The Lazarus Rumba (24 page)

“¿Qué haces?” The voice teetered between boy and man with a huskiness that refuted the notion of a phantom. Startled, señor Sariel pierced too deep into his skin and the blood took a while in coming but when it did it flooded the scene he was working on as Jullanar of the Sea told her king of fighting off the old fisherman who had wanted to deflower her many years before and señor Sariel's blood was now the blood of the old man as Jullanar beat him over the head with the empty husk of a lobster and señor Sariel folded the skin over it and let it dry and let it remain part of the tale before he looked up. He gestured for the boy to step in and the boy did. He looked into his eyes. They were the color of fresh honey. They brimmed with curiosity. He gestured again for the boy to shut the tin door and the boy did and asked if he should hook the latch. Señor Sariel answered him that no that there was no need for secrecy.

“¿Qué haces?” the boy repeated. He was wearing only the pants of his linen pajamas and the hardness of his enthused youth was so evident in the gaslamp shadows that the loose-fit cloth of his pant leg fell like a sail from a twisted mast. Señor Sariel called him closer and he unfolded his skin-canvas and showed him the scene of Jullanar and the old fisherman and the blood was encrusted there as if it really had poured from the old man's head. The boy looked at the scene and saw the hoary beard of Jullanar's king and the wrinkled and spotted hands of the one who had tried to have her chasteness and he was sad for her.

“Poor Jullanar,” he said. “She lives in a country of old men.”

“No es pobre, Héctor,” señor Sariel said. “No es pobre nada.” He rounded up the fan of his needles and inserted them by size and shape into the sheaths of their leather case and he shut tight the three ink jars and put them aside. He offered Héctor the bourbon bottle and the boy took it and swigged back a shot and could not assume (though he tried) a straight face to hide the burning inside him. Since señor Sariel could not finish etching Jullanar's tale he told Héctor of it and as he told him he showed him where each scene would develop—as Jullanar gave the old king a son who was born feet first, which meant, the court magician said mournfully, that he would die by water, and as the son grew and learned of horses and of archery and of the Koran and stayed away from the yellow river as his mother demanded. Héctor listened till he himself was transformed into the young prince and when he reached the age of manhood, Jullanar's brother, who was a great sultan of the sea, visited and bathed the new man in the juice of oysters and smeared his eyes with the ink of squids and rubbed on his loins the sperm of porpoises. “Now your son cannot die by water,” the sultan-brother said to the king. “For just as you rule the earth, we rule the sea and the rain and the river.”

Héctor took another shot of bourbon and sat on the opposite end of the mattress and stretched his legs towards señor Sariel. “My muscles hurt,” he said.

“Which ones?”

“Todos.”

“It means they're growing. It means you're getting stronger.”

Señor Sariel grabbed Héctor's foot and massaged it with his strong hands. The gaslamp flickered in the boy's eyes and untoasted them to a lighter shade. He let out a low soft hum. Señor Sariel offered him the bottle and Héctor took one last long shot and he let señor Sariel pull off his pajama pants. His body was sunburned evenly throughout and smooth except for the soft down of his legs and the dark bramble out of which his pinga shot out like a tuber inverted. Señor Sariel kissed the high arches of Héctor's feet and the boy lay back. Señor Sariel was good throughout. When at first the pain was too much and the boy grew frightened, señor Sariel retreated and he touched the boy's genitals and fingered his culo with the same delicacy he used when handling his white-winged horseflies; and all night he whispered other stories in a changed voice to better teach Héctor how simply pain is converted to pleasure and terror to rapture.

Héctor awoke the next morning on his belly in the foam mattress, his arms folded under his head. On his skin he smelled what he thought was Perdita's cleaning water and he smelled nodded-off flowers. Before señor Sariel left him alone, he kissed both his nalgas and hovered over him so that Héctor smelled figs behind his ears and he felt the skin of the painted thing dragging over his back (though it wasn't pleasant anymore).

“You will not die by air tampoco,” his teacher said.

With the help of the photographer, señor Sariel had a pair of trapezes sewn together with shafts of caña brava and hemp rope and he hung them from opposite branches of the giant fig tree above the trampoline.

“El trapecio is the high art of the acrobat,” he proclaimed and he hung from one trapeze and swung his body till he was moving in great arches and Armando Quiñón grabbed the bar of the other trapeze (as told) and climbed up on the ridge of the garden wall, breaking off a few cola bottles and when señor Sariel screamed: “¡Ahora! ¡Ahora carajo!” Armando Quiñón threw the trapeze towards him and señor Sariel swung towards it and let go and twirled himself in the air so that his body seemed horned and svelte (like a winged chameleon), tinted orange and red and black; and when he was himself again he was swinging from the other trapeze towards Armando Quiñón, whom he snatched with his legs and swung back with him. The photographer wriggled and screeched like a mouse caught by a nightowl and wet himself in the air. All this, to the great pandereteo of the twins who watched from below and pointed to the spreading stain on the photographer's trousers and asserted: “Mira, se meó … mira, se cagó.” Their merriment, however, quickly ceased when señor Sariel dropped Armando Quiñón onto the trampoline and asked the twins to get into their Greek
uniformes
and come join him up on the trapeze. The photographer stumbled down from the trampoline and disappeared into the house. Héctor stripped and helped his brother strip as he always did and when they were on the higher branches of the giant fig tree señor Sariel pointed Héctor away to the opposite trapeze so that only the amethyst-eyed boy joined him on the one he was hanging from. After they got swinging well, señor Sariel dropped down to the trampoline so the amethyst-eyed boy was alone on the moving trapeze. Héctor, on the opposite trapeze, hung still as a cat before a leap.

“You're going to hang there all day like a corpse,” señor Sariel screamed at him. “Mueve el culo y las patas and you'll see how you'll fly.” So Héctor shook his ass and his legs and soon he was swinging in arches as high as his brother, so that when they converged the soft ends of their toes grazed each other. In less than an hour, señor Sariel taught them how to swing up and stand on the bar and how to hang upside down with the knees bent over the bar and how to bend their feet like knees so they could hang upside down by them and they would have learned much more than that the first day had Armando Quiñón not interrupted them. He came out of the house with his linen coat and his baggy trousers and his underwear and even his leather sandals hanging on his forearm, dripping and washed, he himself wearing just a towel around his pointy girlish hips and with a look deeper than embarrassment on his face. “Oye, me parece que quedó el viejo,” he muttered. “I went into his room to look for something to put on and though his eyes are still open and he's still shedding tears, his body has turned to stone.”

They had not seen señor Daluz in two and a half weeks. And they had not missed him. In his worsening blindness, the old man had turned into a ghost. After his wife fled and after the white-winged horseflies that had guided him for a while (and whom perhaps he had relied on much too much, neglecting the gift of his halo-vision for the sheer pleasure of their white-winged breezes) disappeared, the halos had darkened and he lost all sense of time. He had his breakfast at midnight and his supper at noon and would reprimand the boys for staying up so late at two in the afternoon and shed furious tears in the hours of la madrugada (spinning the radio dial this way and that at the wrong times when all actors were still in their own beds on their sixth dream of fortune and stardom) for all his favorite radio-novelas had been cancelled and all he could get was static. Soon, all that his sons knew of him was the murmuring jeremiad from his room as he replayed all the plots of the most famous novelas, raising his voice an octave to play the heroine and lowering two or three to play the villain. (Once—it seemed so long ago—his son Héctor and his niece Alicia had lent themselves for the parts, but now they had gone and to señor Daluz it was as if they existed no more.) When the voices ceased from his room, no one noticed. Armando Quiñón found him with his ear pressed to the radio speaker, and even in his chagrin the photographer did not forget his art, for a last picture of señor Daluz, his flesh the color of light marble, was said to have been thrown into the bonfire along with all the other indecent ones of that period, found in the cellar room of Armando Quiñón's studio on the artist's last day.

That night, when Héctor came to señor Sariel's windowless room, he did not take off his pajamas and señor Sariel etched no tale into his foreskin and did not take off his sackcloth burnoose nor unpeel the bandages around his hands. After they had a few shots of Kentucky bourbon, señor Sariel told Héctor to go back to his brother, that it was a bad time to leave him alone, and that in the morning they would telegram doña Edith in Santiago de Cuba.

Two days later, doña Edith arrived in a heavier pregnancy than her first one. She was appalled that the disfigured dwarf was living under her roof, but when she announced her plans of grabbing him por el cabezón ese de muchacho retardado and throwing him out on the street (this time making sure that he landed on the blade of his machete), Héctor responded in all seriousness (for the first time since the night of the accident looking straight into his mother's eyes) that he would follow señor Sariel and then nudged his brother beside him and the amethyst-eyed boy said that
sí, sí, yo también.

“Qué malagradecidos son los dos,” doña Edith said and she sat back and caressed the fullness of her belly. “Gracias a Dios that there will be more. These will be different. These will love their mamacita.”

Señor Sariel stayed, on the condition that he never set foot inside the main house and that he sleep and even do all his necessities in Perdita's old room, and for this doña Edith threw him out a rusty bucket. “Ahí mea y caga si quieres, desgraciado, en el cuartico de la negra (may she rest in peace), for that's where you belong!”

She did not send him any food, but he was content solely with eating the mango-sized figs from their tree; and though she could not stop her sons from training on the trapeze and trampoline with him, like the Greeks, as they always had (
If we can't practice with him, we'll leave, mamacita. The naked body is a wholesome thing, así nos enseñó él, así nos dejaba papito
), she barred the photographer from the cobblestone patio, still unforgiven for his great sin thirteen years past, and at night she padlocked all the doors of the main house and drew the storm shutters on every window, so that señor Sariel did not see Héctor in his linen pajamas for three weeks. During this time, doña Edith did everything to rid herself of the disfigured dwarf. At night she whispered bedtime stories to her twins of monsters so like him that Héctor would immediately catch on and correct this detail or that of the monster's physiognomy and veer the story away from doña Ediths insidious course down a raunchier road, stealing scenes from señor Sariel's painted thing, till the amethyst-eyed boy blushed and doña Edith huffed that story time was over and tucked them in hastily and put out the lights. One morning, during one of their long training sessions on the trapeze, she stole into señor Sariel's windowless room and took the sackcloth burnoose and the bandages that he wrapped around his hands. She threw the load into her hurdy-gurdy washing machine and washed it with the blood of hens, spoiled rum, the crushed leaves of poisonous tobacco, and bits of the wings from his own horseflies, which she chiselled off the outer walls. She cranked the machine with all her strength so that the hen blood turned bubbly, as if over a flame. Afterwards, she put the burnoose and the bandages through the ringer nine times, each time chanting a curse that her father's mother had taught her, in a language she had never understood. She hung it to dry and replaced it all in his room before they finished training, none the worse for the wash, except for an almost imperceptible rosy tint, like the light of dawn before it is dawn. But nothing changed. Day after day the boys were as happy with him as he was with them. So, fearing that she would go into labor soon and have to leave the boys all to him, she decided on one last drastic measure. Laden as she was with child, one night, after she had padlocked all the doors and closed tight all the storm shutters, she climbed on the trampoline and up the wooden side-steps the boys had nailed to the trunk of the giant fig tree, and leaning from one of the sturdier branches picked every one of the ripe figs she could reach. The next morning, she awoke the boys before dawn and asked them to go out to the cow field in Mingo's finca near the mountains and pick out the one mushroom she had always told them never even to step on. And the twins knew exactly which one it was, the one with the parasol-shaped yellow cap, the one frizzled like a ballerina's dress three quarters of the way up the pale stalk.

“A whole basket,” doña Edith commanded. “Y no se atrevan a meterse uno en la boca.” The twins rubbed their eyes and did their necessities together and set out for the grazing field.

Armando Quiñón saw them that morning, for there were photographs thrown into the bonfire of his last day of the twins frolicking with each other on their way to the field, and photographs of the twins throwing off their clothes, and photographs of the twins climbing on the back of Mingo's morning-dazed cows and supposedly (surely these must have gone into the bonfire first) of Héctor teaching his brother what señor Sariel had taught him, on the back of the monumental and doomed Nina, Mingo's most productive cow. They returned late in the afternoon and señor Sariel refused to see them, berating them that discipline was the first and last virtue of the artist, that without it one remained a mere dabbler, a dilettante. It was the first and only time that the twins saw him lose his temper. They spent the rest of the afternoon watching their mother crush and muddle all the mushrooms they had brought her and add a tad of honey and the pulp of the figs and crush and muddle some more.