The Lazarus Rumba (62 page)

“As you can see from what I've told you, Maruja keeps her first promise only halfway, from her own tongue there is never a mention of the incident, but she has a thousand other tongues at her service, keeping the sordid tale alive. As for her second promise, she has been more true. She is now, in her own demented manner, a devoted servant of la Revolución and its leader, and has in this village almost single-handedly rehabilitated thousands,
from the most base pervert
(that's me)
to the blackest witch
(that's Josefa), as she puts it, and helped reintroduce them into the society of la Revolución. And colorín colorado,
that
finally, señora Alicia, is what you and I are here for, so that some day we too may be as efficient servants as she is.

“But now, Joshua is almost eighteen, and whether Fidel keeps his end of the promise or not, will change our village forever. But that is still half a year away.

“As for you, you should enjoy your time of idleness till Sunday, for that is when, after most of the village gathers at Maruja's house to hear Fidel speak from her television set, you will meet all of them and become an official resident of our village, and be assigned the appropriate duties, as a worker and as an apprentice servant of la Revolución and your time will no longer be yours but belong entirely to Maruja. I am somewhat embarrassed to say that it is she who sent me here, to talk to you, to tell you most of the stories I have told you, for she preaches that the true revolutionary finds a proper use for every resource, and even my corrosive brand of cynicism, as she calls it, can be put to work if tamed properly, very effective against the iron wills of so many of the counterrevolutionaries who have passed through this purgatory. And I am that now which I once was, that which I afterward despised, against my rebellious conscience, I have become again (though not blind to all its ills as I first was) a true servant of la Revolución, and therefore a true servant of the future generations. Now I will go look for ice.”

Alicia laughed openly for the first time since she had left Guantánamo, in the same harsh manner with which she had laughed in el Rubio's face when she had been asked by one of his thugs to sign her confession of murder. (A laugh of initial resistance, though less than four hours later she had signed the confession to lessen the charges against her sister and the other women arrested at the wrestler's house. This memory soured the pleasure of her present laughter.)

“What are you, Marcos, old compadre of my husband? I thought better of you when you dared to question Maruja during the meeting. Is this the up-to-date model of the New Man of la Revolución, is he like the poet who after volumes and volumes of song and lascivious lay, laments his reams of sins in a one-page retraction? If it is, then I am glad that my husband never lived this long, for although they broke him and turned him into a shadow even before they murdered him, a man no longer able to love his wife, his homeland, his own life, at least he never turned into this.” She leaned towards him and placed her bandaged hand on his head, “A mock repentant, an apologizer more than an apologist, a castrato singing the inhuman notes of a lost paradise, no mejor digo, a paradise that never was. Me perdonas if I sound too insulting, y que me perdonen todos los santos, but my Julio is better dead than this.”

Marcos stood. He shook his head. “You judge without full knowledge of the world where you have been sent. You judge now with a widow's mournful rage, with the ungracious grief of a mother estranged from her child; but in time, si Dios quiere, you will judge differently, you will judge with the unencumbered unadorned wisdom of an exile (a true exile, one banished from our land and not one who has fled to the enemy with riches in tow), and, a lo mejor, that will be your only salvation. … I will go get ice, once and for all.” He left and returned soon after with a bag of ice, which he held tight against her bare bruised wrist and he stayed many hours, till after the moon had fallen, but she asked him no other questions and he said no other words to her except to warn her to ration her food carefully till Sunday.

Four days later he returned to lead her back to Maruja's bohío to listen to Fidel's Sunday afternoon speech.

The Devils in the Clock

Joshua was not there among the throng of villagers creeping in and out of Maruja's small bohío, in groups of seven or eight, like fire ants into the hull of a dead roach, just to get one peek at el Líder, atop the platform in the Revolutionary Plaza, sweat stains on the armpits of his olive uniform and on the brim of his olive cap, crowded by a sea of admirers, waving banners and placards and chanting responses to his sermon, which the villagers and Maruja also chanted.

“Cierren la puerta, coño,” she screamed as one group entered and another exited; though all the windows were shuttered, the light from the opened door drowned the improbably small black and white image of el Líder on the screen. When it was Alicia's turn to enter she hesitated, but Marcos grabbed her lightly by the arm and led her in. Maruja did not look at her or greet her but kept her gaze fixed intently on the screen and talked back to it with phrases like
así mismo
and
la verdad, la verdad pura, coño.
Earlier that day, on the way from her bohío, Marcos had told Alicia that he had often objected to Maruja about this method of watching the Sunday speeches. He had explained to her that Fidel's speeches were purposefully so long, so that no one could muster the concentration to
sit
and listen to it from beginning to end, that is, he defeated his listeners, even as he tried to educate them, he out-patienced them just as he had out-patienced his professors at the University of La Habana and Batista and his Rural Guard and three yanqui presidents and would out-patience the Second Coming Himself, if need be, for the sake of our people. It was a virtue Fidel learned from the Jesuits, though all bustle and flurry on the outside, his avid gesturing, his mania for soliloquies (this, his heavy mask in the mad theatre of the imperial throne), on the inside an inner core of sanity and patience as consummate as the practiced stillness of a Tibetan monk, as solid as the limestone walls that surround this false valley. So, the proper way to listen to him was not to try to outdo him in an intricate game where he has made up all the ground rules and revealed them to no one. It is as silly as to have sat blindfolded across a chessboard from the great Capablanca.

“No—the more advantageous way to listen to his speeches (and clearly I am not the only one who believes this
or
practices it), the way perhaps he means for us to listen to him, is with one ear to his rhetorical trumpet and the other ear to the everyday trumpet of revolutionary life—the crickets on a freshly harvested field, the scrub of clothes against the washboard, the tedious murmurs of la cola at the start of the ration month, the cry of a child, the songs from an afternoon of rum, the groans from a sweaty evening of love—so that one may be properly integrated into the other, just as the Jesuits use their concrete intellect to levee and dam the torrential river that is the word and will of God.”

Maruja had looked at Marcos, unmoved to change her habit of sitting for six or seven hours straight
looking
at Fidel and not just listening to him. “Mira muchacho, por favor, it is that kind of sophisticated university babble that got you in trouble in the first place, maybe if you had never known how to build such airy castles with your fancy language, you wouldn't have written all that counterrevolutionary trash. … Coño, para mí es obvio, a man speaks, you listen to him, he speaks wisely you look at him, you listen harder. It is rude to go about and do other things while you
pretend
to listen.”

After their allotted fifteen minutes were up inside the darkened bohío with the flickering black and white screen, during one of Fidel's long pauses, which the crowd at the plaza filled with shouts of
¡Venceremos! ¡Venceremos!
or antiquated doggerels aimed at the enemy:

Maruja flicked her hand and signaled for one group to exit and the other one to be let in. On the way out, Alicia said to Marcos, still within hearing range of their host, that both he and Maruja were mistaken, that the best way to listen to Fidel's speeches was with no ears at all.

“He carps like a disgruntled housewife!”

Marcos hushed Alicia and led her out and took the trouble to introduce her to many of the villagers from his side of the valley. Most of them addressed him as
jefe.

The throng of villagers enjoyed their Sunday afternoons much more outside of Maruja's bohío than within. They went in and came out with somber faces and murmurs of approval at all the work that had been done and greater work that lay ahead for the continued progress of la Revolución. Yet when they had been out for a few minutes, or before they had been selected to go in, it was as if not a thought could be wasted on anything but idle pursuits. Barefoot boys, encouraged by their fathers, raced up the twisted-crucifix antenna, apparently unbeknownst to Maruja, who redundantly cursed the thousandfold accursed phantom of el-indio-demierda Batista (who had recently abandoned his rotted brown body in Madrid) for her bad reception every week, precisely during the course of the Speech. Men played music in improvised drums made of rotted palm stumps and maracas made of hollowed-out coconut shells, and at times with their gitano voices and their primitive instruments seemed to drown out the ubiquitous birdsong of their valley. And the words they chanted, unlike the crowd at the Revolutionary Plaza, were heated with the fire wheel of love won and love lost and not with the bonfires of politics and revolution. Farther away, in a clearing hidden by a grove of shrub pines, women lined up to have their fates told by Josefa's cowrie shells. The woman Maruja had chastised for witchery at the CDR meeting was still very much a practicing madrina and had baptized many of the guajiro villagers into the realms guarded by the
orishas.

“Maruja, la pobre, is out of touch with our world here in the valley,” Marcos admitted.

“Very much like the one she is in love with,” Alicia said.

She went to line up to see the madrina Josefa, who sat crouched on a cloth of satin with her long frock covering all of her body below her neck, on which hung two collars of polished beads, one crimson, the other white. She smoked hand-rolled cigarettes and flicked the ashes into the air. Wild grass grew thick in the meadow all around her, but in a circle around where she sat the ground was bald with wear. Alicia prostrated herself before the madrina and informed her that she was an initiate of Elegua and the madrina seemed to take offense, and said that she knew, that it was clear from the moment she saw her enter Maruja's bohío, that despite the outward appearance of her eyes she could see better than most, that it was obvious from the history of Alicia's cunning dissent against the government and from the scars on her cheek that she did not yet have, who her protector was, that she needed to be offered no such information for,
unlike the sinvergüenzas who run this Island
, she was no charlatan.

Alicia passed her hands over both cheeks.
What scars?
Josefa apologized. She meant no offense. Josefa picked up the sixteen small cowrie shells spread on the satin to the left of her. She passed her hand softly over the sawdust held in a tray to the right of her to make sure the previous divination had been completely erased. She shook the shells in her left hand like a gambler. She asked Alicia why she had come to consult the madrina.

Alicia said that she had no fee to offer the messenger spirit.

Josefa stopped shaking the shells and laughed. She said most of the people had grown so poor, not only in this valley, but in the whole of the Island, that many of the messenger spirits had joined the Party and their fee was now paid by the State, that even Alicia's own powerful protector, the wiliest god Elegua, was forced to switch from his favorite meal of rooster and opossum with rum, to the tendons of mice with black-market watery yanqui beer. She quickly added that she was joking and stopped laughing. “But seriously, hija, pretend you have a coin in your hand and whisper your concern into the air. I trapped un pajarito last night and offered it as sacrifice this morning. The gods know we do what we can. Besides, Elegua is the messenger of all the orishas, and his paths to this world are many, paved or not.”

Alicia held both her hands pinched in the air, more as if she were holding a consecrated host than a large invisible coin. “Where is Joshua?”

The madrina, as was her duty, betrayed no astonishment to the question. She shuffled the cowrie shells from her left to her right hand, at each take transferring fewer and fewer pieces from one closed hand to the other and drawing with the pinky of her right hand either a circle or a slash on the sawdust. When she was finished she examined the pattern on the tray and let the cowrie shells fall from her hands like shattered crystal and closed her eyes and recited, in a borrowed high voice that belonged to the spirit of a young boy, from the memory of Ifa, the oracle that reveals the destiny of all beings, humans and deities: