Before Fidel arrived in Oriente with his eighty-two expeditionaries Arsenio was already an ally, and had hunkered down in Niquero for two days with a hundred men, and trucks loaded with guns and supplies for the invaders. But the fate of the invaders was not to land at Niquero but to sink into a swamp near Belic. Most of them were quickly shot on the run by Batista forces, but Fidel eluded the troops and made it to the Sierra with Che Guevara, then his brother Raúl, and in short order a dozen altogether, with Arsenio’s banditry and leadership at his disposal. Arsenio knew every peasant who had food, knew where to find water, knew every road, and roads that were not roads, every impasse and cliff. He offered Fidel a hundred men but without arms, and Fidel was grateful, but who needs the gunless in battle? He accepted a few helpers from Arsenio; and the outlaw chief also put three of his sons to work with shotguns as escopeteros, robbing travelers to feed the rebels.
When Holtz called Moncho to have someone meet his plane with the guns, Arsenio was the man, and he and three others were alongside when the plane stopped on the grass runway. In ten minutes they had offloaded guns and ammo onto an old Dodge truck. Within twelve minutes they were rattling over a narrow road through a cane field into the dense brush of the forest’s edge into a village where a dozen or, if necessary, two dozen human mules would backpack the weapons up to the lofty, new Cuba Libre.
In the sugar mill Holtz told the pilgrims to wait and he walked to Arsenio and asked did he want to talk to the visitors. Arsenio said no, who are they? I heard of a periodista who claimed to be married to my cousin but I have no such cousin.
Holtz, who knew nothing of what Quinn had set in motion in La Marea del Portillo, said no, she’s my cousin, Renata Suárez Otero, very close to the family for years. From Havana, and she worked with the Directorio. Those guns we just flew here, she sent. She had also negotiated with Alfie for guns for the Directorio but now most of her Directorio friends are dead. She wants to join the revolution here. She is a brave woman.
“Women can do some things,” Arsenio said, “but there are few here, very few. I will ask about this.”
“Alfie Rivero is also here and he really is your cousin, no?”
“Yes,” said Arsenio, ”and sometimes I trust my cousins.”
“He says he can get many guns for Fidel,” said Holtz. “He’s connected to Mafia people in Miami and he has airplanes. He knows guns and he will do anything.”
“We will talk with him about the guns,” Arsenio said.
“The periodista Quinn, all he wants is to interview Fidel.”
“Is that all?” said Arsenio.
“Will Fidel see any of them?”
“I will know tomorrow.”
“Is there a plan? Will we go toward the mountains?”
“If the answer is yes then Moncho will know the place. He will tell you.”
“Should all four of us go? Are we too many?”
“It makes no difference. It is dangerous, no matter how many. Not all of this group will go to Fidel.”
“How many army checkpoints where we’re going?”
“Who knows? They keep moving them.”
“I assume we should have a good reason for going.”
“The army asks who you are and why you are here and where you are going.”
“I can say I’m on business, buying land that was part of an old sugar mill.”
“There are no mills where you are going.”
“Then you know where we’re going.”
“I know where you might be going.”
“What about a family gathering? Quinn has the idea of doing an actual wedding celebration to marry Renata and he wants a babalawo and a Catholic priest to perform the ceremony. Alfie and I would be the bride’s relatives, and Moncho actually is a relative—he was married to Renata’s sister. Marriage seems like a good reason for going someplace. I do like the idea.”
“Is this a real marriage?”
“Quinn wants it to be. I don’t know if Renata wants it.”
“I like the marriage.”
“I know. You do it often.”
Arsenio dropped the stub of cigar he was chewing on and took a new one from his shirt. He put it in the corner of his mouth but did not light it. He stared at the pilgrims who all wanted to go to see the hero.
“Moncho will come here tomorrow,” he said. “You follow him in your car. The mafioso will go with me. Your cousin está muy buena.”
“You have a fine eye, Don Arsenio.”
Arsenio nodded at the pilgrims and walked out of the mill.
Quinn may or may not be about to meet with Fidel Castro and is now in the midst of the waiting game Fidel plays with visitors. He is in the main room of a house in Los Negros, a crossroads village near the northern foothills of the Sierra, where Moncho had led him and the other pilgrims from Palma Soriano. They passed two army checkpoints without trouble, Moncho explaining they were going to a wedding and the bride and groom are in the car behind me. The soldier inspected the Buick Quinn was driving and Renata said yes it’s true, and showed him her grandmother’s wedding ring that she would be wed with, and the soldier waved them on.
Quinn, waiting for Fidel—is now into his sixth hour in this house which belongs to one of Arsenio’s fifteen or twenty mujeres, wives of a sort. This wife lives here with two of her four daughters—and Quinn is witnessing an impromptu prelude to his wedding, a Santeria dance ritual, organized for Renata, that will, he hopes, lead into a divination, the calling down of one, maybe two Orishas who might hint at the destiny of the bride and groom, or offer a prognosis of the marriage, or faux marriage, whichever it is. Quinn hasn’t quite got a handle yet on the details of either the divination ritual or the marriage, but he’s getting there.
The ritual is being enacted by two principals brought here by Moncho—Ezequiel, who is playing the tambor beta, or sacred drum, and Floreal, who belongs to Ezequiel and is a Santera, a priestess of lesser station than a babalawo but empowered to invoke the Orishas. Floreal is singing as she dances barefoot, a chanting singsong in Yoruban verse evoking one of the hundreds of mysteries of Ifa, which is a belief system, a method of divination, an all-encompassing myth of the history of the universe. Her song is melodious despite the limited range of the music. She is wearing a head wrap, something like a turban but also like a crown, and she is floating her great blue skirt, another blue skirt beneath it (blue because that is the color associated with Oshun, the Orisha with whom Renata wants to commune). Floreal dances with graceful twirls and revolutions, with arcs of her body and subtle rhythms of hips, arms, and shoulders akin to the moves of the mambo, but a subdued mambo, elegant in twist and thrust.
This is taking place in the main room of this modest wooden house that Arsenio built for his old wife long ago. Chairs have been pushed to one wall. A table, with a white cloth covering it, is serving as an altar and is set out with two coconuts and a hammer, two stones, a glass of water, several bowls, one with water, two with offerings to the Orishas being summoned. Changó’s is the second bowl, which is wooden so it won’t break. Changó can be rowdy. Both these bowls are full—with beads and sunflowers and small cups of honey, plus herbs and other elements Quinn cannot identify. Behind the table a large fabric, red and light blue, has been hung to transform the room, and there is a festive quality here.
Quinn is fixated on Renata, who is totally absorbed by it all; and she is scoring dance points with Quinn by her effective emulation of Floreal’s moves, which isn’t easy. Quinn is reveling in Renata’s aesthetic control of her body. Grace and beauty prevail in all realms of her being, it seems to him. He is exploding with love for her; and immersed as he is in all this mumbo-jumbo, he would not be surprised to see his love materialize somewhere in this room in the shape of an idea, a corporeal rendering of his possibly insane desire. He would not go on record at the moment as to his own sanity.
Renata had told him she did not like to dance and would not dance with him. But she lied, or perhaps she just c
hanged because of the impulse that started her dancing yesterday in her hotel room and took hold of her again here when Ezequiel’s drum began singing to her and Floreal’s chant and elegant movement brought her to her feet.
Quinn is also on his feet now, dancing with Renata at a distance, he too emulating Floreal’s steps; and he feels the power of this dance. He is with its beat, which is a slow mambo, he has definitely decided—you go with what you know. Floreal gave Quinn a small smile because of the way he was swaying his hips, not bad was his reading of her glance. His only exotic dance specialties were the merengue and the rumba, but soon he’d really nail this mambo, and maybe even the salsa, what the hell, he was in Cuba.
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.