Sometimes, when Everly and Willy were the only ones home, he turned on the radio and danced in the Lederers’ kitchen with a broom. “La Pachanga” was his favorite.
When it came on, Willy turned up the radio and danced, swaying and twirling like the broom was a real person. Everly would giggle and beg him to dance again. Please, one more. He’d spin the broom around and dip it low, then hold it close, he and the broom moving side to side like a man and a woman. He looked to Everly like a movie star, with his narrow waist and broad shoulders, muscular but so slim and graceful. He demonstrated all the dances. Cha-cha. Pachanga. Rumba. Mambo.
How did he learn so many dances? “At the Club Maceo,” he said, swaying with the broom, “in Levisa.” Was it like Las Palmas? He said it was sort of like Las Palmas, but it was for colored people. The blacks didn’t drink like the white people did, but they were more lively. They liked to dance more, he said.
Everly pictured Willy dancing at the Club Maceo. Not with a broom. With a woman. She tried to push this image out of her mind but it kept returning. Sitting at the kitchen table eating the deviled eggs that Flozilla prepared, she’d be suddenly unhungry, stricken with sadness, picturing Willy at the Club Maceo, dancing the pachanga with black people who didn’t drink too much or act silly like the Americans at Las Palmas. She pictured the people in the Club Maceo dancing elegant dances, romantic and dignified. Willy had a whole life away from the Lederers that she didn’t know about and couldn’t see.
“You got to get the wet bar,” Willy said to her father one day.
When he worked behind the new wet bar, Willy wore a white bartender’s jacket with a black bow tie. He mixed stingers and sidecars, pink slippers and old fashioneds. He knew all the cocktails.
After she was sent to bed, Everly could hear her father’s voice booming to Willy to fix Charmaine Mackey another Tom Collins, or telling stories about his childhood, offering details that didn’t seem to follow from what anyone else had said. “They put a red ball on the front of the trolley when the pond was frozen thick enough for skating. That’s how we knew! They had a red ball—” And Marjorie Lederer interrupting to change the topic of conversation, asking the lady from French Guiana whether she preferred Cézanne or Pisarro. “Gauguin,” the woman said. “Such beautiful bodies—”
The men all liked to bring Charmaine Mackey another Tom Collins. She was pretty, with the face of a young child. She had large eyes, a nub of a nose, and plump lips. People said she was the prettiest woman in Nicaro, and Everly figured there was an extra thrill in a pretty woman getting drunk, and another extra thrill if you were the man responsible, the one who brought her another Tom Collins.
Once, at Las Palmas, Charmaine Mackey walked past Everly on her way to the powder room and lost her footing. She started to fall and clutched Everly on her way down, pressing hard on Everly’s shoulder. Everly was only ten and small, but she managed to hold Charmaine Mackey up. She looked at Everly in a peculiar way, as though Everly didn’t exist, was just a block of something, furniture that could take all the weight she gave it.
She righted herself and asked Everly if Mr. Gonzalez had arrived. Everly said she didn’t think so. She’d never seen Mr. Gonzalez in the club. He didn’t seem friendly with the other Americans. Charmaine Mackey looked disappointed. She turned and teetered down the hall. Everly felt bad about disappointing Mrs. Mackey. People must have been waiting for Mr. Gonzalez. Maybe there was some special reason he was coming that night. Everly decided it would be her job to spot him when he arrived. She would go and tell Mrs. Mackey, wipe away the disappointment, and make Mrs. Mackey pleased. But he never showed up, and then it was time for the Lederers to go home. That might have been the only time Charmaine Mackey had ever spoken to Everly. She barely spoke to anyone.
The Carringtons lived next door, but Everly had to walk down the front path to the road and around to the proper entrance, rather than just cutting through from the Lederers’ front yard to theirs, because the cactus fence bordering the Carringtons’ yard was prickly and you couldn’t climb over it without getting lanced by cactus spines. Val said the cactus fence was called “catch the nigger.” “Atajanegro,” she’d said, and translated for Everly. Everly tried to forget its name. One day Willy pointed to it as he trimmed the Lederers’ hibiscus. “Isn’t that wonderful? A fence made out of plants. It’s a special cactus, only grows in Cuba.” It made the ends of her fingers ache with sadness. The same fence Willy thought was wonderful, other people were calling “catch the nigger.”
Val and Pamela themselves weren’t quite white, though this was supposed to be a secret. “Latin,” Val said. “One-quarter Latin.” According to their mother, Val added, they were white, just like Mrs. Carrington. We’re white, like our mother.
Everly walked around the fence and knocked on the Carringtons’ front door. The Carringtons had invited the whole family to a cockfight. Willy had advised them not to go, but her father thought it would be rude to decline.
The Carringtons’ houseboy answered and called to Val. She came out of her room dressed in only a slip and told Everly to come in, that she wasn’t ready yet.
“You don’t care if he sees you in your underwear?” Everly whispered, sitting down on Val’s bed.
“Why should I? It’s just Roosevelt.”
The bedroom door was open. Roosevelt was polishing the hall tiles with a rag, his eyes on the floor. Everly figured he had no choice, with Val standing there in her slip, sixteen and with a body like a grown woman.
“Where’s Pamela?”
“Not coming,” Val said.
“Why isn’t she coming?”
“She’s going to Preston. I can’t say why.”
There was always something secret and dramatic happening with Pamela, who had begun announcing that she was not one-quarter Latin but in fact half-Cuban. Val rolled her eyes and said it was a phase Pamela was going through, an embarrassing phase. She spoke angrily to Pamela in French. Pamela spoke angrily back, in Spanish. “My sister is losing her mind,” Val said. “And she’s adopting that hideous singing Spanish, like a barefoot guajira.” One Saturday, coming back from Mrs. Stites’s house, Everly had seen Pamela down by the seawall with K.C. Stites’s boxing coach, Luís Galindez.
“I bet I know why she’s going to Preston. To see Luís Galindez.”
“What do you know?” Val said. “You’re ten years old. And you’re not even interested in boys yet.”
“I’m interested in boys.”
“Tell me who, then.”
“It’s a secret.” She knew what not to share. Not with Val Carrington or anyone else.
One of the two cocks immediately began losing. It was on its side, blood spreading underneath, its chicken body huffing up and down like a fireplace bellows. A man jumped into the ring and pried open the cock’s beak and blew air from his own mouth into the bird’s lungs. The bird stood up, matted and dazed, and took a wobbly step. The man fluffed up its feathers and steered it toward the other cock, who tore it apart and killed it for good.
They were served chicken after the cockfight. It wasn’t clear to Everly if they were eating the birds that had been fighting, or chicken that came from some other place. Mr. and Mrs. Carrington began to argue as they ate. Everly’s mother said the Carringtons habitually broke the rule of a “unified front.” People fight, Marjorie Lederer said, it’s reality, but you do it in private. When they were finished eating, Mr. Carrington stepped outside for a cigarette. Everly’s mother went to the ladies’ room. Her father got up to pay the bill. (“How did we get stuck with that bill?” her mother later asked.) It was just Everly, Stevie, and Val at the table when Mrs. Carrington started talking, more to herself than to them.
“He thinks I’m full of shit when I say I can quit anytime,” Mrs. Carrington said, “but he doesn’t know the first thing about drinking. About people who drink.”
“Mom—” Val said, embarrassed. “Come on, Mom.”
Mrs. Carrington continued as though
she hadn’t heard. “Every day I quit drinking. When I decide to have my last drink. I get to the last drink and I quit. Every goddamn day. And he thinks I don’t know about last drinks. About quitting. I know all about that.”
Mrs. Carrington picked up the drumstick on her plate as if she hadn’t noticed it was there until just then. “But,” she said, gesticulating with the drumstick, “this place fits with drinking, so what’s the point of quitting?” Everly wasn’t sure if she meant the chicken and cockfight place fit with drinking, or Nicaro, or maybe Cuba. Her mother would have voted the chicken and cockfight place, which she later commented to Mrs. Fourier, the lady from French Guiana, was terribly vulgar. Mrs. Fourier said she’d been to a cockfight herself, in Santiago. She found it “extremely compelling.” But more compelling, Mrs. Fourier said, was the voodoo ceremony she and Mr. Fourier had attended in Regla, across the bay from Havana, where they’d witnessed chickens being sacrificed. Intoxicating, she said, as long as one ignored the hissing steam and the flames from the Shell refinery that loomed over Regla. “The dances of the possessed, the drumming—it was all so human,” she said. “You could smell the humanity. Like a musk.”
“I told Mr. Lederer not to go, that he won’t like it,” Willy said, shaking his head, after Everly reported the grisly details of the cockfight. “I said ‘Don’t go.’”
Willy had the chairs in the Lederers’ living room upside down and was painting the bottoms of their feet with clear nail polish, her mother’s idea. Something about not scratching the floor, which made no sense to Everly because her mother had already ordered new furniture, so the upside-down chairs would be replaced. Mrs. Billings had come over for tea and commented, as she selected a seat in their living room, that it was clear where George parked himself. She pointed to a broad, bottom-shaped indentation in the Lederers’ eiderdown couch. After that, Everly’s mother ordered rattan, which is what everyone else had. It’s so much cooler, Marjorie Lederer said. “And people’s bottoms don’t leave prints in it!” Duffy added.
Everly told K. C. Stites that she’d gone to a cockfight in Mayarí, and K.C. said that in the mountains above Nicaro they had cockfights with men instead of roosters. Stevie teased Everly and said that K.C. had a crush on her. Everly wondered if telling her creepy stories was K.C.’s version of the men bringing Charmaine Mackey another Tom Collins. Trying to do something to her, the way the drinks did something to Charmaine Mackey.
“They put the men in the ring,” he said. “It’s just like cockfights, with spectating and betting.”
She tried to wipe away the scene of two men fighting to the death but kept seeing it. Her mind did this sometimes, acted mutinous like a bunch of drunken sailors, making her see gruesome things that took away her appetite and made her feel dirty on the inside.
She dreamed she was watching actors on a stage. Two men, who argued over a woman. They were dressed alike, in dark suits like her father and the other managers wore. They were shouting, and Everly understood that they were no longer acting, but arguing for real. The men took off their jackets, ready to fight in their white shirts and neckties. They struggled in a sort of awful dance. One man picked the other man up and shook him violently. The other man began to split apart. Milk jetted out of him at the seams where he split. The other man kept shaking him, milk flying in all directions.
11
Rachel K hadn’t realized she’d take pleasure in such a thing. “Zazou,” Fidel called her, and said the resistance couldn’t operate without her. Especially now that he and Raúl were both locked up, serving time for their attack on the Moncada army barracks in Santiago.
It was up to her, Zazou. She had a magic way with Prio, Fidel wrote to her from prison, flattering her. Not just to his changed heart, but also to his wallet. Prio was pledging millions to overthrow Batista. The other girls at the club squealed when they saw pictures of Fidel in Bohemia, midspeech, his finger in the air, next to reprints of his famous prison declaration. He was brave and good-looking and Rachel K was lucky, they said, lucky indeed. What an honor to be guapo Fidel’s confidante. But of the two brothers, she secretly preferred Raúl, partly because of his homosexual put-on. Fidel was far more likely, she guessed, to go that way. Too bristlingly macho to be truly interested in women. While Raúl batted his eyelashes and swished around like a Chinatown cross-dresser, then told her he was packing a weapon and tried to put her hand on his crotch to prove it.
The other girls wanted to help, too. There was plenty for them to do, as Fidel explained in a series of notes that Rachel K received through an elaborate system of intermediaries. At a bar near Havana Harbor, a glass of rum was served with a note underneath it, a cardboard coaster with facedown messages in pencil. Certain clients, Rachel K explained to La Paloma and the other dancers, could be cultivated. Business leaders, for instance, who didn’t like Batista. Things changed quickly at the Tokio, as the dancing and the lights and the music stayed the same. Money was collected, as well as petards, time bombs, and jars of phosphorus, Colt revolvers and ammunition, gallons and gallons of jellied gasoline.
“I’ve been getting this vague feeling,” La Mazière said to her, “that something bad is supposed to happen to you.”
He’d shown up at the Tokio unannounced, having been away for several months. He told her he was in town on business, but the truth was he could have gone straight from Miami, where he’d just met with Prio, to the Dominican Republic, where Cuban insurgents were stockpiling weapons and running a rebel training camp. La Mazière had no pressing business in Havana. He was there to see her.
The feeling had come to him in fleeting moments. He knew she was in the underground—in a sense, he’d nudged her in in the first place—but she wasn’t candid with him to what extent she was involved. Perhaps it was a taste of his own medicine. He’d been plenty coy with her over the two years since they’d met. He’d come and gone without warning, never explaining what he was up to, sometimes not because information was sensitive, but for other reasons, for style and for aesthetics, because honesty was so clunky and irrelevant, like a cumbersome piece of furniture. Why not throw a sheet over it and move on to the business at hand?
“This is your fantasy?” she asked. “Something ‘bad’ is supposed to happen to me?”
“I have my fantasies. That’s not one of them. They aren’t so dull as a simple morality tale, ‘cabaret dancer meets tragic end.’ I loathe morality tales.”
“What’s the dancer’s tragic end? Tell me what happens. I’d like to know what I’m in for.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” he said wearily, as though it wasn’t worth getting into. “Any number of scenarios, really. Let’s say the dancer is caught playing both sides and gets snuffed out by Batista’s henchmen. Henchmen who have their way with her beforehand—or after, depending on their own fantasies, of course.”
“And nothing bad is supposed to happen to you? Trotting around and conducting your dubious ‘arrangements’?”
“The dubious arranger gets away, is how it goes. He escapes to a remote location. Lies on a chaise longue, under a palm tree, on the banks of a slow-moving river. The credits roll—”
“And the girl is long dead.”
“Generally, yes.”
“That’s actually fine with me. You know why?”
“I have a sense.”
“I’m not afraid of that end.”
“Right. That’s the sense I have.”
He liked her reckless attitude, even if it was an act. It seemed a form of intelligence to claim not to care what happened to oneself. Survival instincts are a kind of stupidity, an animal stupidity.
She’d left, to get ready for her show. He watched as the sad bartender played canasta with a dancer. The bartender won, but his face remained dolorous, as if winning were a burden, one more sad duty to perform. It occurred to La Mazière that he hoped she would find a way to avert the demise he’d just narrated, if only to forestall the dull cliché of one more showgirl disposed of.
&
nbsp; PART THREE
12
NICARO NICKEL COMPANY
NICARO, ORIENTE, CUBA
CIRCULAR NO. B-21
Oct. 23, 1955
Hubert H. Mackey
General Manager
GSA Mining Interests, Tropical Division
To all management:
Attached is a photograph of D. L. Mazierre. This man is a political agitator of the worst type: an extremist suspected of supplying arms to political uprisings in North Africa and the Caribbean nations of Haiti and the Dominican Republic. He is believed to pose a genuine threat to the stability of American interests here in Cuba. His description is as follows:
30 to 34 years old
Native of France
Unmarried
5' 11"
150 lbs.
Race: white
Eyes: gray
Hair: brown
Complexion: pale, as if suffering some ailment
Smooth-shaven
Small mouth
Telex From Cuba Page 16