Changó's Beads and Two-Tone Shoes

by William Kennedy

  Renata wanted to receive letters like those. As she grew older she heard her parents talk of them, then found the key to the strongbox where Celia had hidden them, because such things were not fit for young eyes. Renata sat and read them all, her first schooling in the language of sex and the thrilling persiflage of love. She wanted to own the letters but her mother discovered her reading them and put them in a bank vault, telling her: When you are ready.

  Renata was ready now. She wanted to read them again, see farther into those words that had shaped an obsession in her grandmother. She wanted to walk to the town house, which was still there, for it would put flesh on her memory. Here is where it all happened, here the point of tragedy of the solitary young mother who one day hears Uncle Sebastian say Jaime has died in battle, nobly. In fact his head had been split in half by a machete stroke. Renata imagined the fall of her grandmother’s spirit, her instantly cracked heart, her life suddenly without meaning. Margarita did withdraw, her agony turning to delirious flights of conversation with the dead; and she seemed to have forgotten that the baby Celia existed. Jaime’s uncle, whom she rarely saw and who lived on the Holtz estate in Palma Soriano, monitored her condition through daily briefings from the nana he sent to care for mother and child.

  A modest fortune accrued to Margarita, sent as income to her from Spain by the executor of Jaime’s estate, a friend of the Holtz-Otero family. The inheritance came with the proviso that Margarita not remarry, and if she did the inheritance would go to Jaime’s daughter with her, Celia. Margarita was oblivious of such detail, victim of the single-minded disease of love. She dwelt in grief and took pleasure only in the historic passion and memorious fantasy the love letters aroused in her.

  Jaime’s uncle tried to reverse her withdrawal by sending his son Evelio, like Jaime a Spanish lieutenant, to comfort and restore her, a gesture so naive that his family thought him demented. Margarita was twenty-nine, Evelio thirty-four. Evelio visited her, offering comfort; returned the next day and the next with new comfort, which begat the word, the soft stroke, the fervor of immediacy. And there you have it.

  They began in secret and were interrupted when Evelio was sent into unequal combat against the invading American forces. She welcomed the defeat of the Spanish military by the Americans for it meant the restoration of a lover to her life, a lover who banished all her guilt over the swift relegation of Jaime to memory, just as he banished her melancholy with his passion. Three months after Evelio’s release from the army Evelio secretly married Margarita.

  Renata, remembering this, wondered, am I my grandmother? She saw the parallel to Diego and Quinn just as she looked to the doorway and saw Quinn coming toward her.

  “Let’s go,” he said. “I just met your cousin Felipe.”

  “My coffee,” she said.

  “I’ll get you another one.”

  “I didn’t pay for it.”

  Quinn put money on the table and led her out to the street.

  “Those guns of yours,” Felipe told Renata as they moved out of Santiago in his car, “we loaded them into a truck with fake floorboards that made room for them all. There were six Thompsons. Alfie found the truck. He knows how to get things.”

  Holtz had been quietly supporting the Directorio with cash infusions until the previous week when two fourteen-year-olds he knew, neither with any connection to the rebels, were tortured and killed by police; and his outrage escalated. He flew to Havana and told his friend Aurelio he wanted to do more. Aurelio took him to a boat basin to meet a gun dealer, since Holtz had offered to buy guns. But neither money nor guns changed hands that day, the transaction aborted by a cruising police car. The transfer was to be the next day, but that afternoon the Palace attack was launched and Holtz went underground, surfacing only when he knew Aurelio had survived the attack; and by then Alfie, through Renata’s and Quinn’s intercession, had delivered the guns to Aurelio and Javier at the gas station.

  When Renata mentioned yet more guns in the Sixteenth Street apartment that she and Diego had rented, Aurelio put Holtz together with Alfie to find a way to rescue them. Two nights later Fidel’s people were poised to bomb a major electrical grid; and if it succeeded, much of Havana would go dark, a propitious time for burglary. The weapons’ preliminary destination was an empty warehouse where they would be put on a commercial truck bound for Oriente. But then Holtz said to Aurelio and Alfie, if there are no guards at the Santa Fe landing field, and usually there are not, I could fly them to my father’s airstrip in Palma Soriano and Fidel’s people will unload them.

  “So we put them on my plane and took off at dawn,” Holtz said to Quinn and Renata. “Four of Fidel’s peasants met us and took them. Fifteen minutes after our landing the army showed up to search the plane, but there was no contraband to be found.”

  “Where is Alfie now?” Quinn asked.

  “At the house,” Holtz said. “He’s waiting for us.”

  On the road to the Holtz estate, going north out of Santiago, they faced a major army checkpoint with a tanqueta at the ready, a dozen armed soldiers at the barricade, and four cars ready to pursue any vehicle that would try to crash the barrier. Holtz told the soldiers that Renata was his cousin and Quinn her fiancé, and they were visiting at his home. The lieutenant recognized Holtz’s famous name and let them pass.

  “These checkpoints are all over the Sierra Maestra,” Holtz said. “If we do go to see Fidel we must have a reason or they’ll turn us back.” Holtz said he’d brought one americano up to meet the rebels, presenting him as a businessman buying land from a defunct sugar mill.

  “Can we go as a family, having a reunion?” Renata asked.

  “I’d like something more specific. We have an americano here.”

  “What if the reunion is a wedding?” Quinn asked.

  “Whose?”

  “Renata’s and mine. You and Alfie can be cousins in the wedding party. Do you want to get married, Renata?”

  “Is this a proposal or just a way to fool the army?”

  “One reason is as good as another for marrying you.”

  “Do you mean a wedding in a church?” Holtz asked.

  “That’s too complicated. Just have a babalawo do it.”

  “You are crazy,” Renata said.

  “Do babalawos do weddings?” Holtz asked.

  “I never heard of it,” Renata said.

  “Babalawos do everything,” Quinn said. “If I marry you I want a babalawo. They read minds, they predict futures, they heal your soul.”

  “But they don’t do weddings,” she said.

  “All right, we’ll get a priest too,” Quinn said.

  “I like this,” Holtz said. “It’s oddball, which makes it real.”

  “It will be real. All we need is a babalawo and a priest.”

  “A crazy man wants to marry me,” Renata said.

  Felipe’s sister Natalia, who had grown plump since Renata last saw her, she is eating for her pleasure instead of having sex, met them in the foyer, the only family member in the house, her parents en route to Mexico. Holtz took Quinn to find Alfie, and Natalia gushed over Renata looking so lovely, and why haven’t you called? Renata said I called three times for Felipe.

  “Ah, but that is different,” Natalia said. “Who is this man Quinn?”

  “I just met him,” Renata said. “He wants to marry me.”

  “Another one?”

  “Yes, another. What year did Margarita die? I was thinking of her,” Renata said.

  “Of course you were,” Natalia said, “another marriage maniac. I don’t know the year but she lived too long—for her. I don’t want to die like she did.”

  “You should worry about not living like she did,” Renata said.

  Natalia went to the kitchen to have the cook prepare late lunch for the visitors and Renata roamed the parlors and dining room, loving to feel again the grandness of this house with all its historical elegance, although she now sees decline. It isn’t crumbling, just aging visibl
y, yet with grace and formidability—its baroque floor-to-ceiling mirrors, the Carrara marble on the floors, walls, and staircase; the chandelier with eighteen globes and uncountable strands of crystal beads, a creation of high elegance made in emulation of the one in the Captain-General’s Palace in Havana; and, in the music room, the grand piano on a small, elegant stage where the music of civilization, written in the old world, was performed in the new.

  The house was called a palace when they built it in the 1850s, the Holtz Palace, and how it must have dazzled the elite society of Oriente. Celia grew up amid it all, coming here as an infant when the maddened Margarita stopped functioning as a mother and became the pure enamorada—who lived only for love with her secret second husband, her god-sent lover who was wilder at sex than her first husband, and who lived for the bed the way Margarita did.

  The marriage secret was short-lived, and when it became gossip in Santiago the word flew to Spain and into the ear of the estate’s executor, who cut off Margarita’s inheritance and the child Celia’s as well. The catastrophe was compounded within weeks when Evelio, discovering that his wealthy new wife was penniless, left her and moved into a small house with a former housemaid from his father’s estate. The executor wrote Margarita that under the terms of Jaime’s will he could give her such support for residency as she might find in a convent, and if such a convent existed in Cuba, she would be free to seek it out. If not then she could return to Madrid and find residence in any of several convents. The child, in any case, will be cared for by the Holtz family in Santiago.

  Getting married in order to see Fidel—this may be Quinn’s ultimate sacrifice. Fidel. What would Quinn ask him? Herbert Matthews had confirmed his survival, described him as a demigod, as an intellectual, nationalistic, anti-Yankee, anti-imperialistic, anti-communist revolutionary, a dedicated fanatic, a man of ideals, a tough, charismatic hero fighting for a socialistic, democratic Cuba, who has polarized the majority of Cuban youth against Batista and seems invincible.

  Can’t top that.

  So talk to him about the how of what he did—how he made the La Plata attack and what it achieved. Or a longshot—the link between politics and gangsterism. Wasn’t he a gangster in his university days? That’s a new take on the revolutionary. And Arsenio, the rural gangster, collaborating with the connected Alfie to bring you these guns. Isn’t gangsterism just low-level political pragmatism? Machado with his gangster police—the deadly Porra; Prío as president giving jobs to two thousand gangsters to curb crime; Batista making the Italian mob his partners—likewise partnering with goons, the homegrown Tigers of Rolando Masferrer, your University classmate and now your enemy, Señor Castro—gangster then, gangster now. It’s all very tidy and of the moment, yes, and Fidel might be amused. But why would he talk about any of that? What would Hemingway ask him? Nothing about gangsters. He’d talk about Fidel’s gun. He’d ask about logistics, methods, attitudes, what he thinks about war, what was your first revolutionary act and did anybody die from it? Hemingway wouldn’t talk politics. He’d say if you put politics into the novel, and if the book lasts twenty years, you have to skip the politics when you read it.

  Ah, so you are writing a novel about me, Mr. Quinn?

  No, just tracking the hero the way my grandfather tracked Céspedes, and you qualify as heroic merely on the basis of your survival. How do you explain not dying in combat at the Moncada barracks? Or when they captured you there? Or when they had you in Batista’s jail? Or when as an invader you shipwrecked in a swamp? Or now, when you’re dodging aerial bombardment and being hunted by half the Cuban army? All this smacks of a scripted life for Fidel Castro—Achilles without the flawed heel.

  Renata will love this idea: a new Orisha in control of the mountains, fated to defy death from every angle, too original to die. Originality is an ingenious form of defiance, don’t you think? Or do you have a simpler vision and consider yourself lucky? Was Céspedes lucky? He said his children were beggars, or on the cusp of prostitution. The Spaniards executed his rebel son by firing squad the same year his infant son starved to death among the fugitive Mambí. They got to the man himself in ’74 when his originality failed and he feared he was being eclipsed by his general, Máximo Gómez, and was deposed from the presidency in a leadership coup. He ran out of luck, or was it intuition, and he retreated alone to the mountains where the Spaniards caught up with him, and a Cuban volunteer with the Spaniards pulled the trigger.

  But he is still the father of Cuba, El Padre de la Patria, is he not? Was he a chosen figure or did he imagine himself into existence? My grandfather came to Cuba on a bizarre and solitary quest to interview him for a New York newspaper and confirm he was alive—and he later wrote a book about it—Going to See the Hero, have you read it? I’ll send you a copy.

  El Quin and the ex-slave, his name was Nicodemo, were moving toward a mountain they could not avoid climbing without exposure to a Spanish fort below. The horse would probably not make it but Nicodemo said they could try and he led the horse upward as they chopped brush to clear their way. Fifty yards up the horse fell twenty feet, rolling, snapping trees, ripping off its harness, rising up, falling and rolling again, you don’t see that every day, scattering El Quin’s belongings and his second pistol and ammunition. The horse righted itself, pushed downhill through the trees and ran onto the guinea-grass plain, gone forever, so long horse.

  Nicodemo retrieved pistol and ammo and they rolled up the strewn clothing and carried it on their backs—slipping, falling, slashed by briars, crawling over boulders on all fours—emerging onto a mesa that was a relief from incline but opened them to the punishment of a scorching Cuban sun that could quickly crisp El Quin. He rolled down his shirtsleeves and put on his straw hat and they walked two more hours before seeing Mambí troops. The troops had halted next to a great brick tower, taller than any building Quinn had seen in Cuba outside of Havana and whose function he could not imagine; but he would learn that the tower was all that remained of a sugar mill burned by the rebels. It was topped off by the slaveholder’s crow’s nest where, from daybreak to nightfall, a lookout had watched 360 degrees of fields for trails being made in the high grass by runaway slaves who sometimes chanced death rather than live another day creating sugar for the Spanish swine.

  Quinn and Nicodemo walked into the midst of twenty Mambí cavalry soldiers, horses tethered in a grove of trees. An officer with a full beard, wearing a hat, an open, high-collared linen jacket, leggings, and a pistol with belt and bandolier, greeted them.

  “Capitán Díaz Rodón,” he said, “I welcome you to Cuba Libre.”

  He released Nicodemo from duty and Quinn offered the ex-slave his gratitude, which he acknowledged with a brief nod. The Capitán said Quinn should rest, take water, eat something; my troops will protect you while we are in this territory where Spaniards have been seen. He would send a message to President Céspedes to say Quinn had arrived. Did the Capitán know a Lieutenant Castellón? He did. He is an aide to the president. Quinn had a message for him from his wife in New York who has raised much money for the Mambí cause. Capitán Díaz said they would not go directly to the presidential camp, near Contramestre, but would jog west to cut Spanish telegraph wires between Palma Soriano and Jiguaní. Later they would meet General Máximo Gómez’s battalion and move toward a town with entrenched Spanish troops and try to lure them out from their barricades. President Céspedes thought it might be bracing for Señor Quinn, and good for what he was writing, to see our troops in combat. You can watch from well behind the lines and be safe, if you keep your head down, but not too far down or you will miss the battle.

  Natalia found her brother in the library with Quinn and Alfie, who had retreated there hours earlier to wait for Holtz to return. Alfie had been perusing topographical maps of Oriente Province, educating himself on the land, a modest preparation for flying guns into this territory, when Natalia said to her brother, you have a visitor in the casa del ingenio. And Holtz led the visiting pilgrims to th
e sugar mill where Arsenio Zamora, the charismatic bandit, was standing alone by the great gear of a grinder, a picture of anxiety in process, violating Fidel’s first commandment that thou shalt not stay anywhere that can be surrounded. But the public enemy was here on a mission Fidel had sanctioned. And he stared at Holtz and his entourage of three as they entered the mill.

  Arsenio, an essential figure in the revolution’s strategic defense in the Sierra, had accumulated not five to ten wives but twenty, and at last count, seventy-five children. He was forty-one but from the rugged life in the Sierra he looked sixty to Quinn, a long, wrinkled face, a full head of hair whose blackness had survived climate and age, with eyebrows and mustache more gray than black, the tash not cultivated but under control, perhaps a vanity marker, or a less intrusive brush for his harem. He wore a battered black leather hat, not quite a fedora, and smoked a dark brown cigar.

  He had been born on the seven-thousand-acre Holtz estate in a small village of Precarista squatters that two generations of Holtzes had never tried to remove. He began as a young cane-cutter and laborer for Holtz padre, became a cane truck driver, grew into a leader of his village by his late twenties. Smart and aggressive, revered and feared as he was, he evolved into an anti-poverty outlaw. Many of the Precaristas were illiterates who lived without electricity or running water, and their villages served as sanctuaries for outlaws. Quinn would hear the region compared to the wild west in America, which his grandfather had written about in the years after the Civil War.