The Lazarus Rumba (15 page)

“Bueno, tranquila mijita.”

They sat on the veranda of the fanciest house in the complex, glaringly the only one that had been given a paint job since the yanquis left, twice a year, a crisp sunny yellow, coated on so thick now that the grain on the wood sidings was invisible, drowned by the unbearable yellow, the only one with a garden, blossoming with begonias and oleanders and black-eyed susans, the one nearest the bay, where the comandante in charge of the camp lived with his wife and son, where Alicia had already been interviewed by him seven times in three days, about her beliefs, about the depth of her will to disturb the process of la Revolución.

“We do not want to crush any of our citizens,” he said, sucking on a panatela. “We want to show them what benefits, what progress la Revolución has brought to our Island, a never-ending event unprecedented in human history. No reign of terror here.
But
those too self-involved, too heavy with pride to rise with us, we will not save from drowning. ¿No es así?”

“It is exactly what
you
choose it to be. Isn't it, comandante? Nothing more or less.”

“No. No.” The comandante laughed. “If I can assure you of anything, it is that it will be you and only you who will choose your fate.”

The breeze blew in from the bay and comforted Alicia, so that she was thinking little about her fate when she handed her mother the folded manuscript of Beba's translation. Doña Adela opened the papers and squinted, trying to make out some of the words.

“I need my glasses. What is it?”

“Put it away before the guard comes back. Read it to Teresita tonight and then store it someplace safe till I get out of here, with the copy of my sermon. You still have that, don't you?”

“Yes.” Doña Adela had not found the courage to burn it the night Alicia was arrested.

The guard was seated outside the gates by the bayshore, his back to them, his weapon at his side, his head thrown back to the dying afternoon sun. It was Sunday and the comandante and his wife and son had gone to Santiago for the day. Still, Alicia was not comfortable with her mother visiting, sitting there on the veranda of his house.

“Someplace safe,” she repeated. Then there was silence and doña Adela refolded the manuscript and stuffed it down her breast so that it was held in place by the lower strap of her brassiere. She loosened her blouse. After a while, the guard came, his face flushed from the sun, and politely led doña Adela away. Alicia kissed her mother on both cheeks.

“Don't stop talking to her about me. Don't let my daughter forget me.” Doña Adela nodded. The guard waited as they kissed again, then he grabbed doña Adela by the forearm.

When her mother was gone, Alicia made her way back on her own to the beaten-up tin shack at the other end of the complex where she was housed with the other three women. When the guard was out of sight, she picked a black-eyed susan for each of them. Four days later, she was released, no conditions set down, serving only a week of her six-month sentence. Mingo, she heard from her mother, had struck a deal with el Rubio.

“Acuérdese, señoraAlicia,” the comandante of the too-yellow house said on her last day there. “You choose.”

When one of the hand-scripted copies of
Through the Looking-Glass
was confiscated by the government some weeks later, reported by a twelve-year-old pionero to his neighborhood CDR, the teacher was arrested and the twins Mercedes and Beba had their sentences extended by five years, even though only one of their names appeared on the manuscript. Credited with the translation, they had chosen, and they had chosen
together.
El Comité was still looking for other culprits based on the handwriting sample from the manuscript.

Guava Milk

For the first time in eight nights, he slept in the bright and airy bedroom of his cottage, on the wide four-post bed his wife had insisted on buying in Santiago long ago, before the Revolución, wrapped in the linen sheets that had been a wedding present from his mother, except the room wasn't bright or airy anymore, for he had boarded up all the windows of the house and bolted shut all the doors as if its tenant had fled forever, and the bed didn't seem so wide anymore for his magnificent dreams tossed him to and fro, and the sheets smelled not of spring air as they had once, but of stuck sweat and dried urine. When he awoke the first day from a dream of him and Berta alone in a gleaning guava grove beyond the world's reach, the room was still dark and the plywood shutters had been nailed in so well and sealed in so close that not one sliver of morning penetrated the hostage night. So Mingo dreamt on, repeating the questions that had dominated his dream out loud. “¿Cuánto me quieres, mi vida? Yo que te adoro. ¿Cuánto me quieres de veras?” And he imagined the answer inwrought in the sweet blanket of her breath, as he rubbed his cheeks against her furry dewlap and when he leaned under her and drank her milk it tasted like the juice of the guava fruit.

The following day, through dreaming, he went to work. He exited the house through the trapdoor in the cellar, dressed like a finquero for the first time in over a week, in his veal-hide boots and rumply canvas pants and baggy workshirt, neatly tucked, and signature wide-brimmed straw hat. “I hope you're ready, girls,” he said to María, Isabela, and Niña as he entered the barn. He fed them and when he milked them they gave him their stained milk without reserve, as if they had forgotten the lesson of the beating a week back, gave him eighteen and a quarter bucketfuls of milk the color of rose tears. By noon, he was on his way to the northern end of his finca, a fifteen-minute walk across the twisty brook and down the side of the mountain, to a miniature less-productive version of the guava grove he had dreamt about. Years ago, before the land reform acts, it would have taken him over eight hours to walk from one end of his lands to the other, now it was a matter of minutes. But his shrinking universe no longer bothered him. He filled three baskets with ripe guayabas and headed back to the cottage. In the cellar, he ripped the goatskin off his homemade drum, cleaned out the oak cask and turned it upside down. When it was dry, he poured into it four sackfuls of raw sugar he had purchased through la bolsa negra, the moist hiss of the sugar coursing to the cask bottom encouraging Mingo in his purpose. He then added all the fruit pulp and stirred it with a long wooden oar till his shoulders burned and the mixture was a stiff paste. To this, he added the stained milk, stirring it again and letting it sit overnight.

He bathed in the river before he went to bed, swimming over to the site of Berta's desecrated grave and back and over and back and so on till he was so tired his powerful limbs were barely cracking the surface of the dark waters and then he dog-paddled to shore and crawled out of the river and slept in the sealed house. First thing in the morning, he went down to the cellar and stacked three splintery cola crates on top of each other, grabbed half a dry coconut shell, climbed up and stood over the cask of guava milk. Belly thrust forward, he smiled and urinated into the cask, catching the last squirts in the coconut shell and chugging it down.

The urine collected like a sheet of tinted glass at the top of the mixture, above the cream that had risen to which clung bits of guava pulp with tiny sand-colored seeds that looked like shredded flesh and bits of bone. Mingo stepped down and stirred the now finished, last-secret-ingredient-added concoction with the wooden oar. In half an hour it was ready to be bottled. He washed his entire stock of liter-sized bottles in the river. That very afternoon he would go down to town and begin to sell his new product.

On a wooden board, he made a sign with red paint:

He sealed the liter bottles, loaded up a creaky wooden cart, hitched it to Roberto, his strongest mule, and down the mountain he went, the bottles clinking against each other like a festival of bells. He set up shop from the back of his cart, just outside the town limits, not far from the yanqui naval base. His first sale was to a Cuban worker from the base who lived in town. Less than an hour later, he was back with his wife and two daughters to buy four more liters of guava milk. He paid in yanqui dollars, let his wife carry the goods, grabbed each of his daughters by the wrist and hurried away. His daughters broke loose from his grip and jumped around their mother like dogs before mealtime. Mingo stuffed the illegal currency deep into his pockets. Thus it was with that day's sales, usually paid in dollars—some worker from the base or from the purlieus of town would wander past and buy one liter of Mingo's guava milk and less than an hour or two later, return to buy three or more liters. One woman, whom Mingo recognized from the days of Father Gonzalo's services up in his finca, bought as many as ten liters on her return trip. By the time the moon had risen, Mingo was on his way back to his finca, his pockets full of illegal money and his heart tipsy after the first few swigs from the grog of vengeance.

The following day Mingo made more guava milk and the day after, early in the morning, he was on his way back down the mountain to set up shop again. He only made it about halfway down. A throng of people, mostly women, many of whom Mingo knew were members of the widow-bitchwitch's cabal, some men, including the one who had bought the first liter, with his wife and two young daughters again with him, were marching up towards his finca. The one leading them was a milk-skinned redhead with a full handsome figure, a sharp nose, and a stony chin. The early light reveled in her flowing hair, pushing its way in and out of the wavy strands and leaving behind little pearls of brilliance, like droplets on a shored swimmer's back.

“Soy Margaret,” she said, making it a point to speak in her heavily accented Spanish, “la esposa del coronel MacDougal, el americano que dirige la base naval.”

Mingo extended his hand. “Mucho gusto, Margaret.”

Margaret forced a smile. Her teeth were crooked and they gave an incongruous air of humility to her expression. “We want some more of your milk,” she said.

Mingo went to the back of his cart, opened it, and stuck his sign up. He searched in one of the leather sacks hanging on Roberto the mule and pulled out a piece of charcoal. He made two dark X's on the sign. This is how it now read:

The mob gathered around the cart, Margaret's orders to stay back having no effect.

“How much milk do you want, Margaret?” Mingo said, as if implying he was only going to sell to her. The mob moved in closer around the cart. Margaret pulled out a roll of American money, and others behind her tried to follow suit, though they pulled out single crumpled worthless pesos from their pockets instead.

“La yanqui primera,” Mingo said.

“I want to buy for all of them,” Margaret said. “I'll take the whole cart, mule and all.” She started counting the roll of money. “How much do you want?”

“Roberto too, entonces. …” Mingo proposed a preposterous amount, more money than perhaps his present lands were worth and Margaret asked how many liters there were and Mingo told her and Margaret proposed half the amount and, without waiting for Mingo to answer yes or no or to haggle further, she counted out the money and handed it to him. She signaled for two of the women to grab hold of the mule. “¡La repartimos esta noche, dos litros para cada familial” As they left Mingo behind, many voiced their objections to only two liters a family.

“The day after tomorrow,” Mingo yelled. “I'll have even more milk. Bring back the empty liters and I'll give you a discount!” He had never seen or felt an American twenty-dollar bill. Now, he was the foolhardy owner of not only a wad of twenties, but of a few fifties and hundreds. He thought that the serious man pictured on the fifty looked a lot like himself when he let his beard grow. He laughed at this, at his own knurly countenance on a piece of American money.

So it was that Mingo got to know Margaret MacDougal and her charitable ways, every other day as she bought his entire stock of guava milk, no matter how much he made and always cutting the price to just under half of what Mingo asked. Although many Cubans worked in the naval base and traveled back and forth from yanqui territory to Cuban land, Margaret was the only American allowed free passage in and out by the Cuban government—because of her strong record as a good yanqui liberal, and to the chagrin of her husband the colonel, a vocal decade-long supporter of la Revolución. Margaret MacDougal, la peliroja con el corazón de oro, as the Guantanameros knew her, with her husband's American money, bought all the guava milk Mingo produced during the late days of that spring. And with her wont kindness, except for the three liters she kept for herself, distributed it to all the needy in the town of Guantánamo.

From the porch of her mother's house, Alicia Lucientes watched the people hurry for the distribution of guava milk. “Comunistas,” she grumbled, though she said nothing when her mother brought back two liters to feed Teresita.

Soon, only the women of Guantánamo and a few at the naval base, the wives and daughters of officers, were drinking guava milk. The men began to find it distasteful, sour as spoiled wine, though they accompanied their women, their own wives and mothers and daughters, on the every-other-day trek to stock up with more of the concoction that they could not bare to whiff but their women chugged like starved wolf cubs. It became so that every other day was not enough, that by the time each family had brought back its two liters, or sometimes three—for though demand increased, at the height of production Mingo was most effective—by the time they had set the liters down on the kitchen table, the men disappearing into the pantry or back out into the patio, the brave ones who stayed to watch gagging as soon as the first of their women put their lips to the first bottle, too eager to pour it out into a glass, passing it around the table like a chalice, and the other bottle and the third, so that by noon of the day they had brought home their guava milk, it was gone. And what to do but go out and search for more, gathering in the foothills of the mountain in droves, as if by instinct, to journey to the source. Why wait till the day after tomorrow? Why depend on the yanqui redhead? Though she was gracious and kind, unlike any yanqui they had ever known, still this hunger would not depend on charity for long.