A modern tale rooted in recent historical events but filtered through a patiently unfolding storytelling style that pays homage to The Arabian Nights, The Lazarus Rumba is a stunning literary debut, a virtuoso performance like no other Latino writer has ever produced.
This extraordinary 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 best by social dislocation and personal confusion, a country whose soul is best captured by a lush magic realism woven from innumerable tales, tales told contrapuntally in voices both melancholy and lively, lyrical and coarse, delicate and grotesque. As intensely political as Manuel Puig's Kiss Of The Spider Woman or Milan Kundera's The Book Of Laughter And Forgetting, The Lazarus Rumba centers around three generations of women in the Lucientes family and follows the story of Alicia Lucientes as she almost inadvertantly becomes the most famous dissident on the Island.
A modern tale rooted in recent historical events but filtered through a patiently unfolding storytelling style that pays homage to The Arabian Nights, The Lazarus Rumba is a stunning literary debut, a virtuoso performance like no other Latino writer has ever produced.
This extraordinary 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 best by social dislocation and personal confusion, a country whose soul is best captured by a lush magic realism woven from innumerable tales, tales told contrapuntally in voices both melancholy and lively, lyrical and coarse, delicate and grotesque. As intensely political as Manuel Puig's Kiss Of The Spider Woman or Milan Kundera's The Book Of Laughter And Forgetting, The Lazarus Rumba centers around three generations of women in the Lucientes family and follows the story of Alicia Lucientes as she almost inadvertantly becomes the most famous dissident on the Island.
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Overview
A modern tale rooted in recent historical events but filtered through a patiently unfolding storytelling style that pays homage to The Arabian Nights, The Lazarus Rumba is a stunning literary debut, a virtuoso performance like no other Latino writer has ever produced.
This extraordinary 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 best by social dislocation and personal confusion, a country whose soul is best captured by a lush magic realism woven from innumerable tales, tales told contrapuntally in voices both melancholy and lively, lyrical and coarse, delicate and grotesque. As intensely political as Manuel Puig's Kiss Of The Spider Woman or Milan Kundera's The Book Of Laughter And Forgetting, The Lazarus Rumba centers around three generations of women in the Lucientes family and follows the story of Alicia Lucientes as she almost inadvertantly becomes the most famous dissident on the Island.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781466890060 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Picador |
| Publication date: | 01/27/2015 |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 512 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
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.
Read an Excerpt
The Lazarus Rumba
By Ernesto Mestre
Picador
Copyright © 1999 Ernesto MestreAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4668-9006-0
CHAPTER 1
The Rumbas in Beethoven's Violin Concerto
In the middle of morning Mass, as Father Gonzalo led the sparse congregation into the Apostles' Creed, fragments of memories, heavy and sudden as summer raindrops, began to tincture the familiar fabric of the prayer. He remembered the seawater that was green, its foamy crests soapsuds white. He remembered the riverwater that was brown, its ripply hiccups piss yellow. Sometimes the sea flows into the river. In the sea he is moved by the hands of the Lord. In the river he must swim. The river is crowded with 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 lips pursed, trying not to taste the water.
It was silent. The drone of the Creed had lifted and melted in the air like incense. He hurried the rest of the service. After Communion, he muttered for the faithful to go in peace and snuck out a side door near the altar. The congregation—less than twenty faithful—remained inside the church. Father Gonzalo knew they were not waiting for him. They always did this, extending their stay inside the cool dark home of the Lord to avoid the rainy-season mugginess.
He passed through a covered archway into the rectory. He removed his robes as he walked. Anita, his servant, had left the screen door to the rectory kitchen open again. Father Gonzalo slammed it shut and sat at the square wooden table set for one. She was at the stove, her back to him. She ignored 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 door shut."
Anita came to him, bent his head forward, and examined the bite. "I'll put something on it later. Eat your breakfast first."
She placed a cup of cafecito negro in front of him first and then his eggs lightly scrambled with the buttered and sugared toast. Father Gonzalo ate 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 at one."
He finished breakfast and went upstairs to his room and removed all his clothes except for the pair of baggy cotton undergarments that covered half 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 cherry-wood rosary from the top drawer of his dresser, went to his bed, threw aside the tattered mosquitero and lay facedown with his hands crossed under his 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 fingernails last 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 passed it over his upper back. It felt cool and soothing till she pressed it to one of the bites. He lost his place on the rosary and began anew with the second decade 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, between his index finger and thumb, the fourth bead of the second decade of the rosary 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 ten fingers wiggling and just barely grazing his flesh. The spiders danced nimbly around each bite, like celebrants around a fire, tickling the surrounding skin with their thready steps, then they moved downward on his back single file through the ridge on the right side, spreading again and dancing more freely on the soft field just north of his boxer waistband. As she moved down his legs, past his swollen ankles to the bottom of his tender toes, he felt an excruciating bliss that had nothing to do with the prayers he was murmuring; he sighed, he hummed to the joy of the spider dance and lost his place on the rosary again.
"I too have known sorrow," doña Adela said to him as she let him into the parlor and took his thick-woven straw hat. She pressed her cheek to his and Father Gonzalo smelled her breath of desolation. She wore a loose printed housedress and slippers. Her hair was tied back in a tight bun so that the gray roots were accentuated and the many frizzled strands that had 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. Father Gonzalo followed a few steps behind her into the kitchen and doña Adela latched together the shuttered door and pushed open the window over the sink.
"Todo igual, coño. Its been two weeks and nothing has changed—all day locked in my room and wrapped in that musty old shawl she found the devil knows where. I think it was my mother's (la pobre, que en paz descanse). Y lo peor, now she has stopped eating altogether. She says the world 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 across a folded envelope, worn with handling. She handed it to Father Gonzalo, informing him that the police captain had brought it to her the afternoon before. Father Gonzalo examined the contents of the envelope and shook his head and muttered that something had definitely gone awry when they could no longer properly bury their dead.
"A number. That is all the consolation we get for their murder — a number. 'For obvious reasons, and in the interest of national security, the revolutionary 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. He was not hungry. "Un cafecito nada más, por favor, Adela. Then I'll go see her. Maybe she'll talk to me today. Maybe the fasting has awakened her spirit."
"She talks to no one except her cousin. He returned to town as soon as he 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 more like 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, "but the manner in which she lost him—"
"What about the manner in which I lost mine! You of all people know too well. It was enough to have buried myself with him, wrapped in a shroud of shame! But I endured (pues gracias a tí y a la Virgencita) and I will not have my daughter go mad. She too will endure. ¿No es así, Gonzalo? Won't she? Ay, no sé Cuánto más puedo. Estoy completamente desesperada." She tried to hide her tears as she set the coffee down for her guest. Her hands had grown bonier and the veins were thick, bulging out like termite trails. Her fingernails were dull and bitten.
Father Gonzalo reached out and held her damp hands. He felt the sting of the cured mosquito bites on his back. "No seas boba, coño, you have to take care of yourself. Without you what will become of her? These days of doubt will nurture her faith when it grows again. La duda es pura mierda, Adela, but no other fertilizer can so richly nurture our faith."
Music came from Adela's room. Father Gonzalo recognized it and went 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 and the 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 to lose. — No! No! Coño, I won't lose her. I'll take that old shawl and the phonograph and all the scratched records and every piece of her silly jigsaws and build a bonfire in the patio, see what she does then!"
Father Gonzalo had his eyes closed and was listening with pleasure to the intruding melody. "You'd burn Beethoven?" he said, unable to sweeten the harsh tone of sanctimony.
"Que Dios me perdone, Gonzalo, but I'd burn Santa Victoria's handkerchief and Santa Teresa's heart a million times if it meant saving my daughter! 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 finally her floating suffering face seemed to fuse into her body and her torso curled inward like the stalk of a rainstruck infant flower. From Adela's room, Beethoven's violin concerto reached a swollen pause. Father Gonzalo told Adela she had not done anything to deserve any of this. He told her that the Lord does not act like a scripted judge, meeting out specific judgment for each sin.
"She is not the first," doña Adela said between sob-breaths. "The well of 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 the same words to Father Gonzalo. A director in a sugar mill, and then a renowned diplomat for the three elected governments before the 1952 coup 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 Father Gonzalo liked to say in his homilies, lives in a hovel near the foothills of tragedy. On the third week of his retired life (a career choice enforced by the new military regime that had many favors to dole out to those who helped undermine the elected governments) Teodoro suffered a coronary, and faced with such drastic evidence of his mortality, decided to turn his life 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 moments left, all those days, months, and years of shrouded desires. So Teodoro Lucientes' public life became his secret one, and his secret life his public one. (Indeed, his life had been no secret at all, for every thing that the eyes of the townsfolk of Guantánamo knew, their tongues, their blind tongues, knew two or three things better—and what tongue has never been stained with the ruby dye of gossip?) To put it plainly, sin pena ninguna, with the bluntness of the blindest rubiest tongue, his wife and daughter became his mistress and bastard and his mistress and bastard became his wife and daughter.
After he returned from the hospital, he shuffled through the house wearing only a nightgown, his feet like giant eggplants. The doctors had prescribed 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 it up and down the porch steps unless he had had a few drinks, which doña Adela (and the doctors) strictly forbade. One madrugada, after breaking the glass in the liquor cabinet and drinking half a bottle of rum, he discarded his nightgown and went out to the porch and swung on the blue porchswing, keeping rhythm as he stroked his semierect penis. The tender skin became chafed and bloody and he grew so tired that his forearms burned. He broke into tears, yearning for his other life. Shaken from her dream, in which she heard the screeches of the porchswing as the cries of a horde of hungry seagulls, doña Adela hurried outside and wrapped her 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.
"I 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 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.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Lazarus Rumba by Ernesto Mestre. Copyright © 1999 Ernesto Mestre. Excerpted by permission of Picador.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
| GENEALOGIES | xv |
| CHARACTERS | xvii |
| MAP OF CUBA | xx-xxi |
| PROLOGUE: ONE DANCE | 1 |
| Book One: A Widow's Grief: An Old Tale | |
| CHAPTER ONE | |
| The Rumbas in Beethoven's Violin Concerto | 5 |
| A Serpent's Spit | 25 |
| The Widow's Bathwater | 36 |
| CHAPTER TWO | |
| Swimming Without Getting Wet | 42 |
| Invisible Butterflies | 45 |
| Monday Cola | 50 |
| The Sermon of the Seven Kisses | 54 |
| CHAPTER THREE | |
| Berta His Beloved | 60 |
| Nothing More or Less | 66 |
| Guava Milk | 71 |
| The Meat of Castrated Goats | 77 |
| To the Mountain! | 81 |
| Mingo's Dreams Before Dying | 91 |
| Book Two: How the Dead Come Back: The Tale as Rumba | |
| CHAPTER FOUR | |
| The Camarita Flirts with Eternity | 97 |
| Señor Sariel | 107 |
| In the Room Lit with a Red Bulb | 127 |
| Carmen Canastas's Tangled NewYear's Tale | 129 |
| A Shroud of Papaya Leaves | 145 |
| CHAPTER FIVE | |
| Atila and His Resurrected | 157 |
| The Man Who Played His Bones | 172 |
| The Wall & the Prayer-Feathers | 182 |
| Father Jacinto's Great War of the Americas | 189 |
| Demon or Saint | 203 |
| CHAPTER SIX | |
| Seven Against Him | 210 |
| Two Trials | 219 |
| Arrival | 250 |
| The Minister's Visit | 263 |
| Book Three: Exile and the Kingdom of Forgetfulness: A Tale in Tongues | |
| CHAPTER SEVEN | |
| Wordeaters | 269 |
| The Isle of Pains | 289 |
| An Odd Request | 300 |
| A Repeated Tale | 303 |
| The Devils in the Clock | 319 |
| Not Like a Prodigal | 325 |
| The Tale of the Tub (Prologue) | 329 |
| Dinner for the New Man | 347 |
| High in the Banyan | 355 |
| An Annunciation | 364 |
| CHAPTER EIGHT | |
| Monologue of Triste the Contortionist: The Thirty-Mile | |
| Swim | 368 |
| The Name of the One That He Once Loved That She Once Loved | 377 |
| Monologue of Triste the Contortionist: At Lot's Door | 377 |
| Monologue of Triste the Contortionist: The Passion of | |
| Comandante Federico Sánchez | 395 |
| Monologue of Triste the Contortionist: The Tale of the Tub | 412 |
| CHAPTER NINE | |
| Assassination as Birth | 421 |
| Within Alicia's Bohío, in the Colony of the Newer Man | 436 |
| The Ghost in the Yellow Scarf | 443 |
| The Bakery Administrator's Daughter | 453 |
| CHAPTER TEN | |
| Lamentations | 466 |
| EPILOGUE: TWO DANCES | 485 |
What People are Saying About This
"Ernesto Mestre's The Lazarus Rumba concerns the impact of the Cuban revolution on its champions and on those who resist it. The term "magic realism" doesn't cover it; this is twentieth century history as both dream and trauma. Like that other Alice, the brave Alicia Lucientes is adrift in a nightmare wonderland, this one populated by a resurrecting rooster, a bovine inamorata, as well as martyrs, terrorists and contortionists--in short, the whole proud and damned lot of us, who we are and who we hope to be. The Lazarus Rumba revives our hopes that the epic novel can be lyrical, comic and sexy as hell, and still remain unapologetically political. And why not? Cuba is a country but it is also a family, and this family saga has the breath of history to inspirit it." --Gregory Maguire, author of Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West
"The Lazarus Rumba is a beautiful and profound book, its storytelling as original as its luminescent prose. Mestre's Cuba seems less a landscape than a group portrait, whose characters dance to the music of history as best they can. Yet their stories remind us that every self has its own tune thus Rumba's symphonic and instructive scope: the majesty of life for all of us resides in the details." --Linsey Abrams, Our History in New York