Rachel Kushner - Telex From Cuba

(Café Pilon spot)

(Theme music, “La Agua de Clavelito”)

Good evening, brothers and sisters.

As some of you who tune in to my show are aware, our government has decided to crack down on hope. On healing. To limit, or perhaps eradicate, miracles. To fine and regulate those whose earnest claim is to facilitate in the name of dreams.

Should the people be barred from dreaming?

It’s your choice, people of Cuba:

Am I, Clavelito, a man or a nerve wave?

A fraud without special powers? Or a magic vibration that can travel through the water and into your thoughts no matter who you are and where you are?

Which do you want me to be?

Call me a man, and the possibilities collapse.

D. L. Mazierre, with his small mouth and gray eyes, did not come to agitate in Nicaro. Three years had passed since Mr. Mackey posted the letter outside the nickel company offices. Everly never thought about him and his handsome looks anymore, though his photograph was still taped in the hallway. Mr. Mackey had added a second photo of him, wearing tinted glasses like the people in Stevie’s movie magazines. But there were many other photographs outside the nickel plant offices — the Castro brothers: the older, freckled one; and the younger one with the Chinese face, pretty like a girl, with longish, feathery black hair.

Now Everly breezed down the hall to her father’s office, passing photos of workers who had quit suspiciously with no notice, suspected agitators and rebel leaders, understanding that they weren’t magic angels coming to transform her and everyone else. Into what, at age eleven, she hadn’t been sure, but she’d expected D. L. Mazierre to try to contact her somehow. She’d imagined him waiting behind a tree as she walked home from school, stepping out quickly to tell her something. Or standing outside her open bedroom window and relaying his mysterious message — whatever it was — after everyone else was asleep. It was a child’s fantasy that she no longer harbored.

Willy said the mine employees wanted fair wages, fair treatment, and that’s what the rebels were promising. She herself had seen how the miners worked, seven days a week under the boiling sun, a labor boss with a gun in the shade of the only tree. The mine was a dirty secret that made the young and handsome men in the photos seem like heroes.

Mr. Mackey had said the rebels were bandits, an annoyance to nickel operations. But then his own son, Phillip, was caught helping the bandits, and the Mackeys panicked and sent him away. Mr. Stites’s oldest son, Delmore, had run off to the mountains to join the cause. People talked about his disappearance vaguely — said he was “in rebel territory” and not that he was a rebel — but everyone knew.

The agitators were getting bolder now. They torched thousands of acres of United Fruit sugarcane, a fire that coated Nicaro with cane ash and blackened the sky for days. They tried to sabotage the rail lines that ran from the mine, trundling nickel ore down to town for processing. Mr. Mackey said the rebels would be subdued and that the company must play its part. Anyone remotely suspicious was arrested and handed over to the Rural Guard. Everything had changed.

Like the new Cuban guard at their Friday night double feature, Fuzzy Pink Nightgown and The Big Boodle . The new guard wore a holstered gun and a machete — a guampara, Willy called it. He stood stiffly by the theater entrance and didn’t sit down once, not even during intermission. The Nicaro theater was outdoors, a low wall and a screen with folding chairs. Rain began to fall steadily during the second film. George and Marjorie Lederer got up to leave and said Everly and Stevie could stay if they were nutty enough to sit through a movie in the rain. Everly decided she was nutty enough. She munched rain-dampened popcorn and spied periodically on the smoochers in the back row, Pamela and Luís Galindez, and Stevie and Tico Leál. Luís Galindez held Pamela’s hand and fawned over her the same way Tico fawned over Stevie. Stevie and Pamela both went to Cuban dances and wore their socks rolled down and their hair teased up in the front the way the Cuban girls did. Stevie drew a fake beauty mark on her chin with an eyebrow pencil. She learned the pachanga and danced it with Tico, though neither of them were as good at it as Willy. Willy’s pachanga was the real one, everyone else’s just a watered-down imitation. The Lederers worried that Stevie was becoming too Cubanized — that was one thing. Dating a Cuban was beyond what they’d imagined. When Marjorie Lederer found out, she was furious. How could this have gone on, right under her nose, for three whole years ? Everly’s mother wanted to have Tico fired from the nickel plant. Fired immediately, she said. George Lederer refused. He said Tico Leál was one of Gonzalez’s hires, and it would stir up too much trouble the way things were now. They were all nervous about Lito Gonzalez. Mr. Mackey thought he was working with the rebels, cutting secret deals.

“So you’re firing me, instead!” Stevie shrieked. They were sending her back to the States. In two days she’d be getting on a bus for Havana, then flying to Miami, where the Vanderveers would pick her up and drive her to an all-girls boarding school in Tennessee. “Te quiero,” Duffy kept repeating, imitating Stevie. “Te quiero, Tico. Mucho mucho,” and then she made kissing noises. But it wasn’t funny anymore. “Duffy, shut up!” Stevie shouted. “She’s just a child,” their mother said. “Leave her alone.” Duffy cried and burrowed against their mother. But when she turned her head to the side, still sniffling, Marjorie Lederer rubbing her back, she looked not just comforted but also satisfied.

Luís Galindez and Pamela vacated the back row, to continue their smooching someplace else. Would the Carringtons send Pamela away for dating a Cuban? Everly didn’t know where there was to send her back to. They were American, but they’d never lived in America. And Mrs. Carrington didn’t seem to care what Pamela did. It was mostly Val who was upset. The romance with Luís was all she talked about now, as if Pamela had betrayed her. Maybe it was like that with twins — they had to share everything, including choice in boyfriends.

Everyone left the theater but Everly, Stevie, Tico Leál, and the new armed guard at the entrance, who stood stiffly and didn’t watch the film. It boggled her that someone could patiently stand in the rain and let the time pass with nothing to wrap his mind around. But maybe patience, she thought, didn’t mean being unbothered by waiting and boredom, but the opposite: that patient people were exceptionally bothered. Perhaps the guard was able to let his mind bump and drift like a blank white cloud because he’d given up believing that distracting himself was of any use. She suspected that patient people understood the horror of boredom best of all, and thought it was hopeless to pretend there was some way to make it bearable. Which meant patience was actually hopelessness. And impatience, a kind of hope — making the effort to fill time with something, by turning your head to watch the movie, for instance. The guard did not turn to see the film. He confronted his waiting head-on, patient and hopeless, rivulets of water running down the sides of his face.

“You’re almost fourteen, and it’s time you quit hiding behind this tomboy act and let everyone know you’re a young lady.”

Stevie was gone, and now it was Everly’s job to be the eldest daughter, the young lady. “I gave her a Seconal and put her on the overnight coach to Havana,” her mother repeated in every phone conversation about Stevie. “It’s for the best.”