Rachel Kushner - Telex From Cuba

“Just let me escort you.”

Despite her sashay, she exuded a virility that the perfume and heels couldn’t conceal. Try to rip her off, he thought, and I bet she transforms into something more aggressive and male than I am.

“Go where I go,” he said, “and I’ll make it worth your while.”

“And I’ll make it worth yours.” She looked him up and down approvingly. “My while and your while will go perfect.”

Walking with her, it occurred to him that the male virility was not a mistake, a thing she’d accidentally left showing. It seemed, instead, an integral aspect of what made her hard to refuse. The Adam’s apple, her wiry arms and willowy height, the louche appeal of caked mascara rimming huge, dewy eyes, with a shadow of dark stubble on her upper lip.

It wasn’t his thing, but he understood that it was certainly someone’s. Promising tits and ass and tuberose perfume, and at the same time covertly promising something else, but openly-covertly promising this something else. If she were perfectly covert and convincing as a female, what would be the point?

On his flight to Havana, La Mazière had met an Englishman who’d insisted that the male Kabuki who performed in drag were more feminine than any woman. “I’ve just come from Japan,” the Englishman said. “And if you could see these artists — the Onnagata, they’re called — why, they make women, especially Western women, hardly seem like women at all.”

La Mazière doubted going to Japan would convince him that femininity was the art of walking in stilettos, that it had much to do with poise or surfaces, makeup and neck ribbons. Whatever female essence was, he had caught it only fleetingly, a thing women reflected when they were least aware. He couldn’t have named this quality but suspected it had something to do with invisibility, a remainder whose very definition was predicated on his inability to see it. Like dust, a particle too fine for the sieve of his comprehension. It occurred to him that the hooker posed an amusing solution to this problem, by covering feminine mystery in familiar layers: artifice, and also maleness. Underneath the layers lurked the promise of “woman,” but the layers were a safety net, a guarantee of putting off getting to “woman”—whatever she was. For those who didn’t care to know, there were these sublime creatures in the Barrio Chino.

He and the girl jaywalked toward a theater offering LIVE EXTREME SEX, or advertising it. It isn’t extreme if it happens for an audience, was La Mazière’s feeling. Frosted bulbs ran in relay around the theater’s sign like a circling electric tongue. In Paris this was called “life show,” which seemed more poetic and terrible. As if what it promised was a glimpse of the secret reality that subtended all life, and to which all life could be reduced: two paid performers copulating on a square of linty, hot-pink carpeting.

“You’re lovely,” he said, handing her a generous stack of bills. “But I must run.”

Instead of entering the main theater, he darted up the wrong stairway, to be sure he’d shaken off the men following him.

He found himself in a hallway outside a large room, where three Chinese musicians were playing marvelously atonal music, or what he’d thought was atonal music, until he figured out they were tuning their instruments. They were diminutive men with kitty-cat faces, and there wasn’t the slightest trace of sex in the room. The scene moved him, with its smell of rosin dust, the men producing whiny and plaintive strains in this curious rehearsal space. A sign on the theater doors facing the street had announced Gentlemen Only Please.

Here they are, La Mazière thought, watching the three musicians play, sandwiched in a building between people viewing sex and people having it. These are the gentlemen.

Rachel K never knew where Fidel’s underground would send her, or who she’d meet on these errands, and the mystery lent each task a certain surreal excitement. Fidel’s Havana contacts sent her to Miramar, land of the American executives, to keep an Argentinian race-car driver company. They’d kidnapped him on the eve of the Cuban Grand Prix and were holding him hostage, no real purpose but attention, worldwide publicity for the rebel cause. Someone had brought in a television and offered to let him watch the race, but the Argentinian said he could not, that it would depress him to witness what he’d been strongly favored to win.

Sometimes she’d meet contacts who turned out to be aides from the palace, men she’d seen with Batista. She guessed that the president could have tracked their betrayal, found clues in the Novel, if he hadn’t been so obsessed with those parts that were personal, the insults, social exclusions, and petty hierarchies. Batista was upset that the place-card seating for a dinner at Ambassador Smith’s had situated his wife next to Madame Masigli, which he suspected was meant to emphasize how much more glamorous and refined Madame Masigli was, compared to the first lady. He worried that his barber disliked him, that his aides were cheating him at canasta, not that they were plotting his overthrow.

On one errand, Rachel K met with a professor from the now closed university. A gentle, older man who asked why they called her Zazou.

It was French, she said. Something from World War II. At which point he went to the shelf and pulled down a book, flipped through it, and read a passage, nodding. “Yes, of course!” he said, delighted. “They were dissidents — what a wonderful quotation you’ve chosen.” He was a lonely history professor. He invited her to sit, and began talking about wars and revolts and various European underground movements. He recited facts about the Zazou, reading from the book, their ethnic background, the yellow star, their work with the French Resistance, when they were deported, the Gypsy music to which their name referred, how they were linked to another group, a German equivalent called the White Rose. He went to the shelf and retrieved another book, offering to show her photographs, which is when she said she had to get going. He told her to visit anytime she wanted. “We’ll discuss history,” he said. “Various codes and uniforms of protest and refusal.”

She appreciated the sound of “White Rose,” two words dusted with something clandestine. But knowing the details of history would ruin things. It was the vague brightness of the word “zazou” that she liked, a word and a few details: paint-on stockings and grenadine with beer. White Rose, in her own mind, would be something other, surely, than what the professor had tried to explain: a flower made of wax, voluptuous and fragile. A German girl with short black hair and Japanese face powder. A mouth like a bloody stamp.

“Hello, mademoiselle.”

She feigned indifference, standing in the doorway to her little apartment. Not inviting him inside, or asking where he’d been the past few months. They both understood it was a form of affection.

La Mazière took her hand, put his lips to it, and kept them there in a protracted kiss.

Her legs were painted in crisscross diamonds. She wore a tight black dress and heels. “You weren’t on your way out, were you?” he asked.

It was her habit to be made up even when she was home alone, like having music on, a kind of ambience, the mirrors in her room responding that she was still herself, with or without a witness.

“No. I was waiting for an ambassador. I heard one was coming through, on his goodwill tour.” It surprised her how easy it was to slip back into these roles.

“My goodwill tour; yes, of course.”

The batiste cotton dress he’d brought her was a size too small, its capped sleeves squeezing her upper arms like blood pressure cuffs.