The Lazarus Rumba (70 page)

Then one day they had to leave the apartment on Cardenas Street. One day, his mother revealed to him the identity of his father. His mother called him the whitest man on the Island. When they took his mother from him and transferred him to the State hospital, the little illness worsened. The tic in his left eyelid spread its tangle of roots deep inside his head and used the pulp of his brain as nutrients. The fiend grew like a weed in rich soil. It took his body. It took his mind. It snatched for his soul. He told the doctors it felt as if a scorpion were growing inside him. The doctors told him the scorpion was a yanqui scorpion. They told him his illness, they called it a
grand
illness now, was a symptom of his bourgeois degeneracy.
El trabajo te curará
, they said.
Work will cure you. It will make you a man.
He was put into the Communist Youth League and sent to the cane fields for six months. In the fields, where the cane harvesters joked that the sun shone as if it suffered from an incurable fever, his seizures vanished as the doctors had predicted. How could he not then believe in la Revolución? What ingrate does not believe in the miracle that has saved him?

He did not see his mother for five years. By the time they informed him that he must accompany her in her exile, he had forgotten her. He had no family. He had risen in the ranks of the Communist Youth League, was a
vigilante
, an informant to several CDR's. La Revolución was his family, his compañeros, the brothers he had never had.
No
, the leaders of the Communist Youth League said,
no te equivoques, la Revolución has not gone as far as to forget the need of mothers. You will accompany her. You will watch her to make sure she does not stray from the path again. D
uring the trip to the Valley of the Nightingales, in Charo's leaky boat, still wearing his crisp Communist Youth League uniform, he did not speak to her. When she tried to force conversation, he dug in her bag for her black leather Bible and leafed frantically through it. His mother laughed; she said it was obvious no one had bothered to continue his daily lessons. She stumbled over to him and looked over his shoulder and helped him find the passage he was looking for. She pointed at it with her dirty fingernail. “Read it. Read it to me.”

Joshua refused. He shut the book.

“Read it, goddamn it,” Charo shouted, turning from the wheel.

His mother reopened the book and found the passage again. Charo repeated his command and said it was a capital crime against la Revolución to disobey a captain in his boat. Joshua read, shouting against the wind and the roar of Charo's boat engine with the words from Matthew:

“Coño, está jodío el chico comunista,” Charo said, “what a thing for a young man to read to his mamacita. Toss that vile book into the sea!”

Charo's scorn was just a prologue for the scorn with which all the native islanders treated the new villagers. These were the ancestors of the runaway slaves that had established the first homes in the valley. They had seen the white soldiers, the Fidelistas, the legions that served the whitest man on the Island, in their olive drab come and go. But now they had sent one to live among them.
Envidia
, his mother pronounced, after all, they were the first in the valley with a generator, which ran the refrigerator, the television, the air conditioner (part of the deal his mother had made with his father—
if I'm going to move with mi querido hijo to a village stuck en el año de la cometa, give me at least the modern conveniences
). In 1968, the tide of progress, the glory of la Revolución, had not yet washed over this remote valley surrounded by limestone walls hundreds of feet high. Joshua told Triste how his mother tried to win the natives over with the wonder of electricity, cooling their water with crushed ice (which turned to hooks of anguish within their rotted mouths) and inviting them to her bohío to watch Fidel's speeches on the black and white console (which seemed to them like a gray demon's rattle compared to the ubiquitous coloratura of their bird-infested land and the chill air like the unfathomable breath of a long-interred corpse). Ultimately, she could only win them over by becoming one of them, by toiling in the fields just as hard, by forcing her son to stop wearing his young communist uniform, by sharing the fruit of her labors just as generously; and by reading to them from her favorite book of the Bible, which rendered the simplicity of labor as the only human gesture devoid of vanity. It was clear, these men and women and children, descendant of runaway slaves, who had not intermarried, who had obstinately kept their blood dark and thick with the bile of suffering, had built an ideal revolutionary community long before the gaunt bearded white gods had descended from la Sierra. La Revolución had not come here because its doctrines and tenets, fresh and vulnerable as newborn babes to the overprotective regime, were deemed here old and stalwart as the tallest pine. Or as the native islanders put it more bluntly:
esos dichos del Che y de Cara de Coco son más viejo que cagar sentao.
Here was their home, the mother told her son, here he would become a paragon for all future revolutionaries, here he would learn from the truest and oldest revolutionaries on the Island, these sons and daughters of slaves, to outshine his father for when the time comes to dethrone him from his seat in the capital. “But cover your head and your body from the sun. Inherit the blood in their hearts, not the pigment of their skins.”

But it was they (the natives) who risked inheriting the pigment of
his
skin, they who were not as stubborn in keeping their dark lineage pure as his mother believed, their young women who taught him the rules and strategies of love and who over three years bore six children each colored like coffee with
un chorrito
of milk, future heirs to the throne in La Habana who were kept hidden in the bohíos and not allowed out in the fields or near the river to play with the other children, future heirs to the throne in La Habana who would never know of the white face of their grandmother or the whiter bearded face of their fabled grandfather, whose flesh color resignedly revealed the heritage of both the sinners and the sinned-against.

The second morning dawned, and high in the banyan, invisible from the ground as they were, the white one inside the black one, the warm one inside the cold one, hanging forebodingly from an overexerted vine like a giant black pod of misery over the earth, they heard the nearby barking of dogs and they whispered.

I am thirsty.

Sorry, that line has already been used by a very famous persecuted one. Think of something a little bit more original.

I wasn't trying to be original. I'm just thirsty. What is wrong with you? With all of you?

They have made us crazy. We have let them make us crazy.

I'm going to go crazy if I don't get some water. Let me go. I'll sneak to the river and get us some. What is wrong with you—aren't you human? aren't you thirsty?

I haven't been talking quite as much as you have. …If I let go of you, those dogs down there will make your pretty white flesh look like shredded coconut pulp.

Oye, oye, I told you, no funny stuff. Don't call me pretty, I am not a girl. Vaya, la Revolución gives liberty, to all, even maricas. Pero respeta, keep it amongst yourselves. I told you, dejen a los machos tranquilo.

If we were to leave los machos alone, it would be no fun being a marica.

Oye, te dije, respeta. ¡Ay! Wait till my mother hears of this, wait till she learns that I spent a whole night inside the flesh of another man, a man blacker, and more pure a descendant of slaves, than any native of the valley.

I am not a man. You said so yourself. I am the fiend that possesses you. I am the scorpion of your childhood dreams. Forget about your thirst, go on with your story. Another day and the dogs will have their tongues hanging down to their paws. They'll tire of looking for us and climb back up in their towers, and we'll climb down and sneak to Guantánamo.

Ay sí, Guantánamo, I have not told you why I came.

Joshua told Triste of the tub that had belonged to the Spaniard Jesuit and then belonged to comandante Julio César Cruz and then belonged to his widow Alicia and now belonged to the fat fairy they call el Rubio.

Alicia? You know Alicia Lucientes?

Yes. I will tell you.

Yes, tell me, for though I have never met her face to face, she has a place in my heart.

Joshua continued to speak to forget his thirst. He told Triste of the others who were sent to the valley, to recover from their lapses of faith under her mother's care. With the aid of the natives, and through her sermons on the beneficence of simple labor, she had become a sort of priestess; she had established a reputation.
The finest revolutionary therapist on the Island, Granma
reported in a back-page story. The weak, the renegade, the infidel were sent to the valley like the ill to a sanatorium.

Alicia arrived not long ago, a convicted murderer, an eater of revolutionary words, her own reputation also solid:
the most famous dissident on the Island.
The invisible black birds, like the unseen storks who transfer unborn souls into our world, dropped her off at the entrance to her mother's bohío. As early as the third afternoon of her stay, his mother proclaimed that this most famous dissident ever sent to the valley, this wordeater, this murderess, would be her most renowned convert. Thus Alicia's odd request to have her falcon-legged bathtub brought to the valley must be fulfilled. She said she could converse with the ghost of her husband when she bathed in it. Joshua's mother said that all phantoms must be exorcised, that she would convert the ghost of the dead comandante, if necessary. She sent her son to look for the falcon-legged bathtub.

Joshua told Triste of his journey to Guantánamo, of his visit to Alicia's mother and daughter, of el Rubio and his indian woman. He told him of Father Gonzalo's system of aiding and abetting runaways to flee into the yanqui base. He told him of el Rubio again, and of his foul breath, and of the india, and of her black frock and shorn scalp, of Alicia's old house and of the simple majesty of the falcon-legged bathtub, its fullness and flexures as alluring and beckoning as a cubanita's hips. He told him of the feast of innards, described to him the vaporous qualities of brainmeat, of the current of blood still coursing in the flavor of heartmeat, and he told him of the spell of the white corn, the imploration of the fiend of his childhood … and finally, he told him how el Rubio had punished the india for revealing their secret, how he had planted a boot on her chest and murdered her.
And I ran from there like a coward, without my prize, without my falcon-legged bathtub. I did not dare fight this blond devil.

Triste spoke at length for the first time:

There's a story of the Sierra that the one that I once loved told me. I do not know how much of it is true. It is about a guerrillero with a blond mane and a blonder beard. Fidel—your father—had ordered his execution for some perverse crime involving a guajiro's young son. (It was the first law of the rebel band that no harm shall be done to the villagers of the mountain, that their crops shall not be stolen, that their animals shall not be slaughtered, that their bohíos shall not be pillaged, and that their mothers and daughters shall not be raped. They forgot to mention their sons.) Early on the morning of his pronounced death, before it had brightened, the blond man visited the rebel chief at his cottage in La Plata. He asked to be left alone with him. The guards laughed at this.
What,
they said
, are you planning to take el Líder with you?
But your father, being your father, never one to turn his back on a dangerous situation, shooed the guards away. He was left alone with the condemned blond man. The blond man took off his boots and his uniform, took off his under shorts and handed them to your father. The brittle sun-toasted hairs shone on his concave chest and on his engorged belly and on his spindly legs and on his woman's arms like bristles of gold. He asked your father for a knife.

Your Father, knowing that the man was a virtuoso with a blade, but knowing also that no creature in so meek a state would dare raise its hand against him, searched for his stiletto and handed it to him. He turned his back on the condemned man to fix himself some cafecito. The condemned man waited, the steel held aloft in his right hand, till your father turned back to look at him. He reached down and grabbed his testicles with his left hand and stretched the skin of the sac and put the knife to it. He mumbled that this and much more he would do to save his honor and to be allowed to devote his life to la Revolución. Your father stared at the man. He waited. And as the blond man started to slice into the skin of his sac, your father grabbed the blade. Thin streams of blood spread over each side of the sac. Your father grabbed the condemned man's cojones. He told him that once, when he was a student in La Habana, he had held in his hands the eyes of a man that had been blown out of his head by a terrorist bomb. He said that it had felt not much different than these little huevos. He said it was not surprising that these two organs that were not quite inside and not quite outside the body should have the same texture.