The Lazarus Rumba Read Free Page B

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,