Rachel Kushner - Telex From Cuba

The Carringtons’ houseboy answered and called to Val. She came out of her room dressed in only a slip and told Everly to come in, that she wasn’t ready yet.

“You don’t care if he sees you in your underwear?” Everly whispered, sitting down on Val’s bed.

“Why should I? It’s just Roosevelt.”

The bedroom door was open. Roosevelt was polishing the hall tiles with a rag, his eyes on the floor. Everly figured he had no choice, with Val standing there in her slip, sixteen and with a body like a grown woman.

“Where’s Pamela?”

“Not coming,” Val said.

“Why isn’t she coming?”

“She’s going to Preston. I can’t say why.”

There was always something secret and dramatic happening with Pamela, who had begun announcing that she was not one-quarter Latin but in fact half-Cuban. Val rolled her eyes and said it was a phase Pamela was going through, an embarrassing phase. She spoke angrily to Pamela in French. Pamela spoke angrily back, in Spanish. “My sister is losing her mind,” Val said. “And she’s adopting that hideous singing Spanish, like a barefoot guajira.” One Saturday, coming back from Mrs. Stites’s house, Everly had seen Pamela down by the seawall with K.C. Stites’s boxing coach, Luís Galindez.

“I bet I know why she’s going to Preston. To see Luís Galindez.”

“What do you know?” Val said. “You’re ten years old. And you’re not even interested in boys yet.”

“I’m interested in boys.”

“Tell me who, then.”

“It’s a secret.” She knew what not to share. Not with Val Carrington or anyone else.

One of the two cocks immediately began losing. It was on its side, blood spreading underneath, its chicken body huffing up and down like a fireplace bellows. A man jumped into the ring and pried open the cock’s beak and blew air from his own mouth into the bird’s lungs. The bird stood up, matted and dazed, and took a wobbly step. The man fluffed up its feathers and steered it toward the other cock, who tore it apart and killed it for good.

They were served chicken after the cockfight. It wasn’t clear to Everly if they were eating the birds that had been fighting, or chicken that came from some other place. Mr. and Mrs. Carrington began to argue as they ate. Everly’s mother said the Carringtons habitually broke the rule of a “unified front.” People fight, Marjorie Lederer said, it’s reality, but you do it in private. When they were finished eating, Mr. Carrington stepped outside for a cigarette. Everly’s mother went to the ladies’ room. Her father got up to pay the bill. (“How did we get stuck with that bill?” her mother later asked.) It was just Everly, Stevie, and Val at the table when Mrs. Carrington started talking, more to herself than to them.

“He thinks I’m full of shit when I say I can quit anytime,” Mrs. Carrington said, “but he doesn’t know the first thing about drinking. About people who drink.”

“Mom—” Val said, embarrassed. “Come on, Mom.”

Mrs. Carrington continued as though she hadn’t heard. “Every day I quit drinking. When I decide to have my last drink . I get to the last drink and I quit. Every goddamn day. And he thinks I don’t know about last drinks. About quitting. I know all about that.”

Mrs. Carrington picked up the drumstick on her plate as if she hadn’t noticed it was there until just then. “But,” she said, gesticulating with the drumstick, “this place fits with drinking, so what’s the point of quitting?” Everly wasn’t sure if she meant the chicken and cockfight place fit with drinking, or Nicaro, or maybe Cuba. Her mother would have voted the chicken and cockfight place, which she later commented to Mrs. Fourier, the lady from French Guiana, was terribly vulgar. Mrs. Fourier said she’d been to a cockfight herself, in Santiago. She found it “extremely compelling.” But more compelling, Mrs. Fourier said, was the voodoo ceremony she and Mr. Fourier had attended in Regla, across the bay from Havana, where they’d witnessed chickens being sacrificed. Intoxicating, she said, as long as one ignored the hissing steam and the flames from the Shell refinery that loomed over Regla. “The dances of the possessed, the drumming — it was all so human, ” she said. “You could smell the humanity. Like a musk.”

“I told Mr. Lederer not to go, that he won’t like it,” Willy said, shaking his head, after Everly reported the grisly details of the cockfight. “I said ‘Don’t go.’”

Willy had the chairs in the Lederers’ living room upside down and was painting the bottoms of their feet with clear nail polish, her mother’s idea. Something about not scratching the floor, which made no sense to Everly because her mother had already ordered new furniture, so the upside-down chairs would be replaced. Mrs. Billings had come over for tea and commented, as she selected a seat in their living room, that it was clear where George parked himself. She pointed to a broad, bottom-shaped indentation in the Lederers’ eiderdown couch. After that, Everly’s mother ordered rattan, which is what everyone else had. It’s so much cooler, Marjorie Lederer said. “And people’s bottoms don’t leave prints in it!” Duffy added.

Everly told K. C. Stites that she’d gone to a cockfight in Mayarí, and K.C. said that in the mountains above Nicaro they had cockfights with men instead of roosters. Stevie teased Everly and said that K.C. had a crush on her. Everly wondered if telling her creepy stories was K.C.’s version of the men bringing Charmaine Mackey another Tom Collins. Trying to do something to her, the way the drinks did something to Charmaine Mackey.

“They put the men in the ring,” he said. “It’s just like cockfights, with spectating and betting.”

She tried to wipe away the scene of two men fighting to the death but kept seeing it. Her mind did this sometimes, acted mutinous like a bunch of drunken sailors, making her see gruesome things that took away her appetite and made her feel dirty on the inside.

She dreamed she was watching actors on a stage. Two men, who argued over a woman. They were dressed alike, in dark suits like her father and the other managers wore. They were shouting, and Everly understood that they were no longer acting, but arguing for real. The men took off their jackets, ready to fight in their white shirts and neckties. They struggled in a sort of awful dance. One man picked the other man up and shook him violently. The other man began to split apart. Milk jetted out of him at the seams where he split. The other man kept shaking him, milk flying in all directions.

Rachel K hadn’t realized she’d take pleasure in such a thing. “Zazou,” Fidel called her, and said the resistance couldn’t operate without her. Especially now that he and Raúl were both locked up, serving time for their attack on the Moncada army barracks in Santiago.

It was up to her, Zazou. She had a magic way with Prio, Fidel wrote to her from prison, flattering her. Not just to his changed heart, but also to his wallet. Prio was pledging millions to overthrow Batista. The other girls at the club squealed when they saw pictures of Fidel in Bohemia, midspeech, his finger in the air, next to reprints of his famous prison declaration. He was brave and good-looking and Rachel K was lucky, they said, lucky indeed. What an honor to be guapo Fidel’s confidante. But of the two brothers, she secretly preferred Raúl, partly because of his homosexual put-on. Fidel was far more likely, she guessed, to go that way. Too bristlingly macho to be truly interested in women. While Raúl batted his eyelashes and swished around like a Chinatown cross-dresser, then told her he was packing a weapon and tried to put her hand on his crotch to prove it.