The Lazarus Rumba Read Online Free Page A

worst is yet to come.
    Pero vaya, at least He answers. Digan lo que digan, He always returns His calls. Just that He is working in a different time scheme, and sometimes His servant forgets this, and unwarrantedly accuses Him of an unholy silence. His servant could not be more wrong. He is the chatteriest god there ever was. All His servant has to do is open His Book and read the stories therein: the Lord answers!
    He starts and ends with His most finished law, a law that no god before him dared conceive (much less put into practice), a law so revolutionary that it is the first law mock-revolutionaries cast aside. Did not Fidel, almost from the morning he rode into the capital—(Is that the Virgin on his breast? The glow of the tyrant on his cheeks?)—did not he cast it aside almost immediately?
    God, chided for His silence, answers Father Gonzalo:
    Every man’s soul is his own, to it he answers before he answers to his Lord, so it must be; in his own heart he must fashion a likeness of that silent greatness. So it must be. Else the Lord go mad and the world be left Fatherless. What if a man begot twenty children and had to answer, under law, for each and all of their wrongs, and what if the children each begot twenty more and the man had to answer, under law, for all the wrongs of his children’s children and, in time, for those of his children’s children’s children? Would there be any escape from damnation for this poor soul burdened by all his wrongful brood? So is the fate of your wretched Lord. Think of all My children, think of the awful generations of My brood. I am sick. Worse in being worshiped than you in worshiping. I can command the prayer’s knee, but not that selfish heart that feels nothing beyond its own wringing, that with a set of woeful susurrations thinks he can, like a lazy tenant, transfer over the caring of his house to Me. Am I a handyman? Is that what your Lord has become: someone to tighten every leaky tearduct, unstop every clogged heart, straighten every crossed nerve, dig up every weed in the garden of your dreams, plug up every hole in the flesh of those houses I gave you, free of charge, a gift? And am I to be blamed when that house goes up in flames or is eaten by termites through your own negligence? No other creature is as ungrateful as My own children. And you have the gall to wonder why I so often go silent. Silence is my resting place. The only place in My own world where I find peace.
    I am sick of this. Your house is your own. See to it, damn it!
    On those days, Father Gonzalo listened to God cuss in a voice sophisticated and savage, understood and not understood as the cry of birds, not in his dreams (for as a sleeper he was almost dreamless) but during the course of the wakeful day; it passed through the holes of his tattered mosquitero as he rejoiced at the end of another sleepless night, wandered out from the sacristy as he most absently said morning Mass, buzzed along with the mosquitoes and black flies as he walked to the rectory to have his breakfast, creeped into his flesh when Anita did him spiders, burned at the tip of his one daily cigarette as he performed his egestions, flicked ashes at the urgings in his loins, cut in slivers of light through the brim of his straw hat as he daily visited the many in the parish who sought condolence, cuddled with him at the siesta hour, hissed from behind the voices of the few who came to afternoon confession, stewed in the okra broth Anita prepared for dinner, and then after dusk, just when Father Gonzalo’s joints began their most honest ache, God abandoned him. He cursed no more. He went silent.
    Not that He was not there, Father Gonzalo knew that God was always there, just that sometimes, like one in a dreamless sleep, or one who is replete with words but will not mouth them, He says nothing.
    In the worst of his bedtime hours, when no position can bring comfort to his flaring joints, Father Gonzalo