Rachel Kushner - Telex From Cuba

Stevie and their mother sat glued to the set. Everly went out on the porch and shouted questions to Willy through the rain, until her mother said he could come down, that the coronation was over.

Willy said his family was still in Haiti, but it would be impossible to find them. He said he wasn’t sure of their last name, couldn’t remember it. He’d been with Mr. Bloussé since he was six years old, and on his identification his name was Willy Bloussé. He didn’t have papers for traveling and doubted he could go to Haiti. Didn’t he have a passport? He showed her what he had: one pocket-worn yellow index card, his name typed on it, stating that he’d been vaccinated for communicable diseases, the Nicaro doctor’s signature underneath. “You have to vaccinate,” Willy said, “if you want to work in a white person’s home. Everybody have to vaccinate.”

His father had come over to cut the cane in Cuba when Willy was little. When his father returned, there was a problem. Willy hadn’t known what the problem was, but it had something to do with Mr. Bloussé. Mr. Bloussé came to the house and spoke to Willy’s father, and when Mr. Bloussé left their house that day, Willy was sent with him. Wasn’t Willy sad to leave his family? There were ten children, he said, and they ate nothing but boiled yucca. The boys had to cut sugarcane and there was no money to go to school. Without Mr. Bloussé, he never would have learned to read. And anyway it was his own fault, he said, getting sent with Mr. Bloussé, because he’d dreamed of escaping so he wouldn’t have to cut the cane. When he was little he’d wished he was Chinese, anything but what he was. “The Chinese are clever,” he said. “You don’t see them cut cane. They grow vegetables, work in the sugar mill, sell ice cream. They find a way to make a life without cutting the cane.”

“Guanabana! Carombolla! Mamoncillo! Limone! Mango! Piña! Plátanos!” The Chinese came to the Lederers’ door every afternoon, selling fruits, vegetables, fish, tools, soaps, and laundry supplies. Willy showed Everly how to choose a ripe pineapple, how to cut it with her knife, and make a perfect spiral of the outer skin, which was patterned like fancy leather upholstery. Could you save it and use it for anything? No, she discovered. It immediately rotted. You could tell that a pineapple was ripe, Willy explained, if it was veined with red like a bloodshot eye. After school, she’d go home and buy one of the bloodshot pineapples from the Chinese vendor, Lumling. They were small, a one-person pineapple, and she’d eat the whole thing and feel like she was eating something that had to do with Willy.

Sometimes, when Everly and Willy were the only ones home, he turned on the radio and danced in the Lederers’ kitchen with a broom. “La Pachanga” was his favorite.

When it came on, Willy turned up the radio and danced, swaying and twirling like the broom was a real person. Everly would giggle and beg him to dance again. Please, one more. He’d spin the broom around and dip it low, then hold it close, he and the broom moving side to side like a man and a woman. He looked to Everly like a movie star, with his narrow waist and broad shoulders, muscular but so slim and graceful. He demonstrated all the dances. Cha-cha. Pachanga. Rumba. Mambo.

How did he learn so many dances? “At the Club Maceo,” he said, swaying with the broom, “in Levisa.” Was it like Las Palmas? He said it was sort of like Las Palmas, but it was for colored people. The blacks didn’t drink like the white people did, but they were more lively. They liked to dance more, he said.

Everly pictured Willy dancing at the Club Maceo. Not with a broom. With a woman. She tried to push this image out of her mind but it kept returning. Sitting at the kitchen table eating the deviled eggs that Flozilla prepared, she’d be suddenly unhungry, stricken with sadness, picturing Willy at the Club Maceo, dancing the pachanga with black people who didn’t drink too much or act silly like the Americans at Las Palmas. She pictured the people in the Club Maceo dancing elegant dances, romantic and dignified. Willy had a whole life away from the Lederers that she didn’t know about and couldn’t see.

“You got to get the wet bar,” Willy said to her father one day.

When he worked behind the new wet bar, Willy wore a white bartender’s jacket with a black bow tie. He mixed stingers and sidecars, pink slippers and old fashioneds. He knew all the cocktails.

After she was sent to bed, Everly could hear her father’s voice booming to Willy to fix Charmaine Mackey another Tom Collins, or telling stories about his childhood, offering details that didn’t seem to follow from what anyone else had said. “They put a red ball on the front of the trolley when the pond was frozen thick enough for skating. That’s how we knew! They had a red ball—” And Marjorie Lederer interrupting to change the topic of conversation, asking the lady from French Guiana whether she preferred Cézanne or Pisarro. “Gauguin,” the woman said. “Such beautiful bodies—”

The men all liked to bring Charmaine Mackey another Tom Collins. She was pretty, with the face of a young child. She had large eyes, a nub of a nose, and plump lips. People said she was the prettiest woman in Nicaro, and Everly figured there was an extra thrill in a pretty woman getting drunk, and another extra thrill if you were the man responsible, the one who brought her another Tom Collins.

Once, at Las Palmas, Charmaine Mackey walked past Everly on her way to the powder room and lost her footing. She started to fall and clutched Everly on her way down, pressing hard on Everly’s shoulder. Everly was only ten and small, but she managed to hold Charmaine Mackey up. She looked at Everly in a peculiar way, as though Everly didn’t exist, was just a block of something, furniture that could take all the weight she gave it.

She righted herself and asked Everly if Mr. Gonzalez had arrived. Everly said she didn’t think so. She’d never seen Mr. Gonzalez in the club. He didn’t seem friendly with the other Americans. Charmaine Mackey looked disappointed. She turned and teetered down the hall. Everly felt bad about disappointing Mrs. Mackey. People must have been waiting for Mr. Gonzalez. Maybe there was some special reason he was coming that night. Everly decided it would be her job to spot him when he arrived. She would go and tell Mrs. Mackey, wipe away the disappointment, and make Mrs. Mackey pleased. But he never showed up, and then it was time for the Lederers to go home. That might have been the only time Charmaine Mackey had ever spoken to Everly. She barely spoke to anyone.

The Carringtons lived next door, but Everly had to walk down the front path to the road and around to the proper entrance, rather than just cutting through from the Lederers’ front yard to theirs, because the cactus fence bordering the Carringtons’ yard was prickly and you couldn’t climb over it without getting lanced by cactus spines. Val said the cactus fence was called “catch the nigger.” “Ataja negro, ” she’d said, and translated for Everly. Everly tried to forget its name. One day Willy pointed to it as he trimmed the Lederers’ hibiscus. “Isn’t that wonderful? A fence made out of plants. It’s a special cactus, only grows in Cuba.” It made the ends of her fingers ache with sadness. The same fence Willy thought was wonderful, other people were calling “catch the nigger.”

Val and Pamela themselves weren’t quite white, though this was supposed to be a secret. “Latin,” Val said. “One-quarter Latin.” According to their mother, Val added, they were white, just like Mrs. Carrington. We’re white, like our mother.

Everly walked around the fence and knocked on the Carringtons’ front door. The Carringtons had invited the whole family to a cockfight. Willy had advised them not to go, but her father thought it would be rude to decline.