She nodded, more inquisitive than apprehensive.
“I am Gustavo Esteban Quijano, assistant consular officer at the Embassy of the Republic of Cuba. My superior, Señor Alessandro, has instructions from Havana to expedite your arrangements. I telephoned to the number given to me in Miami, but you had already left. I was given your flight number, and am happy to have found you in order to help in any way I can.”
María Arguilla was shepherded through Immigration and Customs, Quijano talking without cease about such subjects as the difference in temperature between Miami and Mexico City, the subtle differences between the temperature in Miami and in Havana, all on account of the Gulf Stream, and his painful absence from Havana for six long months, but all the news was wonderfully reassuring about the great economic and social progress being made back home under Comandante Fidel.
Her bags identified, passed, and placed by the porter on a long trolley, Quijano asked whether María had reservations. Yes, she said, she was staying at the Hotel del Prado, and had planned to go that very afternoon to the Cuban Embassy to apply for a visa. He tut-tutted her about this entirely unnecessary inconvenience, asked her for her passport, and said that he would make all the necessary arrangements.
Might she, María asked, be able to count on taking the flight to Havana the following day? “If I miss that flight, I shall have to wait until Thursday.”
Quijano said that the three-times-per-week flights to Havana were heavily booked but—he winked—he would see to it that she was seated aboard the plane before the other passengers. “And if that means one passenger has to delay his passage—why, that is a pity, no?” He chuckled.
“After all, it’s our airline, is it not? And our revolution!”
María smiled, appreciatively.
They had certainly got the word in Mexico, María reflected, sinking down into the couch of the flower-filled suite into which the Cuban Embassy had upgraded her. No questions. No nothing. But perhaps all that would happen in Havana?
Indeed it did, although the auspices were unexpected.
On the airplane the next day she had written out a note on Compañía Cubana de Aviación stationery. She wrote simply:
Dear F. I am here, longing to see you.
Love,
M.
Waiting for her bags at Customs in Havana, she was about to drop the envelope with the international postage stamp into the postal box when a hand reached up and firmly arrested hers, the fingers gripping her envelope, drawing it back from the postal slot.
She looked up at a young, bearded man who, extruding the envelope from her hand, said to her politely but firmly, “Seguridad, Señorita.”
He asked her to accompany him. They walked into a bare room with a desk, two chairs, and a large picture of Fidel Castro.
“I regret very much, Señorita Arguilla, but I must look at this letter.”
It was addressed: “Sr. J. J. Martí, Apartado de Correo 2008, Oficios y Teniente Rey, La Habana.”
María said nothing. Her interrogator did not open the envelope at once. He picked up his telephone and dialed a number. He spoke in whispers, but what he said was audible to anyone sitting a few feet opposite.
“Yes, Bracero here. Airport—in re Arguilla.”
He did not have to wait long. He was put through to the security operative. He reported studiously into the telephone, “An envelope. Addressed to “Sr. J. J. Martí, Apartado de Correo 2008, Oficios y Teniente Rey, La Habana.”
Again he waited, tapping his finger impatiently on the desk. When the earphone was active again, he sat up, and let his hand slowly idle on the table as his eyes widened.
“Sí, Capitán. Sí, Capitán. Entendido, Capitán. Entendido, Capitán.”
He put down the receiver, and returned the envelope to María Arguilla.
“A thousand pardons, Señorita. You need not fear that anyone will hear of this.”
María thought it time to retaliate. “I cannot give you the same guarantee, señor—what is your name?—”
“Hernando Bracero Delavera, a sus órdenes.”
“—that no one will hear about this.”
Without another word, Bracero opened the door and, silently, escorted her through the Customs formalities. There was general consternation about the checked baggage. María’s was among those that did not materialize in the off-loading station. Bracero told her he would personally see to it that her baggage would arrive at her destination—he would deliver it himself. She must not submit to any foolish delays, he said self-consciously. He took her vouchers and she thanked him, her curtness gone.
She drove in a shopworn 1958 Ford taxi to her little house in Santos Suárez, noticing, en route, only what seemed a uniform deterioration. The shops more threadbare, the trees and shrubs sparer, the buildings and houses more dilapidated. She was tired, and progressively irritated that her luggage hadn’t come. Finally—two hours later—the bags arrived, with apologetic explanations from Bracero for the bureaucratic tangle at the airport.
Although she wished ardently to be done with her mission, she rather hoped that Captain Durango, if he was still acting as Fidel’s procurer-escort, would not come to fetch her that night. She assumed that the letter she had finally succeeded in posting would not be seen by Castro until the following day, perhaps even the day after. Meanwhile she would put the house in order, get some rest, listen to the radio, watch television, and buy magazines and newspapers from the store at the corner, catching up on the local scene.
At ten o’clock, there was a knock on the door. María groaned. She had not even made herself up. But it wasn’t Captain Durango. It was two men, both dressed in fatigues, the senior clean-shaven, the junior with so much beard María wondered for a moment exactly where his mouth was. They were, of course, “Security,” and they dutifully exhibited their documents.
She invited them into her living room while feeling an explosive resentment not so much that there should be a security check on Cubans returning to Havana as that they should present themselves at such an unpardonable hour. She considered telling them to go away and to return in the morning, but reasoned that anything that would cause any blip in her security file was to be avoided.
Captain Herrera explained that such interrogations as he and Lieutenant Ramos—Ramos bowed his head slightly—conducted were routine, and that since Señorita Arguilla had been absent from Cuba for over a year, she must understand the lengths to which the imperialists were going in order to attempt to subvert the Revolution. The political overture continued for almost ten minutes, during which María felt a fearful urge to drop off to sleep; but, eventually, Captain Herrera began his questioning. Lieutenant Ramos took notes.
She wondered whether the name of Fidel Castro would come up. She was determined not to use it except as absolutely necessary.
Why had she left?
Why had she stayed so long?
Whom had she been in touch with?
How did she live?
How did she pay her bills?
Who were her lawyers in Havana?
On and on it went. When asked for one document or another she feigned a feminized absentmindedness, ransacking one suitcase and then another before coming up with the relevant document. She did not want to appear conspicuously prepared for such questions as they asked, however practiced she was. She stated her objections only when, after midnight, Captain Herrera said that he would need to take four of her documents with him, which of course he would return to her, probably by the end of the week. She insisted that he give her a receipt for these documents, and that each one be described in detail.
Finally, they left.
María went to her bed. She found herself, half asleep, wondering whether such an interrogation had in fact been entirely routine. Or—and this was the likeliest explanation—were they agents, so to speak, of the royal guard? Perhaps their superior took special pains to examine anyone who would be in personal contact with Fidel Castro; and, she sighed, t
here was no question that she would, very soon, be in very close personal contact with Fidel Castro.
Finally, she fell asleep. And the next night, at ten, Captain Durango came for her, exactly as of old.
The only item she carried in her little overnight bag that she hadn’t always brought with her on her previous trysts with Castro was a can of 16-millimeter film. It suddenly occurred to her, as she was being driven to Fidel’s house in Cojímar, that she had never taken pains to view the film, even though the facilities for viewing 16-millimeter films, in one of the back rooms at Trafficante’s nightclub, were there. She wondered suddenly if, in the ten years since it had been taken, the film had gone bad? If so, would this cause Fidel to be disappointed? To pout? To be enraged? He had made so many references to the film and his desire to evoke the vicarious ecstasy he had experienced in 1953… Well, she thought, if the film was not good, there was nothing she could do about it now.
Fidel’s greeting was quite simply overwhelming. He embraced her as though she were the Revolution’s only child. The familiar sitting room was unchanged, but instead of the smattering of hors d’oeuvres and the few bottles of this and that at the bar, there was champagne and caviar, and foie gras, and fruits, and vodka.
“This is not just a routine day, this is a celebration!” Fidel said, seizing a bit of everything and stuffing it all onto María’s plate, and then helping himself. The champagne in the ice cooler had been opened, and he poured and drank deeply. “It”—he held up the champagne glass—“is one of the few pleasant things I can think of now being produced by De Gaulle’s France,” he commented, as ever inclined to political orientation. He plied María with questions about her life in Miami and rejoiced over her ultimate success in getting “your little capitalist nest egg.” (“You must remind me not to confiscate it!”)
But all of this—food, wine, conversation—was progressively irrelevant as he became amorous. Suddenly he was on his feet. For a fearful moment María thought a professional would appear to handle the projector; but no, Castro removed a drape behind the couch, revealing the machine at the ready, and, María’s reel of film in hand, he began threading it.
“I took a refresher lesson in the operation of this machine this afternoon. I did not intend to take any chances! I was the projector operator at my preparatory school. Every Friday night we would show a movie based on the latest miracle at Fatima, or something like that”—he was bent over the machine. He reached now to the wall and turned off the overhead lights. He flicked a switch on the projector and a beam illuminated the portable screen situated ten feet in front of the couch. The whhrrr of the home movie filled the room. María braced herself for what was to come.
It was all there, in shots long and embarrassingly tight. Trafficante had synced in some exaggeratedly voluptuarian music, a pulsating, “Bolero”-type non-stopper that sought rough emotional congruity with the events depicted on the screen. Halfway through the showing, Fidel began to disrobe and motioned to María to do the same. He wished, he whispered to her, to replicate the movements of her young screen lover, and she was to do exactly as she had done at La Gallinera. When, ten minutes later, the film reached its climax, so did Fidel Castro, who disengaged himself only to rush back, reverse the film, and begin it again.
At its end, Fidel smiled, his eyes half closed.
Maria rose and said she would go to the bathroom. “I am thirsty for a beer.” Could she bring him one? Yes, he said dreamily, he would have a beer. Maria reached into her bag for her robe, went into the dressing room with her toilet kit, and closed the door.
She took from the little refrigerator two beers, and from the cupboard two glasses. She quickly doused herself with perfume. Her heart was pounding so violently she had to pause before she could control her fingers to turn the lid on the jar she withdrew from her bag. Finally she opened it and let her trembling fingers descend into the cold cream.
Her heart stopped beating.
The capsules were not there.
She began hysterically to dig out the contents of the jar, kneading the cream between her fingers, incredulous. She reached the bottom of the jar, and the door behind her opened. She wheeled about.
He was loomingly there, in his bathrobe, a leer on his face. He extended his arm out toward her, palm open.
“Is this what you are looking for?” He held the two capsules in the palm of his hand.
Two uniformed men, one of them with pistol drawn, entered the bathroom. María had no feeling in her legs as they dragged her out.
25
At the Soviet officers’ club in the San Cristóbal compound vodka was inexpensive, and its enthusiastic consumption was certainly one of the causes of the general merriment before the dinner hour. Ingenio Tamayo, greeted at the door by his host, Major Kirov, soon noticed that Kirov was anxious to detach himself from his compatriots in every way. It went so far—or had Kirov always preferred rum?—as asking the Cuban bartender, after ascertaining that his guest wanted a beer, not for a vodka straight up, or for that matter a vodka anything, but for rum and Coca-Cola—doble. Kirov then drew Tamayo to a corner of the large lounge where over a hundred Soviet officers were gathered, drinking and gabbing, some of them filing by the bar to give their orders. Almost all were dressed in light cotton khaki trousers (a few wore dress whites). The club’s weekday regulations specified “optional dress,” and this translated into a variety of sports shirts. There was no other Cuban present, so far as Tamayo could see.
They spoke to each other in English, in which Kirov was competent, Tamayo fluent. To Tamayo’s surprise, Kirov was yearning to talk, indeed to talk about matters normally thought to be too ideologically risqué to discuss, in particular between strangers—although Anatoly Kirov did not let Tamayo feel for very long that he was a stranger.
Kirov plied Tamayo with questions of theoretical concern to students of Marxism-Leninism and, patently, of immediate concern to him. Had Tamayo studied Marx at college? Had he read Lenin? Had he read the text of the 20th Congress speech, February 1956, in which Khrushchev had outlined the brutalities of Stalin? Did Tamayo believe that the faults in leadership identified by Khrushchev had in fact been eliminated in the Soviet Union?—If not, did Tamayo believe, as many imperialist scholars insisted, that such faults as Stalin was so blatantly guilty of inhered in the system? Or was there a special Russian component that had caused the evolution of Communism, over a period of forty-six years, to take the particular direction it was taking in Russia?
Tamayo, altogether taken aback by the behavior of his host—he acted almost as if he were on drugs of some sort that induced this intimate torrent of questions—answered cautiously. But he wished above all to get close to Kirov and so, however ambiguous his answers, they never had the effect of dampening the conversation. On the contrary, Tamayo managed to be a kind of enthralled listening post. He concluded that indeed it had been established that Stalin was a “very cruel” leader, but, to be sure, Stalin had had singular historical problems to confront, from the internecine question of the succession after the death of Lenin, to the dogged resistance of the kulak class, to the war by Hitler, to the atomic monopoly by the American imperialists—
Wait! Kirov said.
He wished to fetch another drink. Would Tamayo have the same?
He was back quickly; the line had thinned out, and most of the officers had passed into the cafeteria. Kirov plunked down the two glasses on the little round table and resumed talking. “What,” he said with some solemnity, “about Castro? Is he different?”
Time for extreme caution, Tamayo thought.
“Different from what?”
“Well, different from Stalin?—I mean, obviously Castro is different from Stalin, but is he different from the kind of man Stalin was?”
Above all Tamayo wished to come up with the answer Kirov wanted. He decided, on this question, to act decisively. “Yes. Castro is very different. He has no taste for human suffering. He is resolute when he needs to be reso
lute, but always he acts in the interest of the Cuban people and of the Revolution. Yes, he is very different.”
Kirov drew his chair closer. He was speaking now within six inches of Tamayo’s ear. “Do you know Fidel Castro?”
Again Tamayo gambled. “Yes. I know him very well. I was an early recruit in the movement, and he has honored me with special assignments. I report directly to Fidel Castro.”
Kirov’s eyes opened wide in a combination of curiosity and awe.
“Let us,” he said, “go in and have something to eat, and then I do hope to resume the discussion—provided you are willing to do so, Major Tamayo?”
“My friends call me Ingenio.”
“I am Anatoly. Let us eat our dinner and then drive to San Cristóbal and have a drink. Do you have a car? Because if not, I can requisition a jeep.” Tamayo said no no, by all means he had a car, parked right at the Administration Building. During the meal they were crowded around by young Soviet officers speaking in Russian. Kirov said very little, and nothing of any interest.
He is waiting, Tamayo guessed, for an opportunity to move the conversation in a discreet direction.
A half hour later they were at El Burrito de San Cristóbal, at the quiet southern edge of the town. Other customers that night were mostly natives, though two Russian lieutenants and two Cuban girls made up a rowdy table at one end, struggling to communicate with each other in pidgin Spanish.
“What I want you to know, Ingenio,” Major Kirov bent over the little round bar table in the corner of the saloon, “is that I am a profound believer in Marxist destiny. We … specialists … are very carefully picked by our superiors and they correctly concluded that my belief in the philosophy of socialism is very … deep … profound. I am also enough a man of this world to accept that difficult social developments sometimes need … forceful … heavy”—Kirov struggled for the English word—“help from”—he snapped his fingers this time, searching for the word he wanted—“from critically—located human beings. But a true Marxist-Leninist must distinguish between necessary and unnecessary force and violence. Would Castro agree with that?”
Mongoose, R.I.P. Page 21
