Rachel Kushner - Telex From Cuba

The girl on his lap slowed to a steady gyration, her eyes closed. He sensed she might have taken the liberty of falling asleep, but her sleepy movements were no less effective. Her skin was perfectly smooth, her sequins glinting splendidly under the colored cabaret lights. He imagined that she and probably all the girls in the club, despite their showgirl glamour, were from the filthy ring of desperation that surrounded the city. If its center was staked with neon-pulsing casinos, on Havana’s outskirts were miles and miles of slums with no electricity, no running water, and smokily typhoid trash fires. It was a combination he relished, sometimes preferring his high- and his low-grade pleasures mixed instead of pure. Proust’s Marcel bequeathed his aunt Léonie’s couch to a bordello, and whenever he visited the place to tease “Rachel, when of the Lord” (but never buy her services), he was unnerved to see tarts flopped on its pink velvet cushions. A favorite detail of a favorite literature, and yet La Mazière knew what Marcel didn’t, that there is nothing more perfect and appropriate than pink velvet plush flattening under a whore’s ass. La Mazière didn’t care if he reclined on luxurious furniture in the lobby of the Ritz or in a squalid Saint-Denis cathouse. Ate his steak at Maxim’s or at a colonial outpost in Djibouti, a backwater of salt factories and scorching temperatures on the bacterial mouth of the Red Sea. Properly seared steak is everywhere the same. He had even argued, adamantly, that a juicier cut could be eaten in Djibouti, not naming out loud the special ingredient that tenderized the meat: contradiction.

The Pam-Pam Room dancers had mostly left him to himself at his lone back table, having pegged him as quirky, disinterested, and cheap. Until he got the giantess gyrating on his lap. The next evening, girls fluttered around him. They thought he was German and kept saying, “Das ist gut, ja? Das ist gut?” He nodded, smiled distantly, and said, “Ja, gut” in his French accent. He ordered a rum drink with crushed mint and morphine crystals dissolving in a slush of ice. Sipped his drink and stole looks at Rachel K as he tickled the girl on his lap, who erupted in giggles. The girl straddled him. Took his tinted dictator’s glasses and tried them on. Placed her hand on his crotch.

“Das ist gut?” she asked, smiling, pressing with her hand, his tinted glasses slipping down her nose.

“Ja,” he replied, “gut.”

Three weeks after the coup, La Mazière watched on the television in his hotel suite as Batista made his official acceptance speech. Perhaps the president had waited thinking the memory would fade that there wasn’t any election. He was a mulatto with soft features, a faint severity straining his smile, a mean streak that couldn’t quite be suppressed. His general’s uniform was littered with medals and badges, stripes and ribbons. Those guys could never resist. Soon the people would be calling him “Bottle Caps,” which is what the Dominicans called President Trujillo. La Mazière thought of Darnand pinning his French decorations—“bonbons”—to his new Sturmbannführer’s uniform, when he became de facto head of the Vichy Milice. Medals Darnand had won fighting the Germans on the Maginot Line, pinned under his new silver-stitched SS insignia.

Batista smiled and made his face handsome. “I am a dictator with the people,” he said.

Prio was now in exile. Batista home. Everyone switching places as the chips fell. Darnand and the entire Vichy government fled to Germany, but the stakes were so much higher. Darnand, Laval, Pétain. These weren’t small-time factotums from a banana republic and there wasn’t any Miami, a place to cool their heels and wait things out playing canasta under a lanai. Darnand was captured. Brought to Paris. Executed.

That was a dark time. La Mazière preferred the early, glory days in occupied Paris, when royalists and scum roamed with pockets full of cash, La Mazière among them, savoring the hushed feeling of the curfewed city at dusk, riding through the streets in a black Mercedes under the violet-blushing emptiness of the Parisian sky. What had he cared the city was “annexed”? Or that Hitler surveyed the Champs-Élysées and visited Sacré-Coeur? The nightmare of the 1930s, of working-class people and their “paid” vacations invading the Côte d’Azure, was finally over. France had been heading for socialist ruin. Maybe the Germans, he’d believed, were what they needed to finally stamp out the vile ideas of the so-called Popular Front. Parisians blamed the Germans for the tanks that burned on the outskirts of Paris, covering the city in grease and ash. They blamed the Germans for their own quick and miserable defeat, for the toxic soot that coated the cherries on their trees. But they’d brought this failure on themselves. The soot was from their own captured tanks, French tanks. They could contemplate why Germany was strong and France was weak as they ate shoe leather and burned furniture to keep warm. La Mazière never had to eat blighted cherries or boiled shoe leather. As part of the new elite of moneyed riffraff, he lived extremely well, dined at Le Boeuf sur le Toit and Maxim’s, which did booming business, packed for all-night parties of crystal-clinking pandemonium. An impossible time, that time in Paris. Impossible as it was happening.

The television switched to footage of Batista stepping off a plane and kneeling to kiss the tarmac, apparently overcome with love for his country.

Perverse, he knew, to compare occupied Paris, people like Darnand, with this little republic and its General Bottle Caps. And yet something about the place activated familiar sensations, a mixture of dread and privilege, with Americans in shiny Cadillacs instead of Germans in Mercedes. But Havana was so much sultrier, starrier. The girls were purple-mouthed. The cinema palaces had retractable roofs. There was no notoriety and no shame, and instead, a power shuffle that was an open call to opportunists. A new president who reeked of insecurity. An old president in exile, eager to return home. Both would be looking for help. La Mazière could help them.

And there was this girl, a Gypsy or Jew, and either way she couldn’t disguise it. She seemed formed from his own memories and longings, and yet unknowable. A cipher in pasties, painted like a doll. She had a stained, gloating air about her, like the girls who’d ridden topless on carousel horses at Fifine’s on the rue Saint-Denis. The carousel revolving at a slow, erotic keel, the girls floating up and down like lithe, buttery-bodied centaurs. Later those same girls ate veal with German officers, while most of the population stood in ration lines, waiting for bread so moldy and stale they had to chop it with an ax.

“Das ist gut?” The Tokio girls asked him, no idea who he was.

“Ja,” he answered, and honestly, “gut.”

He was at his table in the back when Batista showed up at the club with several bodyguards who hustled him to a private booth down a roped-off hallway. This was predictable, politicians in titty bars. And yet it surprised La Mazière to see Rachel K escorted beyond the rope by Batista’s security detail, and led into the general’s booth. It surprised and intrigued him. Soon it would be time to finally break the wax seal on their silent conversation of glances.

The next evening, when she passed near his table, he stared at her coolly. In her cycle of periodically eyeing him, she was forced to meet his gaze.

He nodded almost imperceptibly.

She came toward him.

“You’re an ambassador or something?” she asked.

Her voice, to his great relief, was slightly low and calm. A high and squeaky voice could have ruined everything.

La Mazière said yes, exactly, an ambassador, but they both knew it was a lie, that ambassador was a code for something complex and possibly unspeakable.