The Lazarus Rumba (95 page)

Swim away, mi negro, there are so many worlds beyond their sea. Leave me here. I will not live to rest my cheek on any shore.

Two Dances

“Do me spiders.”

And she would, before his coffee, as he murmured his morning prayers. She would do him spiders. First one and then two and then a few more and soon hundreds upon hundreds. (She was that good with spiders.) Up and down his back, up and down his hairless legs and especially around and around the hardened dried soles of his feet.

That terrible morning there was no joy in spiders.

He did not murmur his rosary as usual. He was restless as he had never been under the dance of the spiders. He shifted. He squirmed. He stifled his sobs with the pillow. The spiders that morning, so many years since the days of the hepatitis epidemic, seemed a sort of medieval torture, their spindly legs freshly dipped in hot lava, as if they had burrowed out from the holes of the netherworld and not dropped from the gardens of God, as if they wove for him a shroud of fire. There was nothing she could say, nothing she could do to ease his grief, except to do what she had always done, to sit by his bedside and do him spiders. Spiders had saved him then, and they would save him again.

“Do me spiders.”

And she did, and the spiders danced on skinless flesh.

What does a pastor say when he has lost so many sheep? What does he do, besides trying to smuggle the survivors to some other meadow? And how dare
he
flee when the wolf still roams and so many are still vulnerable?

“Do me spiders.”

And she did, as if she were doing it for the first time, as if she had never touched his old wrinkled spotted body, a body that she knew better than her own.

What could she do without him, or he without her, or they without spiders? If his tears were plentiful now, for his friend the old mother (the old mother more a sister than a friend), for the old mother and for the orphaned child—with their suitcases packed for over six years, waiting for permission—if his tears were plentiful now, for the woman coming home in a pine box on the six o'clock from Santiago from the land of her exile, where they had declared her death a swimming accident, black-garbed soldiers as pallbearers, who would make sure they would inter her without opening the box, but a least that, at least they would let her rest in the earth—for all of them, for all this ruined land—if his tears were plentiful now, what of the tears when the Lord decided to separate
them
, he from her and she from him, and they from this daily morning ritual that bound them closer than rings bind lovers?

“Do me spiders.”

And she did, for all the witnesses had spoken and there were no words to add and no words to take away, and the woman whose own suitcase had been added to the stack by the door, next to the water-stained console of the black and white television, waiting for permission, was now returning, in a pine box, with six strangers in uniforms that mocked mourning, on the six o'clock from Santiago.

“Do me spiders.”

And she did, for there was nothing else left to do.

The spiders have their dance.

The dead theirs.

Ernesto Mestre
was born in Guantanamo, Cuba, in 1964. His family emigrated to Madrid, Spain, in 1972, and later that year to Miami, Florida. He graduated from Tulane University with a B.A. in English Literature and currently lives in Brooklyn, New York. Sign up for email updates
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

GENEALOGIES

CHARACTERS

MAP OF CUBA

PROLOGUE
:
ONE DANCE

Book One:     
A Widow's Grief: An Old Tale

CHAPTER ONE

The Rumbas in Beethoven's Violin Concerto

A Serpent's Spit

The Widow's Bathwater

CHAPTER TWO

Swimming Without Getting Wet

Invisible Butterflies

Monday Cola

The Sermon of the Seven Kisses

CHAPTER THREE

Berta His Beloved

Nothing More or Less

Guava Milk

The Meat of Castrated Goats

To the Mountain!

Mingo's Dreams Before Dying

Book Two:     
How the Dead Come Back: The Tale as Rumba

CHAPTER FOUR

The Camarita Flirts with Eternity

Señor Sariel

In the Room Lit with a Red Bulb

Carmen Canastas's Tangled New Year's Tale

A Shroud of Papaya Leaves

CHAPTER FIVE

Atila and His Resurrected

The Man Who Played His Bones

The Wall & the Prayer-Feathers

Father Jacinto's Great War of the Americas

Demon or Saint

CHAPTER SIX

Seven Against Him

Two Trials

Arrival

The Minister's Visit

Book Three:     
Exile and the Kingdom of Forgetfulness: A Tale in Tongues

CHAPTER SEVEN

Wordeaters

The Isle of Pains

An Odd Request

A Repeated Tale

The Devils in the Clock

Not Like a Prodigal

The Tale of the Tub (Prologue)

Dinner for the New Man

High in the Banyan

An Annunciation

CHAPTER EIGHT

Monologue of Triste the Contortionist: The Thirty-Mile Swim

The Name of the One That He Once Loved That She Once Loved

Monologue of Triste the Contortionist: At Lot's Door

Monologue of Triste the Contortionist: The Passion of Comandante Federico Sánchez

Monologue of Triste the Contortionist: The Tale of the Tub

CHAPTER NINE

Assassination as Birth

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

The Ghost in the Yellow Scarf

The Bakery Administrator's Daughter

CHAPTER TEN

Lamentations

EPILOGUE
:
TWO DANCES

ABOUT THE AUTHOR