The Lazarus Rumba (93 page)

You rarely gave me your lips afterwards, even in that room where you consoled me with your hands, wakened me with the needles in your eyes, where you led me beyond grief. Remember our childhood song, our kissing song:

With it, we went where our kisses would not, we gave to each other what our kisses could not.

“Sí, sí, all right” your father said when he heard us (he could not guess that it was any more than a song of children), lowering the volume on his radio, demanding we play out the tale better. And so we did. I played the beautiful dark scorned widow and you the mulatto son of my husband's mistress, or something like that. You seduced me with your humility, with your apologetic existence, with your love for your dead father, for blood, you said, is the greatest tie. And you moved to kiss me. And I let you. I let you touch my lips with yours. But at this, your father interrupted, again the action was becoming too unrealistic for his taste. How did he know we had let our lips touch if he was blind? What sounds did we make?

“No, niña boba, así no,” he said, becoming narrator and writer and director all at once, “you turn your head. You let him approach you. Let him move to kiss you. Sí, sí, all right. He is as handsome, as desirable, as much a man, as your husband once was, perhaps even more so … the lure of the prohibited and so on. Yet, at the last second you turn your head, so that his kiss lands on your cheek. And with this you are revenged. With this little gesture you prove both your bitter love and your monumental contempt for the dead man that is his father and your lost husband. This is where life is, in these simple gestures, rubied with both tardy forgiveness and persistent rancor. This is life, coño. Sí, sí, all right.”

Then your father turned the volume back up, only to find that inside his radio the husband's son had already bedded the dark-haired widow, and he clenched his fists and berated the poor actors some more, proclaiming that it was not so and could not be so in real life, that it was odious to the senses to believe such trashy fantasies. And there we left him, a most disconcerted realist judiciously grieving; and we escaped to where I would not turn my head, where we could taste the tiny drops of the Caribbean in each other's half-dry half-moist lips.

Rarely again after we were children, after you learned other arts and began forgetting our song, did you give me your lips. Yet, I knew how to love you through others that better suited your needs. I loved you even through Julio, through my own husband I loved you. Right next to him, from the fourth row, facing the center ring. I followed you to your death camp, just to kiss you once more on the tiny square of your cheek pressed against the cold fence. I welcomed into my heart the giant twisted man who was your best lover. What would your father say of this, our story? ¡Ay, nuestras ilusiones! O how he would berate the poor luckless narrator of our lives!

“¿Pero qué es esto? Vamos a ver, vamos a ver if I got this preposterous story right. There, the widow, sealed in her mother's room, wrapped in a musty old shawl that she found in a corner of the closet. Sí, sí, all right, her rage is real enough, I'll buy that. Against God, against nature, against all conventions of grief. Her husband was no longer hers, a soldier stripped of his rank, his honor, banished. Though this poor man's St. Helena was his own family, he was condemned to be a mere ciudadano, a mere husband. Sí, sí, all right, I'm with you, I can see
his
rage. Old soldiers are strange, and it is believable enough that one can be in a state of complete exile, even in the midst of one's own family. All great stories are full of that. So the widow is a widow before she is a widow. Sí, sí, all right.

“But let's go back to her, sealed in her mother's tomblike room, wrapped in a musty old shawl that she found in the corner of a closet. Bien, bien, the cloth of her ancestors, of the dead—her wish to join them maybe. A mock shroud. She plays with jigsaws in the dark, feeling the riddly curves of the pieces as she imagines she feels the holes that riddled her husband. She plays music. It smooths and deepens her grief. Her husband's favorite violin concerto. They danced to it, made love to it many a time. They even heard the famous Lithuanian violinist play it once during their honeymoon in Berlin some years after the War. What was his name? Details, coño, the soul is in the details, you clumsy lazy devil. Look it up.
Make it up
, if you have to … but give me a name! Heifetz. Ahí, ahí, all right, Jascha Heifetz. Sí, sí, all right, his name sounds like the tightening of a string. His fingers are worth a thousand heavens! His bow a thousand beauties! It is his recording that she plays (who? who? Paganini? No. No. Beethoven. Sí, sí, all right, the master's singular violin concerto, perfecto), but there is a scratch on the record and it skips and the widow does not move to slide the needle, she is too concerned with the shapes at the end of her fingers, she lets it skip and skip and skip till the strings magically become drums. Others move the needle. The mother who brings the food and the water that the widow hardly touches. She slides the needle. The priest who offers her the condolences her soul must reject, like a bruised muscle cringes at too pressing a touch. He slides the needle. Sí, sí, all right. The ghosts also, for it is true, they are most likely to appear after a recent death, as if to escort the unwilling soul away from the living. The ghosts too slide the needle.

“But this other visitor? No le da un carajo about the stuck needle. Why does she accept him? Why does she let him lounge on the bed behind her, like … like a what?—
a slumbering cat consoling her with his purrs.
Hmmm? Sí, sí, all right, but let's fix this a little. Let's turn down the volume, for here is where things start to go awry, bueno, como se dice, to overstep the modesty of nature. Vamos a ver. You, mi niña Alicia, you play the widow. Heed, heed: all joy has been wrung from her heart. Still, she must live;
and
unless we decide to kill her right off, at the top of the story, she must be played! Take any of your aunt's scarves, let that serve for the musty old shawl. Props: use them well, they are extensions of character. Things, things, treasure them, all earthly things are from God's toy box. You, mijito Héctor, you play this last visitor. Heed, heed: the monstrous act is not yet formed in his head. He too has come merely to console. He has heard of the murder of his dear cousin's husband and has left the touring circus, and come, as the mother comes, as the priest comes, as the ghosts come, merely to console. Vamos a ver, where does he break company from them. Sí, sí, claro, the record, the Beethoven …”

And this time, as I imagine it, your father changes not a thing, for once the radio narrator is not to be outdone, for once your father's play, with us as puppets, follows gesture by gesture what is not heard from inside his radio. The realist is converted. The unimaginable takes place again and again. You come into that dark room. You are the only one who has not bothered to knock. The record is skipping. It sounds like a rumba. The Lithuanian violinist is playing a rumba! (Your father would be wrong in insisting on the name. I never remembered it.) You do not move to slide the needle. You let it skip. I do not look up. I know by the weight of the steps moving towards me that it is not mamá, that it is not Gonzalo, that it is not papá's barefoot spirit (although it is his light steps that yours most resemble, like those of a pigeon). I know it is you. You pass by me and go directly to the bed behind me. You lounge, sí, when you are not in the air, you always lounge. When you are not a pigeon, you are a cat. I feel your hand reaching out for me as you pass but you do not touch me. Then, when you have passed, I hear your voice. Delicate, soft, as if afraid that if you speak too loud I may break. But your voice has always been a balm to my heart.

“Mi primita, mi pobre primita bella.”

I answer you, the first time I have spoken since Marta and I returned from the hospital, since el Rubio himself, beret in hand, brought news of Julio's death. There would be no funeral, no burial. He asked forgiveness, it was not his doing. It was the law of the land. The State took the responsibility of burying its traitors. Vaya, merely to prevent the making of false martyrs. He handed mamá an envelope. In it was a document of burial, with a grave number. El Rubio's joy burst through his mock-mourning like the day's first light through a fine linen mosquitero.

I have not spoken till I answer you in kind.

“Primito, thank you for coming. I know they must be very disappointed that you abandoned them so early in the autumn tour. Mi pobre primito bello, how
is
the circus?”

“The circus is nothing without me. But for you, for you, I would abandon the world.”

“Sí, eso lo sé, mi pobre primito bello. Julio always said the same thing … that the circus was nothing without you.”

“I will rejoin them when they pass through here, it is only a few weeks.”

“Good. You will rejoin them. I thought for a second that you too were a ghost, the way you did not touch me when you just passed by.”

I do not feel you leave, do not feel you come in all those other times, do not feel you shift behind me, yet soon (on what day? after how many visits?) your hand is on my shoulder, soft as lips, peeling off the musty old shawl.

“You have lost weight, primita. Your bones are poking at you from the inside. You should eat. Does la vieja not cook for you?”

“Mamá doesn't like it when you call her that. She thinks it is disrespectful.”

Your fingers tremble like grounded feathers, they make soft circles at the base of my neck. You say mamá has gone to the bodega. You say she will be a long time waiting in the cola. You say the priest is hearing confessions. You lift me from the floor with ease. When we are side by side on the bed, I unbutton your shirt. I poke your belly, I tell you where they have shot him. You are ticklish still.

It is your cooing laughter I hear now, here in the echoes of this limestone cave. The soldiers in their black garbs are sharp-shooting outside. They hunt for the crow and the raven, for any bird that dares to be as invisibly black as them. They hunt, while they wait for me to come out. They have followed me here through the telescopes in their rifles. I am the blackest bird of all, I have taunted the eagle and ridiculed the hawk, and the raven and the crow speak to me as if I were one of them, a compañera. They break God's commandment as they are wont (they are clever and rebellious creatures). They inform me of the hour of my death. It is not far away. But they are wicked, they tell me not the manner nor the method. Instead, they teach me the harsh language of ghosts.

Vamos a ver, I'll take this sheet of muslin they furnished me with.
Sí, sí, all right
, I hear your father:
things, God's things, use them, reuse them.
One of Joshua's black-garbed soldiers, pretending kindness, caught up with me on my flight from the Valley of the Nightingales, or as it has been renamed the Colony of the Newer Man. He held his rifle at his side. He looked at me with his naked yellow eyes and lied right through them. He said it might get cold inside the caves. He handed me this sheet of muslin. It was wrapped neatly in a triangle like a flag, or a newly woven shroud. I took it. I knew I would find use for it. But not as they expected me to find use for it. ¡Bobos! Do they really expect that I will do for them what they must do themselves, that I will wind tight this muslin and knit one end through a curtain of stalactites and the other around my neck?

No. No. ¡Réquete no! What they must do, they must do themselves.

This sheet of muslin already soiled with six nights of slumber, with the musk of the jutías who huddle by me, taking and giving warmth, with the invisible inside-rain that falls like dew from the cave ceilings, will be the musty old shawl. Sí, sí, all right, I will sit and wrap it around my shoulders. The ridges on this floor, so marvelously sculpted by the persistent unfelt inside-rain, will be the curves of my jigsaw pieces. The wind whistling in through the hairline cracks of the limestone walls will be the fugacious sadness of the Lithuanian violinist.

So you must come, for I am in greater need of you now than I was then. You must abandon whatever phantom circus you are performing with and come to this fortress wall where I now dwell. Come, as your giant twisted lover came.

Everything is set. Ahí, ahí, do you hear it, the wind is stuck … it is playing a rumba, but it is more like the lashing of a whip than the heartbeat of a drum. The wind is different than the Lithuanian violinist. Don't you hear it. Now, come, come as you once came, come without knocking, come and also be different. Let me swallow the seawater of your lips and, drop by drop, drown.

You have forgotten our kissing song, our song of children. We are not that anymore. We have gone way past being children. Come, inhabit the stuck wind. They shot you like they shot him, shot you in those soft places in the belly where I touched you, the spots where you were most ticklish. Aquí y aquí y aquí. But do not despair. Bullets cannot kill the wind. The Lithuanian violinist is stuck on a rumba. I will let the muslin sheet drop. Your hands are like kisses. Your eyes like a pincushion pierced with gilded needles. Your lips burn like coral. Let your lips sear shapes in me, aquí y aquí y aquí, primito bello. I too must know your ends. But let us first conceive a hundred daughters of ghosts, let us repeat our sin again and again till it is as much ours as salt is to the sea, till we know it as well, as naturally as we once knew our childhood song.

Mamá … Gonzalo, I hear you both, not in your prayers, not in your hymns, not in your whispery conversations (your hands kneaded together, your brows aching towards each other across the corner of the kitchen table), I hear you in the thump-pa-clump, tatatap, thump-pa-clump of your dance. Is it the dry wind? Is it hurling cannonball-sized rocks against the limestone walls? Are the more ferocious brothers of nature rebelling against this republic of the Newer Man? No, it is too hesitant, too timid a noise to be that sort of wind. Sí, it is your dance, a miraculous sort of performance, for both of you can hardly walk now, one with toes weighted with poison, the other with four legs and no arms, a thing perhaps more pathetic to hear than to watch, thump-pa-clump, tatatap, thump-pa-clump. This freak dance is all you have had since the music of your friendship faded so long ago, since that day when papá fell half-shaven in front of the bathroom mirror. Gonzalo arrived minutes after you put the phone down, you thought he would take longer, you thought I would be finished with my task, but I was just getting the last scruff off papá's neck, and as soon as he saw me there knelt on the bathroom floor with a blade against papá's tranquil Adam's apple, trying to get at a clump of longer hairs that he must have missed morning after morning when he shaved (what did all those young mistresses feel when they put their lips to this token of his slovenliness?), he screamed: “Alicia! Alicia! ¿Qué haces?” and he moved to grab me, but you threw yourself on him. You wept. Now … you wept, wept with desperate little breaths as if your lungs could not match the urgency of your sorrow. And as he held your body up, his eyes still on me, his balance in peril, you danced your freak dance. And I, knelt there on the cold floor by my clean-shaven father, was no longer only a girl.