The Lazarus Rumba (8 page)

“Father Gonzalo, pardon me for intruding,” she said. “I am looking for Alicia Lucientes. I was told she was here.”

Alicia continued gathering her things, her back to the door, as if she had not heard.

“I am Pucha, an officer of the local CDR,” she extended her hand to Father Gonzalo. “I think I have met you before.”

Before he took her hand, Father Gonzalo tapped his forehead where a hat would sit. “Please, you are in the house of our Lord.”

Pucha withdrew her hand and removed her hat and bowed her head gawkishly towards the altar. “Discúlpame. … I went to see her mother first—”

“What?” Alicia turned. “What do you want? Why are you pestering mamá?”

“Señora Alicia, mucho gusto,” Pucha said extending her hand and again it was unreceived. “The CDR has appointed me to head an investigation of the accident at the circus last week. May we go somewhere to talk?”

“No, we'll talk here. I have nothing to hide.” She gestured for everyone to stay in the chapel. Father Gonzalo sat again on the marble steps of the altar, and tucked the two pirated thin paperbacks under one leg.

“Fine. Were you at the circus Christmas day?”

“You know I was. There were five or six soldiers constantly watching me.”

“Yes, well, I need to ask you some questions.”

“I need to ask
you
some questions. Where's my cousin Héctor? That's why I went to the circus. I went to see Héctor perform. And after all the commotion I find out that he was arrested, as if he and not the elephant had caused all the damage!”

“Señora Alicia, Héctor
was
arrested. Many performers were. He will have a just trial.”

“A trial for what?”

“Por favor, I need to ask
you
some questions.”

“¡No! ¡Al carajo! No answers till you tell me why Héctor was arrested.”

“Pues bien. Héctor was arrested for crimes classified under
la dolce vita.
There were rumors … no, mejor dicho, documentations. He was arrested for antisocial behavior, antirevolutionary behavior—”

“You can arrest the whole circus—no, half the country—for that crime!”

“Deviant sexual behavior, if you'd like to know specifically, señora Alicia. Your cousin Héctor was arrested because he is a homosexual, un maricón. He enjoys throwing up his legs and getting topped by other men!—which is against the laws of nature, not to mention the laws of la Revolución!”

Marta swallowed a tiny gasp and Father Gonzalo grimaced and shook his head as if such conversation were better kept out of his chapel. Alicia noticed both these gestures and dismissed them.
“¿La dolce vita?”
she said. “Isn't that the same
classification
under which you arrested Julio?”

“SeñoraAlicia, maybe we'd better go somewhere else to talk.”

“Are you arresting me?”

“No, not at all. I have no power to arrest you. But please do come with me.” She pointed towards the door with her hat. “Por favor, we just need to ask you some questions.”

Alicia complied, for Father Gonzalo's sake, for her sister's sake, although she knew in the long run she could protect neither of them from what was to come. They questioned her for three hours at the makeshift investigative offices el Rubio, the pale blond police captain of the revolutionary police, had set up near the site of the shut-down circus, in the airless lobby of an abandoned hotel, which smelled like a dog pound, due to the unwashed drooling obese bullmastiff that dozed there in one corner of the room. When Alicia entered, it raised its massive skull and examined her with indifference and promptly shut its jaundiced eyes and fell back asleep. Alicia's answers were curt and as uninformative as possible; she told el Rubio that she did not know in advance of the convertible draped with a flag in honor of her husband, and she told him that she followed it on impulse, a matter of respect, of honor, and not one of subversion. She had been going to the circus anyway, to see Héctor. He was the greatest acrobat on the Island. And who cared if he was a homosexual? That was a matter between him and God.

Before they let her go, they went through her handbag in front of her, they wrote down the name of the novel with the red-scripted title in three different notebooks, and they warned her that they might be needing her for further questioning, and that they might be calling on her sister. “Though she is not your
full
sister, I understand,” el Rubio added sarcastically. And he assured her she could see her cousin Héctor soon, when everything was cleared up and those arrested were given fair trials. The circus, though, he vowed, was shut down forever, for it was a breeding ground for the licentiousness la Revolución had fought long and hard to eliminate. Alicia tried not to show any signs of caring one way or the other, though it was impossible to keep her face and manners moodfree when they spoke of Héctor, or mentioned her sister.

“Madness in animals is not a good thing, y'all,” Georgina the Manwoman concluded during her own interrogation, speaking in her beguiling singsong tongue, so that not even the yanqui-looking blond police captain understood her, “… means that madness in people is only a serpent's spit away.”

The Widow's Bathwater

It was only after she walked out, knowing el Rubio's eyes were fixed on her through the large grimy bay window of the abandoned hotel, that Alicia began to feel the weight of his vigilance like a heavy plank strapped across her shoulders. Dusk had fallen and already the air was aflicker with New Year's celebrations. Explosives rattled and caboomed creating contorted serpents of sound, and from the open windows of the city tenements on Oriente Street sultry ballads of that melted year's sad loves blared. Alicia was heading for her mother's house to fall into a deep sleep before midnight, for she never again wanted to feel that bubbly New Year's joy that makes even the most alienated lovers hug each other strangely and hope for better things to come. She would sleep and never again waste the smiles of her heart flirting with those wily first minutes and first hours all dressed in gossamer mañanas. What made her change her path and head for the abandoned house she had shared with her husband she would never know, but once she was there, having entered through the patio in the back, sighing at the withered brown tentacles of the hanging coconut plant, at the corpse of her husband's rooster rotting in the fountain, and passed through the outer courtyard into the main dining room, she knew she would not leave, not that night and not for many nights to come.

That same evening, she set out to restore the house from the abundant damage caused first by Hurricane Flora and later by irreverent looters. She stacked all the mangled furniture left behind into an absurd colossus of lost riches in the backyard. Then right after midnight she sprinkled it with some gasoline she had found in the work shed and tossed a lit match into it. The splintered French country table and the wobbly Moroccan chairs were the first to disappear, wisping heavenward towards the new moon. The hand-painted bombe commode and the Louis XVI-style duchesse that had enjoyed each other's presence side by side in the master bedroom held out longer, bristling with renewed elegance in their final minutes. The shattered mahogany mirror recorded the glow of their glorious struggle a thousandfold jagged times as it too disappeared with the old year. At the height of the fire, she fetched the corpse of her husband's rooster, said a quick prayer, and tossed it in. A single high muffled note, like that of a boxed violin, escaped from its lungs.

After she was finished, all that remained in the house, all that survived of these riches that had so often embarrassed her, that Julio had brought from his farm in Bayamo, long ago bequeathed to him by the one-eyed Jesuit professor who had been his guardian, was two undamaged serapi carpets, which neither the looters nor the storm recognized as treasure worthy of their rage (except for one small water stain), a ceramic figure of the crucified Christ made by Spanish monks, the goose-feather mattress from their marriage bed, a photographic portrait of her husband in full guerrilla regalia, defaced by a black unkind scripture shaped like a noose around his neck, and in the bathroom an antique tub, its legs the sculpted bronze talons of a falcon, full of water tinged the color of ink from a drowned squid by a monstrous decomposing piece of waste.

“Qué desgracia,” Alicia mouthed, leaving the shit in the tub as a monument to the memory of what had been done to her husband.

On the morning of New Year's Day, having slept not a wink from looking for the ghost of her departed husband, reputed to have been spotted the week after his murder meandering about that house, she changed into a faded flowery housedress she had found in one of the upstairs closets, wrapped an old perfumy scarf around her head, kicked off her shoes, broke open all the shuttered windows and with the new air at her back, bleached the graffitoed stucco walls, polished the parquet floors, and wiped clean any windowpanes that had not been shattered. When she was finished, she dragged the goose-feather mattress out onto the front porch, and thinking of him as she might have seen him in the darkened room of her widowhood, a discomfited phantom full of holes, Alicia waited for the spirit of her husband.

For six days she refused to accept visits from her mother and did not bathe or change her faded flowery housedress or remove the old perfumy scarf from her head. When she awoke each morning she went to the bathroom and stared at the insult in her husband's falcon-legged bathtub, then walked to the kitchen and threw up in the sink. On Sunday, the fifth day, when Father Gonzalo came (at doña Adela's request) to hear confession and administer a private holy service, even he was taken aback when she opened her mouth to receive the communion wafer and her breath reminded him of the rotted airs of those receiving their last rites. He decided to shame her into cleanliness. He would bring the entire congregation of the book club to meet at her house the following day.

“Bien,” Alicia said, “I shall receive you.”

That night she did not sleep. She aborted any pass her mind made at memory. She read the novel by gaslamp light on the front porch. By dawn, the gaslamp flame flickered with abandon. Alicia, having turned the last page, took up her ebony rosary and lay back on the goose-feather mattress. In her delirium, brought on by both the viciousness in the novel and her sleeplessness, she heard the music of days past, the exultant strings she had heard with him when they had sneaked to the west side of Berlin. She remembered him nude when he had shed his military garb in the monkish hotel on the east side, not one bit tired after a whole day of meetings and secret conferences, his body more fleshy now than on that afternoon she had first seen him when he burst into her classroom and disrupted the multiplication lessons—as a retired soldier, his body had suddenly taken the look of the warriors in the ancient mosaics, taut and supple, as if reined together by the wine-dark scar on his left side that ran from the side of his belly, under the ribcage and up the sternum and then near his throat dipped downward again towards his nipple so that it looked like a palm twisted and cut in half by a thunderbolt.

“Vamos, mi cielo, enough of these dried-ass comunistas. Tonight we enjoy life. Tonight we listen to Beethoven.”

He trimmed close his unruly beard, the dark hairs falling like iron shavings on the stained sink, and eagerly donned an Italian suit and a stylish fedora she had never seen before, its brim dipped so low that it met his puckish wink. He laughed as he grabbed her.

“In the
other
Berlin, claro.”

She never asked what he had given the guard at the gate who patted him on the back as if they were old friends and chuckled:
“Viel Spaβ
, comandante.” She assumed it was yanqui dollars, for her husband had always had access to them, especially when he was abroad. And it must have been yanqui dollars that paid for a private box at the concert hall. Alicia could then think of no curses on yanqui dollars. They listened to the famous Lithuanian violinist lead the Berlin Philharmonic through a redemptive version of Beethoven's violin concerto. During the last movement coruscant tears streaked down his gaunt cheeks and mingled with the sweat falling from his brow. At intermission, the comandante brought two glasses of champagne into their box, and they kissed and toasted this their honeymoon, six months late.

And six months later, comandante Julio César Cruz was dead. Alicia thought that maybe that venture into West Berlin at a time when he was visiting the other side of the city as an ambassador for the revolutionary government (
Even your honeymoon, doña
Adela had taunted her daughter,
he smears with his maldita Revolución!
) was on the long list of charges at the secret military trial in La Habana. Maybe it was then that he had cemented the plot he had been accused of masterminding under supervision of la CIA. Alicia never asked, not when he left her alone in the balcony during the second half of the performance, the Seventh Symphony, having capriciously turned angry about a champagne stain on the pleats of his trousers, and not when they made love later that evening, the melancholic grandeur of the weeping Lithuanian still fresh in their ears, her husband's warmth pizzling all the folds of her innards, and not on the night that the revolutionary police twisted apart the wrought-iron door of the inner courtyard and burst into their home on B. Street, dragging him out of their bed and cuffing his wrists and taking him naked as he was, and not on the evening he returned from his trial in La Habana, stripped of his military titles but supposedly a free citizen and el Rubio had him arrested again, so that their reunion took place in a visitor's room for common criminals, and not on the day Che himself came to Guantánamo, on the six o'clock from Santiago, and forced el Rubio to release her husband, and not when he came home that evening and she met him at the twisted wrought-iron door and went to kiss him and he turned his head so that her kiss landed on the grizzle of his beard, and not on those few nights when she attempted to revive his lost flesh, for nothing, nothing:
Leave me alone, mi vida
, he muttered,
I have no dignity with which to love you. Por favor
, and not on the eve of her birthday, some weeks later, when he informed her that he was leaving, headed for the yanqui naval base that very night, his birthday gift a light dry kiss on the lips, the only passion he was able to muster after his trial, and a promise that he would see her soon again, maybe in Madrid, maybe in Miami:
Te veré pronto … donde sea
, and not two days later, when she and Marta visited him at the revolutionary hospital, his wounds un-cared for, his mind woozy with morphine, the nurses deaf to Marta's demands to change his bandages, checking on the patient only to see if he had died yet. Alicia did not want to know. Not then and certainly not now. Lying back on the goose-feather mattress, all she remembered were those moments during intermission when they had drunk champagne and he had licked her teeth with his tongue, and for a moment she had forgotten what she had long known: that sooner or later, the guerrillero she had fallen in love with when he burst into the tiny wistaria-covered schoolhouse in the mountains to retrieve hidden arms would make her a much too young widow. She had forgotten that he was anything else but
hers.