Free The Lazarus Rumba by Ernesto Mestre

mangled furniture left behind into an absurd colossus of lost riches in the backyard. Then right after midnight she sprinkled it with some gasoline she had found in the work shed and tossed a lit match into it. The splintered French country table and the wobbly Moroccan chairs were the first to disappear, wisping heavenward towards the new moon. The hand-painted bombe commode and the Louis XVI-style duchesse that had enjoyed each other’s presence side by side in the master bedroom held out longer, bristling with renewed elegance in their final minutes. The shattered mahogany mirror recorded the glow of their glorious struggle a thousandfold jagged times as it too disappeared with the old year. At the height of the fire, she fetched the corpse of her husband’s rooster, said a quick prayer, and tossed it in. A single high muffled note, like that of a boxed violin, escaped from its lungs.
    After she was finished, all that remained in the house, all that survived of these riches that had so often embarrassed her, that Julio had brought from his farm in Bayamo, long ago bequeathed to him by the one-eyed Jesuit professor who had been his guardian, was two undamaged serapi carpets, which neither the looters nor the storm recognized as treasure worthy of their rage (except for one small water stain), a ceramic figure of the crucified Christ made by Spanish monks, the goose-feather mattress from their marriage bed, a photographic portrait of her husband in full guerrilla regalia, defaced by a black unkind scripture shaped like a noose around his neck, and in the bathroom an antique tub, its legs the sculpted bronze talons of a falcon, full of water tinged the color of ink from a drowned squid by a monstrous decomposing piece of waste.
    â€œQué desgracia,” Alicia mouthed, leaving the shit in the tub as a monument to the memory of what had been done to her husband.
    On the morning of New Year’s Day, having slept not a wink from looking for the ghost of her departed husband, reputed to have been spotted the week after his murder meandering about that house, she changed into a faded flowery housedress she had found in one of the upstairs closets, wrapped an old perfumy scarf around her head, kicked off her shoes, broke open all the shuttered windows and with the new air at her back, bleached the graffitoed stucco walls, polished the parquet floors, and wiped clean any windowpanes that had not been shattered. When she was finished, she dragged the goose-feather mattress out onto the front porch, and thinking of him as she might have seen him in the darkened room of her widowhood, a discomfited phantom full of holes, Alicia waited for the spirit of her husband.
    For six days she refused to accept visits from her mother and did not bathe or change her faded flowery housedress or remove the old perfumy scarf from her head. When she awoke each morning she went to the bathroom and stared at the insult in her husband’s falcon-legged bathtub, then walked to the kitchen and threw up in the sink. On Sunday, the fifth day, when Father Gonzalo came (at doña Adela’s request) to hear confession and administer a private holy service, even he was taken aback when she opened her mouth to receive the communion wafer and her breath reminded him of the rotted airs of those receiving their last rites. He decided to shame her into cleanliness. He would bring the entire congregation of the book club to meet at her house the following day.
    â€œBien,” Alicia said, “I shall receive you.”
    That night she did not sleep. She aborted any pass her mind made at memory. She read the novel by gaslamp light on the front porch. By dawn, the gaslamp flame flickered with abandon. Alicia, having turned the last page, took up her ebony rosary and lay back on the goose-feather mattress. In her delirium, brought on by both the viciousness in the novel and her sleeplessness, she heard the music of days past, the exultant