The Lazarus Rumba (89 page)

Y las mujeres son la gran alegría de este mundo. La mujer was what the Creator created after He had created everything, after He had rested, and with this final masterpiece He topped even Himself
, so went one of Father Gonzalo's sermons during one of the illegal celebrations. Yet illegal as they certainly were, el Rubio could not Héctor any of his men to take action against them. As soon as they heard the clickclack of the claves, the raptap of the castanets, the swishwhoosh of the maracas, they laid down their arms and grew deaf to any orders and threats that el Rubio barked at them. They too were fathers of Cuban daughters. Not even el Rubio's loafish bullmastiff Tomás de Aquino (no father himself, for his grotesque belly had made it impossible for him to mount any bitch) could be persuaded of the seriousness of the decree and at each pass of the mulecart Studebakers, he got off his monumental behind and followed the caravan, adding his baritone howl to the percussive harmony.

El Rubio was patient. He kept the decree on the books. But he stopped barking orders and threats to his men, he let them lay down their arms, let the two-cart Studebaker caravan pass, let Tomás de Aquino follow doltishly along. He listened with a tolerant ear to his bullmastiff's over-the-top, harsh-tuned, off-the-tracks, traitorous aria. He listened to the subtle threats in the suggestions of the ladies from the local CDR that the decree, if looked at in the wrong light by the wrong Party higher-up, could
itself
be deemed counterrevolutionary. All the while he said nothing and let the people, with the lashing of their tongues, set their own trap.

There was an administrator of a bakery who had a daughter just shy of fifteen. The administrator was rumored to be terminally ill. And it was said that as a farewell gift to his daughter, he was planning to throw the greatest
fiesta de quince
ever seen in Guantánamo, even more extravagant than those celebrated by the wicked aristocracy in the days before la Revolución. This was absurd of course, for the administrator, even though there were always long
colas
at the bakery and he was more accustomed to the orange fire within his brick ovens than to the yellow fire in the heavens, was paid a measly sum of pesos that was just enough for him and his family to get by. Still, on the evening before the appointed day, seven cases of Dom Pérignon were carried in by two mulatto men through the back door of his house on Calle José Martí near the shores of the Bano River. A few minutes later a massive slaughtered pig was carried in on a pole, through the same back door, by the same two mulatto men. (Cashier clerks at the bakery, el Rubio recognized them.) And then a second pig almost as large, and then three bunches of unplucked white gallinas, tied together by their legs and hung upside down like dead flowers. A barrel was rolled in, possibly rum, and bags of fruits and vegetables and rice followed, then branches thick with flowers, deep red and pinkish white. More black-market goodies than el Rubio had ever seen amassed at one time. He watched from the driver's seat of his powder-blue Studebaker, hidden at the edge of a blooming guava grove near the river. Every time the mulatto men disappeared into the house, waved in by the bony liver-spotted hand of the old administrator, el Rubio put down his binoculars and wiped the lenses with his shirt. He saw more than he could believe, for after all the food was smuggled in, another truck pulled up, and the two mulatto men started unloading hunks of shiny red metal and polished chrome and black-leather bucket seats and whitewall tires whose bands were pearly and unspotted as a bride's new dress. And then another truck from which was unloaded three sets of conga drums and enough brass trumpets and trombones and fugelhorns to supply a small symphony orchestra.

“Qué cojones,” el Rubio muttered. He tried to wake up Tomás de Aquino sprawled on the passenger's seat next to him, just to make sure he was not the only one who witnessed this abominable spectacle, but the bullmastiff flicked his ears and exposed his yellowed fangs. Had Tomás de Aquino known that there was so much comestible booty gathered together in one place, had he listened to his master and raised his large helmet of a skull, he might have charged the criminals with the proper courage of the police dog that he certainly was not; but Tomás de Aquino was wont not to pay any heed to his master, and he went on snoozing in the passenger seat, content, as most of the Islanders, on dreaming of riches that he knew would never be his.

El Rubio continued to watch till the day turned bright and the whiff in the morning breeze of sizzling pig hide awoke Tomás de Aquino, who struggled up and sat on his haunch and poked his cavernous wet nostrils into the air, mawing each open, as if the smell of the thing alone could ease his eternal hunger. Before Tomás de Aquino broke into a hunger seizure, el Rubio rolled up both windows and mud-tailed out of the guava grove. He decided he would let them have their last supper. He asked one of the vigilantes of the local CDR to take note of everyone who attended the fiesta. She returned to him that night with a list of over a hundred citizens who had attended as guests, the twelve citizens who had served as musicians, and the five citizens who had been employed as servants. She was tipsy, un poquito jumada. She said she had gotten too close (vaya, she had needed to get close for champagne corks launched from the patio were whizzing into the street endangering any passerby) and the administrator's wife (
una mulata buen moza, with fleshy hips and sumptuous breasts, she won't be a widow long, eso es seguro
) had caught her peeking through a crack in the red-brick patio wall; but instead of reprimanding her, she had invited her in.

“Vamos, entra, rejoice and party like a true cubana. You comuñangas, all of you, have forgotten what fun it is to be Cuban! My husband has decided to remind you before he goes to his grave. Vamos, entra. Alleluia, my daughter is a woman today!”

El Rubio nodded, he said that perhaps she should consider adding her own name to the end of the list. The vigilante sobered up instantly, her eyes widened, she insisted she had done it out of duty, to get a closer look, a better count. Y vaya, once she was in she could not refuse their hospitalities, else they get suspicious. El Rubio said he would take her sense of duty into account, but added her name to the list anyway. The morning after, he went to the house on José Martí Street and arrested the bakery administrator.

At the trial, the names were made public. The administrator's name was Roque San Martín. His daughter's name was Benicia. She was legendary among the long-tongued neighbors, for since the day of her birth her father had not allowed scissors to touch her chocolate hair and it had grown to graze her ankles. He himself, it was said, combed the knots out of it every evening. Roque San Martín's coffee-colored, wondrously curved and much younger wife was called Yéyé. Each of the guests that attended the feast, beginning with the vigilante, was called by the revolutionary tribunal to testify against their generous host and his family. Only a handful ignored the summons. Only a handful listened to the urgings of Father Gonzalo (who it was revealed later had been briefly at the feast to bless the debutante). In a sermon on the Sunday after the arrest, he proclaimed, mirroring the twisted logic of el Rubio's charges, that there had been no feast on St. Anthony's day, that he had not been there when he went there to bless the child-woman and that all those he saw there, at the greatest fiesta de quince he had ever attended, even during the era of the aristocrats, had certainly not been there either. This, he said, is the way el Rubio and the tribunal should be addressed. Any and all statements infected with nonsense. But only a handful listened to the urgings of Father Gonzalo. Of the 104 guests who had been at the feast, over ninety, including the vigilante, including the two mulattoes who worked for Roque San Martín and helped him purchase the black-market booty, gave concise, clear and descriptive statements of what had transpired on the evening of St. Anthony's day.

Sure enough, from what the tribunal heard, from what it saw (for there had been three photographers hired for the occasion, two who dutifully turned in their negatives to the tribunal), Roque San Martín had made true on his herculean boast—not even in the wicked prerevolutionary days had Guantánamo seen anything like the fiesta for Benicia's fifteenth birthday. As the guests arrived they were handed a single camellia, some white, some red, some bicolored. The guests were then escorted by Yéyé into the main patio where the roasting pit was set in one far corner, and in another corner the two mulatto bakers were assembling an automobile, an Italian convertible. Rum was scooped from the very cask with a wooden ladle, set in the third corner, and distributed liberally, so that it wasn't long before things got rolling, before the guests got anxious for the debutante and her father to appear, for someone to pick up the trumpets and trombones and fugelhorns gently laid on the stools atop the band platform in the fourth corner, for someone to jump behind the drums and pound them, like a tumble-rough lover, like a giant-handed masseuse, to their better life.

“Sí, sí, ya viene la música. … But first, antes que nada,” Yéyé announced, silencing the expectant guests. “The bath.”

A shutter on the second-floor window of the house flew open and the sickly Roque San Martín stepped out into the small semicircular balcony. He was clearly on his last days, his face so deflated that it hung on his skull like a hood, his chest sunken and his spine bent inward like the opening of a final question, the last three wisps of hair on his pate like weedgrass that had endured a long drought. Still, he had found the strength to don his most elegant linen guayabera and now that he was outside he found it proper to put on his most stylish Panama and was liberally sucking on a dark long Hoya, which his wife wouldn't let him smoke inside the house. He found the strength to lean forward on the wrought-iron railing and smile, a frightening gummy smile, and he signaled to the guests gathered on the patio below, with the back of his free hand, as if he were a nonagenarian pontiff on the balcony at St. Peter's square. The guests cheered his presence like wearied pilgrims and they raised their rum-filled glasses to him. They shouted that with God's help he would overcome his illness and see his grandchildren, that God owed it to them, for He had not worked a miracle in Guantánamo in a long, long time.

Roque San Martín grew serious at hearing this. He sucked on his Hoya and spoke with the abandon of the faithless. “Ay no me jodan señores y señoras. Cancer is a most terrible fate. My innards are a nest of scorpions … besides I am atheist!—and the only time I believe in God is when I look into Benicia's brown eyes, when I bury my nose in the fragrance of her hair. Her beauty has been all ours, her mother's and mine, for fifteen years, and under our stern aegis it has blossomed, ya verán, ya verán … for the time has come, the shield must be removed, from here on her beauty is the world's and her admirers will be as countless as the stalks in a cane field.” But, as if unable to imagine his daughter wooed and pursued by so many, Roque San Martín fell into a fit of hacking and coughing, his frail frame doubling in on itself like a spent world, his lit Hoya slipping out of his fingers, bouncing off the wrought iron railing and spiraling down to the patio like a misguided missile. Yéyé moved towards the spot underneath him, as if to catch him in case he too came tumbling down. Roque San Martín pounded his chest and gargled in a gulp of air and waved her off. “No es nada,” he wheezed.

“Do you need help with the tub?” Yéyé called.

“No coño, I said, no es nada. I am fine. Dying, but fine.”

There was cautious laughter below. “Así estamos todos en esta maldita Isla.”

“Bueno, basta, the time has come.” Roque San Martín summoned all his powers and disappeared into the penumbral room behind him, from whence in a few moments emerged, as if moving on its own will, the great white bow of the magnificent bathtub in which the girl-woman Benicia lay, the back of her head resting on the edge, her long, long never-scissored hair falling over the front, her face hidden from the guests below, her nervous giggles audible. Feeble, dying, Roque San Martín pushed the monumental bathtub out onto the balcony till its stern touched the iron railing and his daughter's brown and thick and knotless locks fell halfway down the balcony, unswayable by the gentle spirits of the early summer breeze, smooth as a cataract of caramel.

“Aquí va, aquí va,” Roque San Martín called from the shadows, popping open bottles of champagne with the vigor of a young barman, the corks shooting over the red brick wall into the street, and emptying them into the tub. “Aquí va, coño, put your masks on and witness the first bath of the woman, my daughter the woman! Put your masks on, carajo, respect her dignity.”

Benicia's giggles erupted into outright shrieks as the chilled foamy baptismal French bathwater rose on her virgin body, till it lapped up against her bare nipples like a prophecy of the many eager suitors to come. And before the guests knew it, the band had snuck onto the platform on the fourth corner and began to play a mambo, and their attention shifted from the balcony, so that only a few recalled seeing (their carnival masks in place so that eyes that saw would not be seen seeing) Roque San Martín lift his shrieking shivering daughter from the bathtub (naked and newly a woman as she was, her melonous buttocks goose-pimply) and straddle her in his fleshless arms and carry her into the darkness of the room, and, again, before anyone knew it, they were down on the dance floor, she in a flowing white linen dress, her hair doubled and tripled into a bun, carrying her father through the dance as if he were a lifeless strawman.

From there the feast went on, there were photographs of Benicia in the driver's seat of the motorless Italian convertible, photographs of a rainstorm of camellias that flooded the bucket seats and frame by frame buried the driver up to her neck, photographs of balloon-cheeked trumpet players, a la Louis Armstrong, whose joyous notes seemed to tear through the black and white flatness, photographs of the guests possessed by the spirits of the drums, their eyes white, their mouths agape, their knees bent and their arms akimbo, a fuzzy photograph of the two-faced parish monsignor as he touched the forehead of the debutante with moistened fingers, and finally, photographs (these that irked the tribunal most) of the two monumental plump-haunched pigs hung over the roasting pit, their hide charred, their flesh visibly tasteable.