Rachel Kushner - Telex From Cuba

Willy and Flozilla put out snacks for the television party, little roulades they made with one of Marjorie Lederer’s precious canned hams. When Willy and Flozilla retreated to the kitchen, K.C. said to Everly, “Your houseboy. I swear I know him. He was Mr. Bloussé’s boy.” K.C. said that if it was the same person, he’d come to the Stiteses’ house when K.C. was a tiny boy.

After everyone had left that afternoon, Everly told Willy what K.C. had said.

“I don’t know any American child,” Willy said.

“But he says you were Mr. Drussay’s boy.”

“I don’t know a Drussay.”

“A man from Haiti, he said, who brought workers over.”

“You mean Mr. Bloussé? I’m not his boy.” Willy shook his head. “Not for a long time.”

Willy’s people were from Haiti, but he’d been raised by this Bloussé—a white man from France. The man brought groups of Haitians over to cut sugarcane for the United Fruit Company, and he’d taken Willy with him all over the Caribbean. He’d taught Willy to speak English and proper French, not like a Haitian but like a French person spoke it, and to do arithmetic so that Willy could help with his business, organizing boatfuls of Haitian laborers to go here and there working for foreign companies. Willy said he didn’t remember K.C., but he remembered going to the Stiteses, and there might have been children there. “The big house,” he’d said to Everly, “on the end of the avenue.”

“You know Willy!” Everly said to Mrs. Stites the next Saturday. They were sitting together, about to play a Bach two-part invention that Everly hadn’t practiced sufficiently. It was exciting having Willy around her house, and she had to partly concentrate on him — where he was and what he was doing — which made it hard to focus on anything else.

“Who’s that, dear?”

“ Willy, ” Everly said. “He visited you when he was a boy. With Mr. Bloussé.”

“I do know a Mr. Bloussé. He came with his family. Three girls. He didn’t bring anyone named Willy. Shall we begin?”

Mrs. Stites didn’t remember him, Everly later realized, because he wouldn’t have mattered when he came to her house. He wasn’t a guest. He was the help.

Willy referred to him as mister, Mr. Bloussé. Had Willy worked for him? Or was he more like a father to him, since he raised him? Somewhere in between, Willy said. It was hard to explain. Mr. Bloussé told him what to do and he had to do it, so he supposed it was more like he worked for him. But Mr. Bloussé taught him languages and sent him to a tutor for reading and writing, which made him more like a son. And eventually he’d left, just like a boy leaves a father to go out on his own. “Did he pay you?” Everly asked. “He raised me,” Willy said. “That was the payment.” He said Mr. Bloussé shipped people over to Cuba from Haiti to cut sugarcane. “Like cattle,” Willy said. “They made almost nothing, I mean nothing, for backbreaking work, while Mr. Bloussé is living like a king in Le Cap. He’s white, but he choose to live in a black world, where he rules everybody. Even his own wife. He married a black woman and she’s his servant and wife both. Slave and wife both, just like his cane cutters. They are worse off than servants because they owe him for the ship passage and they never make enough cutting cane to pay him back. The daughters were his servants, too, just like the wife. Everybody running around bringing Mr. Bloussé this and that. The wife, she knows he can put her out in a second, and she’s back to selling discount underwear on the streets of Le Cap, where he found her to begin with. We’re all running around like he owns us. Like we’re his property. I got tired of it and decided I was through.”

Everly didn’t understand how a man could have a wife who was also his servant. Daughters who had to work or they would be put out of the house. But it didn’t seem like she’d understand any better by asking Willy to explain. It was something she’d have to figure out by thinking about it. It was a different world. It almost didn’t seem real.

So he’d just left? “That’s right,” he said. They docked in Cuba and suddenly he knew he was done being Mr. Bloussé’s boy. He tended people’s flowers around Santiago and learned Spanish. He remembered Preston and how beautiful it was, because Mr. Bloussé had taken him there. Very fancy, he said, with pretty gardens. He figured you could have a fine life in Preston, and that he would go there and look for work as a gardener. He hitchhiked from Santiago, and the man who gave him a lift said there were jobs in Nicaro, because the nickel mine was reopening. “Now I work for your father,” he said. “He pays me and when I’m finished for the day I’m finished for the day.” Being raised by Mr. Bloussé had meant he was never finished for the day, and that he was always owing. You have to make a clean break sometimes. No good-bye, just the act of good-bye.

Was Mr. Bloussé sad when Willy went away? Willy shrugged. He hadn’t seen Mr. Bloussé since the day he made his decision, at age fourteen, and he was twenty-one now. They never saw each other again? Willy said there was a Willy who traveled with Mr. Bloussé, and there was this Willy talking to Everly and clipping the Lederers’ hedges, the Willy who lived on his own, and in the evening worked for no one but Willy. They weren’t the same person, and he couldn’t see Mr. Bloussé and not be the old Willy. They would have nothing to say to each other unless he wanted to go back to being Mr. Bloussé’s boy.

“I was sent to be your driver,” Willy had said to her father, a week after their arrival in Nicaro. He’d stood at the back door with his cap in his hand, a navy blue newsboy’s cap.

Her father said he didn’t need a driver.

“Then I’m your houseboy,” Willy said. He’d heard that none of them spoke any Spanish. “You need a houseboy, sir, if you don’t speak the Spanish language. I can speak it for you.” The smile on his face was so broad, so contagious, that George Lederer couldn’t turn him away.

Her mother said that although Willy was lazy and preferred delegating chores to doing any actual work, you couldn’t help but like him, his gentle manner and that dazzling smile, and that they’d be lost without him. Everly heard the lady from French Guiana say he was “compelling.” What did it mean? “That she’s attracted to a Negro,” Stevie whispered. “He’s not a Negro,” Duffy said. “What is he, then?” Stevie asked. “He’s Willy.” None of them was attached the way Everly was. “You follow me around like a little dog,” Willy said, and patted her on the head. She didn’t mind.

Marjorie Lederer still didn’t speak any Spanish, although she practiced her French every afternoon. She’d been practicing her French every afternoon for as long as Everly could remember, but she never seemed to advance to another level. She’d say things to Willy in French, give instructions like she was helping him out, since English, her mother said, was Willy’s third language. But Willy didn’t understand her mother’s French and would repeat words in what must have been the proper pronunciation, asking if that was what she’d meant. “Yes,” Marjorie Lederer would say, and repeat Willy’s pronunciation. “That’s right. You say it perfectly now.” He had a way of making everyone feel good. Her mother’s French wasn’t proper, but she was trying. Willy was complimenting the effort.

The Du Mont television worked, but it didn’t get good reception. When Everly’s mother wanted to watch something important, Willy was sent up on the roof to hold the antenna this way or that, so the picture would stay clear. The week after they got the TV, Queen Elizabeth’s coronation was televised. “Live,” her mother kept saying, which Everly found confusing. Wasn’t everything live? Or did it mean seeing in present time something that was evidence the present had taken place, like the photos and souvenirs that Stevie collected to put in her scrapbook? Maybe it meant you could experience something and see it as a memory at one and the same time. Stevie had a photo album with clippings about the queen, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor pasted onto its matte black pages. Underneath, in white grease pencil, details like Gala Christmas party, Bois de Boulogne, Dress: Givenchy, Dec. 1951 . Everly sometimes took the book out, but more for the amusement of snooping than any real curiosity about the duke and duchess, who seemed wooden and unreal, characters mentioned in ads, like the one in the Havana Post for El Louvre, the big ice cream parlor on La Rampa. “Try our rum raisin, the Duke of Windsor’s favorite!” The coronation went on and on, Queen Elizabeth sitting under hot lights and sweating visibly, in a huge crown and a long dress that looked scratchy and uncomfortable. It was raining in Nicaro, hard, and her mother had Willy up on the roof adjusting the antenna, his foot wedged against a drainpipe so he wouldn’t fall.