“I was heading up to the mine, Mrs. Mackey, but I can take you anyplace you need to go.”
“Do you think I could come with you?” she impulsively asked. “I’ve never been up to the mine.” It was absurd of her to ask. But there was something about Mr. Gonzalez that put her at ease, perhaps too much ease. He was so reserved that he brought out something assertive in her. The Americans in Nicaro were friendly in an overbearing way, with their smiles and warmth and handshakes—sometimes even hugs, which almost hurt Charmaine Mackey’s nervous system. She was standoffish because she had to be, because it was too intense to be embraced by acquaintances. Mr. Gonzalez was not friendly or unfriendly. He let her take the lead, and she did.
“There isn’t much to see at the mine, Mrs. Mackey, and it’s no place for a lady. It’s dusty and hot and unpleasant. And not so safe these days. There are rebels nearby. Perhaps your husband has told you about the situation?”
“He says it isn’t anything to worry about. My son, Phillip, went up there last year on a class field trip with Miss Alfaro, and found it fascinating, just—”
“Is that what he said?”
“Yes, he had a wonderful time. He likes Miss Alfaro quite a lot. All the children do.”
“I meant your husband, Mrs. Mackey. He said the situation was nothing to worry about?”
“He said they’re just a few bandits.”
Hubert had said nothing to her about bandits. She was repeating what she’d overhead him say to someone on the telephone.
Mr. Gonzalez said he hoped her husband was right, but with all due respect, it wasn’t likely.
She was silent, thinking it best to feign that she knew what he meant in claiming Hubert was wrong. If they weren’t bandits, what were they? She felt sure Mr. Gonzalez knew, and that he would lower his opinion of her if he understood how little she herself knew.
When he dropped her off in front of the bakery, a made-up errand she invented to give the impression that she had some structure, things to do, she felt somewhat abandoned, as she had at the welcoming party, and then disturbed by her regret at having to leave the upholstered cocoon of his car.
She stood outside the bakery and watched his long, white car move slowly up the road. When his car had disappeared around a bend, she turned to enter the bakery and discovered that it was closed and locked.
It must have been after 2:00 P.M., she realized. Rain was falling in a fine veil, almost a mist, but coming down steadily. The air had turned chilly, and the water on the bay was a dull bluish-gray, and choppy. Birds were dropping low in the bushes beyond the road, the way birds do when the rain is about to fall harder. How do they know? They just know. Charmaine had no umbrella. Her feet, in a pair of flimsy Capezios, were soaked now, and cold. She watched the dull, choppy water, thinking school would be over soon, and Phillip wouldn’t take the boat out in this weather. He’d come straight home, go into his room and shut the door and study his nautical maps and fishing magazines. She’d pretend to be busy to avoid the servants, who all terrified her, boisterous and confident people who could have bossed her around and told her to mop the floor or fix them a snack and she would have. At five-thirty, Hubert would come home and grumpily cap off all possibility of conversation by responding in a terse and dismissive tone that his day went fine, that there was nothing worth mentioning.
She heard a car rounding the bend. Someone else, too late to buy a loaf of bread. But it was the white Cadillac. Mr. Gonzalez, coming slowly back down the road toward the bakery.
He stopped in front, his window down.
“You’re back,” she said.
“I remembered, when I got home and looked at the clock, that the bakery would be closed.”
“Yes, it’s closed. Oh, well. I hadn’t realized what time it was. Aren’t you going to the mine, Mr. Gonzalez?”
“I was. But now it’s raining, and the road is turning to mud. I don’t like taking this car through the mud. I’ll go tomorrow in a company jeep.”
He looked at her carefully, like he was gauging something.
“Why don’t you get in,” he said.
It was not a question. Her hands, in the pockets of her sweater, were shaking. But it wasn’t the bewildered shake that set in when others barraged her too-sensitive nervous system. Her hands were shaking with excitement.
Mr. Gonzalez’s house was dark and orderly and quiet. They turned on no lights and left the curtains closed. His butler and housekeeper, he explained, both had the afternoon off.
It was an afternoon of time outside of time, although it couldn’t have lasted more than forty-five minutes. When she arrived home, the kitchen clock showed 3:00 P.M. Phillip was nowhere to be found. She’d walked from Mr. Gonzalez’s, understanding that of course he couldn’t drive her home, but feeling slightly rebuffed that they separated with so little chivalry on his part. He’d simply said good-bye, turned, and gone inside, as she set off in the rain on foot. Still, she was elated.
As the days became weeks, the elation started to fade. She grew anxious that the chance of another visit to his home was growing more remote. When she saw him around Nicaro, he behaved as he had before that afternoon, polite and formal. Once, they were alone together outside the plant’s executive offices. She had just dropped Hubert off, and was on her way to send telexes to boarding schools, to inquire about enrolling Phillip. They chatted briefly, but Mr. Gonzalez was distant. It was an opportunity, a moment when they were finally alone together. He didn’t seize it. He asked if he’d be seeing her and her husband at the club, for the Saturday dance. Her and her husband. Was he speaking to her in code? Letting her know that if it weren’t for Hubert, they could have more afternoons like the one when he’d rescued her from the closed bakery? At the club that Saturday, she scanned the entrance all evening, waiting for Mr. Gonzalez to appear. He never did.
Twice she went to the bakery just after 2:00 P.M., knowing it would be closed. She stood in front, thinking if only rain were falling in a fine veil, as it had that day, his white car would appear. He would come down the road and invite her to get in it, and take her to his home, where they would turn on no lights and leave the curtains shut.
She understood that Mr. Gonzalez was not what many women would dream about. People said chemical, about attraction, and she supposed it was that. It had been immediate when she’d spoken to him during the party at his hunting lodge. Since their first conversation, she’d been waiting to speak with him again. He never came to the others’ parties, never to their club. She knew her attraction to him was real because there was no need to tell herself that other women would approve, which is what she’d told herself before she married Hubert—that many other women would have married him. No one would approve of Lito Gonzalez, and she didn’t care. He was up to no good, they declared, a greasy Cuban so-called millionaire, a word they uttered with invisible quotes around it, as if no one could reasonably believe he was any kind of millionaire. He was overweight. His hair smelled pungently of men’s cologne. But he caused a feeling to well in her, an electric anticipation.
She didn’t really believe that standing in the deserted parking lot of the closed bakery would summon his car down the road. She stood in front of the bakery because it brought her closer to that afternoon at his dark and quiet house, which was disappearing into the past, as if it had never occurred.
She thought she knew every moment, the notepad on his bedside table, the cold cotton sheets. After months had gone by, she remembered addressing him as Mr. Gonzalez, even as she’d reclipped her stockings, chattering nervously and sensing, suddenly, that he was waiting for her to leave. She’d called him Mr. Gonzalez, and he had not bothered to correct her.
One afternoon she’d been shopping at the almacén in Preston and was planning to get a ride back to Nicaro on the United Fruit launch, the Mollie and Me, when she saw the familiar white Cadillac parked at an angled spot in front of the United Fruit Company offices. She was ecstatic, and decided she’d take a seat on one
of the benches in the square and wait.
Finally he came outside, shading his eyes from the noontime sun. She couldn’t tell if he’d spotted her, but then he was walking toward her. He sat down and asked if she needed a ride back to Nicaro, as if it were an old routine of theirs. All those lonely afternoons hoping she’d run into him. A few times, running into him only to encounter disappointment. Just, “Good afternoon, Mrs. Mackey,” and nothing more. After all that, this was so easy!
She got in his car as if they were a couple, two people who’d already been together, though not for long, because electricity was pulsing through her the way it only does when love is new. She decided she would not call him Mr. Gonzalez. But she couldn’t bring herself to say Lito, either. She called him by no name. He called her by none, either. Later she couldn’t decide if it was impersonal or intimate that they both used “you” as their mode of address.
He did not invite her to his house, but parked on an access road halfway to the mine. That wonderful leather interior, with a very roomy backseat. He was not exactly gentle that afternoon. In fact, he was rough. He grabbed her and pinched her arm and then the inside of her leg, so hard that he left a bruise. But his roughness seemed exactly right. The way he’d grabbed her, it meant he was paying attention. To her. She celebrated the beet-colored bruise on the inside of her thigh, and mourned its disappearance.
A few weeks later, she waited in his car while he conducted business at the Mayarí courthouse, then followed him into a ravine behind the pool hall. They made love on the ground, under the midday sun. She lay on a bed of pine needles, whose scratchiness had the same intoxicating effect as his rough pinches when they’d done it in his car.
After each incidence, he made her wait and wait and wait to see him again. But by now she’d grown somewhat used to the waiting, and considered it a part of their courtship. She sensed that the waiting, his ignoring her for weeks and even months, abided some logic that was remote to her but not to him. The courtship required profound patience on her part. It tortured her, but torture was part of infatuation.
Hubert continued to talk about Gonzalez as if he were an unconvicted killer. How unlikely that she, Charmaine, had an intimate thread to the person her husband and the other Americans despised. Hubert swore that Gonzalez would be their undoing. Hubert said—not to her, but to Mr. Lederer and Mr. Billings, though right in front of her because she didn’t count, was too stupid and batty to understand—that Gonzalez was working with the rebels, and also making deals with Batista, trying to build a pressure cooker and bring combat right into Nicaro, to drive the Americans out. Her lover, whom they were talking about. And if they only knew. Maybe he was doing all of that, but he told her nothing. He was rough and hasty and never spoke her name, which made him that much more attractive and mysterious.
She imagined years from now, when Phillip was grown up, that maybe she could ask him about Mr. Gonzalez. Phillip had been caught using his boat to ferry rebel arms and supplies across Saetía. Hubert spoke to Phillip and decided to send him away. He said little about it to Charmaine. She suspected that her son, a clever and gifted boy, a sensitive boy, probably understood a great deal about what was going on with the rebels and mysterious Mr. Gonzalez and whether or not he was involved. Someday, when he was all grown up, Phillip might explain it to her.
14
Christmas in Havana
The morning we were leaving, Del kept us waiting. His bags were packed and in the hall with mine and Mother and Daddy’s, but there was no sign of him.
Crushing season was set to begin just after the New Year, and people were going to Havana or Miami or New York to get a proper holiday before the sugar mill started running around the clock. This was December of 1957, just before the big cane fire. Before anything, really, had started to go wrong. We were going to Miami for the annual shopping spree, then to Havana as guests of Deke and Dolly Havelin.
Del knew what time we were supposed to be at the airstrip to meet the company plane. He’d gone off somewhere earlier that morning. I stuck around the house. Curtis Allain came by, and we killed time pitching rotten fruit at the mamoncillo tree, trying to get bats to fly out of it—they sleep in mamoncillo trees. The Allains weren’t going anywhere. I think Rudy and Hatch were supposed to be around all the time, keeping an eye on the mill. I can’t imagine the Allains going on a vacation anyhow. Pearly sure didn’t like to go anywhere, not even to Mayarí. “Can’t blast her out of there with dynamite,” Rudy joked. Mother had gone up to Nicaro that morning. The roads were good, and Hilton Hardy took her in one of the Buicks. She wanted to bring a Christmas ring to the Lederers, and she’d bought a gift for Everly—I think a bottle of perfume. Mother had invited Everly to come with us to Havana, but she couldn’t for some reason that I don’t recall, and Mother was sad about that. As I said, she had a real soft spot for Everly Lederer. She had our piano tuned religiously, even after Everly stopped coming over to play it. Mother felt that she had a unique personality—very “individualistic” is what Mother said. She loved us boys to death, but I think it was a special treat to have a girl around.
When Del didn’t show up on time, we all figured he was off sulking. Daddy had enrolled him in military school in Georgia starting in the spring, and Del didn’t want to go. He was too old for the Preston school. I was almost too old for it, and would be enrolling at Ruston Academy in Havana the next fall. Del had been doing Calvert home schooling system by mail. After Phillip Mackey was caught helping the rebels, Daddy said it was proof enough to him that the humidity was making these older boys soft in the head. Del would go to the States and have a drill sergeant teach him some common sense.
We’d waited maybe thirty minutes when Daddy started getting anxious. “Screw him,” he said. “He’s sixteen and he can take care of himself. Let him eat cat food.”
The entire staff of servants had the week off, except the company guards and Ho, the Chinaman who tended our flowers.
Of course, Mother didn’t want to leave without him. But you didn’t cross Daddy. Hilton Hardy put the suitcases in the Buick, and we left. Daddy gossiped to Mother about Mr. Carrington’s embezzlement troubles. Mother usually had a taste for these things, but she was too preoccupied about Del to enjoy the scandal. “Bought himself a brand-new Cadillac. What a jerk. Can’t even be discreet.”
On the plane, Daddy talked about Deke and Dolly Havelin and how they’d probably do a roast beef and Yorkshire pudding. He seemed in a fine mood, and I guess it was peculiar, given that his oldest son had run off, but I didn’t always understand Daddy.
Aside from Del getting shipped off to military school, everything seemed normal to me that Christmas. Daddy must have known the situation was worse than a few ruffians in the hills, as Batista was claiming, but he hadn’t told us. He never told Mother anything because Mother couldn’t keep a secret. It wasn’t her fault, Daddy said, it’s biology, just how women are.
United Fruit put out their “Jungle Bells” issue of Unifruitco, with pictures from the masquerade at the Pan-American Club, everybody goofing in ridiculous costumes. A lot of people just switched roles—husbands dressed up as wives, women in pants with mustaches drawn over their upper lip. I went as the Lone Ranger, and Daddy let me carry a real pistol. Daddy wore a tall, pointy white hood with eyeholes cut into it and insisted he was dressed like a Spanish Holy Week penitent. He could be perverse like that. The year before, he’d gone as a guajiro. After that, everybody started doing it. It’s an easy costume, just smear dirt on your cheeks, cut jagged hems on your pants, hitch them up with a rope, and walk around going “Sí, señor.” I’m not saying it’s polite. But this was a different time.
Mother’s flamboyán tree was blooming a brilliant red and made things feel Christmasy even if the air was a wet ninety-one degrees. I’d never had a white Christmas anyhow. Christmas for us was Hatch taking all the boys fishing at Saetía. Splashing around in crystal-green, waist-deep water, warm as a tub. Eating pounded octopus we brought back,
a typical Cuban feast except for Mother playing carols on the piano after dessert, and Annie’s traditional no-show. On the evening of the twenty-fourth, Mother let Annie go down to Mayarí to visit her family. Christmas morning, like clockwork, she’d call person-to-person from the Mayarí post office saying she’d missed the bus up to Preston and would have to wait for the afternoon coach. Mother would sigh. “Just take the rest of the day off, Annie.” It was a game. Annie pretending she missed the bus. Mother pretending she was exasperated.
One Christmas I answered the phone, and the operator said, “Josephine Courtland is on the line.” I said we don’t know anyone by that name. We’d always called her Annie. I didn’t know that Mother had made up a new name when I was little because I couldn’t say the real one.
Daddy’s pleasure over Mr. Carrington’s troubles was part of a long tradition of his, hating the people in Nicaro. He said the place was a mess waiting to happen. He partly blamed Lito Gonzalez, who was a Cuban investor in the nickel mine. Having Gonzalez around meant the nickel company had to comply with Cuban labor laws, which to Daddy was sheer idiocy. Daddy said it was a conflict of interest to have a Cuban in management, and that the Americans in Nicaro were green and naive fools. When he heard that Hubert Mackey took too much quinine and went deaf in one ear, Daddy thought that was just hilarious. He said the Nicaro people were no different from the cows we got from Argentina, which didn’t know the difference between alfalfa and Johnson grass, which is poisonous, so they ate the Johnson grass and got sick and died.
Telex From Cuba Page 18