Rachel Kushner - Telex From Cuba

He and she catch a matinee. It’s his habit to go to matinees whenever he’s in Paris. After the matinee they attend another “matinee,” at his place.

As she dozes or pretends to, he gets up from the bed. Naked, he opens his windows to the fresh air, the sounds of rush-hour Paris. The sun is setting. There are a few high clouds now, fanning out and tinged in pink like quilt batting soaked in punch. Such mild weather. Hohenzollern weather, the officers at Wildflecken would have called it. The gauzy white curtains blow in, then get sucked out the windows and flap around. Announcing in their gauzy wind flap — what? That the gentleman standing nude at the window of 5B has just fulfilled a handful of duties that his noble heritage allows, and even requires. Walking a well-tailored suit down the Saint-Germain, drinking, smoking, lurking, and bedding working-class girls from the Café de Flore, who are always soft and amenable.

But if his noble heritage ordains that he seek softness, he is also, and often, a man who sees a dirty hole in the ground and has to put his hand in it.

“Your tarp, señor,” a rebel said when La Mazière arrived in the mountain camp, handing him the moldy shower curtain.

It still had the plastic loops meant for a pole mounted on a bathroom wall. He threaded a length of twine through the loops and propped the thing as best he could between two bushes. He slept on a hopscotch of sugar sacks under his open-sided “tent,” which barely protected him from incredible volumes of rain.

Though he had never planned on staying, he’d done the right thing by going to Oriente. His suspicions about El Extraño, sweat-shiny as a greased pig, had been correct. El Extraño had taken the film reels La Mazière had given him, instructions for killing Batista, directly to the president. Prio’s men stormed the palace and found it stuffed with waiting SIM — the secret police — who ambushed, killing every last attacker, thirty men in all. Now they were attempting to snuff out Prio’s Directorio Revolucionario, and everyone remotely involved. Had La Mazière not left Havana when he did, the SIM would have picked him up. He’d saved his own life by departing, and for a destination that was untraceable. He’d rented a car under the name Chris Person and set out on the Carretera Central with an unfolded Esso map flapping around on the passenger seat.

In Palma Soriano, a small town deep in Oriente Province, where the temperature was a good fifteen degrees hotter than in Havana, the sky somehow lower, the sun closer, the air so heavy with moisture it was more fish tank than greenhouse, he returned the car and waited at a dingy stucco motel for his pickup contact. He paid for a room, showered, and went to sit in the shade of the motel patio, which aproned a swimming pool ringed in algae. To his surprise, there was a group of people clustered on the far side of the pool. From the front, the motel reeked of lethargy and desertion. He hadn’t heard any voices from his room and figured there were likely few if any other guests. The group was absolutely silent, hovering in a semicircle around a camera on a tripod. It was aimed at two men dressed like Cuban rebels in army fatigues and M-26 armbands, except they looked possibly American, pale and clean-shaven. A microphone dangled above their heads. Nearby, a young blonde sat on an aluminum patio chair, having makeup applied.

“Cut!” someone yelled.

He wouldn’t have expected to encounter Americans, or film crews, this deep in rebel country, at the foothills of the Sierra Maestra, which rose dramatically just beyond town, checkpoints and roadblocks at every turnoff. The man who’d yelled “Cut!” waved to La Mazière.

“Come on over,” he called, “if you insist on watching. My only rule is absolute quiet while we’re filming.”

The man introduced himself, pronouncing his own name grandly, as if it would explain everything. It didn’t, and La Mazière immediately forgot it.

“I’m an actor,” he said, when he saw the lack of recognition on La Mazière’s face. “A film of mine, The Big Boodle, is currently playing at theaters all over the island. Though I don’t recommend you see it.”

“Oh, no?”

“It isn’t a good film. And the theaters have all been bombed. Though perhaps a violent interruption of that sort might have improved the plot.”

Her makeup complete, the blonde walked toward them. She was spry and leggy and didn’t seem much more than eleven or twelve years old. Her lips were painted trollop red. Her hair was teased up into a whipped confection, a giant meringue reaching for the stars, with pin curls like inverted question marks swooping down over her ears. And she wore the shortest shorts La Mazière had ever seen. As she bent over to tie her shoe in a manner that seemed oddly solicitous for a child, the shorts crept up to reveal quite a bit of slender, well-formed buttock.

“This is Woodsie,” the actor said.

She cracked her gum and nervously touched her hair in the manner women did when they’d just had something new and unfamiliar done to it at the salon.

“What sort of thing are you shooting?” La Mazière asked, watching the girl.

“A motion picture,” the actor said, “about the revolution. About these brave young people fighting for their freedom, and the women who are assisting them.”

The actor seemed unable to speak without using an absurd Dictaphone voice, as if everything he said were being recorded for posterity.

“The film is called Assault of the Rebel Girls . I wrote it myself. Originally, I planned to use actual rebel girls, but they weren’t quite, shall we say, Hollywood material. So I cast Woodsie.”

“I’m the lead,” the girl said, fingering one of her pin curls. “Daddy says I’ll be a star. They’re going to know me in Hollywood. All over the place.”

“Your father?”

“Oh, please!” She jabbed La Mazière lightly in the rib cage. “My real father wouldn’t make me a star. My real father wouldn’t buy me a pair of shoelaces!”

“We planned on using documentary footage,” the actor said, “but our cameraman had problems. A fire melted some of his equipment, and so we’ve set up our own rebel theater here in Palma Soriano. Restaging things, see, after the fact.”

“After the fact? But the war is not over,” La Mazière said. “It’s far from over.”

“Yes, that’s true, and this is part of what has made our project so interesting. More of an art film, really. I’m thinking we’ll take it to Cannes. It’s fiction, a faked version of a real war, and yet. And yet. It is taking place amid the real war, against it, as its own fictional backdrop. A war it depicts, against this very war. Yesterday a grenade bounced into our film set, and we all had to duck for cover. I have a rash. Manchineel bushes. Terrible itching, which has spread to certain places…very unpleasant, I assure you. Woodsie has a flesh wound.”

The girl swung her long, tan leg up and held it in the air for La Mazière to inspect. A gauze bandage was taped around her calf, blood soaking through its crisscross weave.

“We’ve thrust ourselves in war’s midst,” the actor said. “And only if you’ve been through it as we have, can you understand the terror of the hunted—”

A film hand interrupted, informing the actor that there was a problem with their microphone. They would have to reconvene later in the day.

“Woodsie, dear, you go to the room and take a nap,” the actor said. “I’ll have someone fetch you when it’s time for your scene.”

She turned to La Mazière. “Nice meeting you,” she said, and cracked her gum for punctuation.

The actor sighed and shook his head as he and La Mazière watched her skip off.