The Lazarus Rumba: A Novel - Softcover

Mestre, Ernesto

Softcover

ISBN 10: 031226352X ISBN 13: 9780312263522

Publisher: Picador, 2000

Synopsis

This extraordinarily ambitious novel sets out to portray the spiritual landscape of the Cuban people in the wake of Castro's revolutionary upheaval. Like Cervantes' Don Quixote, The Lazarus Rumba describes a country beset by social dislocation and personal confusion, a country whose soul is best captured by a lush magic realism woven from innumerable tales told in voices both melancholy and lively, lyrical and coarse, delicate and grotesque. As intensely political as Manuel Puig's Kiss of the Spider Woman, The Lazarus Rumba centers around three generations of woman in the Lucientes family and follows the story of Alicia Lucientes as, almost inadvertently, she becomes the most famous dissident on the island.

About this title

About the Author

Ernesto Mestre was born in Cuba in 1964. His family emigrated to Spain in 1972, and later that year to Miami, Florida. He graduate from Tulane University and currently lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The Lazarus Rumba

By Ernesto Mestre

Picador USA

Copyright © 2000 Ernesto Mestre
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780312263522

Chapter One

The Rumbas in Beethoven's Violin Concerto

In the middle of morning Mass, as Father Gonzalo led the sparse congregationinto the Apostles' Creed, fragments of memories, heavy and suddenas summer raindrops, began to tincture the familiar fabric of the prayer.He remembered the seawater that was green, its foamy crests soapsudswhite. He remembered the river water that was brown, its ripply hiccupspiss yellow. Sometimes the sea flows into the river. In the sea he is movedby the hands of the Lord. In the river he must swim. The river is crowdedwith 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 lipspursed, trying not to taste the water.

    It was silent. The drone of the Creed had lifted and melted in the airlike incense. He hurried the rest of the service. After Communion, hemuttered for the faithful to go in peace and snuck out a side door near thealtar. The congregation?less than twenty faithful?remained inside thechurch. Father Gonzalo knew they were not waiting for him. They alwaysdid this, extending their stay inside the cool dark home of the Lord toavoid the rainy-season mugginess.

    He passed through a covered archway into the rectory. He removed hisrobes as he walked. Anita, his servant, had left the screen door to the rectorykitchen open again. Father Gonzalo slammed it shut and sat at thesquare wooden table set for one. She was at the stove, her back to him. Sheignored 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 doorshut."

    Anita came to him, bent his head forward, and examined the bite. "I'llput something on it later. Eat your breakfast first."

    She placed a cup of cafecito negro in front of him first and then hiseggs lightly scrambled with the buttered and sugared toast. Father Gonzaloate 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 atone."

    He finished breakfast and went upstairs to his room and removed allhis clothes except for the pair of baggy cotton undergarments that coveredhalf 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 cherrywoodrosary from the top drawer of his dresser, went to his bed, threwaside the tattered mosquitero and lay facedown with his hands crossed underhis 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 fingernailslast 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 passedit over his upper back. It felt cool and soothing till she pressed it to one ofthe bites. He lost his place on the rosary and began anew with the seconddecade 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, betweenhis index finger and thumb, the fourth bead of the second decade of therosary 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 tenfingers wiggling and just barely grazing his flesh. The spiders dancednimbly around each bite, like celebrants around a fire, tickling the surroundingskin with their thready steps, then they moved downward on hisback single file through the ridge on the right side, spreading again anddancing more freely on the soft field just north of his boxer waistband. Asshe moved down his legs, past his swollen ankles to the bottom of his tendertoes, he felt an excruciating bliss that had nothing to do with theprayers he was murmuring; he sighed, he hummed to the joy of the spiderdance and lost his place on the rosary again.

"I too have known sorrow," doña Adela said to him as she let him into theparlor and took his thick-woven straw hat. She pressed her cheek to hisand Father Gonzalo smelled her breath of desolation. She wore a looseprinted housedress and slippers. Her hair was tied back in a tight bun sothat the gray roots were accentuated and the many frizzled strands thathad 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. FatherGonzalo followed a few steps behind her into the kitchen and doñaAdela latched together the shuttered door and pushed open the windowover the sink.

    "Todo igual, coño. It's been two weeks and nothing has changed?allday locked in my room and wrapped in that musty old shawl she foundthe devil knows where. I think it was my mother's (la pobre, queen pazdescanse). Y lo peor, now she has stopped eating altogether. She says theworld 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 acrossa folded envelope, worn with handling. She handed it to Father Gonzalo,informing him that the police captain had brought it to her the afternoonbefore. Father Gonzalo examined the contents of the envelope and shookhis head and muttered that something had definitely gone awry whenthey could no longer properly bury their dead.

    "A number. That is all the consolation we get for their murder ... anumber. `For obvious reasons, and in the interest of national security, therevolutionary 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. Hewas not hungry. "Un cafecito nada más, por favor, Adela. Then I'll go seeher. Maybe she'll talk to me today. Maybe the fasting has awakened herspirit."

    "She talks to no one except her cousin. He returned to town as soon ashe 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 morelike 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, "butthe manner in which she lost him?"

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

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

    Music came from Adela's room. Father Gonzalo recognized it andwent 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 andthe 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 tolose.... No! No! Coño, I won't lose her. I'll take that old shawl and thephonograph and all the scratched records and every piece of her silly jigsawsand build a bonfire in the patio, see what she does then!"

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

    "Que Dios me perdone, Gonzalo, but I'd burn Santa Victoria's handkerchiefand Santa Teresa's heart a million times if it meant saving mydaughter! 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 finallyher floating suffering face seemed to fuse into her body and her torsocurled inward like the stalk of a rainstruck infant flower. From Adela'sroom, Beethoven's violin concerto reached a swollen pause. Father Gonzalotold Adela she had not done anything to deserve any of this. He toldher that the Lord does not act like a scripted judge, meeting out specificjudgment for each sin.

    "She is not the first," doña Adela said between sob-breaths. "The wellof 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 thesame words to Father Gonzalo. A director in a sugar mill, and then arenowned diplomat for the three elected governments before the 1952coup 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 FatherGonzalo liked to say in his homilies, lives in a hovel near the foothills oftragedy. On the third week of his retired life (a career choice enforced bythe new military regime that had many favors to dole out to those whohelped undermine the elected governments) Teodoro suffered a coronary,and faced with such drastic evidence of his mortality, decided to turn hislife 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 momentsleft, all those days, months, and years of shrouded desires. So TeodoroLucientes' public life became his secret one, and his secret life his publicone. (Indeed, his life had been no secret at all, for every thing that the eyesof the townsfolk of Guantánamo knew, their tongues, their blind tongues,knew two or three things better?and what tongue has never been stainedwith the ruby dye of gossip?) To put it plainly, sin pena ninguna, with thebluntness of the blindest rubiest tongue, his wife and daughter became hismistress and bastard and his mistress and bastard became his wife anddaughter.

    After he returned from the hospital, he shuffled through the housewearing only a nightgown, his feet like giant eggplants. The doctors hadprescribed 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 itup and down the porch steps unless he had had a few drinks, which doñaAdela (and the doctors) strictly forbade. One madrugada, after breakingthe glass in the liquor cabinet and drinking half a bottle of rum, he discardedhis nightgown and went out to the porch and swung on the blueporchswing, keeping rhythm as he stroked his semierect penis. The tenderskin became chafed and bloody and he grew so tired that his forearmsburned. He broke into tears, yearning for his other life. Shaken from herdream, in which she heard the screeches of the porchswing as the cries ofa horde of hungry seagulls, doña Adela hurried outside and wrapped herhusband in a colcha and cured him and guided him to bed, taping his penisto his stomach so that it would not stain the bedsheets. Teodoro,groggy with rum, looked at his organs distended with serous fluids. "Quépena," 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 discardedthe nightgown again, but this time he threw on a wrinkled graylinen suit, and stuffed a blue-tongued bird-of-paradise freshly pluckedfrom his wife's garden into the breast pocket and covered his rumpledmane of gray with a stylish Panama and stiffened his sagging mustachewith labored curling motions and shuffled out to the terrace barefoot. Heglanced only for a second at his wife sitting there, enjoying the afternoonbreezes while rocking herself on the rickety porchswing, in and out of herown siesta.

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

    Doña Adela could not muster up the strength to stop him, though sheknew he was not going anywhere near the sea; and the first few times hedid this, she regarded him with an understanding and scrupulous pity, bemoaningto anyone who might listen how her poor man had gone soft inthe head, loco loquito de la cabeza. Yet with each tiny embarrassment ofeach afternoon departure, and with each further humiliation on his return,sometimes way past dinnertime, six or seven hours later, sometimes waypast the following dinnertime, and the following, two or three days later,rosy-faced and drunk with a long-deferred joy, proclaiming how wonderfuland soothing the sea air was, her pity began to break down like sugarin a still and ferment into a harsh intolerance. At early Mass on Sundays,she heard the ruby whispering behind her, and from the pulpit FatherGonzalo noticed the tightening of her jaw muscles as she whispered thePrayer of Contrition. One Sunday, she approached Father Gonzalo outsidethe church, amidst the entire congregation, and pressed her lips so closeto his ears that they tickled him, and she whispered: "The well of my patienceis running dry, Gonzalo. My husband is very ill. ?A quién le rezoahora? What kind of God listens to our prayers, anyway? What kind ofGod 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 assureddoña Adela that when the time came, Teodoro would die in herhands, but he warned her that it was a sin to so bluntly judge God by themanner 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 towardsHis Bosom. Many years later, seated at her kitchen table, attempting toconsole her for the reclusive rebelliousness of her recently widoweddaughter, he would use this very same logic, almost these very samewords, though they had not proved very useful then and he doubtedwhether they would prove very useful this time. But it was the only wayFather Gonzalo knew how to apply his faith, through a tenacious adherenceto dictums that seemed to fly in the face of all common sense. Butisn'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 fromHim? Would not any other father be judged by the way he turns from awayward child, the rashness with which he shuts the front door of thehouse, then the kitchen door, then the servants' entrance, the conceit withwhich he stiffens his neck and covers his ears and sews tight his lips anddraws the window shutters, so there is no passage through which grief canescape or the vanquished child can call to him, no passage through whichhe (the father) can answer? Isn't the manner in which He lets us stray, infact, one and the same manner in which He calls us back? Is not His well-knownsilence God's greatest sin against His children? Sí, coño, for eventhe most benevolent father sins.

    Why not Him?

Father Gonzalo knew that if Teodoro died in doña Adela's arms it wouldbe mere chance, and completely against his will, such was the course of hismadness, his inside-out last days, and the shameful details of these daysthat doña Adela whispered to Father Gonzalo and his servant Anita in therectory kitchen after Mass on Sundays, they already knew. For who, evenamong the holy, can resist the ticklish prodding caresses of blind rubiedtongues? How does a confessor interrupt a confession that has become alitany of another's sins?

    Things were known.

    On the eve of his retirement, Teodoro had bought for hismistress-that-was-now-like-his-wife a black Ford convertible, a thing so shinywith darkness that its too obviously symbolic color could be discernedbetter in the soft moonlight than in the garish sunlight. (It was the shameof the moon to be so enamored of this horrid machine that proved whereno proof was needed Teodoro's infidelity?silky rays caressing its shinycoat, its leather seats, its buffed chrome, its glassy orbs, its dormantgauges. Le ronca, does the moon have nothing better on this earth to caress?)The thing?the yanqui machine?was conspicuously parked on thegravel, atop the hill, in front of the two-tiered olive house near the BanoRiver, the house that belonged to his mistress-that-was-now-like-his-wife'smother.

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

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

    That is all the rubied tongues offer for now; and with that, pursed lipsand disquieting shifts are answered and they make do, and that they callher, as she was called: la Blanquita?she whose skin was veined andtranslucent as a yanqui's. Like rare Italian marble, some would say, or theface of the moon on a crisp blueblack night (in the ruby tales the moon isa crucial symbol, of light purloined, nature half-hidden). Like a varicoseankle, others claimed, or a rat fetus (dead, or better yet, unborn animalsare also crucial symbols in these tales). Fine marble, a pretty moon. A tattooedankle, a womb-plucked rat. A question of taste, or of situation.

    Teodoro loved la Blanquita, and had loved her for many years, and hadknown her before he knew the woman he married, and about a year afterimpregnating his wife, impregnated her, so that his daughters numberedtwo, one aged fourteen, the other one almost thirteen, one named andcalled Alicia, the other one named one thing and called another?thesetwo sisters almost strangers to each other, almost because FatherGonzalo knew that they sometimes?no, not sometimes, once a week exactly, onTuesday 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 betterthan the moon. Under the pretext that a sister and a sister must know eachother, every Tuesday afternoon he left early from his post at the mill andpicked up his daughters at their separate schools and walked them handin hand to the olive house on a hill near the Bano River. There, on thebreezy veranda, they would enjoy the afternoon merienda with la Blanquitaand her mother, who, when her daughter and her daughter's loverretired upstairs, entertained the sisters with wicked tales of demons andwitches that lived among them. As time passed, Teodoro grew bolder andhe would wander into town hand in hand with la Blanquita, flanked byhis two daughters, and to those he ran into, at the barbershop, in the gardensof Parque Martí, at the movie theater, on the front steps of the yellowchurch, he would remain the gentleman he always was and lower hishead and lift his Panama and greet with a simple "Pues buenas," and moveon.

    On Tuesday afternoons doña Adela had no husband, and for manyyears she let that be, taking her longest siestas on that day, and warningthe servants, on pain of dismissal, that no one, for no reason, should raisehis voice above a whisper, and much less disturb her, till her husband returnedwith her daughter from the beach, where they went each Tuesdayafternoon. Only once was her long Tuesday siesta interrupted, and onceproved enough. A young indian girl, the daughter of one of the cooks, hadsnuck into the kitchen and, playing with the butcher knives, had slicedher hand open betwixt thumb and index finger and at the sight of hergushing blood began to wail, and neither her father nor the other servants,with cupped hands over her mouth and whispery consolations into herears and kitchen rags around her hand, could get her to stop. Doña Adelaappeared at the kitchen doorway, a long leather belt at her side, like awhip. The cook stepped away from his whimpering daughter as doñaAdela approached, and he did nothing as he watched his employer beat hisinjured child with such venom that the rags came loose from her woundedhand and spread her blood in splashes all over, on the yellow walls, on therefrigerator doors, on the shiny countertops, on her father's apron, and onthe dress and face of the woman who was so mercilessly administering uncountedlashes on his daughter's legs. When the beating was done, doñaAdela, gasping for air, the drops of blood commingling with the sweat onher brow, told her cook that there was no need to worry, that he still hadhis job, and that he should get his poor daughter to a hospital. WhenTeodoro came home that evening, he diligently washed every drop of bloodfrom the kitchen, and that night did not sleep, re-covering the stainedwalls with a shiny coat of yellow. He never asked what had happened, andwhen the old cook tried to relate to him the story, he silenced him, assuringhim that his gentle wife had never once laid a violent hand on herown 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 hergifts as lavish and extravagant as the ones he gave Alicia on her ownbirthday.

    With no other option, seemingly satisfied, the cook behaved as if thebright yellow walls had never been stained with his daughter's blood, anddoña Adela was never again disturbed from her long Tuesday siesta, herpatience long as Penelope's, till the day she approached Father Gonzaloand 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 bedof 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 momentsbetween dreams and the morning rays filtering through themosquitero?there God is, too clever to come in dreams (that is only thestuff of stories), where his servant may defend himself with all the skilland wile of the beastly unconscious?for how often is He called to easesuffering, and He comes instead to prove that gouty joints are a mereinconvenience, a heresy, an affront to His imagination to say: "I am now atthe worst. I am replete with morbid humors." For whosoever can mouththose words, the worst is yet to come.

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

    He starts and ends with His most finished law, a law that no god beforehim dared conceive (much less put into practice), a law so revolutionarythat 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 onhis breast? The glow of the tyrant on his cheeks?)?did not he cast it asidealmost immediately?

    God, chided for His silence, answers Father Gonzalo:

    Every man's soul is his own, to it he answers before he answers to hisLord, so it must be; in his own heart he must fashion a likeness of that silentgreatness. 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 andall of their wrongs, and what if the children each begot twenty more and the manhad to answer, under law, for all the wrongs of his children's children and, intime, for those of his children's children's children? Would there be any escapefrom damnation for this poor soul burdened by all his wrongful brood? So is thefate of your wretched Lord. Think of all My children, think of the awfulgenerations of My brood. I am sick. Worse in being worshiped than you inworshiping. I can command the prayer's knee, but not that selfish heart thatfeels nothing beyond its own wringing, that with a set of woeful susurrationsthinks he can, like a lazy tenant, transfer over thecaring 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, straightenevery crossed nerve, dig up every weed in the garden of your dreams, plug upevery hole in the flesh of those houses I gave you, free of charge, a gift? Andam I to be blamed when that house goes up in flames or is eaten by termitesthrough your own negligence? No other creature is as ungrateful as My ownchildren. And you have the gall to wonder why I so often go silent. Silence ismy 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 sophisticatedand savage, understood and not understood as the cry of birds, notin his dreams (for as a sleeper he was almost dreamless) but during thecourse of the wakeful day; it passed through the holes of his tatteredmosquitero as he rejoiced at the end of another sleepless night, wanderedout from the sacristy as he most absently said morning Mass, buzzed alongwith the mosquitoes and black flies as he walked to the rectory to have hisbreakfast, creeped into his flesh when Anita did him spiders, burned atthe tip of his one daily cigarette as he performed his egestions, flickedashes at the urgings in his loins, cut in slivers of light through the brim ofhis straw hat as he daily visited the many in the parish who sought condolence,cuddled with him at the siesta hour, hissed from behind thevoices of the few who came to afternoon confession, stewed in the okrabroth Anita prepared for dinner, and then after dusk, just when FatherGonzalo's joints began their most honest ache, God abandoned him. Hecursed no more. He went silent.

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

    In the worst of his bedtime hours, when no position can bring comfortto his flaring joints, Father Gonzalo wonders if God dreams during theday, and if he, as his minister, somehow manages, unwittingly, to infiltratehimself 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 disgorgethemselves, doña Adela waited for her dotard husband on the ricketyporchswing. 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 openingas wide as the right one for the first time since the heart attack, and hestared at her as if he were conscious of her for the first time since he hadfelt the imminence of his death.

    "Good, then let there be no mourning!"

    With that, he lifted his hat and departed barefoot into the lightning-bleachedtwilight. Doña Adela lost no time, she grabbed her daughter,suited her in her rubber mango-yellow raincoat and black galoshes and instructedher 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 ofguava flesh. "I've lost all patience. Not a good thing, mijita, but that's theway 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-bleachedporchsteps Teodoro had stained with his muddied feet was olive, like thesea often is on blustery afternoons. The old woman (la Blanquita's mother)was sitting out on the white-railed veranda, rocking in her chair, obliviousto the rain that had already begun to slant its way in and slap at hercheeks. She wore a lavender dress that came down to her black lace ankletsand a gray woolen shawl, which she held tightly wrapped around hershoulders. Her skin was wrinkled and as offensively white as her daughter's.She squinted her clear eyes at the two figures standing out in therain.

    "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 daughterto come and die with the other one and Renata hides her from it. As ifdeath were such a bad thing! Qué bueno, you have come, now he can diewith the whole family together, two wives, two daughters. Yo no memeto, I'll stay out here in the storm. I am old, I have seen enough peopledie."

    Doña Adela let the raindrops pelt her face. She welcomed them, adrumbeat 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? Becauseyou are going to lose a father does not mean that you will lose yoursister. You have a most beautiful daughter, señora. I remember you oncewere beautiful too.... Así son las cosas de la vida, you stole him from herthen, 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 Renatasuffers. I will tell you about the whores if you want me to (manywicked tongues speak into this shriveled ear), but not my daughter, notmy poor daughter. She too suffers like an abandoned wife. In anotherworld maybe you would have been friends, partners against him, for thatman, handsome as he is (even now, even after all these years?what godmakes women wither and men bloom in their old age?), is a demon, abeautiful demon, but a demon nonetheless."

    Doña Adela grabbed her daughter's hand and followed her husband'smuddy footsteps up the sun-bleached porchsteps and through the frontdoor of the house.

    "Come, mijita," she said, "and you will see what a desgraciado you havefor 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 notwant to know."

    Doña Adela hurled that first door open with a violence that startledher more than it did the petite woman in the light blue peignoir sittingon the edge of the iron and brass bed where Teodoro was lying, except forthe bareness of his feet (the toes like black grapes), fully dressed. Hestirred 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'tfight, for me, for the father of your daughters."

    Renata la Blanquita did not move, her eyes fixed on the wife whose lifeshe had in so many prayers cursed. Her skin was like a smoked glassthrough which doña Adela imagined she could see the gross fist of herheart, and when she spoke her voice fluttered like a trapped moth: "He alwaystalks 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 tolift her husband up. When Renata resisted, holding him down, sayingthat this bed is where he wanted to die, Teodoro waved his hand at her andtold 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, withhis own wife and his own daughter. ?Qué voy a hacer?"

    Renata said nothing more. She let go of him and with measured stepsbacked off into a far corner of the room, her hands over her mouth, hereyes 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 hiswife, watched and said nothing more.

    When they got to the door, Teodoro leaned heavily on his wife andturned to face his mistress: "Why are you weeping, woman? Is it for yourselfor for me? I can't tell. If it's for me, don't bother, don't waste yourtears. I don't deserve them.... Do you want to come? Then come. We canall 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 yourdaughter and come."

    Renata did not move, did not answer.

    Doña Adela fixed a hold on her husband's arms. She spoke (like theLord on certain afternoons) in hisses: "No one is coming, you crazy oldman, except you. Solo, solo morirás si sigues así."

    Teodoro nodded and turned around. When he spoke again, his back tohis mistress, still leaning heavily on his wife, both women thought that hewas 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 ownbed, with your own wife and your own daughter. I love you, woman, letmy life be a proof of that and not this my errant death. I am stuck. I amstuck. Only one step more."

    And they were out of the room. In her rage, doña Adela had not noticedthat Alicia had gone from her, and when she went to ask her for herhusband's shoes, there was no one there. She left Teodoro standing with atight grip on the banister, warning him not to go back into that room. Hemumbled to her of the need for a man to die in his own bed, in his ownhome. She climbed a narrow staircase to the attic and pushed the half-opendoor 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-opendoor, as if expecting one of the witches from the old woman's storiesto burst through. One wore a rubber raincoat with the hood thrown backand galoshes, the other a knee-length white summer dress and leather sandals.Aside from that, they were unimaginably similar; both had theblack-black hair that had once been the color of their father's. (It was notuntil the year of doña Adela's pregnancy that his hair and his eyebrowswent from the color of coal in January to the color of cigarette ashes on theday his daughter arrived?though Renata had surmised that it was thedire knowledge that with the birth of his daughter he could never leavehis wife that made his shock of hair turn gray just like that.) Both had fairskin (though not pale like a yanqui's, but colored, colored in subtlepeachblossom primrose tones), dark eyes and little noses, and thick lips thatlooked as if they had been wet with the juice of a strawberry, a face likehis, his, the father's?(Where was the mark of the wife or the mistress inthese frightened angelic faces? Had both loved the father so much thatthey were unwilling to leave any mark on their own daughters?)?whomdoña Adela's mother had warned about on the day of her engagement,proclaiming that it was a dangerous thing when the groom was morebeautiful than the bride, when his unpainted face put to shame any beautymask the bride would wear (Not even a pansy's face, the old bitter womanhad said from behind the shadow of her mosquitero, on that day that, upto that point near midnight, before she burst into her mother's room withthe news, had been the happiest of the young Adela's life, is as naturallygorgeous 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, wasa year older, they seemed no more than hours apart in age, as if one hadstalled and the other hurried her journey to womanhood, a journey almostended 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 havebeen 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 childthat haunted her Tuesday siestas (that in those nightmares sometimes becameher husband, sometimes her own daughter, sometimes herself, lyingexpectant of torment), in her arms and hold her tight, till she melded intoher own body, but she didn't, she remained cordial, stern: "Buenas," sheanswered 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 turnedand waved to her sister, who remained cross-legged, alone in the attic andcould not wave back.

    When they tried to put the shoes on Teodoro he became agitated andkicked his legs and almost fell over the banister: "No, no, damn it! I willgo 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 tookoff 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 tothe old woman still sitting in her rocking chair, her hair hanging over herface, wet and loosened by the rain, her lavender dress sticking to her bonyshins: "Adios, vieja," he said. "You have been kind to me."

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

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

Continues...

Excerpted from The Lazarus Rumbaby Ernesto Mestre Copyright © 2000 by Ernesto Mestre. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Picador
• Publication date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 031226352X
• ISBN 13: 9780312263522
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 512