The Lazarus Rumba (60 page)

Marcos looked up, not trying to hide his surprise.

“What? Reformed already, and have been here only a day and a half?”

“I have never said otherwise, and neither did my husband, and neither do
my people.
At heart, I am more a socialist and a patriot than all the overfed murderous swine who roam the Palace of the Revolution. Our quarrel has been and always will be against the Fidelistas' consolidation of power, through the military and through its thousand and one ministries and councils and directorate, in the capital, in the provinces, in the cities, down to each individual maldito CDR (even here in this valley prison) and to each poor child who is forced to wear his red hanky around his neck, and chant their propaganda like nursery rhymes.”

“Sí, sí, tienes razón, in all but in calling this valley a prison, when it is instead an exile. Fidel is a great admirer of the Roman emperors, and he learned from them that those that pose the greatest threat to you, you do not send into prisons, plots are too easily hatched in the incubation of cells (how did he hatch his own plot but in a prison not so far away from here?), instead you send them into exile where they lose touch, where they grow soft and lose their will to struggle.”

“Peor, this valley exile, then we are no better than the cowards who fled to Miami, with their diamonds and gold nuggets as suppositories.”

“Exacto, that is the aim,” Marcos said and pressed his grip on Alicia's wrist, so that she instinctively yanked it away.

“Cuidado,” she said and handed him back her wrist. He examined it some more and touched lightly with his index finger as if he were examining the texture of precious coral. He decided it should be bandaged.

“Bandaged with what?”

Marcos went to the old discarded bedsheets lumped in one corner and cut into them with his teeth and ripped off a long strip. He bandaged her wrist tightly, so that she could feel the circulation falter, and tied the ends in a knot.

“I do not see how we are to grow soft lacking so many necessities.”

“I'll go get some ice from Maruja and come back.” He laughed again. “See, this
lack of necessities
is just one of the many ways with which she keeps control over the people in the valley. She is the only one with ice! The Icewoman!—vaya, she deserves that title as much in a metaphorical sense as in a literal one. We are living as if this were still the nineteenth century. It is part of our penance. Pero no te equivoques, do not think all of us are as loyal to her as we pretend; for she is afraid of even her closest allies in the valley. Josefa for her witchery (as Maruja calls the santeros); and María, esa vieja that was so quiet and still at the meeting, nodding at everything Maruja said, you should see how she talks behind her back. Mira coño,
she
, ella misma, is not as loyal to herself as she pretends, even afraid of her own self. No, Alicia, we are not that much different from you. All of us here in the valley, except for the native guajiros, but even Maruja, at one point or another fought against the injustices of la Revolución, and are now trying to work our way back into it, wiser, but no less dissatisfied. And do not think that half the country is not quietly like us, less insolent and more inveigling, but no less dissatisfied.”

“What was Maruja's crime?”

“You need ice for your hand.” Marcos made a gesture, as if to go search for the ice.

“My hand is fine coño, it's too late for the ice anyway.”

Marcos made a puckering gesture with his lips, as if he had just tasted an unripe fruit, and sat on the floor next to the bed. “Esto, as far as I can tell, and perhaps the reason she is still here with us, her greatest crime is one that she is still gloriously unrepentant for—her fantasy that her son is the heir to the throne in La Habana. Vaya, this story is repeated as often as other stories about her, so I will try to tell it sifting, as best as I can, the fine facts from the coarse fiction. Pero bueno, al fin y al cabo—who knows truths from lies?

“Because of her knowledge of biblical texts, she was given a good position in the National Library after the triumph of la Revolución, although who knows why, since too much reliance on religious faith, in those first austere days when a new creed was being written in stone, made you
ipso facto
a counterrevolutionary. But I think one of the assistant directors (a staunch gruff woman with muscled arms) took a liking to her and to her extensive knowledge of the Bible and hired her. Not much later, when one of the many ideological purges of the National Library brought down both Maruja and this assistant director, it was alleged that they had been caught in one of the stalls of the ladies' bathroom of the Library, half-naked and in the heat of a perverse affair of love. No lo creo; for there was a more substantial reason why Maruja and many of her colleagues and supporters were fired and arrested. She lived with her son in a small apartment in La Habana Vieja, on Cardenas Street. To the many who saw her daily at her desk in the Library and paseando, hand in hand with her young son, whom she dressed impeccably in linen boy-suits and knee-high socks and leather moccasins, on the cobble-stoned cathedral plaza, she led a quiet untroubled life. There was no sign of the passion that was consuming her.

“Every afternoon at her lunch hour, Maruja donned a pair of dark round sunglasses and a colorful yellow silk scarf over her head and disappeared for an hour; none of her colleagues knew where and none grew suspicious that she never accepted their invitation to eat lunch at the ice-cream parlor down the street from the Library. She was a woman after all with a young son who was rumored to be mildly retarded. Only her supervisor at the Library knew the details of her son's true condition, the trances he would lapse into in the middle of some invented war with columns of tin soldiers, or during a reading lesson late at night, when his face would go blank, all the familiar gestures whited out, his only movement a smacking of the lips, the illness the doctors at the clinic diagnosed simply as the petit mal, which had to be closely monitored lest it devolve,
que Dios lo proteja
, into the grand mal, or full-blown epilepsy. Maruja, though, did not go as suspected to check on her son, to monitor him. Joshua was alone in the apartment on Cardenas Street during her lunch hour, his feet dangling over the second floor iron-grill balcony, the seat of his linen suit stained with rust, sometimes falling into his trances for hours on end, so that his mother had to shake him out of it when she arrived at dusk, before she diligently proceeded with his nightly school lessons.

“As her supervisor told her to take as much time as needed with her son, Maruja exited the Library and walked two blocks east and then two blocks north, so that no one would see her mount the bus headed for the Vedado district, to a small park across “L” street from the Hotel Habana Libre, where she would sit on a bench under an almond tree and eat an egg-salad sandwich, and wait for the two Russian jeeps that daily approached the front entrance of the hotel around one-thirty. When the jeeps arrived and the four olive-drabbed men with their tilted berets all entered the hotel, Maruja wiped her mouth and walked across the street to the entrance of the hotel and greeted the doorman, an older mulatto man with an inch-thick sheet of snow-white hair, and asked him how el Líder was that day.
Bien, bien como siempre
, the doorman always answered and smiled
¿Yusted, como está? Yo bien, bien como siempre
, Maruja always answered as well, and smiled as well too, but said no more and took the bus back to the Library.”

“She was stalking Fidel,” Alicia said, “and this stupid doorman could not tell?”

“Don't forget this was eight years ago, and Maruja still held on to that sort of girlish beauty that vanishes so quickly. The lovelorn doorman thought Maruja was interested in him, and the daily arrival of Fidel and his cronies just an excuse to approach him.”

“¿Y qué hacía Fidel?—going every afternoon to the hotel. Una puta, me imagino.”

“No chica, Fidel doesn't flaunt that sort of thing. His erotic affairs he pursues alone, like a wolf. (Ahí está, a wolf! If Fidel were going to metamorphose into anything when he raped a country girl, it would be no bull or cock or goat, but a wolf!—a fat wolf!) But it was no prostitute he was visiting. La cosa es mucho más simple. Why do you think Fidel is the only one who came down from the Sierra with a full belly, trailed by an army of live skeletons? Why didn't any of the thousand foreign journalists covering the victorious ride to La Habana ask themselves
that
question? I'll give you the simple answer: he is addicted to milkshakes, loves them more than he loves his three daily shots of whiskey, more than he loves his cigar.”

Marcos went on. He told Alicia how in the mountains many of Fidel's bravest guerrilleros were sent on missions in search of bohíos with ice boxes (since most dwellings in the mountains were without electricity) who would gladly donate a hunk of their precious ice, and let them get whatever drops of milk they could out of their shriveled-titted goats, when they were told it was for Fidel's daily milkshake. Back in the rebel camp, the guerrilleros wrapped the chunk of ice in a pañuelo and crushed it with their boots and stirred the watery milk into it and arm-wrestled for the honor to bring it to Fidel's bungalow. So it was that Fidel made his daily visit to the Hotel Habana Libre, not to bed any whore, as many on the outside might have improperly guessed, but to sit on the round mahogany bar and drink his daily milkshake, prepared expertly, just as he liked it, by Luisito Cuzco, the small indian bartender, with the ice crushed into small pieces as it had been done in the mountains, with no blender, but with the heel of his workboot.

All this Maruja learned from the snow-capped mulatto doorman as she daily engaged him, bit by bit, in more flirtatious conversation, on one day taking off her dark glasses so that he may gaze into her eyes, on another lowering her yellow scarf so that he may wonder at her thick black hair, and finally coaxing him into showing her the lobby of the hotel and the sealed entrance to the bar where Fidel was enjoying his merienda with three of his chosen comandantes and no bodyguard and a few other clientele of the hotel, usually Europeans, who were carefully selected by the secret police and given clearance, to make it seem as if Fidel was casually dropping by to visit them. For even though it is often noted by the myth-makers that Fidel has never used a bodyguard, he has, and security was much tighter around him in those days than it is now; vaya, con razón,
la CIA
had already begun its strange and lame campaign to have him assassinated. But Maruja, of course, did not know this, and she made up her mind that she would one afternoon sit next to him and have her son legitimized, right then and there, at the round mahogany bar of the Hotel Habana Libre. She grabbed the mulatto doorman's long bony hand and caressed it and hinted to him how much she would be honored to meet el Líder, to for one moment of her lonely life grace in the presence of a man-god, how she might be willing to pledge her life to such a man who was brave enough to lead her to him.

“Ay, no señorita,” the doorman answered, his pupils dilated, his body rigid as a youth, already falling under the spell of her caresses, “I would if I could, but I have strict orders that he cannot be bothered, that the brief half hour that he is in there is his only time of peace in his long day. Porque coño, they say that even in his sleep he is consumed by his passion for the destiny of our people, and has horrible nightmares of the pale monsters invading from the north. For he is sure that it is at night that the next yanqui invasion will take place, one in which they will use a hundred times the men of Playa Girón. El pobre, even in his bed he cannot rest; so he stays up all night, and often visits, unannounced, the fancy homes of the heads of the Central Committee, or of his most trusted comandantes, and keeps everyone awake, wife and children and grandmother and all, talking away the nightlong, one ear to the conversation at hand, the other to the much-augured buzz of yanqui warplanes. … Ay señorita, believe me, for you I would do almost anything, but this, this is beyond my powers. If you want to grace in the presence of a mangod, you might have to wait for el Señor Jesucristo when He comes again.”

“Bien,” Maruja said, moving away from him, putting on her dark glasses again and refastening her yellow scarf over her head, “pensaba que eras más hombre que todo eso.” From behind her sunglasses she noticed, as soon as she moved away from him, how all his years rushed back into him, like pigeons flocking all at once for a meager spread of crumbs, and his chest caved in and his spine bent with their burden, and she knew he would find a way to help her.

Two weeks passed and Maruja sat under the almond tree and ate her egg sandwich and did not approach the entrance of the hotel, though the doorman waved with both hands at her and signaled excitedly for her to come to him. Maruja held her place and after the two jeeps arrived and the four men dismounted and entered the hotel, she walked to the bus stop and waited for her ride back to the Library. On the second morning of the third week of her estrangement from him, the doorman, as soon as he saw her arrive, abandoned his post and walked across “L” Street to the bench where she sat. “You can see him mañana,” he said. “I have spoken to him, I have arranged it. You can go into the bar and see him while he is having his milkshake. You can even have a milkshake yourself, he said … if you like.”

Maruja, who had never seen the doorman do anything in the presence of the four olive-drabbed men but nod his head in a pathetic fit of servitude and hold the door open for them, was skeptical. “We'll see if you are a man of your word, mi querido viejito.” She stood and did not wait for the jeeps to arrive that afternoon and took the next bus back to the Library.

She arrived the next afternoon at the park across “L” Street wearing the same silk yellow scarf over her head and the same impenetrable sunglasses, but wearing instead of the flag-blue skirt and blouse that was the uniform of the Library personnel a tight-fitting summer dress printed with sunflowers with straps over her shoulders and the hem a few inches above her knees, and a pair of black leather moccasins. She carried no purse. She had taken the day off from the Library, telling her supervisor that her son was too ill to be left alone.