The Lazarus Rumba (87 page)

“No importa,” Adela said. “We'll unpack my suitcase. I'll lend you six of mine.”

Teresita giggled. “Ay abuela.” She threw up her eyes and put her hand over her mouth, as if she were trying to imagine herself in the shapeless sheets that were her grandmother's housedresses.

“Ay mijita,” Adela said. She shook her head and with a turn of her chin pushed the girl's eyes away from her and towards the visitor.

“Buenas,” Teresita said. “Are you Benicia? Where is your camera? …
are
you this woman, la Reina de los Quince? We have your business card. Qué raro, I thought you looked different. I thought you were much younger.”

Alicia turned to her mother. “You did not tell her I was coming?”

Adela shuffled over to one of the two colonial-style chairs that were the only furniture in the living room besides the television console. The cover of the chair was torn at the corners and the spongy stuffing poured out of the holes like dirty bathfoam. Adela leaned on her granddaughter and sat. She let out a long sigh. She shook her head.

“No, I could not. Por ahí dicen que me he vuelto loca, perhaps it's true, maybe in my delirium, I forgot to tell her. And what did I know? A cable from a government agency? How many times has the government lied to me, and how many times have I just passed the lies along to this innocent?”

“Ay abuelita, no seas drámatica, what cable? what government? You did tell me.” She turned to the visitor, a gaunt woman with sad carbon eyes and a yellow scarf tied over her head, out of which poked strands of gray hair like tendrils of old Spanish moss. She could not stare long at the visitor's eyes. “But she didn't tell me you were coming, she said we were going to your house. She says you have arranged your garden beautifully, with flowers and creeping vines and potted palms and a swing and even a stone well. Where is your house? Past the railroad tracks, by the river, right? Qué raro, I thought I knew you. Do you live far away? I must have met you. I think I have. Pero my abuelita hasn't finished the adjustments on my dress yet. It's still too long. It was once my mother's. Her wedding. No está en moda, sabe. Her wedding, that was a long time ago. It's still too long, even though I am much taller than she was. Abuelita still has to take off maybe another five inches. But why do you look at me with such horror? I'm sorry, de veras, we did not know you were coming so early. Abuelita said you would not be ready till later this afternoon.” She turned back to her grandmother. “Vamos chica, are you going to finish the dress? I know your hands hurt”—she knelt by her grandmother and massaged the old woman's hands—“un poquito mas, and then no more favors till the day I get married.”

“Five years … five years, and not one word from you.” The old woman freed her hands from the girl and shook them at the visitor. “I made phone calls. I wrote letters. And what was their answer … in cables just like the one I received a week ago.
In the interest of national security
… that's it, you can imagine all they invented
in the interest of national security.
There were rumors that you were involved in the murder of the police captain and his servant and even in the attempt on ese-hijo-de-la-gran-puta Fidel. Good, good, I said, let her be involved. Let her be the assassin with her lone hands. La gente dice que me he vuelto loca. I do not leave this house. I let her, this poor saint, stand in the colas. Gonzalo has to come here to give me Communion. The women at Mass whisper about me. ¡Hipócritas! Gonzalo says that they are afraid to visit me because they cannot stand to look at the grisly mask of my suffering.” She waved her hand under her face as if she were displaying a piece by a tormented and disturbing sculptor. “¡Hmmm, Cristianas no son!” She gave her hands back to the girl.

“Sí me duelen, mi santa. … Each day that passed I became more and more sure that my only daughter, whom I carried for nine months, aquí en este vientre, had been ripped from our lives without as much as one word of condolence … in the interest of (maldito sean todos) national security.” She glared at the visitor, who saw in the ashen eyes of the old woman, the whites like embers, that she had run out of tears long ago. “So why, Alicia, should I have believed the words on that yellow piece of paper that came here a week ago, informing us that you were coming for a three-day visit … a
visit
, mi única hija, after eight years, a
visit
! ¡Maldito sean! And why should I let you into this house? Why should I let you ruin the tenuous peace this child has found at last … as an orphan in the hands of the glorious revolution, both her father
and
mother murdered by el sinvergüenza Fidel. You are dead, Alicia, there are votive candles in my room lit for the benefit of your departed soul. Jesús, María y José, why should I not be mad!”

Teresita stood. She put her hands under her grandmother's arms and tried to lift her up. “Vamos, abuela, what are you saying? Did you forget to take your pills? No hables tonterías. And how many times have I told you to keep your shoes on. Vamos, you're going to scare poor Benicia. She looks old, doesn't she? Older than I thought. It's okay, you don't have to finish the dress today.” She turned to the visitor. Her eyes saw exactly how changed her mother was, how unique her own mask was, made by a sculptor at least as tormented as the one that had molded her grandmother's face … but she continued to speak as if her hawking voice only suspected what her eyes knew. “We'll take the pictures some other day, señora Benicia … really, you can go now … some other day. It doesn't matter what day really. It's just that she is ill, la pobrecita … it was the death of my mamita that finished her. Where are your shoes, coño? Those stockings are slippery and you'll fall again. … There, there abuelita, you've frightened poor Benicia. She came to help us celebrate, but look, look how she weeps. Mírala, abuelita, mírala. Ay qué llanto, la pobre Benicia.”

The visitor spoke for the first time to the girl: “Your grandfather, in the days prior to his death, would not keep his shoes on either. Many times your grandmother and I had to go fetch him to wherever he had fled, his shoes in a bag with us.”

Teresita let go of Adela. The old woman had trouble gaining her balance and grabbed tightly to one of the arms of the rickety chair. She swung her other arm in the air.

“¡Ahí está!” she said to the girl. “Imagine that, she has come to bury
me.
I do not wear shoes so that surely means that I will soon die! You are unorphaned for three days, mi santica. Your misery begins afresh. ¡Ahí está carajo!” She negotiated a temporary truce with her balance and slipped back down into the chair.

“Ay, mamá,” the visitor said. “Ay, mijita.”

“No. No que va. Mamá is gone. She got permission. She got permission because she so missed papá. Dícelo, abuelita. Tell the poor photographer the truth. No!” She let out a little whimper that seemed a prelude to a long lament. She ran from the room and left the old woman shoeless and the visitor (the photographer, la reina de los quince, or the ghost, or whatever the carbon-eyed lady was) waiting with her mouth half-open as if some sham priest had held back from her the Host.

She had locked herself in the big room nearest the patio, the one down the hallway from the kitchen with the double French doors. Alicia pressed her face to the glass panes frosted with palm trees and creeping tropical vines, peering through the clearer sections where the palm fronds were etched. Teresita had drawn the curtains of the two large windows that faced the patio. Though she could make out only a shapeless obscurity, Alicia persisted. She knew her daughter would see the mass of her face pressed to the glass, a featureless rosy glob like an October moon, just as she had seen her own mother's face when she had imprisoned herself in that room in the days after her husband's death, in the days when the child had been conceived. She did not knock on the door or rattle the knob as her mother had done.

Adela explained that of the three bedrooms, it was the only one they used now, sleeping side by side on her marriage bed. “She abandoned her own room not long after you left. What was I to tell her? She slept (she still sleeps) with her arms wrapped around my waist. Ay, mi santica. It is her room now, more than it is mine. It is peopled with her dolls, crowded like a city with their little houses. She makes them herself with scrap wood that she finds near the bay, in the heap that was once the old Spanish fort. She checks the scraps for termites, for water rot, as diligent as if she were building a house for herself. Remember how good she was at building sand castles as a little girl. Remember, Alicia. Gonzalo says she was a master architect at the age of three! When we get there … because we are going, mija, we are going, the suitcases are packed … the great exodus has begun … when we get there, al gran Miami, she will go to the finest American university. There is no need for architects in Cuba.”

They sat at one corner of the long kitchen table, as had always been their habit. Joshua was silent. He had graciously refused an offer for coffee. He had announced that he and Triste would be staying at the home of the new police chief, the stone house built under the ceiba tree. Adela told him not to expect much, that all the orchids except the black ones had long ago perished. Joshua nodded, as if he understood. His hands were spread open and even at the table, in a conscious effort not to hide his butchered finger, the mark of the new covenant with his father. Triste had gone to fetch Father Gonzalo. Adela warned him not to alarm him, to feed him the news of Alicia's arrival in small doses. “He's very frail these days, as we all are.” She made an effort to smile but her wizened lips and her wan cheeks had lost touch with that art.

They let the noise of the barrio that seeped in through the ironwork of the open window above the sink—the busy after-school chatter of the pioneros (incomprehensible as the noise of compounding waves), the raunchy holler of the fruit cart salesman (a vulgar and brave black-market aria), the insistent yelp of stray hounds (as if any could offer respite from the hunger numbing their fangs)—serve as ersatz for the cordial conversation they dared not have, of the valley land the visitors had come from, of invented crimes and fantastical punishments, of the new course of the revolution, of the phantom who sat naked, bullet-ridden, still unaneled all
the way at the opposite corner of the long table, unnoticed, as if he too had long been locked up in an unlit room, thirsting for the fresh coffee the visitor had refused (though from its pale hue, like second man's bathwater, and its ignoble lax aroma, like rained-on bundles of newspapers, it did not seem much different from the cafecito he had made many years before with used and reused grounds from the windowsill), he who had served as husband to one, as son to another, as hero to the last, and as missing father to the girl, the girl not there in that kitchen anymore than he was there.

Thus, with these unsayable words, these undirectable glances, at one corner of the long kitchen table, Adela's head lilting forward like a nocturnal flower at the first light and then suddenly jolting up as if struck by an electrical blow from the inside, fighting off any form of sleep as she had done now for so long, they waited for Father Gonzalo.

Alone in the hallway, patient, describing the feast that was to take place the following day in the holy celebration of a child becoming a woman, the monsignor was able to get Teresita to unbolt the lock, but when she opened the door he lowered his eyes, he pressed them shut with the conviction one tightens shutters before a storm, he pressed his chin to his sternum, he whispered to his God to give him strength to withstand the affront of the child's utter nakedness.

“¿Qué quieres, Gonzalo? Did you come to hear all my vile sins? Will I be pardoned for being a woman before my time?”

Father Gonzalo held shut his eyes. He continued to talk to his God, Who soon answered him. Fragments of verse skipped across his mind like the foamy gurgles of a windstruck sea, as if his God were reminding him of what he had once known well:

He muttered to himself God's answer. He did not open his eyes till he had raised his chin and he knew that they would be cast upward, staring into the girl's own glittery burnt-sugar eyes. Eyes so improbably like those of the one who had been her true father. Things were known from the beginning. Even his old friend Adela, in her outrageous silence, even she knew.

“Niña, por el amor de Dios, never abandon your dignity. Put something on.”

He made a move to reshut the door, never taking his eyes from hers, but the girl took one step forward and kept it ajar with her bare foot as stop, the foot with the anklet of braided black hair, the only thing she wore.

“Tomorrow I will be fifteen. I will be a woman. Does the body of a woman offend you Father? You have been standing out here for over an hour, talking to yourself como un loco, trying to get me to open the door and now you want to shut it? Look, look at my body so that you can better understand my sins. No tengas miedo. Look.”

“Your mother wants to see you.”

“The ghost in the yellow scarf? ¡Qué tonta! What a bad costume. She came disguised as Benicia. Do you know Benicia? Do you know her story? ¡Qué tonta! As if I would not have recognized her the moment I looked into her suffering eyes. Qué raro, you are afraid of naked women but you are not afraid of ghosts? Who has come with the ghost? Has the angel with the dirty wings come? Tomorrow I will be a woman. Did you let
him
know?”

Father Gonzalo again muttered to himself God's harsh answer: