The Lazarus Rumba (76 page)

“Claro, cómo no, mi amorcito,” he said solemnly.
“'A strange time awaited Raskolnikov.'”

Héctor liked to be dramatic this way. “'A strange time awaited Raskolnikov'?. How much stranger could things get for him?”

Pero coño, señora Alicia, you are letting me wander ahead of my story again. Vaya, stop me if you have to! Ah! This bath is so wonderful. I was wrong. Your exile is not such a bad thing. Estás mejor que los corbades que huyeron como ratas para Miami. Yesterday, on my way in I saw again the young man who brings you your food and coffee and rum. No, not such a bad thing at all. Guapísimo que es. I talked to him for a while: he was glad I had come to see you as I had promised him. Joshua. Bello. Joshua, a king's name. Maybe Fidel is doing you a favor by keeping you here, on this paradise full of nightingales and ruled by a beautiful young king. In the mainland things are worse by the day. ¡No dura mucho el reino del hijo de puta ese!

Ever since he got captured inside a hut after the raids on the barracks at Mocanda, Fidel forbade any of his troops from sleeping
inside
during any guerrilla mission away from La Plata. So after they had bathed, your husband and his men put out the fire, they spread their canvas sleeping bags over the jutting and falling roots of the banyan trees (and in the orange moonlight the bullish trees looked as if they wore dresses), and the guerrilleros crouched under the dresses and slept. It rained and there were many leaks in the dresses and Héctor became very cold and your husband wrapped him in one of his blankets till he stopped shivering. While they were huddled together, your husband finally got up the nerve to ask Héctor about the eye stitched under his left nipple, and Héctor told him all and many overheard and did not sleep that first night of the campaign. Your husband promised Héctor that when la Revolución triumphed no such things would happen to anyone, and perhaps in a moment of rapture brought on by sleeplessness he promised Héctor that he would find his lost brother. When Héctor assured him that his brother was dead, your husband then promised him that he would find the body, so that it could be given a decent burial, even if he had to drag all the rivers of the Island. Then he whispered into Héctor's ear a poem Martí had written about the glorious dead. Héctor recited it to me word for word, teary-eyed, when he returned to my abuelita's bohío.

He was in your husband's brigade for a month and half (before your husband joined with Barba Roja), the guerrilleros barely keeping up with his lead as he invented shortcuts over the insurmountable steeps, and (from what Héctor told me much later, after I had dug out the amethyst eye from underneath his left nipple and he could again become drunk and loose-tongued with his bourbon) they could barely keep up with the acrobatics that he introduced them to at night. Vaya, esto con todo respeto, to Héctor's great disappointment your husband never participated in the orgies under the dresses of the banyan trees, though certainly he knew about them. Pero creo, y vaya it's only a guess, that that is why Héctor fled from them, because he had fallen in love with your husband and your husband could not reciprocate that love. So he came back to my bed in my abuelita's bohío where he supposed I would be desperate for his return. He was not wrong.

Your husband never sent anyone after Héctor. He knew that there was no danger of Batista's Rural Guard capturing him and therefore no danger of him turning traitor. Your husband knew very well why Héctor had fled. When Fidel asked about Héctor later, when all the columns came together to descend upon Santiago de Cuba and upon Guantánamo, your husband told him that Héctor had fallen off the side of a cliff and his head had burst open like a rotten mango. Some years later when Fidel saw Héctor perform the Lazarus Rumba at the gypsy circus near La Habana, he stood and clapped for five minutes, and of course, the rest of the crowd did the same, and because of this great ovation initiated by el Líder we thought we had our benediction. That night, however, Fidel wrote a six-page letter to your husband. It dealt mostly with official matters, but it ended like this:

Your husband read Héctor the last part of the letter and asked him how he should answer.

“Cariño a Fidel también,” Héctor said.

Héctor later stole the letter from your husband (though he said your husband had given it to him) and I have it now, hidden in an old suitcase under my dead abuelita's bed. Your husband never seemed to have answered Fidel's letter. Pero vaya, este cuento triste ya se sabe, a year later your husband was arrested on trumped-up charges and later was murdered in the eye of a hurricane and three months after that the gypsy circus was shut down forever and we were arrested and taken to the labor camp, labeled unequivocally as deviants and misfits
and
counterrevolutionaries.

So it was simple: Héctor knew that if they labeled him a deserter they would single him out and punish him for the crime even Fidel had said would go unpunished. When it was evident we were going to be arrested, he asked me to pluck out the amethyst eye from under his left nipple. I did. I dug it out with my fingernails, and Héctor was no longer the child with the blue eye in his chest, he was just another common deviant, and like the hero of the novel that was Fidel's favorite, a strange time awaited Héctor.

He did not remember the bus ride, nor the yellow-bearded gypsy raping him with his finger, nor the guards beating him and rupturing his lungs. The first thing he remembered after I plucked out the eye from under his left nipple was the two steel Chinese balls that had other balls inside them and rung like faraway church bells. They were heated and pressed downward along the ridges of his lower back and around and around his tailbone. He was in a hospital bed that had no mattress. He was suspended on it face down. His upper torso up to his collarbone was in a cast that smelled of rotting wood. His chest was itchy, as if it just had been rubbed by rough wool. His arms were opened like the wings of a dead bird, resting within a long cagelike contraption and fastened with metal clamps at the wrists and at the elbows. His legs were held aloft by a similar contraption, also clamped at the knees and at the ankles. He could wiggle his fingers and his toes. His head was secured in place by an iron halo. He imagined he looked like some flightless creature, caged in a skeleton of shiny steel. He sucked in air and pushed it out with the muscles in his belly. Long needles buried in his chest punished him for breathing. He smelled mierda and old urine. He asked questions but the person who was massaging him did not answer, did not speak at all. Héctor shut his eyes tight and tried to sleep again. He had been dreaming of the white sea. He could not sleep, not till the man who was massaging him—now he could tell it was a man by the rough dry hands—reached under the bed and turned an unoiled crank that screeched like burning angels and Héctor's body rotated till he was face up. He still could not see the man's face. The man put two pills on Héctor's tongue and poured tepid water down his throat. The man's forearms and the back of his hands were carpeted with coily black hair. When he was sure Héctor had swallowed the pills—sticking his index fingers on the inside of his cheeks and spreading them, then prodding with his thumbs under the tongue (his hands smelled like something burned), he turned the crank again till Héctor was face down. On the way out he patted Héctor on the butt, and it was then that mi nenito realized that he was not wearing anything but the cast that smelled like rotting wood around his chest.

“Dormirás ahora, mariconcito,” the man said. Before Héctor passed out from the pills he caught an attack of the shivers, un escalofrío violento.

From then on, with his skin, Héctor knew every callus on the man's hands, at the bases of the palms and between the fingerjoints and on the fingertips, till they felt not like flesh at all but like the shell of a sand animal, though the heated Chinese balls felt good, soothing as he passed them over his lower torso and his legs and the soles of his feet.

“It's to keep the circulation going,” the man once said and patted him harder on the butt. “¿Te gusta, no,
mariconcito?
”

“Sí me gusta. Are you a doctor?” Héctor said, but the man did not answer him again.

The man fed Héctor a cold compote every morning and late every afternoon. He poured water down his throat three times a day. The first time Héctor had to relieve himself he asked the man what to do. There was no answer. Héctor held it for a while, but during feeding time when the man turned the crank and he was face up, he let it go. The man laughed at him and wiped Héctor with a hot cloth and left the pieces of waste there overnight. After he was finished wiping him, as if to punish him, he did not feed him, and turned the crank again and heated the Chinese balls more than usual and they burned his skin so that it stung for a few days. Still, every time Héctor asked permission to relieve himself, the man did not answer and the man laughed wildly when Héctor finally could not hold it in, and the man always left the pieces there overnight till a gray dry crust had formed around them like a cocoon.

One day, he heard an orderly, the one who cleared the aluminum waste pan under him, address the man as Dr. Gómez.

“So you
are
a doctor?” Héctor said, almost relieved. No answer again.

When his breathing became easier, when it seemed to emanate naturally from his chest, Héctor spoke and all he heard was an animal sound; then he realized he had not been speaking out loud before, but only inside his head.

One evening, Dr. Gómez visited him and told him that it was time for his physical, for soon he would be freed from the cast and the iron halo. Héctor was face down on the suspended bed. The clamps were released at his knees and at his elbows. The blood rushed through his limbs. His lower back and his ass and his legs and the soles of his feet were covered with coconut oil. The crank was turned and his belly and his groin and the front of his legs and feet were also covered. The crank was turned again so that he was face down on the bed without a mattress. Dr. Gómez began massaging him with his hands. All over. He even pushed his fingers up his lower back, under the cast, and pressed down with the fingertips on the emaciated muscles. That felt the best. The oil smoothed Dr. Gómez's hands and softened the sand-animal palms. The steel Chinese balls were just the right temperature when he put them to Héctor's skin, as if they had been heated in some feverish region of his own body and released now to comfort him. They glided over the coconut oil and became slippery—but even when Dr. Gómez dropped one, the perfect temperature did not change.

“Ahora sí que te vas a sentir bien, mi mariconcito.”

The Chinese balls were now moving by themselves over his body, rolling near the edges of the steel exoskeleton. They passed over the mound of his ass, close to the ridge, but they did not touch each other, down his hamstrings, to the pocket behind his knees where they paused, down the calves and around the cape of his toes, back towards the front of his body, up his shins to the protrusion of the knees and hard in on his thighs. Héctor felt as if he were moving, as if he were using each muscle the hot Chinese balls passed over in perfect unison the right one to the left one. So that at first he was pulling in a heavy weight and then crouching and then jumping and then curling his feet. The Chinese balls touched and clinked as they settled on his belly and the faraway church bells rang. Héctor was face up now. The crank had been turned and he had not heard it. He was alone in the room with the Chinese balls. They began to move again and made the return journey to the small of his back and settled on the spoon-dips in the back of his upper hipbone. He was face down again. He felt Dr. Gómez's fingers again. They opened the cheeks of his ass and with the coconut oil his ring finger went in easily, then two, then three, the longest one tickling him from the inside till Héctor came into the waste pan below. Héctor was breathing so hard that the buried needles in his lungs (which he thought had been removed) pierced him again.

“¡Asi, así, mariconcito!”

The Chinese balls moved again. They found Dr. Gómez's fingers and he pushed them in. The first forced the muscle open and it felt as if it were tearing. The second one went in easier, the muscle relaxed and not torn. It swallowed it. Dr. Gómez laughed like he laughed after Héctor relieved himself. He pushed the balls farther in, till again they began to move on their own and turn one on the other like planetary orbs and Héctor came again and this time Dr. Gómez, on his knees by the bed so that Héctor could see his bearded chin for the first time, with his trousers at his ankles and both his palms around his penis, came with him, together into the waste pan, and Dr. Gómez's come was yellowy and it colored Héctor's as it mingled with it and Dr. Gómez laughed louder and stumbled up and kissed him and stuck his nose and his tongue where the Chinese balls had gone in. Then he turned the crank and waited for Héctor to release the balls. Héctor was numb and he could not feel them come out but he heard them as they hit the aluminum pan. One, then the other. Dr. Gómez had not stopped laughing.