The Lazarus Rumba (54 page)

Paca Córtez put her bicycle away. She suggested to el Rubio, in a postscript of her report, another tactic. She had the young man chief of el Comité keep close track in a journal of correspondence mailed to her house. She stopped going to the post office and instructed her carrier, her grandnephew Miguel, to take all her mail to her address. She waited on the rocking chair in her porch and took her bundle from him by hand. She sifted through it and daily found nothing from el Comité. She called the young man chief of el Comité and he assured her that at least four pieces were being sent to her every day. Some time later, many of the pieces began to appear in her mailbox, wet and smudged and illegible and weeks late. Miguel assured her that he had not put them there; so she took him off his route and put him in charge of personally picking up the outgoing mail from the offices of el Comité and hand-delivering it, piece by piece. He complained that he did not want to be taken off his route, that he had been on it too long and that his customers had grown accustomed to his presence in the early afternoons and that they bid him into their homes for cafecito and expected his personal services. Paca Córtez answered him that she well knew just how
personal
his services were and how much he was bid into
certain
homes and she promised to reinstate him on his route when this crisis was solved, with a lighter load so he could spend as much time as he needed admiring the orchids at his friend the alderman's stone house. For a while this worked, announcements of quotidian milestones and the other more delicate documents from the offices of el Comité arrived at their intended addresses crisp and legible and punctual. Paca Córtez reported to el Rubio that she was content that the problem had been solved and all was well till the morning Miguel and the mailbag of outgoing mail from el Comité disappeared.

Paca Córtez did not call el Rubio. She dug out her bicycle again and rode to the stone house. She parked her bicycle under the giant ceiba. She knocked on the door with her cane, as forceful as if she were a landlord coming to collect rent. The alderman opened the door. His reading glasses were perched on his beaky nose. He showed no surprise. He was tall and bald and brown as a creole egg and wore a light blue guayabera and neatly pressed trousers.

“Buenas,” Paca Córtez said, her cane still aloft.

“Buenas.”

“¿Dónde está Miguel?”

The alderman removed his glasses and took a step back, as if afraid she might swing the cane, and motioned with his hand for his guest to enter. Paca Córtez stood her ground and asked again the whereabouts of her grandnephew. “Mejor si entras,” the alderman said. Paca Córtez lowered her cane and stepped past him. She said that she had often heard of the famous beauty of his gardens and of his home in general, but that sadly she had never before been invited to visit. The alderman answered that he was a very private man, a recluse really, and that he had only become a public figure in service of la Revolución.

“Hmmm,” Paca Córtez said. She was led past the dark foyer through a loggia that was lined with potted palms and crotons and hanging ferns and faced one of the sunlit patios. There were open passageways to every room of the house fitted with low wrought-iron grills. Paca Córtez leaned up against the loggia railing and stared out into the patio. There was a young poinciana tree in the center and under it a bench and the three brick walkways that led from the bench were hidden with low-creeping vines. “That's my favorite spot to read,” the alderman said, “late in the afternoons when the light falls less harsh.”

“¿Dónde están las famosas orquídeas?”

The alderman motioned for her to follow like a guide leading a tour. He pushed aside the grill in one of the passageways and led her into a room where the floor was of an exquisite veined marble, its base the color of his guayabera. In the center was a mahogany dining table with eight chairs. On one wall hung a Bruegel-style painting of a peasant feast and on another a giant portrait of a black Madonna. The room opened onto another larger courtyard. Some areas of this courtyard were well lit, others were shaded by small tangerine trees and parts of the open air roof above were sheathed by a giant muslin sheet that puffed like a canopy with the breeze. Paca Córtez adjusted her glasses. “Mi Eden,” the alderman said as he parted the low iron grill and led her through the doorway.

Paca Córtez leaned close to the railing. At the center of the garden, in a bricked-off circle of woody mulch, between the light and the shadow, was a profusion of flower spikes each with six or more startlingly white flowers with yellow upturned lips. They hung on the slender spikes as if ready to flutter off. The alderman told Paca Córtez the scientific name of the flowers, which sounded too heavy and vulgar for their airy beauty. He said that every year he managed to fool a few of his orchids, by keeping them in pots in the coolest rooms of his mansion and fanning them with artificial breezes, into believing it was a long spring, and when they bloomed, transplanted them into the center of his garden.

“It is the only one of my orchids on which I play such an obvious trick. ¿Vale la pena, no? Does not their presence excuse such a transgression? Not that such a trick is not without its dangers. The plant sometimes becomes confused and angered and in an act of rebellion against its removal from the natural course of seasons, the foliage becomes diseased and spotted, a rash act of self-destruction in a final effort to save itself from the eternal spring! Thus, most of my plants I let bloom as their nature mandates. It is just this one, this one that I can't resist tampering with.”

Paca Córtez followed the alderman into the garden and towards the center bricked-off circle of woody mulch. He knelt by the plants and passed his fingers over the green leaves. One or two of the plants, though flowering as if healthy, were indeed struck with a rash of tiny yellow spots. “Qué pena,” Paca Córtez said. And the alderman agreed that it was a shame, but he assured her that the plants would recover their health once he returned them to their natural course. He showed her other varieties in his garden, some that grew on pots, some on carefully balanced mounts of stones and rocks, some on the slender trunks and branches of the tangerine trees and others that sunk their tangle of roots into the brick walls or around the wooden rails of the upper balustrades and their flower spikes seemed to grow on air. The alderman showed Paca Córtez one variety that he said was his own hybridization from three Philippine varieties. The flower had a swollen crimson lip and blood-brown petals that fell off on each side, long and floppy with tiny hairs, like a hound dog's ears, and its crown was triangular and twisted and pure white splashed with dots of bright red, like a murdered princess's tiara.

“Mi pobre
guajira guantanamera
, that's what I have named it. It has taken me over half a century to bring into existence. I plan to have it officially recognized at the next international orchid show in Rome.… That is, if I get permission from the government to attend. ¿Qué crees?” He took a pot and presented it as a gift to Paca Córtez. She took it and thanked him; and half-forgot as to the purpose of her visit, she added that he would surely get permission to travel to Rome, she could not see what suspicions the government would have about such a devoted servant of the cause, and she commended him on his beautiful home and on his stunning garden and begged a thousand pardons before she asked him why a man who lived so shamelessly as
un puro aristócrata
was so interested in the success of la Revolución. The alderman grew serious. He took out a handkerchief from one of his pants pockets and wiped his bald pate. He picked up another pot and took the one he had given her and led her out of the garden. “You have come looking for your nephew, no es así, señora? I will show you where he is.” In a room with large airy windows curtained in lace, Miguel was asleep in a wide bed. His body was tucked under white linen and his head supported upward by a mound of pillows. His brow was bandaged and there was a small round bruise on his right cheek. Paca Córtez heard the alderman sigh at the sight of her dormant grandnephew. He put the plants he had brought up on a bedside table and shook Miguel on the shoulders till he woke. “Tienes visita.”

Miguel opened his eyes and pushed himself up on the bed, keeping his body covered with the sheets.

“Hombre,” Paca Córtez said. She pointed at the alderman with her cane. “¿Este diablo te ha hecho daño?”

Miguel looked at the alderman and he said that on the contrary, that his good friend had saved him from harm, that he had offered him shelter and care, and had been reading to him before he fell asleep.

“What happened to you then?”

The alderman excused himself and said that he would brew some coffee.

Miguel waited till the alderman had stepped out of the room before he began to relate the occurrences of that morning. He had gone to pick up the mail from the offices of el Comité the night before, and had taken the bag to the postal office to sort it out and mark it as usual and was out the doors on his delivery route before sunrise. He had not yet reached his first stop on La Avenida, when he was set upon by a band of women dressed in white sheets and sandals. Their hair was loose and wild and fell over their faces so that in the predawn shadows he could not tell who they were. They demanded he hand them the mailbag. He asked them who they were and the one that was their chief, a slight woman with long brown hair, said that they were the wordeaters and that they were hungry since they had not eaten in over a week. Miguel then laughed, sure that this was some sort of prank, or perhaps a test that
you, ti-íta, had set on my loyalty
, and asked them what it was they ate and they answered that they liked best words spiced with mendacity and envy, words stewed in the sauce of shameless plots and kindred betrayals. They demanded the mailbag again, for they said it was full of such words. Miguel laughed again and protested that they were mistaken, that these letters he carried contained announcements of births and marriages and divorces and deaths, the common business of life, and he threw the mailbag over his shoulder and was about to proceed on his route when they set upon him and dropped him to the ground and pressed his forehead to the gravel and, so he could not follow them, stripped him of his uniform.

“I wrapped myself in old newspapers and came here. It was nearby. It was the home of somebody I could trust. I lost the mailbag. I'm sorry.”

The alderman returned carrying a silver tray with two tiny porcelain cups of steaming cafecito and one larger one with tepid tea. He put the tray down and pulled out a chair and motioned for Paca Córtez to sit. He handed her one of the smaller cups and handed Miguel the other one and took the larger cup for himself, confessing he drank tea for coffee disagreed with him. They sipped in silence.

When Paca Córtez was finished, she put her cup down on her lap; she adjusted the bun on the back of her head. She looked at the alderman and waited till he cast his eyes away from her.

“You are someone we can trust, are you not, señor?”

“Claro.”

“Claro,” Paca Córtez echoed him. She looked at her grandnephew. “It is good they did not hurt you. They promised me they would not.”

“You know these women?”

“Claro. You know them well also … and so does your trusted friend here.”

“Ti-íta,” Miguel said, “what is going on?”

Paca Córtez looked at the alderman again and this time he did not cast his gaze from her.

“Señora Córtez, I think
I
know what is going on,” he said. “And what is going to prevent me from going with all this information to the Department of State Security?”

Paca Córtez remained serene, more concerned with a small coffee stain on her dress than with what the alderman had just threatened. She put out her coffee cup so the alderman would take it from her. She grabbed her cane and leaned on it and stood.

“Mi querido concejal, what kind of a world do you suppose you live in? Do you think it mirrors at all the false peace of your gardens and your airy rooms? No, no, no. Bien sabes que no. This world we live in rather mirrors the condition of your badly ulcerated stomach, bleeding from within and without, diseased from its own excesses.”

The alderman wondered out loud how she knew of his illness, which he admitted to no one, not even his dearest friends. He pointed with an open hand towards the man in the bed.

“There is one person to whom you confess all your weaknesses,” Paca Cortez said, “and she is more a beloved to your heart than all the beloveds that have ever lain with you in that bed put together.”

The alderman was silent.

“Do you not write to your sister in the capital on the first Friday of every month?”

The alderman nodded.

“How many people do you think read those letters before your sister does?”

The alderman shook his head. He blushed from the eyebrows up to the apex of his bald crown.

“Voy y te repito, what kind of a world do you think you live in, mi querido concejal? Do you think you are the only one with the wiliness to lead a perfect double life?”

The alderman sat on the bed. He put his hand on Miguel's leg. “You work for el Rubio?”

“He thinks I do, and I unveil just enough of the precious secrets of our town, so that he believes I'm perfectly loyal, vaya, just enough for him to believe that he needs me. People are silly, things they will not dare say face to face or whisper into a telephone, they casually write in a letter that they will hand to a stranger who will hand it to another stranger and another one and so on, till it arrives at its trusted destination. There are not many sinners in this town, from the most petty adulterer to the most dangerous and devoted counterrevolutionary, that have evaded my scrutiny. Of course, I cannot do it all myself, I have many that work for me, readers to sort through most of the nonsense that people write to each other. That poor man I had so publicly fired last week was one of my finest and fastest readers, but there had been too many complaints of unreceived mail and we needed a scapegoat. El Rubio promised him if he confessed to all our invented crimes, if he let us paint him as a tormented and perverted soul without attempting a defense, we would buy him a nice home in the suburbs of Miami, in a little residential area called … como era, ah sí, muy bonito el nombre, the Grove of Coconuts, o algo así, and set up for him and his family an envious life in the land of plenty, a promise that, of course, el Rubio could not keep. This poor servant of la Revolución is now in prison, and if he is not murdered there, he will serve out his full fifteen-year sentence, and by that time even his wife and his children and grandchildren will have no choice but to believe that he is the devil-traitor the tribunal condemned.
That
is the world you live in, mi querido concejal, no matter how well you hide from it, within your lovely rooms, among your ever blooming orchids or behind the puppet-mask of your political post.” Paca Córtez walked over to the bed and caressed Miguel. “This beautiful soul, my sister's grandchild, I saved from all this
sucieza.
Lucky for you, no crees, that I let him be nothing more than a humble carrier. Saved him till the end when I had no choice but to get him involved, and with him you, mi querido concejal, for it is only with your aid that we will be able to succeed in our battle against el Rubio and his cronies in el Comité.”