Telex From Cuba

by Rachel Kushner

  The temperature hadn’t dipped under eighty-five degrees since she and Mr. Carrington and their twin daughters, Val and Pamela, arrived in Nicaro four weeks ago. Unlike their neighbors, the Lederers on one side and the Billings on the other, who showed up with wardrobes of synthetic cloth that not only transformed body odor to an inorganic stench but also melted after one day in the climate of eastern Cuba, Blythe Carrington wore cotton and hadn’t been a bit surprised to encounter damp tropical heat. She’d spent her adult life suspended in it. But tonight the air was heavy and windless as the air in a shut closet, though instead of mothballs she smelled oxide dust. The plant had begun production, the managers too impatient to wait for the new chimney scrubbers to arrive from the States. And so the town was coated in oxide dust—reddish, and blending grittily with the humidity. To make matters worse, Tip Carrington had used up the last of the cube ice, and so lukewarm stingers.

  She was already slightly drunk, what she thought of as twilight drunk: a special moment when she was still sober enough to notice she was drunk, caring more about certain things and less about others, her vision blurring around the edges like a camera with a twinkle filter on its lens. And she was already irritated with her husband, who’d dressed, greased his hair, and patted on cologne with the attentive optimism of a horny bachelor.

  As she went to fix another drink, Val and Pamela came into the living room.

  “Mom,” Val said, “I think it’s only fair to let us go to the party. There aren’t any kids our age in town, so we should be promoted to adult things.”

  Blythe Carrington replied that no one else was bringing teenagers, that it was a meet-and-greet expressly for employees and their wives. Pamela, more hotheaded than her sister, protested that no one was bringing teenagers because there weren’t any teenagers. She said they’d been carted off to live in this muddy two-bit nowhere and get followed around by a weird eight-year-old like Everly Lederer. Pamela marched down the hall and slammed a door, then opened it so she could slam it again. A nasty little habit she’d learned from her father. When Tip Carrington had successfully broken every door in their house in Bolivia, he’d resorted to slamming kitchen cabinets, and had broken all of those as well. Blythe Carrington knew about anger, but she didn’t bother with doors. Fix yourself another room-temperature stinger. That was Blythe Carrington’s answer to everything.

  “I hate this place!” Pamela yelled. “It’s ugly and we have to live under a disgusting factory. My shoes are all ruined because these idiotic people haven’t paved our road.”

  Why Pamela had developed this irrational homesickness for Bolivia was beyond Blythe Carrington. Another corrupt hellhole where her husband had screwed the maid, the laundress, his secretary, and his assistant’s secretary. Where they’d lived a life of tenuous appearances and outright lies. And where her husband’s engineering job at the silver mine had lasted only so long as the hostile locals remained firmly under the company’s shit hammer. Which wasn’t long. When the revolution began, they ran for their lives. Her husband’s employees—the same miners who’d brought gifts, little hand-woven native things, to the house after Tip Carrington successfully negotiated a better ration card system for them—were suddenly the angry mob lobbing medium- and large-sized rocks at their car as they fled to the port in Sulaco. Even the wives had flung rocks.

  Blythe Carrington placated Val and Pamela by telling them they could order whatever they wanted from the El Encanto catalog on her dressing table. Val retrieved it, happy to shop, and to shop expensively.

  “Here, Pamela,” Val said. “Colony perfume by Jean Patou. From France.”

  “I love Colony perfume,” Pamela said, folding the page corner to mark it. “And it’s only forty-five dollars.”

  When the jeep arrived to take the Carringtons to the party the moon had just appeared, rose-colored and hanging low and giant like a ripe mango. Probably the nickel dust, giving it that hue. Mist was settling in the air, and Blythe Carrington felt relieved to be outside, under that moon and free, for a moment, of her own petty irritations. They were going to a party, and the party might actually be fun. Over the past three weeks people had been arriving in dribbles, moving in along the manager’s row. She’d met a few of the wives at the ice factory and the club, and gotten a vague sense of who might make tolerable company, who not. But tonight was the first official gathering, and everyone would be there.

  The party host was this mysterious Gonzalez character whom people had been gossiping about since the Carringtons arrived. The “Cuban millionaire” who’d finagled his way into the nickel mining operation. They were all going up to his hunting lodge on the Cabonico River. She wasn’t sure what to expect, and that alone was reason for hope.

  The jeep fetched Mr. and Mrs. Lederer, and they made their way up the steep, rutted, and narrow road to Lito Gonzalez’s remote lodge. Branches xylophoned down the sides of the jeep as it forced its way through the foliage that strangled the road’s throat. They ducked under a fig tree, and giant water-filled leaves upturned like ladles, raining into the jeep. Figs plopped on the hood like soft leather pouches.

  The river rushed loudly as they pulled up in front of a three-story house that looked like it had been slapped together with driftwood and rusty nails.

  “My God,” Blythe Carrington said, “a polite person would call this ‘rustic.’ I call it a dump.”

  The house was on stilts, pitched over the river, and the entire structure seemed to be listing to one side. Ivy and lianas coiled up and around the eaves of its sagging roof. More vines smothered the exterior and hung down from the power lines in tangled masses, like drain clogs of human hair.

  Lito Gonzalez greeted the four of them as they entered the dimly lit foyer, pronouncing their names slowly, carefully. He was wearing pressed gabardine—the jacket with an excess of shoulder padding, the pants with an excess of pleats girdling his large middle.

  New management people and their wives, some of whom Mrs. Lederer had met, others she’d only seen in town, were crowded around the bar, where white-jacketed Negroes were pouring drinks from a cart of gleaming liquor bottles. Mrs. Lederer tried not to seem too eager as she waited her turn to get a drink. She felt slightly frantic, like this was a department store white sale and the best linens would be gone before you knew it. The girls were at home in Nicaro, where they would be watched over by the new houseboy, and she was planning on getting good and drunk.

  “Never get tight at a company affair,” Fortune magazine advised in the issue devoted to management social mores. Marjorie Lederer had read it cover to cover and taken notes. But after only three weeks in Cuba she’d come to understand that management people drank. And did they ever.

  Tip Carrington commandeered the bar and mixed up a batch of martinis, making the task into an impromptu tutorial for the benefit of the three Jamaican bartenders. He explained to them that extra dry meant not a little bit, but the merest suggestion of vermouth, in a sense none. Which he demonstrated by tipping the vermouth bottle over the shaker, and righting it before any actual alcohol poured from the spout.

  “It’s a gesture of the wrist—like a dance,” he excitedly explained to the bartenders. “You boys like those native dances, right? Rumba?”

  Tip Carrington leaned the vermouth bottle again, leaned it back. He capped the stainless steel canister of gin and ice, shook it up and down—another kind of dance—and strained it into an empty canister.

  The men talked business and the women compared notes on settling in, as Tip Carrington circulated the party with a fogged cocktail shaker, filling people’s drinks.

  “Is the freezer they gave you auto-defrost?” one of the wives asked. “Because I don’t think mine is, and I was promised an auto-defrost. I specifically asked—”

  “But what do you plan on filling it with? I mean, I just can’t get over the lack of produce,” one of the women said, “no peas, no celery, no carrots. Only tropical things. We’ve got alligator pears coming out our ears, and my ki
ds won’t eat them. Yesterday I broke down and paid a dollar twenty-five for a head of lettuce at the commissary in Preston.”

  “Aren’t you on the produce vendor’s route? He comes by the house, the cutest thing, ringing a bell. A little old Chinaman named Lumling. I send the houseboys out, and they haggle with him.”

  “The Chinese vendor?” Mrs. Lederer asked. “But I was told he grows with night soil.” Night soil being the only polite term she could think of to convey that the Chinese vendor was fertilizing his turnips with human waste.

  “The produce can’t possibly be as bad as the dairy products, which, as you know, come from Gonzalez’s dairy. Mrs. Billings took a tour of the place and said it was most unsanitary. Just absolutely dreadful. Cows urinating and defecating practically into the milk. I’ve half a mind to order a home pasteurizer.”

  “Well, don’t order it from the Sears in Havana. They’ll ship you a vacuum cleaner instead—by accident, of course.”

  One of the women commented that the heat was making her listless, and Blythe Carrington said cheerfully that people everywhere were listless, and at least they had something to blame it on.

  “Has anyone noticed that the air in Nicaro—I daresay, the heat itself—seems rust-colored?”

  “The factory,” Mrs. Carrington said. “Nickel oxide.”

  Charmaine Mackey, whose husband, Hubert Mackey, was the new general manager, patted her face with a handkerchief and said she couldn’t believe how infernal the weather had been, and what bad timing it was for setting up a household. Blythe Carrington said her advice was to stock up on cube ice. She said it went quickly in this heat, and that all you could do to stay cool was keep your drink fresh and the fans on high.

  “Don’t they say it’s deleterious to one’s health to drink in equatorial zones?” Mrs. Mackey asked. “I read it in the brochure the company sent, Tips for Anglos.”

  “Deleterious?” Mrs. Carrington said, suppressing her desire to smack Mrs. Mackey right there at the party, in front of the other women. “Forgive me, Mrs. Mackey, but I’m not sure if I know the term.”

  “Bad for the health,” Mrs. Mackey replied, nervously clutching her handkerchief to dampen the shake of her hands. She’d seen a doctor for the problem. He’d prescribed something for nerves, but the medication, and the idea that she suffered from nerves, had made her hands shake more. It was a stupid thing to have said, and she knew better. Her neighbor Mrs. Billings had informed Mrs. Mackey that Mrs. Carrington had a drinking problem. “It’ll end badly,” Mrs. Billings had said. Mrs. Mackey had nodded, wondering silently what would end badly. A great deal of her time was spent not understanding what other people meant when they made these ominous, sweeping, and vague statements. It’ll end badly. Statements that often were lost on Mr. Mackey as well, but Mr. Mackey seemed perfectly comfortable not understanding, didn’t notice there was anything to miss, especially now that his hearing was partly compromised in one ear. When they’d arrived, a month earlier, Hubert had insisted that quinine, their company-allotted malarial vaccine, was harmless. In his fear of tropical diseases, he’d ingested more than five times the recommended dose and lost the hearing in his right ear. He insisted that his hearing was restored, “good as new,” but several times she caught him switching to people’s left as he conversed. The only normal one of them was Phillip. How did they manage to have such a normal son? Phillip could have been spokesman for the Boy Scouts of America. He could have been on television.

  Blythe Carrington took a deep breath and said that Mrs. Mackey might recall that she and Mr. Carrington had just relocated from Bolivia. And that due to her husband’s engineering career, they had been living in Central and South America for most of their adult lives. That it might be the case that Mr. and Mrs. Mackey were from Peoria—or was it Moline?—but she and Mr. Carrington were more from Lima, from Caracas, from Panama City, than they were from anywhere else. And whatever “they” were saying about whether and how much booze was good for you, she could assure Mrs. Mackey that a person could drink herself to oblivion in the tropics and wake up feeling like a million bucks.

  “Carlsbad, New Mexico,” Mrs. Mackey said. But Blythe Carrington wasn’t listening. “We’re from Carlsbad, New Mexico,” she repeated, but there was no point. Blythe Carrington was a bully, and she didn’t care where the Mackeys were from. Earlier in the day, Mrs. Mackey had run into her in the beauty parlor. Mrs. Carrington had been friendly, but even her friendliness was confrontational. “Some of the gals are going down to the club for happy hour,” Mrs. Carrington had said from under her domed dryer. “Meet there at five.” Mrs. Mackey had leaned forward from her own domed dryer, thanked Mrs. Carrington for the invitation but said she thought she’d go home and rest before the party. Mrs. Carrington shrugged. “Whatever suits you.”

  “How was your rest?” Mrs. Carrington had asked her when the Mackeys arrived at Mr. Gonzalez’s.

  Upon returning from the beauty parlor, Mrs. Mackey had gone out to the laundry shed to make sure the new laundress was following directions, ironing Mr. Mackey’s suit on low, as she’d instructed and then repeated with emphasis. These people, it was hard to tell if they listened. The company sent them over and they’d knock at the kitchen door and announce that they were your houseboy, your gardener, your cook, with a curious mix of shyness and dogged insistence. You almost had no choice but to let them in, was Charmaine Mackey’s feeling, even if they made her nervous with their yellow and bloodshot eyes, their impossible Jamaican accents, and their pink hands, which forced you to feel sorry for them somehow. She hated their pink hands. Before she’d gotten to the laundry-shed door, what she saw through the window stopped her in her tracks. Lenore, the new laundress, had taken a long drink of water from a pitcher and was holding the liquid in her mouth with her cheeks puffed out. She blew out a magnificent spray, all over Mr. Mackey’s suit laid out on the ironing table. Mrs. Mackey opened the door. The air inside the laundry shed was inhumanly hot, heavy with the smell of starch and heated cloth. “Lenore, what on God’s Earth are you doing?”

  “I press your husband’s suit, just like you ask,” Lenore said, sweat rolling down her neck. She stared at Mrs. Mackey with her googly and bloodshot eyes. “You got to wet the linen, or it don’t press.”

  Mrs. Mackey turned around and walked back to the house, trying to shut out the staccato bark of Mrs. Billings’s young poodle on the other side of the fence, the sound like a knife to the temple over and over again, driving Mrs. Mackey to fantasize ugly thoughts about stabbing a puppy, thoughts she wouldn’t have shared even with a doctor, but she shared little with doctors. She sat in their offices trying to divine what it was a normal person might say and then said it, took the pills they gave her, and now she had shaky hands.

  Yap! Yap! Yap! Yap! Yap! Was it normal that she wanted to knife a puppy? Or that the laundress was spraying saliva-flecked water all over her husband’s clothes? It was difficult to know what was normal. When she’d been pregnant with Phillip, Hubert had caught her eating chalk. He called the doctor, sure that his nut-job wife would finally have to be committed. But the doctor said it was normal, the behavioral symptom of a relatively common nutrient deficiency, and that all she needed was a multivitamin.

  “Just think, our very own Edward G. Robinson,” Mrs. Billings whispered to her husband, glancing over at Lito Gonzalez. Mr. Billings was in charge of nickel mine security, and though his job didn’t entail keeping tabs on the other mine managers, he didn’t need to, because his wife had this so zealously covered. Throughout the evening, Mrs. Billings tried out her code name of “Edward G. Robinson” on the other Americans, referring to Mr. Gonzalez, assuming he would have no idea who the famous Hollywood actor was, or that he happened to not only look just like him, that carplike face, but also exuded the same unseemly qualities. “Five foot five—with lifts in his shoes,” she said to one person. And to someone else, “Five foot three, with lifts in his shoes.” Earlier that week Mrs. Billings had seen Gonzalez pull up
to the plant’s executive offices in a brand-new Cadillac. She’d watched him leave the offices, as she narrated to the other women, get into that car, shiny and white like a gigantic bar of soap, and drive half a block to the company mailboxes. “And then,” she said, “he got back into that enormous showy car—I mean, go ahead and buy the tackiest thing Detroit has to offer—and he drove the half a block back to his office at the plant.”

  A waiter came around with a tray of drinks, shallow bowls of some sort of rum drink with thin slices of lime floating on the surface like discs of green stained glass, undissolved sugar and crushed ice crusted around the rim of each little bowl. “I’ll take one of those delicious-looking things,” Blythe Carrington said, scooping one up into her hand. She took a sip from the edge of the bowl. “Positively deleterious,” she said, sugar crystals gleaming on her upper lip.

  “Did you read the bit about him in The New York Times piece on Nicaro?” Mrs. Lederer asked. “I found the whole thing confusing. Gonzalez is new to the company, but they said he operated ‘concessions’ when the mine first opened, during World War II. What kind of ‘concessions’ was he running?” The term made Mrs. Lederer think of hot dog and popcorn stands at baseball games.

  “A shack with a red light over the door,” Mrs. Carrington replied.

  “I’m not sure I understand.”

  “A whorehouse, Mrs. Lederer,” Mrs. Carrington said, enunciating like she was talking to a child. “Apparently he did quite a business before the Americans went and shut him down. Hypocrites,” Mrs. Carrington snorted. “Now you can expect them to go over to Levisa—”

  “‘Them’?” Mrs. Lederer asked.

  “The men, Mrs. Lederer. They don’t want one in Nicaro, so they’ll go to Levisa, is what I’m saying.”