The Lazarus Rumba Read Free

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.
    â€œQue 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.
    â€œShe 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