I was in the Ms of Mother’s ancient phone book and found the name Charmaine Mackey, Phillip Mackey’s mother. I had no idea if it was still the right telephone number, or if she was alive. As I said, my wife had just died. Twenty years younger, a knockout, and dead of cancer.
I don’t know what drove me, but I picked up the receiver and dialed the number.
It had been disconnected.
Probably a number from 1963! I mean, ridiculous.
Ever since I was a child, old phone numbers have had this magnetic effect on me. Clavelito used to sell special telephones during his faith healing hour on radio CMQ. They were for calling the dead. He sold various things, planchettes and Ouija boards and something called a “volometer,” which was for measuring a person’s willpower. “Psychic telephones,” Clavelito called them. I don’t know how they were supposed to work. I wanted to see one, but it was a thing you mail-ordered, and as you can guess, they were expensive.
I picked up the phone and called information. It’s nationwide now.
I suppose it’s strange that I would want to call Phillip Mackey’s mother, and not, say, any of the Allains. Maybe the Allains were too close to my childhood, and in another way too far.
When the operator answered I asked for Mackey, Charmaine Mackey. There was one listed in Carlsbad, New Mexico.
I felt like I was doing something you aren’t supposed to do. Put it this way, I didn’t go down to the Teresita afterward and start announcing to the guys at the lunch counter that I’d spent the morning stalking people I’d known as a child.
I’ve always been curious to know what went on with Phillip Mackey and Del before Phillip was sent away, how it was he and Del got mixed up with the rebels. I thought it might explain what went on with Del later, his decision to leave home and go up to the mountains to fight. Del does not talk about that period of his life. He said a few things to Mother when he arrived in Haiti a month after the revolution, but as far as I know, that was it. He never brought the subject up again. Now he’s very conservative, very buttoned up. He’s my own brother, but he leaves no opening to ask about the past. It’s like he isn’t the same person. If I ever bring up our childhood, he asks me if I’ve already seen the photos of his new boat. He doesn’t encourage real conversation. His wife offers me a drink and they’ve got a new patio set they want to show off. The three of us sit down together and they smile at me with their dentistry smiles. My brother says he doesn’t know about the rest of us but it’s time for a dip in the pool and leaves me there with the wife. She probably has no idea about Del’s complicated history. He’s in control, and there’s no window to ask questions, certainly not about things that his current life, in every aspect, contradicts.
I figured if I found Charmaine Mackey, I could ask about Phillip’s whereabouts, then maybe call him or write him a letter. We never saw the Mackeys after we left Cuba. They didn’t move to Florida like a lot of people.
I dialed the number for Charmaine Mackey of Carlsbad, New Mexico.
The phone rang once, and a woman answered. I could feel the particular muffled quiet of a very old person’s home.
I say I’m hoping to reach a Mrs. Mackey, formerly of Nicaro, Cuba.
“Yes, dear,” she says. “How can I help you?”
In a way I envy Del for not wanting any of this stuff. My brother moves through life and doesn’t look back, drawn intensely into one thing, then another, each thing canceling out what came before it.
The wife he has now, it almost seems an indiscretion that anyone fathom Del pining for a person like Tee-Tee Allain. Del’s wife wouldn’t understand that girls like Tee-Tee exist, with her accidental charm, an accidental femininity, a despite-everything sexiness, dirty legs, wolf’s eyes, stringy hair, and possibly crazy. Del’s wife is the antidote, a trophy, very artificial. She’s what he was supposed to want. I doubt he wants it, and I’d guess that is partly the point.
When Del turned up in Le Cap in early 1959, he’d seen Raúl Castro “execute,” or so they were calling it—more than a hundred men in Santiago. Del was ordered to bulldoze the bodies into a mass grave, and I believe that’s when my brother’s career as a “barbudo” came to an end. He told Mother he’d seen body parts floating in he Levisa River that December just before he disappeared, peasants that the Rural Guard had chopped up and dumped in our river. Then he was ordered to dump people into a mass grave. Violence got him in and violence pushed him out.
A year after the revolution he was very anti-Castro, living in Miami and working with various parties to “get the place back,” he said. Of course, that world turned out to be just as violent as Raúl’s. Lito Gonzalez was involved in these movements to overthrow Castro, a Miami big shot. He went to start his Cadillac one morning in 1975 and blew himself to bits. There was a lot of infighting with those guys, a lot of disputes. I came across Lito Gonzalez’s grave in Woodlawn Cemetery down in Miami. I was taking Rev. Crim’s widow to put flowers on her husband’s headstone. After we left Cuba Daddy remained close with Rev. Crim, who had conducted Methodist services in Preston and run the agricultural school. The dictator Machado is buried in that cemetery. So is the president before Batista, Carlos Prio. Prio blew his brains out. People said it was financial troubles. Deke and Dolly Havelin are buried there. They share a giant black marble mausoleum with the inscription, “Cubanos de corazón.” Pretty sappy, but so was poor Deke, who’d given up his citizenship and couldn’t return to the States, not until his relatives shipped him back to be buried in Florida. The family mausoleum at Colón Cemetery in Havana, where Deke had wanted to be laid to rest, was engulfed in ficus roots, its Lalique windows smashed and anything removable taken. Deke and Dolly had ended up living in the Dominican Republic. They were in São Paulo for less than a month, Deke relishing his grand appointment as a Cuban diplomat, before Batista fled the island and the curtain came down. The minute he flees, you’re not ambassador anymore.
After the Bay of Pigs disaster, Del gave up agitating and got into weight lifting. He worked out with Steve Reeves on Muscle Beach. Now it’s real estate. Del has done very well for himself. He lives on Marco Island, where the money is.
Feelings run high. Just sit at the Teresita for one lunch rush and you’ll get the drift. People who feel that everything was stolen from them, and just because it’s been almost fifty years now doesn’t mean they have forgotten. They haven’t. Nor have the companies. A company is like a person in that it has a memory, its own institutional memory. A company can wait and anticipate with more patience than a person. There are pending claims against the Cuban government that the Cubans ignore. Mining concerns like the old Nicaro Nickel Company keep meticulous account of what they lost. United Fruit became United Brands became Chiquita. CEOs came and went. The claim lives on, in a black binder somewhere at the Justice Department—$350 million at this point, with inflation. After every last person who worked for United Fruit is long dead and gone, still, the company will fight to get its assets back.
An assistant in Daddy’s office, Mr. Suarez, ended up overseeing cane crushing and processing after we left for Le Cap. He was ambitious, and when they nationalized they made him administrador, which is what the Cubans call manager. Suarez was bright, and he got the whole operation up and working. When they were short on fuel, he had them running the mill on bagasse, which is cane trash. Suarez was competent, and yet Daddy said that up until 1963 he got a phone call every afternoon after Suarez did his rounds. He called Daddy every day, to run the numbers and report on what was happening. At a mill that was owned by the Cuban government! The company built the mill and the town and the culture around it. You extract the culture, and there’s no purpose to the operation, no overseer, no witness. For whom is the sugar ground? Suarez couldn’t accept that it was no longer ground for us.
Daddy died in 1964. I honestly think he died of a broken heart. You don’t transfer someone to bananas or pineapples, just throw away immense knowledge and experience, when they’ve spent their en
tire adult life managing a sugar operation. He retired early and became very depressed. I went to military school in Gainesville, Georgia. It was September when I enrolled, and I cried myself to sleep every night because the leaves were falling off the trees. I’d never seen anything so terrible.
Some people say Hemingway killed himself because he was devastated that he wouldn’t be able to go to Cuba anymore, after the U.S. travel ban. His first suicide attempt was the day Kennedy announced the Bay of Pigs on television. Maybe it’s worthless to wonder why someone does such a thing, but I can believe that theory. It wrecked a lot of lives to seal the place off.
“Yes, dear,” Mrs. Mackey said. “How can I help you?”
I explained who I was, slightly mortified for disturbing this ancient woman. She said she remembered me, but I don’t think she did. I think she was being polite. Of course she remembered Mother and Daddy. We talked about the evacuation, where they’d gone from Guantánamo. She said her husband had wanted to stay in Nicaro, but Lito Gonzalez threatened to kill him if he didn’t leave. I wondered if she had an active imagination, though a lot of people thought Gonzalez was trouble. She laughed about it, the way old people are able to laugh about serious things because they happened so long ago.
She told me she and her husband divorced just after they returned from Cuba. I said I was sorry to hear it and she said don’t be, that it was for the best. He’d always made her nervous, she said, and he couldn’t stand nervous women. She’d remarried, a gentleman from Puerto Rico, and they had a daughter together. I asked her about Phillip, curious to hear where he lived, what kind of work he did.
“Phillip has been dead for eight years now,” she said.
I couldn’t believe it. I’d always had this vague idea that someday I would get in touch with Phillip Mackey and ask about him and Del and their involvement with the rebels, what Phillip thought of the revolution, Castro, everything. But it was too late. I called too late.
Now, that is an irony: Del lives in Collier County, two and half hours away. I would travel around the world to get fifteen minutes with my wife, with Mother. But I can’t ask a living person to explain something to me.
It had never crossed my mind that Phillip Mackey would be dead, that Charmaine Mackey would be alive and tell me this. She said Phillip had been living in Paraguay—some of the people from Nicaro and Preston were serial expat types. I guess Phillip went that way, too. He got sick and tried to work through it, whatever that means. It doesn’t really matter how he died. The Puerto Rican husband was gone as well, she said. The men always go first. I asked if anyone looked after her. She said no, that she had to take care of their daughter, who was handicapped. This is a woman who must be in her late eighties. Calling her felt like a real intrusion, asking her about her life from fifty years ago, and making her talk about the death of her son. But before we got off the phone she said she was glad I called and she hoped I’d call again. I never did. It’s been three years now. I don’t know if she’s still alive.
I’m looking through Mother’s United Fruit ledger. It’s so fragile that each page I turn, the paper tears and starts to unglue from the binding. There are photographs, pressed flowers, letters, and telegrams. There’s a picture of me in one of the school plays. I hated that play. I was a plum pudding. Mother made me do it.
Here’s a program from the Cabaret Tokio, where Xavier Cugat used to perform. “Air-conditioned,” “national and international Stars”—they capitalized the S for some reason—et cetera. The telephone number is on the bottom of the program:
B-4544
Not something you can call. But what if you could?
People say Batista had a gold telephone, fourteen-carat, a gift from American Telephone & Telegraph—another company that has a giant lawsuit pending against Cuba. Maybe it’s true about the gold phone, but people like to caricature guys like Batista, which makes them that much harder to see. Daddy kept his distance, regarded him as a thuggish sort, but he had a certain respect. Batista was not another peón, an animal that talked, a cartoon with a solid gold telephone. He was of mixed race and from very poor people—a class lower than the lowest class. He’d worked his way up to president. You have to allow people their contradictions, give them what they’re due.
Del once said that Mother’s sympathy for people, without any sympathy for what caused their circumstances, was not real sympathy but sentimentality.
Perhaps it’s true. The fact is we went down there and we took. But I don’t think it was Mother’s responsibility to change that fact, or anything else. I don’t think her sentimentality was any kind of crime.
Hilton Hardy became mayor of Preston. Castro renamed our town “Guatemala,” but I can’t imagine anyone who remembers it as Preston saying “Guatemala.” That is incredible—our chauffeur, mayor of Preston! But that’s communism. Ho Chi Minh started out as a fry cook at the Ritz.
I fish in the Caribbean all the time. I have a boat. I go to the Bahamas. I could easily sail clear into Preston Harbor, go and knock on the door of my very own house. But I never have. I understand that the town is terribly run-down, and I don’t want to see that.
Everly Lederer and her sisters are the only ones who have gone back, as far as I know. She went to Preston and took photos and showed them to Rev. Crim’s widow, who told me about it. I have Everly’s phone number. Mrs. Crim gave it to me. But I haven’t called her. Mrs. Crim said the photos were awful to look at. She said our house is a school and the Crims’ house has about fifteen families jammed into it. Mrs. Crim said Everly told her that she and her two sisters were hoping to find their old houseboy. I wonder if it was that curious boy who’d worked for Mr. Bloussé. Apparently they found this fellow living in Levisa—Castro’s “revolution showcase.” The Rural Guard had burned Levisa flat, and Castro rebuilt it straight away and gave all the blacks real houses, with poured-concrete foundations and indoor plumbing. Mrs. Crim said Everly told her she wires the houseboy money every month, sends it to Mayarí, and the houseboy takes the bus down there to get it. She said Everly talked about this houseboy as if he were practically a blood relative. She goes back there every year to see him, and stays with him and his wife. At some point I’m going to call her. I’d like to hear about Preston, at least I think I would. Part of me isn’t sure if it’s the same place, now that we’re not there, the company isn’t there. I’ll have to be good and ready when I call her. Mrs. Crim said she had the uncomfortable feeling that Everly was a sympathizer to communism. My thought was maybe she’s just a sympathizer period, like Mother.
My phone is ringing again. Someone keeps calling and hanging up without leaving a message. It’s a quarter to eleven. Soon I’ll go down to the Teresita. It might be Red McGreevy calling, but I’ll see him at lunch. The Teresita is what you call a joint, and all my buddies eat there. Red is old-fashioned like me, makes a call, and if he gets a recording puts the phone quietly back on the cradle instead of speaking into the machine. Too old to adjust to the new ways. He and I and some other guys are going hunting this weekend. They wanted to hunt just pheasant, but I insisted we hunt geese as well. If you hunt only pheasant you’re done at nine in the morning and end up in the lodge drinking brandy the rest of the day.
Eventually the state went after Clavelito. They forced him not to sell any more mail-order merchandise, magic powders, and special equipment. Right before we left Preston, they took him off the air completely.
There were articles about it in the papers, housewives, his main fan base, up in arms. He was being charged with fraud, and part of the reason was those special phones for calling the dead. “Selling faulty equipment” was one of the charges.
It seems silly to ban such a thing, much less prosecute someone for selling them.
Anyone who buys a psychic telephone doesn’t really believe it’s going to work. That all you need is $19.99. Buy the machine. Take it home. Plug it in. Dial a number and hear the living voice of someone dead and vanished. People buy things for other re
asons. They weren’t born yesterday. They don’t need the law to tell them the equipment is faulty.
Let people learn for themselves:
You don’t call the dead.
The dead call you.
EPILOGUE
There it was on the globe, a dashed line of darker blue on the lighter blue Atlantic. Words in faint italic script: Tropic of Cancer. She had crossed it more than once, but still she pictured daisy chains of seaweed stretching across the water toward a distant horizon.
And still there was the paradox of zones and borders on a surface that was fluid, that could float a bottle containing a message halfway around the world. During his exile at Guernsey, where the granite cliffs were shaped like kings, a monster, a nun’s habit, letters reached the author addressed simply “Victor Hugo, Océan.” Had the woman from Guernsey really invited the man from Dakar to dinner? It seemed unlikely for 1952. There was a detail a child might overlook: the man from Dakar would be black.
This time she crossed the Tropic of Cancer in an airplane. Her sister brought the scrapbook, but the flight from Miami was so short they barely had time to look through it. “Prime rib, Harvard beets, whipped potatoes, a cold buffet with pineapple ring, and for dessert, rum raisin ice cream from El Louvre in Havana—the Duke of Windsor’s favorite!” Their dinner menu from the SS Florida. “We didn’t stay at the Lincoln Hotel,” the youngest said, the flames of the Regla oil refinery burning in the distance as their taxi sped along the Malecón. “It was the Sevilla, the Graham Greene place with the Moorish tiles.” On the Air Cubana connection from Havana to Santiago, a stewardess passed out hard candies and paper cups of water. The seat belt signs were in Cyrillic.
Telex From Cuba Page 34
