Rachel Kushner - Telex From Cuba

When Daddy first laid eyes on her, he was visiting his brother up near Crawfordsville, Indiana. Mother had run out of gas. Daddy saw her walking along the side of the road and he said here came this angel. Mother had been a May Queen, and she was president of Kappa Kappa Gamma at DePauw. I had to return her sorority pin when she died. Harlan Sanders — that’s Colonel Sanders — he was from Indiana, and always in love with Mother. We were his guests at the Sanders Motor Court once, on our way to Cumberland Falls. You could tell he had that fatal thing for Mother. His hands shook and his face turned red when he greeted us. I think Daddy was amused. He didn’t mind showing her off. Mother was a beautiful woman, and she took fine care of herself. Never washed her face with soap, only cold cream, and she was health-conscious. She had the servants making yogurt back when it was still a very unusual thing to eat. Every night she sat at her desk and brushed her hair a hundred times before she went to bed. You notice those things as a boy. Twice or three times a year Daddy would take us to Miami to shop for Mother’s clothes. He’d arrange for a private room at Burdine’s. He, Del, and I would sit with Mother as the models came out in various things. If we liked what the model wore, Mother tried it on and came out and took a spin. If we agreed that it looked nice, Daddy bought it. Mother said she would never wear anything that her men didn’t approve of. At first I didn’t want to spend the afternoon in a fitting room. But then I got to liking the ritual of it, and how nice Mother dressed herself. When Del started palling around with Phillip Mackey, Del grew less interested in family things and stopped coming with us to Miami. It wasn’t as fun going without him, but it made Mother happy that I was there, and I took pride in helping her choose outfits, in being the son she could depend on. Later, when I was at military school, we dressed up for dances and functions and I knew how to put myself together because of Mother. I cared about these things. Mother said elegance was taking a plain outfit and accenting it with one flashy detail — a tie, maybe. I still think of her when I get dressed up.

Dirt shacks, no running water — the way those people lived, it’s just how life was to me. I was a child. Mother didn’t like it, but Daddy reminded her that the company paid them higher wages than any Cuban-owned sugar operation. Mother thought it was just terrible the way the Cuban plantations did business. It broke her heart, the idea of a race of people exploiting their own kind. The cane cutters were all Jamaicans, of course — not a single one of them was Cuban — but I knew what she meant: native people taking advantage of other native people, brown against black, that kind of thing. She was proud of Daddy, proud of the fact that the United Fruit Company upheld a certain standard, paid better wages than they had to, just to be decent. She said she hoped it would influence the Cubans to treat their own kind a bit better.

I knew something terrible had happened, watching Daddy take off like that, still wearing his pajama shirt. I ran back in to get dressed and heard Mother on the phone with Mr. LaDue, apologizing for calling so early. “Mr. Stites wanted me to call and inform you that there’s a fire in the cane fields,” she said. Of course it was a fire. Nothing else could have made that strange, orange light. “He wanted me to tell you he’s gone out there.” Even in a crisis, Mother was formal, always proper and composed. She was like that up to the very end. And it wasn’t easy for her, believe me. To lose everything. And not just the house, our whole world, but to have her oldest son up there with those people.

Mother was in the kitchen talking to Annie, and I figured it was best to keep quiet and slip out without her noticing. Our house was next to the seawall, at the very end of La Avenida, across the street from my school, the Preston Academy for American Children. I opened the gate and headed right, toward the town square. La Avenida was the managers’ row, with a locked gate and guards at the entrance. There was a pecking order in Preston, and we were at the end of the row, in the biggest house, with our own private guards, one in the daytime and one at night. The night guards were called serenos, and one sat on our steps until dawn. It was still early — barely 6:00 A.M. — and the street was peaceful and quiet. The only sound I heard was Mrs. LaDue’s peacocks. Each house on La Avenida had an arbor at the front gate with bougainvillea, and beyond each gate, exquisite gardens. The company gardeners kept those places immaculate. A breeze was ruffling the bougainvillea, and bright pink leaves were blowing along the sidewalk. The new Unifruitco, rolled up with a rubber band, was sitting on every porch. I passed the swimming pool, where the week before we’d had a big poolside cookout for the Cabot Lodges, who were down visiting. Henry Cabot Lodge was an older fellow, but he’d been on the swim team at Harvard, and he was going off the high dive with us kids, doing flips and jackknives. The Cabot Lodges had returned to Boston a few days earlier. Now the pool was deserted and quiet. I noticed something settling on the surface of the water, a grayish film. It was ash floating down from the air.

The guard station was at the end of the avenue. I waved to the guard and kept going. From the town square, where company headquarters and Daddy’s office were, I could see the mill off to the right. During the harvest, the mill ran on a twenty-four-hour schedule, lit up like a Christmas tree. Crushers going, cane syrup boiling, centrifugals humming. I expected to see steam drifting from the mill’s two giant chimneys, but they were both cold. Cars loaded with cut cane were sitting on the train tracks just outside the mill, waiting to be rolled in and emptied into the crushers. You can’t cut cane and leave it sitting — it turns acidic and dries out. The entire extraction process was designed for that not to happen.

The smell of boiling cane syrup — the meladura, it’s called — used to fill the air in Preston. A warm, malty smell. I loved that smell. I can smell it right now. There was a different smell in the air that morning, not exactly familiar. I headed toward the rail crossing. I figured the flagman might know what was happening and where to find Daddy. Beyond the tennis courts were the golf course, the polo fields, then nothing but cane for miles and miles. A yellowish mutt, one of those scrawny little Cuban dogs, trotted along beside me. As I got closer to the fields, that peculiar smell was getting stronger. The dog was zigzagging and putting his nose up to sniff. The air smelled like burned sugar, a tangy, black carbon smell, like when one of Annie’s pies bubbled over and dripped onto the bottom of the oven.

There was no flagman at the crossing, which seemed odd. Three tracks converged, and cars were always coming in. A railroad car half-filled with freshly hacked cane sat there, abandoned like someone had suddenly decided to stop working. I stepped over the ties and took the access road past a row of workers’ shanties. The workers usually had cook fires going out there in the morning, for boiling sweet potatoes that they ate while they worked in the fields. But there was no one around. Maybe it’s idiotic, but I remember thinking, If there are no cook fires, how did the cane catch fire?

From the access road I saw a plume of black smoke going up. My next thought was that we’d been bombed. The week before, Batista had dropped white phosphorus over the Sierra Cristal, the mountains above us where the rebels were hiding. The smoke drifted over Preston, and the next day we had rain, and the rainwater covered the town with greasy soot. Rain fell in the mountains, too, but the fires up there kept burning. Water won’t put out white phosphorus; it loves moisture. The fires burned for days, killing animals and a few of the guajiros who lived up there. Guajiros, that’s one thing. Americans is another. Batista wouldn’t have bombed us. We were practically the only support he had left in eastern Cuba.