a makeshift outhouse constructed of palm fronds and cane sheaths and a rusty metal bucket set behind the platform. She convinced Father Gonzalo and Anita to stop taking Communion, for this weakened their stance and the wafers, consecrated or not, were bread and bread was food. And she challenged el Rubio to set a watch on them, a challenge that, claro, el Rubio turned down but that others soon took up.

Pucha herself, as the seed of the rumors she had planted began to blossom into a bush that seemed to burn with the flowers of truth, began to believe her inventions, and had an emergency subcommittee set up within the CDR to watch the hunger strikers and keep vigil over them. Nine members, seven women of sundry ages and two teenage boys, took turns, in groups of three every third night, watching the hunger strikers. They set up a long table directly across from the wooden platform and set on it three gas-lamp lights and their coffee thermoses and sat behind the table and at first watched the hunger strikers as if they were judging a competition. But as early as the third round of watch they grew weary and took to bringing magazines to read and cards to play with and when this failed to relieve their boredom, they took to setting giant
jutía
rats loose under the platform and to bringing baskets stuffed with fresh pastries (guava and cheese pastelitos and chicken empanadillas) to taunt the protesters. “Pues que rico están los pastelitos hoy,” they voiced to each other from behind the glare of their gas-lamp lights and they set basketfuls underneath the platform so that the rats would not wander far from there and what the rats ate they accused the three hunger strikers of eating, and so they reported in their biweekly subcommittee reports to Pucha, that the three protesters were cheats, mock-rebels, frauds, stooges of the yanqui imperialists.

By the second week, Father Gonzalo's third week, the hunger strikers had strength only for stillness, so free of motion that their life could only be judged by the moistness of their eyeballs and the slow-motion blinking of their eyelids and the ceremonious fashion (on la Vieja's voiced command every half an hour) in which they simultaneously reached for the water bottles at their sides that the church ladies took turns replenishing. They wet their lips and took only a sip, un buchito nada más, for they had no energy to visit the outhouse more than once a day.

When Doctor Isidoro Antonio Mestre, a young pediatrician famous with the town children for the dulcet softness of his voice even as he pinched them with vaccines, was moved to visit them at the beckoning of his devout mother and with his stethoscope check their heart rates and the pattern of their breathing, he was arrested on the spot and the recent permission that he had been granted to leave the Island with his family for Madrid revoked. “Te jodiste, viejo,” one of the guards said as he placed handcuffs on him, and tapped hard on the cone of his antiquated stethoscope till the drum cracked. “Too bad, they say Franco feeds his loyal subjects the sweetest ham in the world!” Within three days, the young Isidoro Antonio Mestre was charged and convicted of sixteen counterrevolutionary crimes; among the lesser ones (these which fell under the notorious category of
la dolce vita
) were his unaccented fluidity in the English language, his effeminate passion for the opera, and his arrogant and gross display of his medical degree from the yanqui University of Chicago and of cardboard cutouts of yanqui cartoon characters, such as el ratón Mickey and el pato Donald, on the walls of his office.
Our children deserve better
, the state concluded in its brief and foolproof argument and recommended as punishment, along with the revocation of his permission to leave, the divestiture of his license. And so the tribunal sentenced and so it was quickly done, an English-language thesaurus, ticket stubs from the Chicago Lyric Opera and rare recordings of
Tosca
and
Turandot
, the medical diploma, el ratón Mickey and el pato Donald and the deaf stethoscope all confiscated and burned.

From then on, except for the church ladies and a handful of the grandmothers of the imprisoned children, the hunger strikers were alone. The field workers were beginning their preparations for the sugarcane harvest and the children were starting their classes.

On Friday September 6, the thirtieth day of Father Gonzalo's hunger strike, la Vieja was not the first to rise as usual from her bed of hay and use the metal bucket. And when doña Adela and the church ladies came near dawn with their rosaries in hand to awaken the other two, she still had not risen and they found this strange and went to her first and touched her for the first time and put the water bottle to her lips, but her body was losing all its warmth and she thirsted or hungered no more. They awoke Father Gonzalo and Anita and gave them water and before they removed la Vieja's body from between them, they prayed as usual, and Anita said she had heard la Vieja in her dreams at the moment she left and she said that the words she uttered were the words of our Lady and Mother speaking through one of her devoted ones and she repeated them as a prayer for the dead.

El Rubio wanted la Vieja's body. He came flanked by Plácido the coroner and a hospital physician and pointed to the giant rats that nested under the platform and recited, in rote, prophecies of plagues and pestilences and epidemics if the dead were not disposed of properly. And Plácido the coroner nodded reluctantly and added in a pleasant voice that he would care for the body with utmost respect. Father Gonzalo answered them that there was not enough blood or flesh left in that poor old body for any microbe to prosper and he too pointed at the rats and picked up a baby
jutía
that was scurrying about in the hay by the tail and held it over the body to prove that nothing living or hungry could care for the carcass of la Vieja's spirit. He threw the beast on the corpse and the beast poked its pointy whiskered snout into the corpse's open mouth and lifted its head and looked about and showed no further interest as Father Gonzalo had predicted and fled to join its brethren.