The Lazarus Rumba (42 page)

Alicia had no news of me for two days. She had gone to her mother's. When Marta finally brought her to see me in the hospital, a guard stopped them in the lobby and put a rifle to Alicia's cheek and told them they could not see me. Marta grabbed her sister by the wrist and led her to the stairway to the second floor. “Vamos,” she said, loud enough to embarrass the guard. “He won't shoot. No me parece que es tan hombre.”

At my side, Marta told me the story, proud of herself. I could tell by the way she spoke, as if to a toddler, that she thought I couldn't understand her. My head was light with morphine. It was as if already I had lost sense of my flesh. Marta demanded that my bandages be changed and that I be switched to a different room. The nurses did not listen to her and when she tried to do it herself they restrained her. Alicia did not dare approach my bed. She stood on the other side of the room, her hands gripping each other, palms together and pressed to her lips as if she were stifling a scream. Her eyes were dry and opened wide.

This is what we had figured: with the storm on its way, there would be too many other concerns and security at the border would be lax. The original plan had been to attempt the escape on New Year's Eve 1963, when soldiers would be drunk and careless. But this was better, a storm like an Old Testament scourge, a storm beautifully named Flora whose windy mantles we would use as cover and flee from our ruined patria.

There were three of us—myself, a young architecture student named Humberto who had already been caught the year before trying to swim across the bay to the beaches of the base (sentenced, because of his youth, because he had had his leg mangled by a crocodile crossing a river on his escape route, but most pertinent, because his aunt Pucha was an influential member of the local CDR, to only five days in jail), and another sort of veteran, a yanqui trawler captain whom I had first met when I was a child, and who had smuggled arms to us during the War from New Orleans, Louisiana, and who, after the triumph, after Fidel's alliance with the Soviet Union, was one of the few yanquis who traveled freely in and out of Cuba, usually through the naval base. His name was Richard Hadley. When he heard of my trial, of my sentence, he came to Guantánamo, said he would do anything to help.

“Even if it means helping me leave.”

“Especially if it means helping you leave.”

Our first idea was to stow away in Richard Hadley's trawler, drown myself in the pot of shrimp stew as I had done when I was a child, and simply sail into the base on one of his many trips. But Richard Hadley said this was dangerous, and he did not want to put his crew in peril.

“So, we will flee on land.”

“We?” I said. Richard Hadley had a degenerative bone disease, and his limp had grown more pronounced since I had last seen him. (And about the only thing he did well, he said, was swim, every other activity felt as if there were a fire inside his bones …
even the mermaids know how useless I am, they flee from me when I approach them.
) Yet he decided to aid us in our escape
by land.
He would come with us, he had weapons, he knew the terrain, knew where the mines were planted, and he added boastfully, the border guards would not dare shoot a yanqui.

“How will they know you are a yanqui?” Humberto said.

“Porque I have a tattoo of the stars and stripes on my ass, and I plan to make it all too visible to them!”

And there was Mingo who did not want to leave because he said he loved the blackness of the Island's soil too much, but had vowed to help us. It was his finca we used as training ground, his ‘40s Ford pickup truck we drove (el Cacharro later riddled with bullets like in some yanqui gangster film), his stashed black market dollars that bought us most of our ammunition. He was against hurrying things, against changing the original New Year's Eve plan. The truck needed work, parts to be replaced. “Están jodío if el Cacharro doesn't run like the wind … bien jodío. Wait. Wait for the year to end.”

I couldn't wait. Richard Hadley sided with me and Mingo understood. We had less than forty-eight hours to fix up el Cacharro. We tracked the storm and prayed for a direct hit. A friend of Richard Hadley who worked inside the base had snuck out some maps (from an article printed in a yanqui magazine some months before) of the naval base and its environs. We went over them like students cramming for an exam. We guessed at which fields would be most heavily mined. Richard Hadley seemed to
know
, and as he marked each mine on our map, he toyed with the idea of changing plans completely, of avoiding the mines and using his trawler to cross into yanqui territory by water, but finally decided that his ragtag crew would not be up to it, and given the rage of Hurricane Flora the bay would be unnavigable as well as unpatroled. We went back to the original plan, we would try our escape by land.

“I told you once when you were a young boy,” Richard Hadley said to me, “you are a landcrawler and have always lived as one, and if you are to die, you should die as one.”

My body was never returned to my family, never anointed for the journey afterwards. This was one of the most infamous revolutionary edicts. Like Creon, Fidel believed that those who died struggling against the native gods (that is, against him and Raúl and Camilo and the rest of the revolutionary court), did not deserve the honor of a grave or the satisfaction of a family's mourning, but deserved rather to be chewed up by birds and violated by stray dogs. So at the edge of Campo Santo, on the side of a rocky hill, after Marta had identified the body and signed some papers, after el Rubio had slipped off my wedding ring, eighteen karats to be used for better things, he said, to replace one of his many cracked molars, my face was shaved and my corpse was left exposed to the elements. My family and my wife were given a grave number, an empty plot whose same number was given to
many other
families of us the desecrated.

A wild long-haired goat, as if it had been sent by an affronted God to replace my loved ones, passed by and licked my ears and my seven wounds. Soon, it was as if that long grainy tickling tongue was healing me, the saliva undoing the botched stitches and reopening the wounds, waking me to my death. I heard the horns from the funeral march of the
Eroica Symphony.
I found the strength to stand. I wandered here, to my old home. At first, I could not tell for sure whether the shattered windows, the fallen teardrop chandeliers, my ruined record collection or the death of Atila, my old-as-the-century blue-feathered cock (who like Mingo was too in love with the soil of this land to accompany me) floating in the fountain by the terrace, his neck cracked, his coral crest limp with the heavy waters, was the handiworks of zealot looters or the signature of the indifferent winds of Hurricane Flora. Two deeds, however, revealed their authors pellucidly. Scribbled with coalish ink on my rebel portrait, like a hangman's noose around my neck, a poem:

And floating in the water we had reserved in the bronze falcon-legged bathtub was a long, smooth yellowish piece of waste elegantly curlicuing at both ends, by its elegant shape clear that it had passed through the sphincter of a skilled officer and not through the asshole of a common soldier, and by its gold speckling clearer that on its way out the piece of waste had brushed ever so slightly and been tinged by the aureate ass-hairs of none other than el Rubio. ¡Maldito! It wasn't enough that he had me murdered (for the final surgery was never performed), but he had brought his muchachos, his ñángaras, into my home and desecrated it. I had lost so much blood. I was thirsty. I drank from the water in the tub. Now, I use the shit-water every morning for my coffee. Like any true gusano, I subsist on decay.

I have subsisted on little before. I could have been a finquero, could have chosen to be addressed as don Julio, and in the country-that-was-then a well-off landowner, well-off till just about a week ago when the revolutionary government took almost every piece of land from every landowner. But that's beside the point, because I chose to give my lands up long ago, before any Agrarian Reform Acts, chose to give my lands back to the campesinos by choice, lands I had inherited from a teacher of mine, a Jesuit named Father Jacinto, who had inherited them from his Spaniard ancestors, rich black lands in the mountains north of here, lands mother of coffee and sugar and giant plantains and dozens of other crops. But I chose not to become don Julio. I chose to follow Fidel. Father Jacinto died shortly after I had graduated from the University of Havana with a degree in theology. My specialization was demonology and hagiography. I learned how indistinguishable devils are from angels. I was going to teach and perhaps someday go into the priesthood. I was learning to know God, who obviously was not willing to linger in the background of my life, who, like certain sections of Beethoven's greatest symphonies, demanded
all
attention.

The Church virulently fought Father Jacinto's will in the courts. In public, they claimed that he died an insane man, thus his will should be null and void and his property fall into the hands of the Holy Catholic Apostolic Church. In private, they whispered that he had been sinfully in love with me and had abused me as a child. Y claro, one can never know for sure the secrets of another's heart, but if Father Jacinto was in love with me all those years he cared for me, he never used his love in any harmful way. He treated me as a father treats his son, nothing more or less. The Church knew that!—and all its calumnies after Father Jacinto's death forever soured me against bishops and priests and all their blind fanciers. The courts miraculously declared against the Church. The land was mine. The last time I saw Fidel in La Habana, in those days after the contested will, he patted me on the shoulder and assured me that he would see me again, that I would not be a landowner for long. “No te pega, mi gran socio.”

“I have not forgotten God
or
the Holy Mother,” I answered him.

“God is tyrant on
their
side … the words of the tyrant's Son, however, will judge and condemn the Father and this time the story will be reversed and it is He the Father who will perish on the cross. Four years in those airless classrooms of the philosophy department and you never learned the ancient difference between theology and morals?”

Estaba loco desde entonces, mad enough to believe himself.

Flora was merciful. She knew our shame and suffering. She was headed straight for us. Hidden in Mingo's finca cottage, we listened to the Voice of America on Richard Hadley's ham radio. The yanquis were always better at tracking these storms than we were. The voice spoke to us from the main yanqui hurricane-tracking center in a town called Coral Gables, a suburb of Miami. Humberto said that in Miami the women were giant blondes with tits the size of melons and that they dreamed of Latin men as they lay on the white-sand beaches. Mingo added that this was true, but that the milk from their giant tits was sour because their pale skins let in too much of the tropical heat, so all their offspring perished from hunger. Richard Hadley told them in Spanish to stop
comiendo mierda
, and told the boy to stop dreaming, that the yanqui dollar-utopia was not much better than any utopia.

“La vida es una mierda, sea donde sea. Nothing ever makes man happy. Don't you go supposing that us fat yanquis are any better off than you or him.”

“Then why are you helping us?”

“Because you'll never make it out without me … and Julio's honor has been shit on enough.”

He had Humberto close his eyes again and assemble one of the M-l4s we would be taking with us. He timed him with a wristwatch and looked at me and shook his head when too much time had passed. Then he slapped Humberto on the side of the head.

“They'll kill you. Muerto y medio. You won't be able to peek through the blackness of the storm.” He slapped Humberto again and again, till the boy, in desperation, finished assembling the rifle and clicked on the magazine. He opened his eyes and handed Richard Hadley the rifle and looked at him with an unforgiving rage.

“Good,” Richard Hadley said examining the rifle, “the winds will slap you a lot harder.”

“Good, good, Humberto,” I said. “My turn.”

I knelt in front of Richard Hadley as he dismantled the weapon. I closed my eyes and took the pieces and put them back together faster than the boy, though Richard Hadley slapped me harder and more often. I know the blows were causing his bones as much pain as they were afflicting. It's just the wind, just the wind and I clicked on the magazine and without opening my eyes stuck the point of the rifle under my beloved trawler captain's chin. Humberto clapped.

“Some things you don't forget, my little man,” Richard Hadley said and slowly eased the rifle point from under his chin. He took the rifle and disassembled it and closed his eyes and told me to slap him. I did, but not with much vigor, certainly not with the vigor that the winds of Flora would slap him. Richard Hadley stopped. He dismantled the rifle again. He grunted.

“Let the boy do it. You are far too kind, my little comandante.”

Humberto smiled and knelt by him and began to slap Richard Hadley with a force still colored by his anger. Richard Hadley yelled: “Golly, yes, yes, that's it!” and though his disease sometimes made his hands tremble, put the weapon back together in a quarter of the time that I had done it.

“It's easy for you, viejo,” Humberto said, gasping for breath from his effort. “You are a yanqui. Your country is full of guns.”

Richard Hadley's face was rosy from the slaps and his cheeks trembled.

“Nothing is easy,” he said to the boy. “You'll learn that the hard way tomorrow.”

The first time I saw the wounds, I thought of the boy. I wondered if his were just as bad. I wondered if his body too had been thrown out on a hillside for the birds to pick and stray dogs to violate. There was talk that any time a young boy was killed trying to escape into the base, el Rubio paid a visit to the coroner's office and demanded some time alone with the body and that he would lay the corpse on the floor and unfold the shroud and pull his pants down and masturbate over the dead boy while cursing all who succumb to the vicious lust for yanqui things.