Free The Lazarus Rumba by Ernesto Mestre Page B

birthday, some weeks later, when he informed her that he was leaving, headed for the yanqui naval base that very night, his birthday gift a light dry kiss on the lips, the only passion he was able to muster after his trial, and a promise that he would see her soon again, maybe in Madrid, maybe in Miami:
Te veré pronto … donde sea
, and not two days later, when she and Marta visited him at the revolutionary hospital, his wounds un-cared for, his mind woozy with morphine, the nurses deaf to Marta’s demands to change his bandages, checking on the patient only to see if he had died yet. Alicia did not want to know. Not then and certainly not now. Lying back on the goose-feather mattress, all she remembered were those moments during intermission when they had drunk champagne and he had licked her teeth with his tongue, and for a moment she had forgotten what she had long known: that sooner or later, the guerrillero she had fallen in love with when he burst into the tiny wistaria-covered schoolhouse in the mountains to retrieve hidden arms would make her a much too young widow. She had forgotten that he was anything else but
hers.
    She laid her head back on the wedding mattress and shut her eyes and tried to conjure him as he had been in those brief moments. The morning bay breeze stiffened and whirled about the porch, drying the sweat on her unshaven legs and causing the faded flowery dress to flop about and blow up like a sail so that all her body was exposed to the fresh eddies of sea air. Her skin bristled, but not with the memory of him, her husband, nor with the sounds of a long-ago faded concerto, nor with the memory of that scar like a thunderstruck half-palm, nor with the silver tears of a gaunt Lithuanian, but with the soft steps of a more recent memory, with the sweep of a naked foot, with a more lovely voice than any Lithuanian could tease out of horsehair and taut string:
primita, mi pobre primita bella.
He, the last visitor, even after the father, had also been barefoot. He too hated shoes. “What good are shoes in the air, primita?”
    â€œPrimito, thank you for coming again. I know they must be very disappointed that you abandoned them so early in the autumn tour. Mi pobre primito bello, how
is
the circus?”
    â€œYou already asked me that. I told you the circus is nothing without me. But for you, for you, I would abandon the world.”
    With this, his voice, which he had used to take from her the musty old shawl, to lift her into the bed behind her, to tease her into unbuttoning his shirt and showing him (poking him) where they had shot her husband, aquí y aquí y aquí, she was pleased and pleased herself, not summoning that moment when she went to kiss him, as he eased her mourning in a manner the mother and the priest, the sister and the ghost, could not, and he too turned his face, even as he, the cousin (who could be nothing else to her
but
cousin), cemented their love.
    What sin when so many others have done it?
    â€œAlicia. Alicia, mi amor,” a soft unalarmed voice shook her from her lost worlds.
    The hand she brought out from under the old housedress had such a tight grip on the ebony rosary that when she released the pressure the stony beads laced around the three middle fingers left deep livid notches on the lowest knuckles. Alicia sat up and hid her legs under the flow of her dress. She did not look at Father Gonzalo, who stood under the porchsteps, when she told him to go, to come back in a few hours with the members of the book club, for she had been up all night reading the novel and she needed some time to collect herself.
    Father Gonzalo left without saying a word.
    There had not been running hot water in the abandoned house since after the hurricane, so Alicia went into the kitchen and began to boil water in two large tin pots over four flames. She then went to the bathroom, fished the flaky serpent of shit from the antique tub with a pair of rusty tongs she