The Lazarus Rumba Read Online Free Page B

wonders if God dreams during the day, and if he, as his minister, somehow manages, unwittingly, to infiltrate himself 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 disgorge themselves, doña Adela waited for her dotard husband on the rickety porchswing. He appeared an hour before dusk.
    â€œI am going to the sea—”
    â€œThe sea will swallow you today!” his wife said.
    Teodoro’s pearly eyes jumped from their sockets, the left one opening as wide as the right one for the first time since the heart attack, and he stared at her as if he were conscious of her for the first time since he had felt the imminence of his death.
    â€œGood, then let there be no mourning!”
    With that, he lifted his hat and departed barefoot into the lightning-bleached twilight. Doña Adela lost no time, she grabbed her daughter, suited her in her rubber mango-yellow raincoat and black galoshes and instructed her to grab the plastic bag with her father’s new unused shoes, bought three sizes too big because his feet were so swollen.
    â€œYa basta,” doña Adela said, as she threw on a raincoat the color of guava flesh. “I’ve lost all patience. Not a good thing, mijita, but that’s the way 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-bleached porchsteps Teodoro had stained with his muddied feet was olive, like the sea often is on blustery afternoons. The old woman (la Blanquita’s mother) was sitting out on the white-railed veranda, rocking in her chair, oblivious to the rain that had already begun to slant its way in and slap at her cheeks. She wore a lavender dress that came down to her black lace anklets and a gray woolen shawl, which she held tightly wrapped around her shoulders. Her skin was wrinkled and as offensively white as her daughter’s. She squinted her clear eyes at the two figures standing out in the rain.
    â€œQué 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 daughter to come and die with the other one and Renata hides her from it. As if death were such a bad thing! Qué bueno, you have come, now he can die with the whole family together, two wives, two daughters. Yo no me meto, I’ll stay out here in the storm. I am old, I have seen enough people die.”
    Doña Adela let the raindrops pelt her face. She welcomed them, a drumbeat to the fury in her: “Where is my husband?”
    â€œAy, 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? Because you are going to lose a father does not mean that you will lose your sister. You have a most beautiful daughter, señora. I remember you once were beautiful too. … Así son las cosas de la vida, you stole him from her then, now she steals him from you. Who’s to say what’s better?”
    â€œYour daughter is a whore! Where is my husband?”
    â€œNo, no, chica, the whores are others. If you knew how my poor Renata suffers. I will tell you about the whores if you want me to (many wicked tongues speak into this shriveled ear), but not my daughter, not my poor daughter. She too suffers like an abandoned wife. In another world maybe you would have been friends, partners against him, for that man, handsome as he is (even now, even after all these years—what god makes women wither and men bloom in their old age?), is a demon, a beautiful demon, but a demon nonetheless.”
    Doña Adela grabbed her daughter’s hand and followed her husband’s muddy footsteps up the sun-bleached porchsteps and through the front door of the house.
    â€œCome, mijita,” she said, “and you will