The Lazarus Rumba (53 page)

She lit the oven and set the flame just right and shut the trapdoor and then molded the dough and set it on the lightly greased cast-iron pan. While she waited for the oven to heat, she put the five vials and the jar back in the bath closet, exactly in the place they had been. When the bread was done and the kitchen full with its aroma, doña Adela set it on the windowsill to cool. The red crystals had melted and the crust was colored brown with purplish streaks. She boiled six boniatos and peeled them and pureed them; along with the bread and a tortilla flavored with scraps of ham fat—it would have to do as that day's almuerzo. She placed on one end of the long kitchen table four settings and took the bread from the windowsill and set it there too and alongside it the eighth of a stick of butter that was left for the month. She covered the puree and waited, restless and tempted to brew some coffee, though she had set the limit of coffee to only once a day so that it would last past the second week of the ration month.

Half an hour later, towards the front of the house, she heard shouts. She heard the cries of her granddaughter coming from outside on the veranda. “¿Ay Virgencita, qué ahora?” Doña Adela hurried to the front door. When she opened it, Marta ran inside with the girl in her arms.

“Adela! Adela!”

“Where is Alicia?”

Marta put the girl down and Teresita screamed, her little hands tightened into fists and shaking in front of her. “Take her into the kitchen,” doña Adela said, her voice calm and steeped in a mother's authority. “Go now, Marta, ahora, no seas histérica. Take Teresita into the kitchen.” Marta obeyed. Doña Adela then shifted her housedress and buttoned the two buttons she had undone in the kitchen while cooking and wished she had not forgotten to jump into her slippers when she hurried to the front door. She stepped out into the veranda and grabbed the rusty chain of the porchswing when she felt her mind begin to swim. She focused her stare on the faces of the mob gathered below on Maceo Street, packing the street from the near curb all the way across. She was surprised that she recognized so many of the faces, some from Mass, others from the market, others yet who had once considered her a friend and during the early days of la Revolución had ingratiated themselves to her, knowing she was the mother-in-law of an influential comandante, and others still who she could not believe would ever harm her family, whom she had watched grow up and babysat for, and even one, the daughter of a still dear friend, a handsome mulatta who cast her handsome round eyes downward, whose birth she had assisted.

“¿Qué quieren?” doña Adela said, pretending she had never known any of those faces.

No one in the mob answered and its center began to spread open person by person and its wings spilled into the sidewalks and revealed what was buried within. Doña Adela put her hand over her mouth as if to keep herself from making any noise. Her daughter was paraded out to the head of the mob, her right arm held by a young man who was rumored to have replaced Pucha as the chief of the local Comité. He was lank and pale and shabbily garbed in an oversized campesino costume. Whatever fear Alicia felt her face did not betray it. She stared directly at her mother, the afternoon shadows concealing the rage in her eyes. Her hair was let out and doña Adela was surprised it had grown so long past her shoulders and there was even a glint of gray here and there that doña Adela had not noticed before. Over the past months she had lost emotional touch with her daughter, had let her sink back into the quicksand of grief without lending a hand, let her disappear just as the government had wanted her to disappear. Alicia wore the white sashless caftan she had brought back from her five-month sojourn in the mountains, as if she had been waiting for these people, as if she had known the sacrificial role she would play and dressed for it.

“¿Qué quieren?” doña Adela repeated, this time her voice cracking.

“¡Evidencia!” someone from the mob's heart shouted.

“¡Evidencia! ¡Evidencia!” many repeated, from its guts and from its wings.

“The people want evidence,” the young man holding Alicia's arm said. “Evidence we know is in that house, evidence that will show her forever a traitor to la Revolución.”

Doña Adela looked at her daughter.

“Give them nothing, mama,” Alicia said, not trying to raise her voice above the shouts of the mob. The mob roared its disapproval and gathered closer around her. A girl no older than ten or eleven, dressed in a pionera's uniform, with the flag-colored pañuelo around her neck, stepped up to Alicia and spit in her face. When Alicia did not wipe it off, she spit again and again till the young man chief of el Comité shoved her away. The mob's center doubled over with laughter. The young man raised his free arm and waved them to stop and he pulled a white handkerchief from his pocket and wiped Alicia's face. Alicia recoiled from his touch and was no longer able to hide her tears.

“Mira como llora la sinvergüenzona!” the pionera said. The mob laughed some more.

“¡Silencio!” the young man screamed. He looked at doña Adela. “¿Bueno?”

Alicia was now sobbing, her head bent low.

“Whatever you want,” doña Adela said and went inside to look for what she knew they wanted. She passed the kitchen on her way to her bedroom and was surprised to see el Rubio, sitting at her kitchen table feeding her granddaughter a buttered slice of bread, surprised to see a whole block of butter in the butter dispenser. Teresita had stopped crying.

“Where is Marta?”

“Buenas.” El Rubio smiled. “I brought some mantequilla. Pues, I figured you would be short. I came in through the patio. Marta is out there. Llorando la pobre. … Wonderful bread, never tasted any quite so good.” He buttered the boniato puree and ate some with the same fork he fed Teresita.

“Will they let her go if I give them what they want?”

“Señora Adela, perdóname, but I am not here to protect Alicia; I am here to protect you, your other daughter (or I should say, discúlpame, your husband's other daughter), and your beautiful granddaughter, esta muñequita. Alicia is in their hands. Should the business of the people of el Comité be any business of mine, or of anyone on the municipal police force? Don't these people police themselves? … but I do suggest you give them whatever they ask for.”

Doña Adela ran to her room and lifted the statuette of Santa Bárbara on her console and took the envelope of money and the two folded manuscripts that were hidden there, one, the copy of Alicia's Sermon of the Seven Kisses, and the other, her handwritten transcript of Beba's translation of the English children's story. She went to el Rubio and shoved it all in front of him. El Rubio looked inside the envelope and handed it back to doña Adela and said that he saw no need for petty bribes, besides, she well knew, no matter how few, that yanqui dollars were highly illegal (not to mention terribly unimaginative and dull in their color scheme). He opened the manuscripts and examined them, ahemming this and ahumming that and refolded the manuscripts and gave them back to doña Adela. “Your daughter's handwriting? That's good. Pero mejor that you give it to them. The gesture will seem … vaya, como digo … more sincere. Mejor que no me meta yo. What good will it be for anybody if I get involved? And be wise, don't show them the yanqui dollars, it'll just get your daughter in more trouble!”

Doña Adela told him that he was a coward and called out to Marta to come back into the kitchen and chastised her for leaving her granddaughter alone con este gran defachatado. El Rubio said that there was no need to insult the only compañero in the whole town who dared come to her aid and to the aid of their loved ones. He pointed at her granddaughter with his fork. He ate the puree and asked if there was more. He said he had heard of her famous recipe for mutton kidneys and that one day she would have to copy it down for him. When Marta had come into the kitchen, doña Adela stuffed the envelope down her breast and went out to meet the mob again. She held both manuscripts aloft in her right hand, shaking it so the papers ruffled. Alicia had been engulfed by the mob again, its wings folded in on her.

“¡La evidencia! ¡La evidencia!” the mob cheered and it pushed closer to the veranda where doña Adela was standing.

“Give me my daughter and it is yours.”

The young man chief of el Comité walked up the steps of the veranda and stood in front of doña Adela with his hands out. “Por favor,” he said. “No quiero lío.”

“I want my daughter in the house first.”

“Withholding evidence is a crime as serious as any your daughter has committed.”

Doña Adela cast a quick glance at the mob. Still, she could not see Alicia. Two women and the young pionera walked up to the veranda. One woman put her hand on doña Adela's shoulder and forced her to fall back on the blue porchswing. As she tried to regain her balance, the pionera grabbed the manuscripts from her hand. She leafed through them but the young man chief of el Comité told her there was nothing in the papers that would be of good to her as a pionera of la Revolución. She gave him the manuscripts. He walked down the veranda steps and held the manuscripts aloft as doña Adela had. The mob burst into cries of joy. A woman screamed at the young man chief of el Comité to read from the manuscripts, to prove here now and forever señora Alicia's treachery. “Read for yourself,” he said. He flicked the manuscripts in the air. The sheets flew apart and floated downward like giant confetti. Doña Adela tried to get up from the porchswing but she was pushed back down by one of the women up on the veranda.

“¿Mijita, dónde estás?” she muttered.

The mob raised all its arms in unison and reached for the sheets. In silence, the people read the criminal's manuscripts. Those that didn't manage to grab a sheet looked over the shoulders of those that did. The pionera brought a sheet back to the young man chief of el Comité. He thanked her and looked at the sheet and told the mob that there was no use reading in silence, to read out loud so that all the people may know of Alicia's false heart. They read out loud. “Louder!” he commanded. “Loud enough so that even the yanquis at the base hear you.”

He showed them how and the people did as he did, some reading from Alicia's sermon, some from the translation of the Lewis Carroll story. The words spewed shouted and incomprehensible from the sides of their mouths and sentence by sentence they wove the text into a crown of thorns. When they were finished, the young man chief of el Comité tore his sheet in half and then in half again and gave a piece each to the women up on the veranda and a piece to the pionera and kept a piece for himself and he commanded the mob to do the same. He put the paper in his mouth and began to chew on it like a goat and the mob cheered and did like he did, masticating in unison, loud and vulgar with open mouths, and then someone screamed that
she
should be the one eating her own words and they dragged Alicia to the front again. Doña Adela screamed for her daughter but the two women held her down. The pionera tossed her wad of chewed paper at Alicia and it stuck to her neck and they threw Alicia to the ground and forced the wad in her mouth and moved her jaw with their hands so she too would chew on it. Doña Adela began to throw punches at the women who were holding her down but they laughed at her and called her abuelita. One by one they regurgitated their cuds of paper and made Alicia chew on them. When they were done her caftan had been torn open and her breasts were scratched and exposed. The young man chief of el Comité walked up to her and spit his cud, not at her but at her side, and the mob cheered this gesture of mercy and all followed him away from there.

By the time doña Adela reached her daughter and wrapped her in the shawl that had been draped on the porchswing, Alicia was trying to heave back up parts of the paper she had been forced to swallow, but nothing came out, except for a noise that reminded doña Adela of pigs at the slaughter.

After doña Adela had thrown el Rubio out of her house, threatening him with a kitchen knife, Marta put her arms around her sister and promised vengeance. Doña Adela reprimanded her and picked up her granddaughter and said that what they had done to Julio César not long ago and what they did to them now they would do to the girl as well soon, that it was foolish to fight these thugs for they would surely emerge victorious and to think on her defenseless niece when any thoughts of vengeance possessed her. Marta said that they may as well pack their bags and leave for Miami if they were going to take this abuse and torture like a chorus of ruined saints.

“Maybe that is what it has finally come to,” doña Adela said. “Maybe it is time for us to put in for permission to leave. No, mi vida, you are absolutely right, we are no saints. Why fight anymore, when this will always be the outcome?” She scrubbed the silver el Rubio had used, and let it sit in hot water, as if he suffered from some highly contagious disease, and told Alicia to try and eat; but she would not, and held on to her sister, the promise of vengeance more a consolation to her than food.

The first complaints in the late days of 1970 came from people indirectly involved with the business of el Comité, informants and ad hoc members who, for sundry reasons of security and secrecy, did not attend the weekly meetings; and they were filed ¡Ointly with the local postmaster and at el Rubio's office. Pieces of mail from el Comité's office, announcements of members' weddings and of new births and recent deaths, and other more delicate documents such as detailed minutes of a previous meeting or affidavits necessary for corroboration of counterrevolutionary offenses, were not arriving at their destination; or if they did arrive, they came torn and smudged and soiled and illegible as if some barn animal had grown fond of the taste of the ink and tried to lick it off.

The postmaster, an eighty-seven-year-old spinster named Paca Córtez, convinced el Rubio to let her conduct a private investigation first. She dug out the rusty bicycle she had not dared use since the days when la Revolución was young, oiled the chains and attached training wheels and, with her gnarly mahogany cane tucked under one arm, took turns secretly following each of her carriers, and aside from the infractions that (all but one) she already knew about or suspected: that one carrier was a borrachón and carried in his bag two flasks of rum, which he sipped on diligently and emptied just as he emptied the last pieces of mail from his bag; that another carrier, her forty-year-old grandnephew Miguel, a man so cursed with dark long-haired beauty he seemed trapped in the jewelcase of his looks, entered one of the buildings on his route, a Renaissance-style stone house with colonnaded galleries, built under the shade of a giant ceiba, that was the home of the town's alderman, an older bachelor as well known for his revolutionary zeal and talent in cultivating exotic orchids as for his tastes in love, that daily her grandnephew bypassed the stone post-box that was the open-mouthed face of a Roman god and entered through the front door without knocking and was inside for over an hour, much longer than needed to deliver any mail, but doing what, Paca Córtez cared not to ponder further, for whatever his weaknesses Miguel was her most efficient and best-liked carrier and women her own age sighed with joy at the mere sight of him, mouthing that if they were only twenty years younger …; that her only woman carrier was a consummate whore, and that she too like the grandnephew took time off from her afternoon route to visit her queridos, though, unlike her grandnephew's, hers were various and of the more vulgar vein, factory workers and drooling retirees in their stained undershirts, and her appearance, of tired eyes, pockmarked face, blunt features, and pork-fat limbs, did not begin to offset the shamelessness of her profligacy—these and many other sins Paca Córtez discovered (even the one of which, as she reported, she had had no inkling, one carrier, whom she was forced to dismiss and charge under the counterrevolutionary crime code, who took so much interest in his work that he became an expert at distinguishing, by the care and slant with which the addresses were scripted, which pieces of the daily mail were missives from tormented lovers, which from wronged friends, which from wistful faraway relatives in the yanqui diaspora, and some of these he stuffed inside his pockets and took home and at night steamed open and read, and some he kept as mementos under his single mattress, and some he delivered only weeks later), but none that explained the complaint at hand, that some devil was busy eating the words off certain pieces of mail addressed from the offices of the local Comité. All this and more she jotted down (omitting all of her grandnephew's sins) in a thirty-page handwritten report delivered in person to el Rubio's office.