The Lazarus Rumba (71 page)

He stood. He let go and wiped his hand on the seat of his pants. He told the condemned man that this vile act was a further proof of his cowardice and that he was not impressed. He called in the guards. He repeated what he had said when he first proclaimed the death sentence. He said he hated to lose such a skilled soldier.

As word got around the rebel camp of the blond guerrillero's attempted self-mutilation, others were more impressed than your father. They debated in hushed conversations whether any of them would have the courage to commit such an act, even to save their lives. Che himself was heard to say that the ability to repent is one of the most sacred of human attributions. That it is not on the weakness with which a man commits a crime but on the sincerity and strength with which he repents that he should be judged.

Pressure was put on your father to revoke the sentence; and though it was never officially revoked, your father must have listened, for the execution was postponed and postponed and postponed till the events of the war, the lack of skilled guerrilleros, erased it from memory and the blond guerrillero was given back his rifle and bayonet and joined the column with Alicia's husband, commanded by the boisterous comandante Barba Roja, and proved his bravery in skirmishes against Batista's Rural Guard, charging into enemy strongholds, with the abandon of a man already dead, and advancing his fame with each blow of his bayonet into a rural guardsman's chest. Because Alicia's husband wanted nothing to do with the post-war government, this blond guerrillero, whose death sentence had never been lifted, was given command by Barba Roja over the revolutionary police force in charge of the city of Guantánamo. This is the man you feasted with, this is the man living in Alicia's house. Apparently, he has not forgotten his talent for raping young boys, has not repented for his sins as well as Che imagined. We will go to this little dictator (doña Adela was right in calling him that); we will take from him the falcon-legged bathtub. And if necessary we will fulfill the sentence that has never been lifted, we will carry through the forgotten command of your father.

Joshua, throughout this, heard the voice of the black man whose flesh surrounded him, as he imagined his namesake must have heard the voice of the Lord as He instructed him to cross the Jordan, from nowhere and from everywhere at the same time, so that he not only heard it, but he smelled it as unnerving as the sweat of the black natives of the valley and tasted it as pungent as cut tobacco leaves and felt it as the electric tingle of untouched flesh and saw it as pinpricks in the mantle of darkness, and the man who was blacker than any he had ever seen promised him the same promise beyond the power of mortals:
Let me and I will not fail you, I will not forsake you.

Joshua responded, he squirmed inside the black hanging egg like a chick ready to crack open its shell, and he forgave himself for letting the black man love him, for the black man was no man at all, but the fiend that had been in him so many times before.

High in the banyan, invisible from the ground as they were, the white one inside the black one, the warm one inside the cold one, before the dawning of a third light, the dogs had ceased their barking, the frontier guards had relented and returned to their skeletal watchtowers, and the cocoon opened and the weakened vine threaded backward through his arms and his legs, and Triste fell to the earth and like a mountain cat landed on all fours. He quickly rose to his feet and caught Joshua in his arms. They ran from there. Triste unearthed his campesino costume from a hole near the river and they waved good-bye to the crocodiles and sneaked to the bus terminal and took the first packed worker's bus back to Guantánamo.

An Annunciation

Alicia stopped him. She did not want to hear the end of the story, not now. It was already ugly enough as it was. Her home town was one of the provinces of Hell. Visitors returned with calamitous tales like gods from the netherworld.

They had boiled water potful by potful on the iron stove. Twice Joshua had to interrupt his story and go fetch more wood. They filled the tub halfway up and by the time they had poured in the last potful, the growing night breezes had cooled the sitting water. Alicia brought out her suitcase. It clinked like a loaded milkcrate. She had collected in discarded rum bottles certain oils and extracts from the native herbs and fruits of the fields. She had done it just to fill her evenings, when tired as she was, sleep would not come. She did not dare imagine she would ever again sit in her falcon-legged bathtub. She did not think that Maruja and the women of el Comité could fulfill her second request any more than they could fulfill her first request for the company of her daughter. She sat on the edge of the bathtub and asked Joshua to sit by her.

“It was you, after all, and not them, who fulfilled my request.”

Joshua sat just far enough from her so that their legs would not touch. Alicia said she had not noticed before, but that indeed he had the same type of body as her husband, and that is why he fit so well into his guerrilla pants.

The bottles were unmarked, so she sniffed at the lip of each to make out its contents. She reached each bottle out to Joshua and let him sniff. Some she recorked and put back into the suitcase, some she used, adding a few drops into the bathwater and stirring it with her hand. She did not ask Joshua for his opinion, though once or twice he gestured as if to offer it. She said that though it might not seem it, there was a precise art to this admixture of aromas and alleviants.

“Even water, our purest element, can be made purer.” She said she was an expert at it, that if she lived another life, she would become an inventor of perfumes and medicines, a healer of the stinking and the unsound. She would not marry or ever have a lover.

Joshua said that beautiful women, no matter how independent or successful, always had husbands and lovers. It could not be helped.

Alicia said she would choose then not to be beautiful.

Joshua said that one does not choose such things, that a woman has no power over her beauty, or for that matter, over her ugliness, whereas a man has no use for his beauty and can overcome his ugliness with feats of strength and courage.

“If you would have known my cousin,” Alicia said, “you would have seen how you are mistaken, you would have seen how effortlessly beauty can stir in the shape of a man, without paint, without jewels, without gowns, artless and benign as the west wind.” She added crystalized pollen dust from one of the bottles into the bathwater and stirred it in with her hand. She looked up at Joshua and smiled at the thought of this young man, shaped like her husband but with the head of a girl, who so desperately wanted to grow into a man, a guerrillero, a true son of his father. Would he have fought in the Sierra had he been born a decade earlier? And would he now be one of the overfed swine roaming the Palace of the Revolution? His innocence crushed by the weight of military titles and appointments to councils and committees and ministries?

“In fact,” Alicia said, frightened by the thoughts she knew she should not word, “although it is clear your mother has as much distaste for mirrors as she does for clocks, if you want to see how much
use
beauty has in a man, you should go to the river tomorrow morning and stare at your reflection.”

“I am not of that kind, señora. And I did not say that beauty has no use for a man, I said a man has no use for beauty, the more he wallows in it, the more his manhood vanishes.”

“Is this what they are now teaching young compañeros? And what of the beauty of women?”

“Oh that, claro—¿cómo no?—that a man must appreciate, but even then not so much as to go weak for it.”

“No seas bobo, what great man has not fallen into the epilepsy of love a hundred times, at least once irremediably. Didn't Mark Antony forsake Rome for Cleopatra, David murder for Bathsheba, and that pale English king renounce the throne for a yanqui divorcée?”

“It has not happened to my father.”

“No, así son las cosas de la vida, unfortunately it has not happened to your father.”

“He has kept true to his pledge to keep the welfare of the Cuban people foremost on his mind. His bride has always been this Island.”

Alicia thought that one look at Celia Sanchez, Fidel's most famous paramour, with her narrow hips and fleshless form, her mule's gait and guerrillero's wardrobe, would at once explain why his father had never knelt at the altar of feminine beauty. But these thoughts she did not word, lest Joshua might take it as an implicit offense of his mother, a less famous though much more beautiful rumored paramour. Instead, she stirred the water one last time and thanked Joshua for bringing her the bathtub, and told him that he best go, for she wanted to step into the water before it cooled too much.

“Pero señora Alicia, I have not finished my story. I have not made the announcement that I came here to make. I'll wait. I'll go into the bohío and shut the windows and the doors. I will not peek. You must trust me.”

Alicia began to protest. Joshua stood and raised his voice: “On my honor as a compañero, you must trust me.” His voice grew deeper and he pounded the edge of the bathtub with the side of his hand. “I have not finished my visitation.” He stood and went from her and entered the bohío through the back door.

She did not see the shadow of his arms pull in all the wooden shutters, so her valley home seemed as if it were closing its eyes on its own volition.
He has not finished his visitation
, Alicia grumbled to herself as she turned her back to the blind bohío and stepped out of her dress, covering her breasts with her arms till she had lowered herself into the bathwater—
his visitation!—el pobre, he has believed my mother, ha cogido complejo de ángel.
She put her head back against the edge of the tub and stretched her legs out and let the purified warm bathwater do its job, remove her from her senses, so that she lost track of time and forgot the weight of her limbs and her organs and the more cumbrous heft of her thoughts. Later, when she had dressed without drying, she walked to the back door of the bohío, arms again crossed over her breasts, and knocked lightly. Joshua opened it. The gaslamp was lit. He looked bemused. He told her that throughout the length of her bath (almost three quarters of an hour) he had heard her speaking to her husband and to her cousin and to her daughter. Alicia said he had misheard, that she would not be speaking to her daughter for her daughter was not yet a ghost.

Joshua assured her that this was so, that her daughter was not yet a ghost. He asked if the water was still warm, and if she may permit him to bathe in her tub.

Alicia told him it was not good practice to bathe in someone else's water unless that someone else was your lover. She looked for a reaction in his eyes, in the curve of his lips, in the shade of his cheeks, but saw only a child waiting expectantly for permission. She told him that he was welcome to do as he pleased.

“Bien,” Joshua said. He stepped lightly around her and went outside. Alicia shut the door. She set her chair by one of the shuttered windows. She turned off the gas lamp and sat on the chair. Gingerly, with the point of her index finger, she pushed the near shutter out till she had sight of her bathtub and of him. He was already out of his pants, his arms raised upward, as if he were praying to the moon. His dark thick-muscled hairy legs and lean pale smooth torso made it seem as if he were the fruit of some unholy coupling, a creature of the lower orders, half-man, half-something else. When he was done stretching, he turned to the bohío and called that he did not know any ghosts, then he corrected himself and said that yes, in fact, he did know two ghosts, but only one that he wished to speak to. Alicia did not move, did not blink. He stepped into the tub and settled in facing her, his head resting on the opposite side of where Alicia's head had rested. He called out that the water was still warm. He splashed it on his face and on his hair. He submerged his entire body and stayed under for more than two minutes. When he came up, he hung his arms out of the tub and breathed in gulps, the cage of his ribs pushing out on his skin. He spoke not raising his voice, as if he well knew that she was watching him and would not miss a word he said. On their journey back, Triste had tried to show him how to breathe underwater, though it was clear he had not learned so well. Before that, high in the banyan, Triste had shown him how to make love, that he had not learned so well either, though he would get better at it, it was just that he was not one like Triste, like her cousin, like el Rubio. But la Revolución makes room for everyone, el Rubio should have known that, should not have had to resort to his devilish schemes. La Revolución is tolerant and wise, it encompasses all humanity, all acts, all sexes, even the third one. It was just that he, the son of his father, was not one like them.

“He's coming, you know, your beautiful-like-a-woman cousin's giant black lover. He's coming to recount to you the tale of your cousin's death. He's coming to beg forgiveness in the name of those that could not save him. He's coming to our valley. He too now is a dissident. He will be blamed for both murders, though he only committed one. Vaya, with my help.”

Joshua stretched his legs one at a time, raising them and holding his ankles with his hands and pressing his forehead to his knee. He then submerged his entire body again and remained under far longer than the time it would have taken to drown any air-breathing beast or brute.