The Lazarus Rumba (46 page)

“It's la Vieja's ninety-fourth birthday and we knew it was our turn for no light. She likes to celebrate her birthday on the exact day. It just happens that today is our turn for no light.”

“¿Quién es la Vieja?”

The young man pulled his pants up by the belt straps and grabbed a torch that had been spiked into the ground and signaled for us to follow him. The others gathered around us. They helped Brother Joaquín dismount and they looked for a place to tie the horse but there was neither fence nor rail so they kept on looking till Brother Joaquín assured them that the horse would not go anywhere, that it did not have the strength nor the will to flee. They dropped the reins and we left the black horse alone by the shadows of the bonfire and followed. Above the double door entrance to the barn there was a crooked painted national flag (in the torchlight the blue was greenish and the red maroonish) and to the right, in white bold letters,
C. D. R.
Brother Joaquín noticed this too and he grabbed me and whispered to me to let him speak. As they moved inside the barn, the men and their women and children began to absorb the music again and their bodies resumed their forsaken rhythms. The old woman was balanced on a sturdy mahogany rocking chair at the far corner of the room. She was twisted precariously forward. As we approached, her face became a mask of pale serpent hide, the pattern of wrinkles and cross-wrinkles tattooed in almost perfect symmetry. Her eyes were pale as weak tea and her mouth, due to the many absent teeth and the force with which she sucked on a cigarette stub on one side, was misshapened. She wore a rough canvas field dress and sandals. She was just barely summoning enough power to clap her crooked hands together and tap the ball of her left foot to the beat of the dance. She stopped when she saw us. She searched in the pockets of her dress till she found her glass case. She peered at us through her lenses as if looking through a peephole.

“¿Qué son estos? ¿Ingratos?” she asked the young man with the torch.

“No, they are travelers.”

She put out her cigarette on the arm of the rocking chair, which was charred solid black with burn marks. She reached beside her on the floor and brought up a blond-wood case and set it on her lap. From one of her dress pockets she pulled out a bag of fresh tobacco, from another a worn leather wallet where she kept her rolling paper of dark tobacco leaves, folded like bills. She opened a tiny drawer on one side of the wooden case and stuffed it with the cut tobacco, then she took out a single leaf of the rolling paper and ironed it out on the chair arm with the ends of her fingers and inserted it into a slit on the opposite side of the box. Her cuticles were blackened all the way around forming tiny horseshoes around her fingernails. She turned a crank. The leaf rolled in. She slid a compartment door open on top of the box and pulled out a fat tight brown cigarette and wet the seam lightly with her tongue. She blew on it as if to cool it. “Bien. I don't want any ingratos at my fiesta. And take that torch outside, you're stinking up the whole place!”

Brother Joaquín approached her and introduced himself. He introduced me as one of his seminarians, which, thanks to the garment they had lent me back at the Marist house, la Vieja seemed to believe.

“I don't have much use for priests in Los Baños.”

She took off her glasses and put the cigar-rolling machine back on the floor beside her.

“We are not priests. We are brothers. Devotees of the Virgin Mary. We are teachers.”

“Well I don't have much use for the Virgin Mary either, but I do need teachers. The old church is now a schoolhouse. I am Delia María Delgado. I run the local Comité. They call me la Vieja, es de cariño. Perdónenme, I confused you with ingratos, those who live in our town, reap all the benefits, but have refused to put their faith in the difficult workings of la Revolución. Al diablo con esos. I did not invite them to my fiesta.”

“With all respect, señora, we are traveling. We do not mean to stay.”

La Vieja tried not to look offended. She signaled with her cigarette at me: “¿Y éste? ¿Está mudo?”

“He is still a student,” Brother Joaquín said. “He listens. He learns.” La Vieja nodded and sucked on her sparse teeth. “Bueno, la fiesta es de todos. Join in. I am ninety-four today.”

“A los cien!” the crustacean boy shouted from outside. “Llegas a los cien.”

“Join in,” she repeated to us, raising her arms as far as her bones would allow her.

We were served rum from an oak cask and pasteles de carne, greasy and still warm. The dancing continued outside by the bonfire and Brother Joaquín stared and did not clap along, and when someone tried to hand him a pair of maracas he wandered away from the dancing, inside again towards la Vieja, who clapped along, though they left her mostly to herself, rolling her cigarettes and smoking them. She had again removed her glasses so she did not see us approaching. I followed Brother Joaquín. We sat on the ground by her.

“We will need to rest for a day or maybe two. Our horse is weak.”

“Sí,” la Vieja said, pretending to be listening only to the music.

“If there is anything we can do in return, for the school or—”

“You are teachers, no? Teach then the difficulty of faith wherever you go, of faith in our land, in our people, and in our Líder. It's too easy to throw your hands up in despair, too easy to abandon what we struggled so long for. That's what the yanquis want, to infect our people with their easy ways. El Líder will not have it and his people will not have it. Pero la pena es that some of our people, coño,
are
infected. Discontents, doubters, defachatados! They were not
ever
fit to be with us or of us. Those that cheered him as he passed through here on the way to La Habana, those that kissed his hands and caressed his beard and offered him and all his guerrilleros their own baths and their own soap bars so that they may look decent when they arrived at the capital, now those same ingratos huddle behind their shut doors and speak of him as one speaks of a rabid dog! And their own sons and daughters, their own brothers and sisters know better and come and let me and el Comité know all about it. Imagínate, their own kindred sees their wickedness! There are boys in this town, grandsons of mine, no older than twelve, thirteen, or fourteen, that were rushed to the coast and fought against the hijo de putas yanqui-loving invaders. I had two grandsons die in the mountains. One in the Sierra, one in the Escambray.”

I did all I could to remain silent. Brother Joaquín placed his hand on my knee and pressed it, as if beseeching me to
remain
quiet. I now knew where I was. After he had reached the capital, and enconsced himself as head of the provisional revolutionary government, Fidel had written to me about an odd occurrence in a village in the province of Matanzas where the rebel army had stopped two nights before they reached the capital en route from Oriente. The villagers, led by an old woman who seemed to be the ruling matriarch, had received them warmly and slaughtered pigs and brought out their rum casks and the whole town gathered in the central plaza to celebrate Cuba libre. But after the long festivities, way past midnight, the old woman went up to one of the guerrilleros, a young one of seventeen or eighteen, and started unbuttoning his shirt and when she had taken off his shirt, bent as she was, she crouched and started unlacing his boots and when his boots were off she pushed herself up and started undoing his belt buckle and his pants. The young guerrillero along with everybody else was frozen and he stepped out of his pants like an obedient child. The old woman gathered the uniform over her arm and it was only then that she noticed that the fiesta had suddenly turned quiet and that she noticed all the astonished stares of her townspeople.

Ay no jodan
, she said to them,
I have changed too many diapers in this town and have seen too many pinguitas and too many chochitas for it to be of any interest to me! ¿Qué esperan? Muévensen. Get to your homes and boil water. These soldiers need baths and their uniforms need washing. They can't ride into the capital looking like this. Vamos, vamos. La fiesta se acabó. These brave soldiers have liberated you, the least you can do is offer them a warm bath.

And the villagers, each woman and child and man, began to strip the guerrilleros in the same devoted fashion the old woman had done till the entire rebel army except for its leader was standing in the plaza in only their soiled undergarments. No one dared approach Fidel, who was a bit woozy with rum and laughed heartily at these strange antics. The old woman walked up to him and took his cigar from him and was going to put it in her mouth but thought better of it and handed it to one of the many children who horded around her, children who called her abuela, though it was told that she herself only had one son who had been murdered young and childless, and that she had never known a husband or a lover.
¿Y
usted, qué? ¿Piensas que te vas a quedar sucio?
She untucked his shirt and unlaced his boot.

“Vaya at that time,” la Vieja would recount to me less than a month later, on what she thought was her deathbed, “everyone was assured that this young idealist was the Second Coming of el Cristo. And when I went to undo his pants everyone gasped, you could hear them all in one, as if I was going to be struck by lightning just because he too like all his men needed a bath!”

She undid his pants and Fidel too was, like everyone in his army, in his underpants.

“Vaya, it didn't look like he suffered too much hunger in the Sierra, porque he had quite a belly on him. Bueno, como ya bien se sabe, los guajiros de Oriente son los santos de verdad. They took care of the rebels. They offered them everything, their homes, their food, vaya si no llevamos por los chismosos, even their daughters. La verdad plena es que,
they
, and not the rebels, and at the risk of committing treason, not Fidel, won the war.”

The villagers then took the guerrilleros—two to a home—and man, woman, and child bathed them with sponges and lent them their beds. The following day on their way out, Fidel kissed the old woman on the forehead and renamed the village, against the protest of the village monsignor, Los Baños, the City of Baths.

I knew now where I was but I said nothing.

“Now
both
of you are mute,” la Vieja said. “Teacher and student, que bien!” She took out her glass case and put on her glasses and turned to look at us. “We will feed you and feed your horse, all three of you look as if you've taken your fasting much too seriously.” She laughed for the first time and revealed her few yellow and brown remaining teeth and repeated her vow that she would feed us and added that there were some clothes that the parish priests had left behind that she would give to us. A naked brown boy of about six brought her a glass of rum and she asked for two more, which the boy handed to us. La Vieja lifted her glass, grumbled a toast and threw the rum back in her throat with a quick deft motion and then asked the boy for three more shots. The boy collected the empty glasses.

“I make it here,” she said while she waited. This time after the boy handed us the refilled glasses he sat on la Vieja's lap and she let him wet his lips with the rum. He asked the old woman to tell him a story. La Vieja said that she was out of stories but that maybe the priests knew some. Brother Joaquín did not correct her this time, did not insist that we were not priests but Brothers of Mary, instead he pulled out the flask from one of his pockets and held it up to the dim light. He casually mentioned its contents and began his story of Delfina Gutiérrez again, from the top; but before he had gotten past the wedding night with Israel, la Vieja stopped him.

“Ya basta. That is no story for mi nietico's ears. ¡Qué cosas! I told you I have no use for the Virgin Mary, and much less use for her urine.”

So we sat silent the rest of the night and drank shots of rum and the boy was ungratified and he blew horn sounds on an empty cola bottle and heard no story.

Two mornings later, freshly bathed, fully fed, and with new garments on our back, celebrant garb that the parish monsignor had left behind, which Brother Joaquín put on more out of courtesy than anything, so that now we did look like priests and not Brothers of Mary, and a couple of bottles of moonshine rum and chorizo and fresh bread in our makeshift sackcloth saddlebags, we set out eastward from Los Baños. La Vieja pointed us in the direction of the farthest town we could reach by nightfall and gave us the name of the woman who ran el Comité there. “She is like a sister to me. The sound of my name casts a spell on her, just say Delia Delgado and you'll be well looked after.”

Brother Joaquín thanked her. We rode. Brother Joaquín was silent. I told him about Fidel's letter, about the night of the many baths. He said he had suspected as much, that la Vieja surely knew who we were, that she had probably bewitched and bedded Fidel that very night.

“Why all the hospitality then?”

“It is her duty. To make sure you reach Guantánamo safe, shamed and branded and safe.”

“Why would they not supply a military escort then? Or send me on the train with guard?”

“No, no, mijito. You are not worthy of such
obvious
attention anymore. You get a piddling houseless unfed Marist instead …
and
the help and protection of a few CDR's and the matronly witches who run them along the way. You, comandante Julio César Cruz, the great guerrillero, the leader of the famous Fourth Column, once one of the native gods, now a native dog, must rely for protection on a frail monk and a band of abuelitas! ¿No ves? Nothing is left to chance. Shame has become a commodity and it is rationed out by the Party like all other commodities.” He nodded his head, pleased with his insight. “I have just broken the law. I addressed you as comandante.” He was pleased some more by this transgression. “He was merciful. He could have sentenced you to the lower Circles, as is the fate of all traitors. But he was merciful. He merely took from you your title, your right to
gravitas.
You, hi jo, are in Limbo.”