The Lazarus Rumba (52 page)

“Take the body,” el Rubio commanded despite the proof. The coroner and the physician moved towards the platform so that Father Gonzalo had no option but to defend his proof in another, less familiar, manner. Pobre Gonzalo, whose dementia was probably now more real than when he had joked about it some weeks before, pobre Gonzalo, whose own father had been an army colonel and whose grandfather had fought alongside the great warrior Antonio Maceo, whose two saddest memories were the time as a young boy, during the tyranny of Gerardo Machado, he had been forced to march in a military parade with a pike on his shoulder, and the time he had to break the news to his father and grandfather, cara a cara, that he was entering the novitiate, news that both men reacted to with disgust and indignation, shaking their heads and smacking their mouths as if trying to overcome a sour taste, assuring him in mocking tones that the clergy was haven for men who could not, or worse, wanted not to (
¿entiendes, no, muchacho bobo?
), find women, pobre Gonzalo, who had fled from the soldier's life because the very thought of violence made him stomach-ill, picked up another baby
jutía
and whirled it over his head and slung it at el Rubio, aiming it at his head but hitting him instead on the shoulder so that it clung for a moment there, petrified, till el Rubio grabbed the babe rat by the neck and squeezed all breath out of it and threw it back on the platform so that it lay beside the human corpse. His men had jumped out of the powder-blue Studebaker and were standing behind him with pistols drawn and cocked and aimed at the frail form of Father Gonzalo.

“No vale la pena,” el Rubio said. “Put your guns away. Let them stuff the dead rat inside the old witch and let us wait and see what they do with her, for they will not break soil in our town to bury her without our permission.” He turned on his heels and his men and the physician followed him. Plácido lifted his hands as if to beg pardon, then he too turned and followed.

The Minister's Visit

Somehow, perhaps through the usurped leadership of the CDR, news of la Vieja's death made it to the capital, for after they had washed her body and dressed her in a white cotton robe formerly used by a seven-year-old acolyte and fitted her into a tiny pine box fashioned for an untimely death, after an eight-day vigil, which had seen la Vieja's gray flesh sink into the pockets of her skull and her breathless suspiration contaminate the chapel with a sweet rotten smell, that not incense, nor myrrh-scented candles, nor a crateful of apples pricked with cloves and wrapped in cheesecloth and hung on nails at the sides of the coffin could combat, as the mourners planned to lead an illegal funeral march from St. Catalina de Ricis to Campo Santo, police barricades went up all over town and many streets were blocked off and el Rubio announced a mandatory rally at the yard across from the railroad station. Kiosks were set up and new bulbs screwed into every street lamp and six pigs were slaughtered and set on a roasting pit. A dance was announced and the hunger strikers' platform was cleared of hay and transferred to the yard to serve as stage for a salsa band. This was a good night, el Rubio announced as he opened the feast, the Minister of Industry was paying a visit to Guantánamo. He was due in town early in the morning.

Near dawn, after many hours of eating and drinking, el Rubio, his mop of hair dark with sweat and fallen over his brow, called for a halt to the music and took the stage and unveiled a new painting of the minister slouched like a giant over a tiny chessboard, his eyes intense and black and true as always, his left hand stroking his famous goatee, his right hand half open like the beginning of a question, his white king safe in one corner, shielded directly in front by a pawn and a couple of squares on the side by a rook, contemplating a move. It was to be presented to compañero Che as a gift the moment he stepped off the train. And furthermore, el Rubio added, as an act of revolutionary mercy in tribute to the minister, he had released the Marist brother and six of the delinquent youths from prison and he beckoned them all, along with the resentful hunger strikers, to join them now in this feast of pardon, this celebration of liberty.

When Che Guevara arrived at the train station in Guantánamo, not on the ten o'clock of Sunday morning as had been expected, but on the six o'clock train from Santiago, the Death Express, many did not recognize him (
¿Cuál es? ¿Cuál es? ¿Ése, ése?
), could not reconcile the thin lank-faced patchy-bearded pale man in the baggy olive uniform with the giant in the portrait (
No chica, ése no. El otro, el flaco, el flaquito
), could not tell exactly who he was till he put on his black beret and approached el Rubio and put his arm around him and whispered something in his ear and shook his head and whispered something else to his bodyguard and then was whisked away in the powder-blue Studebaker standing by.

Che Guevara visited me in my cell and asked to be left alone and we reminisced about our days in la Sierra and he told me of his visits to South America and to Mexico and of his ever progressing plan for a united southern continent. Then, in a quiet voice, he added that there were many stubborn weeds, pretty and yellow as dandelions, yet to be plucked from the soil of la Revolución, but that no serious planter abandons his land because of a few deep-rooted weeds and he begged me to have patience,
how poor are they who have it not, a
nd he sucked on his asthma spray, kissed me on the cheek, chided me for my thinness and promised me that I would be home with my wife before he left town.

Che Guevara visited St. Catalina de Ricis Church and marched at the tail of la Vieja's funeral procession, alone, his black beret in hand clutched to his chest. The powder-blue Studebaker, on the guise of providing protection against snipers, idled patiently behind him. At la Vieja's grave site, a plot donated by the city government, as if speaking only to her and not to the minister, nor to the hunger strikers, nor to all the other mourners gathered, Brother Joaquín knelt and began again the tale of Delfina Gutiérrez,
to more properly finish it, mi querida, como te prometí.
“Pues ya sabes,” he began, “of her marriage to the mulato aristocrat Israel, of the dreadful bliss of her wedding night, of her escape into the ghettos of Las Palmas Blancas, of her abortion induced by the poisonous white palm fronds, of her drunken nights with the gardener, of her theft of twenty-eight bridal gowns, of her dream of a white child floating in a bark of white palm fronds in an abominable white sea under a perverse white sky that drove her to the white murder of her husband, of her hanging beside her second lover, of her stink attacks on the sacrament of marriage that at the birth of our republic threatened all newly weds in the capital, of the first president's visit to the Marist house in the hills of the country, and of the jasmine-sweet victory, that so failed to convince you and that the president proclaimed as his own political triumph. Ya sabes todo eso. But the president's mortal victory is not the Virgin's, whose most human grace is that she is more interested in our character than in our happiness, and her most precious promise is that she would console us in our sorrows and make them hers and assist us in our deaths and make her everlasting life ours. So she did with Delfina Gutiérrez. When the mountain winds blew and the ghost-child became too cold, the Virgin gave her her robe and when Delfina Gutiérrez wet the robe and was overcome with a violent attack of escalofrío, the Virgin beckoned the ghost-child to come into her, to make her sorrows one with her who has known the greatest of all sorrow and the ghost-child at first was hesitant to share her solitude, but in time obeyed and entered the still naked form of the Virgin and that is why to this day that sacred statue seeps, through all its pores, a substance that is hers and not hers, a liquid that is as many parts vengeance as it is forgiveness.” Brother Joaquín reached into his robe and removed the crystal bottle and uncapped it and poured its blood-brown contents on the fresh mound of la Vieja's grave. The softened dirt drank it as soon as it received it.

That evening, before Che boarded the train on its way back to La Habana, el Rubio granted me and the twelve remaining children our unconditional freedom. After forty days, Father Gonzalo broke his fast with bread and guava juice and that midnight he and Anita took Communion for the first time in four weeks. I never saw Che again, but I know that he did not take his portrait gift, for it still hangs to this day on the wall of el Rubio's office at the Department of State Security, and he tells anyone who dares admire it that it was a gift
from
the minister
to him
on the occasion of his prodigious visit to our town.

Alicia received me in our home, but I could no longer be a husband to her, the man she had married no longer existed, the
guerrillero
who had broken into the tiny mountain schoolhouse to retrieve hidden arms had been erased from the blackboard of history like yesterday's lesson. I left her to the care and caresses of her cousin and when Richard Hadley appeared, I searched for others just as discontented as I was and began to plan my escape into the paradise of the tin roofs.

When I returned here to this house in which we made our marriage, much less a
guerrillero
, much much less a man, with these seven wounds against me, naked as the sacred statue of la Virgencita, my skin liver-spotted and my fingers crooked, my ears deaf to the orchestrated clamor of the virtuous symphonies, my wedding ring a molar in the mouth of my enemy, my old-as-the-century blue-feathered cock floating in the fountain by the terrace, his neck cracked, his coral crest limp with the heavy waters, my falcon-legged bathtub desecrated with a golden
mojón
, my wife a lover to her own, in her an unborn daughter who will, bear my name though not be my own, my only strength my memory, my only solace my prayers to our Lady and Mother, my only pleasure the pale cafecito from the reused grounds and the brief and sudden afternoon showers that wash my wounds, I suspected too well my one unlisted crime, for which no tribunal had the wisdom to condemn me, the where-and-how with which I forgot the patience that Che so urged, that allowed him and all the living to live on.

BOOK THREE

Exile and the Kingdom of Forgetfulness:
A Tale in Tongues

Wordeaters

As doña Adela kneaded the dough, she realized it was too wet, as careful as she had been, she had added too much water and now nothing could be done. She had no more flour. She could get no more at la bodega till the following month for both her ration card and her daughter's card were mobbed with “X's.” And there was not even close to enough money in the yellowy, over-handled envelope she kept under the porcelain statuette of Santa Bárbara to buy flour through la bolsa. Hasta el pan de Dios nos lo quitan. As she pressed the dough trying to squeeze out the extra moisture, she had an idea. She went to her bath closet.

It was filled with labeled vials and jars full of flower pollens and seed extracts and eastern spices that her daughter Alicia used to perfume and animate her morning bathwater. She opened a few vials and smelled them and with some she tilted the bottle and wet her index finger with her tongue and pressed it against the powder and tasted it, either nodding her head in approval and setting the container on one side or puckering her lips and shaking her head in a tremble, putting the container back on the shelf. She selected five vials and one small jar to take with her. In the vials were granules of crystalized honey and dried shavings of coconut meat and essence of orange and papaya blossoms and dust of eggshells, and in the jar, red tiny diamond-shaped bits, bittersweet as they melted in doña Adela's mouth, that Alicia had labeled as
sangre de rosas
but doña Adela had once heard Marta say that it was the blood of doves turned to glass under the sacred fire. She added a sprinkle of each to the soft dough, kneading it in one at a time till she felt the dough become substantial to the touch and then she added half a sprinkle more of crystal honey, a pinch of eggshell dust and after a moment's hesitation one more sprinkle of the glass blood. The dough turned pinkish. And she waited till it rose.