Mambo

by Campbell Armstrong

  He saluted his men, who broke ranks and headed in an orderly manner toward the beaches.

  Tomas Fuentes, who would fly to Cuba on one of the F-16s and land as soon as the fighter-planes had done their demolition work, went inside his tent for the last time. After today, the whole camp would be a mere memory. Bosanquet followed him. Both men sat for a few minutes in silence. This quiet was broken by the noise of bulldozers churning over the pathways between tents, obliterating all traces of this small temporary city; soon the jungle would have ascendance again, the landscape would take back that which had been borrowed from it.

  “I hate this goddam place, but I’ll miss it,” Fuentes said with the snarl in his voice of a man who considers sentimentality a weakness.

  Bosanquet concurred. In a moment he’d rise and go to his own tent and there dismantle the radio. He wanted to wait until the very last moment to do so, because he had been expecting a message from Harry Hurt – a rousing speech, some fine words of encouragement – but the radio had been silent for many hours now.

  Perhaps Harry maintained his silence for reasons of security.

  Yes, Bosanquet thought. That had to be it.

  Harry believed in security.

  Havana

  The woman who answered the door was the one Magdalena had seen in Duran’s photographs. She was pretty if you liked a certain fine-boned Castilian look. Her hair, which normally she would have worn pulled back like a skullcap and tied, was loose and lustrous and hung over her white shoulders; her deep-brown eyes, the colour of bitter-sweet chocolate, were her best feature. Her mouth was ample and she had a fine straight nose.

  “Yes?”

  Magdalena, who very lightly touched the gun concealed in her pocket, said nothing for a moment. She realised that she’d been floating along on the possibility that Duran’s photographs were fakes prepared by him for some vindictive reason of his own. She hadn’t wanted to believe in the existence of this woman, this Estela. Now, faced with the reality, she felt as if her blood had begun to run backward. Her voice was unsteady. “I want to see Rafael.”

  The woman stared at Magdalena as if she’d been expecting her. “He’s out,” she said. “He should be back soon.”

  “I’ll wait if you don’t mind.” Magdalena stepped into the apartment, which smelled of something very sweet, like lavender water. She hadn’t expected Rafael to be absent. She made absolutely sure the woman was telling the truth by strolling uninvited through the apartment. Estela, protesting, followed her. Artwork, reminiscent of old-fashioned Cubism, hung on the walls. The entire place was lit by dull table lamps which cast an odd yellow light through their shades. Magdalena went into the bathroom, then the kitchen. They were empty.

  “What are you looking for?” Estela asked. “I didn’t ask you to come in. What do you want here?”

  Inside the bedroom Magdalena saw crushed white sheets, a jar of skin lotion on the bedside table, a silk robe she recognised as Rafe’s lay across the bed. There was an intimacy here she couldn’t take. Rafael and his wife in this bed, bodies locked together: this dreadful picture reared up in her mind. Did he experience the passion with his wife that he did with her? Was it the same? How could it be? Nothing could have that scalding intensity.

  Back in the living-room Estela said, “Are you satisfied now? What did you hope to find anyway?”

  “Where is he?”

  “He had business to attend to.” Estela sat down again and looked at an electric clock on a shelf. “Why do you want to see him?”

  “Do you really want to know?” Magdalena asked.

  “I’m not sure.” Estela was quiet. The clock made a slight humming noise. “I have a feeling about you. You and Rafael. A feeling. As soon as I saw you on the doorstep. And then the way you just walked through the apartment …”

  “What kind of feeling?”

  “Not a good one.”

  Magdalena had one of those small vicious urges, experienced so rarely in her lifetime, to smack this young thing across the face, but she let the desire go. Was it Estela’s fault that she was the wife of Rafael? Estela probably knew nothing of Magdalena’s existence. Besides, there was something pleasant about Señora Rosabal, an unexpected intelligence in the eyes. This was no air-head, no mindless bimbo, to decorate Rafe’s arm. There were depths to Estela Capablanca Rosabal. This realisation only made Magdalena feel more endangered than before; Rafe could love this woman, and it would be almost understandable. It didn’t have to be a political marriage, a match of mere convenience: He might actually love this woman for her own sake.

  Magdalena said, “We’re friends. I’ve known Rafe a long time.”

  “No, you’re more than friends. I get the impression …” Estela didn’t complete her sentence. She made a small gesture with her hand, palm upturned, as if she despaired of words.

  Magdalena was silent. She might have said Yes, yes, we fuck; we meet in foreign cities and we fuck our brains out, but she didn’t. She had come to confront Rafael, not his young bride.

  Estela said a little sadly, “Sometimes I imagined there was another woman in his life. I didn’t know who. You’re very beautiful. What’s your name?”

  Magdalena told the woman. Estela repeated the name quietly a couple of times. “It has a nice sound.”

  Magdalena wandered to the window, drew back the curtain, looked down into the street. It was all too civilised, she thought. This meeting, the way Estela purred over her name and looks, the politeness. She wished Rafael would come back and she could get the confrontation over with one way or another. This apartment where Rafe lived with his young wife was making her feel weird, off-centre. Her head ached. Rafael doesn’t live here, she thought. Not the Rafael you know. It’s somebody else. A stranger.

  “You love him?” Estela asked.

  “Yes.” Despite it all, yes, yes, yes.

  Estela Rosabal hesitated: “Does he love you?”

  “He married you, not me.”

  “He didn’t tell you he was married, did he?”

  “What Rafael told me or didn’t tell me is none of your concern.”

  “I think it is,” Estela laid her hands on her lap. The wedding ring flashed under lamplight. “Anything that involves my husband affects me too. That’s the way it is. Tell me why you have to see him.”

  Magdalena gazed at the street. She could see a small swimming-pool, surrounded by a fence, to her left. A shimmering light burned under the surface of blue-green water.

  How reasonable Estela sounded, how collected. What reserves of strength did she have that allowed her to handle her husband’s mistress with no displays of hysteria? It wasn’t fair, Magdalena thought. She could never have behaved with such dignity and resolve herself. The young woman had grace beyond her years. Magdalena was jealous now, and not just because of the insight she had into the life Rafe shared here with his wife. Something else. The other woman’s youth. Her enviable maturity. The quietly reasonable manner that concealed firmness and iron. These were qualities Magdalena realised she had recently lost in herself. In loving Rosabal she had given up more than she’d ever really imagined. I was going to be independent. My own person. When I married Rafe I was going to be more than just his wife. Married, dear Christ!

  Something cold went through her. Below, wind altered the smooth surface of the pool, creating concentric circles of disturbance.

  “Tell me why you need to see him,” Estela said. She got up from the sofa and stood some feet from Magdalena, her arms folded under her breasts. Perfect breasts, Magdalena thought. Perfect skin. Smooth and unblemished, unworried as yet by time. There would be no anxious scrutiny of that fine, strong, young face in mirrors, no depression when age made another unkind incision. In the future, sure; but when you were as young as Estela age was like death and disease – it never happened to you, always to somebody else.

  Magdalena was filled with a sudden resentment of Estela so fierce it surprised her. The Señora had youth, she had Rafe, she shared his li
fe, his world, the future in which Magdalena was supposed to figure so prominently. What was left to the rejected mistress? What was she supposed to do with this sense of loss?

  A car drew up in the street below. Magdalena moved back from the window. “Does he have a BMW?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Then I think he just arrived.”

  Magdalena took her gun out, told Estela to sit down and be still.

  “Why do you come here with a gun, for God’s sake?” Estela asked.

  Magdalena went to the door, stood there motionless, listened for the sound of footsteps. Instead what she heard was the quiet hum of a lift ascending.

  “Why the gun?” Estela asked again.

  Magdalena didn’t answer.

  “Are you going to shoot him?”

  “Shut up.” Magdalena gestured with the gun and Estela, who had begun to rise, sat down again.

  “Please. I beg you. Please don’t shoot him.”

  The lift stopped, a door slid open, closed again, clang. Silence. Somebody stood outside the apartment. There was the faint noise of a key-chain. The tumblers of the lock turned, the door opened.

  Rafael came into the room wearing a dark-blue windjammer and jeans and sneakers; handsome as always, unbearably so. And cool. If the appearance of Magdalena shocked him, he didn’t show it. A momentary apprehension perhaps, a quick dark cloud crossing the eyes, but hardly noticeable.

  “What a pleasant surprise,” he said. His smile filled the room and lit it. He had the gift of illuminating a whole environment with that one white, spellbinding smile. Magdalena resisted an urge to put out her hand and touch his face.

  “I assume you can explain,” Magdalena said. There was frost in her voice.

  “Explain? Ah, you mean my marriage.”

  “You didn’t tell me,” Magdalena said.

  “Why should I? What claims do you have on me?”

  “Several million dollars worth. Let’s start with that.”

  Rosabal poured himself a small glass of sherry from a decanter. His hand was very steady. “I don’t like guns pointed at me.”

  “Too fucking bad,” she said. She hadn’t meant to sound upset, hadn’t wanted anything to show in her behaviour or language, she wanted to be as cool as Rafael.

  “The money went to a worthy cause, dear.”

  “Not the one for which it was intended,” she said.

  “There are degrees of need,” Rosabal said. “I tried very hard to be equitable. A little here, a little there –”

  “And a little in your own pocket for a rainy day.”

  Rosabal shrugged in a rather puzzled way, as if he hadn’t understood Magdalena’s accusation. He said nothing; he looked silently offended. He sipped his sherry and she thought: he has a good act, a terrific act. I fell for it time and again.

  From the corner of her eye she was conscious of a troubled expression on Estela Rosabal’s face. Secret aspects of her husband’s life were being uncovered; she was learning new, unwelcome things about the man she’d married.

  “Do you intend to shoot me?” There was a patronising tone in Rosabal’s voice. Magdalena remembered that same voice in other situations, in twisted bedsheets when it became a slyly satisfied whisper, in crowded restaurants when it made outrageous suggestions over the pages of a menu, at heights of passion when it spoke of love in a secret language. God help me, she thought, I still want him.

  “Keep this in mind, Magdalena,” he said. “Kill me, you kill the new revolution.”

  “Oh, yeah, sure, I vaguely remember the new revolution. Our revolution. But refresh my memory. I want to hear all about it. I’m sure your wife will be interested as well. And the people you cheated, they’d love to learn about the revolution they paid for.”

  “You should give up sarcasm, dear. It’s beneath you.” He paused, stared into her eyes with the same knowing look he always used on her. He said, “Castro will be dead within a few hours.”

  “Castro dead?” Estela asked, apprehension in her tone of voice. She might have been expressing surprise and dread at the destruction of some ancient icon.

  “Dead,” Rosabal said, without looking at his wife’s frightened face.

  “I don’t believe you, Rafe,” Magdalena said. “You’re lying about Castro. You’ve been lying all along. You’ve been doing nothing except stealing from people who trusted you.”

  Rosabal made a small injured sound, as if the notion of somebody doubting him were preposterous. “On the contrary, dear heart. While you stand there and wave your gun in my face, officers of the Cuban armed forces have already taken decisive steps to prepare a successful overthrow of the fidelistas. You’re looking at the next President of our nation.”

  Estela said, “The next President? You?” Rosabal silenced her with a swift, commanding gesture of his hand. She shut her eyes, turned her lovely face to one side and looked sad.

  Magdalena reflected on the unexpected solemnity in Rosabal’s voice. He’d changed course suddenly, going from alleged felon and confidence trickster to potential President within a matter of moments. It was a fast transformation, and it shouldn’t have surprised her as much as it did. She should have been able to see directly into Rafael’s heart by this time, but it remained unpredictable territory to her, by turns swamp and glacier, meadow and quicksand.

  “Let’s assume for a moment you’re telling the truth. What happens to the exiles? What happens to Garrido? The people in Miami and New Jersey and California who gathered money for you – what role do they play?” she asked.

  Rosabal sat on the arm of the sofa. He looked comfortable now, as if some minor crisis had just been overcome. “People like Garrido have an important function in my new Cuba. They will not be overlooked. You may remember I gave my word.”

  My new Cuba. The proprietary way he’d uttered this phrase bothered her, but she let it pass, just as she chose not to question the value of what Rosabal called his word. She was like an impoverished woman confronted with money she knows to be counterfeit and yet hopes, in the face of all the evidence, that it might still be real, it might still offer a way out from a lifetime of hardship.

  “What about everything else?” she asked. “The new society. Democracy. All the things we ever talked about. The future we planned. What happens to all that? Does that still come into existence?”

  Rosabal’s smile was tolerant, like that of somebody obliged to explain the simple principles of arithmetic. “In time, my dear. Change can’t be hurried. People have to be prepared. You know that as well as I do.”

  In time, she thought. Yes, he was right, a whole society couldn’t be changed overnight. Then she caught herself: goddam him, she was thinking the way he wanted her to think! She was blindly agreeing with him. Love had petrified her will. Step away from him, she thought, distance yourself, make believe you never loved him, fake the impossible. Pretend he never asked you to marry him. Pretend there was never any planned future. Pretend the sun rises in the west and the moon comes out at midday.

  “After you throw out Castro’s Communism, Rafe – what takes its place?”

  Rosabal said, “I’ll rule as fairly as I can. But don’t expect me to be weak. I won’t allow anarchy any more than I’ll permit instant democracy. Down the road somewhere, perhaps five years from now, I may hold free elections.”

  “Five years? Five years? I imagined free elections within a few months, six, nine at most.”

  “Your optimism is touching. But the Cuban people aren’t ready to control their own future.”

  “And in the meantime?”

  “In the meantime, we prepare the people for eventual democracy –”

  “With you in total control –”

  “Naturally.”

  “And your five years might become ten. Fifteen. Twenty. What happens when you don’t step down, Rafe? What happens if you don’t want to relinquish power? Then nothing has really changed except the name of the dictator.”

  Rosabal shook
his head. “You’re overreacting. Everything changes. No more Communism. No shortages. No more reliance on the Soviets. Cuba will be a free nation again.”

  Magdalena turned away. It was better if she didn’t have to look at his face. Even now he could be so convincing. A free nation, she thought. Was that what he’d said? But how could Cuba be free without elections? How was freedom to be achieved if Rafael Rosabal alone controlled the country’s destiny? Dictators might all start from different points of view, some might begin with benign notions, even with charity, but in the end greed and power rotted all of them and they resorted to the same kind of apparatus that could be found in a score of countries around the world – secret police, political prisons, the disregard for basic human rights, torture.

  She faced him again. He was watching her, counting on her to put the gun down and tell him she’d been mistaken, that she’d overreacted but still supported him.

  Fuck you, Rafe. All she wanted was to lash out at him.

  She looked at Estela and in a voice that was both flat and uncharacteristically spiteful said, “He told me he’d marry me. We used to lie in bed together and plan our wedding. We used to meet in Acapulco. London. Barcelona once or twice. But I don’t imagine he mentioned that kind of thing to you.”

  It was a sleazy little shot intended to cause him discomfort, but he reacted only with a curious laugh, as if he were embarrassed for her. He didn’t need to be. She had more than enough embarrassment for herself. Only the way Rosabal had hurt her could have made her sink so goddam low as to proclaim his indiscretions before his innocent young wife. Magdalena suddenly wanted to deny what she’d said. She felt a sense of shame.

  Estela started to say something but another gesture from her husband quieted her at once. She hated his habit of silencing her with that bossy, chopping motion of his hand. Did he think he could shut her up any time he liked? Despite her calm appearance she wasn’t really any better equipped to deal with this situation than Magdalena, for whom she felt an unexpectedly strong pity. How could she not? Crushed, Magdalena had lost all composure. Only a heart of clay could fail to be touched.