Telex From Cuba

by Rachel Kushner

  “Does Gonzalez have a family?” someone asked.

  “I hear he’s a widower,” another said.

  “What I hear is what I could’ve told you by common sense alone,” Mrs. Billings said, and then lowered her voice, “only homosexuals drive Cadillacs.”

  Mrs. Lederer was making her way back from the bathroom when she saw Charmaine Mackey standing in the hallway by herself, looking glamorous despite her ill-fitting and plain black dress, accented with only a wan strand of what Mrs. Lederer assumed were cultured pearls. Mrs. Mackey was one of those naturally good-looking and trim-figured women who didn’t have to compensate with distracting patterns and bright makeup, or adjust garments to disguise bulges and deficiencies. She had no style and nevertheless managed to look perfect. And moreover, to make style and effort seem gaudy and in poor taste. Mrs. Lederer suddenly felt ungainly in her size-fourteen persimmon-orange dress. Her size-eleven persimmon-orange pumps.

  “Good evening, Mrs. Mackey. How positively smart you look.”

  Mrs. Mackey smiled shyly.

  “I’ve been meaning to ask you,” Mrs. Lederer said, “are you on the wives’ committee, by chance?”

  Mrs. Mackey shook her head. “I don’t think so.”

  “We’re meeting to discuss getting a better commissary in Nicaro, so we don’t have to take the boat over to Preston just to pick up a loaf of bread. You should come to the meeting, if you’re interested. We’re also going to discuss the construction of the pool. Mr. Carrington has agreed to present the plans.”

  “A swimming pool. Right.”

  Mrs. Mackey sensed that any other boss’s wife might know about construction projects. Perhaps Phillip had mentioned the pool. She couldn’t recall. Hubert had not mentioned it. There were lots of things Hubert didn’t mention, but this was her own fault. She sometimes pretended to care about these kinds of things, but she could never remember the details, which proved to everyone, even Phillip, that she didn’t care, and that there was no point in anyone telling her anything. At the dinner table these days, Hubert spoke expressly to Phillip and not to her. Still, she nodded and pretended to listen as he went on about nickel processing and the pilot plant, Cuban politics and labor laws, and this and that about the problems between Gonzalez and the Government Services Administration, which oversaw the Nicaro Nickel Company.

  “Did you read the piece in this morning’s paper about Mr. Neutra?” Mrs. Lederer asked her. “It’s very exciting that he’s been commissioned for a project in Havana—it’s going to be a stunning example of tropical modern.”

  “Is he with the mining concern?” Mrs. Mackey distractedly removed a compact from her handbag and opened it to check her lipstick.

  “Richard Neutra? Oh, heavens, no, dear. He’s a famous Austrian architect—the most famous.”

  “Good evening, Mrs. Lederer.” It was the woman from French Guiana, whose name Mrs. Lederer could not quite recall and didn’t dare mispronounce.

  Mrs. Mackey excused herself somewhat abruptly, but Mrs. Lederer didn’t mind and was even slightly relieved. The woman from French Guiana would know who Neutra was. She had a sober, European air, and from the moment Mrs. Lederer had seen her at the bakery a few days earlier, she’d imagined they might become friends, talk about modern art and articles they’d both read in The New Yorker.

  The woman held up her drink and gestured around the room. “This place is fantastic, isn’t it?”

  “It’s certainly unique,” Mrs. Lederer ventured, locking eyes with her and assuming they could collectively agree that it was not fantastic, that it was a complete horror.

  “Oh, I don’t know if it is unique, Mrs. Lederer. It strikes me as very traditional. This is a real Cuban hunting lodge. Did you see the cast-iron boot scraper by the door? It must be a hundred and fifty years old. I have to remember to ask Lito about that remarkable piece.”

  Lito? Mrs. Lederer wouldn’t have called him by his first name, never in a million years, though twice already this evening he had entreated her to do so. But perhaps there was some elegant subtlety to the gesture, as if it were true class to pretend their unctuous host was on equal footing.

  “Perhaps we could go over to Preston together next week,” Mrs. Lederer ventured. “A ladies’ trip to the friseur.”

  “You mean the hairdresser? I hate to give myself away, Mrs. Lederer, but I brush mine fifty times and tie it in a knot.”

  Alone, Charmaine Mackey felt invisible, the laughter and conversation merging into one loud sound that was more like silence, as though the revelry were taking place behind glass, a transparent barrier dividing her from everyone else in the room. She squeezed past people drunkenly unaware that they were blocking her passage, went through a set of doors and out onto the terrace. There were servants outside, setting the tables for dinner. The terrace jutted out over the river, and the enveloping sound of rushing water was grabbing her thoughts and carrying them away on its swift current. How anyone could live with that noise and not lose his mind was beyond her.

  Mrs. Lederer seemed like the type who expected a great deal from the world. She’d been saying something about Austria or an Austrian, and all Charmaine Mackey could think of was the phrase “mother-of-pearl.” She’d taken out her abalone-shell compact to check her lipstick, to avoid looking Mrs. Lederer in the eye. When had it gotten to the point that she couldn’t look people in the eye? It had suddenly occurred to her, as she blocked Mrs. Lederer’s gaze with the compact in her hand, what mother-of-pearl meant. The oyster is the mother of the pearl, the bed in which the pearl, a grain of sand coated in a milky something, is born. A beautiful thing formed from irritation, its mother pried open with human hands, the pearl removed to live its life with a hole drilled through it, strung together with other hole-drilled babies. The mother made the pearl, but she was worth far less. She was practically junk. They inlaid mother-of-pearl in tables and crushed cigarettes into ashtrays made out of it.

  On the boat that had taken them from Preston to Nicaro for the first time, Charmaine had seen a huge patch of something purple, some sort of flotsam—bluish-purple, oddly shaped balloons, like bladders, that were riding on the surface of the water. One of the Lederer daughters, the redhead, had pointed and said that they were Portuguese man-o’-wars. It was a kind of jellyfish, the child explained, though the child had said “species” instead of “kind.” There must have been hundreds of them. They surrounded the boat and moved toward the shore like the Spanish Armada. Charmaine had never seen them, wouldn’t have known what they were called. It was unsettling when children knew things she didn’t. “Do you know the best way to kill an octopus?” Phillip asked her one afternoon. Was she supposed to know? “I’m sorry, Phillip, no. I don’t know.” “You pop it in a bag of seawater and put it in the freezer,” he said. “It dies in its sleep!” Oh, she thought, relieved. I’m not supposed to know. He wanted to tell me how. These tiny confusions were endless. The biggest problem with children wasn’t that they knew about sea life, animal trivia, it was the manner in which they drew pleasure from these things, their capacity for delight, a special kind of accusation. See my wonderful mantle of innocence? Isn’t it precious? How come you don’t have one? You’re nothing like what I’ll be when I’m a grown-up. What’s wrong with you?

  “Mrs. Mackey, you are lost in thought.”

  It was Mr. Gonzalez.

  “Oh, I…yes, I was lost in thought.”

  “You seem like a person who thinks about things carefully.”

  I do? she wondered. How do you measure?

  Mr. Gonzalez offered to show her around the hunting lodge. Charity, she assumed, because she’d been standing in the foyer by herself. The Americans were all suspicious of Mr. Gonzalez—her husband acted as though the man were an unconvicted killer—but she’d found him reasonably polite the few times they’d met. She accepted his offer, and enjoyed a fleeting twinge of her own version of power: doing what she sensed she was not supposed to. Like asking Blythe Carrington if drinking
below the Tropic of Cancer was bad for you, knowing somewhere in the back of her mind that Blythe Carrington was definitely an alcoholic. It was in these timid forays that Mrs. Mackey felt the vague shape of her own self, as if her essence hid in the margins and could be felt only when these margins were crossed.

  “You are without a refreshment, Mrs. Mackey. May I get you something? A lemonade?”

  Mrs. Mackey said impulsively that she wanted a Tom Collins. She didn’t even know what was in a Tom Collins. It was a drink she’d heard of.

  “That’s with gin?” Mr. Gonzalez asked.

  He was asking, she later realized, because he wasn’t sure, but she assumed he was implying, like her husband might imply, that a nervous woman shouldn’t drink.

  “I’m not a teetotaler, Mr. Gonzalez, although I might seem like one.”

  Though until that moment, the truth was she had been a teetotaler. Her doctor had said drinking could interfere with her medication. But her medication was already interfering, and so perhaps it needed its own interference.

  Mr. Gonzalez fetched her the Tom Collins, which tasted quite good. Then he led her down a hallway to what he announced was his trophy room. The lighting was dim and low, dissolving into folds of darkness near the ceiling. Mrs. Mackey looked up at the faces of animals that had been cleaved at the shoulders and nailed or glued to lacquered plaques that hung from the walls. It was morbid ornamentation, she thought, but also funny. As if the animals were standing behind those painted plywood sets at the fair, putting their heads through the circular holes, placing themselves in the scenery depicted on the plywood. Or maybe they were bursting into the room, their bodies lodged partway through the walls. Were they staring at her? And were they grimacing, or did they have more of a mug shot expression, the face you made when you wanted to make no face at all?

  She said she remembered hearing that General Batista had some sort of hunting reserve not far from here, where they shipped in exotic game from Africa.

  Mr. Gonzalez said yes, that was right. Near Gibara, he said.

  “You’re a friend of President Batista’s?” she asked, an unfamiliar sense of ease coming over her. Tingly but diffuse, like there was a less abrupt transition between her and the outside world. She was a person, a body, at a party, and her presence there felt natural, like a body in a body-temperature swimming pool. It must have been the drink. All this time, she’d avoided alcohol because of her nervous condition. When maybe it was nervous people who should drink. There were Soviet women, she’d read, having babies in water these days. A softer transition, and surely adults needed their own soft transitions—

  “Is that what you’ve heard, Mrs. Mackey?”

  “That’s what Hubert says, that you’re a close, personal friend of the president’s. But what do I know? I mean,” she giggled, “what does Hubert know?” Warmth was spreading through her and putting her in a giddy, almost superior mood. “Maybe I know one thing,” she said, feeling mischievous.

  But Mr. Gonzalez didn’t ask her what it was. And later, she couldn’t quite remember what it was that she knew.

  While people mingled and drank and gossiped, Mr. Mackey, stone sober, waited in the foyer for the ambassador. Mortified at the run-down condition of Gonzalez’s lodge, Mr. Mackey planned to greet His Excellency, pull him aside, and explain the situation. “Humor him,” the National Lead rep had said, “but don’t tell him a goddamn thing.” It was more than humoring Gonzalez to let him host Nicaro Nickel’s welcoming party. Mr. Mackey had wanted to have it at Cayo Saetía, for the simple and right-headed reason that Saetía was where United Fruit had their company parties, and United Fruit had been running a business in eastern Cuba for fiftysome years and knew a great deal about how to do things. But Gonzalez had sent out invitations before Mr. Mackey could stop him.

  When His Excellency arrived, Gonzalez seemed to appear out of nowhere. He was right there at the door next to Mr. Mackey, and to Mr. Mackey’s dismay, Gonzalez took the ambassador by the arm and walked him into the party as if the two of them were old friends. Mr. Mackey trailed behind them, feeling invisible. Gonzalez and His Excellency were laughing. Mr. Mackey took a deep breath and decided to insert himself. He approached. They both fell quiet, and Gonzalez excused himself to greet other guests.

  Mr. Mackey introduced himself and cut straight to the chase.

  “The word is this Gonzalez character is Batista’s hatchet man,” he said quietly, leaning in close to the ambassador, his hearing still a little muffled from the quinine incident.

  “Mr. Mackey, don’t forget that he was approved by the U.S. government,” the ambassador said coolly. “They wouldn’t let just any gorilla buy twenty percent of the company’s shares. Batista is promising no strikes, no labor laws, no taxes, no problema. The way I look at things,” the ambassador said, “he’s your hatchet man, Mr. Mackey.”

  Mrs. Lederer watched as a group of Cubans filtered into the party, low-level managers that Gonzalez, as the men all said, had wrenched into the hiring scheme. The Cuban wives were gaudy to a degree that seemed like deliberate satire, she observed with restored confidence in her own custom-tailored silk organza dress, after her moment of doubt in the presence of chic Mrs. Mackey. In their heavy and probably costume jewelry, red lipstick, paint-on beauty marks, foundation, and rouge thickly troweled over their dark complexions, the Cuban wives looked to Mrs. Lederer almost like drag queens in a Hasty Pudding production. She detected a mishmash of fragrances—Fibah, Arpège, Chanel—a blended overkill that seemed the moral equivalent of Long Island iced tea, a cocktail drunk not for the taste, but as an insurance policy against sobriety. Many of them were in fox-fur stoles. Or probably rabbit, dyed to look like fox. This on a night when the temperature might drop to a chilly eighty-six degrees.

  Mrs. Lederer wondered out loud if Mr. Gonzalez was planning to serve them Cuban food. She said she thought she smelled garlic, that same odor that drifted from the servants’ quarters on Sunday afternoons, when their cook, Flozilla, was off and prepared her own meal on a hot plate. She said garlic made her nauseous and she’d half a mind to ask Flozilla to stop using it.

  “You let your servants cook native in the house?” Mrs. Billings asked.

  “Well, I mean, they can cook what they want to feed themselves,” Mrs. Lederer said, “as long as they serve proper meals to us.”

  Mrs. Billings said there was no place for garlic and boiled yucca in her house. She’d trained her staff to cook reasonable American dishes, and now all she had to do was train them to eat reasonable-sized portions. She said her servants ate enormous piles of food.

  The others listening concurred, and Mrs. Lederer asked how it could be that none of the servants were a bit fat, while she and Mr. Lederer were constantly on reduction diets.

  Mrs. Mackey offered timidly that she’d read in the Tips for Anglos brochure that you could consume more calories in the tropics. But whether you had to be from the tropics for this to be the case, she wasn’t sure. She was just rejoining the group after her tour with Mr. Gonzalez. Despite his pariah status among the others, she’d been strangely reluctant to abandon him. In fact, he’d abandoned her, excusing himself on account of the ambassador’s arrival.

  The brochure had included a list of difficult questions Americans should be prepared to answer when traveling in uncivilized countries. If you are a democracy, why do whites and blacks eat at separate lunch counters? The brochure didn’t propose an answer, as if the answer was obvious, and the issue was only that a person should expect the question. Mr. Mackey said it was a trick question, and that all you had to say was that democracy had to do with separate branches of government, checks and balances and voting.

  One woman said she’d heard that girls went through puberty at a younger age in the tropics and that those with preteens better keep an eye on them. Another said she’d read that women’s cycles were affected by the equator, but she couldn’t remember quite how, something to do with the moon and tides. Blythe Carrington, in ears
hot and now thoroughly adjusted by three, or maybe it was four bowls of that delicious rum drink, was thinking how funny it would be when these birds discovered they were in the latitude of the three-week menstrual period. Swaddled interminably in jumbo-sized Kotex, they would all bleed and bleed. You couldn’t stanch the flow of things in a humid swamp. Sweat was probably this moment soaking the lining of every wife’s party dress. Just as sap was surely oozing from the dark and leafy manchineel trees that hung over the pathway to Gonzalez’s ghoulish and primitive rattrap. Manchineel sap was poisonous. It left fluid-filled blisters on any human skin it touched. And there were the mosquito bites, which wept crusting tears of amber pus for a month and scarred permanently. There was so much for these women to discover about the tropics, Blythe Carrington thought with angry anticipation, a bitter optimism in the future promise of other people’s discomfort, discomfort she already knew, and had the advantage of having accepted long ago.

  Tip Carrington was flirting with the perfumed bevy of Cuban wives, speaking Spanish, telling each of them how lovely she looked, asking where his wife could shop to look as chic and elegant as they did. The Cuban women draped their furs down around their lower backs. Perspiration beaded on their upper lips, caking their makeup and giving their décolleté a particular, reflectant glow. They looked to Tip Carrington as delicious as bowls of ice cream beginning to melt. Something you better lap up quickly, before it puddles.

  Just then, Blythe Carrington walked past. She glared at her husband with her bloodshot, Windex-blue eyes and headed for the bar.

  “Do you ladies shop in Havana,” Tip Carrington asked, “or do you have to go all the way to Paris for this caliber of elegance?”

  The women giggled. They shopped at La Época, a middlebrow department store in Holguín, two hours from Nicaro by car.

  Tip Carrington continued on his rounds with the cocktail shaker, stopping to refill Mr. Lederer’s and Mr. Mackey’s drinks. “So, Carrington, where’d you pick up the Spanish?” Mr. Mackey asked. “You sound practically like a goddamn native.”