The Lazarus Rumba (55 page)

The alderman made a gesture of protest with his mouth and Paca Córtez comforted him and assured him it was safe, that his most heretical letters to his sister, the ones full of counterrevolutionary diatribes and jeremiads over lost worlds and unkept promises, were in her possession and that el Rubio had never lain eyes on them.

“I did not send them off to her, to your sister, for your own safety, because I knew other, less forgiving eyes, would dwell on them.”

“Who is with us?” Miguel said.

“Many, many are with us, my dear.” She recited a long list of names from memory, mostly women, including Pucha, the former chief of el Comité and cousin to el Rubio, and Alicia Lucientes, the widow of comandante Julio César Cruz, and her feisty sister, who was the one that led the band that ambushed Miguel early that morning. She asked the alderman if he could be trusted to join them.

“What choice do I have?” the alderman said.

From that morning on, the wordeaters made the alderman's stone house their headquarters and from there unleashed their word-ravage on all forms of revolutionary literature. They progressed from the mail to propaganda posters where Fidel's entire speech from the previous Sunday was printed in miniscule type, to finally sabotaging the
Granma
office and making off with whole packets of the daily government paper, which would later turn up on certain citizens' doorsteps and on el Rubio's desk at the Department of State Security as a mushy ball of gray pulp, like the innards of some strange fruit from an old black and white yanqui movie world.

Paca Córtez fooled el Rubio as long as possible into believing that she was conducting her own investigations on the plague of wordeaters, till el Rubio could tolerate no more of her delays and called a rally in Parque Martí to publicly denounce the wordeaters, whom he referred to as locusts attacking the life tree of la Revolución. He spoke as all public speakers had learned to speak by that time, his head dancing to the furious rhythm of his rhetoric, his index finger often pointed in accusatory fashion at the heavens, his whole body leaning forward on the podium, in these and in every other gesture shamelessly mimicking el Comandante-en-Jefe. He ruffled the sheets that contained the text of his speech in the air and challenged the wordeaters, if there were any mingled in the crowd, to come eat these words if they dared. When no one approached the platform, he called the wordeaters cowards and devils and he pointed to the steeple of St. Catalina de Ricis Church and he said that today these monsters eat the sacred words of man and tomorrow they will eat the holy words of God and he compared their cheap form of terrorism to the fascist book burnings. The alderman and Paca Córtez and many other appointed politicos and civic leaders sat on the platform and listened and applauded at his every cue, seemingly unsuspectful of the fate that awaited them. El Rubio ended his speech (as the great ball of the sun lowered itself into the steeple of the church and spilled its light down one side like a pierced yolk) by mosquitoing and sucking the blood-truth from the Gospel of St. John, and he assured la Revolución's faithful that just as in the beginning was the Word and the Word was with la Revolución and the Word was la Revolución so in the end the Word and la Revolución would outlast a thousand plagues.

That very evening, before they had a chance to disperse, all but one of the fourteen appointed politicos that sat on the platform, as el Rubio spoke to the gathered crowd in Parque Martí, had been replaced. The mayor, the alderman, the school chancellor, the fire marshall, the councillor for field workers, the chief of the factory workers, the city manager, the province commisary of the Communist Party, the foreman at
Granma
's local printing press, the city's minister of culture, and the postmaster Paca Córtez were all removed from their posts and arrested and charged with neglecting to defend the words of la Revolución. Only the young man chief of el Comité survived the purge. The former chief of el Comité, cousin to el Rubio, was wanted and missing, purportedly having fled into the mountains with the band of women that were the core of the wordeaters.

On that Saturday morning, some moments before el Rubio delivered his six-hour speech, Alicia and Marta and Pucha and the other women conferred with Paca Córtez under the poinciana tree of the alderman's first garden. They tried to convince her not to attend the speech, for it was already rumored around town that el Rubio's speech was a ruse to gather in one place all the politicos that had been plotting against him. Paca Córtez said that then perhaps it was proper that they, who were most at fault for digging the city and the whole Island into this shithole, should pay. She told the band of women to flee into the foothills of the sierras that very afternoon, and there hide for a few months and recover strength, just as the rebels had done a decade before. She waved her cane in the air and said that she had no strength to climb mountains.

“And no more talk of this … el viejo, mi querido concejal, poor man, he is afraid, he wants to go with you; but el Rubio will grow suspicious if all fourteen of us are not sitting right there on the platform, like chickens rounded up to have their necks twisted and their feathers plucked. So no more talk of this … take Miguel with you, he is all the man you will need.”

Paca Córtez had the band of wordeaters abandon their trademark loose-fitting ceremonial white caftans and had them disguise themselves in worn field workers attire, with large straw hats and heavy boots. They lit candles under the poinciana tree and chanted prayers to San Lázaro and Santa Bárbara. They asked Paca Córtez to join them but she said she had forgotten the habit of prayer a long time ago and that she knew the gods only through a colorless and fragmented memory, and that she thought of them almost as one thinks of the vanished loves of childhood, only in rare idle moments. She let them pray and went to get the alderman who was saying good-bye to his orchids and promised him that even if he did not make it to Rome, his hybrid orchid with the ears of a hound and the ruby-spotted crown of a murdered princess would live and thrive in the gardens of men for ages to come, and she consoled him further: it was proper that his improbable looking flower had been named
guajira guantanamera
, for when gardeners of future ages, of yet undrawn countries, raised it, they would admire its tragic beauty and consider the honor and glory of the Cuban peasant, of that Island that by then (many centuries onward), from its most fertile sugar grasses to its highest sierra, may have well been swallowed by the encroaching sea.

Just as Paca Córtez left the stone house, one hand on her cane, the other on the alderman's arm, her grandnephew Miguel drove up in a flatbed truck and the women mounted it and pulled the canopy shut in the back. The alderman kissed Miguel on the forehead and asked him to be careful. As they drove west, they saw the people lumbering to the rally. They passed el Campo Santo and near the shores of the Jaibo River they were stopped by the military police and questioned briefly as to why they were not attending the rally. Miguel dismounted from the truck and undid the canopy in the back; he signaled to the women dressed as workers and said that there were early harvesting preparations to do in some cane fields to the north and that just because the previous year's sugar harvest had failed to reach its famous goal of ten million tons was no cause to lose hope for the upcoming year. “El trabajo siempre primero, ¿no compadre?”

The officer agreed with this oft-repeated maxim and commended him on his sense of duty. He prophesied in a whisper to Miguel that though it was mostly men who had fought to give it first life, it was women who would save la Revolución, and he let the truck pass. They headed towards the township of Soledad. They stopped and were fed by a Jewish bodeguero who asked no questions and as they ate inside the truck Pucha convinced Miguel to forsake the journey westward to the foothills of la Sierra Maestra, that it was better to keep within striking distance of Guantánamo, where guerrilla-style, coming and going, they could continue their assault on the words that were the links to the chain of la Revolución. “What good can we do hiding in the mountains, imitating the actions of our enemies? The new revolution will not come from the mountains; al contrario, when the people are sick enough of toda esta mierda, it will rise from the hearts of the cities, it will bubble up like lava from the sewer tunnels. We have started something and made my maldito cousin nervous. What good can we do hiding? Paca offered herself as sacrifice to save us, I say that now it is up to us to offer ourselves, to save our sons and daughters and their children and the children of their children, and in the process we may even save
ourselves.
If we hide we are no better than those that fled. If we hide we might as well build ourselves a raft and float to Miami.”

They took a vote, and nine against seven they chose to stay in Soledad and continue their gorge on the word-crusted monster of la Revolución. They rented rooms in the house of a retired wrestler who had once performed for the banned gypsy circus (and hated la Revolución simply and unapologetically because it had destroyed his career) and began to plan their second wave of assaults on revolutionary offices in Guantánamo.

From the first days of their fugitive stay in Soledad, Alicia yearned for her daughter; and since they were forced to cleanse themselves in an outdoor shower in which an intricate gadget, similar to an old-fashioned pull-toilet tank, dumped water over a wicker screen ceiling (the wrestler's old house was not equipped with running water or any other modern convenience save for a rudimentary electrical system), she yearned for her falcon-legged bathtub. She did not yet miss her mother, but she accounted for this by the fact that she was still angry at her. They had fought much after the incident with the mob and doña Adela had threatened that if she (Alicia) abandoned now her home and, more important, abandoned her daughter, for the sake of some futile cause, she (doña Adela) would apply for immediate permission to leave with Teresita on the freedom flights to Miami, and that she herself would denounce both Alicia and Marta and the whole band of women to el Comité,
so they can do what they want with you this time!

“Adela, no hables barbaridades,” Marta said. It was the morning before the day they sought refuge in the alderman's stone house, the morning before the day of el Rubio's speech. They were sitting at one end of the kitchen table having breakfast, watery coffee and revoltillo boosted with water and black-market cream. Teresita was still asleep.

“Barbaridades no, I am thinking about my granddaughter. You are both grown women, you can do as you please. I am an old woman ready for my death, así que por mí no, but that child is helpless; and I will do what I have to to protect her.”

“Pero coño, Adela, can't you see that that is exactly what they want, to turn mother against daughter and daughter against mother. This is how they succeed. Can't you see that you're playing right into their net.”

Doña Adela looked at Alicia and ignored Marta. “Any sentence you bring upon your head you bring upon her. Piensen eso bien before you continue playing your dangerous games.” The two sisters were silent. Doña Adela continued. She told them further that they were embarrassing her by persisting in the celebration of their santería rituals. “How am I supposed to explain such things to Father Gonzalo or anyone else at the church?”

“Father Gonzalo doesn't care about such things,” Marta said. “He is a man of faith, and faith is faith, no matter what guise.”

“Marta, por favor,” Alicia intervened.

Doña Adela paused just long enough to give Marta a chance to remain silent, then she told them some of the abhorrent things the children said to Teresita at school. She reminded them that this woman Pucha, whom they now considered such a trusted ally, had more than once, up to no less than six months before, tried to destroy them, had sent el pobre Héctor to his death, and that because she had lost her prominence within the Party she was
una frustrada, una resentida
and still a dangerous woman.

“We all have sins to be forgiven.”

“Mira Marta, I'm not talking to you. I'm talking to my daughter. I'm talking about my daughter's daughter. Maybe someday if you change your habits, you too will have daughters and feel differently.”

Marta pushed her plate aside and stood up from the table and left the kitchen.

Alicia looked at her mother. “That's how you expect to get through to her, by insulting her.” She stood and said that she was going to go wake her daughter. That evening when she put Teresita to bed after dinner she told her that she was going on a brief journey, she asked the child to take care of her grandmother. “And don't ask too much about me or tía Marta, it'll just upset her. We'll return soon. There's just some things we must do.”

“Are you going to go see papi and Héctor in Heaven?”

“No, bella. There are no trips to Heaven. Fidel does not allow them.”

“Abuelita says we can get permission from Fidel. She says we can all go soon. All we have to do is get permission. It just takes time because so many people are asking to go.”

“Sí, mi vida, it takes time.”

The child kissed her mother and put the covers over her head. “Don't be gone long, mamá, so that you'll be here when the permission comes.”

Alicia kissed her daughter through the covers. “What do the kids tell you at school about your mother and about your aunt?”

Teresita pulled the cover down to her chin. “They say nothing.” She pinched her eyes shut and yawned. “They say lies. They make fun of me because you won't let me be a pionera. They call me gusanita.”

“You can't be a pionera. We are not communists.”

“I know. That's what I tell them. I tell them we are Catholics not communists. But they still make fun of me and the teacher lets them.”