Chango's Beads and Two-Tone Shoes (18 page)

Moncho knew all about the involvement of Ezequiel and Floreal in Santeria from his time in Los Negros, and he approached them at their home to do this rite for Quinn and Renata. Moncho first thought he should dissuade Renata from this hasty marriage, she being so young and tempted. But as a believer in irrational love he offered no objection. Also, he had taken a liking to Quinn who is a bit strange, but seems to know what he wants—that fixation of his on
babalawos
and he doesn’t know anything about them. But there is no
babalawo
, for
babalawos
really can’t legally do weddings. And there’s no Catholic priest either. Moncho told Quinn and Renata, You don’t need a priest, I’ll do it.

All-purpose Moncho, a sometime criminal lawyer and public defender, is also a
notario público
appointed for life by Carlos Prío when he was president, with the power to draw real estate contracts and perform other legal functions, marriage among them. Moncho now sits in a corner and observes, across the room, in motion, the two daughters of the house. Holtz, who dances reasonably well, is focusing on the elder daughter. Arsenio’s old wife, and Moncho’s driver, Epifanio, who works with Arsenio, are all dancing, and the seated Moncho is moving his shoulders to the beat of the beta. Then he rises and gets into it. Is Moncho a believer like Renata? Who cares? Moncho dances, betraying ballroom talent and moving like a Cuban Fred Astaire—he could dance for a living—and he jangles toward those two daughters in long dresses, into a communion, perhaps, sanctified by Ifa, competing with Holtz for their attention.

This readiness of so many to dance, and dance well, astonishes Quinn at the moment, for it certainly isn’t the reason these people are here. Dance has resurfaced in their lives and they are seizing the day. Ezequiel has been drumming nonstop for half an hour at least, and all in the room are dancing. Dance is the Cuban national contagion, as ubiquitous as rum and the cigar—keeping together in time, as somebody put it; and those who dance will bond and rise, will overshadow, maybe even overpower groups that do not dance. The military dance, the march, the goosestep, the cheerleaders’ kick step, the fox trot, the close order drill, the dance of shamans, the dance of sex (George Bernard Shaw said dance was the vertical expression of a horizontal desire), the dance of love, the wedding dance, the aboriginal war dance, the dance of death (Socrates took dancing lessons when he was seventy), the slave dance. Quinn’s grandfather watched a slave dance eighty-five years ago in a Mambí encampment.

“It is time for music,” Céspedes said to El Quin after their dinner together—broiled steak, sweet potatoes, boiled corn and bread made from cassava roots—the second night after bloody Jiguaní, the dead buried, the wounded lying on their couches of twigs. Quinn had talked half a day with the president in his thatched-leaf hut, and the success at Jiguaní had produced ebullience in the leader.

“It is time for the people to dance,” he said after they ended their talk. This was a man who wrote music in the years before he declared war on slavery and Spain, wrote as a youth the words for a love song, “La Bayamesa,” which later gained new lyrics and evolved into a battle anthem of the Mambí rebels. He and Quinn walked from his hut to the broad patch of level ground where two Mambí drummers, plus six musicians with flutes, cornets, a bugle, and a guitar, all captured from Spanish troops, were just sitting down to begin their music, the
danza,
Céspedes called it. People sat at the edge of the dance turf, and officers and soldiers came forward with their women. They all danced on the same turf, but with wide separation between officers and troops. Most were mulatos (two-thirds of the Mambí army) among some whites, and all moved with vital pleasure in the accumulating darkness, lit by a few torches. The music was brassy but mellowing to Quinn, the drumming alluring, evoking chants and clapping from dancers and others who had come to watch and feel the beat: keeping together in time.

When this music paused, a black drummer staked out a patch of ground closer to the forest, and a dozen black men and women began not a
danza
but something wilder. Quinn went to watch with Céspedes, who said that only the black Africans danced this way and to this beat, which was mesmerizing to Quinn in its fury—bodies contorting with frenzied invitation but never touching, dancers grunting their communal joy in wild and guttural singing, repetitive and monotonous; but in monotony there is truth. Their joy was echoed by the wildly vocal spectators, all supremely aroused, the entire spectacle looking to Quinn like a warm-up for a hot evening to come.

Nicodemo, the strapping near-giant who had guided Quinn into Cuba Libre—wearing a clean uniform, but still of tatters, his bandaged left arm hanging limp—moved with great vigor and thrust toward two women dancers, first one, then the other, and he spoke to the drum and the women in a language Céspedes said he could not understand. Quinn said it sounded like the universal language of heat. The women received what Nicodemo was sending them and answered with body language of their own, an exotic dialogue in motion. Nicodemo’s slave persona was nowhere in evidence, his movement now obeying memory of an instinctual order, his manic excitement transforming him from machete warrior to warrior of the erotic night.

Quinn, waiting to see another hero of a latter-day revolution, moved in synch with Renata—no need to watch Floreal now, we know the moves—and, as he felt his and Renata’s spirits seriously mingling, he decided this was the corroborating stage of the wedding ceremony.

“It’s time to do the marriage,” he said to Moncho.

“We are still in the dance,” Moncho said.

“We’re getting past it. It seems time. Are you ready to marry me, Renata?”

She broke her trance to throw back her head and laugh, not inclined to stop dancing to be wed. She was in collusion with the chant and the drum, generating the movement of love. “I am getting close,” she said.

“Will you kiss me now?” Quinn said to her. And she danced toward him and took both his hands, then kissed him with a passion that seemed greater and more nervous than when they had last made love; and he decided this was yet another irreversible step toward the ceremony. Renata closed her eyes and danced away to the table. She picked up the red and white beads from Changó’s bowl and put them around Quinn’s neck.

The drumming and the singing stopped.

Floreal, with wide eyes, faced the table, picked up the coconut, and hit it with the hammer. She drained its milk into a dish, broke the coconut into pieces with her hands, and washed the four largest pieces in another dish of water. She threw the four pieces on the floor and stared at how they fell—the white of the meat or the brown of the outer shell facing upward. Ezequiel resumed his drumming, the same beat but slower. Floreal moved toward and then away from Renata and, circling the pieces of the coconut, began to talk to the room. “A woman alone in a room is knitting,” she said, “always knitting, and she knits because she is trying to save you.”

“It is my grandmother,” Renata said. “She did that for years. Is she saving me from marriage?”

“Nothing can save you from marriage,” Floreal said. Then she told Quinn that the Orisha wanted him to speak to Renata what he knows about love.

Quinn said there are fifty million definitions of love and its abortive and deadly and gorgeous and mystifying nature, and he knows quite a bit about it, but he never knew what it felt like before Renata, and
that
love for her is unbelievably great inside him, and growing, and intoxicating his soul. He said he believes its mystical power will conquer every doubt in Renata’s heart about the speed of this leap into marriage, and he rambled on, full of what he remembered others saying of love—love, the itch, and a cough cannot be hid, love conquers all things, to fear love is to fear life, love lodged in a woman’s breast is but a guest, will you love me in December as you do in May? And when he heard his own babble he stopped talking.

Then the drum resumed, and Floreal spoke of the handsome young Babalu Aye who had many women until he was struck with leprosy by Olodumare because of his disobedience—going with a woman on Holy Thursday, which was forbidden. The woman he went with awoke in his bed to see him covered with sores, and she fled. Babalu Aye went to the house of Olodumare and begged to be restored to what he had been, but Olodumare slammed the door and Babalu Aye died on the street. The women of the world wept and went to Oshun and asked her to help bring Babalu Aye back to life. Oshun was moved by their tears and went to Olodumare, who had been her lover years ago. She brought with her a gourd with the special honey Olodumare had loved to kiss off her lips. She put it on his door and when he came home he recognized its aroma as Oshun’s, but she had turned herself into a crone with running sores. When Olodumare saw her he wept. When you gave leprosy to Babalu Aye, she said, he gave it to me, for I was with him on Holy Thursday. Olodumare said he would restore her to health but she said not unless you resurrect Babalu Aye. He did this and Oshun also became her beautiful self and smeared honey on her face and parts of her body, which drove Olodumare wild, and he licked all the honey away. Babalu Aye stood up from the grave, but still with his leprosy and putrid odor, and he walked the world with his dogs licking his sores. People loathed him, and his brother Changó did not even recognize him at first, but Changó took pity and bathed Babalu Aye in the river and prayed to the powerful Olofi, and his prayer was so beautiful that Olofi told Babalu Aye that he would become the king of Arara. Babalu walked the world for a lifetime and then one night when the dry earth broke open and great torrents of rain fell, he believed he had reached the end of his journey, so he lay down to die. But the sky dawned bright and he was young again and people were on their knees worshipping his presence, for they knew he was the prophesied king who would arrive after the storm. And the land was called Arara.

“That’s a sad and happy story,” Quinn said to Renata. “Now you must marry me and my Changó beads. Did you just hear what Changó did for your favorite Orisha, Babalu Aye?”

“I heard,” she said, “and will you always do that for me?”

“I will,” he said. “And will you give me such love that the gods will be jealous?”

“I will try.”

“Then it is time to marry,” Quinn said, and he put her arm in his arm and he walked her to the table with the bowls of Oshun and Changó, and he looked to Moncho, who called Epifanio, his driver, and one of Arsenio’s daughters, Encarnita, as witnesses, and then Moncho spoke from memory the civil ritual that made Quinn and Renata man and wife. Felipe Holtz gave the bride away.

Arsenio’s old wife brought many plates of food to the table, and the wedding feast carried on until after midnight when a messenger arrived and talked to Moncho, and together they told Quinn that it was time for him to meet Arsenio in the forest. His bride would not be going with them. She should see a woman in Havana who would find a meaningful connection for her in the revolution, and Moncho would tell her that woman’s name. Quinn passed this on to Renata who said if I go back to Havana they will arrest and kill me. I will go back with Felipe to his house and wait for you. Then she kissed Quinn, her new husband, and went alone to their marriage bed.