Rachel Kushner - Telex From Cuba

“Young people need all the sleep they can get,” he said. “Ten, twelve hours a night. The heart at that age — it’s still growing.”

He paused, as if lost in thought, and then added, in a voice more intimate and wistful than Dictaphone, “My Woodsie’s heart has quite a bit of growing to do. I don’t know what sort of thing you go in for, my friend, but children can be terribly cruel. I’ve spent many a night mending my bruised and oversized heart with whatever I can find. My Woodsie gives radiant joy, but then she takes it away.”

The actor offered to buy him a drink. A daiquiri, he said, pronouncing it dye -quiry.

“Meester Person! Meester Person!” the desk clerk called across the patio. “You have visitors.”

His contacts, two rebels who waited in front in an idling jeep, had arrived just in time to spare him from a Dictaphone sermon at the motel bar. He gathered his things and checked out.

Rain began to fall that afternoon, en route to the rebel camp. It only invigorated him, wet glancing on his face, green whirring past, the old familiar thrill of bumping along in a military vehicle bristling with weapons that his hosts, Hector and Valerio, two cheerful comandantes — captain and first lieutenant, respectively — had picked up from an abandoned army cache. Valerio expertly guided the jeep up steep, muddy roads, steering carefully around ruts as deep as the graves at Père-Lachaise, then gunned it to eighty kilometers per hour over washboard. La Mazière, impressed, asked who was supplying their vehicles. “Batista,” Valerio said, steering with his knee as he reached to wipe the windshield with a rag.

The invigorating sprinkle turned to a heavy shower as they arrived in camp. The rain continued for several days, making the roads impassable. In addition, they were now blocked by the Rural Guard. Anyone who’d found his way into the mountains would not be finding his way out until further notice. La Mazière was trapped, the entire camp forced to wait out the rain. Hector and Valerio visited his tarp for long and competitive chess games, and rambling conversations about military strategy and the various women they’d each known. La Mazière would hear the two men’s exuberant woops echoing through the trees, their call, the mimic of a mockingbird’s, announcing they were on their way with one of the chess sets Valerio carved out of coconut fruit. Because they turned brown and limp within hours, Valerio was always working on a new set. He and Hector would crawl under La Mazière’s tarp, laughing, dripping wet, Hector booming, “El Francés! Today I will finally take your king.”

One afternoon Hector said something about the girls in Havana working for the underground, that there were some hot ones willing to give a rebel his good-bye “gift” before he set off for the mountains. “And what a gift,” Hector said, grinning. “Those girls are professionals.” He could have meant any girl, there were scores in the underground, or he could have made it up, and yet La Mazière had an uncharacteristic moment of jealousy, wondering if Hector meant Rachel K. Hector was tall and good-looking, with soft pre-Raphaelite curls and large brown eyes. La Mazière resisted pressing for details. The second time it came up, he asked Hector if he had a particular girlfriend in the underground. No, Hector said. La Mazière was not comforted, and developed a strange attachment to Hector, simultaneously admiring and distrusting this handsome fellow who might be screwing his zazou.

Despite being trapped in a soggy mountain camp for several days — twelve or thirteen, so many that he’d stopped counting — there were moments when La Mazière genuinely enjoyed himself, destroying his new friends at chess, and also canasta, which they taught him, and regaling them with stories of the Russian steppes, of smoking bitter tobacco that burned like hay, and seeing Mongolians on horseback come over a high mountain pass, men with rusted, czarist-era pistols and woven wool saddles. But unlike Hector and Valerio, neither of whom seemed bothered by their miserable living conditions, La Mazière was growing tired of being constantly wet and cold and hungry. For the past week, food rations had consisted solely of stale cassava bread. Mosquitoes attacked brazenly at all hours, leaving unpleasant lumps on his face and hands. And he suspected his feet might be rotting, though he hadn’t removed his shoes in several days to look. They were issued hammocks and no longer had to sleep on the ground, but this was a minor improvement, the uncomfortable canvas sling making La Mazière feel like someone else’s privates, crammed into a pair of damp swimming briefs. He tried to remind himself that the need for happiness was a mutilation of character, and that comfort and pleasures so quickly turned insipid. Why don’t you join me for a dye-quiry? At least he wasn’t in a drab and depressing motel, “safe,” and making hash of something real and unsafe. Only if you’ve been through it as we have, can you understand the terror of the hunted —The thought of those people, turning history into a poolside burlesque, made him glad to be where he was, in the heart of the action.

After twenty days of continuous downpours, the rain finally let up. At the same time, Fidel Castro began a vigorous public relations campaign on Radio Rebelde, which was broadcast from La Plata, far south of them, but it came in clear enough. La Mazière’s unit gathered around the wireless each evening as Castro publicly invited journalists from Look, Life, Newsweek, and The New York Times up to the mountains, reading their names over the radio momentously, as if they were lottery winners, and then challenging them to witness for themselves who the rebels were and what they were fighting for. The public relations campaign was apparently working, American journalists lounging in Fidel’s camp, smoking cigars, flirting with the sexy soap flakes model who ran the radio station, and watching Castro kiss the feet of campesinos. La Mazière could have easily grafted himself to some sort of neutral convoy and made it safely to an airport.

Yet he stayed. He had never planned on such a thing, fighting with bearded Cuban revolutionaries, half of them teenagers. But a definitive moment occurred in which he saw the potential for something grand.

One afternoon, two lieutenants returned from scout duty with a captured member of Batista’s Rural Guard. An actual POW, gagged and bound with baling twine. Hector was napping, so the lieutenants came for instructions to La Mazière, regarded as something of an authority, an exotic who might harbor knowledge.

“What do we do with him?” one of the lieutenants asked.

“You know what we’re supposed to do,” the other said, his voice trembling. “All Rural Guard members are enemies of justice. They’re…they’re supposed to be assassinated—”

“No no no, ” La Mazière cut in, tsking and shaking his head gravely. “They are not to be assassinated.”

The lieutenants both looked at him.

“The proper term,” La Mazière said, “is executed .”

“These are not the same thing?” one of them asked.

La Mazière launched into a discourse on the critical distinction between the two. As he spoke, other rebels wandered over, until he had almost the entire unit of thirty men gathered around him, listening. One was spitting pistachio shells — they’d finally received more than stale cassava as food supplies — but lectures were no time for snacking. La Mazière shot him a look, and the offender quickly put away his bag of pistachios and stood at attention. Execution, La Mazière continued, his voice rising to be sure everyone heard, was an act of intent, purpose, and exactitude. Assassination was a far lower act, an act of opportunity, or worse, “necessity”—a word he said as if it were a soiled, smelly rag he held between two fingers. Execution was a ritualized killing, he emphasized. It was never, ever, an act of necessity. It was always an act of choice, a calculated delivery of justice. And only by the elevated loft of choice, he explained, could the act of killing take on symbolic meaning. Killing, he said, had meaning, voluptuous and mystical meaning that should never be squandered. An execution was a rhetorical weapon, a statement that could not be disproved, just as a man could not be restored from death.