Telex From Cuba

by Rachel Kushner

  They left the club and went to nearby La Rampa, a grand avenue of deluxe sundae parlors where the rich strolled and licked. Exclusive confection boutiques that would later be replaced by an enormous state-run ice cream emporium, a concrete spaceship that gave away twenty-five thousand bowls of government-issue vanilla and strawberry every day, a drab and massive enterprise that would be the future government’s elaborate fuck you to the rich, to the presidents and their escorts, who’d strolled and licked along La Rampa in Havana’s diamond days.

  Prio chose chocolate and she guava, a fruit that tasted deliciously unnatural, more like feminine poisons, perfume, or shampoo, than something you were supposed to eat. They were strolling and licking and window-shopping along La Rampa, Rachel K laughing at Prio, who looked unpresidential, she said, with ice cream in his mustache. A member of his dark-suited security team, who normally walked a few paces behind, approached and tapped Prio’s shoulder. The man leaned in and whispered something. Prio blanched. He turned to Rachel K.

  “I must leave you now. Lelo here will take you back to the club.”

  That night on La Rampa, March 10, 1952, was Prio’s last night as president. With the military’s cooperation, Fulgencio Batista staged a coup. Batista had telephoned from Miami, promising to buy all the officers new uniforms. In return they gave undying loyalty and surrounded the palace with tanks.

  “Easy as ordering a birthday cake from Schrafft’s,” Rachel K later heard an American at the Cabaret Tokio remark loudly. One moment Prio was laughing and window-shopping, his wife and children fast asleep in the private wing of the palace. An hour later he and his family were huddled in the piss elegance of the Dominican embassy, booking airline tickets out. They settled in Miami. Prio wrote to Rachel K that he planned to enroll in theater classes and pursue his lifelong dream of becoming an actor. People talked about the coup as the end of democracy. Until later in the week, when the American ambassador endorsed the new government. Batista had been president before, a celebrated army general the Americans knew and liked.

  Stites came back to Havana a few days after the coup. He came to the Tokio whistling and happy, said he’d met with Batista. “A damn good fellow,” he said. “Used to work for us.”

  Rachel K missed Prio, but suspected he might have been relieved to have the presidency stolen from him. He’d put up no fight, chocolate ice cream still frosting the tines of his mustache, a curiously eager tone to his voice, despite his look of alarm. “Lelo here will take you back to the club.” Because this should go unwitnessed. Where do I sign?

  A couple of weeks after the coup, she watched from a crack between the closed stage curtains as two of Batista’s security guards entered the Pam-Pam Room and waited by the bar. One was talking to La Paloma, probably trying to get a freebie, testing out his new role as a state security thug. The other glowered, fingering the contours of a gun in his waistband.

  Opening notes floated from the piano.

  She stood behind the curtains, waiting for her cue.

  “Introducing, from Paris!”

  If she says she’s from Paris, she’s from Paris, was her sentiment. Being from Paris meant filing her nails to a point and lacquering them in Hemorrhage Red, drinking beer with grenadine, and dressing like a zazou, in painted-on fishnets, short skirts, and stacked wooden heels. Eating mouthfuls of cocaine and douching with champagne. She once heard an actual French girl tell the stage manager that she and Rachel K had worked together “for years” at the Moulin Rouge. It was mysterious and wonderful. Worked together for years at the Moulin Rouge! Maybe we have, Rachel K thought, maybe we have. She believed that people are born every minute of their lives, and what they are in each of those minutes is what they are completely. Zazou, and from Paris, are things she does. Things she is by virtue of doing them. It was a lie whose logic and condition the other dancers understood. Prio, too, understood. Batista didn’t, but he liked her anyway, stupidly suggesting that eventually she’d accept her cubanidad. “Like I know my skin color,” he told her, “and no longer bother with the powder.”

  The accompanist began to play an old-fashioned danzón.

  “Zazou dancer, Rachel K!”

  She stepped out. The blue lights were angled toward her, and in them she could see mostly a screen of curling smoke, and through the smoky screen the men in the front two or three rows. Those in the back didn’t matter—the men near the stage laid down bills, and it was for them that she danced. But tonight there was one in the back who intrigued her. She couldn’t see him but knew he was there, at a table by himself. He’d been coming around ever since Batista took over, maybe a foreign dignitary. The girls were calling him “the German.” The bartender said he was French. He seemed confident, amused, self-contained. Each evening he’d been there, his presence distracted her, like he knew that she knew that he was watching her, while pretending not to, and his gaze colored her every movement. She wanted to talk to him but sensed it wasn’t yet the moment, as if there were a tacit agreement between them that they would continue for some time with this ritual of him watching her and pretending not to. She danced for him, invisible to her in the back of the Pam-Pam Room.

  “The president is waiting for you,” the stage manager said as she finished her show. On her way to Batista’s booth she passed near the Frenchman’s table, thinking they would silently communicate once again. But his table was empty. He’d left.

  3

  “Who tipped me the black spot?” Everly Lederer asked in her fake pirate’s brogue. It was Silver’s question, from Treasure Island.

  Her father kept loading suitcases into the trunk.

  “If I’m moving to an island, I need a knife,” she announced, leaning up to the front seat. Her mother said to sit back.

  In Treasure Island, when a pirate died, the first thing you did was rifle his sea clothes and locate his knife. An island was full of danger: malaria-infested bogs, disease that would turn your eyes the color of lemon peel, poisonous snakes, and double-crossing pirates like Barbecue. She’d need a knife to cut down branches and make a sleeping lean-to in the woods, to cut open biscuits to eat with fried junk, like Jim Hawkins.

  On their way to Miami, they stayed at a motor court in Georgia called the Admiral Benbow. The same name as the inn run by Jim Hawkins and his mother, where Billy Bones died. In Billy Bones’s trunk Jim found the treasure map, and the adventure began. But the Admiral Benbow where they stayed was nothing like the one in Treasure Island. It was crowded with tough-looking southern families, kids cannon-balling into the pool and adults yelling at them or swatting them with newspapers. Everly watched a man and woman who talked in hushed voices, dangling their arms over the second-floor balcony of the motel, smoke drifting from the man’s cigarette in a lazy trail. The man and a woman descended the rickety metal staircase, the woman’s high heels—“pumps,” her mother called them—clicking down the stairs. The man and the woman didn’t say good-bye or even look at each other. They separated and walked off in opposite directions. For a moment Everly thought they would count paces and both turn around and draw like in the movies—the Westerns, that is. But neither the man nor the woman turned around. They weren’t counting paces. They were just walking, the woman in her click-click pumps. Each got into a different car and drove out of the parking lot.

  As they were checking out of their room the next the morning, her father said something about the Admiral “Bimbo.” Her older sister, Stevie, laughed loudly. “Admiral Bimbo! Ha-ha!” Stevie liked to be in on the adults’ jokes, even if she had to fake that she’d understood. Their father grabbed her by the elbow and shushed her.

  They left their car at the Miami port building, to be loaded on a lower deck, and stood behind a rope waiting for a maharaja to board before the regular people were allowed on the ship. She’d seen a picture of a maharaja in the encyclopedia and was expecting a man in a jeweled turban, shoes with curled-up toes, a chain of decorated elephants following behind him. Though she figured there might no
t be any elephants.

  The maharaja finally appeared, making his way up the gangplank, porters behind him wheeling carts stacked with enormous brass-latched leather trunks. He was a frail, balding man in a dark suit and soft-collared shirt. No curled-up shoes and no elephants. Not even a turban.

  What made him a maharaja, she asked her father, if he looked just like a normal businessman, too puny to carry his own luggage? Her father said his bank account. He said the man was in trouble with the government of India, that he’d taken money that wasn’t his. He boarded first with a lot of fuss and ceremony, her father said, but he’d been run out of his country. Her father said the maharaja was on French leave. What did it mean? That he’d sneaked away.

  Her mother and father seemed to hate people for being rich, and yet they wanted to be rich themselves. Money was always a problem. That’s why they were going to Cuba, where her father would have a higher salary and be a boss. Her mother said if they had to live in a jungle for George Lederer to get the salary and respect he deserved, well then, they’d live in a jungle.

  Everly was keen on the idea of living in a jungle. Why not? But her mother talked about it like it was something they were forcing themselves to do. Her mother said she was tired of living on “slender means,” which made Everly picture well-fitting men’s pants with narrow legs, even after she was told what it meant. If her parents ever did get rich, their old selves would hate their new selves. Though maybe it wouldn’t matter, because they would have forgotten their old selves, erased by their new selves, since self was self and there couldn’t be more than one in a single body.

  The maharaja’s troubles had been in the newspaper, and from the way her father spoke, she guessed the other adults in line must have read the article, too. It seemed more lonely and shameful than a privilege to walk up the gangplank with so many eyes staring. She felt sorry for the little maharaja, a man who had too many bags to carry by himself, and what was the difference, really, between a grown-up’s shame and a child’s shame? She was always feeling sorry for people and sometimes this led to feeling sorry for herself. Sympathy was messy business, and where did you stop the flow of it? She would think of something, a memory of something unpleasant, like being spanked in the department store or shoved into the shower with her clothes on. When she had her tantrums she couldn’t stop them once they’d started, so her father would stop them for her by putting her in the shower. Everly had once put Tinker in the shower for misbehaving. At first he was scared, but then he liked it. He was a dog and didn’t understand that it was a punishment. Later, Tinker ran away.

  The line to board the ship began to move. Her mother nervously clutched the travel papers and passport, one slim green booklet for her and the three girls. There was a folded-up letter in the passport from the State Department. The letter reminded them that they were emissaries of the United States and should act accordingly. Everly held her younger sister Duffy’s hand as they walked up the gangplank. The sun was low, and the sky had turned the color of ripe watermelon. Florida was all soft and artificial colors. Pink houses, turquoise water, perfumy flowers, and huge gnarled trees with moss caught in the branches like torn lace. The air had an underwater cast to it, a greenish-blue that laved over them as they moved through the thick humidity, up the gangplank and onto the ship. She looked out to where the sea’s horizon met the watermelon sky. Already she felt closer to this mysterious place, the tropics. She pictured an island in a sea of tepid green glass, a foamy ruffle of waves lapping its shore. Beyond the shore, an endless mesh of jungle plants. The smell of ripe fruit. A forgotten lagoon surrounded by palm trees reflected in the silver mirror of the water. At the entrance to the lagoon, green vines as thick as theater drapes, waiting to be parted.

  They were finishing dinner in the ship’s dining room when rain began slapping against the thick glass of the portholes in violent bursts, like someone was tossing buckets of water. Stevie was reading from a list of diversions in the guidebook. “Ping-Pong, deck tennis, and shuffleboard. Skeeball and bingo on the Lido. And with parental permission, children are invited to take a guided tour of the bridge.” She finished reading and put the guidebook in her purse to keep as a souvenir. Stevie was documenting her life as it happened. Everly was not. Documenting life as it happened seemed like a way of not experiencing it. As if posing for photographs, or focusing on what to save and call a souvenir, made the present instantly the past. You had to choose one or the other was Everly’s feeling. Try to shape a moment into a memory you could save and look at later, or have the moment as it was happening, but you couldn’t have both. Everly had not saved the homemade newspaper, the Lederer Times, which she’d spent an entire weekend working on before they left Oak Ridge. Just threw it away along with a huge box of schoolwork and drawings. My things, she’d thought, to destroy if I want to. Her father had printed copies of her newspaper on his Teletype machine at work. She had intended to make a daily, then scaled it down to a monthly, but only ended up making one edition—“March 1952.” It had three articles: “Largest Hailstone Ever Recorded”—six inches in diameter, with a drawing to illustrate the story. “Timothy Hodgkiss Says You Can Die from Eating a Cigar,” a rumor that was confirmed by the school nurse. And “Lederers Are Moving to Cuba!” with more illustrations and a story that included a few fibs, like that Everly would be getting a pet monkey from China, so young that he wore a diaper and would have to be fed green coconut milk from a bottle. And her own pet parrot, like the one that sat on Barbecue’s shoulder in Treasure Island, except hers wouldn’t be called Cap’n Flint. He’d be called Jim Hawkins, and he’d recite lines from the book. “I’ll tip you the black spot!” the parrot would say, but only to people who were mean. It seemed incredible that parrots could talk. And that they could live for a hundred years, which meant Duffy would have to take care of the parrot after Everly was dead, a detail she included in her article. Her mother said it was “morbid.” What did it mean? That you weren’t supposed to think about death.

  Out the dining room window, rain pocked the surface of the sea, making dimpled patterns that changed as the wind shifted the angle of the rain. The wind crescendoed and decrescendoed, sounding like the braided voices of distressed people. The week before, at Everly’s final piano lesson with Mrs. Vanderveer, Mrs. Vanderveer had played a Chopin prelude to demonstrate a proper crescendo and decrescendo. Everly’s favorites were the Chopin preludes. They were all in a minor key, and she only liked music in a minor key. And music that called for damper pedal. In private, she used the damper pedal more than the sheet music indicated, which made her feel thoughtful and dramatic. For the decrescendo, Mrs. Vanderveer had leaned low and delicate over the keys, pressing them softer and softer, notes melting away in the final stanza like a glassy sliver of candy on the tongue, nothing remaining after the note but a vibration, a silent thing that hung in the room. A feeling that was there even though you couldn’t see it and it made no sound.

  But she was lazy and didn’t practice enough, only played her favorite things and ignored those that were too difficult, or in a happy key, went to her lesson with her hands dirty, her fingernails uncut. At her last lesson she’d been overcome with regret. She wouldn’t have any more chances to please Mrs. Vanderveer by practicing diligently and coming prepared, trimming her nails and scrubbing out the dirt. Life was going to be like this. You only understood how to behave and appreciate things when they were being taken away from you.

  The ship began to rock, left and then right, and the horizon moved up and down through the window. Duffy started to cry. A man’s voice came through a speaker, echoing loudly through the dining room. “The captain requests that all passengers please return to their cabins.” Her mother wrapped several uneaten dinner rolls in napkins and put them in her pocketbook. As they all got up to file out of the dining room, the ship leaned again, and the floor of the room tilted up like a Whirl-a-Wheel. A cartful of dirty dishes crashed sideways, and a giant coffee urn spilled over and began glugging
a lake of coffee onto the floor.

  No one was allowed up on deck.

  “Darn. No bingo on the Lido,” Stevie said.

  Duffy bounced up and down on the bed. “Bingo on the Lido! Bingo on the Lido!” When she was worn out from jumping up and down, the room was quiet except for her panting and the sound of the rain.

  They would cross the Tropic of Cancer sometime during the night. Maybe they were crossing it now, Everly thought, picturing the prow of their ship slicing tracelessly through that invisible border and into the tropics, a zone between Cancer and Capricorn that went around Earth like a person’s belt around her waist.

  When Everly told the school librarian, Miss Jiggs, that her family was moving to Cuba, Miss Jiggs pulled out a book called Empire in Green and Gold. Perfect yellow bananas dressed like flamenco dancers in red lipstick and pearls danced across the bottom border of the book’s pages. The book said Cuba was the world’s sugar bowl. Everly pictured a pink crystal bowl, beveled on the edges and filled with glinting white sugar. A pink crystal lid, cut like a gemstone. The sort of thing Mrs. Vanderveer would have brought out for tea service.

  Everyone else was asleep. She lay in bed next to Stevie and listened to the wind and waited for lightning to illuminate the cabin like a photographer’s flash. Was lightning white, or was it purple? It looked white but left a residue of purple, like the shapes that floated across the backs of her eyelids when she pressed on them. She counted Mississippi seconds until thunder and got to seven. The lightning was far away, but she couldn’t remember the formula for how far. Their room moved up and down, and their only window was a small, round porthole. She felt like she was in a tin can turned on its side.