Telex From Cuba

by Rachel Kushner

  Mr. Bloussé and Willy were not father and son. She didn’t know what they were. Willy was what Mr. Bloussé had ended up with, a six-year-old boy. If Mr. Bloussé didn’t think of him as a son or treat him like a son, he must not have wanted one. And yet he’d wanted Willy, gone and taken him after his visit with Willy’s father. Everly imagined that Mr. Bloussé had become attached. Willy was a magnet, and Mr. Bloussé got to have him all to himself. She, too, wanted him to herself. Willy with no time off, no time away from the Lederer house, and no secrets. No Club Maceo. I’m a sick and monstrous person, she thought. She wanted him to be free and constrained at the same time. She wouldn’t have wished this contradiction of wants on anyone, not even herself.

  Five years now Willy had worked for the Lederers. Planted them the most exquisite garden in Nicaro, Everly’s own night-blooming cereus, which would open one night, deep into the abstract future. When she was younger, he’d taught her the names of all the flowers and trees, taught her to fish with a hand line, how to make cashew wine and juice from guanabana, taught her words in Spanish and French. As she got older, he’d explained the basics of Cuban politics, the basics of labor politics. But her world and his were no closer. They were farther apart. She was dressed up in her mother’s Jane Powell fantasy, and returning from a golden boy’s birthday affair. Willy slept in a navy barracks where an armed guard patrolled the rows and rats bit his feet. Like all colored people in Nicaro, he was scared and cautious, and he lied to her like any colored person would lie to any white.

  For five years he’d danced with a broom in the Lederers’ kitchen. And once at Las Palmas. Put a coin in the jukebox and played “La Pachanga” when no one was around to tell him Negros weren’t allowed in the club. It was a show for Everly. Willy with his warm, broad smile, his graceful form, dancing with a broom. An unspoken secret that the broom was Everly, it was Everly he twirled around and dipped low.

  “Thank you, K.C.,” she had said, as she’d put the gold flush handle from Mr. Stites’s private Pullman car into her purse. Thank you, but I’m spoken for.

  It was about as naive as thinking it’s a lovely gesture to walk through town naked.

  18

  He lay under the tarp, exhausted, vaguely hungry, vaguely horny.

  Women floated past, and he reviewed them one by one. Because he had access to none at the moment, he could choose any he desired. It was a fantasy, and the only obstacle to fantasy was his own mind, sometimes noncompliant.

  She was almost like the German girls he’d met on his Rhineland travels, La Mazière thought when he got to Rachel K. Cold and unapologetic, these girls who used up all the hot water, didn’t cry, ate their share of a meal. Rachel K never said thank you, a sensible etiquette he’d also witnessed in SS officers at the elite Waffen officers’ camp of Wildflecken, where he’d trained after his enlistment. It charmed him to no end, the idea that what you needed was simply given to you, a deserved reapportioning that gratitude would only demean.

  But underneath his pleasure at her frosty manner, La Mazière found himself wishing Rachel K had expressed a bit more regret at his departure. A sweep through his past, and half the women were clinging and crying. Even the baker’s daughter who kept a hideous lolloping rabbit in a cage next to the bed, a girl with an exterior like the thick hard crust of bauernbrot, or a stale kaiser roll, had begged him not to leave when it was time for him to report to Wildflecken. Rachel K had shoved him out the door, shut and latched it. He’d stood in the hallway feeling slightly stunned, until he decided he didn’t care and needed to return to his hotel and pack in order to leave Havana by dawn, before Extraño’s goons, or someone else’s, caught up to him. But in that instant, he’d stood and listened, trying to discern her movements from inside. Footsteps, things set here and there, water running, a match struck against emery, the poof of a gas flame, a pot set over it as if she were making coffee. The sounds told him that her life continued with the door shut against him, and would continue after he was gone.

  Rain hammered the tarp above him, which sagged under the weight of water rapidly pooling in its middle, threatening to douse his already damp bedroll. He reached his hand up and pushed, bowing the plastic tarp. Water ran off it. A moment later, he felt the cold water soaking into the ground beneath him. He closed his eyes and wished himself elsewhere.

  Nothing like a wet bedroll to make a man long for a dry and comfortable place to sleep. He thought of his suite at the Hotel Lincoln, but this image led him to her again, shoving him out the door, and to what came next—the spooky figure sitting in the hotel lobby as he had checked out at 4:00 A.M., a gentleman in dark sunglasses, his face pitted with acne scars—why did they always have acne scars?—no doubt waiting for La Mazière. He asked the concierge to call him a taxi, then said he had to run back upstairs where he’d forgotten something, and instead went down to the basement. He exited through a fire door behind the hotel’s laundry room and skulked alleys to the rental car facility five blocks away.

  Forget the Hotel Lincoln, he thought as he again pushed water off his tarp. “It is an indignity to be chased around from hotel to hotel,” the little maharaja had said to him one evening at the Nacional lobby bar, after La Mazière suggested that the maharaja could get himself to Monte Carlo, where he wanted to relocate, without proper authorization, rather than wait for the visa the government of Monaco was reluctant to issue him. “Some people make a life,” La Mazière had responded, “of being chased from place to place.” Still, the maharaja was right. It was an indignity.

  He thought of his Paris apartment, in the Seventh Arrondissement. Its closets filled with naphthalene-redolent suits, fresh from the cleaners and protected in sheaths of filmy plastic, waiting patiently on cedar hangers. Which lucky one would he choose? This is a fantasy—he can select whichever he wants. Dark blue, made in Hong Kong, a fine summer wool. Just out of the bath, clean-shaven, hair with a daub of pomade, he removes the suit from its plastic and puts it on. Takes it for a walk down the Boulevard Saint-Germain.

  He parks himself at the Café de Flore, an outside table. Orders herring. A Pernod. Observes the girls. One, with her hair swept up in a patterned scarf, a lovely neck, Mediterranean skin, modestly curvy, good waist-to-hips ratio, and elegant hands. She’s pretending to read a book. He offers her a cigarette. Leans over with a lit match, breathing her perfume, then ignores her for a measured spell. He watches Sartre, sitting at a nearby table with his notebook, his eyes leering off in two different directions, the equivalent of looking at nothing. Sartre is with a couple of attractive women. He always is, despite his ugliness—or maybe because of it, some unique method of compensating for ugliness by being the first to declare it. La Mazière reads through the stack of newspapers he’s purchased at the kiosk on his way down the Saint-Germain, Le Figaro, Le Monde, Rivarol. Looks up, and what does he know? The girl with the elegant hands has moved to his table.

  He and she catch a matinee. It’s his habit to go to matinees whenever he’s in Paris. After the matinee they attend another “matinee,” at his place.

  As she dozes or pretends to, he gets up from the bed. Naked, he opens his windows to the fresh air, the sounds of rush-hour Paris. The sun is setting. There are a few high clouds now, fanning out and tinged in pink like quilt batting soaked in punch. Such mild weather. Hohenzollern weather, the officers at Wildflecken would have called it. The gauzy white curtains blow in, then get sucked out the windows and flap around. Announcing in their gauzy wind flap—what? That the gentleman standing nude at the window of 5B has just fulfilled a handful of duties that his noble heritage allows, and even requires. Walking a well-tailored suit down the Saint-Germain, drinking, smoking, lurking, and bedding working-class girls from the Café de Flore, who are always soft and amenable.

  But if his noble heritage ordains that he seek softness, he is also, and often, a man who sees a dirty hole in the ground and has to put his hand in it.

  “Your tarp, señor,” a rebel said when La Mazière arriv
ed in the mountain camp, handing him the moldy shower curtain.

  It still had the plastic loops meant for a pole mounted on a bathroom wall. He threaded a length of twine through the loops and propped the thing as best he could between two bushes. He slept on a hopscotch of sugar sacks under his open-sided “tent,” which barely protected him from incredible volumes of rain.

  Though he had never planned on staying, he’d done the right thing by going to Oriente. His suspicions about El Extraño, sweat-shiny as a greased pig, had been correct. El Extraño had taken the film reels La Mazière had given him, instructions for killing Batista, directly to the president. Prio’s men stormed the palace and found it stuffed with waiting SIM—the secret police—who ambushed, killing every last attacker, thirty men in all. Now they were attempting to snuff out Prio’s Directorio Revolucionario, and everyone remotely involved. Had La Mazière not left Havana when he did, the SIM would have picked him up. He’d saved his own life by departing, and for a destination that was untraceable. He’d rented a car under the name Chris Person and set out on the Carretera Central with an unfolded Esso map flapping around on the passenger seat.

  In Palma Soriano, a small town deep in Oriente Province, where the temperature was a good fifteen degrees hotter than in Havana, the sky somehow lower, the sun closer, the air so heavy with moisture it was more fish tank than greenhouse, he returned the car and waited at a dingy stucco motel for his pickup contact. He paid for a room, showered, and went to sit in the shade of the motel patio, which aproned a swimming pool ringed in algae. To his surprise, there was a group of people clustered on the far side of the pool. From the front, the motel reeked of lethargy and desertion. He hadn’t heard any voices from his room and figured there were likely few if any other guests. The group was absolutely silent, hovering in a semicircle around a camera on a tripod. It was aimed at two men dressed like Cuban rebels in army fatigues and M-26 armbands, except they looked possibly American, pale and clean-shaven. A microphone dangled above their heads. Nearby, a young blonde sat on an aluminum patio chair, having makeup applied.

  “Cut!” someone yelled.

  He wouldn’t have expected to encounter Americans, or film crews, this deep in rebel country, at the foothills of the Sierra Maestra, which rose dramatically just beyond town, checkpoints and roadblocks at every turnoff. The man who’d yelled “Cut!” waved to La Mazière.

  “Come on over,” he called, “if you insist on watching. My only rule is absolute quiet while we’re filming.”

  The man introduced himself, pronouncing his own name grandly, as if it would explain everything. It didn’t, and La Mazière immediately forgot it.

  “I’m an actor,” he said, when he saw the lack of recognition on La Mazière’s face. “A film of mine, The Big Boodle, is currently playing at theaters all over the island. Though I don’t recommend you see it.”

  “Oh, no?”

  “It isn’t a good film. And the theaters have all been bombed. Though perhaps a violent interruption of that sort might have improved the plot.”

  Her makeup complete, the blonde walked toward them. She was spry and leggy and didn’t seem much more than eleven or twelve years old. Her lips were painted trollop red. Her hair was teased up into a whipped confection, a giant meringue reaching for the stars, with pin curls like inverted question marks swooping down over her ears. And she wore the shortest shorts La Mazière had ever seen. As she bent over to tie her shoe in a manner that seemed oddly solicitous for a child, the shorts crept up to reveal quite a bit of slender, well-formed buttock.

  “This is Woodsie,” the actor said.

  She cracked her gum and nervously touched her hair in the manner women did when they’d just had something new and unfamiliar done to it at the salon.

  “What sort of thing are you shooting?” La Mazière asked, watching the girl.

  “A motion picture,” the actor said, “about the revolution. About these brave young people fighting for their freedom, and the women who are assisting them.”

  The actor seemed unable to speak without using an absurd Dictaphone voice, as if everything he said were being recorded for posterity.

  “The film is called Assault of the Rebel Girls. I wrote it myself. Originally, I planned to use actual rebel girls, but they weren’t quite, shall we say, Hollywood material. So I cast Woodsie.”

  “I’m the lead,” the girl said, fingering one of her pin curls. “Daddy says I’ll be a star. They’re going to know me in Hollywood. All over the place.”

  “Your father?”

  “Oh, please!” She jabbed La Mazière lightly in the rib cage. “My real father wouldn’t make me a star. My real father wouldn’t buy me a pair of shoelaces!”

  “We planned on using documentary footage,” the actor said, “but our cameraman had problems. A fire melted some of his equipment, and so we’ve set up our own rebel theater here in Palma Soriano. Restaging things, see, after the fact.”

  “After the fact? But the war is not over,” La Mazière said. “It’s far from over.”

  “Yes, that’s true, and this is part of what has made our project so interesting. More of an art film, really. I’m thinking we’ll take it to Cannes. It’s fiction, a faked version of a real war, and yet. And yet. It is taking place amid the real war, against it, as its own fictional backdrop. A war it depicts, against this very war. Yesterday a grenade bounced into our film set, and we all had to duck for cover. I have a rash. Manchineel bushes. Terrible itching, which has spread to certain places…very unpleasant, I assure you. Woodsie has a flesh wound.”

  The girl swung her long, tan leg up and held it in the air for La Mazière to inspect. A gauze bandage was taped around her calf, blood soaking through its crisscross weave.

  “We’ve thrust ourselves in war’s midst,” the actor said. “And only if you’ve been through it as we have, can you understand the terror of the hunted—”

  A film hand interrupted, informing the actor that there was a problem with their microphone. They would have to reconvene later in the day.

  “Woodsie, dear, you go to the room and take a nap,” the actor said. “I’ll have someone fetch you when it’s time for your scene.”

  She turned to La Mazière. “Nice meeting you,” she said, and cracked her gum for punctuation.

  The actor sighed and shook his head as he and La Mazière watched her skip off.

  “Young people need all the sleep they can get,” he said. “Ten, twelve hours a night. The heart at that age—it’s still growing.”

  He paused, as if lost in thought, and then added, in a voice more intimate and wistful than Dictaphone, “My Woodsie’s heart has quite a bit of growing to do. I don’t know what sort of thing you go in for, my friend, but children can be terribly cruel. I’ve spent many a night mending my bruised and oversized heart with whatever I can find. My Woodsie gives radiant joy, but then she takes it away.”

  The actor offered to buy him a drink. A daiquiri, he said, pronouncing it dye-quiry.

  “Meester Person! Meester Person!” the desk clerk called across the patio. “You have visitors.”

  His contacts, two rebels who waited in front in an idling jeep, had arrived just in time to spare him from a Dictaphone sermon at the motel bar. He gathered his things and checked out.

  Rain began to fall that afternoon, en route to the rebel camp. It only invigorated him, wet glancing on his face, green whirring past, the old familiar thrill of bumping along in a military vehicle bristling with weapons that his hosts, Hector and Valerio, two cheerful comandantes—captain and first lieutenant, respectively—had picked up from an abandoned army cache. Valerio expertly guided the jeep up steep, muddy roads, steering carefully around ruts as deep as the graves at Père-Lachaise, then gunned it to eighty kilometers per hour over washboard. La Mazière, impressed, asked who was supplying their vehicles. “Batista,” Valerio said, steering with his knee as he reached to wipe the windshield with a rag.

  The invigorating sprinkle turne
d to a heavy shower as they arrived in camp. The rain continued for several days, making the roads impassable. In addition, they were now blocked by the Rural Guard. Anyone who’d found his way into the mountains would not be finding his way out until further notice. La Mazière was trapped, the entire camp forced to wait out the rain. Hector and Valerio visited his tarp for long and competitive chess games, and rambling conversations about military strategy and the various women they’d each known. La Mazière would hear the two men’s exuberant woops echoing through the trees, their call, the mimic of a mockingbird’s, announcing they were on their way with one of the chess sets Valerio carved out of coconut fruit. Because they turned brown and limp within hours, Valerio was always working on a new set. He and Hector would crawl under La Mazière’s tarp, laughing, dripping wet, Hector booming, “El Francés! Today I will finally take your king.”

  One afternoon Hector said something about the girls in Havana working for the underground, that there were some hot ones willing to give a rebel his good-bye “gift” before he set off for the mountains. “And what a gift,” Hector said, grinning. “Those girls are professionals.” He could have meant any girl, there were scores in the underground, or he could have made it up, and yet La Mazière had an uncharacteristic moment of jealousy, wondering if Hector meant Rachel K. Hector was tall and good-looking, with soft pre-Raphaelite curls and large brown eyes. La Mazière resisted pressing for details. The second time it came up, he asked Hector if he had a particular girlfriend in the underground. No, Hector said. La Mazière was not comforted, and developed a strange attachment to Hector, simultaneously admiring and distrusting this handsome fellow who might be screwing his zazou.