by Paul Vidich
Captain Alonzo shifted to the next canvas. “This one is called Eva en el Bano. The tall nude was painted in 1943. Eva was the wife of a painter. She had an affair and left her marriage for a woman, scandalous at the time, particularly in a country tough with machismo. The insulted husband painted over the oil portrait to obliterate her. I found the piece and had the covering layers removed and the marvelous nude, thought lost, was revealed.
“Sometimes,” Captain Alonzo said, “it’s good to uncover the truth and sometimes it is dangerous to do so.” He turned and faced Mueller. “It’s a pity we don’t have the truth about your friend Mr. Graham.” Alonzo’s face hardened. “Your photographer has also uncovered things that are dangerous. This morning we saw her taking photographs that reflect poorly on Cuba. The subject matter is disturbing. She bribed a corrupt policeman and now he has been relieved of his responsibilities, and you, Mr. Mueller, have your own responsibility. She works for you. You must know she was taking photographs.”
Captain Alonzo’s voice deepened. The charm and reasonableness Mueller had seen were gone, and in their place Mueller heard tempered disdain. “There is a war on. We call it terrorism. They call it revolution. But it is a war. In war truth can be inconvenient.”
Captain Alonzo paused. “As for you.” Alonzo handed Mueller a telex.
Mueller recognized it at once. It was his report to his editor with his first impressions of Havana.
“You can write what you like, but I am bothered that certain words appear too often in the text. The word ‘police,’ for example, doesn’t have to be removed, but it doesn’t have to appear eight times. Once is enough. Twice perhaps. I don’t like the phrase ‘tremor of fear,’ which I don’t understand. And there is an error in the report where you describe the last election as a corrupt event. I think you meant to write crowning event.”
9
* * *
ON THE ROAD TO CAMAGÜEY
“WHAT I didn’t like about him was his bogus charm.”
Mueller was beside Jack in the front of Jack’s Land Rover, and he’d turned his head to the backseat to address Liz and Katie. The four of them were driving through a monotonous section of the Carretera Central several hours into their journey to Camagüey. Fields of sugarcane and thornbush filled the view, and ahead, still a ways off, the russet hills of their destination.
“It was like a bad cologne,” Mueller said, looking at the two women, who had turned away from the window and gave him the courtesy of their attention. They smiled at Mueller’s comment, but their eyes drifted back to the unchanging landscape.
“His comment to me,” Mueller added, “when I said I’d go to the police and he said he was the police wasn’t funny at the time. I was startled, but later I had to laugh. I suppose it should have been more obvious, but no one wore a uniform.”
Jack turned his head. “They say he carries a wallet made from the tanned skin of tortured prisoners.” He looked at the tarred road. “You’ve gotten attention at the wrong level, George. You’re lit up. They probably know you’re here in this car going to the ranch. Your press credential keeps you safe. But it has limits.”
Jack looked at Katie in the rearview mirror. “What did you photograph?”
Katie continued to look out the window.
“What did they catch you photographing?”
Katie’s eyes flashed indignantly. “Someone has to be the interpreter of violence.”
“What did you see?” Liz asked.
“I’m not sure I want to say.”
“Why wouldn’t you?”
“Fine. I got into a police station. They all have their own torture rooms. They have tile walls and drains in the floor so they can be hosed clean. There were bloody clothes on the floor and somewhere in the building a woman’s scolding voice, and above that someone screaming.”
“Destroy the photos,” Jack said. “It gives them an excuse to pick us up. Stick to packaged goods and bikinis.” Jack had raised his voice to be heard over the Land Rover’s laboring engine. Windows were open for relief against the suffocating heat, but the whoosh of air meant he had to speak up to be heard, and that added to the impression of fractiousness.
Katie pretended to understand, and in a moment had withdrawn her attention and gazed out the window again. Her hands grasped her camera.
“He say anything else?” Jack asked.
“About?”
“About anything.”
“He has an interest in Graham. Questions about Graham.”
“Don’t we all,” Liz said.
It must have been noon. For some time they had been traveling on the improved, but rutted road, moving through ravines as it curved around hillocks, and then through untamed stands of thornbush. Everywhere, to please the eye, were tall solitary palms.
“You’re almost out of gas,” Mueller said.
“Half full,” Jack replied. “It’s your line of sight.”
“How far?” Mueller asked.
“Couple of hours.”
“Will we make it?”
“We’ll make it. The thing has no power, which I don’t like, but it travels great distances on a spit of gas.”
“Why didn’t you fill it up at the last gas station?” Katie asked.
“Did you see the price? In Camagüey I’d pay half.”
“He’s thrifty,” Liz from the backseat.
“Frugal,” Jack corrected.
“Frugal,” Liz repeated.
“I can’t hear you,” Jack said.
“I said you were frugal.”
He closed his window to reduce the noise. “You’re right. I’m frugal. I don’t need to put money in the hands of thieves taking advantage of the fact they’re the only gas for fifty miles.”
“Now it’s hot,” Liz said. “Open the window.”
“Turn on the air-conditioning,” Katie said.
“It doesn’t come with air-conditioning,” Jack said. “It’s English. They endure the heat. Makes them feel superior to endure the heat.”
“You’ve never liked the English,” Liz said.
“What do you have against the English?” Katie asked. She leaned forward to Mueller. “Has he always had that view?”
“I don’t hate the English,” Jack said.
Mueller turned and looked back at Katie. “He spent an unpleasant winter there after the war, never comfortable with the English upper class.” He looked at Jack. “Your loud opinions clashed with English reserve. You called it ‘a rainy weakened country with a big useless history.’ ” Mueller laughed.
Jack looked at Mueller. “Well, it wasn’t original with me.” He spoke over the growling engine and cyclone of air. “They lost their sense of entitlement after Suez. Shakespeare and the steam engine. What else have they done?”
Liz slumped in her seat. “I’m tired of talking about England. Can we for once talk about something that you don’t insult by tearing it down?”
“What do you want to talk about?” Jack asked.
Liz looked at Katie. “What do we want to talk about?”
Liz lowered her window a crack.
Mueller turned back to Liz and said, “Katie says you might be pregnant.”
“I didn’t say I might be pregnant. I said I was. I miscarried.”
Mueller felt terrible, believing he’d steer the conversation to something positive, then hearing her confession.
“I’m fine,” Liz said. “We’ve wanted a child for some time, so it was disappointing. There wasn’t anything we could have done. We had good care.”
“We did not,” Jack said.
“I think I had good care.”
“You should have gone to bed rest.”
“That’s my point. I didn’t follow the doctor’s advice. I should have.”
“Don’t blame yourself. You always blame yourself. Next time we’ll do better,” Jack said. “You’ll follow the doctor’s orders.”
Liz had a brave smile. She looked out the window. “Sometimes I
think the child just didn’t want to come out and be part of this world.”
“That’s crazy,” Jack said.
“It’s what I feel.”
Mueller saw a strange, sad expression on Liz’s face that was a window onto a terrible grief. She gazed out at the barren, unchanging landscape of dry red earth on the passing hills. Mueller saw her lost in thought. He wanted to comfort her with a hand on her shoulder, but he was the friend, not the husband, and he was restrained by their tangled past. Her letter to him, in response to his note that he would be visiting Havana, had gushed enthusiasm.
A scorching sun was high in the sky when they turned off the main highway. Jack held the steering wheel firmly in his hand as he passed from asphalt to the gravel track, reducing speed. The Land Rover bumped along the narrow road that cut through impenetrable walls of thornbush. They could see the road ahead, but the view behind was a clotted cloud of red dust thrown up by their tires.
They had been passing through this stretch of land for a while when Katie asked how long it would be before they arrived, and Liz threw out, “An hour. Another hour of this.” She had closed her window to keep out the dust and the car had become stuffy.
“Liz, you’re off by half,” Jack said. “Two hours. This is the worst stretch. Not a good place to break down. Not even the squatters move in here.” Jack turned to Mueller. “Have I told you the story about the squatters?”
“What story?”
“Jack!”
“Oh, come on, Liz. It’s a funny story. I don’t tear anyone down.”
Katie met Liz’s eyes and mouthed, Con un limon en la boca.
Liz burst out laughing.
“What’s so funny?” Jack demanded, sensing he was the object of ridicule. No one answered. “Fine,” he said.
Jack turned to Mueller and continued his dissertation on cattle ranching, which had been interrupted. He said he’d brought Santa Gertrudis cattle to Cuba from Texas because they were better meat producers than the skinny Criollo and Brahman cattle native to the island. “Cuba is perfect for cattle ranching,” he said. “Rain, fertile soil, temperate weather all year round. Cattle like it. Yearlings fatten in the fall and we send them to Havana’s slaughterhouses by train, then on to Miami by ship. My concern is the rail line. A month from now we transport the cattle and I don’t want to find the rebels have shut down the railroad. We’ve put a ton of work into our place. Cleared out thornbush, planted colonião. It’s a guinea grass that is spongy with a lot of green leaf and almost no roots. It’s easy on their hoofs. The only challenge we have—other than the occasional precarista who shoots at the house—is the tick population. The place is thick with ticks. We had to build dipping vats for the cattle.”
They drove on. The afternoon clouds had settled in and turned the sky the color of glue. Vultures in the middle of the road rose from roadkill when the Land Rover lumbered by. Thornbush gave way to algarrobo trees as the road rose up the hills, tires on gravel spewing mushrooming dust. The land was parched at the higher level. The rutted, nameless road was marked only by peaked concrete stakes at kilometer intervals.
“Water,” Jack said, offering his leather bota to Mueller and the women.
Katie took a quick swig. She handed it back, admiring the embroidery, and then Jack quenched his thirst.
“Look at this land,” Katie said. “Hot. Empty. Dry. I want a cool bath first thing when we arrive. I feel sticky.”
Then again the conversation turned to politics, as it always seemed to when other topics were exhausted. Low-grade anxiety about the unfolding uncertainty steered the conversation back to the topic. Mueller had not followed the conversation, but he listened when Jack dismissed Katie’s opinion.
“Just because there is a filthy war on, I see no reason why you have to be miserable.” Then, sarcastically, “You’re young. You can afford the luxury of despair.”
Katie stared. “I don’t understand what that means. Would you explain what you mean?”
“I’m for the welfare of the people as much as the next man, but I have a ranch to run. Cattle don’t feed themselves.”
“There is nothing worse than civil war,” Liz said.
“Defeat is worse,” Jack said.
“Worse? In what way? Worse than what we’ve got?”
“They’re communists,” Jack said flatly.
“A dictator will be gone. We’ll be free.”
“Maybe. Maybe we’ll be free. But they’d take over our property. Nationalize business. We’ll all be free. Free and poor.”
Mueller looked back at Liz, who glared at the back of her husband’s head.
“Do you believe in good and evil?” Liz replied.
“What is good for one person,” Jack said calmly, “may be evil for another, so it’s misleading to talk about good and evil. We don’t live in a monastery.” He nodded at the Camagüey plains. “We live between the gangster colonels and the godless communists. Good? Evil? You tell me.”
Liz said, “Yes, but people sometimes do good things because it is the right thing.”
“Why?” Jack snapped. “Because they feel good about it? Is that the point? How you feel? You don’t think Batista’s thugs get a kick out of their work? I bet they do.”
“And there are people who stop themselves from doing evil because it is evil.”
Jack gave a look of strangled disgust that Mueller found almost amusing.
For some time they had been driving on the unimproved road, partly in a ravine as it wound around the hills common to that part of the country, and partly through untamed tangles of brush. Now they made a turn where the road curved around a dead tree and dipped to a bone-dry riverbed.
“What’s that?” Liz asked.
She was the first to see the small group by the kilometer marker. Red dust kicked up from the road covered the stump occupied by an older man. He wore black and protected his head from the scorching sun with a white handkerchief he held over his head. It was meager cover. A young man in rags and sandals, a machete stuck in his belt, stood at his side. Beside them another skinny person. There was no shade where they stood. The road ran straight ahead to the riverbed, and on the other side climbed the next hill.
“What are they doing here?” Katie asked.
The sight of the three men had gotten the attention of everyone in the Land Rover, and the fatigue of the drive vanished. The group was just beyond the culvert, a spot where cars could safely pull over. They were poorly dressed, Mueller saw, their eyes looking at the approaching vehicle. The older man stood and lifted a water bottle that he pointed at, and to get across his need, he turned it upside down to show it was empty. His face was dark from the sun.
“What are they doing here?” Katie asked again. “Does anything ever pass by here?”
“It’s a bus stop,” Jack said. “The bus we saw a ways back, stopped. Broken down. That’s the risk you run on this road. They’ll be fine.”
“He’s asking for water,” Liz said. “Look, he’s turned the water bottle upside down.”
They had gotten close enough to make out the old man’s face, and to see that each of the men carried a machete in his waistband. Mueller saw only eyes, quiet, almost desperate, but straw hats obscured the faces of the other two men. Then he saw one was a girl.
Liz leaned forward. “Jack, stop. They need help. They’re thirsty.”
“They have machetes. I don’t trust this. If we stop we would not be safe if they attacked.”
Mueller looked at Jack and saw his friend’s face, and saw there was no room in his expression to be inconvenienced by the travails of stranded strangers.
“We don’t know who they are,” Jack said. “You think you’re being a good Samaritan and then when you’ve stopped they’re on you.”
“They’re thirsty, Jack,” Liz said. “She’s a young girl. Jack, stop. For Christsake stop.”
“It’s dangerous.”
“Dangerous,” Liz snapped. “Where? Jack, they’re alone. He’s a
n old man. There’s a girl. It’s hot. They’re thirsty.”
Jack steered the Land Rover to the left to avoid the group. Liz had her eyes on the old man, who came forward and held the water bottle up. Jack slowed down out of caution, but he held the steering wheel in a tense grip.
Liz reached forward and placed a comforting hand on her husband’s shoulder, but he sloughed the attention and rejected her touch.
“Jack, what’s wrong?”
Mueller felt the looming jeopardy, and he saw in the dark corner of his mind where anxiety nests the danger they would be in if Jack was right, but he also saw only the old man pleading for water.
“What do you think, George?”
“Perhaps we should drive on.”
“I’ll send a car back for them when we get to Camagüey.” Jack increased the speed of the Land Rover and he steered to avoid the man, who’d stepped into the road.
Liz was appalled. She looked at Mueller as if he’d betrayed her. She put her head to the open window and looked at the old man’s wrinkled face, eyes pleading.
“You are heartless,” she said. She stared at Jack and Mueller, not comprehending their conspiracy against a simple act of charity.
“We will send a car back,” Jack said again.
“He doesn’t need a car. He needs water.”
“Close the window,” Jack said.
Bright sun and scorching heat turned the two men who had moved into the road into outsized objects. Jack steered straight ahead and maneuvered to avoid them.
“Jack. Stop now.”
“They have machetes.”
“What is it you don’t understand about the word now?”
Liz took the leather bota that hung over the front seat and hurled it out the window.
Mueller felt the Land Rover come to a sudden stop. He saw a look of contempt on Jack’s face and when he looked into the rear at Liz she stared back. Mueller saw in their faces the terrible truth of two people locked in a spiral of resentment. Mueller had no reconciling words to offer.
