Rachel Kushner: Telex From Cuba

“God damnit .” He threw his wrench on the ground. The air was thick with smoke, and one of Rudy’s eyes was red and irritated. His other eye was glass. I started coughing and inched my shirt up over my mouth.

He spun the open wheel again. “We’re shit out of luck, K.C.”

More guys were arriving, fellows from company headquarters. Daddy’s secretary, Mr. Suarez, was with them — he might have been the only Cuban in the bunch. They had machetes, and scarves tied around their mouths. They went in at the break near the busted main valve. There were no cane cutters out there. No mill workers, either. Just management — agriculture guys and pencil pushers from the offices.

“The batey is a ghost town,” Hatch Allain, the plantation boss, yelled, walking toward us. “I’ve got the guards knocking on doors, getting people up around town. We should have at least a hundred guys out here soon.”

The heat from the flames pressed against my face like I was getting a sunburn. I kept coughing, although I had the shirt up over my mouth. How Daddy could stand it in the thick of the fire is beyond me.

Mr. LaDue came down the road, and Rudy called to him that the valve was busted and there wasn’t any water. Mr. LaDue looked even older than usual. His face was half-shaved. He had shaving cream on his neck.

“If we don’t get the fire stopped at the access road, the whole town is going up,” he told Rudy.

As more men appeared, Rudy and Hatch were yelling instructions, where to go into the cane fields and how deep to cut. I wanted to help out. I said, “Rudy, Hatch, put me to work.” But Rudy said I should go home and have my mother call Mr. Smith, the American ambassador. What Ambassador Smith could do about a cane fire was beyond me, but I did what he said.

The cloud of smoke from the fire was shifting out over the bay. It looked like a massive black ocean liner moving across the sky. Ash was flaking down over the town as I ran back to the house to give Mother Rudy’s message. It was like falling snow, lacy gray flakes that sifted through the air and wafted back up on the hot drafts from the blaze. Maybe it was more like fake snow in a snow dome than real snow. It just whirled around, a circular blizzard of cane ash.

Mr. Bloussé, who contracted the workers from Haiti, came to visit us once in Preston. He was dashing like a movie star, blond hair pomaded and shiny, a silk ascot tied around his neck. He wore French-tailored shirts with black onyx cuff links and military jodhpurs. A servant stood behind him, a young Haitian boy who was quiet as a mouse, a curious boy. Mr. Bloussé would snap his fingers and say something to the boy in French, and the boy would scamper off to run some errand. I figured he spoke only French or some version of it, a native patois, but on one occasion Mr. Bloussé’s little Haitian boy spoke to me in English. Mr. Bloussé was in the parlor with Daddy, and the boy stopped me in the hall and asked if we had any books he could look at. This boy carried luggage and shined Mr. Bloussé’s shoes. He stood patiently in the hall like he didn’t have a thought in his head. And yet apparently he was able to read, and in English . I gave him some magazines to look at, and asked him how he learned. He said Mr. Bloussé taught him. That it was part of his training. I don’t know what sort of training. Later, that same boy ended up working for the Lederer family in Nicaro. One of the Lederers’ daughters, Everly, the redhead, used to follow him around. It was the same boy, but he was a grown-up by then — just one more Haitian servant in Nicaro, except he had this curious history, which I knew about.

Mr. Bloussé brought Luxenil lace for Mother, and for Daddy a bottle of expensive cognac. He and Daddy drank and smoked cigars late every night. Daddy collected liquors from all over the world. On a mahogany cart he had miniature glass bears from Russia filled with kümmel, and bottles of yellow and green Chartreuse — the yellow glowed; it looked like it had a lightbulb shining up through the glass from underneath. He had orgeat and syrupy white crème de menthe in cut-crystal decanters. Spanish cider, and pear brandy that had a whole pear floating in the bottle. That one was from Portugal. The bottle was clear and the fruit loomed up like a fish under the surface of a pond. The younger guys in management came over to sit in the parlor, drink cognac, and visit with Mr. Bloussé. He’d been in the French Foreign Legion, he’d traveled all over the world. Zanzibar, you name it. Everybody admired him. He was wealthy, with a magnificent estate in Cap-Haïtien. I remember him talking about his three daughters. They were just old enough to get married, maybe seventeen or eighteen. Some of the guys in management wanted to set up meetings with Mr. Bloussé, to court the daughters. I imagined them as tropical French princesses, pretty girls in elaborate costumes, hand servants fanning them with palm fronds in a courtyard.

“Yes, I’m aware that His Excellency is in Havana, but my husband feels he ought to know,” Mother said to someone at the embassy.

“Call the fire department? Yes, ma’am.”

“Well, I’m not sure why he wanted me to call, but there must have been some reason. If you could forward the message, that this is Evelyn Stites, calling on behalf of Malcolm Stites, and we’ve got quite a blaze on our hands.”

“Yes, ma’am, we’ve called the fire department.”

Mother was too polite to tell the embassy receptionist that this was United Fruit territory, and we were the fire department.

After she made the call, Mother started crying and held on to me and wouldn’t let go. Crying was something Daddy didn’t tolerate. I knew this was her chance to get it out. I didn’t tell her what Mr. LaDue had said about the town going up in flames. I didn’t need to. Through the window we could both see Ho, our gardener, aiming his hose up to wet the roof and the sides of the house.

By noon, the smoke coming from the cane fields was so thick it blotted out the sun. It was the middle of the day and we had the dregs of twilight, like it was nine o’clock on a summer night. Mother and Annie and the other servants were rushing around putting damp towels up against the window sashes and under the doors. Ambassador Smith’s secretary, or maybe his secretary’s secretary, called to say she was still trying but had not yet located His Excellency. Ambassador Smith was never in his office when Daddy needed him. If the workers went on strike, or there was some misunderstanding with Batista’s people about export dues, Daddy called and the ambassador took his sweet time dealing with it, busy playing golf at the yacht club or hosting a charity ball. He was a real high society New England type, Yale University, all of that. The Havana Yacht Club was so exclusive that they blackballed the president of Cuba. Batista was a mulatto from Banes, the other United Fruit town. His father had worked for us as a cane cutter. Batista had worked for us, too, for the company railroad. He started out as an assistant to a chauffeur on a company line car — that’s an automobile with flanged wheels, it runs on the track — and was eventually promoted to flagman.

I was in the parlor listening to the radio, to see if I could find out what was happening in the mountains. It hadn’t occurred to me that the fire was deliberately set, but my instinct had been to try to tune in the rebels’ wireless broadcast, Radio Rebelde. It was on the twenty-meter band, at 5:00 and 9:00 P.M. every night, and came in perfectly clear. Daddy didn’t allow it, but I listened when he wasn’t around, thinking maybe I could find out something about my brother. They talked about Raúl’s column, and this and that victory, and the horrific phosphorus bombings in the mountains, and once I heard something about “brave foreigners” helping the cause. But no one ever mentioned Del by name. It seems surprising in retrospect that they missed such a whopping opportunity for propaganda. The oldest son of enemy number one, the head of La United, had joined the cause, and they aren’t using it.