Rachel Kushner - Telex From Cuba

Whatever was remembered or forgotten of that meal, in the excess of Mr. Carrington’s martinis, they all remembered the ugly scene between him and his wife.

“Dinner theater” is how Marjorie Lederer later referred to the incident.

The two of them had argued at the table, in front of everyone.

Mrs. Carrington had stood up.

Her husband tried to get her to sit back down. She wrenched away from him. “You humiliate me! Don’t you see that?”

If Tip Carrington did see, he didn’t say. He didn’t say anything.

“I’m sick of it,” she slurred. “ Sick sick sick of it!”

The servants had been in the process of bringing out coffee and dessert. Carrington tried to act casual. He dug in his pockets for a cigarette. “Who’s got a light? Lito, got a match?” he asked, mock-cheerful, an unlit cigarette dangling from his lips.

Mr. Gonzalez, seated at the end of the table, leaned over to hand him a pack of matches.

As Carrington stood to receive them, his wife slapped his face and sent the unlit cigarette flying.

He bent down, calmly picked up the cigarette, and asked Lito Gonzalez again for a light.

Everyone was quiet as he was handed the matches, took one out, struck it against the side of the matchbox, and lit his cigarette.

“Okay, let’s liven things up. This is a party, right?” he said, exhaling smoke and waving the match to extinguish it. “Does anyone have a joke? Mr. Lederer, got a joke?”

No one spoke.

“No? No one’s got a joke? Okay I’ve got one,” Carrington said. “ I have a joke. Here goes: Why is a Cuban wedding cake made of shit?”

They all looked at him.

“Because it keeps the flies off the bride.”

Again there was quiet.

“Ha…ha…ha. My husband, the comedian,” Blythe Carrington said. “It’s tasteless, right? And everyone’s heard that joke. But you people aren’t in on why my husband thinks it’s funny.” She looked around the table. “It’s only not funny to you ’cause you don’t get his sense of humor.”

She stood up and walked heavily across the porch. Before she passed through the doors and into the lodge, she said something else. It was difficult to hear because she said it quietly and the river that ran under the porch rushed loudly, swollen from the recent rains. But Mrs. Mackey thought she heard correctly.

“It’s only funny if you know my husband’s Cuban,” Blythe Carrington said. And with perfect ease, she opened the ill-fitting screen door that had been sticking all evening and slipped through, careful not to slam it behind her.

The ice was broken between them, but La Mazière still enjoyed sitting in the back of the Pam-Pam Room, observing her like she was a mysterious specimen, which in a way she had remained.

He’d been in Havana three months now, since his arrival just after the March coup, studying her in his own calm fashion, from up close and from afar, biding his time, his instinct telling him she wasn’t just amusement and flesh, but might, just might, assist him in attracting ex-president Prio as a client. Although how, he wasn’t sure.

His own contact to Prio — the same gentleman who had originally apprised La Mazière of the coup via telex from Havana to Paris — had promised “heavy business” for La Mazière, supplying weapons to the instigators of a new insurrection. But now this same contact was claiming the situation was hopeless.

“It looks like there is no insurrection,” he said in hushed tones when they met one afternoon in the dark lobby bar of the Hotel Nacional, empty except for the little Indian man who was always there, despondently sipping his Harveys Bristol Cream, a deposed maharaja too absorbed in his own troubles to bother eavesdropping on anyone else’s. “The former president is really down in the dumps,” the contact said. “He’s just not motivated to fund an overthrow.” Even the newspapers had acknowledged Prio’s wilted morale. The morning after the coup, the headlines read PRIO QUITS, despite the fact that Prio was technically ousted.

La Mazière had business to attend to in Ciudad Trujillo and was planning to depart the next day. Between Rafael Trujillo, leader and generalissimo of the Dominican Republic, and François Duvalier, a Haitian insurgent with presidential ambitions, La Mazière had a regular beat in the Caribbean. From Havana to Ciudad Trujillo to Port-au-Prince was about the shortest sequence of flights in the world. And maybe, when he returned, something in the Cuban situation would have shifted.

He purchased his tickets at the Air Cubana office near his hotel and then went to the Tokio, taking up his regular station in the back of the Pam-Pam Room. As he was ordering a drink, a man who looked familiar entered the club, though La Mazière could not place him. He was tall, pale, and freckled, with a companion who couldn’t have been more than a teenager, with soft doe’s eyes and hair on his upper lip so pubescent it looked like cupcake crumbs. The taller one, La Mazière realized, was Fidel Castro, a trigger-happy politico who had made himself a public nuisance since Batista moved into the presidential palace. He and his younger companion — an obvious queer, La Mazière presumed — waited by the bar, awkwardly, as though they’d never been inside a place like the Tokio. It turned out they were waiting for Rachel K, who led them to a booth in the back of the room.

La Mazière had seen Castro’s photograph in the news magazine Bohemia, which printed it alongside a letter Castro had drafted, as his own lawyer, to Cuba’s Urgency Court, in protest of the coup. It was such an inspired piece of political rhetoric that La Mazière had cut it from Bohemia with a pair of scissors. “I, Fidel Castro Ruz, resort to humble logic,” the letter began. “I pulse this terrible reality. And the logic tells me that if there exist courts, Batista should be charged. If he should not be charged, and continue as Master of State, Major General, President, Civil and Military Chief, Owner of Lives, Farms, Women, Cattle, and Whores, He Who Flicks Upon the Island His Droit de Cuissage, then there do not exist courts. Nor logic. I repeat: I pulse this terrible reality.”

“I pulse this terrible reality” was peculiar language, almost sensual locution, and yet there was coherence. Castro had made “pulsing” a transitive act, to sense and to monitor, to take a pulse. On the same page as Castro’s letter, below it Bohemia had printed the court’s reply: “In response to the petition filed contesting the revolutionary coup resulting in General Batista’s presidency, the Urgency Court rules that Revolution is the source of law.” At which point Castro apparently gave up filing legal affidavits and began organizing public protests. During the largest of these, on the steps of the university, he fired several shots into the air and one at Batista’s secret service, who were across the street taking their demitasse. No one was hurt, but Castro became an instant enemy of the new regime.

He and his teenage companion stayed in the booth with Rachel K for what seemed to La Mazière like quite a while. When the curtain finally opened, he watched the three of them file out. Each shook Rachel K’s hand as though one had just sold the other a used car or a piece of real estate.

“Formal handshakes among a gangster, faggot, and a variety dancer,” La Mazière said to her later that evening. “It’s certainly peculiar.”

She was silent.

“Or perhaps it isn’t peculiar. But you might be careful. What would Batista think?”

“He’s not much of a thinker.”

She explained that the Castros — the younger one was Fidel’s brother Raúl — had come to the club asking her to connect them to Prio.