Rachel Kushner - Telex From Cuba

The rebels were quiet. Awed, he assumed. He decided the act itself should be part of his impromptu lecture, a complete lesson.

He called the camp chaplain, who gave the Rural Guardsman his last rites. Watching the chaplain trace an oily cross on the prisoner’s forehead and place the Eucharist on his tongue, meager provision for the afterlife, La Mazière thought of the chaplain at Wildflecken, who rode a white horse and wore a silk soutane, his crucifix and iron cross jangling together on their separate gold chains.

When the captive’s last rites were completed and he was properly blindfolded, La Mazière took out his knife and cleaned it on his pant leg until it shone.

“Wait!” one of the younger rebels called out. “Shouldn’t he have a trial? I mean, I’m not saying he isn’t guilty . But shouldn’t we be like a court, and judge him guilty? Sentence him before we do this?”

La Mazière sighed, summoning the patience he needed to teach this clueless boy the basic concepts of law and judgment. “I will explain this once,” he said, “so please, all of you, listen. This is a popular uprising. A popular movement. The people do not ‘judge’ in the same manner as courts of law. They do not hand down sentences. They throw lightning bolts. The people do not condemn Rural Guardsmen, or traitors, or kings. They drop them back into the void.”

And then he quickly swiped his shining knife across the prisoner’s neck. Even with his eyes covered by the blindfold, the man’s face expressed jolting surprise. Under his chin, a quaking smile of red opened up.

Two soldiers vomited in front of all the others, no time to turn away and disguise their weakness — physiologic, beyond their control — and because of this, all the more shameful. La Mazière pretended not to notice, as he might have pretended not to notice a woman’s inept methods and obvious sexual inexperience. People must be allowed to learn.

That night, as they dipped fried plantain chips into a pot of beans, a meal a campesino’s wife brought into camp, the men were quiet. Hector normally provided their dinner entertainment, regaling them with dirty jokes. I asked her if she smokes after sex. She turns to me and goes, “I don’t know, I never looked.” Instead, Hector ate sullenly and said nothing. After dinner he pulled La Mazière aside.

“You sure know how to take the pachanga out of it, man.”

La Mazière said he wasn’t sure what Hector meant.

Pachanga was an attitude, Hector said. A revolutionary movement with pachanga was a lively movement, with a certain spirit — the spirit of fun. Killing Batistianos as a lesson for the men wasn’t what Hector would call fun.

La Mazière replied that fun is in the eye of the beholder. And if they wanted to goof off, play stickball, forget about the goal of taking over the Cuban government, they should let him know, because he’d been under the impression that they were serious.

“We are serious. But there was no need to kill that guy. What about the concept of prisoner of war?”

Concept indeed, considering that Hector had neither captured nor been one. “By all means tell me,” La Mazière said, making no effort to disguise his contempt for Hector’s ignorance, “about prisoners of war. The concept, at least—”

“Look, man, the father is extremely upset. He thought he was being asked to demonstrate last rites, as in, show the soldiers a hypothetical scenario.”

La Mazière responded that last rites were last rites. Would the chaplain be happy to see prayer regarded as a hypothetical scenario— if I were sincere, I’d get on my knees and appeal to God, but I am not, and so this is a demonstration ?

Hector didn’t argue. La Mazière wasn’t sure if he’d convinced him, but he didn’t care. He probably had more sympathy for that unfortunate Rural Guardsman than all of the others in camp put together. He couldn’t explain this to Hector or anyone else who hadn’t graduated from indulgent and idiotic “concepts” to life itself, in its full spectrum of necessary horrors.

Hector and Valerio no longer came to his tent for games of chess, and certain soldiers, in particular the boy who’d suggested they hold a trial for the Rural Guardsman, kept their distance as well. He’d been with the unit two months now, and an obvious schism was growing, between those ready for intensity and those ready for stickball.

A week after the execution, after word got back to him about the incident, Raúl Castro sent their unit a letter of commendation. Raúl declared, as Valerio read aloud, that the future dream of a new society required not compromises, the distorted “fairness” of the old system, but new and severe measures. They were lucky to have on their side this Frenchman with impeccable military training. If he were willing, Raúl would name La Mazière their unit’s official tactical adviser. When Valerio finished reading, some of the soldiers looked down stoically. One of the boys who had vomited during the execution clapped robustly.

His new advisory role uncorked a flow of memories, a mode of being in which La Mazière began to marinate, and happily. Remembering tricks he’d learned as a Waffen, which he shared with the soldiers.

Tape your glasses to your face before you jump, La Mazière instructed, the basics of parachuting, to a squadron being sent on sorties to sabotage army garrisons and sugar mills.

They will open a manhole cover, he explained. The light above you blinks red. When it stays red, drop into the black. Don’t think about it. Just look at the red light and drop.

Don’t try to prevent yourself from falling when you land. Bend your knees and roll. If there is a pond near your landing site, wrap your chute around a rock and sink it.

If you run out of water, suck on bullets.

Always cook off grenades before lobbing them, so they can’t be lobbed back. No more than two seconds, he warned. And never, ever, throw them up stairwells.

From the primitive conditions he’d encountered when he’d first arrived in January, the activities of La Mazière’s unit began to approximate something like modern warfare. In the late spring they finished building their own airstrip in the mountains, and by May they were receiving regular shipments of M-1 and carbine rifles, artillery, mortars, and ammunition — thousands of pounds of weapons whose sale La Mazière himself negotiated, before he had any plan to roll up his sleeves and train the men who’d be using them. With these shipments came proper machining tools, which resourceful Valerio and a team of helpers utilized to convert an enormous tractor into a tank. They welded on thick plates of steel and mounted every caliber of rifle they had, and, to La Mazière’s horror, a catapult, which would launch a single bowling ball they’d recovered from an abandoned American social club. The plates of steel were of mismatched sizes and shapes, the guns loose in their turret holds. Their contraption flopped along the steep, muddy road toward camp like a metal shack on wheels. A group of men tumbled from it, excitedly making mockingbird calls.

“I am amused,” La Mazière said to them, “and even somewhat impressed. However, it is a clumsy thing. Terribly clumsy.”

The men’s faces, all triumphant smiles as they’d dismounted, fell in disappointment.

“I thought that you more than anyone,” Valerio said, “would applaud the project.”

“It’s a living expression of the living creativeness of the proletariat!” another soldier protested.

Others chimed in.

“Who cares if it’s clumsy?”

“Yeah, we’ll blow their asses up!”

La Mazière was beginning to lose patience with the general disregard in camp for the importance of aesthetic as well as military control. He had suggested to Valerio that making swamp shoes out of reeds wasn’t, perhaps, a top priority, and this ridiculous “tank” is what Valerio made instead. More than once, he’d been forced to explain to Valerio that chess games were for rainy days, not every day. Here he was, summoning his old wartime fitness, his finesse, a French killing machine, and he was surrounded by men who argued with their hands but were reluctant to use those same hands to pull a simple grenade pin, preferring to strap on Valerio’s homemade swamp shoes and tromp around the cow lilies, shouting with glee through boqui toquis, as they called their two-way radios. He was not averse to the cult of nature, to grounding a political cause in the facticity of the earth. But the rebels’ rural habits were laziness and leisure in place of discipline. None was interested in midnight hiking, as the Germans at Wildflecken had been so fond of doing. None was game for a brisk, predawn swim in a cold mountain stream. They had little taste for discipline in itself and the transcendence it promised. They could not even clean and properly oil their weapons, and so much worse, they had no understanding of the lyrical qualities of violence, and avoided it as best they could. Twice now, Hector had asked La Mazière to “show them again” when they’d encountered prisoners who had to be dealt with, Hector claiming that the soldiers still had not quite perfected the technique, and that he didn’t want them to squander the meaning of the killing that had to be done, asking could La Mazière please go over once more how “the blade of popular justice” worked, and demonstrate once again how the act was properly carried out. The idea of someone making him, La Mazière, conduct others’ dirty work like a regular low-life hit man was, of course, unthinkable. They were merely too weak to do it themselves, and needed someone strong to do it for them.