Telex From Cuba

by Rachel Kushner

  For the most part, Comandante Stites was severe and serious. A good marksman and tidy draftsman of military graphs, who was not fond of loafing or resting. He rose before dawn, as did La Mazière. Stripped, as La Mazière stripped, both men diving into the mountain stream near camp, Stites athletically surging upstream, switching from crawl to backstroke in a stoic but companionable one-upmanship, La Mazière responding with a muscular butterfly technique. Stites would then follow suit and transition to butterfly, the two of them throwing their arms and shoulders forward, propelling themselves through the cold water with everything they had, relishing this predawn agreement between men.

  The way the American boy brooded and flipped his hair out of his eyes, occasionally reminded La Mazière of the rich and insolent American teenagers who showed up in Paris with their Swiss boarding school chaperones, lining up outside the Louvre, or occupying too many tables and ruining the ambience at the Café de Flore. But Comandante Stites meant business. The stakes for him were unique, and no doubt fueling his brooding focus. He clearly bore a grudge, perhaps not having outgrown the child’s play of breaking, or simply soiling, the law of the father. Comandante Stites seemed especially keen on having his father’s inner circle taken up to the mountains. Keen on having his father’s steak freezers raided, and cutting off his hometown’s telephone lines and water supply. As if the magnificent cane fire the boy had masterminded was not enough. His reputation had been built on that event, which had occurred just after La Mazière first arrived in the mountains. The other rebels revered the act as a grand sacrifice of the boy’s own paternal empire. La Mazière found it slightly more dubious. Oedipal battles must be waged carefully, not compulsively. Though who was he to say which really was bigger, the cosmos of infantile emotion, or the actual cosmos? Either way, the blaze made a devastating impact, more than the Americans likely realized. Fire, La Mazière knew, is alchemical. It changes everything. And long after it’s extinguished, a fire may continue to burn and corrode.

  The Preston and Nicaro abductions were successful. And quite fun, as it turned out. Rebel military posts became theatrical stages, everyone performing for the benefit of the captives and the American journalists who quickly followed. On the day a Life magazine correspondent arrived, La Mazière convened with several men behind a cluster of scrub pines and arranged for the men to crisscross the camp, changing shirts, removing a hat, donning a hat, grouped in different combinations—five men, seven men, and so forth—to create the impression that each time they appeared they were a new battalion passing through. The captives were split into small groups, which were easier to manage and guard. On Raúl’s orders, La Mazière went from unit to unit to supervise security. Some of these units, to his pleasant surprise, were commanded by women. Real women, who smiled and flirted. One was particularly good-looking, and when he saw her swinging hair, her open feminine gaze, smile dimples like two delicate divots in the surface of a pudding, he thought he might be able to engage in softer pleasures in the midst of the more stringent pleasures of war.

  He’d been surrounded by men and consumed with military tactics for the past five months, since he’d arrived that rainy afternoon in January, and he’d all but forgotten that intimacy and war occasionally coincided, if in a less than genteel manner. Of course, the Nazi joy division was a myth. One that served, like so many wartime myths, to allow for licentious fantasy under cover of redemptive guilt. There had been no roaming units of Aryan blondes, packed into wagons and delivered like milk. But there had been, of course, a soldier’s “droit du cuissage,” as La Mazière liked to think of it, one of the spoils of war. Over the grueling weeks he’d been trapped behind Russian lines, living like an animal and sleeping in the snow, there was an occasional farmer’s wife who gave herself freely while her husband was marched out back and pistol-whipped in a pig stall. He remembered one in particular, hoisting herself onto the kitchen counter and lifting her muddy skirts. It was a gamy union—this was the war, and bathing a dim memory—but an enjoyable union all the same. Gamy, after all, was sometimes a pleasure of its own. He had even chosen gamy on occasion. But the “base pastoral” of the kitchen-counter screw with the farmer’s wife could exist only as a lesser value, an inferior pleasure, because it had not been selected in lieu of other pleasures, other varieties of feminine grooming or lack thereof. The highest pleasures, he knew, were those for which he gave up another. Not pleasures of opportunity, but of sacrifice.

  The dimpled commander wore tight-fitting fatigues, her rifle strap bifurcating a decent-looking set, two mounds larger than his two hands could have cupped. Though any set, at that point, would have looked decent to him. When she grazed his arm with her own, he assumed it was a green light. He gestured to the woods, attempting to negotiate a discreet romp with this well-endowed commander. She became angry, almost hysterically so, yelling at him that she was of higher rank, and accusing him of demeaning her and betraying the democratic principles of the revolution, then marched off to “write up” the incident. As if an indispensable leader like himself was not immune to a petty write-up. He was utterly immune. Nonetheless, his heart sank. How disappointing, how tiresome, to be scolded by a woman. Who in any case was dressed like a man, and had suddenly transformed from a warm and receptive female to a power-mad shrew. The incident cast a dreary mood over him.

  He reminded himself that he could easily leave, trade in his hammock for a comfortable bed in the Seventh. Fly from Santiago to Port-au-Prince and then direct to Paris, and in three or four days’ time have all the female comforts he wanted. See Dalida, his Miss Egypt, her torpedo bra and long legs, the depression that gripped her in a manner he found fascinating, an interest that wasn’t quite empathy, but not cruelty, either. Something else, a brackish mixture of the two. Dalida suffered acute and sustained anxiety attacks that lasted several weeks and felt, she told him, “Like I’ve dropped something priceless and fragile, and it’s about to hit the floor and smash into a million pieces. There’s nothing I can do—I’ve already dropped it and it’s going to smash into a million pieces. That feeling. It’s just left my hands. It’s just left my hands.”

  On second thought, he could avoid Dalida. Not tell her he was back, and embark on simpler engagements. Lurk at the cafés and pick up working-class girls, bring them to his apartment, and eject them just as quickly, explaining that he looked forward to savoring the memory of their company as much as or more than he’d savored the company itself, offering his shopworn theory about passion necessitating absence.

  He thought of his indifferent and less predictable zazou. Of course, Hector hadn’t screwed her. La Mazière was simply falling prey to the pathetic notion that everyone must find her desirable because he did. But going to Havana to see her was out of the question. The SIM would put a bullet in his head. And anyway, he’d committed himself to this fugitive world, even if its women, with their prick-teasing attempts to humiliate him, were enough to make him long for an Englishman’s Kabuki drag queen. Even if these soldiers had not quite mastered the mystical potentials of violence, the gifts of merciless discipline, and still could not grasp the basic and vital concept of militiae species amor est—warfare as a kind of love, as Ovid had said. Ovid might have said the reverse, that love was a kind of warfare, but no matter. Both were true.

  The rebels controlled most of Oriente at this point. The central province of Las Villas was almost theirs. After its capital, Santa Clara, fell, they would make their push into Havana. Thousands and thousands of acres of sugarcane were burning. Buses and trains were burning. Every tobacco-curing shed in eastern Cuba was burning. He loved revolt. It was his favorite part of revolution. He had to stay, at least for the grand debouchment from the hills.

  Fidel Castro visited their camp one afternoon and delivered an impromptu speech about diet and nutrition. In times like this, Castro said, when camps were short on food—La Mazière’s had had none the past two days—it was important to remember that termites were edible. But terribly bitter,
La Mazière discovered, when the unit commander ordered the cook to prepare a batch to please Castro. The bitterness of a hundred Fernet-Brancas converging in one spot on the back of his tongue. He covertly spit them out and suggested they borrow a cow from the local campesinos, to be paid back after their triumph. Three rebels set off on this task, but all they managed to rustle up was an emaciated colt. They tied the rangy colt to a post, and it was La Mazière who had to put the thing out of its rangy misery. He shot it and hung it upside down, explaining that this was preferred, so the juices from the head would not drain into their meat. He held a butchering clinic. Skin it warm, but wait for the body to properly cool before cutting. Make one vigorous slice into the armpit, and yank the shoulder. Like this, see, away from the carcass. To remove the round, we locate—here—the ball-and-socket joint that connects the leg to the pelvis. Sever the joint with staccato knife strokes. The neck, by the way, is wonderful for jerky, if you like that sort of thing.

  As the horse meat was broiled, Castro and La Mazière sat in the shade and chatted, watching the men cook and bring order to the camp. It was understood that neither Castro nor La Mazière were men who did chores. Both had graceful, uncalloused hands, with trimmed, clean fingernails. La Mazière kept a paper clip in his pocket for this purpose. To have dirt under his fingernails was to lose his sense of self, as he had discovered in that miserable Russian prison, where his paper clip was confiscated.

  The meal that evening, like all their meals, was egalitarian in character, everyone sitting together, officers of the highest rank taking their share last. But in this performance of equality, La Mazière knew, his and Castro’s separate and far higher status was all the more preserved.

  Late that night, La Mazière heard a rustling of his plastic tarp. He opened one eye but didn’t stir. Castro lay down beside him, quietly, carefully. The camp was silent, soldiers all sleeping, the only sound the rhythmic stridulations of insects.

  For a long time, Castro was still and said nothing. La Mazière lay there, in the humid bosom of night, moonless and black, sensing the commander’s concentration, his restive and alert mind discerning the shape of La Mazière’s own alert mind.

  “Mazière,” Castro finally said.

  “Yes.”

  And then Castro was upon him. In one simple roll, the heavy weight of his body over La Mazière’s. A thin, scratchy blanket between them. He smelled the faint scent of garlic on Castro’s breath. His beard was softer than La Mazière would have expected, though he wasn’t generally in the business of expecting beards. He felt a vague throbbing, not his own. It was Castro’s. A pulsing that was unmistakable, persistent, but then again calm. As if they both understood that there was no need to attend to it, this critical mass of blood, a throbbing, and that they would let it throb against La Mazière, who lay on his back under Castro, and under the plastic tarp, no sound except the drone of insects.

  Some secrets cannot be said but only sung, like those of La Mazière’s ancestors, the great troubadours of medieval France, who sang the secret heresies and chronicles of the Church of Love, which no one dared speak out loud. Some secrets cannot be said but only danced, like those of the rumba, the licentious dance that Batista kept threatening to outlaw. Other secrets, La Mazière knew, must be felt, and faintly. As possibility, and nothing more.

  At some point Castro’s secret throbbing may have become two throbbings. But it can be difficult to discern what is one’s own and what is another’s. As in first aid training at Wildflecken, when La Mazière had learned never to take a pulse with his thumb, which has its own pulse.

  In that position, they, or at least he, began to feel the promise of muffled, guerrilla sleep, a deep animal space where no person could follow, not even a man lying upon him.

  The light above you blinks red, La Mazière had told the soldiers.

  The light blinks red. Keep your eye on the blinking light. When it stays red, drop into the black.

  He began drifting.

  Don’t think about it. Look at the red light.

  When it stays red, drop into the black.

  Look at the red, and drop in the black.

  Drop in the black.

  He did.

  When he woke the next morning, Castro and his retinue were gone.

  19

  They let him go after only five days on account of his migraine headaches, and yet Tip Carrington did not feel free. They were kidnapped, true. But all he and the others had to do, all day long, day after day, was laze in hammocks. Chew horse jerky, which wasn’t half bad. In fact, it was rather delicious. Play chess and smoke cigars. Raúl had announced to them and to the world, via Radio Rebelde, that he’d brought them to the hills so they could contemplate the effects of Batista’s bombs—purchased, Raúl stressed, from the U.S. government and dropped from American planes that refueled at Guantánamo, an American military base.

  Raúl gave the kidnappees liquor, which the rebels themselves didn’t touch. And he threw them a Fourth of July pig roast, a regular bash. During the pig roast, a drunk and sunburned George Lederer practiced fast draw with the Cubans, shattering coconuts. After that the Cubans called him “Desperado” and let him wear a holster with a loaded gun.

  They were divided into little groups. Carrington was placed with Hubert Mackey and a Mr. LaDue—an agronomist from Preston whom Carrington had known only vaguely before their capture. An armed guard watched them at all times, or at least most of the time: a lovely mulatta with a perfect inverted-heart ass.

  Carrington worked on the guard for several days. Because he was a native speaker, and Mackey and this LaDue were nonspeakers, nothing but sí and no, they badgered him to try to negotiate a release. Carrington figured that Mackey and LaDue didn’t really want him to negotiate their release. Displaying some effort was a formality, to confirm that the situation was out of their hands.

  He showered the guard with every manner of flirtation he had in his arsenal, mirroring her funny Oriente singing-style Spanish, trying this and that, aloof or pandering.

  “What’s she saying?” Mackey would ask. “Tell her we’re willing to speak to the Government Services Administration. The State Department. Tell her we’ll get a letter to Eisenhower, for Christ’s sake.”

  “You seem Andalusian to me,” Carrington relayed to the guard, Mackey listening intently to what he assumed was a translation of his message. “Your features, they’re so delicate.”

  “Tell her we’ll do what we can to stop the refueling,” Mackey said. “Promise whatever they want, and we’ll deal with it later.”

  “Aren’t you overheated in those heavy fatigues?” Carrington translated. “Why don’t we lose these two jerks and take a swim? There’s a stream up here, I’ve seen it on nickel company maps.”

  The guard giggled and shook her head.

  “What, you don’t swim? I will teach you! I was a lifeguard in college.”

  She was finally warming to him just the tiniest bit—enough to give him hope to carry on with his campaign—when one of Raúl’s lieutenants told Carrington they were letting him go.

  “You’re a free man,” the lieutenant said.

  “Why me?”

  “Because of the headaches. Raúl feels it isn’t right to hold an ill man captive.”

  Carrington had detected the headache coming on the day they’d been taken. A building and convergence of telltale signs: the tunneling vision, a sensation that ice crystals were forming just inside the top of his skull, then melting painfully away. By the time he and the others were riding into rebel territory, their hands bound with twine, Carrington was succumbing to a full-blown migraine. A species of gloriously awful headache he’d suffered, in times of stress, for most of his life.

  No matter. He’d enjoyed the cigars and horse jerky and the heart-shaped ass, even if he’d had to lie still for several days, a damp cloth over his forehead, his vision interrupted by spooling white patterns. The rebels had made him a special comfy headache bed with extra padding
and pillows. And the episode itself wasn’t nearly as bad as others he’d endured. Like when he and Blythe and the girls were chased out of Bolivia, the British crackpot who ran the mine threatening to dynamite it clear into the sky so that, he’d declared, “no one would have it.” As a driver sped them to the airport in Sulaco, Carrington had become convinced he was a monkey yoked from the neck up in a hole cut into the center of a dinner table, Asian men eating from his head with special utensils. A monkey in a table, and yet a woman nagged at him from somewhere nearby: “Welcome to your lousy life. I said it was coming down and you didn’t believe me! Too busy carrying on with some whore—”

  He was feeling much better, Carrington told the rebel lieutenant who’d come to announce his freedom. Much better indeed.

  “So you can make the trip down the Cristal no problem,” the lieutenant said.

  “I suppose so, yes.”

  Regret was rising in him, but he couldn’t say wait, I want to remain a hostage, please—

  “We’ll send you in a jeep for part of the way. With a guide. You’ll have to walk the rest.”

  “Rosa?” Carrington asked, perking up.

  “No, no. Rosa stays in camp, guarding the others.”

  Two days into captivity, Rosa left them unwatched in order to tend to some emergency.

  Mackey and LaDue decided to start a signal fire, hoping someone would see it. Maybe one of Batista’s pilots, in one of the American planes that thundered overhead now and then.

  LaDue turned out to be just as incorrigibly square as Mackey. Both of them were industrious Boy Scout types. They’d gotten their fire lit right away, then excitedly run off to collect more brush to keep it going.