The Lazarus Rumba (85 page)

You had done it all in the eyes of Luisito Cuzco, and because the angels did not descend on him, our men did, three of them hopped the bar and jumped him, and whipped him with their pistols, and proved again that men know more about murder than angels. But the greater torture is yours, it would have been a blessing to die there behind that bar, Joshua, son of a whore.

Joshua opened his eyes. He had been listening and not listening, for he knew the fold of the story till the moment the bug of his old sickness began to twitch in his eyelid and kick its trapped legs. He looked at the interrogator. He knew he was as full of lies that sound like the truth as any of his father's people.

“If you know so much, carajo, why are you asking me where the apothecary lives?”

The interrogator stood. He walked to the side of the bed. In a calculated and even gesture he threw back his left arm and slapped Joshua with the back of his puffy hand. It was how Joshua came to know that his arms and his legs were secured to the bed with leather straps. He could not defend himself. The blow was of such force that it jolted Joshua to the opposite, the right, side of the bed. The IV needle on his left arm popped loose and dark blood squirted from his arm and stained the bedsheet. He tasted other blood and felt it stain his dignity.

“If I hit you so again a thousand times, it would not begin to counterbalance the violence you attempted to inflict this afternoon, on us, on your people, on your country, on our Revolución! Begin whispering prayers to the father of all demons, for you will soon meet him.”

He screamed for the nurse, a small mulatta wearing only the upper half of her uniform and black slacks, who hurried in and knew exactly what had occurred but said nothing. Her eyes averted, she dutifully reattached the IV needle to Joshua's arm and pressed a gauze to the cut on his lip and took his pulse and touched his forehead and promptly exited the room.

“Prepárate, muchacho,” the interrogator said. “This is only the beginning. We are going to round up the whole nest of traitors. And we will not be pushed. We will do it in our own way, in our own time. We have finally made a nation out of this Island, and we know that the world is watching, waiting for us to trip up. So we are careful. Prepárate bien, muchacho. You will live, but you are going to come out of this a new man.”

This then, in that room, in that hospital where perhaps the ancient apothecary Pío Gorras, the renowned surgeon and member in good standing of the Party, the sometime photographer, sometime gardener, sometime santero, sometime organ thief, was or was not employed, paid for his services in pesos, claro, and not dollars; this then, in that room, the evening after the assassination attempt, the evening that was the thirteenth anniversary of the rebels' march down from the Sierra, that would have been the assassination day of that other leader, had he not made like a roach at a rumba and scrammed, this then was the birth pangs of the new man, or the Newer Man, as he must be known for the sake of the finicky genealogists.

For how does one attempt patricide and fail (fail miserably, cowardly, buckling under the weight of ancient demons) and not be metamorphosed? With what wherehow are we to pinpoint the who, to overcome the tunnel vision of the yanqui biographers, the laxness of stiff-lipped Party factkeepers, the yeasty bitterness of scarred interrogators, and see assassination (even the attempt) as birth? And why should we?

(¿Por qué?)

Porque así son las cosas de la vida. Porque even a New Man, like a new Studebaker, gets old. Porque it's not the shell that crumbles with rust first, not the chrome that is dulled by the noonday first, not the white-walls that are blackened with the mud-sputter of our cane fields first; no que va, the problems start on the inside, so that we can't remember when the air-conditioning compressor compressed or when the windshield wipers wiped, when the starter did not have to be coaxed on and prayed to and screamed at like a deaf and petulant deity or when the brake pedal responded to anything but a violent thump, as if to squash a jutía. Porque no matter how ingenuous we are at finding spare parts in the black market of our soul, long after the odometer of our heart has stopped reading the correct mileage (just add a hundred thousand miles, or is it two hundred, or three—coño, is our Island so big!), long after the speedometer of our breath knows how fast we are going, and the compass of our mind can barely guess in what direction, in the end we must improvise, we must invent. Porque así son las cosas de la vida. Porque we must make the newer of the new. Porque, coño es fácil, we do it by reverting to simpler times. Porque somos y seremos a very fecund-headed and adaptable people. Porque look at how long after la Revolución our Studebakers are running and there is not one single running Studebaker in all the boulevards of yanqui-dom. Porque we cannot only think in metaphors, we can drink them, we can eat them, we can light our rooms with them, we can fall madly in love with them …
and
we can drive in them. Porque it doesn't take much ingenuity to replace a carburator with a rumor-mongering vigilante, a cooling fan with grandmother's Sunday abanico, a crankcase with a Miami exile, a piston skirt with a rumbera's scarf, a muffler with a rolled-up copy of
Granma
, a steering column with the steely words of Fidel's speeches, a surefire starter with Martí's
Versos Sencillos
, a gas tank with a Soviet subsidy, a viscous coupling with … bueno, you get the idea. Porque that's why our Studebakers are still running and theirs are not. Porque we make the newer of the new.

With man as well as with Studebaker.

Within Alicia's Bohío, in the Colony of the Newer Man

“They should hire better writers than that!” Alicia slapped down the two-week-old copy of
Granma
on her kitchen table.

“Who?” Marcos said. His shirt and pants were drenched in sweat from the fields and he stood by the bed not wanting to sit on it and soil it.

“Who? Todos, the paper, the Party, whoever is inventing all this mierda … that boy my lover! This is how they shame Julio, even in his grave, this is how deep their vendetta plummets.”

“Kind of boring, if you think about it,” Triste said, snatching the paper and spreading it before him. He was sitting cross-legged on the floor, shirtless, mud-splashed from the fields. He ate a sandwich and smudged the bread with his hands. He drank straight from a rum bottle. Alicia admonished him again to go wash his hands. He protested that it was not dirt nor grime nor soil but the color of his skin melted off by the harsh sun. He put his rosy palms up as if to prove his theory. “Vaya, kind of boring (you're right, they
should
hire better writers than that). They could at least have had him doing something with
me
! Imagínense, vaya to put a more lurid twist on the whole scandal:
Nameless Assassin Secret Lover of Fugitive Negrón.
” He poked each word of the imaginary headline in the spread copy of
Granma.
After spending a few days in the valley, Triste had been convinced to stay. What better place, after all, Alicia had said, for a fugitive negrón to hide than in this colony first established by runaway slaves.

“No le veo la gracia, Triste. Joshua is likely dead … or worse. Besides, you are not a fugitive. You did them a favor by murdering el Rubio. He was too ambitious, ese hijo de puta. You did them a favor. They know it. That's why they have not touched you.”

Triste took another gulp from the rum bottle. “Bueno, Alicia, perdóname, but I also have … vaya, cómo digo … my charm with the men they send from the capital. They have more than
touched
me. That's why I can joke a bit, I know that Joshua is not dead, some of the men have whispered it in my ear. There will be no public trial, as rumored. Fidel will once again display his ample patience and return the boy to his mother, as if nothing at all had happened. Mercy, these men say in my ear, is enthroned in the heart of all natural kings. Now where the hell do you suppose they got that from, for these gruff men are not poets at heart.”

“Shakespeare,” Marcos grumbled. “It's from somewhere in Shakespeare.”

“Shakespeare? No, no, Virgil maybe.”

Alicia twisted her mouth with disgust. “¿Pero qué le pasa a ustedes? Those men are full of lies. The revolution has no use for mercy and the truth, nor for Shakespeare and Virgil (wherever it's from). It never did. It is lies that are holy writ, that instill fear, that pit neighbor against neighbor.”

“Miren, whatever they have done with Joshua, or plan to do with him,” Marcos said, “it's ruined everything here in the valley. Every week they send a different squad of men with a new list of questions and accusations and pilfered quotations from the great poets. We till the fields and drink our rum and listen to the Sunday speeches at Maruja's and pretend our lives are still the same (even
she
does not mention her missing son, as if he never existed), but our lives are not the same. Our simple life in exile has come to an end.”

“Sí, pero no seas tonto,” Triste said. “They know they have to keep on changing the men they send here, because they know that the longer the soldiers stay here, the more they become part of us and less part of them. The bird songs in this valley dissolve all the rhetoric of their precious revolution. If we can convince enough to stay, as we have two or three already—¿no es así? (one which I will take credit for), pronto, prontísimo we'll have a standing army. Charo will be running a one-way ferry, trip by trip building the new rebel army.”

Marcos went to the window and stuck his head out. He looked both ways as if he were to cross a street. He closed the wooden shutters and fastened the latch. “Triste, soldiers from the capital have always lived in this valley with us. They come and they stay and they don the garment of workers and work the fields and let their skin grow so dark that they become as one of us. But they are
not us
, believe me, I have had many work in my side of the valley, attend our meetings, break bread with us, drink rum with us. Then one morning they are gone and others have taken their place. Those that stay are the eyes and ears of those that leave. ¡Qué cosas! They do not stay to form a new rebel army. They stay because they are told to. Joshua used to refer to them as the invisible black birds. But they do not hide up in trees, they hide among us, at our work, at our meals, at our committee meetings. Now with all this, they are not even bothering to hide. They are building a set of new bohíos near Maruja's house (a Complex, they call it) … I suppose because it's near the river and because they can tap into her generator. They now keep their olive uniforms and stand in the fields with their rifles slung over their shoulders. They no longer get their hands dirty. They are suggesting a conspiracy now. They plan to arrest and charge Maruja and all three of us. They just need to extract a full confession from Joshua. … He is in el Morro, they say, and is ready to talk, to accuse us all.”

“Lies upon lies upon lies … when they come in here, I do not talk to them. I do not answer any of their questions. They threaten to take me to the capital and have me charged and executed in place of the boy. They threaten to charge my old mother and my poor daughter. They threaten to charge my sister. I'm surprised they don't threaten to charge the ghost of my husband. I'm surprised they don't threaten to dig him up and murder him all over again. Sí quieren oír la verdad, Joshua is already dead and all of us are soon to follow. My only wish is that they let me see my daughter one last time before they do me in.”

“No, no puede ser, señora Alicia, ya verás, the men have whispered it in my ear. … Yo conozco a los hombres and they do not lie in those brief moments. Ya verás, time will tell.”

“Dicen that his horse is the color of Martí's.”

“How the hell did they get a horse into this valley,” Marcos said. “We've been trying for years to get mules in here, to drag our plows, and we finally figured that the only possible way to get any beast of burden into this fertile land was to put wings on it and let it fly in.”

Josefa was sitting on the bed knitting. “They could have flown it in … by helicopter.”

“No, negra, que va, we would have heard a helicopter, no matter what remote part of the valley they decided to set down in. Besides, I don't think that the Party has any more than three working helicopters.”

Josefa grunted. She did not like to be addressed as
negra
(after all she had only an eighth of black blood). Triste, to her disgruntlement, always insisted on using this address, no matter how often she asked him not to. She had been tempted to put some curse on him, but there were too few on their side and she did not want to risk losing anyone, even someone as disrespectful as the giant negro. Besides, it was obvious that some greater power had cast a curse over all of them who met in Alicia's bohío every evening. “Mira negro, the way you chug on those rum bottles, a yanqui atomic bomb could be dropped in this valley in the middle of the night and you would not hear it.”