The Lazarus Rumba (32 page)

The following morning, nevertheless, on the exact spot where he had been violated, Paco Fortunato died of shame, his seven-seas tail covering his corpse like a shroud. Elena Mulé left the body untouched, thinking that as it decomposed and if the sun hit it just right, it would turn into a beautiful tropical flower that she would name
siete afortunadas azulitas.
But to Atila and his madre-mistress's dismay, Paco Fortunato's beauty never decomposed. Atila passed by the corpse every day and lifted the seven-seas tail, hoping that maggots had begun to burrow into the flesh, but every day he was confronted with his cousin's offending beauty that would not fade, and thus Atila shook his head and his coral comb flopped from his left to his right and to his left again, and he muttered to himself in the language of cocks: “Coño, hijo de la gran puta, qué belleza.” The white-feathered ladies made pilgrimages from the henhouse—risking their lives, leaving themselves open to attacks from the spearback rat—just to lift the seven-seas shroud and see their murdered lover and sigh as if all the joy and glory of life had been stolen from them too soon. Atila, in vain, tried to show them Paco Fortunato's true nature by bending over and fanning open his own tail and shaking it as Paco Fortunato had done his last night. But even though some haughty Cubans might argue this fact, the five shades of blue of the waters at Varadero Beach are no match against the seven blues of the seven seas, and every white-feathered lady, untutored as they were, knew that.

One evening, while Elena Mulé was playing her recording of various arias sung by Marioneta Alonso, then Cuba's greatest soprano, famous not only for her voice but for two other peculiarities (she was as bald as Queen Elizabeth and blind as Faith), Atila was touched by her rendition of “Habanera” from Bizet's
Carmen.
And he sang along. The music confronted and softened his spirit and he began to forgive Paco Fortunato for being more beautiful than he. He sang over the seven-seas corpse—alone, for it was dark and the spearback rat ruled the night—words in a language that he did not know but that sounded so appropriate. His voice came out of him in quadruple puffs of steam that turned to mist and fell on Paco Fortunato and woke him from his shame-ridden slumber.

Though Atila later abandoned him in an unforgivable act of cowardice, Paco Fortunato was Atila's first and favorite resurrected, perhaps because he was also much more than that. From that first day of his second life Paco Fortunato was as faithful and loyal to Atila as any bride of Christ is to her vows, and he shook his gorgeous seven-seas tail for him and only for him, forsaking forever the distraught white-feathered ladies. Atila did not take well to this at first. Too suffocating, he thought, too smothering. But who can resist for long the talent of a seven-seas tail? How often can one turn his face from such ultimate and vulgar beauty? And, really, why? Atila too eventually forgot about the white-feathered ladies, till one day the spearback rat broke into the henhouse and did away with them forever, leaving Elena Mulé as the only lady left to tickle and please, which (when he could pull himself away from the seven-seas tail) Atila did, with his voice that topped the voice of any human, even the great, bald blind soprano Marioneta Alonso.

So now, six years later, what are you asking?

“Can you quicken the dead, Atila? Is your song that good?”

What? Are you blind, mi madre-mistress? Do you not see this hunk of a cock, who once was dead and now is living, this seven-seas-tail beauty fawning over me, his life devoted to me when he can have any feathered or non-feathered beast in the animal kingdom, male or female? And you, you mi madre-mistress, whom I am as devoted to as this one is to me, whom I have marched to peaks of ecstasy with my feathery tenor one night, with my tumescent baritone the other, like no manflesh ever will. Coño, le ronca, do you have to ask?

Show me, show me the way and I'll show you what my song will dare.

Elena Mulé, with her blue rooster in a cane reed cage, traveled overnight from the town of Holguín to the town of Bayamo, where a week before her sister Yolanda had given birth to a twelve-pound baby who could not breathe because of the hangman's umbilical cord wrapped around his neck. (Stillbirth is the kind, poetic term for this banal tragedy that should be better known as deadbirth.) Yolanda refused to bury her deadborn, for she was old and she knew she would not bear another child. A neighbor telegrammed Elena Mulé, and Elena Mulé went to console her sister and to help her bury the child in the proper manner.

Then why did she bring the rooster in that ridiculous cage, as if he were some type of rare parrot?—which, due to his vibrant plumage, a few folks on the train thought he was and they stuck their ignorant noses into the cage and yelped through the cane reeds: “Coco loco, caca mala,” as if Atila were such an idiot that he would repeat such nonsense, even if he were a parrot. Why the questions about quickening the dead? Did Elena Mulé know the awesome powers of the very first blue rooster she raised
not
to be a fighter? Or was she simply trying to embarrass him?

They arrived near past dawn. Yolanda and her husband and their deadborn lived in a two-room tenement in the seedier district of town. He was a field worker. She knitted baby wear and used the money she made to make sure there would always be a bottle of rum in the cabinet when her husband got home. His back always ached and his feet were always swollen. The rum helped put him to sleep. When Elena Mulé knocked that morning he was already gone for the fields, one more time screaming at his wife that if that baby wasn't underground when he got back, he was going to cut it open and stuff it with stones and toss it in the river. Yolanda made promises she knew she was not going to keep; she knew that when her husband returned from the fields he would be too tired to be so angry. When there was no answer at the door Elena Mulé pushed it open and found her sister and two neighbors saying a rosary over a covered bassinet in the back room. She left Atila's cage in the front room. She hugged her sister and they cried together, and she joined them in the rosary, though Elena Mulé, unlike her sister, had never embraced the Christian god, nor His mother. When she asked to see the baby, her sister would not let her lift the knitted cover, which was folded over and tied at the base of the bassinet.

“When he breathes for the first time we will know,” Yolanda said. “Llorará, like all babies, he will cry.” Before Elena Mulé could say anything (
Me cago, how is he going to breathe when that thing is sealed like a coffin!
), her sister broke into the susurration of another rosary, for there were many Virgins to pray to before her baby could live. No one had opened the bassinet since the second afternoon after the deadbirth. They prayed to a hundred Virgins till their mouths were all dry and the fire of their five thousand Hail Marys was all ashes. At dusk the two neighbors left and Yolanda's husband arrived, stooped over and limping. He drank almost a whole bottle of rum and passed out hanging halfway out the window of the front room, mumbling to nightwalkers on the street below about babies who swallow stones and drown in the river. Elena Mulé took what little rum was left in the bottle and forced her sister to drink it, mixed with a little guava juice, for it looked like she had not slept in ages. She had two glasses. Elena Mulé lay down with her as they had when they were children in Santiago, cradled belly to back like spoons. She asked her what she had named the child. “Julio César,” her sister said.

Elena Mulé said nothing. But she did not think it was a good idea to burden an innocent child with the name of a great warrior. When Yolanda fell asleep Elena Mulé got up, congratulated herself on the clever proportions of rum to guava juice, went to the front room, hiked up her skirt, crouched over the cane reed cage, and wet her rooster. Atila awoke. He did not move, keeping as dignified a pose as possible under such demeaning conditions, because he knew that his madre-mistress's water would bring him luck in his endeavor that night; and even more luck if he tasted it a bit, which he did, throwing his head back for a second. Elena Mulé did not dry herself. Before she returned to bed she undid the latch of the cane reed cage.

“Vaya, let's see what you dare do,” she said. “Hasta mañana, enano.”

Atila shook his tail briskly to dry off his Varadero-blue feathers. He walked across the front room, opened wide his wings, and hopped up on the small of Yolanda's husband's back. The weary drunk grunted a bit but he stayed in place. Atila watched through the window till the moon had sunk, then he went into the back room, where the two sisters slept. Stretching his neck upward, with his beak he undid the knot at the bottom of the bassinet. As soon as the cloth dropped to the sides, it was nose-noticeable that unlike Paco Fortunato, Julio César had begun to rot. Atila pulled the cloth down off the bassinet. The smell had permeated the knitted fibers of the cover and Atila tossed it aside with a flip of his neck. He opened his wings wide and leaped up to the edge of the bassinet. A child who cannot breathe in the womb, he knew, is born blue, not the blue of the waters at Varadero or the blue of the seven seas but the blue of varicose veins. The baby Julio César had progressed beyond that stage. His skin was now a pale shade of gray and an ashy pubescence covered his legs and his torso. His hair was wispy and fallen-leaf brown. One eye was open, doe-colored and creamy and far away. (Was this wink a dare? a mock? a prayer?) Atila perched himself on the deadborn's inflated belly, careful with the nails in his talons, arching them upward, wary that he might pierce the skin and all the fumes and critters of death come bursting out. He enveloped his wings around the child's head and lifted it, pressing it to his breast. He began to sing a dolorous aria from Puccini's
Gianni Schicchi
, softly in soprano. He sang all night and the gray child did not even attempt to breathe. At five in the morning Yolanda's husband appeared in the bedroom swinging a sugar sack full of rocks. He caught Atila on the side of the head and the blue rooster collapsed on top of the gray winking baby.

When Atila came to, the child was gone and Yolanda was waving a kitchen knife and screaming at her sister that the wicked rooster had swallowed her baby and that she was going to cut him open. They left Yolanda's tenement in such a hurry that they forgot the cane reed cage, so Atila had to ride on the train back to Holguín curled up into a ball and tucked under the lap of Elena Mulé's skirt, between her widespread legs, for there were no animals allowed on the coach unless they were caged. To console himself, to do something that would get his mind off his migraine, Atila sang and Elena Mulé's lips parted and she sighed the whole trip long. When she disembarked, many of the passengers congratulated her on her beautiful voice and they presumed the rosy flush on her face to be either typical campesina humility or the modesty of the crippled, for she walked funny.

A week later, in the middle of the afternoon, as Atila was riding the seven-seas tail right in front of the spearback rat's hole, challenging the monster to come after them, because such a brush with danger proved what an hombre he still was—even as he rode the seven-seas tail, and even if Paco Fortunato was terrified of such stunts and could derive no pleasure from them—Yolanda Mulé rode up in a cart-and-mule taxi from the train station in Holguín, holding tight to a bundle of knitted cloth and with a beatific smile on her face. This was enough to scare Atila more than a hundred packs of spearback rats. His hombre-ness melted from him like fat in a bubbling stew; and, still hinged to the seven-seas tail, he darted from there, dragging Paco Fortunato, who thought the monster had made its move and began to cackle like a hysteric hen (a habit he had acquired after his resurrection), backwardly along. They hid underneath a pile of bloodied white feathers in the haunted henhouse, where it was said the ghosts of the murdered white-feathered ladies still yearned and wailed for the body and tail of Paco Fortunato. Atila heard them and was immediately struck with another migraine, a condition he would suffer from for the rest of his life, and pulled back out of the seven-seas tail.

All day Elena Mulé called for her two remaining living roosters. “¡Atila! ¡Paco! ¡Vengan! Good news! Great news! ¿Dónde se han métío?” They did not believe her and remained hidden in the haunted henhouse for two days, till they heard a child cry and Paco Fortunato could not convince Atila that it was a trick of the spearback rat. This is what Atila learned when he dared venture out of the henhouse, that the baby Julio César had been reborn, that the evening after he and Elena Mulé had fled Yolanda's tenement, a basket with a baby in it appeared at her doorstep (just as her husband arrived from the fields), that the child was wet and bloodied as if it had just been born, though Yolanda was told that it wasn't from the womb that he was wet and bloodied but from the belly of the blue rooster who had swallowed him to give him new life, that once the news began to spread in Bayamo of this miracle, the people had begun to build a temple of stone in the center of town and called it San Atila el Milagroso. When Atila saw the baby, rosy-skinned, with Havana-brown hair and eyes lined in violet and drawn in with carbon, he knew right away that this wasn't the child that he tried to save a week back.

But how often does a cock get a temple dedicated in his honor? Who would protest if put in Atila's place? Who but a true saint?

“This is Julio César,” the mother said. “Your resurrected.”

How often does a mother get her deadborn's sentence rescinded? What fairy stories won't she invent? And … near the fields where Yolanda's husband worked, who heard the desperate cry of the guajira mother that her newborn, her liveborn had been stolen from right under her crotch?

Atila crowed a tinsel alto and the baby giggled and kicked his feet as if to dance … and winked. For the first time, and as always from then on, when Julio César was happy, Atila's migraine disappeared.