The Lazarus Rumba (5 page)

“Buenas,” the one girl that was not her daughter said. “I am Marta.”

“I know,” doña Adela would have liked to say, and take her, this child that haunted her Tuesday siestas (that in those nightmares sometimes became her husband, sometimes her own daughter, sometimes herself, lying expectant of torment), in her arms and hold her tight, till she melded into her own body, but she didn't, she remained cordial, stern: “Buenas,” she answered and then turned to her daughter. “Alicia, we are leaving now, grab your father's shoes and come.”

Alicia obeyed, and when she got to the half-opened door she turned and waved to her sister, who remained cross-legged, alone in the attic and could not wave back.

When they tried to put the shoes on Teodoro he became agitated and kicked his legs and almost fell over the banister: “No, no, damn it! I will go barefoot. I have always hated shoes and now I hate them even more. What good are shoes where I am going?” Doña Adela relented. She took off her raincoat and put it on him and they slowly made it down the stairs, out the front door, and down the porchsteps. Teodoro turned and spoke to the old woman still sitting in her rocking chair, her hair hanging over her face, wet and loosened by the rain, her lavender dress sticking to her bony shins: “Adios, vieja,” he said. “You have been kind to me.”

“Adios, hombre,” the old woman answered, her voice shivery, “how could I not be kind? Coño, I was half in love with you myself. You're going to make a beautiful corpse! Women are going to start wanting to make love to the dead.”

Doña Adela pulled her husband away. She grumbled to the dark heavens, begged to know what kind of God lets the whole world go mad, just like that, quicker than the graying of a hair.

The following morning Teodoro awoke before dawn. He stumbled out of bed by himself, stepped out of his pajamas and underpants and, naked, shuffled to the bathroom.

“What are you doing?” doña Adela said, following him, weary-eyed, for she had not slept at all, listening to his heavy breathing (gasping for air at each take), expecting it at any moment to cease, especially when it became most desperate, his neck clenching, the veins in his brow deepening, his vocal chords plucked by a boding air like the heightened last notes of a symphony.

“Voy a cagar and then I am running a bath and then going out.”

“Out where? You can't even walk. We practically had to carry you here last night.”

“Not to the sea, that's for sure.”

“You're not going anywhere. Gonzalo is coming at eight.”

“For what?”

“To … to give you your last rites.”

“How pleasant.” Teodoro sat on the toilet. He farted loudly. He looked down and shook his head. “So big and so useless …
not
to the sea that's for sure.” He hawked and spit on the tile floor, then looked up at his wife cautiously as if he were a child that had just committed a grievous wrong. “Adela … Adela, when I die throw me into the sea. I want to ride the white dolphins, the ones we saw in Varadero. Remember how in love we were there, Adela. Bury me there.” He grimaced and bit his thumbs and began to weep. “My feet hurt, Adela, my feet hurt so much, how am I going to go out if my feet won't take me.”

“No seas dramático. Call me when you are ready,” doña Adela said. “I'll have Alicia bathe you. Gonzalo will be here soon.” She shut the door and went to the kitchen to make coffee. Her daughter was already there, in the half-morning shadows, at one corner of the long kitchen table, drinking a glass of milk.

“He's going to make it, isn't he, mamá?”

“Yes, mija, for now. But he is very ill.” She set the cafetera on the flame and just when the first thick black spurts of coffee came bubbling up, they heard the loud thud in the bathroom.

“Dios santo,” doña Adela said and grabbed her daughter's hand and led her from the kitchen. The bathroom door was jammed, Teodoro's fallen body behind it. They pushed without overdue force, as if in respect for the corpse they knew blocked their way. Teodoro's body lay sprawled and naked on the bathroom floor, a razor blade in one hand, half his face shaven, the other half still foamy with suds. Doña Adela put two fingers to her husband's neck, then she unrolled some toilet paper and wiped her husband's still-soiled bottom. And as she did she spoke to him with the assuredness that he could still hear her: “Qué pena, mi bello, none of them will ever see you again.” She grabbed the razor from his hand and handed it to her daughter. “Finish shaving your father, I don't want Gonzalo finding him like this. I am going to go call him.”

“Mamá, I am only a girl,” Alicia protested.

“Not any more, mi cielo, not any more.”

“Sí, no lo digo por decirlo,” doña Adela said. “I too have known sorrow. I remember many an afternoon after he died sitting out there on that porchswing, literally gurgling up this greenish-yellow bile (I could never digest el almuerzo, no matter how lightly I ate), and like a fool I collected this bile, day by day, and set it in a closed jar on my nightstand, as if I could measure to the exact quarter ounce the amount of venom I had been forced to swallow. Yes, I too almost went mad. But when I could not fight it anymore, I let it in me. Sea lo que sea, Gonzalo, we have to teach my daughter to do the same.”

“In time we will. I'll go and see her now. Is there anything I can offer her to eat?”

“Ay, mijo, you can try. I baked her favorite this morning, guava and cheese pastelitos. I brought them to her fresh from the oven. Ni lo miró, didn't even lift her head from the jigsaw. They sat there on the escritoire and got cold.”

“Bueno, de todas formas, heat some up, bring them in to me later. Let me talk to her a bit first.” He grunted as he stood up from the table and walked out of the kitchen down the hallway to the glass-paned doors of Adela's room. He tried to listen to his God, but the Lord was usually silent when Gonzalo was performing his duties. He knocked lightly.

“Alicia, soy yo, Gonzalo. May I come in?”

No answer. Only a scratchy lonely, lovely Beethoven violin.

“Alicia?”

“Para que tocas coño. You're going to come in even though I don't want you to.”

Father Gonzalo turned the knob and opened the door only about a foot, wedged himself inside the room, and shut the door. The smell of open storage trunks and old wet paper hit him instantly. The damask drapes over both windows that faced the patio were drawn. Father Gonzalo waited for his eyes to adjust, listening to the concerto and saying a Hail Mary in his head. He saw her shadow emerge out of the darkness and instinctively he tightened the muscles in his belly. She jabbed him with four fused fingers of her right hand about an inch above the navel.

“Aquí,” she said.

Father Gonzalo did not move. He waited, holding his breath. She jabbed him again, under the left side of the ribcage and to the right of the sternum, and higher up more to the right, and just beneath the right nipple: “Y aquí … y aquí … y aquí … y aquí …”

Father Gonzalo grabbed her hand. He heard her laugh.

“Don't listen to mamá, I am not mad, Gonzalo. You
are
a priest after all. We both know where the other two bullets struck. They blew off his huevos. They sought to shame him even as they murdered him. Poor Julio. They were so beautiful, his huevitos.”

The sparse afternoon light squeezing its way through the drawn curtains and the yearning notes of Beethoven's concerto created a marriage of shadow and sound in the room so that at first, it seemed to Father Gonzalo, one was competing with the other in trying to engage his senses, till he noticed that they had no awareness of him at all and were rather involved in an intricate ritual of seducing each other—the violin whine cutting its way into space and carving shapes with the clay-thick dimness and the shapes, in turn, throwing themselves behind the music and giving it depth and width, making it a thing of dimensions.

Alicia shuffled away from him and crouched on the floor in front of a giant, half-finished jigsaw puzzle. She picked up a few pieces from one of the three unused piles and put them in place.

“How can you see which shapes match which in this darkness?” Father Gonzalo said.

“They are all with us now,” Alicia said. “They have migrated back to this Island like flocks of sparrows after a hurricane. I have not seen
him
yet though … I have not seen Julio.”

At a crescendo the record skipped. Alicia did not move to fix it.

“Can't you hear it?” she said. “The drums inside the violins. There are many rumbas inside this beautiful concerto, ahí, escondiditas, just like the dead hide in the lives of the living … but you have to listen without your ears. Do you know how to do that? Listen with your hips. Can't you hear it? They've returned by the bunches.”

The skipping continued, irritable at first, but then Father Gonzalo noticed that through the unappreciated abracadabra of monotony, the violins did become drums, with their own liberated rhythm, their own wake-the-bones song. O, if Beethoven knew what a marvelous rumba he had wedged in between two notes! There must be others (think of all the notes), thousands of other rumbas just as beautiful.

Alicia held one piece of the jigsaw aloft: “Two thousand one hundred and forty-three pieces. I've done it four times already. It is the white castle of a mad king.”

Father Gonzalo walked farther into the room, his eyes slowly becoming more adjusted, his hands groping the edge of the bed for guidance. Alicia resumed working on the jigsaw puzzle, jiggling on her sitting bones, dancing with no legs. Father Gonzalo made it to the phonograph and moved the needle, the rumba vanished with a screech, the violin resurged like a bird flying out of a well.

“Don't bother,” Alicia said, “it'll get stuck again, it is an old record.”

“Perdóname,” Father Gonzalo said, “but I don't understand all this. Seré bobo, but I just don't understand this method of mourning.”

Alicia said she was
not
in mourning. She stood up, took a ball of yarn from one of her drawers and sat on the rocking chair at the far end of the room under the two large draped windows. She rocked herself vigorously, in and out of the slivers of orange light that glistened off her cheekbones and cast unforgiving shadows over her face. On her lap, she knit a tangle of unrepentant knots.

“I had a horrible dream. My cousin Héctor, the one who was once going to be my husband, saw his brother die. They were playing together and then they were separated and his brother rode a bike over a hose in the gas station and it exploded. I made Héctor watch the explosion again and again and I held him as he wept.”

“‘Even in our sleep,'”
Father Gonzalo said as if reading a script from his mind, “
‘pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God.
' A pagan wrote that.”

“Es verdad, no entiendes … Héctor is coming later today, he understands. I will not share my grief with any other, only him, not with you, not with mamá, not even with Marta (she has already shared in too much grief), although I have to say for a young woman, she is wiser than the lot of you. … My husband is dead. My husband was murdered. His dignity stripped from him. And what do
you
want me to do about it. Say a few Padre Nuestros? A few Santa Marías? And you think that that will make this mad widow sane and quiet her husband's troubled spirit?”

“I don't want to steal your grief from you. But I do want to make sure it doesn't destroy you. You haven't eaten in two days. ¿Por qué? Will that bring your husband back? Will that
ease
his spirit? And this boy Héctor, I know he is your cousin, but what can he understand about your grief. He is half a child, half a savage.”

“Héctor
loves
me, which is more than I can say for you or mamá.”

“That's neither fair nor just.”

“Go, Gonzalo, go murmur your rosaries, that is the only thing you know how to do.”

“Alicia, mi vida, I did not come here to argue.”

“Why did you come here? To save me? To guide me painlessly into the wonders of widowhood, like you did with mamá? Mil gracias, pero no, Gonzalo. Just leave me alone. Héctor will be here soon. I am fine. Bien, requetebién.”

There was a knock at the door. No one answered and doña Adela waited for a moment before she entered with a trayful of reheated guava pastelitos. She set them on the escritoire. The steam from the pastries became invisible as doña Adela passed from the light of the hallway into the darkness of the room.

“Who asked for those?” Alicia said.

“No seas atrevida. Gonzalo wanted some. They're not for you.” She set the tray down and walked out.

One strike against them, their wispy steam that was their opening act unseen (the first veil dropped in their besieging dance on the senses, the only lure needed for many who would engorge themselves on the promise of such curvy exhalations), the pastelitos turned to the bravura of their odor. Father Gonzalo was silent. He waited till the room was filled with their mollifying aroma, the air particles coated with their lurid sweetness.

Alicia stood and violently drew open the curtains behind her, as if in hope that the light from the patio would consume the smell of the reheated pastries. She walked across the room to her vanity and stared hard into the mirror, not looking at herself but at the room behind her.

Immediately, she knew it was him. She remembered the two long groove-deep wrinkles that sped off from the bridge of his nose, and rode just under the ridge of his eyebrows, all the way along, and stretched out over his temples and finally curled back and in on themselves, like drawn seawaves. His cheeks were slashed with other wrinkles (these, she did not remember), deep and short and butchered, as if carved by a hurried sculptor with a small dull chisel. Alicia did not know if worms had teeth, but if they did, she suspected they were responsible for these wrinkle-scars on her father's cheeks (after they had bored through the cherry coffin that Plácido Flores, the undertaker, had promised them would protect the body for forty-six years—
¡mentiroso!
). But aside from this, the grave, so famed for its feast on earthly beauty, had done little damage to his dear head in eleven years. His hair was a bit rumpled but still as full, his lips as flushed, his eyes as dark, as on the morning when Alicia had shaved half his still-warm face. (When Alicia was four, her abuelita had taken her aside, lulled her near to the bed where a cancer was eating at the inside of her mouth, pulled aside the mosquitero and warned her—the old bitter woman was full of warnings—
Never look at your father straight in those shit-colored eyes, he'll hypnotize you, make you want to love no other man. It almost happened with me once. His own mother-in-law he tried to bewitch. Listen to me, child, I am a dead woman.
And as if to prove it, she grabbed her lower lip with her bony fingers and folded it back and showed Alicia the patch of little white tumors growing there like mushrooms.
So listen to me, your life will be much the wiser if you always heed the voices of the dead.
She wrapped around her the black shawl that Alicia would wear many years later and said nothing more.) Teodoro was sitting on the floor overlooking the construction of the mad king's castle like a foreman, the gray linen suit he had been buried in wrinkled and splotched with mud, eating a guava pastelito and letting crumbs spill on the floor, something he very well knew annoyed doña Adela. Alicia noticed his feet were bare and muddied again, even though doña Adela had spent a whole afternoon washing them and digging out dirt from under the toenails before his body was sent to the coroner.