The Lazarus Rumba (47 page)

We rode on. The black horse (although it did not look it) was rejuvenated with its rest and kept a healthy pace so I didn't have to drag him forward by the reins. Early in the afternoon, we stopped in an open field and Brother Joaquín sliced the chorizo with his rusty blade and made sandwiches. He said he had not been able to sleep a wink in la Vieja's house the night previous. “I don't know how you slept through all the noise. She snores like a fat general.” After he ate, he pulled out the flask of the Virgin's urine and crossed my forehead with his wet thumb, then crossed his own. The grooves in his brow softened and he laid back, shut his eyes, and fell asleep. The tall thick blades bowed over his face and shielded it from the sunlight and bowed over his body as if bent on interring him. I ate some more and kept my eyes on the road.

She seemed at first to be a child like the children that were leading her gray mule up the road. She rode on a saddle too small for the mule's wide back holding on with both hands to the horn. Her head was hooded with a white bedsheet and her body so crouched and tiny that it disappeared underneath the black shawl and behind the animal's thick neck. The mule stumbled and at times stepped off the road and down the pebbly embankment and the two boys that were leading it had to pull on the reins and grab it by the straps of the headstall and scream at it and wrestle with it from the sides. The miniature rider wobbled on its hump but her limbs remained still and she seemed unperturbed with her precarious mount. The grass was tall and the black horse had wondered away from us to a nearby stream, so they would have passed by us on the road without noticing us, for her hood blinded her periphery and the boys were too concerned with keeping the mule on a straight path. They passed by us in a cloud of dust. The mule stepped hard forward and back and forward and back on its progress as if to reassert her unwillingness to make this journey. I slapped Brother Joaquín on the side to wake him.

“¡La Vieja! La Vieja and her grandsons.”

“¿Dónde?” Brother Joaquín stood and screamed with the rattly voice of the just wakened: “¡Oye! ¡Oigan! ¿Adónde van?” The gray mule stopped and its thick legs and thick torso and thick neck hardened. The boys let it be and dropped the reins. It was the young boy who had brought us the rum and another boy, taller and a few years older. They wore rough-cloth smocks that dropped halfway down their thighs, and their legs were exposed and their feet bare. The taller one reached up and grabbed the mule by the bit of the bridle. He wore nothing underneath and his genitals were exposed. He pulled down on the smock to cover them. The mule passed its tongue in between the boy's fingers. Brother Joaquín hurried towards them. “¿Adónde van?”

La Vieja lowered her hood. “She's blind. Ya está ciega mi maldita yegua. La pobre Marenga, she's older than I am.” The gray mule's mongoloid eyes were covered with a yellowy film that hardened crusty white along the inner folds.

“¿Adónde van?”

“We're going with you.”

“We're going to Oriente, all the way to Guantánamo. It's a long way to Guantánamo.”

“I know,” la Vieja said. “¿Qué crees? Don't you think
I
know that!” She flipped on her hood and signaled to her grandchildren to get Marenga going again. “Go fetch your horse, you'll easily catch up with us. We have just enough time to make it to Magdalena before nightfall.”

Brother Joaquín went looking for our black horse.

Marenga would not budge. The boys tugged at it, their bare feet undermining their leverage on the pebbly trail. The smaller boy punched the mule on the neck and the mule groaned and curled its whiskery drenched leather lips.

“Basta, basta,” la Vieja screamed. “We'll wait for the priest. ¡Basta coño! ¡Búsquenme la caja!” The older boy took a wooden cigar box from one of the saddlebags and handed it to la Vieja. It was fitted with a tiny lock. La Vieja opened it and pulled out her tobacco bag and the wallet of rolling papers and handed it to the boys. They did not need the machine to roll the cigarettes. The younger one held out his palms and the other one used them as a surface to lay out the paper and sprinkle the tobacco fillings. They had rolled six cigarettes by the time Brother Joaquín returned. They gave five to la Vieja and kept one for themselves. She gave them back the locked cigar box, which they returned to the saddlebag and sat on the trail and smoked their one cigarette, sharing two puffs at a time. The younger one licked the tobacco crumbs from his palms. “La yegua no anda,” the older one said to Brother Joaquín said.

“What do you mean the mule doesn't work?”

“It won't move,” la Vieja said. She stroked Marenga's neck. The mule nodded its head.

“It doesn't want to go,” the younger one added. “It wants to go back home.”

“No te pongas soquete, niño,” la Vieja demanded. “It doesn't want to go back home. It just needs to be comforted, to be assured that we're not leading her to the edge of a cliff. This mule was raised in another world, in the world before la Revolución where the old have no purpose and are properly disposed. It is frightened. It does not know of our new world.”

Brother Joaquín dismounted from the black horse and took out his flask of the Virgin's urine and crossed the mule with his wet thumb, on the brow and over the crusted eyes. The mule threw its head back and bared its teeth and was all in all shaken from its rebellious stillness, so the boys were easily able to lead it forward. “Vamos,” Brother Joaquín said.

“It worked,” the younger boy said. “That was the Virgin's piss. The Virgin, the mother of God. Her piss!”

“Better that way,” la Vieja said. “De una yegua a la otra.”

Brother Joaquín ignored this insult to our Virgencita and we moved on, the mule and the boys now setting the pace and the black horse struggling to keep up.

Magdalena was a farm town, north-northwest of the famous resort in Guamá, on the shores of Laguna del Tesoro, a sublime serene lake surrounded by swampland where many of the Party elite were known to vacation. It was there that Fidel had decided to spend a week of relaxation after his victory at Playa Girón some miles south. Thus the Committee for the Defense of the Revolution in Magdalena was one of the most well informed and influential in the entire Island. Or so la Vieja recounted to us as we approached the town near dusk.

“Aquí en Magdalena están más en la honda que en la misma Habana.” It was her way, I imagined, of further telling us that she very well knew, and everyone in this town would very well know, who we were, and that their mission was the same nevertheless, to assure our safe passage into Guantánamo. We stayed in Magdalena for two nights at the home of Rosa Domínguez, a woman not much younger than la Vieja who was the head of the CDR there. We traded in the black horse and the blind mule for a carreta led by a pair of fresh young mules. La Vieja and Brother Joaquín rode up front on the driver's seat, her cigar box on her lap now, the boys and I rode in the back. Rosa Domínguez and three of her great-grandchildren followed us in their own carreta. We made headway, past the port of Cienfuegos, keeping close to the southern coast till we reached the foothills of the Escambray Mountains. Our stops were mostly in small villages, though often we just hitched up canvas sheets over the carreta and slept outdoors; but wherever we went we were welcomed there by people who knew Rosa Domínguez or la Vieja either by name or by reputation, and always we stayed at the home of the head of the local CDR, most often a female, usually in her later years.
No ven, es tan claro como el amanecer, the old now have purpose!
All this changed when our party began to grow, for from almost every village the head of the local CDR, or if she was too occupied, her sister or her assistant, or if not her first-cousin or her assistant's assistant, set off with us in another carreta and brought with her two or three grandchildren or great-grandchildren for company and cheer. La Vieja neither encouraged nor discouraged anyone from following us. Except once, with the newspaper man.

To avoid a treacherous crossing through the Escambray mountain range we headed north. We left behind tobacco fields, acres and acres covered in cheesecloth to protect the leaves from the midsummer sun. After we passed through the city of Sancti Spiritus, we travelled on a dirt road parallel with the Central Highway, about a mile or so south. It was pasture land and the cows came right up to the edge of the road to graze. This, la Vieja joked as she pushed the two young mules on, was a path taken by denizens and thieves and revolutionaries and blessed ones so as not to call too much attention from the spiteful gods. She said she missed Marenga. She said it to no one in particular, as if she were addressing those same spiteful gods whose gaze we were trying to avoid. Past the city of Ciego de Ávila, our group, consisting mostly of old women and young children in a convoy of rickety carts, had grown to over fifty. A reporter from the
Granma
office at Ciego de Ávila began following us. La Vieja assured him, in a condescending tone, that neither she or anybody else in the group would answer any of his questions.

“¿Por qué no? I too am a servant of la Revolución! Why are you protecting a convicted traitor?” He rode alongside us on a healthy wine-colored thoroughbred. He wore a leather sombrero and veal-hide boots and a Safari jacket and all in all (even to his carefully textured beard) tried to emulate the look of Hemingway or of a modern Rough Rider. “Do you know who that man is, crouched in the back there, dressed as a holy man and playing balinas with your grandchildren? Certainly a woman with your reputation for insight cannot be so easily deceived!” He galloped closer to our carreta and offered la Vieja a black-market cigarette from a red pack. His fingers were rosy and long like Fidel's.

“Mira, joven,” la Vieja answered, perched on the driver's box of our carreta, “en primer lugar, I don't smoke cheap yanqui cigarettes. Y en segundo, you, like every other minion-editor or puppet-journalist, know very little about what is really going on in this country. Your cities cannot begin to tell the stories of the soul of our Island, which is in the soil, en el campo. So go and hide in your square buildings and write your stories as they are dictated to you by the bureaucrats from the capital and leave the workings of la Revolución to us, to those Fidel intended to run it in the first place, us, el pueblo.” I did not look up again and continued to play with Guillermo and Felipe, drawing a circle in the mound of dirt we had shoveled into the carreta, pretending our flat dull pebbles were round shiny marbles.

“Señora, to so defame
Granma
, the official Word of the Party, can easily be construed as a counterrevolutionary act!”

“Print it in your paper then! Print it that Delia Delgado is a contrarevoluciónaria, and then count the hours and days and weeks you will be laughed at and stripped of your measly position.”

“Señora, por favor, I just came to get some answers.”

La Vieja lit one of her own cigarettes. “No. You already have your answers and you just want to hear me recite them. Al carajo contigo. Clerks like you are the death of la Revolución! Poor Fidel, poor Che, if they will forever surround themselves with you city-hounds.”

“Señora, por favor.” His horse seemed to slow down of its own volition and he faded back behind us, though he stayed with the group for a few days, avoiding la Vieja, talking to other CDR officers who were more willing to pass on rumors, which the faux-Hemingway reporter later printed in
Granma
: that a volunteer band of CDR leaders, brave and noble women from the countryside led by the feisty and true-to-the-bone Fidelista Delia Delgado, were escorting the traitorous comandante Julio César Cruz to his home in Guantánamo, where they would turn him over to the chief of police of that city, un tal, el Rubio, who would then take him into the custody and that the tenuous stay of execution granted by the all-merciful Líder might yet be lifted and the traitorous comandantecito may yet be called to pay for his betrayal with his life.

La Vieja rounded up the group when she had read the story, and holding the crumpled smudge-gray paper in one hand, shaking it in front of her as if to rid it, letter by letter, of its lies, she insisted she did not want to know who spoke such basura to that mock-revolutionary, that sorry-ass excuse for a patriot, but that whoever did best not continue with us, best stay behind and return to their village and resign their position on the local Comité and return to the fields and dig their hands deep into the black soil and keep them there for a few weeks, a few months, a few years, till the worms start crocheting through their fingers, so that they may better come to know what la Revolución is truly about. The following day two parties of women and children did not continue with us; and la Vieja instead of being pleased that they had listened to her, was angry that indeed it had been one of them (one of
us
) who had spoken to
that sinvergüenza who dresses like a yanqui marica and is better suited to be dallying in the streets of Miami with all the other traitors (los cobardes que dicen que tanto aman a su patria pero al primer chance huyeron) than riding the trails of our Island.
“Damn
Granma!
Damn all the leeches in the capital, may the cockroaches eat them all! May the rats infect them with a thousand plagues and their bones all wash up on the shores of Miami Beach! Hacen miga a la Revolución.” She folded the newspaper around the borders of the article and tore at the creases and folded the torn-out story and saved it in her cigar box.

A few days later, early in the afternoon, halfway between two villages, we were struck by the first tropical storm of the season, just a prelude to Flora, the storm we would use as a mantle for our escape attempt some two months later, but still of enough force to merit a name. We saw it approaching from the southern coast, the sky suddenly turned fluid, rolling in great gray waves towards us, as if the world had been turned on its head and the restless Caribbean spilled into the heavens. We tried to put up the canvas sheets over the carts for covering, but it was done so hastily that as soon as the first winds came our shelter went with it. We pushed the mules on, off the trail towards a grove of tangerine trees that provided some protection till the winds picked up and their delicate branches began to fly off like wisp and their trunks to bend low and lower, as if in forced repentance. The mules were now getting harder to drive; I had replaced la Vieja on the driver's seat. She was in the back, her two grandsons crouched over her, holding tight over their head our last piece of canvas. The mules buckled back. Brother Joaquín sat next to me, dexterously handling one set of reins and shouting directions at me on how to handle the other. It was the only time I heard him openly curse. During a lull in the winds, I heard la Vieja tell her grandchildren that Marenga would not have been afraid of the storm. The older one retorted that Marenga was afraid of her own shadow till she could not see it anymore. Brother Joaquín signaled to the rest of the party and we headed towards an embankment that separated one field from another and was the only protection in that flat and loamy country. There, we waited out the storm, and as far inland as we were, we tasted the sea salt as it pelted our faces.