Rachel Kushner - Telex From Cuba

When His Excellency arrived, Gonzalez seemed to appear out of nowhere. He was right there at the door next to Mr. Mackey, and to Mr. Mackey’s dismay, Gonzalez took the ambassador by the arm and walked him into the party as if the two of them were old friends. Mr. Mackey trailed behind them, feeling invisible. Gonzalez and His Excellency were laughing. Mr. Mackey took a deep breath and decided to insert himself. He approached. They both fell quiet, and Gonzalez excused himself to greet other guests.

Mr. Mackey introduced himself and cut straight to the chase.

“The word is this Gonzalez character is Batista’s hatchet man,” he said quietly, leaning in close to the ambassador, his hearing still a little muffled from the quinine incident.

“Mr. Mackey, don’t forget that he was approved by the U.S. government,” the ambassador said coolly. “They wouldn’t let just any gorilla buy twenty percent of the company’s shares. Batista is promising no strikes, no labor laws, no taxes, no problema. The way I look at things,” the ambassador said, “he’s your hatchet man, Mr. Mackey.”

Mrs. Lederer watched as a group of Cubans filtered into the party, low-level managers that Gonzalez, as the men all said, had wrenched into the hiring scheme. The Cuban wives were gaudy to a degree that seemed like deliberate satire, she observed with restored confidence in her own custom-tailored silk organza dress, after her moment of doubt in the presence of chic Mrs. Mackey. In their heavy and probably costume jewelry, red lipstick, paint-on beauty marks, foundation, and rouge thickly troweled over their dark complexions, the Cuban wives looked to Mrs. Lederer almost like drag queens in a Hasty Pudding production. She detected a mishmash of fragrances — Fibah, Arpège, Chanel — a blended overkill that seemed the moral equivalent of Long Island iced tea, a cocktail drunk not for the taste, but as an insurance policy against sobriety. Many of them were in fox-fur stoles. Or probably rabbit, dyed to look like fox. This on a night when the temperature might drop to a chilly eighty-six degrees.

Mrs. Lederer wondered out loud if Mr. Gonzalez was planning to serve them Cuban food. She said she thought she smelled garlic, that same odor that drifted from the servants’ quarters on Sunday afternoons, when their cook, Flozilla, was off and prepared her own meal on a hot plate. She said garlic made her nauseous and she’d half a mind to ask Flozilla to stop using it.

“You let your servants cook native in the house?” Mrs. Billings asked.

“Well, I mean, they can cook what they want to feed themselves,” Mrs. Lederer said, “as long as they serve proper meals to us.”

Mrs. Billings said there was no place for garlic and boiled yucca in her house. She’d trained her staff to cook reasonable American dishes, and now all she had to do was train them to eat reasonable-sized portions. She said her servants ate enormous piles of food.

The others listening concurred, and Mrs. Lederer asked how it could be that none of the servants were a bit fat, while she and Mr. Lederer were constantly on reduction diets.

Mrs. Mackey offered timidly that she’d read in the Tips for Anglos brochure that you could consume more calories in the tropics. But whether you had to be from the tropics for this to be the case, she wasn’t sure. She was just rejoining the group after her tour with Mr. Gonzalez. Despite his pariah status among the others, she’d been strangely reluctant to abandon him. In fact, he’d abandoned her, excusing himself on account of the ambassador’s arrival.

The brochure had included a list of difficult questions Americans should be prepared to answer when traveling in uncivilized countries. If you are a democracy, why do whites and blacks eat at separate lunch counters? The brochure didn’t propose an answer, as if the answer was obvious, and the issue was only that a person should expect the question. Mr. Mackey said it was a trick question, and that all you had to say was that democracy had to do with separate branches of government, checks and balances and voting.

One woman said she’d heard that girls went through puberty at a younger age in the tropics and that those with preteens better keep an eye on them. Another said she’d read that women’s cycles were affected by the equator, but she couldn’t remember quite how, something to do with the moon and tides. Blythe Carrington, in earshot and now thoroughly adjusted by three, or maybe it was four bowls of that delicious rum drink, was thinking how funny it would be when these birds discovered they were in the latitude of the three-week menstrual period. Swaddled interminably in jumbo-sized Kotex, they would all bleed and bleed. You couldn’t stanch the flow of things in a humid swamp. Sweat was probably this moment soaking the lining of every wife’s party dress. Just as sap was surely oozing from the dark and leafy manchineel trees that hung over the pathway to Gonzalez’s ghoulish and primitive rattrap. Manchineel sap was poisonous. It left fluid-filled blisters on any human skin it touched. And there were the mosquito bites, which wept crusting tears of amber pus for a month and scarred permanently. There was so much for these women to discover about the tropics, Blythe Carrington thought with angry anticipation, a bitter optimism in the future promise of other people’s discomfort, discomfort she already knew, and had the advantage of having accepted long ago.

Tip Carrington was flirting with the perfumed bevy of Cuban wives, speaking Spanish, telling each of them how lovely she looked, asking where his wife could shop to look as chic and elegant as they did. The Cuban women draped their furs down around their lower backs. Perspiration beaded on their upper lips, caking their makeup and giving their décolleté a particular, reflectant glow. They looked to Tip Carrington as delicious as bowls of ice cream beginning to melt. Something you better lap up quickly, before it puddles.

Just then, Blythe Carrington walked past. She glared at her husband with her bloodshot, Windex-blue eyes and headed for the bar.

“Do you ladies shop in Havana,” Tip Carrington asked, “or do you have to go all the way to Paris for this caliber of elegance?”

The women giggled. They shopped at La Época, a middlebrow department store in Holguín, two hours from Nicaro by car.

Tip Carrington continued on his rounds with the cocktail shaker, stopping to refill Mr. Lederer’s and Mr. Mackey’s drinks. “So, Carrington, where’d you pick up the Spanish?” Mr. Mackey asked. “You sound practically like a goddamn native.”

“A native, sure. Of upstate New York. I picked it up on engineering jobs. This is what South America will do to a man,” he said with a laugh. “Ruin him.”

Dinner was served, but served too late, after a certain high-water mark of alcohol consumption had been reached. It became an afterthought, a ritual lost in the general drift of drunkenness. The next day, Mrs. Lederer recalled vaguely that they’d been served starchy cubes of something or other, everything oil-drenched and stinking of garlic, and that she and Mr. Lederer had shared a table on the riverfront covered porch with the ambassador and Mr. and Mrs. Billings. Mrs. Lederer had asserted herself among them after being snubbed by the woman from French Guiana — the name was Fourier, she remembered too late. Mrs. Fourier hadn’t really snubbed her. She’d been perfectly polite, which made it worse. In the hazy recall of that drunken evening, Mrs. Lederer had a distinct image of herself, the ambassador, and Mrs. Billings dumping their “dinner” straight into the river when no one was looking. And she and Mr. Lederer, home from the party, eating midnight sandwiches at the kitchen table.