The Lazarus Rumba (64 page)

Alicia looked back to the chariot, she noticed its familiar giant egg shape, she looked at its wheels that were not wheels but talons dug into the mud, like those of a falcon burrowing into the home of its prey. She gave a short scream and ran to her prize, forgetting about the resting giant rats, who scrambled out of her way as far as their rope and harnesses would let them. Alicia passed her hands over the rim of her bathtub and walked a full circle around it, looking for familiar rust marks on its sides. “Pero, niño,” she said. “How? How?” She did not notice her bare feet becoming increasingly tangled in the harness ropes, nor did she hear the helpless squeals of Jeremiah and Ezekiel (and Daniel and Hosea) who were dragging behind her, ass backwards, their claws unable to sink into the muddy earth.

Joshua stood and went to Alicia: “Cuidado, the ropes, you'll fall.” He knelt beside her and freed her foot from the rope. He felt her hand on his head.

“Ay, mí vida, niño precioso, you have been to Guantánamo, you have seen my daughter.”

Joshua stood and Alicia put her hand on his cheek. She trembled.

“How is she? How is my daughter? How is Marta? How is my mother?”

“I saw them all. I met many people from your town. I will tell you. But first tell me where you want your tub, so I can set it up for you.”

“Inside. Inside the bohío, by the stove. So I can heat water. Ay, verás, there is nothing like a warm bath to purge the body … ya verás, even in this weather, to soothe the body and calm the mind.” While she was talking, Joshua crouched over the bathtub and measured its width with his arms and then walked arms still apart to the front door of the bohío. His hands could not pass through. He repeated the same process, the second time measuring the height of the bathtub, not taking the legs into account, and walking to the front door. Again, he could not pass through because of the spread of his arms. “No hay manera, the back door is even narrower; it won't fit. You'll have to continue to bathe under the stars. No te preocupes, the invisible birds watching us are not concerned with nakedness. It bores them.”

Joshua ordered the rats to rise. He spoke to them gently, with the benevolence of a master who knew well-treated servants work better than resentful ones. He lined up Jeremiah and Ezekiel on his left and Daniel and Hosea on his right. He picked up the largest harness and strapped it around his shoulders and around his waist. He asked Alicia to reach him the torch, and sunk his feet into the earth and heaved and pulled with the aid of his friends and the falcon-grip loosened from the earth and Joshua dragged the bathtub around one end of the bohío to the back, halfway between the outhouse and the back door. Its trail cut deep into the earth and Alicia remembered it had taken three men and her husband, one on each leg, to move the bathtub from the moving truck into their house in Guantánamo. Joshua removed his harness and sunk the torch into the ground and patted his animals and took some pellets of food from the pocket of his pants and fed them. They ate and rubbed their snouts against his ankle and circled once around him and rested. Joshua's breath was again heavy with the brief but tasking exertion and sweat glistened on his brow and above his lips. He said he wanted to jump in the river. He asked her to accompany him. They left the torch behind and the moon had already sunk so she did not see much of his nakedness when he took off his pants and casually handed them to her. They were heavy with sweat and mud. He jumped into the stream and splashed around like a child and teased her to come in and join him, that no harm would come to her for her mother had taught him the proper respect that la Revolución demands from all compañeros for the sacredness of a woman's body. When he came out he chided her for her cowardice and Alicia again could find no words with which to chastise his boyish effrontery. She reached the pants to him with her arm fully extended. He thanked her and said he would help her heat water for her first bath under the stars; and while they waited, he reasoned to her chorus of protests, he could tell her how he managed to fulfill her request to el Comité, by journeying all the way to her hometown on the eastern end of the Island and stealing the bathtub from the
cabrón rubio
who had made it his.

The Tale of the Tub (Prologue)

He boasted that when her daughter Teresita had first seen him, she had instantly fallen in love. After that, she could not bare to look at him, wrapping her arms around her grandmother's waist and sinking her face into her belly.

At first, he had gone to Alicia's old house. There was no answer at the front door and no answer when he rattled the iron-grill door of the courtyard on the east side of the house. He went around back and saw a small indian woman dressed in a black frock, her hair shorn down to a thin layer of fuzz the color of cigar ash, coming out of the henhouse, six limp white dead hens held by the scruff of the neck in one hand. When he made known the purpose of his visit she told him in a sibilant voice that la señora Alicia Lucientes no longer lived there, to which Joshua answered that he knew, and he tried to pull out the letter his mother had provided for him, but the indian woman continued in her harsh wheezy voice, asserting that this was now the home of comandante Camilo Suarez, and that if he had any business with said comandante he could go see him at his office in the Department of State Security and that if he tarried any longer in her presence she would have him arrested for trespassing, she was busy preparing the evening meal and she had no time for vagrant children.

“Are there many guests expected tonight?” Joshua asked.

“Guests? ¿De qué hablas, muchacho? Everyone in this town knows that el Rubio always dines alone, exactly at six in the evening.”

Joshua raised his eyebrows and signaled to the six dead hens.

“Ay mijo,” the indian said, her shoulders slumping, her voice softening, “you
are
a stranger amongst us.” She laughed and raised the hens above her head, “Three and thirty and three hundred of these he would eat if I let him. Ves, he doesn't really eat the flesh, despises both the white and dark meat, what his mouth waters for is the innards of these fowl, he will eat a sauteed liver in one swallow, and close his eyes and moan when he crunches on the grainy gizzard, and gob down scoopfuls of giblet with coconut stuffing, leaving the impure flesh, as he calls it, for me and his precious hound Tomás de Aquino, but he best likes a
pastel de corazoncitos
, pot pie made only with the core of red onions and slices of chewy poached heart,
this
, y no se lo diga a nadie, he can be bribed with. Ay sal de aquí, mijo; abandon your quest. You do not want to meet my rotund master, for I am afraid that he will take a liking to you, that dangerous liking which surpasses even his obsession for slippery innards of beast and fowl.”

Joshua pulled out his mother's letter and held it open in front of her. The indian hunched her shoulders and said she could not read, but not to shed any tears for her (as was the wont of many revolutionaries) for she was proud to be illiterate, because the dumber you are in this world the less you are likely to fall into the gutter of men's thoughts. “I am sixty-four and still a virgin, in mind
and
body.” She rubbed her velvety gray skull with her free hand, as if to signal that this was as far as she would let her own hands, or anyone else's, caress her own body.

“Fine,” Joshua said, opening the letter in front of him and following its contents with his index finger. “I will tell you what it says; it will do no harm to your chasteness. … I have express orders from Maruja Irigoyen (my mother), the chief of the 333rd Committee for the Defense of the Revolution, in the Valley of the Nightingales, in the Isle of Pines, to retrieve from this house and bring back to our valley a certain falcon-legged antique bathtub that is the property of one Alicia Lucientes, former resident of this house and now resident of our valley.”

The indian woman shook her head and walked past him towards the kitchen of the house. “Like I said, niño, go back to your mamacita before el Rubio sets his fat claws and his fake teeth on your boyish flesh, for
that
sort does not repulse him. … I have to work now. You have been warned.” She closed the kitchen door.

Joshua went to the second address his mother had written down for him, doña Adela's house on Maceo Street. Alicia's mother cracked the door open a few inches and asked what he wanted. He talked to the slit of her face, explaining who he was, who his mother was, the whereabouts and condition of her daughter, and finally, the purpose of his visit. The old lady said she did not know who to believe anymore, but that she had no choice but to force herself to believe him, and that she was glad to hear her daughter was alive and in good health and not in a prison. (Once she found out that Alicia had been coerced to confess to the murder of the finquero Mingo and had been taken out of Guantánamo, she pressed el Rubio for information on the terms of the sentence, how long, where it would be served. El Rubio's reticence to her questions, the way he scratched his chin with the naked short barrel of the polished derringer, which had been a gift from a famous yanqui novelist after the Sierra War, and suggested to doña Adela that she write the Department of State Security in the capital, for he could not tell her anything—only that it was good that one daughter confessed and thus saved the other one—made her mother fear that Alicia had been sentenced to the firing squad.) So she was unsure of how to deal with Joshua (even as she revealed all this parenthetical history to him, and he to her his task at the beck of el Comité of obtaining the falcon-legged bathtub), unable to deduce to whom the boy pledged his allegiances (for surely no one who worked for
any
Comité, or spoke the same tired jargon of revolutionary glory and revolutionary progress, could sympathize with dissenters like her daughter). Nevertheless, she pulled the door back and asked him into her home.

She looked like a soul condemned to insomnia, her white hair frizzled, her eyes bleary and half-shut, her body bent low like a palm after a windstorm. (Later, after Joshua had accepted an offer to sleep that first night in Alicia's childhood room, unused by Teresita now, who since her mother disappeared could only fall asleep in her grandmother's bed, doña Adela told him that the bags under her eyes, heavy as ripe plums, functioned as a reservoir for all her poisonous tears, and that if she lived to see the day when her granddaughter had become a woman, she would puncture them, and collect the venom of all her grief in a cup, and drink to her death.) She introduced him to the child not yet grown into a woman who was holding tight to her faded housedress, as if afraid a wind might pick her up and take her. She offered him coffee and some guava pastelitos she had baked that morning, assuring him that only one type of guava was pulpier and sweeter than guava picked directly from the tree, that was guava picked from the sheet-covered cartons of the black-market trucks; but told him he must wash first, for he looked and smelled as if he had spent a week in a pigpen. Joshua spread open his arms to display his dirtiness. Doña Adela said that the cloth of his poncho that hung from his bones looked like sooty gray wings of a city pigeon. Joshua said that his journey from the Isle of Pines had taken over two weeks, hitching rides along the Central Highway, and that many days he could not find any river or pond to wash in, although many times he refused offers to shack up at homes from solitary men and women, and even from whole families, who picked him up in their shiny Russian jeeps or rust-eaten Oldsmobiles or carts-and-buggy. His mother had warned him not to become entangled with any strangers along the way, for their kindness was sure to be a lamb's cloth that hid more perverse notions.

“Así mismo, but you are no stranger, you are Alicia's mother.” He sniffed under his armpits. “And you are right, I smell like a rotting carcass.”

The girl walked alongside her grandmother towards the bathroom door and only lifted her head a touch from her grandmother's belly, just enough to peek with one eye, when she heard her mother's name. Doña Adela left her outside as she went inside to run a bath for the visitor. When Joshua crouched and tried to talk to the girl and asked her age, she turned and faced the wall and covered her face with her hands. Joshua smiled and passed his hand through her long brown curls and said that there was nothing to be afraid of, that he was a friend of her mother. Teresita mumbled that she was not afraid, and that if he was truly a friend of her mother he would bring her back, so that the same thing would not happen to her that happened to her father before she was born. Joshua promised that the same thing would not happen to her mother. Teresita said she was almost seven, and old enough not to believe any promise from a comunista.

“I want my mother back, that's all. Can you do that? Can you tell her to come back?”

She turned and looked at Joshua for the first time and Joshua forced himself not to lower his eyes from hers though he had no good answer to her plea.

Doña Adela came out of the bathroom and handed Joshua a clean towel and fresh bar of soap. She let Joshua into the bathroom and told him to reach out his poncho and shorts to her when he had taken them off.

“Why, señora?”

“To burn them, muchacho.”

Joshua laughed. He reached out his clothes to her. “Señora, if you can just wash them, por favor. They are the only clothes I own.”

Doña Adela muttered that all the waters of the Caribbean could not wash the filth from such rags, nor all the perfumes from France make them smell clean again. She went into her closet and rummaged into it, through housedresses and church dresses, all the way back into one corner, where was stored, folded over the bar of a wooden hanger, the only article of men's clothing she possessed, an olive drab guerrilla suit, her dead son-in-law's fatigues. She set them out on the bed. The old cloth gave off a whiff of smoked tobacco and man's toil. The girl asked why it was so wrinkled and why it smelled so bad. Doña Adela said she did not know for she had washed it thrice and pressed it before she stored it away. She imagined a suit of war had no need to be cleaned and ironed and when left to its own devices, like a skilled drunk, reverted to its truer nature. She took off the silver star pins from each collar of the shirt-jacket and put them on the dresser and from the pockets of the fatigues and the suit she gathered a handful of cedar chips. In a box below, in the same corner of the closet, were a pair of black military boots. She put these out at the end of the bed. The leather was dull and cracking, but it would have to do.