Rachel Kushner - Telex From Cuba

“Look at them!” her mother said. “Performing like seals!”

They did look like seals, with their smooth, purple-skinned bodies, diving into the water, then skimming under the surface in fluid motions.

The gangplank went down, and people streamed off the ship. Workers in gloves and grease-streaked clothes unloaded the ship’s cargo. Crates swung on huge cranes, then were lowered slowly to the dock. The men stood in a line, yelling to one another in Spanish and tossing boxes from hand to hand, then stacking them on dollies. More men took the dollies and wheeled them into the customs building. They all wore a crude sort of rope shoe and moved cargo with lit cigarettes dangling from their mouths. They were all Negroes, with darker skin than the boys on the dock, a blackish-purple like the powdery black center of a tulip’s cup. Everly thought of Mavis, their maid in Oak Ridge, the only colored person she knew. Mavis looked at the floor and said Yes, ma’am and No, ma’am when Everly’s mother gave orders. Told her to turn off that God-awful gospel radio. Mavis’s husband waited in the backyard when he came to fetch her. He kept his eyes on the ground and stood far from the house. These men on the waterfront laughed and shouted, and when a pretty woman in a clinging dress passed along the gangplank, they all stared at her bottom, which jiggled as she walked. One of them whistled.

Everly’s mother yanked her arm. “Don’t stare, young lady!” The men were allowed to stare at the lady’s bottom. Everly was not.

They sat in customs for hours, in a dimly lighted room with mint green walls and fans that hung down from a high ceiling, the rotors spinning so slowly they created no breeze. Duffy drew various faces on Scribbles, and Stevie read from what their father, teasing, had called a dime-store romance. When he first said it, Everly thought it meant the book was about people who fell in love in a dime store. Everly sneaked stares at a pair of twins, teenage daughters of another family who were also moving to Nicaro. They were big-boned, horsey-looking girls with oversized teeth like white Chiclets, wearing identical blue dresses and matching ribbons in their hair. They were blond, the sort that people seemed to find pretty for the reason that they were blond, even if their faces weren’t particularly nice. Everly got away with staring at the horsey twins because her mother was busy filling out forms and couldn’t tell her not to. She didn’t understand how it was that some people resisted the urge to stare. Where did they put their eyes? Hers locked onto other people’s faces. She had to look, and only when someone returned her gaze did she look away.

The twins walked over and introduced themselves. Their names were Pamela and Val. Pamela said their father was in charge of construction at the Nicaro plant.

“My father’s in charge of nickel,” Everly said.

“Your father can’t be ‘in charge’ of nickel,” Pamela said. “Maybe he’s running some aspect of it.” She turned to Val and said something in French. Val said something back, also in French.

A customs official in a beige military uniform and amber sunglasses approached and asked the twins something in Spanish. Pamela answered, speaking in the same rapid-fire manner as the man in the amber glasses, her shift from English to Spanish completely natural. Everly asked where they were from.

“Hmm. Let’s see. Tela, Limón, Buenos Aires,” Val said, counting on her fingers, “Bogotá, Panama City—”

“Our father built the port in Limón,” Pamela said. “Last year we were in Bolivia. But then troublemakers started rioting.”

“Daddy tried to help the government,” Val added.

“But the troublemakers ended up taking over, and all the good people had to get out of there fast.”

“And now we get here and there’s practically a revolution.”

“Or whatever they’re calling it.”

“Father says it’s a coup d’état,” Pamela said, “because they gave President Prio the boot.”

“What’s a cootay-tah?” Everly asked.

“Oh, God, there’s Mom,” Val said. Both girls quickly stood up.

A woman was rushing toward them through the crowded room. She had a broad, ruddy face and the same lank blond hair as her daughters, her scalp blushing pink from underneath.

“I’ve been looking all over for you girls.” Her voice was loud but hoarse, like she’d been yelling too much. She looked like someone who might yell a lot.

“Your father is ready to sell you both to the circus,” she wheezed.

There weren’t any twins in the circus. They would have been too ordinary. Triplets, maybe.

She was thinking about the circus, about the paper cones that were dipped in a drum and came out wrapped in turbans of pink cotton batting, and the machine where you could record your own voice, when Pamela and Val dutifully followed their mother away.

Pamela turned back and said, “See you in Nicaro, kid.”

She stood with her family under the sun’s stabbing heat in front of the port building, waiting for the car to be rolled out. Beyond the building, a boardwalk stretched as far as she could see. Large waves crashed against the boardwalk and shot into the air like saltwater confetti, then slopped onto the pedestrian walkway. A man standing on the corner yelled “Lotería! Lotería!” and waved a long pole with strips of paper attached, printed with rows of numbers. The air was hot and moist, like fevered human breath wafting around her. Stevie fanned herself with the menu from dinner the night before, another souvenir for her scrapbook. The street and all the buildings seemed coated in a combination of auto soot and ocean brine. A stench of urine rose from the sidewalk, an anonymous insult. Her mother took a bleached cotton handkerchief out of her pocketbook and held it over her nose. All that fuss, Everly and her sisters with scrubbed faces and combed hair, in their froufrou dresses. She felt like a tea doily, damp and frilly and out of place.

A man missing an arm was rooting through the garbage can near them. He pulled a paper food container out of the trash, leaned his head back, and tipped the container to his mouth. Rice spilled out over his face. None of it made it into his mouth, but the man chewed frantically, then dumped the container and began walking in circles. Clever-looking women milled around, shooting one another mysterious looks. The women were purple-skinned like the boys who dove for coins, but their hair wasn’t like the boys’ hair. It was pressed flat and pulled back like a white person’s hair. One of the women blotted her underarms with what looked like pages from a book. They were pages from a book. The woman retrieved a paperback from her purse, ripped out two more pages, and blotted her forehead. Boys carrying wooden boxes filled with tins of shoe polish, brushes, and spit rags roamed around like stray dogs looking for scraps. A man stumbled among them, his hand clamped to a bottle in a creased and grease-splotched paper sack. The soles of his shoes were coming unglued, flapping as he walked.

Everly looked up and saw an enormous rat jumping from a palm tree. It landed on the oily sidewalk and charged toward a woman who was sleeping in a doorway. Someone whistled a watch-out whistle, and the woman stirred awake and pulled up her legs just before the rat darted past. She wore no shoes, only a ripped dress that was the grayish dinge of the rags Mavis used to polish their good silverware.

“Wow, look at that,” Stevie said, pointing at a poster mounted on a kiosk, a large color photograph of women in elaborate sequined costumes, wearing chandeliers on their heads, draped in strings of pearls. THE CABARET TOKIO — THE PLACE TO BE IN HAVANA! the poster announced. And underneath, VISIT OUR FAMOUS PAM-PAM ROOM, FEATURING, FROM PARIS, ZAZOU DANCER RACHEL K!