The Lazarus Rumba (37 page)

When he reached the purlieus of the town of Bayamo, he saw a radiant rainbow dust cloud rising from the earth. The nimbus changed colors as it ascended into the brighter light and loomed in shades of gold, vermillion, and avocado, lined with a metallic blue, and then unwove itself until it was unseen. Atila followed it until he stood atop a hill overlooking the eastern wall of the fallen temple. There were kiosks set up in the dirt ground all around the wall, on the inner side and the outer side, so that it looked like a bazaar. A horde of townspeople circled and circled the wall as if they were modeling for a painting of one of Dante's infernal levels, and once in a while a Condemned One would be motivated to stop at a kiosk and haggle with the kiosk owner, and if a transaction was agreed upon, the Condemned One would pull out gold coins or green yanqui dollars (it was the only two types of money the kiosk owners seemed to accept), and he would be handed a heavy parchment sheet and a blue feather, its point dipped in red ink. The Condemned One would then pass through the kiosk, in the front and out the back, and kneel in front of the eastern wall. Using his lap as a countertop, the Condemned One would scribble a prayer on the parchment and roll it up around the feather and insert it into a cranny of the wall. To exit he would have to pay another fee to the kiosk owner. Every hour or two, when his allotted portion of the wall was too stuffed with rolled parchment, so that there was no little crevice left to insert even the briefest of prayers, the kiosk owner would pull out all the rolls and neatly pile them and set them on fire. From these bonfires rose the kaleidoscopic cloud Atila saw.

He would later learn that after the destruction of the temple the city government had taken possession of the property on which the wall stood, and after its own attempts at dismantling it proved futile—at one point hiring a team of yanqui engineers, that with their delicate gauges (a theodolite so modern that it could measure the angle of a cricket's fiddle to the exact degree from over a mile away) and with their most sensitive measuring machines came to know the wall better than they knew the contours of their own wives, but still could not knock it down, not even with a modern form of silent explosives at that time being perfected by exiled German scientists in American universities—the city settled on a more inventive way to deal with the ineradicable reminder of its people's madness. It convinced the monsignor of the local parish to preach in front of it and proclaim that like the Jews have theirs now we have ours, our own wailing wall, just that it is an eastern wall and not a western one, but that due to the hurricanes this is more proper for a people of the tropics and that the Lord works in proper ways. Folks from every city and town of the eastern province made pilgrimages to relieve themselves of their greatest fears and sorrows; even the tyrant then in power in the capital made a pilgrimage to the site, hand in hand, like a newlywed couple, with the cardinal of Havana, who was arthritic and could not kneel by the wall so he laid himself face down in front of it and stayed there for so long that the tyrant joked that His Excellency's soul had just been granted a promotion.

The city government had spent a lot of money trying to tear the wall down—just on hiring the yanqui engineers and their frizzy-haired German scientists it had squandered two years of its budget—so now it needed to make some of it back. It hired some of its favorite merchants and rented them pieces of the wall where they could set up their kiosks, so now when a pilgrim wished to make a prayer he had to pay a fee, and of course his own paper and ink were no good anymore, for the acid from these, he was told, ate away at the sacred wall. Instead, the kiosk owners sold the pilgrims a specially treated parchment and the blue feather as a pen (which was in honor of the miraculous rooster the temple had been built for) and the red ink in honor of the blood spilled during the riot that destroyed the temple. The monsignor of the local parish vehemently endorsed this plan, saying that the prayer-fee was no different than the traditional tithe. For his part, he got a kickback for the new tower being added to the Catholic cathedral. For their part, the merchants got to keep up to twenty percent of the fees they collected.

Atila learned all of this and more later, that the color of the iridescent cloud he had followed to his spot atop the hill came from the burning feathers inside the prayer parchments, for the city could not find the appropriate blue feathers for their staged ritual on any fowl, so they bought a paint factory in a nearby town and dyed thousands of hen and rooster feathers, and when these burned they revealed themselves and sent up clouds of their true colors, lined with their false coat of blue. All this Atila learned later. As was true of him throughout his life, there atop the hill he did not think much before he acted, but let whatever song was surging in him guide him. And there atop the hill, Atila sang with his old voice for the first time since he had performed Puccini in the only ceremony in the brief history of the limestone temple. This time it was nothing as exalting as
Suor Angelica
that he sang. This time his song welled from another source altogether. It was a basso cantante aria, and it rumbled from within him, blasting away at the layers of chalkstone lining his throat so that the first few notes were spit out with a cloud of white dust. He did not recognize it at first, this not a work he knew well, not one of Elena Mulé's favorite operas, too dark for her tastes. It was from Arrigo Boito's
Mefistofele.

There atop the hill was the saint returned as demon. When the pilgrims heard his voice they cowered and put their hands over their heads as if the three thrones of the Almighty were collapsing. The kiosk owners began to take down their tents and collect their wares. But the rumblings they heard were not from paradise, and Atila's voice was not meant to frighten them at all. It bypassed them, ignoring their fearful poses (now perfect for that painting they seemed to be modeling for) and as if blown by a vengeful hurricane wind headed for the eastern wall. In every crevice where there had once been stuffed a supplication the voice dug in, through every cranny a pleading pilgrim's breath had passed the voice squeezed by, and in every groove a lamenter's tears had sculpted the voice puddled. With his satanic verses Atila surrounded and strung up the wall and he did with it what six teams of Holstein oxen would not, what eight hurricanes did not, what thirty yanqui engineers and twelve German scientists could not, what a million's million prayers cared not, and what the cardinal of Havana dared not, he groaned a note six scales too low for the left-wardest piano key and then shrieked another six scales too high for the rightwardest so that they headed in a barrel dance for their target, and the eastern wall came tumbling down.

Father Jacinto's Great War of the Americas

There was a great carnival, a street fiesta, after the crumbling of the eastern wall. The same merchants who had been appointed the sacred gatekeepers of the prayer ritual set up the same kiosks that had served as portable temples around the mound of limestone rubble that had once been the same sacred eastern wall, and instead of selling parchment and blue feathers and red ink, they sold rum and pork rinds and corn frituritas and two or three of them put their kiosks together and draped heavy canvases over them and set up a funhouse, into which no children were permitted, for the fun was provided by a ring of belly dancers driven in from gypsy-town every evening. The fiesta lasted six days. More prayers were answered in those six days than in the twelve plus years the eastern wall had stood.

In the moonlight of the last night, late, after the line at the entrance to the funhouse had dwindled to three old drunks who frantically searched their every pocket, pulling out coins wrapped in lint, to see if together, all three of them could gather enough money to buy one of the dancers for a minute each, and most of the other kiosks had been dismantled, Atila, who had been pacing up and down the mound of limestone rubble, because the pieces of stone, still vibrating with the force of their fall a week before, were warm, and the heat eased his arthritic talon-joints, saw a naked boy, his whole body caked in fresh mud, peeking into the funhouse through a tear in the canvas and clumsily stroking himself, unable to manage the burgeoning heft of his thing. Atila crowed softly and the boy jumped, the fright deflating him a little, giving him more control of the task at hand. When he saw Atila, he seemed relieved that it was only a rooster and pulled himself away from the peepshow, and he snapped his fingers calling after the bird and began to stroke again. His fingernails were sharp and as long as Atila's talons and he was careful not to scrape himself, using only the palm of his hand, cupped around his penis as if it were a flightless bird. The mud on his hair and on his face was beginning to dry and crack and the boy seemed barely able to open his eyes and his mouth, through which he breathed, for his nostrils were clogged with earth. Atila crowed a bit louder, directing it at the boy, and the dried mud on the boy's face fell away in chunks. As if aroused by this, his burden eased, the boy seemed to be lifted by a little wind and was relieved. “Ay, gallito, gallito, mío,” he said. “Are you the one who awoke me last week with your monstrous song? What a voice, gallito. It must have penetrated the very core of the earth.” He laid face up on the ground, frothing the fluid on his belly, and stared at the moon and the stars, which after a while seemed to frighten him, for he turned on his belly and, with his face dug in the dirt, he fell asleep.

The following morning the boy awoke and shielded his eyes and raged at the sunlight. He began to dig at the earth with his long nails, and in less than a few minutes he had dug a hole big enough to bury himself. Atila dug him out, but the boy swung at him. Atila had never fought an opponent this large, who although still a youth, was five or six times the size of the largest rattlesnake. He swung at Atila again, obviously furious that he had been unearthed, and this time dug into him with his nails, immediately drawing blood. Atila opened his wings and the wild boy backed off, as if the light of a thousand and one more suns were upon him, then he came at Atila blindly, with his head bent low like a bull, so that Atila was easily able to scoot out of the way and take a swipe at his rump as he passed. The wild boy yelped and fell to his knees and began to dig himself another hole. Atila jumped on his back and with his right talon on the boy's neck and his left talon clutching at his curls forced his head back so that the boy's face was hit directly by the sunlight and when his eyes widened, as if in surrender, Atila saw that they were so carbon-black that he could not find the pupil and that they were lined with a thread-thin strip of violet. Atila knew this boy who suddenly lost all his wildness as his limbs went flaccid. Atila laid him in the first hole he had dug until nightfall and then he dragged him to a nearby tributary of the River Cauto and washed the wound on his buttcheek and all the earth off him, and then with the boy's long brown curls entwined three times around his beak, Atila dragged him to a nearby grotto and waited for the boy to awake.

A one-eyed Jesuit named Jacinto de la Serna walked three miles from the seminary every day to wash in the crisp waters of the tributary, looked all around twice, gyrating his head to and fro, so as to gauge for any possible intrusion, before he shed his robes and his sandals and his undershirt and underpants and jumped in, wearing just the black patch over his left eye, a golden medallion of the Virgin of Guadeloupe and a chunk of coconut-flesh soap tied by a horsehair rope around his neck. Father Jacinto was a professor of archeology and social science at the Belén College in the capital and was ending a two-year sabbatical with a visit to his mother in Manzanillo. During his sabbatical he had visited as a guest and a scholar at the Vatican, had been to la Scala, had gone to Paris, and had spent time with the republican rebels in northern Spain, where he had lost his left eye when their squad was ambushed one morning by Francoist troops. That week he had been invited to spend time with an exiled republican colonel—the war now all but lost—who dwelled in a finca near Bayamo, and as he washed in the river he was already planning a return to the capital. He was joyful for the first time since he had left Spain weeks before, and he sang hymns to the almighty Lord in thanksgiving for sparing his life. He was so enraptured with his own voice, that at first he did not hear the child's scream echoing from a cavern not too far away, and when he did—because he had been washing just above the waterline, just below his potbelly, rubbing vigorously and religiously there with the coconut flesh—he thought the child's scream was directed at him, that he was signaling him out to his friends for ridicule, so Father Jacinto headed out of the water and grabbed his bundle of clothes and threw them on, his body still soapy and the coconut soap forgotten and swallowed by the rivercurrent. Father Jacinto was so discomfited that it wasn't till he was more than a hundred meters from the river that he realized that the child's screams were not at all concerned with him. He turned back, astonished by the endurance of the child's lungs—he had not paused for breath since he had begun to scream. Father Jacinto tracked the cry to a cavern upstream. He ran, not giving much thought to what was making the child scream so. He saw a naked boy on his knees and digging furiously at the gravelly dirt within the cavern. Just as Father Jacinto was to go to him, he felt something dig into his lower leg and his first thought was that he had stepped on a bear trap, then he felt it on his other leg, and glanced down and saw the blue ruffle underneath his robe. There was a wild rabid rooster on the loose. He kicked the rooster away and picked up a heavy stone and threw it, missing the rooster by quite a margin. He stepped back out of the cavern to tend his wounds and the boy's screams became less piercing—perhaps because he knew help had arrived. Then his screams stopped altogether and were replaced by a voice more beautiful than any Father Jacinto had heard at la Scala, a melancholy melody that reminded him of Mozart's darkest late pieces. Not daring to enter the cavern by the same entrance, he climbed along one of the side walls, his leather sandals so useless for traction on the slippery rocks that he had to discard them, till he reached a nook above with a hole that opened into the main cove.