by Jay Cantor
“Raul.”
A name, I thought, like farewell. “No. Even Raul. He’s shrewd and mistrustful. But he believed utterly in Fidel. He was sane within the larger madness. But always within it.”
Ponco smiled. Why, I wondered, did that formulation bring him such particular delight? Did it describe one of us?
I rubbed my backbone against the edge of the step, just for the pleasure of it. A very old cat. My mice were now dream things, memories. “I remember after dinner once, Ricardo—our Ricardo, not Gadea—came over to me. He was very thin then, even more than he is now, and he moved in an abrupt way, as if he were ashamed of his natural grace. He grabbed me by the shoulder. It hurt.”
“Do you think,” Ponco asked, “he’s afraid he’s a Travis?”
“What? A what? Are you serious? I don’t know. You may be right.” It was an odd thought. And what did it matter really? “You read too many stories,” I said.
“I’ve found a new activity,” he said, “a substitute.”
I thought, at the time, that he meant interrogation.
“Why did he take your shoulder?”
“He said, The continental traveler! The hero of the Guatemalan Revolution! Nico has told us about you. Endlessly. Frankly, we’re all sick to death of hearing about you. Do you know a lot of things, as Nico says?’ Yes, I said, I know a lot of things. Just like my wife, I thought. ‘I’ll bet you do! I’ll bet you know how to read and write.’ I thought Ricardo Morales was a little mad.”
“He is,” Ponco said.
“Well, I said, ‘Yes, of course I know how to read and write.’ That was a mistake. ‘Of course you do,’ he drawled. His grip on my shoulder tightened. ‘Of course!’ He pointed to me with his free hand, showing me off to the others. ‘Well, I don’t! So why don’t you teach me?’ Once, he told us, he had seen a bandit just arrested by the police. Ricardo had been bringing in a herd of beef. He stood by the barracks door, listening to the officers taunt the bandit. The police were educated men. They, too, knew many things. And the bandit had said, ‘Oh, gentlemen! If only I had known how to read and write, I would have destroyed humanity.’ Ricardo laughed in that mirthless way of his, as if bitterness itself were his favorite food. That was his ambition, he announced. To rid the planet of its stinking lice. Present company apparently included. He dreamed, he said, of a hare looking up one morning in an empty field. I took a copy of The Civil War in France from my jacket pocket. I told him he needed to know Marxism for a project like his. ‘No,’ he said, ‘I know all about Karl Marx, from Fidel’s letters.’ For Fidel had sent lectures from his cell and they had formed study groups around those documents. ‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘I know what Fidel knows about him. And that’s enough. I want something I don’t know the end of. Like a story.’ ”
“Smart man,” Ponco said. “I always thought so. He’ll join us.” I could hear the relief in his voice at Ricardo’s imagined assent.
“Yes. He will.” And I, too, was pleased, thinking of that thin, lined, bitter face, looking so much older than its years. I thought of how he came to be with the 26th of July: After the Moncada, Fidel had fled to the mountains. Ricardo had taken him in, for no reason. He envied bandits and Batista said Castro was a brigand. Castro was found in Ricardo’s hut, unshaven, covered with mud, asleep on the floor. The lieutenant who discovered him bent over Fidel, holding him down. He brought his cheek close to Fidel’s, and whispered in his ear, “Don’t give your name or you’ll be shot.” Fidel and the lieutenant had been in the debating club together, at the university. So Fidel escaped to stand trial. But the soldiers burned Ricardo’s house down. And the same lieutenant had put Ricardo’s right hand on a rock and smashed it with the butt of his rifle. (There was no debating it: Ricardo had harbored a brigand.) Ricardo followed them down from the mountains, to the prison. He waited there till he could make contact with survivors of the Moncada.
“So you found a story for him.”
“Yes. I borrowed a detective book from one of the other men, and taught him from that, every night for a month.”
“I know,” Ponco said, his face alight with joy. “Ricardo was my teacher. The book was torn by then. He had the alphabet you’d drawn on the back leaf. He kept it in his breast pocket. A charm. It makes me …”
“My grandchild,” I said.
“No. I was thinking: your father’s great-grandchild. That nice old man.”
I saw Ricardo in the mountains, at the beginning, when there were only eighteen of us, already defeated, without a chance. (Or were there fourteen? Or twelve? I sometimes count. But someone is missing. Or counted twice. There are other needs being served here—like a man enumerating his lovers, confused by guilt, longing, and his vision of himself.) Ricardo walked up to a large man watching some cattle in a field. I heard him say, “Do you know how to read and write? Don’t lie to me!” The big peasant looked at Ricardo’s rifle. Then he picked Ricardo up, though Ricardo is a very tall man, and sat him on the back of one of the cows. Ricardo laughed, and shouted, “You’re a stupid … ventriloquist!”—using the most preposterous-sounding word that he could remember. He got down from the cow, and kicked the man in the backside. Then he put his arm around Joaquin’s shoulder. They walked off, a little ways ahead of us, and then a little ways more, Ricardo cajoling him, insulting him, flattering him, till we were ready to make camp. The two of them squatted down, and Ricardo took out his detective novel. It still had its green cover then, with its lurid picture of the woman in the short black negligee.
It was a racist North American novel, full of gooks, spies, and niggers. When we had a mimeo machine later on, Ricardo duplicated passages for our classes. I remember that the book began, “I had just come out of a three-chair barbershop, where the Agency thought a barber named Dimitrios Aleidis might be working. It was a small matter.…”
And even as I recalled the words, I heard my uncanny collaborator’s spectral voice. “ ‘It was a small matter.’ When R. needed volunteers he’d say, ‘The Agency needs an operative. It’s a small matter.’ You know, we made up heroic exploits for Dimitrios Aleidis. How he had come to Cuba to join Fidel. Etcetera.”
That serial, I remembered, was mostly the work of my young friend, Walter of the high unquenchable voice. Much like his stories of himself, but with Aleidis substituted for Walter.
“R. and I,” Ponco said, “are the only ones in Cuba who know the whole plot of that detective story.” He smiled, seraphically.
But I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of asking.
“All right. I’ll tell you the murderer. It was.” And he made a muffled noise into the back of his hand. “You know, Che, Ricardo shared your pleasure. Using pussycats to shock people.”
Found out, so easily!
“He’d cook them up on a Bunsen burner. Make new recruits eat a piece. I told him how much I And my whole family Enjoyed their little livers and tongues. Thus our Friendship.”
I laughed and sat looking out at the ocean, and thought of the water covering the field, lapping up over my boots, my legs, ridding the planet of its vermin.
“Fidel.”
That name, recalling me to my memory work, and suddenly there were no more images. It was too hot outside, that’s why I wanted to drown the world. I was sweating under my arms. My pants clung to my thighs. You’d think this remembering was hard work. I pulled myself back into the shade of the veranda. “I don’t remember what was said.” For today, I thought, was no good for voices. “But I remember how I felt before he arrived.”
“Yes!” Ponco said. Clearly, this was best of all.
“I thought I was angry with myself. I had killed a man for little reason. Or too much for my own reasons. What I’d written my father was bravado. I felt guilty for what I’d done. I hadn’t left his world. And I was confused. I was not the sort of person who could have done such a thing. Then what sort of person was I?”
Ponco made a sound of agreement, a long grating sigh.
I looked off
into the sun. “And I remember an odd thing Castro said to me when we met: ‘I’ve been waiting for you.’ ”
Ponco clapped his hands together. “And?”
I didn’t speak for a while. Looking at the sun had made me a little woozy.
“And? How did it feel? Meeting him?”
I stared out at the long grass. The sun scythed it straight across, like a plain fact. Once again the grass moved inside my blank mind. I saw the room at Maria Antonia’s. Someone entered. “It felt … it felt like I was suddenly part of a drama.”
Ponco clapped and clapped and clapped. Was it the word “drama”? Was I supposed to bow?
“Don’t speak,” he said peremptorily, though I had no thought of speaking; I was entirely vegetative. “Don’t say Another word.” He left his thick book on the chair and went inside. I sat and waited for him to return with some new sheaf of accusing documents. What might they be?
For half an hour the sun slowly rounded itself to a single color. Ponco’s doll’s-head popped out from the doorway, startling me. The rest of the body didn’t follow.
“Is it true you saved his life. In Mexico?”
“Yes.”
“Don’t tell me about it!”
He disappeared. The sun grew larger, achieved a more coherent form, and it, too, disappeared. Ponco didn’t return.
Or come out for dinner. That night I saw the light on in his room. I knew that my collaborator’s ban on speech still applied, so I didn’t disturb him.
JULY 13
He emerged in the morning, after I had been at the table for an hour. He walked a slow shuffle, a tentative step, holding some pages again, but this time apparently uncertain of his accusations. He looked weary, as if accusing me (the substance of our romance) wore him down. And he had shaved his wispy mustache. (It had never amounted to much.)
He sat for a few moments at the table, running his palm over and over on his hair, just touching the top of his curls. “Here,” he said, handing me the papers. He smiled wanly, not sure, I thought, of my pleasure in his work. But why, suddenly, did it matter to him? Before, the barb of the accusation had been its own delight.
AN HISTORIC MEETING
A Play in Two Acts
BY
“Travis” Tulio
“A pen name,” Ponco said. He had risen from his chair, and come over to stand behind me, bending towards my shoulder. He was not the sort of author who would be reticent in offering guidance to the reader. “It’s like a nom de guerre. Perhaps you need one, too. Make you freer in talking about yourself.”
I saw his point: it was a different sort of battle, a different sort of secrecy. I paused, thought. “Che,” I said.
“Sure. Right.” But Ponco had lost interest in that line of attack. He wanted me to read on.
Act One: Ernesto Guevara Smokes a Cigar with Fidel Castro
Scene: The house of Maria Antonia, a wealthy sympathizer of the 26th of July Movement, and of Fidel Castro, its leader. We are in the kitchen, a large room with a big stove. There is an ornate kitchen table of heavy dark carved wood. A big black iron pot of spaghetti sits in the middle of the table. Another pot sits on the stove. There are dirty cups and dishes scattered on the table, and several handguns. A machete hangs from the back of one of the strong-looking chairs. Rifles lean against the stone walls, which have been painted a light-pink color. Seven or eight people occupy the room, some sitting in chairs pushed back from the table. One man stirs the pot, making the plot thicker. One, a blond man, squats by the wall, cleaning his rifle. A tall black man stands, combing his long hair out of a pompadour, parting it in the middle so it falls down the sides of his face. It is not clear from any of this activity if dinner is going on now, is just over, hasn’t begun yet, or was over long ago.
There is a large window right behind the kitchen table.
A lull in the conversation. An air of expectancy.
[Fidel Castro enters. He is thirty years old, light-complexioned; six two; solidly built. He has shiny, wavy black hair and a mustache. He is assured and graceful in his movements. A hush falls as he enters.]
“How can a hush fall?” I asked. “You just said there was a lull in the conversation.”
For a moment the quick man didn’t reply. He looked as Neruda must when he has been drinking and someone corrects his grammar. “It felt that way.” He leaned back from my shoulder.
“You weren’t there,” I said, responding to the mockery. “Not that I remember, anyway. What do you mean it felt that way?”
“I was there.” Ponco leaned forward again, pointing to the page on the table. “There there.”
“Ah.”
“Besides, the story needed it.”
“Yes,” I said. “We know about that.”
“I’ll change it. ‘A deeper hush fell.’ Or: ‘Within the silence the heart of the silence was revealed. The intake of breath. Hands suddenly still.’ All right?”
His voice, I thought, sounded younger: faster shifts within that sliding gravel and dirt. This writing, I realized, was the new activity he’d found, the substitute for reading too many stories. (Perhaps mimicking my prose style had released a voice in him.) I read on:
[Castro crosses the room and stands at the head of the table. Every face follows him. He is brought a plate of spaghetti by the tall black man whose hair comes down to his shoulders.]
CASTRO: My favorite!
NICO: Welcome home, boss! Now I can get my hair cut!
CASTRO: YOU look good, Nico! Strange, but good. (They give each other big hugs and kisses on the cheek. All of the other men come over and hug him.)
[Castro sits at the head of the table in a big wooden chair. He eats the spaghetti in a few seconds, as if he had inhaled it]
NICO [pointing at Castro admiringly]: This blanco eats like a negro! [All laugh.]
CASTRO: Well, I haven’t had any spaghetti in a long time! [He is brought another plate, and he eats and talks at the same time.] Listen! Have you continued our propaganda work?
RICARDO (a tall thin man with a severe lined face): Yes. Ten thousand copies of the Manifesto have been sent to the underground in Cuba. By the way, I can read it now!
CASTRO: Congratulations, Ricardo!
RICARDO: Thanks. It is due to the efforts of a man called Ernesto Guevara, a doctor. He killed a mercenary in Guatemala. He is our kind of guy. Nico will tell you all about him, until you beg him to stop.
NICO: He is very courageous, Fidel. He has his own ideas. You’ll like him, Fidel. I like him, Fidel.
CASTRO: Nico, don’t use my name so much. It loses all meaning. I feel like I’m floating away. I don’t know who I am. It’s like saying “spoon” over and over. But I’m the spoon!
[Nico says “spoon” over and over while everyone listens.]
NICO: I don’t get it? [He turns to the others.] What does he mean, he’s a spoon? [The others all turn away from Nico and towards Castro.]
CASTRO: Never mind, Nico. We must see to it that another ten thousand copies of History Will Absolve Me are printed up for Pais in Santiago. I am more sure than ever, comrades, that ceaseless propaganda work is the heart of the revolution. Propaganda of words, soon to be matched by propaganda of deeds! Ricardo, now that you read and write, take a note for Pais. “Dear Frank: Show guile and smiles to everybody. Don’t be so abrasive with the other parties. We must unite all who will be united and neutralize the rest. Follow the same course we followed during the trial: defend our point of view without wounding others. We will have time later on to trample underfoot all the cockroaches. Accept all sorts of help. But remember, trust no one. Signed, Fidel.” Read that back to me. [Ricardo has been sitting in a chair next to Fidel, with his hands on his legs. He has stared at Castro during the preceding speech without moving.]
RICARDO: Signed, Fidel.
CASTRO: Thank you, Ricardo. [With evident sarcasm] With such men how can I fail!
RICARDO: YOU give Frank good advice, Fidel. But maybe you should say more about
what our point of view is.
CASTRO: Our point of view is: We will unite all who will be united. Our duty is to social justice alone. All will save themselves if they save their principles. From the deepest dregs of corruption will come, more purified and clean, the ideal redeemer. Sacrifice is now our only duty.
NICO [heartfelt]: Thank you, boss! I understand. [He bows his head.]
CASTRO [pats Nico’s head and puts a strand of spaghetti in Nico’s mouth]: Good, Nico. Remember: we will unite all who will be united.
RICARDO: But shouldn’t we say a word or two more about what we are uniting for? More about our principles. About our goals.
CASTRO [exasperated]: I liked you better before you knew how to read and write!
NICO: I understand, Fidel! We will re-establish the Constitution of 1940!
FELIPE [the blond man who leans against the wall, cleaning his gun]: We will get rid of the North Americans!
JESUS: We will build a socialist state in Cuba!
[They all look to Castro.]
CASTRO: We will unite all who will be united!
JUAN: We will link ourselves more strongly with the liberal values of the United States, our shared concern for the individual!
MARCOS: We will realize the dreams of Marti!
ALMEIDA: We will realize the dreams of Chibas!
FELIPE: We will realize the dreams of Lenin!
NICO: We will realize the dreams of Thomas Jefferson!
FAUSTINO: We will realize the Moncada Manifesto!
[Each grows visibly uneasy as he hears the others shout. Each looks about from face to face angrily and then with growing bafflement, exchanging hostile and bewildered looks with the others. Then, like plants slowly bending towards the light, they resolutely look away from one another, and towards Fidel, the sun in the people’s sky.]