The Lazarus Rumba Read Free Page A

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.
    â€œI 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