The Lazarus Rumba (78 page)

Federico Sánchez could have saved Héctor. Héctor knew this but he would not have it. He did very little domestic work around the house. In fact, without his mother's knowledge, Federico Sánchez had hired three other servants to make Héctor look superefficient; they came in to do the housework after midnight when his mother was well into her Valiumsleep. Federico Sánchez paid them with rum and with forged ration-booklets for meat and dairy products. Héctor did help Federico Sánchez paint the exterior of the main house. He paid Héctor with bourbon, which he bought from a yanqui who was
íntimo
with his mother.

“Did you take off your shirt while you were helping him paint the outside of the house?”

“It was very hot, mi amorcito. And you know how much I dislike clothes.”

(Poor Federico Sánchez.) He did not know how much Héctor disliked clothes. He thought that Héctor was stripping for him, displaying himself as lovers do one for the other. Poor Federico Sánchez who bought Héctor the finest linen suits woven by the Italians in the old section of the capital city and silk briefs and socks woven by los chinitos in La Calle del Malecón, who bought Héctor all the bourbon he could drink, and when Héctor was too groggy to protest (when the bourbon had made all his limbs heavy and his heart fond for
any
affection), poor Federico Sánchez dressed him and undressed him like a doll, and right before dawn—when he suspected his mother would begin wandering the long hallways of the house, drinking the first of her two dozen cafecitos negros to offset the pills, and then kneeling in front of the porcelain statue of the Virgin of Cobre, murmuring rosaries till noon—he paid the night servants and let them out and then carried Héctor to his own bedroom and gave him water and three aspirins to drink and washed his forehead with a warm damp cloth and kissed him on the cheeks and on the bridge of his nose and then set under his ruffled-hair head three goose-down almohadas and drew the mosquitero and curled up on the pink-marble floor beneath his bed without pillow or blanket and slept there beside one of his mother's German shepherds, who nibbled on his fingerless fingers, and stared at the contours that Héctor's body cut on the soft mattress and dreamed of Héctor's breath that stirred the air with such sweet snores. Poor Federico Sánchez who thought Héctor would grow enamored of this life in his mother's ruined villa, rising late in the afternoon and costumed in linen and silk and drunk on bourbon.

“It was very hot, mi amorcito,” Héctor repeated. “You don't think I was trying to get that fingerless pervert all horny for me do you? It was very hot. And I liked the paint when it rained from the brush and splashed all over me.”

Dona Sánchez wanted her villa-house painted the same color as the Church of San Francisco down the hill from her. But it wasn't as if she had much choice, for the whole neighborhood was being painted egg-yolk yellow. It was the surplus paint on the black market. (Yellow paint, for some reason, is always surplus on the black market.) The priests at the Church of San Francisco got a good deal on it and Federico Sánchez, due to his military stature, got a better deal. doña Sánchez wanted the wooden storm shutters on the windows and all the wooden doors and doorways on the main floor painted in old green. (“Sort of the color of that ridiculous glove you wear,” she said to her son, and at the moment she had said it, one of her German shepherds, as if on command, on a mission to shame him, licked the three fingerless fingers of Federico Sánchez's right hand.) And the many wrought-iron balconies running along the second floor, as well as the pillars in the inner courtyard, she wanted painted snow-white. The parapet and the steel urns that lined the house on the front, she wanted painted clay-red.

“Yellow, mamá,” Federico Sánchez said. “Yellow—that is all we have. Todo todito amarillito.”

“¿Las puertas?”

“Yellow, mamá.”

“¿Las ventanas?”

“Yellow, mamá.”

“¿Hasta los balcones?”

“Yellow yellow yellow, mamá!”

“¡Ay qué horrible! Va a parecer la casa una tortilla.”

“Mamá, we won't do it then! I'll go right back with Héctor to Camagüey.” Federico Sánchez stretched his tongue.

“Yellow,” doña Sánchez said relenting, “yellow then, todo en el color de la Virgencita, las puertas, las ventanas, los balcones, hasta el ojo de mi culo píntenmelo amarillo!”

Héctor laughed and all that day he imagined sneaking the longer bristles of his yellow-soaked paintbrush into the
eye
of doña Sánchez's wide ass. When Federico Sánchez asked him what he was giggling about he told him and Federico Sánchez laughed also. He laughed at his own mother with glee.

There were four and a half gallons of paint left over when they had finished painting all the outer walls and window shutters and doors and doorways and balconies and doña Sánchez's villa-house looked as if it had been pissed on by King Midas. Héctor suggested they ride around the capital and donate the leftover paint to the people whose house looked most in need of a paint job; and Federico Sánchez said that it was
una idea magnífica, noble. You are finally becoming a son of the revolution!
He dressed Héctor in a new sand-colored linen suit and the light-blue linen shirt buttoned all the way up to his neck, though Héctor complained that it was too hot to be all buttoned up, and the custom-made ox-blood Italian leather shoes that Federico Sánchez told Héctor had belonged to his father, and unfortunately Federico Sánchez's feet had never grown to his father's monumental size of fourteen and a half. His father had been a giant, measuring almost seven feet. Héctor, who was about six feet tall, had to look
down
to meet Federico Sánchez's gaze as Federico Sánchez spoke to him. And the truth hit Héctor with a stupefying clarity. Poor Federico Sánchez was a bastard. And even if he had been a giant like his father who was not his father, Héctor thought that he would never have worn any of his father's fine clothes anyway, because the only time he saw Federico Sánchez out of his military uniform was late at night, when he curled on the pink marble floor next to his mother's German shepherd. And even then he did not wear the fancy linen pajamas that the servants laid out for him, but a tight-fitting white T-shirt, which showed off his thick chest and his boa-arms, and long boxers and a pair of black socks and, of course, his olive-green leather glove, which he never removed and which during their stay had become spotted and streaked with bright yellow paint.

The shoes fit Héctor just fine, with plenty of room for his giant monkey-toes. It was the first and last pair of shoes he owned since he had run away from home when he was thirteen. He found shoes so uncomfortable that he never wore the work boots they gave us in the labor camp, not even out in the fields. I tried to convince him in the showers one night, playing on his fear of snakes, telling him that las culebras like to suck on naked toes, but Héctor just brandished an invisible machete at me.
¡En seis mil pedazos las corto!
The soles of his feet eventually grew so callused they were tough as hooves.

They loaded up the paint and got in Federico Sánchez's jeep and drove east; and though Héctor knew that the bad neighborhoods of the old city were due west, he said nothing. Federico Sánchez made no conversation either. They drove in silence till nightfall and near the beach town of Varadero got off the main highway and followed a sandy road to a small wooden cottage on a hill from where Héctor could hear the drumbeat of the waves. The sky trembled with torch-flame stars and the moon shone like polished silver.

“It's so bright we can paint tonight,” Federico Sánchez said, unloading the food and the fresh water and the paint cans, and handing Héctor the case of Kentucky bourbon that he had gotten from his mother's friend, that former assistant to the former yanqui consul, who despite the embargo and the thousand other yanqui laws still vacationed on the Island every winter. By the front door of the cottage, Héctor tore the case open and broke the seal on the first bottle and drank straight from it.

“Pero ven acá chico, no tanto coño,” Federico Sánchez said, grabbing the bottle from him. “We are going to paint tonight. I wasn't kidding.” Héctor grabbed the bottle back from Federico Sánchez and took another swig.

“Fine, I'll paint by myself,” Federico Sánchez said, then he forced a smile and put the three middle fingers of his ungloved hand softly under Héctor's chin. “Puñetero, tan bonito y tan malagradecido que eres!”

Federico Sánchez took off his military jacket and opened one of the paint cans and started painting the outside walls of the wooden cottage, while Héctor found the highest point on the hill, not far from the house, and sat with his back to Federico Sánchez and, with his bourbon bottle in hand, stared at the coruscant moon-foil sea. Every time Federico Sánchez got down from the ladder to retrieve his dropped paintbrush or to move the ladder along the wall he was painting, he went over to Héctor and grabbed the bottle of bourbon from him and took a long swig. He did not say anything to Héctor. After six trips to the bourbon bottle, when Federico Sánchez stumbled back up on the ladder, he pointed with his sopped palm-gripped brush at the different constellations and told stories about them, mostly plain stories his mother had once told him as they sat on the roof of their villa-house and bemoaned their fate as a wife and son abandoned by the giant man whose secret life with other men they had never imagined. Héctor seemed uninterested in the stories till Federico Sánchez began to tell of the Hyades and of the giant who hunts them.

See that little cluster there, high up, right in front of you, all bunched together like too many diamonds on a ring. Those are the Hyades, the daughters of Atlas, the giant who carries the world. There are six, but you can only see five, and I'll tell you why. Mira, así va el cuento: Zeus, the god of all gods, had a lover and her name was Semele, and his wife knew about this lover and had her burned alive with Zeus's own flames; but before she died, Zeus was able to snatch the child from her belly, and so that her wife would not find him, he gave the child to the daughters of Atlas to care for him, and they named him Dionysus and raised him into a man, and the man was beautiful, with long dark locks and a body so lovely he would never clothe it, and this son of Zeus became the god of wine and the god of orgasms, and he left the daughters of Atlas and wandered the world spreading his religion. But twice a year, during the rainy seasons, he returns to the sky to the women who raised him—Zeus rewarded the women for saving his son by making them stars—and he pleases them like only the god of orgasms can; that's why you can only see five out of the six, for one is always behind them, on the lookout for the coming of Dionysus, and when he comes, one is always with him, being pleased.

Now, there is a giant hunter, who is in love with Dionysus and wants to have him, and his name is Orion. That's him there, to your right, up, up, see his torso and his legs and his bow and arrow and see that long thing sprouting from his side, bent and twisted like a massive oak branch and lit at the end with the brightest star in the constellation, that thing that the many prudes say is Orion's sword, but we who know, who look at it right, can plainly tell that it can't be his sword, that it is too beautiful and, in its outrageous curves, too full of desire to be a sword!—that it can be nothing but his raging hard-on for Dionysus, the god who pleases the Hyades but will not have him!

The yellow paint from the brush Federico Sánchez pointed tremulously at Orion's bent desire for the god of orgasms dripped down his gloved hand and down his arm, but he did not care; he had gotten mi nenito's attention and Héctor was listening to him and staring with lips-parted awe at Orion's wonderful pinga. Federico Sánchez dropped the brush but this time he did not climb down to retrieve it, instead he took off his green leather glove—it was saturated with yellow paint—and he hurled it to the ground from the ladder as if challenging someone to a duel. He stuck his finger-and-a-half hand into the moon. To Héctor, its shadow on the white-plate moon looked like the head of a baby elephant with a stump-horn,
no no, no un elefante, un bebito rinoceronte.
Héctor laughed and swigged more bourbon as he told Federico Sánchez this. Federico Sánchez dug his hand out of the moon. He told Héctor to forget about his hand and to concentrate on Orion and on his bent and unrequited love for the god who was too beautiful to wear clothes. He pressed his naked finger-and-a-half hand against the bulge on his crotch, and later Héctor would see the yellow stains there, like a mutant child's finger painting.

But Orion too is beautiful. Mira, mira, if you can cast your eyes away from his long lovely pinga. Look at the rest of him! Look how the muscles ripple in the ball of his shoulders as he pulls back his bow, his legs firmly planted and spread in the sky, his hair and beard the color of the night, trimmed short like a warrior, his face twisted in longing; pero carajo!—how can you avert your eyes from that oak-branch pinga that never rests, that is even in the way of his vision! And how can the Hyades not see it and try to make it theirs, these poor and sad women who are alone for most of the year, waiting for their lover who is almost their son. They lure the giant hunter, promise him what they cannot deliver, and get to sit on the oak branch that never rests to cure their dank stenchy sulphurous below-the-girdle solitude. Again and again they sit on the bent branch and ride the skies like witches, but Orion never rests beside them for it is another that he is bent for.

Federico Sánchez had made his way down from the ladder and his voice had lowered and he was speaking directly into Héctor's ears. He reached toward Héctor's neck with his ungloved hand and deftly, with his pinky and half his thumb, undid all the buttons of his shirt. Then Federico Sánchez, working with his hand as if it had not a finger and a half but six or seven fingers, undid the belt buckle and the buttons of Héctor's pants. Héctor took another shot of bourbon and laid back on the sandy ground and kept his eyes on Orion. His shoes came off and his pants and silk boxers slid off him. He felt Federico Sánchez disappear for a second. He was angry at himself for being so aroused. And just as he thought that he could easily put his pants back on, he felt a cool soppy grainy tongue lapping at his thigh, covering it with thick cold-blooded saliva, all the way down his leg, to the callused soles of his feet and in between the long toes and then up the other leg. Héctor looked away from Orion and lifted his head. Federico Sánchez, his eyes so open they were almost perfect circles, his long tongue stretched against his lower teeth, so that even in the moonlight, Héctor could see the countless erect rosy mininipples, was painting him yellow. He was holding the brush with his good hand, and just now he was getting to the part Héctor imagined he had wanted to start with, but had denied himself the pleasure of at first, like a child who saves the best part of a meal for last.