Rachel Kushner - Telex From Cuba

“Is that so.”

“But they shouldn’t.”

“Oh, no?”

“It’s a crime to outlaw the rumba!”

Hemingway wasn’t exactly shouting, but his talking voice was louder than the music and the room murmur. I think everyone in the bar was listening, the way I was.

“Even if it’s so sexy it forces people,” Hemingway said, “to do naughty things. That’s the curse of the rumba, and I’ve seen it. Men hiking up women’s skirts and humping them right on the dance floor. It’s probably happening in some back alley right now. I mean this second, while I’m sitting here talking to you. Me, I’ve got a back problem. Still make love good, but not standing up. Do you know why they shouldn’t outlaw the rumba?”

“I couldn’t say.”

“Because people need diversions. Sex is a healthy diversion. A very effective diversion.”

“I suppose I can agree with you there,” the Frenchman said.

Hemingway insisted they toast. “To humping.”

They held up their drinks.

It’s a typical scenario, drunk people carving out worlds as they get drunker, making pacts about what’s important and what isn’t in a couple of lost and forgettable hours. But when you’re thirteen, you don’t realize it doesn’t count, that both those men could enter the bar the very next day and act as if they’ve never seen each other before. Perhaps repeat the conservation word for word, as if for the first time.

They were still talking when the waiter brought the dessert cart around and did the flambé routine for us. It was Mother’s favorite part of going to the Floridita. She said they made the best flambé in town.

“I’ll confess,” Hemingway said, “that I cannot dance rumba to save my life. Like I said, this damn bad back. Listen to me— I said this, I do that — too many goddamn ‘I’s. You know what I should do? Every time I want to say ‘I,’ I’ll substitute something else, ‘Your Operative,’ or maybe ‘This Task Force.’ In any case, ‘Your Operative’ is not a skilled dancer. What he knows is fiction. It’s a very unhealthy diversion. Unless you can give it a high moral tone, which ‘This Task Force’ has failed to do. We need more poets. I once broke a poet’s jaw. I feel bad about it, but he asked me to. More or less. Do you write poetry?”

“I don’t think so,” the Frenchman said. “In fact, no.”

“Because you smell like a high-level civil servant, see, and they used to send us poets. Poet-diplomats, like Perse. Or Valéry—”

“Claudel,” the Frenchman interjected.

“Exactly! Let me buy you another, my friend. Double whatever he’s having. And a double for me as well. And a Ballantine’s, because I’m very very thirsty. What was I saying? Oh, yes, men who type poems on embassy stationery. Send alexandrines to the State Department. Or just a single phrase. A wonderful question. It’s a gift to ask the right question.”

“This is a fact,” the Frenchman said, and then they were toasting their doubles to the art of questions.

“Hell is breaking loose in French West Africa,” Hemingway said.

“Indeed it is,” the Frenchman agreed. “Indeed it is. It will be quite interesting to see what evolves. A can swollen with botulism. Sometimes there is a healthy botulism, you know. A ‘good’ botulism—”

“Like I was saying,” Hemingway said, cutting him off, “hell is breaking loose in French West Africa, and Saint-John Perse sends an embassy report back to France, one sentence. A single sentence. And it’s a question: ‘Is the Pink Lake of Dakar pink, or is it mauve?’ That’s his report!”

“I can tell you that it’s mauve,” the Frenchman said.

I don’t think Hemingway was listening.

“They used to send us diplomats,” he said, draining his drink and starting on the Ballantine’s, “who didn’t dare talk about the price of sugar, the price of nickel, insurgent stunts on wireless radio. They sent us men like Perse, who asked, instead, what has the world given us ‘but this swaying of grass.’ They used to send us poets. Now they send us guys like you. Who don’t even dance the pachanga.”

A driver took us down Calle San Rafael after dinner. They had fake snow and an elaborate manger set up, with life-sized department store mannequins that El Encanto donated from its window displays. The fanfare was all for us Anglos. The Cubans don’t make such a big deal about Christmas — they have the Three Kings, that’s in early January — but the president’s wife gave out gifts on Christmas morning to children from the slums. It goes without saying that there were huge divisions between rich and poor in Cuba. You could look at a map of Havana and wonder about these massive areas, with ominous names like Cueva del Humo — cave of smoke — but the way the city was laid out, we never passed through a single slum. Mrs. Batista handed the gifts out herself, on the front lawn of the presidential palace. Hundreds of kids came to receive them. When the president and Mrs. Batista arrived at the Havelins’ party, Mother complimented the first lady on her Christmas gift tradition. Mother said it was this type of gesture — modest and specific — that just might save the world.

The Havelins’ party was formal formal — greased hair, coat and tie, white bucks. Daddy wore a tuxedo and joked that you could take the hillbilly out of Mississippi but not the reverse. Mother had on a white bouffant gown. I remember it. She leaned in to kiss me, and the puffy fabric of her skirt made a soft, crunching noise. Dolly’s father, Mr. Becquer, had commented that I’d be a lady-killer someday. Mother leaned in and kissed my forehead and said I was her peach and still a one-woman boy. The ambassador was there — not available when your plantation is burning down, but right as rain at a bash with champagne and movie stars. In his white suit, thinning hair plastered back, a tall fellow with coat-hanger shoulders. Face so suntanned that even by expat standards he looked ridiculous. He was a snobbish type with a Yale class ring, and when I think of him and Daddy in the Havelins’ living room, sitting in club chairs with cocktails in their hands, tuxedo or no, Daddy does seem like a hillbilly by comparison. Daddy may have been the Cuba manager of United Fruit, but he was in backward Oriente, not Boston or New York. The people who mattered in Ambassador Smith’s world were the financiers and CEOs, not the guy who hires the agronomist, deals with the day-to-day of cane crushing, of labor politics and revolt.

A guy was playing Gershwin melodies on the Havelins’ grand piano. He stopped playing, and Dolly Havelin clinked a spoon against the side of her glass. People quieted down, and servants circulated the room with trays of poured champagne, making sure everyone had a glass. The servants were done up like French maids, in short skirts and little starched pillbox hats.

Dolly Havelin clinked her glass again to get our attention. Deke Havelin stood up and spoke.

“Everyone have a little bubbly?” Deke asked.

“We’ve got a special guest here tonight I’d like to toast. I’ll give you a hint: Who’s the most important man in Cuba?” Deke looked around. “Not you, Smith.”

Everyone laughed, including the ambassador.

“I refer, of course, to President Batista.”

Batista and his wife were sitting at a special table, decorated with crepe. They both smiled a lot, which I realized later was about photography. People who are used to having their picture taken know to keep their faces placid and camera-ready at all times.

Deke paused to retrieve a little piece of paper from his tuxedo pocket. He unfolded it and read.

“One evening, one of the many lovely evenings I’ve had the enormous pleasure to spend with the president, he asked me, ‘Deke, what do you really think of Cuba, an American like yourself, who’s spent so many years here? Do you love it as your own country?’ Well, I didn’t have to think twice about that one. ‘Claro que sí,’ I said to the president.”