Telex From Cuba

by Rachel Kushner

  “You’re lovely,” he said, handing her a generous stack of bills. “But I must run.”

  Instead of entering the main theater, he darted up the wrong stairway, to be sure he’d shaken off the men following him.

  He found himself in a hallway outside a large room, where three Chinese musicians were playing marvelously atonal music, or what he’d thought was atonal music, until he figured out they were tuning their instruments. They were diminutive men with kitty-cat faces, and there wasn’t the slightest trace of sex in the room. The scene moved him, with its smell of rosin dust, the men producing whiny and plaintive strains in this curious rehearsal space. A sign on the theater doors facing the street had announced Gentlemen Only Please.

  Here they are, La Mazière thought, watching the three musicians play, sandwiched in a building between people viewing sex and people having it. These are the gentlemen.

  Rachel K never knew where Fidel’s underground would send her, or who she’d meet on these errands, and the mystery lent each task a certain surreal excitement. Fidel’s Havana contacts sent her to Miramar, land of the American executives, to keep an Argentinian race-car driver company. They’d kidnapped him on the eve of the Cuban Grand Prix and were holding him hostage, no real purpose but attention, worldwide publicity for the rebel cause. Someone had brought in a television and offered to let him watch the race, but the Argentinian said he could not, that it would depress him to witness what he’d been strongly favored to win.

  Sometimes she’d meet contacts who turned out to be aides from the palace, men she’d seen with Batista. She guessed that the president could have tracked their betrayal, found clues in the Novel, if he hadn’t been so obsessed with those parts that were personal, the insults, social exclusions, and petty hierarchies. Batista was upset that the place-card seating for a dinner at Ambassador Smith’s had situated his wife next to Madame Masigli, which he suspected was meant to emphasize how much more glamorous and refined Madame Masigli was, compared to the first lady. He worried that his barber disliked him, that his aides were cheating him at canasta, not that they were plotting his overthrow.

  On one errand, Rachel K met with a professor from the now closed university. A gentle, older man who asked why they called her Zazou.

  It was French, she said. Something from World War II. At which point he went to the shelf and pulled down a book, flipped through it, and read a passage, nodding. “Yes, of course!” he said, delighted. “They were dissidents—what a wonderful quotation you’ve chosen.” He was a lonely history professor. He invited her to sit, and began talking about wars and revolts and various European underground movements. He recited facts about the Zazou, reading from the book, their ethnic background, the yellow star, their work with the French Resistance, when they were deported, the Gypsy music to which their name referred, how they were linked to another group, a German equivalent called the White Rose. He went to the shelf and retrieved another book, offering to show her photographs, which is when she said she had to get going. He told her to visit anytime she wanted. “We’ll discuss history,” he said. “Various codes and uniforms of protest and refusal.”

  She appreciated the sound of “White Rose,” two words dusted with something clandestine. But knowing the details of history would ruin things. It was the vague brightness of the word “zazou” that she liked, a word and a few details: paint-on stockings and grenadine with beer. White Rose, in her own mind, would be something other, surely, than what the professor had tried to explain: a flower made of wax, voluptuous and fragile. A German girl with short black hair and Japanese face powder. A mouth like a bloody stamp.

  “Hello, mademoiselle.”

  She feigned indifference, standing in the doorway to her little apartment. Not inviting him inside, or asking where he’d been the past few months. They both understood it was a form of affection.

  La Mazière took her hand, put his lips to it, and kept them there in a protracted kiss.

  Her legs were painted in crisscross diamonds. She wore a tight black dress and heels. “You weren’t on your way out, were you?” he asked.

  It was her habit to be made up even when she was home alone, like having music on, a kind of ambience, the mirrors in her room responding that she was still herself, with or without a witness.

  “No. I was waiting for an ambassador. I heard one was coming through, on his goodwill tour.” It surprised her how easy it was to slip back into these roles.

  “My goodwill tour; yes, of course.”

  The batiste cotton dress he’d brought her was a size too small, its capped sleeves squeezing her upper arms like blood pressure cuffs.

  “I’m going to burst out of this.” She was laughing, twisting to emphasize how tight it was. “I’m performing a ballet recital or something?”

  “Just be still,” he said, and began tossing things off the bed—shoes, newspapers, piles of clothes, a long, auburn wig.

  “You’re still a messy little girl. That hasn’t changed.”

  “Had I known an ambassador would be dropping by, I would have tidied things up a bit.”

  He stepped over the wig, which lay on the floor like the debris of some sort of domestic violence, picked her up—she hardly weighed anything at all—and tossed her on the bed.

  “But anyway, tidying,” she continued, as he took off his jacket, his shoes, and set his tinted glasses on her nightstand, “is for desperate people.”

  “In fact, I prefer you messy,” he said, and tugged her downward by the legs so that her head was off the pillow and flush to the bed. “It makes you seem vulnerable.”

  The dress was thin cotton, a fine weave, cool and silky to the touch. Meant to be worn with a slip. Her body was faintly visible beneath it, the sheer white fabric with an underblush of flesh.

  He pinned her down and proceeded with his pantomime, pretending he was taking something from her, a thing she was too fresh and young to understand, this girl in her white batiste dress. Underneath the dress, a body that was solicitous but vulnerable, laid out for his inverse ritual of passing through what was lewd to get to what was innocent, through inverse to get to verse. It was a cheap fantasy, and he hated his propensity to cheap fantasies, but he allowed them all the same.

  Of course he was attractive. And he had the uncanny gift of making her feel as if time and everyone in its viscous grip were frozen, and only she and he were sentient and unfrozen. But on each visit he had paid her, at the club, or her apartment, she had been surprised to see him, having assumed he’d left the island for good.

  He’d come and gone unpredictably for the past six years, since just after Batista took over. If he bothered to say good-bye, it was a canned charade, kissing her and proclaiming that he took his Little K wherever he went, that the version of her he carried along with him was just as real—“more real,” he’d say. A refined essence to honor and elect as company, after the coarse materiality of their body-to-body conversation. A fine conversation, he’d amend. In fact he enjoyed conversing with her body immensely. But the two of them as entwined flesh was only one aspect of things, he’d declare, and the ethereal mingling that took place in her absence was another.

  He seemed to have an arsenal of these performances. Not unlike her own performances, for which there were as many scripts and stages as there were reasons and affects. The role of walking to buy milk, of dancing for the men at the club, of giving the underground information—where Batista would be, at what hour—and preempting meaning with a Frenchman by understanding that there was none.

  “How can I truly adore you, you and your body both,” he said, “if I don’t allow them to marinate properly in my imagination?”

  They were saying their good-byes.

  “I hate to go,” he said, “and I hate that the distance is so integral.”

  “Oh, I hate it, too,” she could have replied in a syrupy voice, playing along. But their game was beginning to tire her.

  “What you do mean, ‘integral’?” she as
ked. “Maybe you could just speak plainly. For once.”

  “To love. Integral to love. There, I said it.” It surprised him how easy it was. But easy, he knew, because he was leaving. It was a tautology, of course, that whatever he took or mistook for love necessitated absence from the loved one. But this circular reasoning had become like a perfect wheel, motoring him here and there among various realms of tomcatting and novelty.

  She scoffed. “Let’s not devalue the term.”

  “But I don’t—”

  “Darling, this isn’t love,” she said in a mock-consoling voice. “And I don’t buy your pretend belief that it is. Unless you’ve managed accidentally to seduce yourself. The hypnotist who put himself under.” She snapped her fingers, to wake him from the spell.

  Prio had insisted he loved her, but it was all part of his gloomy narcissism. One more injustice he was forced to endure. And there was the deluded United Fruit executive. “I’m so sorry, dear, I just couldn’t get away,” he’d say, as if he and she were anxious lovers finally able to continue with their tryst. She’d seen him a few days before, on his Christmas vacation with the family. He took photos from his wallet and handed them to her, his pincer hands slightly trembling. Two tow-headed sons and a handsome wife, the wholesome type of woman whose cosmetics kit probably consisted of a bar of Dove soap. “Saw her on a road in Indiana and told myself here comes an angel,” he’d said. And in apologetic tones, “Sooner or later, you needed to see these. No getting around reality. And I don’t mean to make you feel bad, but this, what you and I have, it’s got limits.” She liked to think he was perverse, showing her photos of his “angel” to let her know that she herself was not one. Because the other explanation was that he was profoundly dumb.

  “You’re cynical,” La Mazière said to her, as if he’d suddenly realized it.

  “And you’re not?” She laughed.

  “To the contrary. I believe that the briefest of interludes can be love.”

  “You call it love because you don’t pay me.”

  But even paid transactions, La Mazière resisted saying, could be affairs of the heart. Where was the heart actually located, and who could say what touched it? His own was impetuous and abstract, and many professional mistresses had touched it.

  “Call it love if you want,” she said. “I’ll call it see-you-next-time. Perhaps you can bring me Dalida’s autograph. Your little Miss Egypt.”

  “Little” was not how he thought of Dalida, his sometimes girlfriend back in Paris. She was a major pain, a grand hysteric whose sudden pop stardom was now one more source of anguish in her absurdly tragic life. But occasionally she amused him.

  “You know that I won’t be seeing her, that I’ll be right here, in your country. ‘Your country’—how silly of me. I forget that my Miss K is French. Never mind her K name and that lovely Manouche face. Or maybe she’s German Jewish, with those sensual lips.”

  He pressed on her lower lip, which felt buoyant and soft and warm under the pad of his thumb.

  “What a coincidence,” he said. “You’re French, and Dalida—did you know?—despite the Miss Egypt title, is Italian. Two European girls, both performers, both what they call ‘exotics.’ And yet you couldn’t be more different. But surely you aren’t jealous—”

  “Oh, please. I was serious. I love that song ‘Bambino.’ They play it forty times a day. Or they did, before Batista shut down the radio station.”

  “I’m going to pretend that you are jealous. Because the idea pleases me very much. My tough and unfeeling little K, lighting a candle in my absence. Perhaps shedding a tear.”

  He traced his finger down the side of her face, the path of this imaginary tear.

  “But I fool myself. To think my chilly Miss K will cry over me. A girl who has to sleep without blankets to feel any warmth at all.”

  He looked at her steadily through the tinted glasses.

  “And do you know what? I adore this chilliness. It’s irresistible, just irresistible—”

  He leaned in.

  She let him kiss her.

  Then she pushed him out the door and shut it.

  16

  Radio CMQ-AM 670

  May 1, 1958 10:00 P.M.

  (Café Pilon spot)

  (Theme music, “La Agua de Clavelito”)

  Good evening, brothers and sisters.

  As some of you who tune in to my show are aware, our government has decided to crack down on hope. On healing. To limit, or perhaps eradicate, miracles. To fine and regulate those whose earnest claim is to facilitate in the name of dreams.

  Should the people be barred from dreaming?

  It’s your choice, people of Cuba:

  Am I, Clavelito, a man or a nerve wave?

  A fraud without special powers? Or a magic vibration that can travel through the water and into your thoughts no matter who you are and where you are?

  Which do you want me to be?

  Call me a man, and the possibilities collapse.

  17

  D. L. Mazierre, with his small mouth and gray eyes, did not come to agitate in Nicaro. Three years had passed since Mr. Mackey posted the letter outside the nickel company offices. Everly never thought about him and his handsome looks anymore, though his photograph was still taped in the hallway. Mr. Mackey had added a second photo of him, wearing tinted glasses like the people in Stevie’s movie magazines. But there were many other photographs outside the nickel plant offices—the Castro brothers: the older, freckled one; and the younger one with the Chinese face, pretty like a girl, with longish, feathery black hair.

  Now Everly breezed down the hall to her father’s office, passing photos of workers who had quit suspiciously with no notice, suspected agitators and rebel leaders, understanding that they weren’t magic angels coming to transform her and everyone else. Into what, at age eleven, she hadn’t been sure, but she’d expected D. L. Mazierre to try to contact her somehow. She’d imagined him waiting behind a tree as she walked home from school, stepping out quickly to tell her something. Or standing outside her open bedroom window and relaying his mysterious message—whatever it was—after everyone else was asleep. It was a child’s fantasy that she no longer harbored.

  Willy said the mine employees wanted fair wages, fair treatment, and that’s what the rebels were promising. She herself had seen how the miners worked, seven days a week under the boiling sun, a labor boss with a gun in the shade of the only tree. The mine was a dirty secret that made the young and handsome men in the photos seem like heroes.

  Mr. Mackey had said the rebels were bandits, an annoyance to nickel operations. But then his own son, Phillip, was caught helping the bandits, and the Mackeys panicked and sent him away. Mr. Stites’s oldest son, Delmore, had run off to the mountains to join the cause. People talked about his disappearance vaguely—said he was “in rebel territory” and not that he was a rebel—but everyone knew.

  The agitators were getting bolder now. They torched thousands of acres of United Fruit sugarcane, a fire that coated Nicaro with cane ash and blackened the sky for days. They tried to sabotage the rail lines that ran from the mine, trundling nickel ore down to town for processing. Mr. Mackey said the rebels would be subdued and that the company must play its part. Anyone remotely suspicious was arrested and handed over to the Rural Guard. Everything had changed.

  Like the new Cuban guard at their Friday night double feature, Fuzzy Pink Nightgown and The Big Boodle. The new guard wore a holstered gun and a machete—a guampara, Willy called it. He stood stiffly by the theater entrance and didn’t sit down once, not even during intermission. The Nicaro theater was outdoors, a low wall and a screen with folding chairs. Rain began to fall steadily during the second film. George and Marjorie Lederer got up to leave and said Everly and Stevie could stay if they were nutty enough to sit through a movie in the rain. Everly decided she was nutty enough. She munched rain-dampened popcorn and spied periodically on the smoochers in the back row, Pamela and Luís Galindez, and Stevi
e and Tico Leál. Luís Galindez held Pamela’s hand and fawned over her the same way Tico fawned over Stevie. Stevie and Pamela both went to Cuban dances and wore their socks rolled down and their hair teased up in the front the way the Cuban girls did. Stevie drew a fake beauty mark on her chin with an eyebrow pencil. She learned the pachanga and danced it with Tico, though neither of them were as good at it as Willy. Willy’s pachanga was the real one, everyone else’s just a watered-down imitation. The Lederers worried that Stevie was becoming too Cubanized—that was one thing. Dating a Cuban was beyond what they’d imagined. When Marjorie Lederer found out, she was furious. How could this have gone on, right under her nose, for three whole years? Everly’s mother wanted to have Tico fired from the nickel plant. Fired immediately, she said. George Lederer refused. He said Tico Leál was one of Gonzalez’s hires, and it would stir up too much trouble the way things were now. They were all nervous about Lito Gonzalez. Mr. Mackey thought he was working with the rebels, cutting secret deals.

  “So you’re firing me, instead!” Stevie shrieked. They were sending her back to the States. In two days she’d be getting on a bus for Havana, then flying to Miami, where the Vanderveers would pick her up and drive her to an all-girls boarding school in Tennessee. “Te quiero,” Duffy kept repeating, imitating Stevie. “Te quiero, Tico. Mucho mucho,” and then she made kissing noises. But it wasn’t funny anymore. “Duffy, shut up!” Stevie shouted. “She’s just a child,” their mother said. “Leave her alone.” Duffy cried and burrowed against their mother. But when she turned her head to the side, still sniffling, Marjorie Lederer rubbing her back, she looked not just comforted but also satisfied.