The Lazarus Rumba (34 page)

“Tell them who you are and who you are fleeing from,” he said, holding a hanky over his nose, “and they will be as hospitable to you as we were.”

He hopped down the mountainside agile as a wildcat and in a matter of minutes had disappeared. Elena Mulé, the skin on the palm of her hands and on the knobs of her knees torn and bloodied, cracked open a fallen coconut with a sharp stone and washed herself with the juice and gave some to Atila to gargle and rubbed some of the oil from the meat on his comb and above his eyes to ease his migraine. They slept under a clutter of royal palms, covering themselves with dried fronds. The following morning they proceeded to Sinsol.

At the entrance to the village there was a gateway made of long flat boulders set one atop the other in a brave equilibrium. As they passed inside, the roof of the jungle grew so thick that the morning light vanished and the dirt road they were on was navigable only by feeling their way from tree trunk to tree trunk on the shoulder. Eventually the flickering lights from the village blinked from behind the dense mass of foliage and the winding-downhill road led them to a compound of bohíos built by the shores of an underground river. Elena Mulé saw a dwarfish man carrying a bucket of malangas and a torch. She told him who they were and the name of the tyrant they were fleeing from. The man answered that tyrants need no name, that they were all one and the same, and as Tati Hijuelos had said, he welcomed them and told them to follow him to his home where his wife would be glad to feed them breakfast. The man was about a foot shorter than Elena Mulé (who herself was not much taller than she was wide) and wore only a pair of work pants rolled up to the knees. His skin was so translucent that she could see the crossways of his veins and arteries running to and from the shadows in his chest. He had no hair at all, not even eyebrows or eyelashes (so that his expression was one of perennial bewilderment), and his pupils were from some angles salmon-pink, from some angles orange. The nails on both his fingers and his toes were long and curved and sharp as talons. His wife was dressed just like him and they looked so alike that the only way to tell them apart was by the pointy sand-colored nipples on her flat chest. She caressed Atila's tail and marvelled at his feathers as if he were a creature from another world. They ate boiled malangas and thin strips of meat that looked and tasted like shrimp. When their host told them it was poached albino grasshoppers, Elena Mulé became ill and she could not finish her breakfast. Atila was fine and asked for seconds.

After breakfast the hairless dwarf and his hairless wife took off their workpants so that they were completely naked, and around their sexes was as barren as the rest of their bodies. They told Elena Mulé and Atila that they were lucky to have arrived on a Saturday, for they would soon meet most of the other villagers. Saturday was the day of the celebration of the red stones. Unabashed, naked as they were, they led Elena Mulé and her rooster out of their bohio and further down the dirt road and soon they came to a stone amphitheater, the walls slippery with white moss, the roof a network of thick, hairy overlapping roots. They left the torch outside. A pyramid of flat stones, like the ones used to build the gateway into the village, glowing red, was set on center stage of the amphitheater, and one villager was tending to the stones, knocking the ashes off the ends and corners so they would not smoke, while others were carting in new stones in wheelbarrows, which were balanced, with the aid of large iron tongs, at the vertex of the pyramid. All the other villagers, whose looks were not so different from their hosts, hairless, with see-through skin and ruby eyes, were seated on the six levels of stone rows, naked and packed in, their legs pressed to their torsos, so that with the only light coming from the burning stones, their eyes flashed and their bony kneecaps shone. Atila thought he felt a feather plucked but he made no protest and when he sat down in the fourth row center he tucked his tail underneath him.

The roots-roof over the amphitheater was domed and thick and low, so that within it felt like being in a giant wigwam. The villagers chanted in unison. And as they breathed in, the glow of the stone pyramid dimmed, and as they let their voices out, it deepened. Soon, both Atila and Elena Mulé, so engrossed with the beatless rhythm of the chant, stopped measuring time, and without a grasp of then and now forgot about each other.

They later learned that the glowing stones were the ancestors of the villagers, some who had ventured away for lives in other villages, other lands, other times, and some like them who had never left their sunless spot and never deepened the pigment of their ghost-skin. As these fathers and mothers of time grabbed her by the hand and took her away from herself, Elena Mulé welcomed the villagers' monotone chant as she had always welcomed Atila's song, and permeating through the shimmering blue halo of air at the base of the pyramid, she spoke with all of Atila's ancestors. They told her how they had once been a peaceful tribe and how the father of their fathers, a black-feathered prince of the Nile, had raped Elena Mulé's mother when she was only nine, and how the child-mother had not survived the birth, split in two, and how Elena Mulé's grandmother, a witch who lived under the bed of the Nile, had cursed all of the black-feathered prince's offspring with a will to fight and to perish fighting and sent him, along with his illegitimate daughter, in a basket that floated into the sea, and the sea so washed them on their journey across the ocean that the black prince's feather turned blue. When Elena Mulé's spirit returned to the amphitheater, the place was half-empty and the body that was once again hers was naked and sweaty and parched. Atila had disappeared. She stood, knocking her head on the knotted-root roof. She looked at the villager who was her host and then at his wife, but they were both still in a trance, their salmon eyes rolled up and inward.

“Atila! Atila!” she screamed. “Where are you? Where are you, descarado? You are my brother, my cousin, my son. We are
all
related!” There was no answer, and Elena Mulé had lost so much water from her blood that she passed out. She came to again inside the bohío they had first visited, submerged in an underground ice-mud bath. The husband and the wife stood above watching her, Atila by their side. They had each plucked a different shaded feather from her rooster's tail and pierced their bodies with them, one through each ear, one through the navel, and two each through the fabric of their genitalia, he through the sac and through the underside of the glans, and she through the outer and inner lips. They suggested Elena Mulé do the same. They had heard in their trances at the celebration of stones that this was the secret to everlasting life.

Atila jerked his head at Elena Mulé; having submitted to a plucking of his tail out of courtesy's sake and looking as if he were suffering from some horrible molting disease, he wanted out of that crazy village.

The Man Who Played His Bones

Their hosts suggested the perfect place to hide was a village on the crest of the mountain range, near Pico Turquino, at 1,974 meters, the Island's highest point. The only drawback, they said, was that La Tiza, as the village was called, was famous for its high rate of suicides.

“You see,” they explained, “unless a village was well hidden or out-of-the-way in these mountains, like ours and a few others, it became the property of the ravenous Spanish landowners; and the guajiros who worked the land had no love for it since it was not theirs, but rented, and the fruit of their harvest merely increased their oppressors' power. Some chose and still choose (for though we won the war of independence, most of the landowners never really left) to kill themselves to escape this vicious cycle. Gracias a Dios, our spot of land gets no sunlight and this frightened away the rich. Vaya, they are so easily frightened. In La Tiza, the landowners were frightened away by the ghosts of the suicides, who unearthed their own bones and crushed them to a chalky dust and spread it over the porches of the landowners' fancy cottage-mansions and in their drinking wells and rum casks. But even after the landowners left, leaving behind all their land, the peasant families that remained in the village were so eased by the habit of suicide that the ritual continued, even though there was no longer any need for it—the land was theirs and they had moved with their families into the landowners' cottages.

“There indeed you will be safe. The henchmen of the oppressors know better than to ever set foot in La Tiza again.”

Because they could not find her rose-colored dress or her jewelry (the head priest at the amphitheater, the keeper of the holy stones, had confiscated them, and from then on, during the celebration of stones, he wore the dress as the holy garment and the pearls as the holy crown while he knocked away the ashes), Elena Mulé left the village of Sinsol with her blue cock Atila dressed simply, head to toe, in a thick coat of brick-red mud. They took the road uphill, again guiding themselves by feeling the knotty base of trees on the shoulder (for their hosts had not supplied them with a torch, for from a place where no light enters, the husband said very seriously, no light may be removed) and were thrilled when they saw the sunlight, in points and dashes like Chinese characters, breaking through the vegetation up ahead. They were out of the land saved by no sun. Just before she was able to see the shape of her rooster, soft-stepping ahead of her, humming a tune, Elena Mulé thought she heard him speak his mind (in the language of cocks, claro): “Y no seas boba, chica. We are not related. You are a woman. And I am cock. Those were dreams in there. God knows what drugs they were burning in that stony tent. … For if indeed you are the granddaughter of a witch who lives under the Nile and I am the descendant of a horny black-feathered prince who goes around putting his thing in nine-year-old girls, who the hell is that damn sister of yours who got us into all this mess?”

The first night they weathered heavy rains that washed the mud off Elena Mulé, and the following morning they had a breakfast of fresh coffee-bread and goat's milk at a peasant's bohío. The paltry wife ripped two of her dresses and sewed them together with her foot-pedal machine and gave Elena Mulé the new-fashioned dress. They continued up the mountain range towards the spine. Wherever Elena Mulé stopped at a bohío and asked the way to La Tiza the guajiros silently pointed up and westward, their faces ashen, but revealing nothing more of the history of this self-slaughtering village. On the fourth day after they had left Sinsol a blind peasant woman informed them that there was only one clan left in the village of La Tiza, the family of Mongo Pérez, and that they soon were destined to perish, and the village would be forgotten in the rumbas that tell the stories of the mountains. They hurried upward, as if racing against the final suicide. On the sixth day, crossing a high saddle near the Turquino peak, their breath so short that Atila could no longer sing to console his madre-mistress, it began to snow and the ground and the pines were so covered with snow that it reminded Elena Mulé of the photographs in books about los Estados Unidos that she saw when she visited the bookstores in Santiago de Cuba. The snow (though it was a thin and warm snow) fell so hard that it began to accumulate on her head and shoulders and Atila had to shake his comb and wag his shorn Varadero-blues tail to get it off him. It fell and blunted the sharp rocks sprouting from the mountainside that were the teeth of the jackal spirits buried there. It fell as if by the will, the rhythm of holy bata drums, coming from just above, just beyond, and when the beating stopped, the snow stopped, and when it could be heard again, it snowed again.

They followed the sound of the snow, Elena Mulé picking up her bird and setting him on her shoulder, because there was so much accumulation now and it was so soft that he sank in it, till they came to a promontory overlooking a canyon, above a wide river, on which was perched a tile-roof two-tier wooden cottage, its eaves heavy with snow. Nearby, on a jutting rock, a man in a heavy cassock that reached down to his bare knees stood against the sky that was a thin stretched-balloon blue, as if it could be pricked by a needle, and beat together two white log-thick sticks in a rhythm endearing to the gods. From him, or rather from the white logs that he beat against each other over his head, or down in front of him, or crouched beneath him, however the gods would ask him, spouted, like water from a spring, the wind ruffling it and then easing to give it back its flawless flowery symmetry, the snow that was falling over and softening the edges of the highest point on the Island. Approaching the snow-maker, Elena Mulé saw that the logs that he was beating against each other were really large bones, and she knew instinctively, though they appeared too big to be human bones (more like the thighbone of some fairytale giant), that these were the bones of his self-slaughtered ancestors.

When the man noticed that he was being watched, he stopped playing. He was so covered in bone-chalk that when he moved it fell off him in chunks as if he were a statue coming from inside a stone and when he blinked it dropped from his eyelids in sprinkles. He did not tell them his name, for he could not speak—his only language was the rhythm of his bones—but Elena Mulé assumed that this was Mongo Perez, the patriarch of the last surviving clan. He moved past them into the wooden cottage, leaving powdery footprints on the porch like the trail of a clumsy ghost. Elena Mulé and her bird were hungry, so they followed him in. They found Mongo Pérez in the pantry, seated on a stool with his head bowed, playing two needle-thin bones that could have belonged to no creature larger than a pigeon. The snow cloud spouting from these bones, as chunks of the old snow kept on flaking off him, from the ridges of his eyebrows and the curlicues of his ears, was almost invisible as it dewdropped on his bare feet. Mongo Pérez fed them sausages and rice with pig's milk. But the meal was so covered with chalk that they spit it back out. When Elena Mulé spoke to him, he answered by playing his pigeon bones, but she could not understand. By the end of their first week there they got used to tasting chalk in everything they ate, and they strained it from their rum and drinking water and pig's milk with lace hair nets that must have once belonged to the Spanish landowners' wives and daughters. They daily awoke to the beating of the larger bones and to a heavy snowfall as Mongo Pérez greeted the day on his jagged rock above the canyon. Every month, Mongo Pérez climbed down a gorge from the mountain peak using a sharp digging shovel to keep his balance, and two days afterward, from below, he brought back fresh bones to play stuffed into a sack strapped across one shoulder and a hog flank strapped across the other shoulder, and in three covered wooden buckets he brought pig's milk and rice and rum. His skin was washed and rosy as if the top layer had been peeled away. Without the snow dust his nose and chin were sharper and he looked much younger, for his hair and beard were black. Elena Mulé told him that she too wanted to bathe, since both she and her rooster were white with the ubiquitous chalk. Mongo Pérez took out some fresh pigeon bones from a leather pouch tied around his waist and he played them. Elena Mulé was learning his bone-language and she understood that they were welcome to follow him the next time he descended the canyon. Atila crooned approval, with the thin mountain air and all the snow-powder, he was beginning to lose his voice, and he could tell that Elena Mulé was getting fidgety. When he mounted her belly and sang to her at night, she would not sigh. Even Puccini failed him.