Rachel Kushner - Telex From Cuba

I don’t know if it was ceremonial — you know, acting — but Deke wiped tears from his eyes.

“I’ll make this short. It’s quite an honor to call this marvelous country home. And now, to call myself Cubano. It’s just wonderful. I feel like I’m dreaming. And so I want to make a toast.” Deke held up his glass. “To President Batista, and to Cuba, which the Havelin family always has, and always will, love as our own .”

Everyone raised a glass in the direction of the president’s table.

“And by the way,” Deke said, “Dolly and I broke out the good stuff, so drink up now and you won’t feel a thing later on, when we start uncorking the rotgut.”

People laughed, and there was a lot of applause. The pianist started in on a tune, and Deke twirled Dolly around the dance floor as everyone watched. He dipped her dramatically, and everybody laughed and applauded again.

Batista had offered Deke Havelin Cuban citizenship, and Deke had accepted. I knew it had something to do with wealth and keeping it protected, but I had no idea Deke was in serious legal trouble in the States. I was thirteen, and suddenly in that wild state that puberty flings boys into, and preoccupied with other things — girls, for instance. There were some pretty ones at the Havelins’ that day, and I felt like I was noticing girls for the first time in my life. I guess there were kids my age who were into all that before I was, but I was a late bloomer. Maybe it had to do with Mother, something complicated about my loyalty to her. I married very late, after Mother had already died, and perhaps there’s a reason for that. Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball were at the Christmas party — they were friends of the Havelins, friendly with Daddy. Mother and Daddy had gone to their wedding reception in Santiago. I was hot on the heels of a niece they brought to the party, Elisia Arnaz, a pretty girl with white-blond hair like mine, who talked with a lisp that made her sound like she was from Spain except I don’t think she could help it. For years I’d watched how Phillip Mackey operated, and I remember adopting his style a bit to flirt with Elisia Arnaz. Phillip had this way of looking girls right in the eye, even if he wasn’t that interested.

I was wrapped up in looking Elisia Arnaz in the eye as if I wasn’t afraid of her, and it didn’t occur to me that Deke Havelin was giving up his American citizenship. I figured it was like Batista was giving him the key to the city, a purely ceremonial thing.

Dolly’s family, the Becquers, had come from Philadelphia, but they’d been in Cuba for more than a century, since long before the Spanish-American War. They had their own mausoleum in Colón, the big cemetery in Havana — black marble with yellow Lalique windows, air-conditioning, and an elevator to the underground tombs. They’d bought themselves Spanish titles — Casa or Marqués de this or that, Gentleman of the Bedchamber of the Queen — which not only made them sound pompous and important but also transferred all litigation against them to Spain, causing so many delays that they could never be taken to court for anything, never had to pay any debts, and had built up a great deal of wealth back when Cuba was still a Spanish colony. Kind of like Deke Havelin getting out of his legal issues by changing passports. I don’t think that’s a coincidence: rich people are clever about holding on to money. Becquer was originally Baker, but they’d been in Cuba so long they Hispanicized it. Deke Havelin didn’t Hispanicize his name, but maybe he would have if things had gone differently.

Watching him twirl Dolly around the dance floor, I guess I figured it was a good thing Batista had done for Deke, if it meant the Havelins got to keep the mansion and the swimming pool with its bamboo cabañas, the gardens and tennis court, the fourteen-foot Virginia pine Christmas tree, which had come all the way from North Florida in a chilled shipping container, in the Havelins’ living room with an avalanche of presents underneath it. Those were happy times. Why not take measures to make the happiness last?

During Deke’s toast, Mother had sneaked out to the guesthouse. She’d been trying to get a call through to Del since we arrived in Havana, but with no luck. Naturally there was a telephone in the guesthouse — they even had a telephone mounted on the wall of each bathroom. That morning after the party I was in the bathtub and thought about calling Elisia Arnaz, but I didn’t have her phone number. I probably wouldn’t have done it, but I can’t think of why they’d put a telephone in the bathroom, except to call up girls while you’re in the bath.

Mother came back into the living room and told Daddy no one was answering.

“I called down to the Allain place and spoke to Rudy,” she said. “Rudy says they haven’t seen hide or hair of him. They thought he was in Havana with us. And since the Mackeys are in New Mexico, I put in a call to Marjorie Lederer, who says that Phillip’s boat is gone from the Nicaro dock. That it’s been gone for several days.”

“Jesus, Evelyn,” Daddy said. “This might be the time to cut him from the apron strings. He’s an ingrate, and I will testify that I am enjoying his — what do you call it? The opposite of company? His absence.”

“But Malcolm—”

“And it’s not like he’s never borrowed that boat. He probably thinks he owns the fucking thing now that the Mackey boy is gone.”

Phillip Mackey graduated from a military academy with honors the next spring. Del set buses on fire, grew a beard, and took his orders from a seventeen-year-old commander, a suspected Communist, suspected homosexual.

When I think of Tee-Tee Allain, I think of my brother. Not that I think of her much. Sometimes, when I see women with that same blank look, I see Tee-Tee’s face as Del handed her the chocolates on Valentine’s Day. She always had that empty look. Maybe that’s what did it for Del. It’s a particular blankness, and I’ve mostly seen it on billboards for so-called gentlemen’s clubs. The convincing ones have that same empty look. Like they know just how to void themselves and not get in the way of some “gentleman’s” fantasy.

Tee-Tee floated around, oblivious, in the shadow of his obsession with her. That’s the strange thing about love. Unless you return it, it’s invisible. Even if you know someone is directing it at you, it’s nothing but a dull reminder of your own indifference to it. One person impaling himself on his own obsession, the other wolfing down Valentine candies, playing dodgeball barefoot, her stringy hair in her face, staring at nothing, mouth partway open like she can’t be bothered to close it.

Del gave up on her about a year before he disappeared. His last attempt was asking Tee-Tee to the cotillion. Phillip Mackey had already asked her, and I think her getting hung up on Phillip is finally what did it.

Daddy had arranged with our company lawyer, Mr. Diaz-Hart, that Del and I would take Mr. Diaz-Hart’s two younger daughters to the dance. Mother wanted us to go with the Lederer girls, but it was a business thing for Daddy, and he’d already arranged it. Mr. Diaz-Hart’s oldest daughter, Mirta, married Fidel Castro in 1948. The wedding was at the church right on the town square in Banes, United Fruit’s other sugar mill town, thirty miles away. It seems absurd that Fidel would marry a society girl whose father’s occupation was helping Americans avoid Cuban taxes and labor laws. They were rich, Americanized Cubans. They vacationed in the States, read Look and Life, and ate cornflakes for breakfast. The daughters dressed straight out of Vogue magazine. Mirta ended up sending divorce papers to the rebel camp. I guess she realized Castro wasn’t going to be the husband who drives a new Buick and gives her a shopping allowance. I think he married her to put a notch in his belt. I mean, an enemy who’s sleeping with your daughter has a certain advantage over you. But I also think he had something to prove, that even as he was destroying it, he wanted in to a social world from which the Cubans were excluded. Maybe he still wants in. When Castro was in Tampico planning his invasion, the story is he spotted this sparkling white yacht on the Tuxpán River and declared, “Here she is — I’m going to Cuba in this boat.” That boat became famous: the Granma, which until 1959 the English-language dailies were calling “Gramma.” It was a pleasure boat exactly like our company yacht, the Mollie and Me . Eighty feet. Meant to carry twenty-five people, with lacquered teakwood trim and white leather tuck-and-roll upholstery. You invade a country in a PT boat, not a yacht with a built-in liquor cabinet! Castro later said the boat had come to him in a vision, and in a way it had: it was a vision of the Mollie and Me, which, of course, Castro had seen countless times anchored at the country club in Preston. They jammed eighty-five men on that little yacht. It almost sank, and then they shipwrecked, ran it aground northeast of Nicaro. If that’s not stupid enough, as they fled into the mountains, Castro’s men were chomping sugarcane, and they littered their own trail with chewed stalks. Batista followed the trail and sent in planes. You can hide in a cane field if you’re being pursued on foot. But from a plane it’s impossible. You’re Cary Grant getting mowed by a crop duster in North by Northwest.