Rachel Kushner - Telex From Cuba

On the back of each card: “Greetings from the banks of nowhere, Christian.”

The stamps were smudged and faint, but a few she could make out: Algiers, Dakar, and Port-au-Prince, Haiti.

She put the cards away when she heard the familiar double honk of Batista’s driver.

Batista was speaking on the phone. She took a seat on one of the sofas in the Green Room, its familiar gold and lime-green drapes and upholstery casting a different mood now that it was Batista’s Green Room and not Prio’s Green Room. It hadn’t been Prio’s for six years now, but Batista still seemed ill-fit to its overbearing decoration, brocade everything, and giant chandeliers.

“I see…yes, thank you. This is wonderful news.”

Batista put the receiver back on its cradle.

“They’ve finally carted that moron off to jail!” He pounded his fist on the desk in satisfaction. “Indicted him for conspiring against me. He thinks he can do what he wants because he’s in Miami. But that asshole isn’t going to get away with so much as jaywalking.”

The moron was Prio. He’d been charged with violating U.S. neutrality laws by financing Cuban insurgents. Batista had made a deal with the Americans, in exchange for Prio’s indictment. The Americans requested that Batista lift martial law in Cuba, and he did. At least in Havana, at least for a few days. Oriente, he said, was out of the question. He hadn’t trusted that the Americans would come through on their end of the deal, but as soon as Batista publicly announced the guarantee of rights, the lifted curfew, the Miami court issued a bench warrant. Police went to Prio’s home and arrested him.

Rachel K had warned Prio that his own cook and butler in Miami seemed to be on Batista’s payroll. “You mean Guillaume ?” Prio had asked in disbelief. He refused to believe that anyone who should be loyal wasn’t. Just as Batista wasn’t capable of understanding that none of the girls — Rachel K or La Paloma or any of the others — was loyal. They would never dare, Batista said, cavort with his enemies. But they did, and openly. He wasn’t aware because it was beyond the scope of what he deemed possible, even as he made himself aware of every last detail.

He devoted the majority of his time to his paranoia, his fragile ego, to keeping meticulous accounts of who said what. He tapped telephones and offices, those of his wife, his ex-wife, his ministers, certain American businessmen, all the newspapers, and CMQ’s Clavelito, whom he suspected of putting a curse on him. The “Novel,” Batista called his daily log of wiretaps. He spent long hours every day listening to the Novel. Or reading it, if the wiretap was less sensitive and could be trusted to a secretary for transcription.

Though he’d sent for Rachel K, he became so involved in the Novel that night that he forgot she was there, sitting on a sofa near his desk. The euphoria of Prio’s arrest consumed him. “After that exciting news, I must listen to today’s Novel developments,” he said, and eagerly slipped on a pair of headphones. Rachel K removed a small notebook and a pencil from her purse, to jot down brief notes. She was spying on Batista plainly and openly, as he spied on others with his elaborate contraptions.

Batista took notes and interjected comments, the reels of his recording equipment clicking with each forward revolution. He spoke loudly, the headphones muffling his ears to the volume of his own voice.

He preferred to listen to the Novel rather than to read it. And ideally to listen while it was “hot from the oven,” which meant recent. The Novel was his obsession, and he loved talking about it. Reading it, he’d once told Rachel K, could sometimes lead to information that listening could not, because those phrases that had been uttered in a breathy or inconsequential manner, trailing off, or quickly added at the end of a conversation — they were right there, typed, and of equal importance.

The reels clicked forward, then stopped. Batista scribbled frantically with a pen.

“I knew it!” he said, and pressed rewind, then stop, then play.

He listened and nodded, making notations. “You go right ahead. I’ll see you here, for your ‘special plan.’” He was talking to the voices coming through the headphones. “I’ll see you and raise you! Ambush me ? You’re already dead, bastard.”

Knows DR plan, Rachel K wrote quickly in her little notebook, while Batista was too engrossed to notice. The DR, or Directorio Revolucionario, was another insurgent group, who believed that storming the palace and assassinating the president was the most effective plan of action. Fidel and the M-26 were against it. Prio was for it. He gave money to the DR and to Fidel, increasing his chances by betting on two horses. Batista seemed thrilled at the discovery. The pen trembled in his hands. The Novel, Rachel K guessed, would be too boring for him to endure if it weren’t for the masochistic promise of locating proof that he’d been betrayed. Like a jealous lover, he wanted confirmation of what he feared. The United Fruit executive was always asking her about her other liaisons. The idea seemed to hurt him, and yet he pestered her for details. When Rachel K refused, he launched into his own lurid and elaborate descriptions, savoring yet disdaining his fantasies of her and other men, like a preacher savoring yet disdaining the sin of sodomy by saying “sodomy” over and over again, as if the word itself might have some erotic effect. The executive’s own repertoire consisted of two positions, missionary and laundress — which meant from behind. Rachel K disliked the laundress position, not because she wanted to look at him — she didn’t — but because old men had pincers for hands, which reached around and clutched her in a brittle and insistent manner that she found unpleasant.

“You let two of these guys do you at once?” the executive asked her. “They do you doggy-fashion? On all fours?”

She laughed at him and he laughed with her, certain that he was in on whatever was funny. Then he inevitably grew excited by the idea of these scenes, quit with the laughter, and ordered her to take off, as he called them, her drawers.

She’d fallen asleep on the couch in Batista’s office by the time he finished with that day’s Novel developments. He woke her but didn’t gruffly escort her, as she assumed he would, to the secret chamber behind the bookshelves, furnished with a bed, Baltimore candy, and stacks of pornographic magazines.

He stood over her, distress creasing his face. She knew this crease, which grew more visible when he tried to suppress it.

“Who blackballed me,” he asked her, “from the Yacht Club?”

He was upset about not being admitted to the right club.

“How would I know? As if I’m a member,” she said, unzipping him to end the conversation.

GOD AND BATISTAblazed in green neon letters from the roof of the palace.

That was new, La Mazière thought, looking up at the glowing message. And why not? Why not convert the palace to an evangelical casino, caboose your name to God’s?

Rain was falling, and storm clouds had muted the afternoon sky. Reflections of the green neon and the red of automobile brake lights ran together and gleamed from the wet streets.

As he walked the Prado, he heard someone strumming an amorandola on one of the recessed benches, singing a song as he strummed.

“Bonanza bonanza, we’ll all be rich! Bonanza bonanza, the sea is calm—”

La Mazière had been back in Havana two days, during which there were maybe thirteen blackouts, four movie theaters bombed, and a massive fire at the Shell refinery across the bay in Regla. Things had certainly progressed over the six months he’d been away.