by Paul Vidich
Jack put the Land Rover in reverse and drove back the short distance. Before stepping out of the Land Rover he pulled a Colt pistol from under his seat and pressed it into his belt.
He recovered the bota from the old man, who’d quenched his thirst and smiled in gratitude. Jack let him take another draught and he waited while the other two drank.
No one said anything when Jack slid back into the driver’s seat. He tossed the bota into the back.
They drove on in silence.
PART II
1
* * *
CAMAGÜEY
THERE WERE two Cubas. The cruise ship Cuba of casinos and neon dance halls and the inland Cuba with its quiet, Spanish colonial past. Camagüey was the other forgotten Cuba.
“You need to write about this,” Liz said. “There is this popular notion that Cuba is all about the Mafia, and that’s true, but it’s not the whole truth. You need to show the other side.”
It was the day after they’d arrived in Camagüey, and Mueller stood in the portico of the Hotel Colon off the small plaza. Liz and Katie had arrived, as they had said they would, to start his tour of the town. Katie had her camera around her neck. A floppy hat and dark glasses protected her from the sun, and Liz was dressed alike. When Mueller came downstairs to the lobby, he’d seen them both and realized for the first time how alike they looked. They dressed alike, were the same height, had the same boyish frame, and if not for the Leica around Katie’s neck he might have confused them.
They stepped into the midday sun. “Camagüey,” Liz said, pointing out landmarks that made good photographs, “calls itself a painted city. A painted city of red tile roofs and pale walls colored from a broad palate of pink, rose, blue, indigo. The city,” she said, “is a red dot on a dry landscape under a violent sun.” The cloudless sky radiated and throbbed carnelian blue.
Violent sun? To Mueller’s question she replied that the city raised poets and she was reciting their phrases. Painted city. Violent sun. Radiating sky.
Mueller jotted down the phrases in his notebook. He wouldn’t have understood the phrase “violent sun” until he stood there experiencing the fierce midday heat, and the assault on his eyes of the blinding brightness. It was indeed a violent sun, he wrote.
Mueller followed Liz into the shade of the covered sidewalk that connected adjoining buildings on the plaza’s north side.
“I want you to see everything,” she said.
It was the way she said the word that made him curious what she had in mind.
Fords and Chevys honked at a train of packhorses crossing the street, each horse under a load of wood, the neck of one tied to the tail of another. The cars waited as scrawny riders with sheathed machetes clattering against saddle leather kicked their reluctant horses with rusted iron spurs. There were indignant yells and aggressive honking when the lead horseman negotiated an intersection with an impatient taxi.
Mueller followed Liz and Katie through a warren of tight alleys and at each turn, as they moved deeper into the labyrinth of narrow streets, curious faces gazed at them from curtained windows. They passed through alleys twisting between stone walls, and Mueller expected at every turn that a door would open defiantly with the hostile face of a man with a machete. Above, there were ornate black iron balconies and small boys who beckoned, and when you came close, they spat.
And everywhere they turned, rising above the low buildings, was the compass point of the cathedral’s square tower with its fluted Moorish tiles.
Liz insisted they visit. The gong of the trolley excited her, and she pulled him along for the two-block ride, and then hopped off. She took his hand and walked him out of the sun through ponderous wood doors. They found themselves suddenly in profound darkness. As Mueller’s eyes adjusted he saw the vast interior below a peaked ceiling, and below that, surrounding the upper reaches of the space, a skirt of dark stained glass depicting early Christian miracles. Dim light drew the eye upward. Blackened rafters crossed the ceiling. Profound quiet filled the rising space.
“This,” Liz said, “was the last cathedral on the island to surrender its seclusion.”
Before the railroad, she said, there was only a dirt path connecting the city to the outside world. “For two hundred years the city was lost. Jack and I fell in love with it.”
She pointed to the great gilt and bejeweled saints’ images in the nave, which she said were carried through the streets on religious feast days, followed by crowds of children in white robes carrying candles.
On their way out they passed a Carmelite nun, who slid by like a shadow, avoiding eye contact. It surprised Mueller and bothered him, that he’d been unaware of her presence in the church. The nun wore a coarse cotton robe that covered her head to toe, and all he saw were her angular face and crusted feet.
Liz stopped at the door and looked back at the nave. Suddenly she took Mueller’s hand, surprising him. He saw she was awed by the bloody crucified Christ.
“There is so much pain here,” she whispered. She turned to him. “Come, I want to show you something.”
They had just been passing the end of the main square when Liz pointed out a nondescript two-story building among a row of similar buildings, but Mueller saw an armed guard at the door, which made it stand out. A small brass plaque read “Cuerpo de Comunidad,” and below it were small porcelain facsimiles of Cuban and American flags.
“No one knows what goes on inside. I’ve had people tell me they’ve never seen anyone come or go. Other people have said the place is lit up late at night with a beehive of activity. Jeeps coming and going.”
Liz looked at Mueller. “I’m told Toby Graham works here. Wouldn’t that be a coincidence?”
There are no coincidences. “I’ll find out.”
• • •
Dusk darkened the stately home that sat on a low rise above the flat pastureland. Liz passed through the gate and drove to Hacienda Madrigal on a winding driveway. As they approached, the red ember sun bled through second-floor windows, making Mueller think the house was on fire. Liz’s excited leap from the Land Rover dispelled the optical illusion. She insisted on giving him a tour of the house while Katie went off to her guestroom.
“You’ll have to stay the night,” Liz said. “Curfew is in half an hour and the roads aren’t safe. I asked the maid to make up a room. Come, let me show you how we live.”
Mueller saw it was a colonial hacienda. A portico of arches and stone pillars wrapped the ground floor and at intervals there were clay pots to collect rainwater. Lush plants hung from black iron rods that swung to catch the sun. A frieze of painted tiles scored the second floor’s stucco walls, and windows on the balcony were thrown open for the breeze. Mueller saw how this sprawling home had once been a magnificent manor house, but it had fallen on hard times. Pink stucco walls were veined by water damage and wood window frames were bleached and cracked. He wanted to see the house as the pleasurable expression of his friends’ adopted life on the island. Instead he saw only a gloomy place, a bleak place that held on to its decay against all efforts of restoration. His heart sank as dusk fell on Hacienda Madrigal like a curse.
Mueller followed Liz through the loggia with its pendant iron lamps until they reached two massive wood doors with muscular hinges that were thrown open. Once inside, he sensed the cooling smell of thick plaster walls.
She stood beside him in the foyer and pointed out blistering paint on cracked walls that were in worse shape than the exterior, but the obvious grandeur of the proportions hinted at vibrant memories of great wealth. Crumbling cornices, chipped terra-cotta floors, and faded plaster frescoes were work from the hands of master craftsmen employed as unrecognized artisans in a colonial time.
Everywhere he saw loving touches of repair, but all in an unfinished state, or abandoned. Old windows let in the dying sunlight and leaded glass depicted heroic mulattos cutting sugarcane. Furniture wobbled on the uneven tile floor and age bleached the blondness from wood, so it looked iro
n black. And then on one wall an enormous gold-framed oil painting of an unsmiling matriarch with her very young boy in jodhpurs holding a riding crop.
“Her husband built this place for her two hundred years ago as a wedding gift. He was Cuban and she was from Madrid. He built it to make her happy, but she was homesick. He tried to be a rancher, but he was never good at it. The house fell on hard times. Jack heard about it through a friend and when we visited we fell in love with the land, the house, everything.” She made a quick, energetic pirouette with her hand, drawing attention to the room as her body spun around.
“All the grazing land had gone wild,” she said, “and the house, as you can see, was in disrepair. It’s so old.” She smiled. “Cuba has Spain in its past so I thought of all that charm, and only ninety miles from Florida. We can be there in an hour in Jack’s plane.” She paused. “We just had to leave Washington after all the hate and vilification McCarthy stirred up. Such a beastly demagogue, and a drunk, as it turns out. We thought we’d start a new life here. Come, let me show you.”
She took Mueller’s arm and led him through an interior door and as they walked she clutched him and drew close, affectionately. “I’m glad you’ve come. You can’t replace old friends with new friends.” She continued walking and threw out, “All this has been Jack’s idea of what would make us happy.”
The door opened onto a large interior courtyard surrounded by the arched open hallways that ringed the private garden. Stone paths meandered through overgrown plantings of bougainvillea, hibiscus, orchids, and invasive weeds, all providing a rich fragrance to the evening air. One tall, spindly palm in the center was a lonely sentry above the hacienda. Bedroom doors thrown open for the evening breeze stood inside the hall that looked down on the courtyard. A swimming pool occupied the center of the courtyard. The blue water was illuminated from below by tiny lights embedded in azure tile walls.
“Jack’s gift to me,” Liz said. “He thought we’d spend the hot evenings here in the pool with our drinks.”
She quickly turned away from the swimming pool’s brooding water and, darting past a bench cluttered with cast-off boots, straw hats, work gloves, all covered in a fine red dust, came to an open door. Mueller found himself at her side in a large formal room. Liz cheerfully pointed out the fine details in the layered tapestry of ruin. The wrought-iron chandelier was brought from Spain, she said, and a large beveled mirror had been made in Venice and transported overland by mules. Her hand swept across the room and she provided commentary on what the plan had been to restore the home to its former glory.
She stood in one spot before a wall bisected by an old, faded pastel blue and a new rose wash. “This is where we got to. We couldn’t agree on the color. I wanted a cooler color to set off against the red tiles and he insisted we keep the original red. I said, ‘Fine, then do it.’ And it’s been like this ever since. The wall divided by his red and my blue. I think this is where our marriage started to fray. Or maybe it had begun to fray before that, but this line seduced us.”
Mueller saw her soften her obvious hurt with a brave smile. “I haven’t told anyone this,” she said. “There is no one from the old group who has come to visit. You’re the first. I’m glad you came. Oh, we have friends here among the expats, and many are nice, but they’re not old friends, like you, and this place is a small town in that way. I wouldn’t feel comfortable sharing any of this.” She pulled him close.
Mueller wasn’t prepared for her admission that the couple he’d admired for stalwart companionship was coming apart.
“We bought the house as is,” Liz said flatly. “And as is it has remained.”
She led Mueller through glazed French doors into a library. Double-height bookshelves lined the wall and upper rows were reached by a rolling ladder that followed a rail. Antique leather volumes were kept in glass cases whose door locks had tiny skeleton keys. Liz pulled one book from the cabinet and presented the worn cover and yellowing pages.
“Jack is a collector. This is Miró Argenter’s Chronicle of a War in Cuba.” She added almost dismissively, “The 1911 Princeps edition. Jack’s pride and joy.”
She shoved it back in place.
“Jack has a scout in Havana who finds these for him. He’s an American with contacts in the Mafia who trades in antiquities. He bargains a good price from families liquidating their inheritance before fleeing the country, and he ships the books here, or Jack flies to pick them up. Jack doesn’t believe Cubans will honor their legacy so he buys up the libraries. That is his excuse for hoarding.” Her hand swept the room.
“That’s Jack. Snobbish at heart.”
“What does he do with them?” Mueller asked.
“Do? He collects them. He looks at them. He shows them to our guests. He is a collector. He has collected all this, the ranch, the library, this life.” Liz was suddenly quiet. “That’s not what I meant, but you know what I mean.”
She looked at the rows of bookshelves. “He likes to say every library has a story. A beginning and an end. He says he is giving these books a new story.”
Liz looked fiercely at Mueller. “I hate it here.”
They continued the tour, moving again to the courtyard and then out to the grounds beyond the main house. She gave a perfunctory description of a tin-roofed barn that housed tractors, a pickup truck, baled hay, and a jumble of rusting machinery.
The sun was glowing red on the dark horizon when she took Mueller through the arched loggia. She suddenly turned to him.
“How do you know Toby?”
“Worked together.”
Mueller saw she wasn’t satisfied. He considered what more to say, and what her interest was, and then he offered an anecdotal account of their personal history in college, where he’d known Graham and Jack, but they had not known each other. Mueller avoided any detail that compromised Graham, or hinted at his dossier. “We were in the State Department together,” he said. “Colleagues, acquaintances, friends. We’ve stayed in touch.”
Mueller spoke volumes but said little. It was his style to want to know why a question was asked before he answered it, and he didn’t want to answer with information that had nothing to do with her question’s intent. “Why do you ask?”
“The group he works for—it’s a front for something, isn’t it?” She said it as if it were an accusation.
“I don’t know.”
“Oh, George. You know. I hear it in your stupid vagueness. If you don’t want to tell me, fine.” She stared at Mueller with a mixture of skepticism and disgust. “This talk about an alternative to Batista has been going on for two years. Everyone wants a third force, but nothing has changed. Things have only gotten worse. You should tell your friends in Washington that they don’t have a clue to life here.”
She cocked her head, eyes wide. “They’re caught up in their gilded world. We have a country club ambassador and his clueless wife. That’s why we left Washington.” Her face creased defiantly. “I hate the hypocrisy and the lies. Maybe it’s all we can expect in an imperfect world. But I wasn’t raised that way.”
Mueller heard a minister’s daughter’s self-righteous tone in her voice.
“We were expected to go forth and do good in the world. We were told that from those to whom much is given much is expected. No one needed to explain this to us. It was all very repressed when I think about it. But we didn’t complain. I just knew that I had to make the world a better place.”
Her eyes were alive and again she’d put her arm through his. “Do me a big favor, George. Stay here a few days. Jack invited Toby to visit for the weekend. I don’t want the two of them to be alone together. I want company when he’s here.”
It was warm out, but her hand was cold. Mueller felt her tremble.
2
* * *
CUERPO DE COMUNIDAD
MUELLER HAD invited himself to accompany Graham on a day’s work with the excuse that it would give them time to catch up, and Mueller would get to see firsthand Gr
aham’s boast that he was making a difference among the rural poor and the squatters. Mueller believed Graham, but he knew it was a self-serving claim, and he wanted the authority of an eyewitness to amplify the exculpatory evidence he’d report to Headquarters. When Graham met him outside Hotel Colon, he mocked, “Grab your pen. Give them what they want. Show them how I’ve changed.”
They drove out of Camagüey that Sunday morning in the soft light of dawn. Graham took the coast road and drove town to town in his jeep, from which all military markings had been painted over, Mueller beside him in the open vehicle. Graham moved easily among the guajiros with his colloquial Spanish, waving at puzzled faces that looked up from work as they drove by. Skinny, barefoot children rushed from houses when the jeep stopped in a hamlet. Everywhere pale stucco wash on buildings and children with animated faces surrounding them calling his first name, stressing vowels—Tobee, Tobee, Tobee. The children were bronzed, wild, and pleaded with open hands for his chocolate, or ballpoint pens, or cigarettes, which Graham disbursed to the mobbing kids. Then he opened boxes in the back of the jeep and distributed sacks of rice, cooking oil, flour—all purchased, he said, out of his own pocket because the embassy had no budget, or will, for community aid.
There was a sick child when they arrived in one hamlet, no more than a collection of houses that had sprung up roadside. Two men with urgent concern pointed to one house and spoke in guttural Spanish. Graham listened patiently, but his eyes drifted to a Cuban army transport and military jeep that were stopped by the salt flats beyond the hamlet. Ocean water fed shallow ponds and salt was harvested when the water evaporated. These were the salt farmers.