Telex From Cuba

by Rachel Kushner

  I asked Daddy if we would visit Mr. Bloussé. Didn’t he live in Le Cap? Daddy looked at me and said, “Who?”

  My entire childhood, this figure loomed large, I mean mythical, in the jodhpurs, the cuff links, the slicked hair. Adventurous and elegant Mr. Bloussé, who spoke a French that anyone could understand, the pronunciation was so refined, who arranged for so many workers to come over and cut the cane, brought bottles of cognac to Daddy, entertained us with grand tales, always followed by that mysterious boy who ended up working for the Lederers. And the Great Scandal of Bloussé’s colored family.

  How could Daddy forget? He brushed me off, and the subject was dropped. Over the weeks we were in Haiti, I wandered the port at Le Cap, watching men unloading the ships that came and went. They were the darkest people I’d ever seen. Their sweat-coated faces shone like black patent leather. And they had these strange haircuts, everything shaved but a tuft on top of their heads, like we were in tribal Africa. I walked the narrow streets, past wrecked mansions that had been built by the French in the eighteenth century, before the blacks deposed them, ripped the white from the flag and left only the blue and the red. I couldn’t get Mr. Bloussé out of my mind. I kept picturing scenes from the stories he told in our parlor. The native voodoo practices, human sacrifice, and ceremonies presided over by an adolescent who was dressed half man, half woman, in a top hat and tails and lace skirts. I suppose it was a hermaphrodite, but I wouldn’t have understood that as a child. People planting a lemon tree at the gate to protect their house from yellow fever. And one fellow who asked Mr. Bloussé to bring him an almanac from Paris. Mr. Bloussé did. He gave this guy an almanac and the fellow hid it from his village and declared he was controlling the sky. “There will be a lunar eclipse on October thirteenth. The sun will set at seven fifty-nine on Thursday. A blue moon will appear in July.” And they all think he’s a god on earth, dictating the heavens.

  The life of this exotic gentleman, Mr. Bloussé, seemed dashing and sophisticated, and also savage. It fascinated me. Mr. Bloussé was Haiti. They were the same thing, and I felt him everywhere.

  27

  La Mazière told himself there was a chance it wasn’t Rachel K. Batista probably had dozens of mistresses.

  He had more than dabbled in this revolution, but he was so much less vulnerable than she. It was a war he engaged in lightly, almost anonymously, and then slipped away, sure that no one would miss him. Now was the time for nationals, not Frenchmen. He understood that for her it was not a game. She was betraying Batista, and moreover, she was disposable. When boys had been murdered by the Rural Guard in Santiago, their mothers flooded the town plaza, demanding justice. In Havana, when a student disappeared, his parents rushed to radio CMQ, where they waited to go on the air and call his name, pleading for his safe release. No one would have called her name or pleaded for her release.

  If something had happened to her, he’d go back to Paris as soon as he could get a flight. The Pan Am office in the lobby of the Nacional was still open, but the airport, a clerk told him, was closed for security until after Carlos Prio arrived later in the evening. Only one terminal was functioning. The other had been torched.

  He left the hotel, walking in the direction of La Rampa and Rachel K’s apartment.

  Certainly his reasons for wanting to see her, for hoping she was unharmed, were selfish and narcissistic. But love was both.

  Six years earlier, just after he’d met her, on a trip to Africa he’d watched women wading into the Pink Lake of Dakar with salt pans balanced on their heads. A blissful scene, and yet he’d been unable to truly enjoy the silver opacity of the salty lake, the women nude from the waist up, dipping their pans in the water, because he’d felt a nagging emptiness. “Greetings,” he’d written her, “from the banks of nowhere,” not having realized that nowhere was anywhere she wasn’t. He wasn’t sure if it was the special fate of wounded dreamers or simply what it meant to be alive that he hadn’t understood this until it was perhaps too late. His mind was riddled with remote compartments, like the caves at Lascaux that could be entered only by lowering oneself, dangerously, with ropes, the walls inscribed with nonsensical images of men with erections and bird masks, bison with their guts spilling out. He wanted to see his own birdmen and bison, whatever form they took, and had always told himself love was banal comfort that didn’t lead to any cave, any recess of understanding. It was a mutilation of character that prevented men from reaching greatness, and should be kept minor. Little passions, as insignificant as little deaths, as the French called climax.

  The streets were ghostly. The strike had worked surprisingly well. Soldiers had ridden through the city announcing Castro’s message through bullhorns, and aside from a group of boys attacking a pay telephone with baseball bats, La Mazière saw few people.

  He walked quickly, suddenly convinced that Rachel K might be the key to something, never mind that the idea of a person as a key was ludicrous sentimentality.

  She’d proven herself to be arbitrary and mysterious, even unkind. There were times when he’d appeared, unannounced, and she’d acted as though she wasn’t pleased to see him. Such a love object was no banal comfort. What if he and she could sustain their distance, but in proximity? Veil each other in lovely deceits, and put off the bewildering but highly likely possibility that love’s true object was absence?

  My Woodsie gives radiant joy.

  The ice cream parlors on La Rampa were closed. The movie theaters as well, their marquees dark. He turned right onto Calle G, her street. She could be the one murdered, he knew, and he better be prepared.

  He was so close now.

  Little deaths.

  There was only one death, and it was grand.

  He saw the legs, painted in their prison chain link, dangling from the balcony of her apartment. That crisscross ink, smearable, but perfect and unsmeared.

  The legs swung slowly back and forth, as if she were lolling her feet off a boat dock.

  He tried to subdue his elation. He had responsibilities, after all, a certain role to play.

  He called up to her. “Excuse me—miss?”

  She leaned over between the rails of the balcony, blood rushing to her Manouche Gypsy or German Jewish face, the blond hair flopping forward.

  She smiled, said nothing.

  “I just thought I’d let you know that if you’re waiting on the parade, it isn’t until tomorrow.”

  He was calm now, his cool and regular self.

  “But I’m enjoying the other parade,” she said.

  “Is that so.”

  “The invisible parade. Empty streets, silence. Would you like to come up and watch?”

  Her apartment was as messy as ever, a joyful mess. “They left me in a room for a long time,” she told him. “Suddenly a guard comes and yanks me up and escorts me out. That’s it, I’m free. But it’s strange, because I don’t know why I got off so easily.”

  “I know what you mean.” La Mazière thought of his own unforeseen amnesty, the yellow telex. He’d been thrilled, of course, even if his prison was not the worst. He’d been allowed to exit in street clothes, no escort, no handcuffs. When the prison gates slammed shut behind him, he’d stood under a sky so much more brilliant than he’d imagined that it was too bewildering to enjoy. He hadn’t been prepared for the blue of the sky, how stunning it was.

  “¡GRACIAS A FIDEL! ¡VIVA LA REVOLUCIÓN!” someone shouted from below her window, guiding cheers with a bullhorn. A chorus of voices joined in.

  She’d been a brave and crucial part of the underground. Fidel had sent a message that there’d be a place for her in his revolution. She hoped so, she told La Mazière, because the casinos and cabarets were closed. No one knew when or if they’d reopen. Thousands of people were out of work.

  The United Fruit executive cabled her from Haiti. He’d secured her an apartment in Cap-Haïtien and wanted her to go to the Nacional and retrieve valises full of Cuban pesos he’d left hidden in the closets of his su
ite. Sew the larger denominations into her clothing, he’d written—hide them wherever women hide things—and get on a plane. CAN’T WAIT. STOP. LIKE OLD TIMES. STOP.

  But it wasn’t like old times. A week after she got his letter, the executive’s paper money was worth almost nothing. Castro had named Che Guevara finance minister, inciting panic among businessmen and a run at the banks. The peso plummeted. Prio, who had arrived in Havana on January 7, the same day as La Mazière, fled back to Miami on January 9, when Fidel announced he would expropriate Prio’s country estate and convert it to an asylum for albinos, who desperately needed above all else shade, Fidel announced, from the incinerating tropical sun.

  The morning after Prio left, Rachel K had been summoned to Fidel’s headquarters at the Hilton. La Mazière was in her apartment drinking coffee and reading about the ex-ex-president’s departure. Poor Prio, outraged and already condemning Castro, whom he’d helped bring to power. But there was a limit to La Mazière’s sympathy. Toppling governments was not without risks. Prio losing his artificial waterfall was nothing compared to the guillotine.

  She returned with an odd expression that La Mazière took for disappointment. Whatever place Fidel had planned for her in his revolution, La Mazière assumed it was a letdown, one that he had been waiting for. He figured she would come around to his own cynical feelings about the promises of revolution. Why couldn’t he just enjoy the flux and tumult of sweeping change? Of history? He did enjoy it, in his own way. He had attended the public trials at the Sports Palace, entertained by the spectacle and ruthlessness of popular justice. That Castro was giving the Americans a run for their money—that was good, quite good. That they’d probably try to invade the Dominican Republic and knock off Trujillo—interesting, a bold tactical move. But logic was absent elsewhere. Castro, for instance, hosting a cookout for the new revolutionary air force at La Cabaña fortress, offering as barbecue a twenty-thousand-dollar breeding bull.

  He clasped her face in his hands and said that whatever it was they’d offered her—a job in a lightbulb factory is what he pictured, an ignoble and ridiculous bit part in their drably populist scheme—she shouldn’t worry, that he and she could leave together.

  “How would you like to go to Paris?” he asked. “You’ve never been there.”

  “I’ve never been anywhere,” she said.

  Then he should take her to France, he announced.

  He pictured her on the Boulevard Saint-Germain in her fishnets and heels, carrying her parasol on the Boulevard Saint-Michel, near the Sorbonne, a phantom conjuring of zazou in the birthplace of zazou.

  I’ll take her, he thought, to the Café de Flore, let her see the place for herself. Let her open the windows of my apartment onto twilit Paris. She’ll stand there, watching the curtains flap around in the wind, moody and graceful apparitions, announcing in their movement—what?

  That a certain Christian de La Mazière, occupant of 5B, has detained one final zazou. And if the rest of Paris wants to see her, wave hello or good-bye, all they have to do is look up.

  She responded with only an inscrutable, luminous smile. Everything in her room seemed to glow with meaning—her eyes like a silent screen star’s, the synthetic strands of a wig splayed on the floor.

  The river of his thoughts flowed around her and the glowing objects in the room.

  My Woodsie gives radiant joy.

  “Paris,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “Why would I want to go to Paris?”

  “To see the world.”

  But, she said, he talked about “the world” as if it were all relative—no place and anyplace. Greetings, as he put it, from nowhere. This place, Cuba, was where she was from. It was all she knew, and she had no intention of leaving it. She’d spoken to Castro, and just as he’d promised, he’d reserved a special place for her in his revolution.

  “Whatever it is, you can’t possibly believe that—”

  She was staying, she said. She added, in a gentle but imperious tone, that he might send her a card from his travels.

  28

  2004: Tampa

  I have a bottle of cognac here, among the boxes that house Daddy’s prized liquor collection from Preston. I ended up with the crates of crème de menthe and the little glass bears filled with kümmel. There’s an entire case of Bacardi—the original Bacardi, made in Cuba, not like the fake stuff they put out now, which is made in Puerto Rico. The old Bacardi bottles are the size and shape of softballs, with nubby-textured glass and ruffle-edged bottle caps like on bottles of cola.

  A whole case of the Bacardi, and I’ve never once dipped into any of it.

  I don’t think of it as something meant to be drunk, but a relic like all the other relics of our life in Cuba that I keep in this room, my den here in Tampa.

  Del didn’t express much interest in Mother and Daddy’s stuff. The older son flies the coop. It’s a classical model. The younger one stays in the nest, his mother’s boy. After Mother and Daddy died, I put everything in here. Del said he would come up and have a look but he never has, even though he lives on Marco Island, a two-and-a-half-hour drive.

  Mother kept immaculate records of our life. It’s all here, in an old United Fruit accounting tablet that must weigh a hundred pounds. This morning I had to get the cleaning lady to help me move it.

  My wife never came into this room, and I didn’t much, either, the six years we were married. It’s frankly overwhelming, though I hadn’t meant to create any kind of mausoleum.

  The big red lamp from the Mollie and Me. My silvered conch shell, which Chatty, the watchman at Saetía, gave me. It was Mother’s idea to have it silvered, probably the very conch that Chatty blew the day I knocked Curtis’s lights out. A framed image of the Black Virgin. I don’t know who gave it to me, somebody who worked for Daddy. You can see the three miners and their capsized boat, the Black Virgin floating above the waves, to save them from drowning. A stack of old home movie reels, a hobby of Daddy’s. I’ve looked at them a few times. Del and me playing catch with Daddy in the yard, riding our bicycles on La Avenida. You can see Annie, Hilton, and Henry in the background here and there. The prints are so scratched that in every scene it looks like it’s raining. In some of them it is raining, and the only difference is that everything in the frame gleams with wet.

  I pick up the conch shell, its inner spiral still a vibrant, fleshy pink, its white outer edge plated in silver. All these years and it never broke.

  The phone is ringing. My answering machine will pick it up. I finally got one. Everybody was complaining that they’d call and my phone just rang and rang. I said, “Let it ring. Call when I’m home.” But I must say, I like the machine. The phone rings once, the machine picks up, “This is K. C. Stites, please leave a message,” and now I never have to answer. If someone insists on reaching me, they can come to La Teresita, where I take my lunch. Anyone who really needs to talk to me knows where I am. Five days a week, at eleven-thirty, seated at the counter with the green and black tiles, flirting with the waitresses. They call me “Cuba” and I never have to order because it’s the same thing every day.

  Suppose you get only fifteen minutes. Would you travel three thousand miles to speak with someone you love for just fifteen minutes, if you know that it’s the last time you’ll ever see that person?

  How far would you travel?

  Suppose you could speak to someone you love who’s no longer living. Would you cross a continent to speak to that person for just fifteen minutes?

  You would.

  When it’s someone you love, the answer is that fifteen minutes is limitless if it means getting information about how to proceed without them. The chance of a clue is worth the journey. Because you don’t know what that person will say to you. You can’t guess what you might be turning down.

  Just after my wife died, I came into this room and took an ancient phone book of Mother’s from the shelf, black leather with gold lettering on the cover. The spine cracked when I
opened it. On each page, twenty different kinds of ink and lots of crossing out. The people we’d known in Oriente moved around a lot after 1959.

  The Ls—“LaDue”—those folks were surely dead. “Lederer.” They’d moved to Chattanooga, Tennessee. Everly and I wrote for a while, but like everything, that friendship had its time and place. I’d thought maybe she was the one, but what do you know when you’re fourteen? We were not so alike. I think she knew it all along. I was too square for her, was the truth. I moved here, to Tampa, after college. I taught at a private school, ran the athletic program. I dated a lot of Cuban girls. I think they were a way to fight the homesickness. Weekends, I’d go over to the dances in Ybor City, the Cuban colony here. The music and the atmosphere reminded me of those native functions out in the batey that Curtis and I snuck into. I dated all kinds of girls, old, young, fat, thin. But I didn’t commit until very late in life. I was fifty-four when I met my wife, on a public tennis court. She could murder the ball. Off the court, she was a kitten, ran a philanthropy, and was interested in museums, cultural things. Sharp as a tack and always cheerful, made everybody feel they were something special. Mother would have loved her.