Rachel Kushner - Telex From Cuba

Willy said the furnace room was hot, very hot. But he was thankful to go to the plant. It was safer to be near the Americans. “Safer than what?” she asked. “Than being out and about,” he said, “where you might find trouble.” “You mean like with rebels?” “I don’t know anything about that,” he said, not looking at her. She suspected he was lying. Why would he lie? Because she was an American, and worse, the daughter of a nickel plant manager who didn’t protest his assignment to the furnace room. She wished Willy hadn’t lied. She wanted him to confide in her. It was selfish but she couldn’t help it, just as she couldn’t help disliking the idea of him dancing at the Club Maceo, Willy off, and working for no one but Willy.

Mr. Bloussé and Willy were not father and son. She didn’t know what they were. Willy was what Mr. Bloussé had ended up with, a six-year-old boy. If Mr. Bloussé didn’t think of him as a son or treat him like a son, he must not have wanted one. And yet he’d wanted Willy, gone and taken him after his visit with Willy’s father. Everly imagined that Mr. Bloussé had become attached. Willy was a magnet, and Mr. Bloussé got to have him all to himself. She, too, wanted him to herself. Willy with no time off, no time away from the Lederer house, and no secrets. No Club Maceo. I’m a sick and monstrous person, she thought. She wanted him to be free and constrained at the same time. She wouldn’t have wished this contradiction of wants on anyone, not even herself.

Five years now Willy had worked for the Lederers. Planted them the most exquisite garden in Nicaro, Everly’s own night-blooming cereus, which would open one night, deep into the abstract future. When she was younger, he’d taught her the names of all the flowers and trees, taught her to fish with a hand line, how to make cashew wine and juice from guanabana, taught her words in Spanish and French. As she got older, he’d explained the basics of Cuban politics, the basics of labor politics. But her world and his were no closer. They were farther apart. She was dressed up in her mother’s Jane Powell fantasy, and returning from a golden boy’s birthday affair. Willy slept in a navy barracks where an armed guard patrolled the rows and rats bit his feet. Like all colored people in Nicaro, he was scared and cautious, and he lied to her like any colored person would lie to any white.

For five years he’d danced with a broom in the Lederers’ kitchen. And once at Las Palmas. Put a coin in the jukebox and played “La Pachanga” when no one was around to tell him Negros weren’t allowed in the club. It was a show for Everly. Willy with his warm, broad smile, his graceful form, dancing with a broom. An unspoken secret that the broom was Everly, it was Everly he twirled around and dipped low.

“Thank you, K.C.,” she had said, as she’d put the gold flush handle from Mr. Stites’s private Pullman car into her purse. Thank you, but I’m spoken for.

It was about as naive as thinking it’s a lovely gesture to walk through town naked.

He lay under the tarp, exhausted, vaguely hungry, vaguely horny.

Women floated past, and he reviewed them one by one. Because he had access to none at the moment, he could choose any he desired. It was a fantasy, and the only obstacle to fantasy was his own mind, sometimes noncompliant.

She was almost like the German girls he’d met on his Rhineland travels, La Mazière thought when he got to Rachel K. Cold and unapologetic, these girls who used up all the hot water, didn’t cry, ate their share of a meal. Rachel K never said thank you, a sensible etiquette he’d also witnessed in SS officers at the elite Waffen officers’ camp of Wildflecken, where he’d trained after his enlistment. It charmed him to no end, the idea that what you needed was simply given to you, a deserved reapportioning that gratitude would only demean.

But underneath his pleasure at her frosty manner, La Mazière found himself wishing Rachel K had expressed a bit more regret at his departure. A sweep through his past, and half the women were clinging and crying. Even the baker’s daughter who kept a hideous lolloping rabbit in a cage next to the bed, a girl with an exterior like the thick hard crust of bauernbrot, or a stale kaiser roll, had begged him not to leave when it was time for him to report to Wildflecken. Rachel K had shoved him out the door, shut and latched it. He’d stood in the hallway feeling slightly stunned, until he decided he didn’t care and needed to return to his hotel and pack in order to leave Havana by dawn, before Extraño’s goons, or someone else’s, caught up to him. But in that instant, he’d stood and listened, trying to discern her movements from inside. Footsteps, things set here and there, water running, a match struck against emery, the poof of a gas flame, a pot set over it as if she were making coffee. The sounds told him that her life continued with the door shut against him, and would continue after he was gone.

Rain hammered the tarp above him, which sagged under the weight of water rapidly pooling in its middle, threatening to douse his already damp bedroll. He reached his hand up and pushed, bowing the plastic tarp. Water ran off it. A moment later, he felt the cold water soaking into the ground beneath him. He closed his eyes and wished himself elsewhere.

Nothing like a wet bedroll to make a man long for a dry and comfortable place to sleep. He thought of his suite at the Hotel Lincoln, but this image led him to her again, shoving him out the door, and to what came next — the spooky figure sitting in the hotel lobby as he had checked out at 4:00 A.M., a gentleman in dark sunglasses, his face pitted with acne scars — why did they always have acne scars? — no doubt waiting for La Mazière. He asked the concierge to call him a taxi, then said he had to run back upstairs where he’d forgotten something, and instead went down to the basement. He exited through a fire door behind the hotel’s laundry room and skulked alleys to the rental car facility five blocks away.

Forget the Hotel Lincoln, he thought as he again pushed water off his tarp. “It is an indignity to be chased around from hotel to hotel,” the little maharaja had said to him one evening at the Nacional lobby bar, after La Mazière suggested that the maharaja could get himself to Monte Carlo, where he wanted to relocate, without proper authorization, rather than wait for the visa the government of Monaco was reluctant to issue him. “Some people make a life,” La Mazière had responded, “of being chased from place to place.” Still, the maharaja was right. It was an indignity.

He thought of his Paris apartment, in the Seventh Arrondissement. Its closets filled with naphthalene-redolent suits, fresh from the cleaners and protected in sheaths of filmy plastic, waiting patiently on cedar hangers. Which lucky one would he choose? This is a fantasy — he can select whichever he wants. Dark blue, made in Hong Kong, a fine summer wool. Just out of the bath, clean-shaven, hair with a daub of pomade, he removes the suit from its plastic and puts it on. Takes it for a walk down the Boulevard Saint-Germain.

He parks himself at the Café de Flore, an outside table. Orders herring. A Pernod. Observes the girls. One, with her hair swept up in a patterned scarf, a lovely neck, Mediterranean skin, modestly curvy, good waist-to-hips ratio, and elegant hands. She’s pretending to read a book. He offers her a cigarette. Leans over with a lit match, breathing her perfume, then ignores her for a measured spell. He watches Sartre, sitting at a nearby table with his notebook, his eyes leering off in two different directions, the equivalent of looking at nothing. Sartre is with a couple of attractive women. He always is, despite his ugliness — or maybe because of it, some unique method of compensating for ugliness by being the first to declare it. La Mazière reads through the stack of newspapers he’s purchased at the kiosk on his way down the Saint-Germain, Le Figaro, Le Monde, Rivarol. Looks up, and what does he know? The girl with the elegant hands has moved to his table.