The Lazarus Rumba (4 page)

With no other option, seemingly satisfied, the cook behaved as if the bright yellow walls had never been stained with his daughter's blood, and doña Adela was never again disturbed from her long Tuesday siesta, her patience long as Penelope's, till the day she approached Father Gonzalo and put her lips to his ears and asked him, befuddled as a three-year-old: “What kind of a God takes a man from his wife and lets him die in the bed of his whore?”

God, chided for His silence, answers Father Gonzalo.

When?

When He sees fit, when His servant is least in the mood for answers, most caught in the horridness of domesticity—in those crusty-eyed moments between dreams and the morning rays filtering through the mosquitero—there God is, too clever to come in dreams (that is only the stuff of stories), where his servant may defend himself with all the skill and wile of the beastly unconscious—for how often is He called to ease suffering, and He comes instead to prove that gouty joints are a mere inconvenience, a heresy, an affront to His imagination to say: “I am now at the worst. I am replete with morbid humors.” For whosoever can mouth those words, the worst is yet to come.

Pero vaya, at least He answers. Digan lo que digan, He always returns His calls. Just that He is working in a different time scheme, and sometimes His servant forgets this, and unwarrantedly accuses Him of an unholy silence. His servant could not be more wrong. He is the chatteriest god there ever was. All His servant has to do is open His Book and read the stories therein: the Lord answers!

He starts and ends with His most finished law, a law that no god before him dared conceive (much less put into practice), a law so revolutionary that it is the first law mock-revolutionaries cast aside. Did not Fidel, almost from the morning he rode into the capital—(Is that the Virgin on his breast? The glow of the tyrant on his cheeks?)—did not he cast it aside almost immediately?

God, chided for His silence, answers Father Gonzalo:

Every man's soul is his own, to it he answers before he answers to his Lord, so it must be; in his own heart he must fashion a likeness of that silent greatness. So it must be. Else the Lord go mad and the world be left Fatherless. What if a man begot twenty children and had to answer, under law, for each and all of their wrongs, and what if the children each begot twenty more and the man had to answer, under law, for all the wrongs of his children's children and, in time, for those of his children's children's children? Would there be any escape from damnation for this poor soul burdened by all his wrongful brood? So is the fate of your wretched Lord. Think of all My children, think of the awful generations of My brood. I am sick. Worse in being worshiped than you in worshiping. I can command the prayer's knee, but not that selfish heart that feels nothing beyond its own wringing, that with a set of woeful susurrations thinks he can, like a lazy tenant, transfer over the caring of his house to Me. Am I a handyman? Is that what your Lord has become: someone to tighten every leaky tearduct, unstop every clogged heart, straighten every crossed nerve, dig up every weed in the garden of your dreams, plug up every hole in the flesh of those houses I gave you, free of charge, a gift? And am I to be blamed when that house goes up in flames or is eaten by termites through your own negligence? No other creature is as ungrateful as My own children. And you have the gall to wonder why I so often go silent. Silence is my resting place. The only place in My own world where I find peace.

I am sick of this. Your house is your own. See to it, damn it!

On those days, Father Gonzalo listened to God cuss in a voice sophisticated and savage, understood and not understood as the cry of birds, not in his dreams (for as a sleeper he was almost dreamless) but during the course of the wakeful day; it passed through the holes of his tattered mosquitero as he rejoiced at the end of another sleepless night, wandered out from the sacristy as he most absently said morning Mass, buzzed along with the mosquitoes and black flies as he walked to the rectory to have his breakfast, creeped into his flesh when Anita did him spiders, burned at the tip of his one daily cigarette as he performed his egestions, flicked ashes at the urgings in his loins, cut in slivers of light through the brim of his straw hat as he daily visited the many in the parish who sought condolence, cuddled with him at the siesta hour, hissed from behind the voices of the few who came to afternoon confession, stewed in the okra broth Anita prepared for dinner, and then after dusk, just when Father Gonzalo's joints began their most honest ache, God abandoned him. He cursed no more. He went silent.

Not that He was not there, Father Gonzalo knew that God was always there, just that sometimes, like one in a dreamless sleep, or one who is replete with words but will not mouth them, He says nothing.

In the worst of his bedtime hours, when no position can bring comfort to his flaring joints, Father Gonzalo wonders if God dreams during the day, and if he, as his minister, somehow manages, unwittingly, to infiltrate himself into all of God's tempestuous nightmares.

What kind of God suffers more than those who pray to Him?

On a September afternoon when the pelican skies threatened to disgorge themselves, doña Adela waited for her dotard husband on the rickety porchswing. He appeared an hour before dusk.

“I am going to the sea—”

“The sea will swallow you today!” his wife said.

Teodoro's pearly eyes jumped from their sockets, the left one opening as wide as the right one for the first time since the heart attack, and he stared at her as if he were conscious of her for the first time since he had felt the imminence of his death.

“Good, then let there be no mourning!”

With that, he lifted his hat and departed barefoot into the lightning-bleached twilight. Doña Adela lost no time, she grabbed her daughter, suited her in her rubber mango-yellow raincoat and black galoshes and instructed her to grab the plastic bag with her father's new unused shoes, bought three sizes too big because his feet were so swollen.

“Ya basta,” doña Adela said, as she threw on a raincoat the color of guava flesh. “I've lost all patience. Not a good thing, mijita, but that's the way it is. Vamos.”

The sea, as they both knew, as the rubied tongues had it all over town, was not his destination, though the two-tiered house whose sun-bleached porchsteps Teodoro had stained with his muddied feet was olive, like the sea often is on blustery afternoons. The old woman (la Blanquita's mother) was sitting out on the white-railed veranda, rocking in her chair, oblivious to the rain that had already begun to slant its way in and slap at her cheeks. She wore a lavender dress that came down to her black lace anklets and a gray woolen shawl, which she held tightly wrapped around her shoulders. Her skin was wrinkled and as offensively white as her daughter's. She squinted her clear eyes at the two figures standing out in the rain.

“Qué bueno, you have come, maybe you can talk some sense into her. She has hidden your sister in the attic. The old man has left one daughter to come and die with the other one and Renata hides her from it. As if death were such a bad thing! Qué bueno, you have come, now he can die with the whole family together, two wives, two daughters. Yo no me meto, I'll stay out here in the storm. I am old, I have seen enough people die.”

Doña Adela let the raindrops pelt her face. She welcomed them, a drumbeat to the fury in her: “Where is my husband?”

“Ay, Alicia, que bella sigues, I have not seen you in such a long time. Why don't you ever come by alone, without him, to see your sister? Because you are going to lose a father does not mean that you will lose your sister. You have a most beautiful daughter, señora. I remember you once were beautiful too. … Así son las cosas de la vida, you stole him from her then, now she steals him from you. Who's to say what's better?”

“Your daughter is a whore! Where is my husband?”

“No, no, chica, the whores are others. If you knew how my poor Renata suffers. I will tell you about the whores if you want me to (many wicked tongues speak into this shriveled ear), but not my daughter, not my poor daughter. She too suffers like an abandoned wife. In another world maybe you would have been friends, partners against him, for that man, handsome as he is (even now, even after all these years—what god makes women wither and men bloom in their old age?), is a demon, a beautiful demon, but a demon nonetheless.”

Doña Adela grabbed her daughter's hand and followed her husband's muddy footsteps up the sun-bleached porchsteps and through the front door of the house.

“Come, mijita,” she said, “and you will see what a desgraciado you have for a father.”

“Second floor, first door on your right,” the old woman called to them, then she tightened her shawl around her and murmured to herself: “Yo no, yo me quedo aquí. I don't care how wet I get. This is one story I do not want to know.”

Doña Adela hurled that first door open with a violence that startled her more than it did the petite woman in the light blue peignoir sitting on the edge of the iron and brass bed where Teodoro was lying, except for the bareness of his feet (the toes like black grapes), fully dressed. He stirred and raised his head: “Alicia … Adela, my pink and yellow sunflowers. How did you get so wet? Have you been to the sea? Come, come, sit by me on this side, hold my other hand. Don't fight, por favor, don't fight, for me, for the father of your daughters.”

Renata la Blanquita did not move, her eyes fixed on the wife whose life she had in so many prayers cursed. Her skin was like a smoked glass through which doña Adela imagined she could see the gross fist of her heart, and when she spoke her voice fluttered like a trapped moth: “He always talks to me about you and your daughter. I hate when he does that. But I never once let him know. Es un hombre bueno.”

Doña Adela said nothing as she moved towards the bed and began to lift her husband up. When Renata resisted, holding him down, saying that this bed is where he wanted to die, Teodoro waved his hand at her and told her to have some respect for his wife, to be quiet.

“Don't fight. I am going now. Así es, a man dies in his own home, with his own wife and his own daughter. ¿Qué voy a hacer?”

Renata said nothing more. She let go of him and with measured steps backed off into a far corner of the room, her hands over her mouth, her eyes brimming with a flood of tears that no levee of pride could hold back, and watched her lover stumble out of the room with his arm around his wife, watched and said nothing more.

When they got to the door, Teodoro leaned heavily on his wife and turned to face his mistress: “Why are you weeping, woman? Is it for yourself or for me? I can't tell. If it's for me, don't bother, don't waste your tears. I don't deserve them. … Do you want to come? Then come. We can all be together at last. What law have I broken in loving more than once? Why all this grief for someone who loved twice? Go, woman, find your daughter and come.”

Renata did not move, did not answer.

Doña Adela fixed a hold on her husband's arms. She spoke (like the Lord on certain afternoons) in hisses: “No one is coming, you crazy old man, except you. Solo, solo morirás si sigues así.”

Teodoro nodded and turned around. When he spoke again, his back to his mistress, still leaning heavily on his wife, both women thought that he was speaking to her
and
the other at the same time. “That's right … that's right, this is how it must end. (What was I thinking?) In your own bed, with your own wife and your own daughter. I love you, woman, let my life be a proof of that and not this my errant death. I am stuck. I am stuck. Only one step more.”

And they were out of the room. In her rage, doña Adela had not noticed that Alicia had gone from her, and when she went to ask her for her husband's shoes, there was no one there. She left Teodoro standing with a tight grip on the banister, warning him not to go back into that room. He mumbled to her of the need for a man to die in his own bed, in his own home. She climbed a narrow staircase to the attic and pushed the half-open door slowly and peered in.

Two girls were sitting on the dusty floor, cross-legged, holding hands. They had been waiting, staring wide-eyed, brows furrowed, at the half-open door, as if expecting one of the witches from the old woman's stories to burst through. One wore a rubber raincoat with the hood thrown back and galoshes, the other a knee-length white summer dress and leather sandals. Aside from that, they were unimaginably similar; both had the black-black hair that had once been the color of their father's. (It was not until the year of doña Adela's pregnancy that his hair and his eyebrows went from the color of coal in January to the color of cigarette ashes on the day his daughter arrived—though Renata had surmised that it was the dire knowledge that with the birth of his daughter he could never leave his wife that made his shock of hair turn gray just like that.) Both had fair skin (though not pale like a yanqui's, but colored, colored in subtle peach-blossom primrose tones), dark eyes and little noses, and thick lips that looked as if they had been wet with the juice of a strawberry, a face like his, his, the father's—(Where was the mark of the wife or the mistress in these frightened angelic faces? Had both loved the father so much that they were unwilling to leave any mark on their own daughters?)—whom doña Adela's mother had warned about on the day of her engagement, proclaiming that it was a dangerous thing when the groom was more beautiful than the bride, when his unpainted face put to shame any beauty mask the bride would wear (
Not even a pansy's face
, the old bitter woman had said from behind the shadow of her mosquitero, on that day that, up to that point near midnight, before she burst into her mother's room with the news, had been the happiest of the young Adela's life,
is as naturally gorgeous as the face of that hunk of man who has asked you to marry him. Cuidado, mijita, such beautiful men end up either as absent husbands, o bueno, que Dios te proteja … maricones
). And though one girl, doña Adela knew, was a year older, they seemed no more than hours apart in age, as if one had stalled and the other hurried her journey to womanhood, a journey almost ended now, with the sisters hand in hand, sitting cross-legged in an attic, terrified of the sounds beyond a half-opened door, of the grief they knew, one day, as women would be theirs, two girls, so alike they could have been sisters born of the same woman.