Rachel Kushner - Telex From Cuba

La Mazière was busy mulling the probability that El Extraño worked for Batista, and wondering who had set him up for such a trap. But Hemingway persisted in engaging him in conversation, launching into a muddled discourse on poetry and diplomats, La Mazière thinking that Hemingway should stick to the topics of humping and the use of “I.” He seemed to miss the point about Saint-John Perse, who wasn’t a mere foil to logic, sending oblique questions as diplomatic correspondence. Perse was from Guadeloupe, and his poems were filled with succulent memories of an idyllic childhood in the tropics, coco plums and the cool hands of yellow nurses, the smell of clay and violets, sour milk, and fresh butter. But what Hemingway quoted was no sultry rumination, but Perse’s treatise on violence and loss, based on Xenophon’s Anabasis, the story of ten thousand Greek mercenaries hired by Persian barbarians — not for their civilized refinement, but for their gifted brutality at waging war. Midexpedition, the mercenaries’ Persian employer is killed. They are suddenly stripped of purpose, wandering deep in the core of an unknown land, outside of place, of law, torn away from their own selves. Trapped, with no leader and no adequate provisions, they are forced to go north, into the rugged and snow-covered mountains of Asia Minor. They survive on the principle of discipline alone, and must invent their own nomad laws, their own destiny, which, once invented, is the path they were meant to have taken. A route that cannot be found without the mercenaries first being lost. “The sea! The sea!” the rearguard soldiers cry out as they near the end of their journey. They’ve risen to a rocky promontory, their shrieks so frantic and pitched that Xenophon, down below, assumes they are being massacred. But no, they have spotted a sliver of the ocean’s chalk-blue bed rising up beyond jagged peaks, the water that will take them home.

Xenophon and his soldiers could not have been closer to La Mazière’s heart. Their abandonment and discipline were his; their wandering, too.

Lost in the Russian steppes, where his Waffen regiment was pulverized and scattered and he became an animal, eating raw horseflesh and sleeping in the snow, he’d seen no sliver of home, only a landscape blanketed in whiteness and death. He’d won a “frozen meat” medal, but he’d as soon eat actual frozen meat than fight Bolsheviks again. He understood painfully well that you couldn’t re-create a moment of ignorance that preceded misery, a luminous winking bubble. Ten thousand soldiers setting off to make fortunes, or one man in his Citroën driving toward the Bavarian town of Wildflecken for elite Waffen officers’ training, his papers stamped with a wet, inky swastika, a profound and electric violation of Frenchness. Confessing publicly, after the war, had meant coming to terms with the stark fact that his luminous winking bubble had floated in a tide of darkness. And yet he still yearned for a luminous bubble, for an impossible time of privilege and turmoil. All he could do was keep going until he found a bubble somewhere on the map.

Don’t talk to me of Anabasis, he’d thought, sitting at the Floridita bar, if you’re only going to quote the swaying of grass. He doubted Hemingway had any comprehension of the homeland that Perse and Xenophon both referred to, a crossroads of will and wandering where new enemies, new wars, new and unknown lands — Port-au-Prince, the streets of Havana, and maybe, now, the mountains of Oriente — were, in fact, the watery promise of home.

The rain let up, and wind was vacuuming out the last low, ragged clouds as La Mazière continued along the Malecón, looking back periodically to be sure no one was following him. The moon appeared, glowing like a quartered orange section that had been ever so lightly sucked, its flat edge thinned and translucent.

He turned and headed up La Rampa, in the direction of the Tokio. He assumed she was still there, still in her zazou getup, her legs painted in prison chain-link, as smearable as when he’d last left his handprints on her soft and unathletic thighs, six months earlier.

The same bartender was working, his face in its same melancholy key, which reminded La Mazière of Chopin. Not Chopin’s face, with the potato nose, but the preludes, lugubrious music for which he had a weakness.

He sat at the bar and ordered a pins ’n’ needles, the blue, morphine-laced drink that had become his Tokio habit. The sweet, toothpasty flavor of the drink and the familiar smell of the Pam-Pam Room, ashtrays and liquor and tuberose oil, plunged him into the full atmospherics of sense memory, the nights he’d spent observing the girl and her zazou act, and eventually investigating for himself, only to discover that her odd combination of remoteness and availability went several layers deep. At times he’d suspected she was only layers, like an onion, and if he peeled them away, to get to some kernel, some essence or truth, he’d end up with just a pile of glossy, eye-stinging skins, an odor on his hands that was difficult to wash away. People said lemons, but the lemons never worked: a hand would smell of onions until it was finished smelling of onions.

She played indifferent, as he did, or as he was. But then again, she opened herself in a way that was almost alarming. He’d felt it every time he’d been with her, this girl who would be, he was sure, no fun to spank. There’d be no threshold of resistance. That’s how people like her win, he thought. By caring just that much less than whatever you ante as indifference.

He asked if the “dancer from Paris” was working, which amused him, even if the irony was lost on the morose bartender.

“Tonight we have La Paloma,” the bartender said. “She’s very good, very nice. If you want to see La Francésa, come back tomorrow.”

I’m not disappointed, he thought, leaving the club. It’s simply an annoyance, walking all the way here in the rain, trying to keep the gift, which was boxed and in a plastic bag, from getting wet. It was a child’s size, but he suspected it would fit her, a batiste cotton dress that had reminded him, when he saw it in a shop window near Duvalier’s palace in Port-au-Prince, of the tiny girls who ran under dogwood branches in the Bois de Boulogne, wearing frocks that were stiff and white like bonded paper.

Two men left the Tokio just after he did. As he walked, he thought he detected their presence behind him. He stopped on a corner a few blocks from Rachel K’s apartment. He looked both ways, and at the street signs, pretending to be lost. When he glanced back, the two men were sitting on a bench, languidly smoking cigarettes as if they’d been there for hours.

He turned left, toward the Barrio Chino. From the corner of his eye, he watched the men hurriedly stub out their cigarettes.

The streets of Barrio Chino were crowded now that it was no longer raining. He wove among the prostitutes and bags of rotting vegetable scraps from the chop suey houses, heat rising off the ripe pavement in gossamer waves of steam. The Barrio Chino was no pretend glamour, no pretend France. It was a marketplace of dour, pockmarked girls, and boys refashioned as girls.

“Hey, you,” one of the boy-girls said, and came close, walking alongside him. “You’re coming with me.” She hooked an arm smoothly through La Mazière’s, encircling him in a musky cloud of perfume. They strolled together.

“You see, I’m just a dumb tourist looking to entertain myself,” La Mazière was telegraphing to the two Cubans who were so obviously trailing him. “Just a dumb tourist looking to ‘restore morale,’ shall we say, in the Barrio Chino.”

“Where you taking me, honey?” the hooker asked him, her Adam’s apple moving up and down, barely disguised under a satin neck ribbon.