The Lazarus Rumba (35 page)

They followed Mongo Pérez down to the river the next time and they bathed, washing away the chalk that tried to seep into their bodies, underneath their nails and in through their nostrils and every other available orifice. Atila gargled the chilly water. When Mongo Pérez undid his peasant's cassock and stripped, Atila heard Elena Mulé sigh as he had not heard her sigh in a long while, since before the building of the limestone temple. He could see why, for though a bit envious, even he was impressed with the sight, and he thought longingly of his murdered lover. From all his bone-playing, Mongo Pérez had the shoulders and arms of an olympian, but Atila was sure that this was not what Elena Mulé was whimpering about like a virgin. Out of Mongo Perez's navel grew a phallus as thick and long as the bones he played each morning, and when he got into the river and washed it, the blood coursed through it as if it were borrowing the force of the rivercurrent and the many veins that twirled around it bulged with vigor and turned the shades of Atila's feathers against the erubescent skin and the thing majestically stood. After he had washed himself of the snow dust he rolled himself on the riverbank and turned bottoms up and went at the fresh fire-colored mud as if it were a living thing; then, draggled and naked, he took his digging shovel, his sack, and his waist pouch and vanished from their sight, returning with the bones, the hog flank, rice, rum, and milk, and he washed himself anew and put back on his cassock.

The next time they went down to the river, Elena Mulé followed him after he had spent himself on the rivermud. Having already adapted to the mountain terrain, she was able to keep close behind. He crossed a dense cane forest and descended further down the mountain through a coffee field, till he came to wide cirque in a valley of plantain trees. His monumental misplaced phallus again became aroused and he made love to the deep black mountain-mud. The walls of the hollow heard and they too cried. He then took his shovel and dug out from the very spot a pile of bones of various sizes, which he washed in a nearby pool. The larger bones he put into the sack, the smaller ones in the leather waist pouch. At a bohío on the way up he bartered with a peasant woman, giving her some of the bones in exchange for food and buckets of milk and rum. She was haggard, bent over, and blind, so she felt the bones with her hand for their quality and nodded her head in approval; then she felt his navel-organ and marveled at its shape and location as if she had never felt it before. Mongo Pérez let her, but he did not become aroused. Irritated at this, the peasant woman pushed him away and called him a marica. Mongo Pérez laughed and waved his good-byes. The peasant woman happily played her newly acquired bones on his departure—but when she played, it did not snow.

In half a year's time Elena Mulé learned the language of the smaller bones (which Mongo Pérez explained to her were not pigeon bones, but phalanges of the unborn from the bone-hollows of certain female suicides) well enough that she could communicate with Mongo Pérez on a basic level. In this way, every afternoon, seated out in the porch of the cottage, after he had finished making snow for the gods, he recounted to her the story of his family, the last clan in the village of La Tiza. Mongo Pérez was not the patriarch. He was the eldest born and named after his father. By the time of his birth, the Spanish landowners had long ago been frightened away and most of the villagers, except for a few ancient ones, had done themselves in, so that the only reproductive couple left in La Tiza was his parents. Even so, when his mother saw the location of his organ, growing from his navel like a misplaced hog's tail, she wanted to bury him, for she was sure it was a sign of evil things to come. His father, however, would not allow his firstborn to be murdered so. “No me importa de donde carajo le crece la pinga. All the better, he won't even have to pull down his pants this way!” They bore three more children, a boy first, with his organ growing from the proper place, because the mother had murmured so many rosaries to the Virgin of Cobre, who saw to it that there would be no confusions this time, and then two girls. During the last birth in the history of La Tiza, his mother died. She was buried with all of the other villagers in the distant valley of plantains, for during the time of the Spanish landowners the peasants were not allowed to bury their own on the land they tilled. The Spaniards thought it would poison the land. Since then, the burial ground had remained the same.

So that their clan would not perish, Mongo Pérez's father forced him to wed his younger sister and his brother his other sister, but the brothers could not bring themselves to lie with their own—Mongo Pérez because he was embarrassed by his deformity and his brother because he had never wanted to lie with
any
woman—so they went down the gorge to the river and taught each other how to rid themselves of their desires in the red mud. Proclaiming in front of the elders that he was just doing it to prevent the death of their village, the father drank a pint of cane rum and slept with his two daughters and showed his sons the bloody sheets to let them know that there was nothing to fear; but still the brothers disobeyed and they would not take their sisters as wives, preferring their own company and the moist warmth of the red earth.

In La Tiza, the generations of villagers, back to the times of the Spanish colonialists, have left their most significant mark on this world by the way they decide to leave it. There are the traditional ways (the ways of the world below La Tiza)—hanging, slit wrists in a tepid tub, heavy boulders fastened around the ankles and into the rivercurrent, the dive into the gorge, and, claro, the rusty musket with the butt-end pressed tightly by the knees and the other end brushing the palate—but Tizonians considered these methods vulgar and demeaning. There were, they knew, if not better, more inventive ways to go. The finale is after all what they, the living, most remember. Suicide is often a noble act, even when done wrong; but when done right, it is graceful and courageous, and it was, for the villagers of La Tiza, the purest art.

A campesino, before the turn of the century, decided to undo himself by swallowing mango pits till he burst open. He began with tiny round lollipop mangoes and progressed to the oval king mangoes. It took him six weeks and he swallowed one hundred and forty-two mango pits before his digestive cañal popped open like an overstuffed sausage spilling all its poisons into his middle cavity. Out of his grave, from his fertilizing tripes, there grew sixteen different varieties of mango trees, whose fruit was served as a delicacy to the Spanish landowners of the following generation.

A woman, who was a divorcee and had moved to La Tiza after her second marriage, thought that by eating the brains of rats, surely a venomous thing, she would put herself to everlasting rest. Pero al contrario, the more she caught the rats in her giant traps and carefully peeled back the skin and chiseled open the breadcrust skulls and ate their brains, the less she slept and the more enthused she became with the adventure of life (and the less she cared about the shame of having been known by more than one man), scurrying up on the thatch of her bohío and building there a nest. One midnight, she was attacked and gnawed to death by a horde of rodents who did not want their brains eaten. It is said that in the end, the woman saw the logic of her death plan and rejoiced at being chewed to death by her brethren. Before she was buried, the Spanish landowners had all her teeth removed, which were not human, but iron-hard like a rat's, and many men wore them on gold chains as amulets so that their wives would never leave them.

A cane cutter, at about the time the landowners were starting to flee La Tiza because of the bone-dust on their porches, shaved all of the hair off his body with the sharp blade of his machete, and went naked into the cane fields, exposed to the torrid sun and to the dagger leaves of the cane stalks that pricked at him like fresh regrets and drew blood. He crossed six different fields before he ran out of blood and fell dead, one of his eyes poked out, the left side of his sac cleanly sliced open so that his testicle hung out like a rosy quail's egg on a string, and his torso lanced and pierced like a dummy after bayonet practice. Others, who later mimicked this suicide virtuoso, never made it past the second cane field.

The peasant workers were not the only ones to pursue, and at times perfect, the art of suicide; many in the landowning families, especially the women, were also quite talented.

The Duchess Josefina, the matriarch of the last landowning family to flee La Tiza, had grown so in love with a campesino boy that she could not bear the thought of leaving La Tiza back to the cold and arid mountains of Asturias. One evening, she wrapped herself in the six cashmere Bihar carpets that her husband had given her as a gift from his trips to the East and ordered the boy to beat the bundle with a churn paddle till it stopped moving. The boy was glad to oblige, since she had ordered him to do so many things that he enjoyed far less. The duchess thus died keeping true to the laws that royal blood must not be spilt to commingle with the unclean earth.

Her four daughters, whom the campesino boy fantasized about when the duchess made him crouch and ordered him to tickle there with his tongue, are the most famous suicide case in the rumbas that recount the stories of this village. They were referred to later as the bidet suicides, for their deaths were inspired by that French porcelain gift to the art of cleanliness that the user straddles like a midget pony to bathe her genitalia and her rump. Nearby the duchess's cottage there was a hot spring that was tapped as a water source for the bidet in her bathroom. The water had to sit and cool in a reservoir under the house for its natural temperature would surely scald the softer parts. The day each of her daughters began to bleed in the manner of women the duchess took each into her bathroom and showed her how to use the bidet and told her in a harsh tone that for the time she bled she must use the bidet three times a day, in the morning, after the siesta, and before bedtime, this way she would remain clean, and the smell of the serpent devils (for this is what the blood was, a reminder of and punishment for the sin of the first woman) would be kept at bay.

What terror followed by what joy each child must have felt!—for when the mother turned on the bidet, the warm jet of water that shot out of the brass upside-down faucet at the base of the basin was the temperature of what the child had always imagined a man's flesh to be (un poquito warmer than theirs), and as it cleaned out her insides and her mother handed her the rose-perfumed soap to wash down there, just like this three times a day, the child felt such giddy joy that it did seem probable that what her mother said was true, that she was washing away all the sins of all the women of this world back to the very first. The oldest girl washed five and six times a day, running by her mother and saying that she had to wash again because she was so afraid of the serpent, and the duchess who had straddled that bidet thousands of times and never once felt a tickle, smiled approvingly because the lesson had been well learned.

As each came of age, the second and third child also learned the ritual of the bidet, and soon also proclaimed a great fear of the serpent. The three older sisters so giggled and whispered around their youngest innocent sister, who would not feel these pleasures for three or four years, that she needled them to know what was so funny, and they answered, que nada, just that we're becoming women now, only that. And so much they loved to wash on the bidet, that they began to slaughter newborn piglets behind their father's back and use the blood to stain their panties to prove to their mother that, yes, they were bleeding again, even though it was only two weeks since the last time. The youngest sister soon caught on and she too stained her panties and experienced the pleasure of the bidet a whole year before she bled for real. It became so hectic in her bathroom that the duchess had her husband buy from the European manufacturer four more bidets for her house, one for each of her daughters.

On the day the duchess was buried, Bihar carpets and all, the daughters decided that she had died because they had lied to her, and the older one convinced them they should now do their rosaries and beg forgiveness of her and of all the women that had ever died for their sins. … And join them. They traced the source of the warm man-hot bidet water to a natural spring not far from their father's cottage. Intermittently, steam and misty water shot out from the geysers twenty and thirty feet in the air. They chose a group of four geysers where the water shot out the farthest. They rid themselves of their heavy mourning garments and while the geysers slept, they crouched over them as they did over their bidets, and said a prayer for the soul of their mamacita. When the steam and hot water shot out, from all four geysers at once, as if a river of fire water were rushing by right beneath them, the girls did not think of the duchess, nor of their sins, nor of the temperature of a man's flesh, nor of each other, nor of their homeland, which not even the oldest remembered. When the hissing gush of water the temperature of the devil's flesh hit their exposed parts, and they felt for a second a terrible pleasure that made them all at once one with the first woman, they all thought of how helpless a piglet feels before you slice its throat and collect its blood, and that's what they did, they shrilled like slaughtered piglets. A doctor who performed the autopsies in a hospital in Santiago de Cuba wrote down in his report that when he sliced open their torsos there was nothing more he could do, for their insides all were melted, and he could not tell for sure which organ was the stomach, which the pancreas, which the kidneys, which the lungs, which the liver, which the heart.

Mongo Pérez's sisters dreamed up their deaths inspired by the man who crossed the cane fields. They would go sweeter than the duchess's daughters. They hunted the cane forest for the thickest and pulpiest stalk. They cut it down and sharpened each end like a spear. One morning, while their father and brothers were out in the fields, they went to his bed and sat spread-eagled on diagonally opposite ends and placed the canespear, which they had soaked in coconut oil, between them. They opened their legs wider and scooted nearer to each other till the soft soles of their feet were touching and each end of the cane-spear began to enter them where their father had entered them. They pushed closer together till they could reach out and clutch hands and the force of the spear entering them passed beyond pleasure and they grimaced. They swayed, their soft backs bending like young palms in a whirlwind. And then, as if they had decided beforehand the exact time they would do it, the number to to's to the number of fro's they simultaneously pushed themselves into each other, so that their bellies slapped and their lips locked and the spear had split them each in two and once again their blood was on their father's sheets.