“Only green kindling!” Mackey had shouted. “Better for smoke!”
As if being commanded by an alien voice, his own, but so much more gruff and assertive, Carrington had lifted the damp cloth from his eyes, risen from his bedroll, walked over, and dumped dirt on their signal fire. Then he quickly laid down again and replaced the eye cloth.
He was lying still, a sick man, a migraine sufferer, when LaDue returned with a handful of kindling.
“Dern it!” LaDue said. “Dag-dern it! Hubert, our fire is out!”
Carrington heard the brush of a body against leaves on the path. Rosa, returning.
He had been left to walk part of the way down the Cristal, just as the lieutenant had warned him. Scratched by brambles and covered with mosquito bites, he was on a mining road that led straight into Nicaro. The town was below him. Safe, American, twinkling. He could see the yellow glow of nighttime windows, the tiny white lights on the processing plant, the blinking red signals on the smokestacks. The signals were red at night and white in the daytime, blinking to warn planes of their existence. He could feel the mist from the bay on his unshaven face, hear the sound of the smokestacks spewing their thick columns of dust.
Then he was under the oak trees that lined the managers’ row, and the whoosh of dust pushed from the chimneys was louder, the mist wetter. He’d never noticed how odd the oak trees were, there in the middle of a jungle. Someone’s idea of home-away-from-home. Not his. He would have advised something local, algarroba or tamarind. But he hadn’t been in on the construction of Nicaro. That was 1942, and they were living in—he couldn’t recall, exactly. Lima, perhaps.
He could see his own driveway, the Cadillac parked in it, a kind of nudity right there in front of the house, reminding everyone of his troubles, the public accusation that the car was not rightfully his. It wasn’t, but lots of things in Preston and Nicaro didn’t rightfully belong to the people who owned them. The problem was the paper trail he’d left.
All the lights were on in the house. He cut around the side of the Lederers’ place, wanting to see his whole house, take it in somehow, before going inside. Three weeks he’d been away. His return was inevitable, so why not resist it for a moment? When a romance was called off, usually by him, there was no reason not to sleep with the girl one last time. One or two or three last times, because the affair was officially over. And when he’d finally succeeded in seducing someone, there was no reason not to put her off. Because she was now guaranteed to submit. Inevitability always produced this in him, a juvenile instinct to stall and resist.
He walked across the Lederers’ backyard and into his own, pushing through the hibiscus bushes that divided the two properties. The sound of crunching foliage and snapping branches was loud enough that if someone were on the back veranda, or listening carefully from inside, he would have been heard.
He walked across the damp grass and stood behind the stout trunk of a bottle palm, looking into the windows of his own house.
The curtains were open, and he could see into the dining room. Dinner had been cleared away. Lights hanging from a fixture over the table blazed into the empty room.
They had all been drunk that afternoon. Not just he and Blythe.
Getting into the Mollie and Me for the trip back to Nicaro, he wasn’t even sure why they’d gone to Preston. Just a lot of stingers and shouting and something about the Stites boy’s birthday, which was elsewhere, but Malcolm Stites ran things, and so the festivity of his brat’s birthday party soaked in like a stain and everybody was at the Pan-American Club for an occasionless afternoon of living it up.
Malcolm Stites’s other son, the older one, was in the mountains somewhere, fighting with the rebels. A fact that had seemed perverse, almost astounding, until Carrington got up there and learned that there were all sorts of American boys volunteering. Six teenagers from Guantánamo had robbed weapons from an armory on the base and made a run for it. And there were foreigners helping to train various units. Soldiers from a nearby camp had come through one day. There was a Frenchman with them who seemed to be in charge, slightly shifty and moreover an annoyance, as Carrington got the distinct feeling that Rosa was flirting with the guy. I’m your hostage, he’d thought, and asked her in a weak voice for a glass of water, emphasizing his special needs as a migraine sufferer.
Carrington had behaved himself for the most part that afternoon at the Pan-American Club. There were no appealing women to ogle, much less seduce, just sexless Preston matrons rouged like corpses and stinking of baby powder. The exclusive Pan-American Club, no Cubans allowed, nothing but dowdy white women, the older ones in hats crusted with what looked like candy and cockatoo feathers bobbing as they nodded their heads, minding everyone else’s business, gossiping about this or that. About him. Did you hear? Playing it off with that phony name. His mother-in-law’s, apparently. Well, I’d certainly call that liberal. I mean really stretching it, taking your mother-in-law’s name!
Blythe had been drunk, but for once not overly drunk. On the ride home, the two of them had sat together on one of the yacht’s banquettes. Like a regular couple, a married couple, people who choose to be in proximity.
“You’re sunburned,” he’d said, touching her shoulder, making a colorless thumbprint that reflushed a painful bluish-pink.
“And you’re as dark as Roosevelt,” she replied, flicking her cigarette butt off the side of the boat.
Carrington looked at his arm.
“Roosevelt—may I remind my pale and lovely wife?—is a Negro. And hey, look on the bright side. If you’d married a Negro, they would have figured it out a hell of a lot sooner.”
They all knew, but still he felt that he was waiting for the other shoe to drop. Not sure what it would mean that they knew. It might mean nothing.
What would mean something was the embezzlement charge. A silly thing, really, just a car. Just one Cadillac he’d bought with company funds. I’ll return it, okay? Be punished, possibly serve a little time in some white-collar facility. But there was more, a lot more, and he had to keep pushing the more out of his mind so he could stand on this one charge and feel honest with himself. That’s what truth was. Establishing a truth in your mind, and declaring this truth to everyone else. If the truth he declared mirrored what he saw and felt inside, then it was true, period. And the more the others accused him of lying, the easier it would be to insist on his honesty. Because then it was no longer about denying one niggling detail, it was about defending character, and any man will defend his own character no matter what he’s done.
It was just a car and he’d been planning on returning it, he was rehearsing silently on that boat ride home from the Pan-American Club. Cold began pinging under the top of his skull. Ice crystals forming, and then melting painfully away. Just one car that he’d been planning on returning.
From his station behind the bottle palm, he heard a door slam inside the house.
“¡No me puedes decir lo que hacer!”
It sounded like Pamela. Her voice and Val’s weren’t easy to distinguish, but only Pamela would speak to their mother in Spanish.
“Fine!” Blythe Carrington yelled back. “I won’t tell you what to do. What’s the use? You seem to think you know. But you don’t. You don’t know anything.”
So everyone still existed. His life still existed. It had simply gone on without him.
“I know some things, Mother. I know we were chased from the last place and the one before it. It’s happening here. Luís says the rebels are going to win. And I know that you and Daddy live a lie.”
“I’ve got news for you, Pamela: it isn’t a lie anymore. Not after you told The New York Times reporter that your father—I mean ‘Señor Guzman’—is Cuban.”
His daughter had outed him in The New York Times? Carrington wasn’t opposed to children. Not to the general idea of them or even his own. They certainly had a talent for broadcasting whatever the parent suppressed, and maybe that was as it should be. You paid up front
with children, to see what came next. If they stabbed you in the back, set the nest on fire, chances were you deserved it.
“You blame me for telling the truth! Should I lie, Mother? Is that what you’re saying? We should all lie, that’s best? Just because you’re a racist. You and Daddy both—”
“Daddy and I have tried to get by and keep him employed so you and your sister—both of you are spoiled rotten, by the way—can continue burning through the money he makes. You think they would have hired a Cuban engineer in Nicaro? You’ve been taking something if you say yes. Because they would never have given him a job. You’re an ungrateful brat going through a phase, and I won’t tolerate it. It’s enough to make me want to defend the bastard.”
“I’m not talking to you anymore, Mother. Why don’t you go fix yourself a drink?”
He could hear it all so clearly. It was like his wife and daughter were actors on a stage, performing for his benefit. And how peculiar it was that he, their secret audience, could so easily step from behind the bottle palm, walk up to the back porch, to the servants’ entrance, and suddenly and irreversibly enter this scene.
The ease of it froze him. He couldn’t move and didn’t dare. It would only take a second, the simplest of gestures, to enter the house and end his sabbatical. Be found instead of missing.
“You go ahead and ruin your goddamn life. Marry him, for all I care. But don’t come crying to me about your cunt-addicted Latin husband.”
“Not every Cuban man is Daddy,” Pamela yelled back. “That’s your own special problem.”
Suddenly Blythe was standing in the dining room under the blazing lights, still as a mannequin. Carrington had been listening and not looking. It seemed almost as if she’d been there for a while and he hadn’t noticed. She was looking in the direction of the kitchen. What was she looking at?
The house was quiet now. She turned, walked slowly up to the large plate window that faced the backyard, and gazed out.
She was looking right at him!
He froze. But then he realized that the lights were all on, and she probably couldn’t see him. She probably couldn’t see much at all, other than the glare of the lights on the glass.
She would only see him if she turned out the dining room lights. Funny how that was the case. That she’d have to put herself in darkness in order to see.
He stepped from behind the bottle palm and stood facing the house, no tree or shrub between him and the window where his wife stood. He was wearing a white shirt, the same white shirt he’d been wearing since the day he was kidnapped, and despite its filth it was picking up the moonlight and glowing like radium. If she turned out the lights, she’d see him plain as day.
If she wanted to see him, it was all she had to do—turn off the lights.
Keep the lights on, she would not.
She gazed out the window.
What felt like a great deal of time passed. A half hour, an hour, he wasn’t sure, him staring at her and her staring back, still as a mannequin, her face close to the glass.
And then it occurred to him: she was looking at her own reflection.
She stared at the glass and Carrington stared back. Blythe, I’m right here. I’m back. They let me go on account of the migraines.
He put his hand up, palm out. He wasn’t sure of the meaning of this sign. Peace, or hello, or no hard feelings.
She’ll turn out the lights if she wants to see me.
It would have been that simple. Just turn them out.
It was all she had to do.
PART FOUR
20
“Our life here isn’t particularly violent,” Mrs. LaDue said, after Mrs. Billings made the comment that it was.
The LaDues, the Billings, and most of the other Americans were at the Pan-American Club. This was December of 1958, near the end of this in-between era, after the Spanish ate the parrots to extinction, and before the Russians brought Marxism along with their smoked pig’s fat. Built brutalist architecture and ran the nickel plant.
“I’m not saying there isn’t violence,” Mrs. LaDue continued. “But violence and violent—those are different. It’s the difference between incident and intent.”
Some features of this era: Georgian estates in sugarcane fields, saltwater swimming pools reflecting tessellated rectangles of sunlight, and an open-air movie theater with love seats in the back row.
Although there was the plantation boss, Mrs. LaDue remembered—Hatch Allain. A decent man, really, even if it’s true there was a killing connected to him. It seems he did it, she remembered; that was the connection. But that was in Louisiana and a long time ago. And Mr. Flamm the paymaster was killed, true enough. But that was the blacks, and their love of chopping people up with those horrific machetes they carry around. They really do look like savages, and it’s the strangest thing to hear them speaking French—
Also in this era, after the Spanish, who cooked their parrots so slowly they remained alive as they were pulled from the oven, and before the Russians, who took the scrubbers off the chimneys and let the red dust rain down: Batista with a secret cavity behind a palace wall. The Fuck Room, he called it, though not in mixed company. An aristocrat’s mausoleum with an elevator to the “basement.” And the addition of cheval-de-frise—jagged pieces of bottle glass in brown, green, and clear—mortared into the tops of the low walls around the Spanish colonial buildings, to prevent vagrants from sitting.
Mrs. Billings said loudly, for everyone in the club to hear, that she was sick of all the violence.
“To here,” she slurred, and put her hand up to her neck.
She’d wanted to leave for some time now, but her husband resisted. They all did. No job in the States would pay them like the nickel company paid them, they said. Or make them mining executives despite the fact that none of them had Ph.D.’s. Or give them enormous ranch-style homes, enroll their children in private school, on the company tab. No salary in the States would buy a staff of seven servants. Where’s the company yacht, her husband asked her, when we’re living in a midwestern shithole?
Also in this era, before the Russians and their brutalist apartments, and after the parrots, who looked up from the dinner plates as their wings were sawed off with serrated knives: a supply of what are called black pineapple grenades—philological proof of destruction’s devotion to the tropics.
The Americans who hadn’t gone to the Pan-American Club that evening were at home. Some watching television, others listening to the faith healer as he made his bootleg radio broadcast. His was the only program on this time of night. Unless you wanted to listen to the rebels, which few Americans did. The rebels, too, broadcast illegally, from their camp up in the mountains. Bearded ruffians who instructed people to burn sugarcane. Who announced, in advance, their own victory.
Mrs. Billings was drunk, as everyone was, most of the time. She was not a person to be taken seriously, the type of woman who bleaches her hair and then dyes it dark again, to get that coarse, ratted, bedroom effect.
“I said I’m sick of all the violence,” she repeated. Then she started an argument with her husband. Some women are very skilled at that. As soon as he began to fight back, she dropped her drink on the floor as a diversion.
A constant in all three eras: syphilis, tobacco, and trees with fruit whose flesh was the pink of healthy mucus membranes, a fruit that smelled like women’s shampoo.
“Put a glass on the radio and my voice will serenade it,” the faith healer told listeners. Those who were lucky enough to go to the studio had their water serenaded with the beam of his green plastic flashlight. “Buy lottery tickets with numbers ending in six. In four. In zero. Drink the agua serenada before you go to sleep.” It was a procedure for winning the lottery. The week before, the finance minister had won the lottery and used the money to buy a house in West Palm Beach. It seemed he expected to be relocating sometime soon.
“Why aren’t we relocating?” Mrs. Billings asked her husband.
“Beca
use we haven’t won the lottery,” he answered drily.
It was almost Christmastime, and there were humans hanging in the trees beyond the security fence. Mrs. Billings had put up a cheerful breadfruit sapling in the living room—the refrigerated shipment of Virginia pine had not been able to get through because the bandits had blocked the roads eastward. She decorated the breadfruit tree with strings of tiny lights and hollow metallic balls and sang “Jungle Bells” and other carols with the children.
Local fragrances, in addition to the flesh-pink shampoo fruit: the feminine traces that lingered in the powder room of the Pan-American Club (Arpège, Fibah, and Colony), and the fetid jungle breath beyond the club’s meticulous gardens (rot, rot, and rot).
The faith healer had been condemned by Batista. Superstition was bad for the country’s image. What they needed was to modernize, to at least appear modern, and thereby regain the confidence of the ultramodern United States, whose support for his presidency was eroding. Batista accused the faith healer of feeding listeners false hope, like baby food, like liquor, a set of baroque and empty promises. He didn’t realize that the faith healer was working in his favor, that faith kept everyone happy, or at least preoccupied. Too busy hoping to be cured of debt, malnutrition, and broken hearts to cause any trouble.
After the business of dropping her drink, Mrs. Billings felt somewhat calmer. She said to her husband in a defeated voice, “I wish everybody would just be quiet. It’s too much. All this talk of phosphorus and ammonia. I can’t keep it straight—what we have, what they have. I’m not a goddamned chemist.”
Telex From Cuba Page 28