The Lazarus Rumba (77 page)

“You are almost well, mi mariconcito.” He never returned.

A week later Héctor was released from the bed with no mattress. He weighed eighty-seven pounds. He caught pneumonia and spent a year recovering in a sanatorium near the capital before they returned him to the labor camp, still thin, at one hundred and twenty pounds. At the time of his death, almost a year after you saw him, two and a half years after he had come to the labor camp, he was almost a picture of health. He weighed one hundred and sixty-four pounds.

Imagínate, when he returned, thin as a street dog, I was at once both horrified to see him so, and thankful to all the saints that mi nenito had lived! At first, I could only see him when we were out in the fields. He was still ill enough to have to spend nights at the infirmary, but not ill enough to be excused from working the fields.
El sudor en la frente is the key to the good health
, the camp physician said. That was his second favorite saying.
El trabajo los hará hombres, ya verán
, that was his favorite. I was always the strongest and the most productive machetero, so the guards always gave me a bit of leeway out in the fields, let me stray out of the sight of their telescopic Belgian rifles, for this I repaid them with favors when they were away from their noviecitas for too long. I convinced them to be lenient with Héctor—and they soon figured out what he was to me. Héctor was so weak when he arrived that he could just barely lift the machete above his shoulder (though because of his fear of snakes, he always kept a grip on it, even while we sat on a shaved part of the field for the meager almuerzo), much less swing it with enough force, low and lower to the ground to cut the stalks properly. The guards let me go to him for two and three hours a day and cut side by side with him, so that his productivity would seem normal.

At nights I saved my meal portions for him—stale bread and strips of dry chicken—and wrapped them in a cloth coffee filter I had stolen from the kitchen, and hid them under my straw mattress. In the morning I would hide it down my crotch and take it to him out in the fields so he could have a second breakfast. Monday and Friday they fed us strips of pork. These too I saved for him. I myself subsisted on the watery black bean soup they gave us for lunch and sometimes at dinner. If I was really good to the guards, in the endless afternoons inside the cabs of the conscript transport trucks, two or three of them at a time, if I made the rolled-up windows steam with their long sighs, they patted me on the head and called me
negrito bocón
and rewarded me with yanqui chocolate bars. These too I saved for Héctor. Soon he was strong enough to be released from the infirmary and transferred to our barracks. He even enjoyed going out in the fields and breaking a sweat. And of course, it was still only in the fields where we were bold enough to touch each other as we wanted to, under the cover of the green-gray stalks or by an old abandoned Spanish church near one of the cane fields, on whose worn steps we knew each other like twisted angels.

Late in the afternoon I would escape and do my duties with the guards and Héctor would sulk and often ignore me for a few days and not eat the meal portions I had saved for him, or the yanqui chocolate bars I had worked so hard for. There was nothing I could do: the guards needed to be pleased—los santos bien saben, most of the times, especially after Héctor arrived, my skin ached when it came into contact with theirs—if not, they would never let us have our own time together.

In six months time Héctor was healthy
and
beautiful again, his musculature naturally rebuilt by the long hours in the fields and his skin bronzed into wholesomeness by the cloud-melting sun. The guards started asking me when it was that I was going to bring him along to join us in our late afternoon sessions. “Tiene el culito rico ese muchachito,” they said.

I refused to let myself even imagine their hands on mi nenito.

“Qué va, Héctor no,” I told them, as if I were not a prisoner and they not my guards. “No sabe nada. He won't know what to do. He's very inexperienced. Very meek.”

“De toda forma, tiene el culito rico. We'll
show
him what to do.”

“Qué va, Héctor no. No y no.”

I worked harder to please them so that they would forget about Héctor. (And for a while they did.)

Héctor liked to take his shirt off when he worked in the fields. I forbade it. He liked to shower both in the morning
and
when we returned from the fields. This too I forbade and told him to cut back his showers to three a week, though in the harvest months they forced us to shower every day. The old guard in charge at the barracks let us shower as often as we liked because he got to watch; and often the guards from the fields would come and watch too, under the pretense that they were watching us so that we would not touch each other, and when someone would get aroused they would walk over to him and beat him under the falling water until he was no longer aroused. And when no one would get aroused, they beat someone for pissing into the drain or soaping himself too long in certain parts, for they said these were pervert codes we had established. Some of us they never beat—those that pleased them, and those that they hoped would one day learn to please them, so Héctor and I were immune to the shower beatings. Héctor loved long showers. He just closed his eyes and sat under the warm ducha and let it massage his head, and eventually his thick hair would soften and fall over his eyes like heavy drapes. Everyone loved to watch him—and a few other campmates were beat for doing so, as if the guards had now also taken to protecting Héctor because they knew that one day he would be theirs.

Monologue of Triste the Contortionist: The Passion of Comandante Federico Sánchez

The guards rarely forced themselves violently on any of us. Pero oye, don't get me wrong, naturalmente, there were a few incidents here and there of rapes and forced acts, but most of them enjoyed the process of seducing us, luring us with promises just as they did with women. There was an officer in the camp named Federico Sánchez who had fallen unabashedly in love with Héctor; and all the other guards, bueno nada más que sabían bretear de eso, for Federico Sánchez was in his late thirties and had never been married and still lived with his mother in her villa outside of La Habana four months a year. Federico Sánchez was a lieutenant-colonel and had been in the mountains during the latter part of the Revolutionary War (after Héctor had fled) and later had commanded troops against the counterrevolutionaries in the Escambray Mountains not far from our labor camp, so he had rank over most of the other guards. Behind his back, the other guards called him
doña
Federica la Marica. Pues sabe, his mother was quite the aristocrat and contrarevolucionaria herself, bueno, still is—her villa has become a fort guarded by her six German shepherds—and she sends letters to
Granma
, calling Fidel a child robber and a soul kidnapper. The editors, as if to liven up the pallor-prose editorial page, sometimes publish her letters. Escribe bello; parece que tiene complejo de escritora. Every time
Granma
publishes one of her long letters, they say Fidel reads it and laughs heartily and then has the entire editorial staff fired. Federico Sánchez knew that behind his back the others called him doña Federica, but it just gave him that much more pleasure when to his face they addressed him as
mi
comandante Sánchez in tones both of love and fear.

Federico Sánchez was in love with Héctor and Federico Sánchez was second in command at the labor camp. He might have saved Héctor and Héctor might have let himself be saved, for aside from his one deformity, comandante Federico Sánchez was a handsome man. He was short though well proportioned, with broad muscle-cupped shoulders and tree-trunk arms. He too, like Héctor, was a mulatto, though his skin was even lighter than Héctor's and his hair, which he always trimmed short, much thinner. He had thin archless black eyebrows that almost touched each other and long eyelashes and hazel eyes specked with cyan. His nose was Roman (like his idol Fidel) and his beard was much darker than his hair and neatly trimmed. His lips were thin, like a yanqui's. He had a long lizard tongue, which he had the habit of stretching by placing its tip against the back of his lower teeth and pushing it out, so that tiny rosy bumps on its surface seemed to grow and harden like a thousand aroused nipples. And it seemed that from many years of doing this his lower jaw had been pushed forward so that he had a serious underbite. Pero al fin y al cabo, even with these oddities, even with his deformity, which he hid rather well with his dark-green leather glove (except claro, when his arm was at his side and a breeze blew and the three middle fingerless fingers and half the thumb bent in the breeze like young tobacco leaves), not a bad-looking man. Because of the accident—a rusty Belgian pistol that blew up in his hand—he never carried a firearm, his only weapon a long seven-inch bowie knife sheathed in black leather on his left hip. Yet, for whatever reason, maybe the scary size of his tongue, or maybe because he suspected what others called him behind his back and needed to make up for this weakness, he wielded more power than any comandante in the camp, even his one superior officer. Federico Sánchez might have saved Héctor.

At first he tried to pull Héctor from the Sunday education lessons, but the comandante in charge of the camp, an avid worshipper of the Virgin of Cobre, a man we called Cara de Jamón because his face was so fleshy, would not allow it. Then, Federico Sánchez had the gall to use his mother to free Héctor from the camp. He told Cara de Jamón that his mother was in need of a servant who could not quit, for all her other servants, hidden in their shack rooms behind the patio walls, tuned in to Fidel's Sunday speeches on their battery-operated radios, had become full of revolutionary zeal and quit, and the villa was falling apart and the prize German shepherds were beginning to look mangy. He wanted then to
borrow
Héctor during the four off-harvest months, and use him in his mother's villa near La Habana. Cara de Jamón, who had become somewhat disillusioned by la Revolución's recent tirades against religion, and especially in its insults to his Virgencita Santa, agreed to have one of his little soldiers—for that is what he called us:
mi soldaditos
—serve time as a criado to an unrepentant aristocrat, simply because Federico Sánchez's mother was also professed to be a great devotee of la Virgencita. They left on the first week of July, just the two of them.

Héctor returned two weeks later under heavy guard. He was wearing a soiled cream-colored linen suit, a torn untucked light-blue linen shirt, and on his left foot one ruined ox-blood leather Italian shoe, the sides all mud-crusted. His right foot was bare and bloodied in between the long toes. His face and his hands and his hair were covered with streaks of yellow paint, like a tribal warrior. He was marched by us; but he did not look at any of us, his eyes downcast, and I noticed then that even his eyebrows and eyelashes were stained with yellow paint. He was put in solitary confinement, in the hole where you can't stand up. We didn't see him again till the end of that summer, when he suddenly appeared one day, asleep in his old bed at the barracks, barefoot but still wearing the same linen suit, now stained with urine and mierda-splotches. We were returning from a nearby mill, which is where we put in most of our working hours during the off-harvest months, and were tired and ready for a meal and a bed, but two or three of us skipped dinner and stripped Héctor—he had lost some weight again—and dragged him to the showers, where the old guard ran a warm shower for him and, as we scrubbed the smell off him with our soaked and soaped workshirts, we noticed the tiny rectangular burn-scabs on the skin of his penis and on his ass and the inside of his upper thighs. He had spent some extra time with Father. The old guard turned his gaze away from the naked Héctor, either in shame at his complicity or in repulsion at their marring of his beautiful organ. Later that night, after the other men had come back from dinner, he handed me a jar of aloe balm and he let me sneak into Héctor's bed with him.

“Sabe, I don't approve of this
they
do,” he said without looking at me. I thanked him for the balm. “Y cuidado,” he added, “because I am lenient doesn't mean that
they
will be!”

In a couple of weeks' time the burns had mostly healed and the old guard made me sleep in my own bunk again. A couple of weeks more and we were out in the fields again. When we were able to sneak away, which was not as easy as before, for I was by then out of favor with the guards, Héctor was finally able to open up about what had happened in the villa of Federico Sánchez's mother.

“Pues vaya,” he said, brushing the blade of his machete against his underchin, not looking at me, his shirt off and tied around his waist, “right away la vieja didn't like me. She knew, mi amorcito. She knew exactly why the old pervert had brought me there—not to help her, but to fuck me without having to bother about anyone finding out. A mother knows these things.
My
mamita knew about me the moment she first saw me after it had happened with mi maestro, señor Sariel. This mother knew too. Así que vaya, right away she didn't like me. She gave me that sideways look and that little grunt in the back of the throat that you almost can't hear.

“
Do you have any experience in domestic help?
that's the first thing she asked me. And Federico Sánchez broke in right away, his face reddening, waving the finger of his good hand at her:
Mama, this is not an interview. I have brought you help for this falling-apart excuse of a house and you should be thankful and not so pedante!
Es verdad, la vieja era un poquito pedante, no sólo en carácter, but in the way she looked and smelled. Even standing across the room from her, her skin gave off a sharp smell, like garlic covered up by cheap lemony perfume. Her face was caked with white makeup, y claro se había hecho la cirujía (it looked like her face had been
fixed
many times), but you could still see the wrinkles lining up like toy soldiers, around her lips and around her eyes. After her son had told her off, her white makeup began to crack and she gave us
both
the grunt at the back of the throat again, and then she left the room. At least the dogs liked me. These were supposed to be the vicious animals that fought off the Fidelistas when they tried to take over the villa, but they spent that whole first day licking my hands and my crotch, and they wouldn't stop no matter how loudly Federico Sánchez called them off me. Vaya, parece que estaba celoso, ¿no ves, mi amorcito?—
he
wanted to be licking my fingers and my crotch. In the jeep, on the ride up, he almost said it outright.
¿Ya sabes cuanto te quiero, Héctor?
he said that to me, not waiting for me to answer,
How much I would do and risk for you? Ya sabes.
What could I say to this?”