Rachel Kushner - Telex From Cuba

The Prado’s lamps flickered on. They were antiquated papillons, Parisian-style butterfly-shaped gaslights — a detail he hadn’t noticed until now. “Paris of the Tropics,” the hotel brochure announced under a map of the island. On the map, a drawing of a girl waist-deep in the warm waters of the gulf, an Amazon rising from the sea with a red gladiola behind her ear. On the Plaza de Armas, just like in Paris, one could purchase Obelisk and Olympia books, and obsolete French pornography — displayed right there in the bookstalls rather than sequestered in L’Enfer, on the top floor of the Bibliothèque Nationale. But the fragile pages, La Mazière had realized upon closer inspection, were speckled with mold, ruined from humidity. The door knockers at La Mazière’s “French-style” hotel had all turned green from salt air. And the enormous lobby mirror was blackening, its silvered tain oxidizing from constant moisture. Paris resituated to the tropics, with its humidity, deluges, and brine, was like a transplanted organ a body had begun to reject.

How he’d missed this blighted, ersatz “Paris,” and he hadn’t even realized it. But this is how it always was with La Mazière, even if he was in love with a city, as he’d been with Havana when he’d visited for the first time — the coup, the club, the girl. It was a marvelous city, but so was Caracas, and so was Dakar, Sidi Bel Abbès, and Ciudad Trujillo.

He had just made his routine triangle through the Caribbean, from the Dominican Republic to Haiti to Havana.

“Do you know why?” Duvalier, who was now president of Haiti, asked him on his stop in Port-au-Prince, a layer of rhetorical dust piling on the cryptic words like lint from a vacuum cleaner bag.

Duvalier reached up, his gaze ponderous and distant, and caressed the red and blue flag hanging from a pole in his office, its silk fabric billowing in the humid breeze coming through the iron bars of an open window.

“Do you know why the Haitian people love Papa Doc?”

La Mazière waited, understanding that the question was a pause for rhythm and not meant to be responded to.

“Because Papa Doc cured them,” Duvalier said.

They all referred to themselves this way, in the third person. As if their names were too grand to be contained by an “I” or an image of an “I.” Names that pointed to entities of which they, too, were merely humble subjects. “Your Operative,” as Hemingway had said.

“The people crawled out of the hills and came into town walking like crabs, on the outsides of their feet. You see, the bottoms of their feet—” Duvalier’s voice broke, as if he were overcome with emotion. He cleared his throat and continued, his tone becoming angry. “The bottoms of their feet were ravaged! So destroyed by yaws that they came out of the hills like crabs. Papa Doc healed their feet. Not with filthy magic. He did it with science.”

The people loved Papa Doc. And yet, as La Mazière was there to inform him, an insurgent radio broadcast had been traced to somewhere within his own palace.

He turned from the Prado onto the oceanfront Malecón. Across the choppy bay, he could see the refinery fire in Regla burning greasily and unabated in the downpour. White-hot tongs of lightning spidered against the dark sky, followed by the sound of falling boulders. The rain surged harder. It gusted with such force it seemed to be eroding the medallions and scrolls on the buildings along the Malecón, as if their ornate facades were made not of sandstone but of a substance more like sugar, crumbly and solvent. La Mazière had no umbrella. Already soaked, he took his time, walking slowly, the rain dominating and releasing him.

A lone man turned from a side street onto the Malecón and walked behind him by a few paces. He and the man continued this way for several blocks, and La Mazière wondered if he were being followed. But then the man’s heels ceased their clicking on the wet pavement. He must have ducked into a building. Perhaps La Mazière was just being paranoid. His meeting the night before with a bizarre character named El Extraño, a supposed contact for Prio’s Directorio Revolucionario, had him spooked, though feeling spooked went with the territory of La Mazière’s chosen life. Prio’s insurgents were training in Miami, and Fidel Castro’s in the Dominican Republic — two groups that might at any moment turn against each other and against La Mazière, and both were being tracked by a third danger, Batista. There was Duvalier and the fomenting insurgency against him, with La Mazière in the middle, playing both sides. And President Trujillo in his self-named ciudad, with no idea that Cuban arms were being shipped from Miraflores Airport, on Trujillo’s own commercial airline. The list went on. It was sometimes dizzying, arming various warring factions, feeling hunted by the mere sound of heels behind him on the pavement. But it was a life to which he was attached, a way to poke his finger into the more interesting but otherwise invisible folds of the cities he roamed.

La Mazière had met with El Extraño at a chicken-dinner-and-cockfight joint near the Havana airport, a place that proved even more vulgar than the concept had sounded. He sold El Extraño the reels of a French film on the planning of assassinations, warning that the film might be useful, but then again was a bit like reading a book to learn how to ski. The allusion had been lost on this Extraño, who seemed strangely unable to communicate by metaphor.

“I mean you don’t just set off for the Alps,” La Mazière said, attempting to explain.

“I’m not going to the Alps,” El Extraño replied, eying La Mazière suspiciously. “Who told you that?”

“I was speaking, you know, figuratively. I meant, you don’t read a book about skiing and assume you’re an expert skier. These things take practice. They require experience, planning, and caution.”

“This is Cuba, for fuck’s sake. You see any snow? Nobody skis here.”

El Extraño’s face shone, coated in sweat. All through dinner he’d jerked his head around every time someone shouted in victory from the cockfighting arena. Why so nervous? La Mazière wondered. Is this guy setting me up?

“What about the other stuff?” El Extraño asked. “When and where?”

“You tell me what other stuff.” La Mazière kept his tone cool and even.

“You know.”

“If I know,” La Mazière said, suddenly tempted by his own weakness for petty word games, “and you know that I know, then you know, too. So remind me: What do I know?”

“Goddamnit. What is this?” El Extraño said angrily. “What the hell is going on here?”

“Perhaps you can tell me, because—”

“This meeting is over.” El Extraño stood up. “You come back and talk to us when you mean business.”

Watching him weave among the tables toward the exit, La Mazière thought he better play it safe and meet with the rebels’ arms procurement officer himself, even if it meant going all the way to Oriente Province.

For the sake of discretion he’d checked in to the Hotel Lincoln this visit, rather than the Nacional. As an added precaution he had the taxi driver take him from the chicken place to the Floridita, a few blocks from the Lincoln. The Floridita would be full of Americans — it was Christmastime, high tourist season — and if any of El Extraño’s people were tailing him, they would stand out.

Without at first realizing it, La Mazière chose a seat next to Hemingway. Within minutes, Hemingway turned and asked him to dance. It wasn’t the first time. Hemingway never gave up asking, men and women both, as if the people at the Floridita were indistinguishable to him and he couldn’t be bothered to take note of a minor detail such as gender. No one would ever dance with him. It was Hemingway’s routine to ask, and a willing dance partner might have wrecked the cosmic balance of his serial life.