The Lazarus Rumba (90 page)

Certainly, the tribunal concluded in a caustic note after reviewing all the evidence, the bakery administrator could go to the grave pleased that he was a fouler aristocrat than all the foul aristocrats who had ever tarnished the history of the Island. ¡Pura degeneración! And before it passed its harsh sentence—fifteen years imprisonment for the administrator (one year for each of the eight counts of embezzling from the bakery, one year for each of the four counts of illegal sales and purchases, one and a half years for his irreverent tirade on the witness stand in which he hurled insults at el Rubio, among the kindest being that the poor police captain did not want girls to become available women because he wanted all the young hombrecitos for himself, and one and a half years for the incestuous overtones of the champagne bath—the tribunal expressed its fondest wishes that the convicted, terminally ill as he was rumored, would live to serve every minute of his sentence), three years imprisonment for his wife (for shamefully letting her daughter be used as a pawn in her husband's sick immoral and rebellious masque), and complete loss of custody of the child Benicia whose virgin hair was shorn, military-style above her ears, and whose upbringing would be resumed by the Communist Youth League of the province of Oriente (it was not, the tribunal expressed its fondest hope, too late to make her a loyal compañera)—it set in stone el Rubio's decree against quince celebrations; from here on, celebration of the feast was strictly prohibited, its venomous bourgeois roots unearthed by this incident, and anyone caught in any semblance of a celebration of a girl's fifteenth birthday would be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the revolutionary code.

Y a propósito
, the tribunal's judgment went on,
to rid us of the temptation, perhaps it would be wise to abolish the fifteenth year of a young woman's life altogether, so that legally (if not chronologically), she leapfrogs from fourteen to sixteen, thus erasing any vestiges of this sham ceremony from the annals of our history. A cubana is a woman, una mujer propia y derecha, when she devotes her moral nature to the principles of la Revolución, not, magically, when she turns fifteen, and her father sees fit to pawn her off to other men. La Revolución has always sought to vanish the horrid discrepancies between the sexes inwrought in our culture. The way a girl becomes a woman should be no different from the way a boy becomes a man, through her deeds in service of her society. All this, of course, deserves further consideration and it is beyond the scope of our power to implement, though we will send a letter to the Central Committee and to the Minister of Culture in the capital with our recommendations.

Young women, of course, still turned fifteen after fourteen. The Central Committee and the Minister of Culture in the capital never answered the tribunal's letter. How could they, with a sober face? Young women, still, when the time came, turned fifteen. No committee or minister on heaven and earth could change that. ¿Quién se atreve a usurpar la naturaleza?—¡ni el Señor mismo! But now there were no fiestas, no father with the rebellious heart of Roque San Martín, no daughter like Benicia who would ever feel the tickle-joy—under the armpit, in the shallow pit of the navel, on the rosy hills (esas colinas inexploradas, jamas pisadas) of her woman parts—of a million frisky bubbles of Dom Pérignon.

So on what man would fall the burden of commemoration? To what sad soul would the banished angels of womanhood reveal themselves, when girls after fourteen (and musn't they?) naturally turned into women of fifteen?

On no man, no man … for what man had the cojones with which to lavish a daughter with feastly love after the heavy sentence that fell on Roque San Martín, what bull had not withered into an ox? So on no man, no man at all … but on a short-haired gorbellied loose-sphinctered flat-muzzled misery of a beast. Angels, especially banished angels, have the strangest preferences for who should serve as their messengers in this world. And so they appeared, one afternoon not long after Roque San Martín's trial, to the bullmastiff Tomás de Aquino. He, no visionary, was lounging on the sun-warmed bricks of his master's inner courtyard, thoughtless almost (as was his wont) except for the close attention he was paying to the expanding bubble of fetid gas that was vacillating in his belly, unsure of whether to escape out the back door or the front. And would not his namesake, the angelic doctor, have lectured el Rubio's bullmastiff that it is exactly when we are paying the most dire attention to the basest matter that heavenly creatures see it best fit to visit us, that it is only in those moments of desperate scrutiny to our impure flesh, esta carne como ropa vieja, that we are vulnerable at all to God's better beauty, to the grace of the immaculate? It was so for the soot-footed Virgencita in her dusty dwelling, it was so for the old gray-haired Elizabeth in her long and barren marriage, and it is so for all beings. The wind, any guajiro knows, howls fiercest past shuttered windows.

But in our story, another wind, a reeking wind lengthened in swirls—like the vaporous tail of a plummeting fiend—in Tomás de Aquino's mid-section so that he had to shift the heft of his thick torso over to his left and cast his prodigious haunch heavenwards to facilitate release; all this, forcing his huge head askance, setting his jaundiced eyes directly into the sunlight that torrented through the iron-grill roof of his master's inner courtyard; and there from the pure nimbusy yellow of afternoon light to the sick yellow of excess bile passed the banished angels of womanhood and possessed this most brutish seed of a vile murderous race (for no man, no man at all, found them worthy for their avenging task).

On that afternoon, less than a week since the sentencing of Roque San Martín and his family, less than two weeks since the last quinceañera feast on St. Anthony's Day, so suddenly and heavenly struck, Tomás de Aquino let out a monstrous tympanic fart and he rolled back his leathery lips and exposed his vulpine fangs and assumed the mantle of his mission.

He sang.

No, no, no, chico, not sang. That is too casual and watery a word. Tomás de Aquino did not sing, not if a song is melody and harmony and rhythm, not if a song is the metered whispers and thunders of a river, not if a song is a deep-tissue massage to the noise-sore soul. No this was no song, no cantata, no madrigal, no aria, no hymn. Perhaps a fugue, yes a fugue maybe. Qué va, no, not even that. This was discord, jagged vengeance of the sort unmatched by all furies of pandemonium, unimagined by even the most modern composers; so Tomás de Aquino most certainly did not sing. Later, they were to name the sky-piercing wail that first burst from his lungs that afternoon like the cry of a thousand tortured demons
el llanto de los quince
(the wail of the fifteens), as if all women that had not become, our
would
not become, women, by decree, had lent their caged voices, their ululant tongues, all the anger of their thwarted womanhood, to this basest of beasts named after the most celestial of saints. Later, mothers and grandmothers, sisters and aunts, cousins and neighbors (indeed all women who had properly become women when it had been legal to do so) were to join Tomás de Aquino in el llanto de los quince, so that the unsevered silence that was once common during the height of the siesta, at the low night hours when roosters slumber and diarists scribble, in the brief moments just after prayer, all were swallowed by the thousand-voiced harsh protest against el Rubio's inhuman decree. Yet on that first afternoon, it was Tomás de Aquino alone, no man, no man at all, and no woman either, but he, humble flatulent he, whom the banished angels of womanhood visited.

And many years after Tomás de Aquino had drowned in a pool of his own vomit, his death synchronized to the second with that of his master who never had the luxury of knowing that his last anguished opium-laced breath would be his last, many years after the feasts of quinceañera had become common again, the decree against them still in the books but degenerated into the sort of law that it is wiser not to enforce, better left, like old parchment, unperused, it was Benicia San Martín, her hair grown past her shoulders again, her old beauty somewhat rough-hewn by her boxed blooming years spent sleeping in bunkers, wearing olive fatigues, and marching in combat boots, who architected the great feasts of quinceañeras, who, after graduating from the Communist Youth League, had been wise enough to set up her own business, a business that had nothing to do with her training as an electronics technician, a business that was, without mincing words, the family business, a business that fed and clothed her and her reunited family, her delirious mother Yéyé—the stunning mulata of the once-sensuous lips droopy now and slippery with dribble, of the irresistible curves forever shrouded now by the stale urine-stained sheets of the bed she would not abandon—and her decrepit father, who had been released from a Santiago jail and given back his house and welcomed back by his family, who against his better judgment obeyed the wishes of the tribunal to endure till he had served every minute of his sentence, though he had only served half of it, because at some point he had seen the light and signed a document that detailed his conversion to the creeds of la Revolución, that with its marvelous drugs and brilliant surgeons had excised all traces of cancer from his polluted body, and now, sound as a dollar but hollow as a peso, wandered the hallways of his house like a phantom, in a ripped soiled undershirt and low-hung underpants, raising chickens in the drape-drawn living room, condemning his daughter's
illegal affairs
and boldly proclaiming that he was only waiting, waiting till his daughter's hair again touched her ankles so that he may step in peace into his grave,
y maldito sea el día that she had ever become a woman y se me metió en el coco a mi celebrarlo, y maldito sea San Antonio and all his days
, a business with no government license, legitimized instead, yanqui-style, with a business card, a whorish red allegro script on a white background, which she handed surreptitiously to any inquirer, palm to palm, folded in two, as careful as if it were three crisp yanqui hundred dollar notes, which is what it was worth, sí, como no, as much as nine thousand pesos on a monthly basis, for so large was the urge to celebrate a new womanhood after the murder of el Rubio and the silencing suicide of Tomás de Aquino.

The banished angels of womanhood, suddenly unbanished, shifted their allegiance to Benicia, La Reina de los Quince, the fairy godmother of present and future quinceañera celebrations, who would do her all to make sure that a young woman would remember this day for the rest of her life, especially for the older ones, the ones in their late teens and twenties who had missed out on their celebrations during the ban period and now came to her with their own bundle of pesos or wrinkled black-market dollars, to reclaim their right. The business was run from the palace of la Reina, the same house where Roque San Martín had staged his infamous St. Anthony's Day feast and now raised chickens and tormented the clientele with his derelict appearance, with his gargly taunts that nothing his daughter would do could match what he had done, that the champagne bath at eight hundred pesos was a sham, soda water tinted with a little bit of coffee and sweetened with a few drops of cane juice, that the linen dress the quinceañera could rent, at 150 pesos, had been altered and re-altered so many times that it had more stitches than a baseball and more stains than the shroud of Turin and stunk worse than a whore's bedsheet, that the makeup the new women would wear for the photo session, personally applied by Benicia, for a mere thirty pesos, had been concocted from the waste and blood of his chickens, that the hibiscus and rose bushes and potted palms set up in the patio for these same photo sessions, at five hundred pesos (even though his daughter was no photographer by trade—
a television repairwoman, carajo, that's what they made her!
), were fakes, as plastic and devoid of fragrance as a capitalist's soul, that the waltzes she played for her measly parties were from records so scratched and from phonographs so antique that the marvelous Strauss “Tales from the Vienna Woods” sounded more like “Wails from the Corner Brothel.”

And what could Benicia San Martín, as the quinceañera's mother placed her hand on her daughter's chin and turned her daughter's eyes away from the mad old man, say to the father who had brought her so much joy on that St. Anthony's Day so long ago? What but a most mild retort?

“Cállese, papacito. Cállese, por favor. This woman just wants to make her daughter happy, like you once made me happy.” And at this, Roque San Martín would hunch his bony shoulders and snivel like a boy and wipe his hands, stained with the blood of slaughtered chickens, on the seat of his underpants, and shuffle back into the living room, and mutter to his daughter that her hair was far too short for anyone to believe that she was a fairy godmother of any kind.

Y quién sabe, perhaps Roque San Martín was right, for the more Benicia let her hair grow, down past her wing-bones stretching towards the foothills of her buttocks, not as dark now, not as thick, streaked with long strands of yellowy gray, like threadings of gold in a countess's gown, the more her business thrived, till she was able to afford real camellia and gardenia bushes and a faux-brick well, which she set up in the center of her patio for the quinceañeras to lean against during the photo sessions, and new Irish linen dresses in six different sizes and styles and boxes of makeup, which she purchased from the local theater company, and even, near the collapse of her business, a Rolleiflex camera, which was said to once have belonged to the town's most famous and notorious photographer, Armando Quiñón (somehow having been pilfered from the bonfire that destroyed all his things on the day of his suicide), that made it almost impossible to take a bad picture, and she even, once or twice, found enough real champagne on the black market for the quinceañera to take a puddle-bath and was able to hire a quartet from the town's symphony to play live waltzes at the fiestas.