The Lazarus Rumba (22 page)

After the show, on his wheelchair and dressed in his customary sackcloth burnoose and leather-strap sandals, señor Sariel followed the boys home. All night he sat under the marquee of the abandoned theater across the street and drank Kentucky bourbon and tapped his bongoes and watched the boys' shadows rise and fall over the red-brick patio wall. The following morning, he wheeled himself up to the porch steps of doña Edith's home, using the butt-end of his long curved machete to propel himself, and began to shout that if her sons had an instructor they could become great circus stars. When there was no answer, he rattled the blade of his machete against the balustrade. Undaunted, doña Edith came out and smelled him and wheeled him away to the edge of the city not far from the circus tents and turned over his wheelchair so that he almost fell on the blade of his instrument. “¡Ahí está, perverso!”

“Maldita,” señor Sariel drooled, “harming a harmless invalid.” That night he went back to the theater and watched the twin shadows again and read out loud from the wooden handle of his machete, on which were carved in Arabic, twirling around it like a serpent of eyes and tails, the twenty-one questions without answers. Then he drank bourbon till he passed out. The day before the circus left town, he noticed their blind father at his show again, and he hobbled down from the stage into the crowd and he made two white-winged horseflies fly around and around the old man's head till the old man smiled. His teeth were yellow in the middle, then brown, then black at the edges. Señor Sariel could tell that the old man did not expose them much, that he always hid his smiles with his lips and that this time he had simply forgotten to do so. And in the dirty smile señor Sariel saw the old man's sorrow, in spite of or, more likely, due to the great beauty of his twin sons. And he asked him: “When can I best see them?”

And the old man, still smiling with all his rotted teeth answered: “They bathe in the laundry pail after they jump. Their mother makes them bathe so they can sleep clean.”

The night the circus left town, señor Sariel was on the rotted wood rooftop of the abandoned theatre and after Héctor and Juanito had finished practicing their jumps on the trampoline, they stripped down and filled a laundry pail with a garden hose and washed each other with a white block of soap, under the arms and behind the ears as their mother had taught them, then they climbed up on the giant fig tree and twisted themselves on the stronger branches till the moonlight dried their gecko-brown bodies. Señor Sariel had them with his eyes. He did not rejoin the circus. All his possessions, his worn leather suitcase and the petrified stump of royal palm in which lived his battalion of white-winged horseflies and his bongoes and his flying sandals and his curved machete, were left under a chestnut tree in the empty lot where the circus had stood. Señor Sariel tied everything to the back of his wheelchair and dragged it back to the abandoned theatre where he set up house behind the torn water-stained screen. In the projector room he found sixteen reels, but only one was undamaged, an Italian movie about a circus strongman who does not recognize his love until it is too late. In the afternoons señor Sariel watched it without sound, since the speakers had been stolen. Every evening, he hobbled up to the roof through a back stairwell—though Nana, the halfwit of la plaza, said she saw someone fly up there once, with many wings, boned and leathery like a bat—and he watched the boys jump and bathe and dry off. He began to perform under the shattered marquee, and many people who had missed the circus and did not know who he was dismissed him as a charlatan. So one night, upside down from the roof, clinging to a rusty pipe with his legs, señor Sariel scribbled on the marquee with a piece of tar. He proclaimed his return.

The crowds came, blocking traffic on Perdido Street and spilling into the porch of doña Ediths home. The twins peered over the patio wall from behind the broken cola bottles mortared there and when he knew they were watching, señor Sariel undid himself, became less and less human and more and more a creature other, tunneling through the concrete side-walk with his claws as if he were digging through sand and coming up on the other side of the street. And the more the twins' fascination grew, their heads lilting higher and higher above the patio walls, the more señor Sariel's resolve grew.

One evening, as he was preparing to rest behind the tattered screen of the abandoned theatre, half-heartedly tapping on his bongoes, lost in longing, señor Sariel felt a hundred streams of light unveil him. Someone had turned on the ancient projector and its light burst through each and every tear on the screen, concentrating into dense lasery beams that he felt certain would burn holes in him. He threw on his sackcloth burnoose and flipped the hood over his head.

“Who's there?”

“Ahí está, papito,” a boy said. “¡Ahí! ¡Míralo qué cabezón!”

Señor Sariel peered through one of the larger tears on the screen but the light burned his eyes and blinded him momentarily.

“¡Ahí! ¡Ahí!”

The child's voice was making his limbs weak. He hobbled to his wheelchair and set the bongoes on his lap and wheeled himself to the side of the stage, to the fringes of the projector light. The Italian movie was playing.

“Mira, papito. ¡Salió! He came out!”

The old man tapped his son on the shoulder. “Go on, tell him.”

“My papito says that my mamita says that you should go back to wherever you came from and that if you dig out the sidewalk anymore she's going to call the police.”

Señor Sariel had his hood pulled so low over his great head that he was sure the boy could not see the hunger in his eyes. “And what do you say, hombrecito?”

The young man raised his chin and his amethyst-eye caught a glint reflected from the screen and it glittered. He looked at his father, but the old man stared away into a dead space.

“Héctor says we want to be acrobats! She didn't let him come. But that's what he says.”

The old man grabbed his son by the arm. “What will your mamita say?

Señor Sariel could not resist. With a fervent syncopated conjuration from his drums, he released his battalion of white-winged horseflies from their night-spell and they poured forth from the dead palm stump where they had been pegged and burst through the holes in the screen in gushes (through the massive torso of the strongman and from the silenced trumpet of his sad love), wrestling with each other (many losing their buoyant miniscule triangular heads in the battle) for position to dance first around the amethyst-eyed boy. The old theatre became so full of white-winged horseflies that their wing shadows overcame the projector light and the lives of the strongman and his neglected love were snuffed and señor Sariel could not see through the whirring cloud. “Ahora, what says your papito that says your mamita?”

There was no answer. The old man had dragged the boy out.

Over the next two weeks, doña Edith filled sixteen garbage bags with dead white-winged horseflies and crushed larvae and aborted pupae and still it seemed that they were more in number than they had ever been, a pestilence brought on from the night of the visit to the abandoned theatre. The morning after, a few had appeared in her sons' room and a few more in the folds of her husband's discarded guayabera. From then on, as the spring wore on, inspired with the heat, they doubled and redoubled their numbers, and wherever the boys were, and wherever the boys had been, there the white-winged horseflies would be. In the morning, drawn by the sweat of their night sheets, they covered their bed in such great numbers that it seemed as if they were trying to invade the fortress of their dreams, and they followed them into the bathroom where the boys performed their ritual as ever, one assisting the other, and there the horseflies tarried longer than anywhere, grazing with their wings the soiled discarded tissues and sipping on the drops that had splattered from the toilet and rubbing their spindly legs on the moist towelettes the twins had used to scrub each other's faces and dipping their antennae into the spilled fake teardrop from the bottle one boy applied to the other's glass eye. They rubbed clean their used breakfast utensils and drank the last ring of milk from their glasses and followed them out to the patio and imitated their motions on the trampoline as if they too were wingless and unused to floating on air. At night, they disappeared during the moonbath and waited for them in their rooms, thickening the bedposts and the dresser and the doorframe, their fragile frames fluttering one upon the other till all things inanimate in that room buzzed with life.

When doña Edith became pregnant again it was said the horseflies had had her, for their number was so great in that house that it would have been impossible to avoid them in whatever weak moment she had turned again into the arms of her unforgiven husband. And although the greater number of them certainly had an avid infatuation with the twins, a good number of them didn't, braver ones, for these put their lives in extreme danger and they pursued doña Edith at her every task, even though she was armed with three swatters, held in place at her hips by the sash of her housedress like toy swords, and a few tamer, nobler ones even reserved their interest for the old blind father, enough so that soon he was letting them direct him to and fro as if they were his forty thousand eyes. At the third month of her pregnancy, tired of killing horseflies and filling bags, doña Edith left to finish out her term at her mother's house in Santiago and she promised that when she returned she would fumigate the house with so many poisons that anyone not wanting to be more dead than the Christ at six in the afternoon either better run miles from that house or get on that maldito trampoline and jump till he reached the outer boroughs of heaven.

A week after she left, señor Sariel was invited into the cobblestone patio to teach the boys how to become great acrobats and the white-winged horseflies little by little disappeared.

Armando Quiñón had become well acquainted with many of the circus stars through the years. Every winter he was there with his hidden Leica and his mounted Rolleiflex and every spring he presented a “circus” show in his studio. Only one performer never allowed photographs to be taken of him, he a firm believer of the first superstition, that the camera stole the soul of the photographed. So on the day doña Edith abandoned her home, Armando Quiñón was immediately suspicious of the man wrapped in a black sackcloth burnoose who wheeled himself into his studio, claiming to be the famous señor Sariel and asking him to record the next few months of his life in photographs. “Ya sé, ya sé that I have never let you photograph me. So you doubt. Pero, my soul is not
in
me anymore; it is escaped somewhere into that house full of horseflies. So I need not fear your little instrument now.” He lowered his melonball head and pressed his bandaged hands to his chest. Armando Quiñón put his hand on his visitor's shoulder, a gesture more of camaraderie than sympathy.

“So what need have you of my camera?”

“Bueno, now that the lady has left the house, I will be invited in there to teach those boys how to fly, make them into great acrobats, and I want you to record every moment of it, for though I am an old man, I will live to be much older, and in a thousand years, when those boys are long gone from this earth, I will be able to look at your pictures and relive my joy.”

“Estás jodío, viejo,” Armando Quiñón muttered, turning away. “You come in here blabbering nonsense and you expect me to drop everything and come with you.”

Señor Sariel pulled out a plump fig from one of his pockets and ate it whole; then he undid the bandage around his right hand and pulled from his other pocket a leather sack and spread his legs as to create a hammock in his lap with the skirt of his burnoose and emptied the contents of the sack, bars and coins of gold and silver carved with yanqui writing.

“These are from los Estádos Unidos. Long ago, we toured there. A man who owned a bourbon distillery in Kentucky bought my third wife from me … a beautiful woman, descendant of both Cleopatra of Egypt and Queen Isabela of Spain … mira, mira esto.” He held up one large coin, “A twenty-dollar gold piece made, by executive order, for presidente Teddy Roosevelt. Claro, my wife was very beautiful, she sold for much more than all this, but this is quite enough, no crees?” He refilled the sack and handed it to Armando Quiñón. “Y más que eso, you'll have the pleasure of being with the boys, whom I hear you've photographed before and whom you have grown quite fond of… from a distance. ¿Sí o no?”

Armando Quiñón blushed. He did not know the dwarf with the great bald head could also read minds and he agreed to señor Sariel's deal, though, as he took the heavy bag of yanquí gold and silver, he felt as if something precious had just been stolen from him.

The late summer days arrived like conquerors from the center of the earth, unleashing all their tropical fury so that by August not a breeze was felt that didn't feel like an oven's breath and not a night lasted long enough to mitigate the harsh memory of the sun. During the day, little could be done. The heat paralyzed all things that aspired to motion. Production at the sugar mill was down five- and then ten- and then twenty-fold, till it finally shut down temporarily because so many of the grinding wheels melted one into the other's grooves, like lovers who kiss too long. The mail was not delivered for weeks. None dared assume the task after Jacinto, the giant West Indian who had been the postman since el año de la cometa, dropped to his knees one afternoon and threw aside his olive-green mailbag and then took off his boots and stepped out of his drenched uniform and peeled off his undergear, and none could believe that a man who must have been close to sixty or sixty-five,
yes at least that, for it was he, on his first day, who hand-delivered all of the invitations for abuelita's wedding
, still had the body of a young bull, with muscles ripply as the rivercurrent, and none could believe when he crisscrossed town as he was, waving his massive arms in the air, and kicking his feet up and about as if in a mad and primitive rain dance, his skin-bagged organ keeping rhythm, slapping against his thighs this way and that like a marvelous rubber pendulum. He made his way past the town towards the bay screaming with all his lungs: “¡Qué calor! ¡Qué calor, cojones!” It was said that after he jumped into the bay he wrestled sharks for six days and did not lose once, but on the seventh he met his match and his severed head washed up on the beach at the yanqui naval base, his fantastic body a grand feast for some unknown water fiend.