The Lazarus Rumba (79 page)

Héctor felt his testicles shrink when the brush, covered with sand dirt and saturated in bright yellow paint, came in contact with them. He wished the other part down there would shrink too. But it didn't. It jumped up and down on his lower belly as if beckoning the brush. Federico Sánchez complied. Then he wriggled Héctor out of his shirt and went on to paint half his torso up to his nipples.

“¡Mi niñito el color de la Virgen!” he said when he was finished, standing open-legged above Héctor. “The giant Orion has come. He has captured his boy!” Héctor laughed, for even in the position they were in, Federico Sánchez looked nothing like a giant. Federico Sánchez took another shot of bourbon. He took off his T-shirt; under the shag of black hair Héctor could make out the well-defined torso. Federico Sánchez stood on one foot and took off one boot, then the other. He let himself drop down on Héctor and began passing his iguana tongue over his belly, meticulously washing away and swallowing, lick by lick, the coat of paint the color of the Virgin. Around his aroused penis and his shrunk testicles Héctor felt as if Federico Sánchez was going over him with a moist thin strip of fine-grain sandpaper. He turned his gaze back to Orion and then Federico Sánchez grabbed him and stroked the shaft with the three nubs of his bad hand and rubbed the head in circle motions with his thumb-stub and kept his tongue at work below the testicles and soon Héctor's eyes rolled back away from Orion and his eyelids fluttered and his tongue poked the inside of his right cheek and Federico Sánchez pulled in his own tongue and encircled his mouth around Héctor and swallowed him.

When Héctor looked up again Federico Sánchez had stripped and, standing, still spread-legged over Héctor's body, was pleasing himself as he had pleased Héctor, the three nubs and the thumb-stump working in the same manner (a mist of yellow paint flying off from the jerk and pull and shining like pollen-dust when it caught the moonlight). His legs too were hairy and muscle-cut and his organ very miniscule compared with his other limbs, the head flat and lined with thick streaks of purple, which reminded Héctor of some mushrooms he and his brother had once picked and eaten in Mingo's finca. Federico Sánchez's come bubbled out of him in three-quarters time, like a syrupy salsa, and mingled with the yellow paint and fell in string-gobs on Héctor and tickled him as it slid down the sides of his belly searching for the dry ground. He carried Héctor into the cottage, threw aside the mosquitero, and set Héctor down on a wide bed dressed in white linen. Héctor felt the wet grainy brush pass over his back and buttocks and in between his legs, and from the smell of the paint and all the bourbon he had drunk, he passed out.

“Así que de veras, I don't know if he fucked me or not, mi amorcito,” he said to me, “pero vaya, his little mushroom was so tiny, that even if he did, I was so drunk that night, I don't think I would have felt it.”

The next morning when Héctor awoke he felt a dull pain in his right foot. There was a gash three inches long across the sole, right under the ball. It had stopped bleeding but when he tried to walk it opened up again. Federico Sánchez was passed out next to him, his body smeared with yellow and red and brown stains, the tip of his tongue, which was hanging out of one side of his parted lips, resting against the lower one like an exhausted guerrillero, also covered in paint and in blood. Héctor wiped off his own blood from Federico Sánchez's seven-inch bowie knife and took it with him and he took the clothes Federico Sánchez had bought for him (he would need them as cover) and he took two bottles of bourbon (these too he would need to fight back the pain in his foot and the hunger as well, for he searched for money in Federico Sánchez's clothes and in the jeep but there was none to be found—a prestigious comandante of la Revolución, Federico Sánchez needed no money, he simply demanded goods and services, which worked everywhere except in the black market). Héctor left the cottage and washed as well as he could in the sea. The cut on his foot stung and he limped as he came out of the water. He would have taken the jeep, but of course he had never learned how to drive, so he escaped on foot. He told me his first plan was to go back to Guantánamo and seek your help, señora Alicia, but he made the mistake of hitching a ride from a campesino who was the head of a local Committee for the Defense of the Revolution, and in his mule and buggy, the man, while giving a well-acted speech on the evils of la Revolución, rode him directly to a local national guard station.

“His finger wagged like Fidel's as he spoke,” Héctor told me later. “I should have known.”

Federico Sánchez almost died of lead poisoning. He was ill for many months. That is why they kept Héctor in solitary confinement for so long; they were readying to charge him with murder and hang him. But Federico Sánchez recovered—and whatever story he concocted when he returned, it saved Héctor's life, for a while, long enough so that he could recount to me what had happened, long enough so that he died for the sins that he came to the labor camp to die for and not for a trumped up murder charge.

Federico Sánchez returned to the camp just as the sugarcane harvest began that year. A week later, Cara de Jamón was transferred and Federico Sánchez became the head comandante. He moved into the wooden cottage by the river. The wrinkled queen who worked as his servant (Federico Sánchez personally selected Cuco la Loca, the oldest and least attractive marica in the camp for this service) said that in the bedroom of the house he installed a large abstract painting streaked with dirt-brown and vivid reds, but mostly done in yellow, the shape of arms and legs and torsos bending into each other. This was the only acknowledgement Federico Sánchez would make of his past life. He treated Héctor as if he had never known him, addressing him with the same insults the guards used on us. Héctor took it all well; pues, was glad. He hoped that Federico Sánchez's face would soon blend unrecognizably with the others who watched us. Little did he know that Federico Sánchez had already begun planning his murder, which he wanted done not by some blind revolutionary tribunal, but under his command.

The guards shunned me that harvest season. I was no longer welcome into the cab of the conscript transport truck. I had been replaced, and thus I could demand no favors from them, no special time to sneak away with Héctor. They watched me swing my machete through the telescopes of their rifles.

“Ya estás viejo, negrón,” they taunted me. “We're harder for younger meat now! Any idea where we can get any? How much time do you expect us to wait for the mulatico, el del culito rico, the boyfriend of doña Federica la Marica!”

Eventually they
did
lure Héctor into the cab of their truck. Héctor assured me he did it for my sake; but I needed no explanations, I knew him. Ever since his maestro first taught him the pleasures of it, Héctor could not do without the feel of another man's flesh, vaya, the simple smell of a man made him as joyous as drumbeats make the possessed, as pleased as bread makes the holy. And though Federico Sánchez must have suffered much, his heart emptied at hearing the telling and retelling of the way Héctor bit his lower lip and gasped when you first went into him and the way his eyelids fluttered, like poinciana clusters caught in a stiff breeze, and his tongue made a bump on his right cheek right before he came, this was all part of Federico Sánchez's plan. It was written. He knew that eventually Héctor would begin to ask for favors, for time to see me.

We met every Tuesday, supposedly because it was the day Federico Sánchez drove into the town of Las Ceras, about ten miles southwest of the camp to lecture at a military school there. But Federico Sánchez was going to town to spend his passions on other boys. Pues, this part of the story I got from Cuco la Loca, who waited on Federico Sánchez hand and foot, and even accompanied him into the boys' whorehouse run by a former comandante, a retired compadre of Fidel—all ages of boys, whose mothers were told they were being recruited for the service of la Revolución, in every shade of skin color from dark brown to yanqui-looking rubios with eyes like the mountain sky.
It's a good thing that I like HOMBRES!
Cuco la Loca told me,
¡Hombres peludos, con los cojones como los huevos de la avetruz! If not, I would have gone crazy in that house. All manners of little not-yet-men.
Cuco la Loca helped Federico Sánchez undress and sat by the bedside and handed the flask of bourbon back and forth to Federico Sánchez as he went through boys that resembled Héctor in everything but the long callused high-arched feet and the scar under the left nipple. And Cuco la Loca said that Federico Sánchez massaged the feet and pulled on the toes of the poor boys as if trying to stretch them. He also said that he was half in love with his employer till he saw his pitiable pinguita shaped and sized like a mushroom and streaked with purple.
Te juro, even some of the boys had to hold back from laughing at it.
When Federico Sánchez returned to the labor camp, stumbling from the bourbon, he called the guards who had watched Héctor and me in the fields through the telescope in their rifles and he asked them to describe exactly what they had seen; and when they weren't graphic enough, Federico Sánchez slammed his gloved hand on his long mahogany table and screamed: “¡Así no fue carajo! Díganme bien.” And when the guards came to the part when Héctor's eyelids fluttered and his tongue poked into his right cheek, he would stop them by raising his good hand as if to proclaim an oath and dismiss them and then he would ask Cuco la Loca to shut off the lights and help him out of his clothes, and he would lie naked, faceup on his mahogany table and sob like a widow, his hairy muscular chest swelling and falling, softened with sorrow.

One Tuesday, when he had drunk more bourbon than usual, and played with the hired boy's feet so long and so hard, pressing and pressing the bones between the palms of his good and bad hands, that the boy forgot he was a worker in service of la Revolución and remembered that he was a child, and began to cry, Federico Sánchez demanded that he stop crying, that his real
boy
never cried, no matter what he did to him. When the boy would not stop crying Federico Sánchez pulled out his seven-inch bowie knife and pinned the boy down, and slit a gash under the boy's left nipple and told the boy as he began to scream that
now
he looked like his real boy and demanded again that he stop screaming. The retired comandante who owned the house and owned the boys asked Federico Sánchez as he left that day,
con mucho respeto, compadre, y sin crear lío
, never to return, handing him back the knife he had wrested from him when he burst into the room. That night, Federico Sánchez interrupted the guards when they were telling him about my meeting with Héctor.

“Next Tuesday, grab him in the middle of his sins and do what you have to do to reform him. Let him know the wrath of our Lord that, pronto o tarde, strikes down all sinners.”

Cuco la Loca did not warn me. He was afraid for his own life.

On Tuesdays after almuerzo the guards called Héctor into the cab of the transport truck and then let him go see me. After he had met up with me, we would walk to a nearby river, un arroyo, and he would not let me kiss him till he had stripped down and crouched by the shore and grunted out all the semen and then washed. Although I did not mind the smell of another man's sex on him, he insisted. “Primero la aborción,” he said as he crouched over the smooth stones and the juices, sepia-tinted by his innards, poured out of him with every grunt and slid into the river like pale baby moccasins. “Pues, I don't want to become pregnant, mi amorcito. Only by you. The others are all forgotten.” He grunted one last time. Sometimes I would join him in the river and if the waters had risen enough we would both go under the surface and kiss for the first time there. It was a stolen private moment, but we knew we would not stay under for long, for if the guards were watching (we never knew for sure) they would become nervous and disturb us. So we came out of the river and everything else we did unabashed, under the afternoon sky, in the plain sight of Changó and all the saints, till the afternoon they took Héctor from me.

In the cab of the conscript transport truck, early that Tuesday afternoon, one of the men put his lips to Héctor's ear, as he bounced his hips on him, and whispered no obscenity, no special request, but only a few words of deepest fondness,
Don't go see Triste today, bellísimo. Por el amor de Dios, no vayas a ver a Triste hoy.
And he wept as he came inside Héctor.

“He cried—¿lo crees?” Héctor said crouching by the river a few hours later, for he paid no attention to the one warning he was given, and he came and saw me anyway. Héctor pressed the muscles of his belly and grunted a few times. He looked down and smiled.

“Mira, mira, mi amorcito,” he said. “Look at all the tears he shed.”

After he had washed we went far away from the river to the ruins of a brick church built by the Spaniards in the last century about a mile and a half south of the cane fields. We held hands as we walked through the fields, Héctor wearing only his work trousers and his wide-brimmed campesino hat and carrying his machete in his other hand, although today he was not looking out for snakes, carrying the weapon limply at his side as if he was unaware he had it. We heard our followers rustling behind us and sang love songs to each other for their benefit. When we got to the steep church steps, whose edges were worn smooth by the long-ago pious, I stripped. Héctor took out a silver flask that the guards from the transport truck gave him every week filled with bourbon and took a few gulps as he watched me and then took off his hat and his work pants and put down his machete. He offered me some bourbon. I refused. He seemed hurt at first, but an idea came to him and he immediately brightened.

“Let's have sex like the twisted angels, mi amorcito,” he requested. “We haven't done it in a long time.”