The Lazarus Rumba (94 page)

After the triumph of la Revolución, after Julio was murdered, after I turned my face away from our God, there over the corner of the kitchen table, over the wrinkled envelope that held the lies about my husband's corpse, you and Gonzalo made a pact. (Mama did you really think I did not know the truth? No soy como tú. I would have surrounded that unnamed numbered grave with a wall of rose bushes, would have built castles of mud over it higher than any tombstone in Campo Santo, it would have outmarvelled even the flowery monument made by papá's whores … but Julio was never buried, there or anywhere, and I knew it, even if you never told me.) In an effort to crush my devilish rebellion you made Gonzalo one of ours, to him one day you would bestow your treasured granddaughter, and he in all his loneliness would welcome her and love her far too much.

And although he says that he will (that he must) die in this land, one day he too will add his suitcase to the stack by the door of your house, next to the television console. To Calle Ocho in Miami you will take your last dance, thump-pa-clump, tatatap, thump-pa-clump, la vieja y el cura making all that noise, what will the exiles say (those pale souls who are not quite so sure anymore when they call themselves Cubans)? They have been yanqui-ized, they are not used to such spectacles.

Bang your two canes, mamá (it will be more purging than any grief), wiggle your poisoned toes, Gonzalo (it will be more soothing than a hundred sermons): thump-pa-clump, tatatap, thump-pa-clump. Remind the exiles in Miami how we dance with our sorrows, remind them before they throw you in the homes where they put their old mothers and their decrepit priests.

There is a fire. I smell it. It is your soldiers, I know, they are still waiting. They are roasting a pig. It must be night again. Maybe a bit chilly. Is it winter already? Have I been back that long? How many winters have I missed? How many soldiers have waited outside that narrow hole from whence I traipsed like a rat into my last home? (How old is my daughter?) I know the one hour, but I have forgotten all the other hours that led to it. Why not just come here and get me? Why not just do what must be done? Have you forbidden them? Will
you
do the deed, escort me to my hour? You, the truncated Newer Man. I smell it, the aroma of fat flesh sizzling over the bonfire, the sweet odor seeps in through the invisible cracks in the wall, seeps in here where no fire can exist, except Charo's fire, the fire that burns with its own breath, here to where the earth is undoing itself with the aid of the starved newborn jutías for whom there was not enough milk. A mother chooses. Some she lets live, some she gives back to the earth.

A mother did not make this world. It is the messy handiwork of fathers who so easily forget their deeds and misdeeds, who are not forced to choose before there are any choosings. Though you will say that your father chose, that forgetfulness is the direst choice of all. You too, like my Teresita, an only fatherless child. Only she, she suffered the sin of the father twice. I too was forgetful.

Ves, Joshua, I have watched you watching me the way a young man should not look at a woman so old beyond her age. I have watched you watching me with that disjointed unaimed novice look. Even now, even as I have stepped into the costume of a woman twice my age, this frizzled coronet of gray, this mask folded with sorrow, these shriveled tits, these bones that huddle close to the earth, for the hour they know is not far away. I, a woman only forty-two, who could pass as anybody's abuelita. I have watched you watching me. I have seen it darken. There is only a shadow's difference between the eye of the lovelorn and the eye of the murderer. (The poet knows.) I have watched you. It does nothing. You are a tyro. You are not your father's son.

I have cut off my hair and used it to bed the nests. I have been diligent, I have woven the cloth into the hairs, made it sturdy, for soon they will not have me, crawling in on their front paws as they come, dragging their bellies, they will have to build their own nests. I have cut off my hair. All my lovers have forgotten me. Why then do I smell you crawling into this hole? Vaya, mi negro, your beauty is preceded by your musk! You still smell of
him
! After all these years. Have you not washed your soul in so long? … since that hour when you saw pigeons dying in his feet? … or have you been sleeping with ghosts? You were right, there is no use in loving yourself if you're only loving yourself, if there's no one's breath seeping through your pores, if there is not a trace of what it was like to once have your lips on his, on his so that his breath was yours, not yours to keep, but yours as your own breath is yours and will not be yours in the coming hour. We have borrowed so much joy from him, mi negro, borrowed it as carelessly and as frequently as if we were moons, but the misery has been all our own, deep as the craters where the caresses of the borrowed light never reach, before we had lost him, before we even knew the flavor of his breath.

Is that why I smell you coming, negro? Do you still follow from nothing to nothing more the one that I once loved that you once loved, the one father of my child, here, where he is lodged like a prayer in my lungs, like a pin in my heart, like a worm in my offals, like a fever in my mind?

What happened to your uniform, mi negro, again you arrive desnudito, con los huevitos escogeditos, your black skin glistening, and now it is you who bring the comforts; the blanket, the thermoses of cafecito and garbanzo stew, the rum, all in a bundle that you dragged behind you through the narrow holes in this cave. You look much better naked. Vaya, I have never told you that, tenía pena, but its the truth. I see what my Héctor saw. Don't glare at me with such pity. Está bien, your Héctor … my Héctor, what's the difference, let's not argue, they have taken him from us, he is theirs now. But our love for him admits no satiety, that is good enough isn't it, good enough for this world, mi negro, that nearness … what else do we have? … those fingers that do not quite touch, those lips that just graze …
our
Héctor.

No, mi negro, gracias pero no, I cannot follow you back. What harmony is left in that world that compares to the harmony of those I will join? There is no remedy, no pardon. I am thrice an adulterer … to my husband, to my God, and to
our
Fidel … what holy one would convince them to put down their stones? It isn't his or yours or theirs or anyone's hell I am going to, but mine mine mine! Do not mock this stench-breathed abuelita! My bones can barely sustain my weight. What good is it to say to one on her deathbed that she may have lived if she had done this and not done that?

Sí, sí, cómo no, have some rum, help yourself, bundle up in your blankets, the cold rises from under the earth, Perdóname, but I can't offer you a bath in the falcon-legged tub this time.

I could have told you stories like you told me, could have wiled away the day—if there were time, if you were not so tired. I could berate you for having fallen asleep without praying for me, mi negro, but I am not the type, I know it is much harder to crawl through holes than it is to swim. For a moment, I fooled myself into thinking it was you who came to escort me, though I knew all the time one always goes to the hour alone, it is the way this fatherless world is made. You have a great thirst for rum, mi negro, but at least you have found something, some method of forgetting. O how my bones ache, I will crawl towards you, since I have forgotten how to walk. I will kiss your breathing belly like I kissed his, aquí y aquí y aquí, adiós, I have lost that grooved vice to endure, adiós mi negro, mi bello, my darling of the wounded name, stay here, there will be those who will need to hear my story, draw your rum-laced breath and do without him a while longer. I cannot.

I am an abuelita with four white legs, two of wood, two of crumbling bones. In the opening on the other side of the limestone wall, the side facing the rocky Caribbean shore, I found twin albino snakes asleep under the cleft of a rock. I commanded them to serve me and, mi negro, you should have seen how obsequiously they uncurled and petrified, as if I were already some dweller of the underworld. Canes! Two more legs to lead me to my hour! I'll take all the help I can get. I am a shorn-headed four-legged abuelita who never knew her grandchildren, wrapped in a muslin sheet like the dress of a guajiro bride, or a ready-made shroud, a veil through which not an inkling of shame can be hidden. My feet are wounded. What bloody dance is this? Thump-pa-clump, tatatap, thump-pa-clump. The white beaches are spotted crimson. Who dares put his dirty wings around this abuelita bride? Leave me alone, I am counting:

What desert is this shore? Does the rocky sand not know how to count, to read my steps? Carajo, why has la Revolución left the sand illiterate! We have
all
been jilted. I will teach it. I will teach the sand how to count. I will get on all fours and crawl backwards into the sea like a crab. Ahí, the abuelita without grandchildren throws one of her wooden white legs into the sunburnt air … and the other. Mira, mi negro, see how the serpents unpetrify, see how they wriggle in the air, thinking themselves acrobats, wingless birds and then, as they must, thump, thump: cursed are you among all wild creatures, on your belly you shall go and dust and rock you shall eat, há háha! you will want to count but you will have no fingers; but
I
can still count, he who condemns you cannot take everything, some knowledge, at least, some nonsense you keep:

Like a crab, like a joyous crab I go. And I see them now, see them perched on the crags of the limestone walls, see them even though they are invisibly black, even though I am going from them, for the sun makes the glass in their rifle telescopes glimmer like diamonds. You are not surprised are you, mi negro? Did you think that they would not have some role to sing in this grand choral finale. I am going from them, like a crab, like a joyous crab, crawling back to the sands of my youth:

Há háHá hahaharáha! What strangely familiar laugh is this? The sea tickles me with its foamy slippery fingers. It steals me. ¡Llegamos coño! Há háHá hahaharáHá hahaharáHá háHá Há. Take me, strangle me with your watery chords till you have purged me of this last illness, these laughing spasms. Out, out I go, my belly shall never crawl on dust and rock again. From this moment on, joy, joy. Há hahá hahaharáha hahaharáha haha Há. Out, out I go.

But what's this? I float. My muslin sheet is as buoyant as a raft of truck tires. Traitors, traitors all! Will you not let a poor abuelita drown in peace? From whence came the order to poison your fabric with air? What yellow cable did you get from the capital? I float, I float, carajo. This gown is glued to me, I cannot anymore get out of it than I can get out of my own skin. Though I try. I try. What indignity! … I am a balsera floating on my shroud, I too am going to that blandest of hells, I am bobbing to Miami, coño. How the pale exiles will laugh when they see me!

Pero, mi negro, didn't I tell you to I stay awhile? Not to come after me. Then why does the sea shake its frothy hips to the drumbeat of the earth, as if a whole army were advancing on the shore? Why do the glittery glass eyes of the invisible black birds peel their gaze from me, this poor floating abuelita, and peer down below them, to the holes in the limestone wall, and then slowly lift them as they follow your hoof steps. Careful, these hunter eyes are more easily tempted by things in motion than by what not stirs. Careful, mi negro, slow down. What's the hurry? I am floating, floating like a cork, and here you are coming at full speed, as if you could save me. Careful, coño. What a beauty you are, mi negro, look at you rumbling towards me, coño. I see what our Héctor saw, look at all those rumbas hidden in your frame, your breath is a drum, your chest is a dancer, it leaps and then falls and bends at the knees and gathers all its mass low like a supplicant before it leaps again. What a gait, mi negro. Your skin is a jealous lover, it presses close to your body as if it owned it, as if it were not merely the sack that held it. It wraps all its arms around your hips. It dances. What music does it hear? What violent symphony? Is it joyous? Look at that! This is indeed what our bones were made for, not to hide the marrow, but as a rack for this suit of marvellous black flesh, you would make any god lonely in his fleshless heavens, scratching his airy bald pate, second-guessing himself, thinking perhaps it would have been the greater glory to have made man of flesh alone.

Leave me, you black pelican. What? Would you pouch a dead fish? I had imagined I was miles from the shore, around the nose of the Island, halfway to Miami, and yet, look, you waded to me, you didn't even need to swim! Good. What a sorry bride you hold in your arms. Only one groom for me. Much blacker than you, mi querido negro. The glass eyes are burning holes on your back. Turn, turn me towards them. Let not any holes be made in your lovely jealous skin. Only joy now. Do you hear it? Há háha hahaharáha hahaharáha haha Há. Turn, turn, let me face them, do not blindfold me with your black skin. And when the glass eyes have seen, when they have justified through both their gods and their demons the little pull of their invisible black-feathered fingers, when the bullets come, all seven of them (for la Revolución is very poetic in its justice), swim away, mi negro, do not try to alter the course of this my story, swim away and leave me here floating, exposed, so they will not miss their mark, aquí y aquí y aquí, and do not worry, I have been dressed for this hour, my muslin sheet is poisoned and penetrable, it has become one with my skin and I am far too wounded already, I will not feel the invisible bullets any more than a dead pigeon feels the cracking of its wings or a barefoot ghost the fire in a bed of coals.