The Lazarus Rumba (56 page)

“You're going to have to be strong. I can't keep you out of school, mi vida. I've told you that. It's against the law.”

“It's a communist law, mami. The teacher told us about the policemen with Russian watches who know exactly at what hour we go into school and at what hour we leave. She says that because of la Revolución even guajiro children in the mountains now have to go to school and learn how to read. It's a communist law, mami, and we are not communists.”

Alicia did not say anything else. She watched her daughter till her eyelids trembled and slowly drooped downward like heavy plantain fronds and she had fallen asleep. Alicia went to meet Marta who was waiting for her at her house on B. Street. She did not say anything to doña Adela and now, as the time stretched at the wrestler's house in the outskirts of Soledad, she wished she had and she wondered how much pressure el Rubio was putting on her to publicly denounce them, under the guise that it would be best for the child.

The wordeaters continued their attack on revolutionary targets in Guantánamo. They snuck into the city in Miguel's truck in groups of eight, disguised as workers. Miguel taught them how to pry open the bottom of mailboxes, and they avoided the mail carriers who were now each accompanied by as many as three of el Rubio's foot soldiers; and Miguel tutored them on the exact times each citizen was wont to go retrieve his mail or his copy of
Granma
, and thus many revolutionary documents and many copies of the Party paper continued to disappear and reappear as ruminated cuds devoid of words, and all this they performed, to the chagrin of el Rubio (who was sure the whole of the citizenry was on his side and would in no way assist the locust-women in their endeavor to eat away at the life tree of la Revolución), in the clear light of day, and they were back in the wrestler's house in Soledad before nightfall.

On each trip into the city, the wordeaters brought their host back a clean and uneaten copy of
Granma.
He proclaimed that the best way to defend one against the enemy was to keep track of all his lies. As they prepared the evening supper, the wrestler sat in his favorite rattan rocking chair, under the only functioning lightbulb in the house, wearing nothing but a pair of his black elastic performance trunks and a pair of golden spectacles, unawares completely of the fubsiness to which slothy retirement had reduced his body, rolling the ends of his dirt-colored mustachio, and he read to them the lies that had been printed in that day's edition, often ad-libbing cynical insertions and ornery addenda, especially to the text of Fidel's Sunday speeches, and sometimes inventing a whole separate parallel text on taboo subjects such as the betrayal of Che or Fidel's one and only testicle in such an authentic mimicry of the dry
Granma
style that Miguel wondered out loud one evening if their host might not indeed be an agent of the regime.

One evening, the wrestler stopped reading long enough to peruse a story in the local section, and he informed them in his monotone reading voice that this he was not making up, that the whole gang of wordeaters,
this new species of counterrevolutionary terrorist, these adders likely hatched in the incubus of la CIA
, had been charged with the murder that had taken place late the previous spring, the death of a comrade finquero who had provided them with shelter and for his favors was repaid with a merciless middle-of-the-night assault in which he was beaten senseless and dragged to the river and drowned. And as footnote to that story it was added that two of the previous leaders of the wordeater gang, the former city alderman and the former postmaster, had been sentenced each with a fifteen-year sentence, but that the former postmaster on learning that she would not be free again till her hundredth year had promptly suffered a coronary and passed away.

“… promptly
suffered a coronary,” the wrestler repeated. “That's exactly what it says.”

“Pobre Paca,” Alicia said. No one looked at the wrestler or questioned the verity of this story.

“So you are now hiding and abetting accused murderers,” Pucha said finally.

The wrestler let the paper rest on his round hairless belly. He took off his spectacles. He leaned forward on his rattan rocking chair. “Let's not kid ourselves, vieja. You worked for these sinvergüenzas. Accused is as good as convicted en los tiempos en que vivimos.”

“We will pray with all our hearts tonight,” Pucha said.

“Pray all you want,” the wrestler said, “pray to all the gods in the pantheon, but that's not going to change the way things are now run on this Island. Las cosas se jodieron.”

Alicia did not sleep that night and before dawn she snuck out of the wrestler's house. She wore only the white ceremonial caftan and a set of keys on a leather necklace. She would be a plain target when she entered the city of Guantánamo. She hitched a ride in a real worker's truck and mounted in the back. None of the workers questioned her or asked her name and they pretended not to know her and to be too tired for anything but silence, but the driver knew exactly where to drop her off without being told. By the time they reached the city limits of Guantánamo the night had turned gray and by the time she arrived at the doorsteps of her mother's house and dismounted the truck the gray had turned to light entire. No one said good-bye to her. She used the keys on the leather necklace and entered her mother's house without knocking. She passed though the hallway by the kitchen and saw her mother sitting there sipping on her morning cafecito. She did not greet her. Doña Adela stood and asked out loud for a blessing from the Mother of God. She followed Alicia to the doorway of the bedroom where Teresita slept. She heard her daughter tell her waking granddaughter not to believe anything she heard from that moment on, to always remember this moment as the truth for, from now on, her ears would be filled with lies and counter-lies and the truth would only live on in this brief moment in this small room as they held each other, like a rare jewel buried under the floor of a deep sea. By the time she had finished talking to her daughter, el Rubio's men had already made their way into doña Adela's house. El Rubio trailed behind them, his mane of blond hair ungreased and disheveled, his eyes puffy, his shirt unbuttoned revealing his sunken chest and grotesque belly, the old scar on his left cheek rosy as if from a recent injury. He pushed his men aside and approached doña Adela. He asked her for some coffee and doña Adela told him there was none left. He moved towards the doorway and saw Alicia kneeling by her daughter's bed. “How long have you been housing this criminal, señora Adela?”

“Toda mi vida. ¿Es usted tonto, capitán? She is my daughter and I have housed her all my life.”

“I wish there was no need to do this.” El Rubio had apparently decided not to be rude no matter how crassly he was treated by the old woman. “I wish each and every ciudadano had faith in the process of la Revolución so that I could retire to a house in Varadero. Wouldn't that be a perfect world?” He signaled to two of his men and they moved into the room and lifted Alicia away from her daughter. Teresita called to her mother and asked her if this was a dream.

“The first time I did this I hoped I would not have to do it again.” El Rubio was still speaking to doña Adela but she was no longer listening.

The Isle of Pains

Alicia walked out into the rickety, rotted dock with eyes downcast and with a look that some who watched the spectacle mistook as shame. She had not been allowed to wear her ceremonial white caftan, so she chose instead to wear a simple light blue dress and leather sandals and a scarf of a somewhat darker blue than her dress, tied over her head. Two soldiers led her out to wait for the ferry at the end of the dock. They held lightly to the backs of her arms, their rifles strapped on opposite shoulders. An army comandante wearing dark-tinted glasses followed behind them. He carried Alicia's small brown suitcase; his belly was sucked in and his chin high and he had all round him the air of a silent snotty servant. Another soldier was left behind by the road, sitting in the jeep. The townspeople who had followed the Soviet jeep from the train station to the harbor were not allowed on the dock and gathered behind a military barricade, but Alicia could still hear some of their insults. The comandante had already commanded them once to shut up and now he turned and did so again, so that for a moment, except for the surface restlessness of the sea and the caw of some low-flying gulls, all was silent. The comandante stepped up in front of Alicia all the way to the very end of the dock and looked out into the horizon, then peered at his watch. “Idiota,” he muttered.

Alicia looked at her own watch. It was past noon. They waited. The call of the townspeople swelled again and gradually drowned out the motion of the sea and the cries of the hungry birds. The comandante grabbed the rifle from one of the soldiers and followed the path of one of the birds and shot. The hit gull dropped headlong into the sea as if diving for food. The comandante laughed and then he turned and screamed at the crowd that one of them would be next if they didn't shut up once and for all. The mob began to disperse. Mothers led their children away first and then the young people left and others, till finally there was only two old women left there, in black shawls and veils, holding on to each other, and one of them screamed that she was not afraid to die for speaking the truth and she waved and shouted that she wished the ferry with the murderess on it would drown. The comandante ignored her. He handed the rifle back to the soldier, crossed his arms and faced the ripply waters.

After more than an hour of waiting, a fishing boat appeared from the southeast and they heard the awful noise of its engine almost as soon as they saw it. As it came closer they noticed that it moved low in the water and rocked back and forth wildly as if trying to taunt the sea into a quarrel and its noisy engines did not leave behind much of a wake. At its helm was a bare-chested old man with grizzled cheeks and a bare sun-spotted crown with long white hair on the sides and back. He was screaming but could not be heard over the engines. He circled in front of them once, then idled the boat into the dock. The soldiers grabbed the ropes and secured the boat.

“Separate yourself, woman,” the old man continued to scream as he stepped unto the dock, “separate yourself from these sons of la Revolución who have ruined my day. Separate yourself for you are no longer a citizen of the Island, but an exile in the Island's island. … How is a man supposed to feed himself and his family if he is not allowed to fish?”

“Cállese, Charo,” the comandante said. “You've already been told that the government would reimburse you for your day lost. Bien sabes that we have always taken good care of you.”

“Sí, sí verdad. I forget myself. I forget the goodness of el Líder.” He walked up to Alicia and sat there staring at her till she looked back at him. “So this is you? íLa traidora Alicia Lucientes, tan bella y tan mala! You have been willed by the ones that will to come live with us, as if our island were a sanatorium for the wicked-hearted. They think that if they can put half a sea between you and them they will be rid of you. If I had been the judge, I would have been wiser, I would have sentenced you to the firing squad. Así mismo, bella, al paredón. But Fidel is too old-fashioned, muy caballero, he does not like to have the mothers of our children shot.”

Alicia did not respond but continued to look at him. His skin was white at its core but stained full with amoeba-shaped orange and brown spots that melted into each other. His eyes were black and they sparkled like unused coals.

“Charo, déjela, you are not here to play judge. You are here to take us where we are going. Do you know how long we've been waiting?”

The boatmaster turned from Alicia. “Perdóname jefe, it is my piece-of-shit boat that is slow not I, and it hates to toil in the sea as much as I love it. Bueno vamos, although I see no sense in this, what has been willed has been willed, vamos, Alicia Lucientes, separate yourself from your old thoughts, you are going to your prison without walls and there are no kings to betray now. Your only ruler will be your solitude and the only one to rebel against will be yourself. I have come to bring you into the heart of the Isle of Pains. But beware. This puke-green sea quells forever the fire of memory. He who crosses it, will find on reaching the other shore that he has not yet lived. Bueno, ahí está, forewarned is forearmed, though you will not remember what I have said. Que pena, coño. We always forget what we should most remember.”

“Estás muy filosófico hoy, ¿no, Charo?” the comandante said.

Charo nodded and said that his wife belittled his ramblings with the same phrase and with the same disdain—but what did women know about the harshness of the world? They climbed into the boat. The lower deck was a few inches deep in water. Charo proclaimed that this was a mere inconvenience and no danger. The comandante seemed unconvinced, but he ordered his soldiers to let loose the ropes and yelled at the soldier waiting by the jeep to pick him up in four days. The two old women still behind the barricades waved, still offering the same devilspeed wishes they had wished before. Charo screamed back at them that the sea was too finicky and refined a creature to care for the taste of his godawful leaky trawler.

The journey across el Golfo de Batabanó, from the southern coast of Cuba to the town of Nueva Gerona on the northern tip of the Isle of Pines, was some fifty-odd miles. Charo's boat took over five hours to traverse it, the boatmaster at the helm simultaneously yelling obscenities at the frothy sea and at his growling boat throughout, as if both were beasts in need of taming.

They landed on a rocky and barren beach late in the afternoon. Charo anchored the boat on the shallow clear waters. They waded onto shore. The comandante carried Alicia's suitcase aloft over his shoulders. A group of army soldiers was waiting for them on the beach. Charo bid good-bye and said to Alicia that they would surely meet again, and took her aside and whispered to her that this smaller island overrun with pines was a truer paradise than the other Island because here no face was a stranger to any other, and all were bound in the kinship of
las penas de la vida
, a utopia less heavenly but truer than the ones cooked up on the bigger Island. They separated Alicia from the boatmaster and climbed a peak and walked on foot to the road and mounted horses southward to the town of La Fé. Alicia rode double with the comandante. He held the reins wide at her side, his chest pressed to her back. She spent the night in a cell of the Department of State Security. The morning after, they took her wristwatch from her. She would have no use for it here in this backward place, she was told, as if the mechanical keeping of time were a notion recently conceived. They moved on, to the forest lands in the southern half of the island. They turned east.