Telex From Cuba

by Rachel Kushner

  Rain was falling, and storm clouds had muted the afternoon sky. Reflections of the green neon and the red of automobile brake lights ran together and gleamed from the wet streets.

  As he walked the Prado, he heard someone strumming an amorandola on one of the recessed benches, singing a song as he strummed.

  “Bonanza bonanza, we’ll all be rich! Bonanza bonanza, the sea is calm—”

  La Mazière had been back in Havana two days, during which there were maybe thirteen blackouts, four movie theaters bombed, and a massive fire at the Shell refinery across the bay in Regla. Things had certainly progressed over the six months he’d been away.

  The Prado’s lamps flickered on. They were antiquated papillons, Parisian-style butterfly-shaped gaslights—a detail he hadn’t noticed until now. “Paris of the Tropics,” the hotel brochure announced under a map of the island. On the map, a drawing of a girl waist-deep in the warm waters of the gulf, an Amazon rising from the sea with a red gladiola behind her ear. On the Plaza de Armas, just like in Paris, one could purchase Obelisk and Olympia books, and obsolete French pornography—displayed right there in the bookstalls rather than sequestered in L’Enfer, on the top floor of the Bibliothèque Nationale. But the fragile pages, La Mazière had realized upon closer inspection, were speckled with mold, ruined from humidity. The door knockers at La Mazière’s “French-style” hotel had all turned green from salt air. And the enormous lobby mirror was blackening, its silvered tain oxidizing from constant moisture. Paris resituated to the tropics, with its humidity, deluges, and brine, was like a transplanted organ a body had begun to reject.

  How he’d missed this blighted, ersatz “Paris,” and he hadn’t even realized it. But this is how it always was with La Mazière, even if he was in love with a city, as he’d been with Havana when he’d visited for the first time—the coup, the club, the girl. It was a marvelous city, but so was Caracas, and so was Dakar, Sidi Bel Abbès, and Ciudad Trujillo.

  He had just made his routine triangle through the Caribbean, from the Dominican Republic to Haiti to Havana.

  “Do you know why?” Duvalier, who was now president of Haiti, asked him on his stop in Port-au-Prince, a layer of rhetorical dust piling on the cryptic words like lint from a vacuum cleaner bag.

  Duvalier reached up, his gaze ponderous and distant, and caressed the red and blue flag hanging from a pole in his office, its silk fabric billowing in the humid breeze coming through the iron bars of an open window.

  “Do you know why the Haitian people love Papa Doc?”

  La Mazière waited, understanding that the question was a pause for rhythm and not meant to be responded to.

  “Because Papa Doc cured them,” Duvalier said.

  They all referred to themselves this way, in the third person. As if their names were too grand to be contained by an “I” or an image of an “I.” Names that pointed to entities of which they, too, were merely humble subjects. “Your Operative,” as Hemingway had said.

  “The people crawled out of the hills and came into town walking like crabs, on the outsides of their feet. You see, the bottoms of their feet—” Duvalier’s voice broke, as if he were overcome with emotion. He cleared his throat and continued, his tone becoming angry. “The bottoms of their feet were ravaged! So destroyed by yaws that they came out of the hills like crabs. Papa Doc healed their feet. Not with filthy magic. He did it with science.”

  The people loved Papa Doc. And yet, as La Mazière was there to inform him, an insurgent radio broadcast had been traced to somewhere within his own palace.

  He turned from the Prado onto the oceanfront Malecón. Across the choppy bay, he could see the refinery fire in Regla burning greasily and unabated in the downpour. White-hot tongs of lightning spidered against the dark sky, followed by the sound of falling boulders. The rain surged harder. It gusted with such force it seemed to be eroding the medallions and scrolls on the buildings along the Malecón, as if their ornate facades were made not of sandstone but of a substance more like sugar, crumbly and solvent. La Mazière had no umbrella. Already soaked, he took his time, walking slowly, the rain dominating and releasing him.

  A lone man turned from a side street onto the Malecón and walked behind him by a few paces. He and the man continued this way for several blocks, and La Mazière wondered if he were being followed. But then the man’s heels ceased their clicking on the wet pavement. He must have ducked into a building. Perhaps La Mazière was just being paranoid. His meeting the night before with a bizarre character named El Extraño, a supposed contact for Prio’s Directorio Revolucionario, had him spooked, though feeling spooked went with the territory of La Mazière’s chosen life. Prio’s insurgents were training in Miami, and Fidel Castro’s in the Dominican Republic—two groups that might at any moment turn against each other and against La Mazière, and both were being tracked by a third danger, Batista. There was Duvalier and the fomenting insurgency against him, with La Mazière in the middle, playing both sides. And President Trujillo in his self-named ciudad, with no idea that Cuban arms were being shipped from Miraflores Airport, on Trujillo’s own commercial airline. The list went on. It was sometimes dizzying, arming various warring factions, feeling hunted by the mere sound of heels behind him on the pavement. But it was a life to which he was attached, a way to poke his finger into the more interesting but otherwise invisible folds of the cities he roamed.

  La Mazière had met with El Extraño at a chicken-dinner-and-cockfight joint near the Havana airport, a place that proved even more vulgar than the concept had sounded. He sold El Extraño the reels of a French film on the planning of assassinations, warning that the film might be useful, but then again was a bit like reading a book to learn how to ski. The allusion had been lost on this Extraño, who seemed strangely unable to communicate by metaphor.

  “I mean you don’t just set off for the Alps,” La Mazière said, attempting to explain.

  “I’m not going to the Alps,” El Extraño replied, eying La Mazière suspiciously. “Who told you that?”

  “I was speaking, you know, figuratively. I meant, you don’t read a book about skiing and assume you’re an expert skier. These things take practice. They require experience, planning, and caution.”

  “This is Cuba, for fuck’s sake. You see any snow? Nobody skis here.”

  El Extraño’s face shone, coated in sweat. All through dinner he’d jerked his head around every time someone shouted in victory from the cockfighting arena. Why so nervous? La Mazière wondered. Is this guy setting me up?

  “What about the other stuff?” El Extraño asked. “When and where?”

  “You tell me what other stuff.” La Mazière kept his tone cool and even.

  “You know.”

  “If I know,” La Mazière said, suddenly tempted by his own weakness for petty word games, “and you know that I know, then you know, too. So remind me: What do I know?”

  “Goddamnit. What is this?” El Extraño said angrily. “What the hell is going on here?”

  “Perhaps you can tell me, because—”

  “This meeting is over.” El Extraño stood up. “You come back and talk to us when you mean business.”

  Watching him weave among the tables toward the exit, La Mazière thought he better play it safe and meet with the rebels’ arms procurement officer himself, even if it meant going all the way to Oriente Province.

  For the sake of discretion he’d checked in to the Hotel Lincoln this visit, rather than the Nacional. As an added precaution he had the taxi driver take him from the chicken place to the Floridita, a few blocks from the Lincoln. The Floridita would be full of Americans—it was Christmastime, high tourist season—and if any of El Extraño’s people were tailing him, they would stand out.

  Without at first realizing it, La Mazière chose a seat next to Hemingway. Within minutes, Hemingway turned and asked him to dance. It wasn’t the first time. Hemingway never gave up asking, men and women both, as if the people at the Floridita were indisting
uishable to him and he couldn’t be bothered to take note of a minor detail such as gender. No one would ever dance with him. It was Hemingway’s routine to ask, and a willing dance partner might have wrecked the cosmic balance of his serial life.

  La Mazière was busy mulling the probability that El Extraño worked for Batista, and wondering who had set him up for such a trap. But Hemingway persisted in engaging him in conversation, launching into a muddled discourse on poetry and diplomats, La Mazière thinking that Hemingway should stick to the topics of humping and the use of “I.” He seemed to miss the point about Saint-John Perse, who wasn’t a mere foil to logic, sending oblique questions as diplomatic correspondence. Perse was from Guadeloupe, and his poems were filled with succulent memories of an idyllic childhood in the tropics, coco plums and the cool hands of yellow nurses, the smell of clay and violets, sour milk, and fresh butter. But what Hemingway quoted was no sultry rumination, but Perse’s treatise on violence and loss, based on Xenophon’s Anabasis, the story of ten thousand Greek mercenaries hired by Persian barbarians—not for their civilized refinement, but for their gifted brutality at waging war. Midexpedition, the mercenaries’ Persian employer is killed. They are suddenly stripped of purpose, wandering deep in the core of an unknown land, outside of place, of law, torn away from their own selves. Trapped, with no leader and no adequate provisions, they are forced to go north, into the rugged and snow-covered mountains of Asia Minor. They survive on the principle of discipline alone, and must invent their own nomad laws, their own destiny, which, once invented, is the path they were meant to have taken. A route that cannot be found without the mercenaries first being lost. “The sea! The sea!” the rearguard soldiers cry out as they near the end of their journey. They’ve risen to a rocky promontory, their shrieks so frantic and pitched that Xenophon, down below, assumes they are being massacred. But no, they have spotted a sliver of the ocean’s chalk-blue bed rising up beyond jagged peaks, the water that will take them home.

  Xenophon and his soldiers could not have been closer to La Mazière’s heart. Their abandonment and discipline were his; their wandering, too.

  Lost in the Russian steppes, where his Waffen regiment was pulverized and scattered and he became an animal, eating raw horseflesh and sleeping in the snow, he’d seen no sliver of home, only a landscape blanketed in whiteness and death. He’d won a “frozen meat” medal, but he’d as soon eat actual frozen meat than fight Bolsheviks again. He understood painfully well that you couldn’t re-create a moment of ignorance that preceded misery, a luminous winking bubble. Ten thousand soldiers setting off to make fortunes, or one man in his Citroën driving toward the Bavarian town of Wildflecken for elite Waffen officers’ training, his papers stamped with a wet, inky swastika, a profound and electric violation of Frenchness. Confessing publicly, after the war, had meant coming to terms with the stark fact that his luminous winking bubble had floated in a tide of darkness. And yet he still yearned for a luminous bubble, for an impossible time of privilege and turmoil. All he could do was keep going until he found a bubble somewhere on the map.

  Don’t talk to me of Anabasis, he’d thought, sitting at the Floridita bar, if you’re only going to quote the swaying of grass. He doubted Hemingway had any comprehension of the homeland that Perse and Xenophon both referred to, a crossroads of will and wandering where new enemies, new wars, new and unknown lands—Port-au-Prince, the streets of Havana, and maybe, now, the mountains of Oriente—were, in fact, the watery promise of home.

  The rain let up, and wind was vacuuming out the last low, ragged clouds as La Mazière continued along the Malecón, looking back periodically to be sure no one was following him. The moon appeared, glowing like a quartered orange section that had been ever so lightly sucked, its flat edge thinned and translucent.

  He turned and headed up La Rampa, in the direction of the Tokio. He assumed she was still there, still in her zazou getup, her legs painted in prison chain-link, as smearable as when he’d last left his handprints on her soft and unathletic thighs, six months earlier.

  The same bartender was working, his face in its same melancholy key, which reminded La Mazière of Chopin. Not Chopin’s face, with the potato nose, but the preludes, lugubrious music for which he had a weakness.

  He sat at the bar and ordered a pins ’n’ needles, the blue, morphine-laced drink that had become his Tokio habit. The sweet, toothpasty flavor of the drink and the familiar smell of the Pam-Pam Room, ashtrays and liquor and tuberose oil, plunged him into the full atmospherics of sense memory, the nights he’d spent observing the girl and her zazou act, and eventually investigating for himself, only to discover that her odd combination of remoteness and availability went several layers deep. At times he’d suspected she was only layers, like an onion, and if he peeled them away, to get to some kernel, some essence or truth, he’d end up with just a pile of glossy, eye-stinging skins, an odor on his hands that was difficult to wash away. People said lemons, but the lemons never worked: a hand would smell of onions until it was finished smelling of onions.

  She played indifferent, as he did, or as he was. But then again, she opened herself in a way that was almost alarming. He’d felt it every time he’d been with her, this girl who would be, he was sure, no fun to spank. There’d be no threshold of resistance. That’s how people like her win, he thought. By caring just that much less than whatever you ante as indifference.

  He asked if the “dancer from Paris” was working, which amused him, even if the irony was lost on the morose bartender.

  “Tonight we have La Paloma,” the bartender said. “She’s very good, very nice. If you want to see La Francésa, come back tomorrow.”

  I’m not disappointed, he thought, leaving the club. It’s simply an annoyance, walking all the way here in the rain, trying to keep the gift, which was boxed and in a plastic bag, from getting wet. It was a child’s size, but he suspected it would fit her, a batiste cotton dress that had reminded him, when he saw it in a shop window near Duvalier’s palace in Port-au-Prince, of the tiny girls who ran under dogwood branches in the Bois de Boulogne, wearing frocks that were stiff and white like bonded paper.

  Two men left the Tokio just after he did. As he walked, he thought he detected their presence behind him. He stopped on a corner a few blocks from Rachel K’s apartment. He looked both ways, and at the street signs, pretending to be lost. When he glanced back, the two men were sitting on a bench, languidly smoking cigarettes as if they’d been there for hours.

  He turned left, toward the Barrio Chino. From the corner of his eye, he watched the men hurriedly stub out their cigarettes.

  The streets of Barrio Chino were crowded now that it was no longer raining. He wove among the prostitutes and bags of rotting vegetable scraps from the chop suey houses, heat rising off the ripe pavement in gossamer waves of steam. The Barrio Chino was no pretend glamour, no pretend France. It was a marketplace of dour, pockmarked girls, and boys refashioned as girls.

  “Hey, you,” one of the boy-girls said, and came close, walking alongside him. “You’re coming with me.” She hooked an arm smoothly through La Mazière’s, encircling him in a musky cloud of perfume. They strolled together.

  “You see, I’m just a dumb tourist looking to entertain myself,” La Mazière was telegraphing to the two Cubans who were so obviously trailing him. “Just a dumb tourist looking to ‘restore morale,’ shall we say, in the Barrio Chino.”

  “Where you taking me, honey?” the hooker asked him, her Adam’s apple moving up and down, barely disguised under a satin neck ribbon.

  “Just let me escort you.”

  Despite her sashay, she exuded a virility that the perfume and heels couldn’t conceal. Try to rip her off, he thought, and I bet she transforms into something more aggressive and male than I am.

  “Go where I go,” he said, “and I’ll make it worth your while.”

  “And I’ll make it worth yours.” She looked him up and down approvingly. “My while and your while will g
o perfect.”

  Walking with her, it occurred to him that the male virility was not a mistake, a thing she’d accidentally left showing. It seemed, instead, an integral aspect of what made her hard to refuse. The Adam’s apple, her wiry arms and willowy height, the louche appeal of caked mascara rimming huge, dewy eyes, with a shadow of dark stubble on her upper lip.

  It wasn’t his thing, but he understood that it was certainly someone’s. Promising tits and ass and tuberose perfume, and at the same time covertly promising something else, but openly-covertly promising this something else. If she were perfectly covert and convincing as a female, what would be the point?

  On his flight to Havana, La Mazière had met an Englishman who’d insisted that the male Kabuki who performed in drag were more feminine than any woman. “I’ve just come from Japan,” the Englishman said. “And if you could see these artists—the Onnagata, they’re called—why, they make women, especially Western women, hardly seem like women at all.”

  La Mazière doubted going to Japan would convince him that femininity was the art of walking in stilettos, that it had much to do with poise or surfaces, makeup and neck ribbons. Whatever female essence was, he had caught it only fleetingly, a thing women reflected when they were least aware. He couldn’t have named this quality but suspected it had something to do with invisibility, a remainder whose very definition was predicated on his inability to see it. Like dust, a particle too fine for the sieve of his comprehension. It occurred to him that the hooker posed an amusing solution to this problem, by covering feminine mystery in familiar layers: artifice, and also maleness. Underneath the layers lurked the promise of “woman,” but the layers were a safety net, a guarantee of putting off getting to “woman”—whatever she was. For those who didn’t care to know, there were these sublime creatures in the Barrio Chino.

  He and the girl jaywalked toward a theater offering LIVE EXTREME SEX, or advertising it. It isn’t extreme if it happens for an audience, was La Mazière’s feeling. Frosted bulbs ran in relay around the theater’s sign like a circling electric tongue. In Paris this was called “life show,” which seemed more poetic and terrible. As if what it promised was a glimpse of the secret reality that subtended all life, and to which all life could be reduced: two paid performers copulating on a square of linty, hot-pink carpeting.