Harlot's Ghost

by Norman Mailer

  Now we were being sent out. We had dispensed with detailed preparation. We were to do no more than rendezvous with a few Cubans who would know where to conceal the flares for the technological magic that would follow—a full invasion force, several orders of magnitude more mighty than santería. Half asleep, I mused.

  Then it occurred to me that I might be entering sleep for the last, or for one of the last times I would ever sleep. The mystery came over me then as never before, and I understood that we live in two states of existence, wakefulness and sleep, exactly those daily manifests provided us for life and for death; we were two histories living in one; at that moment, I wished to write a last letter to Kittredge adjuring her never to give up her theoretical work, for it was profound, yes, profound, and so adjuring her, was waking up—I did not sleep after all—merely lay in the poetic detritus that blows about the marketplace of the mind as one returns from the deep, and I sat up, and felt ready for action even if there were hours to wait. Then, taking a few deep breaths of the foul air of the galley, I pulled down my hood and went on deck.

  Butler was up with the skipper on the flying bridge. I knew the man, Eugenio Martínez. I had written about him to Kittredge. He had made more sorties to Cuba than any other boatman in southern Florida; he was a hero with a sad story, of which half of JM/WAVE was by now aware. He wished to bring his parents out of Havana, but Harvey had forbidden it. Even as I came up the ladder, he was approaching the subject.

  “Tonight, a guy stops by me and says, ‘I have my hood on, so you do not know who I am, but I know you. You are Rolando.’

  “‘If you know me so well,’ I say to him, ‘then you know I am Eugenio Martínez and am only called Rolando.’ ‘That I know as well,’ he answers, ‘but we are told to call you Rolando.’ ‘Of what use is that,’ I say, ‘when even the DGI knows Rolando is Eugenio?’ You see, Mr. Castle . . .”

  “You can call me Frank,” said Dix.

  “All right, Frank, Frank Castle. Frank, I will call you. The argument I hear from Mr. O’Brien, your boss, the corpulent man, is that my parents are well known at their home in Cuba, and it is certain capture for me if I try to reach them. I accept the logic of such matters because I am, by part, Spanish. If you are blessed and cursed with such blood, it becomes your duty to obey the laws of logic. That is a necessity for violent people if they detest chaos.”

  This speech had been so clearly uttered that I assumed Eugenio Martínez might continue speaking. I was mistaken, however. He could serve a silence. We served with him. His silences supported as much cerebration as speech. Up on the flying bridge, we rolled in the swell—the horizon, like a compass needle, doomed forever to adjust itself. Below was the ongoing message of the inboard motors working for us, working for us. We listened to the silences in the lull between each wind. Martínez had listened for so many nights that the silence may have belonged to him. He had a long triangular face with a long Spanish nose and dark eyes in a full depth of socket that seemed ready to take in all his experience, a way, I suppose, of saying that he had seen a good deal and paid the price. I thought his eyes were haunted—had he seen as many ghosts as corpses?

  That is a great deal to perceive at night under a clear but moonless sky, so I will admit that I had drunk with him two nights ago at Butler’s suggestion, and, as is obvious, honored him now. Even my father, however, fond of saying, “I wouldn’t trust a Cuban as far as I could throw him, although I would be happy to throw him through a plate-glass window,” had also said, “Give me a hundred men like Eugenio Martínez and I will take Cuba myself.” So I was pleased to be up on the flying bridge and felt as open to hero-worship as on any fevered day at St. Matt’s. It would not have surprised me if the sky behind us were to go up in a conflagration of fiery mountains, and the unspeakable white light that propelled the mushroom cloud would sear our eyes. No more would it have surprised me if Havana, down the main a hundred miles to starboard, had flared up like a rocket in a tower of flame. The reality of our situation only came to me through the flexing of my feet in response to the roll of the boat. I could sense that we must be near to Cuba. If I was not yet able to see land, Communist searchlights, full of agitation, were flashing away from twenty miles off like that flutter of heat lightning when the forces above are not yet large enough to drive a bolt through the sky.

  I had studied the map and knew where the dinghies were to put in to shore, but the coast was irregular. Mangrove swamps, dignified on the map as offshore keys, sat next to coral reefs. So soon as we had transferred the men, the flares, and our ammunition from La Princesa into the dinghies, we would run due south a few miles to find our beach. Let there be, however, one patrol boat to roar out of its concealment in the mangrove keys, and we would have to race off to the nearest inlet too shallow for them to follow.

  Now, the closer we came to Cuba, the more we saw of other ships. Freighters and fishing trawlers passed in the distance. A U.S. Naval convoy of eight vessels, its flagship a destroyer, out, doubtless, from Key West, sailed by to some destination in the east—was it the line of quarantine? We were traveling in radio silence. All the same, my interest in the world had diminished. What we were about to do was beginning to seem all that there was to do. For the last hour, our prácticos had been busy pumping up the rubber dinghies, checking equipment, breaking out assault rifles from the racks, and stacking cartons of flares on deck. Butler and I sat at the edges of this, ranked somewhere between Agency observers and honored guests. If we were to measure the venture by our usefulness, our presence might be a folly. I knew the physical taste of fear then, and it was nothing remarkable. An upwelling of bile embittered my nose and throat. It occurred to me that keeping control of myself might not be automatic.

  Butler spoke at that instant. “You and me are in the same dinghy,” he said, his voice agreeably husky.

  “Good.”

  “You’ll be my passenger.”

  I didn’t know whether to feel relieved or humiliated.

  “These are okay men,” he went on.

  “You know them?”

  “I’ve trained with a couple. If it goes all right, there is nothing to it. If it goes wrong, you don’t need training. It will be a mess. For the Castros more than for us.”

  “You sound like you are up on this.”

  “I hit the beach at Girón.”

  “You what?”

  “Unofficially.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me before?”

  He shrugged.

  I had no idea if he was telling the truth. It seemed to me that he could be. I was angry. I had thought somehow that we were going out as innocents together. I knew that some intolerable condition between us, present at the edge of every mood since our one abominable night in Berlin, might be thereby shriven. But now I saw myself as a sacrificial clown. Yes, it was better to be angry than afraid.

  I spent my last thirty minutes on La Princesa trying to familiarize myself with the Czech machine pistol handed to me. It had a curved magazine holding thirty 9mm rounds, could be set for semi or full automatic, and could probably, if need arose, be fired from the hip out of a careening dinghy. Not even hours of practice could guarantee such shooting.

  The dinghies were put over the side and loaded, waterproof carton by waterproof carton. Next came ourselves, six men in each boat. Eugenio Martínez came to the rail to say good-bye.

  “Suerte,” he whispered, and we clasped hands. I felt cleansed; I was setting out.

  This lofty intuition was maintained for as long as it took to keep one’s balance and sit down. The swell was sullen, and we were pitching too much for spiritual illumination. “Straight in, due south,” said Martínez at the last. He would meet us at approximately this place on the waters in twenty hours—that is, at eleven tonight—it was now three in the morning—or, if we did not appear, would come back on each following hour through the night.

  The dinghy had a compass and a wheel mounted on a plywood dashboard. Butler, steering the boat, was t
aking us in at ten knots, a speed slow enough for the muffled sound of our twin exhausts to blend with the wind. The chop was in our favor. It would not be easy to detect a black dinghy from any distance when the bob of the wave rose higher than our profile except when we were lifting over a crest. We did not speak. Words could carry more clearly than the throb of a motor. Yet, I could hear another motor, faint as the wash of surf on the shore, and realized it was our companion dinghy moving toward its separate rendezvous. The night air was heavy. We pushed forward slowly, as if ensconced in pillows, the dinghy so closely loaded that our freeboard was not six inches, and we shipped a little water with every rise and fall, and bailed it out with plastic milk jugs cut in half, painted black, attached by a length of rope to a ring in the rubber floor of the dinghy; the sound of bailing added to the quiet advertisement of our passage.

  Shore was approaching. A line of phosphorescence washed onto a narrow beach. Were our people waiting for us, or would we be met by Castro’s militia? The rubber bottom grated on the sand, and I stood up with the others and stepped over the side of the dinghy into a few inches of water, my muscles as tight as a clenched fist. Without a sound, all six of us pulled the dinghy twenty feet up the beach, enough to reach the shelter of a small sea-bent tree whose leaves bent so low as to paw the ground. In the night silence, a gourd fell. Its impact on landing was as raucous as the cry of an owl. Out of the thicket behind the beach came a swarm of small sounds, crawling, creeping, unstinted, inexhaustible—in that thicket was the mill of generation itself. To the rapt advance of vegetation growing came the sounds of insects eating the vegetation.

  “Hubbard,” whispered Butler, “I need you.”

  He had removed the cushion of his driver’s seat from the dinghy and it now unfolded into a long black bag. We inserted our heads, turned on a pencil light, and studied his map. “We’re off the mark,” he whispered. “We can’t be off by more than a quarter of a mile, but is it to the east or the west?” I peered at the map. At the place where we were supposed to have put in, a stream flowed down from the woods to divide the beach. Where we had landed was no stream.

  “Well,” I said, “the current was running west to east.”

  “I know,” he said, “but I could have overcorrected.”

  As we came in, I had perceived a low knoll some few hundred yards to the west of us. By the topographical lines on our map, the knoll had to be a thousand yards west of the stream.

  “Go east,” I said.

  Under the black enclosing blanket, we spoke with our faces inches apart. I felt a distinct desire to terminate this dialogue. Butler, however, kept studying the map as if to deny my conclusion. “You may be right,” he said at last, and we withdrew.

  Now the question was whether to send a man east to reconnoiter the beach and, ideally, locate our waiting guerrillas, or push the boat into the surf once more and ride along parallel to the shore. If I had been in command, I might have sent one man east. He would attract less attention and if intercepted the shots would warn us. Butler, however, decided to get back into the water. Our reception party would be expecting a rubber boat, not a man on foot.

  “One more item,” said Butler. “If there is a firefight, and we are captured, don’t get caught with that rifle.”

  “I know that,” I said. Harvey not only had told me as much, but drew a finger across his neck for punctuation. Before we left, he had provided us with a cover story that could prove sufficient. We were here in Cuba as reporters for Life magazine, ready to describe a raid; Butler was the photographer, indeed he had a camera with him, and I was the writer. Our Life accreditation had been gotten ready for us overnight by a JM/WAVE shop. If we were caught, Wild Bill would contact an editor he knew at Life. The magazine would back us up. Such was our cover. Yes, here on the beach, just arrived, two stringers down from New York, Frank Castle and Robert Charles, marginal journalists shipping out on a gamble. It was not particularly reassuring cover, since I had had no time to work up my biography, but it could suffice. Who in the DGI would know a great deal about the inner workings of Life magazine?

  Even as we dragged the dinghy back into the surf, my mind was developing the scenario. If captured, I would tell the DGI that I had been in Miami for only a week, long enough to meet some coyotes. I would describe the coyotes. That would check out, doubtless, with what the DGI knew. For the next few minutes, as we rode parallel to the shore not two hundred feet out, searching the beach for the mouth of a small stream, I felt as creative as an actor discovering the subtler character embedded in his role. I decided on my boyhood. It had been spent in Ellsworth, Maine. My father was a carpenter; my mother a housewife. I would have graduated from Ellsworth High, which would mark the end of my formal schooling. The DGI would not have a yearbook from Ellsworth High—conceivably the KGB, but not the DGI.

  It was just as well that I enjoyed my scenario, for that proved the last fruitful meditation I was to have for a time. Around a slight turn in the beach, we came upon a stream, and Butler rapped my shoulder once in affirmation, and took us in to shore. Once again we landed, once again we dragged the dinghy into the cover of a low tree, and waited, and listened to the sounds of vegetation growing.

  Since no trail went up into the bush, only the stream which was no more than a brook, we reconnoitered it far enough to post a práctico at the first bend. He was back, however, in twenty minutes. The mosquitoes had proved too fierce. Butler handed the man insect repellent and sent him back.

  We waited. The password was parangón. The reply was incompetente. My hearing grew ready. Parangón—paragon. Would it come in a hoarse voice or a whisper? The insects came instead. I took out my repellent and shared it with Butler. He was impatient with waiting. Back went our heads into the black bag to study the map once more. If, for the sake of hypothesis, we had made an error of more than half a mile on the first approach, then the knoll from which I had taken my calculations could have been mistaken for another headland further down the coast. Our faces six inches apart, our breath disturbed by the anxiety that we were losing any authoritative relation to this map, we argued.

  I refused to give up my interpretation. We did not remove our heads from the bag until the penultimate moment. For in another ten seconds the missing Cubans came forth from the brook in the company of our práctico, and a whispered set of greetings were joined in the darkness of the low trees that bordered the beach. I thought of how much quick happiness was available in war! I had rarely taken to strangers so much as these six Cubans who had joined us at the head of the stream, and in the dark I could not even see their faces.

  In the beginning, there was much translation. Our hosts spoke a dialect I could not comprehend. So they were obliged to address themselves to a práctico who communicated with me. It took time. Whispered links were lost, and there were problems to discuss. Once the boat was unloaded, were we to drag it up the stream until we found a clearing large enough to hide it, or should we let out the air, stuff it in the thicket, and use the foot pump on our return to blow it up again? When it developed that there was no likely place upstream, we took the second course and bound the deflated rubber skin into an object the size of a large suitcase, then located a hollow for it.

  Now we were ready to transport the flares. They came in forty-pound cartons. Since the guides who had come to meet us knew the turns of the stream where the Castro militia could set up an ambush, one of them took the point, another the rear, and all of us, Butler, myself, the four prácticos, and the six locals, each shouldered a forty-pound carton. That took care of all but two boxes. When the heaviest man in our welcoming party handed his machete to a friend and put a carton on each of his shoulders, Butler decided to do the same, thereupon giving me his assault rifle. Loaded with one carton and two weapons, I joined the others as we went up the brook in the dark.

  We slogged along in water that came to our knees, switched from bank to bank on the rocks, slid in mud, sat down in mud, dropped a carton from time to time. In
places, the stream became a pool and we walked in water to our waists. I do not know if we covered a mile, but it felt like five and took considerably more than an hour and much agonized breathing before we reached a dirt road adjacent to the watercourse and found a clearing where the cases could be stacked. A truck, we were promised, would arrive before dawn to transport the flares. The people with us knew no more than how to guide us to the clearing. Now we were told that it would be wise to return to the beach. It was always possible that the militia would drive along this road.

  “I’m staying here,” said Butler, “until the truck arrives.”

  One of the Cubans tried to explain the situation. If the militia were to come by and discover the cartons, that would not be good for the local community. On the other hand, it would not necessarily be a disaster since a gang from Matanzas could have been squirreling away their ordnance here. Should we be found, however, a skirmish with the militia had to ensue, and then there could be dead men to account for. It was better if we went back right now.