Rachel Kushner - Telex From Cuba

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.