The Lazarus Rumba (74 page)

Later, when they asked Héctor how he had been wounded, Héctor did not answer them. They presumed he had tried to commit suicide, that shame had finally brought him low. When they asked him if he still liked to put hard penises in his mouth he looked up at them, sleepy-eyed, with a tight-lipped smile, and told them he would much rather have them up his ass now. … I feel as if I know you well, señora Alicia, but still perdóname. Pardon my dirty tongue, pero la verdad es la verdad. I will not refrain from telling you everything just as it was, not even these parts. I will pretend I am not speaking to you but to the wild nightingales outside your windows, who in spite of their song know well of the savagery of this world.

The two guards who were with the questioner, the blond police captain of Guantánamo, el Rubio, beat him and opened his wound again. When he asked me the same question I lied. But they knew and they beat me also, till I told them the truth and they made me recite all the places in my body I loved to have hard penises, as el Rubio poked me with his finger in all the different spots of my body he wanted me to recite. That week we were given work clothes for the fields and sent to a labor camp in Camagüey. There were five months left in the sugarcane harvest.

In the bus on the way to the work camp our hands were manacled to the bars of the seats in front of us, one long chain running through all the manacles from the front to the back of the bus. The windows were shut. It was a hot January morning and inside we could barely breathe. Héctor sat behind me. He was unconscious again. In those days after the arrest, it was as if he had been struck with the sleeping sickness. He would awake only when we were moved from place to place and then fall right out again. His wound had become infected and there was no color seeping out from under his eyelids. There was enough give on the long chain so that I could twist my torso and reach back and touch his face. The man seated next to him, an old gypsy with a long cigarette-yellowed beard, who had been a laborer at the circus, had his hand on Héctor's thigh. I slapped it off. “Tranquilo viejito sucio.” The old man snickered. Three of his front teeth were missing.

“Is it true that this pollito is yours?” he said.

I ignored him and he put his hand back on Héctor's thigh. I slapped it off again. Héctor's pulse was distant. Little by little, I stole enough give on the long chain that bound us all together—the men up front yelling back at me every time I managed to gain a link or two—so that I could reach back and pull up Héctor's work shirt. The old gypsy stared and put his hand on Héctor's belly and rubbed it in circles. I slapped it off a third time. With a needle I had fashioned from the shaved-down tooth of a metal comb they had neglected to take from me, I pierced the infection under Héctor's left nipple. Pus streamed out and ran down his belly and collected at his navel in a pool. The old gypsy dipped his finger into the pool and put it in his mouth.

“Está rica la leche del pollito.”

I ripped off my own work shirt and cleaned Héctor's wound as best as I could. I undid the hem of my work pants and with that thread and the metal needle I temporarily sewed up Héctor's wound with five clumsy stitches. As I was trying to lower Héctor's work shirt back on him I noticed that the old gypsy had snuck his right hand behind Héctor and inside his pants and was fingering Héctor's ass and masturbating with his other hand. The old man came and a small wet spot spread on the bulge of his work pants. I threw a punch at him but the chain didn't reach and my arm snapped back. The men up front took this opportunity to steal back the give on the chain and my body was yanked away from Héctor and away from the old gypsy who still had his hand in him. “Your pollito is dead,” he said. “His asshole is cold as an ice cube.”

The men up front had stolen all the give in the chain and my body was pressed forward, my wrists pressed against the bar of the seat in front of me and I could not move. I turned my head and saw that now the old man had his head buried in Héctor's lap.

“Cold,” he mumbled, his toothless mouth full. “Cold all over.”

When we got to Camagüey and the guards mounted the bus and they found him, with his head still buried in Héctor's lap, they beat him on the head with their rifle butts till his head was thrown back with one blow and smashed against the window. I heard his skull crack at the end of their rifle butts. He emitted a tiny moan, not much unlike the snicker I had heard previous. Then the guards began to pound their rifle butts into Héctor's chest. I started screaming that he was unconscious, that he had nothing to do with the old gypsy, that he had been raped. The guards pushed me forward. They saw my shirt was ripped off. They laughed and asked me if the old gypsy had tried to rape a big negrón like me too. They hit me in the back with the rifle butts. I fell off the seat and they pushed me forward with their boots. I was still manacled and as I lunged past the seat in front of me it felt as if both my arms up to the elbow had just been dipped into a pool of fire. The sensation spread up my arms and into my chest. Héctor never felt the beating, never woke up as they pounded their rifle butts into him. They broke eight of his ribs and one jagged end punctured his left lung. They took him to a hospital in the city. I got away with just a bad wrist sprain, though I couldn't hold a fork in my right hand for a month, and in the fields I had to swing the machete left-handed. All my hours I thought about Héctor, and regretted that I had listened to him and dug out with my sharp fingernails the amethyst eye that was his brother's eye from underneath his left nipple. He would not have caught the sleeping sickness. I would not have lost him.

Gracias. Gracias. Estoy muerto de hambre. Me encanta la tortilla. Yes, yes, more cafecito also.

That is why they did not let you see him for over three years, because it took that long for him to recover. It took that long for him to regain the rhythm of his breath and the cognac color of his eyes, that long before I could show him again that hard amethyst ball that was his brother's eye and roll it over the rosy ridge underneath his left nipple, the old socket sealed shut till four days after his death, a massage Héctor liked because he said that as I gently pressed down with the stone on the scar, the nerves danced underneath and they tickled his heart.

But I'm getting too far ahead of myself, I'm skipping over too many parts in my eagerness to let you in on la verdad of those last days. I must go back, back to the white sea, for under it swim the reasons why I dug out the stone that was his brother's eye from under Héctor's left nipple and swallowed it, why he succumbed to the sleeping sickness that permitted the yellow-bearded gypsy to rape him and the guards to break his ribs and rupture his lungs. I must return to the white sea, if for a few moments, señora Alicia.

We had so much fun under the cheesecloth of the tobacco fields for the ten days that he passed the marbles that he challenged me to swallow them now. We had washed them in the river and were keeping them in a pouch made of tobacco leaves, the ones high up on the plant, which are the strongest. He said that if I could hold the twenty-six marbles longer than ten days, then he would let me do anything to him under the surface of the white-sea tobacco fields, let me follow my lust for him to
any
measure. Claro, I agreed. If I couldn't, if I passed the marbles in less than ten days, then
he
would be the master and I the slave. Again, I agreed. Just the same. To heighten the thrill, we would keep our hands off each other till the bet was over. To this I was not so quick to agree. “It's just a game,” Héctor said. “It'll be fun.” So I gave in.

The sheriff had told my abuelita that morning that he was sure Héctor's brother had run away, had gotten sick of the circus and fled, maybe back to Santiago de Cuba to find his mother. Two weeks before, my abuelita and I had ridden in her mule and buggy through three towns westward and then three towns southward. Not one villager had seen the boy with the amethyst eye. It was past midnight by the time we returned. Héctor was waiting for us, sitting at the kitchen table, drinking bourbon. My abuelita snatched the bottle away from him. Héctor cried. I asked him if he wanted to go visit his mother at the asylum to see if his brother had gone to her. He said no, his brother had not gone to her, his brother had been taken. I asked him how he knew. He told me he just did. My abuelita said she did not understand. The following morning my abuelita and I went out again in her mule and buggy and she brought him back the gift of the varicolored marbles.

“Vamos, Triste,” he said. “Swallow them. It'll be fun.”

My abuelita was right. He was still a child. So I agreed to play his game. I swallowed the twenty-six marbles as he drummed with joy on an overturned tin milk bucket.

In those days I was studying ancient Assyrian texts and learning to master the inner movements of my body as well as I had mastered the movements of my limbs. On certain weeks I fasted, I fed only on coconut juice and drank water with lemon juice. I drank seawater to cleanse my insides. By the fourth day of my fast I could feel my stomach inside me as tactile as I felt the fingers at the end of my hand. I moved my stomach from wall to wall of my belly-cavern. I could undo my small intestines and tie half-knots in them. I could drop my heartbeat to ten or eleven beats a minute and without moving any part of my body, without exerting myself, I could raise it to over two hundred beats a minute and break into a sopping sweat simply by bending backwards, by doing what yogis call the bow. Other weeks I gorged, I filled my insides to see how far I could stuff myself before I lost control of my functions, cagándome donde sea. I ate everything my abuelita fed us and then I left Héctor and ran to her old brother's finca cottage on the other side of the mountain and ate there, sat at the same table with my uncle who is only three years older while he felt me harden underneath the table. He stroked me and stroked me, so vigorously that the table began to rumble, and his old blind father lifted his head from his plate of congrí, and moved his muddy eyes from side to side. I saw sweat droplets being born on my uncle's upper lip, but I did not wet his hand like my uncle wanted me to. I had learned to control
that
also. Irritated, my uncle banged his hand on the table (the one that had been stroking—it was rosy with exertion and the veins pushed up out of the fair thin skin). He screamed at his father never to serve this ingrato food again. His father lifted his head again and when he laughed rice flew like pellets out of his mouth and he told his son to stop talking nonsense, that I was only a child.

Héctor and I went to the fields under the white sea late in the afternoon of the day after I swallowed the twenty-six marbles. I had already eaten seven meals. I was ready to explode. I left a pile at least a foot high. Héctor sifted through it with his long fingers. Not one marble. He accused me of cheating. The following day he kept a close watch; again I held myself and out in the fields under the white sea late that afternoon, I crouched and left a bigger pile than the day before. Again Héctor searched through it in vain, soiling his arms up to the elbow. Again no marbles. Again he accused me of cheating. He said I had tricked him, that I had not really swallowed the marbles. I told him I would prove his accusations false the next day. He told me he was not ever going to let me touch him again. He left me. I saw him later, masturbating furiously under the folded yellow and gray leaves of a dead plantain tree. His work pants were down to his ankles and his underwear just below his knees. His torso was much darker than his lower body, as if he had been dipped feet first in some kind of cleansing solution. I could tell when he came, his ass squeezed tight and dimples formed on each side. He wiped his hands on the dry leaves and ran into the kitchen of my abuelita's bohío to try to find where she had hidden the bourbon. I knew, but I did not tell him and I did not want to play this game anymore.

The next day Héctor dug twenty-six marbles from the pile I had left behind. He smiled wickedly.

“Yo soy el dueño y tú el esclavo,” he said. I knew my abuelita would not like us playing this game for her mother had been a
real
slave, but that afternoon under the folds of the white sea, I was glad to be a slave, I was glad to follow my master's every command. By evening, as we emerged out of the white sea, Héctor shoved me and set me free and he said I should not have felt sorry for him and let him win.

The following week, while we were readying to join the gypsy circus for its winter tour, someone left a package on my abuelita's doorstep. It was a shoe-sized box wrapped in butcher paper. Inside was a tiny leather pouch with Héctor's brother's glass eye, clean and polished. That night, I told Héctor where abuelita had hidden the bourbon.

Drunk, Héctor sliced his chest open with one of abuelita's kitchen knives, right underneath his left nipple, and buried his brother's eye there. He had me stitch it shut on each side with my abuelita's sewing kit, so that the glass eye, with the amethyst facing out, would not pop out. It took twenty-three stitches, thirteen on the inside, ten on the outside.

Why?

(I know you're too gracious to ask so I'll do it for you.) Why should I do such a foolish thing, assist him so in his madness? I have no answer, señora Alicia, only that his grief touched me so that I was again his slave, as I had been under the white sea, and I would have done anything he asked.

But you know all this, you know how Héctor became the acrobat with three eyes. But what you might not know is what he became like after he recovered from the fevers, the attack his body put up against that foreign object in his chest. That part he hid well from his family and from other performers at the circus and even from my abuelita who (after the photographer who had become his guardian abandoned him) assumed the role of his protector and housed him whenever he was not touring with the gypsy circus.