The Lazarus Rumba (36 page)

Mongo Pérez's father, always the Philistine, got drunk one night and slit his wrists. His brother drowned in the river. (But that was not a suicide, Mongo Pérez was sure; rather, he thought, that a current possessed by the duchess's four lustful daughters took a liking to the round mound of his ass plunging against the muddy bank and snared him away.)

After she had heard his story Elena Mulé began to care for Mongo Pérez with an almost maternal affection. She awoke before him and brewed cafecito and strained it with the lace hair net, and when it was too chilly, she made him wear a wool poncho over his cassock before he went out to play his large bones and converse with the gods. She did not watch him anymore when he took off his cassock to wash in the river, and when he grunted and howled atop the red mud, Elena Mulé swam faraway upstream so she did not have to hear. Atila was enlivened by all this, and one afternoon, awash with nostalgia, as if back in Holguín listening to a recording of Marioneta Alonso, he went to Elena Mulé while she was enjoying a siesta, the windows of the cottage bedroom wide open, the soft mountain breezes caressing her naked folds. Atila climbed on the mound of her belly; he tried to sing, but the lining of chalk in his throat and the thin mountain air in his lungs foiled him. In her sleep, Elena Mulé tossed her arm over him and pressed his head to her belly. Atila tried to nudge his way out but his madre-mistress's arm was heavy. Then he felt something that stopped him from trying to free himself. There were gentle eruptions coming from inside Elena Mulé's belly, not the chaotic rumblings of gas, flatulence in its journey, but a rhythmic toom-a-tum, toom-a-tum. Her heart! Her heart had fallen to her belly. Atila craned his neck upward to underneath her large left tit, grown even larger these days somehow, which was falling to the side of her like a pendulous papaya too heavy for its stem. Another heart! This one beating with a more confident thump-a-pom, thump-a-pom.

Could it be? She who had begun acting as if this deaf and mute man was her retarded son? What mother would take such advantage of her dumb child? Atila waited for the following morning, for if anything was happening, that's when it happened, under the cover of the snowfall.

He spent the night under the roof of a protruding boulder on a cliff-side across the way from where Mongo Pérez daily played his bones. Atila was raging, crowing clouds of snow-dust, that ascended and disappeared in the crisp night air—he imagined these his prayers, prayers that Elena Mulé would prove him wrong, prayers he knew that like the little clouds of his song would never reach heaven. At dawn, Mongo Pérez showed up exactly as the morning's shiny red helmet peaked up from under the horizon. He played his bones, and as a cloud of snow descended on the earth, a shadow, barely discernible in the blizzard, crawled under Mongo Pérez's open legs and limbered up under the cassock until she was sitting directly over his navel, her legs and arms wrapped around him, her head poking out in front of him out of the cassock's collar and thrown back—all the monumental weight of his madre-mistress suspended on the navel-thing! Mongo Pérez continued to play and they rocked to the beat of his drum-bones and the snow fell harder and harder till, as if they were suing for privacy, they became invisible.

That afternoon, Atila left the village of La Tiza, not bothering with farewells. When he would return, many years later, with the bearded liberators, both the village of La Tiza and Elena Mulé would be completely unrecognizable.

The Wall & the Prayer-Feathers

Had it not been for the voices, he would have lived his life out in the Sierra Maestra, would have known nothing of the bearded men who called themselves liberators and may have lived to be a hundred, much longer than any of his ancestors. But as soon as he left La Tiza, Atila began to hear them, first as a susurration, as if someone were whispering too far inside his head, then night after night, clearer, as if he were approaching them. So he retreated. Though to no avail, because at last he heard them so painfully in another bout of migraines that it seemed each word was cut, crafted, and polished into the horns of a wild goat and then rammed into his head. The voices had the honesty and despair of supplicants; and Atila was in no mood to listen, things had been going just fine without them.

The second day after he began his descent from Piquo Turquino, he came upon the finca owned by the blind peasant woman who bartered with Mongo Pérez for his food and milk and rum. He approached her bohío and was pleased to see, sunning at the far end of a field, another rooster. He was a fanciful creature with an inner coat of feathers, orange and red and gold, covered by an outer coat of rougher feathers, brown and black-brown (as if the inner coat were the fire of his spirit and the outer coat the armor nature had supplied—not for his benefit, but for the benefit of anyone who might cross his path, so that he might not be burned to cinders). When Atila came closer he could tell by the way the talons were shaped and by the ridges on the toes that this was a young rooster and a fighting rooster. When he saw Atila he stood and opened his wings to reveal all the flames inside him—so bright, Atila was blinded momentarily—and crowed obscenely. He then darted at Atila and with his beak pierced Atila's side, and backed away, his fire-wings opened even wider, and a bit confused now surely! When the fire-rooster darted again, he moved so quickly that he was able to dig a claw on the side before Atila pushed him off. Atila felt the blood on the underside of his right wing, and when he spread it open again to assume the fighting stance, he felt a stab that was almost a joy, for it brought him closer in touch with his long ancestry of fighting cocks. After twenty-one years of docility, he was finally fighting, and not against a pansy like Paco Fortunato (for though Atila loved him then and now, he could not consider such an effeminate beauty a fighter), but against an experienced fighting cock the color of embers covered by mud. Atila crowed an unheard-before note and he knew that his grandfathers and great-grandfathers were at that minute taking possession of his body. The fire-rooster began to circle slowly, his eyes fixed on Atila's eyes, though Atila knew that this was a trick, that in the fire-feathers there were thousands of other eyes more sensitive than the ones fixed in his head, that could spot any weakness, pick out any vulnerability, any opening for attack. How did Atila, raised as an aesthete, on Italian opera and Austrian violin concertos and the womanly verses of José Martí, purposefully against this gets-you-nowhere violence, know this? How did he too start seeing with his blue feathers, the battle-eyes of his long and doomed ancestry sprouting on his spread wings?

It was in his blood. How else?

The fire-rooster circled some more, a bit baffled now, for his opponent, who had seemed helpless at first, an easy half-round match, was now protecting himself like an expert, guessing all attack plans before he had any time at all to pursue them, staring back at his thousand eyes with a thousand and one. This cornflower-colored powderpuff who was half his size, if that, was going to ruin his siesta. He circled and circled and could find no way to attack the blue dwarf. The siesta was definitely postponed.

Atila guessed that in being still, gyrating on his left talon to the beat of his opponent's circle-dance, he had the advantage. His stillness revealed very little. While the more the fire-rooster moved in circles around him, the more Atila knew about him: the shape of the four balancing toes in his talons, the sharpest nail in the long middle toe, the one in the right talon sharper, which threw the kilter of his motion off for just a millisecond when he stepped on it, raising by an all but imperceptible tad his center of gravity; the fifth nail, the spur, sticking out, thornlike up the ridged leg, again the one in the right talon sharper, shaped more like a gutting knife than a thorn; the yellow down that covered the rest of his leg, thick as fur, erect, making his bony legs look as bulky as his muscular thighs; the left wing that drooped just a bit lower than the right one, perhaps because it had more mud-feathers than fire-feathers; the pouchy wattle that dangled to one side or the other of his neck when he stepped; and of course the beak, sharp as a fishing hook but crooked slightly to the right, for which the fire-rooster compensated by continuously tilting his head to the same side, straightening the beak, a motion that he was so accustomed to doing that it had become involuntary, like a twitch. All these things combined let Atila's thousand and one battle eyes know exactly when he had to make his move—just as the longest-nailed toe of the right talon was planted down, as the fire-rooster's center rose and most of his balance was on his spindly legs and not his huge thighs, as he depended more on his weaker left wing for support (his right wing too busy coordinating balance on the right side), as the combination of his fleshy wattle bouncing around to his right side and the twitch of his head exposed the left side of his neck like a babe left out for the wolves.

Too easy, Atila thought, and the thousand and one eyes of his ancestors agreed. But he let the fire-rooster circle some more, tire out a bit, lunging at him every now and then but not too threateningly, so that his circles would get smaller and smaller, and his motions, as he grew in assurance, sloppier and sloppier, till it seemed to Atila that the poor thing was drowning in a bucket of syrup, and as the right talon went down and the wattle dangled and the head twitched, Atila lunged, pinning his twice-as-big opponent with his beak sunk into the left side of his throat, so that the fire-rooster crowed less obscenely now, begging for a quick and merciful death. But it had been a long time since Atila had his feathers tangled with anyone else's. It had been a long time since he had heard a heart beating so fast. So long, that Atila grew fond of the fire-rooster, and keeping his beak dug into the flesh of his neck, pressing against the windpipe so that the fire-rooster knew that any sudden movement would mean his air would be cut off, Atila began to explore with his left talon under the fire-rooster's tail, which wasn't as stunning as Paco Fortunato's tail, but handsome nonetheless. The fire-rooster was shocked.
Death! Death now! ¡La muerte ahora mismito!
he seemed to crow.
¿Qué es esto? What are you doing? You pervert! You gran bugarrón!
Atila adjusted his position and continued to explore till the fire-rooster was too weak with shame to further protest and Atila lifted his beak and held the fire-rooster's neck with his right talon and mounted him. So is the Greek fabulist correct when he asserts that it is not only fine feathers that make a fine bird? Or, what does mud and fire on the outside feel like from the inside? Or, aren't we getting just un poquito too personal?

Suffice it to say, that though Atila never found another lover with as fine command of his tail as Paco Fortunato, after the encounter with the fire-rooster, Atila took to loving many others in his eleven-year descent down the mountainside. Unlike with Paco Fortunato, Atila felt no guilt. And as he did the first time, when he covered the fire-rooster's corpse with his mud-wing so that it seemed a fresh dirtmound of a grave, so he did with all the other defeated roosters, at such a voracious rate, three or four a day sometimes, that the guajiro chicken farmers banded together and raided the old Spanish cemeteries, disinterred the bodies of the colonialists, plied out the gold from their skulls, melted it all together till they had molded a ball of gold three feet high, and offered it as a reward for the head of the wolfish dwarf cock with the Varadero-blues tail who was raping and murdering their finest stud roosters.

Atila escaped by heading westward on the mountain range, to a rockier and less inhabited region. For many days he did not eat, and when his hunger towered over him, he let go of his desire for other roosters and the thousand and one eyes of his ancestors grew blind again and the voices of his omnipresent migraine became the leathery lash tongues of two groups whipping each other like an irascible Greek chorus turned against itself. Finally, one of the arguing sides caught his attention and he was lifted from his place on the mountain to a point higher than the village of La Tiza, though he well knew that the village of La Tiza was the highest point on the Island. He saw a human mouth toothless and with many many tongues. He placed the voices. The ghosts of all the suicides. And through them Atila saw the Island as it was—as if he were flying over it—a one-eyed crocodile wearing a dress, and he saw the horny skin of the crocodile studded with rubies and black sapphires and diamonds, as if some brave soul had dared to seduce the crocodile and lulled her to sleep and while she slept, sewn with a sickle-shaped needle these jewels into her tough skin, into her dress made of mountain rock and even into her gargantuan see-all eye. The jewels, the voices said, are the great cities of the Island as they will be when you rule over them, and all the waters that wash her will be as beautiful and as varicolored as your tail. We will be your army of sirens, the voices went on, we will help you seduce her first, and later protect her by luring any invaders to her rockiest and most perilous shores. Atila had not said no, had not thought no, but simply doubted that he could ever reign over this great beast when the voices showed him a drastic alternative vision. The crocodile was on her back being devoured by a battalion of scavenger beetles—steel beetles that puffed steam flew in from the north and made a sound like quishy-washy when they chewed, and oak-colored beetles that swam in from the east and used their ashen wings as sails. The waters around the crocodile were brown, yellow, and crimson from her spilling insides. Atila fell back to the earth and the siren-suicides never tempted him again.

There would be others of better use to them.

Instead, the voices of the other side of the dueling chorus captured his attention. These were lonely, selfish, and less ambitious voices and they did not pray for him to save the Island from the treachery of history, but for far simpler things: one, an eighty-nine-year-old voice, prayed that the unbearable solitude of her old age be eased, either by death or by bearing now the children she had never borne, for there was time, she came from a sturdy line of centenarians so she could at least see her children into early manhood; another voice, just as old, prayed that her too-teeming womb would dry (wasn't it time already), there were always too many mouths to feed, and she could not stand it when her ancient but randy husband told the elder son at the time of a new birth, no matter how old the boy was, fifteen or eleven or even nine once, that he could not afford to feed him anymore, that he would have to go into the world and make do on his own, then a little pat on the ass and a
vaya-con-Dios
and she would never see her son again, for boys like trouble as much as trouble likes them. A guajiro prayed for mild weather with a little more rain so that the sugarcane and garbanzo bean harvest be plentiful, even though the land was not his; the finquero who owned that land was traveling to the capital for perhaps his last time, because he had grown so obese that it took four of his strongest servants to wheel him around in an ornately carved dolly-cart from place to place, and he prayed for a famine of such proportions that there would be no food left on the Island, and the livestock would starve and all temptations vanish so he would dwindle down to normal size. One mother prayed for the death of her son, who had fallen into evil ways with hogs and goats and other men, she prayed that his insides be stricken down with some black plague, that his outside be scattered with welts and lesions, so painful and humiliating that on his deathbed he may repent and not perish everlasting; another mother prayed that her son, who had already been reborn once, be reborn again—for a thief-surgeon from the capital had kidnapped him and drugged him and cut into him and stolen one of his lungs—even if she was to forget who he was. This last prayer Atila heard after spending more than a decade in the rocky wilderness. He had survived by drinking from hidden fountains that trickled like pinpricks from the surface of the rough-skinned land, by eating baby rattlers, attacking the nest when the mother had wandered to forage for her newborns, and eating also the tenderized rat meat that the mother brought back and coughed up and left behind in her desolation; sometimes the mother attacked him and Atila opened his wings and summoned again the thousand and one eyes of his ancestors, and as he had defeated the many stud roosters before, he defeated the mother rattler, though he did not even bother to mount her before he sliced off her head with his right spur. So it was amidst all these dead mothers and their devoured offspring that he heard this last prayer of a twice-grieving mother; it was the only prayer he had heard in all his time in the wild that deemed a response. He moved away from the wilderness northward, to the site of his fallen temple.