Rachel Kushner - Telex From Cuba

The other girls wanted to help, too. There was plenty for them to do, as Fidel explained in a series of notes that Rachel K received through an elaborate system of intermediaries. At a bar near Havana Harbor, a glass of rum was served with a note underneath it, a cardboard coaster with facedown messages in pencil. Certain clients, Rachel K explained to La Paloma and the other dancers, could be cultivated. Business leaders, for instance, who didn’t like Batista. Things changed quickly at the Tokio, as the dancing and the lights and the music stayed the same. Money was collected, as well as petards, time bombs, and jars of phosphorus, Colt revolvers and ammunition, gallons and gallons of jellied gasoline.

“I’ve been getting this vague feeling,” La Mazière said to her, “that something bad is supposed to happen to you.”

He’d shown up at the Tokio unannounced, having been away for several months. He told her he was in town on business, but the truth was he could have gone straight from Miami, where he’d just met with Prio, to the Dominican Republic, where Cuban insurgents were stockpiling weapons and running a rebel training camp. La Mazière had no pressing business in Havana. He was there to see her.

The feeling had come to him in fleeting moments. He knew she was in the underground — in a sense, he’d nudged her in in the first place — but she wasn’t candid with him to what extent she was involved. Perhaps it was a taste of his own medicine. He’d been plenty coy with her over the two years since they’d met. He’d come and gone without warning, never explaining what he was up to, sometimes not because information was sensitive, but for other reasons, for style and for aesthetics, because honesty was so clunky and irrelevant, like a cumbersome piece of furniture. Why not throw a sheet over it and move on to the business at hand?

“This is your fantasy?” she asked. “Something ‘bad’ is supposed to happen to me?”

“I have my fantasies. That’s not one of them. They aren’t so dull as a simple morality tale, ‘cabaret dancer meets tragic end.’ I loathe morality tales.”

“What’s the dancer’s tragic end? Tell me what happens. I’d like to know what I’m in for.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” he said wearily, as though it wasn’t worth getting into. “Any number of scenarios, really. Let’s say the dancer is caught playing both sides and gets snuffed out by Batista’s henchmen. Henchmen who have their way with her beforehand — or after, depending on their own fantasies, of course.”

“And nothing bad is supposed to happen to you? Trotting around and conducting your dubious ‘arrangements’?”

“The dubious arranger gets away, is how it goes. He escapes to a remote location. Lies on a chaise longue, under a palm tree, on the banks of a slow-moving river. The credits roll—”

“And the girl is long dead.”

“Generally, yes.”

“That’s actually fine with me. You know why?”

“I have a sense.”

“I’m not afraid of that end.”

“Right. That’s the sense I have.”

He liked her reckless attitude, even if it was an act. It seemed a form of intelligence to claim not to care what happened to oneself. Survival instincts are a kind of stupidity, an animal stupidity.

She’d left, to get ready for her show. He watched as the sad bartender played canasta with a dancer. The bartender won, but his face remained dolorous, as if winning were a burden, one more sad duty to perform. It occurred to La Mazière that he hoped she would find a way to avert the demise he’d just narrated, if only to forestall the dull cliché of one more showgirl disposed of.

NICARO NICKEL COMPANY

NICARO, ORIENTE, CUBA

CIRCULAR NO. B-21

Oct. 23, 1955

Hubert H. Mackey

General Manager

GSA Mining Interests, Tropical Division

To all management:

Attached is a photograph of D. L. Mazierre. This man is a political agitator of the worst type: an extremist suspected of supplying arms to political uprisings in North Africa and the Caribbean nations of Haiti and the Dominican Republic. He is believed to pose a genuine threat to the stability of American interests here in Cuba. His description is as follows:

30 to 34 years old

Native of France

Unmarried

5' 11"

150 lbs.

Race: white

Eyes: gray

Hair: brown

Complexion: pale, as if suffering some ailment

Smooth-shaven

Small mouth

Sometimes wears glasses

Personal habits: drinks occasionally

Is given to frequenting low resort

Mr. Mazierre has been known to travel repeatedly between Havana, Santiago, Port-au-Prince, and Ciudad Trujillo. There is evidence he has been on the northeast coast of Oriente. Be on the lookout for him and any other roguelike individuals attempting to agitate among our employees. If you see anything suspicious, report it directly to management.

Yours truly,

Hubert H. Mackey

He didn’t look dangerous, Everly thought, with his boyish and mischievous face. Dressed in a coat and tie, with shiny prep-school hair perfectly combed but curling slightly upward — not subduable with hair cream, like he might not be subduable by the men who were supposed to be on the lookout.

There were two photos, a side and a front angle. He looked handsome and agreeable from both angles, and what, anyhow, was “low resort”?

She stared at the photos, taped on the wall outside the company’s executive offices. She and the other students milled in the hallway as Miss Alfaro spoke to Mr. Carrington, who was guiding their class field trip around the nickel operation.

“Looking fresh as a daisy, Miss Alfaro,” Mr. Carrington said.

Miss Alfaro blushed. She was unmarried, and Everly’s mother said she didn’t get invited to parties because unmarried women were a problem.

“What kind of problem?” Everly had asked, but her mother hadn’t answered.

“Always so exquisitely put together, Miss Alfaro,” Mr. Carrington said. “I’m curious where you shop, so I can tell my wife. You travel to Havana?”

“You tease me, Mr. Carrington.”

“No, really. You renew my faith, Miss Alfaro. In the educational system. I had no idea schoolteachers could be so…chic and attractive.”

He was flirting with her in front of the whole class, and Everly suspected Miss Alfaro was enjoying it, even if it embarrassed her. She was certainly pretty, or at least she had all the signs of prettiness, what Everly’s father called “vavoom.” Bleached blond hair with a beauty parlor flip on the ends. Red lipstick, narrow skirts, and high heels — as high as the ones Stevie had put on that morning. Their mother had said to turn right around and change into something more appropriate for a field trip to the mine. No one said out loud that the high-heeled shoes — and the seersucker dress and the rouge Stevie had on — were for Tico Leál, who worked at the mine. There were kids in Everly’s class who said that Miss Alfaro’s curtains matched her carpet, meaning she dyed the hair between her legs the same platinum blond as her head hair. Everly didn’t believe it. It seemed impossible that any of the kids would have seen it in order to know. And if an adult saw it he wouldn’t say “curtains” and “carpet” and he wouldn’t tell a kid about it.

They rode in an open ore car, Everly bouncing along under the hot sun, thinking about the man with the shiny hair and small mouth, chanting to herself.

Given to frequenting low resort. Low resort. Low resort. Given to frequenting low resort. Low resort. Low resort. Given to —

The mine was so high above Nicaro that they could see the whole town. Mr. Carrington pointed out the nickel plant on the bay, and the sugar mill smokestacks across the channel in Preston. Cayo Saetía in between, where they went for company picnics, and beyond the fence around Nicaro, the shantytown of Levisa. It was huge compared to Nicaro, with soft-looking huts made of palm leaves, jammed in together and leaning in all different directions. Smoke rose up here and there from between the huts. Willy lived in Levisa. He came to Nicaro on foot and every day Everly watched for his familiar gait, slow and rhythmic, as he turned onto their road. Willy said everybody in Levisa cooked their meals outside, over wood fires. Or with alcohol, if it was raining. But the alcohol stoves, he said, were dangerous. They could blow up and burn your face or burn your hut down if you weren’t careful. All the servants lived in Levisa, except for the ones who lived in servants’ quarters, like Flozilla, whose room was off the Lederers’ kitchen with its own tiny bathroom — a toilet and a tiny sink. The people from Levisa came down to the river by the main highway to bathe and wash their clothes, the women rubbing wet, soapy clothes on rocks, boys and men fishing from the banks without poles, just line wound on spools. It looked so close to Nicaro, right across the main road at the edge of town. She had never been there.