The Lazarus Rumba (43 page)

I thought about Richard Hadley. All the bullets had missed him as he had prophesied … as if the border guards, with their infrared lights, could see the yanqui flag tattooed on his ass. Less than a hundred yards from Cerca Peerless, after the winds of Flora had begun to whip, after we had abandoned el Cacharro (which they later peppered with bullets just to make it seem they had seen us from the start), after he had guided us through the mine fields (hobbling so fast he seemed like a wounded rhinoceros), after the boy had fallen, after I had lost my rifle (without getting off even one bullet) and I too had fallen, he wrapped his large body around me so that no other bullet would touch me. He whispered in my ear that he would now be a better landcrawler than I had ever been, and tried little by little to drag me nearer the fence. The yanquis had come. Their helicopters hovered over the other side of the border. Their jeeps sat on a hill. But they did nothing. They watched … and that is perhaps why the border patrol did not shoot Richard Hadley dead. They put a rifle to his temple, and when he spoke to them, in his broken Spanish, they knew who he was, they looked at the yanqui helicopters struggling against the oncoming winds, coming nearer and nearer to the border, at the jeeps atop the hill, their canvas tops lashing like angry tongues, and they forced Richard Hadley to walk against the wind a mile to the bayshore, forced him to strip so that they may better see the legendary yanqui flag tattooed on his ass, forced him to enter the shark-infested, embroiled waters and swim toward the beaches of the naval base. I never knew if he made it. He was a great swimmer, but it was a great storm.

I was obsessed with the wounds. Every hour or so I stood in front of the cracked mahogany mirror in the parlor and examined them, tried to remember the order in which they came against me. There were seven. I touched the first one, just beneath the collarbone. Painless. I was now living only with the memory of my flesh, like an amputee lives with only the memory of his limb. The second one blew open the navel, which mawkishly gaped back at me like an eyeless socket. I dared not touch it. The other four that came against me in the belly made smaller more beautiful wounds, like small peonies whose countless twisted-out petals were wafer-thin layers of flesh thickened and opaqued with brushstrokes of a coruscant red-brown.

And the last wound taught me what I no longer was. In the sac where I still felt the dangling twinness of my desires, I saw nothing but the crusty cavern of my present frailty. This was the seventh one that came against me, at close range (from a pistol and not a rifle), while I was already sprawled on the ground, after Richard Hadley had been forced to walk to the bayshore and do the only thing he did well, swim, swim away. When he saw me, el Rubio professed that it was proper that I should die a woman and then he pulled out his pistol and aimed it at the dead boy, but thought better and did not shoot and cocked his wrist and made a shot-noise through his lips like another boy at play.

“This one is not dead, capitán,” one of his men, crouched over me, said.

“He will be,” el Rubio prophesied, sliding his pistol back into its holster. And then he argued with one of the army comandantes about who was in charge and about the yanqui trawler captain who had been let go and about bullets that may have crossed into yanqui territory and finally, as if an afterthought, gave orders to take me to the city hospital.

There are many privations in this world after the seven came against me. I cannot feel sunlight, or rather I cringe from it, like one whose skin is badly burned. It is an old feeling. On the second morning here, I was spreading out the used coffee grounds on the windowsill and the rays of the sun brushed my hand and it was as if it were being licked by those faraway flames. The skin was liver-spotted and the fingers crooked. Maybe I have been in this world after the seven came against me longer than I think. I pulled my hand back and ever since that day I try to brew my coffee before dawn and I collect the dry grounds after dusk. I let my beard grow (it comes in faster than before); they cannot shave me now, I will be a barbudo again. I stay within the inside-air shadows and I stay out of the courtyard, except during the afternoon thundershowers when I go out, naked as I roam, and wash my wounds. The rain does its work well. It will be difficult when the wet season ends. But the sun too does its work well. The grounds on the windowsill look and feel fresh. I drink a lot of coffee but I can't taste it or smell it. It keeps me awake. I'm afraid to fall asleep. I wait for the dawn to brew my coffee. I wait for the afternoon to wash my wounds. I wait for the dusk to collect and save the grounds on the windowsill. The rest of the day is filled with thoughts of what I no longer am; and I can do nothing to ease the torment, for my greatest privation is the music that I cannot hear. I was fooled when I heard a shadow of the
Eroica
as I awoke into this new world, tricked into willfully entering this realm of petrified silence from where the rageful Beethoven and the lovely Mozart are banished.

Two Trials

When the shit-water runs out for the coffee I must leave and go I know not where. Maybe to see him, mi gran socio. To the Marist house. There's clean water there. The naked statue of la Virgencita in the garden provides it. It flows into her from an underground spring and seeps out of her like droplets of sweat. The brothers at first thought it was a miracle. The statue has been revered ever since her mantle disappeared many years ago, stolen it was said by the ghost of a halfwit, una tal Delfina Gutiérrez, sent to the gallows convicted of stealing as many as twenty-eight wedding gowns from brides in the capital at the turn of the century. Crowds came from all over the Island to witness the sweating Virgin, till the scientists examined the holy sweat and the Church had to admit that it was no miracle. Just an underground spring. Just geology. Still, I'll go there and catch the Virgin's sweat in a tin pot, use it for my cafecito, to the place where he kept me before he pardoned me, before he sent me home, alive but branded.

It was the old house of the Little Brothers of Mary, on a hilltop in the country west of the capital where the royal palm proliferates and celebrates nothing but itself. The house was surrounded by brick walls with mortared broken-off cola bottles at the top. After the brothers were kicked out and sent to a government-run school in the capital, the bottles were chipped off and barbed wire was coiled along the top of the walls. It was to be the new holding quarters of anyone accused of crimes classified under
la dolce vita
, a catchword that was meant to associate our alleged crimes with the decadence of the European bourgeoisie. (Pues Fidel is a great fan of Fellini.) Many of my counterrevolutionary crimes as they were recounted to me (as if written by a skilled, if style-free, novelist) took place during my visit to Berlin, although all I remember doing there is meeting with a lot of stodgy Eastern military officials and sneaking to the West side one evening to listen to the Lithuanian violinist play Beethoven. Still, the tribunal assured me that they had proof, pictures and fragments of correspondences, that while there I met with la CIA and was plotting the assassination of el Líder. I wish I had been clever
and
brave enough for such things. True, I thought Fidel had served his proper time as head of the revolutionary government and that he should step down and allow for open and free elections at every level. I made this clear and plain to him (as early as his first visit to the United Nations) in almost every letter I wrote to him. We had fought for liberty. We had won not to replace one tyrant with another.

The night of my arrest, naked, dragged from my marriage bed, I was put in the backseat of a four-door Soviet jeep and driven, over three days and nights, to the former Marist house. The building, a Spanish-style two-level tile-roofed structure overlooking the adjoining countryside, was converted to its new purposes effortlessly. The comandante who questioned me during my stay, a lank-faced habanero with bad teeth, had been under my command in the Sierra. He was very proud that it had been his idea to use the Marist house. He had spent some time there as a child, when for a brief while the brothers cared for and taught orphans and runaways. He described it to Fidel as an ideal maze of tiny cells, endless corridors and cramped stairways that more often than not led nowhere. Till the very last night I was there, I knew only one room of the entire building. Before they moved me into the house and led me down a stairway I was blindfolded. I was told to take off the oversized clothes they had lent me and then shut in a nine-by-twelve windowless room. The only other things in the room were a sheetless narrow mattress and a tin bucket in the corner for my necessities. When they shut the door, I was in complete darkness. It was my first night. I had asked for a pillow and sheets. They said no, that I would use the sheets to hang myself.

Three times a day, before meals, the comandante was let into the room and a chair was brought in for him by a guard and a floor lamp with a long extension cord set behind him. They both saluted me and then the guard stepped out. The comandante spread his legs over the seat, the chair's back pressed to his chest, his arms folded around it. When the stink from the corner was too unbearable, even for the brief period he was going to be in there, he ordered a guard to change the bucket. He had no weapon. I sat on the mattress cross-legged, squinting at the sudden brightness that cast a full-body halo behind him. Three times a day his shadow pulled out two iron-folded sheets of paper from the inside pocket of his military jacket. He unfolded them. He separated them and held one in each hand. First he read from the paper on his right side, in an even undramatic voice, the oath of loyalty he had taken with me in the mountains. Then he read from the paper on his left, the list of crimes the revolutionary tribunal was considering against me. His voice rose with the seriousness of each offense, culminating with
conspiracy to assassinate el Comandante-en-Jefe.
Three times a day he asked me if I was ready to sign my confession. Three times a day I said no.

Though I could not make out the features on his face, the comandante seemed neither hurt nor pleased at my answer. He nodded his head and refolded the papers and stood and examined my nakedness and picked up the chair and left the room. A few minutes later two other guards came into the room, both also unarmed, one carried a tin plate with my meal, the other a tin cup with my water. They too saluted me. I was forced to eat without silverware as they watched. When I was finished, they took the plate and the cup and removed the lamp and I was again in darkness.

One morning, about a month after my arrival, the comandante who questioned me brought in, folded over his right arm, my guerrilla uniform, which they had taken from Alicia. I was told to dress. The uniform had been stored in the same trunk as Alicia's wedding dress and it smelled of her. I was weak from malnourishment. My old warrior clothes hung baggy on me. The comandante helped me lace my boots and tugged at my beret to give it the proper tilt. Another guard brought a panful of water and a razor and a soap brush. The comandante fitted the pan under my chin and shaved me and he patted me on the shoulders and smiled at me with his bad teeth. “No mereces ser barbudo.”

I was driven to the capital. My trial took place in a hall of the Palace of the Revolution. My lawyer smelled of rum when he introduced himself to me. After a few rounds of questioning in which I again confessed to nothing and the State presented its irrefutable evidence to itself, my lawyer pleaded in a high womanish voice for the tribunal not to sentence me to death. He opened a Bible and read from the Sermon of the Mount and from the Book of Daniel and as he was leafing through the thin pages, looking for yet another passage, the head of the tribunal told him they had heard enough that this wasn't a church but a courtroom of la Revolución. My lawyer apologized and added that he meant no offense to la Revolución and added furthermore that he found the Holy Book very much in keeping with many of the teachings of la Revolución, that nowhere in the bylaws of the revolutionary government was there a law that abolished God, that such law (if it did exist) was an impossibility, an absurdity. The head of the tribunal told him to sit down and to shut up. My lawyer obeyed, but he kept on leafing through his Bible and when he found the next passage he had intended to read he pointed it out to me. His dirty fingernail was pressed down under a brief verse:

He nodded his head vigorously as if I could not fail to see the great significance of this. I gave him a puzzled look. Then, as if inspired by my ignorance, he read the verse out loud, his voice deepening an octave or two. The head of the tribunal slammed down his hand and called my lawyer an imbecile and a cretin, unpracticed in the manners of the courtroom. Later, during my journey back to Guantánamo, I found out that my rum-swigging lawyer is kept on the revolutionary payroll simply to defend the undefenseable and that his piety is sincere, if ill-suited as an armor against the fell vengeance of la Revolución.

The tribunal convened in another room for less than half an hour. It was said that Fidel sat amongst them for a few minutes. I was sentenced to die. My lawyer could choose one of two methods, by hanging or by execution. “Al paredón,” my lawyer said and then he turned to me and explained it was the more humane of the two. On my way down the steps someone from a small mob that had gathered there threw a rotten mango at me, it hit me on my right cheek and exploded. There was a great cheer. Blood commingled with the soft smelly pulp and dripped on my clean guerrilla uniform. The guards rushed me into the Soviet jeep and hurried me back to the Marist house. The mob ran after the jeep as far as it could follow it throwing more rotten mangoes. The guard in the passenger seat stuck his rifle out of the window and fired twice into the air. The mob halted its pursuit and they stood still and their anger seemed to be blown out of them as if they had collectively been struck by one of the bullets.