Telex From Cuba

by Rachel Kushner

  During Deke’s toast, Mother had sneaked out to the guesthouse. She’d been trying to get a call through to Del since we arrived in Havana, but with no luck. Naturally there was a telephone in the guesthouse—they even had a telephone mounted on the wall of each bathroom. That morning after the party I was in the bathtub and thought about calling Elisia Arnaz, but I didn’t have her phone number. I probably wouldn’t have done it, but I can’t think of why they’d put a telephone in the bathroom, except to call up girls while you’re in the bath.

  Mother came back into the living room and told Daddy no one was answering.

  “I called down to the Allain place and spoke to Rudy,” she said. “Rudy says they haven’t seen hide or hair of him. They thought he was in Havana with us. And since the Mackeys are in New Mexico, I put in a call to Marjorie Lederer, who says that Phillip’s boat is gone from the Nicaro dock. That it’s been gone for several days.”

  “Jesus, Evelyn,” Daddy said. “This might be the time to cut him from the apron strings. He’s an ingrate, and I will testify that I am enjoying his—what do you call it? The opposite of company? His absence.”

  “But Malcolm—”

  “And it’s not like he’s never borrowed that boat. He probably thinks he owns the fucking thing now that the Mackey boy is gone.”

  Phillip Mackey graduated from a military academy with honors the next spring. Del set buses on fire, grew a beard, and took his orders from a seventeen-year-old commander, a suspected Communist, suspected homosexual.

  When I think of Tee-Tee Allain, I think of my brother. Not that I think of her much. Sometimes, when I see women with that same blank look, I see Tee-Tee’s face as Del handed her the chocolates on Valentine’s Day. She always had that empty look. Maybe that’s what did it for Del. It’s a particular blankness, and I’ve mostly seen it on billboards for so-called gentlemen’s clubs. The convincing ones have that same empty look. Like they know just how to void themselves and not get in the way of some “gentleman’s” fantasy.

  Tee-Tee floated around, oblivious, in the shadow of his obsession with her. That’s the strange thing about love. Unless you return it, it’s invisible. Even if you know someone is directing it at you, it’s nothing but a dull reminder of your own indifference to it. One person impaling himself on his own obsession, the other wolfing down Valentine candies, playing dodgeball barefoot, her stringy hair in her face, staring at nothing, mouth partway open like she can’t be bothered to close it.

  Del gave up on her about a year before he disappeared. His last attempt was asking Tee-Tee to the cotillion. Phillip Mackey had already asked her, and I think her getting hung up on Phillip is finally what did it.

  Daddy had arranged with our company lawyer, Mr. Diaz-Hart, that Del and I would take Mr. Diaz-Hart’s two younger daughters to the dance. Mother wanted us to go with the Lederer girls, but it was a business thing for Daddy, and he’d already arranged it. Mr. Diaz-Hart’s oldest daughter, Mirta, married Fidel Castro in 1948. The wedding was at the church right on the town square in Banes, United Fruit’s other sugar mill town, thirty miles away. It seems absurd that Fidel would marry a society girl whose father’s occupation was helping Americans avoid Cuban taxes and labor laws. They were rich, Americanized Cubans. They vacationed in the States, read Look and Life, and ate cornflakes for breakfast. The daughters dressed straight out of Vogue magazine. Mirta ended up sending divorce papers to the rebel camp. I guess she realized Castro wasn’t going to be the husband who drives a new Buick and gives her a shopping allowance. I think he married her to put a notch in his belt. I mean, an enemy who’s sleeping with your daughter has a certain advantage over you. But I also think he had something to prove, that even as he was destroying it, he wanted in to a social world from which the Cubans were excluded. Maybe he still wants in. When Castro was in Tampico planning his invasion, the story is he spotted this sparkling white yacht on the Tuxpán River and declared, “Here she is—I’m going to Cuba in this boat.” That boat became famous: the Granma, which until 1959 the English-language dailies were calling “Gramma.” It was a pleasure boat exactly like our company yacht, the Mollie and Me. Eighty feet. Meant to carry twenty-five people, with lacquered teakwood trim and white leather tuck-and-roll upholstery. You invade a country in a PT boat, not a yacht with a built-in liquor cabinet! Castro later said the boat had come to him in a vision, and in a way it had: it was a vision of the Mollie and Me, which, of course, Castro had seen countless times anchored at the country club in Preston. They jammed eighty-five men on that little yacht. It almost sank, and then they shipwrecked, ran it aground northeast of Nicaro. If that’s not stupid enough, as they fled into the mountains, Castro’s men were chomping sugarcane, and they littered their own trail with chewed stalks. Batista followed the trail and sent in planes. You can hide in a cane field if you’re being pursued on foot. But from a plane it’s impossible. You’re Cary Grant getting mowed by a crop duster in North by Northwest.

  At the cotillion, Del sat along the wall and stared at Tee-Tee the whole night and refused to dance with Alina, the Diaz-Hart girl. I danced with her, although she was a foot taller. She wore white cotton gloves, and her hands were bigger than mine. I took turns between her and the younger one. I didn’t mind.

  Del protested when Daddy first told us about the setup. He said the Diaz-Hart girls were “shallow.” I didn’t ask him how he knew Tee-Tee wasn’t shallow, considering she never said a word. I was a kid. I didn’t know about love, that you see someone and whether or not they say much, they make the world suddenly different, a mysterious and more alive place that you can access only through them. And the new, better world falls lifeless and flat when they go away.

  Phillip Mackey danced with Tee-Tee during the slow dance. He went to put his tongue in her mouth, and she bit him on the face. He let out a loud yelp. Everyone looked over. She left a crescent of red tooth marks on his cheek. It looked like a dog had locked on to him.

  I don’t think Phillip had any special affection for Tee-Tee, and wouldn’t have even if she’d let him put his tongue in her mouth, put his hand over the front of her dress, et cetera. And even the et cetera probably wouldn’t have meant much: a lot of the older boys were getting their practice on the cheap. Daddy shut those places down, but they always reopened. There was a guy who procured small-town girls. They came on boats from Antilla. You’d see them with these dour expressions, fanning themselves in the heat. You know why they’re called red-light districts? In Oriente, the brakemen would leave their railroad lanterns out front when they visited those places. If a train was coming in and they were needed, they could be called back to work. Sometimes at night you’d see two or three red lanterns glowing like buoys along the row of shacks where the girls from Antilla worked.

  After the night she bit him on the dance floor, Tee-Tee started following Phillip Mackey around. When the Nicaro kids came over to Preston to swim in the pool, Tee-Tee would sit at the edge with her bruised white legs in the water, staring, glum and intense, watching Phillip go off the high dive. Phillip told everybody she gave him the creeps, that she looked at him like she wanted to hunt him down with an animal net.

  Phillip’s parents bought him a boat, and he and Del started going out fishing together. Suddenly my brother was obsessed with that instead of Tee-Tee. I once heard him chime in about the “spooky broad” who wouldn’t leave Phillip alone, no mention that he had spent years of his life obsessed with that same spooky broad.

  Phillip kept his boat anchored in Levisa Bay, by the nickel processing plant. He and Del became friendly with the Cuban mine employees who fished off the dock, younger guys from the countryside around Mayarí. A couple of months before our Christmas stay at the Havelins’, in October of ’57, there was a phone call to the Mackeys from Chatsworth—Chatty, the Saetía watchman who gave me my silvered conch. Chatty said Phillip was up to something. That’s when the Mackeys sent him away.

  These peculiar Cubans arrived late to the Havelins’ party,
ministers in Batista’s government. Deke, Daddy, and the Cubans all went down to the billiards room. Mother went to bed. Desi Arnaz’s niece Elisia—Elithia, she said, like she was missing her front teeth—and I snuck out for a late-night swim.

  We were clowning and splashing; I cannonballed into the pool, innocent stuff. We got out, and Elisia pushed me into a cabaña. I remember that she was a pretty aggressive kisser. We were kissing, and she stepped out of her wet bathing suit, just rolled it down and stepped out of it, and put her arms around me. Her skin was cold where the bathing suit had been, but with a body warmth coming through from underneath the cold. I’d gone to second base with girls in Preston, but getting your hand in a blouse is not the same thing as a Cuban girl well into puberty standing in front you with a wet bathing suit looped around her ankle. The truth is, Elithia was ready for a lot more than I was. I wasn’t one bit ready, as it turned out. It was cold. I was nervous. But she was sweet about it, and said we could try again. We didn’t, but that second try happened about a thousand times in my mind, and it wasn’t at all awkward, as it would have been in real life.

  The next morning rain was falling in a steady shower. Mother came and woke me. It took me a minute to remember about the night before in the cabaña. I wondered if Mother could tell. She always said that a mother can detect her son’s presence, that she knows his smell like no one else does. If I’d taken a nap on the porch, she knew because she could smell where I’d laid my head on the pillows of the divan. I wondered if I smelled like Elisia Arnaz. Of course, I didn’t want Mother to know anything about that, but then again it makes me sad to think of her as naive, as unable to detect the smell of a stranger on me. Mothers are possessive. Mine certainly would not have wanted to entertain the idea of me naked in a cabaña with some girl, high society or not. It would have been more palatable to her if it were a proper courtship with someone she knew and liked. I think she wanted me to date Everly Lederer, and I remember waking up and knowing I was betraying that.

  A servant brought breakfast to the guesthouse on carts—poached eggs, bacon, guava juice, butter, and rolls. Mother said Daddy had gone to the Hotel Nacional early to get work done. Because he came to Havana on business so often, he kept a suite at the Nacional as an office. The Yacht Club was having its annual tea party—they hosted it every year, the day after Christmas, but Mother said she’d had enough socializing and would I like to go to the movies instead. One of the Havelins’ drivers took us to La Rampa for a matinee, Mother in a green rain slicker with a black velvet collar, me smelling secretly like Elisia Arnaz.

  We saw Jet Pilot, and I remember thinking it was a pretty good film. Then we went to El Louvre for ice cream. There were these French places in Havana—the Tuileries, El Louvre—but they were just names. There was more French ancestry in Oriente, the descendants of the planters who started coffee operations in the Cristal, above us, after they were run out of Haiti by the blacks. The culture wasn’t exactly what you’d call “French”—there were Rousseaus and Carpentiers up in the mountains and in Santiago, but they weren’t so different from wealthy Cubans, except they danced quadrilles and minuets, and their servants called you “maître.”

  El Louvre was famous for sherbet, but at Christmas you could get tropical snow—a frozen guanabana-flavored custard under a thick layer of flaked coconut. Nothing tasted so exquisite as tropical snow. They were also famous for delicados, cognac and ice cream whipped in a milkshake machine. It gives me a headache just thinking about a cognac milkshake.

  El Louvre was elegant—marble tables, marble floors, waiters in formal jackets, a fountain in the middle of the room, nymphs with water bubbling out of their mouths. I spooned my tropical snow and Mother drank black coffee. She seemed preoccupied, and I knew she was thinking about Del. It was cruel of Daddy to make her leave him at home. Different from putting limits on her, as he sometimes did when she wanted to feed people at the back door.

  When I went to use the men’s room, I passed by an older man sitting with a much younger girl. I didn’t look at them until I was practically squeezing by their table, and it wasn’t until I got down the hall to the washroom that I realized the older man was my father. I didn’t expect to see Daddy at an ice cream parlor and certainly not with a strange girl. The mind does things to correct for what doesn’t make sense, and I just didn’t think it was he. I came out and had to pass by them again. His back was to me, but it was my father’s back. I thought there must be some mistake, but I didn’t know what kind of mistake. She was eating ice cream and he wasn’t, the way I was eating ice cream and Mother wasn’t. But she wasn’t a kid. She was probably in her early twenties, attractive in an unwholesome way, heavy makeup and high heels, that sort of bottle-blond, Lana Turner hair. Her clothes looked too tight. Walking back to the table, I listened to the voices and clattering dishes and had that dreamy, disconnected sensation that takes over in those moments in life when things turn suddenly queer.

  I’m sure Mother saw them. They might have seen us, because when I sat back down, they were gone. Strange to think they’d rushed off like we were the police, or the Rural Guard, or what was worse, like we were total strangers.

  Deke Havelin was the type of guy who joked loudly and in front of Dolly that he was “married but single.” Or “married but looking”—that was his other one. He came off like a swinger, rayon magnate, ladies’ man. It was a performance. Dolly called all the shots, and he adored her.

  Daddy told everyone about seeing Mother on the road in Indiana and saying to himself here comes this angel. Mother did everything right. She was attractive and elegantly put together, and she took excellent care of herself. Never lost her cool, rode her horse out into the countryside to take sick or retarded children to the company hospital. Mother was perfect, but people don’t always want perfection.

  Why Daddy was so reckless that afternoon still vexes me. Either he thought we were at the Yacht Club tea, which is where the Havelins were, or he just decided to take his chances. Or maybe he knew she could bear it.

  People say you discover someone’s secret and suddenly he or she feels like a stranger. The older man sitting with the girl didn’t feel like a stranger. It was my father, equal parts old-fashioned gentleman and Mississippi hillbilly, white ducks and a demi-demi. Daddy, who was intimate with that girl like he was intimate with Mother, if he was intimate with Mother. I’ll gladly remain ignorant about that. I don’t know who she was or if he saw her regularly or what. But he was sitting like a patient father, that girl licking her ice cream methodically, seriously, the way kids do.

  When we got home to Preston, Del’s bag was still in the hall. Mother fainted. Hilton Hardy and Henry Das carried her upstairs while Daddy and I unloaded the car. Hilton and Henry normally refused to speak or even look at each other, something to do with Henry being part Hindu. There was all sorts of hairsplitting among those guys, Chinese, black, mulatto, what have you. Mother and Daddy thought it was cute that the chauffeur snubbed the butler. They talked about Henry and Hilton not mixing like it was sibling rivalry.

  Daddy made phone calls. Crim, Mackey, Allain. He called Diaz-Hart. Even Lito Gonzalez. Lito Gonzalez spoke perfect English, but Daddy spoke Spanish to him on the phone. I’d seen him do that, speak Spanish to Gonzalez while Gonzalez responded in English. Daddy said Gonzalez was one of those types who cared only about money and hated Americans. “Stab you in the back first chance he gets,” Daddy said. The phone rang, and it wasn’t Crim or Diaz-Hart. It was Gonzalez.

  After he hung up, Daddy said it looked like Del might have accidentally crossed into rebel territory and we would have to figure out a way to get him out safely.

  A month later, our cane fields were torched. The blaze burned for almost a week, until rain finally fell and drenched the flames. Afterward, the workers slashed and crushed the burned cane, fed it into the mill rollers in blackened, gummy masses. If they could get it all processed within a week, Mr. LaDue said, the stalks would still have some sugar content. The
rain had turned the town into a giant wet ashtray, and then the mill was flowing burned sugar into the boilers. It was different from the smell of cane fields on fire. More acrid and metallic, like poisoned air hitting my tongue. It made me think about the warm, malty smell we were accustomed to, and how pure it was.

  In an abandoned hut out in the cane cutters’ batey, the Allain brothers had found stacks of notices calling for a strike, and flyers with arson instructions and diagrams: tie a kerosene-soaked rag to the tail of a rat and let him loose in the cane. A cat would work, too. That’s why no one had come to help put out the fire. They were honoring the strike. Everyone came back to work, and because Daddy needed them, he didn’t have a choice but to allow it. Daddy had me helping out, mostly just watching as workers unloaded cane cars, keeping an eye on his “peóns,” as he put it. When I was little I didn’t know what that meant. “An animal that talks,” Daddy said. They saved what they could, but we lost almost three hundred million pounds of sugar. A quarter of the yield.

  Batista’s Rural Guard opened a garrison in Preston, and suddenly there were Cuban officers in khaki uniforms patrolling with guns, and they weren’t shy about using them. That’s how these things work. The crackdown after the ruin and hell-raising. Cubans had a five-o’clock curfew, no exceptions. To prevent people from hiding weapons, Cuban women weren’t allowed to wear the sack dresses that were popular at the time, and the men had to tuck in their shirts. The Rural Guard raided an all-black club in Levisa, the Maceo, and took some of the men in for questioning. One of the officers came and knocked on our door late, after midnight. Henry Das answered, and the officer said they wanted to speak with me. Henry Das assumed they had the name wrong and meant Daddy, but the officer said no, we need to speak with the boy. Henry woke me. I got dressed and told Mother what was going on—Daddy was in Havana on business—and Hilton Hardy took me up to the Rural Guard station. They had all these black guys with their hands chained behind their backs. They brought one of them out. The captain, Sosa Blanco, asked, “Do you know this nigger?” It was the Lederers’ servant. That curious boy who’d come to Preston with Mr. Bloussé. Whenever I went to the Lederers he seemed to disappear, as if he were avoiding me. I got the feeling that he felt found out. Suddenly, he was standing there in chains, telling Captain Sosa Blanco, “He knows me. This boy knows me. Tell them you know me.” I will never forget it. It was as if we’d been having a conversation all along, even if we’d never acknowledged that we knew each other from so many years earlier. There was no question of whether he was innocent or guilty. He’d seen no reason to address me out loud until that moment. It was judicious, to say the least. “He’s innocent,” I said, but there was only a question of who he was. Did a white person know him? If so, he goes free. If not, they shoot him along with the other boys and string him up in a tree along the main highway. I didn’t see any dead bodies in trees. By then Daddy was adamant that Mother and I stay inside the gates.