Mambo

by Campbell Armstrong

  “He’ll need an ambulance,” Pagan said. “We can call from the house.”

  Pagan, followed by Foxworth, walked to the place where Kinnaird lay. Ants, having scouted an abundant source of unexpected protein, were already filing in an unruly manner over the ruined side of Freddie’s face. A fat horsefly crawled across Freddie’s hair. Pagan spat a crumb of black earth out from between his teeth.

  Foxie said, “I was never more glad to see you, Frank. I’d been stuck in the cellar of that bloody house for God knows how long. Our guards here were waiting for Kinnaird to turn up and make some kind of decision pertaining to my fate. When he finally showed up he didn’t waste time deciding what to do with me. I’ll say that for Freddie. He wasn’t the vacillating sort.”

  Pagan smiled by way of acknowledging Foxie’s remarks, but it wasn’t much of an expression. He had no energy left to him. It seemed to him that he stood outside of himself, that he had left his own body and was floating like some weird wind-lifted speck toward the sun, a strange sensation. But the pain in his chest brought him back to earth.

  “New tenants are already moving in, I see.” Foxworth nodded down at the armies of ants. “I only hope they find Freddie edible. Who killed him anyway?”

  “It’s a long story. We’ll talk about it later.” Pagan’s voice was dry, cracked, almost gone. He walked away from the corpse of Kinnaird. Followed by Foxie, he went down through the meadow toward the big red house. He paused once, looked up at the sun; in the distance, the smallest flash of silver, was a tiny aircraft that could be heard droning, then it was gone and the sky, too blue for this season and this country, was empty again. Inevitably he thought of Magdalena, but it was one of those thoughts that opened and closed like a certain kind of ghostly flower.

  Epilogue

  Several days after the death of Frederick Kinnaird, the Lider Maximo spoke in the Plaza de la Revolutión in Havana. His speech started at two in the afternoon. If the past was any guide, he would not finish until six, perhaps six-thirty, and his audience would by then be numbed and hungry. The day was breezy and warm; flags busily flapped around the Plaza.

  The crowd was estimated at three hundred thousand people, many of them bussed in from rural areas. Usually there were some who surreptitiously listened to tiny transistor radios relaying football games or pop music from the USA. But not today. Today there was an atmosphere of tension and uncertainty. Throughout the crowd plainclothes members of security forces mingled, took notes, eavesdropped, dragged away for interrogation anyone who struck them as odd. Security was more tight than anybody could remember – even veterans of these affairs, some of whom had listened to the Lider Maximo for thirty years and knew all the man’s nuances and could tell from experience when he was lying or when – the less frequent occurrence – he was telling the truth. There were metal detectors around the Plaza, and certain people were being searched, and scores were being herded inside police vehicles.

  Nothing was normal now. Nothing predictable. During the last seven days there had been arrests on an unprecedented scale throughout Cuba. There had been “disappearances”. The Armed Forces had been purged by Raul Castro himself, who had hurried back from Angola with the indecent speed of an executioner anxious to use his newly sharpened axe. Everybody had at least one story to tell about a neighbour taken away, a son missing, or a daughter, a nephew, a cousin.

  Estela Rosabal, who pushed her way through the warm crowd toward the platform because she needed to be as close to the Lider Maximo as possible, had more stories to tell than most. At first she’d been advised that Rafael had been taken prisoner; then two days later that he’d committed suicide. The next day she received a phone call from the Ministry of the Interior telling her that he was alive and well after all and she would be taken to see him. An hour or so later, when she was beginning to allow herself some limited optimism, the coffin was delivered to her apartment by men who said nothing and who wouldn’t look at her. They simply dragged it inside the living-room and left it there, lidded, loosely bolted, a long cheap pine box she couldn’t bring herself to open.

  She had experienced nothing so cruel in her life as that. He’s alive, he’s dead, he’s alive, he’s dead again. They had known all along. They had played a malicious game with her because she was the traitor’s wife. Then they had interrogated her in a hot windowless room for almost twenty hours about her role in her husband’s treachery. Seemingly convinced she was innocent, they had released her. But she wasn’t fooled. They would come for her again. They would find “evidence”. They always did.

  Now she pushed herself between a pair of young lovers who stood hip to hip, then past an old man with thick eye-glasses and one sleeve of his jacket hanging empty, then a bunch of fat women who smelled of fried food and beer.

  The Lider Maximo rose on the platform to speak. His voice, carried by a sophisticated sound system, floated out beyond the Plaza itself and into adjoining streets. Television cameras relayed the event through the whole of Cuba, despite power failures, officially attributed to recent rebel activity, in the provinces of Holguin and Santiago.

  The speech began quietly. The Lider Maximo’s face was bloated behind the greying beard. His garberdine fatigues were brand new and stiff; he wasn’t altogether comfortable in them. Observers noticed that his movements were somewhat erratic, as if his coordination had been affected by something. Age, many people thought in their secret hearts; he was too old, too rigid, too inflexible, he had to step aside. But who was going to say so to his face?

  He gazed across the crowd and the fluttering flags. Chopping the air with one hand for emphasis, he spoke of an evil plot instigated by the imperialist government of the United States to overthrow him and replace him with a puppet regime, at whose head was to be the late Minister of Finance, Rafael Rosabal, assisted by General Capablanca, now arrested (actually dead in a cell even as Castro spoke, hanged by bedsheets from a ceiling beam, an official suicide), and a number of misguided officers in the Armed Forces. These men would have a fair trial because that was the Cuban way, the socialist way.

  Agents of the Defence of the Revolution moved through the crowd and acted as cheerleaders, whipping up enthusiasm with their menacing manners. Estela Rosabal had come to a stop where the crowd was jammed together so tightly it created a solid wall of flesh and bone. She couldn’t get through. The Lider Maximo’s voice boomed in the air all around her, but she wasn’t paying any attention. She heard both her husband and father mentioned in a hateful way, but it was background noise, no more. Her father’s fate was probably the same as Rafael’s anyhow, and how much more grief did she have? Frustrated by the mass of people, she moved in another direction, where eventually she found a way forward between a group of slick young men in fresh white guayaberas and blue jeans. They made appreciative noises as she pushed among them, and one laid a hand on her thigh, but she slipped away without looking back. She was lost again in the density of the crowd, surrounded by strangers, and all the while the voice went on and on, now droning, now rising to an hysterical pitch.

  Up on the platform the Lider Maximo, his head filled with the approving roar of the audience, closed his eyes a moment; sweat slid from his brow into his eyelids and he wiped it aside. He drifted away, remembering other times, other speeches, when he had stood in this very spot and addressed his people, when La Revolutión had been young and glamorous, when he had been filled with vigour and the kind of self-confidence that belongs only to youthful believers.

  He spoke of how he had been poisoned by his trusted doctor, Zayas, whose task it was to weaken the Lider Maximo, to confuse him with tranquillisers and tiny doses of a slow-acting poison. That way he could be manipulated and made to believe anything he was told.

  There were gasps from the crowd.

  But the Lider Maximo was strong the way the Revolution was strong! The Lider Maximo survived the way the Revolution survived!

  The crowd cheered again and again.

  The Lider Maximo po
inted to his bloated face as if by way of proof. His very appearance was the result of Zayas’ infamous medications!

  Now he condemned treacherous civilians, those who would see the Revolution dismantled, who would see the course of Cuban history altered. Nothing can stop the course of history, he said. Nothing could prevent the destiny of the Cuban people, which was socialism and freedom.

  A drunk in the crowd whispered to Estela Rosabal: Sure, but will we have the freedom to leave socialism? And he winked at her, but she hardly noticed, because she was still trying to get closer to the platform, pushing, pushing, squeezing between two crones who looked half-dead, wrinkled, their flaccid breasts hanging loose behind cheap floral print dresses. She thought of Rafael’s child in her womb. The baby should have been her priority, but somehow it wasn’t, not any longer. It lay inside her, a tiny, unformed stranger whose meaning was lost to her. So many things had become lost to her lately.

  The Lider Maximo continued to use his hand as a cleaver, a gesture of emphasis. He stared upward into the mid-afternoon sun which was pleasantly warm against his face. He wished he could sit down, and not stand the way he always did, but to sit was a weakness. He had to remain upright; he had to look down from the platform across the multitudes. It was important to maintain the image of standing in a high place.

  He spoke about ungrateful civilians who worked against the Revolution. They were scum, murderous scum, with their secret printing-presses, and their illegal radios, and their hidden caches of American rifles. But they would be rooted out and destroyed. And here his mind strayed again and he remembered how Batista had made similar speeches about La Revolutión more than thirty years ago, and how the dictator had sent his armies into the Sierra Maestra to kill the rebels. There was a world of difference, of course, between himself and the evil Batista, who had been an American mannequin: immoral, indecent, corrupt.

  He praised the bravery of loyal Cuban troops who had rounded up treacherous officers and their men swiftly. He praised the officers and men of the reservists who had brought a dangerous situation under control and had captured illegal weapons in the hands of those who misguidedly called themselves rebels and freedom-fighters.

  Estela Rosabal didn’t think she could get any closer. Strained, sweating, she had come within a hundred and fifty feet of the platform. Behind ropes stood armed guards and security agents with black glasses and all kinds of uniformed men. She fanned the listless air with her hand. She could hardly breathe; the weight of the crowd pressed down on her ribs. Her eyes watered. A streak of mascara slithered down one cheek.

  She thought about the coffin again even though she had resolved never to do so. She remembered sitting in her living-room and looking at the thing hour after hour, remembered the sun rising and falling and the shadows thickening, remembered her hands clasped upon her stomach – and the smell that had begun to emerge from the coffin and fill the room, something she couldn’t name, didn’t want to identify, that awful charred smell like nothing in her experience. And she had thought about the barbarism in the world, a cruelty beyond her understanding, and how it numbed her.

  She fumbled with her handbag, which was jammed against her side because of the pressure of people around her. How was she ever going to open it? She suddenly wanted to scream in sheer frustration. What could she accomplish here? Nothing. Nothing. She should go back. Go home. She had been so scared avoiding the metal detectors and now her nerve was going to collapse entirely.

  She wouldn’t let it. She would be strong.

  The Lider Maximo had become quiet, surveying the crowd; the shadow of the tall obelisk known as the José Marti monument fell across the Plaza. It rose some four hundred feet in the air, a monument to a famous independence fighter, the Lider Maximo’s hero. Its shape was faintly reminiscent of a rocket. The Lider Maximo gripped the edge of his lectern with both hands. He was assailed by a dizzy sensation. He was thinking of the nuclear weapon destroyed outside Santiago.

  Something about the notion of a missile on the island had created pleasing echoes inside him …

  He coughed into his hand. He talked quietly now, and his hands were still. He talked about the weapon that had been brought to Cuba by imperialists and traitors, and assembled in a field outside Santiago, and made ready to fly. To discredit the Revolution! he roared. To make us appear like warmongers! But it was destroyed by the quick actions of the Cuban Air Force. He was allowed to bend the facts and shape them as he saw fit because nobody contradicted his view of reality, they merely adapted to it.

  The Lider Maximo’s mind wandered back to the missile again because it reminded him of those glorious days when Cuba stood at the centre of the world, when Kennedy and Khrushchev almost went to war, when the Lider Maximo commanded international respect, when he was a hero and did not have to curry favour with anyone or beg …

  He struggled to focus his attention on the crowds again. Why did he keep drifting? Why was it so hard to concentrate during his speeches these days? Now he leaned forward, speaking rapidly, spitting as he spoke in denunciation of those enemies of peace who had brought such a monstrous device to Cuba. The crowd, aroused, prodded like animals in a vast holding-pen, cheered louder than ever.

  Estela Rosabal felt she was trapped inside the noise, like an atom surrounded by other reverberating atoms. She was overpowered by the sounds of so many people. The well-dressed man alongside her, eyes glazed from alcohol, had a tiny flag he waved now and again. She stared at him, looked away, glanced up towards the platform at the face of the Lider Maximo, that face with which she’d been familiar from the very day of her birth – posters, photographs, history textbooks, newspapers. He was everywhere always. He was the great endless noise that surrounded and overwhelmed her. He was the noise of Cuba.

  He was a monster. But he wasn’t immortal.

  The Lider Maximo thought: he hadn’t had so much attention in years, every journalist in the world wanted to talk to him about the nuclear weapon, he had almost forgotten how good such power felt … and all because of one stolen missile.

  He raised his hands, shaking both fists at the sky. This was his response to the cheers of the crowd and suddenly it was almost like the old days, a dialogue between the Lider Maximo and the people who loved him, back and forth, give and take. He didn’t see the agents milling through the swarms, didn’t see the prompters and persuaders and those who coaxed and menaced the appropriate responses from people who had lived for a whole generation on promises, promises, promises.

  How hard would it be to steal a missile? he wondered. How much planning had gone into it? How long had it taken the conspirators to grab the weapon? It was an idle line of harmless speculation, of course. But interesting just the same …

  The Lider Maximo swayed very slightly. The breeze grew in strength, the flags shook, plastic bunting creaked. Somebody set off a firecracker and was immediately dragged away by security agents. The Lider Maximo hadn’t heard the noise, didn’t see the scuffle in the crowd.

  If there was a nuclear missile on Cuba what would the consequences be? Respect? Prestige? Would Cuba then have a strong voice to which others in the hemisphere would be obliged to listen? And how would the Yanquis react? Would they risk invasion? Would they retaliate with force? Not if the missile was pointed, for the sake of argument, at Miami Beach … No, they would talk and bargain, they would want to sit down and negotiate the removal of such a missile, because that was their way, all capitalist politicians loved to deal, and something very favourable could come out of it all – say, the removal of the missile in exchange for the return to the Cuban people of the Guantanamo US naval base, which was Cuban soil after all …

  The Lider Maximo thumped the lectern with the flat of his hand. Cuba, he told the masses, will not be a pawn in anybody’s game. He spoke of courage and bravery and loyalty with all the confidence of a man comfortable in a world of abstract nouns. The sun set over the Plaza and the Marti monument and the breeze died and the flags no longer stirred. />
  Estela Rosabal managed to get her handbag open. She found what she wanted inside, exactly where she’d placed it under a packet of tissues. How ordinary the gun seemed to her, surrounded as it was by lipsticks and a make-up compact, a bottle of eyeliner and coins. Everything was ordinary now, and yet oddly heightened, as if the commonplace contained more secrets than she’d ever realised. The smoothness of a lipstick tube, the fibre of the suit worn by the man standing beside her, the colours of his small flag – everything was sharp suddenly, and richly textured.

  She managed to get her fist round the gun.

  She looked up at the Lider Maximo, who was silent again.

  He was thinking.

  He was thinking he knew a wonderful site for such a weapon. A site whose irony amused him. The missile would be placed east of the Peninsula de Zapata, and Play a Giron, where on April 17th, 1961, the last invasion force to make an effort to land on Cuba had provoked the great Cuban victory the Yanquis called The Bay of Pigs – it was the perfect place, and fitting, and comical in its own bleak way …

  An old flame burned in him, an old taste, barely familiar but delectable still, filled his mouth. He stared out across the crowd, which was quieter now, but he didn’t see it as a group of individuals. In the shadows each person had receded, diminished, shedding his or her particular characteristics: one great amorphous mass, controllable, manageable.

  Such a weapon would never be fired, of course. It would be a useful negotiating strategy, a device to back up firm diplomacy, and it would give Cuba entry into the nuclear club, where by rights it belonged …

  Then he wondered where could he acquire such a weapon and who could he get to steal one, if he made such a radical decision. And from where would it be stolen? Fascinating questions.