The Lazarus Rumba: A Novel

THE

Lazarus Rumba

Ernesto Mestre

PICADOR USA

New York

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To Andrew,

without you I’ll lose

my way—a gray crane adrift

on a broken branch

& to my beautiful brothers

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book was a long time in writing, and I am very grateful to the many without whose assistance and generosity I could not have finished it: for fellowships awarded during the time of writing, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the MacDowell Colony, and the Blue Mountain Center; for aid in establishing the cultural and historical background of Cuba, Tad Szulc’s Fidel: A Critical Portrait (1986), Manuel Prieres’s Senderos de Rocío y Sal (1991), Luis Manuel Núñez’s Santería (1992), Gabriel García Márquez’s essay, Fidel—The Craft of the Word (1991), and the works of Heberto Padilla, Reinaldo Arenas, and Guillermo Cabrera Infante; for their devotion to this novel, and their tireless efforts on its behalf, my agent Harold Schmidt, who read the bulky manuscript first and took it on, my old-fashioned editor Michael Denneny (there are few left like him), his assistants Sarah Rutigliano and Christina Prestia, also Robert Cloud, Lisa Shea, and Tom and Elaine Colchie.

A different kind of gratitude is reserved for my parents and the rest of my family, for their loving support, especially tía Cucha, for the bold example of her life, and Angela, because her name is so fitting; and for Bill Dante, whose love, kindness, and understanding during the writing of this novel are not forgotten.

I have my dead, and I have let them go, and was amazed to see them do contented, so soon at home in being dead, do cheerful, so unlike their reputation.

— RAINER MARIA RILKE

GENEALOGIES

CHARACTERS

Doña Adela, mother to Alicia Lucientes

Alfonso, a bodega manager

Anita, servant at St. Catalina de Ricis Church, doer of spiders

Atila, a blue-feathered fighting cock, a resurrector

Barba Roja, rebel comandante, captured Guantánamo

Mr. Blank, or Mr. Dash, a yanqui businessman, surname stolen

Carmen Canastas, lover of the rebel Barba Roja, teller of tangled tales

Fidel Castro, a university student, later el Líder

Charo, captain of a leaky trawler

Doña Álvara Clarón, a gallega, madam of the orange whorehouse

Miguel Córtez, a mail carrier

Doña Paca Córtez, a postmaster

Julio César Cruz, rebel comandante, husband to Alicia Lucientes

Teresita Cruz, daughter to Alicia Lucientes, illegitimate

Cuco, la Loca, servant of Federico Sánchez

Luisito Cuzco, a bartender and rumbero

Héctor Daluz, an acrobat at the gypsy circus, cousin to Alicia Lucientes

Juanito Daluz, his brother, also an acrobat

Juanito Daluz, their father, husband to doña Edith Oregón

Gianni Denti, an Italian journalist

Tomás de Aquino, a bullmastiff

Father Jacinto de la Serna, a professor at the Belén school, caretaker of the young Julio César

Father, a comandante in a labor camp, a torture artist

Plácido Flores, an undertaker

Paco Fortunato, a blue-feathered cock, a hunk

Georgina the Manwoman, a performer at the gypsy circus

Father Gonzalo, monsignor of St. Catalina de Ricis Church

Pio Gorras, an apothecary, rumored thief of organs

Delfina Gutiérrez, the heroine of an introduced story, thief of bridal gowns

Richard Hadley, a yanqui trawler captain

Humberto, an architectural student, murdered

Maruja Irigoyen, Joshua’s mother, banisher of clocks

Brother Joaquín, keeper of a Marist house

Josefa, a madrina in the Valley of the Nightingales

Duchess Josefina, a suicide, mother of four suicides

Joshua, founder of the Colony of the Newer Man, rumored bastard child of Fidel Castro

Alicia Lucientes, widow of Julio César Cruz, later a dissident

Marta Lucientes, half sister of Alicia Lucientes through father’s mistress, later a dissident

Teodoro Lucientes, their father, husband to doña Adela, lover to Renata, la Blanquita

Luis el Catorce, a tomcat

Margaret MacDougal, a charitable yanqui

Marcos, reformed counterrevolutionary in the Valley of the Nightingales

Mercedes and Beba, brainy, bespectacled twins

Dr. Isidoro Antonio Mestre, a well-meaning physician

Mingo, a finquero

Elena Mulé, a breeder of cocks

Yolanda Mulé, her sister, mother to Julio César Cruz

Ñaña, a halfwit

Doña Edith Oregon, mother to Héctor and Juanito, wife of Juanito Daluz

Perdita, a laundress

Mongo Pérez, last survivor of the village of suicides, maker of snow

Pucha, leader of CDR in Guantánamo, later a dissident

Armando Quiñón, a photographer

Renata, la Blanquita, mistress to Teodoro, mother of Marta Lucientes

Federico Sánchez, a comandante in a labor camp, admirer of Héctor

Doña Sánchez, his mother

Roque San Martín, a bakery administrator

Yéyé San Martín, his wife

Benicia San Martín, their daughter, la reina de los quince

Señor Sariel, an old master at the gypsy circus, later master to Héctor and Juanito

Camilo Suarez, el Rubio, police chief of Guantánamo, gourmand

Triste, contortionist at the gypsy circus, lover of Héctor

La Vieja, leader of CDR in Los Baños

Sara Zimmerman, a Jewish doctor

PROLOGUE

One Dance

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.

He had confessed to her the joy of spiders.

Spiders had begun long ago, in the days of the hepatitis epidemic, when he had been sedentary for so long that spiders were the only way to get his blood to circulate a bit. Spiders probably helped him survive, though the doctors in their summer linen suits would never admit that. Back in the days when his stool was white-on-white like the heavily sugar-powdered guava pastelitos, those overrich pastries that had always been his favorite, and his urine was the color of plum juice. Spiders had saved him then, so now he could not wake without them.

Do me spiders.

And she would, every morning daintily defying propriety. She would do him spiders.

What would his congregation say if they knew about spiders? What does the Lord say?—since He does know. It’s only spiders. They saved him long ago. Where would he be without them? Where would they all be without them? Sheep without a pastor.

Do me spiders.

And she would, always nervous at the feel of his leatherback skin.

After the first time, the spiders had a tendency to disappear. They would jimjam and jitterbug flirtatiously up and around the bump in his lower nape and behind the ridge of his ear for a minute or two, and then as if yanked up and away by some resentful mother spider disappear until the next day or the day after when they would dance just a little bit longer than the time before—until he found he could almost command their presence.

Do me spiders.

And she would, more and more often, for longer and longer periods, till her hands tired and the spiders could no longer dance, for he would never ask her to stop.

Her sister had been the genius. She had invented spiders and saved her from her unthinkable thoughts of Francisco, the boy who worked the coffee fields shirtless, his field pants rolled up to his knees, the sap from the beans smudged on his belly. On a muggy pillow-shifting night they came in battalions to soothe her, the spiders her sister said were spiders from God’s garden, dancing on her shivering back and bare butt and on her tickly soles. They had saved her the nights the ghost of Francisco’s limber torso demanded her dreamy attention.

Do me spiders.

And she would, always telling him where they came from. She would do him spiders from God’s garden. Because she had done it to her sister in the last days of her fevers, turned her own creation on her, done her spiders before she had gone forever to God’s garden. That’s how she paid farewell. Doing her spiders. And she never thought of spiders again until they had brought him home from the hospital—he insisting a man should die in his own bed, the doctors in their guayaberas (for it was a Sunday) insisting he wasn’t going to die. She cared for him as always. She washed his listless limbs with a warm damp cloth, and even washed in and around his privates. He was too weak for shame. She wondered who would give him his last rites. He couldn’t do it for himself, she was sure of that. The morning he prophesied would be his last, she remembered her sister’s last morning and she remembered the spiders. How could she resist giving his poor bereaved soul one last bit of pleasure. Down came the spiders from God’s garden. Up and down his back, scurrying on the fallen flesh of the too prominent ribcage, up and down his hairless legs, till the skin became bumpy, and especially around and around the hardened dried soles of his feet. She did him spiders for the first time. From then on he would hardly need to ask.

Do me spiders.

And she would, though it was months till she could work up the vigor with which she had done it that first time. Till it became a ritual like morning Mass. She would do him spiders.

BOOK ONE

A Widow’s Grief: An Old Tale

ONE

The Rumbas in Beethoven’s Violin Concerto

In the middle of morning Mass, as Father Gonzalo led the sparse congregation into the Apostles’ Creed, fragments of memories, heavy and sudden as summer raindrops, began to tincture the familiar fabric of the prayer. He remembered the seawater that was green, its foamy crests soapsuds white. He remembered the riverwater that was brown, its ripply hiccups piss yellow. Sometimes the sea flows into the river. In the sea he is moved by the hands of the Lord. In the river he must swim. The river is crowded with barges. The revelers on the barges are dressed in elegant costumes. They are celebrating a once-in-a-lifetime victory. They dance a rumba. Their waste is flushed into the river. He swims by unnoticed, his lips pursed, trying not to taste the water.

It was silent. The drone of the Creed had lifted and melted in the air like incense. He hurried the rest of the service. After Communion, he muttered for the faithful to go in peace and snuck out a side door near the altar. The congregation—less than twenty faithful—remained inside the church. Father Gonzalo knew they were not waiting for him. They always did this, extending their stay inside the cool dark home of the Lord to avoid the rainy-season mugginess.

He passed through a covered archway into the rectory. He removed his robes as he walked. Anita, his servant, had left the screen door to the rectory kitchen open again. Father Gonzalo slammed it shut and sat at the square wooden table set for one. She was at the stove, her back to him. She ignored the noise of the door. He scratched a mosquito bite on his neck.

Los mosquitos nos comen, he said. I’ve told you to keep that door shut.

Anita came to him, bent his head forward, and examined the bite. I’ll put something on it later. Eat your breakfast first.

She placed a cup of cafecito negro in front of him first and then his eggs lightly scrambled with the buttered and sugared toast. Father Gonzalo ate quietly. Anita drank her coffee standing behind him.

Don’t forget you have to go see Doña Adela’s daughter.

¡Sí, ya sé! How can I forget? It’s early yet; I told her I’d be there at one.

He finished breakfast and went upstairs to his room and removed all his clothes except for the pair of baggy cotton undergarments that covered half his slight, brown frame from above the navel to just below the knees. He washed his face in the basin by the window. He grabbed his cherry-wood rosary from the top drawer of his dresser, went to his bed, threw aside the tattered mosquitero and lay facedown with his hands crossed under his chin.

Anita knocked and without waiting for an answer entered his room. She sat by the bed.

Ay, Virgencita, it looks like a demon was pricking you with his fingernails last night! Quédate ahí, I’ll be right back.

He did not notice her go and return.

She set a pan on his night table and wrung a cloth over it. She passed it over his upper back. It felt cool and soothing till she pressed it to one of the bites. He lost his place on the rosary and began anew with the second decade of Hail Marys.

Magnesian salt, she said. It disinfects them.

Sí, ya sé, he said. Do me spiders.

She pressed the cloth to a few more bites. He pinched hard, between his index finger and thumb, the fourth bead of the second decade of the rosary till it left its imprint on his flesh.

Do me spiders, he repeated.

She put down the cloth and did him spiders with both hands, all ten fingers wiggling and just barely grazing his flesh. The spiders danced nimbly around each bite, like celebrants around a fire, tickling the surrounding skin with their thready steps, then they moved downward on his back single file through the ridge on the right side, spreading again and dancing more freely on the soft field just north of his boxer waistband. As she moved down his legs, past his swollen ankles to the bottom of his tender toes, he felt an excruciating bliss that had nothing to do with the prayers he was murmuring; he sighed, he hummed to the joy of the spider dance and lost his place on the rosary again.

I too have known sorrow, doña Adela said to him as she let him into the parlor and took his thick-woven straw hat. She pressed her cheek to his and Father Gonzalo smelled her breath of desolation. She wore a loose printed housedress and slippers. Her hair was tied back in a tight bun so that the gray roots were accentuated and the many frizzled strands that had come loose set her face in a shadowy ruff apart from her small body, which moved in quick little bursts like a squirrel or a nervous child. Father Gonzalo followed a few steps behind her into the kitchen and doña Adela latched together the shuttered door and pushed open the window over the sink.

Todo igual, coño. Its been two weeks and nothing has changed—all day locked in my room and wrapped in that musty old shawl she found the devil knows where. I think it was my mother’s (la pobre, que en paz descanse). Y lo peor, now she has stopped eating altogether. She says the world smells too much of the dead and that it ruins her appetite. Imagínate, cosas de locos.

She searched the pockets of her printed housedress, till she came across a folded envelope, worn with handling. She handed it to Father Gonzalo, informing him that the police captain had brought it to her the afternoon before. Father Gonzalo examined the contents of the envelope and shook his head and muttered that something had definitely gone awry when they could no longer properly bury their dead.

A number. That is all the consolation we get for their murder … a number. ‘For obvious reasons, and in the interest of national security, the revolutionary authorities reserve the right to bury its traitors.’ Imagínate, when was that law passed? I have not shown it to her. I can’t.

She offered him something to eat. Father Gonzalo shook his head. He was not hungry. Un cafecito nada más, por favor, Adela. Then I’ll go see her. Maybe she’ll talk to me today. Maybe the fasting has awakened her spirit.

She talks to no one except her cousin. He returned to town as soon as he heard what had happened. He spends hours with her. Pero no sé … how much good can he do when he is as faithless as a gypsy, behaves more like a child than she does.

Adela, she is not a child. She is twenty-six.

She is behaving like a child. She is not the first woman to lose a husband.

Sí, verdad, Adela, Father Gonzalo shook the letter in his hand, but the manner in which she lost him—

What about the manner in which I lost mine! You of all people know too well. It was enough to have buried myself with him, wrapped in a shroud of shame! But I endured (pues gracias a tí y a la Virgencita) and I will not have my daughter go mad. She too will endure. ¿No es así, Gonzalo? Won’t she? Ay, no sé Cuánto más puedo. Estoy completamente desesperada. She tried to hide her tears as she set the coffee down for her guest. Her hands had grown bonier and the veins were thick, bulging out like termite trails. Her fingernails were dull and bitten.

Father Gonzalo reached out and held her damp hands. He felt the sting of the cured mosquito bites on his back. No seas boba, coño, you have to take care of yourself. Without you what will become of her? These days of doubt will nurture her faith when it grows again. La duda es pura mierda, Adela, but no other fertilizer can so richly nurture our faith.

Music came from Adela’s room. Father Gonzalo recognized it and went silent and lowered his eyes and held a tight smile.

Ay, esa música, doña Adela said, snatching her hands from his. Como si esto fuera un manicomio. All day long with the same music and the stupid puzzles in that dark room where she can’t even see at high day. I’m going to lose her, tan jovencita, mi única hija, and I’m going to lose. … No! No! Coño, I won’t lose her. I’ll take that old shawl and the phonograph and all the scratched records and every piece of her silly jigsaws and build a bonfire in the patio, see what she does then!

Father Gonzalo had his eyes closed and was listening with pleasure to the intruding melody. You’d burn Beethoven? he said, unable to sweeten the harsh tone of sanctimony.

Que Dios me perdone, Gonzalo, but I’d burn Santa Victoria’s handkerchief and Santa Teresa’s heart a million times if it meant saving my daughter! What is it with her? I too have known sorrow. ¡Perdóname, Virgencita, perdóname!

Father Gonzalo opened his eyes.

She now wept openly and folded her hands over her belly and finally her floating suffering face seemed to fuse into her body and her torso curled inward like the stalk of a rainstruck infant flower. From Adela’s room, Beethoven’s violin concerto reached a swollen pause. Father Gonzalo told Adela she had not done anything to deserve any of this. He told her that the Lord does not act like a scripted judge, meeting out specific judgment for each sin.

She is not the first, doña Adela said between sob-breaths. The well of my patience is running dry, Gonzalo. Bien sabes, I too lost a husband.

A few days before the death of her husband, doña Adela had spoken the same words to Father Gonzalo. A director in a sugar mill, and then a renowned diplomat for the three elected governments before the 1952 coup d’état directed by the handsome indian sergeant Fulgencio Batista, Teodoro Lucientes had been, in the eyes of the townsfolk in Guantánamo, a devoted father and a loving husband most of his life. Yet fate, as Father Gonzalo liked to say in his homilies, lives in a hovel near the foothills of tragedy. On the third week of his retired life (a career choice enforced by the new military regime that had many favors to dole out to those who helped undermine the elected governments) Teodoro suffered a coronary, and faced with such drastic evidence of his mortality, decided to turn his life inside-out, upside-down, blowing into the chasm of death, that is, ass-backwards, so that he could face for the first time, in those few moments left, all those days, months, and years of shrouded desires. So Teodoro Lucientes’ public life became his secret one, and his secret life his public one. (Indeed, his life had been no secret at all, for every thing that the eyes of the townsfolk of Guantánamo knew, their tongues, their blind tongues, knew two or three things better—and what tongue has never been stained with the ruby dye of gossip?) To put it plainly, sin pena ninguna, with the bluntness of the blindest rubiest tongue, his wife and daughter became his mistress and bastard and his mistress and bastard became his wife and daughter.

After he returned from the hospital, he shuffled through the house wearing only a nightgown, his feet like giant eggplants. The doctors had prescribed that he move around the house and even take walks outside, but his ankles felt as if arrows were lodged there and he could not make it up and down the porch steps unless he had had a few drinks, which doña Adela (and the doctors) strictly forbade. One madrugada, after breaking the glass in the liquor cabinet and drinking half a bottle of rum, he discarded his nightgown and went out to the porch and swung on the blue porchswing, keeping rhythm as he stroked his semierect penis. The tender skin became chafed and bloody and he grew so tired that his forearms burned. He broke into tears, yearning for his other life. Shaken from her dream, in which she heard the screeches of the porchswing as the cries of a horde of hungry seagulls, doña Adela hurried outside and wrapped her husband in a colcha and cured him and guided him to bed, taping his penis to his stomach so that it would not stain the bedsheets. Teodoro, groggy with rum, looked at his organs distended with serous fluids. Qué pena, he said, so huge and so useless.

Doña Adela resisted the urge to slap him.

Two days later, after his siesta, Teodoro untaped his penis and dis carded the nightgown again, but this time he threw on a wrinkled gray linen suit, and stuffed a blue-tongued bird-of-paradise freshly plucked from his wife’s garden into the breast pocket and covered his rumpled mane of gray with a stylish Panama and stiffened his sagging mustache with labored curling motions and shuffled out to the terrace barefoot. He glanced only for a second at his wife sitting there, enjoying the afternoon breezes while rocking herself on the rickety porchswing, in and out of her own siesta.

I am going to the sea, Teodoro said, his left eye flickering, to walk in the sands of my youth.

Doña Adela could not muster up the strength to stop him, though she knew he was not going anywhere near the sea; and the first few times he did this, she regarded him with an understanding and scrupulous pity, bemoaning to anyone who might listen how her poor man had gone soft in the head, loco loquito de la cabeza. Yet with each tiny embarrassment of each afternoon departure, and with each further humiliation on his return, sometimes way past dinnertime, six or seven hours later, sometimes way past the following dinnertime, and the following, two or three days later, rosy-faced and drunk with a long-deferred joy, proclaiming how wonderful and soothing the sea air was, her pity began to break down like sugar in a still and ferment into a harsh intolerance. At early Mass on Sundays, she heard the ruby whispering behind her, and from the pulpit Father Gonzalo noticed the tightening of her jaw muscles as she whispered the Prayer of Contrition. One Sunday, she approached Father Gonzalo outside the church, amidst the entire congregation, and pressed her lips so close to his ears that they tickled him, and she whispered: The well of my patience is running dry, Gonzalo. My husband is very ill. ¿A quién le rezo ahora? What kind of God listens to our prayers, anyway? What kind of God takes a man from his wife and lets him die in the bed of his whore?

Because he had no answer to any of these questions, Father Gonzalo assured doña Adela that when the time came, Teodoro would die in her hands, but he warned her that it was a sin to so bluntly judge God by the manner in which He lets us stray from Him. Much better to judge Him, Father Gonzalo said, by the manner in which He guides us back towards His Bosom. Many years later, seated at her kitchen table, attempting to console her for the reclusive rebelliousness of her recently widowed daughter, he would use this very same logic, almost these very same words, though they had not proved very useful then and he doubted whether they would prove very useful this time. But it was the only way Father Gonzalo knew how to apply his faith, through a tenacious adherence to dictums that seemed to fly in the face of all common sense. But isn’t that what faith is, the most uncommon sense?

And like all men of such uncommon sense, he had heavy doubts.

Why not judge God by the manner in which He lets us stray from Him? Would not any other father be judged by the way he turns from a wayward child, the rashness with which he shuts the front door of the house, then the kitchen door, then the servants’ entrance, the conceit with which he stiffens his neck and covers his ears and sews tight his lips and draws the window shutters, so there is no passage through which grief can escape or the vanquished child can call to him, no passage through which he (the father) can answer? Isn’t the manner in which He lets us stray, in fact, one and the same manner in which He calls us back? Is not His well-known silence God’s greatest sin against His children? Sí, coño, for even the most benevolent father sins.

Why not Him?

Father Gonzalo knew that if Teodoro died in doña Adela’s arms it would be mere chance, and completely against his will, such was the course of his madness, his inside-out last days, and the shameful details of these days that doña Adela whispered to Father Gonzalo and his servant Anita in the rectory kitchen after Mass on Sundays, they already knew. For who, even among the holy, can resist the ticklish prodding caresses of blind rubied tongues? How does a confessor interrupt a confession that has become a litany of another’s sins?

Things were known.

On the eve of his retirement, Teodoro had bought for his mistress-that-was-now-like-his-wife a black Ford convertible, a thing so shiny with darkness that its too obviously symbolic color could be discerned better in the soft moonlight than in the garish sunlight. (It was the shame of the moon to be so enamored of this horrid machine that proved where no proof was needed Teodoro’s infidelity—silky rays caressing its shiny coat, its leather seats, its buffed chrome, its glassy orbs, its dormant gauges. Le ronca, does the moon have nothing better on this earth to caress?) The thing—the yanqui machine—was conspicuously parked on the gravel, atop the hill, in front of the two-tiered olive house near the Bano River, the house that belonged to his mistress-that-was-now-like-his-wife’s mother.

And her name? Or must the rubied tongues, out of sheer cowardice (for heaven forbid that their names ever be attached to their tongues), always speak this hyphen-happy slashy-sure anti-brevity margin-hugging speak? Her name for the soul of wit? (And these questions themselves asked without words, with the pursing of lips that first touch the hot cafecito, with a disquieting shift behind the confessional screen.)

Está bien … la Blanquita. That was her name, or at least that is what she was called.

That is all the rubied tongues offer for now; and with that, pursed lips and disquieting shifts are answered and they make do, and that they call her, as she was called: la Blanquita—she whose skin was veined and translucent as a yanqui’s. Like rare Italian marble, some would say, or the face of the moon on a crisp blueblack night (in the ruby tales the moon is a crucial symbol, of light purloined, nature half-hidden). Like a varicose ankle, others claimed, or a rat fetus (dead, or better yet, unborn animals are also crucial symbols in these tales). Fine marble, a pretty moon. A tattooed ankle, a womb-plucked rat. A question of taste, or of situation.

Teodoro loved la Blanquita, and had loved her for many years, and had known her before he knew the woman he married, and about a year after impregnating his wife, impregnated her, so that his daughters numbered two, one aged fourteen, the other one almost thirteen, one named and called Alicia, the other one named one thing and called another—these two sisters almost strangers to each other, almost because Father Gonzalo knew that they sometimes—no, not sometimes, once a week exactly, on Tuesday afternoons—unknown to doña Adela, saw each other.

Things un-known were, claro (as is the nature of these tales), over-known.

Long before he had bought the black Ford convertible for la Blanquita, Teodoro had been extravagant in other ways, in ways the sun knew better than the moon. Under the pretext that a sister and a sister must know each other, every Tuesday afternoon he left early from his post at the mill and picked up his daughters at their separate schools and walked them hand in hand to the olive house on a hill near the Bano River. There, on the breezy veranda, they would enjoy the afternoon merienda with la Blanquita and her mother, who, when her daughter and her daughter’s lover retired upstairs, entertained the sisters with wicked tales of demons and witches that lived among them. As time passed, Teodoro grew bolder and he would wander into town hand in hand with la Blanquita, flanked by his two daughters, and to those he ran into, at the barbershop, in the gardens of Parque Martí, at the movie theater, on the front steps of the yellow church, he would remain the gentleman he always was and lower his head and lift his Panama and greet with a simple Pues buenas, and move on.

On Tuesday afternoons doña Adela had no husband, and for many years she let that be, taking her longest siestas on that day, and warning the servants, on pain of dismissal, that no one, for no reason, should raise his voice above a whisper, and much less disturb her, till her husband returned with her daughter from the beach, where they went each Tuesday afternoon. Only once was her long Tuesday siesta interrupted, and once proved enough. A young indian girl, the daughter of one of the cooks, had snuck into the kitchen and, playing with the butcher knives, had sliced her hand open betwixt thumb and index finger and at the sight of her gushing blood began to wail, and neither her father nor the other servants, with cupped hands over her mouth and whispery consolations into her ears and kitchen rags around her hand, could get her to stop. Doña Adela appeared at the kitchen doorway, a long leather belt at her side, like a whip. The cook stepped away from his whimpering daughter as doña Adela approached, and he did nothing as he watched his employer beat his injured child with such venom that the rags came loose from her wounded hand and spread her blood in splashes all over, on the yellow walls, on the refrigerator doors, on the shiny countertops, on her father’s apron, and on the dress and face of the woman who was so mercilessly administering uncounted lashes on his daughter’s legs. When the beating was done, doña Adela, gasping for air, the drops of blood commingling with the sweat on her brow, told her cook that there was no need to worry, that he still had his job, and that he should get his poor daughter to a hospital. When Teodoro came home that evening, he diligently washed every drop of blood from the kitchen, and that night did not sleep, re-covering the stained walls with a shiny coat of yellow. He never asked what had happened, and when the old cook tried to relate to him the story, he silenced him, assuring him that his gentle wife had never once laid a violent hand on her own daughter, much less on anybody else’s daughter. And from then on, on the cook’s daughter’s birthday, year after year, Teodoro secretly gave her gifts as lavish and extravagant as the ones he gave Alicia on her own birthday.

With no other option, seemingly satisfied, the cook behaved as if the bright yellow walls had never been stained with his daughter’s blood, and doña Adela was never again disturbed from her long Tuesday siesta, her patience long as Penelope’s, till the day she approached Father Gonzalo and put her lips to his ears and asked him, befuddled as a three-year-old: What kind of a God takes a man from his wife and lets him die in the bed of his whore?

God, chided for His silence, answers Father Gonzalo.

When?

When He sees fit, when His servant is least in the mood for answers, most caught in the horridness of domesticity—in those crusty-eyed moments between dreams and the morning rays filtering through the mosquitero—there God is, too clever to come in dreams (that is only the stuff of stories), where his servant may defend himself with all the skill and wile of the beastly unconscious—for how often is He called to ease suffering, and He comes instead to prove that gouty joints are a mere inconvenience, a heresy, an affront to His imagination to say: I am now at the worst. I am replete with morbid humors. For whosoever can mouth those words, the worst is yet to come.

Pero vaya, at least He answers. Digan lo que digan, He always returns His calls. Just that He is working in a different time scheme, and sometimes His servant forgets this, and unwarrantedly accuses Him of an unholy silence. His servant could not be more wrong. He is the chatteriest god there ever was. All His servant has to do is open His Book and read the stories therein: the Lord answers!

He starts and ends with His most finished law, a law that no god before him dared conceive (much less put into practice), a law so revolutionary that it is the first law mock-revolutionaries cast aside. Did not Fidel, almost from the morning he rode into the capital—(Is that the Virgin on his breast? The glow of the tyrant on his cheeks?)—did not he cast it aside almost immediately?

God, chided for His silence, answers Father Gonzalo:

Every man’s soul is his own, to it he answers before he answers to his Lord, so it must be; in his own heart he must fashion a likeness of that silent greatness. So it must be. Else the Lord go mad and the world be left Fatherless. What if a man begot twenty children and had to answer, under law, for each and all of their wrongs, and what if the children each begot twenty more and the man had to answer, under law, for all the wrongs of his children’s children and, in time, for those of his children’s children’s children? Would there be any escape from damnation for this poor soul burdened by all his wrongful brood? So is the fate of your wretched Lord. Think of all My children, think of the awful generations of My brood. I am sick. Worse in being worshiped than you in worshiping. I can command the prayer’s knee, but not that selfish heart that feels nothing beyond its own wringing, that with a set of woeful susurrations thinks he can, like a lazy tenant, transfer over the caring of his house to Me. Am I a handyman? Is that what your Lord has become: someone to tighten every leaky tearduct, unstop every clogged heart, straighten every crossed nerve, dig up every weed in the garden of your dreams, plug up every hole in the flesh of those houses I gave you, free of charge, a gift? And am I to be blamed when that house goes up in flames or is eaten by termites through your own negligence? No other creature is as ungrateful as My own children. And you have the gall to wonder why I so often go silent. Silence is my resting place. The only place in My own world where I find peace.

I am sick of this. Your house is your own. See to it, damn it!

On those days, Father Gonzalo listened to God cuss in a voice sophisticated and savage, understood and not understood as the cry of birds, not in his dreams (for as a sleeper he was almost dreamless) but during the course of the wakeful day; it passed through the holes of his tattered mosquitero as he rejoiced at the end of another sleepless night, wandered out from the sacristy as he most absently said morning Mass, buzzed along with the mosquitoes and black flies as he walked to the rectory to have his breakfast, creeped into his flesh when Anita did him spiders, burned at the tip of his one daily cigarette as he performed his egestions, flicked ashes at the urgings in his loins, cut in slivers of light through the brim of his straw hat as he daily visited the many in the parish who sought condolence, cuddled with him at the siesta hour, hissed from behind the voices of the few who came to afternoon confession, stewed in the okra broth Anita prepared for dinner, and then after dusk, just when Father Gonzalo’s joints began their most honest ache, God abandoned him. He cursed no more. He went silent.

Not that He was not there, Father Gonzalo knew that God was always there, just that sometimes, like one in a dreamless sleep, or one who is replete with words but will not mouth them, He says nothing.

In the worst of his bedtime hours, when no position can bring comfort to his flaring joints, Father Gonzalo wonders if God dreams during the day, and if he, as his minister, somehow manages, unwittingly, to infiltrate himself into all of God’s tempestuous nightmares.

What kind of God suffers more than those who pray to Him?

On a September afternoon when the pelican skies threatened to disgorge themselves, doña Adela waited for her dotard husband on the rickety porchswing. He appeared an hour before dusk.

I am going to the sea—

The sea will swallow you today! his wife said.

Teodoro’s pearly eyes jumped from their sockets, the left one opening as wide as the right one for the first time since the heart attack, and he stared at her as if he were conscious of her for the first time since he had felt the imminence of his death.

Good, then let there be no mourning!

With that, he lifted his hat and departed barefoot into the lightning-bleached twilight. Doña Adela lost no time, she grabbed her daughter, suited her in her rubber mango-yellow raincoat and black galoshes and instructed her to grab the plastic bag with her father’s new unused shoes, bought three sizes too big because his feet were so swollen.

Ya basta, doña Adela said, as she threw on a raincoat the color of guava flesh. I’ve lost all patience. Not a good thing, mijita, but that’s the way it is. Vamos.

The sea, as they both knew, as the rubied tongues had it all over town, was not his destination, though the two-tiered house whose sun-bleached porchsteps Teodoro had stained with his muddied feet was olive, like the sea often is on blustery afternoons. The old woman (la Blanquita’s mother) was sitting out on the white-railed veranda, rocking in her chair, oblivious to the rain that had already begun to slant its way in and slap at her cheeks. She wore a lavender dress that came down to her black lace anklets and a gray woolen shawl, which she held tightly wrapped around her shoulders. Her skin was wrinkled and as offensively white as her daughter’s. She squinted her clear eyes at the two figures standing out in the rain.

Qué bueno, you have come, maybe you can talk some sense into her. She has hidden your sister in the attic. The old man has left one daughter to come and die with the other one and Renata hides her from it. As if death were such a bad thing! Qué bueno, you have come, now he can die with the whole family together, two wives, two daughters. Yo no me meto, I’ll stay out here in the storm. I am old, I have seen enough people die.

Doña Adela let the raindrops pelt her face. She welcomed them, a drumbeat to the fury in her: Where is my husband?

Ay, Alicia, que bella sigues, I have not seen you in such a long time. Why don’t you ever come by alone, without him, to see your sister? Because you are going to lose a father does not mean that you will lose your sister. You have a most beautiful daughter, señora. I remember you once were beautiful too. … Así son las cosas de la vida, you stole him from her then, now she steals him from you. Who’s to say what’s better?

Your daughter is a whore! Where is my husband?

No, no, chica, the whores are others. If you knew how my poor Renata suffers. I will tell you about the whores if you want me to (many wicked tongues speak into this shriveled ear), but not my daughter, not my poor daughter. She too suffers like an abandoned wife. In another world maybe you would have been friends, partners against him, for that man, handsome as he is (even now, even after all these years—what god makes women wither and men bloom in their old age?), is a demon, a beautiful demon, but a demon nonetheless.

Doña Adela grabbed her daughter’s hand and followed her husband’s muddy footsteps up the sun-bleached porchsteps and through the front door of the house.

Come, mijita, she said, and you will see what a desgraciado you have for a father.

Second floor, first door on your right, the old woman called to them, then she tightened her shawl around her and murmured to herself: Yo no, yo me quedo aquí. I don’t care how wet I get. This is one story I do not want to know.

Doña Adela hurled that first door open with a violence that startled her more than it did the petite woman in the light blue peignoir sitting on the edge of the iron and brass bed where Teodoro was lying, except for the bareness of his feet (the toes like black grapes), fully dressed. He stirred and raised his head: Alicia … Adela, my pink and yellow sunflowers. How did you get so wet? Have you been to the sea? Come, come, sit by me on this side, hold my other hand. Don’t fight, por favor, don’t fight, for me, for the father of your daughters.

Renata la Blanquita did not move, her eyes fixed on the wife whose life she had in so many prayers cursed. Her skin was like a smoked glass through which doña Adela imagined she could see the gross fist of her heart, and when she spoke her voice fluttered like a trapped moth: He always talks to me about you and your daughter. I hate when he does that. But I never once let him know. Es un hombre bueno.

Doña Adela said nothing as she moved towards the bed and began to lift her husband up. When Renata resisted, holding him down, saying that this bed is where he wanted to die, Teodoro waved his hand at her and told her to have some respect for his wife, to be quiet.

Don’t fight. I am going now. Así es, a man dies in his own home, with his own wife and his own daughter. ¿Qué voy a hacer?

Renata said nothing more. She let go of him and with measured steps backed off into a far corner of the room, her hands over her mouth, her eyes brimming with a flood of tears that no levee of pride could hold back, and watched her lover stumble out of the room with his arm around his wife, watched and said nothing more.

When they got to the door, Teodoro leaned heavily on his wife and turned to face his mistress: Why are you weeping, woman? Is it for yourself or for me? I can’t tell. If it’s for me, don’t bother, don’t waste your tears. I don’t deserve them. … Do you want to come? Then come. We can all be together at last. What law have I broken in loving more than once? Why all this grief for someone who loved twice? Go, woman, find your daughter and come.

Renata did not move, did not answer.

Doña Adela fixed a hold on her husband’s arms. She spoke (like the Lord on certain afternoons) in hisses: No one is coming, you crazy old man, except you. Solo, solo morirás si sigues así.

Teodoro nodded and turned around. When he spoke again, his back to his mistress, still leaning heavily on his wife, both women thought that he was speaking to her and the other at the same time. That’s right … that’s right, this is how it must end. (What was I thinking?) In your own bed, with your own wife and your own daughter. I love you, woman, let my life be a proof of that and not this my errant death. I am stuck. I am stuck. Only one step more.

And they were out of the room. In her rage, doña Adela had not noticed that Alicia had gone from her, and when she went to ask her for her husband’s shoes, there was no one there. She left Teodoro standing with a tight grip on the banister, warning him not to go back into that room. He mumbled to her of the need for a man to die in his own bed, in his own home. She climbed a narrow staircase to the attic and pushed the half-open door slowly and peered in.

Two girls were sitting on the dusty floor, cross-legged, holding hands. They had been waiting, staring wide-eyed, brows furrowed, at the half-open door, as if expecting one of the witches from the old woman’s stories to burst through. One wore a rubber raincoat with the hood thrown back and galoshes, the other a knee-length white summer dress and leather sandals. Aside from that, they were unimaginably similar; both had the black-black hair that had once been the color of their father’s. (It was not until the year of doña Adela’s pregnancy that his hair and his eyebrows went from the color of coal in January to the color of cigarette ashes on the day his daughter arrived—though Renata had surmised that it was the dire knowledge that with the birth of his daughter he could never leave his wife that made his shock of hair turn gray just like that.) Both had fair skin (though not pale like a yanqui’s, but colored, colored in subtle peach-blossom primrose tones), dark eyes and little noses, and thick lips that looked as if they had been wet with the juice of a strawberry, a face like his, his, the father’s—(Where was the mark of the wife or the mistress in these frightened angelic faces? Had both loved the father so much that they were unwilling to leave any mark on their own daughters?)—whom doña Adela’s mother had warned about on the day of her engagement, proclaiming that it was a dangerous thing when the groom was more beautiful than the bride, when his unpainted face put to shame any beauty mask the bride would wear (Not even a pansy’s face, the old bitter woman had said from behind the shadow of her mosquitero, on that day that, up to that point near midnight, before she burst into her mother’s room with the news, had been the happiest of the young Adela’s life, is as naturally gorgeous as the face of that hunk of man who has asked you to marry him. Cuidado, mijita, such beautiful men end up either as absent husbands, o bueno, que Dios te proteja … maricones). And though one girl, doña Adela knew, was a year older, they seemed no more than hours apart in age, as if one had stalled and the other hurried her journey to womanhood, a journey almost ended now, with the sisters hand in hand, sitting cross-legged in an attic, terrified of the sounds beyond a half-opened door, of the grief they knew, one day, as women would be theirs, two girls, so alike they could have been sisters born of the same woman.

Buenas, the one girl that was not her daughter said. I am Marta.

I know, doña Adela would have liked to say, and take her, this child that haunted her Tuesday siestas (that in those nightmares sometimes became her husband, sometimes her own daughter, sometimes herself, lying expectant of torment), in her arms and hold her tight, till she melded into her own body, but she didn’t, she remained cordial, stern: Buenas, she answered and then turned to her daughter. Alicia, we are leaving now, grab your father’s shoes and come.

Alicia obeyed, and when she got to the half-opened door she turned and waved to her sister, who remained cross-legged, alone in the attic and could not wave back.

When they tried to put the shoes on Teodoro he became agitated and kicked his legs and almost fell over the banister: No, no, damn it! I will go barefoot. I have always hated shoes and now I hate them even more. What good are shoes where I am going? Doña Adela relented. She took off her raincoat and put it on him and they slowly made it down the stairs, out the front door, and down the porchsteps. Teodoro turned and spoke to the old woman still sitting in her rocking chair, her hair hanging over her face, wet and loosened by the rain, her lavender dress sticking to her bony shins: Adios, vieja, he said. You have been kind to me.

Adios, hombre, the old woman answered, her voice shivery, how could I not be kind? Coño, I was half in love with you myself. You’re going to make a beautiful corpse! Women are going to start wanting to make love to the dead.

Doña Adela pulled her husband away. She grumbled to the dark heavens, begged to know what kind of God lets the whole world go mad, just like that, quicker than the graying of a hair.

The following morning Teodoro awoke before dawn. He stumbled out of bed by himself, stepped out of his pajamas and underpants and, naked, shuffled to the bathroom.

What are you doing? doña Adela said, following him, weary-eyed, for she had not slept at all, listening to his heavy breathing (gasping for air at each take), expecting it at any moment to cease, especially when it became most desperate, his neck clenching, the veins in his brow deepening, his vocal chords plucked by a boding air like the heightened last notes of a symphony.

Voy a cagar and then I am running a bath and then going out.

Out where? You can’t even walk. We practically had to carry you here last night.

Not to the sea, that’s for sure.

You’re not going anywhere. Gonzalo is coming at eight.

For what?

To … to give you your last rites.

How pleasant. Teodoro sat on the toilet. He farted loudly. He looked down and shook his head. "So big and so useless … not to the sea that’s for sure. He hawked and spit on the tile floor, then looked up at his wife cautiously as if he were a child that had just committed a grievous wrong. Adela … Adela, when I die throw me into the sea. I want to ride the white dolphins, the ones we saw in Varadero. Remember how in love we were there, Adela. Bury me there. He grimaced and bit his thumbs and began to weep. My feet hurt, Adela, my feet hurt so much, how am I going to go out if my feet won’t take me."

No seas dramático. Call me when you are ready, doña Adela said. I’ll have Alicia bathe you. Gonzalo will be here soon. She shut the door and went to the kitchen to make coffee. Her daughter was already there, in the half-morning shadows, at one corner of the long kitchen table, drinking a glass of milk.

He’s going to make it, isn’t he, mamá?

Yes, mija, for now. But he is very ill. She set the cafetera on the flame and just when the first thick black spurts of coffee came bubbling up, they heard the loud thud in the bathroom.

Dios santo, doña Adela said and grabbed her daughter’s hand and led her from the kitchen. The bathroom door was jammed, Teodoro’s fallen body behind it. They pushed without overdue force, as if in respect for the corpse they knew blocked their way. Teodoro’s body lay sprawled and naked on the bathroom floor, a razor blade in one hand, half his face shaven, the other half still foamy with suds. Doña Adela put two fingers to her husband’s neck, then she unrolled some toilet paper and wiped her husband’s still-soiled bottom. And as she did she spoke to him with the assuredness that he could still hear her: Qué pena, mi bello, none of them will ever see you again. She grabbed the razor from his hand and handed it to her daughter. Finish shaving your father, I don’t want Gonzalo finding him like this. I am going to go call him.

Mamá, I am only a girl, Alicia protested.

Not any more, mi cielo, not any more.

Sí, no lo digo por decirlo, doña Adela said. I too have known sorrow. I remember many an afternoon after he died sitting out there on that porchswing, literally gurgling up this greenish-yellow bile (I could never digest el almuerzo, no matter how lightly I ate), and like a fool I collected this bile, day by day, and set it in a closed jar on my nightstand, as if I could measure to the exact quarter ounce the amount of venom I had been forced to swallow. Yes, I too almost went mad. But when I could not fight it anymore, I let it in me. Sea lo que sea, Gonzalo, we have to teach my daughter to do the same.

In time we will. I’ll go and see her now. Is there anything I can offer her to eat?

Ay, mijo, you can try. I baked her favorite this morning, guava and cheese pastelitos. I brought them to her fresh from the oven. Ni lo miró, didn’t even lift her head from the jigsaw. They sat there on the escritoire and got cold.

Bueno, de todas formas, heat some up, bring them in to me later. Let me talk to her a bit first. He grunted as he stood up from the table and walked out of the kitchen down the hallway to the glass-paned doors of Adela’s room. He tried to listen to his God, but the Lord was usually silent when Gonzalo was performing his duties. He knocked lightly.

Alicia, soy yo, Gonzalo. May I come in?

No answer. Only a scratchy lonely, lovely Beethoven violin.

Alicia?

Para que tocas coño. You’re going to come in even though I don’t want you to.

Father Gonzalo turned the knob and opened the door only about a foot, wedged himself inside the room, and shut the door. The smell of open storage trunks and old wet paper hit him instantly. The damask drapes over both windows that faced the patio were drawn. Father Gonzalo waited for his eyes to adjust, listening to the concerto and saying a Hail Mary in his head. He saw her shadow emerge out of the darkness and instinctively he tightened the muscles in his belly. She jabbed him with four fused fingers of her right hand about an inch above the navel.

Aquí, she said.

Father Gonzalo did not move. He waited, holding his breath. She jabbed him again, under the left side of the ribcage and to the right of the sternum, and higher up more to the right, and just beneath the right nipple: Y aquí … y aquí … y aquí … y aquí …

Father Gonzalo grabbed her hand. He heard her laugh.

"Don’t listen to mamá, I am not mad, Gonzalo. You are a priest after all. We both know where the other two bullets struck. They blew off his huevos. They sought to shame him even as they murdered him. Poor Julio. They were so beautiful, his huevitos."

The sparse afternoon light squeezing its way through the drawn curtains and the yearning notes of Beethoven’s concerto created a marriage of shadow and sound in the room so that at first, it seemed to Father Gonzalo, one was competing with the other in trying to engage his senses, till he noticed that they had no awareness of him at all and were rather involved in an intricate ritual of seducing each other—the violin whine cutting its way into space and carving shapes with the clay-thick dimness and the shapes, in turn, throwing themselves behind the music and giving it depth and width, making it a thing of dimensions.

Alicia shuffled away from him and crouched on the floor in front of a giant, half-finished jigsaw puzzle. She picked up a few pieces from one of the three unused piles and put them in place.

How can you see which shapes match which in this darkness? Father Gonzalo said.

They are all with us now, Alicia said. "They have migrated back to this Island like flocks of sparrows after a hurricane. I have not seen him yet though … I have not seen Julio."

At a crescendo the record skipped. Alicia did not move to fix it.

Can’t you hear it? she said. "The drums inside the violins. There are many rumbas inside this beautiful concerto, ahí, escondiditas, just like the dead